8 ms·

America Has Lost the Plot on COVID

23 points by jbegley 5y ago

anonygler 5y ago
COVID the pandemic ended back in May when the vaccine was widely available. What we have today is COVID the Culture War, screaming about The Science, and narcissists showing how much better they are at following The Rules than you. My daughter has spent nearly half her life wearing a mask 50 hours a week for a disease less risky to her than the Flu or RSV. The vaccine has a ~6x risk of myocarditis for her than COVID itself. Who does that protect? We squandered our opportunity to open up months ago. The vaccine apparently DOES rapidly lose efficacy, as more data has shown, and one political party wants a booster subscription model and outright refuses to commit to any sort of end.
- 1shooner 5y ago
  >COVID the pandemic ended back in May This simply isn't true in my state. We had a significant spike in COVID patient hospitalizations and deaths starting in August. This is attributed by public health experts to the low vaccination rate in my state. I'm not sure if you count them among the culture warriors or narcissists.
- DangitBobby 5y ago
  It's sad to read that someone interprets my behavior, which is inconvenient for me but is mainly about keeping other people from getting hurt because I'm not in a high risk group, as narcissistic, somehow. You should try to reconsider what you think you know about the people who disagree with you, because you are absolutely incorrect and borderline delusional.
  - angelzen 5y ago
    The narcissistic part comes when people boast on Twitter how they are doing their supreme civic duty by taking the vaccine, not like those disgusting filthy diseased barely human individuals that choose a different path. Take the vaccine for whatever reason you may, but there are very little reasons to publicly announce your superiority to others just because you did. Sadly, the vaccine doesn't do much to prevent infection, especially after a few months.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - anthonygd 5y ago
    > You should try to reconsider what you think you know about the people who disagree with you, because you are absolutely incorrect and borderline delusional. You are doing exactly what you're insulting. Some self reflection is in order.
    - DangitBobby 5y ago
      They pretty much called me a narcissist so I'm not sure how you came by your conclusion.
      - angelzen 5y ago
        "narcissists showing how much better they are at following The Rules than you" He didn't though. Unless you do show off how much better you are at following The Rules on a regular basis. And yet you called him "borderline delusional".
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        DangitBobby 5y ago
        > COVID the pandemic ended back in May when the vaccine was widely available. What we have today is COVID the Culture War So if you don't think the pandemic is over, you are on the wrong side of the "culture war". > screaming about The Science, and narcissists showing how much better they are at following The Rules than you. This could be Twitter people or it could be people wearing masks in public. You don't know what this person meant outside of the context provided here. Given how they think that all that remains is a culture war, I took it to mean people who don't think the pandemic is over, so they wear masks and continue to social distance (you know, because we want people to know we can follow rules). Regardless, it reads as though it was written to be intentionally inflamatory to people like me who do not think it's over, or, at least won't act as though it is until a plan is communicated. I think you know that it was inflammatory. So your reading of it to not not include me as its target of criticism is of no interest to me. If I said "idiots who respond to my comments" and you rightly pointed out that it's not nice to call people idiots, how would you respond to a third commenter saying "well, he's not talking about you, he's talking about idiots."
