I’d wager it’s a small number of people who thought it was never a crisis. Approximately 1 in 350 Americans died of COVID in the past two years, so most people know someone who died. Personally, it’s hard not to call it a crisis when it hits that close to home.
The places in the world that reacted the least to covid have excess deaths you can barely even tell there was a potent disease. Not a single country that avoided lockdowns is in the top 30 excess death (per capita). So did many people treat this as a crisis? I would say so. Should we have? That seems to be clearly a no.
This feels a little... Too convenient. Would love to see an analysis that covers all confounders.
That is, I'm sympathetic to the idea that a lot of what we did was probably not super helpful. I'm less inclined to believe that a counterfactual world had fewer deaths. Seems more likely that, while we could have protected nursing homes better, most everything else was likely to look very similar to how it did.
I mean, I get the butterfly flapping a wing argument. But in general, large things moving in a direction tend to arrive where they are headed.
I actually don't know a single young person who died from Covid over the pandemic but I know a few who committed suicide and a couple more who attempted it.
There have been about 24,000 people under age 40 who died from COVID-19 in the US during the pandemic. Suicide data is not available for 2021/2022 yet, but based the age ratio of past suicides (around 50% of suicides below age 40) and the total number of suicides in 2020 (around 40,000), then the number of suicides is likely to be higher than the number of COVID deaths but in the same qualitative arena.
Further apples to apples comparison is tough because kids 0-5 die of COVID but the US does not record any death below age 5 as a suicide.
A related comparison: more school age children died of COVID during the pandemic than have ever across all history died from school shootings.
Given ~67k deaths under 50 years old total from COVID [0] and over 100k overdose deaths in 2021 alone [1], I'll wager heavily that is not true for the under 50 crowd.
No amount of screeching will change the fact that people are far more mentally prepared for grandma to keel over with little warning than they are to lose a random uncle or coworker.
> No amount of screeching will change the fact that people are far more mentally prepared for grandma to keel over with little warning than they are to lose a random uncle or coworker.
That depends. If a coworker dies because they did drugs, you might say to yourself "I'm safe from that mode of death as long as I don't do drugs".
If a random coworker dies because of Covid that they caught on the job, you might say to yourself "I'm next", the result being existential dread and anxiety.
It's true covid skewed old, but people quote the stats of dead young people in the last 2 years as if people were mentally prepared for that. Overdoses don't kill young families in a matter of weeks, but Covid did. Overdoses don't bring down 43 teachers in a school system over the course of a few months, whose average age was 46, but Covid did that. Covid brought all kinds of unique and deep tragedies that aren't reflected in the stats, and people are still dealing with the emotional fallout.
Again I understand that covid skewed old, but grandma is already dead and has been since before Covid. Now my parents are "old" at 65, but I'm not mentally prepared for them to die at all. If their parents are any indication I still have a good 20 years left with them, and so I get really upset when people try to discount their lives as if they wouldn't be missed if they were to die from Covid, or if somehow that's just nature taking its course. Really this shouldn't be a contest of whose death counts more to society.
> No amount of screeching will change the fact that people are far more mentally prepared for grandma to keel over with little warning than they are to lose a random uncle or coworker.
But public health policy doesn't need to be structured around these gut feelings of whose life is more or less valuable or whose death is more or less expected.
To the larger dialogue about protective measures, I understand the claim that "I'm young, my risk of severe disease or death is low. So I need no precautions." But unless you live in isolation, your infection increases my risk of infection. My protective measures reduce that risk but do not implement. And I have elderly parents, in their 90's. They're vaccinated and reasonably cautious. They're also mostly independent and functional. But they aren't particularly ready to die. So despite the relaxation in required protective measures, I wear an N95 in indoor spaces outside my house so that I don't inadvertently infect them. I've also had encounters where I've been yelled at by random strangers for doing so. Apparently for some, the right to choose is not reciprocal - "I would like to choose not to do [x] but I'd also like to compel you do likewise."
I don't know anyone under 40 who died, period. But I know four people over 40 (actually over 60) who died of Covid in the past two years. Even though they are older, it still felt like a crisis.
I don’t know, I think it depends on how you qualify crisis, and what you deem as an appropriate response.
If we’re trading anecdotes I don’t personally know anyone who has died or even been hospitalized with COVID. I know people who know people who did, but that is a small number and the majority were not likely to live long due to other causes (I do know one of one family member of a friend who was in seemingly good health and was hospitalized).
For my personal health and the health of most people I would say there wasn’t ever a crisis, though the delta wave got closest to being so that also coincided with the vaccine availability which removed any crisis that would have come otherwise. For others who are prone to severe illness it has been a crisis and continues to be. Aside from the political banter that is what has made this so divisive, the real risk and experiences of people can vary wildly.
I also don't know anyone who died from covid. However, any event that overloads hospitals to the extreme that care has to be rationed is absolutely a crisis. This happened all over the country.
We can debate what the appropriate responses to this crisis should have been but it was unarguably a crisis. Pretending otherwise is simply delusional.
Let's try and refrain from strong language such as "delusional" and "unarguably," we'll likely find more to agree on if we do.
But yes, I agree a hospital overloading is a crisis for those providing or seeking to receive care at said hospital. The cause and remediation of said crises are I think likely significantly more involved than just attributing it to COVID. In other words, the crisis of a particular overloaded hospital is not likely strictly a COVID crisis, but rather an issue with how care is prepared for and distributed in general.
There was a crisis. It had many aspects (medical, economic, social, political) and there were many different methods of alleviating those different aspects.
Claiming "there was no crisis" is simply, factually wrong.
This is a bizarre reply if intended for a reply to what I said. I'm not sure how what I said could be construed as "semantic goalpost shifting" (as I have neither explored the definitions of words nor given an original goalpost to move).
In any case it does not appear as though you are open to reasonable discourse. You have decided on your "facts" and any opposing, or merely appearing opposing even if it isn't, viewpoint is catalogued as "delusional," even though you've offered virtually nothing in the way of an actual argument. So, I guess, you win?
You seem to be conflating "overloaded enough to require overtime and additional temporary space to compensate" with "overloaded so that even with overtime and every other tool in our belt we are unable to compensate and have to ration critical life saving care, directly resulting in unnecessary deaths."
Those two aren't really comparable, though the former really should have clued us in to how big a risk the latter was.
I'm not so sure they're not comparable, they certainly seem to at minimum be a gradient of the same curve. "Unnecessary deaths" is a tricky thing to attempt to claim, and you'll need a bit more than shouting into the void to back such a claim up. Indeed you'd need some pretty detailed analysis to claim an unusual number of deaths directly attributable to a lack of available care at facilities typically able to provide said care, specifically because they simply didn't have the resources to administer the care.
In other words, I doubt your latter scenario at the more extreme end of overloading was widely the case (in the first world), perhaps you have some analysis backing it up?
Anytime the words “disease” and “reefer trucks” appear in the same sentence, it’s a crisis. People forget that when covid started there was nothing people could do but ventilate and hope. Like sars, the cytokine storm burned out the lungs and that was somewhat age independent. They found anti inflammatories that worked and adapted work from other inflammation diseases to get some kind of treatment.
Then vaccines appeared, and things became more manageable, but up through delta, getting covid was really bad if you ended upon ventilator. The game changed with omicron although even that can affect naive populations. Politicians and pundits trotted out “sacrifice grandma for the economy” but it didn’t really fly. Hope people remember enough from covid to improve aged care and end of life housing.
I remember seeing an epidemiologist near the beginning who was saying that normally people don't listen at all when they talk about these kinds of things and so they sound the alarm loudly. This time people listened and he was warning everyone that an overreaction would kill more people. He probably got kicked off everything for "disinformation."
That seems a bit convenient at this point doesn't it?
There is some truth the the idea that our culture is more attuned to fear than it used to be and that politicians are more adept at exploiting that. You should be more surprised when politicians don't stoke fears and panic for their own purposes.
I don't know if it's still a crisis, but I think America is saying it isn't, because it's tired of the fight. No matter which side you're on (real or not, overblown or not, etc.), America has been at war with itself for 2 years. People have given up trying to convince the other side who's right and who's wrong. Family's don't see each other, friends don't talk. I think everyone is realizing that's the amount of energy to continue is just too great, so people have become apathetic to whatever the outcome is.
The media and politicians are saying it's over because mid-terms are approaching and lockdowns are extremely unpopular (they destroy businesses, jobs, lives, etc).
The measures were always driven by polling numbers and political sentiment alone. Many of the measures had absolutely no basis in science (wearing a mask in a restaurant then sitting down and taking it off is pure political ideology with zero basis in scientific reality).
This is an odd reply - you're claiming someone is wrong by showing them that someone else on this website was also wrong. The commenter specifically mentioned the silly way we have to wear masks while being seated but can then take them off, even if we are less than six feet from the nearest table with other unmasked people. A LOT of people have this exact same complaint, and to write it off because those people are not "experts" is just ridiculous. How does it make any sense??
Okay, I'll bite. Is there any basis in scientific reality? Where is the science that says the six foot rule is not necessary for humans eating and drinking in restaurants?
I mean this is a forum on the internet, it's not a peer reviewed medical journal. People come here to talk about stuff. Sure, there are guidelines that encourage thoughtful, well written comments to foster an actual discussion, but there's no requirement of being an expert in anything.
I don't think you should be "exhausted" by people making claims on the internet. Just insert the words "I think" in front of any comment that does not already include that, because that is what every comment already means.
>Making claims without evidence, especially pretending you have expertise when you do so, decreases the signal to noise ratio on HN.
>And yes, it's exhausting to watch. I wish we would hold each other to a higher standard.
Fair enough; I guess I'm just not as bothered by the misinformation (which seems to be synonymous with "information that's inconvenient to some authority") boogeyman as you are. When I see a claim online that I find interesting I will usually do a bit of research into the topic on my own. If I discover that the comment was incorrect, I may go back and downvote it, but I've still learned something, even though the original claim was wrong. If we had it your way, and no one without a PhD in a field was allowed to talk about things in that field, or every reply to every comment was "do you have a source for that?" with nothing else, this would be a pretty boring place!
Don't you ever see a comment that you just know is wrong but wonder "how could anyone believe this?" I watched a couple flat earth videos once because I just didn't get it. Of course, it becomes pretty obvious it's complete nonsense after just a few minutes, but at least now I have the ability to say "you are wrong, and here's why" in my own words.
I think a big issue with public discourse is that so many people never ever even try to imagine the reasoning behind a viewpoint with which they disagree. Without that understanding, I don't believe you can really convince anyone of anything, because all you can do is tell them they're wrong and point to some authority, which doesn't seem to work.
> If we had it your way, and no one without a PhD in a field was allowed to talk about things in that field
Please try to understand me when I say, if someone says "I don't think X is true," that's very different to me than saying "There's no scientific basis for X to be true."
I'm not saying people shouldn't talk about their beliefs.
I'm sick of people pretending they know what they're talking about, donning the mantle of an expert, and making a proclamation about whether something is even possible.
> people never ever even try to imagine
I'm complaining about people who are trying to shut down all conversation. Not "I don't believe in X," but rather "there's no scientific basis for X."
They're saying, "If you claim X, I know for certain you did not follow any scientific process to make that claim."
They're saying, "Every reasonable person should reject any evidence of X, because it cannot be a scientific claim."
Even better, the six foot rule itself was always a rough approximation of a best guess to reduce really dumb behavior (like getting within inches of each other at a bar and yelling all night type stuff, or huddling around each other), not based off any rigorous analysis of any kind I could find.
Risk decreases significantly with distance, but I’ve found zero scientific evidence that 6 feet is somehow better or fits some set of trade offs better than other numbers (10? 4? 30?).
There has been a lot of cargo cultish behavior, and just dumbness too - like how we got stuck on cloth masks when we could all just be sent properly rated respirators at this point for less (that would be more comfortable AND actually work!) is beyond my ability to comprehend.
You’re not reading what 0xy wrote, so you’re just arguing against yourself. An appeal to authority isn’t convincing when the authorities themselves have been utterly clueless and entirely politicized.
0xy say many measures were essentially nonsensical and non-scientific, and then gave a perfect example of restaurant masking which is perhaps the pinnacle of COVID absurdity.
Wearing masks outdoors is another great example of something where the science was unequivocal, and yet the politicians persisted.
Non-N95 masks being worn improperly (which is essentially all of non-professional masking) was even declared by the CDC as ineffective so I think it’s safe to say the mitigations were not only deeply unpopular but also unscientific.
"authorities themselves have been... entirely politicized"
I'm honestly curious what you think the word "politicized" means.
Politicized: "(of an activity or event) made political in character."
Political: "relating to the government or the public affairs of a country."
So, to be clear, you think it's a problem that "authorities" have made assertions about the public affairs of a country?
I get that you think they've been utterly clueless, and if that's true, of course I think that's a problem.
But I'm focusing on the second part of what seemed to bother you. That, people with authority, have made assertions about how public affairs should be handled? That's a problem, to you?
