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Re:The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human r... by wongarsu on Sunday October 18, 2020 @07:54AM (#24817172)
France was doing worse than Germany in the first wave, and is doing worse than Germany in this second wave. In fact Germany is doing much better right now than the European average.

The only "evidence" that countries that did worse in the first wave do better now seems to come from counties that decided that reducing testing is the easiest way to make the numbers look good.

Re:The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human r... by scottlocklin on Sunday October 18, 2020 @09:19AM (#24817683)
You fail to understand the fact that everyone's going to get it. You can't control that fact, not even by blowing up the economy. The best thing you can do if you're afraid is to wear a mask and take vitamin-D (or go outside to get some).

Unless there is a miraculous breakthrough in vaccines, which seems unlikely in current year, this disease will be with us for the rest of your life. Just like the flu. If it works like other corona viruses, it will burn through the population kill off the people who are susceptible to it, and remain with us forever, just like HCoV-OC43 probably did in 1889 with the "Russian flu" of that day[0]. Nobody worries about that now.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-05-15/corona...

Re:The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human r... by wongarsu on Sunday October 18, 2020 @10:03AM (#24817957)
You can do reasonable steps (masks, distance, no big events) that keep the infection rate to a minimum until we can get a vaccine approved and administered to 95% of the population in 1-2 years time.

Maybe we will live with strains of the virus forever, but that's not the problem. We have many diseases among us that are harmless in childhood and much worse later in live, but they are much more harmless both because people are exposed to them starting in early childhood, allowing them to build some immunity; and because vaccination is an option. That's a much more harmless situation than the initial outbreak ripping through a population that has never seen the virus.

Re:The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human r... by scottlocklin on Sunday October 18, 2020 @04:35PM (#24820932)
You can do whatever makes you feel better: everyone who is not living in a bubble is getting it, vaccine or no vaccine. Notice how we wiped out the flu with the flu vaccine back in 1956? Yeah, me neither. Lung borne viral ailments do not work that way.