- drekk 5y ago
  Oh, the pandemic is over? Well I'm glad I heard it here on HN first. The 7-day average for COVID deaths is over 1,000, and nearly a million Americans have died (how many 9/11s is that?) but the pandemic is over because nearly 60% of our population took a free vaccine! Vaccines rapidly lose efficacy when the virus they target has free real estate (vectors) in which to mutate. The laughably slow vaccine uptake in the US (while the rest of the world couldn't secure doses) is to blame there, not anything else. Americans having to wear a cloth covering to keep their neighbors from catching something almost as contagious as measles is not a large ask, but here we are. It also protects against the flu and RSV since you're concerned about those—which is why the US didn't really have a flu season. Guess those couple hundred thousand deaths a year are preferable to masks when public outbreaks occur though. What I don't understand is the rest of the world has figured this out? Go ride the subway in Japan and no one struggles with this, just westerners who think thatdoing the bare minimum to prevent illness, hospitalizations, and even death impede on their manifest destiny / freedom / constitutional rights / etc
  - didjathinkmess 5y ago
    >Vaccines rapidly lose efficacy when the virus they target has free real estate (vectors) in which to mutate. The finger pointing game really has to stop considering anyone vaccinated can contract, get sick from, act as a vector/petri dish, and consequently spread the mutated virus. Unvaccinated as well. >The laughably slow vaccine uptake in the US (while the rest of the world couldn't secure doses) is to blame there, not anything else. Instead of attempting to blame unvaccinated vectors for the poor vaccine performance, why not blame the actual culprit - the barely tested (with only ~200 clinical trial participants), rushed (sorry, expedited) vaccines?
  - tinus_hn 5y ago
    > Americans having to wear a cloth covering to keep their neighbors from catching something almost as contagious as measles is not a large ask Cloth masks are so ineffective their effect is statistically invisible. Demanding others take ineffective measures because you find them a great token of virtue is in fact a large ask.
- throwaway210222 5y ago
  > My daughter has spent nearly half her life wearing a mask 50 hours a week for a disease less risky to her than the Flu or RSV Aw, shamples. Good. Because it is deadly my parents and me. You can fix your kids mood with an ice cream; You cannot fix dead people.
bumbledraven 5y ago
This article itself has lost (at least part of) the plot: it does not contain the word “treatment”.
penultimatebro 5y ago
“The Delta variant and waning immunity against transmission mean herd immunity may well be impossible even if every single American gets a shot.” Waning? Did you mean nonexistent? A good start to tackling the problem the author focuses on is being honest and forthright with the public. The vaccines have only ever been effective at reduction of symptoms. They have never prevented transmission and never promised to. Once you completely wrap your head around this concept, restrictions on freedom like vaccine passports and violations of human rights like mandatory vaccinations are useless. Even with 100% vaccination coverage, there will still be outbreaks. It’s only a matter of time before the goalposts shift on “fully vaccinated” and one’s passport isn’t valid anymore. Not until you get the booster. And you may think it ends at shot #3, nope. This goes on for as long as we let it. The solution? It’s simple and timeless: natural immunity. Vaccine supporters can get all the additional boosters they want. It’s their body, so it’s their choice of course. It’s time to start embracing natural immunity not as fringe pseudoscience but as what it truly is: the only way out of this pandemic. And the nice part is, you likely already have it. Remember the Diamond Princess cruise ship? Only 20% of the ship tested positive for Covid and they were aboard for over 2 weeks. Everyone else likely had cross reactive immunity from a previous cold season’s coronavirus strain. Disagree? Let’s talk
