11 ms·

Totally agree. I think it's still worth reminding everyone that over a million Americans died from Covid-19 (and counting), and the response was way better than

by boc 4y ago

Totally agree. I think it's still worth reminding everyone that over a million Americans died from Covid-19 (and counting), and the response was way better than the response to the last major economic crisis. Overheating the economy vs starting a depression in the middle of a pandemic? I'll take the current course every time. Inflation isn't the end of the world, and benefits indebted actors (anybody with substantial fixed-rate debt).

briandon 4y ago
Deaths attributed to covid were almost entirely "with covid" and not "from covid". The average age of the fatalities was at or above the average age at which people ordinarily passed pre-covid and nearly all suffered from multiple serious comorbidities that would have been sufficient in themselves to precipitate one of any number of individual health crises that would have led to their passing. Much of the government response, particularly at the federal level, was aimed at terrorizing the public and, when they came online, coercing mostly low-risk people into submitting to experimental, liability-free vaccines that don't prevent spread and so do nothing to protect genuinely high-risk people. The government also financially incentivized refusal to treat covid in its early stages (allowing the patients to either recover on their own or, for elderly and already chronically ill, to become sicker), place patients on ventilators, and prescribe dangerous experimental treatments like Remdesivir that contributed to the death tallies. The federal government's meddling in some states' distribution of monoclonal antibody treatments was especially pernicious. Lawsuits targeting hospitals, local and state governments, and the federal governments for their conduct (everything from propagandizing to causing or contributing to deaths as in the use of Remdesivir) during the pandemic are in process throughout the United States now.
- electrondood 4y ago
  1.5m excess deaths in the US alone. "from COVID" or "with COVID," however you want to slice it. The obvious factor is the global pandemic from a novel airborne virus. The conspiracy thinking assuming some sinister ulterior motive from government actions is just a harmful trope, and wrong.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - briandon 4y ago
    Setting the injections aside for a moment, let's consider other pandemic-era government actions, like the non-pharmaceutical interventions. None of them worked and it was clear from the beginning that they were not going to ameliorate covid's impact. Loose-fitting surgical masks do not meaningfully impede the spread of aerosol-borne viruses. Even N95s have been found to show no additional benefit compared to surgical masks in pre-covid research that compared influenza rates among procedure-mask-wearing healthcare workers and healthcare workers wearing N95s. People seem to forget that the uselessness of masks against covid was known early on, then experts were trotted out to hypothesize (incorrectly but authoritatively) that covid was actually droplet-borne so that the mask-orders being imposed would have some air of legitimacy. Many deluded people still believe that surgical masks are useful against covid. Then there were the capacity limits for businesses and forced closures of non-megacorp businesses. And the stickers on the floor at arbitrary, pointless intervals. Pointless because covid is, as we knew from the beginning, pretended to forget for a while when "experts" falsely asserted the droplet nonsense, and know once more... aerosol-borne. Replication-competent covid virions can linger in the air for literally hours. And the contact-tracing charade. And forced quarantine (not a thing in the USA but did happen in many other nations that were supposedly following "the science"), sometimes simply for alleged exposure to a PCR-positive "case". During the covid pandemic, most citizens of nations that actively tried to "fight" the pandemic were deceived and abused relentlessly and shamelessly by those in authority, abetted by many experts. Those who dissented were falsely labeled kooks, deplatformed, and targeted for destruction. I cannot read the minds of government officials in every country that imposed these sorts of unscientific and harmful alleged public health measures on their populations and tell you why they did it but I can tell you that it was obvious to many with relevant expertise or a rational mind and a willingness to look into what was being done and compare it to most nations' preexisting response plans for epidemics of viral respiratory illnesses and with the published literature with an open mind, even at the time when some were panicking, and know that they did not make sense and would not help.
    - 4y ago
- triceratops 4y ago
  > don't prevent spread Doesn't matter, as long as it keeps people out of the hospital. Dying of delayed cancer treatment because hospital staff is busy dealing with unvaxxed Covid patients isn't great.
  - briandon 4y ago
    If you are reasonably healthy and not elderly, your chances of being hospitalized with covid have always been extremely low. You get none of the alleged benefits, but take on all the risks of adverse effects, including sudden death months later.
    - triceratops 4y ago
      What is the risk of "sudden death months later" compared to the risk of hospitalization for Covid? Serious question.
- taylodl 4y ago
  You know what datasets we have very good statistics for? Deaths. We know, to the person, how many people have died. We have that information year-in and year-out for decades. We know, for a fact, that in excess of 1 million Americans died during the pandemic than would have been expected. Also, please stop waving away these deaths as "comorbidities" and act like Covid wasn't involved in these deaths. If these people hadn't had a Covid infection then they wouldn't be dead. Period end. That's why 1 million more Americans than expected died. There are millions of Americans successfully managing their heart disease and diabetes who otherwise can expect to live long lives. Covid cut those lives short.
