3 ms·

And you have every reason to be incredibly cautious. Were I in your shoes I'd likely err on the side of caution too. Hospitalisation rate says nothing other th

And you have every reason to be incredibly cautious. Were I in your shoes I'd likely err on the side of caution too. Hospitalisation rate says nothing other than they were in hospital. It could have been because they were feeling a bit rough but utterly terrified due to all the scaremongering that's going around. Or they may have been close to deaths door. No way to tell. The figures don't lie: There are vulnerable groups that can be severely symptomatic and even die from this but they make up a tiny tiny fraction of the population.

lostlogin 6y ago
The figures don’t lie. Of one hundred people with covid, two will die and ten will be suffering three months later. The portion suffering long covid is growing too, and it’s poorly understood. Damaged hearts and lungs for example and there are plenty of accounts about. What are you pushing for? There are places we can look to where covid ran free, it isn’t pretty. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(21)00031-X/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...
- _Understated_ 6y ago
  Balance, that's what I'm pushing for. Assess your actual chances of catching and suffering from covid. Then balance it against the risk of a rushed experimental gene therapy still in initial trials. Edit: Remember that none of the media and government published figures show recovery rates - this is hugely important.
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    Elsewhere in this thread you argue that because only 400 people without underlying conditions have died, restrictions should be removed. The other 100k don’t seem to be of concern. I don’t think ‘balanced reporting’ is the full extent of what you are after.
    - _Understated_ 6y ago
      I'm talking about balancing the risk! Yes that 400 figure is foundational to my argument and yes, we should lift the restrictions. But if you are really sick, you'd be at home, in your bed taking it easy anyway especially if your symptoms are as severe as some of the COVID reports suggest. And it's not balanced reporting I want either, it's accurate reporting with facts that can be challenged or verified: most articles are incredibly vague when it comes to COVID and some have incredibly low numbers that, at first glance, look damning but are still tiny numbers. Edit: deleted the 100,000 sentece - In response to that number, yes it may be a large number but there is no breakdown of the cases. For all you know, they were all 90+ years old with previous underlying conditions. All the figures we see have very little behind them that can substantiate the measures taken, while at the same time trigger responses in all of us that make them hard to argue against without coming across as callous but the numbers are not there to justify the lockdowns.
  - henrikschroder 6y ago
    I saw this study from USC: https://covid19pulse.usc.edu/ https://covid19pulse.usc.edu/ You can't link to the exact thing, but choose "Coronavirus Risk Perceptions" and split by age. People under 40 believe that their risk of dying from the virus is over 10% on average. The actual risk for that age group is somewhere around 0.02%, which means they're overestimating their risk of dying by a factor of 500. Five hundred! It's mindboggling how wrong people are. But once you see those numbers, it becomes clear why there is such widespread support for strict lockdowns. However, even with the accurate numbers, I would still say the case for the mRNA vaccines is strong. I think you are exaggerating the risks of the mRNA vaccines, in the same way that regular people are exaggerating the risks of the virus.
    - birken 6y ago
      I'm quite confident people probably over-estimate their chance of dying in a plane crash by a few orders of magnitude as well. People are careful about their own lives, which is probably a good survival mechanism. What specific policy are you suggesting? The more <40 year olds that get the virus, the more virus there is. The more virus there is, the more people who are spreading the virus, the more people who can get the virus, including people at very high risk of dying or being disabled from it. As far as I'm aware no place has let the virus spread uncontrollably, think everything was fine, and not lock down at some point. The policy clearly has to be somewhere in between fully locked down and fully opened up, and I'm not sure discriminating by age and health is going to be some magical solution.
      - henrikschroder 6y ago
        > What specific policy are you suggesting? I think the biggest problem is the hyper-focus on a single cause of death. People look at the covid-19 death numbers, and have no idea how many people actually die in a normal year. And this causes people to focus on ensuring nobody dies of covid-19 to the exclusion of everything else. Yes, it absolutely sucks that a lot of vulnerable people in elder care facilities have died of it, but it's equally tragic that a lot of them have died of cognitive decline due to not being allowed to see their family and friends, or not being allowed to see each other. Or that people are dying or going to die because hospitals and patients alike are postponing care and checkups and routine surgeries, because they're afraid of hospitals being overrun with covid-19 patients, or because they're afraid hospitals will increase spread. I belong to the privileged class of people who can work from home, I've done it for years, and I live far away from friends and family, so I've been doing weekly video calls for years. The effect for me, personally, is pretty much zero. A lot of people who drive policy are like me, and therefore think lockdowns are no big deal. But lockdowns are absolutely miserable for a large amount of people. There's a very good reason that we're seeing violent anti-lockdown protests in several countries, because a lot of people are completely fed up with the restrictions. So, in terms of specific policy, I want governments to encourage and enable people to isolate and distance and keep themselves safe, but I don't want them to enforce it. People have to be allowed to make their own choices, their own risk analysis, and live with the consequences. As we already do for a lot of things. One example of encouragement is to have good sickpay policies in place, so that no-one feels they "have to" get to work even though they're sick or possibly infected, either out of social obligation or financial necessity. > and I'm not sure discriminating by age and health is going to be some magical solution. It's too hard to lock down and isolate a fraction of the population, therefore the solution is to lock down the entire population, except "essential" workers? This argument doesn't make sense to me.

lostlogin 6y ago

The figures don’t lie. Of one hundred people with covid, two will die and ten will be suffering three months later. The portion suffering long covid is growing too, and it’s poorly understood. Damaged hearts and lungs for example and there are plenty of accounts about. What are you pushing for? There are places we can look to where covid ran free, it isn’t pretty. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(21)00031-X/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...

