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Axios-Ipsos poll: Most Americans say Covid is no longer a crisis

97 points by cwwc 5y ago

jleyank 5y ago
What percentage would say there never WAS a crisis (just political bs)? 10? 25? 40? Remember, wishing doesn’t make it so.
- elil17 5y ago
  I’d wager it’s a small number of people who thought it was never a crisis. Approximately 1 in 350 Americans died of COVID in the past two years, so most people know someone who died. Personally, it’s hard not to call it a crisis when it hits that close to home.
  - toolz 5y ago
    The places in the world that reacted the least to covid have excess deaths you can barely even tell there was a potent disease. Not a single country that avoided lockdowns is in the top 30 excess death (per capita). So did many people treat this as a crisis? I would say so. Should we have? That seems to be clearly a no.
    - willnonya 5y ago
      People are conflating the ideas of it being crisis and that it required government action, or at least the government actions we got. It is possible for something to both be a crisis and not be something that is handled well by the heavy hand of government.
    - taeric 5y ago
      This feels a little... Too convenient. Would love to see an analysis that covers all confounders. That is, I'm sympathetic to the idea that a lot of what we did was probably not super helpful. I'm less inclined to believe that a counterfactual world had fewer deaths. Seems more likely that, while we could have protected nursing homes better, most everything else was likely to look very similar to how it did. I mean, I get the butterfly flapping a wing argument. But in general, large things moving in a direction tend to arrive where they are headed.
  - michael_j_ward 5y ago
    > 1 in 350 Americans died of COVID in the past two years Putting 1/700 a year death from covid into context of our overall mortality rate: 1,027.0 deaths per 100,000 population [0] I know more under 40 that have died from overdose in the past two years than I know that have died from covid (which is 0) [0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm
    - nukemaster 5y ago
      I actually don't know a single young person who died from Covid over the pandemic but I know a few who committed suicide and a couple more who attempted it.
      - notafraudster 5y ago
        There have been about 24,000 people under age 40 who died from COVID-19 in the US during the pandemic. Suicide data is not available for 2021/2022 yet, but based the age ratio of past suicides (around 50% of suicides below age 40) and the total number of suicides in 2020 (around 40,000), then the number of suicides is likely to be higher than the number of COVID deaths but in the same qualitative arena. Further apples to apples comparison is tough because kids 0-5 die of COVID but the US does not record any death below age 5 as a suicide. A related comparison: more school age children died of COVID during the pandemic than have ever across all history died from school shootings.
        nukemaster 5y ago
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - tptacek 5y ago
      Overdose deaths are a public health calamity. COVID topped them by an integer multiple.
  - chronofar 5y ago
    I don’t know, I think it depends on how you qualify crisis, and what you deem as an appropriate response. If we’re trading anecdotes I don’t personally know anyone who has died or even been hospitalized with COVID. I know people who know people who did, but that is a small number and the majority were not likely to live long due to other causes (I do know one of one family member of a friend who was in seemingly good health and was hospitalized). For my personal health and the health of most people I would say there wasn’t ever a crisis, though the delta wave got closest to being so that also coincided with the vaccine availability which removed any crisis that would have come otherwise. For others who are prone to severe illness it has been a crisis and continues to be. Aside from the political banter that is what has made this so divisive, the real risk and experiences of people can vary wildly.
    - shkkmo 5y ago
      I also don't know anyone who died from covid. However, any event that overloads hospitals to the extreme that care has to be rationed is absolutely a crisis. This happened all over the country. We can debate what the appropriate responses to this crisis should have been but it was unarguably a crisis. Pretending otherwise is simply delusional.
      - chronofar 5y ago
        Let's try and refrain from strong language such as "delusional" and "unarguably," we'll likely find more to agree on if we do. But yes, I agree a hospital overloading is a crisis for those providing or seeking to receive care at said hospital. The cause and remediation of said crises are I think likely significantly more involved than just attributing it to COVID. In other words, the crisis of a particular overloaded hospital is not likely strictly a COVID crisis, but rather an issue with how care is prepared for and distributed in general.
        shkkmo 5y ago
        This is BS semantic goalpost shifting. There was a crisis. It had many aspects (medical, economic, social, political) and there were many different methods of alleviating those different aspects. Claiming "there was no crisis" is simply, factually wrong.
  - tohnjitor 5y ago
    If each person's Dunbar number is 150, then most Americans do not know someone who died.
  - beefbudd69 5y ago
    - beefbudd69 5y ago
- ramoz 5y ago
  Even if it was political bs, it became a crisis. We shut down adequate health care for serious health issues like cancer; in favor of covid policies.
  - jleyank 5y ago