- drekk 5y ago
  This argument is disingenuous for a few reasons. Not least of which is that no one calls "natural" immunity psuedoscience—it's how the vaccine works. We take issue with people relying solely on that vs a vaccine (where at this point n=hundreds of millions) that prevents hospitalizations. America does not have the capacity for everyone to get sick "the old fashioned way" and then go back to business as usual. The past several months should have clued most of us in on that by now. What happens when we reach a critical mass of health workers quitting? The transmission argument similarly falls short given that the vaccine reduces the odds of you becoming a vector in the first place, or progressing to the point you require state intervention to survive. I'm all for personal choice. If you want to opt out of vaccinations, that has already been in place. It means you may not be able to attend a public school, or hold a position as a nurse. Those are the tradeoffs we make in the name of our freedom. Americans have chosen, in this instance, to put Planet Fitness and Applebee's over the public health. Had everyone been paid to stay home until domestic transmission halted + masked and socially distanced when necessary + got the vaccine if able to we would not see nearly a million dead Americans. I hold the elected officials (Dems and Reps) responsible for politicizing this pandemic and poisoning the public discourse such that a non-negligible portion of our population is consuming veterinary formulations of an anti-helminth dewormer instead of the free mRNA vaccine.
didjathinkmess 5y ago
The author refers to getting innoculated as "immunized" which is about as scientific as flat earth. The rest of the article isn't much better. If everyone was actually immunized, we would have hit Fauci's early number of 65% herd immunity months ago. What's the herd immunity threshold at these days.. 85%? 90%? Utter quackery.
- DangitBobby 5y ago
  You kind of stepped onto that word as a platform for your soapbox but ignored what the author was actually saying.
  - didjathinkmess 5y ago
    I believe the word slip is 100% intentional. It's the same kind of people that conflate, on purpose, "the vaccines are 95% effective!" with the wishful notion that they stop the spread of the virus.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
anm89 5y ago
The plot has always been not to let a serious crisis go to waste and that plot is still very well alive. The vestiges of covid restrictions will still be floating around with patriot act clauses 20 years from now when 99% of people will not be quite sure what the exact origin was but they'll be used to it and 100% certain that things can't be any other way.
legerdemain 5y ago
I think we are overlooking a simple conclusion: the Americans, in sum, find the cost of several hundred thousand deaths each year acceptable in order to safeguard their freedoms and their way of life. Historically, they made peace with the death toll of yellow fever (~5% fatality rate!) and they made peace with the death toll of malaria. Disease prevention is a relatively novelty in the US, historically speaking, and mostly secondary to war readiness (undermined by the Spanish flu around WW1 and polio around WW2). If it wasn't for the threat of foreign wars destroying the American way of life, the American society at large is indifferent to a high death toll from disease. It's not clear whether this is a matter of high religiosity (because death is a goal and only the beginning of a soul's journey) or a history of dehumanizing a huge segment of their own population.
smt88 5y ago
This comments section is an absolute dumpster fire. I don't know why anyone tries to discuss Covid on HN anymore. It is always a culture war with no new or interesting information presented. Let's just flag these as off-topic and move on.

