231–240 of 280 posts
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It's interesting that no one seems to give a shit about real freedoms like free speech or democracy, detention without trial or access to lawyers. But when you close the pubs (or the artisnal pasta makers), suddenly we're on a dictatorship.
In the Netherlands, although not in every city, in some COVID-19 is an excuse for banning demonstrations.
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> Yet when a journalist calls up a scientist and say "What do you think?" and the scientist says "These could have an effect on virulence or transmission or antibody neutralization," somehow that gets translated in to "It's making the virus more virulent" This has been an incredibly large issue for almost a year now and it's ridiculous. Journalists not understanding the way scientists speak was vaguely understandable…
> Journalists not understanding Journalists don't understand anything about the topics on which they write, but they regard themselves as paragons of virtue and arbiters of Truth with a capital T. Trump is a garbage president but the one thing he got right was identifying the fourth estate as the enemy of the people. They were Enemies in March when they told everyone it was just the Flu, and NOT to wear masks, and th…
This assertion makes no sense at all. Journalists aren't expected to create their content from thin air. They are expected to talk with primary sources, ask them questions, gather the answers and information, and report on that to the public.
> Trump is a garbage president but the one thing he got right was identifying the fourth estate as the enemy of the people.
Oh give me a break. The only thing Trump did was come up with a populist angle to sell it to gullible idiots in the form of conspiracy theories. It makes absolutely no difference whether anything resembling Trump's conspiracy theories have a bearing in reality or not because as his term demonstrated he did rigorously zero to address, let alone fix, any of his pet conspiracy theories. He used them as a mariachi's guitar, just popping it out of the case whenever he felt he needed to prop up support from his base and back in the box it went when he felt things went his way.
I mean, just look at the way he boasted about voting by mail and afterwards he proceeded to fabricate all sorts of bullshit to discredit mail-id votes.
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> I'm fed up because so many people flout the rules with no consequences. Been that way since Barnard's Castle. The latest decision that says MPs can see their siblings for Christmas Dinner on the 25th, but a Nurse working on the 25th can't see their parent with terminal cancer for dinner on the 26th, will hopefully be ignored.
What's especially funny is the latest Tier 4 Health Protection legislation has a specific exception for groups meeting in the grounds of castles... I can't believe it hasn't made headlines yet...
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> If everyone flours the rules, the economic hit will be smaller Only assuming that there's no economic hit to a rampant pandemic spreading death, hospitalisation and illness. Which is a barking mad assumption. It never was "illness vs economy" you either have both good, or you have neither good. They can't be separated.
The people dying from the virus are the old, sick and fat. Not a population that adds much to the economy. Depending on long term health effects if covid runs wild you can see as many benefits to average people at the end of it as you did after the black death.
It's not that simple. It's never that simple: i.e. you have simplified to the point of being flat wrong.
> Depending on long term health effects if covid runs wild you can see as many benefits to average people at the end of it as you did after the black death
I don't know what you mean there, for one thing prevalent Long COVID is really not going to be net benefit, for another you should perhaps rethink your economic argument for genocide / decimation. And your assumption about who is "in groups" / "average people" vs out groups. Your whole line of thinking is lacking in both logic and human decency.
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The people dying from the virus are the old, sick and fat. Not a population that adds much to the economy. Depending on long term health effects if covid runs wild you can see as many benefits to average people at the end of it as you did after the black death.
> The people dying from the virus are the old, sick and fat. It's not that simple. It's never that simple: i.e. you have simplified to the point of being flat wrong. > Depending on long term health effects if covid runs wild you can see as many benefits to average people at the end of it as you did after the black death I don't know what you mean there, for one thing prevalent Long COVID is really not going to be net…
And yet that didn't stop you from moralizing.
