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1. This isn’t the same virus as at the start of the pandemic. 2. There is a treatment protocol for COVID, unlike at the start of the pandemic. 3. There are no

by scop 5y ago

1. This isn’t the same virus as at the start of the pandemic. 2. There is a treatment protocol for COVID, unlike at the start of the pandemic. 3. There are now vaccines. There is now a large portion of the population that has vaccine immunity. 4. There is now a large portion of the population that has natural immunity. 5. It should be abundantly clear that case counts is no longer a meaningful metric. 6. Covid is a disease that has markedly different effects based upon the host’s age, medical condition, etc. There is no equivalent level of risk. 7. Most of the population, think working class and kids, cannot sustain continued lockdown conditions without serious mental/economic effects. They don’t have the privilege of the laptop class to just dial in from an office. 8. It should be clear that universally containing an aerosol virus like COVID is impossible. What is possible is targeted containment, I.e. keeping nursing homes under more precautions. Re hospital capacity, Hospitals run close to their limit. I have been in and out of the medical system my whole life and can assure that delays, cancellations, etc are nothing new. Is there strain during the new waves? Of course. But these are waves and they will come and pass. As well perhaps firing unvaccinated nurses wasn’t a good idea? People can choose to isolate during the waves if they want, but if they feel they feel like they have no need to (vaccine immunity, natural immunity). And as a father of small children, I cannot in good conscience continue to deny them a childhood for a virus that they themselves have extremely little risk of. The human brain is only developing during its childhood years once.

