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Notes -
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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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