Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic

[MadGreenSon]

You sound like a conspiracy theorist.

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He is a conspiracy theorist. He's bought into a narrative that is all about politics and not even a little about public health.

 

[OverMaster]

The state of the health care system doesn't seem to be enormously relevant to COVID outcomes, except in worst-cases like northern Italy where the system's capacity is actually overwhelmed. (Which AFAICT hasn't been an issue either in Sweden or the UK.

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And no wonder; there's no known cure or vaccine yet, and there's no treatment that has been completely certified as effective either; so there's not much even the best health care system can do beyond helping the respiratory systems of the most serious cases. The virus isn't exactly an equalizer but it comes close; in most cases beating it relies on your body doing the job itself and there's not much medicine can do yet, so for once your chances of dying don't vary that much if you're rich or poor, other than if you were able to keep yourself healthy before or not.

 

[Germtheory3Z]

TLDR : You're logic differs from how rational planning systems are made because you're not approaching(or from my end presenting) it from a how to solve the problem mentality. You're doing what unreliable doctors do and presenting reasons for why a specific strat should work rather then actually testing it out and rejecting it which is what SEA countries are doing.

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What can be more rational then basing your decisions on evidence? All of the decisions were made on models and assumptions that aren't holding up in practice and were always based on extremely sketchy assumptions like there being barely any undetected infected when testing was haphazard, weeks or months after the fact and heavily focused on the most hard hit demographics.

1) Off course most people would change strat since teh Sweden Strat was , if you listened to some believers from WHO promised to generate much better initial results then was seen when put in place in most countries due to technical details. However most doctors or healthcare work change their stance when reality met with theory and someone had to decide whether it was worth the risk to follow a plan that failed to meet it's internal expectation.

PS: Singapore is one of the very few countries I know off that willingly commited to teh Sweden strat namely because they are one of the few who saw great numbers with it as they could replicate a lot of the factors that made it work. Most other countries however had major problems with high education/high trust strategies for obvious reason. Namely that some large population of idiots wouldn't follow advise and will spread the virus past it's boundaries.

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The knocking of Sweden especially is anti-factual. Look at the non-corona excess mortality graphs from TotalAbsolutism's link. Having checked the UK weekly reports they seem to be counting "corona on certificate but not cause of death" as Corona so these are just the people who didn't have symptoms or a positive test on the body. If you want to try to find total excess body count for the last month it's probably worse. I know England and Wales' total all causes excess was +90% what it should've been compared to Sweden's +30%. The lockdown strategy isn't just failing to save lives or killing people years after the fact from the economic damage it's causing deaths now in a lot of countries and that's probably going to be a bigger tragedy than the Corona spread.

https://www.newsroom.co.nz/2020/05/05/1157173/are-there-hidden-covid-19-deaths-in-nzs-statistics

2) You reallly should consider actually doing the logistics for Public Healthcare stuff. It's a lot more murky then you present. Finding a (competent) doctor willing to bet on any particular outcome is going to be difficult and strategies are flexible due to the inherent nature of low information of C19. And for most of the upper echelon of Public Health the main decision is to find a way to reliably get a specific outcome in unreliable situations. Proponents of Sweden Strat failed in Malaysia since we're aiming for even better health outcomes then what could be done with said strat.

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Finding anyone willing to accept a specific cost like publicized corona deaths that they'd be responsible for in the face of distributed costs they won't be blamed for is difficult. It's easy to say "we must do everything to stop this!" when the public is terrified and screaming for it and mono focused on the Corona death count instead of the overall number, but that doesn't mean it works. Corona's still spreading in all of these countries, there's no evidence flattening the curve actually saves the people who're dying at an 85% rate while on ventilators and there's a rising cost in non corona excess mortality from ongoing lockdown on top of the extreme long term consequences of recession.

3) You sound like a conspiracy theorist.

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At this point I have to take it as a complement, because conspiracy theorists are the only people with working memories at this stage in the game. All the good ones are just the people who remember the last scandal, the last court case, the last verified leak that stormed across the world's reputable media and knowing the people responsible aren't fired or imprisoned think "gee golly I guess they might do the same thing this time, too, mightn't they?"

Most countries are relying on internal data on what works and what doesnt' because most countries have proponents like you who come up with said plans, and the public health heads who test out said plans and deem then unworkable. Why it isn't workable is not relevant. All that matters is that the plan has been tested and failed.

In the case of Malaysia we're not speculating that Sweden strat doesn't work, we know it doesn't work because we tried and failed to get our desired outcome from it on smaller scaled plans. The details of why it failed doesn't matter since in the end only actual practical tests are relevant to our decision making.

Yes it sounds weird but it's important to seperate that there are implementers and there are decision makers on Public Health and only the implementers care about details. The decision makers only care that the plan would work, or barring that is likely to achieve it's intended outcome.

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But to avoid that conversation, which I probably couldn't source without breaking rules anyway, do you think that these countries are lying about the death counts? Not misdiagnosing deaths, not fucking up, but actively lying about the number of dead people reported this month? If you don't think there's an ongoing conspiracy to do that my point stands that botched lockdowns are killing people now in comparable numbers to Corona by it's most generous estimates. That's on top of the huge long term costs I've always been talking about.

