Coronavirus

Brigantium said:
The version I heard was that Xi is a common surname (in China, at a guess) and they didn't want to go there.
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All surnames are common in China. The country is run by practically 100 surnames, with the top 5 Wang, Li, Zhang, Liu & Chen belonging to more than 400 million people.

The ratio surnames -population in China is extremely low: There are probably 2 -3 times more surnames in a small European country i.e. Croatia than in the whole Han China of 1.2 billion people!
I just found out that the number is ~4,000 surnames, but let me assure you that below Top 250 many -if not most- Chinese wouldn't know how to read the surname's character.

Xi is pretty rare though, I did a quick check and it's not even at top 400! There are ~12 million 120k people that bare that name, which is absolutely peanuts for China.

Night Prowler said:
LMAO

I was so optimistic. I'll never move to China.
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If you have the chance, do. Life changing.
 
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Brigantium said:
The version I heard was that Xi is a common surname (in China, at a guess) and they didn't want to go there.

I'm glad our government has shown caution for once about this. The other nations still had some mask wearing, only England had dropped practically every restriction out there, and case numbers have been rising for ages, even without another new variant turning up. As of Tuesday, masks are back on public transport and in shops. I can't find it now, but a recent study found mask wearing more effective as controlling the spread of covid than previously thought.

True, we don't know if this variant is more contagious and more or less harmful, but winter with very few restrictions isn't a good time to take chances. Too much history here of 'it's not dangerous until overwhelmingly proven'.
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Mask wearing indoors in England should have been made mandatory ages ago.

The travel ban is unlikely to make that much of a difference. Omicron has been probably in the UK for some time now. The cases found in Scotland with no travel history suggest that community transmission is already taking place.

Let’s hope we are getting to the stage where the virus is becoming significantly less deadly.
 
Brigantium said:
We really don't know either way yet. There's a lot of quoting of one doctor in South Africa, mostly notably by the Telegraph (which thinks everyone who didn't get a good thrashing at private boarding school is a useless snowflake anyway) saying the one patient she'd seen with the variant had very mild symptoms. For that matter, all people I've spoken to recently who've had covid - presumably Delta variant which is dominant at the minute - have also had very mild symptoms, resembling a cold.
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There have been loads of case in local schools here (children and parents) and all appear to have been with mild symptoms. Some people have been re-infected, having had Covid-19 in 2020.
 
____no5 said:
There are probably 2 -3 times more surnames in a small European country i.e. Croatia
I just found out that the number is ~4,000 surnames
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I did not know it's such a low number for China. 2-3? More like x8, there are ~35k surnames in Cro.

The surname I believe in Asia is not the same as surname in Europe. The concept.

For instance my friend is a Khan, which is 10+ million surname. It is the top surname in multiple countries in Asia and in top 10 in others. Really if you meed someone from Pakistan and he's a Khan it's like meeting a Brit named John.

While in Cro, in 4 biggest cities different surname is the most common. What's striking that Zagreb metro area which contains 25-30% of the country cannot be used as universal average not even in counting names and surnames. It's still possible to ballpark someone by name/surname to region in a fair number of cases. So that information might be encoded in the way we use names and surnames while for Asia that's not true at all.
 
____no5 said:
There are various misfirings here. First, N is Ni, not Nu. Then Ξ is ksi not Xi. If you write it Xi it’s not wrong but you’ll have problem when the Greek X =chi arrives a few letters later.

Then you got Xi’s name which is pronounced Shee in Chinese not Xi. And not to forget that English Alphabet is the base of pinyin and all Chinese know to spell the English way. Thus no problem there. The real problem would be that 1.4 billion people or close to 20% of earth’s population would read that as Shee and maybe that’s the reason why WHO skipped it; the 1.4 billion, not the one man.



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Or if they had kept it Ni as they should, it would be too offensive towards the Knights who say Nee :D
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Maybe they could've named it "It".
Or "ekki-ekki-ptang-vooom".
 
In other news, two guys from the flying club caught the virus. One has the classic symptoms (fever, lost sense of smell/taste) and the other, mild cold symptoms.

I took a self-test yesterday and another today, both negative. Think I dodged the bullet this time.
 
Just got a Moderna booster yesterday after my original J&J/Janssen vaccination in March. Don’t quite feel 100% today, but no major negative side effects.

