8 ms·
Would be a fitting end to 2020; super COVID released from ancient arctic ice.
by Method-X 6y ago
Would be a fitting end to 2020; super COVID released from ancient arctic ice.
- randycupertino 6y agoPerhaps we'll do better for the "next" pandemic now that we have the infrastructure in place and learned some lessons from COVID? Maybe I'm grasping for silver linings and being too optimistic towards humanity...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ggambetta 6y agoOne of the lessons that I've learned from this pandemic is that despite overwhelming evidence and over a million deaths, there's a non-trivial amount of people who still believe it's not real, or who refuse to wear a mask, or who protest against the few, mild, reasonable measures we can take to get through this alive. So if anything, my faith in humankind has gone down :(
- franklampard 6y agoonly in the U.S.
- quickthrowman 6y agoIncorrect: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_over_responses_to_the_COVID-19_pandemic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_over_responses_to_t...
- bearburger 6y agoUnfortunately I see these peoples around in Russia. My estimation of anti-maskers is about 10-15% of population here. Mostly 35-55 males who thinks that wearing a mask is the sign of weakness and/or keeps saying that COVID is "just a flu" and those who died would have been dead anyway in 2-3 month if not from COVID then from something like common cold. Even recent death of 28 y/o school teacher and 23 y/o political activist didn't change their mind.
- ethbr0 6y agoSARS-CoV-2 is pretty perfectly calibrated to hide in people's inability to comprehend statistics and probability. High transmission rate + (relatively) low complication / death rate = ideal conspiracy fodder
- voqv 6y agoPictures of the September Moscow marathon make me think even the government are some kind of anti-maskers
- trhway 6y agoa good mask will help when you're occasionally visiting an infectious patient in a hospital. There is nothing, short of full bio-defense suit, that can help in the densely packed Moscow (or any other large Russian city) subway or bus, and the people in the country have no resources for any prolonged lockdowns. Add to that that the top people in Russia, like in any other country, receive highly personalized healthcare, and that means that they have practically no risk of death from Covid as it is a very treatable given enough resources (antibody injection, etc. under very personalized treatment resulting in just few days of "bad flu" - i.e. while infection-wise Covid doesn't distinguish much, outcome-wise it is very socially unequal decease).
- strogonoff 6y ago> There is nothing, short of full bio-defense suit, that can help in the densely packed Moscow (or any other large Russian city) subway or bus A mask is very effective and is worn for others, not yourself. At any point in time you might be carrying asymptomatic or not-yet-symptomatic COVID. Your mask prevents your saliva from flying in the air around you, protecting people near you and their parents/susceptible relatives this might get passed on to. And if it’s against your interest when emergency healthcare can’t help your sick child because they have not enough resources due to COVID patients, then over long term wearing a mask is actually for yourself, too.
- 6y ago
- jbay808 6y agoCertainly happening in Canada too, even though COVID has basically been treated by the government and opposition parties as a non-partisan issue, federally and in every province, as far as I'm aware.
- gastroturf 6y agoThe brain is part of the immune system.
- xellisx 6y agoThis was apparently learned in 1918 also.
- netsharc 6y agoFefe (a prominent German Internet commentator) posted a user's email yesterday which shows 3 perspectives I really haven't given much thought to. The Google translation is pretty good, one big mistake though, it mistranslated "Asi-Kindern" as "Asian children" instead of "asocial kids": https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.fefe.de%2F%3Fts%3Da14969db https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%... . And Case 1 is someone who builds booths for conventions. A lot of people are going through the "denial" phase of grief and loss, although I wonder if this is valid for the people who showed up with guns at state capitols...
- ativzzz 6y agoThese perspectives make a lot of sense. The livelihoods of people who depend on non-pandemic circumstances are either destroyed or are on death's door. It's a lot easier for us working jobs that are easy to transition to remote and are mildly inconvenienced by the pandemic. Hopelessness, stress and uncertainty all take huge mental tolls on us, and rejecting covid can help these people cope with this malaise.
- rdiddly 6y agoThat sounds more like the anger phase. Or maybe bargaining, ha!
- bnt 6y agoWe can no longer use the phrase “avoid like the plague” because, well, COVID-19 deniers.
- irrational 6y agoThe fact that people can be literally dying from COVID in a hospital yet still deny its existence has almost totally destroyed any faith I have in humanity.
- puranjay 6y agoIt's a strangely western phenomenon. People might be callous about safety measures here in India, but absolutely no one in my extended circle of friends and family has ever denied its existence or that it's something people need to be careful about.
- seventhtiger 6y agoGlobally there's far more trust for institutions and authority than in America. Cultures which respect the elderly, the professional, and the official. Even beyond respect it extends to obedience in some places. I definitely see it in my own culture, which is Arab. It's a double edged sword, and can be said to enable further oppression, but in a crisis situation it's useful.
- SoSoRoCoCo 6y agohttps://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/11/17/south-dakota-nurse-jodi-doering-covid-19-patients-denial/6330791002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/11/17/south-...
- Barrin92 6y agogood friend of mine is a nurse. She has seen people in the ER with Covid deny that it exists too. There's people currently on oxygen who go "nah that doesn't exist I don't have it, the media made that up". So yeah
- ethbr0 6y agoThankfully, life has a way of selecting against people who fail to act to preserve their own. (Said as someone whose fiance is an ICU nurse)
- x87678r 6y agoElon Musk is one person who is one person who thinks the restrictions are too strict. So maybe it is sensible for younger people to keep working and living near to normal.
- jaynetics 6y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
- saiya-jin 6y agoMusk is a brilliant guy in many things, but psychotic weirdo in many others. Glad we have him, but no way he should be a model role to young folks who often can't cherry-pick the good aspects of character from flawed and dangerous ones, and rather think in absolutes.
