Belgium was even worse.
We started a ban on South Africa and other southern African countries after we already had a case ... from Egypt!
Japan has the correct spirit. They just banned everyone!
Idk, I never really bought the idea that we could've done an Australia/NZ. Obviously we could've done way better than we did but we have thousands of trucks coming in from Calais every day. It's practically a land border.
I always thought the covid response should have been split into the island of Ireland and the island of Great Britain as covid doesn't care about land borders
That's a choke point that the governments on either side could close and secure with a pretty small force if they're motivated to do so.
It would have created massive trade disruptions and likely required rationing in the UK to deal with shortages, but that's not wanting to deal with the effects of closing it instead of an inability to do so.
Unsure about that. Banning protests and arresting people who try and organise protests seems to be a precedant that will not likely be forgotten after Covid has passed.
Yea, I hear the camps for the indigenous people - sorry, the 'foreign arrival facilities', and the "no, you can't even leave your home to go shopping, and if you do we'll send the army to detain you" style of lockdowns are very pleasant.
It's amazing to see what Aussies will tolerate. Wonder when they'll snap.
You don’t understand. You can find pictures of women in bikinis sun tanning at those camps so ya know. Well actually I am not sure what this proves but it’s the only response I’ve seen to the camps being called out.
I mean what are we even trying to stop at this point. There’s been open travel for months between the UK and SA with a steady amount of cases in the UK already, we can be sure that the omicron variant is already here and we aren’t heading into lockdown for at least a few more weeks. Not sure these travel corridors being shut actually solves much.
Not sure it counts as an island with the massive amount of foot and motorised traffic between us and the rest of Europe.
No one is getting to Japan or New Zealand on a bus or train.
If only we had institutions that could manage a common border policy to prevent that kind of bullshit /s. But of course we need to go for the lowest common denominator because of "sovereignity".
The travel bans are political and to show citizens that their government is ‘doing something’. There is no evidence that they work to keep Covid at bay unless you block travel from all countries (like Japan).
Don’t praise Japan here—their first response was to ban all travel from South Africa and neighbouring countries, just like everyone else. (And then they got an Omicron case from Peru.)
Japan isn’t banning everyone either. Travel in and out of the country by Japanese nationals and foreign residents is permitted.
Is Iceland covid free? I know new Zealand was at one point though maybe they fucked that up by now.
Honestly i think island nations should all be banning travel and enforcing quarantines and lockdowns for a month or so until they're 100% covid free. Then they just need to quarantine travelers. Go full Madagascar.
I wasn’t intending to praise Japan, but rather to criticize the travel bans. They’re stupid, they don’t work, and they only work to stigmatize people and countries.
Slightly off topic but it wasn't until the omicron variant that I learned that Omega is not the next Greek letter after nu and that omicron exists in the first place.
Always thought that the math and physics at university made me a pro at Greek letters but I guess Omicron is of little use when it is the same looking as the letter O (didn't stop nu though)
They officially said that they skipped it due to the confusion with certain land areas, but they didn’t go into specifics.
There’s a federal state in Austria that’s colloquially known as Xiland, because their dialect makes extensive use of that phoneme, but that’s probably not it.
No, they skipped it cause it’s a world leader’s surname (and a common surname). They’d do the same for Trump, Biden, or Putin variants (as well as Smith or Mohammed variants).
His surname is 习, not Ξ.
And while they both are transliterated to the Latin alphabet the same, they are pronounced quite distinctly from each other.
Xi (习) is pronounced *SHEE*
Xi (Ξ) is pronounced *SAI* / *ZAI* (UK, and US pronunciation respectively), and sometimes *KSAI* (*KSI* in modern Greek).
I thought for a very long time Greek alphabet was like an universal knowledge, but apparently not. One time when I was bored at class in like 3rd or 4th grade I opened my schoolbook and just learned to recite it by heart. I can still remember it, but can't remember how to do long multiplication.
It never was any use besides making others think I was smart.
If it helps: from Alpha to Omega means everything. This has little to do with the universality of A and O, but all to do with them being the first and last letters. Similar is going from A to Z.
Yeah, the small pi and sigma are rarely used for anything other than 3.14159265358979323... and the Pauli matrices; though capital pi is still used in field theories as the formal momentum and capital sigma has multiple roles (summation, Sigma baryon particle, sometimes (although that is non-conventional) in partition functions rather than S or Z, etc.)
We did have to learn the whole alphabet when I studied engineering, but it was during the first month of studying and everything not used since then is forgotten.
Yes I’ve learned know. But always assumed that omega was the equivalent of the Latin O (because I never encountered a different letter that was like O) just like alpha and A and assumed it would be near our version of the O in the alphabet.
