8 ms·

Imagine there was a fire near where you live, constantly spreading and endangering lives in your community. Would you say people can just "learn to live it"?

by isodev 5y ago

lettergram 5y ago
You mean like we learned to live with the far more deadly (at least initially) influenza? As your body increasingly comes in contact with it you’ll build a solid immunity. Similar to the other mRNA viruses such as RSV (dangerous to babies, but almost no one else).
- Daishiman 5y ago
  Influenza didn't kill 5+ million people in two years.
  - tjr225 5y ago
    Uhhhh it killed somewhere around 17-50 million people. I guess you’re technically correct lmao. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
  - sdfdf4434r34r 5y ago
    You're off by a factor of 10, it killed 50 million in 1918-1920, 1-4 million in 1957-1958, 1-4 million again in 1968-1969, 700k in 1977, 100-200k in 2009.
    - lettergram 5y ago
      That’s also not population adjusted.
- roywiggins 5y ago
  It took a couple years for the 1918 pandemic to sputter out. We didn't learn to live with it, our immune systems learned to fight it off, and it retreated from being an acutely dangerous threat to being merely a chronic one. The cost was millions of lives, because it was the only option- there were no vaccines or antivirals. But we have both of those now. The steady-state for COVID-19 will hopefully look something like seasonal flu, but it will take time.
- somewhereoutth 5y ago
  If Covid had occurred in 1918, it would likely have had a much higher CFR than H1N1 - no supplemental oxygen available at that time.
  - dboreham 5y ago
    The 1889 pandemic may be a closer equivalent.
  - lettergram 5y ago
    Lol the number one indicator of having a severe case of covid19 is being overweight and a diabetic — likely being >60. Gotta say I think you’re wildly incorrect there. Influenza impacted the young and still does.
acqbu 5y ago
When far more people are harmed by the indirect effects of the fire (fear, jobs lost, mental health issues etc) than the fire itself, then yes - I would encourage them to liberate their minds, embrace reality and start living.
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  A heck of a lot of people really don't want to move on from all this. Life is way too short to be wasted living the way some of society seems to think is necessary "in order to take this serious". Disease and death have been a part of humanity since time began. All we can do is try to make the most out of the short time we have here on this earth. Playing this covid theater game for 2+ years is, in my opinion, an insulting to human nature. We aren't meant to do this.
  - somewhereoutth 5y ago
    "some of you may have to die, but that is a sacrifice I'm willing to make"
    - _dain_ 5y ago
      literally yes. in the words of my corrupt and buffoonish prime minister: let the bodies pile high. the wisest thing he ever said, even though he won't admit to it. (and really the piles won't be that high. they'll be of low-to-medium height, consisting mostly of the old and fat.)
      - somewhereoutth 5y ago
        Ah mostly the old and fat! That's ok then. People dying is all fine and good until it happens to you or someone you care about.
        _dain_ 5y ago
        yes
bedhead 5y ago
Can you point to a single policy that has demonstrated (in an intellectually honest way) ANY efficacy in slowing covid? One?? Vax passports, cloth masks, N95 masks, face shields, closing schools, cohorts, WFH, clean/dirty pen jars (my fave), plexiglass, 6 feet, travel bans... The grim reality is that there hasn't been a single policy that's been shown to have made any difference at all. NONE. There's literally nothing to do other than stay home if sick and get vaxxed if you want, the rest is all theater and much of it has horrible tradeoffs.
- brazzy 5y ago
  >The grim reality is that there hasn't been a single policy that's been shown to have made any difference at all. NONE. BULLSHIT. How delusional can you be? There is plenty of evidence that masks and contact reduction in various forms have a massive effect on how quickly the virus spreads. Infection numbers and their development over time varied wildly between countries, clearly correlated with such measures, long before vaccines were available.
  - spookthesunset 5y ago
    > There is plenty of evidence that masks and contact reduction in various forms have a massive effect on how quickly the virus spreads. If this is true, why is it when showing a chart of data it is almost impossible to pick when any of these measures went into effect? If these measures worked to any worthwhile degree their effect on any data should be absolutely profound. Thus far, you'd have a hard time picking florida out from oregon or california. If you need PhD level math to prove that all these NPI'S work... it means they weren't worth the extremely toxic and corrosive effectives they've had on our communities. Any fool off the street should be able to look at the raw data and see the impact, which currently you can't do.
    - brazzy 5y ago