23 points by jbegley 5y ago

COVID the pandemic ended back in May when the vaccine was widely available. What we have today is COVID the Culture War, screaming about The Science, and narcissists showing how much better they are at following The Rules than you. My daughter has spent nearly half her life wearing a mask 50 hours a week for a disease less risky to her than the Flu or RSV. The vaccine has a ~6x risk of myocarditis for her than COVID itself. Who does that protect? We squandered our opportunity to open up months ago. The vaccine apparently DOES rapidly lose efficacy, as more data has shown, and one political party wants a booster subscription model and outright refuses to commit to any sort of end.

1shooner 5y ago
>COVID the pandemic ended back in May This simply isn't true in my state. We had a significant spike in COVID patient hospitalizations and deaths starting in August. This is attributed by public health experts to the low vaccination rate in my state. I'm not sure if you count them among the culture warriors or narcissists.
DangitBobby 5y ago
It's sad to read that someone interprets my behavior, which is inconvenient for me but is mainly about keeping other people from getting hurt because I'm not in a high risk group, as narcissistic, somehow. You should try to reconsider what you think you know about the people who disagree with you, because you are absolutely incorrect and borderline delusional.
- angelzen 5y ago
  The narcissistic part comes when people boast on Twitter how they are doing their supreme civic duty by taking the vaccine, not like those disgusting filthy diseased barely human individuals that choose a different path. Take the vaccine for whatever reason you may, but there are very little reasons to publicly announce your superiority to others just because you did. Sadly, the vaccine doesn't do much to prevent infection, especially after a few months.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- anthonygd 5y ago
  > You should try to reconsider what you think you know about the people who disagree with you, because you are absolutely incorrect and borderline delusional. You are doing exactly what you're insulting. Some self reflection is in order.
  - DangitBobby 5y ago
    They pretty much called me a narcissist so I'm not sure how you came by your conclusion.
    - angelzen 5y ago
      "narcissists showing how much better they are at following The Rules than you" He didn't though. Unless you do show off how much better you are at following The Rules on a regular basis. And yet you called him "borderline delusional".
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - DangitBobby 5y ago
        > COVID the pandemic ended back in May when the vaccine was widely available. What we have today is COVID the Culture War So if you don't think the pandemic is over, you are on the wrong side of the "culture war". > screaming about The Science, and narcissists showing how much better they are at following The Rules than you. This could be Twitter people or it could be people wearing masks in public. You don't know what this person meant outside of the context provided here. Given how they think that all that remains is a culture war, I took it to mean people who don't think the pandemic is over, so they wear masks and continue to social distance (you know, because we want people to know we can follow rules). Regardless, it reads as though it was written to be intentionally inflamatory to people like me who do not think it's over, or, at least won't act as though it is until a plan is communicated. I think you know that it was inflammatory. So your reading of it to not not include me as its target of criticism is of no interest to me. If I said "idiots who respond to my comments" and you rightly pointed out that it's not nice to call people idiots, how would you respond to a third commenter saying "well, he's not talking about you, he's talking about idiots."
drekk 5y ago
Oh, the pandemic is over? Well I'm glad I heard it here on HN first. The 7-day average for COVID deaths is over 1,000, and nearly a million Americans have died (how many 9/11s is that?) but the pandemic is over because nearly 60% of our population took a free vaccine! Vaccines rapidly lose efficacy when the virus they target has free real estate (vectors) in which to mutate. The laughably slow vaccine uptake in the US (while the rest of the world couldn't secure doses) is to blame there, not anything else. Americans having to wear a cloth covering to keep their neighbors from catching something almost as contagious as measles is not a large ask, but here we are. It also protects against the flu and RSV since you're concerned about those—which is why the US didn't really have a flu season. Guess those couple hundred thousand deaths a year are preferable to masks when public outbreaks occur though. What I don't understand is the rest of the world has figured this out? Go ride the subway in Japan and no one struggles with this, just westerners who think thatdoing the bare minimum to prevent illness, hospitalizations, and even death impede on their manifest destiny / freedom / constitutional rights / etc
- didjathinkmess 5y ago
  >Vaccines rapidly lose efficacy when the virus they target has free real estate (vectors) in which to mutate. The finger pointing game really has to stop considering anyone vaccinated can contract, get sick from, act as a vector/petri dish, and consequently spread the mutated virus. Unvaccinated as well. >The laughably slow vaccine uptake in the US (while the rest of the world couldn't secure doses) is to blame there, not anything else. Instead of attempting to blame unvaccinated vectors for the poor vaccine performance, why not blame the actual culprit - the barely tested (with only ~200 clinical trial participants), rushed (sorry, expedited) vaccines?
- tinus_hn 5y ago
  > Americans having to wear a cloth covering to keep their neighbors from catching something almost as contagious as measles is not a large ask Cloth masks are so ineffective their effect is statistically invisible. Demanding others take ineffective measures because you find them a great token of virtue is in fact a large ask.
throwaway210222 5y ago
> My daughter has spent nearly half her life wearing a mask 50 hours a week for a disease less risky to her than the Flu or RSV Aw, shamples. Good. Because it is deadly my parents and me. You can fix your kids mood with an ice cream; You cannot fix dead people.

bumbledraven 5y ago

This article itself has lost (at least part of) the plot: it does not contain the word “treatment”.

