There's no way a collective can stay on alert for years.
My reaction was "well deaths are way down" but then I looked and we recently had a spike of deaths as big or larger than the initial wave.
So I think - if I'm being honest - it's as much a crisis as it ever was, we're just finding a way to live with it, no pun intended.
Part of the "crisis" feeling of the first wave was the unknown (and likely much higher) death count that could arrive if we didn't take action.
Now, though, you can have had up to four shots of vaccine and years of learning various mitigation efforts (masks, distancing, etc).
The risk profiles are totally different because of greater tools and information.
I remember when the only N95s you could get were counterfeit masks selling for $50 a mask.
1) Improved immunity (vax and/or recovery)
2) Improved treatment
3) Virus evolution
What else could it be (not rhetorical)?
As of a month ago, about 99% of their population has Covid antibodies. I doubt things are very different here.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
Maybe. To me 800-1,000/day was in itself a crisis and pretty frightening. The fact that we didn't get to 2,000+/day is ... better? but in the moment of April 2020 there was plenty of imminent fear versus fear of worsening.
In fact, per the CDC Feb 1, 2022 was the deadliest single day, but if you went out into the world that day versus Feb 1, 2021, you'd experience two vastly different things.
The point isn’t to argue about who’s counter-factual is right or wrong, it’s impossible to say.
At this point everyone has taken a position as to whether the “mitigations” were ethical, legal, effective, or not. There’s no point discussing it anymore unless or until people in power try to re-impose them.
For USA though the excess deaths number is 17% so that model doesn't make sense at all. How many young people are dying from Covid in USA?
A significant proportion of people in the USA have problems with their blood sugar levels. North Americans eat too much, eat the wrong foods and don't exercise. They tend to suffer from blood-sugar disorders (which then cause cancer and, well, everything).
Blood-sugar disorders are so varied in their symptoms as to exhaust listing here. People so affected are best described metaphorically as "human shipwrecks". New York Times had an excellent series on diabetes years ago:
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/09/nyregion/nyregionspecial5...
Skip to the section "Shortages and Shipwrecks", read it and weep: this was years before Covid and we had an epidemic that nobody was paying attention to. Covid is leaving and we still have a diabetes epidemic.
https://reason.com/2022/01/03/cdc-covid-19-children-hospital...
I'm not even making a claim re: death rate, I'm taking GP's word for it.
I’m outside the DC halo, so I’m not sure what it’s like in MoCo. But here in Biden/Hogan country COVID is over. Even in the most progressive-leaning spaces which had been extremely careful with masking throughout the pandemic (school, church).
I think you're right. The phrase new normal has been batted around a lot since the pandemic began. Often it was used by people thinking masking and social distancing were going to be the new standard for being in public but now it's about living with the disease and accepting that hundreds of deaths every day is now normal.
I read somewhere that the definition of a pandemic being over is not when it's not dangerous anymore, it's when it stops being unpredictable.
Your initial reaction was correct, national deaths (and hospitalizations) are way down (https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home). There may be localities that are near crisis, but this is a national poll.
The peak in February was the second worst in three Feb/Mar of the pandemic and had the highest single-day death count.
https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
One thing we need to step away from is this framing that there are "sides" to be on. Allowing for there to be these separate "sides" just invites conflict and allows people the opportunity to create an identity around something they have no business having an identity about. There are people who are anti-vax now (and weren't before) for example, but that's not a "side" anymore than being for or against bandaids would make sense to have "sides". Framing this as though there are sides also has the effect of legitimizing indefensible things, like being anti-vax.
As an example, are there two sides to the flat earth debate? If you say yes, then you're admitting that people who think the earth is flat have an equal standing with someone who knows that the earth is round. But these do not have equal standing, so it shouldn't be legitimized as a "debate" where there are "sides". Something like private versus public (to oversimplify) healthcare is worthy of two sides and a debate. Broadly speaking there are two defensible and respectable opinions.
No, that's not true. One can acknowledge the existence of two sides while still maintaining that one of those two sides is entirely without merit.
And in fact it is essential to do this because history shows that simply denying the existence of people with crazy points of view does not make them go away, and in fact often increases their power and influence, ironically, because the denial of their existence is actually evidence that their conspiracy theories are correct, that they are in fact the victims of prejudice.
