COVID-19 Strikes Again – TriggrCon 2020 Has Been Cancelled

@Billy Bob If by terrorists you mean inanimate viral capsids then yes.

@Alex Karulin The main and probably only things I'm seeing that will change significantly to substantially in the future are basically:

1) Nursing homes, care homes as we know them. Because of the obscene mortality rate there vs general population we're going to see everything about them change in the long run.

2) Public transit. Crowded subways and buses were already unpopular in many areas, this will simply be the death of them as we know it today. Expect fundamental revisions to capacity, safety, schedule and more.

3) Cruise ships. For too long have they carried a reputation for being germ factories with minimal if any consequences, now they've been relegated to pariah status in the wake of Diamond Princess and others. Expect if not a complete overhaul of health, safety and sanitation regulations and standards, a fundamental revision to how they do things.

4) Office work. Despite all the cheering about "Yay! No more commutes!" and working from home, this is proving a lot of those jobs unnecessary or irrelevant in terms of having positions manned. I'm foreseeing a lot of new automation taking over wide swathes of white collar work in the next year or two.

5) Globalization as a whole. It's dead. We're going back to the standards of the early 20th century. National self-sufficiency is going to become the new hotness, not outsourcing everything to the plague factory that is China. Either that or all those jobs will be automated which is happening already. Either way, globalization as you know it is dead and gone.

@Major Tom 1) You might be right about nursing homes changing but mortality rate will always be higher in institutions like those for obvious reasons.
2) Places that have well-developed public transit will not be able to change much besides administrative measures. Too many people depend on public transport. NYC cannot create more parking out of thin air nor is it economical or efficient or responsible to do so. Remote working and job loss will do most of the regulation there.
3) Agreed
4) Agreed again. This'll be compounded by the current economic downturn i.e. cutting real estate and personnel costs.
5) Again too much investment is in globalization. It's cheaper to implement mandatory health safety measures and health inspections at the current sweatshops. Americans love us some cheap stuff that can't be made by a fellow citizen who wants a house, health insurance and an F250. I can see production moving more to Mexico though. In that case if they get ornery about something, we can always give them some freedom and democracy.

@ Lucky. The majority of confirmed recorded cases of the stuff in Pueblo County Colorado have been all over the retirement homes.

That said, there's increasingly convincing evidence that Wuhan flu/COVID-19/coronavirus has already passed, peaked and declined in our area. We had a very strange cough illness show up in February with persistent two week long dry coughs, some fevers and body aches and generally unusual compared to the regular colds and flu. Lots of kids and staff at the school I work at, myself and my folks included all came down with it, it faded away by mid-March before a single confirmed recorded case of coronavirus had been detected in Pueblo County about a week later. Symptoms were generally consistent with COVID-19 as we know them now but we had no major incidents of hospitalizations or deaths at that time. Now six weeks after we had our first recorded case we only have just over 100 cases (108 to be exact), most of which occurring in the past two weeks or so. That's way too slow for a county of 180,000 people mostly cramped into the city of Pueblo and Pueblo West to be consistent with a brand new uncontained illness.

And worse for the lockdown situation, quite a few counties have little or no recorded cases of COVID-19. We're talking numerous counties like Las Animas, Custer, Prowers, and Otero all having fewer than 10 cases each. There's a still a couple places here that have yet to record a single infection at all.

@Alex Karulin I can see us having public events still- IF everybody wears head to toe latex and mask... although now that I mention it, that sounds like a different kind of comvention...

@Major Tom Globalization isn’t dead, there is too much money to be made in outsourcing supply chains. It’s just that now they’ll probably switch critical infrastructure for things like medical equipment back stateside.

Hopefully we will wake up and write legislation to keep things like domestic 5G networks in the hands of people who aren’t our enemies (e.g. Huawei and China)

@lr788 I'd beg to differ, when it was just China on lockdown in January, the whole world's supply chain for everything got disrupted and it pissed quite a few people off in business and on the street. Now that there's massive evidence of Chinese coverups and outright lying about the numbers they got, it's only inflaming opinion against globalization. The idea of borderless travel in the European Union collapsed overnight, suddenly border controls were the new hotness in the face of Wuhan flu after decades of being told borders are meaningless and that globalization will see an end to such nonsense.

@Major Tom Pandemics happened before globalization, you ignorant twit.

@lr788 Sounds like a better convention than this one.

@Major Tom borderless travel was incredibly convenient in EU. it only really needs to be limited in special circumstances like this.

hopefully this is the wake up call to switch more manufacturing to Vietnam, Taiwan, or India. After destruction of human rights in Hong Kong and then this pandemic being covered up, with whistle blowers being locked away for speaking the truth, the Chinese regime has shown they do not deserve the superpower status the rest of the world has allotted them.

@SpaceGhost While very true, the mass troop movements during WWI which exacerbated the Spanish flu could be construed as a temporary phenomenon analogous to modern-day "globalization"

@SNKY PNKY The Spanish flu reached places that were not involved with WWI. Globalization certainly existed in 1918 and there are credible arguments that it was at least a century old by that time. It's not some new phenomenon as dingbat neoconservatives like to claim and, barring a global catastrophe that sends humanity back to a prehistoric state of existence, it is not going away.

@SNKY PNKY Much more devastating plagues have existed before that (see: bubonic)

Unless we want to go back to caveman times, pandemics will always be a threat. The proper defense is smart medical intervention and public health planning.

@SpaceGhost The real concern isn't that globalization somehow causes epidemics. It's that countries that rely too much on imports are ill-prepared to deal with such epidemics, when other countries that they import from go into lockdown and/or redirect their industrial output to fulfill their own (suddenly increased) demand.