Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19) (SARS-CoV-2) [2020]

Mariner said:
The 1918 pandemic had multiple waves over a few years, I seem to recall. Seems to be the case with most pandemics where the IFR isn't ridiculously high.
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the 2nd wave was the most deadly IIRC it had 3 waves (OK looked on wiki 4 waves over less than 2 years)
It killed a lot more ppl than the current flu for a few reasons eg healthcare was worse, understanding was worse etc but more importantly IMO is where it differed from this flu, back then it could kill 50+% of the population, this one can kill ~5% of the population (going by the ages), sure any age can die from the current pandemic but statistically the chances are greatly increased with age.
I believe in vaccines, masks etc ala the science but I'm just wondering as a thought experiment what would of happened if we done the same as 1918 i.e. fuck all, no vaccines, lockdowns greatly reduced etc would it of burnt itself out by now with ~30million dead, ATM we are at what 10million+ dead but we still have the pandemic so the numbers keep on rising, when will it finish? (if it ever does?) 100+ million

This is just humanity, like the trolley experiment shows, humans will prefer to let 10 people die than kill 1 person, which is totally illogical.
Like the vaccine testing the way we done it was totally illogical, lets try the vaccine on 50,000 ppl and then wait 3 months to see what percent get covid.
We have to wait 3 months cause otherwise not enough ppl would get exposed to covid to see if the vaccine worked or not, WTF illogical.
Much more logical was get 1000 volunteers pay them $10,000 or whatever, give the vaccine and then expose them all to covid (i.e. violate the Hippocratic Oath) then you know within a week if the vaccine works or not, no waiting 3 months to see if they get affected in the real world.
OK you still have to test for sideeffects etc but we could of had vaccines ready months earlier than we did

btw wrt ebola yes its much more deadly but the reason it doesnt get transmitted so easily like covid is when you get ebola, you know it, everyone around you see you have it, because you can't do anything you get very sick (and then die or live) unlike covid, where you get it and with a lot of ppl don't even know thus can passs it to other ppl.
 
There were some challenge trials in the UK last year where people were deliberately infected. Don't know if they produced any useful data because, of course, the volunteers were all young and healthy people. My guess is that the Chinese vaccines would have skipped the first stage of the trials by testing on prisoners because that's the sort of thing that autocratic regimes are likely to do. The trials themselves (in the west) needed to be randomised to check the vaccines actually work and, of course, a wide age range will have been vaccinated, some with co-morbidities to see how effective they are in different groups. There's only so far you can accelerate the process if you want to produce a safe and effective vaccine.

The thought experiment about whether it would have been better to 'let it rip' is possibly accurate, but you'd have to be willing to accept the virtual collapse of society. You'd have to fence the hospitals off with armed guards as those dying in general wouldn't be happy to sit at home and not attempt to get medical assistance. The health care system would pretty much totally collapse regardless so there would be thousands dying without Covid infections. You'd have to be willing to watch thousands of children die, tens of thousands of their parents and hundreds of thousands (at the very least) of their grandparents. I'm thinking here of the UK population.

And it still wouldn't work. Not unreasonably, a lot of people would prefer to stay at home and try to keep their children safe, avoiding exposure as much as possible so there would still be a very large group of vulnerable people for the virus to keep spreading and mutating in.
 
So you're saying its better to let 100 million die than kill 30 million? ala the trolley experiment
The virtual collapse of society? Like what happened in the 1918-1919 outbreak? (of course it would not of been as bad, ala 50% of population then vs 5% of the population now)

Humanity is strange in this regards (me included)
we are not willing to spend 10s of billions of dollars decades ago to stop climate change (we choose to spend trillions in the future)
we wont spend thousands of dollars to greatly reduce the chances of someone resorting to a life of crime but we are willing to spend 100s of thousands to lock them up
we choose to spend ~90% of a persons lifetime spending on healthcare to extend the last 6 months of their sorry life, instead of spending a fraction of this to let them live years longer/healthier
AI driven cars
etc
 
Mariner said:
The Herd Immunity by infection guys - the GBDers. That's what I'm talking about.
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Okay. Needed clarification.

Your Polish friends who are shrugging at the risk aren't generally seeing the hospitalisations and deaths in the elderly and vulnerable that community transmission of the virus (which they help by their actions) causes.
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My polish friends are vaccinated, and also had it last Christmas. ;) They are tutting at the attitudes of their homeland.

