[namanaggarwal]

For those commenting that it's just common cold and about herd immunity, I think we should not miss out on overload on our medical system.

This is what happened in India, due to high number of cases (even if mild) the medical infrastructure completely crashed under the load and lead to far more deaths than just a flu could have caused.

Wear mask and stay indoors if possible

[throwawaylinux]

Politicians have had time to start improving healthcare systems. Corporations that currently pay no taxes could help to fund this stuff. Billions of dollars of war industry purchases could have been slightly delayed. Billionaires could have chipped in a bit more, and we could have started ratcheting up capacities and capabilities of hospitals and healthcare systems. But no it seems that's all teetering on the brink of collapse for some astounding reason.

So it's become quite clear to me that we are not, in fact, "all in this together". The situation is that the ruling class are in it for themselves, and they are demanding everybody else lose their jobs and businesses and we comply and mask up and shut ourselves in, so that they all may carry on as usual and refuse to invest our own money in our healthcare systems.

Given what we know about this situation now, I think perhaps a better approach might be to instead not comply with these demands. Ridicule and hound and vote out anybody who insists that after two years of complying we have to continue to shut ourselves away because the healthcare systems they have not adequately invested in are still on the brink of collapse.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

I don't understand how owning yourself fixes/changes anything.

[throwawaylinux]

That's no problem people who are petrified and happy to be owned by others may continue locking themselves inside their homes. I'm not asking let alone demanding that everybody or anybody else do this, it's just a possible alternative I suggested.

[chimprich]

> happy to be owned by others

> continue locking themselves inside their homes

This kind of melodramatic hyperbole makes it very hard to consider your argument seriously.

[throwawaylinux]

> > happy to be owned by others

The poster I replied to made some weird "argument" about owning ourselves not helping anything.

> > continue locking themselves inside their homes

Not melodrama or hyperbole. Keep shutting yourself in if you are so petrified that you think everybody else must "wear masks and stay indoors if possible" in response to new covid variants as OP said. It's a great way to reduce contact and minimize your own risk.

[chimprich]

> Not melodrama or hyperbole. Keep shutting yourself in if you are so petrified

You don't see the contradiction in what you have written here? You're trying to belittle people taking precautions by saying that they're "petrified". You're using emotive language to try to force through a weak argument.

Obviously you can't stay indoors all of the time. People need to get food, fix their houses, and so on. People who are especially vulnerable to the virus are the ones who have to leave their homes the most for essential medical care.

[danaris]

I'm sorry, what?

"The ruling class has proven that they don't actually care about anyone else"—yes, that's a reasonable message to take away from the past year and a half...

"...So we should stop abiding by all the good medical advice and just party" how the hell do you come to that conclusion? The reasonable conclusion to come to from your first two paragraphs is something along the lines of "So we should protest the politicians who want to deny the science, boycott the companies that are actively making things worse, and push for real societal change that prioritizes human lives and well-being over corporate profits."

You're basically saying, "The very wealthy just want us all to shut up and die, but screw them! We should all get out there and die very loudly!"

[prohobo]

The interventions promoted by the ruling class to "curb the pandemic" have resulted in 20 million people going into starvation in the poorest countries, restrictions and hardships only being placed on the poor in the richer countries, and no resolution in sight.

Meanwhile, half the population has taken it upon themselves to start dehumanizing the rest because of politics, and all the money in society is funneling upwards to the ruling class while small businesses collapse.

What exactly do you not understand about this? There is no "us" in this situation, just division and demands.

[throwawaylinux]

I'm not sure what it is exactly you are unclear on, but that is certainly not what I am saying. I'm saying what I wrote no more and no less. If you want to reduce it to a quip it would be the exact opposite, we should get out and live.

[danaris]

"Getting out", as in going outside unmasked, abandoning precautions, if done en masse, will kill many, many people.

To believe otherwise is, as someone else further down said to another person who, like you, wants to just pretend this is all over, magical thinking.

[throwawaylinux]

There's tradeoffs for everything. We weren't all grandma killing fascists in the previous years for not locking ourselves in our homes and wearing masks and not going to large gatherings and shutting down businesses in response to influenza. Yet the flu killed many many people every year.

We're not hateful anti science bigots for daring to drive automobiles despite that statistically contributing to killing many many people.

