8 ms·

First hantavirus now this. Look, there's valid reason to be concerned here but people who are fearing a repeat of the Covid-19 pandemic are seemingly missing wh

by jmyeet 5mo ago

First hantavirus now this. Look, there's valid reason to be concerned here but people who are fearing a repeat of the Covid-19 pandemic are seemingly missing why Covid was a pandemic. Covid spread so much for four main reasons: 1. It could spread airborne; 2. It spread relatively easily. Not quite measles-level of contagiousness but still, pretty good; 3. Unlike something like the flu, there really wasn't any kind of natural resistance. What we now call the modern flu is a descendant of the Spanish flu that killed tends of millions in 1919-1920 in its first outbreak and it becamse less lethal for a variety of reasons; and 4. (This is the big one) It would spread when the carrier was asymptomatic. The flu can also spread asymptomatically but AFAIK it's less common. People with the flu tend to self-isolate showing symptoms. Still, what's probably most concerning about Covid is the number of people who truly believe it was and is fake. The public health implications of that as well as the societal and psychological impacts is something we're going to be studying for decades to come. The exact contagion mechanism for hantavirus isn't confirmed. Previously it's been from, say, rat to human. It's believed there was human-to-human transmission with the plague cruise ship of doom but whatever the case, it's simply not as contagious. Ebola generally requires contact to spread. How it's spread in a lot of these African regions has historically been from funeral rites. Family of the deceased would touch the body and this contact would spread the disease. So while it was quite contagious, it didn't spread airborne (as far as we know). It's also quite lethal, which naturally tends to limit spread. The king of long-dormant viruses is of course HIV. But at least we aren't dealing with cordyceps [1] so we've got that going for us at least. [1]: https://thelastofus.fandom.com/wiki/Cordyceps_brain_infection https://thelastofus.fandom.com/wiki/Cordyceps_brain_infectio...