- Thorrez 4y ago
  >don't prevent spread Do you mean don't reduce spread at all, or don't prevent it 100%?
  - autoexec 4y ago
    Either way, the claim that "vaccines do nothing to protect genuinely high-risk people" is a clear lie. It's sad to see misinformation thrive here.
    - briandon 4y ago
      It's accurate and factual to state that getting all low-risk people vaccinated with covid with the current set of available leaky, quickly-waning vaccines does nothing to protect genuinely high-risk people. The cited values for time post-shot to peak efficacy and the subsequent time from there to whatever threshold of efficacy you choose (and on to negative efficacy after that) are based on studies of groups of individuals. For some of the individuals, the shots were more or less effective than the mean/median/this-many-standard-devs value in preventing infection and then, as their jabs' effects weakened, in reducing viral load and symptoms that are relevant to onwards transmission. In the absence of any widely-enforced way of measuring an individual's viral load at any given moment, many people who believe themselves to be under a covid shot's umbrella of protection are actually infected with covid and spreading it. Covid is aerosol-borne and can linger in the air for hours. For high-risk people not living in a one-person habitat at the bottom of the ocean or on the Moon, there is no avoiding covid, even if everyone around them gets a booster every three months. There are reasons that effective vaccines for the viruses that cause the common cold (rhinoviruses, coronaviruses, et al.) and for influenza have never been developed. And everyone should have been very skeptical of authorities' "If you get this (or that) shot, you won't get or spread covid!" claims about a bunch of experimental vaccines (some since withdrawn or abandoned due to lack of uptake in the face of adverse effects or realizations about the mildness of this disease for most people) churned out in a matter of months.
      - autoexec 4y ago
        > It's accurate and factual to state that getting all low-risk people vaccinated with covid with the current set of available leaky, quickly-waning vaccines does nothing to protect genuinely high-risk people. It's neither accurate or factual. Genuinely high-risk people who are vaccinated but get covid have much better outcomes than genuinely high-risk people who are not vaccinated. The vaccine can literally protect them from death. You'd have to be crazy to conclude that the vaccine "does nothing to protect" them.
- benjaminwootton 4y ago
  Wow, this comment has been here for 2 hours and hasn’t been downvoted to oblivion. We are getting there slowly.
  - briandon 4y ago
    The amount of effort being expended even on a niche forum like this one to police the narrative and carry out a sort of rearguard action while "the science" around covid and covid-related pharma products and interventions continues to evolve towards what some conspiracy theorists have claimed all along is fascinating to behold.
    - Mountain_Skies 4y ago
      The amnesty they're already starting to beg for isn't going to be forthcoming if they keep fresh in everyone's minds what petty dictators they have been.
      - briandon 4y ago
        And the ones most responsible largely remain in their positions of authority and reserve the right to try to impose the same techno-fascistic abuse schemes again in the future.
    - ccn0p 4y ago
      Fear. We were pounded with flashing scroller death counts and stories of overrun ER's from every corner of earth for what, two years? I made a comment in a running forum about the outdoors being the safest place to be and to please leave the mask at home because of the risk of low blood-oxygen levels and I was downvoted into oblivion.
      - briandon 4y ago
        Whenever I've shared this link ("U.S. Field Hospitals Stand Down, Most Without Treating Any COVID-19 Patients" https://www.npr.org/2020/05/07/851712311/u-s-field-hospitals-stand-down-most-without-treating-any-covid-19-patients https://www.npr.org/2020/05/07/851712311/u-s-field-hospitals...) with members of the hospitals-overrun-youll-die-from-an-infected-papercut crowd, they usually want to change the subject. Same when I remind them of the demands for hospital ships which then weren't used.
automatic6131 4y ago
- autoexec 4y ago
  > Bringing the deaths of the sickest Americans forward by about a year Or a decade or more: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/people-coronavirus-dying-10-years-earlier-naturally-study/story?id=70511494 https://abcnews.go.com/Health/people-coronavirus-dying-10-ye...
  - obiefernandez 4y ago
    Wonder if this will have a tangible effect on upcoming elections.
    - autoexec 4y ago
      Republicans (who tend to be older) encouraging their voters to get infected, avoid going to hospitals, and demand ineffective treatments seemed like a strange move to me, and research suggests that people in counties that voted for trump were many times more likely to die from the virus than people in places that voted for democrats. At times I've wondered if GOP leadership was actively trying to cut away some of the crazy in their base or if they expected the virus would be much worse for minorities in urban areas than for republicans in rural areas and miscalculated when sacrificing their own voters in order to promote spreading the virus. Whatever their "logic" was the virus has been killing many more republicans than democrats for some time. https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/national-international/study-highlights-gap-between-democrat-republican-deaths-after-covid-19-vaccine-released/3895365/ https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/national-international/study...
- happythebob 4y ago
  - refurb 4y ago
    Interesting. The excess deaths from graph looks to be ~500,000 to 600,000, not the 1,000,000 that is claimed.

