So Why Is It

[Chief Stipe]

Well, it's "justification" in the sense that a collapse of civil order with dead people lying in the streets and survivors fleeing in panic, is much worse than "exercise of government authority."

Did that happen in the Covid pandemic? No.

They only needed extra freezer space because they wouldn't let coroner's or funeral workers work.

You watch far too many disaster movies.

Do you genuinely believe that another Black Death, with some new pathogen, is impossible?

There you go again confusing a bacteria with a virus.

Will a Black Death occur again naturally? Very unlikely. Cases still occur but mostly in areas of poor hygiene and pest control. Being a bacteria it is treatable with an antibiotic. It is primarily spread by fleas on rats.

Could a respiratory virus evolve that has a high CFR equivalent or greater than the Black Death? Well there is one already in circulation now and it isn't Covid.

 

[BeSafe]

Problem: you will not realize that you are not "safe enough" until it's too late.

That is, of course, what makes planning for pandemics - and other natural disasters for that matter - more philosophy than math.

Do I believe there be other pandemics? Yes - there will be other pandemics. Do I believe that there can be another black death some day? To be honest, probably not in the developed world unless it occurs during a massive war. There will be nasty diseases but unless it's synthetic, naturally occurring viruses and bacteria follow logical arcs both in their spread and their lethality. Modern epidemiology is too skilled for that level of devastation, IMHO. We're far more likely to suffer self-inflict mortality through bad habits and indulgence than the natural world cooking up something to pick us off.

I think "We are entering a reality in which catastrophic pandemics could become our new normal" isn't any more or less credible than people screaming that the debt is going to topple the US government. Sure, it might - but I'm bet that 10 years from now we won't have endured 10 years of catastrophic pandemics or the collapse of the US hegemony. I think such rhetoric is targeted at the dystopian consumer market to sell clicks.

The official statistics for death by covid by the WHO are 7 million people out of 767 million confirmed infected or 0.1% mortality. Texas had 40,000 deaths out of 30 million people or 0.13% mortality. Apples to Oranges but yes, I absolutely believe that at least 0.03% of Texans died of their own recalcitrance. They were dumb or ideologues or whatever and I'm not particularly interested in defending them.

The question I answered was essentially "why are we still talking about this" and I gave my perspective. To me, there's really only three answers - 1) its not actually over 2) reflection on past events to optimize future impact and 3) gestalt for unresolved emotions.

 

[NeedAClew]

7÷767=0.009 or 0.9%

 

[NeedAClew]

No. There's plenty of it around and it seems to knock most people out for several weeks. I have deadlines that would make getting Covid fucking inconvenient as well as unpleasant. Whether however there is anything new to discuss, I'm not too sure.

Yeah the last 3 years have shown me how much I hate being sick.
The desperate search for aloe kleenex for my red and bleeding nose, the disgusting tissues, the drip, the clogged sinuses, the sinus pain, sleeplessness due to real Sudafed....that's 5 to 7 days with a common cold! No thanks.

 

[Steam Flyer]

That is, of course, what makes planning for pandemics - and other natural disasters for that matter - more philosophy than math.
...

I'm really surprised to see you say something like this. Yes, there is a LOT of math in epidemiology. Especially statistics.

....
Do I believe there be other pandemics? Yes - there will be other pandemics. Do I believe that there can be another black death some day? To be honest, probably not in the developed world ...

Now you look really dumb, this is a surprise. You are letting your inner RWNJ over ride your normal good sense.

Wake the fuck up. We just had an epidemic kill over 1.2 million USAnians. In the pre-2020 world, this would have been preposterous. I really didn't expect you to shrug this off. This is like saying "man will never fly."

As for future chances...
1- resistance to antibiotics is increasing faster every generation and research is expensive.
2- the USA's for-profit model of health care is leaving more and more people out of regular and preventative care.
3- Increasing numbers of people traveling spread germs further and faster, every generation.
4- we live in a world of constant war, at one level or another. Hostile countries are known to be conducting disinformation campaigns targeting US citizens and it's working, with increasing hostility to vaccines, to medical practice, and to science in general... guess who is most receptive to these campaigns.

