Hacker News Reader

Comment by qbasic_forever | Hacker News Reader

I would love to see them provide references and links to studies they are using to make these decisions. As it is this just reads almost like propaganda or a very strong, "trust us, we're the CDC".

We're approaching a megadeath of Americans from COVID-19 and cannot continue on this disastrous path.

View on HN

Kinda stuck between a rock and a hard place. With the way case numbers are going, for everyone to strictly adhere to the old recommendations would necessitate pretty huge disruptions to essential services.

While I agree with both sentiments, I find the juxtaposition between the two interesting as it implies a relationship between them but they don't seem to be related at all.

Who needs a study? We have this!

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/23/airlines-request-to-reduce-c...

Checkout Dr. campbell on Youtube. He is pretty good. I like how he goes over things and explains them.

I've watched him since the start and his quality of advice has strongly declined since the pro-Ivermectin/Joe Rogan crowd started filling his comments with nonsense. He was great in March 2020 when it was clear governments were too slow to react. Nowadays he seems resigned to fatalism that "we're all just going to get it, nothing can be done".

We are all going to get it. This isn't fatalism. It's just a statement of fact.

It's an endemic respiratory virus with multiple animal reservoirs, and there is no vaccine that provides sterilizing immunity. Elimination is a pipe dream.

There are plenty of other infectious diseases that aren't eradicated but that most people never get. Why that dichotomy for this one?

Because those diseases have been circulating amongst the human population for thousands of years (or longer), and there is a level of population immunity that keeps large outbreaks from occurring.

Also, you aren't even aware of most of the viruses you're infected with on a regular basis, because you aren't looking for them, and immunity you've built up over a lifetime reduces the severity of symptoms. For all you know, you've been infected asymptomatically / minimally symptomatically with any number of common respiratory viruses in the past year, and written it off completely.

The big difference for SARS-CoV2 was that the entire global population was immunologically naive in 2020 (maybe; there's evidence for some level of immunity due to common-cold coronaviruses). This is rapidly changing.

Vinay Prasad MD wrote a good explanation about why it will be impossible to avoid this virus.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646

Megadeath? That’s a little extreme considering that the death rate has been tapering for some time. On the other hand, the administration and CDC have been running propaganda the entire year, so this is nothing new. Expecting truth out of either of them about this is a lost cause.

Current US deaths is 815k, and increasing steadilly. At this rate it will hit 1Mdeath by the end of April

Excess deaths are over 1m. See https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...

There is no way to know if those deaths were because or with Covid-19.

Also correlation doesn't mean causation. Confinement caused a lot of hardships on people. Hell, fentanyl alone kills hundred of thousands each year, that's not even counting alcohol, other drugs, stress and solitude.

The hypocrisy is astounding. I don’t disagree with the numbers above, but at the same time you are absolutely right - yet downvoted and grayed out. Reminds me of Twitter and Reddit.

On Reddit / Twitter I would be shadow banned and downvoted by bots and bought accounts.

HN really is a sanctuary IMO.

You shifted the goal post, you claimed that it's nowhere near one MegaDeath (1 million deaths) despite it being fairly close, then you pivoted to "those aren't really covid deaths".

I remember when people said 240,000 American deaths were "a little extreme" when the IHME predicted it at the start of the pandemic.

Wake up--we are far closer to an actual megadeath of Americans than not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com