Coronavirus
Coronavirus, COVID-19, is spreading exponentially. So far we have seen news reports from countries where there is an organised and rapid response to outbreaks. But what we are beginning to see now is it's rate of infection in countries without such preparedness. Italy and more worrying Iran. Italy is adopting a very strict strategy now, after being slow to tackle the infection. Whereas Iran is in denial, they are refusing to quarantine suspected cases. They have refused to lock down an important religious site which appears to be the epicentre of their outbreak. Also it has been spreading amongst the political class. There is talk of it's spreading rapidly throughout the Middle East.
What concerns me is that the chaos which will ensue in the Middle East, the virus will find a breeding ground and develop into a more deadly strain. Similarly to the way that Spanish Flu developed during the chaos of the First World War.
Should we be worried, or should we just wait until a vaccination is developed so that we can irradicate it through a vaccination programme?
Or is this the beginning of a deadly pandemic?
What concerns me is that the chaos which will ensue in the Middle East, the virus will find a breeding ground and develop into a more deadly strain. Similarly to the way that Spanish Flu developed during the chaos of the First World War.
Should we be worried, or should we just wait until a vaccination is developed so that we can irradicate it through a vaccination programme?
Or is this the beginning of a deadly pandemic?
Comments (8466)
The comment I took issue with was declaring New Zealand's strict approach to be an indicator of the right course of action, without caveats. "The lesson is that if you lockdown early and lockdown hard, less people die. And you don't fuck up your economy as much." There's absolutely no need to learn lessons using the best information available to you at the time. We learn lessons using as much good quality data as possible, and where we know data is missing or inadequate we repair that problem before declaring what the lessons are.
Quoting Baden
Where's this coming from? Which expert (or group of experts) has declared that 'the best' explanation for Sweden's similarity to other harsher lockdown is its cultural response? Which have said that 'the best' explanation for South Korea is the focus of the outbreak? I've heard these suggestions being discussed. I haven't heard anyone declaring them 'the best' explanation.
Quoting Baden
Again, the comment I took issue with was about lessons learnt, not justification of responses made in real time.
Quoting Baden
I've been arguing consistently for a less panicky response. I'm not counting, but I'd be surprised if less than half my comments contain papers or direct quotes from experts in their field. The arguments opposing aspects of the approach from my position have not been 'void of reason'. Just because a bunch of gun-toting rednecks want to defy lockdown it doesn't make all arguments in that direction void by association.
Quoting Baden
So as to avoid any potential for accusations of being 'void of reason', I'll leave this one directly in the hands of the experts...
- my bold. Dietrich Rothenbacher, director of the Institute of Epidemiology and Medical Biometry at the University of Ulm in Germany.
Great
I trust expert opinion and I'm optimistic there's currently no cause for alarm. Mutation is par for the course.
The response I've suggested has zero to with panic or @NOS4A2's bogeyman authoritarianism and everything to do with being effective. I don't remember what your specific position is except you raised some interesting points here and there. So, yes, add as many caveats as you want.
The policies you advocate are authoritarian. But I don’t think they are effective because they are unsustainable.
Huh? They're not supposed to be sustained, silly.
What happens if the infections continue? I suspect it is unlikely we will get a vaccine.
We talked about this. Part of the idea of the lockdown is to gain time to put more effective measures in place to deal with new infections e.g. track and trace, to train the population in social distancing, to stock up on PPE, to speed up and increase volume of testing etc. The "dance" part of the hammer and the dance.
Right, the “hammer” is the initial lockdown, the “dance” is what we do afterwords to mitigate. You have told me about this, and it might very well be sustainable. Unfortunately that’s not a world I want to live in.
You're already living in it, I presume. Where are you located?
But to say this already assumes a more lackadaisical attitude towards the virus. If this were the black plague killing everyone in its path, then I think even the most staunchly anti-authoritarian people would balk and would adhere to whatever demands were placed upon them and they'd be just as vocal in their criticism against others who weren't doing their share to limit the disease.
The point being, you don't think this virus is all that dangerous, so you therefore don't think it deserving of a response as if it were the black plague. I truly don't think those who are taking this virus so seriously are just mindless sheep, willing to cede all authority to their leaders, but they think this virus is much more akin to the plague than you do. And, from what I'm discerning from listening, they are at a complete loss how you (and I) can callously just let people die (as if that's what we're advocating).
There's a guy in my office who wears a mask every day, he wipes down everything in his path with Lysol wipes, he closes his office door, and he walks the other way when you approach him in the hall. It's taken some real convincing some here that he's not being passive aggressive and just trying to look holier than thou, but that he's really terrified of the virus.
When I asked about the psychological differences between those like him and those like me, I really was curious. I don't think it comes down to authority versus non-authority types, but perhaps a "don't worry, be happy" attitude, which might just be how some deal with chaos and the unknown.
Are people who wear seatbelts "terrified" of crashing their cars and people who don't just all relaxed and cool. You can take precautions because it's the rational thing to do without feeling much about it one way or the other and you can refuse to take precautions simply because you're ignorant. You realize that, right?
I live in the capital of British Columbia, Canada. The rules here are not as hard elsewhere in the country.
I didn't actually generalize the terrified comment to all who are concerned about the virus, but only stated it applied to the guy in my office.
But regardless, I'll accuse you now of what I just accused NOS of, which is a misreading of behavior based upon a preconceived notion. I said to him that those doing as their leaders say are not mindless sheep, but they truly believe in the extreme danger of the virus (emphasis on "extreme"). Because it's extreme, the precautions taken are reasonable.
Your analogy of these precautions to wearing a seatbelt is to minimize what many believe are extreme measures to thwart a not as serious threat. That is, when NOS says you're crazy to worry about this like you are, you're responding in kind to say I'm crazy not to just do a few reasonable things to reduce the threat.
You think this threat is greater than I do, and I think the restrictions are more significant than you do.
Vancouver, such a lovely city.
Wasn't referring to you specifically but making the point that what's important is what a rational response is not what's 'authoritarian', 'panicky', 'being terrified' etc. These are efforts in my view to skew the debate.
I see hyperbole as just a way to make a point and not so much as an effort to mischaracterize and mislead.
Yea, that makes sense. It’s true, I do not think the virus is such a threat that it warrants these sorts of lockdowns. I’m of the mind that life is a risk anyways. People die all the time. People get sick. I don’t think we should set our lives to one side in an attempt to save them all. I conform to the rules to make others feel better, not necessarily to avoid contracting the virus, which I think we will all get anyways.
Victoria is the capital. Even lovelier place. Less crowded.
When I visited Vancouver in the 1980's with my family from Seattle, I noticed how far more cleaner the city was to US cities. And even Seattle was quite nice too.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/05/uk/neil-ferguson-imperial-coronavirus-sage-gbr-intl/index.html
I would hope so, look what they do to stormtroopers in Alberta...
And I feel it's simply getting worse as many in the administration start to think about the elections and life after the Trump administration. The cronies have to make their buck now!
That whole area is nice. It's really rainy, but really green. I prefer the mountains of the northwest, until winter.
The Puget Sound archipelago seems at first like in Finnish lake district, except it's the sea (I once saw a group Killer whales from a ferry, it was awesome!) and the pine trees are different, which instantly you can notice (I cannot describe the difference, but there is one).
What I'm saying.
Would Trump not be so ignorant and totally inept, he would have, just to further his agenda of getting the economy back to normal and him getting re-elected, opted to talk in a smart way of the mitigation / herd immunity option now that the US health care system could be argued to be prepared (which it naturally isn't, but still). Many countries are likely looking at that now when easing restrictions from the lockdown and understanding that the economy cannot be in a quarantine for a year or so.
But the incoherent rambling moron doesn't do that and here is one great example of how clueless he actually is:
So try after that to talk about mitigation. But of course with Trump, first he lays rules and then he's enthuastic about breaking them, so... :brow:
Anyway, what is totally lacking is a genuine strategy, a long term plan and a road map how to tackle the pandemic when vaccines are way in the distant future. And that is truly a political decision which simply cannot be just be given to medical officials and epidemiologists to decide as it has quite a lot of moving parts than washing hands and social distancing. This is the problem that all countries are now facing, but unfortunately with the US, this planning is now totally absent with Trump.
There simply is no coherent strategy now, just states doing their own thing.
First of all, it's far too early to say that. This hasn't ended yet...at all.
Secondly, when you really look at those countries it seems that what is only thing that has been looked at is the graph without any reference to the actual number. Is it REALLY so that Singapore has done worse than Iran and should take example from the Islamic Republic??? I don't think so, with 3/million deaths compared to 77/million, the obvious Trumpesque response of the mullahs plus totally unreliable stats I wouldn't say that Singapore has done it bad and Iran has made better response. What that site (perhaps unintentionally) paints as the picture is that the pandemic has been beaten. Several of those "covid-19 beating" countries are scaling back their quarantine measures, so that will have implications.
But needless to say what the best action for a government is: DON'T GIVE ACCURATE STATISTICS. Try hiding every fatality that you can as death due to other causes. Doesn't matter if historians later will argue that the deaths were multiple times higher.
With over 600 deaths yesterday, the curve has not come down much. The five tests which the government has identified as necessary for the lockdown to be relaxed are nowhere near being met. With more and more calls for a relaxation and worries about the economy being aired. It's beginning to sound like some people are beginning to think that a few hundred or thousand extra deaths are worth the cost to reduce the economic damage. The government messages are vague and keep changing. Johnson is apparently going to announce the way forward on Sunday the day before the current end of the lockdown period. With an excuse that not all the information is in yet. There is speculation that there is no plan and the government is in chaos.
I understand that it's not really a bonanza, at least for the vast majority, but a Ponzi scheme. A scheme too big to collapse but doomed to a gradual decline. Despite Trump's best efforts, he wasn't able to deliver the promised 4-5% GDP growth, for instance.
Getting a better picture of all this lately, it's remarkable how governments can continue on this course with so little safeguards in such a fragile system. Corona has shown how abruptly it can collapse and at just about any time.
The Invisible Pandemic
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31035-7/fulltext#%20
The author suspects that there is no stopping the virus, and any lockdown is simply kicking the can down the road so to speak. He speculated that in a year no matter what the measures taken the figures will be similar.
Basically a repeat of side 1 of the debate I posted a video of just above your post. Not surprising seeing as it's the same person who wrote this paper.
Piffle. He picks the country who tried herd immunity/mitigation first, just like Sweden, as a comparison. That failed attempt is why they locked down too late and are in a worse position than any other European country now.
Because he has a crystal ball and knows we won't get a vaccine in time? Because he thinks China has hundreds of millions secretly infected? Because he's absolutely sure NZ will go from 0% cases to herd immunity levels despite everything they've done? Because SK never happened; we can't effectively track and trace etc?
Loads of presumptions and sweeping statements. Unless there really are huge numbers of asymptomatic cases (like nothing even imagined until recently) this is trash. Otherwise, it's just misleading.
We won't know for absolute sure until after a year or so or unless there's a vaccine, whichever comes first. And Gisecke laid out a simple way for us to know. We compare Swedish mortality rates when they reach herd immunity and no longer are getting infections to everywhere else. Waiting for those magic millions of cases in China to show up. The CCP may be talented but not enough to hide that many COVID victims.
It seems like one of the basic ideas of the lockdown program is that it will both flatten the curve, and push severe cases into the not distant future. Pushing some cases into the future allows the always limited health care system to handle the flattened curve now. As the resources of the health care system are expanded, more future cases -- severe and not so bad -- can be managed. There's no guarantee that this will work indefinitely, but it seems to be working in many states. Yes, the number of cases is growing; yes the number of hospitalizations is growing; yes the number of cases in ICU is growing. It's all growing, but it remains manageable within the constraints of always-limited resources. So far.
Lockdown logic didn't work so well in New York City, where there are about 175,000 cases, about 44,000 hospitalized, 14,000 confirmed Covid-19 deaths, and an additional 5,400 deaths presumed to be from Covid-19. (I rounded off the numbers) Moreover, a very high proportion of the cases in the rest of the country appear to have resulted from the New York City ground zero (using genetic similarities in the virus found elsewhere). A few people from Indiana went to New York City and picked up the virus and brought it back to Indianapolis--early on.
NYC instituted its lockdown on March 20--waaaay too late. It isn't that they didn't care. I suspect that the virus was present in NYC--and lots of other places--before March and February. Probably it arrived in January, or maybe even December. While it is highly contagious, we know that few people promptly drop dead from Covid 19--or even get very sick. That feature allows the virus to spread, undetected.
By the time the cases started showing up, the virus had already built up a good sized base of cases.
My personal guess (based on various casting of auspices like analyzing the guts of freshly slaughtered lambs), looking into my crystal balls (I use 105, averaging the results) and utilizing the Cover-19 Tarot deck, is that the virus won't be going away anytime soon, that the people will suffer for quite time from infections and a very bad economic situation, and that Donald Trump will be dumped in November. I want Donald to take many more risks with infection -- whatever he can manage, like licking the White House door knobs, visiting Covid-19 ICU wards and inhaling deeply every time one of the poor folk coughs, and whatever else he can do.
Yes, it is. In fact, the figure was specifically mentioned in the second vid and as Ferguson mentioned fits with his calculations of a 0.66% mortality rate for NYC. This was based on 11,000 deaths in NYC at the time of the study. It's more now. And the mortality rate varies depending on the age of the population. His estimate for the UK as a whole, for example, is 0.8-9%. Anyhow, Gisecke reckons there's only a 0.1% mortality rate and bases his argument on that. If that were the case though then 120% of NY State must be infected already (and that's with no further deaths)! Go figure. (26,000/0.001 = 26,000,000).
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
The viral load question is interesting. I reckon that's why Boris got it so bad, running around rubbing his hands on every COVID patient he could get a hold of. And Germany, huge. Really don't know. Haven't had time to look into it.
The fact that Ferguson's data led the UK to take actions that made it hard for the dude to get jiggy with it, if anything, makes him more credible. Working against his own interests. :lol:
That's not fair. Trump has a clear plan.
Phase 1: Send people back to work
Phase 2: ???
Phase 3: Profit!!!
Yeah I didn’t see that. You outlined the opposing ideas accurately, I think, and it’s a very interesting dichotomy. It’s just a bloody shame the stakes are so high.
I just think the unintended consequences could be far greater with the lockdown approach, for instance they are predicting an extra 1.5 million TB deaths due to lockdown (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/coronavirus-lockdown-could-lead-nearly-15-million-extra-tb-deaths/), and famines of “ biblical proportions.
Quoting ssu
See it as "currently winning" as opposed to "have won". The point of the reference is to show that some countries are dramatically bending their curves and gaining control over the virus, even from a large base of cases. That's important information.
Quoting ssu
It's of course good that countries like Singapore have a comparatively low base of cases and deaths. But due to the outbreak there, it has to work to regain control.
You can set aside Iran - it doesn't change the picture at all. The fact is that there are many countries that have the virus currently under control due to their effective action. As long as they continue to test and maintain strict border controls, they should be able to stay that way.
The linked page also lists what actions countries should be taking: act quickly (even with many cases, it's not too late), isolate infected individuals, strict travel restrictions, massive testing, face masks, social distancing, and don't reopen too early.
In my view, all the US states should be doing these things - the virus needs to be properly contained over the coming weeks before normality can return. Here are similar graphs for the US states:
https://www.endcoronavirus.org/states
Note that New York, from a large base of cases and a late lockdown, is now in a much better position. It's better late than never. As opposed to most other states, many of which imagine it's fine to be reopening even though the virus is still out of control there.
I've been concentrating on the developed world. Lockdown in some parts of the developing world, such as India, seems to be being carried out in a way optimized to protect the interests of particular classes and ignore the interests of others. That is a clear problem. First I've heard of an issue with TB, so I can't comment on that as yet.
Yeah, the caste system creates far more injustices than just inequitable coronavirus treatment.
Sounds like fun.
It isn't the lockdowns that are causing disruptions to treatment programmes and food production, it's the virus. It's not legitimate to just compare how things are affected by a lockdown to an idealized normal time absent the virus.
To make the point, consider how these programmes and other aspects of normal life would have fared during the 1918 flu epidemic.
Avoiding lockdowns during a pandemic doesn't imply "business as usual".
Only human beings can shut down such services. I think it’s a grave error to blame a virus for the choices only human beings can make.
It's like a fire is tearing through your neighborhood and someone produces a study saying that leaving your home means your garden won't be watered or the floors vacuumed.
Does it pose an existential threat to these forums?
You mean if all the old buggers popped their clogs, would we be screwed?
I'll leave that one to the gallery.
In the meantime, Piketty on the virus and social inequality.
Are all those people cueing for a Rolling Stones concert?
Yep. Someone's gotta pay for all this.
Try turning down the sound, reading the captions, and mentally adding 'mate' to every second sentence.
Durn. We'll never get you edumucated then.
Return to work.
Don't politicize the end of the war! Just go out in the street and throw off your top hat beneath the ticker tape.
https://appeasement.org/?fbclid=IwAR0FgnPPk_u8TVeZInqm_lAtLQ42UWwsIbgP8SzTUUwsIjFa0_Q92nvyxdQ
With Trump supporters (including Fox News) blaming China for the pandemic to deflect from America's mistakes, it gets hard to pick out the truth. We're left trying to apply logic and common sense to perceive the truth.
It's that I'm programmed to be skeptical of everything Fox says, but reason states that the CCP did screw up.
I would expect the CCP to lack transparency and I expect Fox to distort the facts.
Well personally I'd vote for Lord Buckethead if I thought he'd beat Boris the professional turnip, so wet dish-cloth Starmer will probably get my vote unless he does something, which seems very unlikely.
Meanwhile, have some advice chaps.
https://erinbromage.wixsite.com/covid19/post/the-risks-know-them-avoid-them?fbclid=IwAR1BO5HezHqJ43-QY8bSC5oE7ycNfHmgRUJ7vmEQMoSeXavYbHai9wHBb2g
Looks like the Georgia experiment was the correct course.
So stupid. There's a delay, you know. So the situation you have now is a result of your earlier lockdown. The situation you'll have later will be the result of opening up. And you know that because you're not a retard, so why are you saying this?
Peachy.
Don't hedge your bets here. If it works, it works. Don't try to say it must've been because us Georgians behaved ourselves if it does work. We're going to have a strong economy and no infections and you're just going to have your naysayer sour attitude.
Lol. Good luck. I'd be happy to be proved wrong. We'll check back on it in a month.
It's a deadly virus, highly contagious, with no cure or vaccine. Nothing works except isolation.
This is not the exact video but I think one of the doctors is the same guy and it mentions the issue I was talking about.
ARDS is a diagnosis ICUs deal with a lot. One of the docs in the video was championing the time honored research based ARDS protocol which is known to save lives because it's a lung protective strategy.
This disease acts like ARDS in some ways, but not others and it's not the same for each patient. We need to understand what's happening. It will probably be a couple of years before we have that knowledge. In the meantime we're struggling.
Yeah, one of the first things they did in Antarctica was close all the bars and restaurants.
As far as I can tell there's the untrustworthy authoritarian regimes of Turkmenistan and North Korea, and some isolated Pacific islands. I don't know if there's much to learn there. We should look at countries that have had a substantial number of cases but have managed to control it.
And that's putting it mildly.
Chefs have to wash their hands whenever they have handled raw food, and before they handle any cooked food or food the will not be cooked especially dairy. Maybe 40- 50 times a day. Wash your damn hands every time you change environment, and don't be a whining antisocial idiot.
And when you put totally inexperienced people to do something, the result is the following:
Just to compare this very typical phenomenon of all kinds of conmen getting into the action when money is floating freely around during an emergency, there was a similar case in my own country where a shadowy businessman suckered government officials to buy PPE from China. It least the "PPE" existed, but wasn't appropriate for health care workers. This case made a huge political outcry, the media was all over it and the outcome was that the director of the government institution responsible for that resigned after the Prime minister said the the person didn't enjoy the trust of the government.
Now that Kushner isn't fired or that even this "little" snag doesn't even cause any kind of turmoil just tells just how utterly bad and totally incapable the Trump administration is. And this is one incident among many, just like silencing the CDC advise on how to prepare to open the economy.
Likely it's worse that we see it to be. And that will have a huge effect on the effectiveness fighting the pandemic. If this was a novel, people would argue that it's too fantastic, that actually a Republican administration cannot be such ludicrously incompetent.
It will be one week tomorrow afternoon that NicK has been in Cardiac ICU. I share this for a multitude of reasons, first of which is to let you know that if you have time any extra prayers or energy you may have could be used in Nick's ICU room.
I thought Stroke and made sure that the Fire Fighters were acutely aware of my concern (pardon my sailors mouth) that he had one hour to get to a stroke center and they assured me he was going to a Trauma Level 1/Stroke and Cardiac center. From the time I called 911 and him being prepared for emergency surgery was 22 minutes....they would not allow me in the ambulance, in ER, I had my phone that they would contact me on which is Heartbreaking, leaves you feeling helpless, useless and now I am starting to feel it is almost criminal but I am still in the thick of it so forgive me and some of those kind of emotional based comments.
I begged them to please let me see him before surgery even with both my Indians they said no. We were finally given possible end of life permission. They hurried us down a hall, a nurse and a social worker were masking, gowning, gloving us as we began to run. We got to the Trauma room, had moments with him, met the Thoracic/Cardiac surgeon and I began the question is he going to make it? Dr said he is in the best place possible. I repeated the question and he said I am going to do everything I can to help your husband. I said ok... what is your success rate? He said most. I begged him to get NicK into the most, please. We were able to follow him down the hall to surgery and a social worker who got us in said we could go home and they would call. I said we will be in the parking lot in the car. She worked up the chain and got us into a surgical waiting room for the 5 hr open heart surgery. After surgery I was allowed to see NicK for 2 minutes before being escorted out by security. Since then I have not been able to see him, touch him, stroke his head...it is absolutely Heartbreaking.
The reason? COVID 19. I asked while he was in surgery of the nurses, the social worker how many COVID patients are there at the top hospital we are at. They said a couple. Not a few, not a handful, not a lot, a floor.... they get it but......in surgical waiting when the head surgery nurse was wearing scrubs and nothing more when she told us we could take off the protective gear as it was going to be hours. When she returned to give us an update I asked if I could hug her and she said absolutely and I hugged on her weeping....the social worker was the same.....
I'm not judging any one of anything I am just telling you my upfront and personal experience with a crisis in the middle of this pandemic.
It's going to take a lot of time for Nick to recover and not seeing him, I believe, is hampering his recovery. Not to a deadly point but the process of healing, especially when on sedation for ventilator has got to be having an affect.
So, prayers and enegies if you can, leave passwords with SOMEONE or a password manager especially if you are the company. Please realize that there are unintended consequences in trying to find the balance between lives and livelyhoods and believe we are all doing the best we can with what we have and when we know better we can do better.
Because both are alive, withdrawing life support from either or both can have deadly consequences.
WE are a collection of small businesses and WE are dependant on the survival of both their lives and their livelyhoods and believe me when I say it is an incredibly hard line to walk.
Ps for those of my family here, whom are also friends of mine on Facebook, I ask that you please not desiminate this information as I do have client/friends and I do NOT wish to alarm them until we are further along and out of the woods.
Happy Mother's day to Mom's and happy Parents Day to the Dad's who wear ladies bloomers in addition to their loin cloths.
Though there may have been “missed opportunities”, unlike some countries, these volunteers didn’t sign bad contracts or purchase any crap.
What year did those masks expire in?
Lol.
Not only did you not read what I wrote, but you didn't even read YOUR OWN link you gave. :roll:
Purchasing with 69 million dollars non-existent ventilators would be in my view a bad contract. (And read the link you gave again.)
You have mine.
:pray:
This is an exemplary way of critiquing state overreach during COVID in a way that's not just a shitty reactionary vomit spew of 'Muh Freedoms" and "Muh haircuts":
"We face real and hard choices between investing in humans and investing in technology. Because the brutal truth is that, as it stands, we are very unlikely to do both. The refusal to transfer anything like the needed resources to states and cities in successive federal bailouts means that the coronavirus health crisis is now slamming headlong into a manufactured austerity crisis. Public schools, universities, hospitals, and transit are facing existential questions about their futures. If tech companies win their ferocious lobbying campaign for remote learning, telehealth, 5G, and driverless vehicles — their Screen New Deal — there simply won’t be any money left over for urgent public priorities, never mind the Green New Deal that our planet urgently needs.
On the contrary: The price tag for all the shiny gadgets will be mass teacher layoffs and hospital closures.
Tech provides us with powerful tools, but not every solution is technological. And the trouble with outsourcing key decisions about how to “reimagine” our states and cities to men like Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt is that they have spent their lives demonstrating the belief that there is no problem that technology cannot fix. For them, and many others in Silicon Valley, the pandemic is a golden opportunity to receive not just the gratitude, but the deference and power that they feel has been unjustly denied. And Andrew Cuomo, by putting the former Google chair in charge of the body that will shape the state’s reopening, appears to have just given him something close to free reign."
Is it really? I don't think so.
The state overreach doesn't happen because of the tech companies. It really doesn't. Having meetings over the internet and working from home is something that we'll get used to thanks to the pandemic and surely Google and Microsoft are happy about it, but it genuinely doesn't constitute a government overreach.
What constitutes a government overreach is the length where the US citizens want to create a pre-emptive security apparatus to fight a miniscule group of terrorists and the American reliance on boogeymen being this threat to your existence. Of course, you could have gone the other way: treated the 9/11 perpetrators as criminals and given the case to the NYPD and the justice system as you did with the first Twin tower bombings some years before. And not started a perpetual war fought still in many places.
Of course, a pandemic that is DAILY killing the equivalent number of Americans that were killed in the 9/11 attacks seems at least to me a genuine reason for social distancing and some restrictions. And yes, I think the US would be better off with a real national plan to fight the pandemic. Likely before this month ends or at least in June the US will break that 100 000 number on those who have perished to the pandemic, so I guess the argument for government overreach is a bit strange.
Yes.
I ask you, where does the overreach come from? As the article says:
The fact is that AI gives finally a way for a police state to operate. Before you really had to have a person to listen to the conversations and others to process it. It didn't work, never could. Now with AI you do have the possibility of a genuine all controlling police state, which China is building. The question, who wants to build it and why?
As once Fidel Castro said: "If I order all capitalists to be hanged, a capitalist will come to me and sell rope."
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WDzqCUbUQW0
As with the quote from Castro, I tried to explain that companies are surely willing to sell governments what the governments want (even at their own peril). Yet it is the government and the political leadership that decides what it wants. Once some industry is in a dominant position, it surely can influence the government or simply want it's own status quo being defended, but the objectives of the government aren't simply handed down from an industry.
Since the now age old Echelon, started in the 1960's and established in 1971, the US and it's allies have wanted better and better tech for their surveillance needs. You simply cannot think that companies in the 1990's have themselves made this appetite as the interests are as far older than the internet (which itself started as ARPANET for the department of defense).
Because when you say that the tech companies are "interested in using government to further their interests by expanding government reach for their sakes", yep , it is quite different from saying that "tech companies notice the interests of governments and are eagerly willing to offer the technology and service to fulfill those". That's not what you are saying.
You put the tech firms being the starting engines of the "government overreach" and this is what I disagree with. The government isn't the vehicle of tech firms especially when it comes to the corona-epidemic.
Oh sweet summer child.
There's a new idea for a vaccine called the RNA vaccine. RNA is injected that can produce proteins that mimic parts of the target virus, like the spikes on a coronavirus. Those spikes subsequently produce immunity. This kind of vaccine is quick to make, but it's not known if it will work, and be safe for everyone. Some people might not be able to take it.
To extend its short shelf-life, on-line gamers have been employed to find stable shapes for the RNA.
:up:
Oh geee what a surrprrrisseee who could have seen this coming!
Hey but the stock prices are returning to above their enforced minimum! The markets are more liquid, people are spending money, things will return to normal soon.
Now I need a shower.
Edit: I should've added; it's not the government's fault if you don't want to go out and spend!
Governments have created a good little racket. Shut down the economy, eliminate any means for citizens to provide for themselves, then act as the solution to their economic woes.
They're evidently not doing a very good job at being a solution.
But they have to look incompetent at this point, otherwise people will Rumble them. They will reveal the solution soon, any minute now.
Conspiracy theories are a conspiracy by the tinfoil industry.
Quoting Chester
Is there supposed to be some connection between these two statements? Are you saying that the number of COVID-19 deaths is probably inflated because the number of people who died from the flu is less? That's a non sequitur. COVID-19 is more deadly than the flu. That's why there are more deaths.
#5G
#Obamadidit
As for my example of deaths in the UK recently , that is for perspective purposes. This disease is dangerous for some of those that get it...but it's hardly the black death.This lock down looks like a massive over reaction, Sweden seems to indicate that.
For the sake of clarity, I'm not saying that this is a conspiracy, just that it could be, I'm open minded.
I'd accept it as moving fast through comms training over nothing. All this break was good.
You are dangerous people.
Yes, the economy was going to tank because of Brexit. Now they can blame it on Covid, so they will push for the hardest Brexit possible and head in the direction of a Singapore on Thames. So they can line their pockets and build their mansions in the posh resorts in Devon and Cornwall.
The government has been massaging them down. The excess deaths in care homes in April was 18,000, above the death rate in April the year before. The government is only admitting that 8,000 of these were due to Covid.
The 2007-2008 so called "Great Recession" is small compared to this.
Yes. It remains true that the US stimulus package is not addressing the huge demand shock, seeing as it is mostly adding liquidity to stock markets at the price of leverage rather doing much to address the expected failures of small businesses, the huge unemployment, and the massive downward spike in spending power of huge swathes of workers.
We fall to a lower level and then start very slowly to pick up from there. It will again take years before unemployment is at such rosy level as it was before last year.
And what is happening is that Trump will try to rosy up the statistics, both economic and health statistics and simply will put the government to lie about the situation. That's the next step.
Aye. I'm hoping that in the wake of it wage repression stops. I'm also hoping that the demand shock prompts that. But I don't think it will happen much.
It's likely to be another huge covert wealth transfer and another run through of the austerity/defecit bollocks; now that the bailouts are on the public balance sheet as debt by fiat of accounting.
How do you not have a chronic health issue? Diabetes? Coronary artery disease? COPD?
But only 220,000 people have been tested positive in the UK. Maybe if there were 50,000,000 infected there might be a million dead, but we're not there yet. The infection rate in the UK has been about 3,500 per day, it's not dropping, even in lockdown. As soon as the lockdown is relaxed that number will start to grow, in hotspots it will grow really fast.
Do you know that the experts told Johnson on 23rd of March that unless he locks the country down immediately there could be 500,000 deaths. Then suddenly he changed the policy and locked the country down the same day. Thank God he did, otherwise we would be at about 500,000 deaths by now. Along with economic chaos, social unrest and food shortages.
Well, think about it positively: If we have a serious economic depression, the likely outcome is that income inequality decreases for a short while.
COVID19 is an acute infection. Diabetes is a chronic condition that renders one more likely to die of COVID19.
You do realize that the reason why the death toll remains so low is that the distancing measures have curbed the spread of the disease, don't you?
:lol: Another candidate for the Presidential Medal of Freedumb.
Except that food production and distribution has not shut down. Millions of people are dying around the world from a lack of foreign holidays, football deprivation, and amateur haircuts. Not. What one ought to learn from this crisis is how extraordinarily trivial most economic activity is. That the economy can shrink by a staggering amount without doing more than oblige people to change their habits a little. That if most people never work again, it really doesn't matter much as long as we can still feed and look after them, which is a matter of will and organisation, not of economic luxury.
I think that people would rather face life on their own terms than on the whim of some politician and state health official.
Let me translate:
"I think science-denying schmuck-faces should be set free to spread pestilence in our nation and our top health experts should be ignored."
You're a child.
Translated by a moron. Just perfect.
Neil deGrasse Tyson: "Notice that every sci-fi horror flick begins with people ignoring scientists"
That's because scientists in horror movies are insane.
It’s fiction for a reason.
Doesn't that still mean scientists were/are right.
No other plot device would be more convincing.
Every generation of scientists does the best it can. Degrasse would do well to be satisfied with that.
Hand washing was advocated as a highly effective preventive measure against infection in 1847 (173 years ago) by Ignaz Simmelweisz (1818 - 1865). Simple hygiene rules discovered and advocated nearly two centuries ago were ignored and broken. Result: coronavirus pandemic, 180,000 dead and counting.
I think Jews advocated washing up to the elbows when Noah's dog was a pup.
Coincidences do occur.
I suppose. But if the Chinese guy who gutted that penguin had washed up to the elbows afterwards, we would all be bitching about something else.
I might want to start a thread on this. Thanks for reminding me.
@frank has a medical qualification and is working in a hospital treating covid patients. If he says chronic, it's probably chronic.
- The Trump administration has no strategy to tackle the pandemic other than it will refrain to the most bizarre wishful thinking (an miracle drug is just around the corner) and will continue to disrupt any kind of actions taken against the virus on the national level (one example the watering down of the CDC guidelines) because the President fears "it will look bad" and hurt him in the elections. What this means is that Trump has utterly incapacitated the federal government of any coherent leadership or action on the issue.
- The incapacitation of federal leadership and guidelines will assure that NOTHING will be prepared in the time now for the future and every response taken will be performed at a substandard level compared to other OECD countries.
- The majority of Americans will draw the correct conclusions from this and if possible, will stay home and continue social distancing. A minority won't and this will keep the pandemic strong.