    Anytime the words “disease” and “reefer trucks” appear in the same sentence, it’s a crisis. People forget that when covid started there was nothing people could do but ventilate and hope. Like sars, the cytokine storm burned out the lungs and that was somewhat age independent. They found anti inflammatories that worked and adapted work from other inflammation diseases to get some kind of treatment. Then vaccines appeared, and things became more manageable, but up through delta, getting covid was really bad if you ended upon ventilator. The game changed with omicron although even that can affect naive populations. Politicians and pundits trotted out “sacrifice grandma for the economy” but it didn’t really fly. Hope people remember enough from covid to improve aged care and end of life housing.
Overtonwindow 5y ago
- willnonya 5y ago
  i guess you were lucky enough not to have to watch someone close to you die from it then.
  - nukemaster 5y ago
    - GordonS 5y ago
  - willnonya 5y ago
    - nukemaster 5y ago
  - TheGigaChad 5y ago
- nukemaster 5y ago
  I remember seeing an epidemiologist near the beginning who was saying that normally people don't listen at all when they talk about these kinds of things and so they sound the alarm loudly. This time people listened and he was warning everyone that an overreaction would kill more people. He probably got kicked off everything for "disinformation."
  - willnonya 5y ago
    That seems a bit convenient at this point doesn't it? There is some truth the the idea that our culture is more attuned to fear than it used to be and that politicians are more adept at exploiting that. You should be more surprised when politicians don't stoke fears and panic for their own purposes.
kemiller2002 5y ago
I don't know if it's still a crisis, but I think America is saying it isn't, because it's tired of the fight. No matter which side you're on (real or not, overblown or not, etc.), America has been at war with itself for 2 years. People have given up trying to convince the other side who's right and who's wrong. Family's don't see each other, friends don't talk. I think everyone is realizing that's the amount of energy to continue is just too great, so people have become apathetic to whatever the outcome is.
- 0xy 5y ago
  The media and politicians are saying it's over because mid-terms are approaching and lockdowns are extremely unpopular (they destroy businesses, jobs, lives, etc). The measures were always driven by polling numbers and political sentiment alone. Many of the measures had absolutely no basis in science (wearing a mask in a restaurant then sitting down and taking it off is pure political ideology with zero basis in scientific reality).
  - VikingCoder 5y ago
    - colpabar 5y ago
      This is an odd reply - you're claiming someone is wrong by showing them that someone else on this website was also wrong. The commenter specifically mentioned the silly way we have to wear masks while being seated but can then take them off, even if we are less than six feet from the nearest table with other unmasked people. A LOT of people have this exact same complaint, and to write it off because those people are not "experts" is just ridiculous. How does it make any sense??
      - VikingCoder 5y ago
        They're not saying "I don't think it makes sense," they are making the much stronger claim that there's "zero basis in scientific reality." Both claims were made, without any evidence, by commenters on HN. I really wish people would be much more cautious in their pronouncements. Especially if they have zero expertise in the relevant fields.
glofish 5y ago
The crisis is the mentality of people clinging to the belief that they are about to die if others don't (pick your poison): - mask, lock down, hide from others etc
- onion2k 5y ago
  Your criticism of people who believe it's still a crisis would carry more weight if about 500 people/day weren't dying of Covid[1] right now (average based on the last week - https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/#graph-deaths-daily https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/#graph-...). That's definitely less than the 4000+ deaths per day at peak, but it's still quite a lot. [1] Or 'with Covid' if you believe those people just happen to be dying of something else while having Covid.
  - jtbayly 5y ago
    What percent of people in the US do you think have Covid right now? I ask because 7452 people die per day in the US on average, meaning 6.7% of the people who die now have Covid (using your 500/day figure). Clearly some die from and some happen to die with Covid. The difference could be estimated simplistically based on the percent of the population that currently has Covid. If 0.5% have Covid and 6.7% of the people who die have it, there is a correlation. If 5% have Covid and 6.7% of the people who die have it, there's not much correlation. (Of course, in the correlation case, it still doesn't prove causation, as the weakened immune systems of those who are dying may be unable to fight off Covid at the end.) I think the best way to evaluate is to look at excess deaths. But even there you've got data contamination from the measures that were taken (drinking deaths, suicides up, flu down, etc.) and no way to figure out exactly how many of the various increases and decreases are directly attributable to the Covid measures.
    - nicoburns 5y ago
      Are US hospitals/coroners not recording "from covid" and "with covid" separately? I've seen lots of anti-covid-prevention-measures people here in the UK make a big deal of this distinction as if nobody else had thought of it, but I've seen graphs based on official statistics which distinguish between the two groups in sources as mainstream as the BBC. At least here there's no need to estimate.
AndrewThrowaway 5y ago
I think there is an interesting aspect of this - how society treats death, what is philosophy of death in that society, etc. Colleague's grandpa passed away in Scandinavia. As it was summertime, all the extended family is on vacation, abroad and etc. they put the body in the freezer and schedule funeral at some time when everybody's back. On the other hand I have read about Japanese (might be any other Far East country) culture where passing away of father requires something like a year of mourning. Culture doesn't allow you to go to work for a year as you would look insensitive. However not showing up at work for a year is also a big nono. So it becomes a huge strain on all the family. And we can imagine how these two cultures can have very different approaches to crisis like that, crisis itself is of a very different scope because of culture.
