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Today, the 23rd of March, marks six years since Boris Johnson implemented the first Covid Lockdown in the United Kingdom. This time of year will always remind me of those eerie first couple of weeks of lockdown. The cherry blossom trees, in all their Spring glory, standing lonely in the usually heaving central park at lunch time. Driving down the main motorway in and out of my city and not seeing a single other car at 5pm rush-hour on a weekday. The ease which unfounded terror was spread through the population during those weeks was eye-opening. The unquestioning acquiescence of all my fellow citizens made me realise for the first time just how subject to the whims of authority this society was and just how fragile and precious was my own freedom.
For the first couple of weeks, as the virus’s spread through Europe was meticulously tracked and broadcast, as carefully curated images of overwhelmed hospitals and rows of coffins were plastered across our screens, although I was already vehemently arguing against any imposed restrictions, I still retained some sympathy for the scared and frightened masses. But as the early data coming out of Italy and other places started to emerge and was so evidently at odds with the fearmongering propaganda all around me, my sympathy quickly gave way first to bewilderment and then slowly to anger.
As The Science™ took deeper hold and lockdown for two weeks to flatten the curve turned into lockdown for the summer turned into second lockdown turned into third lockdown and still the people clamoured for more restrictions and railed angrily against even the mildest suggestion that maybe we should ease up on the tyranny. Any moment now, I thought, surely any moment now the people will break and rise up against this imprisonment. All their lives they’ve been told that they live in a free democracy and now they’re happy to be essentially locked inside their homes, told they can’t visit friends and family, told they can’t touch or hug their family members, even if they’re dying, while with their own eyes they should be able to see that the virus for which all this suffering is supposed to be in honour of is so much less potent than they were told, while with their own eyes they should be able to see the hypocrisy of being ordered that grandparents are not to hold or even visit their new-born grandchildren while thousands marched shoulder to shoulder in the streets in celebration protest of the death of a criminal in a land 4,000 miles away. But no, the people never rose up. As Orwell, who understood the crowd better than any, once observed “Nowadays there is no mob, only a flock” and so it proved as my cowed peers meekly submitted to every curtailment of their freedom.
I will always remember lying in an empty field, reading a book in the warm sunshine and being buzzed by a police helicopter for being outdoors while not undertaking my mandated single-allotted daily exercise. I will always remember being told by the police to move on while sat in the deserted central park. I will always remember the multiple other times I was interrogated by the police for not cowering at home like a good citizen. I will always remember the fear in the eyes of my brother’s girlfriend as she shied away from anybody who got within two metres of her. I will always remember the depths of persuasion I had to employ to convince two of my friends to come and spend a night in the countryside with me during summer 2020, and the lies they had to tell their mothers to even be allowed out (and back in) their homes. I will always remember my work colleague who got suspended for hugging another colleague. I will always remember being kept apart from my partner in a foreign country due to closed borders. I will always remember being told by my own parents that I was not welcome in their house.
Today, the 23rd of March, marks six years since Boris Johnson implemented the first Covid Lockdown in the United Kingdom and life has returned to normal. The traffic is heavy and the parks are busy again. The Black Mirror-esque dystopian future that we got a horrifying glimpse of has faded away. Even the predictable economic and public-health consequences of lockdown have somewhat smoothed out. Covid came up in conversation the other day and my dad glibly remarked, “Covid? That’s ancient history now!” The world has moved on but, for me, the memory of Covid lockdowns still dominates my outlook. There is still a deep rage within me at the brutal illustration of the state’s power to strip away my freedom, cheered on wholeheartedly by the electorate. There is still a disbelieving resentment at how readily the populace succumbed to government control and willingly followed directives that just six months previous they would have loudly decried as inhumane. The hypocrisy of lockdown policies was responsible for a violent swing in my own politics, from casual left-wing socialist to hard libertarian, but most of all the lockdowns destroyed my faith in my fellow humans. The stark demonstration of just how easily manufactured-fear convinced the country to follow ridiculous commands replaced my underlying faith & trust in humanity with a smouldering disdain. The betrayal of even my own family, as they chose to follow the orders of tyrants and closed the door on their own child, drove a dagger into my heart.
I remember the lockdowns and I’m still angry.
Are you incapable of seeing the other perspective? 20 to 36 million people died of COVID. I remember hospitals and the healthcare system being utterly overwhelmed in the early days of the pandemic. The vast majority of the world’s governments established lockdowns because something had to be done, we didn’t have vaccines or effective antivirals, and there was a real fear of running out of ventilators.
