Covid-19 Discussion

Because living kills people every day, we never implement policies to minimize lethality without other considerations.

Otherwise the speed limit would be 10 miles per hour, or maybe cars would be banned altogether

Right, but crashing a car is not contagious. It's not like one person crashes and suddenly everyone else in a 100m radius crashes as well, and then everyone within 100m of them etc. The analogy is fundamentally flawed, IMO.

The flu is contagious, can kill very at risk people, and can incapacitate for days others.

Yet we never mandated basically anything during flu season.

In any country.

Many other diseases are contagious (and worse than COVID).but we don't mandate house arrest of the infected, nevermind their contacts or all the people in an apartment complex where there was a case of bronchitis.

Schools close where because of the flu every year? The **** are you inventing right now lol

I'm not an epidemiologist, but my understanding is that those examples don't rise to the level of pandemic and once something rises to the level of pandemic, more extreme measures need to be taken to contain it. My lay understanding is it's to do with both the value of the exponent and the value of the damping/limiting coefficient in the logistic growth function, but I am sure that in practice there are more variables than that.

In any case, "disease x is contagious and kills, disease y is contagious and kills, so we should take the same measures to prevent them" is a vacuous argument as it does not take into account factors such as how contagious, severity of non-fatal symptoms, mortality rate, and a raft of other factors.

The idea that if some people you never heard about says "pandemic" then everything is allowed is absurd but nvmd.

We are OT there is a thread for that.

Lots of places. Nobody's inventing anything here but you. You just have no idea what you're talking about. Literally just Google school closes for flu.

Here are some I found quickly, pre-pandemic. You can find more current ones now easily, though.
https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2019...

https://www.kark.com/news/local-news/flu...

https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/26/health/fl...

https://www.usnews.com/news/national-new...

Here's an article from 2008 with guidance about how schools should know when they should close down because of flu:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20...

This is why I say you really should just take a step back. You're so far out of your lane you think completely normal things should land people in jail for life.

You sound completely insane. Just stop.

I tend to believe in science and scientists unless there is a good reason not to. If someone I've never heard of who has studied all their life to be a physicist tells me that time runs slower on a satellite, I believe them, even if it doesn't make a huge amount of sense to me why it should be so (general relativity, btw). Similarly, if someone who has studied all their life to be an epidemiologist tells me there is a pandemic, and I see people dropping dead all around me, I'd need a pretty good reason to disbelieve them.

You also "never heard of" any expert you've ever listened to, until the first time you did hear of them. Epidemiologists are not exactly tabloid celebrities, why on earth do you expect that you will have heard of them until there is, you know, a pandemic?

Ye the idea for normal people is that epidemiologists don't decide anything even during an epidemy, same as "war armchair experts" don't get to command troops on the field or make any major war decision.

The idea that you think epidemiology to be an actual science like physics, capable of precise objective predictions (hint: it isn't), is funny btw.

Maybe that's why you believe them.

WHAT

Epidemiologists don't have the power to institute lockdowns, only to advise those who do, so I have no idea what you're driving at with your "armchair war experts" analogy.

If physics is a "hard science" and economics is a "soft science" then I suspect epidemiology is somewhere in between. If you agree that huge policy decisions are taken on the advice of economists, why should epidemiologists be subject to a stricter standard?

Note that this wasn't just something a small group of scientists made up from thin air, people were already demonstrably dropping dead in large numbers before the lockdowns.

Apparently, only science that produces theories that right wingers like is a real science (TM). Epidemiology and climate science are fake sciences. Economics, now that's a real science.

Pretty much a slightly more intellectually elevated version of "How do CFCs escape my bathroom?"

Macroeconomic and epidemiology are fairly similar. They both use a lot of math, tend to be data driven, tend to be rigorous, but the problem is basically intractable at it's core because you don't have controlled, repeatable experiments.

So if you want to "prove" something or it's opposite, with some exceptions, you can (IE you can be published saying that, of course you didn't prove or disprove anything in reality).

Now imagine politicians claiming your fundamental constitutional rights are to be suspended because economic experts politically leaning the same as the government say this is a "pancrisis" so science says you have to do what the government says, for as long as it says it, because science.

Btw yes it was something a small group of scientists made up from thin air, that lockdowns were warranted, given worldwide consensus wasn't that pre COVID.

And many of them are now admitting they were wrong btw.

Many of WHO are now admitting they were wrong ABOUT WHAT?

That is absolutely not true .
Doing nothing would have accelerate the virus to mutate at a faster rates since the infection rate would have went even faster .
Not knowing if it would have been a positive or negative mutation for us .
It’s so easy to call ourself genius with insight ….