ticulatedspline 5mo ago
forgot 5. Covid was exactly the right amount of deadly, 0.5-1% which made it easy to "roll the dice" on making containment harder.
- rob_c 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - Arodex 5mo ago
    Absolutely not. https://github.com/mbevand/covid19-age-stratified-ifr https://github.com/mbevand/covid19-age-stratified-ifr
    - rob_c 5mo ago
      in terms of an age corrected population distribution, actually I think you'll find it's lower. that's the whole point of "at risk" in this scenario being mostly age >70yr (or wherever you chose to draw your risk factors) also this is tends to be over-estimating as the reported infection rates are failing to account for asymptomatic carriers which themselves follow an age-based distribution (I'm sorry but as far as a systematic goes, this is poorly recorded, poorly understood and very very poorly modelled, which is made even worse by the politicization of cv19 causing an mis-representation in people volunteering for randomized testing in a large number of western datasets). Again in very high population countries with poor vaccine rates, uptake and very slow roll-out we didn't end up with hundreds of thousands of bodies stacked high ready to be buried. that unfortunately is a large-scale uncomfortable truth to quite a few.
      - Arodex 5mo ago
        >in terms of an age corrected population distribution, actually I think you'll find it's lower The data I linked is giving IFR for each age band, so that people see the actual data instead of sweeping affirmations like "the IFR is X" or "the IFR isn't X". The data is also coming from multiple studies, some under very controlled conditions with systematic testing, such as military service recruits, or prisoners. >Again in very high population countries with poor vaccine rates, uptake and very slow roll-out we didn't end up with hundreds of thousands of bodies stacked high ready to be buried. that unfortunately is a large-scale uncomfortable truth to quite a few. I leave this here: https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/4/26/mass-funeral-pyres-reflect-indias-covid-crisis https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/4/26/mass-funeral-pyr... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/30/brazil-manaus-coronavirus-mass-graves https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/30/brazil-manaus-... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/27/ive-seen-too-many-bodies-jakarta-gravediggers-chart-indonesias-covid-battle https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/27/ive-seen-too-m... It is your negation of reality (and the death of so many people) that might be uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable.
- the__alchemist 5mo ago
  It was good practice for pandemic response. I think (blasphemy, which on its own is wild) the global reaction was too strong on an acute level, but was worth it as prepararion for a deadlier pandemic.
  - amanaplanacanal 5mo ago
    It was a natural reaction though. People saw the Italian hospitals overflowing and thought "oh crap! We can't let that happen here!" At least where I am they tightened and/or relaxed restrictions on a county by county level based on how full hospital beds were getting.
    - philjohn 5mo ago
      Which makes sense - the british called it flattening the curve. No matter how well funded your health service, it doesn't have enough beds, staff or supplies (like ventilators) for a widespread pandemic, because that would be wasteful (of public funds in a single-payer system, and of money that would otherwise be profit in a private system).
  - delecti 5mo ago
    In another time it might have been good practice, but in reality I think, between the grifters pushing fear and those just too self-centered to go a few months without a haircut (yes oversimplifying and straw-manning), it actually precluded the chance that many people will ever cooperate with a pandemic response again.
  - lucb1e 5mo ago
    Or it was too little because it still spread easily? I'm on the border of three countries and you'd always see symptom reports go up in a region, sewage analyses go up, hospitalizations go up, and finally shortly before mortality started to show an increase (several weeks' lag from the moment of infection) they'd decide "guys, here's the statistics, we have to lock down now". Yeah great, now that everyone caught it they have to pretend being on the ball. And people still literally rioted against lockdowns. Or the masking thing, the resistance against filtering your breath... at this "too strong" level in your opinion, I don't see that the outcome was significantly different from "yolo protect yourself as much as you like but don't expect anyone else to be mindful"
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
  > Covid was exactly the right amount of deadly, 0.5-1% Tough to say that's "exactly the right amount of deadly" for a pandemic when the Black Death and Spanish flu killed larger fractions of their total affected populations (in the latter case, of humans) [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics_and_pandemics#By_death_toll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics_and_pandemic...
  - philjohn 5mo ago
    Perhaps fairer to say post germ-theory pandemic. During Spanish Flu it was in its infancy. During the black death it was all about miasma. Also, the window for spread with the ability to get on a plane and be on the other side of the world post infection, but pre symptoms is a "latter half of the 20th century" thing.
