This is very hard for me to judge, but I think it depends on the issue to some degree. IOW the Left as a whole, I think, is much more comfortable seeing conspiracies and abuse in the private sector. The Right with government. I can’t remember what the issue was…something to do with government restricting alternative health products, herbal, etc. And this wonderful collaboration developed between people from both sides and some from extremely distant positions on the political spectrum. I noticed a bit of this around Trump/Sanders followers, where there was some grudging respect for what were being treated as the other teams out of the box candidate.
I still see rebellious and critical factions on both sides, but it seems like the possibilities for odd bedfellow coalitions is disappearing. Everything is so binary these days.
I don’t think the Left wants to notice just how influencable he products of research are, because then, for them, everything becomes religion and we can’t count on experts.
Well, that’s where we are. Just because it is science doesnt’ mean that the technology is a good one. Just because the data seems to indicate X, this doesn’t mean that there wasn’t undue influence by power brokers.
I’ve come from the left into a place where I can’t really tell anyone what I believe, the range of beliefs, or I’ll be seen as evil/mad by everyone,
OH, as an aside, a lot of the new agers were de facto right wing and still are.
I have some nits here, but I basically concede this point. I thought fever was more harmful than it is. In my defense, it does seem to be more harmful in children, and that’s the context of every fever I’ve seen in the last 4 years, and I let that influence my thoughts about fever more generally. Thanks for letting me know.
Nits:
I think you are right that I overestimate the harmfulness of fever, but I still think the cost of fever is not zero. If we’re using an evolutionary approach, we should expect fever to be sub-optimal, otherwise why not always run hotter? Why not vary temperatures more frequently, as other organisms do? Partly I’m sure it’s that warmer temperatures are more expensive metabolically, but varying temperatures would be an efficient way to do that if a higher temperature had no other costs, and in some cases it might be metabolically cheaper to run hot, e.g. less need to sweat. Maintaining a narrow band of temperature as we do is itself fairly metabolically expensive, from which I conclude that leaving the normal temperature range is costly in some way that it’s been disfavored by evolution.
That fevers helped in the evolutionary context might not mean much to their usefulness against modern diseases. For example, SARS-CoV-19 appears to have come from bats, who regularly have 100-105 degree body temperatures. A virus evolved to survive in that organism might actually prefer a feverish human to a non-feverish human. That’s speculation, but the point is this: an immune response evolved in an African ape might not be well-suited to a disease evolved in Asian bats.
It doesn’t appear that fever reducers have a significant negative effect on health or recovery either, which may support the second point above (if modern diseases aren’t affected by fever), or may support the first (if there are costs that sometimes outweigh the benefits).
Fevers do get dangerous around 104+, and COVID fevers can be in that range. If you have COVID, you may still be well-served to take fever reducers.
I do think this is what I’ve been calling “an inflection point in history”, and I think the world will be permanently changed by this. But I think it’s easy to overestimate the extent of that change. I can’t endorse a picture of total breakdown when I can have almost anything delivered to my house in a few days. That takes a huge supply chain that is still functioning, relying on laws and labor and institutions that all roughly equate to ‘society’.
There are definitely many areas where things aren’t functioning so well, but I still think those are marginal. Restaurants and local shops have very high turnover in good times, those industries will rebound once lockdown ends, even if none of the current businesses survive.
Definitely, but government has been changing so fast the past few years I have trouble separating some of the darker trends into COVID-related and right-nationalism-related.
But I think the biggest thing that COVID will do for government is increase uncertainty. The probability of an authoritarian turn as a result of the crisis has increased, but so has the probability of a significant safety-net socialist turn. Even in the Trump era, prior to the pandemic the space of future possibility was pretty tightly contained. Now it is much less so. Social inertia matters a lot, and lockdown will break a lot of inertia and free/force a lot of people to pick a new direction.
I think uncertainty explains this too. Decision-makers often have less uncertainty than the general public (although increasingly less so as information proliferates), but even where they do, there is still substantial uncertainty. We don’t know what will work. If COVID regularly produces a 105+ degree fever, then acetaminophen is a good recommendation; if the risk of mask shortages is greater than the risk posed by people not wearing masks, then telling people not to buy and wear masks is a good call; if 3 million people will die otherwise, then a lockdown that causes a depression might be a good idea. But all of those are based on future projections that can’t be certain, and as facts are revealed previous decisions can look stunningly foolish.