Flat earth is an interesting case in point. It is actually quite challenging to show that the earth is round in a way that does not require you to take anyone's word for anything.
There's a Netflix documentary called Behind the Curve (2018). There's a guy who keeps running these experiments to prove the earth is flat. But keeps inadvertently proving that its round!
Perhaps if you live nowhere near an ocean and have no trees from which to hang a pendulum and can't afford a rangefinder for lining up two boards with holes in them.
I think you will also be surprised how hard it is to fill in the details of the experiments you are alluding to.
Also, ships do not always sink below the horizon. The right atmospheric conditions can refract the light in a way that causes them to be visible at a much greater distance than the straight geometry would allow. But this explanation can be inverted to claim that it is the vanishing that is due to atmospheric effects and that the non-vanishing ship is the accurate reflection of the geometry. Falsifying that hypothesis is, again, not so easy.
(Presumably this is also true at sunrise, so the day is longer than it "should" be from purely geometric considerations.)
Two sides/devil's advocate is the basis of philosophy, thought, learning, etc. To claim otherwise is to demand blind obedience to authority.
> As an example, are there two sides to the flat earth debate? If you say yes, then you're admitting that people who think the earth is flat have an equal standing with someone who knows that the earth is round.
Nobody is saying they are on equal footing. They have a right to their opinions. But the facts are what matters.
800 years ago, you'd be demanding everyone believe the earth is the center of the universe and that anyone who says otherwise is a heretic. You'd be saying we shouldn't legitimize indefensible things like heliocentrism. In my opinion, the side that is trying to stifle debate/opinions/etc is the wrong side. If someone says they are a flat earther, just show them a video of the earth.
Do you realize that just a few decades ago, the idea of vaccination was viewed as indefensible and anti-science? Much of the scientific community viewed vaccine advocates as charlatans. After all, you'd have to be a lunatic to infect yourself with disease right? Almost everything you hold dear and absolutely true today were once "indefensible things". Including almost everything medical and scientific.
Instead of trying to stifle debate, just bring facts with you and you'll be fine. Nothing is gained by zealotry.
You have a right to an opinion. I have a right to dismiss that opinion off-hand like I would dismiss someone saying the earth is flat. Would you host a debate with someone at a university about whether or not the earth is flat? If I went to a Python conference and have a lecture on how strings in Python work which were completely contrary to how the language operates would you suggest that this is a matter of two sides, or that it's the basis of philosophy and learning? I don't think so.
Everything you deem to be wrong? " Allowing for there to be these separate "sides"... "
> It's settled science.
Everything is "settled science" until it isn't. Like the earth being the center of the universe. Like newtonian physics. Like einsteinian physics. Etc. It was settle science that Lamarckianism was scientific charlatanism until epigenetics.
> You have a right to an opinion. I have a right to dismiss that opinion off-hand
We are agreed. Except you don't want to even allow others their opinions.
> If I went to a Python conference
Someone once compared python to a tricycle.
> or that it's the basis of philosophy and learning? I don't think so.
Then you don't know philosophy, science and most importantly the history of science/philosophy. Why is it that the people with the least knowledge/wisdom/etc are the most sure about things they know nothing about?
As I said, if you run into a flat earther, just show them a video of the earth. Or don't waste your time with them. Who do you think you are to say whether they should be "allowed or not" to have their opinion or say?
You sound like you care very much. I've known many zealots who want everyone to adopt their orthodoxy.
> I care when they have a megaphone and they're convincing other people of their reality and that leads those people to their own early death.
Every preacher, pope, cult leader and zealot of all kinds says the same thing. They want "heresy" silenced in order to save souls. How noble and virtuous. Ever consider that people have their own agency? Ever consider whether you are in the wrong?
What happens if someone says the earth is flat on a megaphone? They get laughed at. As long as you have the facts and data, what are you so afraid of?
It never works because it's not symmetric, you want your enemies to shut up but not you, this is because you see yourself as the correct side, which might be either true or false, but the sure thing is that your enemies beg to disagree. The only thing that will make it work is brute force, but other than that it's just another way to say to your enemies "Just admit you're wrong and go to your room".