- The above likely assures that the pandemic won't just fade away and this assures an economic depression in the US. No V-shaped or U-shaped recovery.
- The economic depression in the US will guarantee a global economic depression. Even in the countries that have successfully contained the pandemic will suffer from this.
- As the US has already basically lost it's leadership position in the world thanks to Trump, it will also lose it's clout in fighting pandemics and in the health care sector as everybody now understands how US institutions like the CDC or NIH are totally open to the whims and delusions of totally ignorant ideological politicians.
At least that's what I think. Counterarguments?
Well, in order to understand the coronavirus' likelihood of mutation it's important to understand how it replicates. The coronavirus is particular amongst many other viruses in that it has a correction or "proof reading system" built into its genetic instructions. The reason viruses are highly mutable is most do not have this capacity which allows large degrees of error to accumulate over time changing its genetic profile. This is why there is no vaccine for the common cold (rhinovirus) because it constantly mutates as well as influenza which mutates into different strains each year meaning vaccine mixtures have to be carefully selected each flu season. Thus it is not as likely that coronavirus will become several different strains very quickly or at all. However it is a pandemic and that amount of virus circulating the globe does have an impact on the probability of a mutation.
Secondly... most mutations result in failure to thrive. It is unlikely that a mutation anywhere in the sequence will actually give benefit to the virus. Most cause it to have a weaker capacity to to something be it connect with a receptor on the host cell or manipulate the cellular machinery needed to reproduce itself. It's only rarely that the mutation happens just right to make it more virulent or increase the mortality rate.
The biggest risk posed by what you described is the establishment of viral reservoirs in certain countries whereby it can trickle into other populations via air travel repeatedly throughout the coming years. It may lead to flight restrictions to endemic areas and that could heighten political and economic tensions.
Ok, let's put it this way, covid 19 seems to kill people that already have a bad underlying health problem...for instance, it seems that 25% of people that have died in the UK have diabetes, I believe 40% had dementia . Risk of death amongst 90 odd percent of the population is very low. The top number for deaths in the UK so far (and this number will almost certainly end up being too high ) is 50,000 deaths (15,000 deaths higher than government figures). 50,000 deaths in a population of 67 million equates to 1 in 1340 of the population...given that those people dying are almost always very ill anyway... it's hardly the black death is it?
I don't think you know, or care, what acute or chronic mean.
Ok, so you know what they mean but have no idea how they apply, or the connection between long term health conditions, comorbidity and chronic illness on the deaths. And you've decided that instead of trusting a medical worker's correction of your use of the term, you doubled down and insisted you were right by changing the discussion to more vague terms. Get a grip, learn to know when you don't know, and admit when you are wrong.
There's no discussion being had. You contradicted the usage of a professional in the field and have been corrected. An apology is in order, rather than this bluster, as though everyone else is really wanting to agonise over your nonsense. What a wanker!
But at least some people are getting the proper protective gear. Whenever I start to think the UK government is the absolute pits, the US is right there, ready to show how much more awful it can get.
https://theintercept.com/2020/05/17/veterans-affairs-coronavirus-security-police/?fbclid=IwAR1fNMR3-3daKHxM4DqQs9PYaAQVFkhLHmncaP7bUsrS6WRZpU9xV4wTQbM
Quoting ssu
Think that's an overstatement regarding the leadership position I think. The US's military position has not been weakened due to the coronavirus, they will still have all the economic influence the dollar brings so long as international trade relies upon it, and they're almost certainly not going to lose their veto in the UN.
The US losing its dominance in politics would probably require a big restructuring of the global economy , rather than everyone being in the shit and still having international trade depend on the US.
Trump's not really a global geopolitical disaster for America, despite his ineptness.
Quoting ssu
I suspect that most people are tired of the social distancing measures, and that a majority will skirt and resist the guidelines as much as they feel they can. EG: bars opened in the evening here in Norway this week, and the group size guidelines did little to stem how packed it was. It was the national day today, and the streets were pretty packed, even though most of the displays were cancelled. We're talking crowds of 20 people meeting each other when the rules mandate groups of 5.
If Norway, who by and large have been following the social distancing measures to the letter and have not had a sustained political and media effort to promote ignoring the guidelines are going to ignore them when it's socially acceptable to do so, the US, which has had those efforts, will have more.
There's an added incentive for the US that the furlough payments haven't been as good here; people's livelihoods are more at stake there than here.
I would be extremely surprised if the US's relaxed mitigation measures didn't result in a majority ignoring them for various reasons quite soon.
What to do when you can't differentiate adults from juveniles?
Might be time to address that swamp.
[sub]16 Not The Brightest People Who Are Against The Quarantine Holding Some ‘Interesting’ Signs (Rokas Laurinavi?ius, Ilona Bali?nait?)[/sub]
It is clear that you are complete tosser. Asthma is a chronic condition, as in one that persists over the long term. Most people with asthma can expect to live a normal or near normal life-span with some medication. So in most cases it is not 'serious' in the sense of being life-threatening. Likewise Diabetes is a condition that with treatment people live with for many years. My son-in-law has been insulin dependent type1 diabetic since childhood. That's 35 years of 'serious' illness.
And you, you arrogant little turd, think all these people can be written off as seriously ill anyway so we don't have to care.
Well fuck you and your pathetic racist slurs.
Found this image on twitter giving the death rate for different ages up to the 5th of May...you'll see that the risk of death for the young and healthy is tiny....
PS, for your information anything over 80 is a good lifespan...
“China’s reluctance to allow the international community to investigate and its enthusiasm in creating all sorts of conspiracy theories pointing to non-China origins of the virus only make the world more eager to know the answer,”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/18/china-facing-pressure-over-covid-19-and-taiwan-at-world-health-assembly
If fat cunt Xinie the Pooh (must be in the at risk category) and the rest allowed an actual investigation, maybe we wouldn't have all these cretins coming up with their cretinous nonsense.
Apparently the CCP are not allowing any investigation until 'after the pandemic'. Cunts.
The US is still the sole superpower.
But I was talking really about leadership: the ability to lead, to coordinate, to get other nations to follow your agenda. To get various countries to go along with your policies even if not close allies (or those in need of help). That is what I mean by leadership.
That is totally different thing as being the sole superpower and the biggest economy.
You might not understand just how much Trump just has done and how different it was, well, like when George Bush senior formed an alliance with Muslims countries like Pakistan, Egypt and Syria to fight against Saddam Hussein and got the green light to go ahead from the dying Soviet Union.
That time was different.
Quoting ssu
Eh, I guess we'll see what happens. Trump's insistence on screwing over the country's diplomats has been pretty stupid.
Perhaps there would be better threads to talk this, but just a quick response.
It's not only Trump, but Trump surely has done immense harm to the US role in the world. But this is a far longer process than just Trump. I think the downfall really started with George Dubya Bush let the neocons invade Iraq. I think the last US President that was looked as having that leadership role was Bill Clinton and older Bush. Before that you had naturally the juxtapositioning between the two superpowers.
But in short, The most damage Trump has done is he has given an example of how utterly unreliable the US can be. So if we get a democratic President, who knows, in four years there can come a republican president that is totally against on what earlier was agreed. I don't think the vitriolic partisanship will go away. And now it's not just a crazy theoretical possibility that the US can leave NATO, it's a genuine possibility that the US will fold on it's agreements and simply leave, go it's own way as obviously someone like Trump simply doesn't need allies, just like he showed with his former Kurdish allies.
What the US withdrawal looks like. From half a year ago:
Once Americans have shown how inept leaders they can choose, why would it never happen again?
But of course, you can listen to for example Peter Zeihan how utterly awesome the US of A is and how well the US has done everything and how badly everybody else is doing.
You know, I completely forgot that happened, God damn, thank you for the reminder.
43% chance of zombies.
Bill Gates gave them 25 million dollars.
I am a Covid ICU nurse in New York City, and yesterday, like many other days lately, I couldn’t fix my patient. [...] He was only 23 years old.
Work on the frontline is rough. :(
Please don't strut about risking spreading covid-19 further.
Alarming video shows how quickly coronavirus can spread at a restaurant (Yaron Steinbuch, New York Post, May 2020)
Stay alert! If anyone tries to get more than 2m away from you, chase them to a crowded beach!
"To gather signatures for the letter, Gold and Barke partnered with the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), a doctors' group that advocates for less government interference in the relationship between doctors and patients, and notably has taken part in legal challenges against the Affordable Care Act and advocated to allow doctors to use hydroxychloroquine on themselves and their patients."
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/doctors-raise-alarm-about-health-effects-of-continued-coronavirus-shutdown
"The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) is a conservative non-profit association founded in 1943. The group was reported to have about 5,000 members in 2014. The association advocates a range of scientifically discredited hypotheses, including the belief that HIV does not cause AIDS"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_American_Physicians_and_Surgeons
"AAPS is generally recognized as politically conservative or ultra-conservative, and its positions are unorthodox and at wide variance with federal health policy.
... It opposed the Social Security Act of 1965 which established Medicare and Medicaid and encouraged member physicians to boycott Medicare and Medicaid...
AAPS opposes mandated evidence-based medicine and practice guidelines, opposes abortion and over-the-counter access to emergency contraception and opposes electronic medical records."
:lol:
And then, to top it all, I read today that Trump's family trust holdings include a fund whose largest holding is Sanofi, the maker of Plaquenil, the branded version of hydroxychloroquine. This alone should justify impeachment to my mind. Can the US really vote for this appalling human being again?
Ad hom.
A health organisation that believes that HIV doesn't cause AIDS and is demonstrably politically partisan is a less reliable provider of health news. I'm even more suspicious because it's a health organisation advising on economic matters!
Lol! It's a matter of credibility not logical argumentation. Any doctor who advises that HIV doesn't cause AIDS should not be considered a reliable font of medical advice. But I suppose when we ban people here for pseudoscience we're ad homming them? (Of course because a discredited authority says something is true, it doesn't mean the opposite is necessarily true. That was a humorous rhetorical flourish on my part).
I'm pretty sure @Hanover knows quoting an organization who are known to spread psuedoscience to advance their political objectives disqualifies them from being considered neutral sources of medical advice in the political shutdown debate.
It's ok, they were following their common sense. The new policy of the government.
So if they die, it's their fault because they didn't use their common sense.
You wouldn't ban someone for holding to a pseudo-scientific belief they didn't advance here though. If I believed that HIV did not cause AIDS but I did believe that we needed to more diligently quarantine to protect ourselves from the coronavirus, would you discount my beliefs about the coronavirus? The world does not become flat because Hitler said it's round.
When you present a claim as credible based on an authority, you implicitly make the claim that the authority is credible. If the authority is found not to be credible, you need to find another way to add credibility to the claim. Remember, you made no argument but simply presented a claim attached to a supposedly credible source.
Quoting Hanover
Yes, but nobody would present Hitler as an authority on this issue nor would it be resolved by appeal to the flat earth society.
Quoting Hanover
You are not an authority on medicine, so nobody is going to present you as an authoritative source for that claim. But, say, you presented me with a claim by pseudoscientists that we should quarantine more diligently, I would discount that as evidence even if I believed that we should. Actually, I'm open to evidence in both directions as long as the source of evidence is credible.
So, it's pretty simple, the claim of these doctors carries no special authority on the issue of reopening because due to their propagation of pseudoscience they are not a credible source. That doesn't make the claim necessarily true or false, it's simply as irrelevant as a claim by flat earthers that the world isn't round. We need to look elsewhere for evidence.
"An argument from authority (argumentum ab auctoritate), also called an appeal to authority, or argumentum ad verecundiam, is a form of defeasible argument in which the opinion of an authority on a topic is used as evidence to support an argument. It is well known as a fallacy, though some consider that it is used in a cogent form when all sides of a discussion agree on the reliability of the authority in the given context."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
Pointing to the unreliability of the authority as per the above is not an ad hom. I should put this in resources as it keeps coming up despite the fact it should be obvious.
Yesterday I was feeling a bit better and managed a half mile walk, and today is about the same. I seem to be recovering fingers crossed and apart from an occasional cough and a general weakness and headache, I feel almost human. Mrs un is a bit more pathetic than me still but even she has made it to the end of the road today. She has lost about 6kg, but I haven't because I have been eating. So if you want to come by and infect yourselves, you'd better get it together soon.
I hope you get well soon.
Yes, get well soon both of you.
Only one article by one doctor was skeptical of the idea that HIV caused AIDS. Though I think publishing the commentary is questionable, there is no evidence his views are held by the entire group. In order to prove a doctor is not credible you would have to show where he’s engaged in quackery instead of deeming him guilty by association. So it would be ad hominem.
And consider this paradox:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_not_a_reliable_source
Who says? Source?
Quoting NOS4A2
By your own logic, questioning Wikipedia's reliability is an ad hom. So, how do you escape the contradiction you've trapped yourself in?
Lastly, you quoted the only part of my posts that I already said was a humorous flourish. I've made clear that you can't prove the opposite of a claim by demonstrating the unreliability of the source.
I trying to make a joke about wikipedia. But wikipedia at least cites their information. Luckily I can click on the cited link and see where the information comes from. I did so and one can read the HIV article, which advocates against suppressing dissenting views. It was written and signed by one doctor.
We can continue to argue about the reliability of the source but it doesn't make what I said an ad hom either way because I'm not claiming the argument is false based on the source, I'm arguing that an appeal to authority can't legitimately be made using it because its unreliable. Look, just go read the OP I wrote. If you have something to say about it, say it there.
Agreed. I think her arguments are important and cause for concern, and it would do us well to focus on those instead of the reliability of those who agreed with her and signed her letter. The implications of a continued shutdown are dire, “including patients missing routine checkups that could detect things like heart problems or cancer, increases in substance and alcohol abuse, and increases in financial instability that could lead to "[p]overty and financial uncertainty," which "is closely linked to poor health.” I would also add that if an economy suffers, so to does the health system.
Without a legitimate appeal to authority or any reliable data or stats that meaningfully compare the damage that an immediate release of the lockdown would do to the damage keeping it going would, you're left with nothing here. Of course, the lockdown does damage (we all know that) and, of course, the virus does damage (we all know that). In order to make a successful argument that an immediate end to the lockdown would do more damage than continuing it would, you need to attempt some sort of analysis based on the evidence available. Go for it if you like. You won't find it in the Fox article that's for sure.
Since your standard of what constitutes a successful argument is only held to skeptics of lockdowns, there is little to no incentive to do the work. So I’ll pass.
Many of us on both sides of the argument, including me, @benkei, @fdrake, @Isaac and more have been using data and evidence since the beginning. Go look at the posts. We don't always get it right, but there's a respect for reality and facts that Trumpists, for example, disdain, presumably because they are so regularly on the wrong side of them.
36,000+ NEEDLESS DEATHS.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/05/12/coronavirus-epidemiologist-were-just-second-inning-qa-opinion/3114615001/
:100:
Quoting 180 Proof
Unfortunately that interview is a mixed bag for me. While Osterholm correctly describes the problems the US are having, he seems to dismiss suppression/eradication as a strategy and apparently endorses a "slow burn" mitigation/herd immunity strategy instead.
He mentions that apparently successful countries have had setbacks, as if that's the end of the story. The fact is that eradication of COVID-19 is a very real possibility for some countries, and there have been precedents of that with Ebola and SARS in the past.
In the US, a few states are doing very well, such as Montana and Vermont. The key for them is to keep their borders closed to states that can't or won't control the virus and begin opening up with states that have controlled or, better, eradicated it. Once the actual infections are at zero, the virus can't emerge again unless it's re-introduced from another state.
I don't think this needs to be as difficult as it's commonly assumed to be.
For example, see the paper below showing how community monitoring and neighborhood quarantining was effective at stopping Ebola.
Quoting Yaneer Bar-Yam, How community response stopped Ebola, New England Complex Systems Institute (July 11, 2016)
Especially Ebola is totally different: it is so deadly that it basically kills itself. With this virus it's quite the opposite with many people carrying and spreading the virus without any symptoms.
The thing with eradication is problematic: what if the disease becomes like influenza, a disease the is now called "the common flu"? Will you have a quarantine procedures for rest of our lives? Will Iceland and New Zealand basically abolish tourism? I don't think so.
They may require a mandatory test to see if you have any virus. This might even involve a quarantine period while the test is being processed.
And what do you think that quarantine period does for example to tourism? Who would want to go for a leisure trip for couple day to somewhere where you can be (possibly) quarantined?
And with other countries the idea that they can create themselves to be artificial islands is even more difficult. Just to give one example from real life, Sweden was totally against Finland closing it's Northern border with it as it feared a total collapse of it's health care system in the north as so may health care workers are Finns living in Finland, but coming to work in Sweden. Under the pressure Finland opted to have the border open for this "essential workforce".
Local governments can close their borders and comprehensively test. That will either detect asymptomatics or, at least, isolate them within a geographical area until the virus is eradicated there. In Italy and Spain, some towns and regions did this voluntarily. For example:
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/03/europe/zahara-de-la-sierra-coronavirus-intl/index.html
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-21/one-italian-town-is-bucking-the-countrys-coronavirus-curve/12075048
Eradicating the virus is a matter of collective will. The issue is only over whether communities do that now, or wait some number of months until the death rate and economic toll becomes unbearable before taking effective action. From the earlier paper:
Quoting Yaneer Bar-Yam, How community response stopped Ebola, New England Complex Systems Institute (July 11, 2016)
Quoting ssu
It depends on what the alternative looks like. If the alternative is potentially large numbers of people dying with no end in sight, then I'm sure they would abolish tourism. But realistically, they won't need to. They can simply partner with other regions that are also virus-free.
"I think it's unlikely that this coronavirus — because it's so readily transmissible — will disappear completely," said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious-disease specialist at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee
"The lesson here is that, over time, diseases very rarely disappear" - World Health Organisation 'Managing Epidemics'
"I think the most likely prospect is that we don't entirely eradicate it." - Joshua Epstein, a professor of epidemiology at New York University
"It will probably never end, in the sense that this virus is clearly here to stay unless we eradicate it. And the only way to eradicate such a virus would be with a very effective vaccine that is delivered to every human being. We have done that with smallpox, but that's the only example - and that has taken many years." - Guido Vanham, the former head of virology at the Institute for Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium
“In the absence of robust herd immunity at the population level, we have some risk of a second wave of the epidemic,” - Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at Harvard University
"We do have a big problem in what the exit strategy is and how we get out of this," - Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh.
"The reality is that it will be with us forever because it has spread now.” - Dr Simon Clarke, professor of cellular microbiology at the University of Reading
"We're going to be living with it, and we're not having that discussion at all." - Dr. Michael Osterholm
___
This is all I'm gathering so far. What evidence are you using for your view that "eradication of COVID-19 is a very real possibility for some countries", am I reading a really biased set of reporting, because I'm not getting anything like that from my sources, I'd be grateful for any links.
The realistic options aren't either a total lock down or a Trumpian denial of the pandemic being still prevailing catastrophe.
The main problem in the idea that a certain country or area can "eradicate" the virus simply isn't reasonable NOW as the global pandemic is still going strong. Some countries, as you know, are unable to make a genuine effort on the federal level and opt to leave the states to invent their own policies. EU has been totally unable to coordinate anything as member states have chosen their own path to fight the virus. This is the biggest obstacle to the idea that just one country/area can with itself eradicate the virus and then live normally after.
Yet I have to say that it is good marketing and a policy that can instill trust in the public that the officials are really prioritizing fighting the pandemic. Just like a leader of country at war will rally the people assuring victory for them and a defeat to the enemy. It wouldn't sound good to the people and the soldiers fighting to say: "Well, will continue to fight this war because we are confident we bleed them far more than we ourselves suffer losses and hence we'll get a better deal during the peace talks." The quite Clausewitzian approach doesn't sound so good and doesn't motivate anyone.
The best technical source I'm aware of on the eradication strategy is the New England Complex Systems Institute (Stopping the Coronavirus Pandemic).
For example, see Pandemic Math, which explains how to change the virus transmission from a growing to a shrinking exponential.
As mentioned earlier, this strategy was successful with the Ebola epidemic in 2014.
Yes, it doesn't help if actors at the federal level actively promote the opposite of what needs to be done or are otherwise inept.
Nonetheless if some communities (and countries) are successful in eradicating the virus, they will become a model for other regions to follow.
So for the US and the EU, what I'm suggesting is a bottom-up approach (region by region) as opposed to a top-down approach.
Quoting ssu
Yes. But I think the motivation here can come from the successes that have already been observed, and from the realization that better or worse outcomes really are, in some sense, up to us. They are not inevitably determined by invisible forces, in this case a virus.
Why didn't influenza stick around? Did it kill too many people back in 1918/19?
Thanks for the links. I'll have a read.
The Spanish Flu most likely was never eradicated, in the sense of going completely extinct - more likely, it mutated into less dangerous forms and may still be circulating. Of course, Covid-19 is very different from a flu virus, so direct comparisons are not apt. Nevertheless, the possibility exists that over time it will similarly evolve into something less lethal, as pathogens in general tend to do.
Quoting Andrew M
Ebola wasn't eradicated though, it is endemic and is certain to reemerge from time to time (in fact there were confirmed cases in April).
In more cheerful news: a (non-peer-reviewed, preclinical) Canadian study shows potential for medical cannabis to treat COVID-19.
Yes, to clarify, the paper just describes outbreaks that were stopped in Sierra Leone and Liberia.
Quoting Yaneer Bar-Yam, How community response stopped Ebola, New England Complex Systems Institute (July 11, 2016).
"At a moment of deep national crisis, Díaz’s party insists that “those who have the most must contribute the most.” The so-called COVID tax is targeted at the superrich, particularly the one thousand largest fortunes in Spain. Under the proposal, net assets over €1 million would be taxed at 2 percent, increasing progressively to 2.5 percent above €10 million, 3 percent above €50 million, and 3.5 percent for wealth over €100 million. The tax would also apply to assets held by Spanish residents outside of the country."
:heart:
Now to expand and accelerate this all over the world - as a minimum.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.11.20062133v1.full.pdf
But under the current Swedish strategy there have been around 4000 deaths, far less than the 52,000 to 183,000 deaths they predicted by this time. It’s frightening that the UK and US used such dangerous nonsense to inform their policies.
Fauci anticipates the second wave in autumn. No one presently expects a vaccine before then. The second wave may arrive as a mutation of the first. In the case of the Spanish Flu of 2018, the first wave was comparatively mild, but the mutation of the autumn was extremely virulent, killing healthy young adults indiscriminately with children and the aged. The economy is already severely damaged, and recovery, if it occurs before the second wave, is likely to be slow because of continuing fears. The stock market seems to be in an almost pathological state of denial, with unemployment at near Depression levels. If the second wave is more deadly than the first, our generation will be the Generation of the Second Great Depression, and like Punnshhh, my concern would be with the potential for political chaos and the rise of megalomaniacs promising recovery from the economic debacle. And so the advice though trite is still good: Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst.
@Frank Pray
My deep condolences.
Quoting StreetlightX
Yes, that’s the idea we struggle for. Why give it up now? @tim wood can’t see the wood for the cynicism.
Quoting tim wood
You’re actually told what you agreed with during the election and what you expect as a consequence. How could it be any different? The people are quite capable of knowing what they need without being told. It’s the ones who didn’t vote for the elected member who are told what’s going to be, obviously because they anticipated something different, hence the dissatisfaction. But if you can’t accept that then you don’t accept democracy.
It makes you wonder what people expect from elections these days.
Actually tim wood has opened up a very interesting angle with which to look at things.
I just searched biopolitics, specifically Michel Foucault. Interesting.
Isn’t Johnson a conservative?
I think in political terms it’s less left and right as it is authoritarian vs libertarian.
How do you know you have a false negative or false positive? If symptomatology is the gold standard, why have testing?
Boris Johnson is an anarcho-communist.
There are several tests. The one that's been giving the most false negatives is a fast test (20 min).
The CDC's test is supposed to be 100% accurate.
False negatives will occur with RT-PCR tests if there isn't enough virus in the sample to be detected. While there's no certainty that a person doesn't have the virus with a negative test, the likelihood can be improved by testing on different days or with different tests.
The good news, as frank notes, is that positive RT-PCR tests are 100% accurate. That is, they only test positive if a unique virus signature is detected.
Whereas false positives are a big issue with serological/antibody tests since the detected antibodies may have been caused by a different infection (including other coronaviruses).
Edit: Clarification about positive RT-PCR tests
I don't believe that's the case.
See the earlier discussion and papers referenced here and here. If you still disagree, do you have a reference?
Note: Clarified comment you responded to in case that was the issue
Chester just blames everything on the left, you know the commies. It's like when someone blames everything on the Democrats.
Your going to get what you want now. Cummings and Johnson have trashed the lockdown now anyway. Although not through careful strategy, but rather a Laurel and Hardy sketch.
Cummings (Laurel) inadvertently spills a can of yellow paint, that was balanced on the top of a door, over Hardy's ( Johnson's) head and then Hardy pulls Laurels trouser front and pours a jug of piranha fish down them. And they both stand there looking like a shambles with a satisfied look on their faces.
Genius!
The media in the UK keep bleating on about Cummings breaking the rules, they pretend they speak for the people and that most people are angry...this is disingenuous...most people in the UK have been breaking the rules, not just Cummings. These rules were created to be broken...to a degree.
The only good news that I can see coming out of this mess is that we redirect our economy to be less dependent on China and the EU.
Even if you ease the social distancing rules, it won't help. We will have the economic downturn independent of easing of lockdown measures. The spike in unemployment and the consequences of social distancing (like basically stopping tourism etc.) will hurt the economy even if you want everything to get back to what it was earlier. Aggregate demand has collapsed. People know that we are in a recession. There's no V-shaped recovery.
The simple reason is that this is over only after the pandemic has gone over.
Those are my concerns as well, not just for the Middle East, but for modern civilization more generally. The pandemic is horrible, but we have survived worse ones in the past. What civilization might not survive is our reaction to this pandemic. If the pandemic undermines the stability of one or more of the major nations of the world the resulting geo-political chaos could prove quite problematic.
In the 1930s we had the Great Depression, a fairly routine and predictable part of the business cycle. The stress of the Depression pushed an already weakened Germany over the edge, causing the German people to reach for drastic solutions which proved to be catastrophic.
In our times globalization has undermined confidence in significant segments of the world's population, causing them to reach for other extreme solutions in a variety of countries.
The modern world is a very delicate and complicated business, and any threat to the status quo has the potential to spin out of control.
Do you have a reference for the 1-8% false positives? I'm curious how those numbers could be arrived at even granting human error or poor lab protocols.
As I understand it, a lab has to initially test samples from a reference lab to demonstrate that they are doing their tests correctly. Secondly, they would normally run controls to rule out issues such as cross-contamination.
Now suppose a sample was contaminated and tests positive. How would anyone know it was a false positive? It seems to me that either they wouldn't know or, if they did (per their controls), they would discard the sample.
A really simple way to understand this is through STRATEGIC RESERVES. Strategic reserves and the ability to produce nationally can be in a crisis (war, pandemic, etc.) a smart thing to do. Usually
There's a fine line between protectionism and having national resilience and an the ability to cope in a situation where the international trade and globalization breaks down for some reason. Having a 100% ability to produce everything domestically is not only overkill, but a recipe for an economic disaster. Basically if you wall off domestic production from global competition, the end result is a very poor and costly industry that lacks competitiveness.
I also feel that as the CCP are responsible for allowing this crisis to escalate that we should apply tariffs to their goods even if that does us short term economic harm...it's not like we'd notice much at the moment lol.
Just as an aside , a chap calling from China on the radio this morning says that he thinks unrest is brewing there, and I believe him...an economic tsunami is going to hit China on the back of this crisis, things could deteriorate rapidly both in terms of internal Chinese friction (revolution?) and China resorting to external force (war with Taiwan/Philippines/Japan ?) to divert attention .
I resign. They're hard to spot with my wonky covid19 eyes.
You'd think that an auto-correct smart enough to automatically change covid to civic, would be able to capitalise an i, but it doesn't even bother to flag it.
Edit: I peeked in the Brexit thread. There's a reason I stay out of it!
Yes. Can't stop thinking about that. I've settled on a hamster.
I don't think viruses are technically considered alive, so they wouldn't be reincarnated: they reincarnate themselves in host cells.
Oh yeah, I'm not pessimistic about the human race's survival. Even if Yellowstone were to blow or there was a squid uprising. Just saying we still have 7 months for current times to get more interesting.
Agreed. I'm not into the doomsday predictions stuff. I think we'll survive climate change as well and civilization will go on in some form.
I do wonder what the response would have been if Covid were a more deadly disease like Smallpox, but with an infection rate of Measles. Something that everyone would truly be afraid of.
Just to make one emphasis on this: a 90% economic "recovery" is a HUGE economic depression of -10%. It is something of epic historical proportions seldom seen in the economic history of various countries.
The early 2020's will suck.
Will it really be a depression? Or will the economy lurch toward online retail in a way that's irreversible?
Plus, could you explain how China deals with an economic downturn vs the American way? I guess the American way at this point is "prop up and pretend everything's fine". What's the Chinese way?
Current times are boring as fuck IMO
I think there's an accurate definition for an economy to be in a depression, but this kind of unemployment will have a big effect. Naturally nobody will admit it, of course.
Quoting frank
It's all about aggregate demand. Rule 1: Unemployed people or those believing that they might be unemployed don't spend as crazy. Rule 2: People are afraid and for a reason about the pandemic, which has already changed their spending habits. 3) Social distancing measures have hit the service sector, which employs the most people.
For comparison, when real estate booms go bust they create the problems because a) people have their life savings usually in real estate and b) houses aren't built by robots in China, but local construction workers. Now, just think how much more does the service sector employ than construction? You can see from the unemployment stats the size.
It's not about China at all, it's about the whole World. My and your country and Sweden or Brazil have already been affected.
Or put it in another way: How would you think aggregate demand would suddenly come back to the prior levels? You think people will start taking that vacation to Italy they were planning to do? You think people are going to buy that new house when people are getting laid of at their work? Are you going out just as you were before the pandemic and do you think other people will do so now when we don't have a vaccine and the pandemic hasn't been declared over?
True, although it may be a survival of the fittest moment. Some american conservatives feel resentful and seem to want to establish their authority by rejecting the new normal. We'll see.
But I was asking how China deals with recessions, or are they like Australia and they've never actually had one?
Solberg says at the end of the article, "I think it was the right to do at the time," she said. "Based on the information we had, we took a precautionary strategy."
Adopting a precautionary strategy is the correct approach when the risk is uncertain and potentially devastating.
Norway is in a good position as a result of their lockdown (they are averaging 15 cases a day compared to Sweden's 500 cases a day). So they shouldn't need to lock down again - other effective and less costly options are available to them.
Yeah, it's better to err on the side of caution than risk something a lot worse.
An alternative strategy is to eliminate the virus. Almost 50 countries (and 7 US states) have less than 20 cases daily. Some such as NZ may already have eliminated it (the protests there will be a test of that).
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/03/covid-19-surgisphere-who-world-health-organization-hydroxychloroquine
What could the motives behind this be?
Money?
Why wasn't the study peer reviewed properly by The Lancet?
None of this was reported in the mainstream media, the public doesn't know, or care anymore.
Never had one?
China knows that the real objective for it is to be like the US: have a huge domestic market and those +1 billion citizens to be as great consumers as Americans and Europeans are. But of course the Chinese in general are far poorer, hence it has had to rely on being an export oriented economy. And if you are an export oriented economy, Global recessions will hit you hard.
Chinese leaders aren't delusional, not it's only a game not to tank even more:
(See article China Abandons Economic Growth Targets Amid Pandemic)
(If you believe Chinese statistics....)
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/06/05/covid-19-cleaning-cdc-says-risky-attempts-kill-virus-may-deadly/3155505001/
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/08/asymptomatic-coronavirus-patients-arent-spreading-new-infections-who-says.html
All that social distancing....for what?
I think that now you start to see the differences with in the numbers, like here in the Nordic countries:
...............Deaths due to COVID-19
Norway: 239(Lock-down)
Finland: 323 (Lock-down)
Denmark: 593 (Lock-down)
SWEDEN: 4694 (No lock-down, just social distancing)
Hence this alteration in policy meant for Sweden multiple times more deaths. And "herd-immunity"? Likely in the Stockholm area well less than 10% have had the epidemic and in other places it's even more rare, hence no herd immunity. (And no, Sweden is only twice as big as Finland / Norway, hence there's really a statistical difference!)
Besides, lock-down or not, all countries in an economic recession. Welcome to the hard economic times:
What is concerning is that we based these policies on insufficient evidence. What was true yesterday is untrue today.
Sweden faired better than other lockdown countries in Europe and elsewhere, so I’m not sure why we’d limit the comparison to Norway, Finland and Denmark. What about the UK, Ireland, Belgium. And Denmark is at 0.34 deaths per million while Sweden is at 0.3.
I wager there would be no such recession had everyone went the Swedish route.
I would call that wager! Just that people likely will not now go to Northern Italy and other tourist placed would mean a lot just by itself. Just the slowdown in China would have effected dramatically the global economy even if the US and Europe would have avoided the pandemic.
Just look at the economic forecasts Sweden has got for this year. And remember that this is a country that didn't shut it restaurants, shops, etc. A GDP growth of -6% is utterly horrible.
Same kind of places and all were in a very similar situation. They aren't the tourist hotspots like Northern Italy or New York. Just to give some reasons.
This is utterly false.
Sweden has 465 deaths per 1 million where Denmark has only 102 as of now.
I think you have to check your stats.
