COVID Humbug! (2022 edition)

[Marco]

@finley

My point was that they could have been called anti-alien vaccines and nobody would have even noticed that they didn’t work. Everyone could say “look, I haven’t been probed by aliens, those vaccines are miraculous!”.

Although come to think of it that’s not a very good comparison. It’s like someone released an anti-alien vaccine, and then there was suddenly a massive outbreak of spaceships.

But this is talking about COVID. We’re supposed to be talking about things that are happening that are not COVID.

@finley

You perhaps haven’t noticed, but this is the humbug thread. It’s where we point out that there are other things happening in the world besides COVID, some of which are a bit “sus”.

Post by @tempogain talking about COVID.

@tempogain

@Brianjones

Actually we haven’t dodged all the bullets as you will recall .

No, we have dodged them because we never got to the point of widespread community transmission as has happened in other countries, despite several introductions/outbreaks. You will recall that.

Post by @bingobango about COVID

@bingobango

The idea that TW has largely dodged the COVID bullet due to either natural or some other method of immunity has long been interesting to me. I was introduced to the TW natural immunity idea by a Taiwanese, but I soon wrote it off after realizing how many expats there are in Taiwan, expats either living in the same society as taiwanese or living in a parallel society bubble, and how the virus has not noticably circulated among them here either.

Not to mention COVID is def a problem in China, obviously a place where many people have the same or very similar genetic background as many Taiwanese. So yeah, so much for that theory it seems.

I then - as I am sure others here have - thought, hmm, what if there was something in Taiwanese diets or daily routines that is serving as some sort of COVID prophylactic, something that pretty much everyone here gets exposed to (or less likely, eats, such as stinky tofu ) day in, day out. Again, no evidence of a spike in cutural/geographical bubbles that would be likely to miss this exposure here though. I guess the exposure would have to be completely pervasive/penetrating (?) for this to have any credibility

I guess one of these theories could be true, and enough of the population is immune here so as to defacto protect the vulnerable - either genetically or via lifestyle/lack of covid prophylactic exposure - from harm. Virus can’t metastisize in a population if not enough targets to latch onto right? I am all for public policy like mask-wearing in high-traffic areas such as the MRT, but let’s be real here, anti-Covid proliferation is a game of whackamole that even the best countries with similar strict regulations have tried and failed at. People are not only coming to Taiwan legally and via airports, where obviously there are highly effective regulations in place… Still to this day I have no idea how this place continues to be on top of this virus enough to evade long-term community transmission…

Post by @bigdave criticising exaggerated numbers in relation to COVID and vaccines.

@BigDave

Why do the politicians have to exaggerate the numbers?

Post by me talking about cases.

@Marco

@bingobango

The idea that TW has largely dodged the COVID bullet due to either natural or some other method of immunity has long been interesting to me. I was introduced to the TW natural immunity idea theory by a Taiwanese, but I soon wrote it off after realizing how many expats there are in Taiwan, expats either living in the same society as taiwanese or living in a parallel society bubble, and how the virus has not noticably circulated among them here either.

Not only that, but we had an actual outbreak that resulted in the deaths of 5% of confirmed cases.

Post by you supporting the idea COVID numbers are fudged.

@finley

Because the whole charade would fall to pieces if they didn’t?

“COVID deaths” are the figures that really annoy me. A whole bunch of health authorities have quietly released figures showing the true rate of death due to COVID, which is somewhere between 1% and 10% of the declared numbers, depending on precisely how much weight you give to comorbidities. And yet the politicians and the media continue to holler about the “death within 28 days of a positive test” figures; and worse, the statisticians continue to use that inherently-dishonest metric.

Reply by @bingobango about Taiwan’s COVID experience

@bingobango

Right! Wow I did forget that. Much higher than global average. Amazing to me the genie was put back into bottle here. TW dodging and continuing to dodge this really could be simply chalked up to excellent policy. Definitely less conspiratorial of an angle, but also still blows my mind - Covid is fantastic at finding and whittling away at a country’s weakest link.

Critique about disagreements I’ve had in relation to COVID.

@Marco

But don’t tell that. It’s a secret. The narrative being pushed is that COVID is not a big deal and that 98% 99% 99.9% 99.99% or wherever the goalpost is.

