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This is very bad news. Primarily because we have not socially recovered from the last pandemic. If this turns out to be serious, what's the public's appetite f

This is very bad news. Primarily because we have not socially recovered from the last pandemic. If this turns out to be serious, what's the public's appetite for masks? Lockdowns? New vaccines? For many people it's quite low. For others it's quite high. And the disagreement between these groups will become another political flashpoint.

tehjoker 3y ago
COVID-19 pandemic is still ongoing. Deaths are down compared to 2020, but during the winter thousands of people a week were dying, people are getting injured, early retirements are way up, and disabled people are trapped at home (which never happened to most of us lol, lockdowns are police enforced, we could still go outside anywhere we wanted for the most part). Right wing bot networks continue to harass anti-COVID activists to reinforce the hegemonic idea that it's over so that rich people can clean up. Here's a joke: What's the difference between the right and liberals on COVID? About 6 months.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  There aren't nearly as many deaths from covid nowadays. It's not even remotely close to the early period and it is disingenuous to pretend so. You could see the blip from covid in global mortality data. You can't see it now.
  - tehjoker 3y ago
    When did I say there were as many deaths as in the early days? Back then it was up to 4000 a day, now it's still thousands a week during the winter. These are all preventable and wholly unnecessary deaths. People are sick all the time. If you can't see it in the mortality data, that means something else is compensating in the other direction... perhaps killing off so many vulnerable people has made average mortality decline? You were sold "herd immunity", which means people don't get sick because the disease is prevented by immunity. Instead, we just have total society-wide saturation with COVID. It's a sick, fucked up situation.
EA-3167 3y ago
For better or worse, H1N1 is monumentally lethal, an order of magnitude past the worst of COVID. People who don't have a taste for masks and new vaccines will simply die, in a way we didn't see for COVID. Having said all of that, in the absence of strong evidence for human-human transmission, this should not keep you up at night.
- logicchains 3y ago
  >For better or worse, H1N1 is monumentally lethal, an order of magnitude past the worst of COVID There's absolutely no evidence for this as we have no data on the infection fatality rate, only on the case fatality rate, which like with COVID initially is an order of magnitude or two higher, because the vast majority of people with respiratory infections aren't specifically tested for H1N1.
KittenInABox 3y ago
Frankly after experiencing Covid hair loss and talking with other folks who got mild covid but 3 months later experienced the same nightmare scenario I would happily isolate. Balding sucks.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  Most people are not like you - and I do not think we have sufficient causal evidence on a lot of these post-covid sequelae yet.
  - marliechiller 3y ago
    I think theres mounting evidence that covid can have dramatic long term effects on people without them fully realising. More obviously, the long covid epidemic is much more significant than people really realise and more work needs to be done to bring this into the spotlight
- brink 3y ago
  This reads like parody. What are you going to do - never get Covid?
  - TylerE 3y ago
    That is the general idea. Past the 4 year mark with zero infections here (and that's with testing whenever I have the slightest case of the sniffles). Admittedly the odds are stacked in my favor a bit - I'm a pretty extreme introvert in a quiet small town and have been WFH since 2012. I will never accept another position that isn't 100% remote, and avoiding getting sick is part of that for sure.
    - brink 3y ago
      It's because of others who do interact with people on a day to day basis that your lifestyle is possible. So no, long-term isolating is not a broad solution for covid. It's outrageous that people still talk like this.
ecmascript 3y ago
The risk of dying from covid was probably less than 1% for a healthy adult and it's around 60-70% when it comes to the bird flu. So people will naturally take this much more serious if it starts to spread among humans.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  If we learned anything from covid, it should be that you cannot trust these early mortality numbers because they are biased by the fact that we definitely test people who are dying of a disease but don't test those who are just a little sick. Covid turned out to be 1% fatal in the early days - which is awful. But the early numbers were ~5-10%
  - ecmascript 3y ago
    Ok sure, but even if it's 1/5 as bad it's still very bad.
    - whimsicalism 3y ago
      I think we just have no remote clue what the denominator is though.
      - ecmascript 3y ago
        True but there are reasons to believe that it's vastly higher than the covid though.
  - dyauspitr 3y ago
    Did it drop to 1% post vaccination or were those figures normalized for that.
    - tick_tock_tick 3y ago
      Before, initial reporting showed much higher percents because we massively underestimated how many people got sick but were asymptomatic or had so little symptoms they barely noticed.

