5 ms·

not to mention not a single death in the USA (at least yet) - I really don't want the government over reacting every time a virus pops up; there is value in wai

by ejb999 4y ago

not to mention not a single death in the USA (at least yet) - I really don't want the government over reacting every time a virus pops up; there is value in waiting to see how things play out first. Seems like the media is trying really hard to hype this one now that Covid story is getting stale.

christkv 4y ago
You are going to love the just breaking news about another possible Marburg (Ebola cousin) outbreak in Ghana.
Barrin92 4y ago
>there is value in waiting to see how things play out first No, when it comes to managing diseases the value is in acting before things have gone bad. It completely blows my mind how after a million covid deaths in the US alone, and the pandemic not even being over, people repeat the same kind of arguments again. or HIV for that matter if you want to draw a comparison to another sexually transmittable disease that was not taken seriously either.
- thisiscorrect 4y ago
  The comparison to HIV is apt. At its peak, in the late 80s and early 90s, everyone was taught to dread this disease. Officials acted as though everyone was equally at risk of contracting it. That was incorrect, and pretending otherwise helped noone.
  - Barrin92 4y ago
    >At its peak, in the late 80s and early 90s, everyone was taught to dread this disease And have you considered that is precisely why it peaked? HIV has killed 50 million people worldwide. 35 million of them in Africa. It still kills almost a million people a year. In countries without appropriate response, it has infected large segments of the population, and you're out here in 2022 unironically saying "It's a gay man's disease", seriously?
    - thisiscorrect 4y ago
      > and you're out here in 2022 unironically saying "It's a gay man's disease", seriously? I'm out here unironically showing you data on the CDC's website: https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/risk/estimates/riskbehaviors.html https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/risk/estimates/riskbehaviors.html. Anal intercourse is far likelier (18x the risk from vaginal interourse per encounter) to result in HIV transmission from an infected partner. Internal tearing is likelier and hence contact of other fluids with one's blood stream. In Africa, HIV is especially prevalent in South Africa, which happens to have a practice called "dry sex" [1] which also leads to similar internal tearing for the receptive partner. Behavior that involves having these sorts of risky sexual encounters with multiple partners only compounds the likelihood that one will contract HIV. Not all groups engage in these behaviors with equal likelihood. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_sex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_sex
      - wonderwonder 4y ago
        Adding to this over 40% of South African women are raped over the course of their lives. This also results in tearing.
- prox 4y ago
  Yeah remember that Ebola outbreak in the US? Nope, because everyone did everything to stop it.
  - BitwiseFool 4y ago
    Ebola is also a highly visible disease and it isn't spread through the air. In terms of containment, it's far easier to identify and confront than Covid. I don't believe it's a fair comparison.
    - qbasic_forever 4y ago
      Monkeypox is highly visible too, sometimes scarring for life your face and hands. It's going to be pretty clear in 6-12 months who the people were that took this seriously, and who the people were that went YOLO.
      - thisiscorrect 4y ago
        Presumably the ones going YOLO are the ones who have "had multiple sexual encounters at a bathhouse"?
      - haimez 4y ago
        Highly visible starting from 14 to 21 days after exposure and unclear whether symptoms start before or after becoming infectious to others. So visibility may not actually matter much here, because pre symptomatic may be significant spreaders.
- origin_path 4y ago