 

[Kurtz]

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/op...hotez-covid-pandemic-coronavirus-18121832.php

Want to know why it's not really over? And likely never will be? The dystopian future is being brought to you by the nutters who do their own "research" and hate authority. Like our resident clowns who never go away, just sometimes change their socks. enjoy a peek into the future by someone who is actually educated: Dr. Peter Hotez. I am pasting the article as the local paper is paywalled and the free views are not reliable.

Although the U.S. government has officially ended the national COVID-19 public health emergency, the reality is that both the virus and the illness are still with us. Perhaps the scariest days of the COVID pandemic — when 2,000 to 3,000 Americans perished daily — are past. But not only does transmission of SARS-2, the virus behind this pandemic, remain significant, but now a slate of new omicron-derived XBB variants have become dominant.


In practical terms, this means that we should expect a steady stream of new COVID cases. And because many individuals have declined COVID-19 vaccinations or boosters, we will continue to see serious cases and hospitalizations.

It’s also possible an entirely different type of variant might arise later this fall or in the winter of 2024. Some of the early predictive models suggest that we could still see annual winter waves of some version of COVID-19. The U.S. FDA and CDC are working to predict the new variants and recommend annual fall boosters.

The good news is, our vaccines work to prevent death and serious illness, and it’s never too late to get vaccinated. If you haven’t received the newer bivalent version of the vaccine, now is the time. Or if you received your first bivalent booster last fall, get a second one if you are eligible because of age or immune status.

But now for the bad news: COVID-19, with all its waves and variants, won’t be our last major coronavirus pandemic. Another is probably on its way.
SARS-2 is only one type of coronavirus. The forces that drove the emergence of COVID-19 in Central China in 2019 are likely the same as those that caused other highly lethal coronaviruses to arise: SARS in southern China in 2002; and MERS on the Arabian Peninsula in 2012.

SARS, SARS-2 and MERS all came from wild bat populations before they jumped to humans, either directly or through other animal species. This happened because of accelerated human and animal migrations due to climate change, deforestation and urbanization. New coronaviruses are currently jumping from bats to people hundreds or even thousands of times daily. Every few years one catches fire and causes a pandemic. We should expect yet another major and entirely new coronavirus pandemic to strike us before 2030.

Sorry, but there is more. Those 21st-century forces of climate change, urbanization, and human and animal migrations may also explain why we are seeing more Ebola and Marburg virus cases (both Ebola and Marburg also come from bats), and perhaps also why H5N1 influenza jumped from birds to killing sea lions on the Pacific Coast of South America. A worry is that a deadly animal or seasonal influenza will eventually make its way to humans. This includes H7N9, another bird flu, or potentially an H2N2 or H3N2 type of seasonal influenza, which caused lethal pandemics more than 50 years ago.
Then there are viruses and other pathogens transmitted by mosquitoes and other biting arthropods. Texas is especially vulnerable because we are seeing some of the biggest effects of climate change in America, such as rising temperatures, altered rainfall patterns and catastrophic weather events, together with aggressive urbanization in the nation’s fastest growing cities, and large shifts in human populations.


Another reason is extreme poverty — 3 to 4 million Texans live below the poverty line. In low-income neighborhoods across the state, we have mounds of discarded tires or drainage ditches that fill with water to breed mosquitoes. This, in addition to poor quality housing, crowding and other factors, makes Texas an epicenter of tropical infectious diseases such as Chagas disease, typhus, dengue, Zika virus infection and other illnesses. This is a reason why we built Baylor National School of Tropical Medicine here in Houston.


We are entering a reality in which catastrophic pandemics could become our new normal.


To respond at the national level, the U.S. government has implemented some measures, but they may not be sufficient. The CDC has improved since it missed the entry of the SARS-2 virus from southern Europe into New York and failed to implement diagnostic testing in 2020, but it is still not ready for the next big one. That will still take time. Next, the Biden administration has proposed a Project NextGeninitiative to stimulate investments in universal coronavirus vaccines and other countermeasures, but it remains unclear if those funds will be mobilized. Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) recently reintroduced legislation to help fight the tropical infections affecting areas of extreme poverty, especially in the southern United States, but it is unknown if this has wide support in Congress.


