> Will people ever get over sensationalism and learn to live it?

You see, that's the crux of the matter: Not everyone can live with it. Literally. So far, it killed more than 5 million people globally. There is also the issue with possibly lasting brain damage (even occuring in cases that weren't severe enough for hospitalization) and life-wrecking long covid. Compassionate people have a problem ignoring all that.

Assuming you're going to live for 50 more years from today, wasting a year of your life is only worth it if it prevents a 2% chance of death.

I haven't wasted a year of my life. I've slightly modified my behaviour. I've done some things less and other things more.

This assumes every year of life has equal worth.

Indeed. If you assume that earlier years are worth more, the point is even stronger.

Your calculation needs to take loss in quality of life due to a) contracting long COVID, b) suffering a COVID-induced stroke, or c) living with brain damage post-COVID into account. Furthermore, you should consider that mutations will run rampant if laissez-faire policies are implemented; a variant with increased lethality might come along and cut your life short.

Multiplied by however many hundreds of people one encounters over a year, perhaps your numbers need work.

I know 5 people personally that have died of this virus, forgive me if I take offense at your hand waving of it

I know 2 young perfectly physically healthy people personally whose mental health deteoriorated to the point that they became suicidal. So forgive me if I take offense at your comment.

That doesn't mean any of these NPI's work, are ethical, or are worth their immense cost to society. It is entirely possible to "take this serious" but feel that society is causing itself far more harm with all these measures than it would have by doing absolutely nothing at all. None of these thing were in any playbook prior to march of 2020. And here we are almost a month from 2022 still working from this unwritten, untested playbook and still we have no clue if any of it works.

About the only thing we know works is vaccines and all these cool treatments we've figured out.

Masks are cheap and simple with no drawbacks. Ventilation is easy in many cases. Keeping one's distance costs nothing (which is not the be-all of social distancing, I agree). Vaccines are free.

These are all ethical, very effective and cost the individual almost nothing.

Enforcing social distancing is complex and incurs costs. For outdoor venues it seems to be less effective. What other methods are causing far more harm than good, far more harm than doing nothing?

> Keeping one's distance costs nothing (which is not the be-all of social distancing, I agree).

Actually this costs trillions of dollars.[0]

[0] https://www.bea.gov/news/2020/gross-domestic-product-2nd-qua...

> None of these thing were in any playbook prior to march of 2020.

Which things do you think are wild new tactics for trying to contain a pandemic? Social distancing? Lockdowns? Wearing masks in public? Because if you think any of those are untested wacky "nobody's ever tried anything like this before!" approaches, you need to spend a few more minutes with your favorite search engine.

You've been severely misinformed. You can read for example the UK's pre-pandemic playbook at (https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...) - note they specifically call out universal masking, border closures, and restrictions on public gatherings as bad policies they don't plan to implement because there's no good evidence they help. Maybe they were wrong (I definitely think they were wrong on masks!), or maybe the difference between true influenza and a coronavirus with similar symptoms matters, but it's just not accurate to present these kinds of policies as the pre-pandemic consensus.

then you should also have problem with capitalism/plutocracy.

I think nearly everyone except ardent libertarian ideologues has at least some criticisms of capitalism, yes. But how is that related to the present discussion?

Imagine there was a fire near where you live, constantly spreading and endangering lives in your community. Would you say people can just "learn to live it"?

Imagine being given almost 2 years to build capacity to put that fire out so the community could go back to normal life but instead zero additional capacity was built? Hospitals had almost 2 years to build capacity. Where is it? Why is society being asked to continue bailing out institutions that have had an enormous amount of time to prepare?