  "when it comes to managing diseases the value is in acting before things have gone bad" There is no value to acting at the government level. If there's any work to do here it's with pharma firms. Governments have shown repeatedly that they lack even the most basic skills needed to fight disease. They are literally incapable of even accurately defining their goals and basic words let alone actually defeating a disease: - COVID case counts in 2022 are now much higher than at any time in the past. - Highly vaccinated places have more cases than lower vaccinated places (e.g. Scotland vs England, former DDR vs rest of Germany). Almost all "deaths in proximity to a positive COVID test" are in the vaccinated. Fauci, vaccinated 4x, has now had COVID symptoms for a month and counting after Paxlovid failed to cure him. - Mask mandates were repealed with no increase in cases. - Birth rates 9 months after vaccination reached women of childbearing age (never tested in the trials) are now ~15%-20% lower than normal. - Lockdowns are now widely recognized to have had no effect at all. Shanghai's toughest lockdown in the world led to people starving because they weren't allowed out to buy food, whilst simultaneously failing to reduce case counts. - The vast sums of money required for these failed anti-COVID policies have now wrecked the economy, leading to the highest inflation ever seen for people under the age of about 45. - Public health officials have repeatedly made scientific claims they knew were false in order to manipulate people's behavior and then admitted to lying on the record in major newspapers. That's just a tiny sampling of the recent failures of public health. What we need is for these people to go away, reflect on their failures, learn about 1000 lessons and come back in a decade when they have managed to clear house and fix the systematic vulnerability to pseudo-science that typifies their field. Of course, what they'll actually do is ignore monkeypox because fighting it means inconveniencing gay men, whilst waiting for the next virus they can try to make into COVID2.
  - qbasic_forever 4y ago
    We would not have ANY COVID vaccines if not for the _billions_ of dollars the US government spent with Operation Warp Speed. The entire operation (warp speed, building and funding multiple vaccines at once to only keep the working one at the end) was something the government designed _decades ago_ and kept as a potential mitigation for pandemics. We're in a position for you to comfortably post hot garbage takes from a brand new throwaway account from the COVID-free safety of your home because the government acted to respond to this pandemic...
HarryHirsch 4y ago
At the moment the virus is confined to that part of the gay population that attends wild orgies - healthy young men. Mortality for that segment of the population is low, although by all accounts monkeypox is still exquisitely painful. Once it gets to pregnant women we will see miscarriages in 4 out of 5 cases. Things will improve then, but not before.
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  It's not confined to just the gay population. The UK has a child in the ICU over it for example: https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1614153/monkeypox-British-child-in-intensive-care-latest https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1614153/monkeypox-British-... Many states in the US are confirming there is community spread happening, i.e. it's not restricted to a subset of the gay or hetero community. Here's Seattle for example confirming there are cases with no known sexual encounter or link: https://publichealthinsider.com/2022/07/06/monkeypox-update-local-transmission-of-the-virus-in-king-county-likely/ https://publichealthinsider.com/2022/07/06/monkeypox-update-...
  - scarmig 4y ago
    As an LGBT guy: Yes, there are non-gay people who get it. But gay men, and particularly people who have sex with a dozen different partners in a week (not many straight men in that particular group), are much more likely to contract it. Efforts to limit the spread of monkeypox should be targeted at the demographics most likely to contract it, as you get much more bang-for-buck that way.
    - qbasic_forever 4y ago
      The cat's out of the bag when community spread is confirmed like we see now. The time to take targeted measures for a community getting hit hard by it was a month ago when it was the dozens and low hundreds of cases. Now we're seeing 2k+ cases worldwide a day, and that's with very low testing. We need to shift into proper pandemic response mode--TETRIS, test-trace-isolate. There is nothing inherent about the DNA of this virus that makes it target men, gay men, or men who have sex with men. It will infect any human in the wrong place at the wrong time, period.