Citation needed. What death rate are you talking about, CFR or estimated fatality per infection? And when you say it’s very low, is that relative to seasonal flu, or to ebola?
It has been suggested that those diseases can be partly explained by the evolutionary bottleneck of slave ships: the arduous journey tended to select for people who retain salt, which in their descendants looks like hypertension. I think we could tell a similar story about diabetes, which from my limited understanding involves a decrease in sugar metabolization, which might help ration energy during starvation.
So your “assume” is about expectation, while CDC’s “presume” is just fake? It sounds like maybe you’ve taken [their] quote out of context to make it appear as something it was not.
First, note that you’re giving up 2/3s of your objection here. You implicitly acknowledge that alcoholism and suicide are bad comparisons.
Again, this isn’t true. COVID presents serious symptoms in all age groups and has a mortality rate as high or higher than flu for the least affected demographics, and orders of magnitude for those in mid-life on. Mid-life, not moribund.
The word “fully” is doing all the work here. You can pick a safer car, you can drive slower, you can wear your seatbelt, you can buy a white car or other high-visibility color, etc. All those individual choices will decrease individual risks.
But it’s true that there is a large residue of risk that can only be addressed through collective action. We could restrict driving to those who can prove that they are capable of driving safely, require registration of every car on the road, and have police patrol the roads to make sure that cars are registered and drivers are driving safely. We can forbid driving in lots of places, and limit it to certain speeds or directions in others. We can and do take a lot of steps that significantly reduce the danger posed by driving. Indeed, we’ve continuously improved vehicle safety and regulations to reduce the death rate, and the rate has fallen dramatically in terms of population and miles traveled. The current death total is about 40k/year, lower than expected deaths from COVID. (Also, speculative, but I still think driving is going to be functionally illegal in a generation once automated alternatives mature)
On the other side, eliminating all driving would be much worse for the economy than the current lockdown is.
To sum up, driving an example of an activity that produces fewer deaths, would cost more to ban, and that we’re already taking significant collective action to make safer. What is your point?
Kids are still ok up to 103, 104. F. IOW immediately reducing fevers and muscle discomfort in children is still bad treatment. It comes from kindness, but it is actually wrong.
Which is why we lie around. I am not suggesting that fevers are a good strategy in general. And if we had a higher body temperature than viruses and bacteria would have likely evolved to thrive at slightly higher temperatures. We are tired, usually when sick, and even more often when there is a fever, because our bodies are engaged in an activity. Fighting an intruder. It’s not good to fill your stomach with stomach acids all the time, but it is good to do it when you have food there. This no doubt creates energetic and nutritional costs, but it’s what we do when we have food in there. I suppose what I am saying is that while I don’t think I have denied there is a cost, we spend that ‘money’ for a reason. And inhibiting that reason needs good justification. And while eating and stomach acids are everyday, and diseases are more exceptional, the immune system is running all the time and it has a cost, all the time. We’d probably need less nutrition and could use energy for other things if we had no immune system running at all. So, there’s always cost and benefits. I can’t think of a reason not to spend or consider something is negive if you are fighting a virus and it fights the virus. If it gets too high, fine. Though I would recommend lowering fevers in other ways. A doctor actually made a house call when I had a fever over 106 as a kid. He rubbed me with alcohol. My fever dropped and I felt better. And while this may have made me a safer environment for the virus, it did not, like those medicines inhibit other parts of my immune response.
Having a big brain has a cost. Having children that have less built in knowledge, more plastic brains and greater dependence than other animal babies also has a cost.
In this case we have a cost that has survived natural selection culling.
Of course in individual cases and reactions we may be quite right to override what is a generalized benefit of evolution. But as a rule, no. And it looked lke the public had a rule. There was no general warning the corona was killing people with fevers. Those people were ready to make themselves feel better.
Bats get higher body temperatures when they fly, and when they fly the body temperature goes up into our fever range. I don’t know what that would mean in terms of what an effective virus would be. Me, I wouldn’t wanna fly if I had the flu. I certainly don’t want to run.