But the problem is people listen first and foremost to their peers, taking in data on the world through their own senses. If they aren't seeing the problem, you have a devil of a job getting them to realise and understand it. That isn't something to grumble about, saying, "how stupid are people?!!" but a problem to find a way to work around. Social media came out of nowhere and has created these additional problems of echo-chamber idea reinforcement. Moaning people are dumb helps nothing - it needs a solution, and people aren't ever going to be won around if they keep being called dumb sheep.

Right now in the UK, with cases rising but the death rate falling (almost certainly due to the boosters), you wouldn't know much about it unless you'd visited hospitals and seen the queues of ambulances or if you knew somebody who actually worked there.
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I still don't understand your plan and the fundamental difference. Can you spend a moment explaining what you'd do and why, rather than just saying it's all wrong. ;)

At the moment, short of forcing people to take vaccines, we have a %age population as protected as it'll get (plus getting boosters) and a %age that'll likely never get protected unless there's real evidence they are at risk. The disease is going to spread to everyone eventually. At the moment in the UK, it's a pretty constant infection rate versus elsewhere with massive spikes pushing them into lockdowns. That really needs explaining as, potentially, it shows weaker safeguards means more active immune resistance, and the future of pandemic control might need to understand the relationship. There are so many other illnesses doing the rounds now it seems, scientists really had no idea what 'active immunity' means nor requires to stay healthy and that's an area that needs understanding.

From what I'm seeing, my independent evaluation, C19 seems far more settled in the UK than elsewhere. Whether by luck or judgment, the choices made, by government and people, seem to have 'flattened the curve' and reduced the virus to something of a high simmer, which is possibly as good as it gets. Possibly 'low simmer' is better and attainable but an R number to low would cause the disease to die out, not spread slowly. I guess the theoretical ideal is to get the infection at a sustainable level, then cap R0 at 1.0 and let it stay there for a couple of years, which doesn't sound realistic.

The real upside is we will have so much data after this from different countries with different strategies, that Big Data analysis might reveal something abut how to handle the next pandemic, taking out a lot of the blind guesswork scientists were doing (though still claiming it's scientific by reference to 'models', ignoring the fact those models are made up and not tested against controls ;)). It also highlights how little trust people place in their governments too, which is a wider political debate but one that, again, needs solving for the next pandemic to coordinate efforts for best outcomes.
 
That may be the case, but with so many countries falling over themselves to ban travel from SA that *may* also be to reduce knee-jerk reactions from governments.
 
Arnold Beckenbauer said:
South African doctor who raised alarm about omicron variant says symptoms are ‘unusual but mild’ (telegraph.co.uk)

Good news, everyone?
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We hear all sorts of good and bad news regards this pandemic. People are very quick to vocalise without waiting for proper analysis. Soooo much has been got wrong, such as 'asymptomatic carriers are likely very few' and 'it doesn't spread through the air'. We had 'scientists' modelling the infection and suggesting London may have already reached Herd Immunity last year at 20% infections. We've heard 'Covi19 can reinfect!' after an outlier case of a second infection inside a short interval hit headlines. We had '80% of infections are in the unvaccinated' a short while back, only for that statistic to change dramatically.

The only sane option is wait for decent reports backed with proper investigation. Which means waiting two months while rushed reports are thrown out until someone taking the necessary time to do a proper, meaningful job produces a useful report. Until then, until science has caught up, dealing with the unknowns requires application of sound philosophy and reasoning to make sensible choices and actions.

Edit: As the report notes, seems unproblematic so far for the young but potentially risky for the elderly. Personally I feel this means we should be pushing for vaccines worldwide to those who'll most benefit.
 
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green.pixel said:
What would you spend it on?
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Sorry I looked up and I was talking from my ass (the gist was correct but the number was from my ass)

USA figures
age 0-19 6.4% lifetime health spending
age 20-39 10.8% lifetime health spending
age 40-64 23.6% lifetime health spending
age 65-84 23.7% lifetime health spending
age 85+ 35.9% lifetime health spending

what would I do? No idea I aint an expert, unless its I know well like horror films or music then I'm just an idiot on the web spouting their 2cents

my point was linked to another post I made here, we humans often do not choose the best path
https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/the-selfishness-gene.57636
 
Arnold Beckenbauer said:
South African doctor who raised alarm about omicron variant says symptoms are ‘unusual but mild’ (telegraph.co.uk)

Good news, everyone?
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Partial quote. The same doctor said symptoms had only been seen in young and healthy people so far and it wasn't yet known how the elderly and more vulnerable would be affected.