You’re right. I was looking at the rate for today, and not the entirety. Thanks.
I don't know, but everyone outside where I live has pretty much stopped practicing it. Inside to some extent as well. We'll see what happens. The spread seems to vary quite a bit. If this were NYC, people would be a lot more cautious. But things are opening up there as well, and I'm guessing all the protests have somewhat relaxed many people's concerns about the virus.
I think that in the US the pandemic wasn't squashed, but prevailed to spread on a higher level than in other countries: the tail from the height of pandemic isn't at all so low as in other countries, so clearly it looks that the country came out of lock down too soon.
These kind of news tell an ominous situation:
I wonder where the death toll in the US will be in November.
Like a wet dream for "Freedom", ain't it 'Murica?
States' rights in a nutshell.
"Yes, we are having more infections, but the infected are younger hence the death rate is down!"
The UK right wing rags are doing crap like "Lowest Friday increase in deaths since...", it's some real Animal Farm shit.
What is it about selectively reporting almost exclusively favourable sounding out of context statistics to support a political agenda, despite the reality being quite opposite, which is not Animal Farm shit?
https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/florida
Correction. It's already significantly worse than Italy ever was. Italy peaked at 6,000 [s]deaths[/s] new cases per day. Florida had 9,000 new cases yesterday with just one-third of Italy's population.
Talking of animal farm statistics, is that you comparing new cases in one place with deaths in another?
Typo. Figures are both for new cases. Fixed. Cheers for pointing that out.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/
"UK Coronavirus Death Toll Increases by 36 in one of the lowest rises during lockdown"
Just keeps going and going...
The oxymoron was right wing doing Animal Farm. It's like Marxists privatizing industry, pacifists rearming, etc...
Well, at least it is fortunate for the UK that you aren't in the situation of the US where the containment failed.
Except it's not a figure of speech for rhetorical effect, UK Covid statistics are being reported in tabloids in exactly that way and for a clear political agenda. It's not like Bolshevik Russia, or left wing politics in general, has a monopoly on weaponising statistics for a political agenda.
Yet it's not so different as it is with the situation in the US.
I don't think they forge them either. You don't need to forge anything to get true statistics that can spin to what you like. The overall number of cases in the UK is going down in general, BUT since easing the lockdown there's obviously been an uptick in the growth of new cases since the lockdowns were eased. When it was the apocalypse the same newspapers alternatively underplayed it or mined coronavirus for doomy clickbait while presenting it as a force of nature, now it's not the apocalypse everything is fine.
While Leicester locked down again the other day. Bradford, Barnsley, Doncaster and other towns are showing increases and may follow next.
Meanwhile big surges in many states in the US, I heard a report of over 50,000 newly identified cases in the last 24hrs.
Likewise on super Saturday, the day after tomorrow, if lots of people go to pubs, get drunk and spread the virus, it will be their fault, because they didn't use their common sense. Again the government is blameless.
A poll for the Robert Peston show yesterday has shown that twice as many people think the breakdown in the lockdown is the fault of the people, as those who blame the government.
The in depth analysis is that since the early eighties the governance and direction of the country has been leaning towards less and less social support, national provision and more and more privatisation, individual responsibility in all areas of life. The idea being that the government increasingly absolves itself of responsibility, which is increasingly left to the individual and the market. So now that we have a health crisis, the responsibility is laid at the door of the individual (in the land of the free), the government only coveys the advice of the experts, but is itself blameless. Free to take the credit for any successes and blame any failures on others.
The upshot of this is that the privelidged classes are freed to do whatever they want, while their puppet government is untouchable. This naturally includes a free reign for more untrammelled capitalism and exploitation, with the increases in the social and wealth divide.
The anti-hydoxychloroquine group reminds me of anti-vaxers.
Absolutely delicious irony, thanks for the laugh. Not much self-awareness on this one, I see.
I did. It's an encouraging study.
Just out of curiosity: once "they" come up with a Vaccine with maybe a 25% protection, but not really sure of the long term side affects other than defying death, are you going to be at the front of the line?
And, AND those who do not get in line for a year? Are they going to be labeled "anti vaxer"?
The very idea of flagging people who chose not to be at the front of the line is absurd but absurdity is overriding common sense as of late.
My Indian said tagging people who have had the virus and is 'immune' is really close to dividing our society even further. I asked what makes him think that way and I got an eye roll from him when I had to be reminded of the Jewish tattooing of numbers.
I'm actually grateful that this next generation of leaders have not forgotten the past. :sparkle:
I don't think exercising caution with an untested treatment (as you've described it) is equivalent to idiotic claims that the measles vaccine causes autism.
Quoting ArguingWAristotleTiff
Flagging Jews for extermination isn't a good analogy to identifying those who no longer pose a threat of infecting others. We do it already anyway. If you don't get certain vaccines, you're identified and kept from getting a public education. I don't believe in anyone's right to infect others.
That walks a fine line with this virus as antibody testing is inconclusive at best. Mutations happen and we could have a new virus before we have an antibody test sensitive enough to pick it up.
In the last two months Nick was tested multiple times for active COVID 19, with results available in minutes of the test being performed, negative each time.
However two antibody tests run on my Indian came back negative with a qualifier that it could be inaccurate. Suggestion from the Doctor is to try another lab in a month as the tests are constantly evolving.
Forgive me but I will let you go first in getting the vaccines?
These inaccuracies aren't limited to coranavirus, so why take such a hard line on coronavirus specifically. Are you generally opposed to medical science?
Anyway, you've not pointed out a danger to the vaccine, but only suggested it might not work.
The dead people ought to get the relief, especially those who died of covid. They'll probably get to vote too.
Viruses mutate regularly -- true. Generally these mutations are very minor and do not prevent a given test from recognizing the virus. Why? Because the surface proteins on the virus would have to mutate quite a bit before a typical test would fail to recognize it.
HIV mutates all the time, but the HIV tests still detect it.
Is your son at particular risk of contracting Covid19? Has he been symptomatic? Is he taking the recommended mask-wearing and physical distancing advice?
Quoting ArguingWAristotleTiff
They'll be labeled antivaxxers IF they practice non-vaccination for reliably preventable and serious infectious diseases, like measles, polio, influenza, and so on.
Whether to take a Covid19 vaccine involves a very standard risk calculation: is the expected risk of the vaccine greater than the risk of serious infection (and illness) by Covid19? People make these risk calculations all the time: Is the risk of an auto accident driving 300 miles worth the pleasure of seeing a ball game? Is the risk of sexually transmitted infections worth the satisfactions of unprotected sex? Is the enhanced flavor of unpasteurized goat cheese worth the risk of a very unpleasant gastrointestinal infection?
I had influenza in 1968--a particularly bad strain; it made me very sick. I've had pneumonia, and that was pretty bad. So, I consider the risk of a vaccine less than the risk of a combo Covid19 / pneumonia infection, plus the additional adverse consequences of the infection.
A younger person in robust health MIGHT conclude that the disease isn't worth the risk of a vaccine. Of course, the person in robust health and youth might end up being an exquisite corpse.
What I am trying to show is that there ARE accurate live COVID 19 tests that are capable of giving scientific results within minutes in the medical system but is not yet available to the general public.
Why do you think that is? Is a 24 to 48 hr turn around time for such results sufficient to help Jane public help herself and by doing so help others?
Quoting Hanover
The danger I was referring to (which may have never happened with any vaccines, I truly don't know) is any long term negative health affects.
Is there an inherent risk in letting people receive a COVID 19 vaccine that implies? Suggests? Promises? that they are immune against COVID 19 and it turns out to only cover 25% of the population? Would you have a family member over the age of 70 get the first version?
What about those who have comorbodites?
• Visual evidence of how face masks work
• Visualizing Speech-Generated Oral Fluid Droplets with Laser Light Scattering
I'm doubtful the underfunded IRS could've reasonably be expected to do better but even so.
Seems Trump both "kills the messenger" and "sticks his head in the sand"?
I legitimately hope this son of a bitch drops dead.
Barring that, if someone could stab him in the stomach again, this time with a bigger and more serrated knife, that would be fine too.
I'm totally surprised though that their economy took the same hit as the other countries in Europe already.
I'm not.
Remember that they still are a rather small export oriented country and all it takes is the global economy to get a mild flew and Sweden (just like us here) is down and out for the count. And if one third of the population voluntarily self isolated themselves, that in itself has a devastating effects on any economy. Remember that there isn't much leeway in the modern economic machine of our time, so even a minor hickup will have large consequences. Now you are looking at an economic abyss in Europe, so it's a major hickup, not a minor one.
Just wondering, how so? Why? I know I've seen that in reports, but even if it was a natural adaptation in lab, why wouldn't one look at the possibility that it may have escaped from a lab that was actually studying the disease located in the city of its origin? That seems suspect. These type of lab leaks happen more than people think. Its just never been this worldwide a consequence.
Here's a decent article:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01541-z
Now, again, speculative, but if the main way this virus transmits so easily is the furin cleavage site, that could be one of two things.
1) It is known in nature as a way a virus can spread more easily as an adaptation.
2) If it has been known in nature to spread the virus more easily, it would also be something that can be manipulated to make the virus transmit more easily in humans for gain of function research.
I don't see how 1 would necessarily prevent 2's possibility. In fact, it might even make more sense for 2. Sure, 1 can imply that this happens in nature. But to then say, "So this rules out a lab" would be false logic. And in fact, can be countered as a reason, the lab would favor this mutation.
Also, it is still very suspect that the origin seems to be in a city with a P4 laboratory that itself studies coronaviruses. Why should that be taken as "just" a coincidence? Odd.
Just because there is no direct letter from someone from the lab, or whatnot also does not rule out that it didn't come from the lab. Direct evidence from actual lab members can be suppressed or any direct evidence hidden. It is especially interesting that China does not want inspectors in the lab. But I don't think it is unusual, even in Western countries to get nervous about questions related to highly infectious deadly viruses. These labs are in many countries, with many types of similar research. But, certainly politically, economically, etc. there would be incentive to suppress this. However, China itself would be able to more than other countries, suppress the press, investigations, and evidence in this case. So there is even more ability to hide I would think in a country with so little transparency anyways. However, my point is that you can even take China's specific ability to hide information more easily out of the equation, and there would still be obvious reasons to suppress this that any country might take to not inform the public perhaps.
Now, it may be there was no gain of function research. Perhaps the virus naturally adapted in the lab. That can happen, even while studying it. Or it could have infected a host from the lab and evolved in that host and spread.
I'm just saying because there's not something like a lab worker's suicide note that he mistakenly let out a virus or something, does not mean that this discredits the theory. There is a lot of circumstantial evidence that indeed can point to a lab leak.
I'm also not saying that it cannot be a natural occurrence, but certainly I don't think evidence has ruled out the idea of a lab, actually studying similar viruses could be the origin of this particular one.
What has been largely dismissed is various claims of genetic "proof" that the virus was engineered by gene splicing. I believe there was some Indian studies, or just one study, that sparked off these claims.
More famously, there's a French researcher, Luc Montagnier, accredited with discovering HIV causing AIDS, who claims the corona virus is for certain has a genetic splice of HIV, that it can't be natural. In the same interview, he makes the bizarre followup claims, to paraphrase, "that because it's unnatural, it is not in harmony with nature and thus will evolve away and be gone [by about nowish]" as well as an unrelated claim about his current research into the potential for electromagnetic waves to cure viral diseases. The interview is available here; this was right-wing super-juice as it both simultaneously supports the Wuhan lab origin hypothesis, China's attacked the US if you want to spin things that way, and supports the notion that the threat of the virus is completely overblown as it's not "natural" (supporting, as a subpoint, that the hubris of such scientists is ultimately futile against the power of God's maintained natural balance which is also why climate change isn't a threat) and so is already gone by nowish, and it's clams by a Nobel prize winner so "lefty-facty" people are hypocrites for not believing it wholesale. Unfortunately, the liberal media is so science illiterate and simply corrupt that this sort of highly dubious claims from someone already approved by the establishment cannot be dealt with.
Picking apart the claims is a pretty simple task.
Luc Montagnier supports the HIV engineered hypothesis based on the mathematical permutations required to create the same gene. Even assuming the gene is the same as HIV and a the mathematical permutations requires astronomical (i.e. even if the premises are correct, which I'm not sure about but don't need to bother to even check) the conclusions doesn't follow since viruses do not all evolve independently but share genetic information between them all the time. Someone infected with HIV, or an animal with a related virus, then infected with the coronavirus could pass the HIV gene to coronavius. Indeed, if the gene in question is what makes coronavirus so effective (the motivation for engineering into the virus in the first place) then it also has an advantage in transferring around in natural hosts as it provides the new virus with an immense advantage.
In other words, this "Nobel Prize" winner doesn't understand the basics of his own domain of expertise.
The even more bizarre claim that the virus is "non-harmonious" and therefore will just go away, doesn't even have a plausible mechanism, as the viral replication lines (chains of replication from one cell to another, one host to another) are happening all over the globe and at very different rates or replication, and there is simply no mechanism available to coordinate all these viral lineages to somehow peter-out.
His current research on radiation curing viral diseases is far fetched enough that a credible person realizes some basic proof of concept is required to entertain the idea; such as breaking apart suspended virus particles with EM frequencies (at energy levels well below what would just ionize or then cook the whole body). I.e. a credible person would preamble with such research, or then focus on these steps of proof of concept that could eventually lead to therapeutic application down the road. Presented as he does, it simply sounds completely delusional, and that he is engaged in some macabre program of trial and error of microwaving lot's of mice (and to the small mind of the bureaucrat, if a Nobel Prize winner wants to microwave some mice, it's not like anyone's proved otherwise; if we can broadcast television, why not health?).
However, as , points out, there's no way to rule out a lab origin, either by accident or on purpose, and any credible analysis must admit that if the premises are true, the conclusion still maybe true; and even if the conclusion isn't true, it doesn't rule out other bio-engineering techniques; therefore, it's better to ignore the issue altogether, and fuel claims of a conspiracy to suppress these sorts of claims (which, to be clear, there is a conspiracy between corporate media owners and executives to shape public discourse, and spinning a lack of evidence of one claim as positive proof of the opposing claim, that also lacks evidence, is a manifestation of this conspiracy to shape public discourse; there is only, ironically, a much stronger conspiracy in right wing media to shape right-wing discourse to be so far removed from reality, for instance repeating the idea that they are the real intellectuals and the more liberal media the real conspiracy funded by Soros and run by cultural Marxists et. al., that public discourse more generally is not even possible).
That's the first knee-jerk response I had too, but as from some of the comments above, I wouldn't put this in the folder of "Pizzagate level conspiracies" yet. Schopenhauer 1 makes a point with the fact that coronavirus was indeed researched at the Wuhan lab, so I wouldn't erase the possibility yet:
See article Wuhan lab had three live bat coronaviruses, but none matched COVID-19
But naturally it doesn't matter, except that Trump gets a talking point. What is done now is the issue what really matters.
The real issue is that we may have this pandemic going on for far longer than we anticipated. And now with for example California closing up again, it's quite obvious we aren't heading for any kind of economic recovery. And where the US goes, goes the the World Economy. Even if other countries may have tackled the worst of the pandemic for now.
Yes all this stuff you mention sounds like bullshit, and I was not referring to this, or any similar-dubious claim, so this is kind of a non-sequitor to my claim, though interesting to learn the nutty theories out there. What this does prove is that, the nutty theories will detract from legitimate, more logical straightforward ones surrounding lab leaks and at least a likelihood of it given the evidence (location of origin, P4 lab, gain of function research being a real thing, governments being embarrassed or hurt by something like this, etc.).
Quoting boethius
Yes, this is what I was getting at above to your other section.. The discourse has drowned out sound evidence.. Because of nutballs on the right creating a political spin, it is "right-wing". And then left-wing amplifies this notion making it moot when in fact, it has more than enough circumstantial evidence to be a real possibility. It needs to be divorced from the political discourse though, especially about "nefarious" intentions, bioweapons, etc. Rather, this looks like a case of what is more common- a lab leak. It is also probably a real possibility it was known and is (or trying to be) covered up due to various political, economic, scientific embarrassment, fallout, etc..
SSU, c'mon though.. So one quote from someone at the lab saying "“In fact, like everyone else, we didn’t even know the virus existed,” she said. “How could it have leaked from our lab when we never had it?” Magically puts the issue at rest? Case over.. One research lead strenuously denies ever working with the virus and that puts the issue to rest?
Also, as I stated, it may have been a virus that evolved at the lab (not intentional), and got out. Though that might be harder to prove. Also, what animals are they working with in the lab? Will investigators get to see this? What things might be missing to indicate any connection?
Your first question is has this been talked about. These theories, which we agree are bullshit, have been talked about the most, as far as I have been able to see.
Because of the nutty arguments supporting a lab origin, the liberal media has avoided the subject; usually choosing to imply that the debunking of nutty theories means that the basic idea has also been debunked.
I am simply providing context for your observation that this subject hasn't been talked about a lot.
I make it very clear this is not in relation to your statements, just how about the public discourse (one side has talked about it a lot, advancing nutty theories about it as deflection of excuses for Trump, and the liberal media has largely taken the position that to entertain the lab origin hypothesis is to support Trump).
I make this clear by clearly stating:
Quoting boethius
I agree it's completely possible that the virus has a lab origin; I have mentioned this possibility on this very forum months ago.
However, as far as I know there is no hard evidence that it is lab origin, only circumstantial evidence. The problem with circumstantial evidence is that it's difficult to calculate probabilities because it's difficult to identify independent variables, dependent variables, cause and effect (without which calculations are nonsensical).
For instance: is the proximity of the outbreak to the Wuhan lab, that studied coronaviruses, likely due to the Wuhan lab releasing the virus? Or, does the Wuhan lab study coronaviruses as they have access to the same viral reservoir from which a pandemic would also likely emerge? Or was the virus discovered near the Wuhan lab because the Wuhan lab is able to study these viruses, but the real original outbreak was elsewhere but ability to collect evidence decreases radically the further into the past and the further away from such labs (early transmission chains of novel viruses can meander a lot, due to the chaotic nature of statistics at small numbers but also because the virus may require an incubation period of, on average only ever so slightly greater than 1 replication rate, to build up mutations to arrive at higher replication rates to cause outbreaks). Or, is there enough bio-labs close to enough population centers that an outbreak at random weighted for how people happen to be distributed is simply likely to happen "suspiciously close" to a lab without any relation between the lab and the outbreak one way or another.
In terms of historical political circumstantial evidence, is the timing of the pandemic likely because "it was the right time to release a pandemic to implement further surveillance measures with contact tracing as an excuse, cause global chaos in which killing protests in Hong Kong is convenient and "maybe it's genocide" of Muslims forgotten, without much fear of losing relative power because the incompetence of Trump ensures the virus won't be managed well in the US and there's little risk of auto-inflicting a large comparative economic wound (such as in the scenario that all flights are stopped to China to contain the virus until China is virus free, that the West simply manages things well generally to prevent and control outbreaks (such as SARS 1)" or is it likely "the governing incompetence of Trump the cause of dismantling the global pandemic response system, international coordination to respond to crisis more generally, and that pandemic potential outbreaks are happening regularly (SARS, Ebola, MERS, Swineflu), that high volume plane travel has rendered this sort of situation explosive for a while, but risks have been mitigated "just ever so slightly competently enough" and getting rid of these suppression mechanisms was simply lifting the lid on the whole thing and a pandemic the expected result." Or, was this virus simply the "100 year" emergence of a "sweet spot virus" impossible to contain, and that such a virus emerging at any time will have always historical circumstances supporting one political narrative or another (political intrigue, great power rivalry, winners and losers in a globally disruptive event, being more or less constant explanatory elements).
So, it's difficult to come to definite conclusions based on circumstantial evidence, but we are in agreement that the possibilities are worth entertaining as simply "the state of knowledge at the moment is open on the issue" as well as for the fact evidence may accumulate in one direction or another over time.
The virus was not engineered. This possibility was explicitly debunked by the science.
That certainly leaves the possibility it might have accidentally come from the lab but lets look at the possibilities here.
1. It escaped a lab that has at least some measures in place to avoid the escape and spread of a virus.
2. It spread at one of those live markets, which have been considered a brewery for new viruses for years, which markets have exactly 0 measures in place to avoid this.
3. The PRC did it on purpose for vague and uncertain politics goals in exchange for predictable economic damage.
I'll give 1 a .9% chance, 2 a 99% chance and the last .1%.
I agree. And since no government in the World would be indifferent about the possibility that it really did get out of a laboratory by accident and just reply "Sorry about that!", it will be genuinely hard to prove this (or disprove). We may never know.
More like 1. a 0,999% and 3. a 0,001% as option 3 doesn't make any sense at all.
(If someone argues 1. is of 10%-20% chance, who knows.)
I assumed this was a typo or autocorrect the first time, but do you somehow own an “Indian” person or something?
Also while I’m here, fuck Mitch McTurtleFace for not allowing the senate to even consider extending further aide even now that America is the global hotbed of the pandemic.
We’re going to see some pretty insane economic collapse once the eviction moratoriums and the enhanced unemployment end in a few weeks. Remember who to blame when that happens.
And that evidence, assuming there would be that, likely isn't coming out from the Chinese authorities.
Anyway, I'd have to have the knowledge of my father, as he is a professor of virology, to make any comment of the probabilities or other issues involved here.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Parents still use the genitive when talking about their children, I guess.
You're confusing evidence with proof, due to your fear that simply entertaining the hypothesis fuels Trump supporters.
Furthermore, my analysis was based on the assumption that the premises under consideration are true (I haven't bothered to check as it changes little). If the premises are true, that there is an HIV gene in coronavirus that is the key to it's success, then this is indeed evidence of genetic manipulation. It is not proof, however, which I explain in my analysis as there are other explanations for the gene being there.
Likewise, "que beuno" is evidence that the benefiting party may have been motivated to create such a benefit. If we look at the outcomes, China has indeed benefited in terms of increasing mass surveillance, shutting down Hong Kong independent governance (whatever was left of it) and also benefits from the chaos in the United States. These elements are simply true and cannot be ignored, they are evidence.
Again, I go to some lengths to explain they are not proof, as there are other explanations that account for the same pieces of evidence. Indeed, a global disruptive event will create winners and losers, so if it was completely random emergence of the virus of course someone will benefit. A property owner may benefit from the insurance money from a fire, it is not proof that it's arson, but it is evidence that there was potential motivation.
To be clear, I am not taking sides here. We know pandemics occur naturally (as they happened before genetic engineering) but we also know bio-warfare and lab accidents happen. Random emergence of the virus is completely adequate to explain what we see, even moreso in combination with Trump weakening pandemic institutional preparedness. However, we also can surmise that if the pandemic was deliberate (China being only one of many suspects) that it would be made to seem as natural as possible and numerical analysis would be used to design both the qualities of virus as well as the initial outbreak circumstances.
I see lot's of evidence that can be called on to support lot's of theories. I see no proof of any one theory, however, nor even a leading candidate.
This is an arbitrary weighting of the system. My guess is there are other wet markets in China and the world. This one happened to have a virus lab studying coronavirus in it :chin:. I'd up the percentage on 2. I do agree that 3 is much less likely and more along the lines of the crazy conspiracy theories.
I think lab leaks happen more often than we think. It just hasn't had this bad a consequence until now, if it is the case that it escaped from a lab.
Again, it could be that the virus adapted in the lab under its own evolutionary conditions. Either way, many powers that be, may not like this scenario and would not want this to be well-known. Certainly, there is strong incentives to cover-up any association of the lab with the virus.
Sigh. No, I'm not. I'm not going to condense months of criminal law study in a single post to explain this to you. Look it up.
All you have is a theory.
So you hang your hat on that argument. It could be a coincidence that the virus started in a the wet market in the same city as a virus lab studying the virus. I agree. Or it could have been a coronavirus that leaked from the virus lab studying this virus. There are many other wet markets. But it coincidentally started from this one. Also, the first known case cannot be traced back to the wet market itself.
The coincidence makes it more than tangentially related. Your binary argument revolves around this one idea of lab leaks being less likely than wet market outbreaks.
And yes, viruses can be escaped.. Decontamination failures, logistical failures, equipment failures, human error, or any number of things. It's happened before. It just depends how deadly the virus is and how immediate the response for the consequence. It's happened enough to not rule it out.
The Chinese government also responded with extreme suppression of information. Yes, the Chinese government doesn't like any bad news. Any country wouldn't want the bad press. Obviously, the government's policy is hide misshaps, whether from nature or human. But it seems to me there would be more at stake here that would cause intentional delaying.. more than if this was a virus in a remote province wet market or other area where this might have taken place.
The missing evidence that you seem to be alluding to is some sort of strain that is closer to the pandemic strain that the lab has. This may be found out eventually.. But things can also be hidden, etc. Why aren't people allowed directly in the lab? There are certain things that one can explain away.. but if you do that enough times, you are now actively trying to discount the theory rather than weighing all possibilities.
None of this has to do with supporting a political position either. Dr. Trummpypants doesn't know what the fuck he is talking about almost all the time.. Every once in a while he'll mistakenly say something partially correct based probably on some passing briefings that where he remembered some tidbit without the full understanding of the nuance.. So I am not trying to put some weird Trump spin on this, or right-wing, or whatever. So we must look at the nuances of the possibilities and not at how it is associated with political propaganda.
It's not hanging my hat anywhere, it's dealing with the available evidence. If there is no evidence the lab was involved, then all we can conclude is "coincidence".
If you track the discourse on this; it started as "it was engineered", but this had been proved already not to be the case (boethius' HIV nonsense is just a variation on that) and now the new conspiracy is "it escaped from the lab". The only reason being it happens to share locality. That's no reason or evidence for anything.
Edit: let me try with another example. Say you buy a car from a used cars salesman. You pay too much and the car shows problems. You suspect he does this on purpose and even find out other buyers paid too much for cars with obvious problems. Then you still have no evidence for intent. So you suspect he's a fraud but you're not going to argue it because you don't have the evidence. Even if you proved intent for all the other buyers this says nothing about your particular case.
Here the "evidence" doesn't even rise to that level. Even if every lab in the past had leaked a virus at some point in time then you still have exactly 0 evidence for it having happened this time.
So now we are speaking a bit different languages. I am speaking in likelihoods and you are speaking of direct evidence. I am saying that there is a higher likelihood based on circumstances of the case, not that there is right now any direct evidence.
Let me be clear.. I am not saying that I definitely think it was from the lab. It could be the case that this is from crossover somewhere else. However, the right questions have to be asked and investigated. To do a fair investigation, all the evidence has to be available. I honestly don't know how much cooperation is happening, but I do no know that WHO investigators are supposed to go to China to investigate origins. Are they going to be impartial? Are they going to get as much evidence as they can for every avenue of possibility?
Here is a helpful set of questions that the WHO should probably be asking.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/who-led-mission-may-investigate-pandemic-s-origin-here-are-key-questions-ask
We were talking about evidence all the time since that's what I replied to (the idea of circumstantial evidence being available). If you want to talk probabilities this is a different discussion altogether. Like the example of the used car salesman, the other victims make the likelihood of intent much higher in your particular case. But it's still not evidence though.
Dude, have you read the wikipedia entry on "evidence"?
Quoting evidence
If there is an HIV gene in coronavirus that is evidence, a "fact of the case" (and, please note, I say "assuming this is true" in my analysis), that would need to be established if one wanted to argue that the virus was genetically engineered with HIV (if other evidence came to light, such as testimony of a researcher claiming they were involved in mixing HIV and coronavirus, it would of course be necessary to establish whether HIV genes really are in coronavirus in the first place, because it's important evidence to such an argument).
I go to some lengths to explain that even if this evidence was true (HIV genes are in coronavirus), Luc Montagnier argument is unsound because there's other natural explanations for why a gene may appear both in HIV and coronavirus; viruses transfer genes all the time between each other in nature. However, if there's such a gene, it is still a fact of the case: a piece of evidence. Only much more evidence would be required to conclude that it was indeed genetically engineered.
I go to some lengths to explain why Luc Montagnier argument makes little sense. However, he does have a Nobel Prize for work on HIV, so it's difficult to to just dismiss his claims prima faci, without some analysis.
And, I would argue, it's this sort of intellectual dishonesty -- using "Nobel Prize" as a bludgeon of expertise when Nobel Prize winners support something the left supports (such as action is needed on climate change), but summarily dismissed when a Nobel winner says something "against the narrative" -- is what help fuel Trump supporters.
Luc Montagnier argument definitely sounds like "bullshit", as put it, which I agree with. However, it's still bullshit coming from a Nobel Prize winner, so can't just be ignored; simply ignoring it fuels the right wing spin machine's projection of their own intellectual dishonesty upon the left.
I also go to some lengths to explain why circumstantial evidence, such as "que bueno" or the proximity to the lab to the outbreak, as wikipedia says, "does not rule out other, contradictory assertions". It's still evidence though, just not something, in itself, that establishes any strong conclusions. I literally say:
Quoting boethius
I then go on to explain that the same circumstantial evidence can be accounted for in completely different theories.
Circumstantial evidence is not strong evidence, but it is still in the category of "evidence" that can participate in the "facts of the case" (such as a insurance payout for a fire participating to establish motive for setting the fire; if there was no evidence of an insurance payout, it becomes much more difficult to argue there was motivation to achieve such thing); of course, only the circumstantial evidence of insurance payouts doesn't prove anything, much more evidence would be needed; but the basic fact of the insurance policy existing is still relevant among such a further body of evidence for insurance fraud.
The word "evidence" is literally right in the label "circumstantial evidence".
But please, prey tell, what would I learn in months of your criminal law tutoring that would illuminate me to the errors in the wikipedia entry so that I may correct it for the benefit of all mankind?
Though I agree with your general position vis-a-vis @Benkei, that circumstantial evidence is still evidence we need to consider (if only to guide further investigation as you point out), it is not correct to say, at this time, "there is a higher likelihood" it is a lab accident.
To arrive at such a conclusion, we'd need to build numerical models of the different scenarios. To conclude the outbreak was "suspiciously close" to the lab in the first place, we'd need a statistical model that tells us the places where a pandemic outbreak is likely (population center, close contact with viral reservoirs) and some average distance to labs that study such viruses. If labs that study viruses are closely correlated with reservoirs and population centers within which an outbreak is most likely, then we can't really conclude anything based on the location of the outbreak and the location of the lab.
People have literally gone to jail based on statistical evidence (provided by legit statisticians) that didn't bother to run the null hypothesis scenario (which goes to show how easy these mistakes are to make).
So, until running the null hypothesis of the expected distance between labs that study viruses and completely independent outbreaks of those viruses, we can't do much with simply the distance between the outbreak and the lab. We may find that the lab will be likely in the city center, as that's where people work, and the first noticeable outbreak will likely be in the city center because that's where people are densely packed together to support a really noticeable outbreak.
It's still circumstantial evidence (a fact of the case that there is a lab at some distance to the outbreak), but we cannot conclude this circumstantial evidence renders any scenario "more likely" without actual
statistical models and calculations (which would be a lot of work).
Where there is stronger evidence is the claim employees of the lab had a side business of selling research animals to the exotic animal market that has been identified as the likely source of the initial outbreak.
But let's first consider how @Benkei is able to show this also wouldn't count as evidence even if it was true (which I am not claiming it is true, there are propaganda efforts from state actors spinning things one way or another; so I am fairly skeptical of any given purported fact).
And to be abundantly clear, whatever the origin of the virus, Trump has been completely incompetent in managing the crisis, and the virus origin issue in the right wing spin machine is largely to deflect from this, invoking mostly unsound or preposterous theories. However, not analyzing things properly, that revealing an argument to be unsound does not establish that the conclusions are untrue (if we have no sound and valid argument to the contrary, which at the moment we don't), in my opinion helps the right wing spin machine as they can point to these flaws in reasoning.
At the moment there is simply no strong evidence for any scenario; we cannot exclude natural random emergence, we cannot exclude a lab accident, we cannot exclude deliberate design and release (researchers who claim "there's no genetic evidence the virus is engineered", such as the lancet paper on this topic, are not considering what equally, or more, skilled actors would do to try to outwit exactly such an analysis, and it's simply intellectually dishonest to not entertain such a scenario; what's possible at the cutting edge of biowarfare we civilians simply don't know, and I would wager that of such people who do have cutting edge biowarfare expertise and have formed analysis on the coronavirus origin are state secrets on every side at the moment. For instance, considering:
Quoting BBC
We can note Dr Lentzos doesn't tell us the actual content of these quiet behind-the-scene discussions of the biosecurity expert community.
This lack of knowledge about the cutting edge doesn't establish anything, but it is simply intellectually honest to admit we don't know what a sophisticated actor would be able to do). In my view, if tempting right wing reality deniers to exit the right wing spin machine is possible at all, it is by demonstrating the highest standards of intellectual honesty, and foregoing the use of the jump to conclusions mat on all occasions.
There can be lot's of motivations to create a pandemic from both state and non-state actors and there are means, both known and unknown, to find or craft the "sweet spot" virus; this scenario is relevant as, if it is true, such actors may have more planned for us so it would be best to find them out if they exist and, if they don't have further nefarious undertakings, seeking justice for the crime is a noble thing in itself.
Likewise, laboratory leaks happen; this scenario is relevant because, if it is true, it is best to know how it happened and review and increase lab standards accordingly.
Pandemics can occur naturally, if this is true of this case, it is best to know this to be able to understand how to avoid or contain such naturally occurring pandemics in the future.