You need to remember "corona deaths" aren't some sainted exception to the rules of our mundane world. They're s a sexy, scary, novel thing to report so they became far bigger in our minds than it should be and because of that political decision makers (elected or not) had to respond far more forcefully than would be fair. If the public were being exposed to any other kind of health news reporting with the same kind of scary presentation and constant reminders you'd get the same hysterical reaction.

4) here's what our gov is working with, basically. There are more accurate internal measurements and some coorperative data that's available for implementation purpose due to the SEA international public health cooperative but those are details and those aren't important for general discussion.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/...20-05-09&country=OWID_WRL+SWE+GBR+SGP+FRA+MYS

To note that these are massive

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I fail to see how this supports your argument that lockdown's effective and a good trade off. Sweden does better than most similarly rich lockdown countries on that graph, and it's clearly only using diagnosed corona deaths and not total excess mortality, which is my preferred metric. I mean, do you think Malyasia let alone basket cases like Zimbabwe, Syria and South Africa would be diagnosing as well as a wealthy first world country or that Russia is just doing 20-40 times better than the rest of the northern hemisphere instead of just not testing as much? (Let alone Belarus, doing just as well, where the president refused all lockdown measures completely.)

Overall the chart just seems like an object lesson that something more concretely tracked, like total excess mortality, would be far more meaningful as our measuring stick for a state's performance, barring some mitigating factors like north vs. southern hemisphere seasonal differences or huge demographic differences in age cohorts or average weights etc.

 

[mishie]

Germtheory3Z, since going by all previous posts in the thread, any links to sources that would prove you wrong would just be shrugged off and ignored and waved away as not being the exact specific set of data that you're looking for, whilst you continue to pull out hilariously niche sources that usually just end up proving the exact opposite point to what you intended, here's a short educational video that I feel really sums up the situation nicely.

 

[evildice]

Is this accurate? Is the NYC region starting to trend down like Italy, while the less-urban areas are curving up like Sweden?

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Bonus memes for the people who are stuck home, which might just be all of us:

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[Germtheory3Z]

Germtheory3Z, since going by all previous posts in the thread, any links to sources that would prove you wrong would just be shrugged off and ignored and waved away as not being the exact specific set of data that you're looking for, whilst you continue to pull out hilariously niche sources that usually just end up proving the exact opposite point to what you intended, here's a short educational video that I feel really sums up the situation nicely.

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I've provided far more links and sources than anyone else, and gone through the effort of finding the official government stats straight from the source or academic studies instead of media articles that don't source themselves. The general trend is clear that infection rates are far higher than reported, I've linked several survey studies proving that and articles about government leaders agreeing with them. I've demonstrated excess death totals aren't determined by lockdown by international comparison of outcomes. I've demonstrated western countries have extremely broad definitions of corona deaths by literally showing several sets of official guidelines and Deborah Birx, the American response coordinator, saying that with Fauci standing next to her.

You've all been extremely lazy in doing the same either making unsourced claims, outright refusing to consider the costs of your proposed solution or acting like you can claim one example out of several dozen proves your case when your own source proves the opposite trend. You don't care about the facts, just emotional thinking, you don't really care about the death or suffering only the media coverage. You don't even care if your methods work. It's obscene and it's sadistic.

 

[OverMaster]

You don't even care if your methods work.

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Well, the problem is there is no way to know any method will work until all is said and done. Even for those that 'worked', like Singapore or South Korea's, we've seen everything just starts all over again as soon as the slightest breach in lockdowns happens, but then we haven't seen real solid proof herd immunity works yet either.

A lockdown spanning the whole globe and lasting long enough as to burn the virus out is impossible to enforce, so all we can do is shooting in the dark and hope to God something of what we throw at the wall eventually works for real. If not, we're done, so...

 

[mishie]

I've provided far more links and sources than anyone else, and gone through the effort of finding the official government stats straight from the source or academic studies instead of media articles that don't source themselves. The general trend is clear that infection rates are far higher than reported, I've linked several survey studies proving that and articles about government leaders agreeing with them. I've demonstrated excess death totals aren't determined by lockdown by international comparison of outcomes. I've demonstrated western countries have extremely broad definitions of corona deaths by literally showing several sets of official guidelines and Deborah Birx, the American response coordinator, saying that with Fauci standing next to her.

You've all been extremely lazy in doing the same either making unsourced claims, outright refusing to consider the costs of your proposed solution or acting like you can claim one example out of several dozen proves your case when your own source proves the opposite trend. You don't care about the facts, just emotional thinking, you don't really care about the death or suffering only the media coverage. You don't even care if your methods work. It's obscene and it's sadistic.

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Actually I've mainly just been posting information about Australia, where we've pretty much completely beaten Covid thanks to our approach of isolation and social distancing. Like you can try to spin things as much as you want, but people have repeatedly shown that it does work, and that the countries that either didn't follow it, didn't follow it fast enough, or were unable to follow it due to social reasons paid the price in human lives for it. What's also fun is looking at how America is suffering from a double loaded fuckup, in that not only have they had an absolutely appalling response on both a federal level, as well as an individual level, but they're also unique in that they have fuckall federal programs in place to help those that need it the most during these times.