- chrischen 5y ago
  Wow then Japan is going to have a super labor shortage as their agin population dies off.
oneoff786 5y ago
I agree. Covid is not a crisis. For a vaxxed individual the risk looks very low. I’m happy to grab my boosters as needed and mask up during the winter. It doesn’t really matter. I would wager the virus will continue to grow less dangerous over time. What’s utterly astonishing is what’s going on in Shanghai in spite of this.
- freebuju 5y ago
  Covid will remain an endemic crisis always looming as you rightly point out with the events in Shanghai. Vaccines and multiple boosters won't stop infections and hospitalizations. At this point, if you are alive we have to assume you have developed some immune response to some variant of COVID. Am more disturbed about the overwhelming lack of research on natural immunity and other possible treatments. Vaccine over-reliance is akin to taking a shot in the dark.
  - dahinds 5y ago
    dexamethasone, monoclonal antibodies, molnupiravir, paclovid, as well as all the work on ideas good and bad that did not pan out? And I think there's a decent amount of research on natural immunity going on? (not sure how to measure what you describe as an "overwhelming lack of research")
    - freebuju 5y ago
      I hold my ground and there is an obvious reason why none of the promising anti-inflammatory drugs which have been used in the past to deal with flu haven't seen the light of day. IMO Covid infection was only considered a death sentence because at first we did not have any patient care focused on treatment of known symptoms through the stages of the sickness & foolishly ignored any potential alternatives or rather the scientific community was co-opted into praising mRNA and look nowhere else. Remdesivir is one of the hush hush alternatives proven to have some success with covid treatment but it never comes up. Anywhere. Nevermind that the FDA approved its use for mild-cases treatment. The scientific community let us down a big one on this. Look at masks now. They backtracked on the effectiveness of that.
theyeenzbeanz 5y ago
We’ve reached the point where people who wanted to vaccinated have and those who don’t won’t. Considering that there seems to be boosters every so often it feels like it will be seasonal like the flu.
candiddevmike 5y ago
Whatever your stance is, I think COVID showed how ineffective the federal government is in the face of a crisis. Imagine if COVID was more severe or something else entirely, we'd all be dead before our elected officials could figure out how it can benefit them. Pin it on incompetence, negligence, political grandstanding--the federal government could not contain the crisis and was always months behind what we needed. We were mass producing ventilators when we should've been mass producing tests or masks, we were going maskless based on trailing data instead of the current spikes etc. It was like a shitty game of telephone where people died because the messaging became so delayed and distorted.
- sremani 5y ago
  As a person who has distaste for 'Mandates', a successful Pandemic reaction will always look like an 'Overreaction'. If Federal government has any role in the creation or distribution of effective Vaccines, I would consider it a success. It is still far from perfect but it was a success. I am not trying to change anyones view on this -- just expressing my point of view.
- criddell 5y ago
  The effectiveness of the federal government is complicated. You mentioned some disappointing aspects but I think it's worth keeping in mind some of the positive parts too. For one, the new vaccines are a triumph. As I understand it, DARPA was an early funder of research and development around MRNA tech. And Trump's Operation Warp Speed is, for me, a rare highlight of his time in office.
  - BaseballPhysics 5y ago
    Not to mention the huge subsidy programs that likely saved the economy from a far more profound shock. But that wouldn't support the anti-government narrative that seems to be so popular among Americans in general and techies in particular.
- herdcall 5y ago
  Trying to contain the virus was the bad strategy because of the effectivenesss of the virus in spreading, with/without masks; protecting the vulnerable (mainly elderly) would've been more effective, as I understand. See the excellent interview of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya by Lex Fridman (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIOGUYOPAsA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIOGUYOPAsA). On the plus side, producing vaccines by end of 2020 was nothing short of stunning IMO, with all the skepticism at that time on the timeline. Bid kudos to the pharmas of course, but a lot of credit should also go to the Trump administration, whatever you may think of the president.
akomtu 5y ago
This poll also tells that most americans quickly forget anything and everything, even if it's supposedly a threat to survival of human kind, unless the mass media talks about the 'grave dangers' 24/7. I'm glad to admit that americans aren't that easy to distract from real issues.
pastor_bob 5y ago
Most of Europe has moved passed crisis stage, as they've gotten rid of almost all restrictions. It's hard to argue otherwise
fortran77 5y ago