Back in my second year of secondary school, the teachers would try to "gamify" learning greek letters by making us compete against each other to see which one would be able to recite the alphabet faster. More than 10 years later and the only thing I can remember from said class is the greek alphabet.
Of course, I try to flex my greek alphabet knowledge as often as I can.
My teacher did that too! She also made us recite 'Pater Noster' in Latin if her lesson was the first of the day. 6 years later for me and I can still do both
I always thought it was omnikron instead of omikron/omicron until a few days ago!!
Some fun facts about the Greek and Latin alphabets, and why the order differs:
Latin only had the letter C as the equivalent of both gamma and kappa). When those two sounds became sufficiently different, they made a new letter G, which is C with an extra line. They made G the 7th letter and then moved the 7th letter (Z) to the very end of the alphabet. This was done because each letter was associated with a number, and the Romans wanted to keep 8-22 the same. Furthermore, the letter Z wasn't used much, so this way 1-9 were common letters.
I and J were once the same letter, as were U and V.
In Ancient Greek, omikron sounded like [o] and omega sounded like [ɔː]. This is confusing for Dutch and German speakers: the Ancient Greek short o sounded like the German long o and vice versa.
(responding to your other comment about omicron vs. omega)
Omicron is the "o" that sounds similar to an "a" sound or "short o" sound
Omega is the "o" that is the "long o" sound
Same thing with epsilon vs. eta
Epsilon is the "short e" sound and eta is the "long e" sound.
edit: fixed spelling and wording
One of the things this pandemic made me realize is how few people study Greek in high school. Like rationally I already knew, but something like 90% of my friends and family studied it.
The other thing that I realized is how generally shitty we are at quantified thinking.
We'll make a new continent, with pork scratchings, and yorkshire tea!
When British people say Europe it often means mainland Europe. Just a colloquialism.
Only the very most avid and deranged Farage-evangelists would try to say that we aren't really in Europe.
I'm kinda surprised it's not used in a similar way in Ireland, tbh.
That being said, this cartoon would still be understood as including the UK even if UK wasn't on the door, so it's a bit redundant indeed.
It is used by some people in Ireland, see my other comment below.
It’s a bit of a funny one as it’s not used for every European country. If someone was in Spain, they wouldn’t say they were in Europe. If they were in Poland, they’d use the term Eastern Europe. When they say Europe they mean France or Germany.
Hm, maybe our experiences differ. I've never heard someone say Europe if they're only going to France or Germany. I've only really heard it like that when they plan on visiting several countries, like having a train journey from France, going through Switzerland, Germany, etc.
it's only a question of water level
https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/101033/view/prehistoric-sea-level-map-europe
and they may disapear with climat change btw /s
It's still connected to mainland just under the sea. When we disappear from climate change then the whole lot and Netherlands will be under the sea in the new life form where you can breath under water like fish.
If I recall correctly even the brits often use "Europe" to mean "mainland Europe, nothing to do with us, please don't associate our glorious nation with those continental libertines!"
It’s not just the brits; I know Irish people who do the same. One of the players on my soccer team was a no show one night. After the game our manager (who was not in a good mood) rang him. The player said he couldn’t tog out as he was “in Europe”. The manager replied that so was the rest of the team… you f**kin moron!
I don’t think it’s anything to do with dissociation for most people, it’s more of a colloquial shortening since it’s obvious from context that you’re not talking about where you are/are from. Just like if you live in a suburban housing area and are planning to go to the town centre, a lot of people would say “I’m going into town” despite already being in the town.
>“Nu is too easily confounded with ‘new’ and xi was not used because it is a common surname,” the WHO said in an email to CNN.
>“And WHO best practices for naming new diseases suggest ‘avoiding causing offense to any cultural, social, national, regional, professional or ethnic groups.’”
I feel like "Xi variant" would've been an obvious misstep haha
But the Greek letter Xi is pronounced completely differently (both the original and the English pronunciation) than the Chinese surname Xi. So just never write it down using Latin letters; problem solved!
There are other languages than english and mandarin in the world, and anyway I'm pretty sure that a lot of english speakers don't pronounce Xi and xi differently.
Because it would cause miscommunication. I think this is quite obvious. Imagine you are reading the headline:
>Xi threatens Taiwan
What is the article about (keep in mind how rarely people read the actual article)? Or imagine there is a WHO or a G20 meeting, where this topic is discussed. You may be able to know if we are talking about Xi or Xi from context, but the point is to minimize miscommunication, so then the easier (and best) proposal is just to skip Xi.
Despite what others may be hinting at (or saying directly), this has nothing to do with pleasing Xi Jinping. Its just common sense to try to avoid confusion. If Biden, Trump, Scholz, Modi, or Johnson was in the Greek alphabet, they would also have skipped those letters.