Let me put it another way. What if you had a family member who had cancer and I wrote a bunch of stuff and ran Facebook ads that they read that convinced them to not get very likely life-saving treatment with no downsides to them. All good then yea? You won't be mad or suggest maybe I stop doing that?
This assertion encodes a worldview within it, one that is not shared among a lot (most ?) of religious people, especially in the Middle East. Religious people often assign very high weights to the fact that their religion isn't respected/believed in, and the resulting moral value can be compared with, and often exceeds, material damage to lives and property in their eyes. So the very act of saying "What one does in one's bedroom is none of your business" is itself a topic of intense disagreements. I say this as a closeted atheist in said society who have tried a number of times to play "Devil's Advocate" to atheism and gay rights in my social circles : if only it was as easy as saying "but they don't harm anyone!" and getting people to agree on that.
There are actually analogs to this in western societies (and in every other society I have heard of). Ironically, it's usually the dual to what happens in my soceity : very high sensitivity to anti-lgbt opinions, although the same applies, being anti-lgbt in the abstract doesn't actually harm anyone. Another example is holocaust denial, how does it actually harm anyone ? I don't see an obvious way, a popular stance goes something like "If we allowed people to deny the holocaust, people would percieve it as less serious and it might happen again", but this is overly simplistic and selective, people deny and underplay countless historical atrocities (e.g. the 20th anti- and pro- communism conflicts in Asia,Africa,and South America) and that doesn't automatically make them more likely to happen.
So every society has certain taboos and red lines that you are not allowed to speak against in public (although doing so wouldn't concretely harm anyone), and problems happen when 2 social groups who have different ideas of what should be taboo interact together.
>that convinced them to not get very likely life-saving treatment with no downsides to them
I have several comments on this:
- Cancer and Covid are not comparable in damage, Cancer is uniformly deadly, Covid only so for very specific subsets of the population.
- Cancer is not viral, so whatever happens in the end it will only affect that specific family member and my family, but with Covid you have to balance people's freedom with the threat they pose to the rest of the populations.
Overall, I agree in the abstract that free speech should be restricted in critical expertise-related subject matters, like medical and engineering matters, but the particular case of Covid discourse is such a disaster. Governments and public institutions consistently lied or made up things out of thin air, authoritarians hid behind "The Science^TM" to advance authoritarian solutions to what could be equally solved with voluntary incentive-setting, and overall "The Science^TM" camp just consistently shout louder and assume bad faith more than the reverse. The actual factual subject matter itself is far from settled and much much blurrier than - say - the question of "Does vaccines cause autism", the virus constantly mutates and wipes the floor with the efficiency of the vaccines, lockdown measures are often disastrous and impact far more people negatively than the virus. But there is a certain type of people who will treat the virus as an ultimate demon, to be exorcised at all costs, and they ridicule anyone disagreeing with them as "Science Deniers^TM", and this just becomes exhausting after a while.
There is a ton we don't know about it.
This is despite spending decades and hundreds of billions of dollars on public health.
You remember the public health folk. When they ask for money, they say how it's needed so we're ready for the next spanish flu.
Indications of covid being airborne were available very early on, particularly as its genetic predecessor "OG Covid" / SARS-CoV-1 was also known to be airborne.
The problem was politicians who feared a run on masks and thus refused to follow science. On the other hand, the increased hygienic measures - particularly regular hand washing and disinfection - contributed to the eradication of at least one flu strain and prevented the spread of countless other infectious agents, leading to a reduction of load on the hospital systems, so it was not entirely pointless (and in fact should be kept even when the pandemic condition ends).
There is a reason we don't approve vaccines on an ad hoc basis in normal times. It's an emergency so you gotta take some risks. But trying to shut down dissent with THE SCIENCE IS SETTTLED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! is bullshit.
What is the exact scientific criteria where it'll be settled enough for you to take a vaccine?
Physical motion is fundamentally relative and there is nothing in the laws of physics that says you can’t construct a frame of reference in which everything else moves relative to the Earth. Heliocentrism is certainly easier to reason about and much simpler, but it’s no more true in any fundamental sense.
You'll in fact find that it is not Vax/Anti-Vax but: 1. a group that needs the comforting reassurance of authority for security vs. 2. a group who regard their autonomy as paramount and see no need to have arbitrary rules forced on them.
