Dead Planet

Sorry but I respectfully disagree...testing everyone is not a mountain too high to climb...it would be expensive though but allowing the virus to run wild is expensive too...the virus isn't running out of control right now because of the precautions taken by most of the world..... but we must reopen economically , we can't stay closed until the pandemic dies out...I know every country is doing their best to combat the virus but I will be very surprised if there isn't a 2nd wave then a 3rd wave etc...

I need to listen to it again as it did not grab me years ago when I first picked it up....

Decent stuff...

Also if you look at the numbers , it is obvious that there is a major difference between seasonal flu and covid 19... 291000 - 646000 deaths with about 1 billion infections for seasonal flu about 300000 deaths with about 4.3 million infections right now for covid 19, if we extrapolate the numbers to where god forbid we have 1 billion infections of covid 19 then we would have millions of deaths....I'm not doing the actual math since I'm terrible at math...so yes we need to continue to be very careful how we deal with this virus...

Not sure about that as I've read that the death rate is around 1% while regular flu is 0.1% but there are vaccines for the yearly flu...of course they are still figuring out this virus so the data is changing all the time.... Seasonal flu The flu strikes every year, but no two seasons are exactly the same. Because strains mutate each year, it can be hard to predict what will hit. Unlike COVID-19, we have effective vaccines and antiviral medications that can help prevent and reduce the severity of the flu. Additionally, many people have residual immunity to the flu from years past, as our bodies have seen the flu before. We don’t have any immunity to COVID-19, and it appears to be more contagious and fatal than the flu so far, but this could very well change as we learn more. Key symptoms: fever, cough, sore throat, fatigue Global cases annually: 9 percent of the population, or about 1 billion infections (up to 5 million of which are severe) Global deaths annually: between 291000 - 646000; death rate around 0.1 percent Transmission: spreads through respiratory droplets; each diagnosed person passes it to1.3 persons Most affected groups: older adults and people with compromised immune systems Treatment available: antiviral medications (Tamiflu, Relenza, Rapivab, Xofluza) to reduce duration and severity of flu Vaccines available: there are many vaccine options available that provide immunity against multiple strains of influenza

Lets not forget that covid is 10 times more deadly than the normal influenza...ask me which one I would rather catch?

So does that mean the numbers are too low or too high, because you're right there are inconsistancies in the way the numbers are being tallied...but I'm pretty sure that if you get run down by a bus that you will not be counted as a virus death...lol There is a definite concern about missed surgeries and treatments but that is what happens when the world isn't prepared to deal with a pandemic...I doubt this will be the only one in our lifetimes...

Tell the almost 85000 dead in the US and their families that it is just 'panic talk'......

Does he really have it a second time or is it a false positive, something that is happening around the world....once you catch it once, the antibodies are in your system and I believe they can cause a false positive for the tests....of course some people can probably get it again if their immune system is weakened....

If you don't know where the virus is located then you don't know who needs to be self isolating...all it takes is one person who is asymptomatic to pass on the virus to a ton of others...so yes testing needs to be ramped up and done on a regular basis until you no longer find people with the virus....that said you are correct is one way, we will never be able to get rid of it completely because there will always be a few who don't get tested....the only way to rid ourselves of it is to get a vaccine or medication that does a good job of combating the virus but until that happens testing and tracking is the only way to lower the transmission rate....of course many countries can't afford to do it and others will fight like hell to avoid testing and tracking which means the situation will not be getting better any time soon.... bottom line, I'm not saying testing is the answer, it is just the only thing we can do right now....

Never been a big fan of Glory, the first release was decent but the rest was crap IMO....this song is okay...

Everyone should be getting tested since one of the major sources of this virus are asymptomatic people...until we can track down all the people who are passing this virus on to others we will never get a grip on the pandemic....

Several countries that eased up restrictions are seeing an increase in virus cases so this is far from over...I expect this to be the new normal as the virus is not going away any time soon...we need a working vaccine or at least drugs that mitigate the sickness and the vaccine is at least a year away if not several years...they are still trying to find a vaccine for HIV and that has been around for decades of course there is a lot more money being thrown at this virus so we can only hope for the best....

Good song....a lot to be proud of....

Nice song....

Other than Images and Words I haven't cared for anything Dream Theater has put out and I only like a few songs off off that release....

I'm not a big prog fan but I love Dead Reckoning, unfortunately DR appears to be their best release at least for me as I have not been able to get into their previous releases....

The Hunt (2020) - enjoyed this one...lotta fun...check it out if you get the chance....

