9 ms·

The Great Surrender: How We Gave Up and Let Covid Win

20 points by akeck 5y ago

Grismar 5y ago
I'm not sure about the author, but certain about many commenters here, that popular opinion and scientific standpoint are confused. Being charitable to the author, I feel they are writing about popular opinion, politics and zeitgeist and the sudden change in them - people just suddenly surrendered. Many commenters are defending the changes in scientific position, which is something else altogether - and nowhere near as sudden. With science, as should be, when the data changes, the conclusions change - and in a pandemic, what the response of the people is and is likely to be, is part of the data. The science is solid and sees only small, incremental change, there is no surrender there.
propagadnadz 5y ago
msarrel 5y ago
It's fascinating to me that Donald Trump's message was horrifying, but when biden's message is just the same, we're totally ready to ignore this because it's just the flu and the economy is more important than our lives.
- hprotagonist 5y ago
  change the facts, change the outcome: 85% of my state and 99% of my city is vaccinated; death rates and case rates are rapidly decoupling. No fuss from me about wearing a mask, but my risk calculus adjusts as a function of my situation, and my situation in january 2022 is not even close to what it was in march 2020. It was obvious as early as April 2020 that the pipe dream of "contain and extinguish" was never going to come to pass, and that the only likely endgame was that SARS-CoV-2 or a variant of it would become endemic and relatively nonfatal. You cannot realistically eradicate a disease when you're infectious 48 hours before you're symptomatic, so you buckle down and hang tight until therapies and vaccines become available; then you get those things, deploy them at as wide a scale as you possibly can; then you ease up. We did, and we did, so now we are.
- belltaco 5y ago
  It's only fascinating if you ignore the huge differences like widespread availability of safe and effective vaccines, omicron vs. original strain etc.
- sleepysysadmin 5y ago
  >It's fascinating to me that Donald Trump's message was horrifying, but when biden's message is just the same, we're totally ready to ignore this because it's just the flu and the economy is more important than our lives. Covid response has been entirely 100% political. Medicine/Science was never involved. The division of lockdown or not to lockdown, wearing masks, etc. These have all came down nearly perfectly along political lines in many countries. It shouldn't be like that at all. There should be lots of right-wingers who gladly wear a mask and get locked down. There should be lots of left-wingers who would not. It was also not risk assessment. If you are under 50, the risk of covid was always known to be far less than the flu. Meanwhile people who were scared shitless of covid are also the cigar smoking, drunk driving, 100km/h in a 30km/h school zone type people. I'm pretty sure it has everything to do with yellow journalism. The yellow journalists have convinced their filter bubble group that covid is far worse than it ever was considered to be. https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimates-covid-hospitalization-risk.aspx https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimat... For unvaccinated hospitalization risk, 2% of Democrats responded correctly, compared with 16% of Republicans. In fact, 41% of Democrats replied that at least 50% of unvaccinated people have been hospitalized due to COVID-19. Let's put it more accurately. 98% of democrats answered wrong with higher risk than is in reality. There is a <1% chance of hospitalization with covid if you're unvaccinated. It's all political and the political divide in the USA has never been wider.
Bancakes 5y ago
If you took the vaccine(s), covid doesn't exist for you, statistically speaking.
- cassianoleal 5y ago
  In the last couple days I had 3 fully vaccinated people (including 2 already boosted) tell me they have or just had covid. I have a friend who works for a Rugby team where they're all vaccinated. They've had 6 or 7 athletes with covid in the last week or 2. The football team I root for has everybody in the team and the staff fully vaccinated. The pre-season has just started with 5 players off with covid.
  - hnuser847 5y ago
    They survived, right? Isn't that the whole point?
    - cassianoleal 5y ago
      Is it? I like to not get sick in the first place. Many of these people haven't had a single symptom in years.
      - xboxnolifes 5y ago
        I'd also like to never be sick, but that's not a realistic request in reality.
        cassianoleal 5y ago
        I agree but it’s very much feasible with good habits to go without a single symptom for years. I just gave you examples of people I know that have done that, and suddenly them all got COVID but you decided to gloss over that.
        thrixton 5y ago
glerk 5y ago
I can’t stand this sarcastic and condescending tone. When someone talks to me like that, my instinct is to ignore whatever they have to say.
resonanormal 5y ago
You want to keep up the circus that the world has turned into? The harsh reality is we have to learn to live with it like any other virus. The stigma that it's normal to wear masks everywhere is not something I would want to bestow upon my children
olalonde 5y ago
FWIW in Quebec there's a curfew, lockdown, population is 85% vaccinated and yet there is an all time high of cases. I understand why people feel like giving up when there's no clear solution to stop COVID from "winning". Vaccination reduces risk of hospitalisation and mortality but that's about it.
waynecochran 5y ago
It would be interesting to poll everyone and rate their concern for covid-19 on a scale from 0 to 10. The resulting histogram would show peaks at 1 and 9. I am in the small category that would rate it a 5 and feel they everyone around me has lost their minds.
bart_spoon 5y ago
The entire premise of the author's argument is based upon the idea that nothing regarding the mechanics of the pandemic have changed, just our attitudes. But that's obviously wrong. Vaccinations are available. Effective treatments are available. Omicron is not Delta. We understand the disease orders of magnitude better than we did in March of 2020. The costs of emergency pandemic measures are compounding. Children haven't had a huge gap in their learning and socialization. Inflation is starting to skyrocket. Meanwhile, the actual fatality rate of Covid has plummeted. There are a group of people who seem to be completely unable to process any of this, and while the rest of the world has moved on, they maintain a deathgrip on the fear and apocalyptic visions from 18+ months ago. Adapting to changing reality and refusing to entertain histrionics isn't "surrender", its what we would expect.
- sneak 5y ago
  > Meanwhile, the actual fatality rate of Covid has plummeted. However, the infection count has skyrocketed (even amongst the vaccinated), and the incidence of long-term negative health consequences for those infected is roughly the same for vaccinated and unvaccinated, months post recovery of initial infection. There's a huge negative impact here that society has not yet realized.
  - unpopularopp 5y ago
    >There's a huge negative impact here that society has not yet realized. Applies to the writer too. Blue collar workers aren't getting paid enough, they have to go to work, pay for their rents and such. And yes they get Covid. Not everyone is a fancy writer who can sit at home self-isolating for months or years and work from there. Poor people never have, never had a choice, you either lose your home, your job or you get Covid and get with it. That's it
  - thatswrong0 5y ago
    The only real way to have not "given up" with such an infectious disease that is contagious without being symptomatic would to have been to go the China route of hard lockdowns + privacy crushing contact tracing and enforced curfews. Which, of course, practically no one would support unless the disease were far more deadly to people without comorbidities. And even then you'd have to consider the serious long-term health affects that a multi-year hard lockdown would have on people.
haunter 5y ago
oof this guy's Twitter. So much hate and bitterness
smaryjerry 5y ago
Don’t bother reading this one. This person starts by saying they have lost their mind and they have. I’ve seen more coherent tantrums by 2 year olds, except 2 year olds would not swear this much. I could not even count the number of completely false assumptions made in this article.
JohnDeHope 5y ago
A lot of these kinds of articles, on both sides of the argument, and on a lot of other unrelated arguments, can all be summed up as "I can't imagine people have a different opinion from mine, so I'll just make fun of them."

