Covid-19 Discussion

I think regulators are supposed to function independently of political party affiliation. If you are suggesting a scenario where the regulator is corrupt, then whatever remedies are available to deal with other types of corruption, e.g. judicial, should be available to you here. In practice that may well mean that there are no remedies available, but this is just a standard lament that corruption exists.

And it includes "experts", which should be trusted as much as politicians (almost nothing) every time their determinations have political repercussions.

If you understand why not trusting politicians is proper, I am trying to convey the idea that the same is true for experts linked to politics

I understand what motivation politians have to lie (in general, that is, not about lockdown specifically). I need to understand of the motivation these experts have to lie before I have reason to distrust them. In the UK, which is where I live, what motivation did these scientists have to make up or exaggerate the need for a lockdown?

Apparently to get better jobs because they helped the PM. But it sounds like it wasn't their fault to begin with.

Seems like this would have caused a scandal for the PM.

So that leaves as potentially trustworthy, the non-politicians and non-politically adjacent experts. Find fault with them, and your Mickey Mouse exercise in cynicism is complete.

Except our PM didn't want a lockdown, and we had a tory government at the time, which was very much anti lockdown. So, one would think that "helping the PM" would be advising against lockdown.

I can't make any sense out of Luciom's argument, which seems to be that the experts said what the politicians wanted, which is that a lockdown would be effective, and the reason that the politicians wanted them to say this is it's because it's what the experts advised. It's still unclear to me who initiated this wretched circle of corruption, scum and villainy and why.

Mos Eisely divinity school dropouts, I think

Yeah I've never seen him go off the rails as he has with this Covid back and forth. He's usually more reasonable.

I thought you were talking about Italy there.

I don't want to get bogged down in a discussion about what happened in Italy since it seems like there was something going on there that I know nothing about, but it seems like Luciom is saying that these experts all lied in the rest of the world too, and I am trying to understand what possible benefit it would confer upon them to do so. Maybe there was some secret conference where all the epidemiologists got together and decided to pull an epic prank and lock down the world for shits and giggles. I'm really curious as to what the theory is here.

It is actually patently absurd.

The death rate of Covid prior to vaccinations was roughly 1%.

If everyone in the US had gotten Covid prior to vaccinations, roughly 3,300,000 would have died. As it was, given lockdowns and mask regulations roughly 500,000 died prior to the vaccines.

At most over 2,000,000 people in the US got a full lifetime to live as a result of the lockdowns and mask mandates.

Here is an article that spells out how important lockdowns were.

Had lockdowns not happened, hospitals would have been severely overrun in April/May of 2020. As it was a lot of cities had to open facilities to house Covid patients so other types of emergencies could be handled in Emergency Rooms and ICU's. As a result there would have been less cancer screening than there was. Part of the problem was cancer screening places had a vast shortage of workers. Another problem was that many people wouldn't go to hospitals for screenings because they were afraid of catching Covid.

The only way to increase the number of cancer screenings during a pandemic would be to halt the spread of the pandemic so that visiting hospitals and cancer screening places could be viable. That was not done in the US and it would have been far worse if there had been no lockdowns. South Korea did halt the spread of the pandemic and as a result lost virtually no lives as a result.

When the second wave hit in the fall and winter of 2020, people without Covid died because of things like heart attacks and strokes where they couldn't be treated in their local hospitals. This happened strictly in red states that had discontinued any lockdown like restrictions and had overflowed their local hospitals.

The necessity of lockdowns in the US was literally because the CDC messed up the production of Covid Tests in early 2020. Had massive amounts of Covid Tests been produced by March 2020, the US could have restricted entry by testing people before they got on planes, boats, trains, and at borders for the US. Similarly lockdowns in office buildings, factories, and other businesses that were crucial could have been avoided by closing buildings for 14 days only when outbreaks were initially detected (as was done in South Korea).

Similarly masks could have been mass produced ironically by a Trump supporter who in January of 2020 asked the Secretary of Health if he wanted his factory to produce millions of masks in the US. Incredibly the answer was no (again due to CDC error and the fact that Trump had fired the White House pandemic team in early 2019 after they had done a pandemic simulation that showed the US was drastically short of masks and other surgical clothing and other medical equipment). And then we sent like 20,000,000 masks to China. And by we I mean Trump.