Oh those other 4.99% of people that died? They don’t matter. They were too old or too fat or something something should change health overnight or get younger magically or die anyways something something.

Rebuttal from you about my critique about COVID.

@finley

@Marco

But don’t tell that. It’s a secret. The narrative being pushed is that COVID is not a big deal and that 98% 99% 99.9% 99.99% or wherever the goalpost is.

You might want to have a look at the actual statistics for yourself, instead of just making stuff up. They’ve been out there for two years.

Rebuttal to a rebuttal I received about COVID

@Marco

Like I said, these statistics are only as a result of the interventions. Hardly any country let Corona let run wild and free without vaccinations.

We’ve seen what effective measures look like in Taiwan. We’ve seen what outbreaks can look like.

There are no places that have tested 0 interventions. So you can’t say that with certainty. We can’t change the past and retest. So you can’t tell me with certainty that COVID kills less than 0.01% of people, because there are no statistics available that shows COVID through a population where the action was to simply do nothing. Because no populations exist.

Question to you about Taiwan’s COVID experience

@bingobango

I am honestly curious @finley, why do you think it is Taiwan has been safe from Covid for so long with only a few minimal/containable outbreaks?

Specifically Taiwan please - as it being such an outlier should be of great interest to you.

Your reply to @bingobango about COVID in Taiwan.

@finley

@bingobango

I was introduced to the TW natural immunity idea by a Taiwanese, but I soon wrote it off after realizing how many expats there are in Taiwan, expats either living in the same society as taiwanese or living in a parallel society bubble, and how the virus has not noticably circulated among them here either.

I’ve mentioned this several times here, and of course been ridiculed for it. The evidence globally is that most people are naturally immune to a wide variety of coronaviruses, at least to a level sufficient to ensure they aren’t killed by a “novel” variant. The variance between national statistics is probably due to a whole bunch of things, but one of them must surely be differences in the way data is collected.

Expansion of your reply to @bingobango about COVID.

@finley

@bingobango

Specifically Taiwan please, it being such an outlier should be of great interest to you.

Yes. I find it very interesting. I find it even more interesting that absolutely nobody considers it worthy of a research project. You would think somebody, somewhere, would want to know exactly what is going on in Taiwan, and why.

My hunch is that it’s a combination of several different factors:

1. Differences in reporting and data collection, as mentioned, must be top of the list (I suspect this also explains the close-to-zero rates in African countries). It’s common knowledge that Taiwan simply didn’t test for COVID for several months. COVID is so remarkably similar to other respiratory diseases, both in its presentation and its progression (or lack of it) that it would be easy to conflate any serious cases that did arise with the general burden of respiratory illness and death.

2. Old people in Taiwan frequently die of respiratory disease. It’s considered “normal”. Given a government policy of “Taiwan doesn’t have COVID”, it’d be a brave doctor who decided to put “COVID” on a death certificate.

3. Taiwanese people are reasonably healthy. Metabolic syndrome - which is one of the top three risk factors for complications arising from any respiratory disease - is quite rare here. A fair number of people enjoy (moderate) exercise in the outdoors, including old people, and that must have had a positive impact.

4. Despite Marco’s protestations to the contrary, death-by-COVID (and nothing but COVID) is incredibly unusual in the global experience. If deaths were counted in Taiwan in the historically-normal manner, then someone dying of pneumonia as a consequence of general ill-health would have had his death recorded as due to the underlying disease. The West is racking up thousands of “COVID deaths” because they’re counting positive tests at death; as even the authorities point out, this is not even close to being the same thing as ‘died of COVID’.

5. Taiwan never did proper lockdowns, opting instead for a mishmash of other measures that stopped short of locking people in their houses. Since the most aggressive transmission occurs between people locked indoors with family members, lockdowns elsewhere almost certainly precipitated waves of infection that would not ordinarily have happened.

In short, I don’t think Taiwan is or was any more “safe from COVID” than anywhere else, but it looks like a spectacular success in the context of the gross failure of policy and pathological distortion of the facts in other countries. Objectively, our experience has probably been similar to Japan or Korea (given certain similarities in the terrain). In other words, I suspect COVID is here but has never “taken hold” in waves because the conditions were not right for such waves to occur. For one reason or another (unrelated to anything the CECC has done), R has hovered somewhere around 1.

