Counties like S. Korea, had bold actions like contact tracing and lockdowns. Many many countries covered pay for folks to stay home. The US initially had a lock down then just quit acting really.
Sure, preventing ANYONE from getting COVID was unrealistically, but preventing most people from getting it was always possible.
I was in South Korea from March-June 2020, there was no lockdown in South Korea. The only serious restriction was the 2 week quarantine required to enter the country. Businesses and everything were open just as usual - I was eating out at restaurants and working out of coffee shops everyday. Hell I even went to an amusement park one day (ok that did end up shutting down a week or two later when it was discovered that someone who had tested positive had been there).
Meanwhile my family in the U.S were under lockdown not allowed to leave the house without an excuse deemed acceptable by the government, shocked that South Korea was life as usual despite having such a low case count.
In comparison, countries like Canada (which I'm in) and US, does a half-hearted job in contact tracing.
We rolled out the COVID Alert app, which is supposed to balance privacy concerns with the need for contact tracing, but now with Omicron burning through all the provinces, most have shifted to only PCR testing people in high-risk groups. And having a PCR testing from public health is the only way to get the one time key to fire off the alerts.
North America could barely get masks going, paid lip service to contact tracing...
Australia implemented absolutely dystopian contact tracing decisions, countrywide lockdowns, left its citizens abroad, and it's still clear that every single person in that country is going to get COVID. It will be endemic, just like it is everywhere else. Even worse, the country has by-and-large taken a vaccine which gives them resistance to a spike protein that is not the most common in today's COVID cases. Recent (simian) experimentation has shown that the Omicron booster is not effective for previously vaccinated individuals.
You will not see long term differences in outcomes between Canada, the US, and countries like South Korea or Australia. Our measures did not work, do not work, and are exclusively security theater. Countries which 'have things under control' are either extremely ruthless in their lockdown and travel approach, and have deferred pain, or are lying on the numbers.
Although this would be a non-starter in the U.S due to privacy concerns, I don't deny that this was probably effective. At the same time I imagine cases were drastically underreported because testing positive would result in your whole office shutting down, potentially getting one fired. So there's no incentive to get tested unless you have no choice.
Went and donate blood mid Dec 2021, it's one of the things that I kept up, because people still need that stuff. 10 days later, I get a email from them saying that I may have been exposed. While it's nice that they notify me, it's not from public health's contact tracing.
We've tried nothing and it doesn't work.
Of course the value of any lockdown policy is contingent on the practical ability to correctly assess the threat of a new disease early enough that such short-duration, non-pharmaceutical interventions could work. But I don't think temporary restrictions are incompatible with basic civil liberties.
EDIT: Removed amateur-hour epidemiology, restated "philosophical" argument contingent on NPIs being effective.
As an immunocompromised person, and considering the ADA, I'm of the opinion that some mitigation strategies, like required masking in the grocery store, help preserve my civil liberties and should be considered reasonable accommodations.
Given our civil liberties conflict, you wind up in a tough to resolve scenario.
Positive rights are your assertion that you have the right to action from another group. In general, medicine is one area where positive and negative rights conflict regularly. For example, imagine abortion, assisted suicide, or emergency care during a pandemic. Some of these are solved by employment contracts -- as an ER doctor you are accepting to be bound by people's positive right to emergency medical care.
However, your assertion is that society et large should be bound by your positive right.
You should have a very strong case for this. Do you?
In the US, we've made this call already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_with_Disabilities_Ac...
You know this because you did not have an established mask mandate or legal requirements for facilities to validate that patrons were not ill. Either of these would infringe on the rights of other groups. Like it or not, there are established groups of people who are unable to wear masks. The other route of validating that customers are not sick would paradoxically infringe on the rights of the immunosuppressed.
A COVID test before entering every facility would probably not be a reasonable accommodation. I'm of the opinion that a Federal mask mandate in public spaces could probably have been justified under the ADA - anywhere that can be forced to have an accessible bathroom, access ramps, etc.
> Like it or not, there are established groups of people who are unable to wear masks.
Balancing that would similarly be an ADA question. A lot of people claimed to be in this category, but attempts to use the ADA to bypass state-level mask mandates tended to flop.
Frankly the risk to the immunocompromised does not appear to have been that high. Countries like South Africa, which have nearly a thirty percent HIV positive rate, did not see substantially different outcomes.
Beyond that, we had pre-existing data that masks don't do much. Post hoc analysis and wishful thinking have contributed to a modern round of pseudoscience claiming that masks are effective. When the dust settles, I think we'll see that well-fitted N95s are just about the only effective prevention measure. But, as I'm suspecting you know, this would not constitute a reasonable accommodation. In industries that require it, mask fitting and regular testing are commonplace. Further, fitted N95s can only be worn safely for a short duration.
On the other hand, I think that what the ADA should mandate is proper ventilation systems in these heavily trafficked areas. I do think that this is similar to what we've seen for accessibility requirements for businesses, and frankly a bizarre untackled problem for public health.
I disagree. We agree on many of the same facts - better masks are important, as is ventilation - but not, apparently, the approaches those facts inform. The "as I'm suspecting you know" shit is rude; in this case, for example, some other countries (correctly) don't count cloth masks as legit. We should've done that, too, way back in 2020.
