Everyone knows its not going to kill most people, that's not what they're trying to prevent. They're trying to prevent it getting into long term care homes, or into at risk communities (indigenous, low income, obese, etc). They're trying to give you good reasons to want to wear a mask, want to cut down on your social interactions, and want to help stop the spread.
This is highly questionable. There are many articles (whether factual or not) suggesting widespread lasting effects, e.g. just last week on HN one suggested 1 in 5 patients develop mental illness: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25046157. With all these articles floating around, I just wouldn't agree that there's some sort of consensus that 99%+ of people won't have issues.
>The incidence of any psychiatric diagnosis in the 14 to 90 days after COVID-19 diagnosis was 18·1% (95% CI 17·6–18·6), including 5·8% (5·2–6·4) that were a first diagnosis.
So only 5.8% of people got a first diagnosis, and the remainder of the 18% were people who had been previously diagnosed with one of these conditions.
Further, if you looked at the normal flu the same way, you'd see a 13% incidence rate.. and that's without the impact of lockdowns or media hype.
> Comments like this are gonna quickly turn this place into just another /r/science, where people of no particular qualification chime in and try to make themselves feel smart by contradicting a peer reviewed study without taking the actual effort needed to properly question a peer reviewed study, especially one in as prestigious a journal as the Lancet.
Thank you. Nobody’s interested in your level of incredulity, however you italicize it.
While I agree in principle, the Lancet aren't immune to crummy papers (indeed, no-one is). Even just this year, they published that super-dodgy Surgisphere paper that turned out to be completely irreproducible (to put it kindly).
Scientific papers are written by people, and the peers of people who (for example) don't really understand statistics are likely to also not understand statistics, so while peer review is definitely helpful, one should always read scientific papers sceptically.
That being said, low-effort dismissals based on anecdotes are much, much worse than the average scientific paper.
https://www.nami.org/About-Mental-Illness/Mental-Health-Cond...
>Over 40 million adults in the U.S. (19.1%) have an anxiety disorder.
So it follows that undiagnosed anxiety disorder would be found in abundance in people recently diagnosed with covid.
>In patients with no previous psychiatric history, a diagnosis of COVID-19 was associated with increased incidence of a first psychiatric diagnosis in the following 14 to 90 days compared with six other health events.
So it looks like they compared it to six other health events and it (anxiety, insomnia, dementia) was still higher with COVID, but they add "we cannot exclude possible residual confounding by socioeconomic factors."
From: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...
I hope it's not true, but it looks like more and longer-term studies need to be done.
It's far to easy to dismiss the effects if we see it "only" hurts <1% of people; which is why people feel the need to constantly reinforce the negative impacts.
Economic devastation from lockdowns is clear. Economic devastation from a virus that primarily hurts the elderly is not clear to me.
Again, I'm not making any points about the value determination of lives saved vs GDP saved, only asking how you quantify the economic impact of a virus.
Imagine 1% (or 0.5% or 0.2% or whatever) of planes crashed. How well do you think the airlines would fare? How many people would still fly?
1% is an insanely high number of deaths.
If they were dying in bus crashes, people would notice.
> 1% is not insanely high, it's roughly how many people die each year.
So another percent on top of that is a doubling. As many people again dying from Covid-19 as die from all other causes. How is that NOT “insanely” high?
Demand has dropped off. Whether there are government restrictions or not, people have overwhelmingly decided it’s not worth the risk.
I would say the economic impact is from the fact there is a pandemic. Even Sweden, which tried to avoid lockdowns, still saw an economic impact because people will avoid going out during a pandemic.
The fact that businesses are forced to close, or in the other case, that people would have been forced to work during a pandemic for fear of being homeless is a public policy failure.
My savings rate has increased significantly since Covid as I am barely eating out at all due to the risk of contracting Covid via restaurants as well as worrying that the economy could get much worse and wanting to be prepared. I am just an average person so I would assume that there are many hundreds of thousands of people doing the same as me, thus the economy contracts.
My state is essentially not shut down at all, so very little impact is due to government regulations and almost all of it is due to personal spending choices. The less restrictions in place, the more the virus spreads and the less money I spend.
The economy is highly dependent on people spending and many people dont want to spend right now.
I think a better plan is to keep the virus under control, prevent needless deaths and then get vaccinated, especially now when we are so close to a vaccine release. Why risk the lives of tens of thousands of people when we can just all wear a mask and get vaccinated?