bartread 5y ago
> 3. There are now vaccines. There is now a large portion of the population that has vaccine immunity. Yeeeeesss. The vaccines are beneficial in preventing serious illness but it's important not to overstate their efficacy. As I write this I have COVID, which I caught from my girlfriend. We're not sure where she got it, but she started showing symptoms and tested positive last Saturday. I started showing symptoms on Monday but didn't test positive until Wednesday. We're both double vaxxed and boosted. In my case I had 2 x AZ and 1 x Moderna. Can't remember off the top of my head what she had. Both of us are in good health. Neither of us have underlying health conditions. She's fortunately started feeling a lot better now but I've really only just passed rock bottom. I feel much better than yesterday but still far from well. The internet is full of stories of people who were all, "I had COVID: it lasted 4 days and was no big deal," and then a week later are either in ICU or dead, so I'm not taking anything for granted. Seeming to get better and then getting rapidly worse, or having it linger on for a surprisingly long time, is something of a hallmark of COVID. (Of course, there are also plenty of people for whom it really is no big deal.) Probably I won't become seriously ill or die, but COVID is no picnic, and if you had the choice of getting it versus not getting it I'd advise against it. Even with Omicron, if a large enough proportion of the population were infected at one time, our healthcare systems would collapse under the pressure. Whilst I don't like to credit the current UK government with terribly much intelligence, our experience in this country has been that it has required some degree of careful management to avoid that scenario playing out. Even still, our death rate is high compared with many other nations. There's also the fact that the picture is very different across different countries: for example, the situation in Ireland is very different to the UK. TO BE CLEAR: Unless you have a very clear and specific medical reason not to, you should get vaccinated, but let's not pretend the vaccines are a panacea. That's misinformation as much as it is to state that they're completely unnecessary, that COVID is some sort of elaborate hoax, or - and I don't have enough faces or palms to adequately express my despair at this perspective - that they're some sort of government conspiracy to track us all with nanobots.
bryanlarsen 5y ago
> 8. It should be clear that universally containing an aerosol virus like COVID is impossible. What is possible is targeted containment, I.e. keeping nursing homes under more precautions. China has done it for pre-omicron variants, so it is possible. You and I are not willing to accept the restrictions necessary to do it and that's fine, but you cannot say it is impossible.
- JPKab 5y ago
  Are you really accepting CCP virus counts? How gullible can people be to believe anything from a totalitarian government? We are talking about a nation that has reported zero cases for months at a time when no other nation on the planet has accomplished the same feat including island nations. I've noticed a trend where people who truly believe that if only we followed the rules they believe in harder we could achieve zero COVID hold up the CCP's policies out of pure wishful thinking. It's truly embarrassing to witness such gullible childish thinking. In January of 2020, a Chinese born coworker of mine who is now a citizen had her father die in Beijing. Every symptom of how he died was obviously COVID, but the authorities officially classified his death as cardiac arrest. She was enraged by this but that was the common thread in Beijing. Sure. It's an anecdote but it's not like you can get any real data about this. Who is going to collect it when the entire nation state is turned against you? It's interesting to watch how this thread changed once people on the West Coast woke up. The branch covidians are in full force.
- biorach 5y ago
  Whether China can keep it up until the end of the pandemic is yet to be seen
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    Not just until the end of the pandemic, until the end of time. Same with nz and au
version_five 5y ago
Please run for office wherever you are. We need a lot more common sense like this in the discussion. I fear many places have taken the opposite approach where instead of making it clear why restrictions need to end, people keep focusing on impossible to resolve edges cases as reasons we need to obsess over covid forever
JPKab 5y ago
This is an excellent comment regarding how unsustainable these practices are. School closures and even the isolation tactics when a asymptomatic child test positive are completely unsustainable. They are deeply punishing to the working class and to children from underclass households where every minute they are in their house versus in a school is a net detriment to their education and mental health. I used to do work for the Democratic party many years ago. It was sort of a given back in 2014 that we were going to get the vast majority of Latino votes going into the future. These unsustainable policies have caused Latinos to shift dramatically away from the Democratic party. It is politically unsustainable and destructive. It is politically, unsustainable and destructive. Regarding the unvaccinated nurses getting fired, should be noted that virtually all of them had natural immunity. My sister-in-law is one of these who did not want to get vaccinated because she had already contracted the virus and had attended several patients suffering from adverse events as well as friends who had their menstrual cycles disrupted. There was no scientific harm from this decision because her natural immunity was more protective than the vaccine based on multiple studies, including a CDC study that was just released last week. Your comment on being a father is also 100% correct. People seem to think that children's brains continue to develop at the same rate between the ages of five and eight as they do between the ages of 3 and 5. That's just not how it works. You have these tiny windows of time where the brain is going through rapid development and you can't make up for these windows in a later time period. History will likely not be kind to the policies against children that were pursued to protect unionized teachers and elderly people who will long be dead when the repercussions of this horrible policy towards children are fully felt. But perhaps I have too much faith in the people writing the history to be honest, considering that the laptop class are the most powerful and the most paranoid and frightened.

by scop 5y ago

bartread 5y ago

> 3. There are now vaccines. There is now a large portion of the population that has vaccine immunity. Yeeeeesss. The vaccines are beneficial in preventing serious illness but it's important not to overstate their efficacy. As I write this I have COVID, which I caught from my girlfriend. We're not sure where she got it, but she started showing symptoms and tested positive last Saturday. I started showing symptoms on Monday but didn't test positive until Wednesday. We're both double vaxxed and boosted. In my case I had 2 x AZ and 1 x Moderna. Can't remember off the top of my head what she had. Both of us are in good health. Neither of us have underlying health conditions. She's fortunately started feeling a lot better now but I've really only just passed rock bottom. I feel much better than yesterday but still far from well. The internet is full of stories of people who were all, "I had COVID: it lasted 4 days and was no big deal," and then a week later are either in ICU or dead, so I'm not taking anything for granted. Seeming to get better and then getting rapidly worse, or having it linger on for a surprisingly long time, is something of a hallmark of COVID. (Of course, there are also plenty of people for whom it really is no big deal.) Probably I won't become seriously ill or die, but COVID is no picnic, and if you had the choice of getting it versus not getting it I'd advise against it. Even with Omicron, if a large enough proportion of the population were infected at one time, our healthcare systems would collapse under the pressure. Whilst I don't like to credit the current UK government with terribly much intelligence, our experience in this country has been that it has required some degree of careful management to avoid that scenario playing out. Even still, our death rate is high compared with many other nations. There's also the fact that the picture is very different across different countries: for example, the situation in Ireland is very different to the UK. TO BE CLEAR: Unless you have a very clear and specific medical reason not to, you should get vaccinated, but let's not pretend the vaccines are a panacea. That's misinformation as much as it is to state that they're completely unnecessary, that COVID is some sort of elaborate hoax, or - and I don't have enough faces or palms to adequately express my despair at this perspective - that they're some sort of government conspiracy to track us all with nanobots.