- Kye 6y agoElon Musk is on track to become the Martian John McAfee.
- cyberlurker 6y agoI totally agree on Musk, but I think you could say similar things about many “role models”. We’re just going to need to teach young folks that people are complex. In situations like these I think about how Dave Chappelle speaks of Bill Cosby.
- hef19898 6y agoSince this thing started, I re-read various publications about the black death. And the social reactions are so strikingly similar.
- est31 6y agoDo you have a list? I'm interested. I was surprised that even in 2020 you have people making up straight lies about covid, while I believed that the wild theories that people had about the plague back in the day (e.g. the one that blamed the jews for it) were born from the fact that these people haven't went to school and were badly educated. But now they can write and relevant parts of the population claim similar things. And COVID is way less deadly than the bubonic plague is. This is a pandemic in easy mode. We would have been in for much worse had it been like the bubonic plague.
- wuschel 6y agoI second that - this is very interesting, I would love to see some sources, too.
- adamsea 6y agoSadly these days the ability to read and write is insufficient in order to be an informed citizen because of how complex our media world is. One really needs to have some solid critical thinking skills in order to be able to judge the overall reliability and trustworthiness of a book, article, tweet, news episode, etc. And ideally have some fundamental historical knowledge, basic math, logic, fundamentals of science, etc. Id argue many Americans are, through no fault of their own, not well-educated. EDIT: I cribbed from Noam Chomskys description of what it means to be educated: https://www.openculture.com/2016/04/noam-chomsky-defines-what-it-means-to-be-a-truly-educated-person.html https://www.openculture.com/2016/04/noam-chomsky-defines-wha... 'Humboldt, Chomsky says, “argued, I think, very plausibly, that the core principle and requirement of a fulfilled human being is the ability to inquire and create constructively, independently, without external controls.” A true education, Chomsky suggests, opens a door to human intellectual freedom and creative autonomy.'
- DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
- samiru 6y agoWell, a crisis situation (be it real or manufactured) is a perfect vehicle for driving all kinds of agendas. It is natural there is some opposition.
- knowaveragejoe 6y agoConspiracy culture is a huge problem in modern society that I fear we won't be able to solve
- titzer 6y agoThe most pressing problem we have is not Coronavirus, it's Moronavirus.
- est31 6y agoIt's gonna come sooner rather than later. Humans encroach on the natural habitats of animals all over the world, which increases the number zoonoses dramatically. Most such spillovers don't cause any further human to human spread. Think of MERS. But there are spillovers that do spread between humans, like in the case of SARS-Cov-2. While the COVID pandemic is a major catastrophy, we were still quite lucky. MERS has a much higher case fatality ratio. Something that spreads as easily as SARS-Cov-2 while being as deadly as MERS is entirely possible. We should start preparing once most of the population is vaccinated and human societies have returned to normal. Develop and test antivirals targetting the conserved proteins in major virus families. Build a pipeline that can respond to new viruses quickly with a vaccine. Create capacities to quickly ramp up mass production of PPE. Map the viruses that appear in animals around us to know what we are up to. I hope that political leaders will listen to the people doing such proposals.
- sterlind 6y agoI hope that the new mRNA technology the Pfizer and AZ vaccines are based on will help us develop and manufacture more quickly. The delivery mechanism will be well-understood, the pipeline will be there, the limiting factor would still be knowing what to target and screening for safety/efficacy but it should still help. I hope similar things can be done with rapid antigen/PCR testing equipment.
- trhway 6y ago>lessons from COVID what in our response to COVID was better and more effective than our response to Black Death and Spanish flu? I don't see any improvement despite 700 and 100 years of accumulated knowledge and technology development since then. There has so far been no indication that the only things we were able to muster - archaic lockdown and masks - can prevent it from reaching the 20-30% spread, basically the level of unmitigated spread. I mean, for example, 700 years ago people couldn't know that that ship coming into the port of Venice brings the infection. A year ago we knew that this plane from Wuhan most probably does.
- jakear 6y agoMany orders of magnitude fewer deaths, for one?
- trhway 6y agoOrders fewer? Lets look at the Spanish flu in US - the US wasn't ravaged by WWI/revolutions/rebelions, didn't have systemic hunger, etc. and had time to and implemented some of those measures like quarantines/lockdowns/masks, so very reasonable to compare to today. Spanish flu killed 700K in US . Covid already 250K in US - even if we imagine that we're at the peak today, it still means end number like 500K.
- ncraig 6y agoFood for thought: - The average age of death during the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic was 28 [1]. - 70% of U.S. COVID-19 deaths are age 70 and above [2]. These are very different pandemics, and it's not clear what comparisons between the two actually tell us. [1]: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-commemoration/key-messages.htm https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-commemoratio... [2]: https://www.pnas.org/content/117/36/22035 https://www.pnas.org/content/117/36/22035
- dr_hooo 6y agoI would only like to add that the US population was only around 100m around 1920, and travel would have been much more limited. But overall I agree that the worldwide handling in 2020 has been sobering.
- cronix 6y agoWhy do you think that? They said the same thing after "swine flu" during Obama. Basically, we just got lucky. “It is purely a fortuity that this isn’t one of the great mass casualty events in American history,” Ron Klain, who was Biden’s chief of staff at the time, said of H1N1 in 2019. “It had nothing to do with us doing anything right. It just had to do with luck. If anyone thinks that this can’t happen again, they don’t have to go back to 1918, they just have to go back to 2009, 2010 and imagine a virus with a different lethality, and you can just do the math on that.” https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/04/joe-biden-contain-h1n1-virus-232992 https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/04/joe-biden-contain-h...
- strictfp 6y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortitude_(TV_series) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortitude_(TV_series)