In all cases, the world's institutions, in particularly the US, were woefully incompetent in managing the pandemic, and the origin of the virus should not, in any case, deflect from such failure and what it says about the people in charge at the moment as well as the neoliberal ideological approach to government (not mandating private enterprise have a stockpile of PPE for a known threat because it is more profitable for them to have only just-in-time supply lines, not shutting down air travel early because it would decrease airline stock and best to err on the side of airline stock, not nationalizing and rationing essential supplies so as not to set a precedent that government can more efficiently manage resources relative a crisis as well as ensure corrupt investor interests can make bank off the crisis, bailing out corporations and not people, and in the case of the US, not having universal health-care and other social safety-net institutions that allow the population and political system to weather these sorts of crisis without massive avoidable suffering, along with all the other day-to-day reasons to have such institutions).
I am willing to analyse the origins of the virus honestly, which at the moment my honest analysis is we don't know the origins (the circumstantial evidence we currently have can fit all sorts of mutually exclusive theories fine and dandy), and in exchange I can more easily expect honest evaluation of the failures of neoliberalism as a governing ideology and the right-wing fact denying enterprise and its role in supporting neoliberal ideology along with even more extreme delusions that even centrist mainstream neoliberals want to move away from.
Quoting boethius
What he said. I'm just saying we can't discount it, and I also provided an article with good questions to ask, from a reputable science magazine. Here are the questions in that article, that they thought the WHO should be investigating pertaining to the lab:
[quote=https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/who-led-mission-may-investigate-pandemic-s-origin-here-are-key-questions-ask]What experiments with bat coronaviruses took place at WIV? This is the mother of all questions for those who suspect SARS-CoV-2 came out of the facility. Accidental releases do happen, and one even triggered a pandemic: An influenza strain that surfaced in 1977 was linked to strains in Russian labs collected 2 decades earlier. Is it possible that somebody at WIV became infected with the virus and then passed it on to others outside the lab? It’s unknown which bat viruses WIV has in its collection of samples and whether any of them infect humans. And a controversy surrounds the closest bat virus to SARS-CoV-2, which is called RaTG13. As Shi and co-workers reported, they only fully sequenced this virus after SARS-CoV-2 surfaced and they looked through their database for potential relatives. (The group often sequences only one small region of bat coronaviruses genomes that mutates infrequently, so changes indicate distinct viruses.) A great deal of speculation has circled around the naming of the partial sequence: Shi’s group earlier had reported a virus named BtCoV/4991 that exactly matches RaTG13 in that small region, but are they one and the same? Or could it be, as some assert, that BtCoV/4991 is SARS-CoV-2 itself? What other bat coronaviruses has the lab yet to fully sequence? Could any of them offer clues?
Another outstanding question is whether Shi’s team or other researchers in Wuhan manipulated bat viruses in “gain-of-function” experiments that can make a virus more transmissible between humans. In 2015, Shi co-authored a paper that made a chimeric SARS virus by combining one from bats with a strain that had been adapted to mice. But that work was done at the University of North Carolina, not in Wuhan, and in collaboration with Ralph Baric. Did Shi’s group later carry out other gain-of-function studies in Wuhan—and if so, what did they find?
Finally, diplomatic cables from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing in 2018 warned that a new, ultra-high security lab at WIV had “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators.” Did Shi’s team ever work with coronaviruses in that lab, and, if so, why?[/quote]
Have you paid attention at all these past months? Scientists have already looked into the possibility of it being engineered and it has been waylaid as has been discussed in this very thread. Jeez. https://www.newscientist.com/term/coronavirus-come-lab/
No. Evidence.
Edit: To add: you have a hypothesis and the questions you quote are the questions to ask to test this. As in any criminal case, you should ask the questions that would disprove the hypothesis. By failing to find evidence of the hypothesis being false, you'll most likely find evidence in favour of the hypothesis. However, you should try to disprove it nonetheless to avoid confirmation bias.
Agreed.. Nothing should just be taken as "proven" because there is no evidence on the other side.
Interesting article from April in The Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/
Here is an interesting part to keep in mind:
[quote=https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/]The Chinese government, meanwhile, has put a total lockdown on information related to the virus origins. Beijing has yet to provide U.S. experts with samples of the novel coronavirus collected from the earliest cases. The Shanghai lab that published the novel coronavirus genome on Jan. 11 was quickly shut down by authorities for “rectification.” Several of the doctors and journalists who reported on the spread early on have disappeared.
On Feb. 14, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for a new biosecurity law to be accelerated. On Wednesday, CNN reported the Chinese government has placed severe restrictions requiring approval before any research institution publishes anything on the origin of the novel coronavirus.
The origin story is not just about blame. It’s crucial to understanding how the novel coronavirus pandemic started because that informs how to prevent the next one. The Chinese government must be transparent and answer the questions about the Wuhan labs because they are vital to our scientific understanding of the virus, said Xiao.[/quote]
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/15/coronavirus-contracts-government-transparency-pandemic?fbclid=IwAR0Oo3uEwgXNNGJxS7MPf6fM3DvPaC1UZ6cC4KGeqS0kv3e0GqWxB70lJIg
Discuss, making sure to lay to one side the sods, so they can be replaced over the graves, or wherever the bad news is being buried.
Gaia is angry, and so am I.
You mean those who formerly voted labour that didn't get excited about Jeremy Corbyn last time? :snicker:
At least you aren't in the same category of lock-down bunglers as the Americans. (So whopee.)
No not them, they only "lent their vote", I mean the true Tory voter. I heard a group of them being interviewed on the BBC lastnight. They are very happy with Boris, he's doing a "great job" and he'll get Brexit done too. You can tell them all about the reality and it will just wash over them, they won't change their view come hell, or high water.
Those ex-Labour voters you mention will soon be gnashing their teeth, because they are in the areas where the infection rate is rising and the economies will be hit hardest.
National Geographic; July 10, 2020
This is the US only.
Seems the most pronounced differences correlate with political sentiments.
The Community part could be explained by "density" of people.
As an aside, my personal take is that it's respectful/considerate to wear such head gear in public to protect others (well, depending on the situation I suppose). After all, people have preventably suffered and died; it's not like it's difficult or detrimental to do or anything. Actually, it's moral.
It’s a shame the issue has become so political because the science isn’t exactly there at the moment.
According to the WHO’s most recent mask guidelines, “At present, there is no direct evidence (from studies on COVID- 19 and in healthy people in the community) on the effectiveness of universal masking of healthy people in the community to prevent infection with respiratory viruses, including COVID-19.”
Of course there are “potential benefits”:
But these need to be weighed against the potential harms:
https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/advice-on-the-use-of-masks-in-the-community-during-home-care-and-in-healthcare-settings-in-the-context-of-the-novel-coronavirus-(2019-ncov)-outbreak
From the very document you cited:
My bolding.
Then,
Stop being such a fuckwit.
The CDC (US) concurs.
About Cloth Face Coverings
CDC; June 28, 2020
Very much so.
Assume the pandemic will continue as it is now for let's say eleven months.
If Joe Biden wins, will the media forget the pandemic after January 20th 2021?
Just saying while remembering how the "War on Terror" suddenly disappeared as a topic of criticism in the media after Obama came into power (and continued the Bush policies quite actively).
Quoting Banno
It's not a parochial question as much as a political one. The emphasis of attention paid to covid, just like any issue affecting a population, is determined by political concerns. There are all sorts of issues impacting American society today that could be targeted like covid based upon the havoc they wreak. For example, we could look at the daily charts associated with motor vehicle injury and texting and driving and then rake our politicians over the coals in daily briefings asking why this tragedy should be permitted to persist. We don't though, as a political decision has been made to emphasize covid and the pain caused by it, but not so much with texting and driving.
@ssu's question recognizes a reality to covid, which is that its "cure" entails the disruption of the American capitalistic economic status quo, allowing its detractors an opportunity to make efforts to change the economic system and to attack Trump and his attempts to protect it. Should Biden win the election, covid will no longer be necessary as a catalyst for economic change, and perhaps, as SSU asks, will there still be a political demand to emphasize covid over other problems affecting American society.
And the reason why have they been so unable is an important question.
Other countries, including mine, could find a political consensus on how to deal with the pandemic. In the US it just used a political campaign tool.
And let's say we had now a Clinton administration. Think the consensus would have been found then? Would all those Republican governors gone with what Hillary would have declared with Fauci standing next to her? Even if the fight against the pandemic would have been better, I think still even without the inept and utterly incapable Trump this wouldn't have been an outstanding success for the US.
Quoting Hanover
I raised this question because I don't see the partisanship going away. In fact partisanship is just incited more and more and every decision made by the political leadership is made to be an ideological decision.
At present, there is no direct evidence (from studies on COVID- 19 and in healthy people in the community) on the effectiveness of universal masking of healthy people in the community to prevent infection with respiratory viruses, including COVID-19.
Go Oxford.
I'm not sure what you are disagreeing with.
The very definition of circumstantial evidence I cited from wikipedia is that it is very weak and compatible with mutually exclusive hypothesis. I am using circumstantial evidence in the way wikipedia describes.
Your issue with my statements seem to be you want to gate-keep the word evidence for the lawyer community.
If someone brings up a fact, and it seems plausibly tied to the case, I simply see no problem calling it evidence and analyzing from there. Questioning whether it counts as evidence or not seems a sterile debate. A detective tries to collect or record all the "evidence" in a case, without prejudice as to what's important enough to be called "evidence".
I have no problem saying "we have evidence" and concluding "based on the evidence, no scenario seems more likely", which is my position.
So, if you want to set yourself up as arbiter of what counts as evidence (what premises people are even allowed to propose for making an argument), then I am happy to continue there.
If we ignore the debate about evidence, our real difference, however, is you seem to think a lack of evidence proving (or even establishing as more slightly more likely) that the pandemic is a lab accident or purposefully released, means it's more likely it's natural.
Though I agree there's no evidence indicating a lab accident or purposeful release of the virus is more likely, I disagree that the natural occurring hypothesis is by definition the default hypothesis.
The paper "proving it's not engineered" is clearly bad faith. It is simply a non-refutable statement, as we cannot prove it's impossible to engineer a virus to not-appear-engineered, which would be a clear and strong motivation in the scenario where the virus is engineered. Indeed, it's fairly trivial to be convinced that such an engineering method is feasible, since both natural biology and biology manipulation are stochastic process so we can simply repeat techniques until they randomly appear natural.
So, if it's non-refutable to begin with, it's not science whatever these so called scientists are doing in the paper.
A scientifically valid approach would require, as a first step, a challenge to experts around the world to engineer viruses to appear natural and the team conducting the study trying to differentiate between these and other viruses actually taken from nature. If they are able to find the engineered virus in each challenge submitted by other labs around the world, then the idea they have such a detection ability becomes more credible. We would still need to wonder whether bio-weapons labs are not far, far ahead for such an exercise to be meaningful, but at least we have a starting point of a claim that has been properly submitted to refutation. So, this would be a refutable based framework for determining the engineered can be consistently differentiated from the natural by experts trying to defeat such detection, at least in the current state of civilian bioengineering.
Without such an adversarial framework, the claims these academics are making are simply their opinions based on non-refutable reasoning; i.e. they are not doing science as is understood by their contemporaries.
Now, that such academics are willing to squander their intellectual credibility and demonstrate they have either no basic critical thinking skills, no understanding of the scientific method or then they are simply liars, doesn't mean the virus is engineered, only that stupid is as stupid does.
Be that as it may, to be abundantly clear, I have not claimed here coronavirus has a "HIV gene" only that the we can't simply ignore a Nobel Prize winner (for work on HIV) claim that it does and it proves it's engineered (we need to actually analyse what we can before determining that this Nobel Prize winner's analysis makes no sense, which I bother to do, and by extension the Nobel Prize makes no sense as a standard of the "true-true" expertise).
I legitimately do not see any compelling reason to believe any of the scenarios (natural, accident, or on purpose) are ruled out in any significant way based on the information that's available.
All arguments, presented here or elsewhere of what is "more likely", seem to be mainly about the world view of the person proposing the argument. If one's world view is that "China would, like, for sure never release an epidemic with pandemic potential on their own population" then one is likely to conclude it's either natural or an accident. If one believes that "scientists are, like, totally competent and there's never, ever any reason to question scientific institutions are for the public good, even in totalitarian China", then one is likely to conclude it's not a lab leak. If one "doesn't believe in coincidences" in these tense geopolitical times, then one is likely to suspect foul play.
I realize Trump supporters are essentially rabid to believe it's not natural, so as to have a scapegoat. However, if there really is no compelling evidence one way or another, my view is that it only helps them to claim otherwise. Putting "credibility" behind the opposite of what Trump supporters, or Trump himself, believes simply because they believe it and entertaining the possibility "helps Trump", simply erodes the credibility put forth to back such counterclaims, and boost Trump supporters when they can show their basic ideas have not in fact been "ruled out" and alternative "debunking" has holes.
In my opinion, it's more productive to accept there is no compelling evidence (we just don't know, and I think likely at this point we will never know; and if we do find out, it won't be from any analysis that happens on the internet) because there is no compelling evidence, in order to move onto what we can know: which is if US intelligence suspected a bio-attack or then a bio-weapon leak, obviously the US administration did not do anything about it, for instance contain it when it was still possible to have an effective containment policy (what I advocated when I first joined this thread many moons ago) and when they failed to act on that, followup with further failure to prepare; and, more importantly, the global system, and in particular the US, was knowingly vulnerable to such a pandemic threat because ignoring it maximized short term profits: In other words, the market is not efficient at allocating resources, and, in addition, the US security establishment does not bother much to ensure the US is secure from threats to US citizens that don't happen to coincide with arms sales and imperialism (i.e. either way, US citizens aren't the object of "US security"; well, not in the way the republicans previously liked to imagine). So, regardless of the scenario of the emergence of the pandemic, we can draw the same conclusions: If it was an attack then it's an easy attack exploiting a weakness elites in the West didn't care to fix because of money and they don't care about the poor as they can get top-notch care and just hide from the virus anyways. If it's a lab leak, then obviously far more regulation is needed about these labs and drastically or fully cutting plane travel ties with any dystopian totalitarian state which cannot be trusted to police best practices. If it's natural, then capitalism as we know it today, in particular in the US, was obviously unprepared for a known risk along with bad public health policies in general that amplify that risk, unwilling to do a flight freeze in the critical moment because "will someone please think of the airplane stonks!", lacking the institutions to keep society stable in such a health and economic crisis, yet unhesitating to bail out the wealthy while they huddled in their compounds and traveled to islands and yachts and New Zealand to insulate themselves from the consequence of their governing system. I.e. we can draw sound conclusions about our leaders and sound policy recommendations about the current system in any of the potential scenarios.
If that power is held what's stopping that from happening. Couldn't be more than ignorance or laziness. Self indulgence and realizing greatness really isn't a thing you do once and forget about resting on laurels for all time perhaps after deciding it's too much for you. But that's not the point.
If there's a problem find out why and where and solve that problem. You have to make that great again first or as some will say for the first time... surely we're not afraid of a selfless challenge that really isn't. Otherwise. In a word. Entropy. As shown.
The problem is that even on the basis of those wiki links, you are not using the term correctly. Your idea of circumstantial evidence is simply wrong.
You are willing to entertain that because Jane was murdered in her bedroom and because John's handprints are all over the house but not yet found in her bedroom that this is circumstantial evidence of John having murdered Jane. This is an inference you're not allowed to make for obvious reasons.
Some viruses are engineered, there's a virus, therefore it is engineered... is not a valid inference.
Some viruses escaped labs, there's a virus, therefore the virus escaped a lab... is not a valid inference.
Some viruses are engineered, there's a virus, therefore it might have been engineered... is a valid inference but it's not a conclusion of fact and therefore not (circumstantial) evidence.
That has nothing to do with gate-keeping a word but everything to do with properly using words in their ordinary meaning and logic.
I haven't used circumstantial evidence in this way.
I'm willing to entertain a Nobel Laureate's (for work on HIV) claims about HIV and coronavirus, in the sense that claims by such a person warrants some analysis; otherwise, it's just picking and choosing experts.
I'm willing to assign the label of "circumstantial evidence" to facts about circumstances that are at least somewhat connected to the case, even if it doesn't help draw conclusions as to likelihood, now or in the future. This is how wikipedia describes "circumstantial evidence": weak evidence that is compatible with contradictory accounts; wikipedia does not say circumstantial evidence needs to make a scenario "more likely" (it's a fact of the case compatible with a theory; doesn't mean that theory is more likely).
I've gone to some lengths to demonstrate the same circumstantial evidence can be accounted for in all 3 scenarios, and that none of the circumstantial evidence (at the moment) makes any of the 3 scenarios "more likely" in any meaningful statistical sense (every "this is more likely" theory I have seen so far simply expresses the "feeling" of the theorizer based on their world view).
For instance, I go to some trouble to explain that even distance to the lab maybe no more significant than the null hypothesis (both in the distribution of labs, population centers, and likely pandemic virus reservoirs; as well as the sense that novel viruses are likely to be first noticed near a lab). However, that the first notable outbreak was at some distance to a lab is still "circumstantial evidence", just doesn't tell us much at the moment of what conclusion is more likely (i.e. it's circumstantial evidence an intense amount of statistics would be required to plausibly interpret).
When I describe a scenario and the circumstantial evidence that's compatible with such a scenario, it's not to say that scenario is more likely because there is "circumstantial evidence", it's just to show such a scenario is compatible with what we know so far; I do so for each scenario to demonstrate my opinion that no scenario can be ruled out as far as I can tell. To say one scenario "is more likely" would be an amazingly complicated statistical exercise, and so I don't have an opinion on likelihood either; I'm sure such studies will be done, but I doubt very much the authors will claim to have actually increased confidence in one conclusion or another (the "models of history" that would be needed are beyond our grasp to make; i.e. the best we can do is very simplified assumptions of how the world works, so simplified that it doesn't really tell us anything).
So, I am not providing any analysis of what's "more likely" but I am interested to analyse arguments that do make such claims (whether the Nobel Laureate claiming it's spliced from HIV; claims that it's for sure not engineered; claims that it's likely an accident; all three I am willing to analyse, and all three I find unsound; which is why I don't care about what we label "circumstantial evidence" or not, in each case the conclusions don't follow from the circumstantial evidence offered as premises, so who cares about whether the circumstantial evidence in question is even true; it doesn't matter if there's an HIV gene as it's presence tells us nothing since HIV is already a pandemic and we can expect it will spread successful genes around in co-infection events; it doesn't matter if there's no "telltale" signs of bio engineering as a bioweapon engineer may go to some lengths to remove such telltale signs (i.e. making sure the genome accomplishes the task at hand within the bounds of what peers will view as "statistically normal"); it doesn't matter the distance to the lab if we don't have the null hypothesis expected radius of such pandemic outbreak to such labs in our particular moment in history).
I think that’s why he used bold type, trying to make it appear meaningful.
It was a direct quote from the WHO. What it says is “ there is no direct evidence (from studies on COVID- 19 and in healthy people in the community) on the effectiveness of universal masking of healthy people in the community to prevent infection with respiratory viruses, including COVID-19.”
You don’t think that means anything?
Lol.
Obligatory mask use everywhere hardly is the rule anywhere. The reason why we use masks is that one can be spreading the virus without symptoms, for starters.
Just what the WHO wants is quite simple:
You can get the same effect by wearing a bag over your head. Or maybe one can simply refrain from spitting on others.
As posted by :
Quoting Universal masking for COVID-19: evidence, ethics and recommendations
Quoting Universal masking for COVID-19: evidence, ethics and recommendations
Notice the ethics part as well.
The problem is there are downsides to wearing masks, for instance a false sense of security, more face touching. So public health officials need to weigh the pros and cons.
Won't do. Nothing new.
Quoting NOS4A2
Sure, we already know, including your re-response to Banno. And, say, it's not like some to whom wearing such head gear would be detrimental are both being forced to go out in public and wear detrimental head gear, rather protecting them is of importance here. Get real. Don't be such a childish contrarian. :) Why wouldn't you want to protect when it's so simple and cheap, and we've already had people preventably suffering and dying?
Incidentally, we just a worker come by, that respectfully/considerately was wearing head gear (per public recommendation). (y)
I’m not opposed to wearing a mask. It’s just that I prefer when it’s a matter of choice rather than mandatory, and for the same reason I oppose any mandatory article of clothing. You could easily get the same effect by standing a meter away, covering your mouth when coughing, sneezing, talking etc.i find that the mask finger-wagging is largely done at the expense of other preventative measures, which rarely enters the discourse around the topic.
Well, it’s kinda hard to tell how often others wash their hands, touch their faces, social distance, etc. from just looking at them. A mask, on the other hand, is quite obvious.
People can wag their fingers and do... other preventive measures? at the same time, btw.
We will probably need blanket mask wearing rules too as, after having got down to single figure new cases, the government decided to let American tourists come here under self-policing quarantine. That has predictably not worked out too well and cases are up again. Thanks, Trump virus.
You're using a proposition here, the truth value of which you do not know, assume it as true and then conclude that that is any type of evidence.
That's even worse for obvious reasons.
If we were hit by a large meteor, we would be dead. Assuming it's true we were hit, that's "evidence" for us being dead. Except we're not.
I just don't see where you get that from. It seems really clear in the paragraph you cite.
I'm saying here is that "if there is an HIV gene in coronavirus that is evidence"; in other words, a fact of the case.
I was analyzing the Nobel Laureates argument, of which my first step is to see if it's sound or not, and I conclude it's unsound (i.e. if the premise is true, the conclusion does not follow; it's pretty normal to assume the premises are true in prefacing an analysis of soundness; if the argument is sound, then validity becomes the next step to check; since I conclude it's not sound, I simply don't care about the premises).
However, simply because the argument is not sound does not render the purported facts that the argument is based on untrue and furthermore not-evidence.
This is all I'm explaining in saying:
If it's true, then it's relevant evidence. This seems obvious to me for the reason I explain.
I'm making an "if" based statement: If it is true, it would have some relevance and be counted as evidence, as it's plausibly connected to the case.
This is in contrast to things that are true but don't have any plausible connection to the case (i.e. "the moon orbits the earth" I think we would agree is true, but also agree is not evidence in the coronavirus origins case), and also in contrast to things that are simply untrue (i.e. "Trump went on national television and admitted to personally creating coronavirus", I think we would agree is false and therefore not evidence because it is simply not a fact).
Again, you seem to just want to gatekeep what counts as evidence and so what arguments are allowed to be made in the first place. I am simply doing no such gatekeeping. If facts are consistent with a theory, I'm willing to admit that those facts are consistent with the proposed theory, why pretend otherwise. If the theory is plausibly connected to the origins of coronavirus I am willing to label such facts "evidence". Doesn't make the theory true, but if I'm not able to rule it out then the facts it's based on seem to me relevant evidence in the case (i.e. something we would want to keep a note of in the event further evidence starts to confirm the theory in question).
If you have no issue with any of my analysis, that your only issue is with labeling things evidence until "the case is closed" and we know the truth and can thus separate the relevant facts from the irrelevant (i.e. make a box of the "evidence that proved the case"), then I'd have no problem keeping to the more rigorous terminology of "potential evidence"; that everything that is a fact and plausibly connected to the case, has merely only the "potential" to become "evidence" in the event the case can be closed and we can go through the "evidence locker" and throw out all the details that turned out to be irrelevant (i.e. throw out the "evidence" from the "evidence locker" that we no longer need and therefore is "not evidence"). But if that's our disagreement, it seems your issue is with your own profession and not with me; it seems simply the case that detectives and lawyers claim to be "collecting evidence" and do not scrupulously stick to the more rigorous "collecting potential evidence" to put in the "potential evidence locker" to then "throw out potential evidence that turns out not to be actual evidence"; and so, evidence is used both in the context of "potential evidence to make a given case provided further evidence comes to light that proves it" (which is inclusive of everything that might be relevant) as well as in the context of "the case was proven based on this body of evidence" (which is exclusive of the things that turned out to be irrelevant). I completely agree that a profession which prides itself on rigorous thinking simply makes a fool of itself in using the word evidence to have different extension referents in different contexts and in the same case (before and after it is closed), and it is this sloppy non-rigorous diction that gives rise to the idea that "there's evidence that supports an argument" being true can be seen to imply, to the general public, that "the argument is the most likely because there is evidence" (i.e. the legal community has setup the opportunity for bait-and-switch fallacy on the ambiguity of the meaning of evidence; a crime? I think that is a case here we can settle).
I think the fact is that COVID-19 will surely be a focus of research even after the pandemic, hence there will be a lot of scrutiny about it. Hence I think this question can be answered. Simply too many labs are focusing on COVID-19 now. Yet unfortunately the answer won't make everybody happy, so it can remain quite vague as many things do at the present and you have to know your biology.
Covid-19 is officially a Pandemic by definition (all people) and by declaration (WHO). Like the Spanish Flu of 1918, it affects the whole (pan-) world. You should "worry" about it though, only only to the extent that you can do something about it. Right now, about all non-specialists can do is wear masks and practice social distancing. But for those who think it's a hoax, we should be worried about them, because they could be asymptomatic carriers. All you can do in that case is shun those who don't wear protection. For example, some men don't wear condoms during casual sex, so it's up to the woman to shun them, or accept the fetal consequences. :joke:
Covid-19 vs Spanish Flu :
[i]"Generally speaking, the fatality rate for the Spanish flu is calculated at about 2%. . . . .
the global fatality rate for COVID-19 as of April 1 is about 5%, although in the U.S. it is about 2.16%. . . . Some experts, . . . project the fatality rate will be about 1%, which is still about 10 times the fatality rate of a typical seasonal influenza of 0.1%."[/i]
https://www.biospace.com/article/compare-1918-spanish-influenza-pandemic-versus-covid-19/
World population 2020 = 7,800,000,000 x 2% = 156,000,000 people dead :fear:
This....
As someone who works in the emergency room this is exactly why my hospital in particular is facing an uptick in admissions because younger people as well as conspiracy theorists think exactly like this.
Quoting Anaxagoras
(y)
Conspiracy theorist died of coronavirus after trying to catch it at Covid party to prove it was a hoax (Jimmy McCloskey, Metro News, Jul 2020)
Darwin Award material?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/27/china-truth-coronavirus-panorama-xi-jinping?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR0nkxojQMyCQuw7oZz3iwxCsgZkQ2WQub8Jq08RGuzC6_LM2tUMlitt0JQ
Yup and the unfortunate thing for him that award if for life.
The problem is that the question is simply not resolvable in a lab. All three scenarios do not form a refutable hypothesis (a recipe that if followed, can confirm the hypothesis to any good faith actor).
For instance, it's been reported yesterday that the particular strain of coronavirus that COVID19 came from has found in the host bats. This does not rule out a lab accident, nor does it rule out a bioweapon. Obviously, labs collecting bat viruses could accidentally release one even without ever knowing they even had it. Likewise, bioweapons creators may seek to find viruses in nature that are the closest to being a strategic threat (either to create a weapon or investigate such potential weapons to mount a defense); indeed, this is "plan A" in the bioweapon creation tool box.
So, unless extremely obvious gene-editing techniques are used, none of the scenarios are really resolvable in a lab.
In terms of "what's mostly likely" given the available evidence, the problem is likelihood requires a null hypothesis to form. Getting a royal flush does not indicate in itself cheating as the null hypothesis is that royal flushes happen, as do "lucky streaks" etc. Following an individual player we need some time for "lucky hands" to happen in enough frequency to indicate cheating. However, if we're looking at a whole population of gamblers there is going to be people on entirely natural lucky streaks on the tail end.
The problem with calculating a null hypothesis for the pandemic is that a pandemic can happen at any time starting essentially anywhere, and has, so far, happened only once in our modern economy (which is very different from the 1918 or black plague economy; so these reference events inform us a type of phenomena can happen, but don't really provide a statistical natural background context of some sort). The statistical problems approaching this kind of unique event that can happen anywhere on the planet over a long period of time are essentially non-resolvable; any event of this kind is going to have all sorts of "peculiarities" associated with it, and there's little way to calculate what we should expect in terms of the "natural peculiarities" of a big unique event that can happen anywhere.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/virus-linked-hunger-tied-to-10000-child-deaths-each-month/2020/07/27/84d349ca-d059-11ea-826b-cc394d824e35_story.html
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31647-0/fulltext?fbclid=IwAR1HQCA_VMDyK-yPRQEdUM6HghHR0YrSX3VhI1VSYrMzG6vJsTqd5GT4gyM
Hercain Main.
Excellent news. One of the founders of Turning Point carked it too. Can't wait till more of these fucks drop dead.
God I would hate to die this ironically
[tweet]https://twitter.com/THEHermanCain/status/1271367024963248128[/tweet]
I think this is it's understandable: the pandemic is quite low now. Nobody has died in a week and the 7 days before only one person died. There are eight people hospitalized in the whole country for covid-19 and none are critical. Daily new confirmed infections are now below ten. For now.
How those numbers compare to the US, multiply them by 66. And here you spot the difference: if there would be 528 people in hospitalized for COVID-19 in all of US and similar amount of infections observed daily in a population of 330 million, not the nearly 300 000 observed now, would there be a huge discussion for making use of masks obligatory in the US?
If the government will make the use of them obligatory (for example in public transports), likely people will obey.
Meh. Correlation, causation let's call the whole thing off. Yes, for the record I did read your "most likely" but the message is the same.
~shrugs~
Quoting ssu
I'm mystified at the suggestion that as Americans, we would somehow "obey" better than self regulate, calculate our own risks and act accordingly. As an American, I can tell you what incentives us to act, even if it goes against our own perspectives, is capatilisim. For better and/or for worse our behavior is chosen, to a point and that point is at the transaction of the dollar.
If a store that I want to shop at demands the wearing of a facial mask if I choose to shop there, I do so by their rules. There are a plethora of reasons why people should wear masks and if they don't want to wear one then they will have to find somewhere else to shop. That is the way the USA operates and I know you know this but I am not sure how you cannot see that thread running through this entire pandemic. When I look around my guesstimate is that 85% of people are wearing masks maybe 90,%? But 100% of my youngest indian entering his senior year, in person, on campus living as his University is an hour away, are required to wear masks unless they are in their dorm room. The University has quarentine hotel/dorms, daily temperature checks, the Wellness center that will triage if necessary.
Once again these are just a few of the changes but it follows the money. With a tuition of 52k, unless you have additional fuel costs for flight time to become a Pilot, the University WILL find a way to do it safely.
I've suggested plexy glass enclosed podium squares to allow the older professors to safely teach in person. And have also asked the admission for the risk ratio they are using. Is it a certain % of infected students that could shut things down? Tragically the death of a student or a Professor? Other parents and students want to know and they better have a plan.
Hi Tiff!
Oh I was talking about the Finns.
In fact it's very American to believe in self regulation. We Finns on the other hand are a very small country with few people (5+ million, so there's more Arizonians than Finns). Everybody here across party lines understands how truly expendable we are, so we really cherish having our own country and own government and hence take seriously what the government then tells us to do (even if many distrust the EU). For us there really are bigger potential enemies than our own government. People here may think that politicians are inept, but they don't think they are corrupt. They trust the police and the military. Just to prove the point I'll give a telling anecdote: The speed limit in urban areas is 50 km/h. A patrolling police car usually drives slower than this typically at 40 km/h. This creates a problem in Finland: the police car forms a queue behind it of hesitant Finnish drivers who don't dare pass the police car, because they fear that they might get a ticket for speeding. Hence they form a mini traffic jam. (Yes, there are those who do know what the speed limit is and will overtake the police car, but these kind of drivers driving behind the slow police car you genuinely do find.)
Another case example is the Hollywood catastrophe-movies. The ones where the heroic American dad struggles to get his family into safety against all odds fighting his way through hostile neighbors (who act like zombies!) and an insidious ominous government that doesn't care of it's people and on the way reconnects with his wife and gets the respect and admiration of his children. You surely know how the plot goes. If Finns would be depicted in this film, they would be the ones who go and stay inside their homes and listen from the TV or radio what the authorities are saying what they should to do, because, obviously, the authorities know. Americans would call these people sheeple, naive idiots who trust the government and follow it into their own doom.
Yet as you and I are now really living that catastrophe-movie (and there surely will be those movies made about this time for sure!), this difference genuinely shows in real life. Once the leftist-centrist administration (filled with young female women politicians btw.) here decided in agreement with the opposition to introduce a lock down because of covid-19, the public response was different. There really weren't any public discussion of government overreach, of freedoms of the individual being crushed (even if we have a similar constitution) or anybody openly saying that the whole issue was a hoax. The only outcry before the lock down decision was from city and municipality authorities that they wanted decisions and action taken by the central government as it wasn't their job to decide about these issues during a pandemic. And there we find the crux of the difference in culture, in the legal framework, history and why the US is so different from many European countries.
Quoting ArguingWAristotleTiff
And again here you see the difference.
In my job we are (also) pondering how to start again our voluntary courses. Surely we can decide what to do, but above every discussion is the acknowledgement that our own decisions are meaningless if the government, lead by the ruling administration, decides something else. The school semester will start for my 8 and 12 year old children in two weeks, and there's no reason to believe that the two different schools won't apply the same uniform code that basically comes down from the decisions taken by the administration on how to prevent a second surge of the pandemic in the fall. An individual school making up their own rules would likely create contempt and scorn from the parents and questions why the school officials would differ from the government rules. So there are truly differences in culture, I might say.
I think when he speaks like that lots of people see him as a strong leader sticking to his cards. Performing certainty. It is sad.
Suggesting that Epstein was murdered (don't seem able to post just that video).