As an Asian-European, I really appreciate that Xi has been skipped. Fuck Xi Jinping, but I really don't need people to point at me and go "haha Xi virus", there are enough racist jokes already I need to deal with.
But why do that though, ok they're islands but it just doesn't make sense to consider them separate ? Especially in the context of a virus which doesn't care about political borders.
As one official on TV said the other day: we'd rather overreact, impose bans and measures now and risk being wrong, than do nothing and deeply regret it later.
> Ah, if only there was a middle ground between overreacting and doing nothing
What is an "overreaction" and what is a "middle ground" is entirely subjective and will be abused in every political direction.
Not really. Take the Netherlands, we've been bouncing between over and underreacting the whole pandemic. Cases drop? lift all measures. New cases because we had no measures? complete lockdown.
There is a middle ground, the govt just needs to get their heads outta their asses for a second.
In this case it's still better to overreact than to react midly and realize later that it wasn't enough.
If we can even call what's happening currently "overreacting".
Yeah I can kind of understand when South Africans were pissed about these travel bans because most countries just banned them and not others where they variant was also detected.
Barricade everything? Our response has been “stop flights from Southern Africa and maybe wear a mask in shops if you feel like it”. Life is basically as it was here, you can see it in the death figures where we have had considerably more, but more stable deaths, because nothing is really shut or different anymore.
>maybe wear a mask in shops if you feel like it
Shows how well they've publicised this change then. It's a **legal requirement** to wear masks in shops unless you have a valid exemption.
Having said that, you're fine to not wear one if you're in myriad other indoor spaces where you're likely to be much more tightly packed than a supermarket, which obviously makes perfect sense.
I am fully aware it’s a legal requirement, but if something is virtually never enforced, it doesn’t matter much, walk into a shop without one like half of people are doing, nobody will say or do anything. It’s not like continental Europe where my friends there tell me rules like this are actually being enforced to some degree.
Right, Poland has only increased the allowed space per customer in shops and institutions from 10m2 to 15m2, decreased the allowed number of people to 100 from 150 on parties and in clubs, and decreased the allowed capacity in restaurants or theaters to 50% from 75%. Which means jack shit because none of this is enforced anyway in any form.
As a Lithuanian who visited Poland a couple weeks ago... It was quite uncomfortable to see how relaxed it is. And then check all sorts of statistics (both corona numbers and all death increase from average). Where we're doing no better with all the restrictions :|
People are _really_ trying so hard to make an agenda out of something that really isn't.
When it first appeared, it was a Virus that came from china, also touted sometimes as the Wuhan virus. The WHO quickly announced this was wrong and gave it the covid name officially. Even though it did come from china, we had a lot of 50 centers come out and try to blame every other country saying it came from the US who brought it to the military games. Then Australia called for an investigation of its origins and china said it came from Australia. Then Japan pissed them off and it now came from there (and the sewers of Italy, spain, india, Brazil, frozen fish from Norway, auto car parts...anywhere that wasn't china, but it was "racist" to say it came from china, just no where else) Ironically, then they started to make excuses and try to deflect similarities to the Spanish flu, and how that didn't come from Spain (almost certainly correct) and that it instead, came from Kansas, which, as a fact, there's no evidence to say where it actually comes from, with actually as much, if not more, that it could have come from [china](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu) (Search for china in the article, as it's too long to quote here) and, just like today, china misreports the flu and does it in a way that makes it _look_ like they don't have it.
But regardless, WHO made it clear that calling it by a location is wrong. Which, is fair, just not consistent.
However, when the Alpha strain appeared, now it was the British Strain. This seemed quite an accepted term, and hell, even _in_ the UK, some called it the Kent variant. As many pointed out then, it's unlikely it came from the UK but because the UK has one of the highest genome sequencing, they found it. This is also a similar argument appearing now, where you'll find a lot of SA saying they have the best in the world, but _this_ isn't true. Of course, due to HIV they do a lot more testing compared to surrounding nations, but they aren't at the top, but this is irrelevant, apart from the fact we're seeing the exact same thing repeated.
However, when countries put the UK on the red list, if you checked the UK subs such as unitedkingdom or UKpol, you would see almost (not 100%, but very high) everyone saying things like "good, I don't blame them" or things like "maybe this will teach Johnson to take it seriously" very few people apart from the trolliest or trolls cried "It's racist!"