Most people accepted the fact that staying at home was a very small sacrifice compared to all the lives that could be saved, directly or indirectly. Quarantine has been an effective measure to mitigate infectious disease outbreaks for nearly a thousand years (and before modern medicine, the only available tool). Covid era lockdowns are nothing compared to historical ones, when you could be summarily executed for crossing the wrong boundary. And now you have the ability to work, to talk to all your friends and family across the world, and endless entertainment.
I remember all the nurses so bored they made tiktoks all day.
New York was briefly overwhelmed, in part because they refused to work with field hospitals for braindead ideological reasons. Even that was briefly.
Lockdown isn't quarantine, either.
Alas, we finally could've done something about New Yorkers moving south.
Well. Until they got sufficiently bored and found an ideological-acceptable reason to throw parties.
Having periods of inactivity while otherwise having to be available is not the rebuttal that you think it is.
I am providing the level of evidence and care that OP deserves. No one is going to change anyone's mind on this topic anyway, we all settled into camps nigh-on six years ago.
Personally, performing for social media while at work (as distinct from consuming while on a break or waiting for a run to complete or whatever) is unprofessional regardless of immediate busyness, and that particular trend was just one of the many social psychoses going around as a side effect, but to each their own.
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If the triage admissions were packed to the gunwales I don't think they'd get bored
How often do you think new admissions should come in order to fill the empty beds of a hospital to capacity?
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This is literal insanity. Arguably the main theme of modern Western politics is the gigantic population overhang of the Ageing population and figuring out how to balance the books in the face of it. COVID with gigantic, unwieldly response and maximal attribution as a cause of death hit barely anybody at a global scale. If it had been allowed to 'rip' it likely would have produced significantly better outcomes for most advanced economies.
If politicians were willing to argue openly that death of older or vulnerable people can be a good thing because it helps with demographic issues, and they got democratic support, then so be it – that's coherent. That wasn't at all the case though. Most arguing against lockdowns were also arguing that they didn't work and were a conspiracy done for other reasons than public health.
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Quarantines were enacted to isolate only those who were confirmed to be infected. Let's not misinterpret clear definitions.
Quarantine is from "quarantena", literally "40 days", the time period of isolation for new ships arriving in Venice. The whole point was that bubonic plague can be asymptomatic for a week after infection; if you were to immediately let people in just because they weren't confirmed to be infected, you would eventually let in people who were infected.
But this isn't what happened during the lockdowns. The entire population was subjected to them.
Right. If you'd said "quarantines were enacted to isolate only those who traveled from city to city" then that wouldn't have needed correcting.
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Also, quarantines were NOT an effective measure to mitigate infectious disease outbreaks for a thousand years. The original quarantine was a measure against the Black Death. It failed.
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Covid was built on a lie. We knew the hysteria was overblown not in mid 2020, but in March, before the first lockdowns in the western world, with the Diamond Princess. We knew it posed no danger to young, healthy people. We knew it was less contagious than commonly claimed. And the establishment just went and lied, lied, lied to push an agenda.
We had evidence from the Diamond Princess pointing to SARS-CoV-2 being less dangerous.
We also had evidence from Wuhan pointing to SARS-CoV-2 being more dangerous.
At the time, how do you determine which of these is the anomalous result?
The red Chinese were lying, this is something they’re known to do and the cruise ship data is known, reliable, and confirmed.
At that time, the Red-In-Name-Only¹ Peking Clique seemed to be lying in the opposite direction, concealing the true extent of the disaster to maintain the image of infallibility to which they felt entitled.
¹Does anyone have any examples of something that's red on the outside and brown on the inside?
An m&m?
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Wow. Are you incapable of just admitting you were wrong and apologize?
It is honestly incredible how wrong so many you were and how much damage it caused. And instead of any of you ever admitting you were wrong, you just make up nonsense as to why, if you think about it, you weren't really wrong and also even if you were it's totally understandable and also it was probably inevitable anyway and it's not as bad as burning down entire towns with all the people in it in 1348 so stop being a baby.
Not a single thing in this comment is accurate. No, 36 million people didn't die from COVID and if you seriously believe that do you think without the totalitarian response it would have been worse? The diagnosis and testing and classification were knowingly bad and they did it because it gave them horrendously exaggerated numbers which they wanted. And no, hospitals were not overwhelmed in the early days. Hospital admissions and emergency room admissions were DOWN. World governments had plans for this exact event which they tossed out the window to launch on worldwide experiments and they all cowardly crowded along since being wrong when everyone is wrong is the least dangerous path. Lockdowns and quarantines are not the same thing. Ventilators were killing people and having fewer of them requiring judicious use would have been far better. We had effective treatments early on and they were suppressed for reasons we're all left to speculate about. The covid injections cause more harm than it abates. The lockdowns didn't stop after 2 weeks to flatten the curve, they continued long after even the propaganda couldn't convincingly lie about it.