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If "normal" variant is more virulent, it should spread faster than other variants and will be dominant. If you vaccinate which eradicates "normal" variant than those less virulent strain which may be vaccine resistant will get opportunity to spread. That is if such variants exist. Problem is that there is no alternative. You either vaccinate or let it run through your population. With IFR of 0.5-1% that is really har…
> With IFR of 0.5-1% that is really hard choice to make. I'm getting the sense that there's little public appetite for waiting another 6-9 months for a new vaccine. This might change as more people get the virus, but there's a good chance 10-15% of Americans have already had or currently have the virus, so if that didn't scare people already, I'm not sure if another month of full ICUs will.
Another problem is that CDC and other agencies at first were openly lying and trying to downplay the virus or say how masks were not effective. This leads to people not trusting what they say because everyone can remember how they were against masks and now are in favor of masks. Then you add in politicians with mixed messages and you get highly doubtful public.
IFR is around 1% in the western world. That is incredibly high for something that could become as seasonal as flu.
I find it completely disappointing and disheartening that the west has done almost nothing to curb the virus, thus increasing the chance of mutation and continued spread. It's just hard to see the pointing of fingers at China that's happened, especially in hindsight when it's unclear if it even began in China (which doesn't really matter anyway if it was a naturally occurring zoonotic crossover event) and not somewhe…
Some of the finger pointing at China may be unfair but clearly they knew a lot about the virus while letting their citizens travel outside. Not that the West would’ve handled it any better necessarily but when you seed the world with virus there is going to be some blowback.
I find it completely disappointing and disheartening that the west has done almost nothing to curb the virus, thus increasing the chance of mutation and continued spread. It's just hard to see the pointing of fingers at China that's happened, especially in hindsight when it's unclear if it even began in China (which doesn't really matter anyway if it was a naturally occurring zoonotic crossover event) and not somewhe…
Some of the finger pointing at China may be unfair but clearly they knew a lot about the virus while letting their citizens travel outside. Not that the West would’ve handled it any better necessarily but when you seed the world with virus there is going to be some blowback.
Note that the document appears to imply that WHO’s team will not be allowed to operate on the ground in China to collect evidence (see Phase 1 of Implementation plan, the paragraph about building on existing information and not duplicating existing efforts).
Note that the document does not mention the possibility of lab escape, despite documented evidence of SARS-CoV previously escaping from a lab in Beijing and resulting in at least one death years earlier, and the fact that Wuhan is home to another one of the very few BSL–4 labs.
I am tired of uninformed “who dealt it” finger-pointing as much as the next guy. First, we currently lack information. Second, even if we had that information, we should accept that mistakes happen (human factor and so on).
The only valid grounds for finger-pointing, as far as I’m concerned, is if someone attempts to undermine an effort aimed to make humanity better equipped to deal with a similar scenario in future.
[0] https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/who-convened-global-...
I find it completely disappointing and disheartening that the west has done almost nothing to curb the virus, thus increasing the chance of mutation and continued spread. It's just hard to see the pointing of fingers at China that's happened, especially in hindsight when it's unclear if it even began in China (which doesn't really matter anyway if it was a naturally occurring zoonotic crossover event) and not somewhe…
I heard this quote on a podcast recently, and somehow stuck with me, because it's quite amazing how we think that we can control somehow such a force of nature like a new virus: “Man cannot control the current of events. He can only float with them and steer.” Otto Von Bismarck.
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It was only a lockdown in name. Schools were in. Shops were open. Ministers have even been supplying pubs with methods to skirt the rules (scotch eggs ffs). Not saying it's not bad, just that very little is actually being done to prevent the spread. Govt care more about keeping people in work.
Yet it worked well. In Cheshire (not badly hit), daily cases halved between the start of lockdown and end, having doubled in the previous month. In Cumbria it was even more of a drop Overnight covid paitents in the NW went from a peak above that of April in Mid November (i.e. had caught it in October), dropping to 70% of the peak a month later, same in NE+Yorks.
But there were places where one in a hundred was a contagious carrier. Stay at home was the only thing that would worked well. They're still not at that point, plans are still to return schools in T4 and as others testify, most shops ignore the rules. It's shambolic.