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The Coronavirus Is Here Forever

theatlantic.com

871–880 of 1001 posts

Re: The Coronavirus Is Here Forever

#871
post #489

"The transition to endemic COVID-19 is also a psychological one. When everyone has some immunity, a COVID-19 diagnosis becomes as routine as diagnosis of strep or flu—not good news, but not a reason for particular fear or worry or embarrassment either. That means unlearning a year of messaging that said COVID-19 was not just a flu. If the confusion around the CDC dropping mask recommendations for the vaccinated earli…

This all sounds well and dandy, except the best data we have for covid-19 shows a .2% - .3% infection fatality rate, about 2x or 3x worse than the seasonal flu, which is still -- as we learned in May 2020 -- highly gated to people with severe age- and weight- related comorbidities. In short, comparing this to chicken pox or other epidemics with "massive body counts" is flatly asinine. It's a slightly worse version of…

5% more deadly would be "slightly". 2-3x more deadly and much more infectious isn't "slightly".

You could perhaps say "like a deadlier flu".

Re: The Coronavirus Is Here Forever

#872

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not 26 per 100k population I know people like to think that doing the per-capita calculation puts every country on an even footing for comparison. But it's kind of silly to straight compare countries with vastly different geographies and economies, regardless of population normalization. > I think there's a fair chance they'll beat it again If they are locked down, again, 16 months into this thing, they never beat…

> If they are locked down, again, 16 months into this thing, they never beat anything. They eliminated this virus across Aotearoa. We didn't eliminate it everywhere else (actually almost anywhere else) and infected people continued to arrive at their border, eventually one of those infections (from Australia) leaked into their community about two weeks ago. Unless your point is some purely nihilist position like "In…

> they beat this and now they're going to have to do it again.

It’s easy to quit smoking. I’ve done it a dozen times.

Re: The Coronavirus Is Here Forever

#873
post #764

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "We go hard and we go early" works. "We go hard and we go early" works *in a small, remote island nation that is willing to hermetically seal itself off from the rest of the world.

"small", "remote", and "island" aren't significant direct contributions here. "seal" does -- whether any group is collectively capable of taking chain-of-exposure and its management seriously. Make your island arbitrarily small and remote but have even a single person who's boating/flying or any kind of unmanaged travel outside the bubble regularly and you'll see infection overrun the island. Pick an arbitrarily larg…

It is far easier to lock down an island chain of 5 million people than it is to lock down a city of 8.5 million people.

But China knows how to do it, and they have much more density than the USA. You just need to be very authoritarian; e.g. marching people under guard to quarantine hotels from airplanes.

Re: The Coronavirus Is Here Forever

#874
post #489

"The transition to endemic COVID-19 is also a psychological one. When everyone has some immunity, a COVID-19 diagnosis becomes as routine as diagnosis of strep or flu—not good news, but not a reason for particular fear or worry or embarrassment either. That means unlearning a year of messaging that said COVID-19 was not just a flu. If the confusion around the CDC dropping mask recommendations for the vaccinated earli…

“Turning vaccines into a political wedge issue is one of the stupidest things I've seen in my life.”

It’s truly maddening. My wife (very on the right) refused to get it and instead talked endlessly about hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, vitamin D. All of which she got from conservative media. Right now she is lying in bed wracked with COVID. Ate up with fever and a cough that sends jolts of panic through me when i hear it echoing down the stairs. It breaks my heart, man.

God help us and God bless all of you out there with sick loved ones.

Sorry for the sappy post. It’s been a rough few days.

Re: The Coronavirus Is Here Forever

#875

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. For small island countries like New Zealand it works "great." This was never an option for countries like the US, or even most of Europe. Much less so for countries like India. But we'll see how it goes. If New Zealand and Australia persist in this notion that they're going to stay locked down until the virus goes away, particularly with its endemicity now inevitable, I think you will soon find vast swaths of th…

Edit: Don’t mean to sound nasty, but this type of reasoning gets repeated so often without much criticism. It worked for China too, so don’t come with this “small countries” crap. The US is “small” relative to China. Okay… now we get the “easy in a dictatorship” response to which I offer Japan. A democracy, with relatively large and dense population, yet have had relative few cases… although I am sure an excuse can b…

Japan is having lots of problems with COVID. They are like Sweden in this regard.