_Understated_ 6y ago
Balance, that's what I'm pushing for. Assess your actual chances of catching and suffering from covid. Then balance it against the risk of a rushed experimental gene therapy still in initial trials. Edit: Remember that none of the media and government published figures show recovery rates - this is hugely important.
- lostlogin 6y ago
  Elsewhere in this thread you argue that because only 400 people without underlying conditions have died, restrictions should be removed. The other 100k don’t seem to be of concern. I don’t think ‘balanced reporting’ is the full extent of what you are after.
  - _Understated_ 6y ago
    I'm talking about balancing the risk! Yes that 400 figure is foundational to my argument and yes, we should lift the restrictions. But if you are really sick, you'd be at home, in your bed taking it easy anyway especially if your symptoms are as severe as some of the COVID reports suggest. And it's not balanced reporting I want either, it's accurate reporting with facts that can be challenged or verified: most articles are incredibly vague when it comes to COVID and some have incredibly low numbers that, at first glance, look damning but are still tiny numbers. Edit: deleted the 100,000 sentece - In response to that number, yes it may be a large number but there is no breakdown of the cases. For all you know, they were all 90+ years old with previous underlying conditions. All the figures we see have very little behind them that can substantiate the measures taken, while at the same time trigger responses in all of us that make them hard to argue against without coming across as callous but the numbers are not there to justify the lockdowns.
- henrikschroder 6y ago
  I saw this study from USC: https://covid19pulse.usc.edu/ https://covid19pulse.usc.edu/ You can't link to the exact thing, but choose "Coronavirus Risk Perceptions" and split by age. People under 40 believe that their risk of dying from the virus is over 10% on average. The actual risk for that age group is somewhere around 0.02%, which means they're overestimating their risk of dying by a factor of 500. Five hundred! It's mindboggling how wrong people are. But once you see those numbers, it becomes clear why there is such widespread support for strict lockdowns. However, even with the accurate numbers, I would still say the case for the mRNA vaccines is strong. I think you are exaggerating the risks of the mRNA vaccines, in the same way that regular people are exaggerating the risks of the virus.
  - birken 6y ago
    I'm quite confident people probably over-estimate their chance of dying in a plane crash by a few orders of magnitude as well. People are careful about their own lives, which is probably a good survival mechanism. What specific policy are you suggesting? The more <40 year olds that get the virus, the more virus there is. The more virus there is, the more people who are spreading the virus, the more people who can get the virus, including people at very high risk of dying or being disabled from it. As far as I'm aware no place has let the virus spread uncontrollably, think everything was fine, and not lock down at some point. The policy clearly has to be somewhere in between fully locked down and fully opened up, and I'm not sure discriminating by age and health is going to be some magical solution.
    - henrikschroder 6y ago
      > What specific policy are you suggesting? I think the biggest problem is the hyper-focus on a single cause of death. People look at the covid-19 death numbers, and have no idea how many people actually die in a normal year. And this causes people to focus on ensuring nobody dies of covid-19 to the exclusion of everything else. Yes, it absolutely sucks that a lot of vulnerable people in elder care facilities have died of it, but it's equally tragic that a lot of them have died of cognitive decline due to not being allowed to see their family and friends, or not being allowed to see each other. Or that people are dying or going to die because hospitals and patients alike are postponing care and checkups and routine surgeries, because they're afraid of hospitals being overrun with covid-19 patients, or because they're afraid hospitals will increase spread. I belong to the privileged class of people who can work from home, I've done it for years, and I live far away from friends and family, so I've been doing weekly video calls for years. The effect for me, personally, is pretty much zero. A lot of people who drive policy are like me, and therefore think lockdowns are no big deal. But lockdowns are absolutely miserable for a large amount of people. There's a very good reason that we're seeing violent anti-lockdown protests in several countries, because a lot of people are completely fed up with the restrictions. So, in terms of specific policy, I want governments to encourage and enable people to isolate and distance and keep themselves safe, but I don't want them to enforce it. People have to be allowed to make their own choices, their own risk analysis, and live with the consequences. As we already do for a lot of things. One example of encouragement is to have good sickpay policies in place, so that no-one feels they "have to" get to work even though they're sick or possibly infected, either out of social obligation or financial necessity. > and I'm not sure discriminating by age and health is going to be some magical solution. It's too hard to lock down and isolate a fraction of the population, therefore the solution is to lock down the entire population, except "essential" workers? This argument doesn't make sense to me.