We Must Start Planning for a Permanent Pandemic
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Color me shocked.
I guess 'terrorism' has lost its luster in the eyes of the military industrial complex. Now we have to pivot to 'domestic terrorism' and 'public health'. Like an overactive immune system, our war machine has no more enemies to fight and now must turn on itself.
that's arbitrarily specific. any state wants power, and lockdowns are exhibitions (and also legitimizations) of power. the 'democracy' or 'modern' specifics add no additional information.
what's more interesting about the 'modern democracy' bit is that power has found a way to subvert masses of people collectively in our modern democracies, and that's something, as citizens, we should be wary of and thinking deeply about.
Covid has fully become.political theater and the CDC has been publishing articles about not quarantining or locking down since mid 2020. Stop listening to politicians and start listening to epidemiologists and health professionals please.
[Omitting rant on how to find truth on the internet these days, and how sad it is that has been a huge breakdown in trust in our leaders.]
Similarly, is there a good place to, say, find Covid data science? I for one would like to know where the disease is actually being transmitted. It would be nice to be able to determine which interventions a state should reasonably make to fight the virus, and which look good but do nothing.
skepticism should always follow money or power--or frenzy, their more easily recognizable proxy, as in this case. there's no magic answer to your question, and finding answers in the real world is not easily outsourced to a textbook or to 'expertise'. we each must put in the work to tease out the good stuff for ourselves, as best we can (what skepticism impels).
as a broader example, democracy is premised on the idea that each citizen will do at least some work discerning fact from fiction, and by the collective wonder of crowd wisdom, we'll find an optimum. democracy, or any collective action really, doesn't presume each person will individually be right, as that's obviously an impossible expectation.
Woke: permanent climate-crisis / energy-shortage lockdown.
This makes it sound like most pandemic diseases reach a point where they essentially go extinct, but my understanding is that's not really accurate. They typically just reach an equilibrium where the negative effects fade into the background noise of general illness. This is what happened with the four human-endemic Coronaviruses which likely caused major pandemics in their time, but now fade into the background of cold season.
When I think about it, such a claim doesn't even make sense, because for it to be true, all transmission would have to be stopped, instantaneously and completely. But that would be impossible, as there would still be transmission within bubbles, and transmission through all the essential work that continued where social distancing was not an option. That would reset the clock, and since the infectious period was thought to be about 15 days, such a statement could not possibly have been true.
Does anyone have any examples of public health advisories claiming that the lockdown would only last 15 days?
Dr Fauci even admitted to selectively lying about a number of things (masks, herd immunity) because he felt the public couldn’t handle the truth.
Do you have any examples of public health advisories claiming 'flattening the curve' would be short, and not based on the hospitalization numbers?
Why? Because we already have 4 Corona-Viruses endemic causing normal colds. Where did they come from? Probably from animals. When? We don't know exactly, but there is a good chance that the 1889-90 pandemic was caused by a corona virus [1]. Pandemics turn into endemics. Why should it be different this time?
*As reported by popular media.
(And lots of it is BS)
Maybe it would be better if we don't allow off topic threads, just to discourage politics bots from invading
As horrific as it sounds, I'd at least consider asking, "what happens if we weight the trade-offs, and decide to mostly resume life as it was, knowing that our health care systems will be overwhelmed and a decent chunk of the population (10%?) would die." Aside from being scarred, would a place like that move on without endless restrictions, or, if a jurisdiction did that, they're still at risks from new variants around the world, aren't they?
On a different topic, I tend to be against forcing people to vaccinate. But I do wonder, how did things go down with seatbelt laws, in which people are forced to wear them? (Although I think there's only 90% compliance, even now). At what point should a state intervene to save lives? Conversely, at what point can a state decide to not intervene, even when it will cost lives?
I don't think we know that, and frankly I'm reminded of all the counterfactual ranting we get in economic arguments from establishment figures and orthodox, uncritical thinkers (we didn't spend enough, it would have been worse).
In both the US and UK, emergency set-ups (nightingale hospitals, the ship sent to NYC, nevermind Javitts center, etc.) went largely unused. It seems these things are highly localized, and in many places never really pan out. Of course, many people over-weight the power of human agency.
So you accept in your theory that you can die because of an overwhelmed health care that cannot save you from a trivial otherwise treatment, not Covid19
That's a ridiculous claim. The hospitalization rate for Covid19 isn't even close to 10%, let alone the mortality rate.