- jandrewrogers 5mo ago
  The IFR for COVID was ~0.1%, about the same as measles.
trvz 5mo ago
> People with the flu tend to self-isolate showing symptoms. Do you have any other fantasy tales you’d like to tell?
- pixl97 5mo ago
  Yea, I recently caught flu from someone else that "could not miss their work". So these things don't really apply well to the US at all.
  - mystraline 5mo ago
    Yep. This is called "food service". Shit pay, no benefits, and managers who threaten to fire you if you dont show up. Sick? Puke in the bathroom. Whys this the case? Cause we Americans have garbage for labor laws. You can be fired for pretty much any reason. And you are NOT protected if youre sick. When I had to work food seevice, at starbucks, subway, random pizza chain, etc, I begrudgingly came in sick, infected LOADS of customers. My choice was to work, or get fired (or not fired but 0 hours for next 2 weeks on schedule as punishment). Who knows how many I got sick and potentially killed due to compromised immune systems. Im sure I did. This is the real, hidden external cost, of our unmitigated capitalism. People get sick and die for the reason of making the boss more money, and too fucking bad.
    - pixl97 5mo ago
      >Cause we Americans have garbage for labor laws And healthcare being tied to "having a good enough job". But yea, it's a huge mess.
      - amanaplanacanal 5mo ago
        Divorcing health care from employment would be a wonderful change, but I don't see it ever happening. Employers love it because it makes employees fear for their job, and insurers love it because if everybody saw how much they were actually paying every month they would fight to change the system.
  - 5mo ago
BLKNSLVR 5mo ago
Just finished watching the last episode of season 2 with my daughter this morning. Now biting my nails for another 6-12 months awaiting season 3... Dammit.
thrownthatway 5mo ago
[flagged]
- soared 5mo ago
  I’ll solve the second to last one for you! I know multiple people who had Covid, and very quickly died, of Covid.
  - KetoManx64 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    - amanaplanacanal 5mo ago
      Something like half the population in the US is "metabolically unhealthy". Hopefully the new weight loss drugs will fix some of this.
      - thrownthatway 5mo ago
        You know what would help fix this. Tapeworms.
    - Arodex 5mo ago
      Are you sure you aren't "metabolically unhealthy"? Are you sure that if you happen to die, we won't find any "underlying health condition" during your autopsy? Are you fine with you death being dismissed as "got what he deserved"?
      - KetoManx64 5mo ago
        I got COVID 3 times, was sick for about a week with a bad flu and then it went away. All my friends had similiar experiences. The only people I know that were struck the hardest were those that were obese and had other health issues. Nobody deserves to die from the flu, but the flu doesn't give a damn about what you do or don't deserve, just about your body's ability to handle fighting off infections.
radu_floricica 5mo ago
2, 3 and 4 apply to the hantavirus as well.
- reed1234 5mo ago
  Hantavirus does not easily
rob_c 5mo ago
"no evidence of human to human transmission", was something repeated far too often and far too politically for me to take them serious on the next issue, serious or not. > "It would spread when the carrier was <LARGELY> asymptomatic" , the largely is very important here otherwise containment would have been a lot different. The main concerns for covid were also limited to a novel strain of a known virus type (again a KNOWN TYPE) being released into a global general populous with no inherent immunity. Aka expect ~5% of cases to probably have complications and some smaller %-age of that to be serious. If we didn't know what covid was we wouldn't be calling it "covid-19" to expressly describe which genus we're talking about. (Followed by general stupidity from people of pretending we don't know how other covid strains progress (regardless of any 'novel' effects)). Sill no sensible scenario put death rates >1% for anyone not in an at risk group. I mean everyone forgets the south-park sars skit that there's a 97% chance of catching that practically without symptoms. Why this became polarised about steam rolling through untested technology onto the populous is identical to the "green coal" and "tech will solve the carbon footprint" thinking...
JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
Covid turned into a pandemic because it wasn't taken seriously at the start. (Looking at you, China.) Public-health experts never seemed concerned about hantavirus. They are with this. It's appropriate to take their declarations seriously. > Ebola generally requires contact to spread "Human infection occurs through close contact with the blood or secretions of infected wildlife, such as bats or non-human primates, and subsequently spreads from person to person through direct contact with the blood, secretions, organs, or other bodily fluids of infected individuals or contaminated surfaces. Transmission is particularly amplified in health-care settings when infection prevention and control (IPC) measures are inadequate, and during unsafe burial practices involving direct contact with the deceased" [1]. So yes on traditional burial. But much easier to spread than HIV. [1] https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2026-DON602 https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2...
- jmyeet 5mo ago