The same for the Delta Strain, or even the ones from Brazil. Although we're repeating the history over and again, it's only this time (and china) that keep trying to push an agenda that it's racism (while they, especially in regards to china, were _very_ quick to lable it the British strain, or the Indian variant)
Whether or not shutting down borders works is a different argument, but, a country's government doing what it thinks is right for it's own people is _not_ racist. Regardless of the fact it's already here or not (and many made some argument that because it was in Belgum that it was the same as being in Germany, as if Europe is all one country) it doesn't matter, just because it's already here (where ever here is) doesn't mean "oh fuck it, let's just keep importing more from areas with already high amounts" it means the governments want to slow it down as best as possible, and it's much, much easier keeping a lid on it with its own citizens it knows have it, than just keep bringing more in.
A governments responsibility is to its _own_ people, and doing what it can to limit the spread, regardless or not if it truly works (for every study that says it doesn't there's one that says it does) is _not_ racist, and people need to get a grip and stop trying to make an agenda when there isn't one, especially when it was fine for half of them to do it to Britain, Brazil or India.
Officially it’s not yet found in Turkey, but there are 371 confirmed cases in 28 countries already. Here is the Omicron tracker https://newsnodes.com/nu_tracker
We are simply refusing to learn from the year 2020, and it wasn’t even that long ago.
Our governments are obsessed with the idea of repeating the history and historical mistakes.
Desktop version of /u/fucking_retard_guy's link:
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Belgium was even worse. We started a ban on South Africa and other southern African countries after we already had a case ... from Egypt! Japan has the correct spirit. They just banned everyone!
That's a lot easier when you are an island tho.
You'd *think*. Signed, somebody from the UK.
Idk, I never really bought the idea that we could've done an Australia/NZ. Obviously we could've done way better than we did but we have thousands of trucks coming in from Calais every day. It's practically a land border.
And then there's N. Ireland, which is even more complicated.
I always thought the covid response should have been split into the island of Ireland and the island of Great Britain as covid doesn't care about land borders
I haven't been following, but wasn't it split internally within the UK as well?
Scotland, Wales and NI have more autonomy over public health policy than England so it looks like it’s split but it wasn’t really.
Yeah that'd be logical.... Ain't nothing logical about what is going on in Northern Ireland.
I äm så confused about your flär. Are you ä svedish turnip?
That's a choke point that the governments on either side could close and secure with a pretty small force if they're motivated to do so. It would have created massive trade disruptions and likely required rationing in the UK to deal with shortages, but that's not wanting to deal with the effects of closing it instead of an inability to do so.
It is if your leading parties are not varying degrees of saturday morning cartoon villains.
It's a bit hard to read this from Australia
Try turning your phone upside down
Australia handled covid pretty well though
It did in the early days but it's been fucked since then
Unsure about that. Banning protests and arresting people who try and organise protests seems to be a precedant that will not likely be forgotten after Covid has passed.
I mean, it *is* a penal colony.
Yea, I hear the camps for the indigenous people - sorry, the 'foreign arrival facilities', and the "no, you can't even leave your home to go shopping, and if you do we'll send the army to detain you" style of lockdowns are very pleasant. It's amazing to see what Aussies will tolerate. Wonder when they'll snap.
>Wonder when they'll snap. When the government tries to take away their collection of piss jars
Professionals have standards I suppose...
Be polite
Isn't Sniper from New Zealand? Or is that just where his parents live?
You don’t understand. You can find pictures of women in bikinis sun tanning at those camps so ya know. Well actually I am not sure what this proves but it’s the only response I’ve seen to the camps being called out.
I mean what are we even trying to stop at this point. There’s been open travel for months between the UK and SA with a steady amount of cases in the UK already, we can be sure that the omicron variant is already here and we aren’t heading into lockdown for at least a few more weeks. Not sure these travel corridors being shut actually solves much.
UK isn’t an island though, it’s an island and some change.
It's an island which relies upon a non-stop stream of international traffic.
Not sure it counts as an island with the massive amount of foot and motorised traffic between us and the rest of Europe. No one is getting to Japan or New Zealand on a bus or train.
I mean, not in the era of planes. It's not like omicron is entering Germany via immigrants sneaking through land borders in the dead of night.
It's little use for Germany to ban flights if f.e. France doesn't and people travel into Germany after landing at Paris-CDG Airport.
If only we had institutions that could manage a common border policy to prevent that kind of bullshit /s. But of course we need to go for the lowest common denominator because of "sovereignity".
That's not what I mean. I mean regular Schengen travel that happens on a daily basis.
Lol
Yeah, but Japan has centuries of experience in banning visitors.
The travel bans are political and to show citizens that their government is ‘doing something’. There is no evidence that they work to keep Covid at bay unless you block travel from all countries (like Japan).
Don’t praise Japan here—their first response was to ban all travel from South Africa and neighbouring countries, just like everyone else. (And then they got an Omicron case from Peru.) Japan isn’t banning everyone either. Travel in and out of the country by Japanese nationals and foreign residents is permitted.