No, and there never will be since medicine is not mathematics. But nor is there any reason to believe our immune systems can't deal with this virus like they deal with any other virus.
> Are you ok with 250k deaths a year from covid every year going forward?
250k/7.8 billions = 0.003%. Yes, I'm fine with that.
> Why risk the lives of tens of thousands of people when we can just all wear a mask and get vaccinated?
That's a hypothetical question considering we don't have a vaccine yet and masks are hardly the only restrictions.
If the healthcare system gets overwhelmed the damage is longe term because doctors and nurses will die and it takes along time to replace them.
The UK NHS is recruiting at the moment, in the most visible campaign I can remember. I'm wondering if this is linked - certainly I wouldn't want to be faced with the upcoming winter in a medical role dealing with this, given what happened in March to June this year.
Per the CDC: "Overall, an estimated 299,028 excess deaths have occurred in the United States from late January through October 3, 2020, with two thirds of these attributed to COVID-19. The largest percentage increases were seen among adults aged 25–44 years and among Hispanic or Latino (Hispanic) persons."
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6942e2.htm
I would argue that "adults aged 25–44 years" are a pretty integral component of the economy and more of them dying than normal is not great.
The economy is not the only thing that matters, and if children can have their grandparents for another 5-10 years, then that's massively important to them, while being irrelevant to GDP.
Full disclosure: Both my mother and my wife's parents are in the age group that is super vulnerable to Covid, and I'd like my daughter to remember them.
Without hospitalization a fair number of the 9% that is hospitalized but won't die will instead just die. This is why you see death rates of close to 10% in areas like Lombardy or NYC where the hospital system was overloaded. And even if they don't, they're too sick to go to work. Most industries will have serious problems if 10% of employees call in sick. Then there are issues with people who have non-COVID illnesses (say car accidents) who won't be able to find beds because all the hospitals are filled with COVID patients.
When #FlattenTheCurve came out people had very legitimate criticisms that centered around them doing the math and computing that if we flattened the curve enough to avoid overwhelming the hospital system, we'd be locked down for the next 20 years. Realistically, the only solution was to lockdown, social distance, and wear masks long enough for a vaccine to come out, then vaccinate everyone who hadn't already gotten it. It looks like that'll actually be the outcome in wealthy coastal areas like the Bay Area or New England, but in the middle of the country we'll just overload the hospital system and see what happens.
It doesn't matter how much you overshoot medical capacity, because as soon as you do, death rates go way, way up.
"Everyone I disagree with is either acting in bad faith and trying to manipulate people or is a rube who's being manipulated. All of my opinions come exclusively from rational philosophical means achieved independently of any external media influences."
A huge amount of people who survive will deal with increased depression, anxiety, etc.
Even though its easy and callous to write off the lives of millions of (easily preventable) deaths with a hand-wave, there are going to be serious and long-term effects for those who didn't die and for their families, jobs, etc...
The current discourse and societal response to the disease seems likely to have as big or larger of a mental health effect than the immediate consequences of the disease itself.
Secondly, that is exactly what triage is! People die, doctors are trained to decide of a group of people which are dying, who has the better chance of not dying.
I would be interested in seeing if there is data to say whether being put in the ICU actually _increased_ risk of death. Of course this would be hard to prove as only the most sick went to the ICU etc.
1) Severely reduced in-take of new patients of patients due to lack of beds available (and longer COVID recovery time)
2) Reduced ability to effectively care for other patients due to limited beds and transmissibility of the disease, and workforce reductions as healthcare workers get sick (this is not a hypothetical, this is happening in the hospital my wife and brother work at).
3) Forcing healthcare works to perform their jobs without subsequent PPE for their own protection, increasing their own health risks and creating serious issues for mental well-being when working in this environment day-in and day-out.
The healthcare system is designed to treat patients. Believing the system is not exceeding what it can handle because somehow "the system itself" is not damaged (which I'm not even sure what you mean by that) but dismissing patient care and outcomes is like evaluating a vehicle's crash rating, but not evaluating the damage to the vehicle occupants.
I think your definition of "what they are capable of handling" (for some reason I can't reply to your other clarification of this definition) isn't one that many people would think is a good one. It may be technically correct in some domain, but this isn't it. Healthcare systems are there to provide healthcare for people, and if they can't do that (as in this situation) then they are incapable of handling it. In addition (in the UK at least, can't speak for anywhere else), this has led to not only ICU capacity being exceeded, but also routine healthcare being diminished - either because of people being unable to visit a hospital, or unwilling to do so.
