You clearly don’t understand unnecessary.
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Just curious, I pretty much agree with a lot of what you’re saying, I think, but you’ve lost me with this, what do you mean?
I’m probably going to travel to the USA this summer, I don’t particularly want to, mostly because of the hassle of travel right now and because I’m not looking forward to quarantining in Taiwan, but the judgment of some people here seems a little extreme. its been over a year, perhaps some people need to travel to see their loved ones.
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I haven’t traveled over 5 years now.
Me too. And I have very little sympathy for those who feel they NEED to.
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So your suggestion of providing chocolate and prostitutes would optimize it? Oh my.
That isn’t what I said.
really? what about someone whose parent is sick? or dying?
no. Many people don’t travel just because there is quarantine.
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Firstly that the world has largely regressed to a state where superstitious beliefs completely override facts. In the Open thread I’ve brought up various statistics and research papers - reputable ones - offering a big-picture impression of coronavirus that isn’t even remotely congruent with the way it is portrayed in the media. These are always rejected outright or ignored. Nobody cares what the facts are. Most people are unable to integrate the facts in their heads anyway (for the reasons given below). That’s true of conversations on here, within mainstream public debate, and in the halls of power. Intelligence doesn’t come into it - 95% of humanity simply have no facility with numbers or the scientific method. Science is a foreign country.
We’re now living in the 15th century: only opinions and power are relevant to the decisions that are made. The conversation above (about the nature of punishment and reward, which is one of the best-understood topics in psychology) is exemplary.
Coronavirus is not weaponized smallpox. It’s broadly comparable to flu. Despite the fact that it has infected somewhere between 500million and 1.3billion people (Nov. 2020 estimate), it has killed 0.035% of the population. Compare that with the 1968 flu (0.028%), the 1957 flu (0.038%), and the 1918 ‘Spanish flu’ (2.6%). These numbers are completely irrelevant, and I’m sure a whole bunch of people will now post explaining why they’re irrelevant.
The reason we’re living in a post-science world is that science education was comprehensively dismantled from the late 1970s on. For a brief period of history - somewhere between about 1920-1970 - it looked like science might actually become a force for good. IMO that was halted because TPTB realised that a scientifically-literate population wouldn’t listen to bullshit and flimflam, and that’s bad for business.
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That’s exactly what you said.
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Good grief mate. I did elaborate. It was a joke.
So it is what you said?
I said considerably more than that. But as I was just saying to starla, facts don’t matter anymore.
Seemingly don’t, to some.
Do not put words in my mouth mister.
First of all, we are talking about Taiwan.
Second, I said there are few cases of escapees caught because there is a big hole: the phone. But luckily where the technology fails, people come through. But we do not know the real number. We only get the news worthy cases.
In other countries where people are not quarantined seriously or isolated for treatment cases escalate. To those who believe in the plandemic conspiracies or that this is overreacting, well, fine, but to the poor, the sick, the disfranchised it might as well be a big issue. But then you also need a social net for assistance. That requires believing in common good though. Not sálvese quien pueda.
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I was replying to SuperS54.
I agree that we don’t actually know how many are “escaping”. Which was partly my point: we should be aiming to keep people inside even if they’re not being watched, and that means giving them the right motivation.
I completely concur with the ‘social safety net’ thing. That, again, was part of my point. If you can give people the impression that they are being cared for, they will be more inclined to care about others. If you set out to punish them - even when they’ve done nothing wrong - they’ll be resentful and ornery.
I’ll also reiterate that I have no problem at all with the idea of quarantine. It’s the implementation of it that I’m arguing about.
No it’s not.
It’s almost entirely due to them being OLD.
Basically nobody under 50, metabolic syndrome or not, dies from covid…The risk accelerates after fifty very closely correlated with age.
Getting old is not a choice.
So you’re saying America has far more old people than, say, Japan? OK.
There are other factors. Several other factors, it seems. And as we’ve already established, you seem completely unwilling to admit that old people naturally die at (much) higher rates that young people. I did a little chart for you. The blue line is risk of all-cause mortality in any given year. The red line is the CDC estimate for (risk of death|COVID-19 infection); the CDC figures, incidentally, despite being a suspiciously-straight log line, do check out against the raw data, once you’ve figured out what the baseline is.
It’s reasonable to consider the two as having some intuitive relationship since COVID-19 has been a year-long event.
zooming in on 0-60:
or with log axis:
Yes, one line is higher than the other. But you do need to consider natural/baseline death rate when hollering “won’t someone think of the old people?”. It isn’t meaningful to say age is a factor in COVID-19 deaths when age is the ultimate cause of all deaths. You will never see a banner headline proclaiming “LATEST STUDY: AGE IS MAIN CAUSE OF CANCER”.
Here is the same chart with a factor of (1/1.8) applied to all the risks, on the assumption that one-third of the older population has metabolic syndrome and the risk increase associated with m.s. is 3.4 in an older cohort:
So … a healthy 80-year old has maybe a 10% chance of dying in a COVID-19 year, compared to a hypothetical less-than-healthy average citizen at 5% in a normal year. Certainly a cause for concern, but it’s amazing how you can inflate that to “7000x the risk!” by buggering around with the numbers while not technically lying (the natural all-cause risk ratio between ages 5-17 and 85+, independent of disease, is about 1500x).
One might ponder on the political purpose of such scaremongering, might one not?
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It’d be nice… 
But no girls. Don’t want to risk community spread.
shshshsh! You’ll upset SuperS54 again.
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