So once again, even though there are countries where this is working amazingly, I guess in a way you are right. The tactic of social distancing and isolation is doomed to fail in America, because the people there are just too stupid, selfish, and just plain incompetent to be able to follow basic instructions and wear a mask when they have to go out. So uh, have fun with that.

 

[Evillevi]

I've provided far more links and sources than anyone else, and gone through the effort of finding the official government stats straight from the source or academic studies instead of media articles that don't source themselves. The general trend is clear that infection rates are far higher than reported, I've linked several survey studies proving that and articles about government leaders agreeing with them. I've demonstrated excess death totals aren't determined by lockdown by international comparison of outcomes. I've demonstrated western countries have extremely broad definitions of corona deaths by literally showing several sets of official guidelines and Deborah Birx, the American response coordinator, saying that with Fauci standing next to her.

You've all been extremely lazy in doing the same either making unsourced claims, outright refusing to consider the costs of your proposed solution or acting like you can claim one example out of several dozen proves your case when your own source proves the opposite trend. You don't care about the facts, just emotional thinking, you don't really care about the death or suffering only the media coverage. You don't even care if your methods work. It's obscene and it's sadistic.

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You talk, act , and sound like a conspiracy theorist while providing stuff that's not useful (to be fair most people who aren't intimate with the industry would sound like that)

On a purely professional level your talking points lack important charectistics to make them actionable.

How much does it cost , how soon cna it be implemented, what do we do if it fails, what are your goals, what's the impact of letting it spread like wildfire, who do we contact, how many parallel projects can we have at once, how do we analyse the data, What do we do to remove the confounding variables, how do we mitigate risk if and when failure happens, where are we going to get the budget.

You specifically might be correct in hindsight, but there's hundreds of people who tlaked like, you, sound like you, and are wrong, super wrong or so wrong they sound right. And the head of the Anti C19 initiatives can't differentiate people who are wrong and people who are right if they all sound the same without actual plans to compare and contrast.

Sweden strat is actually bundled up in our jumbled mess of plans where the Prime Minister gave out specifics goals, and everyone under him tested and refered any strat that accomplished said goals or are close enough. Sweden's strat did not make the cut.

 

[OverMaster]

How much does it cost , how soon cna it be implemented, what do we do if it fails, what are your goals, what's the impact of letting it spread like wildfire, who do we contact, how many parallel projects can we have at once, how do we analyse the data, What do we do to remove the confounding variables, how do we mitigate risk if and when failure happens, where are we going to get the budget.

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Again, that's a problem shared with every course of action, because we are dealing with a total unknown.

How much does a lockdown cost? We have no way of knowing, since there's no telling how long the lockdowns will have to be.

How soon can a lockdown be implemented? Its effectiveness will depend on how soon the whole of your population is willing or even able to (especially in poor countries) to go through with it, with the caveat that if a small part of the population is infected it will infect the rest sooner or later anyway. And there's no way to predict that...

What are we going to do if lockdowns fail? We don't have any more idea than what we're going to do if herd immunity fails, or there's no vaccine, or if the virus mutates for worse or better, or all of them put together.

I'm not all that up with the approach of Germtheory3Z either, but I'll admit that his strategy isn't much more of a 'Let's see what happens and cross the fingers' than what most others in this thread favor. Ultimately we all fall under the umbrella of 'We have no fucking idea whether this thing will really work, and what will we do if it doesn't', regardless of camps.

 

[Germtheory3Z]

Well, the problem is there is no way to know any method will work until all is said and done. Even for those that 'worked', like Singapore or South Korea's, we've seen everything just starts all over again as soon as the slightest breach in lockdowns happens, but then we haven't seen real solid proof herd immunity works yet either.

A lockdown spanning the whole globe and lasting long enough as to burn the virus out is impossible to enforce, so all we can do is shooting in the dark and hope to God something of what we throw at the wall eventually works for real. If not, we're done, so...

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Doesn't the belief that infections start up again after lockdowns end and that the lockdown is impossible to sustain globally convince you it's pointless long term? If you aren't willing to keep it going for a year or more to have your vaccine plan ready then it's wasted effort, isn't it?

Actually I've mainly just been posting information about Australia, where we've pretty much completely beaten Covid thanks to our approach of isolation and social distancing. Like you can try to spin things as much as you want, but people have repeatedly shown that it does work, and that the countries that either didn't follow it, didn't follow it fast enough, or were unable to follow it due to social reasons paid the price in human lives for it. What's also fun is looking at how America is suffering from a double loaded fuckup, in that not only have they had an absolutely appalling response on both a federal level, as well as an individual level, but they're also unique in that they have fuckall federal programs in place to help those that need it the most during these times.

