This example (that I suspect you shoe-horned in to rant) undermines, but also fully demonstrates, your entire point because you've just casually and conveniently ignored the reduced risk _to society as a whole_. I.e., those actually vulnerable from getting sick in the first instance, but further still overwhelming the health and welfare services to the detriment of *everybody*.
But also reeks of FY;GM.
I was all for various covid measures, did all the vaccines, didn't travel, practiced social distancing meticulously... to no avail, we caught it 3x by now, all the times through our small kids. At this point its milder/similar than common cold for us, unlike those being hit for the first time.
Looking back, many governments around the world applied ridiculously strict restrictions, which just highlighted how badly incompetent in the best headless chicken form they are in SHTF scenarios. You couldn't travel more than 1km from your home (ie France), you couldn't be out after 6/7/8 pm even if you just want to go for a stroll or run in the forest, alone (which I do a lot). Things like these were completely needless and heavily infringed on common folks basic rights, not even going into the topic of fucking up population physical health massively down the road. Not surprisingly population's overall mental health decreased significantly too.
Forcing education of kids from home is seen as failure of even greater proportions. Not only was the system utterly unprepared in first months, but this form just doesn't work as well as direct physical contact. Kids missing tons of societal development that will never work well in digital form. We should have just put extra care into protecting vulnerable and otherwise move on with our lives. If I would be an old fart and somebody would give me choice of fucking up my grandkids lives for some potential extra safety for me, I would choose my grandkids anytime, everytime.
When we could have handled it ie like Sweden (from what I've heard), without any significant basic rights restrictions, and with resulting covid numbers very much the same. Next winter will show how missing 2 cold/flu seasons will bode for us, I suspect mortality stats will jump through the roof (within these diseases number ranges of course). Diabetes, cardiovascular and mental issues are already up.
And one more point I haven't seen much mentioned - society as a whole completely fucked up its approach to healthcare workers. Yes there were evening claps for few months. While a nice gesture, they won't fix the burnout many had. So anywhere I look, health systems have much less medical personnel, mainly nurses simply left their jobs. The situation ie in France is so bad some big cities have to close emergencies through the weekend (!!!). Some emergency doctors left too. There is no quick fix for this. An example - I've recently spent 4 hours to get 1 blood test done (something taking 15 mins before) - and that is already optimized for timing and location since my wife is a doctor.
This period won't be judged nicely by our descendants.
In the end, US casualties only being ~1 million was actually a positive outcome, things could have been a lot worse even if exactly the same people got sick but they did so even slightly faster. Worse suffering 5+ times as many casualties in 2020 would not have prevented the variants which would happily reinfect people.
There wasn’t any great options, but many of them where far worse.
1) Healthcare is too important for light touch regulation =>
2) Big political fight over regulation =>
3) Competition in healthcare largely disappears =>
4) Oh no something went wrong, now we have to adjust what human rights are available based on how prepared the government is for a rather predictable crisis (COVID wasn't/isn't even the bad-case for a highly contagious respiratory disease).
There are people seriously trying to argue that walking more than single-digit kilometres from a body's home depends on what the government's hospital policy was 5 years ago. In complete seriousness, this is crazy. I thought we'd agreed that basic rights were a thing but it turns out large segments of the population and bureaucrats seriously don't believe that.
And exactly what we got to show for this is questionable. Border controls are the only government tool that I have faith in after that pandemic. Even the vaccine we only managed because people agreed that the usual safety procedures would take to long and that we could skip them because the economic damage caused by fearful people was too great. The governments of the world caused a lot of problems these last few years.
Mary Mallon was forcibly quarantined, let go resulting in 2 additional deaths, and then permanently quarantined in the US because she was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever in the early 1900’s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon The most common versions historically was locking people in their homes or isolating a community from the outside.
As to your complaint, walking outside does carry the risk of infecting others as people demonstrably have gotten COVID from walking past each other. It’s a low risk which why it was generally acceptable, but officials where balancing even this vs more people dying.
If you look at agency budgets you’d think our money would’ve bought a better plan.
The US for example encouraged but didn’t mandate the general public get vaccinated. It’s easy to say that’s the wrong choice, but people would have seriously objected.
I don’t know about the situation in the USA where everything seemed very political and what was done was far less stringent than in my own country but here in France it was pretty obvious that most of the measures were taken haphazardly mostly to placate an ageing population. It was very funny. The media kept blaming the young socialising for cases when it was painfully obvious that most contaminations came from schools.
That parahraph seems to contradict itself. By locking down we slowed down transmission, until treatments and vaccines were available. That is why the effects were so mild for you vs the people who caught it in the earlier waves. How was it to 'no avail', when you state the benefit right afterwards?
The reason we have annual flu shots is because influenza mutates so readily, so it's not like most people have a highly developed immunity to whatever common influenza strain is going around anyway. And fun fact (truly, it's awesome), at least one strain of influenza appears to have gone extinct. It seems possible that your prediction is completely backwards, and that our scattershot headless chicken COVID mitigation policies have managed to permanently improve flu season.
https://www.npr.org/2021/06/03/1003020235/certain-strains-of...