So, we’d have to know a lot more. While it is possible that a disease is not helped by a fever or even the fever helps the disease, this is generally not the case. And again, better ways to lower body temperature exist. You can start just with how you dress, the temperature of the liquids you drink, to luke warm washes, to cool washes and more. And then there’s things like Yarrow tea which is antiviral and lowers fevers. But that’s getting into a whole nother ball of wax.
If it’s true that recent viruses have origins in bats and we do better without fevers, it is weird that NO one has said this to us. And while the only study I read during the Covid period said that young men did worse if they took these over the counter drugs, older viruses, given the amount of people taking them, should have produced enough data to at least mention this. I feel like this is stretching.
I am not sure how you know this. I also can’t see how something that inhibits immune response, such as in the creation of antibodies, would be a good idea. And the WHO seems to share this concern.
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Carelas, come on. They could have told us: take a fever reducer when your fever hits ________. I did not get a fever that high. I was around 102. There would be no good reason for me to take a fever reducer. People will take them for muscle aches. Covid has caused pretty much every level of fever from nearly nothing to danger levels. I never said no one should break their fevers. I am pretty sure from the beginning I have been saying do it when the fever is dangerous.
The current policy was primarily, by governments, to be silent on the issue, despite all sorts of evidence that these pills were not helpful in cases of non-dangerous fevers, and likely negatively affecting the immune system. Alternative treatments, including ones that have no negative side effects, like garlic pills, they did take a moment to criticize. Even though there is evidence that the latter might help and there is absolutely no evidence despite decades of widespread use that the former fight viruses.
That’s nothing, a drop in the bucket. Go ahead and compare it to seasonal flu, car accidents, alcoholism, lung cancer.
Now, this is the point that you should admit you’re wrong, and admit to the hoax, scam, lie, that has and is destroying 4 years of economic growth. THAT is the real damage and crime here. THAT is what we should be “panicking” about. We should also be “panicking” about how this fakeness and hysteria, has cost people their jobs, cost the credibility of Mass Media Mob (liars), and will further handicap the next generation of US citizens.
The Pagan world was about dignity, honor and virtue.
The Christian world was about goodness, holiness and righteousness.
The old world was about spiritual, supernatural religion and ethics, morality, whereas the new world is about material, natural religion and, health.
Incrementally we partly got away from ethics and morality, first with libertarianism (don’t tread on me), then with progressivism (don’t hate), along with absurdism, existentialism and nihilism.
We no longer measure people by how good they are, so much as by how sick they are.
What’s the difference between goodness and health?
Goodness is more intangible, it’s about how we treat others and ourselves, whereas health is more tangible, it’s about the condition or state of our bodies, minds and the environment.
I foresee a new authoritarianism emerging, where the sick are forcibly quarantined, treated or terminated, either for their own sake, or for the sake of keeping their sickness and its deleterious effects from spreading.
Where doctors and psychiatrists are the new priests.
Where they’re given the power to forcibly test, quarantine and treat us for an increasingly long list of illnesses both real, and imagined.
Where the world becomes one big clinic, hospital and insane asylum.
The asylum, clinic and hospital won’t be something you visit in an emergency or on occasion.
It’ll be all around you, inescapable, varying degrees of it everywhere.
The beginning of a brand new society, not based on traditional religion, or an ideology, but on psychiatry and science itself.
Psychiatric and scientific medicine will be the new ideology.
They will force us to be hygienic, sanitary, to take our antibiotics, drugs and vaccines, to only think sane, rational thoughts, to only feel sane, rational feelings.
And along with medical tyranny, environmental tyranny will accelerate, and the nanny state; no guns, wear your seatbelt, etcetera.
There will be new environmental hoaxes in addition to climate change.
There’ll be geological change, oceanic change, all manner of manmade changes.
Earthquakes are our fault, we need to reduce inessential driving, walking, hopping, skipping and jumping to stop the earth from shaking.
Tornadoes are our fault, we need to eliminate inessential flapping, fluttering and flying.
Tsunamis are our fault, we need to eliminate inessential boating and swimming.
They’ll get involved in every detail of our physical, mental and environmental health and safety.