Our city of Houston benefited from the Texas Medical Center institutions, which had the scale, size and adroit leadership to weather the patient surges that devastated other parts of Texas or the nation. During the pandemic, the TMC also reaffirmed its role as a national and global biomedical innovator. To cite a few examples, Houston Methodist led efforts to track virus genomes, and the Houston Health Department worked with Rice University to pioneer innovative wastewater virus testing. A new Texas Epidemic Public Health Institute was established to help coordinate responses to future pandemic threats, while Texas Children’s Hospital led efforts to elucidate and treat the harmful effects of COVID-19 on children.


Almost 100 million doses of our low-cost and patent-free Texas Children’s Hospital-Baylor College of Medicine COVID-19 vaccine technology were administered across India and Indonesia. This provided proof-of-concept that it is possible to bypass the Big Pharma companies to accelerate and deliver new vaccines on a large scale. We’re now developing a universal coronavirus vaccine as a low-cost patent-free alternative to the Big Pharma vaccines. Baylor College of Medicine is also leading the clinical testing of the major COVID-19 vaccines used in North America. Such initiatives must continue to expand.


But even the Texas Medical Center couldn’t hold back the widespread mistrust of public health that also arose in the pandemic. Texas became the worst affected U.S. state in terms of COVID-19 deaths — almost 100,000 — with approximately 40 percent lost unnecessarily because so many Texans refused a COVID-19 immunization during our horrible delta and BA.1 waves. This occurred at a time when COVID-19 vaccines were more than 90 percent protective against death and serious illness. Those more than 40,000 Texans who died in 2021-22 were victims of a politically motivated “health freedom” propaganda campaign that began in Texas a decade ago. Our state has become an epicenter of the American anti-vaccine movement.


We do big things in Texas. Appropriately, Stephen Harrigan’s recent epic history of Texas is entitled “Big Wonderful Thing,” from a comment made by the artist Georgia O’Keefe when she painted and taught here more than 100 years ago. It was a similar spirit that first brought me to Houston and the TMC. Now, we must continue advancing important projects to combat our future plagues, but also be mindful of our worst anti-science demons, and not allow them to destroy lives as they did in 2021-22.


Peter J. Hotez, M.D., Ph.D, is Professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology and Microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine, where he is also the Texas Children’s Hospital Chair in Tropical Pediatrics and Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine. His forthcoming book is The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist’s Warning (Johns Hopkins University Press).

sounds like overpopulation is the actual problem.

 

[BeSafe]

I'm really surprised to see you say something like this. Yes, there is a LOT of math in epidemiology. Especially statistics.


Now you look really dumb, this is a surprise. You are letting your inner RWNJ over ride your normal good sense.

Wake the fuck up. We just had an epidemic kill over 1.2 million USAnians. In the pre-2020 world, this would have been preposterous. I really didn't expect you to shrug this off. This is like saying "man will never fly."

As for future chances...
1- resistance to antibiotics is increasing faster every generation and research is expensive.
2- the USA's for-profit model of health care is leaving more and more people out of regular and preventative care.
3- Increasing numbers of people traveling spread germs further and faster, every generation.
4- we live in a world of constant war, at one level or another. Hostile countries are known to be conducting disinformation campaigns targeting US citizens and it's working, with increasing hostility to vaccines, to medical practice, and to science in general... guess who is most receptive to these campaigns.

I think you're blurring conversations. But ALL of your future chances have almost nothing to do with COVID. They're underlying bad practices and are self inflicted. There's nothing natural about them. To your specifics:

Antibiotic resistance is a huge problem which is why I advocate for limits on factory farming. The average factory farming situation can't exist 2 WEEKS without antibiotics for HEALTHY herds - that's a ridiculous system. Yes, that will lead to an increase in all meat production costs which will be born primarily by the poor - tough shit.