There are safe and effective vaccines available and people can make up their own minds to use effective masks and isolate themselves, shut down their businesses, and take advantage of all the online and remote services that now pretty much means they never have to leave their house or see another living person if that is what they choose, and that's fine they can make that choice. That's not the responsibility of everybody else though. This strange collectivism where apparently I am responsible for the choices of others and that I must change my lifestyle to keep you safe is where things are going way off the rails, in my opinion. You keep you safe.

[chimprich]

> We're not hateful anti science bigots for daring to drive automobiles

In most developed countries there are strict rules about driving. You are expected and required to drive according to certain rules to keep other people safe. There are rules for driving because the right of other people to not get injured or killed are considered more important than your right to do what you feel like.

Do you think restricting your right to drive drunk on a pavement is "strange collectivism"?

[incrudible]

> Wear mask and stay indoors if possible

For all we know about transmission, you should stay outdoors, if possible. If this isn't possible, maximize ventilation. Limit contacts in general. Masks have a very modest impact on transmission.

[ChuckNorris89]

>Masks have a very modest impact on transmission.

Please stop propagating this BS.

If someone positive coughs in your direction but wears an FFP2 mask on and so do you, then the chance of you getting infected is much lower. That's why it's mandatory in Austria and why healthcare workers wear them, not because it's fashionable but to limit the spread of airborne disease which COVID is one.

Granted, Austria failed to contain the spread of COVID, but not due to the FFP2 enforcement but mostly due to skeptics who refused vaccination, social distancing and other measures, plus lots of pointless and half-assed measures from the government that were more of a theater and were enforced too late in an attempt to not piss people off and not hurt the economy which turned into a self fulfilling prophecy and a negative feedback loop, creating more skeptics and more infectious in the long run.

[merpnderp]

"Please stop propagating this BS." At least in the US hardly anyone has or uses FFP2 level masks (N95 here) and the government has not promoted them (except on the last page of the CDC page on masks with half a sentence saying they're better). And the data on cloth masks does show their effectiveness is much lower than initially advertised.

If the parent was speaking about the US, then they weren't propagating BS, as hardly anyone speaks of N95's when talking about masks. I assume it is because the government ran a massive ad campaign to get people to not wear them in the beginning.

[ChuckNorris89]

> I assume it is because the government ran a massive ad campaign to get people to not wear them in the beginning.

They said the the same thing in Europe, in order to prevent opportunists from scalping them and the general population from hoarding them, so the healthcare workers would have access to them.

IMHO, intentionally deceiving the population in order to save masks for healthcare workers was a terribly short sighted move which cause more long term damage to the credibility of the governments when they pushed for compulsory mask wearing after the supply caught up. They could have been upfront about it and use every possible legal and gray-area channel to secure mask supplies before they could fall into the hands of opportunists, but instead, they chose to lie about it and treat everyone like dumb kids hoping people would fall for it.

They did the same thing again when Israel announced the protection of the Pfizer vaccine is wailing and a third dose is needed but the EU governments said that's not needed, and then backtracking on that statement a few months later and now making it mandatory.

Do you know the story of the boy who cried wolf? Yeah, this back-and-forth on the efficacy of masks and vaccines is exactly the ammunition Covid-deniers and anti-vaxxers needed and the useless governments just gave it to them on a silver platter.

[merpnderp]

The irony, at least in the US, is that the ad campaign against using N95 masks was completely unnecessary as they were diverted in the supply chain to hospitals and government. There were no masks to be had at the hardware store or retail goods.

This pandemic has shown our public health organizations are not very good at their jobs.

[incrudible]

> This pandemic has shown our public health organizations are not very good at their jobs.

They don't abide by the first law of holes. If they stopped at that one "noble lie", maybe we'd be in a better place.

[dathinab]

More like:

> Wear mask and stay (in your) home.

As in no contact > contact outside > contact inside

Also assuming you are not in tight crowds outside or "outside but bad ventilated" areas (e.g. tends):

longer contact outside without mask > longer contact inside with mask

Not because masks don't work but because being outside has such a strong effect (assuming you are not in a crowded area, or some area which wrt. ventilation is only pseudo-outside or you stick very close to other persons outside of a crowd, or you insist to always be direct facing a person instead of being beside that person etc.)