  First, we still don't know the origins of Covid-19. The most accepted answer is zoonotic origin but there are problems with that, namely that Wuhan is far from the suspected bats and there is no documented case of Covid-19 in any wild population. The other competing theory is the "lab leak" family but again there's no evidence of this eitehr. Research and findings of Covid-19 in Italian sewerage suggest that Covid-19 might've been circulating in Italy in 2019 [1]. So another possibility is that Covid-19 resulted from forming a virulent strain in a person who was infected with multiple strains at once [2]. We may never know the true origins of Covid-19. So with asymptomatic spread and a novel virus, it's unlikely that whatever China did actually mattered at all. Once cases reached the US in particular, it was game over. People just can't miss work. There were very few places that maintain zero Covid for any significant period of time (eg Australia) through a combination of luck, geography and extreme quarantine. By geography I mean Australia doesn't have any land borders. And even then it only lasted so long. [1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7428442/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7428442/ [2]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9059428/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9059428/
  - Arodex 5mo ago
lucb1e 5mo ago
> 4. (This is the big one) [...] People with the flu tend to self-isolate showing symptoms. Even if optimistically 80% of people do that (in western europe I'd guess it's more like 45%+/-20, might be better elsewhere), if the spreading ability is high (points 1 and 2), you get a bus full of people infected by the two out of ten individuals that decide calling in sick isn't worth it Technically you can only call in sick when you are literally not able to do your job, and that's not the case if you're just coughing and feel cold or so. Even if your employer might prefer that you don't take the whole team down with you, people's judgement seems to very much be on the "it'll be fine" side. Idk that this is 'the big one' outside of a 2-out-of-100 years pandemic situation where people are exceedingly careful and paranoid
jeffrallen 5mo ago
> could spread airborne ...and even though it was more or less immediately clear it could, the public health authorities dragged their feet admitting it was spreading via airborne transmission (to preserve PPE for healthcare workers), allowing it to get way more out of control than it would have. Ebola is no laughing matter, it takes cargo planes full of chlorine and plastic sheeting to contain. But it is "easy" to contain if you respect it and do the necessary. And because a big part of "the necessary" is social, and it "luckily" recurs in the same societies, people get better and better at containing it. Wishing my MSF and WHO friends the best.
Izkata 5mo ago
> 4. (This is the big one) It would spread when the carrier was asymptomatic. This was also quickly found to be false. From memory the spread was 98.8% symptomatic, 1.2% pre-symptomatic, and 0% symptomatic. Granted you can't tell pre-symptomatic from asymptomatic beforehand, but with such a low proportion of infections being in that category it shouldn't have been a concern.
HDBaseT 5mo ago
Most people don't think COVID-19 was/is "fake" per se. Most people just think the situation was overblown. It is a sickness most analogous to the common cold or flu. Both of which suck, both of which you SHOULD self-isolate for, although the conditions, spread and death toll is effectively the same (or lesser) than that of the cold or flu. Which no matter how you spin it, the Global restrictions were too harsh.
- jmyeet 5mo ago
  The majority of people believe something fake about Covid [1]. While the number of people who think it was a hoax or otherwsise completely fake is pretty low, I've seen figures that it was as high as 13% in the early pandemic, which is millions of people. We still have people who believe in ivermectin, don't believe in vaccines and somehow still think the vaccine is more dangerous despite there being at least 7 million Covid deaths recorded and, well, 7 million fewer vaccine deaths. The health and hospital system was in total collapse. The lockdowns helped slow the spread. Were it not for that, many more would've died. Even so, we had not enough ventilators such that doctors and nurses essentially had to choose who lived and who died. The collective trauma on healthcare workers is something we'll be dealing with for years. What really scares me is how otherwise educated people can fall for the misinformation and absolutely nothing will convince them otherwise. It's basically a mind virus with no cure. [1]: https://www.kff.org/health-information-trust/covid-19-misinformation-is-ubiquitous-78-of-the-public-believes-or-is-unsure-about-at-least-one-false-statement-and-nearly-at-third-believe-at-least-four-of-eight-false-statements-tested/ https://www.kff.org/health-information-trust/covid-19-misinf...
  - unethical_ban 5mo ago
    Whenever someone complains about the overreacting to COVID, I recall the morgues that ran out of room so they had refrigerated shipping containers to hold bodies. If a virus gets bad enough that the hospitals can't handle the intake and the morgues can't handle the dead, it's serious. I don't see how this is controversial. I know it was a bad deal for kids and I'm not sure the response was perfect.
  - 5mo ago
tim333 5mo ago
You missed lab origin and cover up during the initial spread.