How cute - you think that "long covid" is something specific to covid-19.
One thing that covid-19 has shown is that the public health community hasn't bothered to work on flu since the 1940s, even though it kills 35-75k Americans a year and has so for decades if not longer.
You remember the flu. It's an essential part of the "you have to give us lots of money so we're ready for something like the Spanish flu" and yet, when covid-19/sars2 came long (a couple of years after sars1), "we" didn't know anything useful about coronavirus transmission.
One of the "Spanish Flu" stories told by the public health community is that one of the major outbreaks happened when a city had a parade to celebrate "beating" the flu. So, guess what the public health community said was a good thing during height of the pandemic. (To be fair, only the parades and demonstrations that the PHC liked were safe.)
Of course, the public health community's first instinct is to lie. They started with "masks aren't necessary for ordinary people" and then pivoted even though there was no new data either way. (And there's also the whole "vaccines can't be delivered in a year" thing.)
Note that the pre-Covid recommendation from WHO was no masks and no general lockdowns, but instead, "protect vulnerable subpopulations", which we knew at the beginning. Contrast that with what the public health community talked about. And no, there wasn't new data.
I firmly believe that the whole "masks aren't necessary for ordinary people" was not based in any science at all, but because they were next to impossible to find, and they didn't want a panic.
In my midsize town, with a 600 bed hospital, people (staff, patients, etc) were walking through the ER, and stealing whole boxes of N95 masks off of shelves. The hospital had to move them all to locked cabinets along with the addictive painkillers. They were almost completely out, and not able to get any more.
There were literally states/hospitals organizing a purchase (at insane prices) only to have the feds come and seize the masks and end up with nothing.
Yes, medical folk wanted to get masks for medical folk (some of whom even know how to wear them) but "they didn't want a panic" is self-deception. They may have wanted that effect but that was not the likely result of such an announcement.
That's because the public health community has been incompetent at best and typically self-defeating at messaging for decades.
Unfortunately, pretty much everything other than self-evident statements out of the public health community has been good reason to think that the exact opposite is the right response. In this case, "don't panic" was best interpreted as "things are likely to go south, so urgent action is probably a good idea".
"hey, don't hoard masks, we don't have enough for medical personnel" would have been more effective.
As to the feds seizing masks, that was mostly the public health community doing the seizing.
>"So, now I see your comment, and I get to try to evaluate it. Are you a virologist? "
You come into restaurant and wear that mask for 10 min and then you sit for an hour without mask. Sorry one does not have to be an "expert in the field" to see through this bullshit.
>"And now here we are, learning more about Long Covid every day."
Or, maybe, there could be trials where we experiment and find out?
Or we could analyze past data, to see if counties where people worse masks in the lobby of restaurants had lower transmission of Covid than counties where they didn't?
If I go into a crowded restaurant and wait for 30 minutes for my table, I come within about 6 feet of about 30 people. When I sit at my table for an hour, I come within about 6 feet of about 3 people (server, and the person who brings drinks, and the person who brings food.) Especially if there are dividers between tables.
I'm not claiming wearing a mask in the lobby reduces transmission to zero. But I can easily imagine how it reduces transmission some.
And yet, others are claiming that no one could possibly imagine how wearing masks in the lobby of a restaurant could possibly reduce transmission.
You and I can talk about whether we believe wearing masks in the lobby reduces transmission.
I'm tired of people claiming there's "no scientific basis" (or something similar) for masks helping, or for there to be long-term implications of Covid, or anything else, really - especially when they're not an expert.
To be fair, it's roughly the same death count now with most people barely (if at all) paying attention, versus the first wave when most people were locking down and wouldn't even go to the park.
Part of the "crisis" feeling of the first wave was the unknown (and likely much higher) death count that could arrive if we didn't take action.
See my take-away from your first paragraph is quite different from your second paragraph.
The point isn’t to argue about who’s counter-factual is right or wrong, it’s impossible to say.
At this point everyone has taken a position as to whether the “mitigations” were ethical, legal, effective, or not. There’s no point discussing it anymore unless or until people in power try to re-impose them.
I think it's clear avoiding the park, in retrospect, was unnecessary. I'm just describing the feeling at the time, which I believe was shared by the vast majority of people for at least those first few weeks. I could be wrong though.
> Part of the "crisis" feeling of the first wave was the unknown (and likely much higher) death count that could arrive if we didn't take action.
Maybe. To me 800-1,000/day was in itself a crisis and pretty frightening. The fact that we didn't get to 2,000+/day is ... better? but in the moment of April 2020 there was plenty of imminent fear versus fear of worsening.
I'm not sure what data I was looking at before, but my point was that we were near peak just a few months ago and yet perception about the state of the pandemic does not really match that.
In fact, per the CDC Feb 1, 2022 was the deadliest single day, but if you went out into the world that day versus Feb 1, 2021, you'd experience two vastly different things.
There is a factor that has changed, though - the majority of people have now been vaccinated, and medical professionals have 2 years of experience in treating severe cases. So it's possible that policies such as lockdown prevented a much higher death count 2 years ago, but now that much higher death count is prevented by medical treatments we have since developed.
The UK's socialized medical system tracks the percentage of their population that already has Covid antibodies in their system, either via vaccination or a prior infection, or both.
As of a month ago, about 99% of their population has Covid antibodies. I doubt things are very different here.
True. Either severity lessened, or social distancing was largely useless. I'm pretty confident it's the former, but that assumption is implicit to my comment above.
This is it exactly, in the first year we had little to know information as to the severity of the illness or the methods of transmission. With time we have developed vaccinations to mitigate the worst outcomes and have a much better understanding of the transmission vectors. I still wear a mask around because it's such a small inconvenience, and I still won't go into indoor crowded event, but I am considering easing up my defensive profile.
Also the production of N95/KN95/CA-N95/P99 masks have been upscaled greatly and they are far more accessible and affordable than they were at the beginning of the pandemic.
I remember when the only N95s you could get were counterfeit masks selling for $50 a mask.
At least in my country, I have come to understand the deaths marked to Covid are now mostly people who were already in bad condition and had other health issues. Excess deaths seem to hover at 3%.
For USA though the excess deaths number is 17% so that model doesn't make sense at all. How many young people are dying from Covid in USA?
Gravityloss says >"For USA though the excess deaths number is 17% so that model doesn't make sense at all."<
A significant proportion of people in the USA have problems with their blood sugar levels. North Americans eat too much, eat the wrong foods and don't exercise. They tend to suffer from blood-sugar disorders (which then cause cancer and, well, everything).
Blood-sugar disorders are so varied in their symptoms as to exhaust listing here. People so affected are best described metaphorically as "human shipwrecks". New York Times had an excellent series on diabetes years ago:
Skip to the section "Shortages and Shipwrecks", read it and weep: this was years before Covid and we had an epidemic that nobody was paying attention to. Covid is leaving and we still have a diabetes epidemic.
Very few young people are dying from Covid in the USA. The vast majority of deaths have been in the age 65+ group. However, the USA does have an exceptionally high obesity rate and we know that greatly increases the risk.
The initial waves were a crisis in that we were suffering from resource exhaustion in the medical system. People were dying simply because we ran out of resources to treat them, both for Covid and for non Covid medical issues. With vaccination and improved Covid care we can now handle the patient load although at great personal sacrifice to medical professionals.
> it's as much a crisis as it ever was, we're just finding a way to live with it
I think you're right. The phrase new normal has been batted around a lot since the pandemic began. Often it was used by people thinking masking and social distancing were going to be the new standard for being in public but now it's about living with the disease and accepting that hundreds of deaths every day is now normal.
I think we're overlooking that the majority of the people in the U.S. dying from Covid today aren't vaccinated and never abided by the mask mandates. They took health risks, risks having a non-zero chance of them getting Covid, and they lost. Even though the number of people dying per day today is as high as when the pandemic first started, the risks are totally different. Today you have a lot of control in managing your risk, you didn't have that control two years ago.
I don't think this take is fair to the people dying. The majority of people dying are old vulnerable vaccinated people. By making bold statements with possibly true per capita stats you cast the dying as people who took things into their own stupid hands.
Holy shit. January saw the highest seven day peak of the entire pandemic here in MD. And we’re heavily vaccinated.
I’m outside the DC halo, so I’m not sure what it’s like in MoCo. But here in Biden/Hogan country COVID is over. Even in the most progressive-leaning spaces which had been extremely careful with masking throughout the pandemic (school, church).
There's one difference though: back then there was a lot more uncertainty about just how bad things would get. When the curves were trending upwards, we didn't know how far they would go.
I read somewhere that the definition of a pandemic being over is not when it's not dangerous anymore, it's when it stops being unpredictable.
Or it could be that if something goes on long enough it becomes life. There are a lot of things in our lives that if they just popped up suddenly in utopia, it would become a crisis. COVID will never go away completely. Responsible people did what they could to mitigate it as best as possible (Lockdowns to start, vaccines, masks, vaccines). Now we live in a world where it is one more thing that can kill you out of the many in our lives that are 100% fatal in the end.
Most people I think just want to return to "normal". We live in a new normal, but we can't live in crisis forever. I don't think that is necessarily apathy it is adapting.
It has been longer than two years. Prior to the pandemic we were subject to a wave of blatantly divisive rhetoric that seemed intent on driving us to civil war. The 'post-truth' era hit us hard for years before COVID-19 showed up and became just another weapon toward that end.
Yeah, we're tired of it. It is difficult to care anymore, honestly. A lot of Americans are going to die, a lot of them are going to be economically ruined, everything that made this country worth anything is going to be dismantled by fascism and plutocracy, and you know what? I think we've earned it.
> No matter which side you're on (real or not, overblown or not, etc.)
One thing we need to step away from is this framing that there are "sides" to be on. Allowing for there to be these separate "sides" just invites conflict and allows people the opportunity to create an identity around something they have no business having an identity about. There are people who are anti-vax now (and weren't before) for example, but that's not a "side" anymore than being for or against bandaids would make sense to have "sides". Framing this as though there are sides also has the effect of legitimizing indefensible things, like being anti-vax.
As an example, are there two sides to the flat earth debate? If you say yes, then you're admitting that people who think the earth is flat have an equal standing with someone who knows that the earth is round. But these do not have equal standing, so it shouldn't be legitimized as a "debate" where there are "sides". Something like private versus public (to oversimplify) healthcare is worthy of two sides and a debate. Broadly speaking there are two defensible and respectable opinions.
How you choose to see what separates the two "sides" is quite interesting.
You'll in fact find that it is not Vax/Anti-Vax but:
1. a group that needs the comforting reassurance of authority for security
vs.
2. a group who regard their autonomy as paramount and see no need to have arbitrary rules forced on them.
> a group that needs the comforting reassurance of authority for security
And I assume you say this when someone is getting surgery, buys ibuprofen, or gets a splint as well?
> a group who regard their autonomy as paramount and see no need to have arbitrary rules forced on them
In the specific context of vaccines at least in America, nobody is forcing anyone to take a vaccine so the position wouldn't make any sense. Maybe you want to clarify what you mean here?
As an aside, this idea of autonomy here is a psychological reflex to control something about a situation that you have absolutely no control over. But it's really just an illusion. They're not more autonomous than anyone else is. A vaccine wouldn't make a difference in your autonomy, and in a really bad pandemic ala The Stand (Stephen King novel) you'd be forced at gunpoint to take a vaccine and you'd happily comply. It's all just lifestyle and cosplay at this point.
> in America, nobody is forcing anyone to take a vaccine so the position wouldn't make any sense.
Employers, en masse, are forcing it as a condition of employment.
I do agree with some of these employer mandates, e.g. airlines, because they increase connectivity and thus spread. Not so much with some others, e.g. clerical stay at home workers.
No not really. Like you can't choose to get COVID-19 or not. The only control you really have is the agency to get a vaccine or not, which is why it's so emotionally charged - it's the one thing people believe they can "control". So psychologically you grasp that because you're terrified of something you can't control (the pandemic).
Comorbidities increase your risk or "serious COVID", just like being unvaccinated does. But that still doesn't satisfy anything. Comorbidities increase your risk, getting vaccinated decreases your risk substantially, so if you want to blame this "well only fat people get it", well sure. Most people are fat, therefore they should get the vaccine since you can do that in a very short period of time whereas weight loss takes a while and you may have other comorbidities that you can't actually control or change at all.
We've known that high body fat was a serious risk factor for over two years now. While I agree that everyone eligible should protect themselves by getting vaccinated, people who want to lose weight have had plenty of time to do so.
Yea people should be healthy and lose weight. I couldn't agree more. Myself included.
But aside from these asinine "fat positive" movements (which are very similar in pathology IMO to COVID deniers) nobody is out there advocating for people to ignore their weight and that drinking milkshakes just might not be bad for your heart. Next thing you know of course drinking milkshakes and eating burgers are ok. The government just wants to control what you eat!1!
Actually, you'll find it is 1. a group that understands that if we all would act together in the interest of public health we could have greatly reduced the death toll of COVID-19 vs 2. a group of idiots who won't learn until they win themselves their own personal Herman Cain Award.
