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In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

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Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also was to increase the number of people who got covid after being vaccinated, instead of before. Edit - to elaborate, I just mean that it made sense to try to keep infections down and give companies time to develop a vaccine. Not sure why this struck a nerve.

[flagged]

> So the vaccines did not prevent infection nor transmission.

Yeah they did. They just didn't do it perfectly. And only about half the people out there got vaccinated. So vaccines failed to be a silver bullet that ended the pandemic.

Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but an infectious disease is also limiting on people's freedoms, so it's equally not obvious that those rights override the rights of people to be protected from infectious diseases.

People are free to stay inside if they're afraid of getting sick. Rights can only be overridden if and only if there are no other choices, which is not the case here. Me getting to an hospital doesn't limit someone else's freedom.

Thousands of people going to the hospital at the same time due to a preventable phenomenon certainly limits the freedom of lots of people to continue living when those hospitals are overrun and unable to provide care. We had already tried a few months of the "let everyone decide individually and hope for the best" approach and the problem kept worsening superlinearly.

Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#223
post #111

> Whereas lockdowns in the Covid-19 case might have contributed to a lengthening of the crisis by delaying herd immunity The point of the lockdown was not to entirely stop the spread- that was obviously not happening. It was to slow the spread to avoid overwhelming hospitals. It allowed us to reduce the lethality of COVID-19 by having more resources per sick person.

At least in the American context, it’s far from clear the lockdowns reduced mortality [1].

Adjusting for age/health Florida had similar mortality to California’s.

[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/04/02/why-major-study-argue...

Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#224
post #111

> Whereas lockdowns in the Covid-19 case might have contributed to a lengthening of the crisis by delaying herd immunity The point of the lockdown was not to entirely stop the spread- that was obviously not happening. It was to slow the spread to avoid overwhelming hospitals. It allowed us to reduce the lethality of COVID-19 by having more resources per sick person.

Except the hospitals really couldn't do anything to help these people anyway and in some cases actually sped up their death with use of ventilators. Even more frustrating, they could have been giving things like monoclonal antibodies right away but they didn't. Additionally, hospitals had years to figure out a better way of expanding their ICU's for emergency use. They also tend to operate on lowest required beds to…

> Except the hospitals really couldn't do anything to help these people anyway and in some cases actually sped up their death with use of ventilators. Even more frustrating, they could have been giving things like monoclonal antibodies right away but they didn't.

Uninformed and wrong. ICU staff worked through extreme conditions to save many. Ask a few how much better their patients would have fared at home instead.

> Additionally, hospitals had years to figure out a better way of expanding their ICU's for emergency use. They also tend to operate on lowest required beds to save costs and began to quickly get overwhelmed due to their unpreparedness.

Expanding ICUs is not a matter of furnishing rooms, it's a matter of finding people with the requisite skills and experience. A localized need can be met by moving people around, but when every hospital in the country needs to grow its staff there is no way to conjure up more of this sort of person.

Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#225
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vaccine was never meant to prevent infection or transmission, it was to prevent severe symptoms like death

That is simply not how the vaccine was presented by authorities and the media. They literally said the vaccine will stop you from getting it and stop transmission. It took them months to acknowledge you could still get it and spread it with the vaccine and all the data simply points to a reduction in severity of symptoms. What happened was they rolled out the vaccine before they had all the data, and it was bit overs…

They were lying. Or at the very least didn't understand the claims actually made by Pfizer/etc, which was only that these vaccines prevented the disease, not that they prevented infection/transmission. They made no claims about infection/transmission.

We knew this in 2020:

https://www.washington.edu/news/2020/12/02/covid-19-vaccines...

https://www.businessinsider.com/who-says-no-evidence-coronav...

https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2020/12/covid-...

It comes down to the stupid conflation of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 into just "covid". Pfizer/etc use the two terms correctly, saying they prevented COVID-19, but didn't say anything about stopping SARS-CoV-2, but because everyone thinks "covid" is the virus they can't seem to understand what was actually said.

Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those that are interest in the nuances of modelling infections, I'm going to leave a Wikipedia extract here. "R_{0} is not a biological constant for a pathogen as it is also affected by other factors such as environmental conditions and the behaviour of the infected population. R_{0} values are usually estimated from mathematical models, and the estimated values are dependent on the model used and values of other…

> it is recommended not to ... compare values based on different models i.e. R0 numbers are worthless. You can't compare these values between pathogens, you can't even compare them between different academic groups studying the same pathogen or between outbreaks of the same pathogen as modeled by different versions of the same software. There's no agreed way to measure this value empirically. Instead they write a pro…

It's not useless. Do you think all contagious illnesses spread at the same rate?

InB4 "clouds don't exist, nobody can tell exactly where they start and end"

Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#228
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but an infectious disease is also limiting on people's freedoms, so it's equally not obvious that those rights override the rights of people to be protected from infectious diseases.

There is no right to protection from infectious disease. It appears nowhere in the US Constitution. There was never any valid moral or legal justification for restricting the 1st Amendment right of freedom of assembly during the pandemic.

Well, that is not quite true at the State level. There are a number of States who have implemented laws that punish transmission of HIV/STDs knowingly. I'll concede there doesn't exist anything at the Federal level that I am aware of.

https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/policies/law/states/exposure.html

Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also was to increase the number of people who got covid after being vaccinated, instead of before. Edit - to elaborate, I just mean that it made sense to try to keep infections down and give companies time to develop a vaccine. Not sure why this struck a nerve.

[flagged]

Can you name a single vaccine that prevents infection and transmission, as in "nobody with the vaccine gets sick or gets someone else sick"? I don't think such a vaccine exists, but I might be wrong.

Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will agree that isolation for long periods could have had some negative impacts, but masking never did and never will.

Exactly, case in point is the abundance of mask wearing in Asian countries. They seem to go about their lives just fine.

They were doing it even before covid, although not to the same extent. I don't know why people have such a problem if someone wants to protect themselves from airborne illness.
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