Inside the Nightmare Voyage of the Diamond Princess https://www.gq.com/story/inside-diamond-princess-cruise-ship-nightmare-voyage?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Here is an interesting article from the New York Times doing a quick comparison between the US and Canada over the virus.... NYTimes.com May 2, 2020 Two Medical Systems, Two Pandemic Responses By Ian Austen After lamenting in a recent Canada Letter about my inability to find an expert who could offer an informed comparison of how the medical systems in Canada and the United States were responding to the coronavirus pandemic, I soon heard from Prof. Peter Berman He is particularly well placed for such an assessment, after spending 25 years teaching at Harvard, most recently as a professor of global health systems and economics at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Professor Berman is now based in Vancouver as the director of the school of population and public health at the University of British Columbia’s medical school. I’ll begin the comparison with some numbers. Massachusetts, the previous home of Professor Berman, has a population of 6.8 million and British Columbia has slightly over five million residents. But the toll of the pandemic on the two areas has been significantly different. As of Friday afternoon in Massachusetts, there have been more than 62,000 reported cases and 3,562 deaths, or 52 fatalities for every 100,000 people. In B.C., there have been just 2,112 reported cases and 111 deaths or just two victims for every 100,000 residents. Professor Berman cautioned that those numbers reflect a wide variety of factors outside the medical system like the demographic makeup of different cities and regions. But he noted that near his old office at Harvard “there must be thousands of the world’s best hospital beds and there are three top international top hospitals within a couple blocks.” So with resources like that, why is there such a great disparity with British Columbia? Part of the answer, for Professor Berman, can be found in how hospitals are funded and managed by the public health care systems of Canadian provinces. “The kind of system we have in Canada — and I think in British Columbia we have a pretty well-run version of it — allows the public health authorities to essentially commandeer the hospital system. It’s a command and control thing, it’s not a coordination thing,” he said. In the United States, Professor Berman said, hospitals are largely private institutions without any overall control. The effect of having these different systems plays out in many ways. “In British Columbia, the province just said: ‘We need to get ready for this, we need to free up 30 percent of the hospital beds,’” Professor Berman said. “And they instructed the health authorities to do it.” But in Massachusetts, he said, not only was there no one to tell hospitals to clear out beds, the economics of the system work against such steps. “If you have a private hospital where all the beds are paid for by patients and by insurance, when you have an empty bed, you have no revenue,” Professor Berman said. “So there’s a strong incentive for the hospital managers, especially in trying economic times, to be reluctant to cooperate. And then you end up with this kind of panicky atmosphere that has been happening in the U.S. where people are saying: ‘We don’t have enough beds, we don’t have enough this, we don’t have enough that.’” By contrast, Canadian hospitals have fixed funding. The number of full or empty beds has no effect on their budgets. The structure in the United States leads to other problems. Few American hospital administrators got together to do things like moving medical supplies and patients around between their institutions, Professor Berman said. “They have a strong disincentive not to do that and in addition there is no one who can make them do that without a pretty heavy duty expression of police powers of the state, which we haven’t really seen happening,” he said. Professor Berman also noted that while the American system has vast medical and scientific expertise, there’s little national coordination. Instead, responsibility has been fractured among a variety of long established agencies like the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health and the coronavirus task force established by President Trump. “So you see these different agencies being brought in to weigh in with their opinions without any sense of who’s really the spokesperson,” he said. In Canada however, “at a national level, Theresa Tam is doing that and then at the provincial level, we have people like Bonnie Henry doing that. I think in the U.S., no one’s been allowed to do that.” None of this means that Canada’s approach to the crisis and the structure of its medical system is perfect. Among other things, Professor Berman said that Canada’s health systems, which effectively treat doctors as private contractors, sometimes leads to disconnections between primary health care and the hospital systems. He also said that the country has been slow to push testing for the virus out into communities. But none of that has led to the sort of response he’s seeing back in the United States. “I’m a health economist,” Professor Berman said. “So the argument is always given in the United States that we have a lot of innovation, the system is very efficient and so on. But this is the other side of the argument.”

Several provinces in Canada are easing restrictions as well...I wonder if the first wave will be over before the 2nd wave hits....... if we need a lesson about this we only have to look at the 1918 influensa epidemic where the 2nd wave was much worse than the first wave... and then there was a third wave...

Good stuff...I would be interested in a full release.....

Just when I thought I had heard everything about this virus...we get COVID TOES!!!! https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2020/04/covid-toes-probably-more-rampant-than-we-realize/&fj=1

I agree with the sentiments about the left and the politically correct crowd....the whole PC thing has gotten out of hand, the liberal left has lost its mind as it is getting to the point where you almost have to apologize for being white...its a shame that political parties(not just in the US) are either running to the left or the right....we need parties that walk the line between the 2 polar opposites, centrist or as I prefer to call them, common sense parties...I can understand people voting for Trump either because he represents what they are comfortable with or because they feel there is no other reasonable choice....personaIly I'm tired of both the far left and the far right as neither group represents my vision of how the world should be....I just don't see Trump as the answer for anyones problems...as for Biden I honestly don't know if he would be a good president maybe he will be heavily influenced by the left and make the gulf between the 2 sides even worse than it already is...I do think he deserves a chance...even if you ignore the guy in the oval office and look at what the Republican party stands for, they haven't tried to bring the 2 sides together, IMO they seem more interested in enriching themselves at everyone elses expense by cutting taxes for the rich which was supposed to trickle down to the rest of the country but that didn't happen....

This is one of the reasons that I pay very little attention to the artists behind the music as a few of them are not very good people....I just want to hear the music and to hell with all the noise behind the scenes....this is why I can watch The Cosby Show episodes and enjoy them despite Cosby being a predator.....