How does this… suggestion, account for many more numerous cases of diabetes and hypertension within Caucasian peoples? as well as a rise in cancer and so many more other ‘modern’ illnesses…
…and the cases in the Caribbean have very little African ancestry… if any at all, and allergies there are also on a mass increase, as it is in the Western world, or in those of us that have been living a Western life.
Who’s trying to poison us to extinction? here in the West…
Actually, to prevent tens of thousands of alcohol deaths, all you have to do is shut down or restrict liquor stores, bars and pubs, but to prevent tens of thousands of Covid deaths, you have to shut down half the economy, so it makes even more sense to shut down or restrict places that sell and serve alcohol than to shut down half the economy.
As for suicides, admittedly that’s not the greatest example, from what I gather, why people commit suicide is sort of intangible.
Firstly, I don’t accept their statistics for reasons I’ve already given all throughout this thread, they’ve assumed one of the worst case and least likely scenarios would’ve happened had we not declared martial law.
Secondly, I said for the most part, the vast majority of Covid deaths are people in their 70s and 80s with multiple morbidities, whereas the vast majority of driving deaths are relatively young, healthy people.
None of the restrictions we’ve placed on cars have hurt the economy, they may have even helped it, but the restrictions we placed due to Covid have devastated the economy.
Due to shoddy testing, the number of Covid deaths has likely been exaggerated.
But eliminating all inessential driving to prevent driving deaths would be less economically devastating than eliminating all inessential everything to prevent Covid deaths.
Generally, in the early 21st century, I find the right tends to be more skeptical of big government than the left is skeptical of big business, whereas in the late 20th century, the left tended to be more skeptical of big business than the right was skeptical of big government.
Altho sometimes the right likes big government, like when it’s going after drug dealers terrorists.
However overall, the mainstream right and left are far too trusting of both big government and big business, or rather, they work for them.
Yup, where big government and big business intersect in ways that blatantly harm the people, that’s where the fringe left and the fringe right can find common ground against them, and the mainstream left and the mainstream right can find common ground in favor of them.
Well campaign Trump and campaign Sanders had some common ground, even tho one was a capitalist and the other a socialist.
Both of them were protectionists.
Campaign Trump was anti illegal immigration and campaign Sanders used to be anti illegal immigration before flip flopping.
Both were anti regime change wars.
Both portrayed themselves as antiestablishment, as outsiders, as champions of the people.
But president Trump is mostly a shill, and Sanders probably would’ve been a shill too if he were elected.
It’s more binary, which’s bad, but at least people may be a bit more willing to take a chance on fringe candidates than they were two or three decades back.
Yup, you’re like me in that you’re not politically tribal, you judge each issue and person on a case by case basis.
Unfortunately, we both know that’s not how most people are, and they’re easier to manipulate that way, but there’s little we can do about that.
Maybe birds are dropping out of trees because they’ve been poisoned? pigeons have been being culled for many years now.
There’s birds in my garden and those fuckers are breeding and multiplying like it’s going out of fashion. When they start dying, then I’ll know something’s up.
I think this is the original paper on the idea, but I can’t tell for sure. Wikipedia mentions a 1983 origin, but the source is a blog without a lot of detail. That article has a lot of problems, I did what I could but it needs more attention than I can give it.
Because genes that lead to hypertension exist in all populations, because they’ve been adaptive in many periods of human evolution. That’s true in African and European populations, and my understanding is they are similar in their rates of hypertension and heart disease. But slaves were subject to unique selection pressure, so the frequency of certain genetic tendencies changed as those tendencies influenced survival. So, the hypothesis goes, you see different rates of diseases with a genetic component.
The Caribbean has a lot of African ancestry, again mostly as a result of the slave trade and likely subject to similar bottlenecks. Is there some specific sub-population that you’re thinking of?
Why would allergies and hypertension have a common cause? Do they have the same epidemiology?
No one.
Yes.
I assume you acknowledge that we can find lots of stories circulating about people being mensches and good neighbors, and we could speculate that what will come from this is a UBI and universal healthcare and a soft socialist paradise on the nordic model. That too would be speculative fiction.
I’m not saying that such speculation is bad generally, but I think it’s important to differentiate it from a sober description of what’s happening.
