Both of those things are controlled by vaccine. Common colds are what they are because they spread in spite of acquired immunity.
Our Covid Response
- Thread starter gorfias
- Start date
All of the elements I listed are directly the result of policy, and under government control. And all of them greatly affected our ability to respond to the virus.
I reckon that for Finland it could have only been done by getting rid of our constitutional committee that put a block on the heaviest restrictions on top of slowing things down for everybody. Equality under the constitution turned out to be a bit of a *****. Though of course that committee itself is pretty crappy and probably shouldn't exist in its current form. Turning Finland to a police state (y'know, to restrict private gatherings) was never an option - we don't have the resources. Social democracies don't have what it takes to stop epidemics that spread as easily as this one, and for better or worse it does highlight some of social liberalism's failures.
I had to unhide this comment to see what the sentiment was.
It's actually rather bone-chilling. "I rather sacrifice near a million of my fellow citizens' lives than one more iota of my perceived 'freedoms'".
Isn't the casual indifference to human life in favor of one's wishes or desires the textbook definition of psychopathic? Are there some other measures that need to be met?
That isn't even remotely what I said.
This virus spreads even through acquired immunity, it conquered the globe even while places locked down, and it follows the pattern of other endemic viruses. Maybe you should give the powers that be a break for not winning an unwinnable fight.
I said nothing about sacrifice or freedom. If you could take away all my freedoms for a short time and eradicate covid19, I'd support it, but it wouldn't work.
The main reason that they don't have what it takes is that their populations don't have the will to put the necessary measures into practice. When most of the population get away with nothing or cold symptoms, they just don't see the restriction to their lives worth it - and if thousands of oldsters die, well that's just other people.
If we had a disease with the infectiousness of covid and the mortality of ebola, I can quite bet you we'd be taking the necessary measures, and we wouldn't hear a fucking peep about mask and vaccine mandates except from a truly miniscule bunch of crazies.
And what variant has been bad for those with prior immunity? The more the virus mutates, the less deadly it becomes anyway. Getting scared of some variant is accomplishing what?
Sure some probably were, but likely not most. It's not like covid caused hospitals to fill up every department's beds.
We have vaccines. Why are we wasting money on so many tests that can be going to more important public health issues?
You not being contagious and testing negative are 2 different things. Also, the CDC director just admitted those isolation periods weren't based in science and just what they thought the public would be OK with. Immune asymptomatic people are not close to contagious for 10 days, maybe just a day or a few hours. From the time you take a PCR test and say you're positive at that time, it takes a day or 2 to get the test result and you're probably not even contagious at that point so what's the point of getting the test in the 1st place? And if you were say negative, what's to say you ain't positive and contagious when you get the result and think you're fine? And the rapid tests are only as accurate as the PCR tests when you're symptomatic so what's the point? Can't you just assume you have covid and stay home a few days because even if it's say the flu, wouldn't it be better to not spread that either? I'm not seeing how these tests are stopping transmission because they're obviously not when you have transmission numbers this high and tests are sold out or you gotta wait hours to get one. What is actually being accomplished here? It sounds like the TSA all over again, just "safety theater".
So you're not attacking his argument. Don't you know me by now? Attack the argument. Other ID ethicists have said the same thing about testing.
None of the parties actually want healthcare for all. The democrats need the republicans so they can blame them when such and such they promised or say that they want doesn't go through. Instead of buying 500 million tests or putting it towards something else for public health, just giving the people that money straight-up would be more beneficial.
There were almost 10 million missed cancer screenings in the 1st year of the pandemic. And these weren't missed because cancer doctors and nurses were on covid duty. People were just scared to do stuff that wasn't "essential" when the chances of getting covid because you got a screening for cancer is very low. The post below yours is someone that is scared to go out and get a bag of chips when they're almost certainly vaccinated, you think this level of fear is making people healthier? I didn't say covid does nothing, I said the response to covid has produced more harm than benefit. Please direct me to just ONE cost-benefit analysis that says covid restrictions have saved more life.
