[rusk]

Alcohol spreads COVID. Not exactly ... but it breaks down social barriers and can cause people to be careless. If we had banned or at least curtailed alcoholic sales I can guarantee you probably the numbers would be half what they are now. A big problem is that once you close pubs clubs and other outlets then people start having secret house parties and these are very hard to police. I guarantee you, that even the best intentioned host will have a super spreader event on their hands before long. It doesn’t take many - 10 even to churn the virus among themselves and then head off home to give it to whomever is there.

I’m really sorry that you feel your rights are being curtailed, but what we are living through is hopefully a once in a lifetime event that if we could have just knuckled down at the start and endured some discomfort we would be pretty much over it by now.

So much for that “blitz spirit” all we hear is moan moan moan ...

[gruez]

>. If we had banned or at least curtailed alcoholic sales I can guarantee you probably the numbers would be half what they are now.

but that's not what's happening. You can still get beer by going to a physical store, you just can't have it delivered to your house.

[nickpp]

> if we could have just knuckled down at the start and endured some discomfort we would be pretty much over it by now

Didn’t we do just that in the spring?

[rusk]

You and I did maybe.

[djsumdog]

This is complete and total arbitrary nonsense. You're taking a conclusion and trying to walk back a path of logic to some type of justification.

Let's see this for what it is: arbitrary decisions that curtails the human rights of all human beings by politicians who are figuratively drunk with power. They are banning things for the common people while they leave their regions, have expensive $1k dinners for their political backers and ignoring all the rules they've imposed on the population. From Canada to California to the UK, we watch elected leaders ignore the bullshit rules they put on people, either because they think it doesn't apply to them or they've seen the numbers and know the risks are bullshit.

We're talking about a disease that's literally has over a 98% survival rate if you're under 55 (which causes people to spout more "long COVID" narrative media non-sense). 100 years from now, do you really think scholars will see 2020 and 2021 as anything other than the largest cast of mass hysteria to date?

Let's isolate the elderly and vulnerable, or anyone who wants to be isolated, and let the rest of the world evaluate their own risks again.

[JohnCohorn]

Hypocrisy of elected officials following measures doesn’t imply that the measures they’re imposing aren’t needed.

I agree there have been elements of mass hysteria in this thing, but at the moment we have real and present reasons for hysteria to be appropriate. The number of cases we have at once is overwhelming hospital capacity in many regions and all signs point to it getting much worse over the next month.

[djsumdog]

> The number of cases

Please research PCR and the amplification cycles. Right now most tests are using over 40 cycles and it's causing a lot of false positives. Cases should never be the number to use, fatalities should (and even then many people get marked for COVID deaths because they test positive yet die of something unrelated).

The way PCR is being used is insane and a lot of the numbers are just plain misleading to increase the amount of fear.

[JohnCohorn]

Sure cases as a metric has been overemphasized and unnecessarily increases fear. But the fact that that metric isn’t ideally measured or presented shouldn’t take away from the fact that the metrics that are most critical like hospital capacity are getting to frightening levels right now .

[pw201]

> Right now most tests are using over 40 cycles

This is misleading. The number of cycles used is irrelevant. Reference: https://virologydownunder.com/the-false-positive-pcr-problem... (from someone who has actually used PCR in research, as neither you nor I have).

> and it's causing a lot of false positives.

We can get an upper bound on false positives from ONS surveys over the summer, by assuming all their positives were false (prevelance was low then). At https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan... the ONS says "We know the specificity of our test must be very close to 100% as the low number of positive tests in our study means that specificity would be very high even if all positives were false. For example, in the most recent six-week period (31 July to 10 September), 159 of the 208,730 total samples tested positive. Even if all these positives were false, specificity would still be 99.92%." (The false positive rate would then be 100% - 99.92% = 0.08 %). The ONS prevelance surveys are processed at a couple of the Lighthouse Labs which also do the Pillar 2 testing in the UK.

Can you explain why "false positives" go down among vaccinated patients?

> fatalities should (and even then many people get marked for COVID deaths because they test positive yet die of something unrelated)

Evidence for "many"? We have a couple of metrics for UK deaths from COVID: deaths within 28 days of a positive test, and root cause / contributing causes ("of" vs "with") on death certificates. These are imperfect in both directions (for example, some patients who die spend more than 28 days in hospital with COVID, meaning the 28 day metric undercounts them) but agree that the UK has seen around 70000 deaths of COVID.

[rusk]

Sorry but this is derived from actual contact tracing (not the UK where they haven’t really bothered but a culturally similar neighbour) - but of course you’re so outraged that’s what matters more.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/09/k-overloo...

This article is about 6 months old, and we’ve moved on even more since then. It’s so saddening to see so many bright people unable to keep up.

Tell me again about Sweden sad lol

[djsumdog]

Can you post a link on the evidence for contact tracking in the UK and the data analysis please? I genuinely want to see it.

Edit: the poster updated the post with an article rather than adding a comment. It wasn't there when I commented. Also an article from The Atlantic isn't data analysis.

[rusk]

Sorry. Ran out of comments. Wasn’t trying to engage with you though so much as flesh out my argument. Good Luck!