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Flu seasonality is a thing so when the only two exceptions to the rule are the two far south developed nations, and all of the northern hemisphere developed nations follow the rule, we have to seriously consider the possibility it's not due to the same strategy everyone else is employing. If we don't see a spread of covid in the southern winter then there's more evidence that lockdowns can work if you enact them quickly enough, but really given the amount of interaction between Australia and China it seems odd the first cases could reach it weeks after Europe.

So once again, even though there are countries where this is working amazingly, I guess in a way you are right. The tactic of social distancing and isolation is doomed to fail in America, because the people there are just too stupid, selfish, and just plain incompetent to be able to follow basic instructions and wear a mask when they have to go out. So uh, have fun with that.

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Just insulting people who want to go about their daily lives isn't very helpful at all. It's far from clear that a ~+50% rise in your monthly mortality for maybe a couple of months is worth cutting yourself off from medical treatment, family life, work, immigration, tourism, education or exercise. If we could blindly make the bet between house arrest for a significant portion of our lives and a one in a thousand chance of death near the end of our lives I know what I'd pick. Plenty of the old folk and asthmatics I know are saying the same things to me, they hate being isolated and are starting to take the risks voluntarily because they've decided seeing their grandkids or spending time in the sun is worth it to them.

You talk, act , and sound like a conspiracy theorist while providing stuff that's not useful (to be fair most people who aren't intimate with the industry would sound like that)

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Frankly at some point you need to seriously consider whether the conspiracy theorists are actually wrong for remember the outcome of government trials, the contents of declassified intelligence documents and the details of medical scandals or whether the public are just dangerously uninformed.

Keeping to the old, old, stuff it's uncontested that the CIA engaged in mass torture and extra judicial killing throughout the cold war, with next to no criminal trials of the worst offenders and participants rising up the ranks, and the chiefs of staff wanted to launch false flag attacks on US citizens and soldiers to justify war in Cuba. A chemical was used in Vietnam called Agent Orange that's causing birth defects and severe health problems to this day which were denied for decades. People just don't know about things, even when the sources are official.

Then you have to consider the history of medical malpractice we're looking at here. Black farmers were lied to about their syphilis status, and falsely told they were cured or negative, for forty years. Forced sterlization has a long history worldwide, and there are official admissions of millions being sterilized in given years in India. The idea that it's dishonest or insane to have humanitarian concerns, especially for the third world, when the people developing and distributing the vaccine are firmly on that side of the debate is just ignorant.

On a purely professional level your talking points lack important charectistics to make them actionable.

How much does it cost , how soon cna it be implemented, what do we do if it fails, what are your goals, what's the impact of letting it spread like wildfire, who do we contact, how many parallel projects can we have at once, how do we analyse the data, What do we do to remove the confounding variables, how do we mitigate risk if and when failure happens, where are we going to get the budget.

You specifically might be correct in hindsight, but there's hundreds of people who tlaked like, you, sound like you, and are wrong, super wrong or so wrong they sound right. And the head of the Anti C19 initiatives can't differentiate people who are wrong and people who are right if they all sound the same without actual plans to compare and contrast.

Sweden strat is actually bundled up in our jumbled mess of plans where the Prime Minister gave out specifics goals, and everyone under him tested and refered any strat that accomplished said goals or are close enough. Sweden's strat did not make the cut.

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Continuing business like in any bad flu season is a plan though. The cost is, maybe, higher corona deaths in exchange for everything else continuing to function. You distribute masks, inform the local police and businesses it's legal to wear them, tell people to wash their hands and clear out community centers for tent hospitals if you need the capacity for palliative care.

The overall covid mortality rates really don't look to be determined by strategy at all. Obesity and age are big factors, and I suspect seasonality too. Economic impacts, the long term costs of austerity and short term lockdown deaths due to avoiding medical treatment will be though and could add up to several times the cost of a fully infected population even if you assume a lockdown could've stopped it, which looks increasingly doubtful.

 

[Evillevi]

Again, that's a problem shared with every course of action, because we are dealing with a total unknown.

How much does a lockdown cost? We have no way of knowing, since there's no telling how long the lockdowns will have to be.

How soon can a lockdown be implemented? Its effectiveness will depend on how soon the whole of your population is willing or even able to (especially in poor countries) to go through with it, with the caveat that if a small part of the population is infected it will infect the rest sooner or later anyway. And there's no way to predict that...

What are we going to do if lockdowns fail? We don't have any more idea than what we're going to do if herd immunity fails, or there's no vaccine, or if the virus mutates for worse or better, or all of them put together.

I'm not all that up with the approach of Germtheory3Z either, but I'll admit that his strategy isn't much more of a 'Let's see what happens and cross the fingers' than what most others in this thread favor. Ultimately we all fall under the umbrella of 'We have no fucking idea whether this thing will really work, and what will we do if it doesn't', regardless of camps.

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A lot of plans account for this by doing a little of everything at once and seeing what works. Specifically within SEA there's something like 4 different national plans, not counting the studies in regards in regrads to the budget, the immune system/C19, possible cures or at least medicines that will let you live through the C19.

These 4 national plans have 2-3 sub plans which themselves had 2-3 subsubplans which had to pass whatever internal metrics that specific gov think was important.