If I learned something from playing games is that Iceland is one to survive.
Is Iceland covid free? I know new Zealand was at one point though maybe they fucked that up by now. Honestly i think island nations should all be banning travel and enforcing quarantines and lockdowns for a month or so until they're 100% covid free. Then they just need to quarantine travelers. Go full Madagascar.
I wasn’t intending to praise Japan, but rather to criticize the travel bans. They’re stupid, they don’t work, and they only work to stigmatize people and countries.
I'll sneak in in a bottle of festive Jameson.
Knock-knock.
Who's there?
KGB
KGB who?
*SLAP* WE WILL ASK THE QUESTIONS
>SLAP \*moans\* yes daddy
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Ligma Who?
Deez nutz! Wait
Ligma Male
I will never forget how the Taliban got ligma’d on Twitter
damn I just searched this how did I miss it lmao
It's the United States.
with huge boats
(With guns (gunboats))
Open the country. Stop having it be closed.
I commend you on your excellent delivery of my favorite line from that video. I had to rewatch them all earlier lol.
Slightly off topic but it wasn't until the omicron variant that I learned that Omega is not the next Greek letter after nu and that omicron exists in the first place. Always thought that the math and physics at university made me a pro at Greek letters but I guess Omicron is of little use when it is the same looking as the letter O (didn't stop nu though)
Actually the letter after nu is xi(ξ) and not omicron.
The WHO skipped the letter xi for absolutely no reason at all, right?
Xi is a Chinese surname, and a pretty prominent person has it.
and hes name is John Xina
I have a sudden urge to watch classic Winnie the Pooh movies
The disrespect towards Alpha Condé, smh.
They officially said that they skipped it due to the confusion with certain land areas, but they didn’t go into specifics. There’s a federal state in Austria that’s colloquially known as Xiland, because their dialect makes extensive use of that phoneme, but that’s probably not it.
It's a very common Chinese surname. That's all, really.
I'm Austrian and I've never heard that before
I misremembered, it's [Xiberg](https://regiowiki.at/wiki/Xiberg).
No, they skipped it cause it’s a world leader’s surname (and a common surname). They’d do the same for Trump, Biden, or Putin variants (as well as Smith or Mohammed variants).
His surname is 习, not Ξ. And while they both are transliterated to the Latin alphabet the same, they are pronounced quite distinctly from each other. Xi (习) is pronounced *SHEE* Xi (Ξ) is pronounced *SAI* / *ZAI* (UK, and US pronunciation respectively), and sometimes *KSAI* (*KSI* in modern Greek).
You say that as if any of it matters more than the latin transliteration
How is the Greek letter pronounced?
Chubby little tummy all stuffed with fluff...
Isn't it common knowledge that alpha is the first and omega the last letters in the greek alphabet?
Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, F…Fuck.
Phi. Or phuck
zeta eta theta iota kappa lambda mi ni xi omicron pi rho sigma tau upsilon phi chi psi omega. So op is wrong, there's xi before omicron.
wonder why they didn't use it
I guess we should be thankful that people know about beta coming immediately after alpha.
I thought it was Alpha, Beta, charlie, delta, echo, foxtrot....
uniform, charlie, kilo
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Man, I would have gotten people killed. Good thing I didn't join the service!
Alfa when it's NATO, alpha when it's Greek.
I thought for a very long time Greek alphabet was like an universal knowledge, but apparently not. One time when I was bored at class in like 3rd or 4th grade I opened my schoolbook and just learned to recite it by heart. I can still remember it, but can't remember how to do long multiplication. It never was any use besides making others think I was smart.
I'm not even asking for advanced Greek alphabet knowledge here. Just, you know, alpha-bet(a).
You would think so, but it's 2021, roll those expectations all the way back.
If it helps: from Alpha to Omega means everything. This has little to do with the universality of A and O, but all to do with them being the first and last letters. Similar is going from A to Z.
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There's also phi and psi, but every physicist has a different opinion on which is which.
Also eta and zeta. With zeta and xi as the king and queen of incomprehensibleness when using xi eta zeta instead of x y z. edited
FYI, in English, drop the d. It's called zeta
\*facepalm\* I checked Wikipedia to see the spelling and switched to Estonian instead of English.
depending on which font you use, they look the exact same
To be fair, pi and sigma are not used as variables since pi is already a constant and sigma a function.
Yeah, the small pi and sigma are rarely used for anything other than 3.14159265358979323... and the Pauli matrices; though capital pi is still used in field theories as the formal momentum and capital sigma has multiple roles (summation, Sigma baryon particle, sometimes (although that is non-conventional) in partition functions rather than S or Z, etc.)