Never take complaints or arguments from covid zealots about human rights or laws seriously because they've already demonstrated the very low bar at which they will toss all that out the window. And they will do it again.
It was certainly something to watch the party of "my body my choice" become "you must take a 'vaccine' via OSHA mandate or else we'll unperson you."
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This comment reminds me of why arguments about lockdowns became so difficult, because the public forum was so often being poisoned with nonsense.
I think lockdowns are the greatest crime inflicted upon modern humanity outside of war. I strongly believe that those who supported and facilitated them should be at the very least imprisoned, if not far worse.
Nonetheless, I would never make a ridiculous claim to support my position like admissions being down, or ventilators killing more people, or vaccines being worse than the disease. Covid obviously was a pandemic. It, like the similar pandemics of the 50s and 60s, had a fatality rate of 0.1 - 0.3, and made a huge number of people very ill.
Lockdowns were a disaster not because Covid was all fake, but because the costs vastly outweighed the benefits. You don't need to lie or believe ridiculous things to understand that.
However, as soon as you start arguing about lockdowns, you are immediately lumped in with the 5G nutters, the anti-vaxxers, the china hoaxers, and so on. It was incredibly difficult to talk about it with normal people because, no matter how correct you are, being supported by masses of conspiracy nuts is an extremely difficult barrier to overcome.
I find these 'I'm one of the reasonable ones' posts so tiresome because the status quo will lump you in with other dissidents to discredit you no matter how many times you post comments like these. It doesn't matter how much you ridicule and insult the people further down the "conspiracy nut" totem pole than you. Your only defense is just being correct and telling the truth.
I think part of this is my shorthand is leading to confusion.
Hospital admissions and emergency room admissions were lower in February 2020 through at least April 2020 than previous years. This is findable data which I looked up years ago. You can think it's ridiculous all you like, but you are wrong and that is a true statement.
the dancing nurse/doctor phenomenon makes more sense (and you can just look into the periphery of the videos) when you realize part of the reason is the hospitals were not full, the pop-up tent hospitals were empty, and the hospital ships were empty
my claim is ventilators were overused and this overuse caused people to die
ventilators are dangerous and should only be used when the downsides of their lack of use are dire
in the early days of the covid hysteria, they were regularly being used on people when they shouldn't have been for various reasons but the result was people who would have lived otherwise fell into the ventilator spiral where they declined and then died
and this is why the protocol for their use w/re COVID19 treatment was significantly changed in the summer of 2020 which substantially reduced their use
have you ever heard of the 1976 flu vaccine which was pulled from use?
well shucks, this cannot be because it has the word "vaccine" in the name!
I get it dude, but these slimy 'I'm one of the reasonable ones!' posts gain you nothing and just make holding dissident beliefs harder and more costly as it reinforces exactly what you're complaining about.
After all: you're the conspiracy nutjob who thinks there was some crazzzzzzzzzzzzed conspiracy at local, state, and federal government and their corresponding institutions and people lied repeatedly about facts and stats on the ground and the known effects of lockdowns! I'm one of the reasonable ones, I don't believe lockdowns are the greatest crimes against humanity outside of war. Please don't lump me in with people like you.
Presumably because the lockdown stopped idiots like me from breaking bones playing sports and riding bikes (I've done both) and that decrease in hospital visits was larger than the increase due to COVID? Which was literally the point of lockdowns (at first, before we all went insane).
Had hospitals had to deal with both the regular base-line level of hospital admissions + COVID patients they would likely have gotten absolutely fucked and quality of care would plummet for all.
It also stopped people having heart attacks from going to the hospital, stopped people with cancer from having appointments, et cetera and so forth.
I really hope people with heart attacks, cancer appointments, etc still went
Them not going is a massive failure on our society
I'm not even pro-lockdown, I was very against them by mid 2020 when it was clear no one had a plan or coherent strategy.
I just dislike bad reasoning
A bunch of diagnostic services were cancelled which didn't necessarily reduce the amount of Triage attendees but impacted the discovery of major issues.
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Probably varied heavily by region and severity, and we'll never really know the stats.
At one point early on I had some sort of gallbladder attack, with symptoms fairly similar to appendicitis. I bet on it not being that, and it turned out okay. But maybe somebody else ignored the same symptoms for the same reason and it didn't. So goes life.
As we should!
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To be honest, I just don't believe you.
But more importantly, your thinking seems extremely blinkered, like you can't see the wood for the trees.
Covid was a very infectious disease, hence why even very strict lockdowns were mostly useless. Across the world a very large number of people died and probably a significant majority of the population was exposed to it.