20 points by akeck 5y ago

I'm not sure about the author, but certain about many commenters here, that popular opinion and scientific standpoint are confused. Being charitable to the author, I feel they are writing about popular opinion, politics and zeitgeist and the sudden change in them - people just suddenly surrendered. Many commenters are defending the changes in scientific position, which is something else altogether - and nowhere near as sudden. With science, as should be, when the data changes, the conclusions change - and in a pandemic, what the response of the people is and is likely to be, is part of the data. The science is solid and sees only small, incremental change, there is no surrender there.

propagadnadz 5y ago

msarrel 5y ago

It's fascinating to me that Donald Trump's message was horrifying, but when biden's message is just the same, we're totally ready to ignore this because it's just the flu and the economy is more important than our lives.

hprotagonist 5y ago
change the facts, change the outcome: 85% of my state and 99% of my city is vaccinated; death rates and case rates are rapidly decoupling. No fuss from me about wearing a mask, but my risk calculus adjusts as a function of my situation, and my situation in january 2022 is not even close to what it was in march 2020. It was obvious as early as April 2020 that the pipe dream of "contain and extinguish" was never going to come to pass, and that the only likely endgame was that SARS-CoV-2 or a variant of it would become endemic and relatively nonfatal. You cannot realistically eradicate a disease when you're infectious 48 hours before you're symptomatic, so you buckle down and hang tight until therapies and vaccines become available; then you get those things, deploy them at as wide a scale as you possibly can; then you ease up. We did, and we did, so now we are.
belltaco 5y ago
It's only fascinating if you ignore the huge differences like widespread availability of safe and effective vaccines, omicron vs. original strain etc.
sleepysysadmin 5y ago
>It's fascinating to me that Donald Trump's message was horrifying, but when biden's message is just the same, we're totally ready to ignore this because it's just the flu and the economy is more important than our lives. Covid response has been entirely 100% political. Medicine/Science was never involved. The division of lockdown or not to lockdown, wearing masks, etc. These have all came down nearly perfectly along political lines in many countries. It shouldn't be like that at all. There should be lots of right-wingers who gladly wear a mask and get locked down. There should be lots of left-wingers who would not. It was also not risk assessment. If you are under 50, the risk of covid was always known to be far less than the flu. Meanwhile people who were scared shitless of covid are also the cigar smoking, drunk driving, 100km/h in a 30km/h school zone type people. I'm pretty sure it has everything to do with yellow journalism. The yellow journalists have convinced their filter bubble group that covid is far worse than it ever was considered to be. https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimates-covid-hospitalization-risk.aspx https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimat... For unvaccinated hospitalization risk, 2% of Democrats responded correctly, compared with 16% of Republicans. In fact, 41% of Democrats replied that at least 50% of unvaccinated people have been hospitalized due to COVID-19. Let's put it more accurately. 98% of democrats answered wrong with higher risk than is in reality. There is a <1% chance of hospitalization with covid if you're unvaccinated. It's all political and the political divide in the USA has never been wider.

