Covid Took My Grandfather. But It Wasn’t What Killed Him

But we've been living with the reality that the flu does this every year, and yet now it's personal?

Vice signaling.

But you're absolutely right. I'm baffled by how many people are eager to announce how much they hate people who never did them any harm, how people deserve misery and suffering, why it's fine to let thousands die.

In the past at least there was the pretense of morality, even if it was frequently hypocritical. Now it looks like all the hypocrisy is gone and all that's left is open hatred. I really hope this shocks enough people to turn it around.

Anyone who thinks capitalism is a cause of our societal woes should really look into materialism, its philosophical foundation.

If you share her political views, you probably share her bogeymen too.

I think you missed my point about him already being in the high risk group. She implies throughout the article that someone in his small Appalachian town who didn’t wear a mask is responsible for killing him yet he was already unhealthy and in and out of the hospital. It’s a large stretch. By her logic, she should be blaming the hospital but that wouldn’t make sense either.

"Maybe if our COVID response was like Germany" This is classic strawman. What I said is true, that this one anecdote doesn't tell anything. I am not saying Trump's response is good, just that this story doesn't prove anything just a zeal against trump.

> Literally nothing suggests that, no other country in the world has any statistics to back this up

New Zealand. Taiwan. Vietnam. South Korea.

That's pretty much a given that you'll get downvoted. I mean yeah, masks seem like a good idea regardless, and they aren't too onerous. People should wear them. They should wash their hands, too, and take vitamin D, and try to lose some weight. Same with outdoor dining or reduced occupancy. But everything else is COVID theater pretty much, and our politicians are known to make idiotic decisions under the circumstances. That's why some of our states (such as NY and NJ) have some of the highest death rates in the world - the politicians there had the bright idea to send COVID patients straight to the nursing homes, even though it was clear from the very beginning of the spread in the US that this was an extremely bad idea. The outbreak _started_ in the nursing homes in the Washington state. These same people are still there, and they're still in charge of whatever passes for "COVID response" in their states. The results are quite predictable.

As another person has already pointed out, many countries have done an incredible job at controlling and containing Covid.

Unsurprisingly, most of them are countries who have been through a version of this before (2002-2004 SARS Outbreaks).

It turns out that having a strong, coordinated response and treating the issue seriously go a long way.

As the sibling comment says, several countries have managed to contain it.

The problem is where measures are "leaky". Like computer security, you can't tell when it's working, and it potentially only takes one leak for an outbreak to happen. It seems (and well-collated evidence is lacking for this) that it's certain workplaces where the transmission is happening, along with people who don't believe it's real continuing to meet indoors in close spaces. For example, meat processing plants: https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-meat-ex...

> [...] it's already clear to me that in the US wearing face masks is more like a religion or a political statement [...]

What about wearing masks in countries where there are mask mandates with different levels of strictness and requirements? At which point does the personal decision to wear a mask, when not strictly mandatory, become a "religion or a political statement"? Are mask mandates elsewhere religious or ideological decisions, rather than debatably effective public health decisions?

Leaving aside the question of whether masks are or are not effective (and if so, to what extent, under what conditions, etc.), I think that it's disingenuous to dismiss the decision of people who wear them as an irrational or ideologically motivated choice. Many of them honestly believe (rightly or wrongly) that scientific evidence supports that using a mask is an effective way of either preventing their own infection or community spread. It is in the nature of human society that we don't meticulously research every rational decision we make, but rather rely on general approximations and societal consensus.

I think that talking about wearing face masks as a religious or political statement is in itself a political statement.

Here’s a simple rule for you regarding American politics: can X be blamed on the other side? If yes, then it will be.

Simple as that. Don’t expect any rationality to come from such discussions.

You start out cricising the "US perspective" and go on to give an entirely US-centric perspective on it: We can't do anything, nothing has been proven, none of you are thinking clearly.

You have a dismissive attitude towards all measures taken by asian countries with very good (at least compared to willfully negligent countries) COVID-19 responses. This entire post obliquely critiques other people for not thinking clearly (or even god forbid "rationally"), but it is ironically very clear you have an extremely tenuous grasp of the reality of the situation yourself.

Uh no, Italy failed to enforce social distancing in the two most critical transmission choke points: public transport and health care.

In the months after the first wave nobody bothered leasing new vehicles for an already over-capacity public transport network. Excuses abounded, someone even claimed the form for the vehicle registration certificate didn't have separate fields for owner and leaser... I'm not joking. The real reason? Debt. There's no money left and 20 years of defunding and spending-diversion left behind a crippled and stunted administrative apparatus. So, people and students traveled face to face in early September when schools and workplaces reopened.

Hospitals are under-staffed after years of austerity measures trying to tame monstrous debts. General Practitioner networks have also been shut-down to favor private clinics and centralized hospitals. Infected people sat in ER waiting rooms for hours, and the few GPs that still operate were given 5 protective masks per month to work with.

"COVID Hotels" - normal hotels rented out wholesale by government to keep low-grades and convalescents were never made operational and people were left home to infect family members or in hospital to infect other patients while overwhelming the already thin infrastructure. Some criminally-stupid civil servant even ordered them back to nursing homes, killing more of the aging population that fortuitously survived the first wave.

This has nothing to do with the effectiveness of masks, but all to the culturally ingrained disorganization of Italians.

Eg: In Germany the government is already planning the logistics for mass vaccination, while in Italy the Special Commissioner for Health of Calabria (try to imagine this like a bankruptcy executor, but for a regional government) resigned after an interview where to the question "where is the COVID plan for Calabria" he answered "why are you asking me? Do I have to make this plan? - shuffles papers - Oh yes, according to this document I'm responsible. Hmm." They're trying to find a replacement, but two other resigned for various reasons... it might have to do with the last political murder of Calabria some years ago: the hospital supply chain is in the hands of the 'Ndrangheta (the local organized crime syndicate)

People are dying at a much lower rate, we have the highest testing throughput in the world (and still growing), and if mainstream press is to be believed, we're a month or two from deploying a "95% effective" vaccine. We'll be fine.