How many people do you think died because of improper medical care from ventilators (keeping in mind the counterfactual where they might die anyway without any intervention)? What was the death rate or side effect rate from vaccines? It's not going to be even 6 figures. It's a fraction of a fraction.
How are you defining side effect? Unless you're defining it narrowly, "side effect rate" is going to be like 90+% of people that take a vaccine- the vast majority of people have some degree of soreness and lethargy after a vaccine, and COVID vaccines seem worse for this than most.
I'm also left to wonder how many side effects were not identified as caused by the vaccines because the message was broadcast loud and clear to every doctor that if you question the vaccines you risk becoming a pariah and a crank.
My wife got a condition that could have also been blamed on the vaccines, but since there was another plausible explanation for it, doctors clung to that other one. I'm not saying they're wrong, but I'm saying I'm not confident that they gave the possibility that the vaccines were the cause a serious, scientific look. Multiply events like this all over and who knows what the death rate/side effect rate even is? That's what happens when achieving political objectives is more important to politicians and the high level medical establishment than achieving the correct medical outcomes.
Thoroughly seconded.
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This is pretty close to COVID being fake. The costs were deliberately overblown (faked) in order to justify the intervention. It's manufacturing consent, and it's clear if you have eyes to see.
This is also deliberate as part of the same manufacturing of consent. This is how the demos is led around. This is how you condition people to hate, by providing approved targets and encouraging marginalization.
I suppose I understand this, but I don't care, and I can't see how anyone with any integrity can care so much about the opinions of others. The weirdos were right, and that made the respectable people uncomfortable. That's what integrity means, that's what it's for. If your rubric stops at "what other people will think" then I don't want you making decisions of any importance.
Lockdowns came in, and persisted, because ultimately the public in most countries were in favour of them.
If you want to stop them next time, then you need to get the average person on side - and for the average person, being associated with "5G causes cancer" is enough for an instant dismissal. Even today, you won't find that many people who really understand how incredibly damaging lockdowns were. You can't win a political argument just by being right
You have it backwards. People were in favor of lockdowns, because they came in and persisted.
Also on the opposing side - there's a lot more people thinking 5G causes cancer then there was before thr pandemic, because the establishment couldn't admit they were wrong. Look at any elite get-together, they've been crying about "regaining ze trust" for years now.
You're not stopping the crazies, you're literally paving the way for publically funded crystal healing.
Maybe. Status quo is a powerful thing. But at the same time, now that lockdowns have been used, it's always going to be a tool people think about whenever there is some crisis. In the UK, for example, there has been a small outbreak of meningitis cases at a University. It's not remotely hard to find people calling for lockdowns. And polling exposed a huge chunk of the population who love being petty tyrants, even today you'll find something like 25% support for closing nightclubs forever.
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Believing wrong things about 5G is less nuts than wanting to imprison the entire planet over a spicy cold. Your hatred of being "lumped in" with them is misplaced. They're wrong but they're better than the other, more dangerously wrong group that actually got to call the shots.
I don't have any issue with being lumped in with other people, it's a very common method of trying to discredit an argument.
But like I said to KMC above, if you actually want to win the argument and prevent lockdowns next time, you need to stop very easy wins for the other side like being tied to extremely dumb conspiracy theories.
That's not your choice. It's the enemy's. (Or, equivalently, the media's)
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This really stuck with me. As clear as day that the "cure" was worse than the disease. Same with Remdisivir, I think, that also caused a lot of deaths.
I'd love to speculate, so I'll start. It was because if there were treatments, the vaccine couldn't be pushed through in an emergency fashion. The vaccine needed to be pushed through, the emergency measures were the only way to do it, and therefore no alternative treatment could ever be allowed.
If you had to guess what happened to the few whistleblowers in late March who claimed the ventilator protocol was killing people, do you think it was 1) they were hailed as heroes for risking their careers and employment to save the lives of their patients or 2) they were fired, informally blacklisted by their state medical board and couldn't get employment elsewhere, and had their licenses threatened?
The protocol was changed shortly afterwards, but that started what would become a pattern: any licensed professional who came out against policies which were killing people would have their lives destroyed by public health institutions, the media, and state licensing boards. Any deviation from the approved message would be severely punished.
I'm honestly unsure. The powers that be appeared to have a strong interest in doing whatever to continue the emergency. Laws, constitutions, human rights, didn't matter much for multiple years there and courts simply refused to issue holdings restricting executive power w/re public health insanity. I seriously doubt an admission of an effective treatment would have stopped emergency approval/usage of stuff like remdeathivir or the injections many months later.
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Probably true. It was less.
Why do you think early admissions were down? Do you think it might have to do with the fact that people were in their homes quarantining themselves instead of crashing, social drinking, working, fucking, and spreading germs?