Bancakes 5y ago

If you took the vaccine(s), covid doesn't exist for you, statistically speaking.

cassianoleal 5y ago
In the last couple days I had 3 fully vaccinated people (including 2 already boosted) tell me they have or just had covid. I have a friend who works for a Rugby team where they're all vaccinated. They've had 6 or 7 athletes with covid in the last week or 2. The football team I root for has everybody in the team and the staff fully vaccinated. The pre-season has just started with 5 players off with covid.
- hnuser847 5y ago
  They survived, right? Isn't that the whole point?
  - cassianoleal 5y ago
    Is it? I like to not get sick in the first place. Many of these people haven't had a single symptom in years.
    - xboxnolifes 5y ago
      I'd also like to never be sick, but that's not a realistic request in reality.
      - cassianoleal 5y ago
        I agree but it’s very much feasible with good habits to go without a single symptom for years. I just gave you examples of people I know that have done that, and suddenly them all got COVID but you decided to gloss over that.
        thrixton 5y ago

glerk 5y ago

I can’t stand this sarcastic and condescending tone. When someone talks to me like that, my instinct is to ignore whatever they have to say.

resonanormal 5y ago

You want to keep up the circus that the world has turned into? The harsh reality is we have to learn to live with it like any other virus. The stigma that it's normal to wear masks everywhere is not something I would want to bestow upon my children

olalonde 5y ago

FWIW in Quebec there's a curfew, lockdown, population is 85% vaccinated and yet there is an all time high of cases. I understand why people feel like giving up when there's no clear solution to stop COVID from "winning". Vaccination reduces risk of hospitalisation and mortality but that's about it.

waynecochran 5y ago

It would be interesting to poll everyone and rate their concern for covid-19 on a scale from 0 to 10. The resulting histogram would show peaks at 1 and 9. I am in the small category that would rate it a 5 and feel they everyone around me has lost their minds.

bart_spoon 5y ago

The entire premise of the author's argument is based upon the idea that nothing regarding the mechanics of the pandemic have changed, just our attitudes. But that's obviously wrong. Vaccinations are available. Effective treatments are available. Omicron is not Delta. We understand the disease orders of magnitude better than we did in March of 2020. The costs of emergency pandemic measures are compounding. Children haven't had a huge gap in their learning and socialization. Inflation is starting to skyrocket. Meanwhile, the actual fatality rate of Covid has plummeted. There are a group of people who seem to be completely unable to process any of this, and while the rest of the world has moved on, they maintain a deathgrip on the fear and apocalyptic visions from 18+ months ago. Adapting to changing reality and refusing to entertain histrionics isn't "surrender", its what we would expect.

sneak 5y ago
> Meanwhile, the actual fatality rate of Covid has plummeted. However, the infection count has skyrocketed (even amongst the vaccinated), and the incidence of long-term negative health consequences for those infected is roughly the same for vaccinated and unvaccinated, months post recovery of initial infection. There's a huge negative impact here that society has not yet realized.
- unpopularopp 5y ago
  >There's a huge negative impact here that society has not yet realized. Applies to the writer too. Blue collar workers aren't getting paid enough, they have to go to work, pay for their rents and such. And yes they get Covid. Not everyone is a fancy writer who can sit at home self-isolating for months or years and work from there. Poor people never have, never had a choice, you either lose your home, your job or you get Covid and get with it. That's it
- thatswrong0 5y ago
  The only real way to have not "given up" with such an infectious disease that is contagious without being symptomatic would to have been to go the China route of hard lockdowns + privacy crushing contact tracing and enforced curfews. Which, of course, practically no one would support unless the disease were far more deadly to people without comorbidities. And even then you'd have to consider the serious long-term health affects that a multi-year hard lockdown would have on people.

haunter 5y ago

oof this guy's Twitter. So much hate and bitterness

smaryjerry 5y ago

Don’t bother reading this one. This person starts by saying they have lost their mind and they have. I’ve seen more coherent tantrums by 2 year olds, except 2 year olds would not swear this much. I could not even count the number of completely false assumptions made in this article.

JohnDeHope 5y ago

A lot of these kinds of articles, on both sides of the argument, and on a lot of other unrelated arguments, can all be summed up as "I can't imagine people have a different opinion from mine, so I'll just make fun of them."