I don't see the same parallels. After 9/11 the US was extraordinarily united and committed to vengeance. Thousands joined the military. After COVID we're more divided than ever and people are not even willing put a piece of cloth on their faces. Widespread denial and resistance to anything inconveniencing them. Whereas after 9/11 people were willing to put up with 3+ hour wait times and tons of other restrictions.
Should I go on?
Last week: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8395971/
Conclusions: There was no reduction in per-population daily mortality, hospital bed, ICU bed, or ventilator occupancy of COVID-19-positive patients attributable to the implementation of a mask-wearing mandate.
Also last week: large Bangladesh study showing cloth does nothing, surgical 11% reduction but only among people over 50 and it still was neither statistically significant nor could be attributable to masks vs other factors.
Half the country doesn't care, they're forever stuck in their COVID jingoism, proud to tell people how righteous they are. So, enjoy those Freedom Fries, I mean masks!! I mean look at your response, like, "Oh no don't you dare say that 'there is no god' around here!!" It's just a faith-based issue at this point.
These sorts of analyses are extremely hard to control all confounds for.
Here's what a Harvard epidemiologist has to say about the Bangladesh study:
"The Bangladesh mask study does not show a statistically significant difference in the efficacy of cloth masks vs surgical masks. Based on the confidence intervals, both could be around 0% or both could be around 20%."
https://twitter.com/MartinKulldorff/status/14355739027894640...
Other performative examples would include permanent enclosed "outside" buildings complete with heating, AC and no airflow.
masks: petty symbolism
ivermectin: horse dewormer
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/09/surgical-mask...
What is it that you think you read in this article? What you have said is not supported in any way by the link you have provided.
This means you can’t draw conclusions from this finding apart from that any difference there actually is is really small.
The reduction in infection rates wasn't large enough to qualify as statistically significant. That just means that the reduction that they saw from cloth masks could have been due to chance.
Edit: Since the size of the cloth mask group is half the size of the surgical masl group, the effect in the cloth mask group would have to be comperatively larger than the effect on the surgical masl group to qualify as significant.
Somewhow you take that as evidence cloth masks don't work?
If anything, this argues that we weren't strict enough on masks. Require not just wearing one, but a good one.
Are you sure that's the parallel you want to be drawing here? Might you have a different opinion about this event in, oh, say, a decade or two? By then of course the damage will have been done.
I thought we were reflecting on 9/11. COVID is such a bad analogy. FUCK, it's such a bad analogy.
The govt reaction is similar. The populace has learned new lessons since 9/11.
So I support the expiration date idea. I just wish there was a way to implement it such that it actually had the desired effect.
I'd go even further than this, I'd argue that all laws that ordinary people are likely to come into contact with in the course of their everyday life should have an expiry date, forcing a debate every x decades as to whether or not they're still fit for purpose. The date could be variable based on the nature of the legislation, but this mechanism would be fantastic for forcibly clearing out a lot of society's "technical debt".
This mechanism in my opinion would have stopped the lingering damage from moronic wars on abstract concepts. There would have to be some exceptions of course, things like fundamental liberties and human rights for example can't ever be negotiable in a civilised society. There's also an awful lot of very sector-specific legislation which probably doesn't need to be directly re-written every couple of decades too, although society at large won't be coming into contact with it much either so it's not really in the scope of the goal which is to stop yesterday's issues leaving nasty remants for today's societies.
There's no "us versus them" in this scenario, just "us". This approach immediately takes the poison out of the barb and makes politics far less adversarial. Politicians would be forced to rely on the strength of their arguments and the quality of their local representation rather than the colour of their rosette to get re-elected, and it also makes corruption more difficult as it's far easier to bribe a few members of the party top brass than it is to bribe 50% + 1 of a parliament. Of course informal alliances will form between politicians but that's fine as long as it happens transparently and within the public institutions which are accountable to all, this is very different to a party which is only accountable to its members.
No, we couldn't. I mean, we could eliminate formal parties, but making factionalism less transparent doesn't eliminate it, it just makes it harder for voters to know what they are getting.
There's plenty of research about both better proportionality of results and more supported parties improves most measures of health of democracies, including popular satisfaction with government.
> There's no "us versus them" in this scenario, just "us".
Just because the labels associated with “us” and “them” don't appear on formal organizations or besides names on the ballot doesn't mean they don't exist. (You can see that within parties now—the harsh divisions between the progressive and neoliberal wings of the Democratic Party don't need separate formal parties, or even entities of any kind, to exist; further, the well-defined factions that became the original US parties existed and were widely recognized before formal parties did. Parties are a product, not the source, of factionalism.)