by jmyeet 5mo ago

ticulatedspline 5mo ago

forgot 5. Covid was exactly the right amount of deadly, 0.5-1% which made it easy to "roll the dice" on making containment harder.

rob_c 5mo ago
[flagged]
- Arodex 5mo ago
  Absolutely not. https://github.com/mbevand/covid19-age-stratified-ifr https://github.com/mbevand/covid19-age-stratified-ifr
  - rob_c 5mo ago
    in terms of an age corrected population distribution, actually I think you'll find it's lower. that's the whole point of "at risk" in this scenario being mostly age >70yr (or wherever you chose to draw your risk factors) also this is tends to be over-estimating as the reported infection rates are failing to account for asymptomatic carriers which themselves follow an age-based distribution (I'm sorry but as far as a systematic goes, this is poorly recorded, poorly understood and very very poorly modelled, which is made even worse by the politicization of cv19 causing an mis-representation in people volunteering for randomized testing in a large number of western datasets). Again in very high population countries with poor vaccine rates, uptake and very slow roll-out we didn't end up with hundreds of thousands of bodies stacked high ready to be buried. that unfortunately is a large-scale uncomfortable truth to quite a few.
    - Arodex 5mo ago
      >in terms of an age corrected population distribution, actually I think you'll find it's lower The data I linked is giving IFR for each age band, so that people see the actual data instead of sweeping affirmations like "the IFR is X" or "the IFR isn't X". The data is also coming from multiple studies, some under very controlled conditions with systematic testing, such as military service recruits, or prisoners. >Again in very high population countries with poor vaccine rates, uptake and very slow roll-out we didn't end up with hundreds of thousands of bodies stacked high ready to be buried. that unfortunately is a large-scale uncomfortable truth to quite a few. I leave this here: https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/4/26/mass-funeral-pyres-reflect-indias-covid-crisis https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/4/26/mass-funeral-pyr... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/30/brazil-manaus-coronavirus-mass-graves https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/30/brazil-manaus-... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/27/ive-seen-too-many-bodies-jakarta-gravediggers-chart-indonesias-covid-battle https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/27/ive-seen-too-m... It is your negation of reality (and the death of so many people) that might be uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable.
the__alchemist 5mo ago
It was good practice for pandemic response. I think (blasphemy, which on its own is wild) the global reaction was too strong on an acute level, but was worth it as prepararion for a deadlier pandemic.
- amanaplanacanal 5mo ago
  It was a natural reaction though. People saw the Italian hospitals overflowing and thought "oh crap! We can't let that happen here!" At least where I am they tightened and/or relaxed restrictions on a county by county level based on how full hospital beds were getting.
  - philjohn 5mo ago
    Which makes sense - the british called it flattening the curve. No matter how well funded your health service, it doesn't have enough beds, staff or supplies (like ventilators) for a widespread pandemic, because that would be wasteful (of public funds in a single-payer system, and of money that would otherwise be profit in a private system).
- delecti 5mo ago
  In another time it might have been good practice, but in reality I think, between the grifters pushing fear and those just too self-centered to go a few months without a haircut (yes oversimplifying and straw-manning), it actually precluded the chance that many people will ever cooperate with a pandemic response again.
- lucb1e 5mo ago
  Or it was too little because it still spread easily? I'm on the border of three countries and you'd always see symptom reports go up in a region, sewage analyses go up, hospitalizations go up, and finally shortly before mortality started to show an increase (several weeks' lag from the moment of infection) they'd decide "guys, here's the statistics, we have to lock down now". Yeah great, now that everyone caught it they have to pretend being on the ball. And people still literally rioted against lockdowns. Or the masking thing, the resistance against filtering your breath... at this "too strong" level in your opinion, I don't see that the outcome was significantly different from "yolo protect yourself as much as you like but don't expect anyone else to be mindful"
JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
> Covid was exactly the right amount of deadly, 0.5-1% Tough to say that's "exactly the right amount of deadly" for a pandemic when the Black Death and Spanish flu killed larger fractions of their total affected populations (in the latter case, of humans) [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics_and_pandemics#By_death_toll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics_and_pandemic...
- philjohn 5mo ago
  Perhaps fairer to say post germ-theory pandemic. During Spanish Flu it was in its infancy. During the black death it was all about miasma. Also, the window for spread with the ability to get on a plane and be on the other side of the world post infection, but pre symptoms is a "latter half of the 20th century" thing.
jandrewrogers 5mo ago
The IFR for COVID was ~0.1%, about the same as measles.

trvz 5mo ago

> People with the flu tend to self-isolate showing symptoms. Do you have any other fantasy tales you’d like to tell?

pixl97 5mo ago
Yea, I recently caught flu from someone else that "could not miss their work". So these things don't really apply well to the US at all.
- mystraline 5mo ago
  Yep. This is called "food service". Shit pay, no benefits, and managers who threaten to fire you if you dont show up. Sick? Puke in the bathroom. Whys this the case? Cause we Americans have garbage for labor laws. You can be fired for pretty much any reason. And you are NOT protected if youre sick. When I had to work food seevice, at starbucks, subway, random pizza chain, etc, I begrudgingly came in sick, infected LOADS of customers. My choice was to work, or get fired (or not fired but 0 hours for next 2 weeks on schedule as punishment). Who knows how many I got sick and potentially killed due to compromised immune systems. Im sure I did. This is the real, hidden external cost, of our unmitigated capitalism. People get sick and die for the reason of making the boss more money, and too fucking bad.
  - pixl97 5mo ago
    >Cause we Americans have garbage for labor laws And healthcare being tied to "having a good enough job". But yea, it's a huge mess.
    - amanaplanacanal 5mo ago
      Divorcing health care from employment would be a wonderful change, but I don't see it ever happening. Employers love it because it makes employees fear for their job, and insurers love it because if everybody saw how much they were actually paying every month they would fight to change the system.
- 5mo ago