Or in other words beside outside being good ventilated you also have often less chances to directly cough at the face of a person, as you e.g. walk besides a person when taking a walk and activities being less crowded and as such it's easier to cough in a direction where no one is close by.

It also means that there are good reasons to ware masks if you are in a crowded area outside, it's just most "outside activities" are not in very crowded areas and hence outside infection rates are way lower. We are also less outside then inside etc.

Or at least that is how I understand it.

[smallerfish]

> Masks have a very modest impact on transmission.

False.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7883189/

[timmf]

I do agree with all your points, except:

> Masks have a very modest impact on transmission

They are an effective measure which has lead to significant decrease in infection rates.

There are of course parameters like the type of mask.

[mathverse]

How many people are even using those masks correctly? There's a lot of people going around with old and contaminated masks or wearing them improperly.

[ceejayoz]

"People aren't using them properly" is an argument for better education, not ditching the things.

[mathverse]

And I have mentioned ditching the things where? It's an argument for not "relying that much" on an unreliable use of such tool like masks.

[xphilter]

If masks didn’t work, surly we’d all have anecdotes of people catching covid while wearing a masks. I literally have not heard of a single story. Everyone I know who has caught covid was maskless (not even stories of people wearing masks poorly).

[dageshi]

I imagine they mean, avoid leaving home as much as possible.

[vaylian]

> Masks have a very modest impact on transmission

Do you have a source for that?

[incrudible]

The (to my knowledge) largest study on community transmission finds ~10% reduction:

https://www.poverty-action.org/sites/default/files/publicati...

There are many other studies that find no or modest reduction. We need to accept lower results as an upper bound to effectiveness, especially when it comes to how the average person uses masks, versus how a health care professional.

[chimprich]

I had a quick scan of that paper and read

"The results in all specifications are the same: we estimate a roughly 9% decline in symptomatic seroprevalence in the treatment group (adjusted prevalence ratio (aPR) = 0.91 [0.82, 1.00]) for a 29 percentage point increase in mask wearing over 8 weeks."

So when mask use increased 29%, symptom prevalence reduced by 9%? That doesn't seem quite the same argument as the one you're making.

> We need to accept lower results as an upper bound to effectiveness

Why?

[incrudible]

> So when mask use increased 29%, symptom prevalence reduced by 9%? That doesn't seem quite the same argument as the one you're making.

It is a real word example. It's not an increase of 29%, it's an absolute difference of 29%. Specifically, mask wearing in the intervention villages was 42%, in the control 13%. That is, in a hypothetical village where mask wearing approaches 100%, you might expect something like a 20-30% reduction, assuming a linear correlation. Again, that's not the real world.

> Why?

If an intervention is effective, the effect needs to reproduce. If it doesn't, the larger effect likely occurred by chance. Publication bias promotes positive results and inhibits negative or null results.

You have the same problem with all these COVID drugs. Remdesivir appeared to have an effect in early trials, now it's proven useless. Molnupiravir was initially report to be 50% effective, now it's down to 30%. At the other end of the aisle, you see that Ivermectin has many small studies showing remarkable effectiveness, but the larger ones show little to no effect.

If you apply scientific standards, you must apply them across the board. You must not let wishful thinking guide your decisions.

[mrtesthah]

Certainly if you wear loose fitting cloth masks like most people I see; they need to be FFP2-rated or N95, tight-fitting, and sanitized (heat, ozone, or UVC, etc.) or replaced between uses.

Otherwise in general, they do work.

https://www.kxan.com/news/coronavirus/do-face-masks-work-her...

[crimsoneer]

https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj-2021-068302

It's probably about a 10% reduction in incidence. Which I guess is quite modest in comparison to, say, vaccines.

[corinroyal]

Actually, a recent metastudy found that masking reduces transmission by 53%, which is huge. https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20211118/mask-wearing-cuts-n...

[teekert]

"maximize ventilation", have you seen the gas prices lately ;)

[mathverse]

I am sorry but no. I have already lost 2 years of my life just following and obeying the orders. Enough is enough.

This is not on me to solve. The government had enough time to convince everyone to vaccinate or prepare the healthcare sector for influx of cases of unvaccinated.

