3 pallets of toilet paper on the way. Just kidding, I already installed bidets during Covid.
In all seriousness, even if we get into a pandemic again, unless we see mortality rates in the double digits, I doubt the world would go into prolonged lockdowns again.
Very few. Covid mass infection events happened mostly through the air, much less so through touching a surface. We learned that early in the pandemic. Hand washing after the first few months was mostly kept as hygiene theatre and for preventing transmission of infections other than covid.
> Very few. Covid mass infection events happened mostly through the air, much less so through touching a surface. We learned that early in the pandemic.
No, "we" didn't. The CDC and, by extension, much of the coverage was insisting on surface sanitization even though there was plenty of evidence for airborne transmission already. I distinctly remembered going with the CDC recommendations until a friend pointed me out to a bunch of published articles with a preponderance of evidence for airborne transmission. It took many months for the CDC and other agencies to change their stance, by which time the whole 'surface cleaning' was already entrenched in everyone's minds.
A million dead people, sufficiently far from us in any particular dimension, don’t matter. It’s a funny piece of human psychology. Deaths years ago or years in the future, or in Africa or wherever. Just don’t matter to most people. Goes double when they are “other”.
I am really aiming for density here. I don’t think it’s weird (or debatable) that humans don’t care as much about other humans that are far away. They care about ones that are closer.
The thing is lack of density was sufficient to trigger this lack of care. Kind of interesting.
“sufficiently far from us in any particular dimension” is where that falls apart, though. One million dead within the US alone means a lot of people were touched by COVID death.
It is not clear to me that any significant number of deaths were prevented by lockdowns once vaccines were available, only delayed by a maximum of 3 years. Everyone still got covid. Some people didn’t make it through the filter, that’s what new diseases are like.
Whatever the number of dead, it wouldn’t be true for them. If we don’t take precaution X then Y more people die, but that doesn’t mean every X is worth it.
My generous interpretation of OP is that during the covid pandemic our precautions that kinda-sorta slowed down covid were adequate to basically remove influenza from the human population as indicated by being the least amount of influenza activity on record[0]
It's not widely agreed upon that this was due to mitigations, and there's unfortunately no evidence they slowed down COVID either. All claims that mitigations slowed COVID fall apart when examined carefully (often they aren't even real, they're just model predictions being presented as if that was the same thing as empirical evidence).
Rather, there seems to be some mechanism by which some viruses push out others. This can also be seen in how new SARS-CoV-2 variants would often rapidly exterminate the prior variant within weeks, instead of co-existing.
That doesn't make sense. If that were the case then the cold & flu wouldn't intermingle, though they very much do. And now, when fewer mitigations are around, we see people hospitalized with COVID, influenza, and RSV. Why, when mitigations are removed, is COVID no longer so dominate it's pushing the flu out?
> Why, when mitigations are removed, is COVID no longer so dominate it's pushing the flu out?
Because nearly everyone has had it already. The mitigations were removed because Omicron so visibly ignored them that everyone just gave up at that point.
Here in Alberta it's still killing at nearly 5x the rate as the flu, so it's still very much present. Unfortunately, it's impossible to argue further because of the lack of population testing (Alberta only tests those hospitalized), but more people here were found to have COVID this season than influenza[1].
If we're now largely immune to COVID why isn't influenza now pushing it out?
I'm not being clear. The interference appears to be related to how recently you were infected with something else. If lots of people around you are getting COVID, then they aren't getting something else. Once most people are immune to it, they aren't getting infected with it anymore and other viruses can compete again.
> it's still killing at nearly 5x the rate as the flu
The way they define COVID deaths make such numbers incomparable.
Sure, if that proves to be the case I would happily lock myself up. I can quarantine with the best of them. But the fact of the matter is that we don't know a lot about H5N1 infections in people due to the extremely low number of known infections. The individual in question here appears to be having more mild symptoms.
The number of infections is low in the US but we have a lot of data from China and south east Asia where it’s more prevalent. 800 people have been infected in total so far with about a 50% mortality rate since the late 90s.
Do we know the rate they tested at? Do we think it's possible they caught everyone infected?
To be clear in this, I took COVID very seriously, I still carry a mask in my pocket and use it when I travel, but I'm trying to be realistic about the situation.
That depends on the time difference between when it becomes transmissible and when it causes death. If it's short, it won't spread much. If it's long, it'll spread all over the place.
This exact virus (H5N1) has at least 15-30% mortality. The exact number is really hard to know, because there have been too few cases, but it's certain to be at least 20 times as deadly as SARS-CoV-2.
