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On Covid

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Re: On Covid

#101

Post by csours »

immibis wrote: post #95
csours wrote: post #93

* I am not a doctor, this comment is for entertainment purposes only * I do think it's time to start thinking about what the end of the pandemic looks like: 1. Sars-Cov-2 will be around forever. People will continue to get sick and die from it. 2. There will be more peaks on the infection and death charts. These are real people with real families. It will suck for them. 3. At some point one of the peaks will be the h…

Your point 1 is missing a big disclaimer. 1. Sars-Cov-2 will be around forever because the population votes for it to be that way .

The virus spreads to other animals - no disease agent with an animal reservoir has ever been eradicated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_reservoir

I wish it were otherwise, and maybe in the future it will be so.

Re: On Covid

#102

Post by immibis »

oxymoran wrote: post #94
eli wrote: post #9

Thousands of Americans are losing their lives every day to Covid. New cases are MUCH higher than they were at any point in 2020 or 2021 (though it looks like we may finally have crossed the peak of this wave). I'm sorry, but it isn't over yet. I wish it was. However wishing it or asserting it doesn't make it true. This was a sensible argument to make in July 2021 when vaccines were more effective and cases were liter…

Have you talked to the parents of young children? Because those are exactly the people that are over it. A)kids are at statistically zero risk of covid unless they have cancer or something B) we have all already had covid because little kids are germ factories 3)the vaccines have been available for over a year now so you have had ample time to get one if you want to 4)the masks and lack of social engagement for child…

Perhaps they meant the impact of the parent dying will be much greater if they have young children.

Re: On Covid

#103

Post by immibis »

refurb wrote: post #29
eli wrote: post #9

Thousands of Americans are losing their lives every day to Covid. New cases are MUCH higher than they were at any point in 2020 or 2021 (though it looks like we may finally have crossed the peak of this wave). I'm sorry, but it isn't over yet. I wish it was. However wishing it or asserting it doesn't make it true. This was a sensible argument to make in July 2021 when vaccines were more effective and cases were liter…

Thousands of people die everyday during bad flu epidemics like 2018 when 80,000 Americans died over a ~6 month flu season. We didn’t keep kids from school, we didn’t panic when hospitals were overwhelmed, we didn’t shut down businesses.

So, even by your inflated number, 20 times fewer than COVID-19, if we assume we are halfway through the pandemic?

Re: On Covid

#104

Post by immibis »

refurb wrote: post #71
wokwokwok wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

800000 people have died over the past two years in the US alone. That’s an order of magnitude difference. That’s why the response was an order of magnitude more substantial. I’m baffled you think this is somehow surprising.

I’m baffled my point went over your head. We have tens of thousands of thousands of deaths every year . In the past decade 300,000 died of the flu and nobody notices .

And in the next decade, based on current death rates, 4,000,000 Americans will die of COVID-19. Are you saying there's no difference between 3x10^5 and 4x10^6? Well, the difference is not that large, but apparently it does cross our arbitrary threshold for "this is actually quite bad and we should probably stop it from happening"

Re: On Covid

#105

Post by immibis »

csours wrote: post #101
immibis wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your point 1 is missing a big disclaimer. 1. Sars-Cov-2 will be around forever because the population votes for it to be that way .

The virus spreads to other animals - no disease agent with an animal reservoir has ever been eradicated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_reservoir I wish it were otherwise, and maybe in the future it will be so.

There are states in between uncontrolled spread and total eradication. When COVID in the west has the same status as, for example, TB in the west, we can easily declare that the pandemic is over in the west.

Re: On Covid

#106

Post by immibis »

gomox wrote: post #72

There's one interesting thought in the article: that financial markets could be correctly predicting the end of the Covid pandemic phase. The unwinding of the Covid trade doesn't necessarily correlate with that, but it's a reasonable proposition. Most of the other stuff is opinions and I agree with the sentiment of many of the other commenters: You might be right, and I certainly would like you to be right, but there…

Or it could simply be the collapse of the financial market as it fails to be propped up for much longer than it was supposed to be.

Re: On Covid

#107

Post by immibis »

GrandMasterPuba wrote: post #87

I feel like I'm being gaslit. By blog posts, the media, Twitter, social media, my work - everyone. I keep up to date with the latest studies on Covid. Sars-Cov-2 is not a respiratory virus; it's a circulatory virus. And its long term effects on the body are not widely understood. Everyone is acting like because Omicron doesn't make you cough that Covid is over. But scientists are finding deeply concerning long term e…

It's not everyone. The people with views like this editorial are the minority of people, but they are a very loud minority. If they would put as much effort into not spreading COVID as they put into convincing the rest of us to convincing the rest of us that COVID isn't a big deal or doesn't exist, there would be no pandemic today.

Re: On Covid

#108

Post by immibis »

ryandrake wrote: post #61
basisword wrote: post #20

Maybe he’s right. Hopefully he’s right. But personally, I feel like this is just more shortsightedness. I’ve lost track of the number of times my employer thought it was time to get back to the office - only for restrictions to be increased a month later as cases rise. This cycle repeats and people seem to not learn. They get overly optimistic and then kicked in the teeth. Yes, things are better than they’ve been but…

Exactly. COVID has made very clear humanity’s amazing ability to play make-believe, making failed attempt after failed attempt to get “back to normal”. We have this idea that “life as it was in November 2019” is the One True Normal, and we must keep trying to return to this Normal lifestyle, despite that pesky, stubborn reality. Every time restrictions relax, and we rush back to capital-N Normal, cases rise, deaths r…

We could get back to normal if people would stop thinking that we could just declare it, as if the virus could read and follow government proclamations. All it takes is to not spread the virus for several weeks.

Re: On Covid

#109

Post by immibis »

ramesh31 wrote: post #50

What worries me more is the next time, when there's multiple different viruses and the death rate is much higher. Given that there are two possible scenarios for the origin of COVID; natural transmission or lab origin, I find the former to be a far more terrifying prospect. If it were a lab outbreak, that's a protocol problem that can be addressed to prevent it in the future. If it was natural transmission, why hasn'…

It has happened plenty of times. HIV, for one? But such transmission is quite rare and only seems to occur every few decades.

That's for "interesting" viruses, by the way. "Boring" viruses probably get transmitted all the time. Most things are boring.

Re: On Covid

#110

Post by kevingadd »

mistercheph wrote: post #69
kevingadd wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Immunocompromised people are allowed to tut-tut until they can actually go outside without significant risk of death.

Personally, I would lock my children in a cellar for 15 years if that's what it took to protect those who have compromised immune systems. Talk about not being able to defend yourself!

You don't have to lock your kids in a cellar, but measures like mask mandates and temporary school shutdowns are the sorts of things that are necessary to keep covid under control so immunocompromised people can live their lives, instead of having to stay at home because it's incredibly difficult to avoid exposure due to states just going 'eh I'm done with these lockdowns' and repealing mask mandates.
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