[tweet]https://twitter.com/ParkerMolloy/status/1290519397518446593[/tweet]
Many people at my workplace are restless from stay-at-home, and have begun to very vocally express their skepticism about the severity of the pandemic. As far as I can tell, the underlying points include:
I am not so dumb as to express my opinions at work and risk alienating myself from people I have to work with every day, but my views on this are:
What do y'all think?
I agree, here in the UK it is the populist press which fuels the ideas that it is not a serious disease and that greater harm is being done to the economy. There are commentators saying that a mask is like a muzzle and is an affront to civil liberties etc. In reality it is the billionaire barons who own such media outlets and who fund the government who are scared, because they milk the system and it's their assets will are now devaluing big time. That is why there is a campaign to make people go back to the office rather than work from home, even though productivity might be up and bosses are happy with their workforce working remotely. The landlords who own the high rises office blocks who are loosing out and who hobnob with the Conservative government, the bribery is in plain sight now. The plan is to turn worker against worker and shame people to go back to the office.
Our government makes me sick, they are holding on by their fingernails and have been spiralling down since the financial crisis of 2008. Turning to more desperate means to keep in office and likely to take us all down with them, Brexit being a symptom of this trend.
What you depict and what and tell means that the US would have failed in it's pandemic response even without the absolute inability of Trump (which made it an absolute fail).
Because really, under a Hillary Clinton administration, would things have been so much better? Would your co-workers would have different attitudes? The last President that could have made Americans act as the government wants would have been Eisenhower.
The answer to this really depends on how easily influenced the general population is, which itself somewhat depends on how charismatic the president is. I don’t have an answer to that question, but I’d imagine that if you took the time to pour over all the data you would find an uptick in certain areas since Trump took office. Racist behaviors would likely be one example. It is also obvious that Trump is viewed/portrayed as a racist by much of the population. Therefore, you could at least assume a correlation between the two. Having a president that is largely viewed as racist at least has some affect on racist behavior. However, even this doesn’t show that people’s beliefs on race were actually changed by Trump being in office. It could be that those who were already racist felt more comfortable in exhibiting racist behavior.
So, I’m not naive enough to believe that having a president that embraces conspiracy theories over science, makes his name by mocking all things “liberal” (which includes health and safety concerns), and generally endorses typical macho male behaviors (i.e. risk taking by not wearing masks) has no affect on the population. But at the same time I’m not sure of what Clinton’s response to the virus would have been, or how she would have been viewed/portrayed by those who oppose her. Answering how different things would have been requires knowledge of how different they would have been, as well as countless other variables that need to be factored in to account for something as complex as human behavior/beliefs. So I can’t answer this question with any certainty whatsoever, and at the same time you cannot assume that things would have been more or less similar had Clinton been elected instead.
Obama administration did deal with things like ebola outbreaks, so you can extrapolate from there. And the relationship Hillary Clinton has with Republicans is obvious and likely wouldn't have changed.
Why I asked this is simply because:
a) I believe that the vitriolic juxtaposition and the divisive polarization would also continue under a Hillary Clinton presidency. This isn't just about Trump, even if he makes things worse. If you think how little the Hillary scandals were, the missing emails or Benghazi, how about then a scandal like Jeffrey Epstein, a sex ring organizer with ties to the ex-president husband of the sitting president getting killed in prison when on suicide watch? Just one example.
b) How do you think the relations would have gone with Hillary Clinton and the republican governors? You think that would have been a great team effort everybody?
Let's look at what the Trump administration did do: it poured trillions of dollars into the economy without a blink of the eye and the democrats came along with this. Steve Mnuchin did do something (and now it's the Republicans dragging their feet). Think of this situation when a democratic administration and with the opposition being the Republicans. Would they play ball?
The unfortunate thing is that except if the country is under a terrorist attack, there's not unity that the two ruling parties will show to each other because they know that if the other fails, then the other will have the next administration. That's the logic behind all the vitriol and non-existent bi-partisanship.
It comes down to even issues like fighting a pandemic.
This is from the CDC website
"As of April 14, 2020, CDC case counts and death counts include both confirmed >>>>and probable cases and deaths<<<<<<. ( aka fluff numbers) This change was made to reflect an interim COVID-19 position statementpdf iconexternal icon issued by the Council for State and Territorial Epidemiologists on April 5, 2020. The position statement included a case definition and made COVID-19 a nationally notifiable disease. Nationally notifiable disease cases are voluntarily reported to CDC by jurisdictions.
A confirmed case or death is defined by meeting confirmatory laboratory evidence for COVID-19.
A probable case or death is defined by one of the following:
>>>>>Meeting clinical criteria AND epidemiologic evidence with no confirmatory laboratory testing performed for COVID-19<<<<
>>>>>Meeting presumptive laboratory evidence AND either clinical criteria OR epidemiologic evidence<<<<
>>>>Meeting vital records criteria with no confirmatory laboratory testing performed for COVID19<<<<
.(meaning fluff to make it look worse then it actually is)
Number of Jurisdictions Reporting
There are currently >>>>60 U.S.-affiliated jurisdictions reporting cases of COVID-19. This includes the 50 states; the District of Columbia; New York City, the U.S. territories of American Samoa, Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S Virgin Islands; and three independent countries in compacts of free association with the United States (Federated States of Micronesia, Republic of the Marshall Islands, and Republic of Palau).<<<<<<
So this means that when they say "death toll in the US" they mean all the fluff numbers mixed in AND like 1/3% of the world's land masses not just the 50 States that you think they mean when they say "US" . And let's not forget how there are literally dozens of other things that kill 10 times as many people annually that aren't even talked about on the news
The 2009 influenza resulted in no lockdown.
Those who are capable of clear thinking and how politics works can make their own conclusions.
And it seems clear all these so called philosophers really dont think for themselves but are deferring to fear porn.
You want to curtail liberty and bow to govt because of an imaginary danger!?
Wow! The paranoia of the insecure.
are indeed fluff and wildly inflated.
The science is similiarily bogus,with many doctors saying the lockdown is a spurious response.
As for the danger. Well it depends if one cowers from a cold.
It's amazing to see so many people fearful of govt disinformation.
These people can be grouped under the heading of vulnerable groups. In the UK, this group is about 2 million, in a population of 67 million. Should we just forget about them, for some other reason?
Let's see. Covid-19 has been killing people in America for about five months now, despite extreme cautionary measures of periods of shut down and physical distancing laws. Care to list a dozen or two of those dozens of other things which have a 10 times higher annual death rate?
Well honestly I feel like it won't do anything other then take up my time because your blindly assuming that the media is true and so with a food eater mentality like that there's no real point in me wasting my time.
So when you tell me that hardly anyone dies from Corona virus, while a multitude of different competing media sources are telling me the very opposite, I'm supposed to believe you instead?
No no no see you are not understanding what im saying.
Im not tellibg you to believe me and not them
Im saying STOP believing.
As I said, there is a multitude of different, competing media sources reporting roughly the same thing. I could add to that, the fact that the various levels of government are taking very extreme measures. Why would I believe that all these different institutions, and organizations are conspiring to give poor peons like me such radically false information? How does the government profit by shutting down business practices and paying billions in aid? Or do you think that the media has been able to mislead the governments as well?
Quoting MAYAEL
I am to my very core, a skeptic. But I will never stop believing that it's a mistake to step in front of a fast moving fright train. If you think you might convince me otherwise, you're welcome to try. In the meantime, I do not want to propagate a deadly virus, so you can perform your acts of persuasion from a safe distance.
I actually work in the emergency department and I can tell you people are dying and it will only get worse. If you don't give a shit about yourself, give a shit about those who it may kill
How old were they? Preexisting conditions? How many?
Proof of cause of death?
There are multiple verified reports of hospitals being empty and many reports of inaccurate death certificates and bogus diagnosis.
To say nothing of the non entity that is germ theory.
Asymptomatic carriers! Yep and grass is pink.
I know what I see with my own eyes and hear. Dont need some misinformed medic to get emotional. Your not the only source that works in a hospital.
The corporations and mega wealthy elite surely gained by this whole fiasco? Debt and taxation and govt intervention
is now higher,and thstvis what was wanted right from the start.
It's funny folks believe chynah and other states are corrupt and issue disinformation but never there own just because the word democracy is bandied about.
The US elite are just as corrupt and worse than the chinese elite. Pearl harbour gulf of tomkin WMDs the banking system Edward Snowden???
That's besides the point. People die everyday, but it doesn't negate the fact that we ought to take precaution.
Quoting Asif
There are a variety of affected ages.
Quoting Asif
Some of the ones I've encountered yes, some no. For example a 13 year-old girl died from Covid-19 and went into respiratory distress.
Quoting Asif
How many what, positives?
Quoting Asif
Proof?
Quoting Asif
I personally don't care what you think just understand the consequences.
The same proof you give from your personal experience I have from others who work in hospitals. Or is only your experience valid?
Honest or knowledgable medics will admit establishing a cause of death is many times fraught with misdiagnosis.
I personally equally do not care for your misinformed fear porn. And the only consequences I see are public fear due to irresponsible information from ill informed people who worship the media and cannot think rationally.
See for yourself, this is a rough estimate for the week. The other indicates the amount of positives to deaths in Los Angeles County.
Quoting Asif
Not sure how there isn't. If what you say is true then what are we finding in our labs when we do Covid swabs? The above is hard facts that Covid exists.
Quoting Asif
Where is your proof? Where is your documented proof that contradicts scientists from across the world?
Quoting Asif
I've already posted the facts...The above pics were just taken from my hospital desk those are the facts.
Write the stats if you wish.
You obviously have no idea of the science of kochs postulates or the validity of germ theory. Your swabs and tests are detecting natural biologocial inflammation which everyone has to some degree. But the tests are arbitrary and do not detect flu,they detect only inflammation. I could probably test positive if I had a tough workout at the gym.
Asymptomatic disease is an affront to human rationality.
The CDC and many scientists admit false positives and the dubious nature of the tests.
Fauci wrote an article in the Lancet saying covid wasnt much different to the flu. Go google many scientists saying the dangers and lockdown are spurious.
Your conflating facts with manipulated stats and bogus science.
You personally how many covid deaths you witnessed?
Never heard of it.
Quoting Asif
Apparently you know jack shit what the swabs test for.....The most common tests (including the ones used at my hospital) are called PCR assay or polymerase chain reaction which is a specific type of nucleic acid test. This test in the labs look for specific Coronavirus genetic material. When you get exposed to Covid-19 it replicates in the upper respiratory tract hence is why you have the 6-inch nasal swab.
Quoting Asif
Wrong. First, see above post. Second, we tend to look at symptoms first such as cough, shortness of breathe, dizziness, diarrhea, vomiting etc. Third, regarding false negatives one may test negative however this may suggest that they could in fact be in the early stages of the virus. However to be sure this is why these tests are done. If serious symptoms progress this is why we conduct CT scans or X-rays to look at the lungs. If we suspect something funny there we place you in the category of PUI or Patient Under Investigation and then we isolate you until results comeback. But all in all, you're clearly wrong.
Quoting Asif
According to the University of Texas Cancer Center:
"The chances of a false negative at MD Anderson in a symptomatic patient due to a COVID-19 infection are very low, provided the lab receives a good-quality specimen.
MD Anderson takes several measures to ensure a low false-negative rate. First, we use a dedicated team of nurses to collect swabs, which ensures a high-quality specimen is collected every time. Second, the tests used in our laboratory have undergone a verification process to confirm that they perform as expected. And finally, we are tracking when repeat tests are positive on individuals who had previously tested negative.
To date, this last scenario has occurred in less than 1% of our tests. And, in all cases, the time between the negative and positive test results was more than 72 hours, opening up the possibility for infection to have occurred between the two tests’ administration."
Source: https://www.mdanderson.org/cancerwise/is-covid-19-coronavirus-testing-accurate-and-9-more-things-to-know-about-covid-19-nasal-swab-testing.h00-159381945.html#:~:text=It's%20called%20a%20%E2%80%9CPCR%20assay,small%20amounts%20of%20the%20coronavirus.
Mind you, this institute conducts the same test as my hospital.
Quoting Asif
According to the CDC there are some similarities however there are some significant differences:
"While COVID-19 and flu viruses are thought to spread in similar ways, COVID-19 is more contagious among certain populations and age groups than flu. Also, COVID-19 has been observed to have more superspreading events than flu. This means the virus that causes COVID-19 can quickly and easily spread to a lot of people and result in continuous spreading among people as time progresses."
Source:https://www.cdc.gov/flu/symptoms/flu-vs-covid19.htm#:~:text=For%20both%20COVID%2D19,is%20still%20under%20investigation.
With Flu, some people can recover in to less than two weeks. With Covid-19 there are longstanding effects such as blood clots in the veins and arteries of the lungs, heart, legs or brain. also in children, they can develop School-aged children infected with COVID-19 are at higher risk of Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C), a rare but severe complication of COVID-19.
Quoting Asif
Ok. In one picture depicted our In-House (positive) patients which was 37
In-house patients under investigation: 4
Overall tested positive: 1,368
Total Tested Overall: 6,664
Patient Cases in Los Angeles County
Confirmed: 206,761
Deaths: 4,967
This was not claimed by the media, it was claimed by one specific US government agency..
Quoting Asif
Sorry to disillusion you Asif, but I'm not one of those "folks" you refer to here. I'll tell you though, you seem to have a misunderstanding of the relationship between the various elements of media, and the government, in a democratic state. Do you assume that they work together, as one entity, with the same goal?
Quoting Asif
You started talking about falsity in the media concerning Covid-19. I implied that the government corroborates the media. You haven't established the required relationship between the "wealthy elite" who gained from this, and the government, to support your claims.
You can take excerpts from any science literature,there isnt any consensus and many scientists say the exact opposite.
You havent heard of germ theory.or kochs postulates and yet you claim you understand swab testing and viruses.
And the PCR assay! Do you even know how that works and the criticisms that can be levied at it?
So which age groups does it differ from the common.flu?
The extent of political bias and fake reporting in the mass media is blatantly obvious. Both rich Democrats and Republicans have gained hugely from this hoax in terms of wealth and political possibilities. It is election year.
Democratic state? Ah,you mean plutocracy. You think stock market reporting is accurate and honest with no agenda for the wealthy?
I cannot list the deaths as the numbers are factored into Los Angeles County statistics. I know for sure from the shifts I've worked there were at least 6 deaths in the Emergency department alone. As far as statistics that would be something I'd have to access from our administration which would be unlikely since I cannot access those numbers as a simple employee.
Quoting Asif
Yes my hospital which was the intent of mine when I tried posting the pictures. It's on every screen saver in my hospital as far as the statistics concerning positive patients, patients under investigation, and those being admitted.
Quoting Asif
Where is your proof? You sound like Trump saying "there are many scientists" when you haven't even provided anything to substantiate your views. Saying stuff like "look it up" when you cannot even substantiate what you've postulated.
Quoting Asif
I've clearly explained how SWABS worked....like intimately and have even listed verifiable links just in case you wanted more understanding.
Quoting Asif
I do know how it works thus why I explained it. Again you're just appearing to just simply talking out of your ass. I mean after all you thought you could be tested positive for simply exercising that is how I know you're into junk science and don't know shit about Covid-19 testing. I'm clearly wasting my time with you. I suggest @Metaphysician Undercover doesn't either.
All stats relevant to Your experience are unavailable.
So basically you follow the govt media driven narrative despite witnessing how many deaths???
You grasp on the science is derivative quoting literature is not understanding and there are many medical opinions to the contrary. Your trump reference is just blah. As if the medical industry isnt involved in the same alternative facts as trump.
You also ignored my points on theory,kochs postulates and strawmanned my point on inflammation.
Its workers like you who dont ask critical questions and spread fear who have helped this hoax. Your govt loves your compliance and timidity.
Remember the pictures from wuhan of people dropping dead in the street foaming at the mouth? Doubtless propoganda and lies. What makes you think the US doesnt work exactly the same way?
How many doctors and medical staff you personally know who have died of covid? There is a clue there for you...
wtf? :D
Why the difference? You can wtf all you want. The worldwide stats have no rhyme nor reason and outside the media most people have no direct evidence of people dying any more than any other year.
Agreed to a certain extent. My only point to consider is whether or not Hillary would have “fanned the flames” the way Trump has, which surely contributes to the divisiveness. But sure, the right would have probably continued hating Hillary and chanting “lock her up” had she been elected.
Quoting ssu
Not very well.
Taiwan (1,010 km from Wuhan, China)
• area - c14k sq mi
• pop. - c23.8m
• Covid-19 Reported Cases / DEATHS - 486 / 7 (January 21 - August 20, 2020)
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/taiwan/
Florida (13,315 km from Wuhan, China)
• area - c65.8k sq mi
• pop. - c21.5m
• Covid-19 Reported Cases / DEATHS - 588,602 / 10,052 (March 1 - August 20, 2020)
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/florida/
In sum:
As of today August 20, 2020, with 4.7 times greater geographical area and yet roughly the same population numbers as well as 13 times FARTHER AWAY from Wuhan, China, the U.S. state of Florida ( :death: ) has 1,211 times MORE reported Cases of Covid-19 infections and 1,437 times MORE reported Deaths from Covid-19 than the entire country of Taiwan ( :mask: )
Quoting NZ Herald - Covid 19 coronavirus: Donald Trump takes aim at NZ again
I imagine if pathogens were visible to the naked eye, we would all be more concerned about not spreading them. But because they are microscopic and invisible, we don't worry - out of sight, out of mind.
Just keep downplaying all the negatives people. Keep Pollyannaising life. It's all worth it to create suffering, harm, negative, pain on behalf of another person. It's not that bad.. Everything works out.. I mean parents have to do their duty for themselves, their legacy, the country, humanity. Overlook, downplay, shrug your shoulders at the costs.. Play with other people's lives because you want to play a role.
It already was. The clearness of the connection of a pandemic and not exposing people to it is too easy. And c'mon, this is an obvious point.
Wish that could be said about exposing people to things like viruses and replace "pages" with "years".
Seems like interest in the Corona-virus is disappearing in this forum.
Trump's thumb has been on the response to covid-19. The entire system has forsaken all the knowledge underwriting the stringent rules for clinical trials. "Warp speed" or some shit. He is desperate to be able to say that his abandoning the safety protocols of scientific study ending in a net positive. Those rules were in place for one reason and one reason only... public safety.
Those safety measures are characterized as "horrible red tape and massive regulations"... yet another Republican right wing trope.
The plasma stuff just allows him to boast that his actions had results. Those results are characterized as net positives by all those Trump apologists. They boast of having "started from scratch" and have since fast tracked all the current treatments and tests they claim are available, all the while conveniently ignoring the brute facts that the only reason they had to start from scratch is because Trump fucked up royally in his initial response.
Corona has killed about 9000 people in the US, a practically irrelevant figure.
(Yes, the figure always quoted in the media is 150,000, but those are with co-morbidities. Corona alone only 6% of that, aka about 9000 people).
See updated CDC page:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm?fbclid=IwAR2-muRM3tB3uBdbTrmKwH1NdaBx6PpZo2kxotNwkUXlnbZXCwSRP2OmqsI#Comorbidities
Now there's only the Spanish Flu to compete with. That's 500 000 to 850 000 dead, so I assume this pandemic won't break the record.
With 9000 Corona-only deaths in the US so far (I think adjusted for co-morbidities, figures look similar in other countries), no it won´t.
The CDC statistics show that it is really heard on the elderly, plus people with several co-morbidities. For most of the population, it is neglibible.
This isn't correct. Prior to effective treatments, AIDS killed 100% of those infected regardless of age or comorbidity. Covid kills primarily (and with very few exceptions) those already vulnerable. With covid, it's a reasonable question to ask to what extent has death been hastened by the infection in those with comorbidities because the answer will determine to what extent we need to implement safety measures against infection. It's clear that such a question is difficult to answer because it requires an evaluation of the deceased person's pre-covid prognosis, and prognoses are by their nature speculative.
From a political perspective, the fact that death from covid cannot be distinguished from death with covid is extremely problematic because it leaves the question of how diligently we ought to protect ourselves against covid subject to legitimate debate.
It is correct.
HIV doesn't kill, it's the other diseases.
Can you truly not see a distinction between having a pre-existing comorbidity that leaves you vulnerable to serious illness from an otherwise modest viral attack versus being infected with a virus that devastates your immune system to the point where you succumb to otherwise benign opportunistic diseases?
And Derukugi's argument was that only 9000 have died in the US to COVID-19 and hence the whole pandemic scare is negligible, which I think is a wrong conclusion.
On a global scale, yes but with respect to individual countries it might not be the worst thing.
For whom?
Just the Vietnam War killed far more people than COVID and during 1959-1961 the Great Chinese Famine killed between 15 to 55 million people thanks to the "Great Leap Forward".
But who cares about if many millions of people died in Mao's China.
I could agree with this if the time period is changed to this century, to the 21st Century and up until now.
This doesn't change the fact that 150K people with pre-existing conditions are dead.
"Well, if they weren't diabetic, maybe they wouldn't have died. COVID-19 didn't kill them!"
"Well, if the forest wasn't so dry, it wouldn't have caught fire. The lightning strike didn't start it!"
"Well, if she had been wearing her seat belt, she would still be alive. The drunk driver didn't kill her!"
COVID-19 is still a pandemic, even if it doesn't kill healthy people. The combination of certain pre-existing conditions and COVID-19 has proven to be lethal, and those vulnerable to this are pleading to everyone else: please don't kill me.
Yes, but WITH Corona, not FROM Corona. It is a different statement.
And it more reflects the general health of a population than anything about the virus. (Which I suspect will be the general global outcome anyway, once this thing has run its course.)
CDC 6% COVID Death Rate?? | A Doctor Explains [sub]Here's how to actually interpret those CDC #COVID19 mortality numbers.[/sub] (8m:53s facebook av) ? a trained medical professional explains
False claim shared by President Trump that only 6% of CDC-reported deaths are from COVID-19 is based on flawed reasoning (Pablo Rougerie; Health Feedback; Aug 2020) ? fact check
Misrepresentation is this ? ? close to lying (or it's bullshitting).
How many people without co-morbidities likely died from the Spanish flu, or die each year from the seasonal flu? What makes you think the situation with Covid is any different? The important figures are the number of deaths and the mortality rates per capita.
If it wasn't for covid, a lot of people would still be alive despite their underlying conditions.
There's actually an indepth discussion in this thread on the subject to what extent covid is killing people that would've died in the next year any way. Search for "cohorts".
I do not know that, and neither do you. Fact is, Corona alone is killing very few people. Incidentally, the Spanish flue killed especially young and healthy people (apparently caused of overreaction in the immune system), so it is more like opposite situation of Corona.
Not at all. Vulnerable people die from a combination of COVID-19 and other illnesses.
What you seem to be implying is that COVID-19 is an epiphenomenon of sorts, that it happens to accompany these deaths but does not actively play a role in them. This is unsubstantiated. COVID-19 does in fact play a causal role in these deaths.
Quoting Derukugi
In other words, "sucks to suck!" :roll:
When such people contract Covid19 and die, the death is a result of the combination of the two.
To say that they did not die as a result of - FROM - contracting Covid19 is just plain false. They were living with the conditions prior to.
:roll:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-53356593
The long term effects are not well known yet, and definitely something to be concerned about.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/coronavirus-long-term-effects/art-20490351
However, healthy practise like exercising and eating well, usually counts for something in that type of situation.
Yes, apparently Spanish Flu killed people of all ages, and according to some accounts most especially those younger than 5 those between 20 and 40 and over 65. It does seem highly likely though that those with co-morbitities would have been especially vulnerable. There are probably no reliable statistics on the relative numbers of deaths from Spanish Flu among those with co-morbities versus those without.
In any case, it's not clear what point you are trying to make with this. The latest estimates are that Covid kills 6 times as many as the seasonal flu.
"Fauci and other public health experts have put the COVID-19 death rate at about 0.6% -- six times that of a typical flu season -- which is the latest CDC projection."
From here.
Also this figure is the death rate among those infected; if Covid kills six times more of those infected than the seasonal flu (on average obviously) does; this does not take into account the apparently much greater infectiousness of the Coronavirus. Have we ever seen, apart from the Spanish Flu, medical systems overwhelmed by seasonal flu deaths and people, out of necessity, being buried in mass graves?
FOX Noise: fu45 to Bob Woodward, 2.7.20
https://youtu.be/5Z8nV10dFcw
There's a fire raging towards us and it might destroy our town.
Mayor Trump:
That's terrible! But I love my town and I don't want to scare the people. So we should downplay the fire. Tell them to stay calm, it will go away.
Later...
Townspeople:
A fire burned through our town and, devastatingly, we lost people and property. Shouldn't we have taken a precautionary approach to the fire?
Mayor Trump:
Nobody could have predicted something like this.
--
From the New England Complex Systems Institute, January 26, 2020 - on Coronavirus:
Quoting Joseph Norman, Yaneer Bar-Yam, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Systemic risk of pandemic via novel pathogens – Coronavirus: A note, New England Complex Systems Institute (January 26, 2020).
That is something you`d have to show in each individual case, and even than it is not clear.
Fact is, for the young and health, Corona is a practically non-existant danger. For the old and healthy, it is a small danger. For the obese, diabetic, supersized-junkburger and dietcoke consuming crowds waddling through Walmart it is a very big danger. They already should take some responsibility for their health, Corona just amplifies that.
My prediction stands: By and large, general population health will be the biggest factor.
In other words, fat people deserve to die.
k.
However, charts coming from Western Europe a coarser indicator of mostly reliable data suggest that COVID is here to stay for generations, just as many other viruses that regularly afflict mankind.
One can hope that some protective measures can be discovered but that has not worked for other corona viruses like SARS. Then again, we've never had a president before who could will prevention and cure to any disease just prior to election.
It is, in the death certificate, filled out by a health professional. I'm sure if someone presented you with statistics for other causes of death, you would accept them at face value, as you no doubt do with "the flu" when you make fallacious comparisons to it. The reality is that if coronavirus is medically deemed to be a contributing factor to a person's demise, then they record it on the death certificate. The medical community relies on this type of data all the time. So if the general totality of trained medical personnel find these numbers compelling, you should probably assume they are right and accept it because you personally have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
Quoting Derukugi
This is a deeply ignorant and dangerous statement. For one, you seem to be one of these people who is only looking at death numbers and thinking that is all that matters. If you at some point become inclined to be informed about the disease and make good decisions about it, you need to look much further than that. The long term effects of the disease remain completely unknown and will for years. Current information suggests that people of all ages are showing long-lasting effects including cardiovascular problems, chronic fatigue, and diminished brain function. Many of these are people who had only mild or moderate symptoms from the virus itself. Previous physical health and age are similarly not good indicators as these effects are being seen in people of all ages and regardless of prior physical health or underlying conditions. A study in Germany has shown that among ALL hospitalized cases (regardless of age) the rate of long-term heart problems may be as high as 80%. That means young, healthy people are getting this and ending up with heart problems that are likely to dramatically shorten their life expectancy.
What you have said is not based on the evidence surrounding this disease. It is based on a fantasy that you are choosing to believe, most likely for purely political reasons. Hopefully, the majority of the damage this does when it is all said and done will be to the selfish people who won't listen to reality and are currently responsible for extending the duration and severity of this outbreak. Currently, you sound like one of those people.
True, official statistics underestimates COVID mortality almost everywhere, for various reasons (not necessarily nefarious), but the extent of undercounting varies widely. However, in retrospect we can always look at excess mortality (difference between this year's deaths from all causes and the average number over the same period in the last several years) and get a measure of what's going on. It's a crude measure, but when the excess is pronounced, it's hard to argue with. (Though some try: Russian authorities threw a screaming fit when several prominent news organizations published their analyses based on official mortality data that showed that Russian COVID statistics were way off.)
Excess mortality in 24 European countries by week
Most early deaths of the elderly were probably due to COVID followed by a secondary bacterial infection which drew strong immune response from the patients' system which killed damaged and too many undamaged lung cells. Younger, much more active people have greater lung capacity to work with, helping to outlast the infection.
Guess we're in for another round of mismanagement and downplaying.
To see the future, compare the GB chart to France which is perhaps a month ahead in development.
They're so devoted to their tribe that they're willing to kill and die for it, apparently.
A) They’re incapable of thinking for themselves.
B) They’re mouth breathers.
Not a good thing to be without a mask.
The US GDP is estimated to drop something like -3%, but let's see what the reality will be. As Fauci has said (if I remember correctly) that the likely timetable with vaccines etc. would put us in control of the pandemic in middle or late 2021, then you are bound really to have the economy simply to fall to a lower level and then start climbing back.
Far too many people will have lost their jobs for the economy and demand to somehow bounce back up.
My dear god man, will we survive these people? Will we? Wait until Trump's Storm Troopers hit the streets. These people rally behind violence, they are the very worst of America. We get what we deserve, the Left retreated into the Ivory Tower over the last fifty years. This allowed the Right to seize the culture. We have not hit bottom yet, hold on everybody because the fireworks are just about to begin.
No, they’re just easily lead, for whatever reason. I doubt they can be lead to significant violence by the orange fool. His weird charisma isn’t nearly strong enough.
Quoting JerseyFlight
It allowed the Right, or rather capital, to gain power. Practically all of us are caught in the trap of capitalist culture though, I agree.
You doubt this? They have already killed people.
So has the Left, in the same manner.
What? You are sore mistaken about the nature of Left violence. Vast research has been done on authoritarian personalities. The Left favors democracy, the right, monarchy and a violent system of law. Do some research, you will be surprised.
The Republican Party or conservativtism isn’t an authoritarian personality. Granted Trump is a dictator wannabe, and many of his supporters seem willing undermine democracy in their support of him.
Quoting JerseyFlight
Can you point something out?
The general dimensions are normally believed to look like this:
I think we need to a third axis:
Rational <-----------------------------> Irrational (Magical? Conspiracist? Nonsensical? Trumpist?)
LET ME BE CLEAR. I’M NOT IN COMPLIANCE. I’M IN DEFIANCE.
— Pastor Greg Locke; Jul 28, 13m:14s facebook av
THEY ARE TRYING TO SHUT OUR CHURCH DOWN. WE WILL NOT BE BULLIED.
— Pastor Greg Locke; Sep 1, 8m:31s facebook av
Is that ? what draws an enthusiastic crowd in the US?
Should they just be left to their own devices, and perhaps be asked to self-identify so others can keep a distance?
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[sub]False claim shared by President Trump that only 6% of CDC-reported deaths are from COVID-19 is based on flawed reasoning (Pablo Rougerie; Health Feedback; Aug 29)
Still Confused About Masks? Here’s the Science Behind How Face Masks Prevent Coronavirus (Nina Bai; UC San Francisco; Jul 11)
How Well Do Masks Work? (Schlieren Imaging In Slow Motion!) (Jul 4, 8m:20s youtube)
Conspiracy theorist died Covid after trying to catch it to prove hoax (Jimmy McCloskey; Metro News; Jul 11)
Demagogue (Wikipedia)
Persecutory delusion (Wikipedia)
psychoceramics (Urban Dictionary)
[/sub]
Prospect of 'acceptable deaths' in pursuit of COVID-19 "herd mentality" in the US - in order "not to panic" Wall Street by "keeping the economy open" - during a second term for Putin's covIDIOT Bitch:
• US pop. - c328 million
• herd immunity - approx. +60% infection rate, or +197 Million Infected
• .03% fatality rate (based on 198k fatalities / 6.7m infections as of Sept. 16, 2020) - c5.91 MILLION DEAD
FIVE MILLION, NINE HUNDRED AND TEN THOUSAND (or more) Dead Americans - mostly Elderly, mostly Black & Brown people, and mostly the Working Poor (including blue collar Whites) with jobs that cannot be done 'from home'.
:mask:
(Deaths from COVID-19 do not account for the persisting and perhaps permanent illnesses or disabilities from which (at least) hundreds of thousands to a few million of severely afflicted survivors also would likely suffer.)
On a different, more hopeful note, it has long been a puzzle why Covid morbidity/mortality seems to differ significantly in different parts of the world, even after accounting for known factors, such as timing and demographics. Some places just seem more immune to the virus. This could still be down to the known but not fully accounted factors, but one of the more plausible, though speculative alternative explanations has been prior vaccinations, particularly the old anti-tuberculosis vaccine BCG, which is or was widely administered in some countries, but not others. Some of the correlations have been pretty suggestive.
Related to this, here is an interesting article on BBC about vaccines' "non-specific effects:"
Quoting The mystery of why some vaccines are doubly beneficial
Sweden.
Quoting Ansiktsburk
Actually the US has now more deaths per million people than Sweden.
Correct to notice that it was the right wing that in Sweden demanded a lockdown, which the government didn't do.
Here it was the right-wing that demanded also tough quarantine measures... and the ruling women from the left-centrist administration agreed. At start of the pandemic, the administration and the opposition reached a consensus on this and now Finland has the lowest amount of corona cases and deaths per million of the Nordic countries. But who knows, maybe it will become worse.
So basically the argument that the lock-down or no-lock-down argument is inherently politically or ideologically motivated is simply nonsense. It really isn't.
Sweden
About right. The dicussions nere has been as intense as everywhere. But generally out chief epidemiologist said from the beginning No lockdown. And the government listened to his department. Covid has been severe in homes for elderly people, and more people died here under 70 yo, than the total number of fatalities in our neighbouring countries Norway and Finland. They did the lockdown. Abou 5000 died here about 400 there each. But can one say whats right or wrong?