Also, you apparently have no idea what "arbitrary" means.
> Also, you apparently have no idea what "arbitrary" means.
Ah, right. They were just highly intelligent people "following the science". Not at all obsessed with stoking fear so they could seize control and consolidate power:
Admitting there are two sides is hardly admitting both points of view are equal. This attitude on both sides of if you believe “reasonable thing” that means you believe “unreasonable and unreasonable to infer from what was said” thing creates a lot of animosity.
In all honesty your attitude creates a lot of the problems you describe.
It’s a free country if people don’t want to be vaxxed they can take their chances with the 99.9% survival rate for those under 50. Or the lower survival rate if they are over 50.
> It’s a free country if people don’t want to be vaxxed they can take their chances...
Can you name a single person in America who has been held down against their will and administered a vaccine? Can you name multiple, coordinated instances of this happening? Can you point to a lawsuit?
If not, you should stop repeating this.
> In all honesty your attitude creates a lot of the problems you describe.
I used to think that too but ultimately what you have is a group that cannot be reasoned with ala flat-earth proponents and no amount of information, debate, or reason would change their mind because the point isn't to understand, it's to create a lifestyle and culture. It's like a religion. The only thing that's left to be important here is to combat disinformation by bad actors and prevent further corrosion of civilization.
I’m antivax and anti mask mandates and think vaccines are a good idea. I’ve even gotten two vaccines. However I won’t be getting another the reason I won’t is to stand in solidarity with the unvaxxed, note this is a political stance and not a scientific one. If you want me to get vaxxed to save whoever then the mandates must be lifted in their entirety save for actual quarantining of the infected which I think is reasonable.
I can definitely be reasoned with and reason with the unvaccinated all the time.
I opened my home in contravention of the mandates to throw parties and have unvaccinated people a place to socialize and people found my point of view to be in line with theirs. Namely that vaccines work but for them they would prefer the risk of getting Covid to getting vaccinated.
It may surprise you but many people can be talked to and turn out to have points of view vastly different than what you read on the news / see on social media.
I'm not disputing that you can do these things? You could also host a party where everyone is comfortable and enjoys talking about the tooth fairy, or about how birds aren't real (great marketing campaign actually). The dispute comes when you go from incorrect private opinion to reality. For example, you can think that vaccines are a good idea, but be anti-vax yourself, but then you should acknowledge and recognize that your views are wrong and irrational and make sure not to speak publicly about your views in case you confuse others who may be harmed by your belief.
>Can you name a single person in America who has been held down against their will and administered a vaccine?
You aren't arguing in good faith. "No, we aren't banning gay marriage, we just implemented a federal regulation that forces employers to fire anyone who is gay married. It's their choice!"
I'm not even against vaccine mandates (at least I did when the vaccines worked), but come on, admit what you are actually supporting here.
> As an example, are there two sides to the flat earth debate? If you say yes, then you're admitting that people who think the earth is flat have an equal standing with someone who knows that the earth is round.
No, that's not true. One can acknowledge the existence of two sides while still maintaining that one of those two sides is entirely without merit.
And in fact it is essential to do this because history shows that simply denying the existence of people with crazy points of view does not make them go away, and in fact often increases their power and influence, ironically, because the denial of their existence is actually evidence that their conspiracy theories are correct, that they are in fact the victims of prejudice.
Flat earth is an interesting case in point. It is actually quite challenging to show that the earth is round in a way that does not require you to take anyone's word for anything.
It is actually quite challenging to show that the earth is round in a way that does not require you to take anyone's word for anything
Perhaps if you live nowhere near an ocean and have no trees from which to hang a pendulum and can't afford a rangefinder for lining up two boards with holes in them.
You would be shocked at how many people there are who have never seen an ocean. You would be shocked at how many people there are who live within an hour's drive of an ocean who have never seen it. There are a lot of things that the typical HN reader takes for granted that are unimaginable luxuries for billions of people.
I think you will also be surprised how hard it is to fill in the details of the experiments you are alluding to.
> One thing we need to step away from is this framing that there are "sides" to be on.
Two sides/devil's advocate is the basis of philosophy, thought, learning, etc. To claim otherwise is to demand blind obedience to authority.
> As an example, are there two sides to the flat earth debate? If you say yes, then you're admitting that people who think the earth is flat have an equal standing with someone who knows that the earth is round.
Nobody is saying they are on equal footing. They have a right to their opinions. But the facts are what matters.
800 years ago, you'd be demanding everyone believe the earth is the center of the universe and that anyone who says otherwise is a heretic. You'd be saying we shouldn't legitimize indefensible things like heliocentrism. In my opinion, the side that is trying to stifle debate/opinions/etc is the wrong side. If someone says they are a flat earther, just show them a video of the earth.
Do you realize that just a few decades ago, the idea of vaccination was viewed as indefensible and anti-science? Much of the scientific community viewed vaccine advocates as charlatans. After all, you'd have to be a lunatic to infect yourself with disease right? Almost everything you hold dear and absolutely true today were once "indefensible things". Including almost everything medical and scientific.
Instead of trying to stifle debate, just bring facts with you and you'll be fine. Nothing is gained by zealotry.
What debate is being stifled? It's settled science. This is equivalent to going back and claiming that the earth is the center of the universe and then being upset when presented facts to the contrary.
You have a right to an opinion. I have a right to dismiss that opinion off-hand like I would dismiss someone saying the earth is flat. Would you host a debate with someone at a university about whether or not the earth is flat? If I went to a Python conference and have a lecture on how strings in Python work which were completely contrary to how the language operates would you suggest that this is a matter of two sides, or that it's the basis of philosophy and learning? I don't think so.
If we look at vaccine science 40 years ago and thought that it was settled, we wouldn't be where we are now. If we believe it is solved, how will it get better than today, why would anyone look into it anymore?
Everything you deem to be wrong? " Allowing for there to be these separate "sides"... "
> It's settled science.
Everything is "settled science" until it isn't. Like the earth being the center of the universe. Like newtonian physics. Like einsteinian physics. Etc. It was settle science that Lamarckianism was scientific charlatanism until epigenetics.
> You have a right to an opinion. I have a right to dismiss that opinion off-hand
We are agreed. Except you don't want to even allow others their opinions.
> If I went to a Python conference
Someone once compared python to a tricycle.
> or that it's the basis of philosophy and learning? I don't think so.
Then you don't know philosophy, science and most importantly the history of science/philosophy. Why is it that the people with the least knowledge/wisdom/etc are the most sure about things they know nothing about?
As I said, if you run into a flat earther, just show them a video of the earth. Or don't waste your time with them. Who do you think you are to say whether they should be "allowed or not" to have their opinion or say?
I don't care if someone is just wrong about some belief. I care when they have a megaphone and they're convincing other people of their reality and that leads those people to their own early death. If you sat at home and did this, nobody would really care.
> I don't care if someone is just wrong about some belief.
You sound like you care very much. I've known many zealots who want everyone to adopt their orthodoxy.
> I care when they have a megaphone and they're convincing other people of their reality and that leads those people to their own early death.
Every preacher, pope, cult leader and zealot of all kinds says the same thing. They want "heresy" silenced in order to save souls. How noble and virtuous. Ever consider that people have their own agency? Ever consider whether you are in the wrong?
What happens if someone says the earth is flat on a megaphone? They get laughed at. As long as you have the facts and data, what are you so afraid of?
That's unrealistic though, nearly everyone would be okay with their ideological enemies "sitting at home and doing their thing", including your ideological enemies themselves. I live in the Middle East and this attitude, translated nearly verbatim to Arabic, is a common stance on an issue like atheism or gay rights, "Oh, we are actually entirely ok with atheists|gays if they just shut up completely".
It never works because it's not symmetric, you want your enemies to shut up but not you, this is because you see yourself as the correct side, which might be either true or false, but the sure thing is that your enemies beg to disagree. The only thing that will make it work is brute force, but other than that it's just another way to say to your enemies "Just admit you're wrong and go to your room".
The difference with atheism or gay rights here is that it doesn't actually harm anyone. Nobody dies from being an atheist.
Let me put it another way. What if you had a family member who had cancer and I wrote a bunch of stuff and ran Facebook ads that they read that convinced them to not get very likely life-saving treatment with no downsides to them. All good then yea? You won't be mad or suggest maybe I stop doing that?
>The difference with atheism or gay rights here is that it doesn't actually harm anyone
This assertion encodes a worldview within it, one that is not shared among a lot (most ?) of religious people, especially in the Middle East. Religious people often assign very high weights to the fact that their religion isn't respected/believed in, and the resulting moral value can be compared with, and often exceeds, material damage to lives and property in their eyes. So the very act of saying "What one does in one's bedroom is none of your business" is itself a topic of intense disagreements. I say this as a closeted atheist in said society who have tried a number of times to play "Devil's Advocate" to atheism and gay rights in my social circles : if only it was as easy as saying "but they don't harm anyone!" and getting people to agree on that.
There are actually analogs to this in western societies (and in every other society I have heard of). Ironically, it's usually the dual to what happens in my soceity : very high sensitivity to anti-lgbt opinions, although the same applies, being anti-lgbt in the abstract doesn't actually harm anyone. Another example is holocaust denial, how does it actually harm anyone ? I don't see an obvious way, a popular stance goes something like "If we allowed people to deny the holocaust, people would percieve it as less serious and it might happen again", but this is overly simplistic and selective, people deny and underplay countless historical atrocities (e.g. the 20th anti- and pro- communism conflicts in Asia,Africa,and South America) and that doesn't automatically make them more likely to happen.
So every society has certain taboos and red lines that you are not allowed to speak against in public (although doing so wouldn't concretely harm anyone), and problems happen when 2 social groups who have different ideas of what should be taboo interact together.
>that convinced them to not get very likely life-saving treatment with no downsides to them
I have several comments on this:
- Cancer and Covid are not comparable in damage, Cancer is uniformly deadly, Covid only so for very specific subsets of the population.
- Cancer is not viral, so whatever happens in the end it will only affect that specific family member and my family, but with Covid you have to balance people's freedom with the threat they pose to the rest of the populations.
Overall, I agree in the abstract that free speech should be restricted in critical expertise-related subject matters, like medical and engineering matters, but the particular case of Covid discourse is such a disaster. Governments and public institutions consistently lied or made up things out of thin air, authoritarians hid behind "The Science^TM" to advance authoritarian solutions to what could be equally solved with voluntary incentive-setting, and overall "The Science^TM" camp just consistently shout louder and assume bad faith more than the reverse. The actual factual subject matter itself is far from settled and much much blurrier than - say - the question of "Does vaccines cause autism", the virus constantly mutates and wipes the floor with the efficiency of the vaccines, lockdown measures are often disastrous and impact far more people negatively than the virus. But there is a certain type of people who will treat the virus as an ultimate demon, to be exorcised at all costs, and they ridicule anyone disagreeing with them as "Science Deniers^TM", and this just becomes exhausting after a while.
None of the science of Covid is settled. It took over a year for scientific bodies to recognize it was an airborne virus. The medical field made a basic aerodynamics mistake for about 50 years that lead them astray.
Can you specifically point to the things we don't know about COVID as it relates to the efficacy and safety of the COVID-19 vaccine? What are the exact details that you are referencing?
What is the efficiency of the 4th shot vs a third shot after 5 months? What is the risk of a 4th shot?
There is a reason we don't approve vaccines on an ad hoc basis in normal times. It's an emergency so you gotta take some risks. But trying to shut down dissent with THE SCIENCE IS SETTTLED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! is bullshit.
We're not just ignorant about covid-19. We're ignorant about all coronaviruses and flus in general. It's not exactly surprising that they've been killing 35-75k Americans every year for decades.
This is despite spending decades and hundreds of billions of dollars on public health.
You remember the public health folk. When they ask for money, they say how it's needed so we're ready for the next spanish flu.
> It took over a year for scientific bodies to recognize it was an airborne virus.
Indications of covid being airborne were available very early on, particularly as its genetic predecessor "OG Covid" / SARS-CoV-1 was also known to be airborne.
The problem was politicians who feared a run on masks and thus refused to follow science. On the other hand, the increased hygienic measures - particularly regular hand washing and disinfection - contributed to the eradication of at least one flu strain and prevented the spread of countless other infectious agents, leading to a reduction of load on the hospital systems, so it was not entirely pointless (and in fact should be kept even when the pandemic condition ends).
> This is equivalent to going back and claiming that the earth is the center of the universe and then being upset when presented facts to the contrary.
Physical motion is fundamentally relative and there is nothing in the laws of physics that says you can’t construct a frame of reference in which everything else moves relative to the Earth. Heliocentrism is certainly easier to reason about and much simpler, but it’s no more true in any fundamental sense.
One thing we need to step away from is this framing that there are "sides" to be on.