Admittedly you can't blame any specific person since no one knows anything concrete.

For reference Singapore went through at least 2 subplans that I know of before deciding on their specific strat. And their internal metric didn't include foreign nationals that got infected which was why they ultimately ended up with a a high education/trust strategy enabled by relatively high testing rates and cushioned by social welfare since their internal data suggest that the only risk groups are aforementioned foreign nationals.

In that sense their strat did succeed admirably until they realized they miscalculated the political cost of having so many foreign workers infected at once and had to implement a soft lockdown to assuage fears.

 

[OverMaster]

Doesn't the belief that infections start up again after lockdowns end and that the lockdown is impossible to sustain globally convince you it's pointless long term? If you aren't willing to keep it going for a year or more to have your vaccine plan ready then it's wasted effort, isn't it?

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Once again, it's a gamble that depends on unknown factors, so it's still a coin toss that goes both ways.

Infections start again as soon as lockdowns end, that is true. The question is to what degree when compared to non-lockdown conditions. The best guess is it all will depend on how much followup and play catch we can make to keep those restarts to a minimum. For many countries with incompetent governments and limited resources that's a pipe dream. The best organized countries may stand a chance to do well if following those game plans to a tee, although again, a lot of that still depends on luck.

And the coin has two faces; we don't know for sure either, if herd immunity is a strategy that will work on its own. Because we still know too little on how this virus really works and how fast it could reinfect our masses.

We may be caught in a catch-22 situation. We also may be in a situation where both lockdown and herd immunity strategies can work, but which one would be more costly in lives through infections or economic ruin respectively remains to be seen. We may be in a situation where only one of the two stands a chance of working. The point is we have no way of knowing, and no side can claim knowing their guess is better than the other's.

 

[Aleh]

Doesn't the belief that infections start up again after lockdowns end and that the lockdown is impossible to sustain globally convince you it's pointless long term? If you aren't willing to keep it going for a year or more to have your vaccine plan ready then it's wasted effort, isn't it?

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... alright. I've been generally ignoring the conspiracy-mongering here due to a general lack of spoons and generally being sick of, well, conspiracy-mongering everywhere else. Work has had me "dealing with" Judy Mikovits far more than I ever wanted to.

This, however, goes beyond mere conspiracy-mongering and is well into the realm of willful ignorance and stupidity. Lockdowns and the like are last-ditch measures to slow the spread of disease, hopefully bringing it down to something that can be controlled via lesser means. To end the lockdown without those lesser means in place results in the outcome you describe... but nobody competent advises doing so.

To bring it under control, and hopefully burn a disease out, you need a situation where what's known as the R number is less than one. In other words, you need a situation where, on average, each infected person is infecting less than one other person. If this is the case, the disease burns out (although it may take a while); if it's not, the disease spreads throughout the population -- and possibly kills millions.

Vaccines are only one means by which this can be accomplished. The use of masks is another, albeit one that's generally inefficient and often insufficient on its own. The method that pretty much everyone who understands epidemiology recommends involves a combination of testing, what's known as "contact tracing", and targeted quarantine.

Broadly speaking, this means testing people so that you know who's infected, finding out who they've exposed to it, and keeping said people from spreading the virus further. This is what we want to transition into.

Doing that, however, requires testing people, and the general testing situation here in the US is generally absurd for what I'll broadly call "Rule 8 Reasons."

This means that changing paradigm from a population-level approach (lockdown, social distancing) to a more structured, targeted approach... isn't possible until we gear up testing and train people to do contact tracing. We should have been starting on that months ago. We haven't -- again, for Rule 8 reasons.

And thus the lockdown drags on... and on... and on.

Edit: Left out a single word. The sentence was understandable without it, but it was embarrassing, so fixed.

 

[Germtheory3Z]

... alright. I've been generally ignoring the conspiracy-mongering here due to a general lack of spoons and generally being sick of, well, conspiracy-mongering everywhere else. Work has had me "dealing with" Judy Mikovits far more than I ever wanted to.

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You continue to degrade people as 'conspiracy theorists' without actually considering the history of the world you live in. That's willful ignorance. We're still the people who gave ourselves societal lead poisoning for centuries.

We're still the people who took decades to realize Teflon was dangerous, fought the knowledge at every turn, and still haven't actually done anything about it.

We've had directed energy weapons since WW2, we know the effects of them, and people still act like debating whether covering everything with electromagnetic soup could cause health problems is insane.

The Swine Flu vaccine very likely gave thousands of people narcolepsy, according to the governments of Finland, Sweden and the UK. That was a flu with an estimated death rate of 0.03%, and the usual spread of at risk people. It's far from unreasonable to think healthy young people would've been at more risk of complications than from the illness. Everything has side effects and it's completely reasonable to be aware of them, and extremely dishonest to downplay them.

Just look into your own head now. I'd guess it's the usual "this guy is crazy, there might be side effects but if people knew about them they might refuse to take the vaccines so I need to minimize them". Thing is everyone thinks like that now so they don't notice when the calculations shift. It's doubly bad when the people making the case are the ones who'd be liable for any mistake or malpractice suit.