Re: The Coronavirus Is Here Forever

#876
post #764

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "We go hard and we go early" works. "We go hard and we go early" works *in a small, remote island nation that is willing to hermetically seal itself off from the rest of the world.

Being a remote island nation really doesn't make much difference in the era of Air travel. It has (had) very high immigration rates and a lot of tourists.

[deleted]

Re: The Coronavirus Is Here Forever

#877
post #489

"The transition to endemic COVID-19 is also a psychological one. When everyone has some immunity, a COVID-19 diagnosis becomes as routine as diagnosis of strep or flu—not good news, but not a reason for particular fear or worry or embarrassment either. That means unlearning a year of messaging that said COVID-19 was not just a flu. If the confusion around the CDC dropping mask recommendations for the vaccinated earli…

> Turning vaccines into a political wedge issue is one of the stupidest things I've seen in my life.

Sadly, there is one thing worse: health "authorities" and "experts" completely disregarding therapeutics, e.g., Ivermectin, which is as safe and as cheap as Aspirin, and which reduces the risk of serious illness and death by up to 86% [1] (which brings the death risk to about 1/4 of the flu... aka a low enough level to not even warrant a news story), all because a politician said it works.

I recommend listening to episode #1671 of the Joe Rogan podcast, in which he interviews Pierre Kory and Bret Weinstein. Once you listen to this, if you are not absolutely astounded by what you learn, please let me know (unless the reason is because you already knew this stuff).

Edit: imagine being so ignorant and deranged as to down vote these well studied and cited (see below) facts.

1. https://c19ivermectin.com

Re: The Coronavirus Is Here Forever

#878

There is lots of competition for the top of the stupidity list. NYC locking down all summer and then 'opening up' in September seemed top of the list to me. It's not that I thought they should have stayed locked down the entire time, its that they should have opened in the summer so they could lock down in the winter if they really needed it. But seriously though, locking down in the summer to only open up in flu sea…

> Or maybe the whole 'if we just lock down for two weeks, this will be over' tops the list of stupidity New Zealand had 26 deaths in over a year of the pandemic. Not 26 per 100k population. Not 26 per day. Twenty six people full stop. Because in fact "We go hard and we go early" works. Right now they are locked down (since last week) because they had one case in their community, but of course it isn't ever one case a…

Police state shithole.

Re: The Coronavirus Is Here Forever

#879
post #764

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or maybe the whole 'if we just lock down for two weeks, this will be over' tops the list of stupidity New Zealand had 26 deaths in over a year of the pandemic. Not 26 per 100k population. Not 26 per day. Twenty six people full stop. Because in fact "We go hard and we go early" works. Right now they are locked down (since last week) because they had one case in their community, but of course it isn't ever one case a…

> "We go hard and we go early" works. "We go hard and we go early" works *in a small, remote island nation that is willing to hermetically seal itself off from the rest of the world.

Right, I will second this, our law enforcement shut down the Florida Keys at what we call he 18 mile stretch. No one that is not a resident was allowed in. for a good deal of time it worked and to be honest, I am thankful that they did, as at that moment in time, we did not know what we where looking at.

Re: The Coronavirus Is Here Forever

#880

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vaccine refusal is a major partisan political issue on Brazil. Current president didn't want to take proper action and pushed for "herd immunity". And created, shared and supported the craziest conspiracy stories with his alienated supporters. Like Trump but worse.

And still, 95% of the population intends to take the shot anyways. What's happening in the US is really curious and can't be attributed solely to politics. I would love to hear a more comprehensive explanation for why antivax ideas could proliferate to such a large extent in the US.

1. Big pharma + medical community shoving opioids down our throats for decades leading to a nationwide heroin issue, all so doctors could keep driving their 7 series.

2. Fauci lied about masks. How can we believe him moving forward? Simply swap him out for the greater good and get better with messaging. Why the need to keep this one fucker’s name clear at the expense of millions of Americans faith in government?

3. We were lied to about WMDs, spent 20 years in the Middle East fighting for nothing. Many who fought and died were republicans and might be skeptical of our responses to large scale events.

4. Our political leaders knew about the Virus as early as November 2019, traded stocks and did quite well before, during, and after the crash in April 2020.

5. Local news is a joke so most people get their news and hear things via Facebook, Twitter, Big News...etc which create partisan knowledge bubbles.

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