Assuming 99% of people had zero issues then you would see 52 million people completely fine and 520,000 hospitalizations except many people get severely ill without going to a hospital so we would easily be approaching herd immunity.
Instead it’s likely closer to ~3-6% hospitalizations with nearly half of those people dying. With 70,000 people currently in the hospital, expect the death toll to keep increasing. The numbers do look better for young people, but if your thinking of 55+ as old, a huge hunk of the population is old.
PS: The recent bump hit 1,000 deaths per day, but daily peak is still increasing rapidly so expect that to rise significantly.
I'm the father of an at risk child, there is absolutely no way we can totally isolate ourselves from society at large.
I could go into depth about our situation, but what I came here to say is: don't believe any hand waving politician who says we can set up some sort of parallel society, where all the venerable are sheltered, whilst the rest go about our lives. It's just the latest incarnation of survival of the fittest.
If New Zealand, with probably the world's best geographic / technological isolation, can't prevent infection, how can we expect that from a family of 4, an old man living alone, a recuperating heart patient?
Take a look at what’s currently happening at El Paso Texas. There’s no hospital to go to.
Mostly, you can't convince them otherwise. But I wish they could just see the effect it would have on non-covid hospital cases and think about that, if nothing else.
https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...
We choose a level of precautions (cost) according to the risk. Which is what bugs me about the non-mask crowd cause it costs NOTHING.
Having yourself injected with a newly developed substance is a different thing.
Let's face facts, the long-term effects are unknowable - you trade that for the short-term protection.
Most no longer make eye contact. Or shake hands. I can't tell whether someone is genuinely smiling or laughing. Voices are muffled. They're a distraction.
I miss face to face conversations with strangers. I miss talking fast, getting excited, and not having my glasses fog up because I apparently breath fast when excited.
There's an element of humanity that's simply been lost.
EDIT: This isn't a response to what is the appropriate trade-offs for lives lost.
It's specifically a response to the idea that "nothing" is lost when wearing a mask.
I want my newborn to see her grandmother and my family.
I'm just not willing to trade off a bunch of deaths for that.
5 years? Ten years? The rest of your life?
it’s all a matter of where you draw the line of risk/reward
Folks should be wearing masks when they are or even might be sick with ANY transmissible disease. Its actually pretty insane that pre-covid, folks would go into public and work while endangering who knows how many people (I know a lot of people don't have the option, which is a whole other bag of worms).
I find it extremely depressing that people compare this to other easily preventable deaths (I see it often online and from my own family) and say: "See we handle the seasonal flu pretty horribly, why are we trying so hard with COVID-19?"
Stores, schools, etc. should also really think about circulation, hand sanitizer, and perhaps even nightly UV-C disinfectant.
Company culture needs to change: when sick, people should work from home for a job like programming and companies need give more sick leave for jobs like teaching where telecommuting doesn't work as well. Businesses really need to think about their part to play in protecting their customers.
As a side note, my mother who is older wasn't interested in the flu shot and I always wondered why. Even if it's 60% effective, that's just halving your chances of a sometimes fatal disease for $20 and a fifteen minute visit to a pharmacy. The US in particular needs to figure out how to do public health better.
It's not really "far more" deadly. The main problem is the lack of immunity and everyone getting it at once.
The estimate for this flu season is 24k to 62k deaths.
246k people have died from Covid so far, despite precautions.
Its a substantial difference.
Covid hit after flu season, so those numbers are probably a better case scenario.
Sure, lock yourself in your house until the virus goes away. We are fine with that.
Just don't impose those restrictions on everyone.
Or drunk driving.
The reason for those anecdotes is to counter the false narrative that young people are basically invulnerable to Covid, and should therefore live like it doesn't exist. That false narrative has been quite prevalent, even here, as an oblique way of arguing against public health measures.
There's no actual prevalent narrative that no one escapes Covid unscathed that needs to be countered.
Maybe not on HN, but if you talk to regular people that get their news from newspaper or cable news, they tend to be very misinformed about Covid-19’s severity and prevalence.
A poll done in the UK found that people, on average, thought Covid-19 deaths were 100 times more numerous than they actually are.
https://www.kekstcnc.com/insights/covid-19-opinion-tracker-e...
That's the wrong way to look at it. How many people over 35 in the USA have died or was hospitalized because an under-35 was a link in the transmission chain? How many people under 35 have expereinced short or long term medical harm because of an infection that didn't manage to kill them?