This, however, goes beyond mere conspiracy-mongering and is well into the realm of willful ignorance and stupidity. Lockdowns and the like are last-ditch measures to slow the spread of disease, hopefully bringing it down to something that can be controlled via lesser means. To end the lockdown without those lesser means in place results in the outcome you describe... but nobody competent advises doing so.

To bring it under control, and hopefully burn a disease out, you need a situation where what's known as the R number is less than one. In other words, you need a situation where, on average, each infected person is infecting less than one other person. If this is the case, the disease burns out (although it may take a while); if it's not, the disease spreads throughout the population -- and possibly kills millions.

Vaccines are only one means by which this can be accomplished. The use of masks is another, albeit one that's generally inefficient and often insufficient on its own. The method that pretty much everyone who understands epidemiology recommends involves a combination of testing, what's known as "contact tracing", and targeted quarantine.

Broadly speaking, this means testing people so that you know who's infected, finding out who they've exposed to it, and keeping said people from spreading the virus further. This is what we want to transition into.

Doing that, however, requires testing people, and the general testing situation here in the US is generally absurd for what I'll broadly call "Rule 8 Reasons."

This means that changing paradigm from a population-level approach (lockdown, social distancing) to a more structured, targeted approach... isn't possible until we gear up testing and train people to do contact tracing. We should have been starting on that months ago. We haven't -- again, for Rule 8 reasons.

And thus the lockdown drags on... and on... and on.

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Thing is, you assume by saying that that all of this is meaningfully halting infections. We keep getting survey studies that show the infected numbers are far higher than proven, and if we look at past examples the WHO/CDC and other bodies have good estimates for total infected many, many, times the confirmed cases. Swine Flu's confirmed cases were about half a million and the estimated totals from 700 million to 1.4 billion (10-20% world population). Certainly Corona testing's been far wider, but it's still far from universal and what we're seeing in the lockdown countries would fit pretty well with the typical bell curve for these things, honestly.

Official line is we're past the peak here, and the last published weekly deaths (we 1 May) back that up. At about 33,000 deaths with corona mentioned on death certificates (to then) the totals are suspiciously close to the kind of 30% infected and 0.3% death rate I've been considering a decent upper bound. An estimated population of 66.5 million, ~20 million infected, 0.3% die for 60,000 in total. Assuming things go down the same rate as they went up we should undershoot that significantly. Apparently there's a mass antibody testing plan in the works for later in the year to confirm how widely the infection actually spread, but the testing data so far is holding out 20% in line with that.

 

[BoML]

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[alethiophile]

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Stay away from political topics, please.

 

[Aleh]

You continue to degrade people as 'conspiracy theorists' without actually considering the history of the world you live in. That's willful ignorance. We're still the people who gave ourselves societal lead poisoning for centuries.

We're still the people who took decades to realize Teflon was dangerous, fought the knowledge at every turn, and still haven't actually done anything about it.

We've had directed energy weapons since WW2, we know the effects of them, and people still act like debating whether covering everything with electromagnetic soup could cause health problems is insane.

The Swine Flu vaccine very likely gave thousands of people narcolepsy, according to the governments of Finland, Sweden and the UK. That was a flu with an estimated death rate of 0.03%, and the usual spread of at risk people. It's far from unreasonable to think healthy young people would've been at more risk of complications than from the illness. Everything has side effects and it's completely reasonable to be aware of them, and extremely dishonest to downplay them.

Just look into your own head now. I'd guess it's the usual "this guy is crazy, there might be side effects but if people knew about them they might refuse to take the vaccines so I need to minimize them". Thing is everyone thinks like that now so they don't notice when the calculations shift. It's doubly bad when the people making the case are the ones who'd be liable for any mistake or malpractice suit.

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This entire section is pretty much the definition of conspiracy theory-style thinking... and, if you ignore the section on lead poisoning, is almost fractally wrong.

Yes, Teflon can be a health hazard... if ingested. It's not dangerous to cook things on unless you raise the temperature past the smoke point of most oils... which is why modern frying pans that use it contain a variety of warnings about temperature and how to avoid said dangers. Your own links document this.

The "electromagnetic soup" you mention involves extremely low levels of non-ionizing radiation. The weapons you mention involve extremely high levels of ionizing radiation. Again, your own links document the extreme difference between the two.

Vaccine side-effects are a much, much more complicated topic... but no, your discussion isn't at all fair. Among other things, Pandemrix isn't "the" swine flu vaccine -- it was a swine flu vaccine, and the evidence was never enough to clearly establish that it was the cause of those case of narcolepsy. The vaccine in question was removed from the market as a result, however, and is no longer in use.

Here is a much better, more thorough discussion of the matter, written by a notable neurologist.

And that's all just scratching the surface.

As for the rest of it... no, we don't have firm numbers on COVID. Again, testing has, at least in America, been woefully inadequate. Lifting the lockdown in a responsible manner requires not only those numbers but also a good idea of who is infected and who can spread the disease. Lockdowns are, as I noted, a last-ditch, desperate measure.