bryanlarsen 5y ago

> 8. It should be clear that universally containing an aerosol virus like COVID is impossible. What is possible is targeted containment, I.e. keeping nursing homes under more precautions. China has done it for pre-omicron variants, so it is possible. You and I are not willing to accept the restrictions necessary to do it and that's fine, but you cannot say it is impossible.

JPKab 5y ago
Are you really accepting CCP virus counts? How gullible can people be to believe anything from a totalitarian government? We are talking about a nation that has reported zero cases for months at a time when no other nation on the planet has accomplished the same feat including island nations. I've noticed a trend where people who truly believe that if only we followed the rules they believe in harder we could achieve zero COVID hold up the CCP's policies out of pure wishful thinking. It's truly embarrassing to witness such gullible childish thinking. In January of 2020, a Chinese born coworker of mine who is now a citizen had her father die in Beijing. Every symptom of how he died was obviously COVID, but the authorities officially classified his death as cardiac arrest. She was enraged by this but that was the common thread in Beijing. Sure. It's an anecdote but it's not like you can get any real data about this. Who is going to collect it when the entire nation state is turned against you? It's interesting to watch how this thread changed once people on the West Coast woke up. The branch covidians are in full force.
biorach 5y ago
Whether China can keep it up until the end of the pandemic is yet to be seen
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  Not just until the end of the pandemic, until the end of time. Same with nz and au

version_five 5y ago

Please run for office wherever you are. We need a lot more common sense like this in the discussion. I fear many places have taken the opposite approach where instead of making it clear why restrictions need to end, people keep focusing on impossible to resolve edges cases as reasons we need to obsess over covid forever

JPKab 5y ago

This is an excellent comment regarding how unsustainable these practices are. School closures and even the isolation tactics when a asymptomatic child test positive are completely unsustainable. They are deeply punishing to the working class and to children from underclass households where every minute they are in their house versus in a school is a net detriment to their education and mental health. I used to do work for the Democratic party many years ago. It was sort of a given back in 2014 that we were going to get the vast majority of Latino votes going into the future. These unsustainable policies have caused Latinos to shift dramatically away from the Democratic party. It is politically unsustainable and destructive. It is politically, unsustainable and destructive. Regarding the unvaccinated nurses getting fired, should be noted that virtually all of them had natural immunity. My sister-in-law is one of these who did not want to get vaccinated because she had already contracted the virus and had attended several patients suffering from adverse events as well as friends who had their menstrual cycles disrupted. There was no scientific harm from this decision because her natural immunity was more protective than the vaccine based on multiple studies, including a CDC study that was just released last week. Your comment on being a father is also 100% correct. People seem to think that children's brains continue to develop at the same rate between the ages of five and eight as they do between the ages of 3 and 5. That's just not how it works. You have these tiny windows of time where the brain is going through rapid development and you can't make up for these windows in a later time period. History will likely not be kind to the policies against children that were pursued to protect unionized teachers and elderly people who will long be dead when the repercussions of this horrible policy towards children are fully felt. But perhaps I have too much faith in the people writing the history to be honest, considering that the laptop class are the most powerful and the most paranoid and frightened.