There are 35 comments.

1. Inactive
   Hammer, The

   @RyanM

   12:15 PM EDT ⋅ Apr 12, 2021

   Roderic (View Comment):

   Hammer, The (View Comment):
   The reality, though, is that there are virtually no “mitigations” that have been shown to be at all effective, so all of the widespread testing gets us absolutely nowhere. But people don’t like the seeming randomness of this. So they demand that we treat it as something that it is not.

   I agree that with the testing being so uneven that it’s impossible to tell anything from reports of new cases. A dead body is a fairly easy thing to count, though, so death rates ought to be a reliable if trailing indicator, and I don’t believe that over-diagnosis of COVID deaths is a thing. Going by that there is no difference between strict lockdown states and lax states, so now we know. The good news is that the vaccines appear to be having an effect.

   Misdiagnosis of covid deaths is definitely a thing, though.  It will be interesting to see where overall death figures appear for 2020/2021 in the next 5 years or so.  This past year was the most deadly year, overall, since … 2018?  2015, maybe?  Yes, covid is most definitely a thing, but it is not anywhere close to being the sort of thing to define an entire century, and to entirely change our approach to our individual health, much less enable authoritarian control in the name of “public health.”  In the grand scheme of things, covid is a bad flu year, which, having plucked the low-hanging fruit, will very likely result in a few very light “overall death” years in the very near future.

   The creation of vaccines has been impressive, and if they make people more comfortable, they should be made available to anyone who wishes to have one.  They are, however, an ongoing experiment that are – however helpful – likely unnecessary.

2. Coolidge
   Flicker

   @Flicker

   2:19 PM EDT ⋅ Apr 12, 2021

   Hammer, The (View Comment):

   Roderic (View Comment):

   Hammer, The (View Comment):
   The reality, though, is that there are virtually no “mitigations” that have been shown to be at all effective, so all of the widespread testing gets us absolutely nowhere. But people don’t like the seeming randomness of this. So they demand that we treat it as something that it is not.

   I agree that with the testing being so uneven that it’s impossible to tell anything from reports of new cases. A dead body is a fairly easy thing to count, though, so death rates ought to be a reliable if trailing indicator, and I don’t believe that over-diagnosis of COVID deaths is a thing. Going by that there is no difference between strict lockdown states and lax states, so now we know. The good news is that the vaccines appear to be having an effect.

   Misdiagnosis of covid deaths is definitely a thing, though. It will be interesting to see where overall death figures appear for 2020/2021 in the next 5 years or so. This past year was the most deadly year, overall, since … 2018? 2015, maybe? Yes, covid is most definitely a thing, but it is not anywhere close to being the sort of thing to define an entire century, and to entirely change our approach to our individual health, much less enable authoritarian control in the name of “public health.” In the grand scheme of things, covid is a bad flu year, which, having plucked the low-hanging fruit, will very likely result in a few very light “overall death” years in the very near future.

   The creation of vaccines has been impressive, and if they make people more comfortable, they should be made available to anyone who wishes to have one. They are, however, an ongoing experiment that are – however helpful – likely unnecessary.

   What gets me is how most English speaking countries are willing to beat their people with truncheons, throw them to the ground, then handcuff them, for not protecting themselves from a largely innocuous virus.  And even in Canada, they whisk them away to secret prison-like facilities, out of communication with family or lawyers.

3. Member
   Zafar

   @Zafar

   3:31 PM EDT ⋅ Apr 12, 2021

   Roderic (View Comment):

   Zafar (View Comment):

   Roderic: Nancy Reagan pushed her “Just Say No” campaign against drug abuse in kids, but it was an educational campaign, not a policy agenda. Yet her “Just Say No” campaign is credited with a big increase in public awareness and concern about drug abuse.

   Did the rate of drug use go down?

   It did, but whether it was due to Nancy Reagan’s campaign is hard to say because the war on drugs was ramping up at the same time. Penalties for drug use and incarcerations went through the roof.

   So it’s impossible to establish causality.

   Nevertheless, the public attitudes about drugs inculcated during the Just Say No era continue to impact us even today.

   Honestly, I don’t see it.  Marijuana is in some way legal in how many states now compared to the Reagan era?

    

4. Member
   Doctor Robert

   @DoctorRobert

   5:45 PM EDT ⋅ Apr 12, 2021

   Hammer, The (View Comment):

   Doctor Robert (View Comment):

   Roderic (View Comment):

   Hammer, The (View Comment):

   Yeah, I don’t think that has anything to do with it. This is a cold virus, and it does what cold viruses do. I suspect that it shows itself to roughly the same extent that people are fearful of it and constantly testing for it. If we went back to treating it like a cold (only testing hospital cases where doctors believe it is the primary illness at play), it would “disappear” everywhere.

   As the pandemic winds down and people at risk are vaccinated this is increasingly true. The disease is showing up in younger people who have mild disease, people who would not have been tested early on. But earlier in the course of the pandemic there’s no question that this was a deadly disease and nothing like a cold. Even now people are dying from it, and a COVID death is different from a bad case of the flu.

    

   My first wife died of the flu. She went from being well on Monday night to sniffles on Tuesday night to dead on Wednesday morning.

   My second wife and I had covid, we were as sick as one can be without requiring hospital care.

   A flu death is worse than a bad case of covid.

   My in-laws and sister and brother-in-law all had covid. My sister lost her voice for a week, and all of them lost their sense of taste, except my brother-in-law, who felt very mild symptoms for a few days. He has an employee, though, who is 34 years old and died. People die of colds and of the flu. I don’t doubt that if we treated colds and flu in the same way that we’ve been treating covid (massive testing, expanded definitions, censoring any sort of debate and eliminating decades of research and wisdom and accumulated knowledge, creating incentives for miscategorization, creating incentives for power grabs, authoritarian rule, and enabling powerful lobbies to benefit either through direct profit, or through putting competitors out of business, or simply by allowing them to “work from home”) – if we did this for the flu and for the cold, I have very little doubt that those things wouldn’t look like national emergencies as well.

   No, they are not all the same thing. But they are all in the same category of thing, and none of them is so different from the others as to justify the absolute destruction that has been forced on literally the entire world over this past year. None of them is enough to justify the ongoing transformation of our free society into a technocracy, where individual rights are all but nonexistent, and where the constitution is nothing more than a historical curiosity.

   Bravo.  Bravo.  Beautifully put.  I would not trade one person’s job to prevent my covid case.

5. Coolidge
   Roderic

   @rhfabian

   Post author

   3:52 AM EDT ⋅ Apr 16, 2021

   Nanocelt TheContrarian (View Comment):
   Take your Vitamin D, folks.

   I agree.  Basically, if you don’t take a Vitamin D supplement then you’re deficient.  Pale people in the South are not immune, especially since air conditioning tends to keep them indoors.