And, unfortunately, COVID is being spread by people who don't have any symptoms yet. That means that the only way to know the above is to track down the people any infected person could have spread the disease to, quarantine them all, and test to see who actually caught it.

The rest of what you said? Utter tripe in many ways, and often irrelevant. Projections of the disease's peak, for instance, always have a heavy behavioral component. If we lift the lockdowns in an irresponsible manner -- and I have seen no evidence of responsible attempts, especially among the states lifting them -- exponential growth resumes.

Edit: Accidentally double-quoted.

 

[mishie]

There's also another significant factor that Germtheory3Z is ignoring, and that's the fact that one of the main reasons why the American economy is shitting the bed so hard isn't just because the government shut everything, it's because most people are afraid to go out and get sick. They don't want to either infect themselves or their at risk loved ones, so until the situation is handled and people feel safe again, things are only going to get worse. And I'm sure that your instant rebuttal is how this proves that all of the problems are caused by the media and how things aren't actually that bad, but the core issue is the fact that the Covid response has been such an unmitigated failure in America, that despite the fact that months have passed, there still isn't sufficient testing to proper contact tracing to be done.

Bad sadly, there's been a complete failure at the federal level to organize this, so instead of being able to target only those that have been in contact with a positive patient for self-isolation, now everyone is trapped at home because they have no way of knowing if they'll run into an asymptomatic carrier at the shops or whatever outside.

 

[Germtheory3Z]

Apparently there's more stuff coming out about Vitamin D levels and Ventilator inefficiency. Rhonda Patrick got into both of them today and more evidence seems to be surfacing, especially on Vitamin D levels. It wouldn't fit the narrative for Ventilators to kill people and getting outside/taking cheap Vitamin D pills to be the solution but if I can find enough other sources it's a better explanation than anyone else has given me.

80% is the lowest figure for people dying on ventilators I've seen so far and apparently more of the doctors involved are starting to ask questions too.

Rhonda goes into a lot of other examples but here's one that's found consistent correlation between national low vitamin D and high death rates, worth looking at the comments there too, and associated article. I think this is the Indonesian study she was referring to, which shows a pretty strong correlation between the people who lived and died.

In a way it would be tragically comic if that was the post outbreak consensus. The fetishized medical technology was counterproductive, the lockdown made things worse and the cure wasn't an expensive experimental vaccine but fixing a chronic nutritional problem.

 

[evildice]

the lockdown made things worse

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[TanaNari]

80% is the lowest figure for people dying on ventilators

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You really need to watch this:



What you're giving here is what I like to call a "lying fact" because, while technically true, it completely misleads everyone looking in that general direction who are too stupid to use their brains.

Yes, the large majority put on ventilators die. Because they only put the most critical of patients on ventilators- really, the question isn't 'how many died on ventilators', it is 'how many MORE would die if they weren't on ventilators'. And the answer to that question is 'almost all of them'.

Not unlike saying that more people die in emergency rooms than any other part of the hospital, and therefor emergency rooms kill people and we should get rid of them. Or that the majority of patients on chemotherapy die a slow and painful death (or used to at any rate- the tech's improving at remarkable rates), ergo it doesn't fight cancer. A true statement to justify an utterly unsupportable conclusion... like most conspiracy theories.

It's asinine and it should be legal to punch people who say such stupid shit. Right up there with anti-vaxxers.


That being said... yes, ventilators are fucking dangerous. They're delicate machines being used to run one of the most delicate parts of the human body, so there is the real possibility of accidental harm... and then there are those that are simply too far gone for a ventilator to help (not all of whom are obvious).

That is why they only use the things when they're desperate and have exhausted all other possibilities. Much like the emergency room or chemotherapy, the ideal situation is you'll never need one.


As to the Vitamin D correlation? Hah, no. Just. No. While I've little doubt that a good VitD supply would give your immune system a better chance against any brand of coronavirus... among other things, it's essential for the immune system and helps reduce inflammation... two things that obviously have a role to play in any lung infection... even the studies you cite don't support the argument that supplements will do much to help.

Especially since it's pretty heavily linked to asthma and some types of dementia. Traits well known for their ability to make you more likely to die of pretty much everything.

Because, and here's the thing you'd know if you read your own sources, the elderly have significantly lower VitD than the young, and there's a great many "preexisting conditions" (especially kidney diseases- there's basically nothing kidney diseases doesn't negatively impact) which fuck with VitD supplies in all sorts of ways I'm not going to discuss in detail.


And there's one factor one must consider here... elderly individuals with good VitD supplies usually have access to advanced healthcare and listen to their doctors (as opposed to people who have access but are too stubborn to get a damn checkup once in a while), because few older people can naturally produce enough of their own and thus only those who use supplements will have sufficient supplies.

The people listening to their doctors will probably also follow quarantine instructions and, if they do get sick, will be alert enough to contact their healthcare professionals earlier than aforementioned stubborn fucks. And there is no dispute that catching the symptoms early will drastically improve one's odds of surviving the vast majority of lethal disease, including all known variants of SARS.

fixing a chronic nutritional problem.