      >If this is true, why is it when showing a chart of data it is almost impossible to pick when any of these measures went into effect? Quite exactly the opposite is actually true: it's always very clear from such charts that the measures are very effective. Some examples: https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/phac-aspc/images/corporate/publications/chief-public-health-officer-reports-state-public-health-canada/from-risk-resilience-equity-approach-covid-19/covid-19f2-eng.jpg https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/phac-aspc/images/corporate... https://www.nejm.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/mms/journals/content/nejm/2020/nejm_2020.383.issue-8/nejmc2025203/20200814/images/img_xlarge/nejmc2025203_f1.jpeg https://www.nejm.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/mms/jour... https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/state-timeline https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/state-timeline Doesn't take "PhD level math" either, just some basic understanding how the effects are delayed by incubation period, testing and reporting, and how an exponential function changes shape as the exponent changes
spookthesunset 5y ago
Imagine being given almost 2 years to build capacity to put that fire out so the community could go back to normal life but instead zero additional capacity was built? Hospitals had almost 2 years to build capacity. Where is it? Why is society being asked to continue bailing out institutions that have had an enormous amount of time to prepare?
- bonzini 5y ago
  You just don't build capacity against something that grows exponentially until it hits a substantial part of the overall population. Say a country like the UK, at the peak of the curve, would have 1% of their population getting sick everyday for a week or two, and 1% of that getting in a hospital (very conservative since 1% is the IFR and lots of people get out of the hospital on their legs) You might have built the 90.000 beds you need, but where will you find the doctors?
  - spookthesunset 5y ago
    Such an excuse. You find the doctors or find a way to get people to help. It’s an emergency. Figure it out. Forcing society to grind to an halt because some “experts” just waive their hand and give up is absurd.
    - mahkeiro 5y ago
      How are you going to find the doctors? It doesn’t take 2 years to train one. Of course you can get them from other countries but here you are just transferring the problem to someone else.
  - _dain_ 5y ago
    sorry, have I been time travelled back to march 2020? I heard this exact same preposterous extrapolation then. people going mad with fear at the omnipotent power of the exponential function. hundreds of thousands in hospitals all at once, millions of people sick at a time, we were told. I should know, I was one of them. I scribbled some numbers on the back of a fag packet, concluded we were doomed, and started buying tinned food and scrounging N95s from B&Q. but then it didn't happen, did it? it never fucking happened, anywhere, lockdown or no. I remember a giant emergency field hospital that got built in the middle of london, and it sat there completely fucking bone idle. my initial numbers were wrong, and so were the experts'. I remember a terrifyingly huge bell curve for hospitalizations assuming no lockdown, with a piddling little horizontal line just above the x-axis representing bed capacity. that apocalypse never happened for sweden or the numerous other places which never locked down. I remember watching the sweden case graph intently around May, smugly predicting a self-inflicted genocide. It never came. Then there was a US state (I forget which one) that ended its lockdown and opened up back to normal. I very confidently predicted a disaster that never arrived. eventually (much later than I should have) I woke up from the mass hallucination. turns out covid, like other coronaviruses, is strongly seasonal, it waxes and wanes for reasons we don't quite understand. the exponential curve always burns itself out well short of what the hammer-and-dance people said, no matter what we do. do you expect us to forget all that? do you really think we can be fooled twice? do you honestly think people will sit down and take another wave of lockdowns when we're in the middle of a supply chain and inflation crisis caused by the first one?
School-Cotton 5y ago
No because burning buildings kill 100% of the people in them whereas COVID-19 kills fewer than 1% of people infected with it. Obviously we would react differently to completely different things. What is even the point of this analogy?
cat_plus_plus 5y ago
I see that you are not from California

Imagine there was a fire near where you live, constantly spreading and endangering lives in your community. Would you say people can just "learn to live it"?

by isodev 5y ago

Imagine there was a fire near where you live, constantly spreading and endangering lives in your community. Would you say people can just "learn to live it"?

lettergram 5y ago

You mean like we learned to live with the far more deadly (at least initially) influenza? As your body increasingly comes in contact with it you’ll build a solid immunity. Similar to the other mRNA viruses such as RSV (dangerous to babies, but almost no one else).