I think it's easy to confuse the two major covid conflicts as one. The first, more obvious and dumber conflict is the "covid is fake/nothing!" idiots. That's the conflict you're mainly addressing. The second, less one-sided conflict is whether our anti-covid measures have a good return-on-investment vs less-stringent measures. Covid deaths and government anti-covid efforts seem to be less closely coupled than is intuitive. For example, comparing Sweden, a country with very lax covid mandates, to countries with stronger mandates. They came off much worse than Finland, but better than the UK, comparable to Germany, and much better than the United States.
I wouldn't say that I'm confusing those as I'm directly responding to anti-vax.
I agree completely that there is further study to be done on lockdowns and other efforts that were undertaken. For example, I'm monitoring this and we'll see, but perhaps China's COVID 0 lockdown strategy wasn't the right one compared, to, say, the US strategy. There's much to say about how historic human efforts to contain disease (we've always done lockdowns) may be or may not be effective with 8 billion globalized people.
But even in this case I don't think we need "sides". We need analysis. Sides create tribalism and suboptimal outcomes I think in this case.
So essentially you are arguing for Orwellian use of language.
I was reluctant to even respond to your comment, lest I legitimize sophistry. There aren't really two sides to it, you're openly calling for playing language games.
Identity politics has been around and salient for a lot longer than eight years. McCarthyism. Slavery/Jim Crow. The Southern strategy. Women not being allowed to vote. Those all had pivotal effects on politics in the United States.
how so? i mean its no secret that jewish people are over reprersented when it comes to government, banking, media, pharma, judicial institutions etc.(and thats okay and understandable but i digress) but "cultural marxism" has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with injecting communist values in cultural avenues so that they can slowly make communism acceptable in the minds of us unwashed plebians.
Couldn't have ever said it better myself. That is exactly how I feel and what I believe I'm seeing in the country. Fuck it... Drink paint. I don't have the energy to fight a culture war. I'm vaxxed, my friends that have radically different views that I find really offensive. Fuck it. I hope I can help keep them safe and I hope they are doing things in a way that they think keeps me safe. I do not want to fight my neighbor, I'm so tired, the world is so messed up. I want to make art and do business and just enjoy the time I have when I have it with the least amount of war I can experience.
Your criticism of people who believe it's still a crisis would carry more weight if about 500 people/day weren't dying of Covid[1] right now (average based on the last week - https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/#graph-...). That's definitely less than the 4000+ deaths per day at peak, but it's still quite a lot.
[1] Or 'with Covid' if you believe those people just happen to be dying of something else while having Covid.
What percent of people in the US do you think have Covid right now?
I ask because 7452 people die per day in the US on average, meaning 6.7% of the people who die now have Covid (using your 500/day figure).
Clearly some die from and some happen to die with Covid. The difference could be estimated simplistically based on the percent of the population that currently has Covid. If 0.5% have Covid and 6.7% of the people who die have it, there is a correlation. If 5% have Covid and 6.7% of the people who die have it, there's not much correlation. (Of course, in the correlation case, it still doesn't prove causation, as the weakened immune systems of those who are dying may be unable to fight off Covid at the end.)
I think the best way to evaluate is to look at excess deaths. But even there you've got data contamination from the measures that were taken (drinking deaths, suicides up, flu down, etc.) and no way to figure out exactly how many of the various increases and decreases are directly attributable to the Covid measures.
Are US hospitals/coroners not recording "from covid" and "with covid" separately? I've seen lots of anti-covid-prevention-measures people here in the UK make a big deal of this distinction as if nobody else had thought of it, but I've seen graphs based on official statistics which distinguish between the two groups in sources as mainstream as the BBC. At least here there's no need to estimate.
If you can find such numbers, I'd love to see them.
> If the decedent tested positive for COVID, the virus also gets placed on the death certificate. Many of these people likely died with COVID, not from COVID, Grannis said.
> Indeed, distinguishing between dying with and dying from COVID-19 may require a more complex investigation into the cause of a death, beyond citing a positive SARS-CoV-2 test that was completed prior to the person’s death.
There are several causes of death that are responsible for 500+ deaths per day in the US, most of which are significantly preventable. We do not treat any of those causes of death as a crisis that requires intervention to the extent we have COVID.
This obvious inconsistency is relevant to the discussion.
There are several causes of death that are responsible for 500+ deaths per day in the US
In the case of things like car crashes, there's a significant benefit of using cars that means we choose to tolerate deaths as part of the cost of having easy access to transport. The same is true of many things that kill people. The utility of the cause of the deaths means the cost is accepted.
I don't think there's a strong argument in favor of the usefulness of Covid.
There is a strong argument in favor of not locking people down, not closing the stores, not forbidding people to get together, etc. They are even stronger than anything you may think for private cars.
There is even an argument in favor of not requiring masks. It's a much weaker one, but the benefits are not large either because masks on the general population are not very effective against omicron.
I think there is an interesting aspect of this - how society treats death, what is philosophy of death in that society, etc.
Colleague's grandpa passed away in Scandinavia. As it was summertime, all the extended family is on vacation, abroad and etc. they put the body in the freezer and schedule funeral at some time when everybody's back.
On the other hand I have read about Japanese (might be any other Far East country) culture where passing away of father requires something like a year of mourning. Culture doesn't allow you to go to work for a year as you would look insensitive. However not showing up at work for a year is also a big nono. So it becomes a huge strain on all the family.
And we can imagine how these two cultures can have very different approaches to crisis like that, crisis itself is of a very different scope because of culture.
I agree. Covid is not a crisis. For a vaxxed individual the risk looks very low. I’m happy to grab my boosters as needed and mask up during the winter. It doesn’t really matter. I would wager the virus will continue to grow less dangerous over time.
What’s utterly astonishing is what’s going on in Shanghai in spite of this.
Covid will remain an endemic crisis always looming as you rightly point out with the events in Shanghai. Vaccines and multiple boosters won't stop infections and hospitalizations. At this point, if you are alive we have to assume you have developed some immune response to some variant of COVID. Am more disturbed about the overwhelming lack of research on natural immunity and other possible treatments. Vaccine over-reliance is akin to taking a shot in the dark.
dexamethasone, monoclonal antibodies, molnupiravir, paclovid, as well as all the work on ideas good and bad that did not pan out? And I think there's a decent amount of research on natural immunity going on? (not sure how to measure what you describe as an "overwhelming lack of research")
I hold my ground and there is an obvious reason why none of the promising anti-inflammatory drugs which have been used in the past to deal with flu haven't seen the light of day. IMO Covid infection was only considered a death sentence because at first we did not have any patient care focused on treatment of known symptoms through the stages of the sickness & foolishly ignored any potential alternatives or rather the scientific community was co-opted into praising mRNA and look nowhere else. Remdesivir is one of the hush hush alternatives proven to have some success with covid treatment but it never comes up. Anywhere. Nevermind that the FDA approved its use for mild-cases treatment. The scientific community let us down a big one on this. Look at masks now. They backtracked on the effectiveness of that.
> What’s utterly astonishing is what’s going on in Shanghai in spite of this.
And ironically, with the case numbers vs. deaths we see there, it seems to strongly support the stance that the crisis is over. 7 deaths for 12k infected is ridiculous. They just cannot change course from zero covid without losing face, this is why they push through with this nonsense.
7 in 12k is way less than the rate you'd expect in the overall population. It's 0.5 in 1000 people. The US' overall death rate was 8.8 per 1000 in 2020.
It's still thousands of potential deaths, and nearing a million for all of China.
And that's before taking into account the fact that this will be an underestimation since deaths tend to trail the infection count by something like 2 weeks.
> It's still thousands of potential deaths, and nearing a million for all of China.
People die all the time. Every day. Shanghai has 25M people. Let's assume the US's annual death rate of 8.8 per 1000. That's 220k deaths per year, or 4230 deaths per week.
Statistically with the current numbers, getting everybody infected would result in less deaths than having no covid at all :o) Sure, we'll only see real deaths with a delay of a few weeks, so that's witless, but as stated in my sibling comment in this thread, Omicron seems not to deliver on this from my personal experiences at all.
Having a total lock-down over it seems absolutely ridiculous to me.
I'm willing to call the Shanghai lock-down ridiculous, because it seems to be doing quite a lot of harm and doesn't serve any kind of realistic end goal.
But I am worried about the effectiveness of their vaccines and the rate at which the disease will eventually spread.
You're also assuming that the Chinese government is reporting the numbers accurately and honestly, and that's a big assumption considering how much effort they put into burying the truth about COVID in late 2019 / early 2020.
Purely anecdotal of course, but currently, covid is rampant here in Germany, at least my region. Everybody and their mom is catching it currently, I had it two weeks ago, most of my colleagues did or currently do. All were vaccinated, nobody went down for longer than 2 or 3 days with a fever, and a few more days to get up to speed again. No loss of sense of smell/taste, nobody short on breath. This is very different from any cases from my circle of acquaintances in 2021/2020, which were way more severe. Also, no more overloaded ICUs here. I guess this is why they're lifting all the restrictions here currently, despite case numbers skyrocketing.
This seems to be the norm with Omicron. If Shanghai is just Omicron too, I'd be surprised if a wave of deaths will follow.
It's similar here in the UK. 1 in 13 people in the UK had covid last week. And deaths are up, but not more than previous waves where we had far fewer cases.
What seems to be somewhat different in China is that between an up-til-now successful zero-covid policy (facilitated by lockdowns) and the less effective Sinovac vaccine, immunity levels are much lower. And I've seen a lot of people suggesting that the milder cases from Omicron are mostly down to existing immunity (either from vaccines or past infection) rather than Omicron being inherently milder (tentative consensus seems to be that it is a bit milder, but not so much as the reduced severity of infections would suggest in absence of other factors).
> currently, covid is rampant here in Germany, at least my region
It's _probably_ true here in Canada, too; but in our province, if not nationally, they've given up nearly entirely on PCR testing and case tracking. Schools aren't mandated to report absences unless they reach some very high threshold. As a consequence, there aren't any really good ways for an individual to judge their risk.
The billion dollar question is how effective are the Chinese vaccines. The Zero tolerance policy may be a reflection of effectiveness or lack there of, of the Chinese vaccine.
My understanding is that that the clinical trials for Sinovac showed ~50% efficacy against the original covid variant vs 70-something percent for AstraZeneca, and 80-something for Pfizer and Moderna, and that efficacy for all of them has decreased as new variants have emerged.
While 50% isn't useless it does seem significantly worse than the other vaccines. And frankly if I were Chinese I'd be questioning why China didn't license one of the other vaccines rather than continuing with their less effective homegrown version.
My understanding is also that regardless of vaccine used, the Chinese government is still trying to blame outbreaks on foreigners, and as such has prioritised vaccinating people like dock workers and airline staff over their elderly which seems rather questionable at this point. Australia and New Zealand also attempted a zero-covid strategy, which worked well enough until Omicron. But they have both now abandoned this strategy, and I feel like China is going to have to do the same at some point.
90% of the Chinese government's job is just saving face. They have the emotional maturity of a child, which makes sense because the whole system they have is relatively new.
So pretending and acting as if the virus is some sort of foreign threat that can be curbed by 0-covid strategies (which failed even for hermetically sealed countries) is all part of that face saving campaign. They want to look like the country that had Covid under control—at all costs.
The article's contents mean that China would have to quickly vaccinate the population of Shanghai, and could remove the lockdown shortly after. This is much a easier feat than keeping the entire city fed (besides, is the Chinese strict lockdown effective enough for omicron?).
A sizeable part of the Brazilian population got vaccinated with only Coronavac when omicron got here, but there wasn't enough difference on the death ratio to decide if it was less effective. So I imagine it isn't much worse than the Pfizer one on preventing death.
The efficacy drop is for symptomatic disease, but those symptoms can be merely a runny nose. It's protection from severe disease, hospitalization, and death that are far more pertinent.
It's amazing that so many people believe the numbers that the Chinese government has been publishing, considering they have been censoring the truth since the very beginning of the pandemic and arresting people who try to report the truth.
Sure but… there’s no reason to believe China is experiencing a significantly worse pandemic. If they’re lying and it’s just America’s 2021 experience with worse vaccines, that’s not really that bad still. Or at least, it’s not “imprison 24 million people in your wealthiest city for weeks with poor food supply planning” level of bad.
For all the tiresome arguments of the cure being worse than the disease, just this once I’ll have bite and say yeah, this cure is WAY worse than the disease.
It's amazing to me how people resort to these "hurr durr China bad" rhetorics to justify any claim about China. I don't see how the numbers are off besides how they simply couldn't do nearly enough tests by the start of the pandemic in 2020.
Zero covid was successful up until Omicron, evidently. While Christmas markets had to close early in Germany because Delta was so bad, you had huge overcrowded markets in Shanghai, with many people not wearing a mask. If anything, we probably have the most statistically significant numbers about infectiousness and ratio of symptomatic:asymptomatic cases because of the totally over the top testing of every possible contact they did whenever even a single case popped up anywhere.
If anything, with the current draconian lockdown if they had any incentive to lie, they would have to make it look worse than it actually is to justify it.
>I don't see how the numbers are off besides how they simply couldn't do nearly enough tests by the start of the pandemic in 2020.