No, that's not certain at all. The total number of confirmed human cases in the world is under a thousand [1] in 20 years. That's not enough data to get any kind of mortality statistic for an influenza variant.
Chances are >99% of cases are so mild they were never tested. It's pretty surprising this one was detected at all. It's only the second confirmed case in the US despite tons of confirmed animal cases in poultry and migratory birds.
> The patient reported eye redness (consistent with conjunctivitis), as their only symptom, and is recovering.
This is not a disease with a double digit mortality rate, no matter how many times people try to do math with a three digit sample size of poor people in developing countries.
The CDC only caught this case because it's literally testing anyone with symptoms at the cattle farm.
i'll never understand the compulsion to do these hybridization experiments to find out if its possible, how about we just live life assuming its possible and work on figuring out how to help humans recover from disease in general
Lockdowns make sense if emergency rooms cannot keep up with the emergency rate. Other than that*, we'll see a lot of people going back to WFH on a temp basis and lots of masks and hand sanitizer.
Yeah, this is why lockdowns were started. The ER was full of sick people and, if you were in a car wreck or had a heart attack, you would likely die from lack of beds. Go back and look and the ER/ICU/All-Bed occupancy rates were >95% over most of the country for months.
As a Texan, if you depend on our elected people to keep you informed about anything important you're probably backing the wrong horse.
Unelected people like public health experts should always be important parts of any discussions about issues that affect the health and safety of all members of a community. They can work with elected representatives to help define policy and guidelines that protect our property and keep us all employed and healthy.
Ignoring the input of unelected experts is dangerous to society and leads to exactly the conditions we have now where people chose sides based on partisan identity politics instead of solid pandemic management principles.
We can't elect everyone who should have a voice in defining policy but we can consult them and take advantage of their expertise and skills when bad things happen.
You don't gripe when other disasters like prairie fires require evacuation notices do you? Those people are also unelected. They are also recognized experts at their trades who spend their careers trying to keep us all safe.
To others, it's important not to respond to trolls who only ask over-simplified, inaccurate rhetorical questions.
When it's obvious that your answers will be an order of magnitude longer than any question or input they provide, it is too likely that they are unpersuadable, and are wasting your time on purpose.
You live in a fantasy world. Here in the freedom loving state of California, not once did any person, LEO or not, tell me not to leave my house.
Did Chuck Norris and the Texas Rangers lock you up? Where did the bad man touch you?
The closest thing to lock down this country has seen in recent memory was Minneapolis police marching through the streets firing paint rounds at people standing on their own front porch during protests about George Floyd.
> So un-elected people can decide when I can't leave my house then?
Nobody has ever told you that you couldn't leave the house. You could leave the house any time you wanted. What you couldn't do is partake in activities that would gather crowds.
Because the goal was really to close businesses rather than forcing service/retail workers to serve as a Petri dish. Politicians/bureaucrats are intrinsically authoritarian and often overshoot with simplistic heavy handed responses. Then a political movement formed around acting like idiots out of spite, cementing the opposing positions.
I was in a blue state that issued a strongly worded stay at home recommendation, but no "lockdown" with legal force. It worked great, owing in part to still having some sense of social cohesion. When your society can't get through novel disruptions with leadership informally keeping most everybody on the same page, that's what you should be worried about.
> The preparedness paradox is the proposition that if a society or individual acts effectively to mitigate a potential disaster such as a pandemic, natural disaster or other catastrophe so that it causes less harm, the avoided danger will be perceived as having been much less serious because of the limited damage actually caused.
Likely referring to the Japanese-style bidet, aka washlet, which have a built-in dryer so zero toilet paper is required. But even a cheap one without a dryer will drastically reduce the amount of toilet paper required.
Yes, they're only called bidets for lack of a better word in English. Mine has adjustable water temp, heated seat, air dry, variable pressure, front/rear wash, oscillation, and several more modes I've not even dared to try yet. Got mine from Costco during one of their periodic sales. I highly recommend them even when there's no toilet paper shortage.
> going in a lockdown is the prevention measure to avoid mortality rate in the double digits…
Huh? Mortality rate is the mortality rate, its independent of a lockdown; unless more vulnerable people are "locking down" at rates different than less vulnerable ones, but at that point we're not talking about a "lockdown".
The purpose of the COVID lockdown wasn't to suppress the mortality rate; it was to suppress the total infected/mortality.
In normal times the experienced mortality rate is based on most of the sickest people receiving supportive care in the hospital that greatly blunts mortality rate.