You just don't build capacity against something that grows exponentially until it hits a substantial part of the overall population. Say a country like the UK, at the peak of the curve, would have 1% of their population getting sick everyday for a week or two, and 1% of that getting in a hospital (very conservative since 1% is the IFR and lots of people get out of the hospital on their legs)

You might have built the 90.000 beds you need, but where will you find the doctors?

sorry, have I been time travelled back to march 2020? I heard this exact same preposterous extrapolation then. people going mad with fear at the omnipotent power of the exponential function. hundreds of thousands in hospitals all at once, millions of people sick at a time, we were told. I should know, I was one of them. I scribbled some numbers on the back of a fag packet, concluded we were doomed, and started buying tinned food and scrounging N95s from B&Q.

but then it didn't happen, did it? it never fucking happened, anywhere, lockdown or no. I remember a giant emergency field hospital that got built in the middle of london, and it sat there completely fucking bone idle. my initial numbers were wrong, and so were the experts'.

I remember a terrifyingly huge bell curve for hospitalizations assuming no lockdown, with a piddling little horizontal line just above the x-axis representing bed capacity. that apocalypse never happened for sweden or the numerous other places which never locked down. I remember watching the sweden case graph intently around May, smugly predicting a self-inflicted genocide. It never came. Then there was a US state (I forget which one) that ended its lockdown and opened up back to normal. I very confidently predicted a disaster that never arrived.

eventually (much later than I should have) I woke up from the mass hallucination. turns out covid, like other coronaviruses, is strongly seasonal, it waxes and wanes for reasons we don't quite understand. the exponential curve always burns itself out well short of what the hammer-and-dance people said, no matter what we do.

do you expect us to forget all that? do you really think we can be fooled twice? do you honestly think people will sit down and take another wave of lockdowns when we're in the middle of a supply chain and inflation crisis caused by the first one?

Thank you very much for this. You summarize my thoughts exactly. SARS-COV-2 is a real physical virus that can ruin your day. But Covid isn’t the only illness it has seemed to cause. It’s also caused one of the greatest mass hysteria events in human existence. This meme/virus we’ve been passing around for 630 days and counting is as much a illness of the mind as it is something that makes you physically I’ll.

Such an excuse. You find the doctors or find a way to get people to help. It’s an emergency. Figure it out.

Forcing society to grind to an halt because some “experts” just waive their hand and give up is absurd.

How are you going to find the doctors? It doesn’t take 2 years to train one. Of course you can get them from other countries but here you are just transferring the problem to someone else.

Hospitals are Covid hotspots. Lots of transmission. We need isolation center capacity

You mean like we learned to live with the far more deadly (at least initially) influenza?

As your body increasingly comes in contact with it you’ll build a solid immunity. Similar to the other mRNA viruses such as RSV (dangerous to babies, but almost no one else).

It took a couple years for the 1918 pandemic to sputter out. We didn't learn to live with it, our immune systems learned to fight it off, and it retreated from being an acutely dangerous threat to being merely a chronic one.

The cost was millions of lives, because it was the only option- there were no vaccines or antivirals. But we have both of those now. The steady-state for COVID-19 will hopefully look something like seasonal flu, but it will take time.

If Covid had occurred in 1918, it would likely have had a much higher CFR than H1N1 - no supplemental oxygen available at that time.

Lol the number one indicator of having a severe case of covid19 is being overweight and a diabetic — likely being >60.

Gotta say I think you’re wildly incorrect there. Influenza impacted the young and still does.

The 1889 pandemic may be a closer equivalent.

Influenza didn't kill 5+ million people in two years.

You're off by a factor of 10, it killed 50 million in 1918-1920, 1-4 million in 1957-1958, 1-4 million again in 1968-1969, 700k in 1977, 100-200k in 2009.

That’s also not population adjusted.

Uhhhh it killed somewhere around 17-50 million people. I guess you’re technically correct lmao.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu

When far more people are harmed by the indirect effects of the fire (fear, jobs lost, mental health issues etc) than the fire itself, then yes - I would encourage them to liberate their minds, embrace reality and start living.

A heck of a lot of people really don't want to move on from all this. Life is way too short to be wasted living the way some of society seems to think is necessary "in order to take this serious".

