On an individual basis, people who survive the pandemic (by avoiding infection or by surviving infection) are tempted to reason that the fear, doubt, and mitigations were all in fact overblown. After all, most folks got through it ok, right?
The reality is that COVID worked out way, way worse than even pessimistic guesses in early 2020. It killed over a million Americans, many of whom were in fact healthy adults without obvious risk factors. And the long-term legacy of “long COVID” impairment is still being learned.
To this day, her and her husband will rant and rave about how dangerous the vaccine is (which my family and I all the boosters for).
I've been told about the millions that will die any day now from the vaccines. And while I've yet to actually hear of a single person that took the vaccine who's died from either covid or the vaccine itself, I have multiple family members and friends family members that I know died from covid.
I don't even doubt that there are people that have received the vaccine and later died from covid, I just don't personally know anyone that is in that category.
it was the imperious attitude that forfeited the credibility of institutions and will weaken another social response, and not the people who wouldn't be lied to. people talked about the unvaccinated as a risk, what about the people who for their eagerness to submit, their fearfulness, and their profound contempt for honesty, failed to be persuasive and credible in a crisis?
some people used a flu to run a society wide milgram experiment and everybody knows now. nobody will listen again.
I found that the risk of supplying a deadly contagion to a loved one is a risk that mattered to me. Even if my loved one were elderly or burdened with a health issue.
I also realized some concern for the lives of people I didn't love. FF to now and I mask up when I do service calls in medical buildings (because of high risk patients).
[0] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1889%E2%80%931890_pandemic#Cor...
(BTW, take all death estimates for old pandemics with a giant pinch of salt).
But at any rate, COVID didn't fill the hospitals. New York had a problem temporarily due to bad management of their very limited morgue capacity, but look at most other places and there was no issue. Even in Bergamo early on, in the period when doctors were accidentally killing patients with unnecessary intubation, they never actually ran out of hospital capacity. Go check the reports at the time if you don't believe me.
Unfortunately, almost everything that people believe about COVID and what happened during it is wrong. When it came to hospitals what you'll see if you review the historical evidence carefully is that media reports and online commentary frequently blurred the line between "it is predicted that hospitals will overflow" and "hospitals are actually overflowing". The former rapidly became reported as the latter with no actual change in the situation. This kind of problem of predictions/reality getting mixed up cropped up many times in different contexts.
Then on top you have the problem of outright fake or misleading reporting. For instance, there was a brief period when TV news crews simply faked reports of full hospitals. They often liked to do this by reporting on a local hospital and claiming it was straining/at the limit etc, then showing video footage of an ICU in Bergamo from months or even years ago without informing the viewer of where it was, leaving viewers to infer it was a video of what was actually happening. This trick with that specific video happened so frequently it became something of a meme. In another case, a news crew turned up and organized doctors and medical staff at the (in reality fairly quiet) hospital to get in their cars and pretend to be patients queuing up to enter the hospital. Someone local got suspicious and visited the hospital a day after the report, discovered there were no queues or overload problems anywhere and asked around what had happened, which is how the news crew were found out.
If you remember, this blew up when bored medical workers started uploading videos of themselves dancing to Tiktok. This revealed the true situation at a time when people were being told to stay home to save the hospitals from overload.
I remember getting into an argument with my German teacher about this topic, because the Swiss health minister (Berset, ugh) actually went on TV and claimed hospitals were overflowing. The Swiss government's own dashboard showed that there was no unusual level of hospital load, there were lots of free beds all over the country and there were no problems to report. He literally just made up a non-existent crisis. They do this because it works, she had no idea he was lying and when I tried to show her the actual graphs just got distressed, saying "I'm not a data person".
But in any case, I think you kind of proved the point that if what you say was true, it wasn't generally known.
Medical procedures were postponed because some governments emptied out hospitals in anticipation of huge influxes of patients, they believed this would happen due to academic models with no validity. So this then did lead to backlogs for non-COVID treatments, but it was an artificial backlog and how bad it was depended on how quickly governments realized the academics were charlatans. In Switzerland hospitals were only emptied out for a period of weeks because the private hospitals started going bankrupt and laying off medical staff due to lack of work which played very badly with the "we will be hit with a huge wave of demand" narrative, so they quietly reversed the policy and hospitals went back to work. In the UK OTOH the NHS stayed emptied out for months. With no bankruptcies to deal with the problem was able to remain ignored for longer, and so they ended up with unsolvable backlogs. They're working their way through it slowly now, but partly by just letting people die whilst waiting. Catastrophic :(
Everything I'm saying was widely known in the community of "sceptics" who realized that the government narratives were built on lies early on, but admittedly in 2020 when this was going down that community was quite small.