When your medical needs exceed resources mortality rate converges toward untreated mortality rate.
Try this on for size what is the untreated mortality rate of a single gunshot wound to the chest. Its close to 100% but the overwhelming majority survive with prompt treatment. You wouldn't say that the mortality rate was what it is.
I suppose the mortality rate could go up if the healthcare system in a particular area is fully overwhelmed, such that significant number of normally treatable cases end up in death rather than recovery. The morbidity rate is probably less affected though.
> I doubt the world would go into prolonged lockdowns again.
Most of the world didn't go into any lockdowns. Sure, most gatherings were banned and places like restaurants couldn't have people dining in. But most people could go outside and do almost anything they wanted, provided they didn't gather in crowds.
The lockdowns like China enforced where people had their doors barred and could only leave once a week for groceries (or had groceries delivered by the government) were an outlier.
If we ever see mortality rates in the double digits, expect real lockdowns.
Most countries implemented policies they called "lockdowns" so whatever personal definition you're using isn't very helpful. Certainly, being able to go outside was seen as a regrettable bug and not a feature in many places. For example, the UK police notoriously used drones to find couples sitting on park benches. Where I live I was forbidden from leaving my apartment for a couple of weeks when my wife got COVID, for any reason except purchasing groceries. So that was definitely a China-style lockdown.
> If we ever see mortality rates in the double digits, expect real lockdowns.
We'll see them because our ruling classes are psychologically and politically unable to push back on corrupt academics, not because they work. Lockdowns had no effect on COVID because respiratory viruses are able to spread long distances on air currents, but lockdown policy assumes they can't.
> So, you were told to self isolate because you were in a household with a sick individual. Wouldn't that be the prudent thing to do anyway?
That'd very much depend on what the reason to leave the house was, wouldn't it? I never got sick anyway so must have been immune to that variant.
> Also, what does 'forbidden' means? What would have happened if you went out anyway?
I think there were fines. I forget exactly, it was a few years ago now. I'm not sure how it was policed.
> Citation needed. Also, the viral load at 'long distances' is unlikely to be problematic.
Go look at any regression analysis of lockdown/masking severity vs outcomes, there are plenty out there. Or study what happened on the Diamond Princess way back in Feb/March 2020. The data from that semi-controlled experiment is only compatible with long distance transmission on air currents. Or look at how SARS-1 was able to spread between buildings, and apartments within the buildings. They were able to show it was spreading through ducts within the buildings and then on wind currents between buildings.
Or if you want a more direct approach, look at the old graphs of case numbers for a country you aren't familiar with and try to work out when mask mandates or lockdowns were implemented or relaxed. I've tried, it can't be done. If these policies worked you'd see clear impact because clear impact is the definition of worked. No impact can be seen, as you'd expect from gas-cloud type spread.
> Most countries implemented policies they called "lockdowns" so whatever personal definition you're using isn't very helpful.
That doesn't make much sense. Just because some country called their measures "lockdown" doesn't make the situation comparable to another country with different measures who called theirs "lockdown" as well. I suggest doing a duck-test ("if it walks like a duck, ...").
> Where I live I was forbidden from leaving my apartment for a couple of weeks when my wife got COVID, for any reason except purchasing groceries. So that was definitely a China-style lockdown.
That doesn't require a lockdown. Technically even the status of your wife and yours was different at the time. Your wife was in medical isolation and you were quarantined (at least it sounds like you were not testing positive at the time which makes all the difference here).
Just started playing Talos Principle 2 and cross species infections is really on my mind.
For those who enjoyed Portal, it is a nice first person puzzler. Completely different mechanics. I do not think it required much (any?) high precision/twitch actions. Not finished, but I think I am preferring original Talos Principle vs Two, because there were not so many annoying NPCs in the first.
> The illness is mild and the worker is expected to recover
How do cases like this ever get diagnosed? IME the standard of care for mild respiratory illness in the US tends to be basic symptom management, or maybe a standard diagnostic panel to determine whether to prescribe antibiotics. How does someone with mild symptoms get tested for a rare virus in the first place?
> CDC is working with state health departments to continue to monitor workers who may have been in contact with infected or potentially infected birds/animals and test those people who develop symptoms. [1]
- Antibiotic resistance (The sheer stupidity of using the same antibiotics we depend on to stay alive just to make animals grow faster and be more profitable.)
84 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] threadIn all seriousness, even if we get into a pandemic again, unless we see mortality rates in the double digits, I doubt the world would go into prolonged lockdowns again.