It really, really, isn't.
Hospitals the world over were completely and wholly overwhelmed with patients sick with COVID-19. Lockdowns reduced transmissions, hospitalisations dropped.
That's it. That's all that needs understanding.
Sometimes you have to put on your adult pants, realize you live in a society and not n million individual states of nature, and give up a bit of individual freedom, temporarily, for the safety of the whole.
Because I didn't need to, and no one required me to? Because I didn't believe having to wear a mask, get a vaccine and not being able to eat out at a restaurant was an intolerable violation of my rights, given the alternative?
The alternative being the increased chance of getting COVID and the increased chance of spreading it to others. Not the permanent state of pharmaco-military-industrial complex imposed tyranny the anti-maskers kept insisting we would all inevitably descend into because "when governments take away your rights they never give them back voluntarily." Nope, here I am, not in a globalist labor camp, with all the rights and freedoms I had prior to the pandemic.
Obviously the balance between liberty and safety leads to anarchy on one extreme and authoritarianism on the other, but the question of whether governments can justifiably take temporary measures which interfere with individual liberties in order to mitigate a pandemic outbreak isn't an open one.
And once it sank, we can add few other easily bannable cases (random examples - sugar, no exercise) which will put the number of saved lives in few millions, per every year.
Yet suddenly all those internet warriors who feel righteous and know by heart what needs to be done for society and by society are quiet about these. Nobody is arguing government should force people to exercise, yet school showed us how easily it can be done. It would save more lives than any covid measure ever taken, it will measurably improve people's lives, its quality and happiness, and no adverse effect apart from US HFCS industry.
Where do you draw the line? Certainly elsewhere than I do. But I am not showing that line down your throat and forcing you to live by it, do I. Can you please righteous people like you let people like me take a walk in the forest, alone? Is it really that hard to understand?
This is typical internet discussion for 21st century - few people are very vocal, and they give the impression their voice is consensus. Yet reality is a bit more complex.
This isn't an objective argument.
> Because I didn't need to... Because I didn't believe...
I agree with all the things you mentioned here. However, you failed to mention a myriad of things the government imposed that were, at best, worthless and, at worst, counter-productive. Did you agree with closing beaches/parks? Closing outdoor gatherings is and was known to be anti-science at the time. It had the nice side effect of having people gather indoors because people are social and you won't stop them from gathering.
> The alternative being the increased chance of getting COVID and the increased chance of spreading it to others
Would you be on board with the sealing in of doors as happened in China or is that too much imposition on your freedom? Would you agree with the travel restrictions placed on people in Australia? Both of those instances achieve your goal of reducing your chance of getting and spreading COVID.
There is an entire population of people who have different, subjective, opinions. You're going to have a bad time if you think yours is the _one true opinion_ and fail to tolerate any descent.
You and I seem to be of similar minds in what restrictions are reasonable (and I tolerate a bit more or less because I know I'm not objectively correct). The difference between us is that when some people think the line should be drawn elsewhere, I don't derisively refer to them like this:
> Not the permanent state of pharmaco-military-industrial complex imposed tyranny the anti-maskers kept insisting we would all inevitably descend into because "when governments take away your rights they never give them back voluntarily." Nope, here I am, not in a globalist labor camp, with all the rights and freedoms I had prior to the pandemic.
> but the question of whether governments can justifiably take temporary measures which interfere with individual liberties in order to mitigate a pandemic outbreak isn't an open one.
And (nearly) nobody thinks it is because that's the easy question. The hard question is always how much and you've done a masterful job of acting like people who have a different answer to the hard question instead have a different answer to the easy question thereby making your disdain of them justified.
This sounds a lot like "we should ignore warnings about pollution because the cost of moving away from fossil fuels would be too expensive," actually.
Picking such an open-ended thing like this really undermines your point here. You want people's Covid-prompted behaviors (exaggerated into stuff like "two years mostly staying home, gaining 50 pounds") to be compared to "fear of nuclear meltdown." But you can't substantiate those long-term risks in anything like the same way we can those of burning coal at this point. Is Covid more "potentially unrecoverable" for kids and young adults than themselves or family members being drafted for a world war and dying en masse? Than school shootings that we tolerate for vague "protect our liberty" talk?
Sure, I think it's reasonable to expect people to provide sources to support ideas when possible, but it's a little unreasonable to expect people to do extensive first-party research to support their opinions.
I think there's value in the discussion either way. Most of the time I don't think we're going to change people's minds with this sort of discussion, but I do enjoy seeing what people's positions are on these sorts of topics, and find that I learn things from it.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/7/5/heres-why-we-re...
"Cowardice"? From an old version of the Wikipedia article, "Fear and excessive self-concern lead one to not do things of benefit to oneself and one's group" [0]
It's funny because I was actually able to lose 50 pounds by establishing an exercise routine at home.
I understand your argument but it doesn't work for COVID: if anything lockdowns gives people more time to exercise instead of commuting via car.
It's kind of fair enough to be afraid with a chances of meltdown projected at 1/3704 reactor years:
https://lemielleux.com/what-are-the-chances-of-a-nuclear-pow...
