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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   39208 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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It's officially Joever

Now we see if 3 months is long enough to rev up a credible presidential campaign.

He doesn't mention picking a successor, but may in a speech later this week.

E: He endorsed Kamala. Obama did not, calling for an "open nominating process", and didn't even mention Harris.

Once in a century pandemic

Tempting fate here, with avian flu spreading freely in American cattle...

Is it really "tempting fate" or is it just battlespace prep for November?

Sorry, what do you mean?

Im asking a question is "avian flu spreading freely in American cattle" or are partisan operatives in the cdc trying to muddy the waters?

Fact is that the Influenza A pandemic of '68, and the swine flu outbreak of '09 were both more deadly on a case-by-case basis than covid-19 turned out to be. Covid was not unique in its risk factors, it was unique in that that it came at an opportune time.

Edit: given what we have since learned about the whole "lab leak theory" a cynic might fibd themselves suggesting that Fauci and friends are litteraly the bad guys from V for Vendetta.

Fact is that the Influenza A pandemic of '68, and the swine flu outbreak of '09 were both more deadly on a case-by-case basis than covid-19 turned out to be.

Source? My understanding was that Covid truly was more deadly (albeit slightly) than the ‘68 and ‘09 influenza viruses, but that might only be because we’re an older and fatter population now.

I think Covid is and always was significantly more infectious. Per-case deadliness doesn't matter if a virus can only get a small fraction of humanity to start with. And of course, the deadliness estimate for swine flu depend on the actual number of infections, which may be underreported. So either it's deadly but not very virulent, or it's virulent (but still less virulent than Covid!) but not very deadly. The original Covid had both virulence and deadliness, which justified the extreme response.

The highest estimates for H1N1 I can find are 10% of the population being infected. Do you know anybody who's never had Covid? Google puts the US at 77% with antibodies as measured in 2022. That's not comparable.

Hong Kong flu was up there too. And the world barely noticed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_flu

The point of COVID was the noticing more than it having any insane outlier effectiveness as a disease

In the US, COVID was the most deadly pandemic since the Spanish flu of more than 100 years ago. That makes it an outlier in my book.

Had the most aggressive attribution modelling, the highest population of US citizens, incredibly fallow grounds in terms of the vulnerable (More obese, elderly, immunocompromised exist today than at any other point in human history). It was the biggest in a while (though I do think if the same laxitude of attribution was extended to other historic bad flus it'd likely be very similar), but was hardly an outlier.

It's the worst pandemic in the US since the Spanish Flu even in per-capita terms.

It wasn't. It was on the level of flu outbreaks in 1970s.

The US had higher excess mortality than some other countries, totally due to unnecessary and wrong measures taken.

It was on the level of flu outbreaks in 1970s.

Give an example of such a flu outbreak in the 1970s.

Here it is: http://avepri.com/a/sweden1.jpeg

Notice that the little COVID bump is bigger than the bumps under any of the three arrows showing the "Severe Flu Waves". It's just that the general level of deaths per capita was higher in the 70s and 80s, not that the flu waves were worse than COVID.

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