The fact that the prevention is worse than the disease, in terms of economic hardship, depression, deprivation of education, etc; the fact that prevention measures hit poor people and minorities much more than rich people (who can move around and educate their kids in private schools that largerly do not shut down) - these are all inconvenient facts.
At least be honest - say you know lockdowns are horrible for many people that even if they got the disease would be fine (save for the extreme anecdotes!) but we still decide to impose them.
Really hard to have an honest conversation based on facts these days.
New Zealand had the advantage of having a huge amount of experience with protecting their biodiversity. I'm willing to bet a lot of that experience was transferrable to this situation.
Being an island. Yada yada. Has nothing to do with it. It’s all about the simple actions they took that we could repeat but some people don’t want to because they’ve been conned.
Being anti-mask and knowing it puts others at risk is purely an antisocial behavior. It’s a FU to everyone else. It costs nothing to do, it saves lives, and ironically is what would enable us to be as normal as we possibly can by controlling this thing. Being anti-mask and believing it doesn’t put others at risk is a sign they were conned by a few sociopaths who wanted to exploit this for their own political gain.
If you remember, this is exactly what China did. It failed because despite how hard you try to tell people that it's nothing to worry about, people will start to realize that hospitals are overrun. Your solution is not only demonstrably poor, but is also how we ended up in this mess. It's a tall order to tell people there's "nothing wrong" while nurses are working 12 hours shifts.
Until the virus is cured, people will continue to increase savings where possible as the virus causes economic uncertainty regardless of lockdown status. To think that if we just lifted all restrictions life would go back to normal is not accurate. If we lifted mask requirements in stores, my spending would sink even lower as my risk would go up.
I think it’s too soon to declare that, with long term lung/organ damage being indicated for people (of course, this also depends on a few different factors).
From Mayo clinic: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...
Before we get this thing under control, in US we will at current rate expose almost 10% of population to COVID-19 (now at some 11M people[1]). We should really pray that long term effects are negligible because otherwise we have non-insignificant part of population that are partially damaged and further hinder US in the global competition against China and others.
All they’ve said is we shouldn’t draw conclusions yet about long-term COVID damage. No mention of vaccines.
We know fairly well what damage covid-19 does to the body, and we know fairly well what other similar Corona viruses have done.
Similarly we know the qualities of these vaccines and the likelihood of their success and failure rates.
The vaccine isn't created by pure chance. It's a result of an iterative scientific process.
If you look at what the experts say, you’d find them being cautious with their words when commenting on vaccines, efficacy, etc. It’s in people’s best interests to follow precautions like wearing masks, washing hands with soap and maintaining some distance from other people, regardless of what news comes on the vaccine front.
Also just because you don't know anyone doesn't mean it's bad. If we can reduce people dying it's worth doing it. And it's just not a few in this case.
But if we recalculate the odds in terms of a particular in-group, and tell you that, of the 25 people you know and care about, there's a 22 percent chance that one of them will die, that seems like a large risk, and one you would work hard to avoid.
And if we then polled all of the people like that, the majority of them wouldn't know anyone that had a bad case! We'd have anecdotes popping up constantly telling us "actually it wasn't that bad" and "stop worrying so much", alongside other anecdotes like "my sister was in the hospital for 3 weeks" and "my wife died in the waiting room". And if you look around in reality, you do in fact see both sets of anecdotes.
(I used a 1% rate for serious cases because it's easy to work with, and not because it's accurate. Reality is as always more complex.)
Isn't that 25% chance that someone will die of the personal cohort?
I feel a lot of well-off people are not considering effects like these, which will likely be quite large, when they weigh the long term consequences of our disease response. And it's weird to me that even the most progressive people in my life are happy to use grocery delivery and similar services that essentially transfer disease risk from privileged groups to poor minorities. It's like people don't have the emotional bandwidth to be worried about the disease and inequality at the same time.
Is using a grocery delivery service a greater risk vector than making a trip to the store in person? That's not obvious to me, certainly poor minorities can work at grocery stores too.
Is is it necessary true that grocery delivery service providers are poor minorities? At the risk of revisiting the Prop 22 debate, my downstairs neighbor is a college student who's happy to go out and do some deliveries as time allows.
It's not necessarily true but it is statistically true. Gig workers are more likely to be non-white and have lower educational attainment than traditional workers, and non-white gig workers are more likely to rely on gigs for primary income than white workers.
