Coronavirus - General Chat - No statistics

[XFool]

This is why public health measures, such as surveillance and vaccination are so important. Particularly supporting these in poorer countries. So it's not exactly luck, more a case of getting lucky after decades of hard work. The only real luck was sane policies were supported by politicians, but the Smallpox Liberation Front is working on that.

Aided and abetted by journalists at The Telegraph, The Spectator and sundry persons?

[Ashfordian]

What is slightly alarming is that we (the world) actually got somewhat lucky with this current pandemic due to it being caused by a coronavirus so the virus involved wasn't 100% novel since we had already encountered SARS-CoV1 and MERS-CoV. Because of that we already had a pretty good genetic analysis of some close-ish relatives that we could use as a blueprint to guide us in dissecting the SARS-CoV2 virus so quickly and isolating the spike protein amongst others. The Oxford vaccine group for instance had already been working for a while on a vaccine for MERS-CoV, using spike as the antigen, and had even started phase 1 human trials in December 2019 (https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2019-12-19-ne ... udi-arabia); that is a big reason why Oxford/AZ were able to respond so quickly. If something more novel in humans than a coronavirus had hit us then I dread to think how slow and ineffective our response would have been like.

- Julian

What I find more alarming is so many people think like you because they don't want to admit the reality of SARS-CoV2, that they were hoodwinked by the fear spread from Government and health 'experts'.

For the vast majority of people, the virus was not dangerous. The pandemic was over when Governments finally had to admit the virus was going to do what viruses do, because they could no longer afford the cost and the damage that their policies were inflicting. However, everyone will be paying the financial costs of the overreaction for decades to come, and if you happen to require it, many will experience poorer health outcomes due to the short-term policies applies, while putting no thought into the long term consequences of those decisions.

[servodude]

What I find more alarming is so many people think like you because they don't want to admit the reality of SARS-CoV2, that they were hoodwinked by the fear spread from Government and health 'experts'.

They're right to a point though.

You could have given novel Covid to everyone in the UK at the same time and 95% of folk would have been fine - that IS a vast majority.

Of the remaining ones
- about half would be dead (take https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160895v7.full have a look at the demographic of the UK and convolve)
- and the other half would still be suffering

You don't need to be a rocket surgeon to understand that.

It's the idea that THAT would have been less traumatic as a population than being told to stay inside while we geared up and got vaccines ready is what I find queer

-sd

[GoSeigen]

What I find more alarming is so many people think like you because they don't want to admit the reality of SARS-CoV2, that they were hoodwinked by the fear spread from Government and health 'experts'.

They're right to a point though.

You could have given novel Covid to everyone in the UK at the same time and 95% of folk would have been fine - that IS a vast majority.

Of the remaining ones
- about half would be dead (take https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160895v7.full have a look at the demographic of the UK and convolve)
- and the other half would still be suffering

You don't need to be a rocket surgeon to understand that.

It's the idea that THAT would have been less traumatic as a population than being told to stay inside while we geared up and got vaccines ready is what I find queer

-sd

The fear was spread not so much from governments and health experts -- I think in general they had the measure of the disease by around July 2020 -- it was from the economically dominant and politically decisive baby-boomer generation who gave us Brexit and who were petrified of contracting COVID, particularly as it was more deadly for their cohort. The extreme measures that were imposed for far too long came at huge personal cost to me (arguably: lost a home, lost an inheritance, lost a cousin to suicide, couldn't bury my own father, unable to legally leave the country I live in, all pretty directly a result of boomer-imposed COVID rules).

GS

[pje16]

The fear was spread not so much from governments and health experts -- I think in general they had the measure of the disease by around July 2020 -- it was from the economically dominant and politically decisive baby-boomer generation who gave us Brexit and who were petrified of contracting COVID, particularly as it was more deadly for their cohort. The extreme measures that were imposed for far too long came at huge personal cost to me (arguably: lost a home, lost an inheritance, lost a cousin to suicide, couldn't bury my own father, unable to legally leave the country I live in, all pretty directly a result of boomer-imposed COVID rules).

GS

I am sorry for the awful time you had
and assume you are not a baby-boomer
You seem to have forgotten how it spread among kids at schools who brought it home and infected entire families

[XFool]

The fear was spread not so much from governments and health experts -- I think in general they had the measure of the disease by around July 2020 -- it was from the economically dominant and politically decisive baby-boomer generation who gave us Brexit and who were petrified of contracting COVID, particularly as it was more deadly for their cohort. The extreme measures that were imposed for far too long came at huge personal cost to me (arguably: lost a home, lost an inheritance, lost a cousin to suicide, couldn't bury my own father, unable to legally leave the country I live in, all pretty directly a result of boomer-imposed COVID rules).

