If anything lack of respirators saved lives. With hindsight we now know that putting people on respirator was actually the thing that killed them - not COVID. All this hospital heroic in New York and around the country was huge mistake and most people who were in hospital at the time should have stayed home. On lockdowns - you have to do them 100% (China, Australia, New Zealand) or just give up. Half measures just do…
Oh god help us, the HN tech bros believe they're doctors now.
Covid mainly was a threat to life for the elderly. I'd be curious to see a covid death by state chart side by side with the states average age. If Florida has more elderly a middle of the pack performance might be exceptional. If you contrasted nursing home covid deaths to high school covid deaths you'd see high schools "did better", but that probably has nothing to do with policy.
What I think you're getting at - and please correct me if I'm wrong - but we should only protect citizens from external health risks greater than the most healthy young adult can bear. If you are disabled, ill, or otherwise more at risk for illnesses, you are not worthy to protect. Certainly not as much as a young adult.
I took the comment to mean, "the matter of whether something is a conspiracy is unrelated to the fact pattern of the event." I apologize, for that's obviously not what you meant now that I see this comment. But perhaps you can acknowledge that this assertion is pervasive on the internet: that if something is a conspiracy, it is so because of the beliefs of the believers, rather than the fact pattern of the event.
If you look at the comment I originally replied to, OP says something like "when does conspiracy become fact". In having a enough conversations about the topic of conspiracy, you realize people are conflating conspiracy as laying(lying?) on the spectrum of likelihood. So when they say "when does conspiracy become fact?" it sounds like our understanding of the topic evolves from being a conspiracy to instead being a f…
Not that I disagree but you are accusing OP of shilling/astroturfing and I suspect its one reason why threads like these get downmodded.
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Do you really expect the thread to be full of agreement? Upvote the best discourse and if you think someone is speaking fallacy then downvote or refute. I think it would be interesting to have a separate discussion which explores the subject of astroturfing but do you think OP is going to be like "right you are, here I am an astroturfer AMA" right here in this thread?
Correlation is the mother of conspiracy. "they would stop doing it so that the cases would go back up again" is quite the statement. How about this instead: "Extreme measures to slow down cases had obvious down sides and were used as sparingly as possible, and eased up when not as necessary"?
(Proven) correlation is not causation. It's correlation, meaning things are related. Causation would mean that something causes something else. Correlation, meaning things are related, means that one of them might be the cause of another, or they could all be the effects of some unrecognized / unobserved phenomenon. Correlation is the mother of conjecture; conspiracy is a bunch of people huddling in a small space bre…
Correlation is the mother of conspiracy. Without correlation there's no blanks to fill in with baseless conjecture. With correlation you get to jump to all the conspiratorial conclusions without any further evidence.
That doesn't mean that all correlation results in conspiracy, but conspiracy loves correlation. Without the conspiracy part it's just a good starting point for scientific inquiry. The nuance is lost on the CO2 saturated tweeters.
It feels like (at least in my country) all the lockdowns were part of an experiment; try something else, see if it works. At some point they tried a curfew for a few weeks, it had an effect but people didn't like it and enforcement was a huge issue (naturally). The other thing is that every time a measure was effective, they would stop doing it so that the cases would go back up again. That said, as China proved, a t…
> China got back to productivity faster though, and gave their population time for a vaccine to be developed and distributed. Wasn't China famously locked down long past the point where the rest of the world was back up and getting on with life? By the time we got to Omicron the vaccine appeared to be doing next to nothing and China was still locked down.
The vaccine was never doing "next to nothing" it was always very effective at keeping you from dying a suffocating death. That's one of the three big things vaccines are supposed to do -- prevent infection, prevent transmission, and reduce pathology. The conspiracy propaganda tried to make it seem like a vaccine that allows a mild case is a failure, when that is, in fact, a success.
Covid mainly was a threat to life for the elderly. I'd be curious to see a covid death by state chart side by side with the states average age. If Florida has more elderly a middle of the pack performance might be exceptional. If you contrasted nursing home covid deaths to high school covid deaths you'd see high schools "did better", but that probably has nothing to do with policy.
What I think you're getting at - and please correct me if I'm wrong - but we should only protect citizens from external health risks greater than the most healthy young adult can bear. If you are disabled, ill, or otherwise more at risk for illnesses, you are not worthy to protect. Certainly not as much as a young adult.
At no point does any of that say that. Really none of what I said is even opinion at all, no idea how you got to that conclusion.
> so that we can be more prepared in terms of creating vaccines and understanding the preventive measures that can be taken in future pandemics. Did the existing decades of research help with that when COVID-19 organically and naturally spontaneously jumped to human hosts?
Can't tell if this is a serious question, but the answer is: yes, obviously. Without the decades of research the death toll would have been orders of magnitude higher. Consider the platform technology revolution in how vaccines are made (and the highly effective vaccines). Structure-based immunogen design, that also helped with the rapid development of antivirals. Consider for example that there are zero recorded dea…
I'm not talking about virus research in general, I'm talking about the specific type of research EcoHealth Alliance was doing. You're not arguing that their research helped us develop hospital PPE, are you? My question is whether pre-pandemic research into hybrid coronaviruses was essential for the development of the vaccines or other treatments for COVID-19.
No, I don't think it is remotely likely they did it on purpose. But if it were proved absolutely they did, then I don't think retaliation would be off the table, which is what I responded to. The virus was most likely either natural or an accidental lab leak (I lean slightly towards latter). If anyone released it on purpose, which is unlikely, China's government would not even be my first bet...I am simply saying tha…
The extremely watered down version of the pants on head "they did it on purpose" theory I've heard is they didn't close outbound travel and did some other non-actions so that the rest of the world would be equally screwed in this zero sum game . Even that I find to be national-narcissism. Not everything China does is about you OK. Its not actually zero sum. Some people just think in those terms.
(puts on tinfoil hat): the cia could have done it in order to display the over-reliance of supply chains on China causing a correction to more robustness. Plus they get to roll out some new tech and divert a bunch of money to their friends. (takes off tinfoil hat): bats are gross and labs are very leaky. hanlon's razor says something stupid happened.