Also, you apparently have no idea what "arbitrary" means.
Ah, right. They were just highly intelligent people "following the science". Not at all obsessed with stoking fear so they could seize control and consolidate power:
And I assume you say this when someone is getting surgery, buys ibuprofen, or gets a splint as well?
> a group who regard their autonomy as paramount and see no need to have arbitrary rules forced on them
In the specific context of vaccines at least in America, nobody is forcing anyone to take a vaccine so the position wouldn't make any sense. Maybe you want to clarify what you mean here?
As an aside, this idea of autonomy here is a psychological reflex to control something about a situation that you have absolutely no control over. But it's really just an illusion. They're not more autonomous than anyone else is. A vaccine wouldn't make a difference in your autonomy, and in a really bad pandemic ala The Stand (Stephen King novel) you'd be forced at gunpoint to take a vaccine and you'd happily comply. It's all just lifestyle and cosplay at this point.
Employers, en masse, are forcing it as a condition of employment.
I do agree with some of these employer mandates, e.g. airlines, because they increase connectivity and thus spread. Not so much with some others, e.g. clerical stay at home workers.
It may be difficult for some to accept, but we as individuals have essentially total control over our own health and COVID was no exception.
Essentially all serious COVID cases had multiple LIFESTYLE-casued comorbidities. The most prevalent: obesity.
Comorbidities increase your risk or "serious COVID", just like being unvaccinated does. But that still doesn't satisfy anything. Comorbidities increase your risk, getting vaccinated decreases your risk substantially, so if you want to blame this "well only fat people get it", well sure. Most people are fat, therefore they should get the vaccine since you can do that in a very short period of time whereas weight loss takes a while and you may have other comorbidities that you can't actually control or change at all.
But aside from these asinine "fat positive" movements (which are very similar in pathology IMO to COVID deniers) nobody is out there advocating for people to ignore their weight and that drinking milkshakes just might not be bad for your heart. Next thing you know of course drinking milkshakes and eating burgers are ok. The government just wants to control what you eat!1!
It's the exact same kind of nonsense.
I think it's easy to confuse the two major covid conflicts as one. The first, more obvious and dumber conflict is the "covid is fake/nothing!" idiots. That's the conflict you're mainly addressing. The second, less one-sided conflict is whether our anti-covid measures have a good return-on-investment vs less-stringent measures. Covid deaths and government anti-covid efforts seem to be less closely coupled than is intuitive. For example, comparing Sweden, a country with very lax covid mandates, to countries with stronger mandates. They came off much worse than Finland, but better than the UK, comparable to Germany, and much better than the United States.
I agree completely that there is further study to be done on lockdowns and other efforts that were undertaken. For example, I'm monitoring this and we'll see, but perhaps China's COVID 0 lockdown strategy wasn't the right one compared, to, say, the US strategy. There's much to say about how historic human efforts to contain disease (we've always done lockdowns) may be or may not be effective with 8 billion globalized people.
But even in this case I don't think we need "sides". We need analysis. Sides create tribalism and suboptimal outcomes I think in this case.
In all honesty your attitude creates a lot of the problems you describe.
It’s a free country if people don’t want to be vaxxed they can take their chances with the 99.9% survival rate for those under 50. Or the lower survival rate if they are over 50.
Can you name a single person in America who has been held down against their will and administered a vaccine? Can you name multiple, coordinated instances of this happening? Can you point to a lawsuit?
If not, you should stop repeating this.
> In all honesty your attitude creates a lot of the problems you describe.
I used to think that too but ultimately what you have is a group that cannot be reasoned with ala flat-earth proponents and no amount of information, debate, or reason would change their mind because the point isn't to understand, it's to create a lifestyle and culture. It's like a religion. The only thing that's left to be important here is to combat disinformation by bad actors and prevent further corrosion of civilization.
You aren't arguing in good faith. "No, we aren't banning gay marriage, we just implemented a federal regulation that forces employers to fire anyone who is gay married. It's their choice!"
I'm not even against vaccine mandates (at least I did when the vaccines worked), but come on, admit what you are actually supporting here.
I can definitely be reasoned with and reason with the unvaccinated all the time.
