If you didn't have a horse in this race, you wouldn't be so busy making arguments about the origins of the disease.
If someone like the former CDC director said he believes the lab leak theory is most likely (and got death threats for saying that btw), then obviously the theory has merit and should be discussed.
The USA did have a wave starting in March, it was just a lot smaller than the preceding one. Compare the USA and UK: both have a major peak in cases around the turn of the year. However, the UK declines steadily to almost nothing by May. The USA declines to March, and then has another "bump" which boosts on into May, which coincides with the alpha variant becoming the dominant US variant.
Waffle about flu is a big fat load of straw man.
"Concerned" requires context. Does the USA need to worry about mass hospitalisation and casualties like it was 2020 and early 2021, no. But it does need to consider a massive rash of cases and subsequent healthcare burden from the delta variant, plus ill-health from long covid. Like I've said, take a look at the UK, which is now on over 40k new cases a day from a low of 2k. From simple equivalent scaling, the USA can plausibly expect being back over 200k new infections a day. Although it might not get that bad. Cases are currently now up to 29k per day from a low of 12k (7-day rolling average), as that new delta variant sweeps through and takes off. It could just be another April-May like bump, but I would say that the experience of the UK suggests otherwise.
Although "concern" is really also just a big fat load of straw man. The real point is that Marty Makary is just wrong: the USA simply does not have herd immunity, as delta is about to demonstrate to you irrespective of whether it's an April-size peak or a really big January peak.
The USA bump (March to mid-April) also coincided with the weather getting nicer, Spring Break, and the Easter holiday. So, again, saying that was from the UK variant is very correlational and the "bump" was very far from IMPENDING DOOM.
Talking about the flu is not a straw man, it's staying CONSISTENT with normal risk. It's a fact that going to see the NBA Finals right now is less dangerous than it was seeing Michael Jordan play in December in the 90s. Nobody was concerned about going to a basketball game then when the risk was higher, why should they be concerned today when the risk is lower? Nor did we have kids wearing masks back then when the flu was more dangerous to them, yet at the MLB All-Star game they had kids OUTSIDE catching fly balls during the HR Derby wearing masks for no fucking reason.
You may want to be concerned a bit if you're not vaccinated and in an area where transmission is high, but that is a very small % of counties in the United States. Funny thing is that a survey showed that more vaccinated people are concerned by the Indian variant than nonvaccinated people. I kinda get why nonvaccinated without natural immunity wouldn't be concerned because if they were concerned they would've gotten vaccinated. But why would vaccinated people be concerned over the Indian variant when the vaccines are still more than 90% effective? Mabye cuz the fear-mongering media like how the media will say cases are up say 50% in say 30 out of 50 states yet in many counties that means the cases per 100k went from say 4 to 6 (and 6 is still very low); when cases are so low and they go up and you make that into percentages, it looks a lot worse than it is as the numbers are still something everyone would've loved to have seen just a few months ago but are made to look like they are bad when they're not. I don't know how you can say most of the US doesn't have herd immunity. It would be dumb for anyone to claim that the entirety of the US would have gained herd immunity at the same time because every place has different infection numbers (natural immunity) and different vaccination numbers. Where I go and do stuff in Northwest Indiana, places are packed with basically nobody wearing masks and new cases is 4 per 100K according to that map of all the counties. I was in Indianapolis for work for the last 2 or so months and nobody is wearing masks, they had the Indy 500 with 130+K people, and people are living completely normal and 6 cases per 100K in Marion county. If that's not herd immunity, then what is?
I wasn't told that at least. Of course I don't listen to funny beanie man. I also don't watch CNN or MSNBC, but from the beginning what I heard was "it's implausible, but worth investigating". And then it was investigated.
Just because you didn't hear it, doesn't mean it wasn't said. It was so denied as being plausible, it was considered a conspiracy theory.
It's science, people.
www.sciencealert.com
Because I care more about medical journals. Big tech is it's own set of issues, but on the question of whether or not there was a lid on research into the virus, Facebook banning nobodies from talking about it doesn't even enter into the equation, it's a different topic for a different talk.
I gave 2 links of researchers/scientists in 2 different places (Australia and the US) saying researching/publishing studies that had to do with the lab leak were hard. Facebook banning discussion of this is also a sign that the scientific community saying it's a conspiracy theory as why would Facebook ban something that the scientific community says is plausible aka open for debate?
And I find it hard to believe when I saw research going on, as much as you can medically research whether a virus came from a lab or not.
Researching whether it came from a lab or not has basically run out into the sand at this point since that outside certain specific circumstances you're not going to determine if it's lab made or not medically, they're just going to have to examine the lab itself and like others have said, the Chinese aren't going to let that happen easily even if they're completely in the clear on it.
There's other ways to study the virus and possible origins like that Australian study that looked at the likelihood of specific animals being the link to human infection, which didn't have any takers until the lab leak theory was no longer "taboo". The fact that is was taboo says it all, that's the opposite of science.
Yes, but that's not really enough-- you have to also refrain from saying stuff that's categorically wrong.
Like what?
OK. So, how come the UK had an RE under 1 even outside of lockdown, and then it rose back above again?
About that "Freedom day"...
Yes, we had packed sporting events. The finals of Wimbledon went ahead in front of about 15,000 people, and the final of the Euros took place in Wembley, and was attended by 60,000 people. I live in the capital, and every day I can see how almost zero social distancing is observed during rush hour on the tube. And meanwhile, the incidence rate of Covid has skyrocketed.
About 2/3 of adults are fully vaccinated in the UK. And yet the incidence is back up over 50,000 cases daily.
Where's my herd immunity? It's long past April, bud!
Uhh... who said the UK had herd immunity in April? A lot of the cases are in vaccinated people, which don't really matter and the cases in nonvaccinated actually went down by 22% last week. I don't know the ins and outs of the UK so I'm not going to try to claim herd immunity in the UK nor have I in the past.
Pff, that's nothing. We got 80,000!
That number isn't right. Only the the Daily Beast is reporting that number with nobody else close to that number in fact, like NY Times has 31,000.
