51–60 of 148 posts
Since hospitals are practically empty right now, have we thought of allowing people to voluntarily get infected/quarantined (using a tiny viral load)? Obviously no old, immuno-compromised, or other vulnerable people. But for healthy "essential" workers it would mean not living in fear that they might get it... because they already got over it.
> No one could have ever predicted ...
Humans continuously invent their "normals". There was no "old normal" and there won't be a "new normal". Already, different countries and regions have different cultures, histories, responses and outcomes. If anything, their future societies are diverging as a result of conscious choices and actions by humans exercising creative will.
Out of all the buzzwords to come out of COVID, "new normal" is maybe my least favorite. What the hell does it even mean?
I assume they mean something else. We are dealing with a virus. Alcohol and bleach wipes ftw.
It's reactionary to say it but China has to pay a price for this, otherwise what's to stop it happening again? Edit :I've been completely hammered on this topic so I won't make any more comments. Hope that's ok
Also, China has paid an enormous price for this. Do you think that Chinese administrators are looking at what happened and saying, "golly, we got off lightly here, no need to make any changes".
Also: claiming that someone has to pay a price for doing something without having in mind a realistic mechanism for making them pay is not reactionary, just dumb.
I feel like that exited back in 2011.
> The days of carefree travel are long gone. I've been digging up videos of people from the early 1920s and I see very little impact of the Spanish Flu on people's mannerisms even just within a year or two after (like no masks in the streets even though mask wearing was apparently a big thing during the pandemic). Just the other day, I was reading up on Charlie Chaplin. Looking at his filmography, I noticed a a gap o…
> Within a year after a vaccine becomes available, We have never successfully developed a vaccine for a coronavirus before. And even if it's proven to be feasible, it will be unlikely to be very practical (are we going to manufacture billions of doses? How long will it take? Won't there be some kind of herd immunity by then?) and there are also indicators that such vaccines would not be effective beyond 6 months or s…
The days of carefree travel will return. It'll be a while, but it will be back. In early March, looking for a park to sit quietly with my thoughts in the sunshine but away from others, I found myself in a local cemetery. Alone, but not far from a great many people. Seattle's a pretty young place on the scale of things. I was surprised to find that our local graveyard had a substantial contingent that had lived throug…
> I sat there and silently asked a number of them what they'd tell us, if they could. Don't dig up my body and recreate the 1918 virus? http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/523163.stm > Because the corpses were buried in the "permafrost" - ground that is frozen even at the height of the Arctic summer - tissue samples from the brain, kidney, lungs and spleen were well preserved.
> The days of carefree travel are long gone. I've been digging up videos of people from the early 1920s and I see very little impact of the Spanish Flu on people's mannerisms even just within a year or two after (like no masks in the streets even though mask wearing was apparently a big thing during the pandemic). Just the other day, I was reading up on Charlie Chaplin. Looking at his filmography, I noticed a a gap o…
> Within a year after a vaccine becomes available, We have never successfully developed a vaccine for a coronavirus before. And even if it's proven to be feasible, it will be unlikely to be very practical (are we going to manufacture billions of doses? How long will it take? Won't there be some kind of herd immunity by then?) and there are also indicators that such vaccines would not be effective beyond 6 months or s…
For example, we already produce and distribute an annual vaccine on the scale of billions (the flu). The flu also has tampering effectiveness on a pretty short time scale. The flu vaccine is also not 100% effective. And despite all of those short comings, we're able to mitigate flu into something that people literally use as the low bar for infectious diseases in terms of spread and severity.
I think you're right that the vaccine is unlikely to let us eradicate coronavirus, but it'll let us get back to a new normal - one that isn't fundamentally different from our old normal (at least from a health perspective - who knows what happens at a societal or policy level).