I opened my home in contravention of the mandates to throw parties and have unvaccinated people a place to socialize and people found my point of view to be in line with theirs. Namely that vaccines work but for them they would prefer the risk of getting Covid to getting vaccinated.
It may surprise you but many people can be talked to and turn out to have points of view vastly different than what you read on the news / see on social media.
I was reluctant to even respond to your comment, lest I legitimize sophistry. There aren't really two sides to it, you're openly calling for playing language games.
I can't even...
Most people I think just want to return to "normal". We live in a new normal, but we can't live in crisis forever. I don't think that is necessarily apathy it is adapting.
It has been longer than two years. Prior to the pandemic we were subject to a wave of blatantly divisive rhetoric that seemed intent on driving us to civil war. The 'post-truth' era hit us hard for years before COVID-19 showed up and became just another weapon toward that end.
Yeah, we're tired of it. It is difficult to care anymore, honestly. A lot of Americans are going to die, a lot of them are going to be economically ruined, everything that made this country worth anything is going to be dismantled by fascism and plutocracy, and you know what? I think we've earned it.
more like 8 years aka. the ramping up of identity politics and other cultural marxist shenanigans
The measures were always driven by polling numbers and political sentiment alone. Many of the measures had absolutely no basis in science (wearing a mask in a restaurant then sitting down and taking it off is pure political ideology with zero basis in scientific reality).
Both claims were made, without any evidence, by commenters on HN.
I really wish people would be much more cautious in their pronouncements.
Especially if they have zero expertise in the relevant fields.
Risk decreases significantly with distance, but I’ve found zero scientific evidence that 6 feet is somehow better or fits some set of trade offs better than other numbers (10? 4? 30?).
There has been a lot of cargo cultish behavior, and just dumbness too - like how we got stuck on cloth masks when we could all just be sent properly rated respirators at this point for less (that would be more comfortable AND actually work!) is beyond my ability to comprehend.
I get similarly tired when I watch my non-technical friends on FB make pronouncements about technology.
If someone says "I believe X" or "I don't believe Y," or "I saw an article about X which convinced me," that's great.
But please, don't don the mantle of expertise and make pronouncements, especially in areas you have no understanding of. It's exhausting.
I don't think you should be "exhausted" by people making claims on the internet. Just insert the words "I think" in front of any comment that does not already include that, because that is what every comment already means.
There are no retractions. There are no apologies.
There's no value.
Making claims without evidence, especially pretending you have expertise when you do so, decreases the signal to noise ratio on HN.
And yes, it's exhausting to watch. I wish we would hold each other to a higher standard.
>And yes, it's exhausting to watch. I wish we would hold each other to a higher standard.
Fair enough; I guess I'm just not as bothered by the misinformation (which seems to be synonymous with "information that's inconvenient to some authority") boogeyman as you are. When I see a claim online that I find interesting I will usually do a bit of research into the topic on my own. If I discover that the comment was incorrect, I may go back and downvote it, but I've still learned something, even though the original claim was wrong. If we had it your way, and no one without a PhD in a field was allowed to talk about things in that field, or every reply to every comment was "do you have a source for that?" with nothing else, this would be a pretty boring place!
Don't you ever see a comment that you just know is wrong but wonder "how could anyone believe this?" I watched a couple flat earth videos once because I just didn't get it. Of course, it becomes pretty obvious it's complete nonsense after just a few minutes, but at least now I have the ability to say "you are wrong, and here's why" in my own words.
I think a big issue with public discourse is that so many people never ever even try to imagine the reasoning behind a viewpoint with which they disagree. Without that understanding, I don't believe you can really convince anyone of anything, because all you can do is tell them they're wrong and point to some authority, which doesn't seem to work.
Please try to understand me when I say, if someone says "I don't think X is true," that's very different to me than saying "There's no scientific basis for X to be true."
I'm not saying people shouldn't talk about their beliefs.
I'm sick of people pretending they know what they're talking about, donning the mantle of an expert, and making a proclamation about whether something is even possible.
> people never ever even try to imagine
I'm complaining about people who are trying to shut down all conversation. Not "I don't believe in X," but rather "there's no scientific basis for X."
They're saying, "If you claim X, I know for certain you did not follow any scientific process to make that claim."