The delivery person could have a higher risk due to visiting all the households, but my experience is that they are all hands off. The gig worker drops the groceries at the door and leaves.
Concentrating harm in an already disadvantaged group in the name of the 'greater good' is ethically thorny though. It can be used to justify a lot of not-so-great things.
I'd be wary of coming to strong conclusions here without data; you can easily come up with plausible arguments either way.
What symptoms did they display? What was the timeline of their symptoms, or how did their illness develop/proceed? How soon after initial infection, did person-to-person infection begin? When were the infections/illnesses occurring (Feb/Mar/Apr? Or more recently?) What are the symptoms that stood out to you/them the most? What made them think that it was covid vs another upper respiratory disease? Did they get tested, what tests were used, and how accurate were those tests? What were the treatments, and treatment modalities that were recommended to them by public health officials or private physicians? Do they have post-illness physical records you're willing to share?
I, too, (and I'm sure we all do) have quite a bit of other anecdata I could share - in my workplace, a number of people and their families have been infected. There's a wide variance of experiences - from very mild, to multiple deaths. I chose not to include that information because I couldn't verify their disease progression, or symptom development, or treatment regime. I can provide that actual in-depth information on my experience, based on counsel from my physician and medical health professionals.
Ultimately, the most important questions: how do you create policy for a population, when their experiences are so different? Is this really the best we and our governments can do?
One died.
This might skew your "average" anecdata a bit.
So either we're not collecting the data that would reveal them as actually a problem, or something else has to explain why they are immune to the devastation that is supposed to be associated with Covid.
And people aren't likely to mention the sex worker they saw to a contact tracer, meaning the vector will be overlooked.
Combine that with a relatively young demographic, and an ability to control who you interact with fairly carefully.
You might, might be able to interpret my comment as saying that for the very unique set of circumstances that involve sex work, masks aren't important. But that still wouldn't be a charitable interpretation. Please follow the hn guidelines.
Masks and social distancing are always important, and always reduce the likelihood of spread. There are situations when those aren't possible. For example my dentist can't exactly maintain 6 feet of distance from me at all times. But can I wear a mask while in the office.
For that reason we should maintain social distancing and mask precautions where possible, to keep the chance of spread low. While most transmission is via super spreader individuals, you can't know if the one person you give covid-19 will end up a spreader.
I don't think my conclusion from your assertion is abusive to your position. There are many many 1:1 interactions in this world.
For instance, we could simply say, as long as your store is low volume, only has 1 cashier, and only lets 1 healthy looking person in at a time, you don't represent a "spread concern".
> While most transmission is via super spreader individuals, you can't know if the one person you give covid-19 will end up a spreader.
Yet as far as we know, no such event has ever been tracked back to a sex worker. Not conclusive, but if you're honest you have to at least wonder why and if we have some mistaken assumptions in our models.
Like I said, you're parsing my comments with an agenda. Please stop.
Just because I have an opinion that is different than yours, does not make my attempt at refuting your assertions, or at least showing their weaknesses, any more agenda based than you doing the same to mine.
Stop putting yourself in the position of moral superior and arbiter of truth. Make your arguments and refute mine to the best of your ability. I will do the same, thanks.
You seem to not want your reasons for dismissing any concern about sex workers considered or applied anywhere else. But that is a good test of their truth, if they can be used to judge other situations too, which is all I was doing.
Let me tell you what the big darn deal is, from the perspective of someone who likely won't get sick either.
My wife just suffered through sepsis from a previous surgery. She ended up being admitted into the ICU for three days. I learned after the fact that there are roughly 40 staffed ICU beds in the entire county, population ~400,000. Those beds could easily be taken by COVID patients in a situation where you have uncontrolled community spread, and the hospital is now making difficult choices of who deserves those beds.
Now as she recovers her immune system is still fragile. In her normal condition, she probably would be OK after contracting COVID-19. Now, perhaps not so much. If others around me assume that contracting COVID-19 is "no big deal" and end up transmitting it to her, that may not be a problem for those people. It would be a huge deal for me.
What's missing in these rosy pictures of COVID-19 is the lack of awareness that... gasp... we live with other people, and that we all have a duty to protect each other, not just ourselves! What is so wrong with that? If wearing a mask helps me protect others around me, then why not do it? Honestly, if that's the worst encumbrance you've encountered in your life so far, then you've had quite the privileged experience, and as I'd say to my children, you're damn spoiled.