This is wrong. My friend who is a New York City plastic surgeon was pressed into monitoring a floor full of patients on ventilators. Meanwhile in Idaho, the hospitals were full.
> I had recovered from it in about January 2020, so it was not one bit uncertain to me.
We learned a lot of lessons in the 18 months after Feb 2020, including about long COVID and who was impacted. Were any of your conclusions reshaped in the face of later broad, consistent medical evidence?
If you were to consider your process of understanding COVID, was there ever a point where it could be fairly described as working backward from a conclusion?
I'm going to parse this and offer some personal impressions.
"One thing" (variant = "All I know") signals to me that my question - are you working backward from a conclusion - can't be considered at this time. It's a reasonable response and I hope you will consider my Q at a later time.
In considering your whole response, I get a vibe that you were justified or maybe vindicated. In my experience, those are markers of clinging to a conclusion and waiting for evidence of it. If I'm off base, help me out here.
I also think you're being forthright with me and not subversive.
Getting to “not one bit uncertain” from what you could possibly have known then shows poor reasoning skills.
40% of Americans are obese.
Even assuming it was, it would only have been a fraction of a fraction of the risk from age.
1) healthy adults and children were and continue to be killed by covid, even if at lower rates. 2) this is horribly devaluing the lives of people with confounding vulnerabilities. Are you suggesting it's fine if they get decimated or worse? 3) This ignores the long term disabling effects population wide where patients survive but suffer awful quality of life for months or years
I'll probably get downvoted into oblivion for mentioning long covid and eugenics, but I'm fine with that. I've been very disappointed in the shift observed in HN commenter population lately. I used to think this was a group of intelligent & thoughtful people but am no longer suffering that illusion.
It is a fantasy to consider your suggestion as a solution. Even if it were possible, you're condemning those people to a life of isolation and slowly dying alone.
If we instead set & raised indoor air quality standards and established social norms of staying home when sick or masking when that's not possible, then life could go on mostly as normal. But fuck me for asking people for small inconveniences to help others.
I would say it's reasonable to suggest vulnerable folks avoid indoor public dining, but not to remain alone indefinitely.
Anyways, bring on the downvotes.
Acute and specific things we could do to mitigate H5N1 right now, in particular, are deploying the vaccine we have to all poultry and dairy workers to reduce animal to human crossovers.
Which I pointed out is not possible, because those people depend on many other healthy people to care for them. Either those people also need to join the "at risk" bubble (not feasible since they have jobs, school etc) or you don't really have the at risk population isolated as you suggest.
If you don't understand this then you have no idea how care networks function, with duties spread across facility staff, families, volunteers, visiting caregivers etc.
Suggesting you cut off one or more legs of those support networks isn't practical or humane. It would mean people without adequate support for basic needs like feeding, toileting & bathing, leaving aside mental/physical exercise and socialization.
This implies you have the means to have every need met at home. It's not the most common scenario.
This response (and a few others here) hints that your concern for well being might not extend much to other people.
This isn't a condemnation. I have HFA relatives who struggle with this limit, particularly those who are especially gifted elsewhere. Demonizing them is wrong.
However, views without empathy might necessarily be downgraded - that is, they may carry less weight where empathy is needed.
That's an interesting perspective. I don't share it, however. My perspective is this.
After several decades of autistic folks being deeply embedded in my life, I've come to view the spectrum as a normalcy that all of us reside on. Our challenges aren't equal but our list of possible factors is.
In that view, HFA is a shorthand we use to indicate someone exhibits enough degrees of enough factors. I see HFA as a pointer to a cluster, not a person.
Two of those factors are a dearth of connection and authenticity. I believe our poster exhibited both. The reason I referenced HFA: It's the term I know that also points to a strong presentation of both of those. If you have a better, I might adopt it.
Regarding a dearth of connection, it's something I'm intimate with. I've managed to develop some empathy but it's like trying to grow a garden without seed, soil, air or sunlight.
But if someone is there, I know they've already brought what they have to the table. I need to adjust my expectations.