Those odds are why not a single insurance company will insure a nuclear reactor for more than 0.3% the cost of a nuclear disaster.
Speaking of fallacies, your argument squarely falls under the false dilemma fallacy. Nuclear is not the only form of green energy. In fact it is by far the most expensive one as well as the only one that imparts a small chance of catastrophe.
It isnt needed to provide reliable power either. Wind, solar, pumped storage, batteries and demand shaping can, together, do it cheaper:
https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/3539703-no-mi...
https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/anu-finds-530000-potent...
That is for existing reactors. The point of new designs is to do better:
"The likelihood of core damage due to NuScale reactor equipment failures while at full power conditions is 1 event per module every ~3 Billion Years."
https://www.nuscalepower.com/benefits/safety-features/emerge...
Otherwise it's all talk. Manufacturers will always claim on that their product is 99.9% safe.
The closest realistic measure is how much financial liability their insurer is willing to shoulder and at what cost.
Which is still capped at 0.03% of 1 fukushima in the US because the government thinks pushing it any higher would spook them.
One could argue that certain features of covid make it riskier with regard to long-term effects, but that is not a proposition that is well developed in the public conversation, especially by proponents of the zoonosis hypothesis. The lab origin hypothesis with its accompanying assumptions of serial passage and direct gene modification would in my eyes strengthen the case that covid's long-term effects were less likely to conform to historical data on other viral infections, though interestingly the intersection of those who find the lab origin more convincing with those who have serious concerns about long-term harms is a pretty small set.
Yes. The distinguishing factor there is that most new strains do not kill millions of people within the first year or two of discovery. Compare, for example, the H1N1 variant that caused the 2009 flu pandemic, which killed "only" around 300,000 people (based on best excess death estimates).
> One could argue that certain features of covid make it riskier with regard to long-term effects, but that is not a proposition that is well developed in the public conversation, especially by proponents of the zoonosis hypothesis.
This has long been an established part of the messaging: we're more or less confident that short term effects to young, otherwise healthy individuals are minor. The guidance has still been to avoid infection, because we're not confident that mild short term guarantee or protect against serious long term effects. Chickenpox (and subsequently shingles) exemplify this.
I understand the intuition that a non-zoonotic origin would lend credence to the possibility of long term risks, but I don't think the epidemiology actually supports the intuition: my understanding is that viruses that jump the species gap tend to have higher variability in terms of their harm to the new species.
that trillion estimate, one of the lower ones by the way, is a cost figure without the associated profits and revenue. As horrible as it is and was, the 'military industrial complex', as a whole, profited incredibly -- this 'trickled down', a phrase I hate to use , all across the United States in the form of jobs from market players and call-for-bids across the nation to fill in niche topics (like airport security, for example) that were otherwise un-worked beforehand.
Another aside : the proof that airport security has changed anything for the better is scant at best, and corrupt at worst.
tl;dr : if you think any of the wars in the middle east were fought for the sake of 'American Safety', whatever that might be, then you're just not paying enough attention.
What you end up with after spending that trillion is a bit different though.
That's an article of conservative dogma dating from the Reagan and Bush eras, and it's pretty-much discredited now. For most major capital expenditure programmes, the majority of the money trickling down stops trickling once it reaches shareholders and executives.
We’re talking about the guy who managed to tank the worlds healthiest budget
https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2012/07/23/super...
Why replace one type of antiscience/antiintelectualism (anti nuclear people) with another (antivax)?
People aren't black and white in their beliefs, despite what the political duopoly would like you to believe.
Good thing nuclear doesn't produce hazardous waste we need to store safely for thousands of years. That would be a pretty horrible, long term risk.
But OTOH who gives a fsck about generations to come, storing the waste safely while I'm still alive should be doable.
As in literally dig a hole the size of an Olympic swimming pool, store literally all the nuclear waste that has ever been produced (maybe you’ll need a few pools, I haven’t checked), and spend a few million a year maintaining it for the next century or so.
It's situations where the emotional terror of acute risks forces you to default to a behavior that has less tractable, long term, systemic risks. Mitigating the acute risks is too expensive, so instead, you accept being the frog boiled alive because long term risks are harder to quantify and more nebulously terrifying. You're terrified of a nuclear meltdown, so instead you subject global civilization to decades of unnecessary fossil fuel burning. A nuclear meltdown that kills hundreds or thousands is terrifying, but coal burning that quietly kills millions from air pollution is silent.
Other examples...
* When you're terrified of Covid, so you suspend most of your activities and spend two years mostly staying home, gaining 50 pounds and decimating your fitness which drastically increases your risk of cardiovascular disease and overall significantly increasing your likelihood of dying young far in excess of the acute risk that Covid actually posed to your demographic.
* When we're so scared as a society of the Covid death spike that we stunt the social and educational development of children by years, which is potentially unrecoverable.
* When a small group of religious radicals kill 3000 people in a fantastical way, so you set yourself on a trillion dollar war to lose thousands more of your young people to combat deaths and directly and indirectly kill hundreds of thousands of poor foreigners, coming away not practically any safer than the basic changes to airline security policies would have done for a fraction of the dollar and human life costs.