Nobody said to sacrifice the at-risk. You know, you can focus protection on those at-risk vs the entire population, right? Like how the elderly were first up to get the vaccine, right? We are currently still doing it ass-backwards, the least at-risk have the greatest restrictions and testing.
-That's not the argument. If Country_A has high or low covid, why would Country_A stop you from leaving? There is literally no Country_B in my question. Australia blocked people from leaving Australia.
-There is literally no cost-benefit analysis showing lockdowns have had more benefits than harms. Surely if there's a filing cabinet full of these "sources", you can provide just one.
-How are you gonna stop the variants in the 1st place? One hypothesis for Omicron is that it came from animals so you gonna vaccinated the world's animals too? You're not gonna stop the mutations and it's just the normal course of nature, which includes the fact that viruses become less deadly as they evolve. One of the problems with the vaccines is that your immune system only sees the one spike protein instead of the whole virus that your immune system makes antibodies for more than just the spike protein so if that mutates, you have antibodies for another protein that either didn't mutate or barely mutated. This Harvard study showed that not even ONE medical worker that had covid previously got covid again, and this study included the period of the Delta wave, the SCARIEST variant of them all. Everyone is going to get exposed to covid and if you have been vaccinated before getting your first exposure to the virus, you're very unlikely to get severe disease or die. Then, your immune system will have seen the whole virus and be that much more prepared for the next time you get exposed to covid. If covid originally just gave you a cold, it wouldn't have even been a thing in the 1st place. Getting an infection with mild symptoms is not an example of the vaccines failing and covid being resistant to vaccines. I did expect the vaccines to be better as they were claiming 90+% effectiveness against infection, which didn't end up being true (across more than a couple months). It's apparent natural immunity is far superior than vaccination immunity.
Why is 100% effectiveness against merely testing positive the goal? That's not possible even with measles let alone covid.
China's numbers are false, they literally lie about everything, even GDP, this has been a known thing for a long time. And you think that in a city, Wuhan, that has more people than NYC where a virus started and spread unknown is going to have less deaths than the initial NYC wave when we were actively searching for it? It's just common sense that their numbers are bullshit. And what they actually did do to squash the virus isn't something anyone here would say is ethical or OK. Would you be for locking everyone in their homes and not letting them go to the hospital if they were sick? Because that's what China did.
Most people weren't infectious for 5 days at the start of the whole thing let alone now when they're vaxxed and probably naturally immune. The 10 day thing wasn't based on any science either.
There's no way you could've stopped covid, it's too infectious. Just maybe there was like a one in a million chance China sequencing the virus from one of the first people infected and being able quarantine and stop it. The chances of that are so rare because those 1st infections would have to have been serious enough to go to the hospital (and the vast majority get very mild symptoms) without it getting spread much at all and if that did happen, what is then the chance of them sequencing the virus when the illness doesn't really seem like anything new and different? Chances are extremely likely the virus was out of China before they even discovered it. And that isn't China being bad a sequencing either; if it started in the US, we wouldn't have found it right away either.
How many of those viruses that flare up and stay localized spread as fast as covid and are infectious PRIOR to symptoms? Not a single one.
And those getting boosters and now 4th shots aren't greedy when billions in the rest of the world haven't gotten a single shot?
And cost-benefit analysis of covid restrictions all point to more life lost from restrictions than saved by them.
How many of those countries have as good reporting as the US? India's, that borders China, death toll is very under reported for example. If conservative policy is so bad, why is Florida's death rate when adjusted for age better than average among US states?