by boc 4y ago

briandon 4y ago

Deaths attributed to covid were almost entirely "with covid" and not "from covid". The average age of the fatalities was at or above the average age at which people ordinarily passed pre-covid and nearly all suffered from multiple serious comorbidities that would have been sufficient in themselves to precipitate one of any number of individual health crises that would have led to their passing. Much of the government response, particularly at the federal level, was aimed at terrorizing the public and, when they came online, coercing mostly low-risk people into submitting to experimental, liability-free vaccines that don't prevent spread and so do nothing to protect genuinely high-risk people. The government also financially incentivized refusal to treat covid in its early stages (allowing the patients to either recover on their own or, for elderly and already chronically ill, to become sicker), place patients on ventilators, and prescribe dangerous experimental treatments like Remdesivir that contributed to the death tallies. The federal government's meddling in some states' distribution of monoclonal antibody treatments was especially pernicious. Lawsuits targeting hospitals, local and state governments, and the federal governments for their conduct (everything from propagandizing to causing or contributing to deaths as in the use of Remdesivir) during the pandemic are in process throughout the United States now.

electrondood 4y ago
1.5m excess deaths in the US alone. "from COVID" or "with COVID," however you want to slice it. The obvious factor is the global pandemic from a novel airborne virus. The conspiracy thinking assuming some sinister ulterior motive from government actions is just a harmful trope, and wrong.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- briandon 4y ago
  Setting the injections aside for a moment, let's consider other pandemic-era government actions, like the non-pharmaceutical interventions. None of them worked and it was clear from the beginning that they were not going to ameliorate covid's impact. Loose-fitting surgical masks do not meaningfully impede the spread of aerosol-borne viruses. Even N95s have been found to show no additional benefit compared to surgical masks in pre-covid research that compared influenza rates among procedure-mask-wearing healthcare workers and healthcare workers wearing N95s. People seem to forget that the uselessness of masks against covid was known early on, then experts were trotted out to hypothesize (incorrectly but authoritatively) that covid was actually droplet-borne so that the mask-orders being imposed would have some air of legitimacy. Many deluded people still believe that surgical masks are useful against covid. Then there were the capacity limits for businesses and forced closures of non-megacorp businesses. And the stickers on the floor at arbitrary, pointless intervals. Pointless because covid is, as we knew from the beginning, pretended to forget for a while when "experts" falsely asserted the droplet nonsense, and know once more... aerosol-borne. Replication-competent covid virions can linger in the air for literally hours. And the contact-tracing charade. And forced quarantine (not a thing in the USA but did happen in many other nations that were supposedly following "the science"), sometimes simply for alleged exposure to a PCR-positive "case". During the covid pandemic, most citizens of nations that actively tried to "fight" the pandemic were deceived and abused relentlessly and shamelessly by those in authority, abetted by many experts. Those who dissented were falsely labeled kooks, deplatformed, and targeted for destruction. I cannot read the minds of government officials in every country that imposed these sorts of unscientific and harmful alleged public health measures on their populations and tell you why they did it but I can tell you that it was obvious to many with relevant expertise or a rational mind and a willingness to look into what was being done and compare it to most nations' preexisting response plans for epidemics of viral respiratory illnesses and with the published literature with an open mind, even at the time when some were panicking, and know that they did not make sense and would not help.
  - 4y ago
triceratops 4y ago
> don't prevent spread Doesn't matter, as long as it keeps people out of the hospital. Dying of delayed cancer treatment because hospital staff is busy dealing with unvaxxed Covid patients isn't great.
- briandon 4y ago
  If you are reasonably healthy and not elderly, your chances of being hospitalized with covid have always been extremely low. You get none of the alleged benefits, but take on all the risks of adverse effects, including sudden death months later.
  - triceratops 4y ago
    What is the risk of "sudden death months later" compared to the risk of hospitalization for Covid? Serious question.
taylodl 4y ago
You know what datasets we have very good statistics for? Deaths. We know, to the person, how many people have died. We have that information year-in and year-out for decades. We know, for a fact, that in excess of 1 million Americans died during the pandemic than would have been expected. Also, please stop waving away these deaths as "comorbidities" and act like Covid wasn't involved in these deaths. If these people hadn't had a Covid infection then they wouldn't be dead. Period end. That's why 1 million more Americans than expected died. There are millions of Americans successfully managing their heart disease and diabetes who otherwise can expect to live long lives. Covid cut those lives short.
Thorrez 4y ago
>don't prevent spread Do you mean don't reduce spread at all, or don't prevent it 100%?
- autoexec 4y ago