Now for US, well, we have never had masks here, and now very few people die. The most important thing seem not to be government policies but how well people really follow the rules in the country. Have had pretty extensive communication with people in lock down countries and thats no walk in the park, unemployed and stuck in a small apartment alone. The situation is above all difficult, the virus behaves unpredictable, and hunting wrongdoers is maybe not the best thing to do. Do you keep the distance yourself?
It's a measure of what degree any belief is based upon an appeal to reason and evidence as opposed to ideology or magical thinking.
Under the correct circumstances, all sorts of positions could be quite reasonable. In general, the moderate left is most likely to correlate with rationality, although extreme conditions could vary that considerably.
Herd immunity has to be built.
The vaccine is not around the next corner - we have to turn quite a few corners, before we see light.
There will always be multiple opinions. That is human nature.
Being at loggerheads with nature, gives us no advantage.
The Cost of Herd Immunity in the U.S.
Yes, the quest for herd immunity is likely to take years and a vaccine may never be created. If more and more restrictions are placed on people indefinitely so many are going to suffer despair through severe poverty and mental illness. The whole emphasis is on protecting the vulnerable but endless more people are going to be made vulnerable, including many people under 50, and are likely to be vulnerable for the rest of their lives.
The government is giving endless guilt messages and threats as well threats of more threats. Surely, it would be more empowering if we were just told of risks and given the freedom to make informed choices about our own health and about protecting others. It might enable people to care more than imposing endless rules which are likely to create anger and a desire to break restrictions as far as they can without being fined.
It will be interesting to see what historians make of all the mess when they can view from hindsight. Will they think that people were too selfish for wanting to go about their daily lives or that the government chose to allow civilisation to collapse?
Swedes here made a decision and didn't flinch as the British government did. And the Swedish went with that.
Quoting Ansiktsburk
After the pandemic we know.
We are here having the second wave and both people and especially officials are getting really jumpy. Guidance and even possible regulations about using masks are getting more common. Until now, the Finnish street has looked a lot like the Swedish street. Yet the pandemic ought to blow out of proportions here if Finland should catch up the death toll of Sweden.
Cities like Helsinki have now ordered the use of masks in public transports. Likely using masks will get to be as in the US here too.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-54248507
I've noticed this being very important: the success stories have usually been countries that before have had a lousy response earlier epidemics, which put their politicians into a bad light and hence made them to take these issues more seriously.
Perhaps in the US case one issue here was that the CDC did succeed containing earlier pandemics like the Ebola outbreak.
Just what I needed over in the Brexit thread.
P.S. Trump has just been taken into hospital.
That's the knowledge that grounds a shutdown and widespread testing and quarantine. That knowledge has not been utilized in the UK or the States...
It's the same here too, but then again the symptoms are flu symptoms. Cough, sneezing, fever, etc. This makes basically having any old flu a reason for one to take a corona test and quarantine oneself for the time and hence a lot of people are tested.
As it's flu season now, taking a corona test is very typical and ordinary. Few weeks ago my son complained about a sore throat in school and he was immediately sent out from school and taken into a corona test, which came back in two days negative. Only after no flu symptoms did he go back to school. Not a rare thing to happen in families with smaller children, and you have countless examples of people going to self quarantine until the test comes back negative.
It is going to be very interesting to watch what happens when flu season really pops off in the next few months. It is highly likely that masses of people with flu-like symptoms will be prevented from going into work at a rate "hitherto unseen" - such a thing would be detrimental to economy and society. Does anyone know if there been any word from the experts about the possibility of this?
I don't know about you, but I would never go to work if I had the flu. Why would you even think of doing such a thing?
Two reasons:
2)I never call out...ever. and
1)I go into work every day, no matter what
It sounds like you've got some bad habits. It's not healthy for the individual who is sick, or for those in one's surroundings, for a person to go to work sick. So why adhere to such irrational principles?
Lovey-dovey.
This is logical when you get paid by the day or have hard deadlines for your projects, for example if you're an accountant working for yourself.
You might as well be paid for being sick, and besides, taking a day off is so much more rewarding on a fine sunny day when you're feeling happy. :cool: :beer:
At least officials here are now saying that this time now is the critical for the second wave. The majority of those few new cases reported here do not know where they have gotten the virus. And just to note, they didn't say the same thing in the summer.
The good thing now is that they are somewhat ready to handle a new wave: it's not anymore a mystery disease, there are ample amounts of facemasks to be bought and people likely aren't going to panic and hoard toilet paper. Basically the societies are adapting to a "new normal" of pandemic.
You are hilarious :lol: I've never heard anyone refer to "reliability", or to "going into work" as a bad habit. Personally, I have always, regarded unreliability and the avoidance of one's work obligations as bad habits.
Going into work when sick is far from irrational for anyone who wants to eat. And it's even farther from the irrational for those who have bills to pay, unless of course you can find some sucker to pay them for you.
My point is, the average flu might knock a person out of work , maximum, a week. But, this season, everyone who gets flu like symptoms will be out 2 weeks, minimum. It's going to be interesting to watch.
It is appaling how fast the tyranny of the masses can effect a new "new normal". I'm pretty sure the "old normal" is dead and extinct. I mostly feel bad for the kids who are growing up in a cowardly faceless world.
Hey man, pushing yourself too hard is unhealthy. And to justify pushing yourself to an unhealthy extreme with "I have to eat", or "I have bills to pay" is nonsense. Face it, you have an unhealthy attitude toward work which you try to portray as good by calling it "reliability".
I like your passion, but we just have a different work ethic, I can respect that. Sometimes being responsible and disciplined requires one to push hard. If one's responsibility and self-discipline in pushing hard is unhealthy and should be avoided as such, then the prospects of excellence in the world look dim. Imagine if all the historic world figures were prevented from pushing themselves too hard because it is "unhealthy", we'd all be living in caves.
Nevertheless, I balance my rigorous work ethic with astounding feats of laziness on my designated days off (I woke up at 2pm today), so you don't have to worry about me burning myself out. :blush:
That all said, my personal work ethic has no bearing on the potential implosion that society will incur when flu season kicks off in Covidworld 2020
If we get that vaccine, it won't take long that the pandemic is history...assuming it goes away in 2021. How important will it be depends of course from future events, but if this is a once in 50 to 100 years thing, not much will remain about it. Just as there's absolutely no collective memory of the Spanish flu, and who remembers that we had the "Hong Kong flu"-pandemic in the same year Woodstock happened.
What likely has happened is that working from home got a real boost from the pandemic and likely companies will look just how much office space they actually need in the future.
What is "excellence" if not a healthy being?
Quoting Merkwurdichliebe
I didn't say that it's always bad to push oneself hard, I said it's bad to push yourself hard when you are sick. Normally that's only a few days in a year, and has very little bearing on a person's overall accomplishments, because we tend to not do very well when we're sick anyway. So what's the point in going to work when your sick, risking making your coworkers sick, and making yourself even sicker, for the sake of doing a bad job because you're not at your best when you're sick anyway?
Quoting Merkwurdichliebe
Do you think that the flu is so much more contagious than Covid-19 that it will spread around more than the latter, despite all the mask wearing and distancing? You do realize that there are vaccines for the flu as well, don't you?
Good point. This is one of the new normal that I find interesting. I wonder if remote schooling will become a lasting reality as well.
I'm not speaking of contagion, the idea I am putting forth is that when flu season strikes it will do what it always does. You don't have to be very old or pay much attention to know that every year from approximately October to March, huge numbers of people are infected with cold and flu symptoms, and despite all effort to administer flu vaccines. Yes, cold-flu season will do what it always does, with one exception: it will conflate the covid panic beyond control, and the fallout will likely be disastrous.
You don't think covid is disastrous on its own?
WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!! :death:
On it's own, absolutely not. I think that it's effect on the world has been somewhat devastating, but we have yet, not even begun to see the slightest extent of what real disaster looks like (i'm talking woman backs into the fan disaster)
Well, from the experience with my daughter I can tell that for first graders it doesn't work, it sucks. Yet have to say that the pandemic was a crash course for teachers on distance learning. For higher classes an especially in tertiary education, it's an option even if the limitations are obvious. We do need that physical contact.
I think the norm will be that you basically can work from home some days, but typically you will have physical meetings every once in a while.
You just figured that out...? Bless your sweet lil' buns. :kiss:
Physical contact, which was already becoming swiftly antiquated in our high tech world, is one of the biggest casualties from this pandemic panic. Newspeak like "social distancing" and "self-quarantine" have reformed our society in ways that we haven't even begun to recognize.
Well, I should point out that the Spanish flu didn't change the way people behaved later, even if it did alter a lot of things back then when the pandemic was raging.
Parts of Europe are going into their second wave? For the most part, the US is holding steady or declining. The hotspots we're getting are mostly young adults. How's Finland?
The "second wave" can be seen here from certain European countries:
Here's the situation in Europe from last month looked on the map. As you can see, the situation is bad again in Spain while for example in Italy and in Germany it's good:
Quoting frank
Here's a chart of the daily new cases. In the highest peak there was over 200 new cases during one day, yet after the spring there were well below twenty new confirmed cases daily. The latest figures shown a slight increase, but what has stopped quite dramatically are the deaths to the virus as knowledge how to treat the virus is obviously increased here and around the World:
Infections could start jumping upwards, but now in all 346 have died, which is less than the death toll in West Virginia, but more than in North Dakota.
Basically the strategy in the UK is in chaos, with the young, between 18 and about 30 years of age being the main spreaders, predominantly when they returned to University over the last few weeks.
Another is a state close to panic that some people experience when they're tested. It magically goes away if they're negative. Panic can produce some pretty dramatic respiratory distress.
Your brain is working overtime to keep you safe right now. It has adjusted to a whole new reality and learned in a relatively short amount of time that what was once benign is now dangerous. For many people, these new fear associations are so strong they can even be triggered when the threat isn’t imminent. Has your stomach clenched during a concert scene in a movie? Or did looking at pictures of the Rose Garden Supreme Court nomination ceremony make you recoil? That’s your brain’s learned fear response in action.
A fear of crowds isn’t inherent — most of us didn’t have this response to large groups of people pre-Covid-19. So, how did we develop this new anxiety so quickly?
Over the past seven months, the country has taken part in a giant fear-conditioning experiment. We have learned that crowds are a high-risk situation for contracting Covid-19, so we don’t go to places with crowds anymore (most of us, anyway). Not only that, we have developed a physiological fear response (sweaty palms, knotted stomach, shallow breathing) triggered by this new conditioned stimulus. Pavlov would be so proud.
Fear conditioning is when you learn that a previously neutral stimulus (a crowd) predicts a dangerous or unpleasant situation (a deadly disease). Eventually, the neutral stimulus starts to trigger the fear response on its own, even when the dreaded outcome isn’t possible, like when you view a crowd scene on TV. You can’t catch Covid-19 from a movie filmed in 1989, but the association is so strong that your brain produces a fear response anyway when you watch the New Year’s Eve party scenes in When Harry Met Sally for the 17th time (or maybe that’s just me).
The classic fear-conditioning experiment is giving mice a brief electric shock right after a sound is played. Initially, the mice freeze in response to the shock (their natural reaction), but soon they start to freeze in response to the sound, even before they’ve been shocked. The mice have learned that the sound predicts the shock, and their fear response kicks in early. In the final stage of the experiment, the mice continue to freeze in response to the sound, even when no shock comes. The fear conditioning is complete.
Fear conditioning is one of our most deep-rooted forms of learning, because it helps us to avoid — and therefore survive — potentially dangerous situations. It sits at the intersection of emotion and memory, controlled in the brain by the amygdala and hippocampus, which are involved in processing fear and memories, respectively. The two brain regions work together to learn, contextualize, and remember new situations that are potentially dangerous and warrant a fear response.
If you experience the previously neutral stimulus (a crowd or a noise) enough times without the scary event (Covid-19 or an electric shock) following, the conditioned fear response will start to decay. You’ll stop reacting to the situation as if it’s dangerous, and the connection in your brain will weaken. This means that eventually, when the risk is over, you will be able to go to a concert and not have a panic attack. But that’ll probably be a while.
This made me think of optimism bias
What about the people (like some in our government) who have also heard that crowds increase the risk of catching Covid-19 but go to large events with lots of other people anyway? They likely are experiencing something called optimism bias: “Sure, the coronavirus has infected more than 7 million Americans and killed over 200,000 of them, but it won’t infect me. I’m special.”
For an Elemental article I wrote in August about how our brains process risk, I spoke with David Ropeik, author of the book How Risky Is It, Really? Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts. He says:
When we take a risk, we engage in something that’s called optimism bias. That is, it won’t go as bad for me as it will for somebody else. And we use that all the time to do all sorts of risky things — drunk driving, jaywalking, speeding, going out in the sun without protection for our skin, you name it — so that we can do stuff that’s risky. That’s the rationalization tool used for taking risks. “It won’t go as bad for me as somebody else.”
Unfortunately, wishful thinking doesn’t work on the novel coronavirus. But distance and masks do.
Try this to snap yourself back to reality
Starting to feel your fear conditioning wear off or your optimism bias slip in? Think of the most horrific outcome of what would happen if you caught the coronavirus, or read a few stories by people who have lost a loved one to Covid-19 or have been scarily ill themselves. Seriously. Evocative stories or images drive home how great the risk really is and can shake you out of your apathy or denial.
A colleague recently recounted her own terrifying and drawn-out experience with the virus this spring. She writes:
The terror of being on the early end of a not-well-understood disease, of being at the mercy of a never-ending array of bizarre and worrisome symptoms, of feeling like there was no one who could help, of feeling better only to feel worse again, of being rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, of my four-year-old asking me, “Mommy, can you please keep your eyes open?” was too much to bear.
Keep that in mind the next time you think about going to a football game or a political fundraising event.
I think I've always had an optimistic bias.
sheps labeled me as an eternal utopia seeker.
I'd like to think I am trying to live the love out of life :flower:
But at this moment in time I am too scared to participate if others don't wish to as well.
I make no political statement about it, I just slip out the back. My absence should be enough said. Until someone has lived one hour on the receiving end of not being able to be with your loved one in their absolute hour of need?
Save it.
I really believe that most people are not actually in fear of covid-19. They practise physical distancing measures as a moral responsibility to protect those within our society who might be negatively affected by the disease. The odds are quite low that I will be one of those who die from the disease, so I do not fear the disease whatsoever. This attitude is expressed in your examples of risk taking. People take risks without fear.
However, statistics show that some people have died, and will die from the virus. So I feel morally responsible to take these relatively simple measures, distancing and mask wearing, to do my part to help those unknown people who inevitably will be negatively affected. This is quite simply a matter of will power. Are you capable of preventing yourself from doing what comes naturally from instinct, and long standing habits and desires, for the sake of protecting others?
Therefore I think your portrayal of "fear conditioning" is a misrepresentation. We learned thousands of years ago, that moral responsibility is not based in fear. That idea was left behind in the Old Testament, the fear of God. The New Testament displays the new learned reality, that moral responsibility is based in love for others.
The fear conditioning (in this case) goes beyond the potential dangers of covid. Myriad people are wearing masks and observing social distancing &c., simply to avoid persecution from strangers who have gone all in on pandemic panic. And, if not for that reason, they do it simply to be allowed into public places so they can buy food and other necessities for living. We are facing a classic mode of oppression that utilizes fear mongering in order to stimulate predictable behaviors.
It originates with fear (in this case, covid) and establishes new societal mores, and these alien social expectations inevitably incite a new fear (of being persecuted or excluded) in those who have not bought into the hysteria. In this way, everyone is made to play along, and in the end we create a brave new world together.
I wear pants for the same reason. Damn fascist prudes infringing my right to hang loose!
I bet you wear a seatbelt too, scaredey cat.
What about those beloved cultural icons like Bugs Bunny and Winnie the Pooh, who aren't required to wear pants, what kind of message are we sending to the kids...Hang loose brah!
It really is the coolest way to fly
I prefer a cocktail of regenerone, steroids, and bleach myself. But each to his own.
:rofl:
Quoting Baden
:lol:
And then the evil car manufacturers in cahoots with the fascist governments will put airbags, collision avoidance systems and automatic rescue service call systems in your car. And that's just the reality now, tomorrow if you want to kill yourself by driving off a cliff, the car will perhaps drive automatically you to see a shrink. The horror, the horror...
I agree about bleach, it gives everything that minty scorched freshness. I like it in my coffee.
Right! They are removing all the fun from vehicular mayhem. I'm really gonna miss the old chaos, but the new gods are calling for "safety for all". Right?
I remember from the university a professor of economic history, that only had and bought cars that were older than mid-1970's. The reason was that in cars before that time he could repair everything himself, but after the mid-70's they start to have so much electronics that he could not do it himself.
If we extrapolate how things are now going, I assume doing anything else than fueling the car, filling windshield viper liquid and washing the car, the car manufacturer will sue you for "hacking" the car and making it unsafe for use. But they surely they will be more easy to use and correct your driving errors even more than now.
Yes, the dumbing down of the consumer by making things easy and automatic also benefits the manufacturer: just think about a car from the 1920's (or typical computer from 1980's). How many present car owners would be totally clueless and have extreme difficulties of starting and driving an antique car? Many actually would hurt themselves in the process as just to starting the thing or putting on the lights can end up in disaster.
If people don't believe me, just watch this instructional clip about driving the Model T Ford. 9 minutes:
Consumers are about as dumb as it comes, hard to believe they can be dumbed down even further.
I would say Apple has mastered that strategy better than any other corporation.
Even if this is going a bit off topic, I agree.
Although they still have buttons and ports, to make it difficult... uh, call that back:
Explain this: a famous climate change denier was finally banned from YouTube for COVID19 denial.
Climate change is a bigger problem, though. ?
The pandemic is coming back with a vengeance in the UK, a number of towns and cities in the north of the country have over 600, or 700 confirmed cases per 100,000 of their population. It is now spreading south across the country like a wave. Track and trace is barely working and the hospitals in the north are at full Covid capacity. I've heard that similar spikes are happening across Europe now, with Spain and France quite bad.
Where I am, it's speculated that we've had so many cases that we now have some herd immunity at around 20% post infection. Not full blown herd immunity, but along with masks and social distancing it's acting like it.
Apparently it's upticking in NY again. :sad:
Hope the UK will level out soon. I'm taking vitamins D and C per Dr Fauci.
I have no idea how American net corporations make their own regulations, obviously using an army of hilariously overpaid woke lawyers teamed with woke pr-managers alongside other managers and executives creating the most hypocrite and virtue signaling mess of inconsistent guidelines which then can be interpreted whatever way some woke employee of the corporation wants...or by myriad algorithms.
Here in Finland they have already cut back the times restaurants and pubs are open and the administration is thinking of tougher measures, but not going into lock-down again (at this time). Public gatherings beyond 20 people are not advised.
There is real worry about the economy, a lot of businesses which scraped through last time are going to go to the wall and government support is less and patchy. The government really doesn't want to go to a national lockdown, because it will probably bankrupt the country, but they may have to within a few weeks.
Many areas in the north have been locked down more today, as there is a lot of bad feeling and distrust about the way the privelidged south is forgetting about the north. The voters in the north who leant their vote to Johnson are very angry now.
Fortunately I am in a low risk area with low population density, with plenty of work. But it's difficult to avoid some worry.
https://www.who.int/bulletin/online_first/BLT.20.265892.pdf
The strain on our medical facilities wasn't caused by covid itself, but by the disproportionate measures that were taken and never reversed. Hospitals are overworked because a large portion of their personnel is "treating" patients who have flu symptoms.
Quoting Benkei
Turns out they made wrong assumptions, then. I don't fault people for making wrong decisions when there was no information available. Information is available now, and governments should start acting upon it instead of trying save their hides by pretending they haven't made some grave mistakes.
Quoting Benkei
Yet we accept this "problem" every year with the flu and other coronaviruses.
Quoting Tzeentch
This is bullshit.
Edit: Look up "immune imprinting". Previous infections with other strains of the same virus matter.
This we can talk about. Typically Dutch is no wish to punish. As an example, some hairsalons only take 1.5 m distance, others insist on ventilation, masks for personnel and clients and 1.5 m. In that last situation, barely any chance of infection arises but both are treated the same. If a client has covid, the hairdresser that cut his hair has to go into quarantine for 10 days. Instead, if you require ventilation and mask wearing and punish by locking the entire salon for 2 weeks if measures aren't taken regardless of an infection, you actually start having sensible rules and you sobe require such extreme lock downs.
Where are you getting those figures from? I can't find a source newer than the sources for CFR, and it seems rather short-sighted to counter the implications of estimates of fatality being wrong by using data from the same cohort as has just been shown to contain (albeit inevitable and understandable) estimation errors. We'd need a newer, preferably similarly collated, estimate of critical care pressure to properly support such a counter argument, should such a source exist.
Obviously the case for increased pressure on critical care in general is a no-brainer, but with shutdown of 'non-emergency' services to factor in, critical care capacity is not a blank cheque for any and all lockdown strategies to be considered justified.
I honestly don't know. My dad mentioned it today when I was talking to him. I do know it's based on Dutch figures with respect to the first wave. It's also expected the fatality rate in hospital admitted case will be lower this time around but it won't near the 6%.
I agree that an important factor missing from considerations is the knock on effects of measures. It's buried somewhere in this thread but I raised it before: just the deaths resulting from the poverty might outweigh some choices being made. There are definitely models available for this but they're not used. Same for deaths due to standard care being delayed. There's a reason policy is aimed at a certain length for the waiting list. But that data isn't used.
Edit: Also, it's not CFR, if that causes the confusion. It's a subset of cases.
In fact, the numbers of new infections in Sweden is quite the same as other Nordic countries and Estonia without any huge spikes upward:
Not only has the lethality of the pandemic obviously decreased, but now interestingly countries are on different path.
The reason that Sweden opted for a more lax policy is of course Anders Tegnell, who recommendations the leftist administration has followed. Yet even now herd immunity as an policy option is refuted even by Tegnell himself: "people getting infected on purpose is of course not [in] accordance with any public health policy. We tried to slow down the spread of the virus as much as anybody else in any other country. And we managed to slow it down just as much as most other countries. It took slightly longer than other countries. On the other hand, we don't have the resurgence of the disease that those countries have. - In the end, we will see how much difference it will make to have a strategy that's more sustainable that you can keep in place for a long time instead of the strategy that means that you lockdown, open and lockdown over and over again."
Jesse!
Per CNN, the number of elderly europeans infected is rising.
You know how everyone is saying we should have seen the virus coming, because it was obvious that it eventually would? You know they say we shouldn't have just blindly wandered along blissfully assuming a pandemic could never happen? You know how they say we should have taken decisive action before the crisis, instead of bumbling in to it and having to figure things out on the run?
I think you should write to Reagan and tell him this arms race has to stop!
An amount of apology to an amount of other people. I am very happy to admit that fewer people are dying than I feared. Long may I continue to be wrong about such things in the same direction.
But can we have a continued lockdown anyway, please? It is so restful without the endless traffic all around and above. I had forgotten birdsong.
No. There's a 60% mortality rate for any patients who end up on a ventilator for covid related lung damage.
It's bad.
According to the recently collated experience at Vanderbilt University Medical Center
As bad as it is is bad enough, there's no advantage in pushing a narrative, otherwise we miss dealing with the real problems.
Put your spectacles on, Isaac.
Well if your figures only include a subset of all ventilated patients then the study you're extracting them from must be extreme indeed because prior to the Vanderbilt study the figures we were working with were around 65-80% of all ventilated patients.
Either your subset is not far off the full set or your study massively overestimated deaths compared to contemporary studies.
I think it was in jama, but with all your time in the ICU, I'm sure that number doesnt surprise you. :roll:
State checkpoints, stay at home orders, closed businesses aren’t a sign of peace and quiet, to me. We’ve reached peak statism. Despite our educated populations, who no doubt know by now what one has to do to protect himself, the nanny-state forces new restrictions. Police checkpoints on roads leaving Melbourne; shuddered businesses with a new lockdown in Ireland; curfew in Madrid. They have taken power and refuse to relinquish it.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2765184
This one perhaps? There were serious methodological flaws (still struggling patients were not recorded, only survival vs death).
Personally, I'd hope anyone actually working in an ICU would be far too busy to analyse a range of papers and compare methodologies, range and applicability. If I wanted an overview I'd turn to a statistician or epidemiologist, not a random frontline worker.
As always, it's a joy to chat with you.
Wait, what timeframe did this study cover? I'm in contact with people all over the country and nobody is getting results like that.
It doesn't say, but at Emory University in Atlanta they got a mortality rate among 165 COVID-19 patients placed on a ventilator of just under 30%, so it's not an oddity. Nor is it unexpected, as care treatment regimes stabilise (as well as some reduction in most vulnerable prior comorbidities). I'm not sure what effect you're thinking of which would be effected by timescale (as opposed to just sample size), perhaps you could elaborate?
Right, I get what you mean by 'timeframe' now. No, none of these studies are from after July, but then I very much doubt the 60% figure is from after July either, we don't seem to be able to gather good data that quickly so if you've some reason to believe earlier practices gave an artificially low mortality, you'd have to explain the much higher mortalities of studies which preceded them by only a month or so.
None of the analysis I've read has mentioned an effect of changing the threshold for intubation, but if there were one, what could explain the much higher figures of early studies?
Then they're useless.
Quoting Isaac
Now that I've worked with people who were in NY and got the whole holy fuck story, yes, I could tell you why the mortality rate was awful.
Notice that there aren't many news articles reporting shortages in critical equipment starting with masks. The industry has been able to respond in half a year.
I think we'll have to wait a couple of weeks to speak to that.
Quoting ssu
This is true. We know it fairly well now. Still, when it decides to kill, it kills. There's nothing we can do about it.
Quoting ssu
Which is pretty amazing. Part of the reason shortages were a problem was that supply lines stopped during the lockdown. IOW, our ability to respond to it depends on limiting lockdown.
And thanks for being a nice, normal human being.
Whew!
There were lot of plans already in existence. In the US both the Bush and Obama administrations had done extensive plans how to tackle a pandemic.
Yes, Trump is one big reason, but not the only reason. Even with an administration headed by President Hillary Clinton, the US response wouldn't have been exemplar.
The main reason is simply that health officials don't make plans like the Armed Forces do with their OPPLANs (Operational Plan). The Military makes these plans to be able to immediately react to a situation, if North Korea attacks South Korea or if China invades Taiwan etc. and systematically and rigorously trains for these events. Yet other government institutions don't plan and exercise in truly similar fashion. Other departments of the government are designed to be efficient in normal times, they usually have no excess personnel or resources to handle a large scale crisis happening out of the blue, they will get their act up only basically in 6 months or so.
Quoting frank
And also to get orders in, have a normal competition and inspection. This simply doesn't happen in few weeks or in a month. But in several months, then the capitalist machine gets it's act together.
Also the speed that we will get a vaccine will likely be impressive.
Yet it's very interesting to compare the death rates that given here and compare them to what and wrote on the first page of this thread 8 months ago. While the overall mortality rate especially with below 70 year olds is far lower than then anticipated, the death rate among people over 80 infected with covid-19 seems to be accurate even then (if I remember correctly the numbers from the video).
So why did you cite one from that period to make your point?
Quoting frank
Well, that would be really useful, from where would you get your data and what model do you think it's best to use to analyse it?
It's a point of view. My point of view is that we have reached peak travel, and peak noise, and "they" will not relinquish the imposition of endless noise and busy-ness on "us".
Why didn't you move to Alaska or some place like that? Just curious.
Preparing for impact... NicK and I were the only two.
That's actually a bit insulting, you know. Why doesn't everyone that has the least criticism of society go and live somewhere else? I want my country to be pleasant, not some other place.
I'm sorry.
My sister wanted to move someplace remote, Alaska your question.
Those poor people:
Idaho if she'd like it there or not.
Jamaica?
No, it was her idea.
Ooh, that must be Russia over there. :starstruck:
There isn't really a basis for this belief. No vaccine trial, vis-a-vis covid, is designed to prove actual effectiveness at changing the course of the pandemic. Different experimental design would be needed for that and very likely different targets of efficacy.
Generally, there is healthy skepticism in the evolutionary biologist community whether a vaccine that cannot irradiate the disease is a good investment, as the obvious prediction based on science is the disease will simply evolve to defeat the vaccine. Vaccines of this kind also have the potential to simply shift harm profiles around without reducing total harm, which is difficult to capture in trials which may easily a confuse looking at a shift at one part of the harm profile and conclude a general reduction of harm can be inferred when there is no basis for such a conclusion (vaccines that reduce disease severity for most people, may increase transmission while significantly increasing the severity for a sub population; for instance, that a sub population has severe over-reaction of the immune system). So, we will find out, but there is no reason to have higher confidence than a skilled gambler down on his luck on this particular issue.
However, considering the harm the pandemic has already had on the global community, we can already conclude that vaccine technology does not protect public health from negative infectious disease outcomes, and investments in vector control, better outbreak protocols, treatment capacity, but most importantly simply public health in a general sense (preventing preventable diabetes, obesity, lung harm from bad air etc.) are more effective investments. In particular, investments in public health in the sense of healthy people is not even a cost but pays for itself many times over.
And yet, public health policy of the last decades has been based on under-investing in healthy foods, healthy city design, healthy habits, and healthy air -- which turns out to benefit fossil and food corporations -- and over-investing in medical technologies that "fix problems post-fact" -- which turns out to benefit pharmaceutical and other medical corporations. Certainly only coincidence and these policy failings will be swiftly corrected going forward.
Absolutely right. Which is why this Hollywood disaster movie narrative needs to be undermined. The hero is not going to "tell little Johnny I love him" and then sweep in and save the world from the evil virus. The 'evil' is the fact that we've strung out our health services, and the health of our citizens, to such a knife-edge that they can't handle what should be an expected part of human life (the emergence of a novel virus).
Unfortunately, 'successive governments yield to self-interest and corporate lobbying to create conditions for an otherwise handle-able virus to become devastating, but gradual pressure form social-interest groups brings about reform' doesn't make anywhere near as good a story as 'evil deadly virus sweeps the planet while the brave pharmaceutical workers engage in a selfless race to seek a cure (that will completely coincidentally earn them billions)'
As an example - the issue I just raised about reduction in the deaths on intubation. What came up as one of the most common factors in reduction of mortality? Normal ICU care. Not some fancy new technique, not a new medicine, just the ordinary, already established level of care that any sane country would have built some capacity in, given the very obvious and well-predicted threat of such an event as this.
And as to...
Quoting ssu
... where else would you here such an expression outside of this narrative? "the speed which which you did those pre-flight safety checks was impressive", "the speed with which that new food additive was passed by the FDA was impressive", "The speed with which that new pesticide was approved was impressive". In any normal sense we'd be very worried indeed that a drug which is probably going to be taken by the entire world was being rushed through as the only hope of humanity's survival, but in this movie it's fine because the pharmaceutical companies have become the all-American hero, and any narrative dissenting from the "evil virus will kill everyone unless stopped by medicine" storyline is given greenish under-lighting and discordant music in the background.
Errrrr...
Quoting Isaac
First ask yourselves, how much investment and focus is put into vaccine research generally? Compare that with what is now happening with Covid-19. You think those billions now poured into various vaccine programs by major countries won't have an effect? That the 100 or so vaccine development programs currently underway won't matter? They are just scams of big pharma ripping off governments and totally useless or something?
Usually vaccine development is something like the following decade long process:
Accuse me of being a naive optimist, but I do think that the Covid-19 vaccine will take far less than 10 years to come out.
And anyway, how many hospitals are declaring now that they have shortages with masks and other equipment? At least here no hospitals or authorities are declaring similar worries as they did during the spring. And no one is shaking hands and usually people have changed their habits, so things aren't the same as they were in the spring.
Quoting Benkei
You are always so positive, Benkei. :grin:
Maybe, but there is currently no evidence that they will. In my version of science I believe things when there is evidence to believe it. The experimental design of the current covid related vaccine trials, do not seek to answer the question of whether the pandemic will be significantly curtailed in one way or another, and the scientists running these trials do not make such a claim.
For instance, if the virus simply evolves to defeat the vaccine (how evolution works) the scientist will simply point out that their experimental design did not seek to provide any insight on this issue.
The reason I mention evolution is that in an exponentially expanding new virus there are many evolutionary paths available and with 7 billion people there are many hosts available in which those evolutionary events can take place. There are already now a diversity of strains of the virus, a vaccine developed against a certain strain may already not be effective against strains that already exist, which will of course then come to dominate once the conditions are such that they have an advantage. The virus has simple maths on its side. The long amount of time it usually takes to make an effective vaccine, for good reasons, means simple math is not on its side.
But my main point seems to be lost on you, which is that obviously vaccine technology cannot possibly be relied on to intervene to prevent major harms from infectious disease ... because those major harms have already occurred in the case of Covid, for basically the reasons you state.
Vaccine technology is simply not a reliable basis for protecting public health from infectious disease generally speaking and the disastrous consequences of a pandemic. You may say "But of course! Vaccines take time and aren't meant to intervene to strop a pandemic before there is already major health harms and economic disruptions! dum dum", but, of course, my response is simply to repeat, that for exactly that reason, "Vaccine technology is simply not a reliable basis for protecting public health from infectious disease generally speaking and the disastrous consequences of a pandemic". There do exist other policies that can have a much bigger consequence.