No, "we" didn't. The CDC and, by extension, much of the coverage was insisting on surface sanitization even though there was plenty of evidence for airborne transmission already. I distinctly remembered going with the CDC recommendations until a friend pointed me out to a bunch of published articles with a preponderance of evidence for airborne transmission. It took many months for the CDC and other agencies to change their stance, by which time the whole 'surface cleaning' was already entrenched in everyone's minds.
I was unlucky and lost 3 grandparents between my wife and I. Matters more to me probably.
The thing is lack of density was sufficient to trigger this lack of care. Kind of interesting.
[0]https://www.cdc.gov/flu/season/faq-flu-season-2020-2021.htm
Rather, there seems to be some mechanism by which some viruses push out others. This can also be seen in how new SARS-CoV-2 variants would often rapidly exterminate the prior variant within weeks, instead of co-existing.
Because nearly everyone has had it already. The mitigations were removed because Omicron so visibly ignored them that everyone just gave up at that point.
If we're now largely immune to COVID why isn't influenza now pushing it out?
https://www.alberta.ca/stats/dashboard/respiratory-virus-das...
> it's still killing at nearly 5x the rate as the flu
The way they define COVID deaths make such numbers incomparable.
To be clear in this, I took COVID very seriously, I still carry a mask in my pocket and use it when I travel, but I'm trying to be realistic about the situation.
It's not. The CDC only caught this case because they are proactively testing workers at farms that have confirmed animal outbreaks.
> "The patient reported eye redness (consistent with conjunctivitis), as their only symptom, and is recovering." [1]
Diseases like ebola or hendra virus that actually have 50%+ mortality rates don't have mild forms like this.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2024/p0401-avian-flu.html
Give it a two week incubation time (not that far-fetched) and it will spread far and wide.
Chances are >99% of cases are so mild they were never tested. It's pretty surprising this one was detected at all. It's only the second confirmed case in the US despite tons of confirmed animal cases in poultry and migratory birds.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/avianflu/chart-epi-curve-ah5n1.html
> It's only the second confirmed case
We know it doesn't transmit very well in humans. Luckily people have been working on that:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/observations/controv...
> The patient reported eye redness (consistent with conjunctivitis), as their only symptom, and is recovering.
This is not a disease with a double digit mortality rate, no matter how many times people try to do math with a three digit sample size of poor people in developing countries.
The CDC only caught this case because it's literally testing anyone with symptoms at the cattle farm.
You make it sound as though they're working on making it transmit well in humans. Oh wait, they are! What's wrong with them?!
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8852235/
This is what it looked like in Dec 2020: https://www.statista.com/chart/23746/icu-bed-occupancy-rates...
Unelected people like public health experts should always be important parts of any discussions about issues that affect the health and safety of all members of a community. They can work with elected representatives to help define policy and guidelines that protect our property and keep us all employed and healthy.
Ignoring the input of unelected experts is dangerous to society and leads to exactly the conditions we have now where people chose sides based on partisan identity politics instead of solid pandemic management principles.
We can't elect everyone who should have a voice in defining policy but we can consult them and take advantage of their expertise and skills when bad things happen.
You don't gripe when other disasters like prairie fires require evacuation notices do you? Those people are also unelected. They are also recognized experts at their trades who spend their careers trying to keep us all safe.
When it's obvious that your answers will be an order of magnitude longer than any question or input they provide, it is too likely that they are unpersuadable, and are wasting your time on purpose.
Did Chuck Norris and the Texas Rangers lock you up? Where did the bad man touch you?
The closest thing to lock down this country has seen in recent memory was Minneapolis police marching through the streets firing paint rounds at people standing on their own front porch during protests about George Floyd.
Nobody has ever told you that you couldn't leave the house. You could leave the house any time you wanted. What you couldn't do is partake in activities that would gather crowds.
Which was 100% unenforced in nearly every state. Most places with "lockdowns" had several verified superspreader events
How many people ended up fined or in jail during "lockdowns"?
I was in a blue state that issued a strongly worded stay at home recommendation, but no "lockdown" with legal force. It worked great, owing in part to still having some sense of social cohesion. When your society can't get through novel disruptions with leadership informally keeping most everybody on the same page, that's what you should be worried about.
[0] https://www.dallasnews.com/arts-entertainment/state-fair/202...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox
https://www.cdc.gov/respiratory-viruses/data-research/dashbo...
> unless we see mortality rates in the double digits, I doubt the world would go into prolonged lockdowns again.
