It seems you were wrong again and the experts are in fact the experts.
Thatâd exactly what you are consistently trying to do .
And you are even more guilty of cherry picking data points as anybody you criticise.
You didnât have ICUs completely overrun in the UK because the government did actually institute a lot of effective measures to reduce transmission in hospitals and homes and workplaces and yes multiple lockdown. They have very good tracing system in the UK that could pick up on the explosive growth of the B variant quite early.
Otherwise you probably would end up in a position like Brazil and France now. The reason for the death number being what is it is BECAUSE mitigatioms measures were put in place.
There was NEVER a situation where you would not noticed covid impact because either
A) you have all kinds of restrictions or
Bďź you have an epidemic that completely jams up hospitals and kills a lot of people (France now, Brazil now).
Or something in between. How do you not notice 'on the ground â exactly ?
Thereâs no way to stick your fingers in your ears and cover your eyes and pretend itâs not happening.
Absolutely. Is.
The biggest single jump by far is the 2019-2020 excess death data point!
If people in Brazil donât even notice 60K murders (which is almost certainly an underestimate), they probably wouldnât notice 330K COVID deaths if it werenât flashed up on the TV screens all the time. Thatâs 0.15% of the population. 1 out of 640 people. 330K is comparable to cancer, which happens all the time, every year.
Itâs surprising how limited the natural range of oneâs eyes actually are. Spanish flu was noticeable. Everyone was affected; it was 10x more virulent than COVID-19. COVID-19 is not Spanish flu. You donât need to cover your ears and eyes. You just have to switch off the news.
The critical point here is: what do you propose to do about all this? If nothing can be done, whatâs the point in scaring the shit out of everyone? Cancer, for example, is worrying; but because everyone knows full well that it canât be fixed (or rather that we donât know what causes it or how to fix it) itâs not front-and-centre on the news all the time.
Where you can do something about it, you get on with quietly doing those things, and you donât panic. The UK (sensibly) built some extra hospital capacity ⌠which was never even used. There was no possibility of the health service being overwhelmed. But the media thought it would be amusing to spread panic regardless.
Oh they notice alright. Brazilâs cities are famous for being pretty dangerous places.
Brazilâs president saidâŚâtake it like a manâ.
And the reality is now Brazilâs health care system is cratering, their govt is fjcjed , economy is fuxksd , and Brazilians are probably going to be banned travelling just about anywhere overseas .
https://www.ft.com/content/55713895-2423-4259-a222-f778f9587490
Itâs physically impossible for COVID-19 itself to have that effect. Even in the absolute worst case - where everyone carried on regardless - the vast majority of those infected are neither debilitated nor killed. Given adequate preparation and a sensible attitude, neither the economy nor the health system needs to collapse. Government did that. Not the virus.
Confirmed cases in Brazil is 13m; therefore somewhere between 50m-130m have most likely been infected anyway, ie., perhaps half the population. So this is the worst case. Or, looked at another way, the best case: this is as bad as it gets, and the number of people who can potentially become infected/harmed is rapidly declining. Now youâll say âwhere did you get 50-130m from?!â, and Iâm not rehashing that all over again. But if Iâm right, even without vaccinations (Brazil seems to be lagging in that regard) that upward trajectory will start tailing off within the next few weeks, exactly as it did in other countries.
Brazil is fcked because (a) Brazil always was fcked and (b) panic. Not because of COVID-19 per se.
Are you aware this is the second infection for a sizeable number of people?
No matter worst case or best caseâŚItâs very bad news for Brazil.
Look in the dictionary under âbad newsâ, and youâll see a picture of Brazil, perhaps with some pictures of their shit-for-brains politicians.
I donât disagree that itâs bad news; but again, how is panicking going to help matters? You do what you can, where you can. The endless sackcloth-and-ashes routine just makes things worse, not better.
The concept of a âsecond infectionâ is complete nonsense. Itâs the same virus (more-or-less), infecting the same people. Cases will wander up and down until the virus is no longer ânovelâ, and then itâll settle down to a background level of irritation that people just put up with, just like every other problem in Brazil. Watch that chart.
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Oh yeah ?
Until recently everybody was getting herd immunity by nowâŚhowâs that working out .
How is âsecond infection â a conceptâ ?
Itâs reality not âa conceptâ.
If itâs so similar how come they are getting infected so fast again ?
I have no idea, and I donât think anybody else does either. My hunch is that itâs working out reasonably well.