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Given that Canada requires VitD additives in milk and, while the USA doesn't mandate it, all USA companies add it anyway for marketing reasons... this virus would be doing far less damage in the Americas if VitD was a noteworthy factor.


That said- I do encourage VitD use. I doubt it'll mean much against Wuhan Flu, but even a 1% improvement in survivability will save hundreds of lives in the long run. I'm more focused on the fact that it reduces the risk of everything from osteoporosis to cancer to forgetting where your house is and wandering into the woods in the middle of January. Any other benefits beyond "helps prevent cancer" are ancillary where I'm sitting.

 

[Aleh]

Apparently there's more stuff coming out about Vitamin D levels and Ventilator inefficiency. Rhonda Patrick got into both of them today and more evidence seems to be surfacing, especially on Vitamin D levels. It wouldn't fit the narrative for Ventilators to kill people and getting outside/taking cheap Vitamin D pills to be the solution but if I can find enough other sources it's a better explanation than anyone else has given me.

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Rhonda Patrick is a quack. I don't say this because of the interview -- I didn't watch much of it. What I did do was take a look at her website, which allegedly offers nutritional advice based on uploaded DNA data. There is no scientific support for anything like that -- at all.

This isn't at all a new scam. Here's an article from 2008 detailing several such cons. They're also a recurring subject on SBM.

80% is the lowest figure for people dying on ventilators I've seen so far and apparently more of the doctors involved are starting to ask questions too.

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I started to write about this, but TanaNari said essentially everything I needed to.

As for Vitamin D levels... correlation does not equal causation, especially in medicine. TanaNari's analysis is missing a few key points.

Do you know what else correlates with low vitamin D levels? Low physical activity levels and preexisting medical conditions -- particularly things like diabetes and heart problems. Both of those tend to restrict physical activity levels, and thus time spent outside... particularly in circumstances like these. Both of those are also major risk factors for dying from COVID.

In research, we refer to things like that as "confounds" or "confounding variables." I can easily think of several others that apply here.

And taking Vitamin D pills? It's more hype than help. Seriously.

And not just for COVID.

 

[mishie]

I gotta say, it was a pleasant surprise to see that Germtheory3Z had continued on their trend of totally and utterly ignoring all evidence that proves their previous batshit claims wrong, and just moving only new bullshit. Although sadly I was too late since people have already proven their latest nonsense totally incorrect, but I'm sure that within a day or two they'll have moved onto a brand new reason why the lockdown is bad and they should be allowed to go back to putting people in danger with their ignorance.

 

[litaispe]

Well I don't know about you, but I find drowning in my own fluid-filled lungs is a pretty horrific way to go.

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Nah, typically with COVID-19 you don't have fluid-filled lungs.

The lungs basically seize-up and stop working. One of the reasons there are basically no therapeutic treatment options.

 

[TanaNari]

The lungs basically seize-up and stop working. One of the reasons there are basically no therapeutic treatment options.

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As in, more like someone holding a pillow over your face until you asphyxiate, rather than pushing your head into the bathtub until you drown.

I consider that something of a lateral move, where the 'horrible deaths tier list' is concerned.

 

[litaispe]

On the topic of Sweden, they are getting the economic implosion since all their neighbors are also economically imploding and the EU is still stuck on the whole 'debt is bad' and refusing a Euro-wide recovery program, and Sweden's unexpected death stats are hell-bad. And those are lagged by 2-3 weeks!

As in, more like someone holding a pillow over your face until you asphyxiate, rather than pushing your head into the bathtub until you drown.

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Have you see that increasing numbers of COVID-19 survivors are suffering low-oxygen derived systemic organ damage?

COVID-19 appears to impact oxygen absorption in the lungs, but the exhaling reflex is derived from high CO2, not low O2. Which makes it apparently "non-symptomatic" even for individuals with impacted health.

I consider that something of a lateral move, where the 'horrible deaths tier list' is concerned.

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Yup.

 

[mishie]

What's also interesting is the fact that even without the lockdown, people are choosing to isolate in Sweden, so they've ended up with the fascinating result of both increased deaths, whilst still fucking the economy.

 

[MadGreenSon]

What's also interesting is the fact that even without the lockdown, people are choosing to isolate in Sweden, so they've ended up with the fascinating result of both increased deaths, whilst still fucking the economy.

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Lots of death also fucks the economy, but a lot of people seem to not realize that. People on lockdown will eventually contribute to the economy again. Dead people won't. The slump caused by lockdown can be recovered from much more quickly and easily than a slump caused by mass death.

 

[TanaNari]

People on lockdown will eventually contribute to the economy again. Dead people won't. The slump caused by lockdown can be recovered from much more quickly and easily than a slump caused by mass death.

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Being incredibly blunt for a minute? Not so much an issue with this disease. The number of dead working adults we'd get if everyone caught this disease would be negligible.

And the elderly aren't net contributors to the economy, anymore. From a utilitarian point of view, there are a lot of benefits in terms of lessening the burden of social programs and freeing up real estate that will likely counter the economic damage from their deaths, given how few of them are in the workforce.


Of course, I'd prefer we not do that... but I can see where a sociopath might approve.