You should have learned from the last pandemic that going in a lockdown is the prevention measure to avoid mortality rate in the double digits…
Huh? Mortality rate is the mortality rate, its independent of a lockdown; unless more vulnerable people are "locking down" at rates different than less vulnerable ones, but at that point we're not talking about a "lockdown".
The purpose of the COVID lockdown wasn't to suppress the mortality rate; it was to suppress the total infected/mortality.
When your medical needs exceed resources mortality rate converges toward untreated mortality rate.
Try this on for size what is the untreated mortality rate of a single gunshot wound to the chest. Its close to 100% but the overwhelming majority survive with prompt treatment. You wouldn't say that the mortality rate was what it is.
Soon new patients would live or die with no medical care and death rate for the diseases and anyone who is at risk of dying wo care would skyrocket.
50M people would ultimately die in the US alone everything would collapse and people would lock down of their own accord.
Most of the world didn't go into any lockdowns. Sure, most gatherings were banned and places like restaurants couldn't have people dining in. But most people could go outside and do almost anything they wanted, provided they didn't gather in crowds.
The lockdowns like China enforced where people had their doors barred and could only leave once a week for groceries (or had groceries delivered by the government) were an outlier.
If we ever see mortality rates in the double digits, expect real lockdowns.
> If we ever see mortality rates in the double digits, expect real lockdowns.
We'll see them because our ruling classes are psychologically and politically unable to push back on corrupt academics, not because they work. Lockdowns had no effect on COVID because respiratory viruses are able to spread long distances on air currents, but lockdown policy assumes they can't.
So, you were told to self isolate because you were in a household with a sick individual. Wouldn't that be the prudent thing to do anyway?
Also, what does 'forbidden' means? What would have happened if you went out anyway?
> Lockdowns had no effect on COVID because respiratory viruses are able to spread long distances on air currents
Citation needed. Also, the viral load at 'long distances' is unlikely to be problematic.
That'd very much depend on what the reason to leave the house was, wouldn't it? I never got sick anyway so must have been immune to that variant.
> Also, what does 'forbidden' means? What would have happened if you went out anyway?
I think there were fines. I forget exactly, it was a few years ago now. I'm not sure how it was policed.
> Citation needed. Also, the viral load at 'long distances' is unlikely to be problematic.
Go look at any regression analysis of lockdown/masking severity vs outcomes, there are plenty out there. Or study what happened on the Diamond Princess way back in Feb/March 2020. The data from that semi-controlled experiment is only compatible with long distance transmission on air currents. Or look at how SARS-1 was able to spread between buildings, and apartments within the buildings. They were able to show it was spreading through ducts within the buildings and then on wind currents between buildings.
Or if you want a more direct approach, look at the old graphs of case numbers for a country you aren't familiar with and try to work out when mask mandates or lockdowns were implemented or relaxed. I've tried, it can't be done. If these policies worked you'd see clear impact because clear impact is the definition of worked. No impact can be seen, as you'd expect from gas-cloud type spread.
That doesn't make much sense. Just because some country called their measures "lockdown" doesn't make the situation comparable to another country with different measures who called theirs "lockdown" as well. I suggest doing a duck-test ("if it walks like a duck, ...").
> Where I live I was forbidden from leaving my apartment for a couple of weeks when my wife got COVID, for any reason except purchasing groceries. So that was definitely a China-style lockdown.
That doesn't require a lockdown. Technically even the status of your wife and yours was different at the time. Your wife was in medical isolation and you were quarantined (at least it sounds like you were not testing positive at the time which makes all the difference here).
We are still “in” one, in all seriousness.
For those who enjoyed Portal, it is a nice first person puzzler. Completely different mechanics. I do not think it required much (any?) high precision/twitch actions. Not finished, but I think I am preferring original Talos Principle vs Two, because there were not so many annoying NPCs in the first.
How do cases like this ever get diagnosed? IME the standard of care for mild respiratory illness in the US tends to be basic symptom management, or maybe a standard diagnostic panel to determine whether to prescribe antibiotics. How does someone with mild symptoms get tested for a rare virus in the first place?
> CDC is working with state health departments to continue to monitor workers who may have been in contact with infected or potentially infected birds/animals and test those people who develop symptoms. [1]
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2024/p0401-avian-flu.html
- Pandemics
- Antibiotic resistance (The sheer stupidity of using the same antibiotics we depend on to stay alive just to make animals grow faster and be more profitable.)
- Climate change (1/6th of all emissions)
- Soil, air, water pollution
- Deforestation
- Higher food prices
- Less net food available