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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14742 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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We should have let the Kung flu burn itself out faster.

Did anyplace on Earth achieve herd immunity? What makes you think this was possible? What was to prevent more dangerous mutations from spreading, before herd immunity was reached?

(Also, if you want to annoy the CCP, call it "Sars-Cov-2," not "Kung Flu.")

It's possible that many places achieved a transient herd immunity among the smaller pool of people who were susceptible to covid . Only about half of immune naive people seem to be vulnerable at any given time. which makes the herd immunity threshold low enough that it's plausible countries in Western Europe and the US hit it during the spring 2020 wave. Note, hit it regardless of whether they locked down or not. It's in my opinion the best explanation for why countries with severe lockdowns and countries without, such as UK and Sweden, achieved essentially identical outcomes. Lockdowns did nothing, they both hit herd immunity thresholds regardless, and the timing of lockdowns coinciding with that in the UK was only Regression fallacy.

Then there's Peru, which had so many deaths in 2020, despite extreme restrictions, that it implies >100% of the population should have had covid.

I don’t care about annoying the CCP, I care about annoying the people that pushed lockdowns on me and mine.

And we have herd immunity now. Some of that might be vaccines but the clear selective pressure on the virus was to become a cold. Faster spread=more generations=it turns into omicron faster.

And we have herd immunity now.

We do not (except perhaps to specific extinct strains, which is mostly practically irrelevant). Herd immunity is a state in which spread has stopped because there are enough immune individuals that an infection chain cannot be sustained within the herd. We have that for measles, excepting a few communities with low vaccine adoption who are being hit. But COVID is now endemic; it continues to spread through the population. It's just far less deadly now, likely because most of those especially susceptible to the disease are either dead or recovered with an immune system now better able to handle the disease. Because COVID doesn't usually harm children greatly, as long as it is endemic we can expect death rates to be low, because children will be first infected when they are at their least susceptible and this will prime their immune system for later infections.

We do not (except perhaps to specific extinct strains, which is mostly practically irrelevant). Herd immunity is a state in which spread has stopped because there are enough immune individuals that an infection chain cannot be sustained within the herd.

By this definition herd immunity is any time covid infections are declining, which means it cannot be sustained. In practice, like flu and other coronaviruses, covid will likely alternate between herd immunity and very slightly below the threshold for herd immunity in perpetuity.

I'm still not 100% convinced that the antigenic imprinting thing didn't transpire with the vaccines -- I've had it exactly once, during the Omicron wave, and don't seem to get it anymore despite the odd known exposure. Which is stark contrast with my (largely rabid vaccine fan) coworkers, who seem to be down with it all winter and still complain about side effects from booster shots.

Granted it's not putting them in the hospital or anything, but they do seem to be uniformly pretty damn sick for several days everytime -- which is worse than my initial natural exposure. Unlikely to get a good study on it, but if anything it seems like kind of the opposite of herd immunity -- I always thought that this was one of the more plausible reasons not to take the vaccine, so I get a nice glow of smugness everytime somebody calls in saying "OMG I can't even move, see you next week".

The neurotic shot takers I know do seem to be sick a lot, but they also seemed to be sick a lot before covid. Possibly too much observation bias for me to draw a strong conclusion.

I caught COVID once before vaccines were available. Then I caught it anywhere between 3-4 mores times, including after 2 boosters. There was little difference in severity.

It's not a good idea to go off such n=1 anecdotes in general.

It's not a good idea to go off such n=1 anecdotes in general.

Certainly true -- I'd consider it n=2 now though! My lifestyle absolutely involves a lot less exposure to infectious diseases than yours, so I doubt that I'm like highly immune anymore -- but would expect severity to remain mild if I get it again.

How severe were your more recent infections?

I'm young(ish) and in otherwise good health, so they were never that bad. My first and last confirmed bouts were the worst, being somewhat worse than the average cold. The others were indistinguishable from the same. Just a few days moping around in bed waiting for the worst of it to pass, barely even a fever. It's possible I caught it more than 4 times, but I stopped bothering to get tested a long time ago.

It really should have been Wuhan Flu.

Except it wasn't a flu, so that would just be incorrect.

Flu is almost always symptomatically indistinguishable from COVID. Not very many people need to know or care about the exact taxonomy of a moderate respiratory infection, and frankly speaking, most doctors don't either. To the minor extent that treatment might differ, we'd mentally just keep that bit in mind. It would hardly be the worst name in the world.

If the name had developed organically in the media or whatever and pedantic doctors had insisted calling it by a name that no one was using, I could see the argument. But OP was saying that this name that nobody was using should have been the preferred nomenclature. And while it would hardly be the worst name, given the severity of the disease, it could have led to some bad outcomes caused by people thinking that it could be prevented by a flu shot, or treated with existing antiviral medication.

Flu is almost always symptomatically indistinguishable from COVID

My theory is that it was much more widespread in the US than anyone admitted because testing was constrained early on, and a lot of first-wave cases got called flu with no further diagnostics.

I'm not sure why there are so many people insisting that we should have used a more inexact name for this disease just because it fits a certain naming scheme (or geopolitical interest).

There's a clear different memetic impact depending on whether people mentally bucketed covid as 'a new potentially-deadly virus' or 'a new strain of the flu', so that was always an important territory to fight over.

The implication with "Wuhan flu"/"Chinese flu" etc comparisons was that it was comparable to the Spanish flu, which is our primary modern point of reference for a communicable disease that kills a lot of people.

The implication of calling it ‘Kung flu’ ‘chink virus’ ‘Chinese cringe aids’ etc was, in the minds of those actually calling it that ‘it’s a flu. It’s way overblown.’

Remember when we all pretended it was a rule not to name diseases after places? That was fun.

They stopped naming COVID variants after Greek letters right when they got to 'Xi'.

Or name them after monkeys because of homosexuals?

Again, I'm not sure why people are insisting on this. Is there something particular gained, apart from - again - the geopolitical interest?

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