Disease and death have been a part of humanity since time began. All we can do is try to make the most out of the short time we have here on this earth. Playing this covid theater game for 2+ years is, in my opinion, an insulting to human nature. We aren't meant to do this.

"some of you may have to die, but that is a sacrifice I'm willing to make"

You can still take vaccines, wear masks, and practice distancing. At some point your well-being becomes solely your responsbility, not everyone else's. We can debate on where that point lies. Just because your fear of COVID is the trendiest political cause doesn't necessarily mean other people's quality of lives don't matter. Life is about trade-off, not about virtue-signalling.

It’s perfectly reasonable to think X people dying is worth it to avoid Y people’s quality of life being reduced by Z, depending on the values of X, Y, and Z.

Everyone behaves as if this is true every single day, regardless of how mad they get when it’s stated explicitly.

> It’s perfectly reasonable to think X people dying is worth it to avoid Y people’s quality of life being reduced by Z, depending on the values of X, Y, and Z.

not if I'm part of the X group, for purely selfish reasons, and it's perfectly rational for anyone to not want to be in the X group, no matter what values assigned to Y and Z are.

So the crux of the problem isn't what you stated - it's that these decisions are made, and some people disagree, because either they are in the X group, or not. This is why conscription is required in a war, and this is why lockdowns are needed in a pandemic, etc.

We choose to die for/in defense of a lifestyle all the time. We call it war.

“It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.”

literally yes. in the words of my corrupt and buffoonish prime minister: let the bodies pile high. the wisest thing he ever said, even though he won't admit to it.

(and really the piles won't be that high. they'll be of low-to-medium height, consisting mostly of the old and fat.)

Ah mostly the old and fat! That's ok then.

People dying is all fine and good until it happens to you or someone you care about.

yes

Can you point to a single policy that has demonstrated (in an intellectually honest way) ANY efficacy in slowing covid? One??

Vax passports, cloth masks, N95 masks, face shields, closing schools, cohorts, WFH, clean/dirty pen jars (my fave), plexiglass, 6 feet, travel bans...

The grim reality is that there hasn't been a single policy that's been shown to have made any difference at all. NONE. There's literally nothing to do other than stay home if sick and get vaxxed if you want, the rest is all theater and much of it has horrible tradeoffs.

>The grim reality is that there hasn't been a single policy that's been shown to have made any difference at all. NONE.

BULLSHIT.

How delusional can you be? There is plenty of evidence that masks and contact reduction in various forms have a massive effect on how quickly the virus spreads. Infection numbers and their development over time varied wildly between countries, clearly correlated with such measures, long before vaccines were available.

> BULLSHIT. How delusional can you be?

The comment you responded to asked for an honest, intellectual response but your response was reactionary, rude, and provided no insight.

The links you supplied in your other comment do not show a clear causal effect of mandates and restrictions on case rates. Outbreaks are known to follow a pretty clear 45 day cycle; the onset of restrictions usually occur as rates are exponentially increasing and theres no evidence that such restrictions taper infections to a degree discernible from the normal cycle.

Furthermore, observational evidence from states like Florida, a state that has zero restrictions or mandates and yet currently has the lowest case rate in the United States, make the idea that such measures have a “massive effect” on spread dubious at best.

> The links you supplied in your other comment do not show a clear causal effect of mandates and restrictions on case rates.

They do. It's not mathematically-clean, but that is just not what you get in a messy reality.

>Outbreaks are known to follow a pretty clear 45 day cycle; the onset of restrictions usually occur as rates are exponentially increasing and theres no evidence that such restrictions taper infections to a degree discernible from the normal cycle.

What is the mechanism behind this cycle that you claim? How do you conclude that it's not the typical beaurocratic reaction time to rising case numbers and implementation of restrictions that cause the cycle?

We know how the virus spreads. How contact reduction and masks prevent that is simple enough for a preschooler to understand. We have strong empirical evidence that it works at scale. Claiming anything else is simply reality denial.