Look harder.
April 19th, 2020.
Look at the reported deaths before and after; skyrocking, then straight to zero.
Then look at the arrests (on that same day) of activists who had been reporting the coverups and censorship that had been happening since the very beginning.
I agree covid is likely over. But as a vaxed person I would still avoid it. It took me 8 weeks for my cardiovascular system to return to baseline after omicron infection (metrics via Oura, apple watch).
I noticed elevated heart rate for months after my second dose. Honestly I think my health consequences would have been improved by not getting jabbed, as a fit young person. But alas afaik the current science doesn’t go as granular as fitness level.
It’s over in America because nearly everyone was exposed to omicron and nearly everyone who was going to get it, got it. The numbers stopped growing and sharply fell because there wasn’t anyone left to infect.
China didn’t have that and what’s happening is what trying to control with lockdowns will look like periodically forever.
Many mitigation measures are only effective as delay instead of prevention.
The risk is low for unvaccinated individuals, too. It always has been.
Within six months, the risk of a vaccinated individual approaches the risk of an unvaccinated one. That’s before considering new variants with potentially high immune escape.
We’ve reached the point where people who wanted to vaccinated have and those who don’t won’t. Considering that there seems to be boosters every so often it feels like it will be seasonal like the flu.
Whatever your stance is, I think COVID showed how ineffective the federal government is in the face of a crisis. Imagine if COVID was more severe or something else entirely, we'd all be dead before our elected officials could figure out how it can benefit them. Pin it on incompetence, negligence, political grandstanding--the federal government could not contain the crisis and was always months behind what we needed.
We were mass producing ventilators when we should've been mass producing tests or masks, we were going maskless based on trailing data instead of the current spikes etc. It was like a shitty game of telephone where people died because the messaging became so delayed and distorted.
As a person who has distaste for 'Mandates', a successful Pandemic reaction will always look like an 'Overreaction'. If Federal government has any role in the creation or distribution of effective Vaccines, I would consider it a success. It is still far from perfect but it was a success.
I am not trying to change anyones view on this -- just expressing my point of view.
The effectiveness of the federal government is complicated. You mentioned some disappointing aspects but I think it's worth keeping in mind some of the positive parts too. For one, the new vaccines are a triumph. As I understand it, DARPA was an early funder of research and development around MRNA tech. And Trump's Operation Warp Speed is, for me, a rare highlight of his time in office.
Trying to contain the virus was the bad strategy because of the effectivenesss of the virus in spreading, with/without masks; protecting the vulnerable (mainly elderly) would've been more effective, as I understand. See the excellent interview of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya by Lex Fridman (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIOGUYOPAsA).
On the plus side, producing vaccines by end of 2020 was nothing short of stunning IMO, with all the skepticism at that time on the timeline. Bid kudos to the pharmas of course, but a lot of credit should also go to the Trump administration, whatever you may think of the president.
Bhattacharya has been consistently wrong on COVID from basically the start, declaring it nearly done as early as April 2020. Is there reason to believe that has changed?
Met him and he showed the opposite of what he was trying to sell his audience.
Claims he doesn't care about money then took a bunch of huge sponsorship deals. Claims he didn't want fame but went on to try to network with a guy from Hollywood claiming he could make him famous. Claims to love everyone, and given the chance he attacks people with deep anger. Has a massive massive ego, always brags about being alpha.
I donno, hes just not in any way who he claims to be.
I think the ineffectiveness comes from the lack of gravitas such problems have on the public psyche. We now feel that it is "over", so we relax instead of buckling down and asking ourselves "how can we make the next time this happens not such a shitshow?". Luckily, there are organs within the government that do keep at least some focus on it. The problem is getting public and political attention to not chase whatever shiny Hollywood is doing or the Strawman of the Week is being put forth instead.
However, I have far more trust in these government organs at doing something effective than leaving it to "the market" which will just always be distracted by money instead of "taking one for the team" and focusing on the hard problems "just in case".
> We now feel that it is "over", so we relax instead of buckling down and asking ourselves "how can we make the next time this happens not such a shitshow?"
The cultural rot that prevents iterating on effective government runs deep, and has little to do with exhaustion. In _Spring 2020_, i was shocked by the strong reaction I got from my friends at even passing mentions of the FDA/CDC's significant and severe early failures.
In the usual reductive framing, I'm a pretty "big govt" guy. While govt is horrendously incompetent, as a baseline, it allows us to choose from a wider array of goals, more precisely than the market does. But I learned that even my nominally-intelligent friends are too simple-minded to understand this, and that their support is rooted in religious belief in an omnicompetent govt that provides flawless protection from the world's dangers.
An environment that can't even see failures is not one that's going to improve upon them. Already, the excuses have been lined up: every single failure was due in some way to Trump, and now that he's gone (hopefully), the gov't can go back to its usual, hyper-efficient mode of function (lol)
Yes, realizing that not everything is perfect (good or evil) is a good base that needs to be done first. Trump made lots of blunders and such, but the morass that is our government is also what insulated it from his attempts to destroy it. If government were an efficient machine, a strong leader would be able to redirect it much more easily. However, we instead have a swarm of pearl-clutching monstrosities that have defenses they can deploy. Yes, it makes improvement slow, but it also (largely) protects us from terrible leadership.
The main thing Covid has shown, imo, is that there exists a segment of the population that will do everything in their power to sabotage good-faith efforts of beating the virus in an effort to prove they’re right.
> I think COVID showed how ineffective the federal government is in the face of a crisis.
I've always said, the federal government is only good at killing people (referring to the military)...I'm starting to think it applies to a lot more than that.
This poll also tells that most americans quickly forget anything and everything, even if it's supposedly a threat to survival of human kind, unless the mass media talks about the 'grave dangers' 24/7. I'm glad to admit that americans aren't that easy to distract from real issues.
...I wondered if the problem in the U.S. is really an obesity "epidemic" and not a COVID epidemic. The statistics for non-elderly deaths seem to bear this out. (Of course, the NY Times neglected to comment on the elephant in the room.)
I was never a COVID skeptic -- I got vaccinated, and I wore N-95 masks, fitted as best I could, when indoors in crowds. I rarely ate in restaurants so giving that up wasn't a big lifestyle change for me. (I was fortunate to have a decent supply of N-95 and N-99 masks pre-pandemic because I often visit places where things are fabricated, and dust and particles are around.)
But I was skeptical about mask mandates for one simple fact -- whenever I was out in public, I'd observe that only about 30% of people were wearing masks in a way that could possibly do anything -- covering the nose and mouth, and not taking it on and off continuously / not touching the face. So we'll never really know if masks work on population studies.
There was a lot of "theatre" -- (I fly a lot for work, and still flew during the pandemic to Europe and the mid-east quite often. I have multiple passports so I could get into places even during times when tourism was banned). Airplanes never banned CPAP use in flight, even though study after study from previous airborne viruses showed CPAP to aersolize a person's exhalate and spread disease. (See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7298691/ ). United Airlines claimed that they were following the guidelines of the "Cleveland Clinic" for their covid mitigation, and yet that clinic warns about CPAP machines. (The reality is, the airlines didn't want to battle the ADA rules, so they put the public at risk.)
My faith in polls took a massive, massive hit after recent elections and political cycles. Also the US had a political regime point at 30-40% approval ratings and said "those people want it so we're doing it." Seemingly turning any poll into a pretext for any political changes.
Sorry, but, until something changes in the world of polls dramatically I have to underweight their importance.
I find the polling now to be useless: the media is currently focused on what gets better ratings (Ukraine) and formerly Covid-hysterical politicians are downplaying their (IMO) destructive actions presumably due to horrendously bad polling.
What happens a bit down the road when the election cycle passes, Ukraine (hopefully) gets resolved, and it's flu season again and the hysteria starts getting good ratings again? Are the highly malleable crowd going to be reprogrammed to go back into "Wear the Mask" and "No Jab, No Job" mode?
Has been down in the prior month-ish.. Although numbers are looking to trend upward right now. Watching how Omicron unfolded in Europe and December, and had a resurgence a month ago.. I would say that we may be in for a nasty wave.
Also, S Korea, dropped their covid restrictions and that's a bloodbath now.
It's like car crashes and mass shootings. Both are preventable. But we just choose to ignore them because doing something about it would be too hard and not fun.
We have vaccines, lockdowns are inneffective...literally what else is there to do. We can't just cower in fear in our basements for the rest of our lives. It took 50 years after the first mass vaccination rollout for the Polio vaccine for it to be "eradicated" - i'm not putting up with draconian public health measures for the rest of my life. EFF THAT
The powers that be have concluded that a significant fraction of the population suffering IQ loss due to long covid is preferable to continuing to print money to bail out the economy.
What if it is still a crisis? What are we going to do? Take a sweater? Everyone who could be vaccinated is vaccinated. Everything that could have been done is done with notable exception of ramping up therapeutics production
You have obviously never actually tried to set up a Foucault pendulum. It is not so easy. You can't just hang a weight from a rope tied to a tree. That won't work. Also, Foucault's pendulum does not show that the earth is round, it merely shows that the earth is rotating. Flat disks can rotate.
Also, ships do not always sink below the horizon. The right atmospheric conditions can refract the light in a way that causes them to be visible at a much greater distance than the straight geometry would allow. But this explanation can be inverted to claim that it is the vanishing that is due to atmospheric effects and that the non-vanishing ship is the accurate reflection of the geometry. Falsifying that hypothesis is, again, not so easy.
In fact, the sun at sunset which appears to be above the horizon is already well below the horizon, precisely because the atmosphere is less dense at higher altitudes. See https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_26.html Fig. 26-7
(Presumably this is also true at sunrise, so the day is longer than it "should" be from purely geometric considerations.)
> with cases rising, and hospitalizations and deaths holding steady at low levels.
That... seems to confirm the idea that it's no longer a crisis?
Again, the crisis is in the hospital systems. Flattening the curve was all about controlling infection rates in order to ensure the systems continue to function. COVID zero and crushing the curve was never a public health goal in North America.
If you accept that, then the reality is COVID is here to stay. That much is a given.
So if we've reached the point of mostly decoupling hospital/ICU/death rates from case rates (or at least dramatically lowering the frequency with which a COVID case escalates to hospitalization/ICU/death) through a mix of vaccines, antivirals, and other measures, then it seems perfectly reasonable to conclude that the crisis has past.
And I say all that as someone who still compulsively wears a mask in a lot of circumstances.
Is there something in that analysis that I'm missing?
My first impression of this sort of survey is → "define: crisis." I'm not even sure how I would answer this survey without some definitional clarity, and I'm probably one of the most cautious people around.
236 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 247 ms ] threadIt is possible for something to both be a crisis and not be something that is handled well by the heavy hand of government.
That is, I'm sympathetic to the idea that a lot of what we did was probably not super helpful. I'm less inclined to believe that a counterfactual world had fewer deaths. Seems more likely that, while we could have protected nursing homes better, most everything else was likely to look very similar to how it did.
I mean, I get the butterfly flapping a wing argument. But in general, large things moving in a direction tend to arrive where they are headed.
Putting 1/700 a year death from covid into context of our overall mortality rate: 1,027.0 deaths per 100,000 population [0]
I know more under 40 that have died from overdose in the past two years than I know that have died from covid (which is 0)
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm
Further apples to apples comparison is tough because kids 0-5 die of COVID but the US does not record any death below age 5 as a suicide.
A related comparison: more school age children died of COVID during the pandemic than have ever across all history died from school shootings.
https://www.capradio.org/articles/2021/04/29/fact-check-did-...
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Se...
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/...
Covid skewed old.
No amount of screeching will change the fact that people are far more mentally prepared for grandma to keel over with little warning than they are to lose a random uncle or coworker.
That depends. If a coworker dies because they did drugs, you might say to yourself "I'm safe from that mode of death as long as I don't do drugs".
If a random coworker dies because of Covid that they caught on the job, you might say to yourself "I'm next", the result being existential dread and anxiety.
It's true covid skewed old, but people quote the stats of dead young people in the last 2 years as if people were mentally prepared for that. Overdoses don't kill young families in a matter of weeks, but Covid did. Overdoses don't bring down 43 teachers in a school system over the course of a few months, whose average age was 46, but Covid did that. Covid brought all kinds of unique and deep tragedies that aren't reflected in the stats, and people are still dealing with the emotional fallout.
Again I understand that covid skewed old, but grandma is already dead and has been since before Covid. Now my parents are "old" at 65, but I'm not mentally prepared for them to die at all. If their parents are any indication I still have a good 20 years left with them, and so I get really upset when people try to discount their lives as if they wouldn't be missed if they were to die from Covid, or if somehow that's just nature taking its course. Really this shouldn't be a contest of whose death counts more to society.
But public health policy doesn't need to be structured around these gut feelings of whose life is more or less valuable or whose death is more or less expected.