Re: South Africa, it's a young population, and being HIV+ alone doesn't make you inherently immunosuppressed if treated effectively - which SA is quite good at.
For example, requiring a workplace to provide an employee who requires it an N95 mask very clearly falls under the 'reasonable accommodation' category.
However, requiring all employees or patrons to wear N95 masks does not track with other examples of reasonable accommodations.
The current policies in the west have done nothing to proactively protect the fragile, and everything to restrain the non-fragile.
As an example of what I mean : I spent a couple of lockdowns in a relatively poor country (Serbia) which for example allowed the 60+, fragile and immunocompromised exclusive access to shops, malls and other commerce until 9, a 30 minute pause to ventilate with nobody inside, and then normal access for the rest of the population. Subsidised delivery services were organised, etc. 16 hospitals with 900 ICU bed each (pop 6 million) were built chinese-style in 6 months, so the local healthcare system could go back to normal.
Also, health insurance has a basic public option, with price-controlled drugs, generally 10-15x smaller than the US retail price, even for US-made drugs, new or old.
Watching the US figuratively struggle for air for two years has been quite demoralizing.
Another way to look it it is birth rate versus death rate. Globally speaking COVID death would need to be at lest one order of magnitude higher to stagnant growth. The 2 year pandemic made the global world population lag by about a week. So in a week we have the same number of people as we would have today if there were no COVID. Its that insignificant.
On a population chart over 100 years COVID will be p much invisible, a tiny tiny slow down of the growth. There are no absurd levels of death there are just many many humans and thus the death number feel subjectively high.
Easy for the laptop class of this website to call not wanting lockdowns selfish when it disproportionally harms the poorest and most vulnerable of our society.
So does dying from Covid, or getting sick numerous times and missing work. Or not being able to afford missing work so you go in anyway and spread the disease, leading to your work being shutdown for weeks.
No matter what is done, the poorest and most vulnerable will be disproportionally affected. While I agree we can't perpetually mandate stay-at-home orders and expect everyone to live off savings, we _can_ expect the gov't to make that possible beyond the pathetic payments that folks received.
You need to compare it to normal (expected) total.
excluding comparisons means you cannot judge severity one way or another. Basic stats here
Now if you have something against government mandating that businesses operate within certain safety parameters then I’ve got news for you….
South Korea has a total confirmed case rate 10x lower than the USA, and a death rate 20x lower. It's absolutely realistic. It just requires serious effort on the part of everyone to follow straightforward rules about testing/tracing/mitigation. Korea hasn't been shut down for two years. They've just been smarter about it.
Its know fact that Europeans were immune to some of the diseases they brought to America that nearly wiped out Native Americans. Therefore its not unreasonable to think that different populations will have different levels of response to a disease. Perhaps South Koreans were more likely to be exposed to similar enough corona viruses in the past to garner them enough protection this time.
This fallacy is distressingly common. That's not the way logic works. The contention above was that it was impossible to mitigate the spread of covid. I provided an existence proof that it was not. It's not on me to refute every contradicting hypothesis. It's clear that Korea did something right, and people interested in techniques to fight the virus would do best to study those actions instead of make excuses for why it must have been something else.
As far as natural population immunity though: that's just wrong. It's a novel virus (c.f. the initial outbreak in a nearby east asian nation), everyone gets it. Korea has absolutely had rapid outbreaks too (the church group got a ton of press early) that show that covid can spread rapidly there. They just handled it better.
I'm guessing. I don't know. If anyone has actual information, feel free to jump in...
I know there are some standards for recycling air in public buildings such as schools, and air born sickness seems like something they would have to worry about normally, so I would imagine they were pretty prepared for that aspect
I skimmed this but didn't really see much past the actual heat source https://www.cibsejournal.com/general/life-support-keeping-sc...
Bigger issue is getting people to vaccinate especially since long Covid will cost billions in increased insurance premiums and Medicare costs.
This is sort of a half truth. You can still spread it if vaccinated.
There are many groups, doing many different activities. There are plenty of vaccinated people who are done with masking, done with isolation, and going out in public or traveling. While there are also people who caught covid while doing a necessary job before a vaccine was required.
It's false to create only two groups. This completely ignores symmetry, undermining your entire argument of saying I'm ignoring it.
>It's false to create only two groups.
That claim is not even a half-truth...
>This completely ignores symmetry
... and this would not follow even if it were.
[Update moved to a subsequent reply.]
That claim is not even a half-truth."
Would you like to expand on that? There clearly are numerous different groups providing a variety of permutations of risk taking or risk avoiding actions.
">This completely ignores symmetry
... and this would not follow even if it were."
Would you like to explain this too? It appears to me that two artificial groups were formed and then used in a false dichotomy.
I'm not being pedantic. Attacking a large number of people in a heterogeneous, artificial group is disingenuous when a moderate to large number of the people in that group may not even exhibit the risks claimed, while wholly ignoring the risks posed by the "good" group.