The effectiveness of drugs like Ivermectin or Hydroxychloroquine could not be repeated in larger, more rigorous trials. I don't think Ivermectin particularly should've been demonized the way that it was, but it just wasn't what it needed to be.
I don't think they do. If you have data to the contrary then I will try to look at it.
Either way, I'm sure 90% of those 36 million would have died within like 3 years anyway due to pre-existing illnesses.
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That stat may or may not be true, I'd have to look at the data.
Keep in mind that the system can be overwhelmed with admissions dramatically down - entire surgical floors that should be filled with boring wound care and uncomplicated recovery being replaced with 1/4 of that but actually real sick respiratory patients is already enough to fuck everything up.
An increase in ICU level care but no ICU beds? Disaster.
Kill the variety and easy cases and things get fucked real fast.
All kinds of tensions like that caused problems.
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because hospitals keep track of this data, local governments collect it, and publish it and you can just go look at the data
one of the reasons all those nurse/doctor dance videos caught on is because hospitals across the country didn't have many people in them and they had nothing else to do
have you looked?
you either undermine the need for lockdowns because hospitals are not overrun or you undermine the need for lockdowns by claiming people were staying home anyway
wrong
had that one handy
not easily at hand, have you looked?
generally, my policy on discussion boards is to mirror effort so I'm not going to play the "sources?!@" game until I'm convinced the person asking has anted some up
I'm not denying the claim that hospitals had an initial decrease in admissions. I'm granting it. I grant the claim. I'm asking why you think that is. Is it because everyone all of the sudden starting feeling fantastic when covid hit the states, or do you think people (even sick ones) actually quarantined themselves and stayed at home because they were scared of the virus's impact and the potential of being further exposed after seeing the news out of Europe? Do you think that is possible?
Yes, I had that one handy too. It used to be called ivmmeta. I used it to make the same argument you're making right now. There is no doubt these studies portray a marked improvement when ivermectin is used, but when you scratch past the surface and look at the critiques, the benefit from ivermectin in these studies isn't so clear. Many of these studies had issues with their methodology. There appears some benefit in symptom relief, but in terms of mortality, its observed benefits in symptom management did not significantly influence critical clinical outcomes in COVID-19 patients. These outcomes, in comparison to monoclonal antibodies are not significant.
I have a hard time believing you scratched the surface and dove into the criticism which you found convincing on ivmmeta, e.g., inclusion/exclusion criteria criticism, but you're going to attempt to use that uncorrected meta analysis which includes a study which was retracted half a year before this was posted because its data is obviously fabricated (Elshafie et al.). The removal of this one study changes mortality RR from .91 to approx .73 after correction alone which is statistically significant lower mortality. Whoops.
Or the inclusion of studies with near death patients who are given a single low dosage of ivermectin. There are multiple significant errors just on first glance and each of these errors just so happen to affect the outcome in one direction. It must be complete coincidence.
I'm just way past the point of spending significant time wading through this crap and I'm done pretending these people are anything but dishonest.
What was ivermectin's efficacy compared to monoclonal antibodies even after the Elshafie oopsy in that study?
I empathize with this to some extent. My issue here is your suggestive claim about hospitals being empty, and your claim that the Covid vaccines themselves do more harm than good. If you don't want to take the vaccine, don't take it. If you don't want to use treatments other than Ivermectin, then don't use them. People should have had this option and they (and Ivermectin) shouldn't have been demonized the way that they were.
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The kinds of people who would make that data have long since burned whatever credibility they have left.
That's the biggest part of the problem. Nobody has been hanged over this shit. Hell, nobody has even been shamed, tried, jailed, or punished. Fauci got a blanket pardon on the way out the door!
So while I'm sure your request seems reasonable to you, I hope you understand how I see you, and how you're seen more broadly. It's not reasonable, and it's not worth engaging with because it will ultimately boil down to appeals to authority.
Yes, they destroyed their credibility, but what data do you or others have to counter their data when it comes to vaccines? I'm not coming here to deny that a blanket vaccine mandate, and lockdowns, and the messaging from the public health apparatus were bad, but arguments about the vaccine causing "more harm than it abates" is absurd to me unless you have something to suggest otherwise.
Yes, it seems I am only checking most of the boxes in your purity test, and not all of them. A grave sin.
Why would I address data from people with no credibility? I don't have to take their data at face value, since they're fucking liars with no credibility, that's the point. The null hypothesis is fuck off, I don't want any. The experiment is trusting these charlatans ever again.
You don't have to address the data from people who have no credibility. Provide data that refutes the noncredible people.
The Ethical Skeptic has the best charts, if you're into that sort of thing.
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This is so absurd in the face of all the news I remember from the early days of the pandemic. Where did you see this information?