The US healthcare system is a crappy system of outsources services based on flawed cost model. I've said before if PRESIDENT Biden did nothing more than what CANDIDATE Biden promised by reducing the age of Medicare to 60, it would be a step in the right direction toward single payer and he'd have had a successful presidency. I'm still waiting. You know I've said there's no way for capitalism can work with health care when one side of the equation is 'infinite' and unless we're willing to put a price on life - which we aren't - it can't EVER work. That's why I donated money to BERNIE, despite his other wacky ideas.

Travel is a philosophical question. Should people be allowed to travel unfettered? I lean on more mobility over lower mobility, but I'm not naive to overlook the penalties such as increased pollution and yes, increased spread of disease. I think the best cure for Xenophobia is interaction and that 'othering' is the first step toward genocide. So yes, I'm inclined to keep as few restrictions on mobility as possible, knowing the risks.

Weaponized social media is a pretty pernicious problem and one I'm not going to linger. That's a topic for itself.

To your general comment - I said its philosophical vs mathematical because there's too many unknowns which have too broad of a range of inputs to optimize. The two big ones - what's the value of human life and its corollary what's an 'acceptable' level of risk. The black death killed an estimated 40% +/- 10% of all people on earth. The COVID pandemic has killed 0.1%. Unfortunately, covid is endemic so it's total will keep rolling slowly along. Austin died from COVID. I know people have lost loved ones and I'm sorry. I miss my friends too. But in epidemiology, scale does matter.

Alcoholism destroyed my family. I have every reason to want alcohol banned but the vast majority of people like alcohol so fuck me. Their enjoyment is worth more than my genetic risk. Risk and reward decisions are made at a society level all the time and I appreciate your passion and I don't think you're stupid for your position. But there are other points of view. If you think I'm stupid, just put me on ignore. You'll be in good company.

 

[Steam Flyer]

I think you're blurring conversations. But ALL of your future chances have almost nothing to do with COVID. They're underlying bad practices and are self inflicted. There's nothing natural about them. To your specifics:

Antibiotic resistance is a huge problem which is why I advocate for limits on factory farming. The average factory farming situation can't exist 2 WEEKS without antibiotics for HEALTHY herds - that's a ridiculous system. Yes, that will lead to an increase in all meat production costs which will be born primarily by the poor - tough shit.

The US healthcare system is a crappy system of outsources services based on flawed cost model. I've said before if PRESIDENT Biden did nothing more than what CANDIDATE Biden promised by reducing the age of Medicare to 60, it would be a step in the right direction towar single payer and he'd have had a successful presidency. I'm still waiting. You know I've said there's no way for capitalism can work with health care when one side of the equation is 'infinite' and unless we're willing to put a price on life - which we aren't - it can't EVER work. That's why I donated money to BERNIE, despite his other wacky ideas.

Travel is a philosophical question. Should people be allowed to travel unfettered? I lean on more mobility over lower mobility, but I'm not naive to overlook the penalties such as increased pollution and yes, increased spread of disease. I think the best cure for Xenophobia is interaction and that 'othering' is the first step toward genocide. So yes, I'm inclined to keep as few restrictions on mobility as possible, knowing the risks.

Weaponized social media is a pretty pernicious problem and one I'm not going to linger. That's a topic for itself.

To your general comment - I said its philosophical vs mathematical because there's too many unknowns which have too broad of a range of inputs to solve. The two big ones - what's the value of human life and its corollary what's an 'acceptable' level of risk. The black death killed an estimated 40% +/- 10% of all people on earth. The COVID pandemic has killed 0.1%. Unfortunately, covid is endemic so it's total will keep rolling slowly along. Austin died from COVID. I know people have lost loved ones and I'm sorry. I miss my friends too. But in epidemiology, scale does matter.