They're saying, "Every reasonable person should reject any evidence of X, because it cannot be a scientific claim."
They're doing what you accuse me of.
One thing that covid-19 has shown is that the public health community hasn't bothered to work on flu since the 1940s, even though it kills 35-75k Americans a year and has so for decades if not longer.
You remember the flu. It's an essential part of the "you have to give us lots of money so we're ready for something like the Spanish flu" and yet, when covid-19/sars2 came long (a couple of years after sars1), "we" didn't know anything useful about coronavirus transmission.
One of the "Spanish Flu" stories told by the public health community is that one of the major outbreaks happened when a city had a parade to celebrate "beating" the flu. So, guess what the public health community said was a good thing during height of the pandemic. (To be fair, only the parades and demonstrations that the PHC liked were safe.)
Of course, the public health community's first instinct is to lie. They started with "masks aren't necessary for ordinary people" and then pivoted even though there was no new data either way. (And there's also the whole "vaccines can't be delivered in a year" thing.)
Note that the pre-Covid recommendation from WHO was no masks and no general lockdowns, but instead, "protect vulnerable subpopulations", which we knew at the beginning. Contrast that with what the public health community talked about. And no, there wasn't new data.
In my midsize town, with a 600 bed hospital, people (staff, patients, etc) were walking through the ER, and stealing whole boxes of N95 masks off of shelves. The hospital had to move them all to locked cabinets along with the addictive painkillers. They were almost completely out, and not able to get any more.
There were literally states/hospitals organizing a purchase (at insane prices) only to have the feds come and seize the masks and end up with nothing.
That's because the public health community has been incompetent at best and typically self-defeating at messaging for decades.
Unfortunately, pretty much everything other than self-evident statements out of the public health community has been good reason to think that the exact opposite is the right response. In this case, "don't panic" was best interpreted as "things are likely to go south, so urgent action is probably a good idea".
"hey, don't hoard masks, we don't have enough for medical personnel" would have been more effective.
As to the feds seizing masks, that was mostly the public health community doing the seizing.
0xy say many measures were essentially nonsensical and non-scientific, and then gave a perfect example of restaurant masking which is perhaps the pinnacle of COVID absurdity.
Wearing masks outdoors is another great example of something where the science was unequivocal, and yet the politicians persisted.
Non-N95 masks being worn improperly (which is essentially all of non-professional masking) was even declared by the CDC as ineffective so I think it’s safe to say the mitigations were not only deeply unpopular but also unscientific.
I'm honestly curious what you think the word "politicized" means.
Politicized: "(of an activity or event) made political in character."
Political: "relating to the government or the public affairs of a country."
So, to be clear, you think it's a problem that "authorities" have made assertions about the public affairs of a country?
I get that you think they've been utterly clueless, and if that's true, of course I think that's a problem.
But I'm focusing on the second part of what seemed to bother you. That, people with authority, have made assertions about how public affairs should be handled? That's a problem, to you?
What would have been better, in your mind?
You come into restaurant and wear that mask for 10 min and then you sit for an hour without mask. Sorry one does not have to be an "expert in the field" to see through this bullshit.
>"And now here we are, learning more about Long Covid every day."
Totally irrelevant to particular case
Or we could analyze past data, to see if counties where people worse masks in the lobby of restaurants had lower transmission of Covid than counties where they didn't?
If I go into a crowded restaurant and wait for 30 minutes for my table, I come within about 6 feet of about 30 people. When I sit at my table for an hour, I come within about 6 feet of about 3 people (server, and the person who brings drinks, and the person who brings food.) Especially if there are dividers between tables.
I'm not claiming wearing a mask in the lobby reduces transmission to zero. But I can easily imagine how it reduces transmission some.
And yet, others are claiming that no one could possibly imagine how wearing masks in the lobby of a restaurant could possibly reduce transmission.
You and I can talk about whether we believe wearing masks in the lobby reduces transmission.
I'm tired of people claiming there's "no scientific basis" (or something similar) for masks helping, or for there to be long-term implications of Covid, or anything else, really - especially when they're not an expert.
I do not remember ever waiting for 30 min in the lobby with 30 people. But I guess I just do not visit places where I have to waste so much time.