I'll be honest, I've followed politics in my country since the age I could vote and I'm struggling to think of anything positive other than perhaps improved decisiveness in a crisis that parties bring to the table that couldn't be achieved more transparently and efficiently in a non-partisan system. What they do bring to the table is an enormous attack surface for egotism, corruption, and intrigue.
In the US, political parties are in the public sphere and extensively regulated, unlike private entities that are not political parties but engage in political campaigning independent of formal parties and individual candidates.
Abolishing formal parties in the US would increase, not limit, the role of unaccountable entities driving political factionalism.
Yes, the intense factions that sprang up without parties immediately after adoption of the Constitution formed the nucleus around which the first parties formed. Parties are a symptom, not the source.
> the point I'm getting at that in practice these parties often behave as vehicles for private (and often fairly elitist) interests
Yes, elite factions do that whether they are formalized as parties or not.
Banning formalized parties has no effect on that.
> I think their useful functions should be carried out more directly by democratic parliaments
There is no possible configuration of laws which would produce that effect.
I don't think having very strict rules about the relationships between corporations/non-profits and politicians is necessarily a bad thing in itself, in fact many would see it as a good thing that further protects democracy from manipulation by private interests. However, I do see the other side of the argument in that it would probably open its own can of worms especially in areas like freedom of speech. The whole idea does start to unravel if your conception of free speech applies to entities like corporations as well as individuals. Unsurprisingly I lean towards the idea that it doesn't, but I can also see some very valid arguments for the opposite as well.
It could well be a moot point however, I'm not sure how well these "not-parties" would do once society had got used to a few elections without parties and experienced the relief that would come from making politics much less adversarial (I suspect arguments between friends and family would be less common without the tribal labels backed by billions of dollars of "enrangement is engagement" for example). We can probably get some idea by looking at extant "not-party" political entities like charities, NGOs, and lobby groups to see how effectively they influence elections today.
This makes it practically impossible in the US; so long as not coordinated with a formal party or candidate committee, it has been ruled a violation of the First Amendment to even limit expenditures on promotion of a candidate by private entities; to outright ban such actions would be a more flagrant violation.
> I don't think having very strict rules about the relationships between corporations/non-profits and politicians is necessarily a bad thing in itself, in fact many would see it as a good thing that further protects democracy from manipulation by private interests
You cannot “protect democracy from manipulation by private interests”; the concept is incoherent. Democracy is the aggregate of private interests determining the public interest.
> It could well be a moot point however, I'm not sure how well these "not-parties" would do once society had got used to a few elections without parties and experienced the relief that would come from making politics much less adversarial
We’ve had the absence of formal parties, politics was violently adversarial and formal parties emerged from the adversarial factions.
You cannot alter human nature by abolishing formal parties, which are, again, a symptom not the cause of political factionalism.
In each re-authorization things were removed. And finally it expired completely.
Some politicians won't touch it.
I think you're fooling yourself if you believe there's some hard target.
edit: My first sentence was a bit garbage. The target is to save lives from covid and avoid its spread. Hospital utilization and mortality rate from the disease are good KPIs for that. Almost all responsible countries are at least trying to follow those KPIs.
Ok your argument just fell apart. Do we not always have the "need" to save lives? The "threat" is never going away.
That's ambigous and completely subjective. What is is not is an objective measure of any sort. Which means it continues indefinitely until our leaders decide otherwise.
The fact you cannot give me a set time when it will end, or what status we need to meet for all of the safety measures to end is pretty telling.
>I don't know how you don't see that.
Because you have no data or facts to back up your claim. You can't even explain it yourself.
What would you have us do? Dispense with masks and vaccines and just let the chips fall where they may? That's madness. COVID is a threat. It's best to work to counteract that threat using the best tools we have available, which are pretty simple: masks, distance, and vaccination.
>The fact you cannot give me a set time when it will end, or what status we need to meet for all of the safety measures to end is pretty telling.
It kinda feels like you're demanding to talk to the manager of coronavirus here.
>What would you have us do? Dispense with masks and vaccines and just let the chips fall where they may? That's madness. COVID is a threat.
>You are being Fox-news-level combative about your hobbyhorse here.
While you're at it stop with the strawman and ad-hominem attacks. What it looks like is you have nothing to support the idea that this will stop once we meet a certain "threshold".