tehjoker 3y ago

COVID-19 pandemic is still ongoing. Deaths are down compared to 2020, but during the winter thousands of people a week were dying, people are getting injured, early retirements are way up, and disabled people are trapped at home (which never happened to most of us lol, lockdowns are police enforced, we could still go outside anywhere we wanted for the most part). Right wing bot networks continue to harass anti-COVID activists to reinforce the hegemonic idea that it's over so that rich people can clean up. Here's a joke: What's the difference between the right and liberals on COVID? About 6 months.

whimsicalism 3y ago
There aren't nearly as many deaths from covid nowadays. It's not even remotely close to the early period and it is disingenuous to pretend so. You could see the blip from covid in global mortality data. You can't see it now.
- tehjoker 3y ago
  When did I say there were as many deaths as in the early days? Back then it was up to 4000 a day, now it's still thousands a week during the winter. These are all preventable and wholly unnecessary deaths. People are sick all the time. If you can't see it in the mortality data, that means something else is compensating in the other direction... perhaps killing off so many vulnerable people has made average mortality decline? You were sold "herd immunity", which means people don't get sick because the disease is prevented by immunity. Instead, we just have total society-wide saturation with COVID. It's a sick, fucked up situation.

EA-3167 3y ago

For better or worse, H1N1 is monumentally lethal, an order of magnitude past the worst of COVID. People who don't have a taste for masks and new vaccines will simply die, in a way we didn't see for COVID. Having said all of that, in the absence of strong evidence for human-human transmission, this should not keep you up at night.

logicchains 3y ago
>For better or worse, H1N1 is monumentally lethal, an order of magnitude past the worst of COVID There's absolutely no evidence for this as we have no data on the infection fatality rate, only on the case fatality rate, which like with COVID initially is an order of magnitude or two higher, because the vast majority of people with respiratory infections aren't specifically tested for H1N1.

KittenInABox 3y ago

Frankly after experiencing Covid hair loss and talking with other folks who got mild covid but 3 months later experienced the same nightmare scenario I would happily isolate. Balding sucks.

whimsicalism 3y ago
Most people are not like you - and I do not think we have sufficient causal evidence on a lot of these post-covid sequelae yet.
- marliechiller 3y ago
  I think theres mounting evidence that covid can have dramatic long term effects on people without them fully realising. More obviously, the long covid epidemic is much more significant than people really realise and more work needs to be done to bring this into the spotlight
brink 3y ago
This reads like parody. What are you going to do - never get Covid?
- TylerE 3y ago
  That is the general idea. Past the 4 year mark with zero infections here (and that's with testing whenever I have the slightest case of the sniffles). Admittedly the odds are stacked in my favor a bit - I'm a pretty extreme introvert in a quiet small town and have been WFH since 2012. I will never accept another position that isn't 100% remote, and avoiding getting sick is part of that for sure.
  - brink 3y ago
    It's because of others who do interact with people on a day to day basis that your lifestyle is possible. So no, long-term isolating is not a broad solution for covid. It's outrageous that people still talk like this.

ecmascript 3y ago

The risk of dying from covid was probably less than 1% for a healthy adult and it's around 60-70% when it comes to the bird flu. So people will naturally take this much more serious if it starts to spread among humans.

whimsicalism 3y ago
If we learned anything from covid, it should be that you cannot trust these early mortality numbers because they are biased by the fact that we definitely test people who are dying of a disease but don't test those who are just a little sick. Covid turned out to be 1% fatal in the early days - which is awful. But the early numbers were ~5-10%
- ecmascript 3y ago
  Ok sure, but even if it's 1/5 as bad it's still very bad.
  - whimsicalism 3y ago
    I think we just have no remote clue what the denominator is though.
    - ecmascript 3y ago
      True but there are reasons to believe that it's vastly higher than the covid though.
- dyauspitr 3y ago
  Did it drop to 1% post vaccination or were those figures normalized for that.
  - tick_tock_tick 3y ago
    Before, initial reporting showed much higher percents because we massively underestimated how many people got sick but were asymptomatic or had so little symptoms they barely noticed.