>Furthermore, observational evidence from states like Florida, a state that has zero restrictions or mandates and yet currently has the lowest case rate in the United States, make the idea that such measures have a “massive effect” on spread dubious at best.

How so? How can development in a state that has no restrictions prove anything at all about how effective they are?

At most, the example can prove that there are other things that can reduce case numbers. I never said there weren't. Now go and tell me what they are, how they work, and how they can be transferred elsewhere. Because if the answer turns out to be "warm climate" that is not very useful.

It's totally worth looking at. But not as a diversion to avoid doing things we know to work at preventing hundreds of deaths every day.

> There is plenty of evidence that masks and contact reduction in various forms have a massive effect on how quickly the virus spreads.

If this is true, why is it when showing a chart of data it is almost impossible to pick when any of these measures went into effect? If these measures worked to any worthwhile degree their effect on any data should be absolutely profound. Thus far, you'd have a hard time picking florida out from oregon or california. If you need PhD level math to prove that all these NPI'S work... it means they weren't worth the extremely toxic and corrosive effectives they've had on our communities. Any fool off the street should be able to look at the raw data and see the impact, which currently you can't do.

>If this is true, why is it when showing a chart of data it is almost impossible to pick when any of these measures went into effect?

Quite exactly the opposite is actually true: it's always very clear from such charts that the measures are very effective.

Some examples:

https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/phac-aspc/images/corporate...

https://www.nejm.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/mms/jour...

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/state-timeline

Doesn't take "PhD level math" either, just some basic understanding how the effects are delayed by incubation period, testing and reporting, and how an exponential function changes shape as the exponent changes

It's not nearly as straightforward as you're pointing out because people voluntarily change their behaviour in response to circumstances, like case numbers, deaths, etc. Your big assumption is that top-down policies/controls are the biggest factor causing delayed change in numbers, but that isn't at all clear from the data alone.

I was arguing against the ridiculous claim that measures don't work at all. Whether they are voluntary or top down policies does not really matter.

amazing how in many places the cases start dropping the instant the lockdown comes into place, or sometimes even slightly before, rather than ~10 days afterwards as would be expected from the incubation period. can the virus hear us?

Incubation period varies, and is probably best modelled as a Gaussian function.

Some cases will incubate nearly right away, and others will take more than the 2-3 weeks that are often used as quarantine periods. Getting to the 95th or 99th percentile is not the same thing as getting to the 100th percentile.

This is one of the reasons that a covid-zero strategy is effectively unimplementable.

Correlation does not equal causation. And of course studies done by people with a vested interest in proving all this worked will say this worked.

You’d be hard pressed to find studies that say none of this worked. Such researchers would destroy their careers and be labeled as kooks.

So basically, you just don't want to believe the evidence, don't have any substantial criticism either, just vague bullshitting.

I have done that in another reply before your comment, and the data is in fact very clear and obvious, your silly denial nonwithstanding.

Let's turn the tables: if you claim that contact reduction measures and mask mandates don't work, show me the evidence. Show me a place where they were implemented, and there was no effect on case numbers after 2 to 4 weeks. Go. I'm waiting.

> ANY efficacy in slowing covid? One??

Here, this was recorded on March of 2020

https://twitter.com/MikeIsaac/status/1238604080571772928

Simply because your country's leadership is incompetent and you are incompetent at finding opposing views and analysis doesn't mean that said tools don't exist

Apologies for writing such a scathing comment but, guys, we are 1 year plus into this, please just... I don't even know, I'd like to say "inform yourselves" but with the web and informational intakes being so fragmented who knows what you guys even consider "good information" anymore

In Hawaii, there was a direct correlation to covid cases and travel bans i.e. allowing only covid -ve tested travelers.

State has also seen no increase in covid cases once they allowed fully vaccinated travelers. So yeah lockdown works. And so would masks at some level.

No because burning buildings kill 100% of the people in them whereas COVID-19 kills fewer than 1% of people infected with it.

Obviously we would react differently to completely different things. What is even the point of this analogy?

I see that you are not from California