Early on in the pandemic when we saw stories like this about entire families who succumbed to covid: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/nyregion/new-jersey-family-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/nyregion/new-jersey-famil... ...I wondered if the problem in the U.S. is really an obesity "epidemic" and not a COVID epidemic. The statistics for non-elderly deaths seem to bear this out. (Of course, the NY Times neglected to comment on the elephant in the room.) I was never a COVID skeptic -- I got vaccinated, and I wore N-95 masks, fitted as best I could, when indoors in crowds. I rarely ate in restaurants so giving that up wasn't a big lifestyle change for me. (I was fortunate to have a decent supply of N-95 and N-99 masks pre-pandemic because I often visit places where things are fabricated, and dust and particles are around.) But I was skeptical about mask mandates for one simple fact -- whenever I was out in public, I'd observe that only about 30% of people were wearing masks in a way that could possibly do anything -- covering the nose and mouth, and not taking it on and off continuously / not touching the face. So we'll never really know if masks work on population studies. There was a lot of "theatre" -- (I fly a lot for work, and still flew during the pandemic to Europe and the mid-east quite often. I have multiple passports so I could get into places even during times when tourism was banned). Airplanes never banned CPAP use in flight, even though study after study from previous airborne viruses showed CPAP to aersolize a person's exhalate and spread disease. (See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7298691/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7298691/ ). United Airlines claimed that they were following the guidelines of the "Cleveland Clinic" for their covid mitigation, and yet that clinic warns about CPAP machines. (The reality is, the airlines didn't want to battle the ADA rules, so they put the public at risk.)
egberts1 5y ago
Meanwhile, the flu is now on a steep uptick from some 25y historic low. We merely replaced one common pandemic with another only last time the government decided to try at some draconian public policy.
ianai 5y ago
My faith in polls took a massive, massive hit after recent elections and political cycles. Also the US had a political regime point at 30-40% approval ratings and said "those people want it so we're doing it." Seemingly turning any poll into a pretext for any political changes. Sorry, but, until something changes in the world of polls dramatically I have to underweight their importance.
crawfordcomeaux 5y ago
America was born out of trauma denial. Denying there's something going on has been a common pattern in our history.
logicalmonster 5y ago
I find the polling now to be useless: the media is currently focused on what gets better ratings (Ukraine) and formerly Covid-hysterical politicians are downplaying their (IMO) destructive actions presumably due to horrendously bad polling. What happens a bit down the road when the election cycle passes, Ukraine (hopefully) gets resolved, and it's flu season again and the hysteria starts getting good ratings again? Are the highly malleable crowd going to be reprogrammed to go back into "Wear the Mask" and "No Jab, No Job" mode?
duxup 5y ago
The number of infections is down. Restrictions mostly gone / loosening without any disastrous results. Sounds about right for now. I worry about COVID, but I also worry about wearing out people / society / side effects. If there's space to loosen restrictions I'm all for it. Let the scientists keep a lookout, let the citizens relax.
- monksy 5y ago
  > The number of infections is down. Has been down in the prior month-ish.. Although numbers are looking to trend upward right now. Watching how Omicron unfolded in Europe and December, and had a resurgence a month ago.. I would say that we may be in for a nasty wave. Also, S Korea, dropped their covid restrictions and that's a bloodbath now.
  - dfxm12 5y ago
    Trending up, with big holidays in the coming weeks, just like the December timeframe.
kindatrue 5y ago
It's like car crashes and mass shootings. Both are preventable. But we just choose to ignore them because doing something about it would be too hard and not fun.
valis_iii 5y ago
- nukemaster 5y ago
  Case in point.
rubyist5eva 5y ago
We have vaccines, lockdowns are inneffective...literally what else is there to do. We can't just cower in fear in our basements for the rest of our lives. It took 50 years after the first mass vaccination rollout for the Polio vaccine for it to be "eradicated" - i'm not putting up with draconian public health measures for the rest of my life. EFF THAT
- timcavel 5y ago
phendrenad2 5y ago
The powers that be have concluded that a significant fraction of the population suffering IQ loss due to long covid is preferable to continuing to print money to bail out the economy.
AzzieElbab 5y ago
What if it is still a crisis? What are we going to do? Take a sweater? Everyone who could be vaccinated is vaccinated. Everything that could have been done is done with notable exception of ramping up therapeutics production
BaseballPhysics 5y ago
> with cases rising, and hospitalizations and deaths holding steady at low levels. That... seems to confirm the idea that it's no longer a crisis? Again, the crisis is in the hospital systems. Flattening the curve was all about controlling infection rates in order to ensure the systems continue to function. COVID zero and crushing the curve was never a public health goal in North America. If you accept that, then the reality is COVID is here to stay. That much is a given. So if we've reached the point of mostly decoupling hospital/ICU/death rates from case rates (or at least dramatically lowering the frequency with which a COVID case escalates to hospitalization/ICU/death) through a mix of vaccines, antivirals, and other measures, then it seems perfectly reasonable to conclude that the crisis has past. And I say all that as someone who still compulsively wears a mask in a lot of circumstances. Is there something in that analysis that I'm missing?
kashunstva 5y ago
My first impression of this sort of survey is → "define: crisis." I'm not even sure how I would answer this survey without some definitional clarity, and I'm probably one of the most cautious people around.
timcavel 5y ago