BLKNSLVR 5mo ago

Just finished watching the last episode of season 2 with my daughter this morning. Now biting my nails for another 6-12 months awaiting season 3... Dammit.

thrownthatway 5mo ago

[flagged]

soared 5mo ago
I’ll solve the second to last one for you! I know multiple people who had Covid, and very quickly died, of Covid.
- KetoManx64 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - amanaplanacanal 5mo ago
    Something like half the population in the US is "metabolically unhealthy". Hopefully the new weight loss drugs will fix some of this.
    - thrownthatway 5mo ago
      You know what would help fix this. Tapeworms.
  - Arodex 5mo ago
    Are you sure you aren't "metabolically unhealthy"? Are you sure that if you happen to die, we won't find any "underlying health condition" during your autopsy? Are you fine with you death being dismissed as "got what he deserved"?
    - KetoManx64 5mo ago
      I got COVID 3 times, was sick for about a week with a bad flu and then it went away. All my friends had similiar experiences. The only people I know that were struck the hardest were those that were obese and had other health issues. Nobody deserves to die from the flu, but the flu doesn't give a damn about what you do or don't deserve, just about your body's ability to handle fighting off infections.

radu_floricica 5mo ago

2, 3 and 4 apply to the hantavirus as well.

reed1234 5mo ago
Hantavirus does not easily

rob_c 5mo ago

"no evidence of human to human transmission", was something repeated far too often and far too politically for me to take them serious on the next issue, serious or not. > "It would spread when the carrier was <LARGELY> asymptomatic" , the largely is very important here otherwise containment would have been a lot different. The main concerns for covid were also limited to a novel strain of a known virus type (again a KNOWN TYPE) being released into a global general populous with no inherent immunity. Aka expect ~5% of cases to probably have complications and some smaller %-age of that to be serious. If we didn't know what covid was we wouldn't be calling it "covid-19" to expressly describe which genus we're talking about. (Followed by general stupidity from people of pretending we don't know how other covid strains progress (regardless of any 'novel' effects)). Sill no sensible scenario put death rates >1% for anyone not in an at risk group. I mean everyone forgets the south-park sars skit that there's a 97% chance of catching that practically without symptoms. Why this became polarised about steam rolling through untested technology onto the populous is identical to the "green coal" and "tech will solve the carbon footprint" thinking...

JumpCrisscross 5mo ago

Covid turned into a pandemic because it wasn't taken seriously at the start. (Looking at you, China.) Public-health experts never seemed concerned about hantavirus. They are with this. It's appropriate to take their declarations seriously. > Ebola generally requires contact to spread "Human infection occurs through close contact with the blood or secretions of infected wildlife, such as bats or non-human primates, and subsequently spreads from person to person through direct contact with the blood, secretions, organs, or other bodily fluids of infected individuals or contaminated surfaces. Transmission is particularly amplified in health-care settings when infection prevention and control (IPC) measures are inadequate, and during unsafe burial practices involving direct contact with the deceased" [1]. So yes on traditional burial. But much easier to spread than HIV. [1] https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2026-DON602 https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2...

