331–340 of 470 posts
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We did flatten the curve. You just don't get to see the alternate reality where we didn't.
I'm not questioning the flattening the curve part. I'm saying the 2 weeks part was gaslighting. What they should have said is "one year or greater to flatten the curve." That would have been honest
Hindsight is powerful, but I don't think in March anyone seriously thought this’d go through the year.
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The "two weeks to flatten the curve" feels like gaslghting in retrospect.
Unless you live in New Zealand you probably haven't ever written down your contact information when entering a store, and probably don't even know what that is. Flattening the curve was really about overloading hospitals. The end game is to make covid-19 extinct in the wild, or domesticated in the sense that only relatively harmless variants remain. Without serious testing and contact tracing that may take a very lon…
We did that for bars and restaurants in the UK, but it doesn't seem to have done as much good as it was probably just lost or ignored by our abysmal track and trace services...
We also had a QR code system to tag yourself in places, but it fell down because it was firstly optional, and secondly there was no way to tag out so the records weren't that accurate.
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I think the error here is perceiving errors from medical authorities as having emotional or manipulative motivations. First masks were unnecessary and hand washing was crucial. Now it’s essentially the reverse. It helps to wash hands of course but we realize it’s less of a vector. Then various governments said it’ll be over by summer. Then various governments said it’ll be a year. No one was attempting to gaslight; t…
> I think the error here is perceiving errors from medical authorities as having emotional or manipulative motivations. I think you might be forgetting medical authorities approving certain protests as being more important than containing covid. Dont want to start was flamewar here but just pointing out a flaw in your response. That was factually a 'emotional or manipulative motivation', right or wrong. > This is nor…
Can you provide some examples? I googled around and found this [1] which seems like a reasonable summary of the Covid-related consequences of the George Floyd protests. The "reasons it seems like it was OK" doesn't seem too divergent from what many medical professionals are saying (don't gather indoors, wear masks, wash hands).
I'd also like to point out that institutional racism and police brutality are public health crises with uncountable effects on the health of Black Americans. Further, when you consider that Covid-19 has had far worse effects on communities of color, and that many essential workers are people of color, the protests don't seem that unrelated.
Edit, found some:
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/political-and-health-l...
- https://abcnews.go.com/Health/people-protest-george-floyds-d...
- https://time.com/5848212/doctors-supporting-protests/
- https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/05/health/health-care-open-lette...
Here are some quotes:
> “Protesting against systemic injustice that is contributing directly to this pandemic is essential,” Dhillon said. “The right to live, the right to breathe, the right to walk down the street without police coming at you for no reason . . . that’s different than me wanting to go to my place of worship on the weekend, me wanting to take my kid on a roller coaster, me wanting to go to brunch with my friends.”
> "Staying indoors all the time in a pandemic is equivalent to an abstinence-only policy,"
> For her part, Patel says the core tenants of harm reduction fit into public health doctors’ broader obligation to protect human rights while also helping people stay safe. "You’re describing a broader human rights-based approach to policy and medicine," Patel said. "These are the tenants of human rights."
> "There’s broad recognition that racism is one of the top public health issues of our time," Beletsky said.
> "Racism is a public health problem," the health department tweeted Monday. "In New York City, Black and Brown communities face the disproportionate impact, grief and loss from the COVID-19 pandemic on top of the trauma of state-sanctioned violence."
> “If people were to understand that racism, and all of the social and political and economic inequalities that racism creates, ultimately harms people’s health,” Boyd says, they would see that “protest is a profound public health intervention, because it allows us to finally address and end forms of inequality.”
> "We created the letter in response to emerging narratives that seemed to malign demonstrations as risky for the public health because of Covid-19," according to the letter writers, many of whom are part of the University of Washington's Division of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. "Instead, we wanted to present a narrative that prioritizes opposition to racism as vital to the public health, including the epidemic response. We believe that the way forward is not to suppress protests in the name of public health but to respond to protesters demands in the name of public health, thereby addressing multiple public health crises."
[1]: https://www.vox.com/2020/6/26/21300636/coronavirus-pandemic-...
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I'm not questioning the flattening the curve part. I'm saying the 2 weeks part was gaslighting. What they should have said is "one year or greater to flatten the curve." That would have been honest
I think the error here is perceiving errors from medical authorities as having emotional or manipulative motivations. First masks were unnecessary and hand washing was crucial. Now it’s essentially the reverse. It helps to wash hands of course but we realize it’s less of a vector. Then various governments said it’ll be over by summer. Then various governments said it’ll be a year. No one was attempting to gaslight; t…
What I saw:
1. Lots of outright lies, for example Chinese people saying the truth getting arrested, WHO toeing the CCP line (for example claiming there was no human-human transmission) when it was obviously a lie already, etc...
