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Covid 5 years later: Learning from a pandemic many are forgetting

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Re: Covid 5 years later: Learning from a pandemic many are forgetting

#51

Post by cameldrv »

jader201 wrote: post #26
dailykoder wrote: post #14

I still desperately want to know the current (scientific) state of wearing a mask. On the one side we have people that say 'our bodies need to learn again to fight against viruses' and the other side which wants you to put on a mask even if you have the smallest sign of a common cold. - Though, I do understand the fear of people who have/had long covid, MCFS or do know people who have, but I don't know what conclusio…

> I still desperately want to know the current (scientific) state of wearing a mask. 100% agreed. We wore masks pretty religiously (definitely when it was mandated, often when it wasn’t for a while). Several months ago, our household got COVID, one persons at a time. We always quarantined in a room, and wore a mask for the limited time we left quarantine. A couple months ago, my mom tested positive, while living with…

There’s an extremely wide range of viral expulsion rates, both from person to person, and from day to day for a single person. You really have to think about things logarithmically. There’s some viral concentration that is enough to infect you 50% of the time, but most of the time, the actual concentration is either way higher than necessary or way lower than necessary.

The types of masks most people use and the way they wear them maybe filter 70-80%. That’s about 0.5 on a log 10 scale. That will make a difference sometimes, but not that often if the experienced variation in concentration is maybe 4-5 orders of magnitude for a positive person.

If you’ve got someone sick in your house and you don’t want to get covid, you need to do high quality masks on everyone, fans blowing out windows, air filters, intelligent HVAC operation, etc. If you do all of that you can probably get 3 orders of magnitude reduction and likely keep it from getting everyone in the house.

Re: Covid 5 years later: Learning from a pandemic many are forgetting

#52

Post by kennywinker »

atorodius wrote: post #28

I skimmed the article but did not find my question answered: what's the current view on whether the political and social response was properly done?

Which response? Every country responded differently, every state in every country responded differently. Cities implemented the state and national guidelines differently and then rural and urban populations reacted to the responses differently.

Imo, your question is a question with 10,000 answers. But also imo the biggest issue with most places responses was that it asked people to behave collectively in a society that rewards only individual action. Asking people to stay home when they’re sick for the good of their neighbours only works if people are supported when they stay home, or they have the means and desire to do it out of the goodness of their heart

Re: Covid 5 years later: Learning from a pandemic many are forgetting

#53

Post by logicchains »

dailykoder wrote: post #15
Traubenfuchs wrote: post #11

At large, covid was never dangerous to children and (healthy) (non-senior) adults. The fear of whole working populations becoming crippled and unable to work due to „long covid“ (mostly just good old PVFS/SEID/CFS) was quickly disproven. Policies never reflected that, disproportionately harming the young mentally, physically and economically. The damaged trust in governments and public health organisations was immens…

>At large, covid was never dangerous to children and (healthy) (non-senior) adults. We didn't know that in the first place though. We expected it, but I shared the sentiment of better be safe then sorry. At least for 2020. I think after that it got handled extremly badly. I can only speak of germany from personal experience though. While I still can understand _some_ of the decissions made by politics, I think they w…

We absolutely did know this in the first place; China published detailed mortality data by age group in Wuhan. The media just refused to publish it, fearmongering to the benefit of its aging, at-risk owners.

Re: Covid 5 years later: Learning from a pandemic many are forgetting

#55

Post by ricksunny »

Utter origins propaganda from Jon Cohen, demonstrating his usual biased set of interviewees (only Bloom serves as the fig-leaf exception).

To get a quote from Baric unrelated to origins, when that fellow is at the absolute epicenter of FOIA litigation (led by USRighttoKnow) on the topic, is simple journalistic malpractice.

Re: Covid 5 years later: Learning from a pandemic many are forgetting

#56

Post by wkat4242 »

ducdetronquito wrote: post #35
dailykoder wrote: post #14

I still desperately want to know the current (scientific) state of wearing a mask. On the one side we have people that say 'our bodies need to learn again to fight against viruses' and the other side which wants you to put on a mask even if you have the smallest sign of a common cold. - Though, I do understand the fear of people who have/had long covid, MCFS or do know people who have, but I don't know what conclusio…

To continue on sfblah's comment (just above mine): in France, before the mask mandate that came after the first covid lockdown, I don't remember a single doctor/nurse* to wear a mask to do their job even during intense period of sickness like in winter or even during previous pandemics. I don't remember anyone wearing a mask either in the doctor's waiting room, even when it was fool of sick people (old and young mixe…

Yeah here in Spain nobody does masks anymore either. Except some tourists.

I'm glad, I always found it a super heavy burden, for me even worse than the lockdowns. But this is due to prior respiratory issues and PTSD related to that. For other people it will be a lot easier.