Beyond that, it is consistent with every factual claim you have made to say that the population lies on a broad spectrum of how thoroughly they are contributing to ameliorating the impact of this epidemic on the population as a whole. Your own argument is predicated on this spectrum being divisible into two populations. My point is that, wherever you make that divide, one group is helping more than the other.
With regard to your specific questions here:
1) Putting aside the abstruse issue around the axiom of choice (which is not relevant here) one can always create two groups, and in my expanded reply, I made a relevant, non-pedantic case for that.
2) There are more symmetries than dichotomous ones.
Also:
> while wholly ignoring the risks posed by the "good" group.
With words like 'wholly' and 'false', you are making straw man arguments. It is factually accurate and completely reasonable to say that some people are net contributors to public health, while others have the opposite effect.
My argument is that the person who made the division into two groups did so using the wrong line, and even then blamed one group for the damage while absolving the other. This two group divide was poorly defined and should not have been made in the first place.
"With words like 'wholly' and 'false', you are making straw man arguments."
Not at all. 'False' is a perfectly acceptable way to identify a factually incorrect statement. If the person making the argument supports their argument with facts as well as non-subjectively, unambiguously defined definition of the groups, then one could address the individual points. As it stands, they made a blanket statement which is not supported by facts but rather by opinion. Perhaps they could rephrase it to be accurate or add facts to support their claim.
"It is factually accurate and completely reasonable to say that some people are net contributors to public health, while others have the opposite effect."
But it is not factually accurate based on the division made by the original person. Nor was that the claim (net contributors to public health). Nor have I seen facts to support the claim that one group is a net positive and the other is a net negative. If both groups are capable of catching and spreading the virus, then there is no net positive in that context - merely one group is less of a net negative - to what degree would again require better definition of the groups.
At that time, you called it a half-truth. You wrote "You can still spread it if vaccinated", dividing the population into the vaccinated and the rest. You were not arguing then that this particular line is poorly defined, and you have not done so since, even though you have frequently made that claim.
>...and even then blamed one group for the damage while absolving the other. [my emphasis.]
This is straw-manning again: Dhosek did not go that far. This is not as pedantic as it might seem, as any claim that this was implied would depend on the commonsense notions of net benefit that you are trying to argue against.
> Not at all. 'False' is a perfectly acceptable way to identify a factually incorrect statement.
But that is not what you were doing when you introduced 'false' into the discussion.
> But it is not factually accurate based on the division made by the original person.
Suddenly you seem to know exactly what Dhosek meant! Your argument seems to be "I don't know what you mean, but you are wrong."
>If both groups are capable of catching and spreading the virus, then there is no net positive in that context.
This is the crux of your argument, and its downfall. Unless you can show that vaccination, contact tracing, social distancing and mask-wearing have no causal and beneficial effects over the 'null hypothesis' of doing nothing, then it does not follow that they have no net benefit to society, except (or even) if practiced to the maximum and with vaccination providing complete protection. That's what 'net' means in this context (and others)! You would have to put an unjustifiably high weight on any deviation from the ideal situation in order to turn it negative.
I don't even think "covid burden" was the topic, depending on how you define that it could mean the demographics most at risk hospitalization (as overwhelming hospitals seems to have been the concern, and justification for lockdowns). It was only defined as people acting as reservoirs and vectors. This is essentially the entire population given that experts believe catching covid is inevitable, and that the virus can persist after exposure, including in the gut. So the only distinction I can see being made in this context of inevitable infection, reservoirs, and vectors, is vaccine status. Which is not a great dividing line. Basically, my whole point is that in the context of reservoirs and vectors, there's not a reasonable basis for a division into two groups.
As for the argument that everyone will get it eventually: For one thing, the pace matters, the recent shortage of ICU beds is a negative public-health outcome, and the statistics clearly show the benefit of vaccination in this regard (few health issues have better statistical evidence.) This alone shows that there is a reasonable basis for so dividing the population.
When I hear folks say that, I always ask them, "Herpes has a 100% survival rate, does that mean you'd shrug it off as no big deal if someone gave you herpes?".
Nobody is denying that COVID causes problems for some people, the argument is that it doesn't justify forcing everyone to wear masks everywhere, get vaccinated multiple times to do anything in society, get COVID tested anytime one needs to travel (for countries that haven't shut down borders), and force remote learning on children. Maybe it's possible that the side effects from these authoritarian policies don't outweigh the benefits, and disproportionately harm the youth for the benefit of the elderly since COVID is only statistically dangerous for those close to the median age of life expectancy. Perhaps people should be able to vote with their feet.
EDIT: just to add: from what we can see, vaccines help cut down on adverse outcomes due to a covid infection, which is why I'm still pro-vaccine. But many other policies out there are just nonsense.
From what I can tell even the CDCs latest online review, as of Oct 2021, doesn't have any evidence that one is better than the other in terms of antibodi titers [1] In fact the most recent CDC published studies, from this year, have shown naturally induced immunity to be superior to vaccine induced immunity in terms of both illness and death [2]
[1]https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...
[2]https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm?s_cid=mm...
Some of the HK doctors that got infected had some of these long term effects, IIRC.
There's a reason why they don't fuck around in trying to limit the spread over there.