That can work but nobody in a western nation would do it because the public outrage would be so fucking massive. That is what China did and locked people sick in their homes and let them die. You'd have to not just have lockdowns but literally keep everyone home for at least 2 weeks, maybe a month. That means no stores whatsoever open, everyone would have to pack up on food and needed medicine (which in itself would be a massive undertaking), you'd have to complete shutdown every single industry (even utilities) and hospitals as well. And even if you did that, there's no guarantee that it works as other countries would also have to do this too (unless you completely locked your borders, which isn't really possible outside of island countries). And you can always have some immunocompromised people that the virus is still infectious in them after the month and the spread starts again, very slowly initially, but it's back up to full steam rather quickly. Sure you bought some time until vaccines and saved deaths, but you're not extinguishing the virus, it's just not possible.
Considering the fuckknuckles running the joint have managed to make a fiery shitshow of just about everything this should not be a surprise. They didn't want people leaving because it might have added to the thousands of Australians already overseas they were doing fuck all to help get back to Oz and even the Murdoch media were starting to ask questions about it... and of course it didn't stop government ministers and their staffs fucking off on junkets disguised as high level policy and diplomacy circlejerks.
When will the fear-mongering stop?
From the actual article:
And while the number of children going into the intensive care unit at the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago has not increased...
He added that many of the infections the hospital is treating are mild or were incidentally caught during the hospital's screening process in children who were getting admitted for something else.
www.cnn.com
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www.dailymail.co.uk
From the actual article:
And while the number of children going into the intensive care unit at the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago has not increased...
He added that many of the infections the hospital is treating are mild or were incidentally caught during the hospital's screening process in children who were getting admitted for something else.
Child hospitalizations are surging in this Chicago hospital. Only one of the young patients was fully vaccinated, doctor says | CNN
Inside one children's hospital in Chicago, Covid-19 cases are roughly three times higher than the hospital's previous peak in December 2020. In the past week, hospitalizations are four times higher what the hospital typically sees.
www.cnn.com
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Emails reveal how Fauci, head of NIH colluded to try to smear experts
The emailsshow Fauci and Francis Collins attempting to coordinate a 'devastating takedown' of the Great Barrington Declaration, an alternate theory of prevention that abandoned lockdowns.
If you're concerned, pick another country. The point is we have a wealth of data for southeast Asia and it is generally very positive compared to the US. As for the US
U.S. COVID death rate by state 2023 | Statista
As of March 2023, Arizona had the highest COVID death rate in the U.S., with 455 deaths per 100,000 population. Hawaii had the lowest death rate.
www.statista.com
Generally speaking yes, conservative states are doing worse than less conservative states.
So if they've determined the science was wrong, why is that not what Dr Fauci is saying? Instead he's saying go die for the economy (or go kill someone for the economy I guess since this hypothetical person already has a positive Covid test).
It's a-fuckin-mazing how important getting Covid under control by keeping positive cases away from everyone was super important until the labor market realized that getting a dime while the boss makes a dollar might be a shit deal...
Nope. Just like how the vegetables I didn't want to eat as a kid didn't have anything to do with starving children in Africa, at least on my end.
A cost-benefit analysis done by a particularly looney economist who directly equates human life to a dollar value, yeah.
What does "when adjusted for age" mean? Are we not counting old people again?
Where did he say that? Seems uncharacteristically frank.
There is some science behind it.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/201...tific-brief-options-to-reduce-quarantine.html
Also the science wasn't "wrong".
It has changed with the new variant and vaccinations.
The time of ten day quarantine was based on the higher end for the dormant period as observed at the time and was a risk assessment.
In Australia the period was 14 days and even then there was reports of people developing symptoms after that.
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This, like so much else you are peddling, is not true. The ten days was a reasonable estimate based on studies for how long live virus particles could be found inside covid patients, thus how long someone might be contagious. From a health perspective some health experts preferred 14 days, but there was a lot of political pressure for the isolation period to be shorter. So it's a bit of a fudge, but it is scientifically informed.
A reduction to shorter times follows refinements assuming negative tests and vaccination. In the former case because it strongly suggests the infection has gone, in the latter because vacccination should enhance the body's immune response against the virus and clear it faster. There is scientific justification for this although, again, policy reflects to some degree political will and pressure to reduce isolation times.