Other policy measures do not have this problem, and in the case of public health in terms of "healthiness", actually pay for itself. Therefore, focus should be first investing in policies that both intervene at all stages of a pandemic such as we are experiencing and moreover pay for themselves. Ultimately, relying on vaccine technology to control infectious disease was lazy thinking by the medical community. Does that make them idiots? I'm sure you are already confident my answer is yes, yes it does make them idiots. However, it was not a consensus; many experts predicted exactly this scenario and pointed out more effective investment strategies to protect global health against the inevitable "high impact" event we are seeing.
This is just like 100% wrong.
Hey, he got closer than anyone. But blew it in the end.
Lot of that going around. Do they have a vaccine for it??
There are only something like 36,000 people in the Yukon, a geographic area larger than California.
As a lifelong Florida hermit kinda guy, I figure I'll just slip on my flipflops and a little sunscreen and head on up there!
2-3 days for the test results.
@Benkei Right? How to pray for a negative feels counter intuitive. Kind of like leaning into a right hook! :yikes:
How on God's Green Earth could anyone not get this? I'm absolutely dumbfounded at the selfish behavior around me.
Btw: if person A is COVID 19 positive, how long is their incubation period? How long after person A tests positive is person B at risk if person A doesn't know when they contacted it?
WHYYYYYYY????????
Calculated risk to be blunt honest. I attended the ceremony and left without hugs from anyone. I left and the others at the ranch stayed for the reception of drinking, buffet food and fuck all.....
Quoting ArguingWAristotleTiff
:roll: Russian roulette? spinning the chamber every 10-15 minutes ...
It's easier to stay indoors in CO, especially NoCo, on account of the wildfires making the atmosphere polluted with smoke.
Yes, absolutely I think that (or at least not the scale of effect relied on). Developing a vaccine involves a very great number of resources and those resources are spread sufficiently thinly such that it takes a considerable amount of time to complete all the stages. Not all of those resources can simply be bought by throwing money at them. How is money going to increase the number of trained staff? How is money going to increase the supply of minority condition groups to test against? How is money going to speed up the long-term monitoring period?
It's lunacy to invest this amount of money in a medicine which might not even work when there's absolutely proven interventions which we know will save tens of thousands of lives not only now but in the next one, and the next one...
I think from contact to symptoms is around 5-7 days. In the hospital we stop treating infected people as if they're contagious after 21 days (though I think the real number is around 14 days).
We were all uncomfortable when we started doung that, but it's been fine.
I wouldn't call it lunacy especially as the investment does also go into treatment, not only in a vaccine.
The HIV pandemic that has killed roughly 32 million, killed at it's height in 2005-2006 nearly two million people annually. Now with treatment and spread of information the deaths have been reduced by some 50% and in many African countries the majority of HIV patients are receiving antiretroviral therapy. To put the investment into scope, between 2000 and 2016 about half trillion dollars was spent in HIV research globally, btw.
Its making me wonder if another mutation has taken hold. I'm sure somebody's checking.
It's not about the simple act of spending money on a problem, it's about where the money's spent.
We know for a fact that general health improves outcomes yet barely a penny goes into schools sports, sports grounds are sold off for housing, social active schemes can barely scrape by and corporations are allowed to push sugar and fat drenched foods on children, force workers to sit for eight hours a day with impunity...
We know for a fact that good healthcare including capacity improves outcomes, yet healthcare services have been stripped to the bone and the scraps sold to the highest bidder.
What's the difference between the solutions above and the pharmaceutical route? The flow of money. Government to people in the first two cases, government to corporations in the latter.
You don't have to be a genius to work out why the corporations favour the latter. What is much more baffling is why a majority of left-wing commentators are so willing to work so hard to popularise the corporations' favourite solution for them.
Like saying to someone who wears a seatbelt that they're a scaredy cat as if being a retard who doesn't wear one is something to be proud of. No, I'm not afraid any more than looking before I cross the street makes me afraid. Now please crawl back into your hole of stupidity.
The only one you are fooling is yourself.
Covid aside, I do think laws requiring clothes are puritanical and unjustified, and I’ve sometimes imagined that a great protest against victimless crimes and general tyranny would be to just sit around naked on the steps of a prominent government building doing nothing but existing.
What? God, just go away.
+This goes for anyone else who hasn't progressed beyond a mental age of 15 and thinks it's cool to do stupid shit because "mUh fReeDoM!". Keep doing it. You'll get your Darwin award eventually.
If you have such a hard time dealing with other people's views maybe you're the one who should leave.
That's your problem. Not mine.
I guess instead you'd like everyone to make mature comments such as this one.
You need a long look in the mirror my friend.
Quoting Tzeentch
And if you have any trouble figuring out where you should start looking, start here:
When you are confronted with a view you do not agree with, you wish for that person to get hit by a car.
When I am confronted with a view I do not agree with, I wish for them to reflect.
Now reflect upon that, and tell me which one of us hasn't progressed beyond the mental age of 15.
First of all :lol:
Secondly, when I'm confronted with someone who at the outset of the pandemic claimed that it was nothing to worry about and who after over a million deaths and untold suffering has not only shown no sign of remorse but not even an ounce of recognition concerning how horribly wrong they were and instead doubles down on the same species of inanities they began with as if this was something to be proud of, I treat them with the absolute contempt and derision they deserve. And I will continue to do so, unapologetically. When it comes to regular human beings who I just happen to disagree with, I'm happy to offer mutual respect.
Remorse? Remorse for what? The millions of deaths and untold suffering that I am somehow responsible for in your head?
Please.
You're just trying to convince yourself that I must be a horrible person so you don't have to think about what I have to say.
Again here notice that it isn't just one or two governments doing this, this is a global effort. And in that global effort there might be also players that are indeed effective, even if many are inefficient.
If you talk about US health care, that's obviously stupendously ineffective and costly when it comes to the money actually spent and results that are dismal, but this isn't just an US effort. The argument of " healthcare services have been stripped to the bone and the scraps sold to the highest bidder" might hold true in one national example, but to argue that ALL NATIONS have gone this route is false.
The virus seemed to be spreading unimpeded across parts of the UK for a while until about a week ago. With a few cities and counties having up to 1,000 confirmed cases per 100,000 of the population. It was doubling about every 2 weeks. Now the chaotic government has introduced some localised lockdowns, it is doubling about every 4 weeks in the worst places. Already the numbers are to high for test and trace to be effective. Scotland and Wales now have full national lockdowns, but England is not going down that route as there are a number of politicians in the governing party who insist that there should be no lockdowns and that the people should just use their common sense and live with it. This is exerting pressure on the government causing more dither. We are like a boat without a rudder at the moment.
I can't speak to the reasons why the spread of the virus has increased in other countries, but I can say something about Austria.
Austria was one of the first counties to place a lockdown into effect. We had a great deal of mild panic in the beginning, but it really settled down after a few days. Home office became the norm. Home schooling became an ordeal, but for the most part Austria was well prepared with decent internet connections and all teachers being able to do online classes.
Once the masks were proven to be somewhat effective, Austria took little time to put measures into effect to make masks norms without endless debate. Sure it was strange and to a degree inconvenient, but hey it helped a lot.
We used network theory to help find potential hot spots and clusters before they formed. The models were extremely helpful and yes... were a major player in the fight against this virus.
We did home office and got that up and running as well as it could run very quickly. We set up social programs to have partial employment of those in sectors that were very much exposed to the virus as to keep people employed with most of the incomes and keep business afloat without too many going belly up.
We did home schooling and yes parent for a brief moment came to value the profession of teachers. Thankfully Austria has a very good internet service and for those who were in a disadvantage they rather quickly found aid to help their kids still learn.
Sure some folks complained about not getting haircuts or being able to go to the fitness center, but for the vast majority such measures were viewed as absolutely necessary. Austria became, for a short while, a model of success in the battle.
OK... the number of cases were worked down fairly quickly from a 7 day moving average of about 740 new cases in late March to a moving average of between 25 to 35 new cases from the end of May to the end of June.
Today we had over 3,500 new cases and now a moving 7 day average of new cases over well over 2000. (and to think during all of May and June we had only 2,300 new cases in total)
So, what happened?
More or less the people became very comfortable with the virus . They also became impatient with the governing authorities and wanted life as usual. As we began to slowly reopen the people put pressure upon the political authorities to quicken the removal of restrictions much faster than the medical community recommended. Once a restriction was loosened the people took to it like American shoppers on Black Friday. If the restrictions stated a social gather of 50 people was the maximum there was no social gathering happening under 70 people. Basically the pushed every loosing of the restrictions to the very limit of the law and beyond.
The watershed moment came when the people placed extreme pressure upon the government that summer vacations outside Austria for Austrians and of course having tourism return for a few weeks in summer was SO NECESSARY to keep themselves sane and of course to recover a small bit of the losses in the economy.
So for the final month of the season Austria reopened. Now there were restrictions and guidelines, but hey... it's a vacation... which meant a vacation from the guidelines as well.
Prior to the vacation is a must the cases were beginning to go on the rise once more, but it 'seemed' a slow and 'manageable' increase from the perspective of the people demanding a vacation and the political heads remembering that they are exactly that political heads... they needed the people's support to keep their jobs.
Of course the medical professions were stating over and over this is going to be really bad, but no one cared to listen. The populist talking heads constantly mentioned how there are so many beds free in our super equipped hospitals for patients and as long as that's the case why constrict anyone's freedom. (once I heard this BS I kind of felt the virus quietly say "Yummie!")
As if someone set off a light switch the numbers exactly 2 weeks after the vacation season was over exploded like never before, but the people grew found of the reacquired social mobility and the 'liberty of the individual' was touted as the real important issue in debates. In the case of Austria mostly by the liberal parties, especially the Greens. (this ain't America)
So... after nearly 3 months of lockdown and nearly beating this damned virus, the NEED for a vacation for 4 weeks has caused us to be in worse shape than ever thought. Well... more than ever thought by the people, as the folks in the medical professions kept saying 'this is a very bad idea... a very bad idea indeed'.
So now we are on the verge of another lockdown, but they can't call it that, but that's what it's gonna be. At the moment the government turned back into a political theater with wishy washy restrictions that seem to change on a daily basis. They set up a 'Corona Stop Light'... after weeks of debate and anticipation, well... on the first day it was presented if was already redundant. That's what happens when the science is no longer done by scientists, but by political science appointees. It's a total mess.
Personally I hope the people of Austria remember how nice those 4 weeks of vacation were when they realize that the entire Ski vacation season in Austria (the entire industry of Ski Vacations!!!) will be more or less a total bust. Basically 4 weeks of vacation will likely kill off 5 months of a ski season... the single biggest money maker in the tourist sector and the 3rd most important sector of the Austrian economy.
I just hope the 'selfies' were nice, as they'll have all winter to admire them while they find themselves unemployed.
I'm sure the vacation didn't help, but I think it's possible that the virus was quietly spreading through the summer. Mild cases can go undetected. I guess what I'm saying is that it's possible this surge was going to happen one way or another. Maybe it's just worse due to the vacation?
Quoting Punshhh
Hey, at least you have a real chief executive. We've got dick.
If you want a fuckbuddy, try Tinder. I care as little about your existence as you do about the million that died from the disease you continue to downplay. Deal with it and piss off.
Apparently, 'human nature' is a COVID-19 risk-factor. "Two-thousand-two-zero party over / Oops out of time / So this winter we're gonna party like 19-1-9" :mask:
Who's looking for a fuckbuddy?
Really? What nation did you have in mind whose health service is run primarily with the health of the nation in mind, without demands of greater efficiency being laid on it to either increase profits or reduce government expenditure, whose health industry is not suffuse with influence from multi-national pharmaceutical companies? I may well like to move there.
Projection seems to be becoming a theme in our conversation, no?
You don't seem to have much understanding of humanity. After all we are primates with a complex social and economic structure with a long history of warfare, exploitation, poverty, genocide etc etc. All that is required to upset the relative equilibrium we have enjoyed over the last 70 years, in the West at least, is something like a global pandemic.
There is an acute tension developing between healthcare objectives and economic objectives in many countries. Both are experiencing great loses, with catastrophe just around the corner. Those sitting on great wealth, or in ivory towers will be getting worried to the extent that they will stop caring about the vulnerable and the old.
There are rumours going around the UK that the government is secretly happy that many thousands of old people will die, saving a great deal of expenditure in health and social care, as a vast social care crisis was looming before Covid, due to a population with to many old people.
The debt bubble could fracture at any time now, as the economy feels like it is on a rollercoaster with no controls.
Are you going to bury your head in the sand, or remember what humans are like when the pips squeak?
They were able thru network theory and contact tracing to identify the many origins and source of the new clusters... over 80% were linked to the vacations themselves and activities where the vacationers upon their return came into further contact with social grouping... most of the grouping also in violation of a whole number of guidelines and rules.
While indeed there were mild cases that went undetected that wasn't the real catalyst for this shit show.
btw... the vacationers were not just younger people at beaches. The elderly have taken up the charge to 'spread the good word' by bus vacations as usual. It's a collective failure.
Quoting 180 Proof
There's no cure for the willfully stupid. To be honest, I'm not too sure how to prevent it.
I have to say one things I've noticed in all of the 'freedom at all costs' apologetic replies...
... 'existential crisis' has really been dumbed down in the past few years.
'Give me convenience even if it gives them death'.
This seems incredibly implausible to me.
1. The majority of the Tory vote is in the older population, they'd be killing off their own support.
2. The costs of their response are predicted, even by their own think tanks to far exceed the temporary and minor drop in pressure on the social care budget.
3. The biggest threat to the social care budget comes not in the form of the current elderly and vulnerable, but the immediate future elderly and vulnerable coupled with a relatively smaller working age population.
:confused:
One would think that the Tory's would want to keep their older voters alive to keep voting for them. But that relies on some kind of normal political balance, like what we have experienced over the last generation. In reality, I suggest, the Tory's are grappling with an existential crisis, in which they can see the younger vote abandoning them and their reliable voter base inexorably dying off. Resulting in their only hope of survival as a political force requiring them to veer hard to the right and hope to convince the population that that place is normality, while the left are communist lunatics. This course relies on a healthy economy. It is of course doomed to failure, now.
Ah, yes. I made the mistake of presuming any rational basis behind this clown-show of a government... As it is I'm now prepared to entertain that they might have any of a dozen crackpot theories behind their 'strategy'. UFOs may even feature.
:lol: I'm not exactly enamoured of your opinions either but at least you have a sense of humour. :kiss:
It's an interesting experiment, how so many people will give up moral responsibility at the drop of a hat, for the sake of insignificant pleasure. It seems like if one individual person does not follow the rules, for the sake of "freedom", then the next will see this transgression as an excuse not to follow the rules, quickly producing a cascade, until a large portion of society falls into that hole. Monkey see monkey do.
I think your answer points out fairly well just what happens.
And if the virus infection rates have been low (as here in Finland), then there is the factor of a single event turning the stats up. One example of this happened in a small city called Vaasa located in Northern Finland. The city has a small university and of course, as usual, it was a large student party that was the reason for the spreader event. Some time later the city turned red with all indicators with over 600 new infections in a region with typically well below 100 cases since the start of the pandemic. The city went to lock-down and forbid any meetings over 10 people.
Yet I think the ordinary flu season has caused people to be alarmed as anybody showing signs of flu will typically take a corona test. My son in school said he had a sore throat and off he went home and to take a virus test. Schools are easily shut down if there is a covid-positive case. A lot of people have been off from work to be getting a test, hence I assume these usually negative tests will keep people on guard.
Likely the countries that score the highest points in various studies with the public health sector.
Japan for example has a quite well performing health care sector and it has scored in many investigation top places with it's health care sector compared to others. And it's doing just fine with the pandemic: see How Japan’s Universal Health Care System Led to COVID-19 Success
Needless to say, in such rankings the US ranks quite low.
Bus vacations would be loony. I understand the desire to get back to normal, though.
That doesn't have any bearing on the point I'm making. There are key components of a healthcare system which cannot be bought in a short timescale no matter how much money you throw at them. It takes years to train as a nurse, doctor, researcher...and if you don't have enough you can't handle the task properly. Even if Japan's health system is in good shape, it doesn't mean their research facilities are, nor does it mean they wouldn't equally benefit from more robust and well-established interventions than a wild scramble to find Phizer's next golden goose.
Thank you for helping me understand :up:
Thankfully I am Covid-19 negative.
Component Results
SARS-CoV-2, NAA
Your Value
Negative
Standard Range
If I'm reading Bloomberg correctly, elderly people were specifically refused access to intensive care in the first months of the pandemic.
Some of them may have just been dehydrated, so I dont know how to process that information.
Yay!!
Quoting Hippyhead
These comments are so low quality and from people of such low analytical abilities -- and I would wager worth as human beings as well -- that they do not merit my attention; a general theme of the forum as of late.
However, for fun, and when I have the time of course, I'll post in my next comment a few jewels of Covid denialism these lowly-esteemed contributors made in the past, so further contrast the irony that they are now on the side of "science".
However, if others of better faith, sharper whit, more honorable character, to paraphrase my argument: it's simply fact now that vaccine technology did not stop Covid before major damage, and the idea pandemics can simply be ignored in a calculus of public health investments is absurd; given the disruption to society that pandemics engender they should be weighted not only in deaths but the cost of social disruption particular to them; already the pandemic has cost trillions; trillions that could have been invested before the pandemic in things that would actually prevent, stop, or significantly reduce the severity of said pandemic. Other policies could have prevented the pandemic or limited it's severity: vector control, outbreak protocols and general public health.
This does not say that vaccines would have no place in an optimum public health strategy, only that investments in vector control, outbreak protocols and public health as a primary defense against infectious disease would, by definition, displace funds for vaccines, but more significantly, reduce the chances and severity of not only pandemics but existing endemic infectious diseases, thus affecting the cost-effectiveness calculation for any particular vaccine (i.e. if a primary investment already deals with a problem, there is less reason to invest in other solutions to the same problem).
Also notable, I seem to be in very close agreement with on this issue, who brings up some good points I also agree with, and I am glad to see we share common ground on the foundational issues of public health and only disagree on some details as it turns out; the forum never ceases to surprise.
That's your first false idea, as if I'm promoting a short timescale answer. Or that just throwing money to everything is an answer. Believe me, the US is a prime example of how that goes and that with higher costs you don't always get better health care. The fact is that better health care systems do have positive outcomes, but if a pandemic breaks out, likely the best system and the best policy actions just minimize the deaths.
Food security appears to be perilously on the verge of vanishing at this point. Millions have slid into poverty, or will succumb to insufficient healthcare. It's truly tragic.
We've also seen a very prominent vice of human psychology illuminated. Political dissension in the United States has exponentiated. The two individuals at the forefront of the election responsible for determining how the world's strongest (apparently) country is to be spearheaded, are two near-octogenarians incapable of articulating themselves without a teleprompter, demented comment or racist remark inbetween. Ethno-national governments have expanded their stronghold quite inexorably.
In the midst of all of this, having exploited the nature of sheer capitalistic brilliance, the world's billionaires have generated over half a trillion additional dollars to their name.
The latter, of course, highlights the inevitability of Pareto inequalities in free markets. Apart from Marxists, or adherents to intermediate doctrines such as Fabian Socialism, I don't believe many will reproach the outcome's philosophical nature. Having said that, it has far from constituted a cause for celebration.
If you've ever housed dormant misanthropic proclivities, now would be a fitting time for them to manifest.
This was discussed a few months back in the context of "it's ethical to sacrifice people in rich countries by letting the pandemic run rampant, because the economic costs of lockdowns and social distancing will kill more people in poorer countries."
I completely agree that far more people in poorer countries will suffer and die due to the economic consequences of the pandemic than the disease itself globally, but it's a false dichotomy.
These are not victims of the pandemic, but of a global economic system that kept them poor before and will do little to nothing to help them now.
The solution to wanting to help poor people in poor countries is doing things that effectively help poor people in poor countries, pandemic or not; and, more importantly than that, stop doing things that keep them poor and under corrupt management, such as the full spectrum of neoliberal "market access" policies, debt peonage, as well as simply overthrowing or assassinating any leader that might nationalize resources or repudiate debts accumulated under previous corrupt client regimes put in place and propped up by external money, external intelligence information, external cloak and dagger operations, and external military training of domestic terrorist organizations (aka, the military and police, trained by western military and intelligence to carry out genocides of people with the "wrong political ideas", throw people off planes into the ocean and the like).
I'm not sure if you are or would make such an argument (economy over protecting people from Covid, because poor people suffer from a bad economy), but I feel it useful to paraphrase what has been already discussed on this particular topic, and of course I welcome your thoughts on the above or then continued analysis of simply the socio-economic consequences as such (given that we do live in a neoliberal world policy framework that will do little to help poor people).
12 people found infected with a mutated coronavirus that doesn't respond to antibodies. All mink in Denmark to be killed.
Adjusted for population, Europe has twice as many people hospitalized for covid19 than the US. If you get the NYT, it's here.
Wtf? Is it that the US is just behind due to weather? I actually don't know of any reason for this that makes sense.
I assume that means twice as many covid fatalities. Or do Europeans simply like hospitals more than Americans? In the United States, nobody gets news about Europe because nobody cares, and that doesn't sell newspapers...bullshit does. And, in the US, nobody gets the news at all because everybody reads at a 3rd grade level and they eat up all the bullshit they are fed on the tools of ignorance (e.g. traditional media, social media).
Quoting frank
Maybe people that can read (like Europeans) are more susceptible to being hospitalized for covid...I wonder.
Americans avoid the hospital out of fear of bankruptcy. Europeans don't have to worry about something as silly as that.
Yes, and you can add that, especially in America, COVID is disproportionately affecting the poor who are just the ones who would have that fear.
I'm guessing you're joking. I was asking a serious question.
I'm guessing it's not a joking matter.
Covid is an amazingly elegant beastie. It affects each person individually according to their baseline physiological weak points, seemingly analyzing where and how to have the most effect. No matter how good the mask, it cannot protect you from a life time of being unhealthy.
The mortality numbers in the US are high while the mortality rates are less disturbing. Canada has less mortality, raw death number-wise, yet nearly triple the mortality rate (confirmed infection to death ratio).
Low socio-economic status results in a generally less healthy lifestyle, lower quality food, less exercise/more sedentary lifestyle, less medical follow up, etc. The basic determinants of health, as a baseline. In comes Covid and finds a population of less healthy individuals...Poof! higher infection rates, higher mortality rates. Covid highlights, and hits, the weakest points within a healthy individual, weakening them further, perhaps unto death, most often not. Leaving the survivor depleted, with an adjusted baseline, that, theoretically, can be restored with time, exercise and commitment. However, if an individual lacked the resources initially to be optimally healthy, it is highly unlikely that they would, after infection and initial recovery, suddenly find themselves in a position to rectify a lifetime of previous lack.
The poor are always hit harder than the wealthy. Again, fundamental determinant of health : Can you afford to be healthy? or are you doing the best you can with what you have?
I suggest that "appropriately affecting" is a more accurate term. There are reasons populations are affected as they are, whether these reasons are readily identifiable is not always clear.
I do not think you have made an appropriate generalization here, Book273. Health cannot be tied to wealth in this way. Wealth can buy treatment is about as far as we can go.
Quoting Book273
Can you provide the context please?
That's the case fatality rate not the death or mortality rate.
CoViD fatigue.
It's not a thankful topic for philosophers anyways. It doesn't lend itself to analysis from first principles, and a lot of data is unclear. Figuring out just what kind of reaction is justified is very technical.
OK, I've got the quote here:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This was in response to M of S's description of how people sort of give up on physical distancing practices, suddenly, seemingly altogether en masse. "Moral responsibility" here would refer to one's apprehension of being liable for one's own decisions as to good and bad actions.
Regarding the social determinants of health, wealth (socio-economic status) play much larger roles than simply being able to purchase treatments. Wealth allows one access to quality foods, preventative health regimes (exercise programs, equipment, etc), adequate housing, clothing, as well as allowing restorative downtime. Additionally wealth allows increased security, both perceived and real. All of these are contributors to an individual's base health level.
It is only extreme poverty which denies people quality food and adequate shelter. Generally the lack of proper nutrition is the product of other factors. I believe that eating quality foods is more a matter of attitude and priority, and this makes it more of a psychological issue rather than a financial issue. Sure there are people at the fringe of society who are incapable of buying healthy food, but if they were not actively seeking a healthy diet, and you gave them some money, this would not incline them to seek a healthy diet. The majority of those who do not eat healthy, buying low price, low quality, or for whatever other reason, do so as a matter of choice. Their priorities are elsewhere.
Quoting Book273
No, it's a matter of personal choice, therefore the judgement of good and bad is based in one's own perspective. So, for example, if an individual hears about a party taking place, but knows from one's own perspective of good and bad, that it is not good to attend that party because there may be COVID transmission there, the individual might still choose to attend that party. This would be a matter of shirking one's moral responsibility.
Quoting Book273
What you ought to recognize about what I am saying, is that it does not matter whether one's judgement of good and bad is based in "accepted norms". An individual is free to act in accordance with, or in discordance with what one believes is good and bad, based in ones own reasoning. And this is what I mean when I say "people will give up moral responsibility", when a person acts in discordance with what one believes. In the particular example I replied to, what is the case is that people know, and believe, from their own sense of moral responsibility that gathering is not a good idea because it puts the health of numerous people at risk. But if others start gathering, they see this as an accepted norm, and therefore relinquish their own sense of moral responsibility (go against one's own belief) because others are. It's a sort of herd mentality, which inclines one to dismiss one's own moral sense of good and bad because others are behaving in a different way, which produces the illusion that this is an accepted norm.
Great term!
Unclear data, like the actual effectiveness of masks.
...and this is supposed to be good news? Has the narrative so easily been rewritten?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/pfizer-flynn-pharma-fined-prices-drugs-nhs-cma-a7460266.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pfizer-bribed-nigerian-officials-in-fatal-drug-trial-ex-employee-claims/
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/pfizer-fined-23-billion-illegal-marketing-off-label/story?id=8477617
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-pfizer-lawsuit-idUSKCN10D1D8
Yes, because a vaccine will help protect people from infection and help slow the spread of coronavirus.
According to the industry with hundreds of proven (and thousands of suspected) cases of lying about the results of its trials, lying about the procedures for testing them and manipulation of markets.
I'm not saying vaccines don't work, but seriously...if this happened in any other field we'd be up in arms - oil industry, pestcides, arms sales, banks...we don't trust a word they say and with absolutely good reason. The covid narrative has become so politicised that industries like the giant pharmaceuticals can just sweep in uncontested because literally any opposition to any action at all taken to prevent the disease is automatically considered right-wing, and they're not going to oppose the pharmaceuticals are they? So we hand them whatever corporate strategy they want on a silver platter because the right-wing don't care and the left-wing have voluntarily gagged themselves in frenzy of partisanship.
No. All a vaccine is going to do in the short term is make an enormous amount of money for a few firms out of the terrified wealthier nations, while the rest of the world gets shafted by their utter failure to do anything at all about the cripplingly poor healthcare systems which could otherwise cope adequately with this and future such pandemics.
To add to this, we are already reaching health-care saturation in many places and with "lock-down fatigue", the exponential growth (over the time frame of next months) has already locked in disaster in many places. So, it should be clear that even if the vaccine does work, it hasn't "saved us from disaster" of the first wave nor the second wave, whereas countries, such as New Zealand and communist Vietnam, have proven other policies can prevent disasters unfolding.
To connect with the previous discussion about vaccine efficacy, these phase 3 results do not establish immunity against existing or novel strains of Covid that the trials didn't address (by definition), such as the Mink strain (which may or may not be a truly novel strain). It seems the Mink strain has been contained (I don't have a problem believing that, the response was consequential) but what this event demonstrates is that Covid can jump into an animal reservoir and back to humans in a relatively short turn around (the same thing that drives novel flue strains), and so the same thing that happened with Danish minks could be happening in other much worse conditions where there isn't testing for new strains; such as US pig farms where many industrial pig agro-corporate-managers may not even believe in Covid and so may not sound any alarms even if they obverse respiratory disease in their pigs.
I think it is reasonable to assume there has never in the history of humanity been this many individuals carrying a dangerous novel pathogen at the same time (and if that's not the case now then I think it's fairly certain to arrive in a few more doubling times), due to there simply being more people than ever as well as plane travel spreading the virus efficiently around the globe, and so there is no real precedent to evaluate evolutionary potential of such a pathogen, numerically positioned in this way.
The purpose of such an analysis is to first avoid wishful thinking around the policy of vaccine reliance (when presented in a way that displaces policies known to work and proven in many different countries), as well as simply underline the disastrous consequences of abandoning containment in the early stages of the pandemic and the incompetence of our institutions and leaders and the neo-liberal governing ideology. The short term cost of effective containment (which, again, many countries proved was possible), no matter how "relatively uncompetitive" over a short term for places with an outbreak, is nearly an insignificant global cost compared to the costs of the generalized pandemic that was left to unfold (out of fear of bringing down airline, Airbus, and Boeing stocks by a few points; of course, that ultimately the pandemic increased the stock price of our major corporations as a whole means policy has been extremely effective from the neo-liberal governing point of view), and even higher potential costs of letting a pathogen increase to the numbers we are currently seeing (and have already locked in many doubling times of even higher numbers); a very new global experiment in biology.
In short, even if the vaccine works it is not a "successful policy" for managing the pandemic considering the harms already experienced, and the vaccines may not even work due to things such as novel strains dominating once a vaccine puts pressure on the current dominant strains, or then too many "freak harms" happen due to the vaccine, as UK minister puts it, resulting in populations avoiding the vaccine even more than would anyway (either due to unscientific beliefs or then the entirely scientifically justified, assuming economics is a science, decision to free-ride on other people taking the vaccine since free-riding maximizes economic self-benefit whenever it is possible to do). Likewise, long term side effects require long term studies to evaluate, so confidence on this issue can only be, by definition, entirely theoretical at this point without any "scientific evidence" (in the sense of running experiments to confirm hypothesis, which is becoming a "fringe" definition of science nowadays in favour of the "expert consensus" of academic state-agent definition of science) to support such a belief (of course, hopefully it's true and there are no long term side effects of; but hope is not reality as has been already verified).
I have worked 14 years in critical care. Rushing a vaccine is ALWAYS a bad idea.
You can't just throw away the dream job and try and turn it into some ridiculous situation outside of any and all reality. I mean, really? What? Seriously? If they were dressed in work attire I fear the image you'd have to post to convey it- I'm sure it would be illegal in most countries and frankly rally PETA. By these standards.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/sweden-stages-coronavirus-u-turn-banning-public-events-with-more-than-eight-people-11605538856
For me the most reasonable comparison is to look at their closest geographical, cultural, demographic, economic and political counterparts, which include the countries you mention and Denmark. It's not absolutely cut and dried but the u-turn is in itself an acknowledgement that their strategy up to now has not been successful.
I don't see these similarities. Where are the brown shirts, where is the blood and soil rhetoric? Who are the people singled out as aliens for their ethnicity?
Quoting Book273
That's not remotely comparable. Also, I highly doubt "speaking out" has any consequences itself, other than social ones.
Quoting Book273
Historically, all the lockdowns in Europe, the US and Australia have drastically reduced the spread and prevented or stopped the collapse of the healthcare system.
The exact efficacy of masks is unclear, but wearing one isn't much different from wearing a helmet on your bicycle.
Quoting Book273
In the case of Canada? Waiting for the numbers to drop and then doing your protest?
Vote.
Like which ones?
Quoting Book273
And because you think that, the government are fascists?
You are right, actually. Deleted.
No, yet as it is naturally compared to it's neighbors, Sweden looks worse. Perhaps if it was next to Belgium, things would look better. Here's the situation in Europe, and you can see how Sweden compares to Norway, Finland or Denmark:
Here even if the country is one of more brighter spots in Europe, we are implementing new restrictions as it's estimated a sharp rise in cases will happen as the second wave hits. The above graph explains well why Sweden is issuing restrictions.
"Tyson supervisors at a pork processing facility in Waterloo, Iowa took bets on how many workers would get infected with Covid-19, even as they took measures to protect themselves and denied knowledge of the spread of the illness at work, according to new allegations in a lawsuit against the company and some employees."
https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/19/business/tyson-coronavirus-lawsuit/index.html
We are pushing the biosphere hard enough that significant parts of it are in risk of collapse, and the biosphere is responding by sending it's antibody soldiers to the site of the infection. If we keep pushing against the limits of the biosphere and the corona bug does not end the infection, more antibody soldiers will be sent.
If we keep pushing, either we will kill the biosphere, or it will kill us. Either way we lose.
It's not doing a very good job, and if it were actual medicine, it would be nothing more than a useless placebo. If we assume the official death toll is accurate (which anyone with 2 shits for brains knows has been grossly inflated), covid barely ranks in the top 10 causes of death worldwide. It needs to start killing more efficiently and more indiscriminately if it hopes to effectively cure the disease of mankind.
The question is: why has society implemented such draconian measures with covid, but not with the other more prevalent causes of death? I guess we don't mind if people die from heart disease and traffic accidents, but god forbid anyone die from covid. Very suspicious.
Sacrifices have to be made.
Not happening even that light thinning. Even tripple the death toll and it wouldn't have any effect on the demographics.
I'd say the real changes on human population come from:
a) Prosperity and the pension system: people don't make babies in order for there to be someone to look after them when they get older.
b) Lifestyle changes and changes in the society: women don't have so many babies as before. A lot more single people and less children.
Final nail in the head for population growth will be when it's acceptable to live your life with a humanoid robot. Hedonistic individualism rules. Some corona killing a few million doesn't flinch the population stats. Those mentioned above do.