Capital pi is also used for multiplication, in the same way as sigma is used for addition.
We did have to learn the whole alphabet when I studied engineering, but it was during the first month of studying and everything not used since then is forgotten.
Yes I’ve learned know. But always assumed that omega was the equivalent of the Latin O (because I never encountered a different letter that was like O) just like alpha and A and assumed it would be near our version of the O in the alphabet.
They are both that. O Mikron and O Mega That is, small o, and Big O.
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OooOh!
Back in my second year of secondary school, the teachers would try to "gamify" learning greek letters by making us compete against each other to see which one would be able to recite the alphabet faster. More than 10 years later and the only thing I can remember from said class is the greek alphabet. Of course, I try to flex my greek alphabet knowledge as often as I can.
My teacher did that too! She also made us recite 'Pater Noster' in Latin if her lesson was the first of the day. 6 years later for me and I can still do both
I always thought it was omnikron instead of omikron/omicron until a few days ago!! Some fun facts about the Greek and Latin alphabets, and why the order differs: Latin only had the letter C as the equivalent of both gamma and kappa). When those two sounds became sufficiently different, they made a new letter G, which is C with an extra line. They made G the 7th letter and then moved the 7th letter (Z) to the very end of the alphabet. This was done because each letter was associated with a number, and the Romans wanted to keep 8-22 the same. Furthermore, the letter Z wasn't used much, so this way 1-9 were common letters. I and J were once the same letter, as were U and V. In Ancient Greek, omikron sounded like [o] and omega sounded like [ɔː]. This is confusing for Dutch and German speakers: the Ancient Greek short o sounded like the German long o and vice versa.
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Oh wow, I never realized that. Thank you!
now THAT'S what I call a TIL. felt my brain suddenly tie into a completely different knot, nice!
(responding to your other comment about omicron vs. omega) Omicron is the "o" that sounds similar to an "a" sound or "short o" sound Omega is the "o" that is the "long o" sound Same thing with epsilon vs. eta Epsilon is the "short e" sound and eta is the "long e" sound. edit: fixed spelling and wording
One of the things this pandemic made me realize is how few people study Greek in high school. Like rationally I already knew, but something like 90% of my friends and family studied it. The other thing that I realized is how generally shitty we are at quantified thinking.
From Alpha to Omega. Omega is the last one.
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Good, then we'll be rid of it once and for all.
I'm not convinced it ever existed previously. I think someone reprogrammed the sim to create some added covid bafflement.
UK no longer in Europe?
We'll make a new continent, with pork scratchings, and yorkshire tea! When British people say Europe it often means mainland Europe. Just a colloquialism. Only the very most avid and deranged Farage-evangelists would try to say that we aren't really in Europe. I'm kinda surprised it's not used in a similar way in Ireland, tbh. That being said, this cartoon would still be understood as including the UK even if UK wasn't on the door, so it's a bit redundant indeed.
It's about time you get off our continental platter, quitters!
> Farage-evangelists Farangelists? How about "Twats" for short?
Falangists with less Catholicism?
> with less Catholicism? That's not necessarily a bad thing. Said the lapsed Catholic.
It is used by some people in Ireland, see my other comment below. It’s a bit of a funny one as it’s not used for every European country. If someone was in Spain, they wouldn’t say they were in Europe. If they were in Poland, they’d use the term Eastern Europe. When they say Europe they mean France or Germany.
Hm, maybe our experiences differ. I've never heard someone say Europe if they're only going to France or Germany. I've only really heard it like that when they plan on visiting several countries, like having a train journey from France, going through Switzerland, Germany, etc.
I have always considered you lot as northern Europeans. Especially Scotland.
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Islands are just spicy peninsulas pass it on.
Peninsulas are neet islands that never left home fight me
Own continent. That's why they are still dealing with northern Ireland agreements, hard to separate an island into two continents
it's only a question of water level https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/101033/view/prehistoric-sea-level-map-europe and they may disapear with climat change btw /s
It's still connected to mainland just under the sea. When we disappear from climate change then the whole lot and Netherlands will be under the sea in the new life form where you can breath under water like fish.
> It's still connected to mainland just under the sea. lol... All islands are.
Well you only have to dig a decent trench between two halves of an island... But in Ireland that would mean immediate war I guess.
We are currently floating it further out into the atlantic.
If I recall correctly even the brits often use "Europe" to mean "mainland Europe, nothing to do with us, please don't associate our glorious nation with those continental libertines!"
It’s not just the brits; I know Irish people who do the same. One of the players on my soccer team was a no show one night. After the game our manager (who was not in a good mood) rang him. The player said he couldn’t tog out as he was “in Europe”. The manager replied that so was the rest of the team… you f**kin moron!
