I just went outside and couldn’t help just posting a brief observation here. It’s like there’s a lockdown without any actual lockdown in place.
Taiwan is doing precisely the same things that I saw in Elbonia last year (and indeed the same things that were done in the UK last year - the prez has made no secret of her admiration for the utterly disgraceful shitshow that went down over there). Spreading paranoia and getting everyone to stay at home (ie., in enclosed spaces, maskless) will achieve the maximum rate of spread in the shortest possible time. There are only two possible explanations for this course of action:
Taiwan has been told by TPTB that they need to get with the programme and ensure that Taiwan suffers along with everyone else.
The people running the show are as clueless and arrogant as the people running the show in other countries.
I don’t really care which one it is. I’ve decided to embrace mental illness (assuming @Gain is right) and lock myself in my house so that I don’t have to watch the lemmings following each other over the cliff.
Given the facts out on the streets, my predictions stand, except that the government will probably make up an ad hoc variant of level 4 without actually calling it level 4 (eg., telling people they can’t walk in the hills). Given the announced vaccine schedule - I reckon it’ll be August/September before they get their act together - I’ll revise my deaths estimate to “a few hundred”.
Of course, I’m completely mad, and my predictions didn’t come true in Japan or Korea, so, ergo.
[sound of tinfoil hat being replaced and door slamming shut]
Nah, I know what depression looks like. I’m keeping busy (although somewhat hobbled by the fact that my back is playing up) and I have no desire to self-harm or anything like that. I just hate everybody. I don’t think that’s in DSM-V.
I’ve read people writing this a few times (including you, I guess)…and I just don’t buy it. I can believe that there might be some immediate increase in local (i.e., household) transmission from one infected family member passing it to several others, but that’s surely massively outweighed by the dramatic reduction in overall interhousehold contacts?
In any case, even in the non-lockdown case, you still have family members staying inside maskless, eating dinner together, etc., but with the benefit of households not mingling.
We’re drifting someone OT, but it doesn’t really matter if you buy it or not. That is what happened in 2020, and that’s what’s going to happen in Taiwan. Just watch. Four weeks from now we’ll be over 100,000 cases (hard to predict because of the exponential term in the upswing). The reason for my shock is that Taiwan is acting with the benefit of perfect hindsight - and yet choosing to ignore all of that valuable information.
Without going off into a long discourse on graph theory it’s hard to explain why this happens because it is slightly counterintuitive. The simple explanation is that you have (let’s say) 1000 people who, undetected, are superspreaders, and they’re now going to be confined to their homes, where they will spread the virus with enhanced efficiency among their social network. Don’t imagine people will stop visiting their extended family - the small points of overlap between closed clusters will be sufficient to spread the virus between clusters. As soon as the “lockdown” is lifted you will have an enormous pool of “spreaders” primed and ready to go … and boom.
Not that it matters. People still haven’t accepted that they can’t control this and don’t really need to. The madness will play out to its bitter end, and they’ll all slap each other on the back and say “job well done”.
So how is it better for the 1000 superspreaders to be spreading it within their homes (for, say, half of the day) but in addition spreading it to their colleagues, people on the bus, people in grocery stores, etc., for the other half of the day? That doesn’t seem to make any sense at all.
I know. And it won’t work. It doesn’t work in theory and it didn’t work in practice. There are plenty of research papers comparing lockdown conditions vs. infection dynamics. Have a look.
It just occurred to me earlier today why scientific facts don’t matter when it comes to policy decisions or personal behaviour, or at least why they appear not to matter.
For many people, the only fact that’s worthy of consideration is this one : “I am afraid of coronavirus”. That single fact is big and real and important.
All of the research about the spread of the virus (that is, what helps and what doesn’t - to the extent that anything works at all) is meaningless in the context of their fear. Likewise with the facts about mortality - ie., that your additional risk from COVID-19 is quite modest compared to your all-cause risk.
These facts are perhaps acknowledged, but the fact of one’s fear is all-consuming. The facts about the virus do not register on one’s personal radar for the same reason that facts about rainfall patterns in Abu Dhabi aren’t on one’s personal radar. They are deemed uninteresting.
In all seriousness, that is how people get manipulated. But in this case, fear of death is a good thing. Keeps people doing things to survive.
I know you believe the contrary but I rather have people trying to kill the virus with soap and disinfectant rather than facing death or injury or at least a very bad time wondering if their luck will hold or not.
I believe that it will have precisely the opposite effect: vulnerable people will die because things that should be done will not be done. Fear is the enemy of courage, and I see a lot of weak-willed people making weak decisions, because they are allowing their own fear to lead them by the nose.
@DrewC: how do you offer support when there are two factions debating the nature of reality?
I said I wouldn’t participate here, and in general I’ve avoided the COVID threads, but if you think that any support is actually possible, let’s hear about it.
We agree to disagree. I believe it was lack of solidarity and social net that kills more. We have that here. Taiwan’s strength is inner, it may not be respected outside the borders but no one here wants to gamble with agong’s life…only agong!
Maybe we should listen to what people who are older and wiser have to say about it? Of course age doesn’t necessarily confer wisdom, but I suspect most people over 70 have seen a lot worse than this. And yet we’re just patting them on the head, calling them idiots, and telling them to keep their masks on and keep quiet.
Maybe, just maybe, they’re not all senile old fools. Maybe they know something we don’t.
You know what you’re doing and it’s not cool. This isn’t the space for you to get on your philosophical soapbox, whether one agrees with you or not. There’s literally over a dozen threads for those kind of debates. This thread is a mental health thread for people impacted by the pandemic, whether that’s financially, emotionally or their physical health. It’s not the place for whatever point you’re trying to make. Now take it elsewhere or I’ll ask mods to start cleaning this crap up.
Sorry, DrewC, but your delusions don’t cancel out my delusions. I have as much right to sit in the corner gibbering as you do. However if this corner is taken, I’ll not lurk where I’m not welcome.
