There is also the possibility that we will look back on history and realize how hysteria and media fearmongering drove human society to take wholly unnecessary measures and paved a path towards more authoritarianism, more surveillance, a financial crisis due to the government printing trillions of dollars which a lot of it is going into the stock market and driving up companies to insane valuations, creating a generation of software addicts due to the pandemic forcing teenagers to stay home and cope using their computers as opposed to going out and interacting with their peers in person, and a myriad of other problems that we do not yet see in the short-term.

This is the most truth I've seen packed into a few sentences in the past two years regarding what's happened.

One major thing that's missing - NPR radio is about 95% race discussions. Every single time I turn it on, it is about race. When did race become such a dominant part of the society? I saw this flare up right after COVID.

Not sure if these race discussions are doing anything but dividing people more. It is having a negative effect.

NPR also helped kill low power FM radio.

Amen!

What way to beat the virus? Clearly not vaccines as they aren't that great... Clearly not lockdowns as as soon as we give that up the virus hits... We aren't beating it in anyway... Maybe it is time to accept the reality.

The vaccines reduce the risk of hospitalization and/or death from the virus by 20x or more.

That’s pretty great even if not perfect. Much better than we ever had when facing the initial waves of any previous pandemic virus.

Unfortunate that delta and then omicron seem to have bypassed the immunity from getting sick but most of his have had a “mild” sickness many times in our lives and the vaccine will prevent it from getting worse.

I've been telling people to "get it, and get over it" since March 2020. The best thing anyone can do is live a healthy lifestyle, and the majority will be fine.

This was terrible advice. Rate of spread and our inability to treat it early on would have been catastrophic if we took that approach. Like it or not, lockdowns and mitigations were effective at keeping infection rates manageable and our healthcare system functioning.

It's a somewhat more reasonable stance since omicron seeing as our ability to prevent spread is greatly reduced and infection severity is also down, but I haven't been convinced completely yet. The current healthcare "collapse" is a real enough consequence to make me think twice.

You don't care if hospitals hit capacity and healthcare workers become exhausted and people then die from lack of care? Preventing that scenario, which has occurred to varying degrees in many places, is and has always been the primary reason not to spread the virus.

Not to challenge the overall idea too hard, but have you thought about what that really means, to say that? If you extend the IFR of, let's say, 1% to the entire population of (let's pick, for example, the US), would it be acceptable to just let 4,000,000 people die and take no mitigating procedures against that happening?

4 million, my mistake, squeezed an extra zero in there.

Probably depends on a number of factors. If you're 4 years old and the next year is 20% of your life and you may never have this level of social and intellectual plasticity again, you may be way better off being free to intermingle with people and learn to live life at the expense of more dead old people.

If you're old and vulnerable, but not near death, a year of reduced social exposure might be better for you.

Sadly the pandemic measures have forced us to sacrifice one for the other. I fear my toddler's development will always be just a little decayed due to masks during her early linguistic development and being shut in the house during shutdowns. But I also acknowledge some old folks may have been saved at her expense.

people don’t seem to realize just how good we handled the pandemic. Of course, we handled the pandemic awful compared to what we could have done. But in hindsight there’s always a better way.

In early 2020 we significantly altered society, cancelling major events, moving things virtual, and creating new apps and services to handle the pandemic. Then over the course of late 2020/2021 we created more apps and services and developed new technologies to treat Covid-19.

In just 1 year, we created and started widely distributing a vaccine which, while it doesn’t completely prevent the virus, makes it very mild for the vast majority of people. So far, at the second-year mark, over 2 billion people have been vaccinated. Along with monoclonal antibodies and other technology, we’ve significantly lowered the death rate, hospitalization rate, and likely the risk of long covid.

Imagine what an outbreak like this would do in an earlier time. You don’t really have to imagine because it’s happened before - the Spanish Flu outbreak and the Bubonic plague. Look at the population (not raw count because our population is much larger) of casualties those diseases caused. We failed to prevent covid-19 infecting everyone, but with vaccines and modern medical care we have made the infections significantly less harmful.

>Imagine what an outbreak like this would do in an earlier time.

Probably we wouldn't have even noticed. Spanish Flu/black death is just no comparison.

People did die a lot, didn't they?

The black death is estimated to have killed around 33% of the population.

Society r who had even a whiff of objection to the narrative. The number of ordinarily sane people who’ve yelled at me because I questioned something...

No way dude. History is not going to look fondly at the last two years at all. We should be ashamed at our arrogance and hubris—the idea that we could somehow contain or control an airborne respiratory virus. The sheer damage we caused to our children.

Disagree. People holding to the lab leak theory were seen as racist/Xenophobic until the new leadership (president of U.S. arrived) and all the sudden its not a racist theory.

Lest we forget, China's reaction to Australia’s call for an international probe into the origins of the corona-virus pandemic was by no means working together for the global good.

I wish I could agree with the thought but that's not what I remember happening.

As for history: Communication in the 21st century has made it so that there is constant talk between countries but this cannot be confused with collaboration.

The Spanish flu of 1918 was clearly different then this due to it being in the late stages of WWI.

I'm not convince we did beat it.

For decades people would ask, "why is there no vaccine for the cold or flu like smallpox, measles, mumps, rubella, and chicken pox?" and the answer was that they were fast evolving corona viruses and you cannot vaccinate for those.

Then suddenly we have one this time. But it's efficacy drops - according to Pfizer's own trial - to ~47% after six months. And people "double vaxxed and boosted" still get it. And still die from it.

So...we still don't have vaccines for those it seems to me. It doesn't matter how many people call them that, they don't provide immunity like vaccines do.

Big pharma did get super rich off of them. And you can't sue them if they kill your spouse. So there's that at least I guess.

> For decades people would ask, "why is there no vaccine for the cold or flu like smallpox, measles, mumps, rubella, and chicken pox?" and the answer was that they were fast evolving corona viruses and you cannot vaccinate for those.

I would suggest doing some research on Google. We’ve had vaccines for influenza (flu) for over 70 years.

And yes, sometimes their efficacy was under 50% but they’ve always been called vaccines and have saved thousands of lives.

> And people "double vaxxed and boosted" still get it. And still die from it.

The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine is 91% effective in preventing the COVID-19 virus with symptoms in people age 16 and older. The Moderna COVID-19 vaccine is 94% effective in preventing COVID-19 with symptoms. Janssen/Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine. In clinical trials, this vaccine was 66% effective in preventing the COVID-19 virus with symptoms — as of 14 days after vaccination. The vaccine also was 85% effective at preventing severe disease with COVID-19 — at least 28 days after vaccination.

Source: The Mayo Clinic https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...

I'm not going to bother debunking the rest of that bullshit. Your statement is straight out of the anti-vaccine propaganda playbook. Shame on you for spreading FUD.

Those numbers are laughable. Look around there are 100s of thousands of vaccinated people testing positive in the US daily! Those numbers may have been true against the original version of covid-19, but they are way off now.

If hundreds of thousands of people vaccinated people are testing positive, how was it ever a vaccine?

It's a glorified flu shot with a 6 month half life. Just like the flu shot...

On their own, these numbers do not contradict each other.

I agree being able to deploy a vaccine in record time is very impressive.

I think an interesting thought experiment would be: take the modern COVID strain and go back to the 1900~'s UK/America? (That's where most the site is from as far as I know)

Just the massive lack of co-morbidities (Diabetes, heart disease, obesity, cancer) and demographic differences (Average age was far lower, population density) could make it an almost a non issue.