I get that the lockdowns crippled a lot of businesses and individuals financially. And I get that many Republicans think that supporting businesses from a financial standpoint is more important than saving lives. And you are entitled to your opinions. But as has been mentioned before even without lockdowns a very significant % of the population would have stopped going out in public. The economy would have been crippled anyway.

The communist menace

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Poeple doont understand modeling. They werent saying what would happen, they were doing their best to understand the plausible worst case.

The experts could be accused of overestimating politcians competence in enacting any measures.

Nobody is claiming it was exactly the same as keeping them online for a year. You cited the number of times schools closed in 2021-2022 as if that number means something. Those numbers were *not* the number of schools that closed for an entire year. If you are claiming that's the case you need to prove it because it was nowhere in the screenshot. It was the number of schools that closed *at all* and it likely means permanently. Our public education system is under attack by the right and teachers are quitting left and right. The stat didn't mention a thing about covid.

I assume the stat is either closed permanently, for which the reasons are obvious, or closed even for a day due to illness or even COVID specifically. You left it vague to imply it was somwthing it's not. Dishonest. What it's not is schools that closed for a whole year because of covid.

You have no shame as you are the one that lies constantly to try to make a point and claims people would be put in jail for life for things that are literally commonplace.

Please block me so I didn't have to read your horrific, dishonest, clueless replies to me anymore.

That is not true and not at all how that works.

1) the rate of infection would be higher (more people per time period). Quality of care goes down once a certain threshold is exceeded, and Italy was *quite demonstrably* past that threshold.
Also, higher the infection rate, the faster the mutations come.

2) delaying infections gives more time for better treatments to be discovered and vaccines to be developed.

3) COVID can and does infect people multiple times. It's not binary. So "everyone got COVID later anyway" is really "everyone got COVID fewer times in total." Multiple COVID infections are horrible for the body, despite your precious lethality rate, which I've tried to impress on you multiple times is not the only important issue.

In short, you are once again employing a superficial thought process to a complex issue in which you have very little knowledge of anything of significance.

You really need to stop.

I did the work for you and tracked down that statistic. Oh look I was right. It has nothing to do with covid specifically, it's the number of schools that are no longer operating. At all. Not "went online because of covid."

So in case you dn't know, the public education system in the United States is under attack. The right wants to destroy public education and is actively trying to do so.

What you are seeing is a result of lack of funds and teachers quitting. Precisely what the right wants.

That has zero to do with covid. I wouldn't mind jailing the people responsible for that for life, though.

Many people want to do their own research. Here's about the best you can get and the price can't be beat:

Physics of COVID-19 Transmission

MIT is one of the greatest schools in the world that attempts to train the best and brightest to understand the systems around them. They've provided most courses online for free for the past couple decades. They have bias toward reality. There's no room for goofy trolls like you all.

Accurate. One of the most appropriate summaries I heard in 2020 was "faced with the decision to sacrifice the lives of hundreds of thousands of people or the economy, Donald Trump bravely chose both.

In Italy, the government because of the chinese connection.

Elsewhere it depends, in most places, experts because they saw italian experts change their mind entirely and figured their power would increase immensely if the entire population at their disposal

They were covering their asses and giving legal cover to politicians.

When the best case is "nothing happens" and the worst case is "apocalypse", you aren't saying anything but legally the politician can claim that in order to avoid the worst case he can suspend the constitution.

It's like as if the constitution got suspended because of climate change, with models claiming there is "some" possibility of a 5 meter raise in sea levels in 30 years which justifies unlimited violations of fundamental rights.

That's even if the same model gives you a "possibility" (some sigma on the other side) of 10 cm raise.

You know for the climate to this day people fraudulently use RCP 8.5 (worst case) to justify their claims

The megalomaniac scientists wanted to increase their power and have the population at their disposal? I don't even understand what possible benefit the exercise of this putative power confers. Colour me unconvinced.

A more plausible scenario seems to me that they had a model where lockdown mitigated the effects of the pandemic and reduced the R value. But I guess that's too benign for you? There *had* to be a malicious intent, even if you don't know what it was?

You are usually fairly reasonable and I like discussing things with you even though we often disagree, but you're starting to sound like a standard paranoid conspiracy-theory mongering right wing clown here, dude.

Oh it's the ole "they get more funding". It's OK, got it, don't need to take this derail any further.