Are you saying covid vaccines cause more harm than good? This also goes against all information that I have seen.
I’m no Covid zealot. I have little emotion about the pandemic other than relief that it’s over, and concern that the next one will be far worse, that governments will be too cowardly to enact the measures necessary to deal with it due to the increased number of politically polarised, anti-vaccine conspiracy minded populists.
A lot of the "covid vaccines might be bad, actually" data comes from the military. Infertility claims doubled in the year after vaccination. Women with completely steady cycles (in my entire life I'd never had a late period. as a teen it was every four weeks during chemistry on thursday, that predictable) had their cycles thrown off for months. Young men (again, the military data) had a ridiculous amount of heart complications. The MRNA processes hadn't been tested enough, and MRNA trials since covid have been pulled for having too many side effects. Never taking another MRNA shot again personally.
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Hospitals were overwhelmed.... in villages in Italy where the average age was over 80. Some of those images were later recycled and falsely claimed to be hospitals in the US.
Bergamo, where most of the viral images of overwhelmed hospitals came from, is a municipality of 120,000 people with a metro area population of c. 500,000, unless you consider the whole Bergamo area a suburb of Milan. The population within city limits is 25.4% over 65, which is only marginally more geriatric than Italy as a whole.
I don't know why Bergamo was such a mess, although I suspect the answer is "they were the first city other than Wuhan to be hit badly and had no clue what they were doing".
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Have you ever looked?
Yes. The evidence of it being merely a wash is strongest in those with poor immune responses like the very elderly, but even there it doesn't have a significant positive effect on infection let alone mortality. Anyone under the age of approx. 75, it causes harm on net. It's honestly criminal it was ever approved generally for minors let alone babies where there is just no good argument at all w/re to health.
Hopefully that social capital has been burned for at least a generation.
generally, my policy on discussion boards is to mirror effort so I'm not going to play the "sources?!@" game until I'm convinced the person asking has anted some up
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Perhaps you lot should have thought about that before deciding to shut the world down over a virus that was dangerous enough to cancel normal life but not dangerous enough to release a vaccine before it was politically opportune.
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Presumably, all the tiktoks and instagram reels nurses were making of hospitals completely empty of anything other than medical staff, occasionally interrupted by liking and reposting that stupid "comic book hereos bowing in respect to the real heroes" one-panel. And the completely unused medical aid ship in New York. If you saw bona fide crowded hospitals, then I can only assume you were watching stock footage, and not actual, real-time footage of hosptial admissions.
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Dateline 1348: The vast majority of the Holy Roman Empire towns established flagellant parades, because something had to be done.
Far less damaging, and probably more effective, than lockdowns.
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As a matter of fact, we had vaccine candidates on March 9 (2020), and had confirmed immune response in mice and started testing them in humans by April 23.
As a matter of law, it was simply illegal to give or sell the vaccines that we did have to non-test-subjects before efficacy testing finished, and on top of that it was illegal to recruit test subjects with a plan of "expose healthy volunteers to Covid deliberately and immediately under medical supervision" rather than "wait for six or seven months for a decent sample size to be exposed to Covid incidentally and unexpectedly out in the wild", so efficacy testing wasn't finished and mass manufacturing couldn't even be begun until cumulative world excess mortality was well over a million and rapidly growing.
As a matter of deduction, totalitarianism did not outperform freedom here. It killed millions, and got away with it only because it had already managed to strangle the globe so thoroughly (even in the United States!) that freedom was never tried.
What was stopping a pharma company from declaring their vaccine open to the public, as long as you signed up for their trial*?
*requires a deposit equal to the retail price of the vaccine
The FDA, obviously...?
Right, why couldn’t they just have expanded their trial?
The obvious reason is that the government would come down on them like a ton of bricks, even if they found a way to violate the spirit of the law while adhering to the letter.
But the legal reason is ... harder to find? There's a lot of letters of the law, so I'd think "you can't weasel out of testing requirements by declaring that your 'test' subjects might include half the country" has to be covered by one of them somewhere, but a quick skim didn't show me where.
Ah, wait, AI to the rescue; I was looking at the wrong parts.
21 USC 355 says "No person shall introduce or deliver for introduction into interstate commerce any new drug, unless an approval of an application filed pursuant to subsection (b) or (j) is effective with respect to such drug."
Then 21 CFR 312 talks about the "Investigational New Drug Application (IND)" exemption to that, but part one of the exemption process is basically begging the FDA to approve your proposed trial protocols so you can run the trials you need to get the final approval. If your trial protocol is "give it to anyone who pays" or even just "give it to anyone who wants it", good luck getting that "trial" approved, and "A sponsor shall not begin a clinical investigation subject to § 312.2(a) until the investigation is subject to an IND".
