By the way I am enjoying watching more and more of you eventually come around to the point of view I have held for many, many months.

I think there's a lot of diversity of opinion and more sanity out there than say Twitter would have one believe but the politicization has been deranging some and scaring away others. It also seems like a lot of the institutions and public communicators charged with handling this are not very good, particularly in the US (FDA, Fauci, and so on).

It was hard a year ago to talk about the most basic concepts of QALY, mortality and how around 1% die every year, how $$ can be translated to human health, mitigation costs matter and can be worse than disease burden, a sick 95 year old dying is not the same as that person dying at age 22, etc. These things would probably have been considered "obvious" outside the context of the pandemic. In 2019 all the progressive people were up in arms over how certain disadvantaged groups earned less money or had lower educational attainment and then in 2020 they said it didn't matter if schools were closed down indefinitely and double digit percentages of the population were thrown out of work. If anybody cares to look back at this stuff 5-10 years in the future when it's no longer actively politicized it will look crazy.

Some of them aren't ready for the new normal (in urban areas) but hopefully every flu season there's a lockdown or at least forcing of the masks.

Well, if you have the sniffles, you probably should stay home, even if it's just the common cold. That should be the new normal.

I know you’re just trying to get a rise out of me, but the scary thing is that some people actually feel this way. Fortunately they are a small minority.

Agreed. There really isn't an excuse not to if you can work from home.

^ That depends on the “sniffles”. If you’ve got the flu or might then yeah, stay home. But not seasonal allergies.

Agree with this generally.

The thing is my work involves a lot of time spent with pharma companies and various healthcare providers, and looking at disease mortality, cost of drug development, treatment funding (whether Medicare reimbursement or various national health systems, etc), so I’ve been pretty dispassionate about Covid since the beginning. A lot of old people were going to die and that’s just life. Society was going to need to accept a fairly large number of deaths, ie, the ones where the costs to prevent them would just be too high. I am quite sure I mentioned QALY in explaining the fact that there has always been a consensus that a young person’s life was worth more than an old person’s. That’s just obvious and logical.

Unfortunately we had this mass/social media and political freak out that just took on a life of its own and it’s going to cause damage that lasts decades, rather than just, you know, 5-6% of old people dying a bit prematurely.

^ How will you ever develop immunity to viruses that we don't have vaccines to (which are most of them) if everybody did that?

School is a wonderful cauldron of viruses, a training ground for our young immune systems. We take for granted the immunity we have for so many viruses out there because we were exposed to them over and over again in our youth.

It is lack of prior exposure to viruses that killed off, tragically, millions of Native Americans centuries ago when Europeans brought those viruses over.

It's important to not get caught up in the false idea that infection = bad and lack of infection = good. We did not evolve in that environment. We need exposure to infectious antigens in order to build our immunity--it could save one's life some day.

Yes, I should clarify. If you have something that you reasonably suspect to be, or could reasonably be suspected to be, a contagious virus, then you should stay home. I'm not talking about seasonal allergies. This was true before COVID.

just as it is to not get caught up in thinking anyplace is anywhere near herd immunity to covid.

Agreed but that's not the point. We shouldn't be demanding negative PCR tests every time coughs or sneezes which can be any number of reasons.

Is that actually happening though? I have yet to need any type of vaccine pass/negative test, ect.
I live in California to top it off :haha:

^

https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-cYNhmqmtF...0/paranoid.jpg

yep. agree to all of that. there's a reason why schools are (not so jokingly) referred to as "germ factories".

little kids are supposed to get sick. it is literally how their young immune systems learn to deal with a germ-filled world.

now, i get it, covid is a novel thing, it's brand new and there is much we still don't know about it, so i don't have a big problem with taking some precautions regarding it.

but we need to MANAGE the risk, not eliminate it.



if my 5 year old wakes up one morning with a runny nose and no fever, there's like a 99% chance that it ain't covid. LET ME SEND HIS ASS TO SCHOOL!

99% is good enough.

if he's got a fever too, fine, yes, i'll go get him a PCR test just to be sure.

it's this "no child who isn't in 100% PERFECT health can ever set foot in a school again" zero-tolerance idiocy that is just completely aggravating for any parent with a kid who has symptomatic seasonal allergies (sometimes for weeks/months on end).

I was mostly talking about adults and work. It's different for children. It does you no good as an adult to catch the cold or flu.

Why not? Humans have eliminated other risks to our health so lets try out COVID and other viruses.



What's the deal here? If they have allergies then they aren't sick, so obviously they have to go to class. If they have a flu/cold they stay home.

^ That's debatable. Our immune system, ie memory immune system, develops and learns throughout our lifetimes.

I am now immune to some nasty gastroenteritises that I caught in my 30s. While working in a busy hospital and doing a lot of traveling, every few months I caught a nasty bug giving me diarrhea. I almost never become ill from those now, because my immune system has "seen" these viruses before.

Immunity is the one place where the old saying REALLY holds true: What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

continue to blithely deal illness and death all you wish. you won't be working at our company. good riddance. :tup:

^Pedestrian can let us know how it really works, since the pseudoscience is wrong on a lot of stuff. Getting "aligned" won't solve anything.

Did you read my previous comment where my wife had to test negative for Covid is she had cold like symptoms? She is in Texas and works for evil oil and gas.