[gruturo]

I hate to break it to you, but a virus doesn't really care if you're sick and tired of the situation. It sucks, yeah. No, it's not OK to stop caring only because it's been so long. The socially responsible behavior is still the best course for an individual, even if surrounded by morons.

[junon]

"I'm inconvenienced and no longer care if others die because of it!"

[mathverse]

"I am not arguing in good faith nor do I have an ounce of empathy for someone that have not seen family and loved ones for more than 2 years".

[junon]

I'll be sure to tell that to my neighbor who lost both of her parents and a sister to COVID before the vaccines were available. I'm sure she'll understand.

If omicron is actually a breakthrough variant, I'm sure all the people who are about to die will also understand how hurt your feelings are.

I'm merely pointing out the selfishness in your stance and how harmful it is to the overall efforts of the medical community. That's not bad faith.

We've all had an absolutely shit time. You're not special.

[mathverse]

Medical community should not be the only one making decisions that have such a massive impact on society.

>I'm merely pointing out the selfishness in your stance and how harmful it is to the overall efforts of the medical community. That's not bad faith. We've all had an absolutely shit time. You're not special.

Why is your right keeping families separated not selfish?

[junon]

> Medical community should not be the only one making decisions that have such a massive impact on society.

Perhaps not when it's economic, technological, wartime, etc. Sure. But when it comes to the healthcare of everyone (not just the individual), they absolutely should. The problem is that politicians seem to think they know more about healthcare than the experts do.

> Why is your right keeping families separated not selfish?

My family has been separated, too. By almost half the planet. Your victim appeal doesn't work here.

[RobertoG]

There is not realistic healthcare infrastructure that could compensate for exponential grow of patients.

[Dumblydorr]

How was the government supposed to convince anti-vaxxers to do what they believe contains micro chips or what they believe is worse than the virus itself? This isn't on the government, this is on anti-vaxxers for swallowing garbage information, hook line and sinker.

And you didn't lose 2 years of your life. You're alive, you didn't die due to the pandemic, did you? That's much less than can be said for 5 million others, mostly older or unhealthy to begin with. They're dead because people didn't follow the guidelines early and it kept spreading and spreading.

So, be grateful you're not dead, and do your part to increase collective resilience.

[techdragon]

Two years isn’t an inconceivable time to build additional hospital capacity and attempt efforts at preventing normal causes of medial and nursing school drop outs in order to bolster the number of adequately trained medical professionals available to staff those hospitals. In fact a lot of countries have an artificial cap on the number of doctors and nurses which is driven by various medical professional associations, the government could easily have said “STFU, well take as many doctors and nurses as the universities can graduate” to these “industry self regulations”.

[chimprich]

> Two years isn’t an inconceivable time to build additional hospital capacity

The limiting factor is medical professionals, not adding buildings. You can't train a doctor in 2 years.

> preventing normal causes of medial and nursing school drop outs in order to bolster the number of adequately trained medical professionals

What's the drop-out rate? How would you "prevent" this? Do people drop out because they can't cope with the role, or some other reason? What would the overall effect of this policy be in terms of numbers? I suspect it would be minimal.

[techdragon]

I did mention the fact that in many countries the medical students are put through a course structure designed not just around individual achievement on simple academic competency, but aimed and structured sometimes explicitly capped to only graduate a fixed number of doctors. Many put forward justification for this such as “there aren’t enough placements in the field once they graduate” and other semi-valid arguments to put downward pressure on the number of doctors able to and willing to (many migrate to other non “doctor” fields after the first few years of medical school) finish a medical school education as a doctor capable of working with patients on the front line.

I’m well aware it’s not possible to train a decent doctor in two years, which is why my point was more that they could have applied positive pressure like merit based scholarship opportunities or any of a number of other ways to assist students in the second/third years of medical school to stay on track to graduate as doctors and nurses. The point is that there’s never been a shortage of people trying to become Doctors, we have social, educational and economic effects in play that limit the number of people that manage to get there all of which the governments around the world could have done things about.

[tomp]

> You can't train a doctor in 2 years

Why not? Do you really need a "doctor" to treat COVID, or just a "person trained in treating COVID and putting people on the respirator"?