âAgainâ? What makes you think this?
In the absence of evidence to the contrary, wouldnât it be reasonable to assume that those who are being infected now are those who have not been infected previously, or were not exposed sufficiently to develop an immune response? A few months ago there was a reasonable pool of such people. At this point, that pool is rapidly shrinking.
Like I said, watch that curve. We have the luxury of doing that, I realise, because weâre not in Brazil. But it will start dropping real soon now. Iâm pretty certain.
Yes. I think so. Watch the curve.
Since there is no known method of stopping this from happening without causing even worse problems - apart from vaccination - it seems rather pointless to debate the effectiveness (or otherwise) of âherd immunityâ. Itâs all weâve got.
And the thing with Brazil is this. Theyâve had more than a year to build up some extra healthcare capacity. I dunno, maybe get some sort of rapid-response teams set up around big cities to drop oxygen tanks and masks to peopleâs homes? Get some O2-saturation meters available on request at pharmacies? Train up a few more people in basic critical-care procedures? Most people donât need much more than that to keep them alive and comfortable: the full facilities of a hospital are rarely required, and putting highly-infectious patients in a big building with lots of other people comes with its own obvious problems.
Brazil has a massively unhealthy population. They could have warned people to do something about that. They could have told people to lay off the Coca-cola, at least (Brazilâs consumption of Coke - a pretty reliable barometer of ill-health - is not far behind the US).
Did they do any of this? No. Same could be said of 95% of world governments. Complete and utter disregard for practical solutions, because they thought that depriving everyone of their liberties and chucking a shitload of money down the toilet (the default procedure for every problem that governments face) was the magic bullet. They were wrong.
Thailand is vaccinating everyone in Phuket. Targeted vaccination.
They want to reopen it for tourism. I think theyâre going to do the same on Samui.
I assume the WHO will criticize their use of vaccines.
38 000 maskless idiots attend MLB opener w no seating restrictions. Texas wants to make sure as many people get COVID as possible. This is why this isnât going away.
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I dunno, but back in the day it was up to the individual to decide what level of risk they wanted to live with. Of course, here we are with the State making the decisions, and filling peopleâs heads with fear to keep them in line, but perhaps weâre returning to a simpler time when people, you know, just did whatever TF they wanted without paranoia?
It appears from the article that the Texas governor is simply modifying the rules in line with majority opinion. Which is his job.
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If the risk only affected that individual thatâs fine. Maybe we should let them all smoke cigs at the game and blow it in kids faces while theyâre at it.
I think people are afraid of an illness thatâs killed over 500,000 people in the country. Many preventable, because of stupid shit like this.
People doing what TF they want is leading to other people dying, and that has nothing do with âparanoiaâ. If fears are founded on something real, they are not paranoid.
No it isnât. His job is to keep his citizens safe. This isnât just a matter of stupid governace, itâs greed on the Rangers part and foolish decision making by those in attendance.
Not if it involves doing so against their will. The governor is responsible for considering the opinion of the people who put him in that position. Thatâs what democracy is all about. We used to value democracy as more important than safety.
If the minority thinks his decision wrong, too bad. The governor removed the mask mandate and allowed businesses to open. The Rangers (and their patrons) are merely exercising their rights.
In the case of smoking it was not so long ago that people were allowed to blow smoke in each otherâs faces. In the West generally the death rate has gone down, dramatically, since the early 1980s when the tide of fashion turned against smoking. Nevertheless, back in the day, majority opinion was that smoking should be permitted as a personal freedom, even if it impinged somewhat upon non-smokers such as myself. While many people thought smokers were misguided, we accepted the (modest) risk and/or the inconvenience of having to move away when someone nearby was smoking. When it became clear that majority opinion was on the non-smoking side, governments dealt with it via a PR campaign, not by persecuting smokers.
We continue to accept that cars kill well over a million people every year, because the majority opinion is that the death toll is an acceptable tradeoff for the amusement value that automobiles afford. Please donât say âoh, thatâs completely differentâ, or Iâll go off on a rant explaining precisely why itâs not that different.
Maybe, maybe not. I agree that many of them died needlessly, but not for the reasons you think. Iâve tried many times to put this number into context and relate it to other things (things it correlates strongly with) which we do not fear, or even attempt to control.
But the point is : have you forgotten that there is now an all-powerful magic vaccine? Science will save us!
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