151–160 of 381 posts
I for one love it when mouthy oncologists get picked to talk about epedemiology in the Journal. Next week, tune in for a sculptor's hot take on the Mars lander.
This is textbook ad hominem, and I think is against HN guidelines.
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AFAICS this isn’t talked about enough! If lockdowns were taken seriously from the start, it would had prevented going wild and risking new strains. But here we are
Lockdowns were never going to work, and any strategy that relied on them was doomed to fail. A strategy that involves convincing every country, and every little province, to destroy their local economies, all at the same time. I can’t believe it didn’t work! Maybe if we just keep trying.
Sadly, coronaviruses definitely have the potential to deliver on that. Now that so many people have become infected because lockdowns weren't taken seriously, and because poor and working people weren't protected or provided for, we're going to have to deal with every possible mutation that could be imagined. Scary situation when MERS was a thing.
The idea that the world can't wait at a fairly comfortable sustenance level for any period of time is one that might be written on our species' tombstone.
I'm not sure how much stock I would put into this type of claim in an opinion article, but anecdotally, I've been tracking the daily new cases and percent positive in my area very closely for a while. Especially in the last couple of weeks the percent positive & new cases has fallen dramatically. Seemingly for no good reason. In my state, we are now consistently seeing percent positive less than 10%. After the holida…
2020 Jul = 25%
2020 Aug = 6
2020 Sep = 4
2020 Oct = 7
2020 Nov = 8
2020 Dec = 9
2021 Jan = 13
2021 Feb = 4
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This is textbook ad hominem, and I think is against HN guidelines.
Pointing out that someone is not an expert at something is not an ad hominem.
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The economic damage is being done by the pandemic: people aren’t going to congregate when it’s risky and many businesses can’t survive without high in-person volume. Having lockdowns can get you back to the point where businesses can safely operate with community spread control measures (see e.g. Australia or Taiwan). What won’t work is attacking medical precautions or dissembling about vaccine effectiveness — and on…
"Having lockdowns can get you back to the point where businesses can safely operate with community spread control measures (see e.g. Australia or Taiwan)." How do you explain Florida, not locked down, vs. California with some of the strictest lock downs in the country having similar rates of death/infection? It's even more of a puzzler for those pushing lockdowns since Florida has a population tilted way more in the…
It's like claiming a brand of toothpaste isn't very effective because you brushed your teeth once a week and still experienced the same level of tooth decay as somebody who never brushed at all. Is it the toothpaste's fault, or your fault because you were too lazy to brush your teeth more than once per week? There's not enough data to say. Maybe it was a truly ineffective toothpaste and no amount of brushing would have helped. You don't know enough to say.
Calling anything we've tried in America a "lockdown" is laughable, considering how voluntary and unenforced it was. Lockdown, my ass. More like a polite suggestion to stay at home that most of the country ignored whenever they felt like it.
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AFAICS this isn’t talked about enough! If lockdowns were taken seriously from the start, it would had prevented going wild and risking new strains. But here we are
>If lockdowns were taken seriously from the start, it would had prevented going wild and risking new strains. I don't think a strategy that needs every country on earth to cooperate this tightly ever had a chance to work. Most countries aren't the first world, most countries don't have the resources to test and quarantine properly, most countries can't afford lockdowns. On top of that a lot of countries have much wor…
The United States meets all these criteria, and has the highest number of cases and deaths in the world. (And near the top in per-capita measures, too.)
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It should be noted that WSJ’s opinion section is extremely politicized. Their regular news desk is separately edited and maintains decently high journalistic standards.
isn't OP-ed synonym for what they generally disagree with (e.g. to allow them to claim they're "listening to both sides") ? relevant example from this week is Australia, where editor in chief for the Murdoch conglomerate has no answer to why they banish all articles about climate change science to the Opinions sections. https://twitter.com/ChaplainheArt/status/1363168269599973382
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It should be noted that WSJ’s opinion section is extremely politicized. Their regular news desk is separately edited and maintains decently high journalistic standards.
It's pretty weird actually. The news desk for the WSJ is among the best out there. Their news stories tend to be really dry in a good way - full of facts and figures, with very little in the way of click bait hyperbole. Their subscriber model is all about business people who want the details and not opinion... Which then makes the opinion desk at the WSJ a real oddball. It's consistently right-leaning, sometimes to t…
BBC with more extensive coverage (more than just the breaking news) would be my ideal model.