Daishiman 5y ago
Influenza didn't kill 5+ million people in two years.
- tjr225 5y ago
  Uhhhh it killed somewhere around 17-50 million people. I guess you’re technically correct lmao. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
- sdfdf4434r34r 5y ago
  You're off by a factor of 10, it killed 50 million in 1918-1920, 1-4 million in 1957-1958, 1-4 million again in 1968-1969, 700k in 1977, 100-200k in 2009.
  - lettergram 5y ago
    That’s also not population adjusted.
roywiggins 5y ago
It took a couple years for the 1918 pandemic to sputter out. We didn't learn to live with it, our immune systems learned to fight it off, and it retreated from being an acutely dangerous threat to being merely a chronic one. The cost was millions of lives, because it was the only option- there were no vaccines or antivirals. But we have both of those now. The steady-state for COVID-19 will hopefully look something like seasonal flu, but it will take time.
somewhereoutth 5y ago
If Covid had occurred in 1918, it would likely have had a much higher CFR than H1N1 - no supplemental oxygen available at that time.
- dboreham 5y ago
  The 1889 pandemic may be a closer equivalent.
- lettergram 5y ago
  Lol the number one indicator of having a severe case of covid19 is being overweight and a diabetic — likely being >60. Gotta say I think you’re wildly incorrect there. Influenza impacted the young and still does.

acqbu 5y ago

When far more people are harmed by the indirect effects of the fire (fear, jobs lost, mental health issues etc) than the fire itself, then yes - I would encourage them to liberate their minds, embrace reality and start living.

spookthesunset 5y ago
A heck of a lot of people really don't want to move on from all this. Life is way too short to be wasted living the way some of society seems to think is necessary "in order to take this serious". Disease and death have been a part of humanity since time began. All we can do is try to make the most out of the short time we have here on this earth. Playing this covid theater game for 2+ years is, in my opinion, an insulting to human nature. We aren't meant to do this.
- somewhereoutth 5y ago
  "some of you may have to die, but that is a sacrifice I'm willing to make"
  - _dain_ 5y ago
    literally yes. in the words of my corrupt and buffoonish prime minister: let the bodies pile high. the wisest thing he ever said, even though he won't admit to it. (and really the piles won't be that high. they'll be of low-to-medium height, consisting mostly of the old and fat.)
    - somewhereoutth 5y ago
      Ah mostly the old and fat! That's ok then. People dying is all fine and good until it happens to you or someone you care about.
      - _dain_ 5y ago
        yes

bedhead 5y ago

Can you point to a single policy that has demonstrated (in an intellectually honest way) ANY efficacy in slowing covid? One?? Vax passports, cloth masks, N95 masks, face shields, closing schools, cohorts, WFH, clean/dirty pen jars (my fave), plexiglass, 6 feet, travel bans... The grim reality is that there hasn't been a single policy that's been shown to have made any difference at all. NONE. There's literally nothing to do other than stay home if sick and get vaxxed if you want, the rest is all theater and much of it has horrible tradeoffs.