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Regarding challenge trials, 1Day Sooner came into being as a result of our clear failure here. COVID was a ridiculously good candidate for challenge trials: a disease that spreads quickly, so every day matters, and which is dangerous to one segment of the population but relatively harmless to everyone else. Our global failure here doesn't speak well for our prospects if a genuinely dangerous plague comes along. (Imagine if the disease had a 30% fatality rate to everyone. Challenge trials would be even more important, and a lot harder to justify ethically.)
I guess the most optimistic take is that if a real threat to society comes along (i.e. a plague which doesn't mostly just replace the "cause of death" for unhealthy seniors), we might actually be spurred to take appropriate measures. It's "only" the threat of creeping totalitarianism which we utterly failed at, enthusiastically cheering on lockdowns and unpersoning anybody who said "uh, wait a minute".
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0.44% of the world? Almost certainly not true; the Diamond Princess, a cruise ship full of old people, had less than that. We get 7.1 million from WHO. Anything more goes down to counting excess deaths, which is both unreliable and also counts excess deaths due to lockdowns.
Diamond Princess had 712 confirmed cases and 14 deaths, a 2% mortality rate, which indeed makes sense for a ship full of old people.
Diamond Princess had 3,711 on board and 14 deaths, a rate of 0.38%. The 0.44% I gave was mortality due to COVID (36 million divided by 8.1 billion), not case fatality.
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Yes, it only goes to less than that after adjusting for the Diamond Princess passenger list being unusually old, then consider the counterfactual that matches global population demographics.
Still, there are places that have more official covid deaths (and even more excess mortality) than the Diamond Princess (or any other statistical analysis of age-stratified mortality) should allow. Peru, for one. Back in mid-2021 when I was meticulously keeping track of the relevant stats, Peru had:
Mainstream reasons offered for this failure are ad-hoc, post-hoc, and treat things that are common to all undeveloped countries as somehow being the cause of Peru's unique poor performance. Something went horribly wrong in Peru. And the best hypothesis standing for what happened is those unusually extreme, early, and lengthy lockdowns.
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Is this meant to be an argument in favour of the lockdowns that did nothing to stop them dying?
Nuking ourselves would also have been something to do. Doesn't make it a good idea.
Wrong.
There is absolutely no historical precedent for the totalitarianism of the Covid Lockdowns. None at all, as much as some of those responsible tried to claim as such for legitimacy. And the reason should be pretty obvious, too. A stay at home policy imposed on a subsistence agriculture society would be an omnicidal disruption to the food supply.
If this justifies lockdown, then I would prefer burning the entire internet to the ground just to remove the justification.
I’m capable of being persuaded that lockdowns were ineffective and other measures would have been better, but you should lead with figures and statistics, not anger over the tyranny of stay-at-home orders. Your current attitude and approach will get you pattern-matched with anti-science, vaccine denying populists and it’s very difficult not to immediately dismiss it.
I spent 6 years leading with figures and statistics. Perhaps those who locked us down could provide theirs first for once. After all, they're the ones who were in charge.
But if you insist...
When you crunch the numbers on age stratified covid mortality compared and remaining life expectancy by age, you find that each covid infection is equivalent to 15 life days being lost. Therefore the absolute best case scenario for lockdowns, going from 100% of the population being infected to 0%, only gives everyone an extra 0.04 QALY per capita. Add in the reality that even lockdown proponents did not suggest this sort of swing in percentage infected would occur, and it's more like 0.02 QALY per capita. This is an incredibly small budget.
For comparison if you do a lockdown that lasts 200 days (about the UK's duration of stay at home policy, but not all restrictions) and make the incredibly generous assumption that lockdowns only reduce quality of life by 5%, that is 0.03 QALY lost per capita.
Nothing about this approach to public health is novel. QALYs is standard public health fare. I am not the only one to make this sort of observation. Caplan has and gets referenced here, and so has Scott
And again
Those implementing lockdowns would either be aware of the QALY implications, in which case they were malicious, or not aware, in which case they were incompetent to such a degree that their refusal to immediately resign from their post was malicious.
I made a more realistic model with the final results of the UK's cumulative lockdowns here: https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/18492
Note this entire exercise depends on the axiom that lockdowns actually reduced covid deaths as advertised. The experience of Sweden would suggest otherwise.
It feels almost too late to bother, but I do hope to one day write this all out in a lengthy blog post that explains every step in excruciating detail. Any omission here is just because I'm not going to write that blog post today.