All I'm asking is what the threshold is. Are you really sure I'm the combative one in this situation?
Very much so. That much was clear from your first comment, when you equated the knee-jerk acceptance of insane and ineffective security theater post-9/11 with the entirely rational measures we've taken in the face of a novel pandemic for which there is no existent immunity.
Your tirades here demanding someone tell you the threshold at which point we can dispense with masks and distancing are ridiculously off base. As long as ICUs are packed, and as long as regular care is rationed because of antivaxxers flooding hospitals with COVID or Ivermectin ODs, we'll have to keep doing what we're doing to keep ourselves and those we love safe(r).
Do you enjoy repeating yourself and making no headway?
Which is still a good outcome, because you don't want to overwhelm the healthcare system to the point that it can't handle anything that isn't COVID.
That was the whole point of the early-pandemic "flatten the curve" campaigns.
Don't we all die eventually? What's your point then?
Are you saying that if people get COVID they'll all die of COVID related complications *eventually•? Because that's not necessarily true. If someone is the 101st person who needs a ventilator and all 100 ventilators are being used by COVID patients, then that person likely dies and they could have been recovered.
Sometimes I picture our anti-covid measures as piling sandbags in front of a tsunami. Might hold back the water for a little while, but won't do much in the long term.
It seems that since COVID is highly contagious and not going away, we are all going to get exposed to it and have to fight it off with our immune systems eventually.
Being vaccinated to train your immune system before your first bout with COVID seems to greatly improve your outcome. In my state currently COVID is 15x more deadly for an unvaccinated person than a vaccinated one. So it made sense to try to limit the spread as much as possible while we were waiting for vaccines to become available, because the difference between "everybody gets it eventually, with no vaccine" and "everybody gets it eventually, but most were vaccinated first" is a significant number of deaths avoided.
Now that the vaccines are widely available and pretty much everybody who wants to be vaccinated, is, the only reason I see to continue with restrictions is to keep the rate of infection slow enough that the hospitals aren't overwhelmed and can continue to serve everybody who needs medical care (COVID or not). That threshold is being hit in some states in the US, so I can understand why some restrictions are still needed. Eventually I would think we will accumulate enough immunity from vaccination + natural infection that we don't have a hospital capacity problem anymore.
Also, for death rates being higher in the elderly... isn't that going to be true for most diseases? Pointing this out seems tautological to me.
And what does "very few" actually mean here?
Is death the only negative outcome of COVID-19?
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...
To put this into perspective... 36,000 people died of car accidents in 2019.
In the under 50 group around 20,000 people died of Covid.
The under 50 age group makes up around 80% of the population.
Interpret that however you want.
I think you intended that as a rhetorical question but I want to point out that in the UK the NHS has calculated the "worth" of a single quality-adjusted life year. If a treatment gives less quality-adjusted extra life years than it costs, it isn't administered. In 2014 it was £20-60k [1]. This shows the NHS definitely does consider older peoples' lives worth less than younger peoples', on average.
Also, based on my casual skimming of this article: https://www.nice.org.uk/process/pmg6/chapter/assessing-cost-..., this particular model evaluates other factors beyond age (such as health history) and is in the context of providing specific treatments for specific conditions rather than broader actions for disease prevention.
But yes, my question was rhetorical, in the sense that I've read far too much casual acceptance of the deaths of older people on HN, as if this ~15% of the population [in the US at least] are freely expendable.
I don't think most people on HN implying such things mean to say old people are freely expendable, but rather that they should not be saved at _all cost_. Our non-pharmaceutical interventions have a cost associated with them too, so we have to strike a balance that's acceptable. The debate to me is ultimately over where the line is. It's not helped that the true costs of lockdowns etc. (or indeed the true cost of not locking down) are not actually all that clear. One consequence is that debates over policies such as these have happened without reliable figures on both sides, and have therefore descended into unconstructive emotional arguments.
There are real arguments and a real, valid debate here on the limits of a government’s influence upon its citizens, while also fulfilling its tacit obligation to maintain a reasonably stable society in a chaotic world, and in a form where its citizens are free to assemble other organizations with their own forms of governance and capacity to encourage actions among their own members. But the debate seems to be projected onto a shape increasing in magnitude, but decreasing in dimension, flatting nuanced arguments into more extreme, tangential versions of themselves. People end up speaking different languages, where all words contain other tacit assumptions which are unstated but differ greatly depending on the speaker/listener.
It’s hard to find a good discussion nowadays.
