This is what happened in India, due to high number of cases (even if mild) the medical infrastructure completely crashed under the load and lead to far more deaths than just a flu could have caused.
Wear mask and stay indoors if possible
So it's become quite clear to me that we are not, in fact, "all in this together". The situation is that the ruling class are in it for themselves, and they are demanding everybody else lose their jobs and businesses and we comply and mask up and shut ourselves in, so that they all may carry on as usual and refuse to invest our own money in our healthcare systems.
Given what we know about this situation now, I think perhaps a better approach might be to instead not comply with these demands. Ridicule and hound and vote out anybody who insists that after two years of complying we have to continue to shut ourselves away because the healthcare systems they have not adequately invested in are still on the brink of collapse.
> continue locking themselves inside their homes
This kind of melodramatic hyperbole makes it very hard to consider your argument seriously.
The poster I replied to made some weird "argument" about owning ourselves not helping anything.
> > continue locking themselves inside their homes
Not melodrama or hyperbole. Keep shutting yourself in if you are so petrified that you think everybody else must "wear masks and stay indoors if possible" in response to new covid variants as OP said. It's a great way to reduce contact and minimize your own risk.
You don't see the contradiction in what you have written here? You're trying to belittle people taking precautions by saying that they're "petrified". You're using emotive language to try to force through a weak argument.
Obviously you can't stay indoors all of the time. People need to get food, fix their houses, and so on. People who are especially vulnerable to the virus are the ones who have to leave their homes the most for essential medical care.
And food can and is delivered. Not everything can be but almost everything for most people.
"The ruling class has proven that they don't actually care about anyone else"—yes, that's a reasonable message to take away from the past year and a half...
"...So we should stop abiding by all the good medical advice and just party" how the hell do you come to that conclusion? The reasonable conclusion to come to from your first two paragraphs is something along the lines of "So we should protest the politicians who want to deny the science, boycott the companies that are actively making things worse, and push for real societal change that prioritizes human lives and well-being over corporate profits."
You're basically saying, "The very wealthy just want us all to shut up and die, but screw them! We should all get out there and die very loudly!"
Meanwhile, half the population has taken it upon themselves to start dehumanizing the rest because of politics, and all the money in society is funneling upwards to the ruling class while small businesses collapse.
What exactly do you not understand about this? There is no "us" in this situation, just division and demands.
To believe otherwise is, as someone else further down said to another person who, like you, wants to just pretend this is all over, magical thinking.
We're not hateful anti science bigots for daring to drive automobiles despite that statistically contributing to killing many many people.
There are safe and effective vaccines available and people can make up their own minds to use effective masks and isolate themselves, shut down their businesses, and take advantage of all the online and remote services that now pretty much means they never have to leave their house or see another living person if that is what they choose, and that's fine they can make that choice. That's not the responsibility of everybody else though. This strange collectivism where apparently I am responsible for the choices of others and that I must change my lifestyle to keep you safe is where things are going way off the rails, in my opinion. You keep you safe.
In most developed countries there are strict rules about driving. You are expected and required to drive according to certain rules to keep other people safe. There are rules for driving because the right of other people to not get injured or killed are considered more important than your right to do what you feel like.
Do you think restricting your right to drive drunk on a pavement is "strange collectivism"?
Driving your automobile legally on the road is statistically responsible for many many deaths. No two ways about it. That makes your next rhetorical question a failure. You also couldn't address the flu one either.
> Do you think restricting your right to drive drunk on a pavement is "strange collectivism"?
No.
For all we know about transmission, you should stay outdoors, if possible. If this isn't possible, maximize ventilation. Limit contacts in general. Masks have a very modest impact on transmission.
Please stop propagating this BS.
If someone positive coughs in your direction but wears an FFP2 mask on and so do you, then the chance of you getting infected is much lower. That's why it's mandatory in Austria and why healthcare workers wear them, not because it's fashionable but to limit the spread of airborne disease which COVID is one.
Granted, Austria failed to contain the spread of COVID, but not due to the FFP2 enforcement but mostly due to skeptics who refused vaccination, social distancing and other measures, plus lots of pointless and half-assed measures from the government that were more of a theater and were enforced too late in an attempt to not piss people off and not hurt the economy which turned into a self fulfilling prophecy and a negative feedback loop, creating more skeptics and more infectious in the long run.
If the parent was speaking about the US, then they weren't propagating BS, as hardly anyone speaks of N95's when talking about masks. I assume it is because the government ran a massive ad campaign to get people to not wear them in the beginning.
They said the the same thing in Europe, in order to prevent opportunists from scalping them and the general population from hoarding them, so the healthcare workers would have access to them.
