Will people ever get over sensationalism and learn to live with it? It will continue to mutate and spread for years to come. Putting life on pause should've never been an option because of the toxic precedent it created.
You see, that's the crux of the matter: Not everyone can live with it. Literally. So far, it killed more than 5 million people globally. There is also the issue with possibly lasting brain damage (even occuring in cases that weren't severe enough for hospitalization) and life-wrecking long covid. Compassionate people have a problem ignoring all that.
You might have built the 90.000 beds you need, but where will you find the doctors?
but then it didn't happen, did it? it never fucking happened, anywhere, lockdown or no. I remember a giant emergency field hospital that got built in the middle of london, and it sat there completely fucking bone idle. my initial numbers were wrong, and so were the experts'.
I remember a terrifyingly huge bell curve for hospitalizations assuming no lockdown, with a piddling little horizontal line just above the x-axis representing bed capacity. that apocalypse never happened for sweden or the numerous other places which never locked down. I remember watching the sweden case graph intently around May, smugly predicting a self-inflicted genocide. It never came. Then there was a US state (I forget which one) that ended its lockdown and opened up back to normal. I very confidently predicted a disaster that never arrived.
eventually (much later than I should have) I woke up from the mass hallucination. turns out covid, like other coronaviruses, is strongly seasonal, it waxes and wanes for reasons we don't quite understand. the exponential curve always burns itself out well short of what the hammer-and-dance people said, no matter what we do.
do you expect us to forget all that? do you really think we can be fooled twice? do you honestly think people will sit down and take another wave of lockdowns when we're in the middle of a supply chain and inflation crisis caused by the first one?
Forcing society to grind to an halt because some “experts” just waive their hand and give up is absurd.
As your body increasingly comes in contact with it you’ll build a solid immunity. Similar to the other mRNA viruses such as RSV (dangerous to babies, but almost no one else).
The cost was millions of lives, because it was the only option- there were no vaccines or antivirals. But we have both of those now. The steady-state for COVID-19 will hopefully look something like seasonal flu, but it will take time.
Gotta say I think you’re wildly incorrect there. Influenza impacted the young and still does.
Disease and death have been a part of humanity since time began. All we can do is try to make the most out of the short time we have here on this earth. Playing this covid theater game for 2+ years is, in my opinion, an insulting to human nature. We aren't meant to do this.
Everyone behaves as if this is true every single day, regardless of how mad they get when it’s stated explicitly.
not if I'm part of the X group, for purely selfish reasons, and it's perfectly rational for anyone to not want to be in the X group, no matter what values assigned to Y and Z are.
So the crux of the problem isn't what you stated - it's that these decisions are made, and some people disagree, because either they are in the X group, or not. This is why conscription is required in a war, and this is why lockdowns are needed in a pandemic, etc.
(and really the piles won't be that high. they'll be of low-to-medium height, consisting mostly of the old and fat.)
People dying is all fine and good until it happens to you or someone you care about.
Vax passports, cloth masks, N95 masks, face shields, closing schools, cohorts, WFH, clean/dirty pen jars (my fave), plexiglass, 6 feet, travel bans...
The grim reality is that there hasn't been a single policy that's been shown to have made any difference at all. NONE. There's literally nothing to do other than stay home if sick and get vaxxed if you want, the rest is all theater and much of it has horrible tradeoffs.
BULLSHIT.
How delusional can you be? There is plenty of evidence that masks and contact reduction in various forms have a massive effect on how quickly the virus spreads. Infection numbers and their development over time varied wildly between countries, clearly correlated with such measures, long before vaccines were available.
The comment you responded to asked for an honest, intellectual response but your response was reactionary, rude, and provided no insight.
The links you supplied in your other comment do not show a clear causal effect of mandates and restrictions on case rates. Outbreaks are known to follow a pretty clear 45 day cycle; the onset of restrictions usually occur as rates are exponentially increasing and theres no evidence that such restrictions taper infections to a degree discernible from the normal cycle.
Furthermore, observational evidence from states like Florida, a state that has zero restrictions or mandates and yet currently has the lowest case rate in the United States, make the idea that such measures have a “massive effect” on spread dubious at best.
They do. It's not mathematically-clean, but that is just not what you get in a messy reality.
>Outbreaks are known to follow a pretty clear 45 day cycle; the onset of restrictions usually occur as rates are exponentially increasing and theres no evidence that such restrictions taper infections to a degree discernible from the normal cycle.
What is the mechanism behind this cycle that you claim? How do you conclude that it's not the typical beaurocratic reaction time to rising case numbers and implementation of restrictions that cause the cycle?
We know how the virus spreads. How contact reduction and masks prevent that is simple enough for a preschooler to understand. We have strong empirical evidence that it works at scale. Claiming anything else is simply reality denial.
>Furthermore, observational evidence from states like Florida, a state that has zero restrictions or mandates and yet currently has the lowest case rate in the United States, make the idea that such measures have a “massive effect” on spread dubious at best.
How so? How can development in a state that has no restrictions prove anything at all about how effective they are?
At most, the example can prove that there are other things that can reduce case numbers. I never said there weren't. Now go and tell me what they are, how they work, and how they can be transferred elsewhere. Because if the answer turns out to be "warm climate" that is not very useful.
It's totally worth looking at. But not as a diversion to avoid doing things we know to work at preventing hundreds of deaths every day.
If this is true, why is it when showing a chart of data it is almost impossible to pick when any of these measures went into effect? If these measures worked to any worthwhile degree their effect on any data should be absolutely profound. Thus far, you'd have a hard time picking florida out from oregon or california. If you need PhD level math to prove that all these NPI'S work... it means they weren't worth the extremely toxic and corrosive effectives they've had on our communities. Any fool off the street should be able to look at the raw data and see the impact, which currently you can't do.
Quite exactly the opposite is actually true: it's always very clear from such charts that the measures are very effective.
Some examples:
https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/phac-aspc/images/corporate...
https://www.nejm.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/mms/jour...
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/state-timeline
Doesn't take "PhD level math" either, just some basic understanding how the effects are delayed by incubation period, testing and reporting, and how an exponential function changes shape as the exponent changes
Some cases will incubate nearly right away, and others will take more than the 2-3 weeks that are often used as quarantine periods. Getting to the 95th or 99th percentile is not the same thing as getting to the 100th percentile.
This is one of the reasons that a covid-zero strategy is effectively unimplementable.
You’d be hard pressed to find studies that say none of this worked. Such researchers would destroy their careers and be labeled as kooks.
Here, this was recorded on March of 2020
https://twitter.com/MikeIsaac/status/1238604080571772928
Simply because your country's leadership is incompetent and you are incompetent at finding opposing views and analysis doesn't mean that said tools don't exist
Apologies for writing such a scathing comment but, guys, we are 1 year plus into this, please just... I don't even know, I'd like to say "inform yourselves" but with the web and informational intakes being so fragmented who knows what you guys even consider "good information" anymore
State has also seen no increase in covid cases once they allowed fully vaccinated travelers. So yeah lockdown works. And so would masks at some level.
Obviously we would react differently to completely different things. What is even the point of this analogy?