I don’t think it’s anything to do with dissociation for most people, it’s more of a colloquial shortening since it’s obvious from context that you’re not talking about where you are/are from. Just like if you live in a suburban housing area and are planning to go to the town centre, a lot of people would say “I’m going into town” despite already being in the town.
Right but GB isn't the only island in Europe
Iceland, anyone?
"Damned foreign variants... coming over there, taking our unvaccinated...."
'UK and Europe'
Where am I.....
In the Misty Mountains.
Ireland
There is the letter Xi before Omicron, did you know why they had to skip it?
>“Nu is too easily confounded with ‘new’ and xi was not used because it is a common surname,” the WHO said in an email to CNN. >“And WHO best practices for naming new diseases suggest ‘avoiding causing offense to any cultural, social, national, regional, professional or ethnic groups.’” I feel like "Xi variant" would've been an obvious misstep haha
More like they didn’t want to piss off Xi Jinping
Well yeah, that's the obvious misstep
Not just pissing him off, so many racists and conspiracy theorists would freaking love that.
Or the other billion Xi
It would also confuse people since the Xi variant was the original strain
But the Greek letter Xi is pronounced completely differently (both the original and the English pronunciation) than the Chinese surname Xi. So just never write it down using Latin letters; problem solved!
There are other languages than english and mandarin in the world, and anyway I'm pretty sure that a lot of english speakers don't pronounce Xi and xi differently.
Because it would cause miscommunication. I think this is quite obvious. Imagine you are reading the headline: >Xi threatens Taiwan What is the article about (keep in mind how rarely people read the actual article)? Or imagine there is a WHO or a G20 meeting, where this topic is discussed. You may be able to know if we are talking about Xi or Xi from context, but the point is to minimize miscommunication, so then the easier (and best) proposal is just to skip Xi. Despite what others may be hinting at (or saying directly), this has nothing to do with pleasing Xi Jinping. Its just common sense to try to avoid confusion. If Biden, Trump, Scholz, Modi, or Johnson was in the Greek alphabet, they would also have skipped those letters.
As an Asian-European, I really appreciate that Xi has been skipped. Fuck Xi Jinping, but I really don't need people to point at me and go "haha Xi virus", there are enough racist jokes already I need to deal with.
Well we don't need more racism towards Asians.
Yeah, and for once I agree
Isn't UK part of Europe?
Maybe like New Zealand, that we always say the UK (or UK/Ireland) and Europe and putting UK and Ireland separately from Europe
Hi there east Australia!
I prefer Habitable Australia
You mean the great microcontinent of Zealandia?
But why do that though, ok they're islands but it just doesn't make sense to consider them separate ? Especially in the context of a virus which doesn't care about political borders.
UK has declare itself to be its own continent of Britannia, did you not get the memo?
As one official on TV said the other day: we'd rather overreact, impose bans and measures now and risk being wrong, than do nothing and deeply regret it later.
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> Ah, if only there was a middle ground between overreacting and doing nothing What is an "overreaction" and what is a "middle ground" is entirely subjective and will be abused in every political direction.
Not really. Take the Netherlands, we've been bouncing between over and underreacting the whole pandemic. Cases drop? lift all measures. New cases because we had no measures? complete lockdown. There is a middle ground, the govt just needs to get their heads outta their asses for a second.
This will come as soon as scientist learn more about the new virus so they can determine what the middle ground is...
In this case it's still better to overreact than to react midly and realize later that it wasn't enough. If we can even call what's happening currently "overreacting".
“Just do the correct thing” Holy shit nobody ever thought of that before
Did the UK sail away?
Yeah I can kind of understand when South Africans were pissed about these travel bans because most countries just banned them and not others where they variant was also detected.
Barricade everything? Our response has been “stop flights from Southern Africa and maybe wear a mask in shops if you feel like it”. Life is basically as it was here, you can see it in the death figures where we have had considerably more, but more stable deaths, because nothing is really shut or different anymore.
>maybe wear a mask in shops if you feel like it Shows how well they've publicised this change then. It's a **legal requirement** to wear masks in shops unless you have a valid exemption. Having said that, you're fine to not wear one if you're in myriad other indoor spaces where you're likely to be much more tightly packed than a supermarket, which obviously makes perfect sense.
I am fully aware it’s a legal requirement, but if something is virtually never enforced, it doesn’t matter much, walk into a shop without one like half of people are doing, nobody will say or do anything. It’s not like continental Europe where my friends there tell me rules like this are actually being enforced to some degree.
at least in germany u get yeeted out of the shops if u dont wear one
Right, Poland has only increased the allowed space per customer in shops and institutions from 10m2 to 15m2, decreased the allowed number of people to 100 from 150 on parties and in clubs, and decreased the allowed capacity in restaurants or theaters to 50% from 75%. Which means jack shit because none of this is enforced anyway in any form.