2. Lots of governments around the world using the lies for their own gains at expense of population, for example in Brazil the media was quick to paint the president as evil, to allow a inconstitutional power grab by governors and mayors (mind you, I am not saying quarantine is bad, I am saying it was done in a extremely illegal manner, and often for corrupt reasons, now a ton of the people involved are going to jail after quickly stuffing all money they could on their own pockets).
3. Lots of politicians lying and trying to pin the blame on scientists, see Cuomo lying about deaths on nursing homes to avoid Trump criticizing him.
4. Tons of corruption in procuring vaccines, masks, remote working tools, catering, etc... some examples are various politicians from multiple countries getting caught getting bribes from chinese manufacturer, politicians forcing lockdowns but maintaining their own business open, that crazy case in hollywood where open air restaurants were shut down but there was even a catering company serving movie production crew in a makeshift open air restaurant right in front of a local restaurant that was forced to shut down...
5. Lockdowns used for supression (see Iran executing the guy that asked why he had to lockdown but religious people didn't...)
the list goes and goes and goes on.
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Yeah but you can't meet strangers. We're all bubbled in. And I love my friends, they're my pillar of peace in this pandemic, but there is a different part of me that craves the interaction with strangers in strange places.
It's a great opportunity to connect with non-humans: mushrooms, plants, insects, birds, mammals. When is the last time you have even looked at one of them closely, let alone formed a close relationship? It is something we humans have done our entire existence, until recently, yet many today go their entire life without such an experience.
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Yes, I understand how damaging this is for people who are alone. It's also the reason why I've been staying inside since march, to help get this whole thing behind us. Unfortunately some people just don't give a shit.
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Yes, it's terrible. Even those of us who are "coping" aren't coping terribly well. But ironically the disconnection has made the costs of the disease invisible as well. The zoom funerals. I personally know a couple of people who are now effectively long-term disabled with respiratory issues - well enough to leave hospital, but their previous lifestyle can't come back. The death toll dwarfs every single "disaster" in…
But those mostly killed people still the prime of their lives, while COVID mostly (not entirely, but mostly) advances the Grim Reaper for the old and sick who likely only had a few years anyway. If we measured the toll in disability-adjusted life years instead, the comparison would be quite different. Cynical thought: COVID lockdowns are extreme largely because unlike most public health problems it affects the rich t…
It's a hell of a thing for someone who only had a few short and precious years left, to have those ripped away from them as well.
I'm hard of hearing - people joke that there's no point in wearing ear protection since I'm already deaf. No, the opposite. Because I have only a little hearing left, it's so much more precious to me than normal hearing is for most people. I protect it jealously.
I get your point, but I can't forget the human part of that equation.
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The "two weeks to flatten the curve" feels like gaslghting in retrospect.
The problem is people saw China bring the situation under control in under six weeks and thought that containment rather than management was also an achievable goal here. They therefore interpreted the term "flatten the curve" in that context and assumed it would lead to containment. What they didn't see (and what was never really talked about) is just how extreme China's eventual response to COVID was relative to th…
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I know zero people that have been permanently damaged by COVID. I don't think my social circle is all that small, either.
Here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.16.21249950v...
It would be interesting to do a relative comparison of physical and psych effects of lockdown versus post-Covid complications. It isn’t clear what the severity for the “33.6%” was.
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> I think the error here is perceiving errors from medical authorities as having emotional or manipulative motivations. I think you might be forgetting medical authorities approving certain protests as being more important than containing covid. Dont want to start was flamewar here but just pointing out a flaw in your response. That was factually a 'emotional or manipulative motivation', right or wrong. > This is nor…
> I think you might be forgetting medical authorities approving certain protests as being more important than containing covid. Can you provide some examples? I googled around and found this [1] which seems like a reasonable summary of the Covid-related consequences of the George Floyd protests. The "reasons it seems like it was OK" doesn't seem too divergent from what many medical professionals are saying (don't gat…
From your cnn link
'"Prepare for an increased number of infections in the days following a protest," the letter says. '
> “The right to live, the right to breathe, the right to walk down the street without police coming at you for no reason . . . that’s different than me wanting to go to my place of worship on the weekend, me wanting to take my kid on a roller coaster, me wanting to go to brunch with my friends.”
This is obviously an emotional response. She didn't do A/B testing of various activity outcomes on public health and base her conclusions on that. Can't somone simply say going to church is good for metal health of the population, she didn't obviously measure the outcomes of that activity.