97 points by cwwc 5y ago

What percentage would say there never WAS a crisis (just political bs)? 10? 25? 40? Remember, wishing doesn’t make it so.

elil17 5y ago
I’d wager it’s a small number of people who thought it was never a crisis. Approximately 1 in 350 Americans died of COVID in the past two years, so most people know someone who died. Personally, it’s hard not to call it a crisis when it hits that close to home.
- toolz 5y ago
  The places in the world that reacted the least to covid have excess deaths you can barely even tell there was a potent disease. Not a single country that avoided lockdowns is in the top 30 excess death (per capita). So did many people treat this as a crisis? I would say so. Should we have? That seems to be clearly a no.
  - willnonya 5y ago
    People are conflating the ideas of it being crisis and that it required government action, or at least the government actions we got. It is possible for something to both be a crisis and not be something that is handled well by the heavy hand of government.
  - taeric 5y ago
    This feels a little... Too convenient. Would love to see an analysis that covers all confounders. That is, I'm sympathetic to the idea that a lot of what we did was probably not super helpful. I'm less inclined to believe that a counterfactual world had fewer deaths. Seems more likely that, while we could have protected nursing homes better, most everything else was likely to look very similar to how it did. I mean, I get the butterfly flapping a wing argument. But in general, large things moving in a direction tend to arrive where they are headed.
- michael_j_ward 5y ago
  > 1 in 350 Americans died of COVID in the past two years Putting 1/700 a year death from covid into context of our overall mortality rate: 1,027.0 deaths per 100,000 population [0] I know more under 40 that have died from overdose in the past two years than I know that have died from covid (which is 0) [0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm
  - nukemaster 5y ago
    I actually don't know a single young person who died from Covid over the pandemic but I know a few who committed suicide and a couple more who attempted it.
    - notafraudster 5y ago
      There have been about 24,000 people under age 40 who died from COVID-19 in the US during the pandemic. Suicide data is not available for 2021/2022 yet, but based the age ratio of past suicides (around 50% of suicides below age 40) and the total number of suicides in 2020 (around 40,000), then the number of suicides is likely to be higher than the number of COVID deaths but in the same qualitative arena. Further apples to apples comparison is tough because kids 0-5 die of COVID but the US does not record any death below age 5 as a suicide. A related comparison: more school age children died of COVID during the pandemic than have ever across all history died from school shootings.
      - nukemaster 5y ago
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - tptacek 5y ago
    Overdose deaths are a public health calamity. COVID topped them by an integer multiple.
- chronofar 5y ago
  I don’t know, I think it depends on how you qualify crisis, and what you deem as an appropriate response. If we’re trading anecdotes I don’t personally know anyone who has died or even been hospitalized with COVID. I know people who know people who did, but that is a small number and the majority were not likely to live long due to other causes (I do know one of one family member of a friend who was in seemingly good health and was hospitalized). For my personal health and the health of most people I would say there wasn’t ever a crisis, though the delta wave got closest to being so that also coincided with the vaccine availability which removed any crisis that would have come otherwise. For others who are prone to severe illness it has been a crisis and continues to be. Aside from the political banter that is what has made this so divisive, the real risk and experiences of people can vary wildly.
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    I also don't know anyone who died from covid. However, any event that overloads hospitals to the extreme that care has to be rationed is absolutely a crisis. This happened all over the country. We can debate what the appropriate responses to this crisis should have been but it was unarguably a crisis. Pretending otherwise is simply delusional.
    - chronofar 5y ago
      Let's try and refrain from strong language such as "delusional" and "unarguably," we'll likely find more to agree on if we do. But yes, I agree a hospital overloading is a crisis for those providing or seeking to receive care at said hospital. The cause and remediation of said crises are I think likely significantly more involved than just attributing it to COVID. In other words, the crisis of a particular overloaded hospital is not likely strictly a COVID crisis, but rather an issue with how care is prepared for and distributed in general.
      - shkkmo 5y ago
        This is BS semantic goalpost shifting. There was a crisis. It had many aspects (medical, economic, social, political) and there were many different methods of alleviating those different aspects. Claiming "there was no crisis" is simply, factually wrong.
- tohnjitor 5y ago
  If each person's Dunbar number is 150, then most Americans do not know someone who died.
- beefbudd69 5y ago
  - beefbudd69 5y ago
ramoz 5y ago
Even if it was political bs, it became a crisis. We shut down adequate health care for serious health issues like cancer; in favor of covid policies.
- jleyank 5y ago
  Anytime the words “disease” and “reefer trucks” appear in the same sentence, it’s a crisis. People forget that when covid started there was nothing people could do but ventilate and hope. Like sars, the cytokine storm burned out the lungs and that was somewhat age independent. They found anti inflammatories that worked and adapted work from other inflammation diseases to get some kind of treatment. Then vaccines appeared, and things became more manageable, but up through delta, getting covid was really bad if you ended upon ventilator. The game changed with omicron although even that can affect naive populations. Politicians and pundits trotted out “sacrifice grandma for the economy” but it didn’t really fly. Hope people remember enough from covid to improve aged care and end of life housing.