IMHO, intentionally deceiving the population in order to save masks for healthcare workers was a terribly short sighted move which cause more long term damage to the credibility of the governments when they pushed for compulsory mask wearing after the supply caught up. They could have been upfront about it and use every possible legal and gray-area channel to secure mask supplies before they could fall into the hands of opportunists, but instead, they chose to lie about it and treat everyone like dumb kids hoping people would fall for it.
They did the same thing again when Israel announced the protection of the Pfizer vaccine is wailing and a third dose is needed but the EU governments said that's not needed, and then backtracking on that statement a few months later and now making it mandatory.
Do you know the story of the boy who cried wolf? Yeah, this back-and-forth on the efficacy of masks and vaccines is exactly the ammunition Covid-deniers and anti-vaxxers needed and the useless governments just gave it to them on a silver platter.
This pandemic has shown our public health organizations are not very good at their jobs.
They don't abide by the first law of holes. If they stopped at that one "noble lie", maybe we'd be in a better place.
> Wear mask and stay (in your) home.
As in no contact > contact outside > contact inside
Also assuming you are not in tight crowds outside or "outside but bad ventilated" areas (e.g. tends):
longer contact outside without mask > longer contact inside with mask
Not because masks don't work but because being outside has such a strong effect (assuming you are not in a crowded area, or some area which wrt. ventilation is only pseudo-outside or you stick very close to other persons outside of a crowd, or you insist to always be direct facing a person instead of being beside that person etc.)
Or in other words beside outside being good ventilated you also have often less chances to directly cough at the face of a person, as you e.g. walk besides a person when taking a walk and activities being less crowded and as such it's easier to cough in a direction where no one is close by.
It also means that there are good reasons to ware masks if you are in a crowded area outside, it's just most "outside activities" are not in very crowded areas and hence outside infection rates are way lower. We are also less outside then inside etc.
Or at least that is how I understand it.
False.
> Masks have a very modest impact on transmission
They are an effective measure which has lead to significant decrease in infection rates.
There are of course parameters like the type of mask.
Do you have a source for that?
https://www.poverty-action.org/sites/default/files/publicati...
There are many other studies that find no or modest reduction. We need to accept lower results as an upper bound to effectiveness, especially when it comes to how the average person uses masks, versus how a health care professional.
"The results in all specifications are the same: we estimate a roughly 9% decline in symptomatic seroprevalence in the treatment group (adjusted prevalence ratio (aPR) = 0.91 [0.82, 1.00]) for a 29 percentage point increase in mask wearing over 8 weeks."
So when mask use increased 29%, symptom prevalence reduced by 9%? That doesn't seem quite the same argument as the one you're making.
> We need to accept lower results as an upper bound to effectiveness
Why?
It is a real word example. It's not an increase of 29%, it's an absolute difference of 29%. Specifically, mask wearing in the intervention villages was 42%, in the control 13%. That is, in a hypothetical village where mask wearing approaches 100%, you might expect something like a 20-30% reduction, assuming a linear correlation. Again, that's not the real world.
> Why?
If an intervention is effective, the effect needs to reproduce. If it doesn't, the larger effect likely occurred by chance. Publication bias promotes positive results and inhibits negative or null results.
You have the same problem with all these COVID drugs. Remdesivir appeared to have an effect in early trials, now it's proven useless. Molnupiravir was initially report to be 50% effective, now it's down to 30%. At the other end of the aisle, you see that Ivermectin has many small studies showing remarkable effectiveness, but the larger ones show little to no effect.
If you apply scientific standards, you must apply them across the board. You must not let wishful thinking guide your decisions.
Otherwise in general, they do work.
https://www.kxan.com/news/coronavirus/do-face-masks-work-her...
It's probably about a 10% reduction in incidence. Which I guess is quite modest in comparison to, say, vaccines.
This is not on me to solve. The government had enough time to convince everyone to vaccinate or prepare the healthcare sector for influx of cases of unvaccinated.
If omicron is actually a breakthrough variant, I'm sure all the people who are about to die will also understand how hurt your feelings are.
I'm merely pointing out the selfishness in your stance and how harmful it is to the overall efforts of the medical community. That's not bad faith.
We've all had an absolutely shit time. You're not special.
>I'm merely pointing out the selfishness in your stance and how harmful it is to the overall efforts of the medical community. That's not bad faith. We've all had an absolutely shit time. You're not special.
Why is your right keeping families separated not selfish?
Perhaps not when it's economic, technological, wartime, etc. Sure. But when it comes to the healthcare of everyone (not just the individual), they absolutely should. The problem is that politicians seem to think they know more about healthcare than the experts do.
> Why is your right keeping families separated not selfish?
My family has been separated, too. By almost half the planet. Your victim appeal doesn't work here.
In pandemic times medical community matters more but nobody should be the only one making decisions about the life of others. People on the front-line lack insight about everything else that's happening. And experts on other fields and even politicians know things that epidemiologists don't. This has gone too far.
