The CDC lost control of the coronavirus pandemic, then the agency disappeared

People don't use CPAP on trains and buses. Just when they're sleeping on airplanes.

And the answer is "yes".

I have been told on United flights that I can't eat the nut snack I've brought on board because there's some kid 20 seats behind me in the coach cabin with a nut allergy. If 1 person with a nut allergy is allowed to dictate what particles the rest of the plane can emit, then surely the "rest of the plane" should be able to dictate what one person who wants to use an in-flight CPAP will emit.

Plus there are other treatments for sleep apnea, such as weight loss. See these _medical school_ web sites.

- http://healthysleep.med.harvard.edu/sleep-apnea/treating-osa...

> For those who can't tolerate the CPAP machine, there are other options for treating sleep apnea. Losing weight is one: a majority of sleep apnea patients are overweight or obese. That extra weight causes their airway to collapse and their breathing to be interrupted.

(Source: https://healthcare.utah.edu/healthfeed/postings/2019/09/slee... )

> Lose weight if overweight. Even a 10% weight loss can reduce the number of sleep apnea events for most people.

(Source: https://www.cedars-sinai.org/health-library/diseases-and-con... )

Why this is relevant to this thread:

We have some government agencies (presumably the DOT and whoever enforces the ADA) saying one thing, and other agencies giving other advice about exposing other people to CPAP machines in close quarters.

Being offended by completely speculative offence theoretically been taken by ill-defined third parties is one of the Internet's weirder trends.

The IFR for Covid-19 is still not known, but just based on deaths, it is obviously either much more virulent or much more deadly than a seasonal flu. There is no way to look at ~127k deaths in the US for half a year, with no sign of slowing down in summer, and say that it is similar to the flu (which killed ~34k people last year in the US).

The comparison to malaria is also interesting. You're absolutely right that the infection vector is completely different in almost all characteristics. The difference between a disease killing mostly children and a disease killing mostly old people is important, but I don't think "robbing a country of its future" is a meaningful way to look at it. For example, there are no demographic risks from malaria, like your metaphor would seem to imply. The majority of the economic impact is coming either from households having to pay for the care of their sick family, or from lost work due to the sickness. The long-term impairments that malaria may leave children with are also a factor.

Of these, the first and possibly the third apply to COVID-19 as well, except that the costs for COVID-19 care are much higher, and with the important caveat that we don't know the long-term impacts of COVID-19 (though it is very likely not to affect children significantly, fortunately).

And while malaria can be eradicated (with great effort and time), as has been done in the southern US and southern Europe at least, it remains much more likely that COVID-19 will remain an endemic burden that we will just live and die with. I don't think we have any examples of successfully eliminating a human-to-human transmitted respiratory disease, unless we get lucky with a vaccine. It may well end up as a new tuberculosis.

And the assertion that limited restrictions could work as well as lockdowns is an extraordinary claim without any form of evidence. The only countries that successfully stopped the disease used some combination of timely lockdowns, travel restrictions, ubiquitous mask wearing, large scale testing, and excellent universal healthcare. Limited protections for the elderly have not been shown to work anywhere in the world, so why bother discussing them?

Note: in the spirit of nitpicking about my use of "not comparable" when I meant "much worse than", I should also point out that SARS-CoV-2 is a virus, so it is literally not comparable to the Flu, which is a disease. You can compare SARS-CoV-2 with (one of) the Influenza virus(es), or compare COVID-19 with the Flu/Influenza.

> England and France famously fought a "Hundred Years' War" in the 14th and 15th centuries over the claim of the English king to the French throne. From that time onwards, neither country ever experienced a Hundred Years' Peace even on their own soil. The longest stretch of peace for either country started in 1945 and extends to the present day.

And Spain fought for independence/Reconquista for 780 years against Moorish occupation of Iberia, the Sengoku Jidai lasted 148 years of internal civil war. I'm really not sure what else you're trying to achieve other than deflecting from the point that we don't have to abide by this mode of operation moving forward and trying to one-up your understanding of Imperial conflicts form the past isn't proving as effective as you think it is.

That fact that it occurred is not being denied, no one is disputing this took place. It just isn't in the US' People's interest to do this given the alternative that exist today. I'm come for a military family, I lived near the biggest Marine Base camp in the US: I've seen first hand the consequences of these campaigns, there is no glory in it just a long list of sad casualties and injured people on the US side.

> It's more than zero, which is what you made it out to be.

Only because your initial argument was based on the notion that the dark ages awaited us if the US pulled out of trade route protection in its attempts to fill the vacumm left behind Rome, when in reality that it's clearly not true... But if you wish me to clarify: yes, US joint coalitions helped, in conjunction with other Global partners participation, re-commandeer sea vessels lost to pirates.

> Yes, and I think it takes a completely willful or perhaps tendentious ignorance of history to claim otherwise.

You seem entirely fixed on the idea that it must continue this way so much you refuse for it to be any other way. Do you really think having this mindset is correct during a pandemic, mass economic crisis and global civil unrest while China is trying to expand its territory and illegally annex Hong Kong and eying up Taiwan, while playing bully in the South China Sea? This doesn't end well for Humanity if it does and could ensure we really do go extinct, Nuclear leaks have been detected in N. Europe from possible failures in Russia this week, do you really think Warfare is in any way a viable choice given all the problems we have going on? We still have Fukushima pouring nuclear contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean for what will soon be a decade in 9 months from now.

I'm afraid there really is no getting to people this belligerent and jingoistic about the matter, I just wonder how long you'd hold that point of view if it was you and those you care about on the front lines fighting these needless banker wars.

1: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/radiation-sc...

You should watch “Yes, Minister” and “Yes, Prime Minister” for reasons why you shouldn’t believe the elected politicians have anything to do with what the UK government actually does.