by ejb999 4y ago

christkv 4y ago

You are going to love the just breaking news about another possible Marburg (Ebola cousin) outbreak in Ghana.

Barrin92 4y ago

>there is value in waiting to see how things play out first No, when it comes to managing diseases the value is in acting before things have gone bad. It completely blows my mind how after a million covid deaths in the US alone, and the pandemic not even being over, people repeat the same kind of arguments again. or HIV for that matter if you want to draw a comparison to another sexually transmittable disease that was not taken seriously either.

thisiscorrect 4y ago
The comparison to HIV is apt. At its peak, in the late 80s and early 90s, everyone was taught to dread this disease. Officials acted as though everyone was equally at risk of contracting it. That was incorrect, and pretending otherwise helped noone.
- Barrin92 4y ago
  >At its peak, in the late 80s and early 90s, everyone was taught to dread this disease And have you considered that is precisely why it peaked? HIV has killed 50 million people worldwide. 35 million of them in Africa. It still kills almost a million people a year. In countries without appropriate response, it has infected large segments of the population, and you're out here in 2022 unironically saying "It's a gay man's disease", seriously?
  - thisiscorrect 4y ago
    > and you're out here in 2022 unironically saying "It's a gay man's disease", seriously? I'm out here unironically showing you data on the CDC's website: https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/risk/estimates/riskbehaviors.html https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/risk/estimates/riskbehaviors.html. Anal intercourse is far likelier (18x the risk from vaginal interourse per encounter) to result in HIV transmission from an infected partner. Internal tearing is likelier and hence contact of other fluids with one's blood stream. In Africa, HIV is especially prevalent in South Africa, which happens to have a practice called "dry sex" [1] which also leads to similar internal tearing for the receptive partner. Behavior that involves having these sorts of risky sexual encounters with multiple partners only compounds the likelihood that one will contract HIV. Not all groups engage in these behaviors with equal likelihood. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_sex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_sex
    - wonderwonder 4y ago
      Adding to this over 40% of South African women are raped over the course of their lives. This also results in tearing.
prox 4y ago
Yeah remember that Ebola outbreak in the US? Nope, because everyone did everything to stop it.
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  Ebola is also a highly visible disease and it isn't spread through the air. In terms of containment, it's far easier to identify and confront than Covid. I don't believe it's a fair comparison.
  - qbasic_forever 4y ago
    Monkeypox is highly visible too, sometimes scarring for life your face and hands. It's going to be pretty clear in 6-12 months who the people were that took this seriously, and who the people were that went YOLO.
    - thisiscorrect 4y ago
      Presumably the ones going YOLO are the ones who have "had multiple sexual encounters at a bathhouse"?
    - haimez 4y ago
      Highly visible starting from 14 to 21 days after exposure and unclear whether symptoms start before or after becoming infectious to others. So visibility may not actually matter much here, because pre symptomatic may be significant spreaders.
origin_path 4y ago
"when it comes to managing diseases the value is in acting before things have gone bad" There is no value to acting at the government level. If there's any work to do here it's with pharma firms. Governments have shown repeatedly that they lack even the most basic skills needed to fight disease. They are literally incapable of even accurately defining their goals and basic words let alone actually defeating a disease: - COVID case counts in 2022 are now much higher than at any time in the past. - Highly vaccinated places have more cases than lower vaccinated places (e.g. Scotland vs England, former DDR vs rest of Germany). Almost all "deaths in proximity to a positive COVID test" are in the vaccinated. Fauci, vaccinated 4x, has now had COVID symptoms for a month and counting after Paxlovid failed to cure him. - Mask mandates were repealed with no increase in cases. - Birth rates 9 months after vaccination reached women of childbearing age (never tested in the trials) are now ~15%-20% lower than normal. - Lockdowns are now widely recognized to have had no effect at all. Shanghai's toughest lockdown in the world led to people starving because they weren't allowed out to buy food, whilst simultaneously failing to reduce case counts. - The vast sums of money required for these failed anti-COVID policies have now wrecked the economy, leading to the highest inflation ever seen for people under the age of about 45. - Public health officials have repeatedly made scientific claims they knew were false in order to manipulate people's behavior and then admitted to lying on the record in major newspapers. That's just a tiny sampling of the recent failures of public health. What we need is for these people to go away, reflect on their failures, learn about 1000 lessons and come back in a decade when they have managed to clear house and fix the systematic vulnerability to pseudo-science that typifies their field. Of course, what they'll actually do is ignore monkeypox because fighting it means inconveniencing gay men, whilst waiting for the next virus they can try to make into COVID2.
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  We would not have ANY COVID vaccines if not for the _billions_ of dollars the US government spent with Operation Warp Speed. The entire operation (warp speed, building and funding multiple vaccines at once to only keep the working one at the end) was something the government designed _decades ago_ and kept as a potential mitigation for pandemics. We're in a position for you to comfortably post hot garbage takes from a brand new throwaway account from the COVID-free safety of your home because the government acted to respond to this pandemic...

HarryHirsch 4y ago

At the moment the virus is confined to that part of the gay population that attends wild orgies - healthy young men. Mortality for that segment of the population is low, although by all accounts monkeypox is still exquisitely painful. Once it gets to pregnant women we will see miscarriages in 4 out of 5 cases. Things will improve then, but not before.

qbasic_forever 4y ago
It's not confined to just the gay population. The UK has a child in the ICU over it for example: https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1614153/monkeypox-British-child-in-intensive-care-latest https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1614153/monkeypox-British-... Many states in the US are confirming there is community spread happening, i.e. it's not restricted to a subset of the gay or hetero community. Here's Seattle for example confirming there are cases with no known sexual encounter or link: https://publichealthinsider.com/2022/07/06/monkeypox-update-local-transmission-of-the-virus-in-king-county-likely/ https://publichealthinsider.com/2022/07/06/monkeypox-update-...
- scarmig 4y ago
  As an LGBT guy: Yes, there are non-gay people who get it. But gay men, and particularly people who have sex with a dozen different partners in a week (not many straight men in that particular group), are much more likely to contract it. Efforts to limit the spread of monkeypox should be targeted at the demographics most likely to contract it, as you get much more bang-for-buck that way.
  - qbasic_forever 4y ago
    The cat's out of the bag when community spread is confirmed like we see now. The time to take targeted measures for a community getting hit hard by it was a month ago when it was the dozens and low hundreds of cases. Now we're seeing 2k+ cases worldwide a day, and that's with very low testing. We need to shift into proper pandemic response mode--TETRIS, test-trace-isolate. There is nothing inherent about the DNA of this virus that makes it target men, gay men, or men who have sex with men. It will infect any human in the wrong place at the wrong time, period.