Yes. Now, if only there was a way of getting through a global pandemic without anyone at all coming to any harm...

[XFool]

Was the Covid pandemic bad for mental health? It depends who you ask

The Guardian

A report has been seized upon to argue that lockdown had little effect on mental health – but the truth is more nuanced

Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh

[Ashfordian]

What I find more alarming is so many people think like you because they don't want to admit the reality of SARS-CoV2, that they were hoodwinked by the fear spread from Government and health 'experts'.

They're right to a point though.

You could have given novel Covid to everyone in the UK at the same time and 95% of folk would have been fine - that IS a vast majority.

Of the remaining ones
- about half would be dead (take https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160895v7.full have a look at the demographic of the UK and convolve)
- and the other half would still be suffering

You don't need to be a rocket surgeon to understand that.

It's the idea that THAT would have been less traumatic as a population than being told to stay inside while we geared up and got vaccines ready is what I find queer

-sd

Except that everyone in the UK could and would not have caught Covid at the same time . We had more than enough real life situations that proved this very early on (eg the Diamond Princess cruise ship).

You could easily identify 90+% of the demographic who did not need protecting from Covid and did not require any vaccine assistance against the virus. This part of society could have continued near normal living thus not damaging education, mental health and huge swathes of the economy. As well as not needing the huge financial costs to support these parts of the economy and society.

Let's go with a very simple example that most people can see the obvious stupidity behind it. Why did we close schools, children's play areas, etc, but keep garden centres open if we were looking to protect the demographic that was at higher risk from the virus?

It's this and other examples that were illogical and proves many of the wrong areas were shut down or had restrictions placed on them. And now the whole of society is going to pay these hugely wrong decisions financially, medically, or mentally, or a combination of all three!

[servodude]

What I find more alarming is so many people think like you because they don't want to admit the reality of SARS-CoV2, that they were hoodwinked by the fear spread from Government and health 'experts'.

They're right to a point though.

You could have given novel Covid to everyone in the UK at the same time and 95% of folk would have been fine - that IS a vast majority.

Of the remaining ones
- about half would be dead (take https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160895v7.full have a look at the demographic of the UK and convolve)
- and the other half would still be suffering

You don't need to be a rocket surgeon to understand that.

It's the idea that THAT would have been less traumatic as a population than being told to stay inside while we geared up and got vaccines ready is what I find queer

-sd

Except that everyone in the UK could and would not have caught Covid at the same time . We had more than enough real life situations that proved this very early on (eg the Diamond Princess cruise ship).

You could easily identify 90+% of the demographic who did not need protecting from Covid and did not require any vaccine assistance against the virus. This part of society could have continued near normal living thus not damaging education, mental health and huge swathes of the economy. As well as not needing the huge financial costs to support these parts of the economy and society.

Let's go with a very simple example that most people can see the obvious stupidity behind it. Why did we close schools, children's play areas, etc, but keep garden centres open if we were looking to protect the demographic that was at higher risk from the virus?

It's this and other examples that were illogical and proves many of the wrong areas were shut down or had restrictions placed on them. And now the whole of society is going to pay these hugely wrong decisions financially, medically, or mentally, or a combination of all three!

[servodude]

What I find more alarming is so many people think like you because they don't want to admit the reality of SARS-CoV2, that they were hoodwinked by the fear spread from Government and health 'experts'.

They're right to a point though.

You could have given novel Covid to everyone in the UK at the same time and 95% of folk would have been fine - that IS a vast majority.

Of the remaining ones
- about half would be dead (take https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160895v7.full have a look at the demographic of the UK and convolve)
- and the other half would still be suffering

You don't need to be a rocket surgeon to understand that.

It's the idea that THAT would have been less traumatic as a population than being told to stay inside while we geared up and got vaccines ready is what I find queer

-sd

Except that everyone in the UK could and would not have caught Covid at the same time . We had more than enough real life situations that proved this very early on (eg the Diamond Princess cruise ship).

You could easily identify 90+% of the demographic who did not need protecting from Covid and did not require any vaccine assistance against the virus. This part of society could have continued near normal living thus not damaging education, mental health and huge swathes of the economy. As well as not needing the huge financial costs to support these parts of the economy and society.

Let's go with a very simple example that most people can see the obvious stupidity behind it. Why did we close schools, children's play areas, etc, but keep garden centres open if we were looking to protect the demographic that was at higher risk from the virus?

It's this and other examples that were illogical and proves many of the wrong areas were shut down or had restrictions placed on them. And now the whole of society is going to pay these hugely wrong decisions financially, medically, or mentally, or a combination of all three!