To the larger dialogue about protective measures, I understand the claim that "I'm young, my risk of severe disease or death is low. So I need no precautions." But unless you live in isolation, your infection increases my risk of infection. My protective measures reduce that risk but do not implement. And I have elderly parents, in their 90's. They're vaccinated and reasonably cautious. They're also mostly independent and functional. But they aren't particularly ready to die. So despite the relaxation in required protective measures, I wear an N95 in indoor spaces outside my house so that I don't inadvertently infect them. I've also had encounters where I've been yelled at by random strangers for doing so. Apparently for some, the right to choose is not reciprocal - "I would like to choose not to do [x] but I'd also like to compel you do likewise."
If we’re trading anecdotes I don’t personally know anyone who has died or even been hospitalized with COVID. I know people who know people who did, but that is a small number and the majority were not likely to live long due to other causes (I do know one of one family member of a friend who was in seemingly good health and was hospitalized).
For my personal health and the health of most people I would say there wasn’t ever a crisis, though the delta wave got closest to being so that also coincided with the vaccine availability which removed any crisis that would have come otherwise. For others who are prone to severe illness it has been a crisis and continues to be. Aside from the political banter that is what has made this so divisive, the real risk and experiences of people can vary wildly.
We can debate what the appropriate responses to this crisis should have been but it was unarguably a crisis. Pretending otherwise is simply delusional.
But yes, I agree a hospital overloading is a crisis for those providing or seeking to receive care at said hospital. The cause and remediation of said crises are I think likely significantly more involved than just attributing it to COVID. In other words, the crisis of a particular overloaded hospital is not likely strictly a COVID crisis, but rather an issue with how care is prepared for and distributed in general.
There was a crisis. It had many aspects (medical, economic, social, political) and there were many different methods of alleviating those different aspects.
Claiming "there was no crisis" is simply, factually wrong.
In any case it does not appear as though you are open to reasonable discourse. You have decided on your "facts" and any opposing, or merely appearing opposing even if it isn't, viewpoint is catalogued as "delusional," even though you've offered virtually nothing in the way of an actual argument. So, I guess, you win?
https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...
Those two aren't really comparable, though the former really should have clued us in to how big a risk the latter was.
In other words, I doubt your latter scenario at the more extreme end of overloading was widely the case (in the first world), perhaps you have some analysis backing it up?
Then vaccines appeared, and things became more manageable, but up through delta, getting covid was really bad if you ended upon ventilator. The game changed with omicron although even that can affect naive populations. Politicians and pundits trotted out “sacrifice grandma for the economy” but it didn’t really fly. Hope people remember enough from covid to improve aged care and end of life housing.
There is some truth the the idea that our culture is more attuned to fear than it used to be and that politicians are more adept at exploiting that. You should be more surprised when politicians don't stoke fears and panic for their own purposes.
The measures were always driven by polling numbers and political sentiment alone. Many of the measures had absolutely no basis in science (wearing a mask in a restaurant then sitting down and taking it off is pure political ideology with zero basis in scientific reality).
Both claims were made, without any evidence, by commenters on HN.
I really wish people would be much more cautious in their pronouncements.
Especially if they have zero expertise in the relevant fields.
I get similarly tired when I watch my non-technical friends on FB make pronouncements about technology.
If someone says "I believe X" or "I don't believe Y," or "I saw an article about X which convinced me," that's great.
But please, don't don the mantle of expertise and make pronouncements, especially in areas you have no understanding of. It's exhausting.
I don't think you should be "exhausted" by people making claims on the internet. Just insert the words "I think" in front of any comment that does not already include that, because that is what every comment already means.
There are no retractions. There are no apologies.
There's no value.
Making claims without evidence, especially pretending you have expertise when you do so, decreases the signal to noise ratio on HN.
And yes, it's exhausting to watch. I wish we would hold each other to a higher standard.
>And yes, it's exhausting to watch. I wish we would hold each other to a higher standard.
Fair enough; I guess I'm just not as bothered by the misinformation (which seems to be synonymous with "information that's inconvenient to some authority") boogeyman as you are. When I see a claim online that I find interesting I will usually do a bit of research into the topic on my own. If I discover that the comment was incorrect, I may go back and downvote it, but I've still learned something, even though the original claim was wrong. If we had it your way, and no one without a PhD in a field was allowed to talk about things in that field, or every reply to every comment was "do you have a source for that?" with nothing else, this would be a pretty boring place!
Don't you ever see a comment that you just know is wrong but wonder "how could anyone believe this?" I watched a couple flat earth videos once because I just didn't get it. Of course, it becomes pretty obvious it's complete nonsense after just a few minutes, but at least now I have the ability to say "you are wrong, and here's why" in my own words.
I think a big issue with public discourse is that so many people never ever even try to imagine the reasoning behind a viewpoint with which they disagree. Without that understanding, I don't believe you can really convince anyone of anything, because all you can do is tell them they're wrong and point to some authority, which doesn't seem to work.
Please try to understand me when I say, if someone says "I don't think X is true," that's very different to me than saying "There's no scientific basis for X to be true."
I'm not saying people shouldn't talk about their beliefs.
I'm sick of people pretending they know what they're talking about, donning the mantle of an expert, and making a proclamation about whether something is even possible.
> people never ever even try to imagine
I'm complaining about people who are trying to shut down all conversation. Not "I don't believe in X," but rather "there's no scientific basis for X."
They're saying, "If you claim X, I know for certain you did not follow any scientific process to make that claim."
They're saying, "Every reasonable person should reject any evidence of X, because it cannot be a scientific claim."
They're doing what you accuse me of.
Risk decreases significantly with distance, but I’ve found zero scientific evidence that 6 feet is somehow better or fits some set of trade offs better than other numbers (10? 4? 30?).
There has been a lot of cargo cultish behavior, and just dumbness too - like how we got stuck on cloth masks when we could all just be sent properly rated respirators at this point for less (that would be more comfortable AND actually work!) is beyond my ability to comprehend.
0xy say many measures were essentially nonsensical and non-scientific, and then gave a perfect example of restaurant masking which is perhaps the pinnacle of COVID absurdity.
Wearing masks outdoors is another great example of something where the science was unequivocal, and yet the politicians persisted.
Non-N95 masks being worn improperly (which is essentially all of non-professional masking) was even declared by the CDC as ineffective so I think it’s safe to say the mitigations were not only deeply unpopular but also unscientific.
I'm honestly curious what you think the word "politicized" means.
Politicized: "(of an activity or event) made political in character."
Political: "relating to the government or the public affairs of a country."
So, to be clear, you think it's a problem that "authorities" have made assertions about the public affairs of a country?
I get that you think they've been utterly clueless, and if that's true, of course I think that's a problem.
But I'm focusing on the second part of what seemed to bother you. That, people with authority, have made assertions about how public affairs should be handled? That's a problem, to you?
What would have been better, in your mind?
One thing that covid-19 has shown is that the public health community hasn't bothered to work on flu since the 1940s, even though it kills 35-75k Americans a year and has so for decades if not longer.
You remember the flu. It's an essential part of the "you have to give us lots of money so we're ready for something like the Spanish flu" and yet, when covid-19/sars2 came long (a couple of years after sars1), "we" didn't know anything useful about coronavirus transmission.
One of the "Spanish Flu" stories told by the public health community is that one of the major outbreaks happened when a city had a parade to celebrate "beating" the flu. So, guess what the public health community said was a good thing during height of the pandemic. (To be fair, only the parades and demonstrations that the PHC liked were safe.)
Of course, the public health community's first instinct is to lie. They started with "masks aren't necessary for ordinary people" and then pivoted even though there was no new data either way. (And there's also the whole "vaccines can't be delivered in a year" thing.)
Note that the pre-Covid recommendation from WHO was no masks and no general lockdowns, but instead, "protect vulnerable subpopulations", which we knew at the beginning. Contrast that with what the public health community talked about. And no, there wasn't new data.
In my midsize town, with a 600 bed hospital, people (staff, patients, etc) were walking through the ER, and stealing whole boxes of N95 masks off of shelves. The hospital had to move them all to locked cabinets along with the addictive painkillers. They were almost completely out, and not able to get any more.
There were literally states/hospitals organizing a purchase (at insane prices) only to have the feds come and seize the masks and end up with nothing.
That's because the public health community has been incompetent at best and typically self-defeating at messaging for decades.
Unfortunately, pretty much everything other than self-evident statements out of the public health community has been good reason to think that the exact opposite is the right response. In this case, "don't panic" was best interpreted as "things are likely to go south, so urgent action is probably a good idea".
"hey, don't hoard masks, we don't have enough for medical personnel" would have been more effective.
As to the feds seizing masks, that was mostly the public health community doing the seizing.
You come into restaurant and wear that mask for 10 min and then you sit for an hour without mask. Sorry one does not have to be an "expert in the field" to see through this bullshit.
>"And now here we are, learning more about Long Covid every day."
Totally irrelevant to particular case
Or we could analyze past data, to see if counties where people worse masks in the lobby of restaurants had lower transmission of Covid than counties where they didn't?
If I go into a crowded restaurant and wait for 30 minutes for my table, I come within about 6 feet of about 30 people. When I sit at my table for an hour, I come within about 6 feet of about 3 people (server, and the person who brings drinks, and the person who brings food.) Especially if there are dividers between tables.
I'm not claiming wearing a mask in the lobby reduces transmission to zero. But I can easily imagine how it reduces transmission some.
And yet, others are claiming that no one could possibly imagine how wearing masks in the lobby of a restaurant could possibly reduce transmission.
You and I can talk about whether we believe wearing masks in the lobby reduces transmission.
I'm tired of people claiming there's "no scientific basis" (or something similar) for masks helping, or for there to be long-term implications of Covid, or anything else, really - especially when they're not an expert.
I do not remember ever waiting for 30 min in the lobby with 30 people. But I guess I just do not visit places where I have to waste so much time.
There's no way a collective can stay on alert for years.
My reaction was "well deaths are way down" but then I looked and we recently had a spike of deaths as big or larger than the initial wave.
So I think - if I'm being honest - it's as much a crisis as it ever was, we're just finding a way to live with it, no pun intended.
Part of the "crisis" feeling of the first wave was the unknown (and likely much higher) death count that could arrive if we didn't take action.
The point isn’t to argue about who’s counter-factual is right or wrong, it’s impossible to say.
At this point everyone has taken a position as to whether the “mitigations” were ethical, legal, effective, or not. There’s no point discussing it anymore unless or until people in power try to re-impose them.
Maybe. To me 800-1,000/day was in itself a crisis and pretty frightening. The fact that we didn't get to 2,000+/day is ... better? but in the moment of April 2020 there was plenty of imminent fear versus fear of worsening.
In fact, per the CDC Feb 1, 2022 was the deadliest single day, but if you went out into the world that day versus Feb 1, 2021, you'd experience two vastly different things.
1) Improved immunity (vax and/or recovery)
2) Improved treatment
3) Virus evolution
What else could it be (not rhetorical)?
As of a month ago, about 99% of their population has Covid antibodies. I doubt things are very different here.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
Now, though, you can have had up to four shots of vaccine and years of learning various mitigation efforts (masks, distancing, etc).
The risk profiles are totally different because of greater tools and information.
I remember when the only N95s you could get were counterfeit masks selling for $50 a mask.
For USA though the excess deaths number is 17% so that model doesn't make sense at all. How many young people are dying from Covid in USA?
A significant proportion of people in the USA have problems with their blood sugar levels. North Americans eat too much, eat the wrong foods and don't exercise. They tend to suffer from blood-sugar disorders (which then cause cancer and, well, everything).
Blood-sugar disorders are so varied in their symptoms as to exhaust listing here. People so affected are best described metaphorically as "human shipwrecks". New York Times had an excellent series on diabetes years ago:
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/09/nyregion/nyregionspecial5...
Skip to the section "Shortages and Shipwrecks", read it and weep: this was years before Covid and we had an epidemic that nobody was paying attention to. Covid is leaving and we still have a diabetes epidemic.
https://reason.com/2022/01/03/cdc-covid-19-children-hospital...
I'm not even making a claim re: death rate, I'm taking GP's word for it.
I think you're right. The phrase new normal has been batted around a lot since the pandemic began. Often it was used by people thinking masking and social distancing were going to be the new standard for being in public but now it's about living with the disease and accepting that hundreds of deaths every day is now normal.
I’m outside the DC halo, so I’m not sure what it’s like in MoCo. But here in Biden/Hogan country COVID is over. Even in the most progressive-leaning spaces which had been extremely careful with masking throughout the pandemic (school, church).
Your initial reaction was correct, national deaths (and hospitalizations) are way down (https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home). There may be localities that are near crisis, but this is a national poll.
The peak in February was the second worst in three Feb/Mar of the pandemic and had the highest single-day death count.
I read somewhere that the definition of a pandemic being over is not when it's not dangerous anymore, it's when it stops being unpredictable.
https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
Most people I think just want to return to "normal". We live in a new normal, but we can't live in crisis forever. I don't think that is necessarily apathy it is adapting.