The point of the lockdowns was to lessen the load on the hospitals so they would not be overloaded and forced to triage. A very real possibility at the time, given just how fast the disease was spreading and the amount of people expressing debilitating or life threatening symptoms. Instead of everyone falling ill during the same short timespan, the course of the pandemic was spread out over a longer period, allowing time to adapt and treat serious cases as they came in. Incidentally, this also bought time to develop a vaccine, resulting in less people becoming sick than would have otherwise been expected.
I will grant you that the lockdowns did not directly save lives compared to risking infections. Covid is not the bubonic plaque that so many make it out to be. To many, it was in fact no worse than the flu. But the effect of overloaded hospitals had the potential to be immense. Tons of people would have been unable to work as important operations were postponed. Healthcare workers would have been worn out and more likely to become sick themselves.
Further, you have to factor in the fact that no modern society is willing to turn the sick or injured away from hospitals. Modern morals dictate that if there is a path to treat everyone, then we must follow it. Even if it results in lowered quality of life for others.
You can look back now and make a reasonable argument that the lockdowns were a mistake. But at the time, I don't see how the politicians could have really done anything different. They are accountable to the public if nothing else, and most people were watching the situation pretty closely. The numbers of infected were constantly going up, breaking news showed bodies being transported through the streets, and anyone with a connection to healthcare (whether it be as doctor or patient) could see the situation slowly spiraling out of control. The public demanded action. History tells us that the main way to stop infection is to isolate the sick. So everyone had the same question burning on their lips: "If a lockdown can slow this down, then why are we not doing it?"
Without a compelling narrative, your statistics are powerless against such sentiments. And as I outlined above, there were legitimate arguments here. In retrospect, they may not have been sufficient, and we can hope that we will make better decisions in the future. I personally hope for hospitals that have the resources to handle sudden influxes in patients without resorting to triage. But in the end, our leaders were under pressure to act rapidly, and this was the best answer they could come up with at the time.
Completely false- modern society was quite happy to turn away people from organ transplants and other necessary surgeries if they didn't have the vaccine.
There was a whole Reddit community dedicated to mocking people that died of COVID. Pathetic cretin Jimmy Kimmel mocked them on national TV.
Modern society will absolutely turn people away, as long as they get to feel ideologically justified when they do so.
This is the most polite damning with faint praise I think I've ever heard.
Their best was completely and utterly retarded.
Who was turned away from treatment based on facts that weren't related to their refusal to accept medical procedures?
"If you want to get treated, do what the doctors say" was true long before covid in pretty much any place that had hospitals, to my knowledge.
How many people are still given medical aid despite refusing medical suggestions like losing weight or stopping smoking or ceasing their intake of their drug of choice?
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The UK did lockdowns. Did not overload hospitals. But achieved the same negative outcomes we would have gotten from overloaded hospitals, as they just stopped treating patients instead.
Given the lack of empirical evidence that lockdowns slowed the spread in the UK compared to countries that did not lock down, why even propose this as the "point" of lockdowns? What mechanism is there for lockdowns to achieve this when they don't slow covid? Less traffic accidents to deal with?
This is not true.
Firstly because no hospital invests infinite resources in a given patient.
Secondly because NICE specifically prevents certain treatments from being offered in the UK on the basis that they are not cost-effective.
Well the end result was most of the politicians responsible got booted out by the public as a result of the catastrophic economic and social effects of their lockdowns, even if most voters failed to recognize that lockdowns were the cause.
Who gave them the impression that lockdowns would slow it down?
Sweden had no such difficulty in not locking down. They simply chose not to lock down, and wow, lockdowns didn't happen. What a surprise.
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What you post was the pravda. The claims that the Very Smart People made to support lockdowns.
They were patent nonsense, and they were always patent nonsense. The hammer and anvil didn't work and could not have, if they disease had followed the models the epidemiologists were using. In fact, it did not, and the epidemiologists continued to use those models (with more and more bizarre parameters, as shown by the Canadian COVID people constantly showing hockey sticks which never materialized). The lockdowns were not a good faith mistake. They were something some people wanted and were willing to manufacture theories and evidence to support, and to stick to long after it was clear none of that was true.
Who are the people that you believe supported the lockdowns, knowing that they were lying about the effects they would have? I have a hard time identifying any group that benefited from this, other than the hospitals which were under less pressure than would have otherwise been the case;
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Your current attitude is holier-than-thou smugness. Not exactly any better. The anti-science vaccine denying populists were right, and their prescriptions were better than listing to 'science.'
Even the appeal to 'science' disgusts me. There is no such this as science! There are people making arguments, and there are people countering there arguments, and there are people shouting down their arguments.
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and in the same vein, repeating debunked propaganda you remember from the covid hysteria will convince no one and just get pattern-matched with other covid zealots who aren't interested in being convinced anyway
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But did you see where he said he was like, in a field, around nobody, and that was still not good enough?
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