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On Covid

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Re: On Covid

#71

Post by refurb »

wokwokwok wrote: post #55
refurb wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: On Covid

#72

Post by gomox »

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's little hard evidence that you are, and June 2021 was a nice cautionary tale that you very well might not be.

Re: On Covid

#73

Post by bairrd »

mistercheph wrote: post #59
bairrd wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flu season doesn't lead to insanely high excess death rates, and overwhelm hospital capacity, making things like biking now a much higher risk activity as any visit to a hospital due to a broken bone or something is far more likely to result in a lack of proper treatment. That we are in 2022 and still discussing this leads me to, very grimly, believe that we are in some period of hyper-darwinism, where this train of…

Yes, maybe after that it will come for people who can't tell plural from singular. I am all for grammatical punishments of the most grim variety.

Willful missing of the point. Also not implying that the outcome is anything approaching a good outcome, just a grim Darwinian one, where thinking responding to covid in any way to improve life expectancies is just some sign of weakness. Our further atomization and slide towards a individualist society will leave us living shorter, less collaborative lives where we will try and treat cancer with a juice fast or some nonsense, instead of transforming our fundamental relationship to healthcare away from a not-for-profit one. But one is something a consumer can do, the other requires collective action, and that's only for the hysterical weaklings to dream of, so instead we will just virtue-signal our way towards dying at 30 on a bowflex machine after taking unregulated gym substances or whatever in a failed attempt to steel ourselves against our lack of societal fabric and collective ability to combat anything.

Re: On Covid

#74

Post by refurb »

bairrd wrote: post #38
refurb wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Flu season doesn't lead to insanely high excess death rates, and overwhelm hospital capacity, making things like biking now a much higher risk activity as any visit to a hospital due to a broken bone or something is far more likely to result in a lack of proper treatment. That we are in 2022 and still discussing this leads me to, very grimly, believe that we are in some period of hyper-darwinism, where this train of…

Feel free to hide under a rock avoiding covid while ignoring all the other risks you take everyday.

Hospitals hit capacity during flu seasons - did you wear a mask everyone, keep your kids home, work from home and cancel all travel plans? I’ll bet you didn’t even know they were at capacity.

I’m vaccined, I’m moving on with life.

Re: On Covid

#75

Post by Yoric »

peteradio wrote: post #56
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…

I think there is reason to be a bit more hopeful in America at least when you consider a few things: 1) Natural immunity is quite robust: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm?s_cid=mm... Now, that is according the CDC whose governance has sought to give the impression that natural immunity is not so great (perhaps for generally good reasons). But now they see fit to give the impression that natural imm…

...and then comes BA2.

I'm not very optimistic about that one.

Re: On Covid

#76

Post by throwthere »

I’ve never met Fred but I’ve read his articles, particularly the Ives mba series ones multiple times.

Like any intellectual, they push to grow their knowledge and sometimes venture outside their area of competence. They don’t realize they’re living in a relatively healthy area of society surrounded by people with easy access to medical care and without comorbidities.

omnicron is less lethal than the other variants but it still threatens significant lives, takes icu beds and takes an enormous toll on the nurses working with a still steady stream of dying patients.

We all want to move on, and Omnicron looks to be peaking soon— the nature of the beast is omnicron has only affected half the people it will.

I guess I agree there’s reason to be optimistic. But I don’t think now is the time we stop talking about it.

Re: On Covid

#77

Post by Yoric »

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…

> The unwinding of the Covid trade doesn't necessarily correlate with that, but it's a reasonable proposition.

It's certainly an interesting thought, but why would it be true?

Re: On Covid

#78

Post by seanalltogether »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #49
CoastalCoder wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And you can wear masks if you are uncomfortable on the plane or the subway. My understanding was that mask-wearing was mostly to protect others . Has that changed?

This was my understanding about surgical masks pre-covid, but I plan on wearing a better-sealing (KN95, KF94, N95) on public transportation, airplanes, and in busy places like supermarkets for the rest of my life. If I can avoid even 10% of the colds or other viruses over the course of my life it seems like a very worthwhile tradeoff.

Every year I travel to the east coast for Christmas and every year except this year I've gotten sick during travel. I'm happy to normalize masks cause I want to wear them on planes to avoid feeling miserable the whole time.

Re: On Covid

#79

Post by it_does_follow »

the_snooze wrote: post #53
it_does_follow wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's not an "easy W" and treating it like it is causes more deaths. Have you even looked at the current situation we are in? Death's are continuing to climb and we're soon to be what is in the second most severe wave of the pandemic [0], and in a week we'll see if we start to compete for the worst wave. I don't know how people can rationally talk about this being a "mild variant" and encouraging people to get…

The solution is to get more people vaccinated. Not to ask more of people who are already vaccinated. Vaccinated people have done their part effectively removing themselves as burdens on COVID wards. The leverage point is in getting more people into that protected population. Remember what this was called in the beginning? Novel coronavirus. The problem was that we were all immunologically naive to it, which resulted…

> We have vaccines. Take the damn win.

Unfortunately it's still not that simple. If you look at the death rates in very high vaccination rate states/countries you see the same pattern. For example, VT has the highest vaccination rate in the country, at >90% with at least one dose, and is experiencing this as it's worst wave [0].

There's no doubt that vaccination helps and reduces overall severity, but it is by no means an "easy W"

Additionally we are starting to see diminishing returns in Israel's 4th round of shots [1]. It is increasingly looking like, even if we're will to do a life time of booster shots, this strategy may not be effective.

0. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/vermont/

1. https://healthpolicy-watch.news/israel-fourth-covid-booster-...

Re: On Covid

#80

Post by eli »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #68
eli wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thousands of Americans dying a day isn't bad enough? How much worse does it need to get before it's something we should still be very concerned about? And deaths are in fact rising. According to your chart they were around 6000/day (7 day average) on Jan 1 and are 7600/day in the most recent data two weeks later.

First of all. Not thousands, but 571 as i checked on a population of 320.000.000 in the US and with a reasonable amount of people unvaccinated ( and they chose for this, other people aren't responsible for other people's decisions) And as mentioned in my above comment. Can you show me how many are dying because of Omicron specific and how many are related to previous Delta infection that were already admitted in the…

Most states don't report deaths on the weekend, which is why you should look at the 7-day average. It was 3,866 deaths on Friday.
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