Thinking just about end result, after the fact knowing if you were right or wrong isn’t how medical policy should be taken , that’s gambling !

It should take every possible outcomes and go from there .
The danger of facing even worst derivative of Covid without even have any concrete solution for the first strain was very real and dangerous ….

Jfc schools closing a few days because they don't have enough teachers to keep classes going, exactly the same as keeping them online for a year, you have no shame really, I will just block you as I risk a ba. Everytime I answer to you

Mutation rate, sure, but the extremely simple math of having fewer infections before a vaccine was available makes it EXTREMELY OBVIOUS that masking and staying home saved tons of lives. I mean it's not even arguable. Those are two of the absolutely most obvious ways things would've been much different had no mitigations taken place.

But not all people are stupid. Most would have stayed home as much as possible voluntarily, masked up voluntarily, etc. And then we would have many of the same economic and education outcomes.

Trying to compare the "lockdown timeline" with some fictional no mitigation, no repercussions timeline is just foolish in the extreme.

Governments implement economic policies all the time that have far more long term impact on far more people than the Covid lockdowns did.

I don't know enough about epidemiology to definitively say that it is a much "harder" science than economics, but common sense would dictate that it is on par with biology in that regard. You can, of course, conduct repeatable experiments on samples of different strains of viruses to derive a lot of their properties. The same cannot be said of macroeconomics.

Quite frankly, this whole "epidemiologists made it up" argument sounds like conspiratorial bullshit worthy of being contained in the Playbig2000 vanity thread (i.e. conspiracy thread).

Nearly all of Luciom's nonsense belongs in the same bin.

Nah, he makes some good points at times, this just isn't one of them. But it's refreshing to have a right winger here who engages in good faith dialogue, brings facts to the table, doesn't ghost challenging questions etc. Most of them are of the Brian James variety so it's pointless even trying to have a discussion with them. I may not agree with most of Luciom's views, but I respect the manner in which he engages with his detractors.

Epidemiologists (and not them in particular, other "experts") as well, made up the idea that lockdowns were a proper response to the arrival of a semi-nivel airborne coronavirus yes.

They totally made it up.

Try to find pro lockdown literature in case of airborne epidemies in the pre 2020 literature, go.

They tried 5 days in Mexico city once, that's about it.

Government implement economic policies all the times, but they don't violate basic constitutional rights doing so with the excuse of emergency powers.

What you have in mind that can be approx on par with biology is VIROLOGY, not epidemiology.

Scientists can get a fairly good grasp of what SARS-CoV-2 does yes (that's virology).

They don't have a ****ing clue how many cases there will be 78 days from today if today cases are X in a given society.

No ****ing clue at all. That would be epidemiology.

They can barely write some model telling you that cases will be lower if you do x as a government, but they won't be able to quantify how much within any reasonable range anyway.

I admit I read this thread a lot less often than, say, the covid thread, but I'll just say that isn't true at all over there.

D2 this was the seminal article that convinced many countries to lockdown (not Italy: Italy locked down because our government was allied with china at the time. We were the only signatories of the belt and road initiative in the west and the governing party movimento 5 stelle was a china propagandist)

https://tomaspueyo.medium.com/coronaviru...

That "expert" didn't even have a degree in any healthcare related field.

****ing degree in "public management" whatever that might mean.

He invents this "hammer" from which the virus never recovers, and that is it.

****ing pseudo science that caused incalculable damage

They can tell you the function that governs how many cases there will be 78 days from today, it's just that the inputs to that function need to be very precise in order for the answer to be correct.

There is one lily sitting in a pond, and the number of lilies doubles daily. Within 30 days the pond is totally full of lilies. How many days does it take for the pond to be at least half full of lilies?

The answer is 29 days. For every day you're out, your mistake is a compounded factor of 2. Such is the nature of exponential growth (the logistic growth I referred to above is exponential growth with a "cap"). The "r" that epidemiologists refer to was 2 in the toy example above, but with pretty much any "r" over one you get uncontrollable growth, unless you take measures to cap it.

The fact that they can't tell you how many cases there will be 78 days from now is indicative of the fact that those predictions are very, very sensitive to initial and ongoing conditions. For another toy example, starting with 1 case, an "r" of, e.g. 1.2 would result in 1.25 million cases in 78 days and an "r" of 1.3 would result in 593 million cases in 78 days. So the exact value of "r" matters. A lot. The purpose of the lockdowns was to reduce "r". But you can see how a seemingly innocuous difference of even 0.1 in the exponent compounds to a difference of 500x in the result in less than 3 months.

It might be more intuitive to you to think of it like compound interest.