For me I'll just take the risk as it comes, I'm sure it's a bit higher without them but there's many things that can kill you in this life. For me being overweight is probably a lot more likely to do so.

Re: Covid 5 years later: Learning from a pandemic many are forgetting

#57

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

It's disappointing to see how comments on this topic always center around whether masking worked or not and whether it was a lab leak or not. These just aren't that important in the grand scheme of things.

It's like we got in a car crash and instead of taking about how we can be safer drivers we're debating which brand of crutches is best.

I wish we'd zoom out a bit and look for some more impactful questions to ask. Questions like:

- How many fewer pandemics would we have if we stopped eating mammals?

- Does dwindling diversity among wild animals make for greater risk? (Presumably so, because the remaining ones start to look like a monoculture) How can we prioritize the types of conservation work that most effectively mitigate this?

- How much more effective could our vaccines be if we equipped people with the genes for CAS9? (Such that our vaccines could be CRISPR targeting RNA).

- How much better could our surveillance be if it were more common to sequence samples from sick people? How much cheaper does sequencing need to get before that can happen? Can we achieve that with policy alone or is there engineering work to do?

Re: Covid 5 years later: Learning from a pandemic many are forgetting

#58

Post by hjnilsson »

oneshtein wrote: post #41
dailykoder wrote: post #14

I still desperately want to know the current (scientific) state of wearing a mask. On the one side we have people that say 'our bodies need to learn again to fight against viruses' and the other side which wants you to put on a mask even if you have the smallest sign of a common cold. - Though, I do understand the fear of people who have/had long covid, MCFS or do know people who have, but I don't know what conclusio…

It's easy: masks helps to avoid infection or/and buys more time for body to fight a virus. Looking at graphs of mortality rate between countries with good mask culture and bad mask culture, it looks like masks reduced Covid19 mortality by 2x at least. Country # of cases # of deaths USA 111,820,082 1,219,487 UK 24,910,387 232,112 Japan 33,803,572 74,694 S. Korea 34,571,873 35,934

Is it not more likely the # of deaths are related to obesity for example, where US has 5-7 times as many obese as Japan for example. Which matches the % deaths statistic you have there quite well.

In other words: it's not easy. There are many factors at play.

Re: Covid 5 years later: Learning from a pandemic many are forgetting

#59

Post by alex1138 »

dullcrisp wrote: post #54
alex1138 wrote: post #43

[flagged]

Science isn’t a proper noun unless you’re talking about the journal.

It's kind of mocking 'The Science' (to which Fauci equated himself) but also just how bastardized discourse has become in relation to it

Like yeah, science and censorship is completely natural... right?

This shouldn't be politicized

Re: Covid 5 years later: Learning from a pandemic many are forgetting

#60

Post by defrost »

yieldcrv wrote: post #37
defrost wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seemed entirely appropriate and exactly on point from my PoV: On 24 March, Western Australia closed its borders to the rest of Australia, and on 1 April, the state implemented borders between regions in the state. By mid-April 2020, the state had eliminated community transmission of COVID-19, becoming one of the few places in the world to do so. Elsewhere (the UK and US in particular) looked like a total clusterf*…

> During May 2022, Western Australia experienced sharply rising cases amongst the highest per capita cases seen anywhere in the world throughout the pandemic. Just delaying it to 2022 according to those same articles, as it had already exited the evolutionary fit population’s memory everywhere else in the world

Delaying any free active COVID presence until 99% of the state population had been double vaccinated and following COVID infections resulted in very few hospitalisations and one of the lowest per capita COVID death rates globally.

I suggest you read the articles, from the linked Wikipedia source:

  Why are there so many Covid cases in Australia?

  Prof Catherine Bennett, the chair in epidemiology at Deakin University, said Australia’s high reported infection rate may be the result of high “case ascertainment”.

  Although PCR testing rates have dropped off in Australia, “we’re probably still doing it more so than anywhere else in the world”, Bennett said. “We still have free PCR testing. A lot of countries don’t.”

  The number of confirmed Covid cases shouldn’t be relied on in isolation, Bennett said. “If you compare us to, say, the UK, they look much better for infection rates,” she said. “The UK’s confirmed case rate is 128 cases per million – less than a tenth of Australia’s 1,515 figure.

  “Yet their hospitalisation rate per million is 209, and ours is 124. It suggests that they probably have twice as many [true] cases [as Australia].”
~ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/07/explainer-why-...

In short, we paid attention to case numbers, when we had zero cases we had zero cases and when we had 1,500 mild infections post vaccnation we had 1,500 mild infections.

Other places seemed to run on guesswork and magical thinking.

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