Case in point, in Italy in 2020, at the peak of the first wave ("Bergamo"), they fast-tracked final year medical students. Looks like the change is permanent [1]. So clearly "you can't doctor in X years" (AFAIK 6-7 years in most of Europe) was wrong before the pandemic. We can and should do better.

[1] https://pmj.bmj.com/content/96/1137/375

[corinroyal]

Maybe if more people voted for the party that typically funds healthcare, instead of the one that tends to defund healthcare, we would be further along on hospital capacity. There's only so much democrats can do when republicans insist on opposing everything sensible just because the hated opposition supports it.

[techdragon]

That’s certainly one element of what’s happened in the USA… but I was trying to keep a more global perspective as the fact we are clearly watching the development of what may become an endemic infection like the seasonal influenza virus waves currently are makes it more clear than ever that in the long term this is a massive global issue we need to be coordinating better on.

The global nature of the situation makes any solutions focused on a single nation and their own citizens inadequate as they will just be eventually defeated by the natural mutant strains developing elsewhere. In fact “more doctors and nurses and hospital beds because we’re just going to let it happen” is the only local to national level strategy that has any long term ability to make a difference if the virus continues on its course to become endemic.

[blain]

For starters I would want my government to change the narrative. They should do their own independent research and present their own facts. Instead they blindly buy vaccines from US and repeat the agenda as everyone else.

There is way too much politics involved. Pandemic should make people naturally empathic not forced by their governments to blindly obey.

[mathverse]

>How was the government supposed to convince anti-vaxxers to do what they believe contains micro chips or what they believe is worse than the virus itself? This isn't on the government, this is on anti-vaxxers for swallowing garbage information, hook line and sinker.

This is solely on the government. It's immoral to keep vaccinated people in uncertainty and include them in any sort of lockdowns.

>And you didn't lose 2 years of your life. You're alive, you didn't die due to the pandemic, did you? That's much less than can be said for 5 million others, mostly older or unhealthy to begin with. They're dead because people didn't follow the guidelines early and it kept spreading and spreading.

This is not arguing in good faith. Healthy people in their 30s are not dying. Of all the 0.5m children infected in Israel only 200 were severe cases.

>So, be grateful you're not dead, and do your part to increase collective resilience.

I already did my part. Now my part will be attending a demo with all those "antivaxx / 5G chips believing people" and I will fight for my right to live a normal life.

[chimprich]

Threats don't disappear just because you feel the solution is inconvenient to you.

[lobocinza]

Covid is not the only threat. And what is being labeled as convenience sometimes is just physical/mental health. How I'm supposed to exercise, be healthy and productive by staying indoors all the time? Also, am I supposed to substitute IRL social activities with video calls and social media?

Don't get me wrong, I know there's some sort of middle ground but I wanted to provide food for thought.

[Bud]

"You lost"? You?

This isn't about you. And those 2 years are sunk costs for all of us.

You're engaging in magical thinking, here. We can't afford it. It's self-centered. And it does nobody any good, most especially not you. Might get you killed, though.

As an aside, no, the healthcare "sector" is not at all prepared, it has never been prepared, and it can't magically be made prepared, either. The only solution there is to avoid overloading the system. There aren't any other solutions. So rational people will continue to argue for all of the mitigation measures that we know are effective. Whether you like it or not. It's just as much "on you" to participate in that as it is "on" all of the rest of us.

[_moof]

Over 800,000 people in Europe have lost a lot more than two years.

I understand that it's been a long time and you're frustrated, but this simply isn't over yet, and the consequences are real.

[kingkawn]

You’ll learn the hard way then not to address nature at your convenience

[Mistletoe]

It’s wild how few campaigns I am seeing for vaccination. I want 1950s era propaganda posters on every street corner and at every tv and radio break until we get these numbers to 100%.

[Bud]

We had plenty of posters and advertising on this. Vaccination rates were great in early 2021, before an entire major political party decided to cynically pretend that fighting vaccination was somehow defending "freedom".

[impendingchange]

But it is the common cold:

https://www.bitchute.com/video/UvuXzdVwj3ed/

Get lots of Vitamin D from sunlight and be sure to take your Vitamin C. Breathe lots of fresh, unfiltered air. Keep the curve low.

[nojito]

The common cold doesn't flood ICUs and pushed them to 125% capacity.