Your analysis on this point is not rigorous and seems highly motivated. Your entire argument seems to be the use of the word “presumed”, as though finding an otherwise healthy elderly person dead of severe respiratory problems after contact with a known case of COVID and “presuming” that that person died of COVID is basically lying.
And undercounting is probably a much greater problem, exactly because they don’t make presumptions willy-nilly. Someone with severe asthma who dies alone is going to be hard to diagnose without a specific test for SARS-CoV-19, and so doesn’t get recorded as a COVID death.
I don’t see why this matters if the other people that get it die at a high rate. The rate at the low end is flu like, that’s a serious and kills a lot of people. But it goes up from there. It’s significantly more deadly than the flu, most of the deaths will be of the very old and infirm, but it’s still very deadly in other demographics by disease standards.
To put it another way, if the disease were uniformly deadly for everyone 45 and up, and that rate were the rate that we actually observe it killing 45 year olds, it would still be a serious pandemic. In reality, it’s even more deadly than that, and the majority of deaths are of old people just because it kills so many old people, and not because it doesn’t kill younger people at a significant rate.
So, this is question begging. Restrictions cost car companies a lot, they cost consumers a lot, the price of a car has increased a lot because of the restrictions we place on them. I agree that those haven’t hurt the economy, but then I think lockdown will help the economy relative to the alternative of letting a substantial part of the population die.
Essential does too much work here to really evaluate the claim. If we’re comparing what we’re not allowed to do now to a world where we can do all those things so long as we don’t drive to them, then yes, obviously that is a lesser restriction. If instead we are talking about restricting driving enough cut driving deaths to 1/4 their current level, then that could well cause a larger economic impact.
You seem to want to debate from a point of lack of sufficient knowledge, and I’ve never professed to being a teacher… and never that twain shall meet.
Mags is Caribbean, so let’s go down the slave angle… yawn. Not all Caribbeans have (much) African blood, and yet modern illnesses are rife… diet and lifestyle are key to not acquiring them, fact! as that would account for the world-wide mass rise in cases globally, and when diet and lifestyle are changed the symptoms subside.
Toxins are the cause, fact! Those with (more) African heritage have less health problems than their very-mixed counterparts actually, but you know otherwise?
While there are many, I think one in particular dominates in the west, and what they want is a totalitechnocratic superstate.
I think there’s probably some occult shit going on too, but it’s mysterious, by virtue of being the occult.
The exoteric agenda is easier to uncover than whatever esoteric agendas are going on.
No. You’re making things up and playing word games again just to save face.
One more time
Point 1:
Like you, I ‘assumed’ the tests were done correctly which is why most people didn’t register positive even though most people carry fragments of non-novel coronavirus DNA.
With me so far? We BOTH ‘assumed’ the tests were done correctly.
Since neither of us are professionals in this field and neither of us saw how each and every test was processed, we can only assume they were done correctly. I don’t think that this is a point worth arguing over again.
Point 2:
However, I’m stating categorically that the CDC numbers are false/fake/misleading/incorrect/wrong and possibly even fraudulent.
This is not an ‘assumption’ on my part. This is not an opinion or belief I hold. This is a fact based on the evidence from the horses mouth.
The CDC’s website states: “Data include both confirmed and presumptive positive cases of COVID-19 reported to CDC or tested at CDC since January 21, 2020, with the exception of testing results for persons repatriated to the United States from Wuhan, China and Japan. State and local public health departments are now testing and publicly reporting their case”
Since we have no idea on how many people have been deemed ‘presumptive positive cases’ then the numbers are unreliable at best and and possibly fraudulent.
I rest my case.
I think the driver was probably on his way to hospital. I think we can presume he was going to be tested for COVID-19. If he was going to be tested for COVID-19 we can presume he had symptoms. Since he had COVID-19 symptoms and passed away, we have reported this as another tragic COVID-19 death. Ridiculous? Of course it is but not much more ridiculous than the way CDC gets its official numbers.
I wonder how many people who are dying of seasonal flu now are being counted as covid deaths. I have heard that a lot of comorbidities and other flus are being batched with corona, so there are less people now being killed by seasonal flu than are generally, and also of heart disease. Though I can’t find a breakdown online.
pigeons have been being culled for many years now.