penultimatebro 5y ago

“The Delta variant and waning immunity against transmission mean herd immunity may well be impossible even if every single American gets a shot.” Waning? Did you mean nonexistent? A good start to tackling the problem the author focuses on is being honest and forthright with the public. The vaccines have only ever been effective at reduction of symptoms. They have never prevented transmission and never promised to. Once you completely wrap your head around this concept, restrictions on freedom like vaccine passports and violations of human rights like mandatory vaccinations are useless. Even with 100% vaccination coverage, there will still be outbreaks. It’s only a matter of time before the goalposts shift on “fully vaccinated” and one’s passport isn’t valid anymore. Not until you get the booster. And you may think it ends at shot #3, nope. This goes on for as long as we let it. The solution? It’s simple and timeless: natural immunity. Vaccine supporters can get all the additional boosters they want. It’s their body, so it’s their choice of course. It’s time to start embracing natural immunity not as fringe pseudoscience but as what it truly is: the only way out of this pandemic. And the nice part is, you likely already have it. Remember the Diamond Princess cruise ship? Only 20% of the ship tested positive for Covid and they were aboard for over 2 weeks. Everyone else likely had cross reactive immunity from a previous cold season’s coronavirus strain. Disagree? Let’s talk

drekk 5y ago
This argument is disingenuous for a few reasons. Not least of which is that no one calls "natural" immunity psuedoscience—it's how the vaccine works. We take issue with people relying solely on that vs a vaccine (where at this point n=hundreds of millions) that prevents hospitalizations. America does not have the capacity for everyone to get sick "the old fashioned way" and then go back to business as usual. The past several months should have clued most of us in on that by now. What happens when we reach a critical mass of health workers quitting? The transmission argument similarly falls short given that the vaccine reduces the odds of you becoming a vector in the first place, or progressing to the point you require state intervention to survive. I'm all for personal choice. If you want to opt out of vaccinations, that has already been in place. It means you may not be able to attend a public school, or hold a position as a nurse. Those are the tradeoffs we make in the name of our freedom. Americans have chosen, in this instance, to put Planet Fitness and Applebee's over the public health. Had everyone been paid to stay home until domestic transmission halted + masked and socially distanced when necessary + got the vaccine if able to we would not see nearly a million dead Americans. I hold the elected officials (Dems and Reps) responsible for politicizing this pandemic and poisoning the public discourse such that a non-negligible portion of our population is consuming veterinary formulations of an anti-helminth dewormer instead of the free mRNA vaccine.

didjathinkmess 5y ago

The author refers to getting innoculated as "immunized" which is about as scientific as flat earth. The rest of the article isn't much better. If everyone was actually immunized, we would have hit Fauci's early number of 65% herd immunity months ago. What's the herd immunity threshold at these days.. 85%? 90%? Utter quackery.

DangitBobby 5y ago
You kind of stepped onto that word as a platform for your soapbox but ignored what the author was actually saying.
- didjathinkmess 5y ago
  I believe the word slip is 100% intentional. It's the same kind of people that conflate, on purpose, "the vaccines are 95% effective!" with the wishful notion that they stop the spread of the virus.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

anm89 5y ago

The plot has always been not to let a serious crisis go to waste and that plot is still very well alive. The vestiges of covid restrictions will still be floating around with patriot act clauses 20 years from now when 99% of people will not be quite sure what the exact origin was but they'll be used to it and 100% certain that things can't be any other way.

legerdemain 5y ago

I think we are overlooking a simple conclusion: the Americans, in sum, find the cost of several hundred thousand deaths each year acceptable in order to safeguard their freedoms and their way of life. Historically, they made peace with the death toll of yellow fever (~5% fatality rate!) and they made peace with the death toll of malaria. Disease prevention is a relatively novelty in the US, historically speaking, and mostly secondary to war readiness (undermined by the Spanish flu around WW1 and polio around WW2). If it wasn't for the threat of foreign wars destroying the American way of life, the American society at large is indifferent to a high death toll from disease. It's not clear whether this is a matter of high religiosity (because death is a goal and only the beginning of a soul's journey) or a history of dehumanizing a huge segment of their own population.

smt88 5y ago

This comments section is an absolute dumpster fire. I don't know why anyone tries to discuss Covid on HN anymore. It is always a culture war with no new or interesting information presented. Let's just flag these as off-topic and move on.