The GBDers at the Telegraph who have been publishing disinformation for months didn't mention that, oddly enough. It would be nice if Omicron gave milder symptoms but there's no real reason it should and no evidence that it does yet. This tactic from the right wing press is absolutely deliberate. They will selectively quote and obfuscate just as they have done practically all the way through the pandemic.
 
John Campbell covers both South African doctors. The results among the unvaccinated sound potentially worse.

Mariner said:
Partial quote. The same doctor said symptoms had only been seen in young and healthy people so far and it wasn't yet known how the elderly and more vulnerable would be affected.

The GBDers at the Telegraph who have been publishing disinformation for months didn't mention that, oddly enough.
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Quote article:

“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said.

Plus subheading "Dr Angelique Coetzee noticed otherwise healthy patients showing unusual symptoms and worries how the new variant might hurt the elderly," which they qualified with a paragraph in the article:

South African demographics are very different from those in the UK. Only about six per cent of the population are over the age of 65. This means that older individuals who are more vulnerable to the virus may take some time to present.
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The Great Barrington Declaration folk. Gupta, Bhattacharya and Kuldorff and their followers such as the HART Group. They've been wrong every step of the way during the pandemic and continue to be so. The Telegraph has backed them every step of the way. The HART chatlog leaks show that they have been actively laising with Telegraph journalists to help promote their anti-scientific bullshit.
 
John Campbell has been a useful source of info during the pandemic but he's really jumped on board the Ivermectin train despite the lack of evidence and hasn't got off at the next stop since the strongest studies in the meta-analysis which appeared to show it was effective were withdrawn. In fact, he's now doubled down by trying to claim that Ivermectin is more effective than the new Pfizer drug.

A real shame as he's been pretty reasonable in most other regards.
 
Mariner said:
The Great Barrington Declaration folk. Gupta, Bhattacharya and Kuldorff and their followers such as the HART Group. They've been wrong every step of the way during the pandemic and continue to be so. The Telegraph has backed them every step of the way. The HART chatlog leaks show that they have been actively laising with Telegraph journalists to help promote their anti-scientific bullshit.
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Having listened to some of them, I didn't get at all that they were over prommoting natural immunity. I only got nuanced positions instead. IMO might have been a reaction to the over promoting of vaccine's superiority over it.

I further disagree with the of the coff summary of their track record you provided. (though imo what got to me was that they glossed over the fact that the "isolating the vulnerable" strategy just cannot be applied world wide.)
 
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entity279 said:
Having listened to some of them, I didn't get at all that they were over prommoting natural immunity. I only got nuanced positions instead. IMO might have been a reaction to the over promoting of vaccine's superiority over it.

I further disagree with the of the coff summary of their track record you provided. (though imo what got to me was that they glossed over the fact that the "isolating the vulnerable" strategy just cannot be applied world wide.)
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If you look deeper, you'll see that they've been actively promoting an anti-vaxx, anti-mask agenda as well. In fact Bhattacharya has been pushing it so much that he's been barred from appearing as an 'expert witness' in certain legal cases in the US because he's making unfounded claims in areas where he's not an expert. He boldly claimed India had reached herd immunity in January and that vaccination would be unethical!

https://theprint.in/opinion/majorit...ntire-population-can-cause-great-harm/582174/

Didn't work out very well, did it? He's not changed tack since. Perhaps understandable if he thinks it is the way forward, but he was wrong about where we were at a year ago, is still wrong and now with added dishonesty.

Gupta was claiming the UK had almost reached herd immunity in April 2020! She then advised the UK government against an earlier lockdown in late 2020, because of, well, "We're almost herd immunity". At various points in 2021 she's rolled out the same argument and is continuing to argue for "natural immunity" to this day. Most recent article in the Telegraph was earlier this month. One of many.

Why should people who have been so completely wrong so often still be listened to? Despite being completely wrong, they have had a lot of influence over the decisions of the UK and US governments during the pandemic and still wield plenty of influence today thanks to the right-wing press giving them op-eds galore.

For an example about the disinformation from the right-wing media in the UK which I mentioned earlier in the thread, today we've seen the WHO announce that Omicron is a very serious worry. The Daily Mail headlines are trying to report it as potentially a good thing (with the caveat that it might turn out be a very bad thing, right at the bottom of the bullet points):

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Given that England is going to reintroduce mask mandates for shops and public transport from tomorrow, I can't help but think that the aim of this sort of 'reporting' is to spread disinformation and stop mask wearing. It's not a potentially life-threatening new variant, it's a good thing!
 
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