brazzy 5y ago
>The grim reality is that there hasn't been a single policy that's been shown to have made any difference at all. NONE. BULLSHIT. How delusional can you be? There is plenty of evidence that masks and contact reduction in various forms have a massive effect on how quickly the virus spreads. Infection numbers and their development over time varied wildly between countries, clearly correlated with such measures, long before vaccines were available.
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  > There is plenty of evidence that masks and contact reduction in various forms have a massive effect on how quickly the virus spreads. If this is true, why is it when showing a chart of data it is almost impossible to pick when any of these measures went into effect? If these measures worked to any worthwhile degree their effect on any data should be absolutely profound. Thus far, you'd have a hard time picking florida out from oregon or california. If you need PhD level math to prove that all these NPI'S work... it means they weren't worth the extremely toxic and corrosive effectives they've had on our communities. Any fool off the street should be able to look at the raw data and see the impact, which currently you can't do.
  - brazzy 5y ago
    >If this is true, why is it when showing a chart of data it is almost impossible to pick when any of these measures went into effect? Quite exactly the opposite is actually true: it's always very clear from such charts that the measures are very effective. Some examples: https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/phac-aspc/images/corporate/publications/chief-public-health-officer-reports-state-public-health-canada/from-risk-resilience-equity-approach-covid-19/covid-19f2-eng.jpg https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/phac-aspc/images/corporate... https://www.nejm.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/mms/journals/content/nejm/2020/nejm_2020.383.issue-8/nejmc2025203/20200814/images/img_xlarge/nejmc2025203_f1.jpeg https://www.nejm.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/mms/jour... https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/state-timeline https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/state-timeline Doesn't take "PhD level math" either, just some basic understanding how the effects are delayed by incubation period, testing and reporting, and how an exponential function changes shape as the exponent changes

spookthesunset 5y ago

Imagine being given almost 2 years to build capacity to put that fire out so the community could go back to normal life but instead zero additional capacity was built? Hospitals had almost 2 years to build capacity. Where is it? Why is society being asked to continue bailing out institutions that have had an enormous amount of time to prepare?

bonzini 5y ago
You just don't build capacity against something that grows exponentially until it hits a substantial part of the overall population. Say a country like the UK, at the peak of the curve, would have 1% of their population getting sick everyday for a week or two, and 1% of that getting in a hospital (very conservative since 1% is the IFR and lots of people get out of the hospital on their legs) You might have built the 90.000 beds you need, but where will you find the doctors?
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  Such an excuse. You find the doctors or find a way to get people to help. It’s an emergency. Figure it out. Forcing society to grind to an halt because some “experts” just waive their hand and give up is absurd.
  - mahkeiro 5y ago
    How are you going to find the doctors? It doesn’t take 2 years to train one. Of course you can get them from other countries but here you are just transferring the problem to someone else.
- _dain_ 5y ago
  sorry, have I been time travelled back to march 2020? I heard this exact same preposterous extrapolation then. people going mad with fear at the omnipotent power of the exponential function. hundreds of thousands in hospitals all at once, millions of people sick at a time, we were told. I should know, I was one of them. I scribbled some numbers on the back of a fag packet, concluded we were doomed, and started buying tinned food and scrounging N95s from B&Q. but then it didn't happen, did it? it never fucking happened, anywhere, lockdown or no. I remember a giant emergency field hospital that got built in the middle of london, and it sat there completely fucking bone idle. my initial numbers were wrong, and so were the experts'. I remember a terrifyingly huge bell curve for hospitalizations assuming no lockdown, with a piddling little horizontal line just above the x-axis representing bed capacity. that apocalypse never happened for sweden or the numerous other places which never locked down. I remember watching the sweden case graph intently around May, smugly predicting a self-inflicted genocide. It never came. Then there was a US state (I forget which one) that ended its lockdown and opened up back to normal. I very confidently predicted a disaster that never arrived. eventually (much later than I should have) I woke up from the mass hallucination. turns out covid, like other coronaviruses, is strongly seasonal, it waxes and wanes for reasons we don't quite understand. the exponential curve always burns itself out well short of what the hammer-and-dance people said, no matter what we do. do you expect us to forget all that? do you really think we can be fooled twice? do you honestly think people will sit down and take another wave of lockdowns when we're in the middle of a supply chain and inflation crisis caused by the first one?

School-Cotton 5y ago

No because burning buildings kill 100% of the people in them whereas COVID-19 kills fewer than 1% of people infected with it. Obviously we would react differently to completely different things. What is even the point of this analogy?

cat_plus_plus 5y ago

I see that you are not from California