The COVID humbug thread (2021 edition)

So Swedish businesses all closed down, because all their customers were too terrified to leave their homes? Should all work be forbidden on the basis that the risks are too great?

Keep it factual, Brian. I really don’t want this thread to go off into the weeds. It’ll end up getting shut down.

1 Like

Swedish model is good for Sweden (debatable ).

But for Asia…You have to explain how that translates to this part of the world.

Interestingly, these are the same people who scared with the covid stats completely unable to assess the risks once the scooter ignition is on. I wonder if the media were pushing the accidents theme that much as it happens with covid now.

6 Likes

Shitty COVID mitigation strategy: Increase road fatalities and COVID seems much less dangerous :man_shrugging:

But yeah - I get that point: Why do countries get into lockdowns because of COVID if they otherwise seem to ignore a large cause of mortality and injuries which would be preventable with some effort?

Although I would still argue that the issue is not so much about the lockdown, but more about ignoring the traffic issue…

Indeed. Which was (partly) the point of the thread. Every other problem that we had in 2019 has fallen by the wayside before the allure of COVID, which means that those problems are either still there, or are being made worse.

There are many, many things that can be done to reduce death, injury, and sickness, in the broadest terms. They are not being done. Instead, vast amounts of money that could have done a great deal of good were spent on a highly dubious enterprise, with little to show for it except chaos.

3 Likes

Hi Humbuggers,

This obsession with COVID numbers/ deaths, etc. doesn’t seem to be a healthy way to run any society for any length of time. I also don’t think it is healthy for the individual, either. It seems to cause emotional and mental disturbance leading one to just live in fear constantly, 24/7, jumping at shadows and what not.

Previously governments weren’t overtaken by one specific bureaucratic arm, as we’re seeing now. These days, unelected health bureaucrats run the show all over the world. We didn’t vote for them to govern our lives to this extent, but that’s what is going on.

It’s skewed, disproportionate and unbalanced and creates a mentally unbalanced society, for sure.

I vote for focusing on ways out to get back to normal that don’t rely on this obsession with COVID cases and deaths. A very small number of people will get COVID. A very small number of those will get sick. A very small number of those will die. The latest world figures I’ve seen is that around 0.02% of people who contract COVID will die. 99.9% survival rate doesn’t seem to warrant the reaction.

2 Likes

Those numbers would suggest a CFR in the ballpark of 2%, but the fact remains that very few people contract any serious form of the disease: 3M deaths is a lot in absolute terms, but it’s 0.04% of the global population, and does not capture the fact that deaths are not random. Survival rate (1/CFR) for under-50’s is definitely 99%+.

I think these number needs to be put in the context of the harms done by government reactions to the problem: I would argue that some unknown fraction of those deaths were caused directly by acts of the State, and that some further fraction (“with” COVID) are related to pre-existing problems such as metabolic syndrome.

Really? Math is not my strong point. Even so, that means 98% of those who get COVID won’t die, right? If so, I’ll take it.

In any case, I’ve yet to see any stats or information about COVID (or ‘variants’) that would give me any cause for concern at all. Not one.

Overall, I’d be leaning towards govt. responses doing more harm than good to society in general at this point.

(4/183)x100 = 2%. Personally, though, I don’t think CFR is a meaningful metric to focus on because (apart from the technical problems with it), it’s not a number. It’s a very definite function of age, varying from almost nothing for young people to about 15% for 90-year-olds (your COVID death risk actually correlates very strongly with your all-cause mortality risk - which in itself suggests that a certain number of COVID deaths are being misclassified). I think this is why there’s such a range of views on exactly how dangerous COVID is - it depends who you have in mind as your ‘typical case’.

But yeah, I think the harms done by governments have been horrific, and the consequences will be with us for a decade or more.

1 Like

Looking at all these new strains and the needs for re-vaccination promotions, I would be surprised if a subscription model not to be implemented. Pretty much everyone is already accepting a regular fees for lots of different things, and it covers more and more subjects.

2 Likes

I don’t know any other country that was charging for the vaccines. That’s my humbug.

2 Likes

On the plus side, if we hadn’t paid for the first one, we wouldn’t be eligible for the second one for ages. :nerd_face:

2 Likes

So … um, you want people to accept a loss of income amounting to tens of thousands of NT$ as a result of lockdowns, and also pony up money for your magic potion?

I would suggest people should just be charged at cost.

  • If the gov’t is expecting everyone to get vaxed, then it seems pointless to pay from the treasury and then claw it back from taxes. It’s just adding another layer of inefficiency (and in corrupt countries, an opportunity for skimming).
  • People who want the vaccine but don’t actually need the vaccine might be thus encouraged to hold off a bit, so that at-risk groups can be dealt with first.
  • People who don’t want the vaccine are (ultimately) not just paying for other people’s vaccination but also for a vaccination that they haven’t had. Although it might give certain people a warm and fuzzy feeling to think that ‘anti-vaxxers’ are being punished thus, it’s just one more kick in the bollocks added to a whole list of COVID-related insults.

I don’t know other countries that charged individuals for the vaccine . That’s all I’m saying.

Im very glad I had the foresight to seize the gift horse in the mouth unlike the people who really needed it such as docs and nurses.

There’s no such thing as a free vaccine. People paid for it somehow. Or rather they will be paying for it.

Another disadvantage of tax-funded vaccines is that there’s an incentive to make the process very inefficient … exactly as (I’ve heard) is happening in Taiwan. Depending on how medical services are paid for from government coffers, certain well-placed people can make a lot of money that way.

If people are paying out-of-pocket there’s an incentive to avoid public outrage at inefficient (=costly) processes.

What gets me with lockdowns is places like pingdong locking people down, shutting down supermarkets etc then telling people to all go outside and line up in the heat in large groups to get tested.