Alcoholism destroyed my family. I have every reason to want alcohol banned but the vast majority of people like alcohol so fuck me. Their enjoyment is worth more than my genetic risk. Risk and reward decisions are made at a society level all the time and I appreciate your passion and I don't think you're stupid for your position. But there are other points of view. If you think I'm stupid, just put me on ignore. You'll be in good company.

I think we agree more than we disagree, and I apologize for saying that you are stupid- that was wrong to say, or I would not have spent the time & effort replying.

Where we disagree: the era of mass disease, plagues, and pandemics, never ended. No more than mankind's dependence on the Earth's ecosystem for water, air, and food, ever ended. It's true that we have a great ability to heal, or more accurately to keep the body functioning while it heals itself; and we know a lot about how diseases spread. When this knowledge is effectively applied, we can have really good results.

Indeed, overall the results have been quite good, good enough that a lot of people don't have much experience of contagious disease and assume that it's not a threat. Kind of like the way so many people text while driving, don't crash -that- time, and assume it's perfectly safe. The human brain is wonderful at fooling itself, maybe the way I try to explain things is a good example.

BTW the Covid pandemic has killed slightly more than 0.3% of USAnians (1.2M/ 330M) at this point.

 

[FlyingCircus2]

BTW the Covid pandemic has killed slightly more than 0.3% of USAnians (1.2M/ 330M) at this point.

Steamy my man,

1.2 million is more Americans than died in World Wars 1 and II and both sides of the civil war.

United States military casualties of war - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Those who can get you to believe absurdities can get you to commit atrocities.

 

[d'ranger]

FlyingCircus don't do statistics or science. For instance in the Civil war minimum military dead = 500,000 total deal close to 750k. The current population is over 10xs what it was in 1860 so if we extrapolate (warning big word) this to day it means at least 5 million soldiers died then. I could go on and on but then there are many more digits involved and it's just no worth the trouble. But what the hay, the Spanish flu killed 675k of a population of 103 million so Yikes! math involved but let's just say it was devastating. There was no vaccine and not even much information on how it was spread. Fun fact: the rural areas thought they were safe since it rampaged thru the cities. Oops, was spread throughout the country by the mailman.

The atrocities are the moronic postings by the non thinking cretins who insist on proving their lack of knowledge here. And the fact I take the time to even respond doesn't speak well of me either. Major character flaw.

 

[NeedAClew]

If we don't feed the beast it will go elsewhere. I hear Twitter is fun.

 

[MagentaLine]

 

[Chief Stipe]

Indeed, overall the results have been quite good, good enough that a lot of people don't have much experience of contagious disease

FFS influenza, corona viruses (common cold) affect millions every year if not everyone. I would say everyone has had the experience of a catching a contagious disease.

 

[NeedAClew]

Double your pleasure double your fun

 

[Bump-n-Grind]

 

[nota]

the pure blood idiots who are mostly rumpers anyway
are killing themselves at 5 times the rate for the double shot
3 or 4 shot people die even less
real Q is do we want more MAGA NUTS
IF LIKE ME YOU HAVE LITTLE NEED FOR FASCISTS
let them be stupid and unvaxed in fear of the vax

is there a real down side to less of them ?

 

[Gissie]

the pure blood idiots who are mostly rumpers anyway
are killing themselves at 5 times the rate for the double shot
3 or 4 shot people die even less
real Q is do we want more MAGA NUTS
IF LIKE ME YOU HAVE LITTLE NEED FOR FASCISTS
let them be stupid and unvaxed in fear of the vax

is there a real down side to less of them ?

Because then you would need to find a new group to vilify and you might be in it?

 

[fboats]

Haha! This is wonderful! The amazing part is people are so brainwashed they can't see themselves here.

 

[NeedAClew]

Tom Hanks' Harvard commencement address had interesting observation wrt malleable "facts" and questioning tactics to spread nonfacts. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/05/31/tom-hanks-commencement-harvard/
In case there is a paywall here is key part.
Double ignore keeps one's posts from being misused to keep the lies flowing.

 

[FlyingCircus2]

Haha! This is wonderful! The amazing part is people are so brainwashed they can't see themselves here.

They just cant relate to the muscles.