If you don't want to listen to me, listen to the people who have taken an oath to protect my life and yours: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-enraging-deja-vu-of-a.... It's absurd the entitlement that some people display, thinking "well, if something bad happens to me, there will be someone to save me". At the end of the day, the nurses and doctors that treat you are people too. Respecting them means more than sending flowers or banging on pots, it means doing your part to help ensure they can care for the true emergencies and not just idiots who can't be bothered to follow some simple rules to help out the greater good.
Furthermore, as a bicyclist you can manage your own risk and the risks aren't correlated. Viruses don't listen to Fox News or MSNBC. You can't wish away exponential growth. Just because a car crashes into your bicycle, doesn't mean that three other crashes occur in close proximity. I'm sorry, but your comparison doesn't make any sense.
However, I have a strong sense of duty to a cause larger than myself. So when there is a tradeoff between a minor inconvenience to myself (say a vaccine or in this case a mask in public places), I tend to err on the side on a minor personal inconvenience to help out the larger whole. When it comes to matters of personal responsibility that have consequences limited to the individual engaging in the activity, I tend to say that is their choice.
I'm curious - you haven't mentioned any concern with other communal health mandates. After all, clothing mandates for private businesses aren't even all that crazy. Have you tried entering a restaurant--or indeed any business--without a shirt or shoes? (I have) You'll be politely asked to leave. Why should your freedom to wear (or not wear) clothing of your choice be infringed by the proprietors of these establishments?
BTW- I used to think that these requirements ("no shirt, no shoes, no service") were part of local health codes, but as I was researching my comment here I came across this: https://people.howstuffworks.com/where-did-shirt-shoes-requi.... I have no idea if that's true or not, but I find it even more interesting that nobody has a problem complying with that rule but when it comes to reducing the risk of a highly contagious airborne virus, wearing a face covering is suddenly a huge imposition.
And also, the extremes are important because statistically more people hit those extremes than with other respiratory viruses. There are states reporting nearly full ICUs right now. There are states (re)opening field hospitals.
The whole reason for lockdowns and restrictions isn’t to prevent a huge amount of deaths. Most people don’t die from Covid. The whole point is to keep our hospital system above water.
It's now competition and one of the best ways to score points in this competition is by manipulating the empathy of your fellow human.
I wish the internet was still about real discussion but now it's about heartstrings and upvotes.
Haven't you notice the same pattern with the "long covid" stories? Light on science, heavy on heartstrings.
An internet based off of rational discussion is long dead, even here on HN. Just watched the mods (hi @dang ) wipe nuke a story about Sweden's Covid-19 success off the front page. [1]
Oh well.
Edit: would you please stop using HN for political and ideological battle? It turns out you've been doing that a ton, and basically exclusively. That's not what this site is for, and we ban such accounts. Please view https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules.
The thing is, not all viewpoints are equally valid, and some are both unreasonable given the facts and have actually dangerous implications.
For instance, minority viewpoints like promoting herd immunity as a solution at this point (like some prominent people were doing as recently as a month ago [1]) is about the dumbest thing ever. It's pretty much "let's try to get everyone sick (with the death and disability that entails) just before our vaccine effort bears fruit and would make that pain unnecessary. It's nonsense, and at this point it makes more sense to downvote than to beat the same dead horse yet again.
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-embraces-idea-herd-imm...
It's technically valid, but tiresome to rehash the same broadly rejected viewpoints over an over. What you called "toeing the covid line" above is basically agreeing with the consensus of experts who actually know what they're talking about.
> But people who believe all the numbers and still think we are overreacting are still being censored/ignored to oblivion. Not only that, but my (highly reliable ;-) anecdata tells me that most of these people are busy raising kids and growing the food you eat. Just because they don't have the time to spray their opinions all over the internet and petition their govt officials to freak out doesn't mean that their viewpoints are less valid.
Oh, I know some of those people, and they're part of the reason the state my parents still live in has been a covid shitshow for several months and only just came around to imposing a mask mandate and occupancy limits. Their viewpoints are definitely less valid, being either wishful thinking or lack of concern for others.
Exactly, so don't complain about downvotes again next time you want to resist "toeing the covid line." To make an analogy, there are probably people (maybe even whole communities) who want to resist "toeing the drunk driving line," but the ship has sailed on that and few people care to hear their arguments that they should be able to drive when the blow a 0.12 or whatever.
I miss the old internet where I could talk to rational people like you but now Eternal September has truly arrived.
[1] - https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/china-covid...
[2] - https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-kamala-harris-got-big-soc...