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by fallingknife 1881 days ago
> why are there still plane flights 12 months in to the pandemic? Someone fill me in on what I've missed; this seems to be not taking the situation seriously. Are these variants not going to be travelling between countries by plane and ship?

Because the virus is more than an order of magnitude less dangerous than initial estimates, but we are stuck with the legacy decisions made back then in a political environment where admitting you were wrong is seen as suicide. This is why each successive "lockdown" has basically been "do like last time, but more half assed." The reality of the situation is that the virus has a mortality rate of around 0.3% of which half are over 80. This is just not worth shutting down large swathes of the economy indefinitely for, but, politically, you can't say that. So here we are.
2 comments
howinteresting 1881 days ago
You are commenting on a thread that is literally about an entire country's healthcare system collapsing because of this virus. People in their 30s and 40s who would otherwise have survived with appropriate medical care, are dying because they can't get hospital beds.

The raw facts are that lockdowns and other COVID restrictions saved millions of lives. I'm open to arguments about other balancing factors but they must come from an underlying view that some restrictions on personal liberty are completely legitimate in emergencies. Skeptics like the signatories of the "Great Barrington Declaration" should learn from India, take the L and have some more humility next time.

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sigstoat 1881 days ago
> The reality of the situation is that the virus has a mortality rate of around 0.3% of which half are over 80.

...when everyone can receive medical treatment in a roughly modern-ish hospital.

the concern from the start of the "flatten the curve" discussions has been to ensure that the number of simultaneous severe infections does not exceed the number of hospital beds, so that we stay at merely 0.3%.

(and also to keep the rate of transmission low enough that we're not providing ideal conditions for the virus to evolve.)

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