There are many bright individuals around the world that could contribute to this fight but as long as their opinion goes against the built consensus they will stand no chance of getting heard. As a global society we are committing all in to a local optima that sucks.
For the last two years I tried my best to stay at home and used respirators even at outdoors. Please see that politicians are the ones that benefits from this new status quo because on this long lasting and seemingly eternal crisis they have absolute power over people freedom to travel, to gather and to express on public. This being the new normal scares me.
I live in a poor country with cases slowly approaching zero, a high vaccination rate and in the midst of the hot/humid season. Also staying at home is a luxury that the large majority of the population can't afford so my decision has a linear effect because nobody on my neighborhood will be "staying at home" or using masks anyways. Right now poverty and hunger are more of an issue than Covid.
Oh yeah let's ignore all the economical, social and health issues that are side effect of the "staying at home" and insist on social shaming and in a policy that is unsustainable. Let's adopt a dogmatic approach to solve novel issues.
If you want to shorten the global pandemic please lobby your politicians into not holding but subsidizing vaccines to poor countries.
I'm a supporter of building longer term effects that contribute into making society more robust against Covid and other kinds of airborne diseases. Like proper indoor ventilation in public spaces, load balancing, better respirators for daily use. Improved vaccine manufacturing capability and shorter lead times for vaccine development. I understand that they are not mutually exclusively in theory but there's so much we can lobby for at the same time and I prefer not to waste it.
And you didn't lose 2 years of your life. You're alive, you didn't die due to the pandemic, did you? That's much less than can be said for 5 million others, mostly older or unhealthy to begin with. They're dead because people didn't follow the guidelines early and it kept spreading and spreading.
So, be grateful you're not dead, and do your part to increase collective resilience.
The limiting factor is medical professionals, not adding buildings. You can't train a doctor in 2 years.
> preventing normal causes of medial and nursing school drop outs in order to bolster the number of adequately trained medical professionals
What's the drop-out rate? How would you "prevent" this? Do people drop out because they can't cope with the role, or some other reason? What would the overall effect of this policy be in terms of numbers? I suspect it would be minimal.
I’m well aware it’s not possible to train a decent doctor in two years, which is why my point was more that they could have applied positive pressure like merit based scholarship opportunities or any of a number of other ways to assist students in the second/third years of medical school to stay on track to graduate as doctors and nurses. The point is that there’s never been a shortage of people trying to become Doctors, we have social, educational and economic effects in play that limit the number of people that manage to get there all of which the governments around the world could have done things about.
Why not? Do you really need a "doctor" to treat COVID, or just a "person trained in treating COVID and putting people on the respirator"?
Case in point, in Italy in 2020, at the peak of the first wave ("Bergamo"), they fast-tracked final year medical students. Looks like the change is permanent [1]. So clearly "you can't doctor in X years" (AFAIK 6-7 years in most of Europe) was wrong before the pandemic. We can and should do better.
The global nature of the situation makes any solutions focused on a single nation and their own citizens inadequate as they will just be eventually defeated by the natural mutant strains developing elsewhere. In fact “more doctors and nurses and hospital beds because we’re just going to let it happen” is the only local to national level strategy that has any long term ability to make a difference if the virus continues on its course to become endemic.
There is way too much politics involved. Pandemic should make people naturally empathic not forced by their governments to blindly obey.
This is solely on the government. It's immoral to keep vaccinated people in uncertainty and include them in any sort of lockdowns.
>And you didn't lose 2 years of your life. You're alive, you didn't die due to the pandemic, did you? That's much less than can be said for 5 million others, mostly older or unhealthy to begin with. They're dead because people didn't follow the guidelines early and it kept spreading and spreading.
This is not arguing in good faith. Healthy people in their 30s are not dying. Of all the 0.5m children infected in Israel only 200 were severe cases.
>So, be grateful you're not dead, and do your part to increase collective resilience.
I already did my part. Now my part will be attending a demo with all those "antivaxx / 5G chips believing people" and I will fight for my right to live a normal life.
Don't get me wrong, I know there's some sort of middle ground but I wanted to provide food for thought.
This isn't about you. And those 2 years are sunk costs for all of us.
You're engaging in magical thinking, here. We can't afford it. It's self-centered. And it does nobody any good, most especially not you. Might get you killed, though.
As an aside, no, the healthcare "sector" is not at all prepared, it has never been prepared, and it can't magically be made prepared, either. The only solution there is to avoid overloading the system. There aren't any other solutions. So rational people will continue to argue for all of the mitigation measures that we know are effective. Whether you like it or not. It's just as much "on you" to participate in that as it is "on" all of the rest of us.
I understand that it's been a long time and you're frustrated, but this simply isn't over yet, and the consequences are real.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/UvuXzdVwj3ed/
Get lots of Vitamin D from sunlight and be sure to take your Vitamin C. Breathe lots of fresh, unfiltered air. Keep the curve low.