It has been longer than two years. Prior to the pandemic we were subject to a wave of blatantly divisive rhetoric that seemed intent on driving us to civil war. The 'post-truth' era hit us hard for years before COVID-19 showed up and became just another weapon toward that end.
Yeah, we're tired of it. It is difficult to care anymore, honestly. A lot of Americans are going to die, a lot of them are going to be economically ruined, everything that made this country worth anything is going to be dismantled by fascism and plutocracy, and you know what? I think we've earned it.
One thing we need to step away from is this framing that there are "sides" to be on. Allowing for there to be these separate "sides" just invites conflict and allows people the opportunity to create an identity around something they have no business having an identity about. There are people who are anti-vax now (and weren't before) for example, but that's not a "side" anymore than being for or against bandaids would make sense to have "sides". Framing this as though there are sides also has the effect of legitimizing indefensible things, like being anti-vax.
As an example, are there two sides to the flat earth debate? If you say yes, then you're admitting that people who think the earth is flat have an equal standing with someone who knows that the earth is round. But these do not have equal standing, so it shouldn't be legitimized as a "debate" where there are "sides". Something like private versus public (to oversimplify) healthcare is worthy of two sides and a debate. Broadly speaking there are two defensible and respectable opinions.
You'll in fact find that it is not Vax/Anti-Vax but: 1. a group that needs the comforting reassurance of authority for security vs. 2. a group who regard their autonomy as paramount and see no need to have arbitrary rules forced on them.
And I assume you say this when someone is getting surgery, buys ibuprofen, or gets a splint as well?
> a group who regard their autonomy as paramount and see no need to have arbitrary rules forced on them
In the specific context of vaccines at least in America, nobody is forcing anyone to take a vaccine so the position wouldn't make any sense. Maybe you want to clarify what you mean here?
As an aside, this idea of autonomy here is a psychological reflex to control something about a situation that you have absolutely no control over. But it's really just an illusion. They're not more autonomous than anyone else is. A vaccine wouldn't make a difference in your autonomy, and in a really bad pandemic ala The Stand (Stephen King novel) you'd be forced at gunpoint to take a vaccine and you'd happily comply. It's all just lifestyle and cosplay at this point.
Employers, en masse, are forcing it as a condition of employment.
I do agree with some of these employer mandates, e.g. airlines, because they increase connectivity and thus spread. Not so much with some others, e.g. clerical stay at home workers.
It may be difficult for some to accept, but we as individuals have essentially total control over our own health and COVID was no exception.
Essentially all serious COVID cases had multiple LIFESTYLE-casued comorbidities. The most prevalent: obesity.
Comorbidities increase your risk or "serious COVID", just like being unvaccinated does. But that still doesn't satisfy anything. Comorbidities increase your risk, getting vaccinated decreases your risk substantially, so if you want to blame this "well only fat people get it", well sure. Most people are fat, therefore they should get the vaccine since you can do that in a very short period of time whereas weight loss takes a while and you may have other comorbidities that you can't actually control or change at all.
But aside from these asinine "fat positive" movements (which are very similar in pathology IMO to COVID deniers) nobody is out there advocating for people to ignore their weight and that drinking milkshakes just might not be bad for your heart. Next thing you know of course drinking milkshakes and eating burgers are ok. The government just wants to control what you eat!1!
It's the exact same kind of nonsense.
Also, you apparently have no idea what "arbitrary" means.
Ah, right. They were just highly intelligent people "following the science". Not at all obsessed with stoking fear so they could seize control and consolidate power:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=arbitrary+six+foot+rule&ia=web
In all honesty your attitude creates a lot of the problems you describe.
It’s a free country if people don’t want to be vaxxed they can take their chances with the 99.9% survival rate for those under 50. Or the lower survival rate if they are over 50.
Can you name a single person in America who has been held down against their will and administered a vaccine? Can you name multiple, coordinated instances of this happening? Can you point to a lawsuit?
If not, you should stop repeating this.
> In all honesty your attitude creates a lot of the problems you describe.
I used to think that too but ultimately what you have is a group that cannot be reasoned with ala flat-earth proponents and no amount of information, debate, or reason would change their mind because the point isn't to understand, it's to create a lifestyle and culture. It's like a religion. The only thing that's left to be important here is to combat disinformation by bad actors and prevent further corrosion of civilization.
I can definitely be reasoned with and reason with the unvaccinated all the time.
I opened my home in contravention of the mandates to throw parties and have unvaccinated people a place to socialize and people found my point of view to be in line with theirs. Namely that vaccines work but for them they would prefer the risk of getting Covid to getting vaccinated.
It may surprise you but many people can be talked to and turn out to have points of view vastly different than what you read on the news / see on social media.
You aren't arguing in good faith. "No, we aren't banning gay marriage, we just implemented a federal regulation that forces employers to fire anyone who is gay married. It's their choice!"
I'm not even against vaccine mandates (at least I did when the vaccines worked), but come on, admit what you are actually supporting here.
No, that's not true. One can acknowledge the existence of two sides while still maintaining that one of those two sides is entirely without merit.
And in fact it is essential to do this because history shows that simply denying the existence of people with crazy points of view does not make them go away, and in fact often increases their power and influence, ironically, because the denial of their existence is actually evidence that their conspiracy theories are correct, that they are in fact the victims of prejudice.
Flat earth is an interesting case in point. It is actually quite challenging to show that the earth is round in a way that does not require you to take anyone's word for anything.
Perhaps if you live nowhere near an ocean and have no trees from which to hang a pendulum and can't afford a rangefinder for lining up two boards with holes in them.
I think you will also be surprised how hard it is to fill in the details of the experiments you are alluding to.
Two sides/devil's advocate is the basis of philosophy, thought, learning, etc. To claim otherwise is to demand blind obedience to authority.
> As an example, are there two sides to the flat earth debate? If you say yes, then you're admitting that people who think the earth is flat have an equal standing with someone who knows that the earth is round.
Nobody is saying they are on equal footing. They have a right to their opinions. But the facts are what matters.
800 years ago, you'd be demanding everyone believe the earth is the center of the universe and that anyone who says otherwise is a heretic. You'd be saying we shouldn't legitimize indefensible things like heliocentrism. In my opinion, the side that is trying to stifle debate/opinions/etc is the wrong side. If someone says they are a flat earther, just show them a video of the earth.
Do you realize that just a few decades ago, the idea of vaccination was viewed as indefensible and anti-science? Much of the scientific community viewed vaccine advocates as charlatans. After all, you'd have to be a lunatic to infect yourself with disease right? Almost everything you hold dear and absolutely true today were once "indefensible things". Including almost everything medical and scientific.
Instead of trying to stifle debate, just bring facts with you and you'll be fine. Nothing is gained by zealotry.
You have a right to an opinion. I have a right to dismiss that opinion off-hand like I would dismiss someone saying the earth is flat. Would you host a debate with someone at a university about whether or not the earth is flat? If I went to a Python conference and have a lecture on how strings in Python work which were completely contrary to how the language operates would you suggest that this is a matter of two sides, or that it's the basis of philosophy and learning? I don't think so.
What is the exact scientific criteria where it'll be settled enough for you to take a vaccine?
Everything you deem to be wrong? " Allowing for there to be these separate "sides"... "
> It's settled science.
Everything is "settled science" until it isn't. Like the earth being the center of the universe. Like newtonian physics. Like einsteinian physics. Etc. It was settle science that Lamarckianism was scientific charlatanism until epigenetics.
> You have a right to an opinion. I have a right to dismiss that opinion off-hand
We are agreed. Except you don't want to even allow others their opinions.
> If I went to a Python conference
Someone once compared python to a tricycle.
> or that it's the basis of philosophy and learning? I don't think so.
Then you don't know philosophy, science and most importantly the history of science/philosophy. Why is it that the people with the least knowledge/wisdom/etc are the most sure about things they know nothing about?
As I said, if you run into a flat earther, just show them a video of the earth. Or don't waste your time with them. Who do you think you are to say whether they should be "allowed or not" to have their opinion or say?
You sound like you care very much. I've known many zealots who want everyone to adopt their orthodoxy.
> I care when they have a megaphone and they're convincing other people of their reality and that leads those people to their own early death.
Every preacher, pope, cult leader and zealot of all kinds says the same thing. They want "heresy" silenced in order to save souls. How noble and virtuous. Ever consider that people have their own agency? Ever consider whether you are in the wrong?
What happens if someone says the earth is flat on a megaphone? They get laughed at. As long as you have the facts and data, what are you so afraid of?
It never works because it's not symmetric, you want your enemies to shut up but not you, this is because you see yourself as the correct side, which might be either true or false, but the sure thing is that your enemies beg to disagree. The only thing that will make it work is brute force, but other than that it's just another way to say to your enemies "Just admit you're wrong and go to your room".
Let me put it another way. What if you had a family member who had cancer and I wrote a bunch of stuff and ran Facebook ads that they read that convinced them to not get very likely life-saving treatment with no downsides to them. All good then yea? You won't be mad or suggest maybe I stop doing that?
This assertion encodes a worldview within it, one that is not shared among a lot (most ?) of religious people, especially in the Middle East. Religious people often assign very high weights to the fact that their religion isn't respected/believed in, and the resulting moral value can be compared with, and often exceeds, material damage to lives and property in their eyes. So the very act of saying "What one does in one's bedroom is none of your business" is itself a topic of intense disagreements. I say this as a closeted atheist in said society who have tried a number of times to play "Devil's Advocate" to atheism and gay rights in my social circles : if only it was as easy as saying "but they don't harm anyone!" and getting people to agree on that.
There are actually analogs to this in western societies (and in every other society I have heard of). Ironically, it's usually the dual to what happens in my soceity : very high sensitivity to anti-lgbt opinions, although the same applies, being anti-lgbt in the abstract doesn't actually harm anyone. Another example is holocaust denial, how does it actually harm anyone ? I don't see an obvious way, a popular stance goes something like "If we allowed people to deny the holocaust, people would percieve it as less serious and it might happen again", but this is overly simplistic and selective, people deny and underplay countless historical atrocities (e.g. the 20th anti- and pro- communism conflicts in Asia,Africa,and South America) and that doesn't automatically make them more likely to happen.
So every society has certain taboos and red lines that you are not allowed to speak against in public (although doing so wouldn't concretely harm anyone), and problems happen when 2 social groups who have different ideas of what should be taboo interact together.
>that convinced them to not get very likely life-saving treatment with no downsides to them
I have several comments on this:
- Cancer and Covid are not comparable in damage, Cancer is uniformly deadly, Covid only so for very specific subsets of the population.
- Cancer is not viral, so whatever happens in the end it will only affect that specific family member and my family, but with Covid you have to balance people's freedom with the threat they pose to the rest of the populations.
Overall, I agree in the abstract that free speech should be restricted in critical expertise-related subject matters, like medical and engineering matters, but the particular case of Covid discourse is such a disaster. Governments and public institutions consistently lied or made up things out of thin air, authoritarians hid behind "The Science^TM" to advance authoritarian solutions to what could be equally solved with voluntary incentive-setting, and overall "The Science^TM" camp just consistently shout louder and assume bad faith more than the reverse. The actual factual subject matter itself is far from settled and much much blurrier than - say - the question of "Does vaccines cause autism", the virus constantly mutates and wipes the floor with the efficiency of the vaccines, lockdown measures are often disastrous and impact far more people negatively than the virus. But there is a certain type of people who will treat the virus as an ultimate demon, to be exorcised at all costs, and they ridicule anyone disagreeing with them as "Science Deniers^TM", and this just becomes exhausting after a while.
There is a ton we don't know about it.
There is a reason we don't approve vaccines on an ad hoc basis in normal times. It's an emergency so you gotta take some risks. But trying to shut down dissent with THE SCIENCE IS SETTTLED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! is bullshit.
This is despite spending decades and hundreds of billions of dollars on public health.
You remember the public health folk. When they ask for money, they say how it's needed so we're ready for the next spanish flu.
Indications of covid being airborne were available very early on, particularly as its genetic predecessor "OG Covid" / SARS-CoV-1 was also known to be airborne.
The problem was politicians who feared a run on masks and thus refused to follow science. On the other hand, the increased hygienic measures - particularly regular hand washing and disinfection - contributed to the eradication of at least one flu strain and prevented the spread of countless other infectious agents, leading to a reduction of load on the hospital systems, so it was not entirely pointless (and in fact should be kept even when the pandemic condition ends).
Physical motion is fundamentally relative and there is nothing in the laws of physics that says you can’t construct a frame of reference in which everything else moves relative to the Earth. Heliocentrism is certainly easier to reason about and much simpler, but it’s no more true in any fundamental sense.
I think it's easy to confuse the two major covid conflicts as one. The first, more obvious and dumber conflict is the "covid is fake/nothing!" idiots. That's the conflict you're mainly addressing. The second, less one-sided conflict is whether our anti-covid measures have a good return-on-investment vs less-stringent measures. Covid deaths and government anti-covid efforts seem to be less closely coupled than is intuitive. For example, comparing Sweden, a country with very lax covid mandates, to countries with stronger mandates. They came off much worse than Finland, but better than the UK, comparable to Germany, and much better than the United States.