Overtonwindow 5y ago

willnonya 5y ago
i guess you were lucky enough not to have to watch someone close to you die from it then.
- nukemaster 5y ago
  - GordonS 5y ago
- willnonya 5y ago
  - nukemaster 5y ago
- TheGigaChad 5y ago
nukemaster 5y ago
I remember seeing an epidemiologist near the beginning who was saying that normally people don't listen at all when they talk about these kinds of things and so they sound the alarm loudly. This time people listened and he was warning everyone that an overreaction would kill more people. He probably got kicked off everything for "disinformation."
- willnonya 5y ago
  That seems a bit convenient at this point doesn't it? There is some truth the the idea that our culture is more attuned to fear than it used to be and that politicians are more adept at exploiting that. You should be more surprised when politicians don't stoke fears and panic for their own purposes.

kemiller2002 5y ago

I don't know if it's still a crisis, but I think America is saying it isn't, because it's tired of the fight. No matter which side you're on (real or not, overblown or not, etc.), America has been at war with itself for 2 years. People have given up trying to convince the other side who's right and who's wrong. Family's don't see each other, friends don't talk. I think everyone is realizing that's the amount of energy to continue is just too great, so people have become apathetic to whatever the outcome is.

0xy 5y ago
The media and politicians are saying it's over because mid-terms are approaching and lockdowns are extremely unpopular (they destroy businesses, jobs, lives, etc). The measures were always driven by polling numbers and political sentiment alone. Many of the measures had absolutely no basis in science (wearing a mask in a restaurant then sitting down and taking it off is pure political ideology with zero basis in scientific reality).
- VikingCoder 5y ago
  - colpabar 5y ago
    This is an odd reply - you're claiming someone is wrong by showing them that someone else on this website was also wrong. The commenter specifically mentioned the silly way we have to wear masks while being seated but can then take them off, even if we are less than six feet from the nearest table with other unmasked people. A LOT of people have this exact same complaint, and to write it off because those people are not "experts" is just ridiculous. How does it make any sense??
    - VikingCoder 5y ago
      They're not saying "I don't think it makes sense," they are making the much stronger claim that there's "zero basis in scientific reality." Both claims were made, without any evidence, by commenters on HN. I really wish people would be much more cautious in their pronouncements. Especially if they have zero expertise in the relevant fields.

glofish 5y ago

The crisis is the mentality of people clinging to the belief that they are about to die if others don't (pick your poison): - mask, lock down, hide from others etc

onion2k 5y ago
Your criticism of people who believe it's still a crisis would carry more weight if about 500 people/day weren't dying of Covid[1] right now (average based on the last week - https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/#graph-deaths-daily https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/#graph-...). That's definitely less than the 4000+ deaths per day at peak, but it's still quite a lot. [1] Or 'with Covid' if you believe those people just happen to be dying of something else while having Covid.
- jtbayly 5y ago
  What percent of people in the US do you think have Covid right now? I ask because 7452 people die per day in the US on average, meaning 6.7% of the people who die now have Covid (using your 500/day figure). Clearly some die from and some happen to die with Covid. The difference could be estimated simplistically based on the percent of the population that currently has Covid. If 0.5% have Covid and 6.7% of the people who die have it, there is a correlation. If 5% have Covid and 6.7% of the people who die have it, there's not much correlation. (Of course, in the correlation case, it still doesn't prove causation, as the weakened immune systems of those who are dying may be unable to fight off Covid at the end.) I think the best way to evaluate is to look at excess deaths. But even there you've got data contamination from the measures that were taken (drinking deaths, suicides up, flu down, etc.) and no way to figure out exactly how many of the various increases and decreases are directly attributable to the Covid measures.
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    Are US hospitals/coroners not recording "from covid" and "with covid" separately? I've seen lots of anti-covid-prevention-measures people here in the UK make a big deal of this distinction as if nobody else had thought of it, but I've seen graphs based on official statistics which distinguish between the two groups in sources as mainstream as the BBC. At least here there's no need to estimate.