jmyeet 5mo ago
First, we still don't know the origins of Covid-19. The most accepted answer is zoonotic origin but there are problems with that, namely that Wuhan is far from the suspected bats and there is no documented case of Covid-19 in any wild population. The other competing theory is the "lab leak" family but again there's no evidence of this eitehr. Research and findings of Covid-19 in Italian sewerage suggest that Covid-19 might've been circulating in Italy in 2019 [1]. So another possibility is that Covid-19 resulted from forming a virulent strain in a person who was infected with multiple strains at once [2]. We may never know the true origins of Covid-19. So with asymptomatic spread and a novel virus, it's unlikely that whatever China did actually mattered at all. Once cases reached the US in particular, it was game over. People just can't miss work. There were very few places that maintain zero Covid for any significant period of time (eg Australia) through a combination of luck, geography and extreme quarantine. By geography I mean Australia doesn't have any land borders. And even then it only lasted so long. [1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7428442/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7428442/ [2]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9059428/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9059428/
- Arodex 5mo ago

lucb1e 5mo ago

> 4. (This is the big one) [...] People with the flu tend to self-isolate showing symptoms. Even if optimistically 80% of people do that (in western europe I'd guess it's more like 45%+/-20, might be better elsewhere), if the spreading ability is high (points 1 and 2), you get a bus full of people infected by the two out of ten individuals that decide calling in sick isn't worth it Technically you can only call in sick when you are literally not able to do your job, and that's not the case if you're just coughing and feel cold or so. Even if your employer might prefer that you don't take the whole team down with you, people's judgement seems to very much be on the "it'll be fine" side. Idk that this is 'the big one' outside of a 2-out-of-100 years pandemic situation where people are exceedingly careful and paranoid

jeffrallen 5mo ago

> could spread airborne ...and even though it was more or less immediately clear it could, the public health authorities dragged their feet admitting it was spreading via airborne transmission (to preserve PPE for healthcare workers), allowing it to get way more out of control than it would have. Ebola is no laughing matter, it takes cargo planes full of chlorine and plastic sheeting to contain. But it is "easy" to contain if you respect it and do the necessary. And because a big part of "the necessary" is social, and it "luckily" recurs in the same societies, people get better and better at containing it. Wishing my MSF and WHO friends the best.

Izkata 5mo ago

> 4. (This is the big one) It would spread when the carrier was asymptomatic. This was also quickly found to be false. From memory the spread was 98.8% symptomatic, 1.2% pre-symptomatic, and 0% symptomatic. Granted you can't tell pre-symptomatic from asymptomatic beforehand, but with such a low proportion of infections being in that category it shouldn't have been a concern.

HDBaseT 5mo ago

Most people don't think COVID-19 was/is "fake" per se. Most people just think the situation was overblown. It is a sickness most analogous to the common cold or flu. Both of which suck, both of which you SHOULD self-isolate for, although the conditions, spread and death toll is effectively the same (or lesser) than that of the cold or flu. Which no matter how you spin it, the Global restrictions were too harsh.

jmyeet 5mo ago
The majority of people believe something fake about Covid [1]. While the number of people who think it was a hoax or otherwsise completely fake is pretty low, I've seen figures that it was as high as 13% in the early pandemic, which is millions of people. We still have people who believe in ivermectin, don't believe in vaccines and somehow still think the vaccine is more dangerous despite there being at least 7 million Covid deaths recorded and, well, 7 million fewer vaccine deaths. The health and hospital system was in total collapse. The lockdowns helped slow the spread. Were it not for that, many more would've died. Even so, we had not enough ventilators such that doctors and nurses essentially had to choose who lived and who died. The collective trauma on healthcare workers is something we'll be dealing with for years. What really scares me is how otherwise educated people can fall for the misinformation and absolutely nothing will convince them otherwise. It's basically a mind virus with no cure. [1]: https://www.kff.org/health-information-trust/covid-19-misinformation-is-ubiquitous-78-of-the-public-believes-or-is-unsure-about-at-least-one-false-statement-and-nearly-at-third-believe-at-least-four-of-eight-false-statements-tested/ https://www.kff.org/health-information-trust/covid-19-misinf...
- unethical_ban 5mo ago
  Whenever someone complains about the overreacting to COVID, I recall the morgues that ran out of room so they had refrigerated shipping containers to hold bodies. If a virus gets bad enough that the hospitals can't handle the intake and the morgues can't handle the dead, it's serious. I don't see how this is controversial. I know it was a bad deal for kids and I'm not sure the response was perfect.
- 5mo ago

tim333 5mo ago

You missed lab origin and cover up during the initial spread.