  Either way, the claim that "vaccines do nothing to protect genuinely high-risk people" is a clear lie. It's sad to see misinformation thrive here.
  - briandon 4y ago
    It's accurate and factual to state that getting all low-risk people vaccinated with covid with the current set of available leaky, quickly-waning vaccines does nothing to protect genuinely high-risk people. The cited values for time post-shot to peak efficacy and the subsequent time from there to whatever threshold of efficacy you choose (and on to negative efficacy after that) are based on studies of groups of individuals. For some of the individuals, the shots were more or less effective than the mean/median/this-many-standard-devs value in preventing infection and then, as their jabs' effects weakened, in reducing viral load and symptoms that are relevant to onwards transmission. In the absence of any widely-enforced way of measuring an individual's viral load at any given moment, many people who believe themselves to be under a covid shot's umbrella of protection are actually infected with covid and spreading it. Covid is aerosol-borne and can linger in the air for hours. For high-risk people not living in a one-person habitat at the bottom of the ocean or on the Moon, there is no avoiding covid, even if everyone around them gets a booster every three months. There are reasons that effective vaccines for the viruses that cause the common cold (rhinoviruses, coronaviruses, et al.) and for influenza have never been developed. And everyone should have been very skeptical of authorities' "If you get this (or that) shot, you won't get or spread covid!" claims about a bunch of experimental vaccines (some since withdrawn or abandoned due to lack of uptake in the face of adverse effects or realizations about the mildness of this disease for most people) churned out in a matter of months.
    - autoexec 4y ago
      > It's accurate and factual to state that getting all low-risk people vaccinated with covid with the current set of available leaky, quickly-waning vaccines does nothing to protect genuinely high-risk people. It's neither accurate or factual. Genuinely high-risk people who are vaccinated but get covid have much better outcomes than genuinely high-risk people who are not vaccinated. The vaccine can literally protect them from death. You'd have to be crazy to conclude that the vaccine "does nothing to protect" them.
benjaminwootton 4y ago
Wow, this comment has been here for 2 hours and hasn’t been downvoted to oblivion. We are getting there slowly.
- briandon 4y ago
  The amount of effort being expended even on a niche forum like this one to police the narrative and carry out a sort of rearguard action while "the science" around covid and covid-related pharma products and interventions continues to evolve towards what some conspiracy theorists have claimed all along is fascinating to behold.
  - Mountain_Skies 4y ago
    The amnesty they're already starting to beg for isn't going to be forthcoming if they keep fresh in everyone's minds what petty dictators they have been.
    - briandon 4y ago
      And the ones most responsible largely remain in their positions of authority and reserve the right to try to impose the same techno-fascistic abuse schemes again in the future.
  - ccn0p 4y ago
    Fear. We were pounded with flashing scroller death counts and stories of overrun ER's from every corner of earth for what, two years? I made a comment in a running forum about the outdoors being the safest place to be and to please leave the mask at home because of the risk of low blood-oxygen levels and I was downvoted into oblivion.
    - briandon 4y ago
      Whenever I've shared this link ("U.S. Field Hospitals Stand Down, Most Without Treating Any COVID-19 Patients" https://www.npr.org/2020/05/07/851712311/u-s-field-hospitals-stand-down-most-without-treating-any-covid-19-patients https://www.npr.org/2020/05/07/851712311/u-s-field-hospitals...) with members of the hospitals-overrun-youll-die-from-an-infected-papercut crowd, they usually want to change the subject. Same when I remind them of the demands for hospital ships which then weren't used.

automatic6131 4y ago

autoexec 4y ago
> Bringing the deaths of the sickest Americans forward by about a year Or a decade or more: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/people-coronavirus-dying-10-years-earlier-naturally-study/story?id=70511494 https://abcnews.go.com/Health/people-coronavirus-dying-10-ye...
- obiefernandez 4y ago
  Wonder if this will have a tangible effect on upcoming elections.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    Republicans (who tend to be older) encouraging their voters to get infected, avoid going to hospitals, and demand ineffective treatments seemed like a strange move to me, and research suggests that people in counties that voted for trump were many times more likely to die from the virus than people in places that voted for democrats. At times I've wondered if GOP leadership was actively trying to cut away some of the crazy in their base or if they expected the virus would be much worse for minorities in urban areas than for republicans in rural areas and miscalculated when sacrificing their own voters in order to promote spreading the virus. Whatever their "logic" was the virus has been killing many more republicans than democrats for some time. https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/national-international/study-highlights-gap-between-democrat-republican-deaths-after-covid-19-vaccine-released/3895365/ https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/national-international/study...
happythebob 4y ago
- refurb 4y ago
  Interesting. The excess deaths from graph looks to be ~500,000 to 600,000, not the 1,000,000 that is claimed.