It goes without saying that I’m just handwaving here. I’m disappointed that nobody has attempted to get to the bottom of this. The idea that it was down to clever quarantining, masks, etc etc just doesn’t seem plausible. Plenty of other competent authorities did the same things, and more - and it didn’t work.

Rebuttal to me about COVID.

@finley

@Marco

So you can’t tell me with certainty that COVID kills less than 0.01% of people, because there are no statistics available that shows COVID through a population where the action was to simply do nothing. Because no populations exist.

Well, I can, because all the evidence is that those actions had absolutely no effect.

You don’t need a binary all-or-nothing scenario to conduct an observational study on the effect of mitigation efforts. You just need different locations doing different things. If you ever bothered to use Google, you’d find that several researchers have attempted to determine if there is any relationship between the ‘severity’ of mitigation measures and mortality/morbidity. The correlation is basically zero; most studies found a slight detrimental effect associated with lockdowns, although IIRC it was not statistically significant.

Having said that, the control groups that you think do not exist are in fact out there.

Most African countries did precisely nothing to “control” COVID, and they (supposedly) have the lowest impact of the disease. No doubt you’ll suggest they’re just lying, and I suppose they might be, but the fact that they can get away with lying without having to hide mountains of corpses suggests that COVID didn’t hit them that hard. The more plausible explanation is that their younger populations genuinely weren’t affected.

There’s Sweden, of course. You can’t exactly say they did nothing , but they certainly didn’t attempt to force the whole population to do X, Y and Z “for their protection”.

I spent the whole of 2020 in a location where the response to COVID was … erratic, at best. None of the interventions had any scientific validity, and served only to plunge thousands of people into depression and poverty. Those measures were soon (mostly) abandoned, except for a desultory show of checking papers and similar nonsense. I never heard of anybody actually getting COVID until the vax programme kicked off in mid-2021. At that point everyone seemed to be getting it, although deaths remained low.

The Amish went out of their way to get COVID over and done with. They’re hard to study because of their reclusiveness, but as far as anyone knows COVID blasted through their communities pretty fast, and their death and morbidity rate was no higher than, and perhaps somewhat less than, the remainder of the US. Amish are mostly anti-vaxers. Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Wisconsin together have recorded exactly the same rate of COVID death (2.6/1000) as the US as a whole - the Amish population is small, of course, but presumably if they were dropping like flies you’d see that register in the State death toll.

Post by @cake describing corruption and secret agreements relating Big Pharma, governments in relation to COVID vaccines.

@cake

EU - another group that is corrupt:

My reply to @yyy talking about the direct cost to the taxpayer of COVID.

@Marco

@yyy

Iirc you identify as a fiscal conservative,

I do not. I’m not a politician that has to rigidly stick with party doctrine. A non-politician economist specialising in macroeconomics knows a country’s needs today may not necessarily be the country’s needs tomorrow. But you can’t do that as a politician or you get called flip flop.

Personally, when the cases were initially rather low in the first wave. I would’ve just put $10000 in everyone’s pocket, keep people largely home, ramp up contact tracing, make grocery stores and stuff deliver by mobilising Uber/Taxis/Army for four weeks and eradicated it like it was eradicated in Atlantic Canada. And it would’ve been cheaper. Stay home for four weeks and earn $10000? Who could say no?

Post by you criticising COVID restrictions against unvaccinated.

@finley

FFS. This reads like some shit from The Onion.

Austria’s mandate kicks in at about the same time as Italy’s. I wonder if the vaccinated will be able to keep the trains running on time when the unvaccinated are all forbidden to go to work?

I like that Romanian guy. He does a good job of hectoring the tinpot fascists.

Post by @Mick criticising strategies designed to ‘piss off the unvaccinated’. Unvaccinated for what? COVID of course.

@Mick

Tell you what, some of our so called leaders are coming across as complete psychopaths.

Do I need to go on? I’m having difficulty understanding what you mean about we’re talking about things besides covid.