AndrewThrowaway 5y ago

I think there is an interesting aspect of this - how society treats death, what is philosophy of death in that society, etc. Colleague's grandpa passed away in Scandinavia. As it was summertime, all the extended family is on vacation, abroad and etc. they put the body in the freezer and schedule funeral at some time when everybody's back. On the other hand I have read about Japanese (might be any other Far East country) culture where passing away of father requires something like a year of mourning. Culture doesn't allow you to go to work for a year as you would look insensitive. However not showing up at work for a year is also a big nono. So it becomes a huge strain on all the family. And we can imagine how these two cultures can have very different approaches to crisis like that, crisis itself is of a very different scope because of culture.

chrischen 5y ago
Wow then Japan is going to have a super labor shortage as their agin population dies off.

oneoff786 5y ago

I agree. Covid is not a crisis. For a vaxxed individual the risk looks very low. I’m happy to grab my boosters as needed and mask up during the winter. It doesn’t really matter. I would wager the virus will continue to grow less dangerous over time. What’s utterly astonishing is what’s going on in Shanghai in spite of this.

freebuju 5y ago
Covid will remain an endemic crisis always looming as you rightly point out with the events in Shanghai. Vaccines and multiple boosters won't stop infections and hospitalizations. At this point, if you are alive we have to assume you have developed some immune response to some variant of COVID. Am more disturbed about the overwhelming lack of research on natural immunity and other possible treatments. Vaccine over-reliance is akin to taking a shot in the dark.
- dahinds 5y ago
  dexamethasone, monoclonal antibodies, molnupiravir, paclovid, as well as all the work on ideas good and bad that did not pan out? And I think there's a decent amount of research on natural immunity going on? (not sure how to measure what you describe as an "overwhelming lack of research")
  - freebuju 5y ago
    I hold my ground and there is an obvious reason why none of the promising anti-inflammatory drugs which have been used in the past to deal with flu haven't seen the light of day. IMO Covid infection was only considered a death sentence because at first we did not have any patient care focused on treatment of known symptoms through the stages of the sickness & foolishly ignored any potential alternatives or rather the scientific community was co-opted into praising mRNA and look nowhere else. Remdesivir is one of the hush hush alternatives proven to have some success with covid treatment but it never comes up. Anywhere. Nevermind that the FDA approved its use for mild-cases treatment. The scientific community let us down a big one on this. Look at masks now. They backtracked on the effectiveness of that.

theyeenzbeanz 5y ago

We’ve reached the point where people who wanted to vaccinated have and those who don’t won’t. Considering that there seems to be boosters every so often it feels like it will be seasonal like the flu.

candiddevmike 5y ago

Whatever your stance is, I think COVID showed how ineffective the federal government is in the face of a crisis. Imagine if COVID was more severe or something else entirely, we'd all be dead before our elected officials could figure out how it can benefit them. Pin it on incompetence, negligence, political grandstanding--the federal government could not contain the crisis and was always months behind what we needed. We were mass producing ventilators when we should've been mass producing tests or masks, we were going maskless based on trailing data instead of the current spikes etc. It was like a shitty game of telephone where people died because the messaging became so delayed and distorted.

sremani 5y ago
As a person who has distaste for 'Mandates', a successful Pandemic reaction will always look like an 'Overreaction'. If Federal government has any role in the creation or distribution of effective Vaccines, I would consider it a success. It is still far from perfect but it was a success. I am not trying to change anyones view on this -- just expressing my point of view.
criddell 5y ago
The effectiveness of the federal government is complicated. You mentioned some disappointing aspects but I think it's worth keeping in mind some of the positive parts too. For one, the new vaccines are a triumph. As I understand it, DARPA was an early funder of research and development around MRNA tech. And Trump's Operation Warp Speed is, for me, a rare highlight of his time in office.
- BaseballPhysics 5y ago
  Not to mention the huge subsidy programs that likely saved the economy from a far more profound shock. But that wouldn't support the anti-government narrative that seems to be so popular among Americans in general and techies in particular.
herdcall 5y ago
Trying to contain the virus was the bad strategy because of the effectivenesss of the virus in spreading, with/without masks; protecting the vulnerable (mainly elderly) would've been more effective, as I understand. See the excellent interview of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya by Lex Fridman (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIOGUYOPAsA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIOGUYOPAsA). On the plus side, producing vaccines by end of 2020 was nothing short of stunning IMO, with all the skepticism at that time on the timeline. Bid kudos to the pharmas of course, but a lot of credit should also go to the Trump administration, whatever you may think of the president.

akomtu 5y ago

This poll also tells that most americans quickly forget anything and everything, even if it's supposedly a threat to survival of human kind, unless the mass media talks about the 'grave dangers' 24/7. I'm glad to admit that americans aren't that easy to distract from real issues.