The factors involved in traffic death and coronary failure are easily as random and accidental as any covid death, and society has much more accurate information concerning the former two. Where are the laws to prevent such horrors? It is obvious that there is a major inconsistency in the way society is coping with all these potentially fatal threats.
And at this point, considering the alleged fatality rate of covid, it does not kill fast enough to put a minor or significant dent in the thinning of the global population. Bearing that in mind, the retarded tyrannical measures being imposed on everyone feels more like some type of fast food social experiment than an actual concern for people's health.
Jesus, just wait a few months for the vaccine and then you can go and get pissed in the pub again. Tyranny, my cock.
Yes, total tyranny. Tyranny is tyranny, no matter how you justify it. And if you are trying to justify it, it likely you are a tyrant yourself.
And, how effective is a vaccine gonna be with a virus that the body does not develop a natural immune response to and can be contracted multiple times?
Not a very good one apparently, seeing as you're still here.
Right, you have been waiting for the chance to ban me for a while now. But don't feel bad, most tyrants aren't very good in the first place.
Right on. Lol
Terrible anology. Guns are actually lethal, they kill shooting victims at vastly higher rate than patients die of covid. My entire family got covid and no one died. I guarantee that if everyone in my family was shot, a number of them would die. Speculation speculation.
With this in mind, why don't we start cutting off everyone's index fingers as a precautionary measure to prevent gun deaths. If we do it before the fact, no one will be able to pull a trigger, and no one will ever be shot. After all there is no way of telling who might acquire a gun and begin shooting into crowds.
How retardedly tyrannical!!!
Quoting tim wood
That would be great and all if masks actually prevented the spread of covid, but we all know they do NOT. You have to be insanely retarded to buy into all this hysteria.
The tyranny, oh the tyranny!
I thought masks are supposed to be quite effective. Where do you get your information from?
...hunger, a famine; poverty, destitution; uncertainty, paralysis. It’s like calling Trump King Midas, or a child’s finger-painting a “Rembrandt”, or the whirlpool in a tub drain, Charybdis.
Of course, hyperbole can be used in all such examples to elevate, toward some rhetorical or poetic goal, certain low objects to an exaggeratedly higher level; but to call the mandates of mild administrative governments, meant to mitigate the illness and death due to epidemic, tyrannical, in a philosophical discussion, is not only to dilute real tyranny to the point of nothing, but also to turn it on it’s very head: far, far more souls have been, and are being even now, lost to the malevolence of tyrants, than will ever be saved by the humanitarian efforts to mitigate COVID...
...and many of these efforts are being, or have been, made by currently tyrannical governments!
Yes, perhaps I do know better than everybody: I know better than to believe something because everybody says its true.
And I disagree. The tyranny from an individual dissentor, whether ignorant and stupid or not, is most definitely NOT the most lethal kind of tyranny. After all, I've never killed anyone, and I know I'm most definitely a stupid ignorant individual. Without a doubt, the ignorance and stupidity of the group is the greatest source of the most lethal and unjust tyranny ever witnessed in history: mob tyranny. And you can be damn well sure, when someone gets as angry over an individual's individual opinion as you appear to be, they sure as hell belong to the mob.
Have you thought of staging a protest for your right to get sick as crap?
I now am living with a woman, and have been for many years, under the same roof, whose family lives in various parts under different roofs, from children to grandchildren to great-grandchildren, who insists on meeting with them over Christmas, as we’ve always done, and they are in agreement with that. I am not, because I realize that we may get infected.
I tell her, “just wait till next year: we will be vaccinated, and then we can get together with your family as we’ve always done”, but she is obstinate.
What am I to do? I have the choice of refusing to go with her, to gather with her family, possibly alienating them from my affection, or going with the flow, gathering with them, but contracting COVID...
What a difficult position a virus and a division of mindsets about it have put us in!
This virus could not have been engineered in a lab as precisely as it has been by nature to divide ppl.
No not "quite". They have some percentile of effectiveness in case studies. But how it plays out in the real world is something else.
I get my information from life, and from research. Where do you get yours?
• masks are dirt cheap
• widespread use of masks is known to make a statistical difference, check history for that matter
• masks have been shown to make a difference in labs
• heck, it's common sense, use your gray matter, others may not be interested in all your exhaust
• no, you're not particularly entitled to stride about spreading disease
• wearing a mask is being respectful to others, yep, there are morals somewhere here
• the virus couldn't care less about you me us anyone, it's in the business of infecting, whether you cry "tyranny" or not
* the virus is known to be dangerous enough, hopefully a vaccine can come about soon
• yo' can friggin' live with the minor inconvenience ya' cry-baby :)
• no, you don't have to wear the darn thing when on your own, at home, in your backyard, in your "bubble", whatever
Getting sick is not a right, it is a privilege.
Definitely mob morality, I'll pass
I'm certain I would feel the same as if I got the flu and knew I had infected somebody and they died. But I've never really contemplated what feelings it would invoke. Bear in mind this is all speculation, but I imagine I would definitely not feel like a killer in the sense of a public shooter. I would probably feel like a junk food salesman when they know of a person that died from diabetes, or like a cigarette salesman when they know of a person that died of lung cancer, or an auto salesman when they know of a person that died in a traffic accident. To quote Airplane : "they bought their tickets, they knew what they were getting into. I say, let 'em crash".
Im alright with reasonable regulations to prevent obscenely powerful human organizations from gratuituosly overstepping the line. But I'm totally opposed to babyproofing the world against the course of nature because it allows unthinking humans to feel a false sense of security (just another lie to live under), and it provokes generational cowardice and a Nietzschean mob morality.
Did you know the CDC restricts the use of masks on newborn babies? They don't seem to be doing too bad, eh?
Nature and labs do what they do, it is people that divide themselves. Like guns, they do what they do, it is people that pull the trigger.
This is mob morality in your book?
Quoting Merkwurdichliebe
Masks are (mainly) for others' protection.
So you want to wear the annoying thing around newborns. Right?
Sure hope you're not one of these:
Creepy.
Newborn babies rarely get the cold. And if your baby would die of COVID, I guess that would get news coverage. But I guess the probability is similar for you to get shot by the police on the way from the maternity ward.
And what about cats and dogs? It's reported that they can get Covid-19 too. And the CDC doesn't want the animals to use masks either. Or not that I've heard.
Yet that isn't at all a reason why not to wear a mask.
That explains your actions then, you've found yourself a loophole. Go ahead, continue acting like a newborn, maybe you'll avoid the fines.
I hope you don't belong to the privileged class in this case.
Should be getting a vaccine soon. Thank you Pfizer!!!!!!!
:pray:
Will you be taking it? I already have a chair outside the facility! Hit me up! :strong:
Actually I am a needle FREAK so I am more worried about the pain than the reaction to the vaccine. :yikes:
Yep. I think it's the mRNA vaccine, so it's new technology. I've heard the side effects can suck.
I don't have an issue with needles, but I'm phobic about dental stuff. I have to take two tylenol PM's to get through having a tooth filled, then I sleep the rest of the day.
31% of US Coronavirus deaths are from people over 85, 58% over 75, 80% over 65. Just 6,900 under 45.
Whatever effects the virus will have, it won't directly affect demographics, except for indirectly due to the lockdowns and economic distress.
This is why I think comparisons to wars are spurious. A large proportion of the deaths are in people who weren't expected to live another 5 years, and many who were past their "health span." Obviously though there is a big difference between people getting sick at 65, getting ready to enjoy their retirement, versus relatives I have who are 90+ who express a desire to pass on, and are now living their last months locked in their room.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
I've got better things to do than hang around newborns.
Covid has brought that into focus, hopefully resulting in better, more thoughtful hygiene practices and self-quarantining when infectious. Of course elimination of all risk from life is impossible and probably not even desirable, but elimination of entirely unnecessary risk is desirable in my view.
:rofl:
It not a reason at all. But it highlights how ridiculous all this covid hysteria is, and that is a reasonable reason. Wouldn't it be hilarious if it turned out that pets were the biggest transmitters of the disease?
I've done it so far, and it has worked out great for me.
The privilege of getting sick belongs to all living humans. Let's all be grateful.
If I should refuse to get the vaccine, would that count as a demonstration for my right to get sick?
Your morality is old and lame. It is played and has run its course. You can keep believing everything your told by your media masters, but my morality necessarily rejects that garbage. I dont simply conform to the rabble to whom you belong, I prefer to think for myself and come to my own conclusions. If that makes me free, so be it. And as we all know, the self incarcerated are scared of free individuals, and that makes them dangerous (easy rider).
Quoting tim wood
I'll make you a deal, I'll grow up, if you pull your head out of your ass...you first
I think you need to find a person who's covid-19 positive and give them a big smoochy kiss right on the lips with lots of tongue.
... may I ask what your opinion on these topics is, and whether you think human beings ought to be free express dissent with regard to them?
I had the first shot of the shingles and that was rough but I am willing to go through the crap feeling to stay safe and see my Mom and Dad :heart:
Mom called to let me know that my brother in law, who is a teacher for those with learning disability has been hospitalized in Chicago, Covid-19 positive, on supplemental oxygen and being given Remvesidere (sp?).
I'm stuck in a depression but I am sure I am not the only one.
I've been looking for that special person. And that is the only way I kiss, wish I could show you personally.
But have you really been trying? You know there's more to protesting than just typing stupid stuff on your phone.
:up:
What does this even mean? Do you mean getting sick proves we're alive so hurray?
Also the math is wrong: My mask ( that work makes me wear) is designed to stop over 95% of bacteria and pollen. Great. Bacteria are, on average 20 times greater diameter than the Coronavirus, so, mathematically, this is like using a volley ball net, set up appropriately for volley balls, to stop paint balls. To me this seems ridiculously ineffective. I am thinking the pain balls are gonna hit me anyway, so why bother with the net?
Yep, pretty much. Means we aren't dead yet. Which is where we all end up eh, no matter what anyone does. It's the defining feature of life, it ends.
So wearing a mask is a constraint on freedom like having to have a driving licence. Nobody cares If you want to kill yourself in your own car on your property, but we don't really want you to kill us on the public roads. Like having a licence, masks don't guarantee safety, but they help along with other stuff.
I suspect you're confusing masks as PEP and as a measure to protect others. It's not effective as PEP without additional PEP but it's quite obvious why healthcare staff wear a respiratory mask when, for instance, intubating or during surgery.
It stops droplets though, making it an obvious choice to limit risk for others.
It's not about you though. Read unenlightened post above.
Just interesting. But note that people take these things seriously.
Let's not forget what happened to all those poor Danish minks, all 17 million of them, now found in mass graves. Well, of course, at least the Danish government isn't going after the wild ones in the Danish fauna.
Freedom of expression was born of the idea of freedom of speech, a child of the Enlightenment; the idea was that philosophers and scientists ought to be allowed freedom to publish their thoughts and conclusions, however opposed to the political/religious authorities...but with this caveat: that the products of science benefit, not just the thinkers (who, after all, just wanted to understand the truth of nature), but humanity at large, through the application of their knowledge to the practical problems of mankind.
It seems to me that this pandemic has exposed a theoretical flaw in the foundations of the Enlightenment. Medical science looks at the data, and concludes that masks significantly reduce the virus’ spread, and therefore promote public health; on the other hand, using the same arguments that a Copernicus or Galileo might have used to justify adhering to their discoveries and findings in opposition to ecclesiastical authorities, ordinary citizens rise in revolt by refusing to wear those same masks!
This is why masks have to be mandatory. The world has too many selfish people like Book273 who say wearing a mask won't protect me, therefore there's no point in me wearing one.
Quoting 180 Proof
:mask:
Then stay away from other people, or at least ensure you don't expel your exhaust onto those that don't want it.
Hopefully a vaccine can be generally available soon, so we can do away with these (inconvenient) safety protocols. (y)
I absolutely reject the notion that any person is equal. The only equality I acknowledge between individuals is that each one is equally unequal. It is indeed a democratic prejudice as described by Nietzsche's slave revolt.
As far as freedom of the individual, each individual is born into slavery, but not one is born inherently a slave. Each individual has the capacity to extricate himself immediately at any moment. It is like we are all born in a cage with the key in our hand, and the longer we spend in the cage, the more comfortable we become, and less likely we are to use the key. And imagine if someone decided that the cage was unsatisfactory and wanted to use the key to escape, or had escaped the cage and come back to testify, they would definitely meet with persecution and ridicule from those who have come to love the cage. This differs from Plato's cave in that each individual innately possesses the ability to escape their confinement and is not dependent on another "free individual" to escape.
I think individual dissention is a self-evident, God-given right for everybody. One of the most noble things an individual can do is to defer from the generational quaff and stand alone.
Everything you say is very reasonable. If somebody knows they are sick, then they should have the courtesy to avoid infecting others as far as possible.
But with covid, everyone is treated as infected before the fact. This ethic contradicts one of the most essential and important principles that free societies are built upon: innocent before proven guilty. It seems that everyone has forgotten this in the covid hysteria, and now we are setting up a very dangerous precedent for the future. What happens when we begin to assume other bad things are the case before the fact and respond with more pervasive countermeasures? How far are we willing to go?
I believe all the covid nonsense and hysteria directly correlates to a historically unprecedented degree of cowardice in the current generation.
To clarify, I have no desire to recruit others into my morality. All that my morality requires is that I stay true to my principles, regardless of consequence. It only requires that of me, not anyone else. So when I express my ethical opinion, please do yourself the favor of understanding that I am not trying to convince you of anything, rather, I am just expressing my opinion, it's a terrible tragedy.
Others, however, require me, and you, and everyone else, to conform to the morality to which they have subscribed and conformed themselves. To anyone like that, I say "fuck off", and I will mock them until they actually do "fuck off".
Quoting Book273
Right on.
No, it's treated as unknown, because that's what it is in the population at large, unknown.
In small "bubbles" of acquaintances, confidence can be higher.
Surprise — widespread use of masks is known to make a statistical difference.
(At close-up, in labs, masks have been shown to make a difference.)
And so, that's where it's at — make a difference. Common sense, too.
Should someone pin an info-post on the pandemic or something...?
Or not. There are a few available out there anyway. Some will remain challenged apparently.
Quoting Merkwurdichliebe
Hyperbole. Bad analogy. Take the virus to court.
Of course. My method of protest in my daily life is persistent and inconspicuous.
Extend your logic to everything. If everything unknown is approached with the same mass cowardice that covid is, we are totally fucked as a civilization.
Quoting jorndoe
That is the delusion that has always plagued modern man: make a difference. The truth is, you can't make a difference, not when it come to sickness, age, or death. That people actually think they have such measures of control...it would be the funniest thing ever of it wasn't the saddest.
As Ricky Roma said: I subscribe to the law of contrary public opinion: "if everyone thinks one thing, then I say, bet the other way." That is my common sense. For other people, common sense is "to believe what everyone else does", if that is you, I say "go for it".
Quoting jorndoe
You don't need to go that far, I have access to all the same propaganda you base your opinion on.
Quoting jorndoe
Terrible analysis, it wasn't an analogy.
For example, you reject the notion that all men are created equal, yet you assert that they indeed are, insofar as you also say that each is born into a cage the key to which he possesses, subverting the Platonic cave, into which everyone is born, but the ability to exit only a few possess by their natural but unequal ability. Is this a fair characterization?
Which is it; Wide spread or in labs?
Wide spread masking does not make a difference. If you have an actual study, Not a health organization reference, but an actual study, I would love to read it. Again, not an observational or anecdotal study, something peer reviewed and robust, that I could use in my practice.
Lab use of masks is not wide spread use. I use mask when suctioning patients, and they work under those circumstances. Of course I use an N95, not the crap on my face right now. And a face mask, because who wants that splashing on your face or your eye, or anywhere else? So, yes specific, procedurally appropriate PPE is valid, functional and totally supported by me. However, I do not use my hazmat suit to go shopping, only for hazmat appropriate events.
Seriously, if you have the study, I want it. My health region doesn't have it, none of my peer reviewed platforms have it. I have access to one out of Vietnam that states non-medical masks (the blue ones) used as recommended, double the likelihood of catching whatever you are trying to avoid, if it's aerosolized, and that cloth masks increase it by a factor of 13. Scary. Latest data from my region is that "there is an associated increase in transmission from cloth masks due to poor storage and decreased rate of mask changing". Something I brought up 6 months ago, to no avail.
Absolutely, and I wouldn't mind if it were derogatory as long as it was clever.
Quoting Todd Martin
That is a great question. The fact that we are all born into the cage does not necessarily mean that each is beset with the same circumstances within the cage. Some may be closer to the gate, and see the way out more clearly. Amongst them some will be daunted by the idea of passing through, while other will see the merit in doing so. We literally can draw from infinite factors in order to demonstrate how each individual, although perhaps nearly identical on face value, is ultimately and irrevocably unique in his own right.
That is, each individual has the innate ability in proportion to the particular task set before him, that of using his own key (which is uniquely fit to him) to escape his own incarceration (which is uniquely fit to him).
Like licking elevator buttons? By any means necessary, you know?
Btw, the predictive text on my phone goes straight to:
by any means necessary.
Hmm.
First of all, thanks for conducting this thought experiment with me. Let's continue...
Not exactly. There there are infinite cages. But they have the same essential effect on everyone: incarceration. So I just call it "the cage" since its incarcerating effect is universal, as it were.
However, each individual's incarceration is unique to the individual, that is, his relation to the cage is unique to him alone. For each individual, there is only one way of escaping, so there are infinite means of escaping (if there are infinite individuals). Nevertheless, each individual has access to only one means of escape, that is his own key (which is uniquely fit to him, and to the lock of the cage.)
:rofl:
Well, I am pretty serious about the cause. Plus elevator buttons look so delicious when they glow. :yum:
I am in the process of transferring phones, so there may be a delay.
Indeed! Best of luck with the phone.
Now we aren't talking about a physical cage so I won't assume you are talking about a physical place, but using "place" in the royal sense.
Everyone that escapes is subject to a universal condition, freedom. But the universality of freedom qualitatively differs from the universality of incarceration. The universality of incarceration is reductive, in that it eliminates possibility, and ultimately, especially when brought to its extreme, it appears identical in relation to each individual. It might be correct to say that real equality only exists amongst the incarcerated.
In contrast, the universality of freedom is dialectical, in that it expands possibility, and in it's most radical mode, we will find the greatest diversity of individuals. So, in freedom, we are in infinitely different places, yet there is nothing to prevent one person's place from overlapping with another's, or even circumscribing many places simultaneously. The beauty of freedom is that it is an unconstrained state, and its expansiveness can be all consuming.
As dialectics, this happens to be hogwash.
It takes global constraints to create local freedoms. The return part of the deal is those freedoms must be designed so that they are themselves going to reconstruct the whole that has formed them.
That is the logic of how dialectics produces historically enduring societies and institutions.
So why did Western institutions come to underwrite individual property rights? Well, that encouraged the personal enterprise that then contributed to the collective nation-building wealth. It was understood as an obviously virtual circle.
And the same applies to a social approach to health, education or any other useful common good.
If you want the right to individual good health, then the social system has to be set up in a way that closes the loop and shapes your freedoms in a way that is conducive to that being a collective general outcome.
You are instead speaking of freedoms as if they could be contextless. And that is illogical.
What nation would vote to be ruled by a lack of logic.
Oh....
:clap: :100:
The Greeks, as I'm sure you know, apo, had a word for 'speaking (and trying to live in society) as if freedoms are context-free': idi?t?s. :mask:
Yes, I am disregarding context, but it is not illogical. That is because I am speaking of psychological freedom, not societal or physical. And since the psyche is determined by it's own content, the freedom I'm discussing here is absolutely noncontextual.
So what's the problem? If you want to discuss societal freedom or physical freedom, I can do that too.
Quoting apokrisis
The United States. Did you not see it? They just had a presidential election in which it was thoroughly demonstrated.
You know how the retard rabble is going to respond to this: "'derr, but 'derr...Da mask save da life, 'derrrr."
Apparently your psyche is untroubled - informed - by non-subjective (non-psychological) "content" like evidence or sound inference ... or prescribed meds.
Quoting Merkwurdichliebe
Projection. :chin: Must be those pesky shadows (of strawmen) making you bark at them so.
Finally you address me directly, I was starting to think you didn't love me.
Anyway, to address your lack of comprehension, psychological freedom at its maximum, is never troubled by external content of any kind, whether evidential or soundly inferential. Psychological freedom can appear quite apathetic in regard external content, regardless of how much you join others in believing some external content is objective fact.
Quoting 180 Proof
I just like to alliterate :worry:
Btw, it is "determined by it's own content", it is NOT "it's own content". What are you, a solipsist?
Quoting Merkwurdichliebe
For someone with so much supposed psychological freedom, you seem rather constrained by your own cultural trope.
But I guess whatever gets you a nanosecond of attention.
That's a great idea, Toddler!
You don't have to have already had an accident to be required to wear a seat-belt, or indeed obey the general road rules. Personally I think it has nothing to do with cowardice, just regard for your own life and the lives of others and the courage to forebear a little inconvenience.
You're privileged when you have a right or some other benefit that most others don't.
This isn't an "exclusive or" type thing.
Quoting Book273
But it is observed. Like that party over there turned out a spreading-event, that ferry over there carrying passengers daily while observing protocols isn't, whichever. Why would you want to dismiss observations, when we're after the truth of the matter, and safety?
Not the kind of thing you'd typically find with carefully constructed (large scale, controlled) experiments reported in Nature magazine. The world at large is an inadvertent "experiment" here. And so we best learn, of which observing is a means.
The minor inconvenience of safety protocols (and visor perhaps) taken together with observations and "safety first" makes them reasonable, irrespective of your demands.
If you're an accredited medical professional, then ... nevermind. I call contrarian bollocks. Maybe you ought be tagged a public risk?
"I reget that I can only get covid-19 once a year.". -- devoted human rights activist
I never claimed to have so much psychological freedom. I do claim to have a little.
But I'll take the attention anyway :kiss:
If only we could get it multiple times, then I could really demonstrate!
You can get it multiple times. I don't think that happens very often tho.
I see a problem with observational studies. Too much bias. I want to see result "A". Shockingly, my observational study reveals result "A". I am a hero. Yay me. Of course, as I disregarding everything that did not support "A" as a result...the outcome was predetermined. So not a hero, but full of shit. However if no one looks at my process...Yay, I am a hero.
12 people wore masks everywhere and after 2 weeks were found to not have T.B
Conclusion: generalized mask wearing prevents T.B
Not mentioned information: there were no cases of T.B in the region of the study group, ergo, there was no chance to catch T.B regardless of what they wore or did.
Do a real study, send me results. I want to be given actual data supporting your position. Then I will shut the hell up and wear a mask. Until then, unless you have data, you have an opinion, as do I. I know what mine is based on but can not speak to yours.
Another child controlled by a meme. This ain't about medical science but about sociology.
You say, “psychological freedom at its maximum, is never troubled by external content of any kind, whether evidential or soundly inferential”. Does therefore the apparent fact that “the sun also rises” every morning, inferred from it having so risen from antiquity, constrain in no way the free soul to accept this as a fact shared with all other souls, whether free or enslaved, that have ever existed? Does 1+1 not equal 2? In other words, is there nothing obviously true to all ppl that may be inferred, and if not, where may we draw a line, and by what rationale, b/w what is obviously true, and what is debatably so?
Secondly, you say, “I have no desire to recruit others into my morality...So when I express my ethical opinion...I am not trying to convince you of anything, rather, I am just expressing my opinion.” But it is difficult for us to believe that a human being would exert such time and energy in something that he would not hope to reap some reward from. Furthermore, it is clear that you possess a certain weltanschauung that you believe is true, concerning the “cage”, and of whose veracity you would like to convince others...why else would you spend so much time describing it to us?
Amen Brother. That captures it succinctly.
Just a stellar post in its entirety.
I can only respectfully disagree. For me, and I mean no disrespect to anyone, but for me, wearing masks as prescribed is a little too close to wearing tinfoil hats to block out all the radiowaves penetrating your skull.
In fact, I can make a compelling argument for why governments should mandate tinfoil hats. Want to hear? Ok.
The brain damage caused by radio waves can cause psychosis and violent tendencies, in individuals. And it may negatively affect the mental development of children.
Of course, I don't believe any of this, but it is a bit comical for me, and it feels a lot like the rationale for mask wearing, which I also do not believe.
Quoting Janus
I think it is a mob frenzy happening, and one of its active ingredients is fear. It is a fear of something highly unknown, compounded by a couple other existential unknowns. I can't willingly accept such a pervasive and irritating mandate based on such shoddy evidence. After all, minor inconvienice is tyranny's abusive stepfather.
Yours Always, Merkwurdy
Calm down!!! Don't be afraid of triviality, it will kill your sense of humor, it is an essential component of comedy. I coughy freely, and I consider that a privilege too. Don't take the notion of privilege too seriously, most privileges are completely trivial.
HELLO!!!! Who's out there?!?!?!
(My eyes aren't that useful anymore)
Well that's disappointing. So much for my narrative. Darn it, I've been preparing it for months now.
Says the god of the dialectical method: A P O K R I S is?
I got results and data supporting my position, and you are welcome to them anytime.
Well that will save us for sure!
Awesome! I love when someone wants to philosophize for real.
I see no difference in the constraining power of either analytic or synthetic reasoning, beyond the fact that one is expansive, and the other eliminative.
So to answer your question, the free soul is in no way constrained to behave a particular way, although he would be most benefited to behave according to the rules of the game to which he is subject to, whether he is GOD incarnate, or not.
M9re...
Well, the notion of absolute truth is a bit like the idea of God. It requires a commitment from the believer. Beyond that, I can see no undeniable evidence of methodologies which bring us all closer to reality in itself. And until then, I see very few refusing to accept the refuse. I call LAME!!!!!
Because I'm bored. But more likely, because I know what's up, much better than you. (Like ). I come to deliver the message of insanity to the wise ones that know all, and hope that all the unknowing ones might awaken....
I don't care for other words. Please let me give you my words directly. The psychological condition of incarceration only applies to me because I am the only one who can free himself. I cannot free you, only you can free you.
So as much as it applies to my particular situation, it is a universal condition for all. But what is of utmost importance is the particular circumstance for the individual within the constraints of the universal. The universal becomes something that applies to all, universally, but to me, it applies in a very particular relation, one of subjectivity. It requires a particular solution to its particular problem.
If you know what "me" means, you can understand what I'm saying.
Thanks. I totally dig what you have to say. Keep it up, but don't get banned. :cool:
Yes. Life is hard for the protestor. Lenin had to ride a train all the way across europe to get to Russia in time to kill the czar. They say he was in bad mood when he got home.
Are you going to get vaccinated?
The cage is unique to each individual, while the cave is universal, consisting of the laws, and of the religious beliefs, of the community. Communities vary in these particulars, but the character of these laws and beliefs is the same: they are designed to require allegiance to community, and to the gods that insure its safety and prosperity.
The key to the cage is unique to each individual, while the way out of the cave is universal, effected by following the dictates of Nature as opposed to those of Community. Beyond the cage there is no universal Nature, the assumption of all science and (at least before Nietzsche) philosophy.
But, beyond the cage, at least some hope of a reunion of freed souls is offered: “...there is nothing to prevent one person’s place from overlapping with another’s” (Merkwurdichliebe)...but what is there to suggest, beyond the author’s mere statement of this supposed fact, the existence of such overlapping? What can individuals uniquely freed from unique circumstances expect to find, on the other side, in common after they are free, like the common Nature Plato’s philosophers can expect to share?
In fine, Plato’s cave is more congenial to me than Merkywurdy’s cage, because I find, in those who exit it, a potential community, based on Nature, beyond the vulgar community; whereas in the Nietzscean/Merkywurdian cage I find only unique individuals uniquely freed who have nothing certainly in common other than that they were freed from something different from anything I was ever liberated from.
It is certainly not in drawing attention to yourself;
Intus omnia dissimilia sint, frons populo nostra conveniat.
Not wearing a mask in public is not proving your freedom from mob hysteria; it only shows that you don’t understand the true nature of dissent...which is in HAVING your own opinion, and not necessarily EXPRESSING it...unless you do so in a philosophy forum...ha ha!
I think that the Coronavirus restrictions are raising major areas of philosophical debate although in the media they are not touched upon in that exact way.
It is a complex lifeboat ethics situation, with questions about who should be saved. In placing decisions about the lockdowns, governments have been favouring the vulnerable and older people, because the statistics show that only a minimal amount of younger people have died from the virus.
Many people are aware of this slant and this is causing a backlash. Aside from protests, in England the majority of England are now thrown into tier 2, which involves many restrictions, but not as tight as lockdown. Today, lockdown is over and what I have seen in London is that people are seizing all opportunities for freedom after lockdown. I think it is likely that this loosening will probably result in tier 3 restrictions for London within a week.
The point I am trying to make is that political leaders have been making lifeboat ethical decisions in terms of the elderly and vulnerable, 9without this being said outrightly. But the other side of this is that other parts of the population are being thrown into poverty. This is acknowledged in the news but almost as an afterthought. In England it is described in the rhetoric of the need for the NHS to avoid being overwhelmed. But the true lack of consensus about priorities is not being addressed by leaders in open debate.
Of course the deaths cannot be ignored but perhaps it would be more helpful if, rather than coercion by endless rules, which cause anger, people were encouraged to think in terms of risks and responsibilities. In the end, vaccinations may be offered and some might refuse. In this way, the whole area of thinking may have to be reframed to allow for individual choice and informed risk assessment rather than all encompassing rules and regulations.
Great anecdote! :rofl:
Only if they pay me. I will be taking a capitalist approach with the vaccine.
On the upside I finally figured out what my issue is with the response I have been seeing to this Covid bug. S.I.R.S!!! Only with the human population of the planet as the body. Totally makes sense now. And it has a high mortality rate left untreated, so...The whales are gonna win. I am ok with that.
S.I.R.S: Systemic Inflammatory Response Syndrome. For those who don't know. Look it up, apply it globally, and good luck.
Demystifying U.S. Covid-19 death counts (Tam Hunt; Dec 3, 2020)
Death toll significantly overestimated...?
Either way, looks like an attempt at downplay.
The article is strangely reminiscent of Trump's attempt to disqualify Biden votes as illegal. And so it all adds up to the claim of "very significant mistake". Do you think that if a person died in a car crash, and they had previously tested positive for Covid-19, their death would be counted as a Covid-19 death?
If their recovery was in any way hampered by Covid-19 (even having had it) then it would form part of the chain of events leading to death (the other being the car crash injuries) and so it would form part of the Covid-19 statistics, yes. That's how they're designed and it's a deliberate strategy so that the statistics encompass the full impact of the pandemic - ie that person might not have died if one part of the chain of events was removed.
But just pointing that out that the issue of 'excess deaths' is consequently complicated by by this decision is not in the least bit reminiscent of Trump's nonsense. Partisanship in politics is one thing, but when millions of people are dying or at risk of dying what we need is good data and dispassionate analysis, not mob rule shutting down any discussion not totally on board with the Hollywood version of this disaster movie.
The decision to count all listings of Covid involvement as a Covid death was a perfectly rational one, and a good idea, in my view, but subsequently pointing out that the result of this decision is that the statistics, particularly related to excess deaths caused by policy responses, needs to be treated with caution is not
Quoting jorndoe
it's a necessary part of developing policies which cause the least collateral harm whilst still tackling the pandemic.
Obviously there is no recovery in my example. The person died "in" a car crash, not in a hospital. The article said that in some states, if any person who dies had previously tested positive, it was counted as a Covid-19 death. The article doesn't mention any judgement of a "chain of events".
Quoting Isaac
Did you read the article? It seems to have been written with a very bias slant, to me. The way they suggest that Covid deaths ought to be recounted to exclude a whole bunch as illegitimate seems very similar to the way that Trump suggests votes ought to be recounted.
No one is "shutting down any discussion". The article is right there for you to read, and we are discussing it here. Of course I am free to say shut up, I don't want to hear your nonsense, and walk away from this discussion, which is what the judges are doing to Trump. But the thing which Trump is complaining about, a presidential election, seems to be a lot more important than the other thing, number of Covid deaths, which is just statistics used for models. And, I think we all know that error is inherent within descriptive statistics. Is the point, that maybe we do not all know this, and so the various possibilities for error ought to be pointed to?
Quoting Isaac
As I said, the article appears to be written with a slant, as evidenced by my example. Have you read the article? Here's the quote:
This does not even address the authors claim of "90% or more effective false positives" in "various types" of testing. I don't know which agencies would be using different types of testing which are known to give results with more than ninety percent of the positives being false positives.
.
There's a post mortem which will still try to establish the cause of death. If the person in the car died from their injuries at the scene and one excaserbating factor was a covid infection then it would be listed as a covid death. We're talking unlikely circumstances at this stage, but it would be recorded the way the article describes, and for good reason too.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It's how death certificates work.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
In that they're both asking for a recount? Surely the significant factor in Trump's actions is that he's asking for legitimate votes to be discounted. The legitimacy of the picture presented by the statistics for the job at hand is what matters, not the superficial resemblance anyone making such a request shares.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I was referring here to the general trend, not that specific article.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Those models determine policy and public response which, in the current state of crisis, determines who and how many die. So I think they are extremely important.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, I don't either, and that claim about false positives should have been supported with a citation or quote from an expert. It doesn't invalidate the consequences the author highlights on the counting of non-covid excess deaths.
It's pretty much uncontested that policies designed to reduce deaths from covid will cause a rise in deaths from other causes. So how we monitor and predict those collateral deaths really matters.