Well that post got stuck half way and munged.. I'll remind myself to come back

[Lootman]

The fear was spread not so much from governments and health experts -- I think in general they had the measure of the disease by around July 2020 -- it was from the economically dominant and politically decisive baby-boomer generation who gave us Brexit and who were petrified of contracting COVID, particularly as it was more deadly for their cohort. The extreme measures that were imposed for far too long came at huge personal cost to me (arguably: lost a home, lost an inheritance, lost a cousin to suicide, couldn't bury my own father, unable to legally leave the country I live in, all pretty directly a result of boomer-imposed COVID rules).

Correct me if I am wrong here but weren't you in Australia at that time? And wasn't your inability to return to the UK to attend to those misfortunes not the fault of UK policy at all? But rather the fault of the over-zealous Australian travel ban?

Because UK borders remained open for good cause. I was able to leave and enter the UK throughout that period, and did so, for situations such as family events.

[GrahamPlatt]

A new hope

https://www.labiotech.eu/trends-news/ne ... -covid-19/

[dealtn]

I don't know which is worst: being totally unprepared for a pandemic leading to excess deaths and a waste of a lot of money ...

I don't know what is worse: being totally unprepared for a pandemic leading to excess deaths, or being totally prepared for every potential pandemic leading to excess deaths and wasting a lot of money when 99% don't lead to that outcome.

Very easy in hindsight.

[servodude]

I don't know which is worst: being totally unprepared for a pandemic leading to excess deaths and a waste of a lot of money ...

I don't know what is worse: being totally unprepared for a pandemic leading to excess deaths, or being totally prepared for every potential pandemic leading to excess deaths and wasting a lot of money when 99% don't lead to that outcome.

Very easy in hindsight.

Is it binary? I hadn't noticed

I do know things could have been handled better in the response to the pandemic that I experienced
- but to be fair to them, those in charge here do seem to be trying to review and affect change in what they got wrong (I've been dragged back in to stuff at work as a result regards preparedness - how can we keep the momentum up in device development without adding risk ); when they could very easily just point to places elsewhere and go... but look at how they did!

- sd

[dealtn]

I don't know what is worse: being totally unprepared for a pandemic leading to excess deaths, or being totally prepared for every potential pandemic leading to excess deaths and wasting a lot of money when 99% don't lead to that outcome.

Very easy in hindsight.

Is it binary? I hadn't noticed

No its not binary. Not sure how you would expect it not to be.

Those are the extremes of a very broad spectrum. I'm not sure why anyone, including the person I responded to, can imagine any government attempting to operate a policy as extreme as that mentioned. The reality is all governments, over time, and in any country, will be operating a policy towards the middle. For the vast majority of the time the costs of such aren't noticeable, as is the non-existence of a pandemic.

So post-pandemic hindsight criticism of such a nature is a ridiculous place to take.

[9873210]

Is it binary? I hadn't noticed

No its not binary. Not sure how you would expect it not to be.

It's not even one dimensional.
Probably not even finite dimensional.

Unfortunately the "something must be done, this is something" crowd met "doing anything is tyranny" crowd, which collapses everything to zero sum, and binary.

[servodude]

No its not binary. Not sure how you would expect it not to be.

It's not even one dimensional.
Probably not even finite dimensional.

Unfortunately the "something must be done, this is something" crowd met "doing anything is tyranny" crowd, which collapses everything to zero sum, and binary.

And if it were hypothetically one dimensional those two positions posited were definitely not the two extremes

[XFool]

Have we found the 'animal origin' of Covid?

BBC News

We now have "the best evidence" we are ever likely to find of how the virus that causes Covid-19 was first transmitted to a human, a team of scientists has claimed.

"It is the latest scientific twist in the troubled, highly politicised search for the cause of the worst pandemic in a century, one which has produced several competing theories which have neither been proved or disproved conclusively."

[Ashfordian]

Have we found the 'animal origin' of Covid?

BBC News

We now have "the best evidence" we are ever likely to find of how the virus that causes Covid-19 was first transmitted to a human, a team of scientists has claimed.

"It is the latest scientific twist in the troubled, highly politicised search for the cause of the worst pandemic in a century, one which has produced several competing theories which have neither been proved or disproved conclusively."

For the first 3 years of the pandemic the Chinese wanted us to believe that Covid 19 came from a bat, that was being sold at the Wuhan market.

This article just smells of the Chinese dropping bread crumbs to try and distract the world from the most plausible theory, that being it coming from a laboratory.

[XFool]

...Why is coming from a laboratory the "most plausible theory"?