I agree completely that there is further study to be done on lockdowns and other efforts that were undertaken. For example, I'm monitoring this and we'll see, but perhaps China's COVID 0 lockdown strategy wasn't the right one compared, to, say, the US strategy. There's much to say about how historic human efforts to contain disease (we've always done lockdowns) may be or may not be effective with 8 billion globalized people.
But even in this case I don't think we need "sides". We need analysis. Sides create tribalism and suboptimal outcomes I think in this case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance
I was reluctant to even respond to your comment, lest I legitimize sophistry. There aren't really two sides to it, you're openly calling for playing language games.
I can't even...
more like 8 years aka. the ramping up of identity politics and other cultural marxist shenanigans
- mask, lock down, hide from others etc
[1] Or 'with Covid' if you believe those people just happen to be dying of something else while having Covid.
I ask because 7452 people die per day in the US on average, meaning 6.7% of the people who die now have Covid (using your 500/day figure).
Clearly some die from and some happen to die with Covid. The difference could be estimated simplistically based on the percent of the population that currently has Covid. If 0.5% have Covid and 6.7% of the people who die have it, there is a correlation. If 5% have Covid and 6.7% of the people who die have it, there's not much correlation. (Of course, in the correlation case, it still doesn't prove causation, as the weakened immune systems of those who are dying may be unable to fight off Covid at the end.)
I think the best way to evaluate is to look at excess deaths. But even there you've got data contamination from the measures that were taken (drinking deaths, suicides up, flu down, etc.) and no way to figure out exactly how many of the various increases and decreases are directly attributable to the Covid measures.
> If the decedent tested positive for COVID, the virus also gets placed on the death certificate. Many of these people likely died with COVID, not from COVID, Grannis said.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/post-tribune/opinion/...
Here's an article about Australia, too:
> Indeed, distinguishing between dying with and dying from COVID-19 may require a more complex investigation into the cause of a death, beyond citing a positive SARS-CoV-2 test that was completed prior to the person’s death.
https://theconversation.com/died-from-or-died-with-covid-19-...
This obvious inconsistency is relevant to the discussion.
In the case of things like car crashes, there's a significant benefit of using cars that means we choose to tolerate deaths as part of the cost of having easy access to transport. The same is true of many things that kill people. The utility of the cause of the deaths means the cost is accepted.
I don't think there's a strong argument in favor of the usefulness of Covid.
The strong argument is in favor of not living life as though we were amid a crisis, locked down and paranoid.
There is even an argument in favor of not requiring masks. It's a much weaker one, but the benefits are not large either because masks on the general population are not very effective against omicron.
There is definitely a strong argument in favour of not shutting down an economy because of it.
Colleague's grandpa passed away in Scandinavia. As it was summertime, all the extended family is on vacation, abroad and etc. they put the body in the freezer and schedule funeral at some time when everybody's back.
On the other hand I have read about Japanese (might be any other Far East country) culture where passing away of father requires something like a year of mourning. Culture doesn't allow you to go to work for a year as you would look insensitive. However not showing up at work for a year is also a big nono. So it becomes a huge strain on all the family.
And we can imagine how these two cultures can have very different approaches to crisis like that, crisis itself is of a very different scope because of culture.
What’s utterly astonishing is what’s going on in Shanghai in spite of this.
And ironically, with the case numbers vs. deaths we see there, it seems to strongly support the stance that the crisis is over. 7 deaths for 12k infected is ridiculous. They just cannot change course from zero covid without losing face, this is why they push through with this nonsense.
And that's before taking into account the fact that this will be an underestimation since deaths tend to trail the infection count by something like 2 weeks.
Still more alarming than ridiculous in my books.
People die all the time. Every day. Shanghai has 25M people. Let's assume the US's annual death rate of 8.8 per 1000. That's 220k deaths per year, or 4230 deaths per week.
Statistically with the current numbers, getting everybody infected would result in less deaths than having no covid at all :o) Sure, we'll only see real deaths with a delay of a few weeks, so that's witless, but as stated in my sibling comment in this thread, Omicron seems not to deliver on this from my personal experiences at all.
Having a total lock-down over it seems absolutely ridiculous to me.
But I am worried about the effectiveness of their vaccines and the rate at which the disease will eventually spread.
This seems to be the norm with Omicron. If Shanghai is just Omicron too, I'd be surprised if a wave of deaths will follow.
What seems to be somewhat different in China is that between an up-til-now successful zero-covid policy (facilitated by lockdowns) and the less effective Sinovac vaccine, immunity levels are much lower. And I've seen a lot of people suggesting that the milder cases from Omicron are mostly down to existing immunity (either from vaccines or past infection) rather than Omicron being inherently milder (tentative consensus seems to be that it is a bit milder, but not so much as the reduced severity of infections would suggest in absence of other factors).
It's _probably_ true here in Canada, too; but in our province, if not nationally, they've given up nearly entirely on PCR testing and case tracking. Schools aren't mandated to report absences unless they reach some very high threshold. As a consequence, there aren't any really good ways for an individual to judge their risk.
The boosters work but then efficacy seems to drop faster after them.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2119451
While 50% isn't useless it does seem significantly worse than the other vaccines. And frankly if I were Chinese I'd be questioning why China didn't license one of the other vaccines rather than continuing with their less effective homegrown version.
My understanding is also that regardless of vaccine used, the Chinese government is still trying to blame outbreaks on foreigners, and as such has prioritised vaccinating people like dock workers and airline staff over their elderly which seems rather questionable at this point. Australia and New Zealand also attempted a zero-covid strategy, which worked well enough until Omicron. But they have both now abandoned this strategy, and I feel like China is going to have to do the same at some point.
So pretending and acting as if the virus is some sort of foreign threat that can be curbed by 0-covid strategies (which failed even for hermetically sealed countries) is all part of that face saving campaign. They want to look like the country that had Covid under control—at all costs.
A sizeable part of the Brazilian population got vaccinated with only Coronavac when omicron got here, but there wasn't enough difference on the death ratio to decide if it was less effective. So I imagine it isn't much worse than the Pfizer one on preventing death.
You can get more information on the spectrum of COVID symptoms here https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/overview/clin...
For all the tiresome arguments of the cure being worse than the disease, just this once I’ll have bite and say yeah, this cure is WAY worse than the disease.
Zero covid was successful up until Omicron, evidently. While Christmas markets had to close early in Germany because Delta was so bad, you had huge overcrowded markets in Shanghai, with many people not wearing a mask. If anything, we probably have the most statistically significant numbers about infectiousness and ratio of symptomatic:asymptomatic cases because of the totally over the top testing of every possible contact they did whenever even a single case popped up anywhere.
If anything, with the current draconian lockdown if they had any incentive to lie, they would have to make it look worse than it actually is to justify it.
Look harder.
April 19th, 2020.
Look at the reported deaths before and after; skyrocking, then straight to zero.
Then look at the arrests (on that same day) of activists who had been reporting the coverups and censorship that had been happening since the very beginning.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/china/
https://qz.com/1846277/china-arrests-users-behind-github-cor...
If you dare to know how deep it goes, look at those activists Github page. Use google translate in Chrome.
Curious what metrics from those apps did you use to confirm your hypothesis.
China didn’t have that and what’s happening is what trying to control with lockdowns will look like periodically forever.
Many mitigation measures are only effective as delay instead of prevention.
Within six months, the risk of a vaccinated individual approaches the risk of an unvaccinated one. That’s before considering new variants with potentially high immune escape.
We were mass producing ventilators when we should've been mass producing tests or masks, we were going maskless based on trailing data instead of the current spikes etc. It was like a shitty game of telephone where people died because the messaging became so delayed and distorted.
I am not trying to change anyones view on this -- just expressing my point of view.
But that wouldn't support the anti-government narrative that seems to be so popular among Americans in general and techies in particular.
On the plus side, producing vaccines by end of 2020 was nothing short of stunning IMO, with all the skepticism at that time on the timeline. Bid kudos to the pharmas of course, but a lot of credit should also go to the Trump administration, whatever you may think of the president.
(Lots of cited examples at https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/jlockdowns/)
Met him and he showed the opposite of what he was trying to sell his audience.
Claims he doesn't care about money then took a bunch of huge sponsorship deals. Claims he didn't want fame but went on to try to network with a guy from Hollywood claiming he could make him famous. Claims to love everyone, and given the chance he attacks people with deep anger. Has a massive massive ego, always brags about being alpha.
I donno, hes just not in any way who he claims to be.
However, I have far more trust in these government organs at doing something effective than leaving it to "the market" which will just always be distracted by money instead of "taking one for the team" and focusing on the hard problems "just in case".
The cultural rot that prevents iterating on effective government runs deep, and has little to do with exhaustion. In _Spring 2020_, i was shocked by the strong reaction I got from my friends at even passing mentions of the FDA/CDC's significant and severe early failures.
In the usual reductive framing, I'm a pretty "big govt" guy. While govt is horrendously incompetent, as a baseline, it allows us to choose from a wider array of goals, more precisely than the market does. But I learned that even my nominally-intelligent friends are too simple-minded to understand this, and that their support is rooted in religious belief in an omnicompetent govt that provides flawless protection from the world's dangers.
An environment that can't even see failures is not one that's going to improve upon them. Already, the excuses have been lined up: every single failure was due in some way to Trump, and now that he's gone (hopefully), the gov't can go back to its usual, hyper-efficient mode of function (lol)
I've always said, the federal government is only good at killing people (referring to the military)...I'm starting to think it applies to a lot more than that.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/nyregion/new-jersey-famil...
...I wondered if the problem in the U.S. is really an obesity "epidemic" and not a COVID epidemic. The statistics for non-elderly deaths seem to bear this out. (Of course, the NY Times neglected to comment on the elephant in the room.)
I was never a COVID skeptic -- I got vaccinated, and I wore N-95 masks, fitted as best I could, when indoors in crowds. I rarely ate in restaurants so giving that up wasn't a big lifestyle change for me. (I was fortunate to have a decent supply of N-95 and N-99 masks pre-pandemic because I often visit places where things are fabricated, and dust and particles are around.)
But I was skeptical about mask mandates for one simple fact -- whenever I was out in public, I'd observe that only about 30% of people were wearing masks in a way that could possibly do anything -- covering the nose and mouth, and not taking it on and off continuously / not touching the face. So we'll never really know if masks work on population studies.
There was a lot of "theatre" -- (I fly a lot for work, and still flew during the pandemic to Europe and the mid-east quite often. I have multiple passports so I could get into places even during times when tourism was banned). Airplanes never banned CPAP use in flight, even though study after study from previous airborne viruses showed CPAP to aersolize a person's exhalate and spread disease. (See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7298691/ ). United Airlines claimed that they were following the guidelines of the "Cleveland Clinic" for their covid mitigation, and yet that clinic warns about CPAP machines. (The reality is, the airlines didn't want to battle the ADA rules, so they put the public at risk.)
We merely replaced one common pandemic with another only last time the government decided to try at some draconian public policy.
Sorry, but, until something changes in the world of polls dramatically I have to underweight their importance.
What happens a bit down the road when the election cycle passes, Ukraine (hopefully) gets resolved, and it's flu season again and the hysteria starts getting good ratings again? Are the highly malleable crowd going to be reprogrammed to go back into "Wear the Mask" and "No Jab, No Job" mode?
Restrictions mostly gone / loosening without any disastrous results.
Sounds about right for now.
I worry about COVID, but I also worry about wearing out people / society / side effects. If there's space to loosen restrictions I'm all for it.
Let the scientists keep a lookout, let the citizens relax.
Has been down in the prior month-ish.. Although numbers are looking to trend upward right now. Watching how Omicron unfolded in Europe and December, and had a resurgence a month ago.. I would say that we may be in for a nasty wave.
Also, S Korea, dropped their covid restrictions and that's a bloodbath now.
Also, ships do not always sink below the horizon. The right atmospheric conditions can refract the light in a way that causes them to be visible at a much greater distance than the straight geometry would allow. But this explanation can be inverted to claim that it is the vanishing that is due to atmospheric effects and that the non-vanishing ship is the accurate reflection of the geometry. Falsifying that hypothesis is, again, not so easy.
(Presumably this is also true at sunrise, so the day is longer than it "should" be from purely geometric considerations.)
That... seems to confirm the idea that it's no longer a crisis?
Again, the crisis is in the hospital systems. Flattening the curve was all about controlling infection rates in order to ensure the systems continue to function. COVID zero and crushing the curve was never a public health goal in North America.
If you accept that, then the reality is COVID is here to stay. That much is a given.
So if we've reached the point of mostly decoupling hospital/ICU/death rates from case rates (or at least dramatically lowering the frequency with which a COVID case escalates to hospitalization/ICU/death) through a mix of vaccines, antivirals, and other measures, then it seems perfectly reasonable to conclude that the crisis has past.
And I say all that as someone who still compulsively wears a mask in a lot of circumstances.
Is there something in that analysis that I'm missing?