There are elderly people dying in other countries and perfectly healthy Americans are lining up for the vaccines and acting righteous about saving granny when the reality is they're doing it in their own self-interest.
No one cares one bit about anyone, except for the people that are close to them.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to gas light you for their own self interest.
Again, you say “covid deaths”. That is not precise.
EDIT: except when there isn't enough testing, which underreported deaths with covid towards the beginning of the pandemic.
Does precision matter in this case?
But of course, never let a good chance go to waste. We'll see an increase in restrictions because of Covid, they're not going away anytime soon.
who is "they" in your opinion, because plenty of people and organizations do cite excess death stats
are you really so far removed that you need us to provide a citation on excess deaths, this far into things? this reminds me of conversations in May 2020, because this entire conversation was procedurally generated in May 2020. Have you considered the possibility that all your apps marginalized you in this niche where no other information is shown to you everyday for the past year?
One of the earliest fears about the spread of COVID was exactly this issue: too many cases would overwhelm the healthcare system and cause deaths to rise even more. Even if we couldn't stop the spread of the virus, one of the goals was to slow it down to keep the number of simultaneous cases to a minimum.
over the past 15 months, many organizations (including the CDC) municipalities (including within the US in democrat and republican areas) and countries have revisited old deaths and current death recording practices, in direct response to this observation and criticism
most times they end up finding more COVID deaths, different ones in greater quantity than the incorrectly recorded ones that shouldn't have been counted. sometimes there is a slight temporary downward death count adjustment. and more importantly, the aggregate stats everywhere already account for this. when news reports X-hundred thousand death milestone, its already factored in the corrected numbers.
what seems most important to me is that all ailments, especially respiratory ones, have the same recording and accounting discrepancies. if the aforementioned "those circles" were also the "just the flu" circles, then the gravity of COVID relative to the flu (or anything else) would still be seen from the original flawed recording standard, because all prior year’s flu numbers are polluted the same way. makes it hard to view those circles as a better alternative to listen to, when the flaws of the established authorities still point to an aggregate good enough signal.
The mainstream presses never had a reckoning for their role in issuing false rationales for the war in Iraq. Those who believed the propaganda shouted down dissent as "conspiracy nuttery" and anti-Americanism. After the fact, many of those I know simply switched their positions. They denied they ever unfairly dismissed concerns or experts (Hans Blix) which ran counter to prevailing propaganda.
Which brings us back to the present rationales for expanded state power, where dissent is dismissed as conspiracy nuttery and anti-science. Once again, the incentives are ignored.
9/11 victims, granny-killer, same side of a different coin.
Hysteria, paranoia, morality, a plan to keep people "safe" - beware of this dangerous pattern.
Above all if everyone is acting in good faith, there should be no taboos about inquiring about ulterior motives. Instead of ridiculing or censoring dissent, coherent and consistent explanations should be provided. If the rationales for hysteria and emergency measures cannot withstand an open debate, that should be illustrative.
https://www.corbettreport.com/911-a-conspiracy-theory/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_QFYn_G1lc
Wikipedia lends itself to exactly the kind of cringe worthy coverage I described above. Starting with the reliable source policy which has only become more partisan in recent years. All of those reliable sources were involved in uncritically promoting WMD propaganda.
Yes, there are nutters with nutty concerns. There are also nutters who wear shoes, but we don't conclude that we must go barefoot. The generalization is misleading at best and disinfo at worst.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/08/14/most-covid-19-t...
A dialectic method of historical and philosophical progress that postulates (1) a beginning proposition called a thesis, (2) a negation of that thesis called the antithesis, and (3) a synthesis whereby the two conflicting ideas are reconciled to form a new proposition.
Oh, and you confused 'ironic' and 'coincidence' but I guess that hardly matters.
Edit: Oh, the usual. Editing out all the antisemitic stuff once somebody calls you out for it. At least don't run away once someone questions your shitty beliefs.
I deleted it because it was imprecise--
The dialectic switches between communism and capitalism depending on A/B testing of political revolution messaging. They're both.
Are they?
Complaints about post-9/11 "security" have mostly been about the ineffectiveness of steps that are clearly security theater, or the boondoggles of things like the x-ray scanners. Input from security experts was widely ignored in favor of, well, dumb ideas.
The COVID remediation steps we've been asked to take -- masks in public, social distancing, taking the vaccine once it's available -- are exactly what epidemiologists would've said were the right steps if asked about a hypothetical pandemic 25, 50, 75, or 100 years ago. They're directly in line with expert advice, and provably effective.