I know lack of thought to detail is common here, but this sort of government mandated oxymoron should be punished, legally. Makes me wonder if we have an unknown brain parasite outbreak as well.

IMO the epidemic is not primarily viral but psychological. Infectious hysteria leading the kind of headless-chicken behaviour that you describe.

Since another round of “we all need to lock down!” posts are popping up in the COVID threads, a few thoughts on that:

First, here’s an article about the unelected emperor of Airstrip One, and his views on good governance:

"It [China] is a communist one party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought… and then Italy did it. And we realised we could. "

In there is a mention of the city of Manaus, which according to journalists had “probably 70 per cent” infection rates, “overwhelmed” medical systems, etc. etc. It turns out there were 13,000 COVID deaths to date in Amazonas (of which Manaus represents about half of the the 4m population). That’s a lot, to be sure - it’s the same as Hungary. But the deaths were concentrated in a single month-long wave, they never peaked at more than 100 a day, and have been close to zero for the last couple of months. So if it’s true that 70% were infected, that appears to have been a very good thing indeed.

It seems reasonable to suggest that people died there not merely because COVID, but because Manaus is in the middle of a bloody forest in the middle of Brazil, a country not renowned for getting its act together. And yet here’s the inevitable handwringing:

Note that this article was ‘commissioned, not peer reviewed’. By whom, I wonder?

1 Like

I look at this virus less emotionally. It is a real virus, yes. its not as bad as the reaction in some places has led us to believe, but its not nothing either.

What really irritates me is how the world wants to treat this a if it were real life 28 days (movie name). By proxy, those people should have put/supported embargo on china. Regardless whether it was leaked or not. no proof yet so still not sure useful conversation.

What is proven is Chinas coverup of the virus which led to its mass spread. As well as the clusterfuck of corruption that is the WHO. Then followed by whichever countries that also fucked up their reactions later on (most coutries).

My point would be, if you are a person that is super triggered by this virus and think lockdowns are good, you should also be absolutely against made in china and be vigilant in getting people to stop supporting the CCP.

Otherwise, I only see hypocrites that are mentally unstable and just prone to panic, paranoia and hysteria, while simultaneously allergic to reality.

Frankly i dont mind lockdowns, when needed and a solid plan is on the table. What i do mind is complete idiocy and lack of basic intelligence, which is what we are seeing more of in taiwan on the official level. That annoys the absolute shit out me. This whole thing reminds me of the government reaction to FMD in pigs 20 years ago. total clusterfuck of stupidity that basically slit our own throats. People should be held responsible for criminal negligence in such cases because some things are just so far beyond stupid that they should not posses any form of power over others. Speaking of governments.

Sure. There are people at both extremes - those who genuinely think it’s a complete hoax, and those who think that the human race will be decimated. Although I originally thought there weren’t many people in the middle, it’s becoming apparent that those people are simply being silenced. People like Bret Weinstein, who is accused of being a conspiracy theorist and a peddler of misinformation, is IMO a moderate who accepts that there is a big problem and is merely asking, “and what then is to be done”? Yet his videos get regularly deleted or delisted from search results. There are millions of ordinary people like him who have a good handle on the risks but (I would guess) have no public voice because they’re being de-platformed or shouted down.

That’s the big, stinking, 10-ton mammoth in the room, isn’t it? Where is the outrage against China? Why is the outrage directed instead against - for example - “ignorant” old people who refuse to play the game? I can think of some uncharitable answers to that little condundrum.

I wouldn’t have a problem with them if they worked - that is, if they did more good than harm. I know dozens of people who have had their lives ripped to pieces by lockdowns, but not one single person who has suffered because of COVID - not even a single case of the sniffles - and I have a pretty wide social circle in three countries. I personally lost a viable business overnight and tens of thousands of US$ in lost income.

The problem is not just that lockdowns appear not to work. We don’t really have any way of testing whether they work or not. There is no obvious reason why they ought to work, and no government was considering a lockdown before China did it, but they’ve now acquired a mythical reputation as being the solution of last resort, the nuclear option; it hurts but it works. No: it just hurts, same as other nuclear options.

Just by way of example, here’s Sweden in the world ranking, with +/-25% death rates. There is no obvious connection between any of these countries, and certainly no correlation between death rate and government policy:

Yup. Interesting thing here is that Neil Ferguson was in charge of said fuckups in the UK - almost universally acknowledged to have been wasteful, pointless and probably illegal - and yet he still has a job. A very influential job. Insert Illuminati memes here.

I doubt anybody will ever have to answer to a judge for this. But they should. There are some moves in that direction; I simply can’t see it happening. The system has been gutted from the inside out.

@cake’s picture in the funnies thread made me wonder how the Amish actually have been affected by COVID. It turns out that the answer - to the extent that there’s any data at all - is “not much, and no worse than anybody else”.

The Amish are about as close as you can get to card-carrying covidiots and vaccine-deniers. Although they have made a desultory attempt to comply with government rules, they’ve more-or-less ignored the pandemic and only ~15% have got vaccinated.

This breathless article suggesting that the Amish were decimated mentions a 125% death rate. If the Amish die at the same rate as anybody else (they don’t - they’re generally healthier) then ~1.25% of them would have died in 2020 (4100 people), as compared to 1% in 2019 (3300 people). So a few hundred excess deaths. A great tragedy? I suspect they don’t think so. And it’s basically the same as the USA-at-large.

This hilarious “fact check” says “we don’t really know, but the Amish don’t seem to die of COVID like other Americans do”. On this basis, it declares the “rumour” that the Amish are not being hard-hit by COVID to be definitively “false”. So we’re now officially in true=false territory.

1 Like