91–100 of 173 posts
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> The US had the expertise, technological capacity, and economic investment capacity And incompetent leadership that foundered an opportunity to be the heroes of a generation.
I'm no trump fan, but his administration did fund operation warp speed, which funded vaccine research and support vaccine production capacity
I always wondered why people thought quicker lockdowns in Chyna would have stopped covid-19 from spreading since no one knew who was infected and a single person who escaped the country during the arbitrary quarantine would have made the whole thing pointless. I'm also confused why they think a virus with such a low death rate is important. The only thing I can think of is a shocking percent of people don't actually…
If you are wondering why people thought the virus was important despite the “low” death rate you only need to look at India right now. Or Italy before it. When it floods a medical system to the point of collapse things become very dangerous.
Seriously my dad is 85. Death rate in his age group is not 'low'. These kinds of people simply refuse to consider the implications.
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
The WHO can't be trusted unfortunately.
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This was very early in the pandemic, I doubt that many people had masks early, and the problem of people hoarding was very real and medical professionals were having a lot of difficulty acquiring PPE. I think it was a difficult situation, I don't think they handled it the best they could have, but the response (in the context of massive amounts of hoarding) was understandable. I know that this will not be a popular t…
> medical professionals were having a lot of difficulty acquiring PPE Weirdly, medical professionals were also being told not to wear masks. Multiple nurses were either fired or quit over the issue, because hospital policy didn't allow general mask-wearing out of a fear of scaring people: https://www.wbrc.com/2020/03/23/nurse-claims-he-was-fired-we... https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/85760 https…
Which is the greatest irony of all. Nothing is more terrifying than finding out you are being lied to, it's actually way worse, and leadership has no clue what it is doing.
Why is "preventable" even a meaningful label for a pandemic. All it means is that it wasn't inevitable, like death. It's like saying that you could have won a game you lost, if only you had played better.
So talking about how covid-19 was preventable is meaningful because it's treating it as a case-study.
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I always try to use HIV as my point of reference for COVID-19. We got off lucky by that measure. So maybe my pessimism is unfounded, but I really wish we had learned more lessons from HIV.
From what I understand, HIV is fairly difficult to transmit, requiring an exchange of infected body fluids. This makes it deeply traumatic because the people you're most likely to infect will be people extremely close to you. To some extent this is true of almost any transmissable disease, but HIV added the twist that infection is very, very unlikely to happen between two individuals that are not physically intimate…
Fauci didn't think so in 1983.
"But if ''nonsexual, non-blood-borne transmission is possible, the scope of the syndrome may be enormous,'' writes Dr. Fauci of the National Institutes of Health in an editorial to be published Friday in the Journal of the American Medical Association."
https://www.nytimes.com/1983/05/06/us/family-contact-studied...
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Also WHO told people not to wear masks and that it could actually make it more likely to get covid (CDC echoed this as well). “But it was justified lying to protect the mask supply!”—some people already had masks, and didn’t wear them because of this. I had someone literally get mad at me and block me because I said wearing a mask was obviously a good idea, and an N95 is more likely to protect you than a cloth mask.
And politicians were encouraging people to go out in the streets and gather en masse to celebrate / protest / whatever, denouncing border controls as racism, etc. Putting positive patients into nursing homes ill equipped to cope with it. It was a huge clusterf...
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Well, you're definitely right that competent companies help a lot, but the government still does a lot of technical work in Five Eyes countries and in countries like China and Russia that have very strong mass surveillance too the government does a lot of the job.
How do you measure competence? China plays whack-a-mole with its population. They certainly haven't eliminated dissent. They have the world's largest army as the only real backstop against opposition.
I think it is less about competent. It is actually are you willing to set out policy to solve the problem but lose your popularity? Is government is ready to make the hard choice? People can only do that during war time.