pastor_bob 5y ago

Most of Europe has moved passed crisis stage, as they've gotten rid of almost all restrictions. It's hard to argue otherwise

fortran77 5y ago

Early on in the pandemic when we saw stories like this about entire families who succumbed to covid: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/nyregion/new-jersey-family-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/nyregion/new-jersey-famil... ...I wondered if the problem in the U.S. is really an obesity "epidemic" and not a COVID epidemic. The statistics for non-elderly deaths seem to bear this out. (Of course, the NY Times neglected to comment on the elephant in the room.) I was never a COVID skeptic -- I got vaccinated, and I wore N-95 masks, fitted as best I could, when indoors in crowds. I rarely ate in restaurants so giving that up wasn't a big lifestyle change for me. (I was fortunate to have a decent supply of N-95 and N-99 masks pre-pandemic because I often visit places where things are fabricated, and dust and particles are around.) But I was skeptical about mask mandates for one simple fact -- whenever I was out in public, I'd observe that only about 30% of people were wearing masks in a way that could possibly do anything -- covering the nose and mouth, and not taking it on and off continuously / not touching the face. So we'll never really know if masks work on population studies. There was a lot of "theatre" -- (I fly a lot for work, and still flew during the pandemic to Europe and the mid-east quite often. I have multiple passports so I could get into places even during times when tourism was banned). Airplanes never banned CPAP use in flight, even though study after study from previous airborne viruses showed CPAP to aersolize a person's exhalate and spread disease. (See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7298691/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7298691/ ). United Airlines claimed that they were following the guidelines of the "Cleveland Clinic" for their covid mitigation, and yet that clinic warns about CPAP machines. (The reality is, the airlines didn't want to battle the ADA rules, so they put the public at risk.)

egberts1 5y ago

Meanwhile, the flu is now on a steep uptick from some 25y historic low. We merely replaced one common pandemic with another only last time the government decided to try at some draconian public policy.

ianai 5y ago

My faith in polls took a massive, massive hit after recent elections and political cycles. Also the US had a political regime point at 30-40% approval ratings and said "those people want it so we're doing it." Seemingly turning any poll into a pretext for any political changes. Sorry, but, until something changes in the world of polls dramatically I have to underweight their importance.

crawfordcomeaux 5y ago

America was born out of trauma denial. Denying there's something going on has been a common pattern in our history.

logicalmonster 5y ago

I find the polling now to be useless: the media is currently focused on what gets better ratings (Ukraine) and formerly Covid-hysterical politicians are downplaying their (IMO) destructive actions presumably due to horrendously bad polling. What happens a bit down the road when the election cycle passes, Ukraine (hopefully) gets resolved, and it's flu season again and the hysteria starts getting good ratings again? Are the highly malleable crowd going to be reprogrammed to go back into "Wear the Mask" and "No Jab, No Job" mode?

duxup 5y ago

The number of infections is down. Restrictions mostly gone / loosening without any disastrous results. Sounds about right for now. I worry about COVID, but I also worry about wearing out people / society / side effects. If there's space to loosen restrictions I'm all for it. Let the scientists keep a lookout, let the citizens relax.

monksy 5y ago
> The number of infections is down. Has been down in the prior month-ish.. Although numbers are looking to trend upward right now. Watching how Omicron unfolded in Europe and December, and had a resurgence a month ago.. I would say that we may be in for a nasty wave. Also, S Korea, dropped their covid restrictions and that's a bloodbath now.
- dfxm12 5y ago
  Trending up, with big holidays in the coming weeks, just like the December timeframe.

kindatrue 5y ago

It's like car crashes and mass shootings. Both are preventable. But we just choose to ignore them because doing something about it would be too hard and not fun.

valis_iii 5y ago

nukemaster 5y ago
Case in point.

rubyist5eva 5y ago

We have vaccines, lockdowns are inneffective...literally what else is there to do. We can't just cower in fear in our basements for the rest of our lives. It took 50 years after the first mass vaccination rollout for the Polio vaccine for it to be "eradicated" - i'm not putting up with draconian public health measures for the rest of my life. EFF THAT

timcavel 5y ago

phendrenad2 5y ago

The powers that be have concluded that a significant fraction of the population suffering IQ loss due to long covid is preferable to continuing to print money to bail out the economy.

AzzieElbab 5y ago

What if it is still a crisis? What are we going to do? Take a sweater? Everyone who could be vaccinated is vaccinated. Everything that could have been done is done with notable exception of ramping up therapeutics production

BaseballPhysics 5y ago

> with cases rising, and hospitalizations and deaths holding steady at low levels. That... seems to confirm the idea that it's no longer a crisis? Again, the crisis is in the hospital systems. Flattening the curve was all about controlling infection rates in order to ensure the systems continue to function. COVID zero and crushing the curve was never a public health goal in North America. If you accept that, then the reality is COVID is here to stay. That much is a given. So if we've reached the point of mostly decoupling hospital/ICU/death rates from case rates (or at least dramatically lowering the frequency with which a COVID case escalates to hospitalization/ICU/death) through a mix of vaccines, antivirals, and other measures, then it seems perfectly reasonable to conclude that the crisis has past. And I say all that as someone who still compulsively wears a mask in a lot of circumstances. Is there something in that analysis that I'm missing?

kashunstva 5y ago

My first impression of this sort of survey is → "define: crisis." I'm not even sure how I would answer this survey without some definitional clarity, and I'm probably one of the most cautious people around.

timcavel 5y ago