A couple of family acquaintances who had long-term side effects after receiving the J&J vaccine claimed that those cleared up after they received an mRNA booster. So far that is not the case with the persistent tinnitus I picked up after my original J&J vaccination, and in fact my tinnitus might have gotten slightly worse after the Moderna booster, but at least it didn’t leap up dramatically. Still feels like it was the right tradeoff to make for now.
 
For over four moons, the hero Janssen stood alone in the fight against the evil demon Covid. Steady. Unfaltering. With a will of iron and a heart of steel. The armour remained unpierced and polished as on the first day.
And yet, while there was no doubt in the strength and ability of this champion, worries arose. For the evil demon Covid seemed to grow stronger every day. How long could our champion last, alone in the war? How long would he have to keep fighting?
Then, as a sunray breaking through the tempest, a voice echoed across the battlefield.
"You are no longer alone," it thundered. "I will now stand with you."
The warriors stood together forming a line against the behemoth, their swords pointed outward, their shields raised.
"Pray," said the warrior Janssen, whatever weariness there may have been being gone from his voice and with the sensation of a tremendous weight lifted off his shoulders, "what is thy name, noble heros?"
And the second champion turned to him with great confidence and great strength, and spoke thus:
"They call me Moderna".
And the boost was in the land.
 
I will be eligible to register for the booster on 7th Dec. Hopefully it won't take too long to find a place with capacity, cause Czech govt. closed some massive vax centers at the end of summer. I've got Moderna so far, so will be aiming for Comirnaty this time around.
 
Funny. About 10 years ago i admitted to a friend of mine that I was reading the following book. She thought I was weird for doing so. Not so weird now:

Amazon.com

www.amazon.com
 
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Perun said:
I thought only the Berlin government was stupid enough to do that.
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I went to see Massive Wagons and The Darkness at the same venue I got my second jab back in July. :D

To be fair, it would be impossible to keep a live venue as a vaccination centre once shows were allowed to resume.
 
Hence they use crappy football clubs' grounds like Middlesbrough. ;)

I thought I might treat myself on my birthday to a visit to the vaccine tour bus in the town centre for a shot of Pfizer. I'd prefer Moderna, but there's no choice in these things.
 
Jer said:
Just got a Moderna booster yesterday after my original J&J/Janssen vaccination in March. Don’t quite feel 100% today, but no major negative side effects.

A couple of family acquaintances who had long-term side effects after receiving the J&J vaccine claimed that those cleared up after they received an mRNA booster. So far that is not the case with the persistent tinnitus I picked up after my original J&J vaccination, and in fact my tinnitus might have gotten slightly worse after the Moderna booster, but at least it didn’t leap up dramatically. Still feels like it was the right tradeoff to make for now.
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Wow, that sucks... You sure the tinnitus is from the vaccine? I had a tinnitus years ago after a very stressful time, and it went away after a few months, thankfully.
 
jazz from hell said:
You sure the tinnitus is from the vaccine?
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I can’t prove causation, but there’s a pretty convenient correlation. Within 2 days of receiving the J&J shot I suddenly had very noticeable, consistent ringing and whooshing in both ears. Not super loud, but loud enough to be very noticeable in silence, and still noticeable but generally ignorable during the day. I’d had no changes in diet or stress level, no head trauma, none of the typical sources. That persistent tinnitus never reduced or disappeared over the 8 months following my initial vaccination. J&J’s test data cited 7 people out of the initial 40,000 or so who reported tinnitus, and while 6 of them said it faded over time, 1 test subject reported no improvement over the entire test period. Looks like I may be in the same boat as that person.

I’m only 3 days out from receiving the Moderna booster, but as of yesterday (2 days post-vaccination) my tinnitus seems to have increased a similar amount to what it did post-J&J, so it’s now noticeable all the time, and about as loud as if I’d gone to a metal concert with no ear protection the night before. Thankfully it doesn’t muffle anything or mess with the EQ, so music still sounds normal to me, just with this persistent ringing alongside it. I’m hopeful that the post-Moderna effect may still subside over time, but if it doesn’t, then I’ll probably be seeing an ENT and avoiding any further COVID shots, since anything more than what I’m currently experiencing would really damage my quality of life.
 
Hopefully the tinnitus goes down over time. I'm really sorry to hear that. It seems the tinnitus was originally linked to J&J, so I wonder if the Moderna shot activated an immune reaction somewhere in your ear.
 
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