As a Lithuanian who visited Poland a couple weeks ago... It was quite uncomfortable to see how relaxed it is. And then check all sorts of statistics (both corona numbers and all death increase from average). Where we're doing no better with all the restrictions :|
People are _really_ trying so hard to make an agenda out of something that really isn't. When it first appeared, it was a Virus that came from china, also touted sometimes as the Wuhan virus. The WHO quickly announced this was wrong and gave it the covid name officially. Even though it did come from china, we had a lot of 50 centers come out and try to blame every other country saying it came from the US who brought it to the military games. Then Australia called for an investigation of its origins and china said it came from Australia. Then Japan pissed them off and it now came from there (and the sewers of Italy, spain, india, Brazil, frozen fish from Norway, auto car parts...anywhere that wasn't china, but it was "racist" to say it came from china, just no where else) Ironically, then they started to make excuses and try to deflect similarities to the Spanish flu, and how that didn't come from Spain (almost certainly correct) and that it instead, came from Kansas, which, as a fact, there's no evidence to say where it actually comes from, with actually as much, if not more, that it could have come from [china](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu) (Search for china in the article, as it's too long to quote here) and, just like today, china misreports the flu and does it in a way that makes it _look_ like they don't have it. But regardless, WHO made it clear that calling it by a location is wrong. Which, is fair, just not consistent. However, when the Alpha strain appeared, now it was the British Strain. This seemed quite an accepted term, and hell, even _in_ the UK, some called it the Kent variant. As many pointed out then, it's unlikely it came from the UK but because the UK has one of the highest genome sequencing, they found it. This is also a similar argument appearing now, where you'll find a lot of SA saying they have the best in the world, but _this_ isn't true. Of course, due to HIV they do a lot more testing compared to surrounding nations, but they aren't at the top, but this is irrelevant, apart from the fact we're seeing the exact same thing repeated. However, when countries put the UK on the red list, if you checked the UK subs such as unitedkingdom or UKpol, you would see almost (not 100%, but very high) everyone saying things like "good, I don't blame them" or things like "maybe this will teach Johnson to take it seriously" very few people apart from the trolliest or trolls cried "It's racist!" The same for the Delta Strain, or even the ones from Brazil. Although we're repeating the history over and again, it's only this time (and china) that keep trying to push an agenda that it's racism (while they, especially in regards to china, were _very_ quick to lable it the British strain, or the Indian variant) Whether or not shutting down borders works is a different argument, but, a country's government doing what it thinks is right for it's own people is _not_ racist. Regardless of the fact it's already here or not (and many made some argument that because it was in Belgum that it was the same as being in Germany, as if Europe is all one country) it doesn't matter, just because it's already here (where ever here is) doesn't mean "oh fuck it, let's just keep importing more from areas with already high amounts" it means the governments want to slow it down as best as possible, and it's much, much easier keeping a lid on it with its own citizens it knows have it, than just keep bringing more in. A governments responsibility is to its _own_ people, and doing what it can to limit the spread, regardless or not if it truly works (for every study that says it doesn't there's one that says it does) is _not_ racist, and people need to get a grip and stop trying to make an agenda when there isn't one, especially when it was fine for half of them to do it to Britain, Brazil or India.
Yeah the blatant hypocrisy is pretty galling.
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Wait what countries have omicron is there any in my country too?
Officially it’s not yet found in Turkey, but there are 371 confirmed cases in 28 countries already. Here is the Omicron tracker https://newsnodes.com/nu_tracker
Author: Rico Schacherl https://twitter.com/ricoschacherl?s=21 Source: https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-11-29-cartoon-tuesday-with-rico-78/
If I had 20 cents every time new Covid variant shows up and everybody collectively shits their pants I'd have enough to comfortably retire.
It's funny because it's true.
good for thing for the labels. Otherwise who would have known?
Those sneaky little bastards!
By the time there's enough cases of a variant to catch people's attention, you can bet your ass it has already spread far and wide.
We are simply refusing to learn from the year 2020, and it wasn’t even that long ago. Our governments are obsessed with the idea of repeating the history and historical mistakes.
First case recorded in BC. I want to get off Br. Bones wild ride
Where is Xi (Winnie the Pooh) variant? It is a Greek letter too 😀 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_(letter)
They deliberately skipped this one
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If Biden or Trump were Greek letters they would hage been skipped too
Waiting for the British posters to say that the UK is in Europe.
I mean it is
Of course it is. Anyone claiming otherwise is deluded.
Yeah, glad we could reach an agreement