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There are more important things than preserving the remaining lifespan of every old and sick person. You can’t turn the whole world upside down to save grandma. And grandma should have taken more personal responsibility for her own safety (and severely curtailed her own activities) rather than all these restrictions and travel bans and expensive testing. |
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^ I remember that game.
My wife was induced for our first kid and all told it was like a 30 hour process from when we arrived at the hospital until our baby girl was actually born. Our son came a out A LOT quicker. Hang in there |
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This is what I'll never understand. With something like 200 million Americans having now had at least one shot of vaccine (very rough math--please, no criticism on that), we'd be dropping like flies in a cloud of Black Flag if it was anything like as unsafe as covid. So just looking at the issue in relative terms, remaining unvaccinated makes even less sense than getting in a closed car with someone who is sick while you are yourself unvaccinated. |
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Absolutely nobody on this side of the Atlantic is talking about measures beyond vaccination and wearing masks in limited (mainly indoor) circumstances yet you keep bringing up "turning the world upside down" or other complete straw men. I guess the modern term is "gaslighting". But your comments amount to pretty much nothing else. What is turning the world upside down at the moment is the number of people sick with covid who cannot or should not work (just as if they had a bad cold except this number of people never get colds all at once). And if they were all vaccinated and wore masks when it is the sensible thing to do (and maybe, yes, limited indoor public socializing to times and places that are terribly important to them), it's likely fewer of them would be sick all at once and the world wouldn't be quite so turned upside down. |
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“Limiting indoor socializing” and limiting travel does turn the world upside down. You were young once, I guess. Years of youth have been stolen from people that they can’t get back. And I live in London essentially so that I can travel. The gaslighting was done by governments and public health authorities who convinced so many people that this was a killer virus, that their children were/are at risk, that employers were basically committing murder by making their 20-something year old staff go to work, etc. But that was what they did to try to achieve some compliance with the rules, otherwise everyone under 50 or 60 would have (rightfully) decided that they didn’t really give a damn. There is no point to masks now. Everyone is going to get Covid, unless they are extremely cautious (meaning they don’t go out). If you are still so concerned even after the vaccine, then you should stay home, order groceries, and watch Netflix. But I’m not going to keep wearing a fucking mask over my face just because a few old farts think they should be able to go to restaurants and shops and other public spaces without getting a ridiculously infectious cold. We owe you nothing. |
^^^^
There must be a reason you had to squeeze in: " And I live in London essentially so that I can travel." Out of nowhere… Lol |
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It reminds me of 9/11 where there was a real threat but it was exaggerated, and then measures to cope with that exaggerated threat were pushed far beyond a reasonable cost-benefit. I believe in the future, when the political aspect dies down and the people who made the decisions are out of the picture, this will look like a similar era of massive policy failure. Many people have a warped view right now because they are fearful or partisan (remember when the US was doing badly due to Donald Trump and Joe Biden was going to bring things back to normal? :)). I think for us to have an "off-ramp" we will need some kind of narrative for why the measures are not needed anymore (even though many did nothing or were never justified). I'm hoping the shift from omicron will provide this pretext, and maybe it just can't happen right now because of high cases. Wide availability of vaccines would have been a good point at which to dump most of the restrictions. |
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My sister and her husband have been in Tokyo since late 2019 and will return to Europe this summer. It was supposed to be an amazing experience, largely to travel that part of the world. Covid restrictions have ruined that, and since spring of 2021 there has been no reason for them. |
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On the gaslighting point - a big part of why Covid was so overblown in the US is that it’s why Trump lost the White House. It’s no surprise that the NY Times and similarly inclined media went hard on the “pandemic apocalypse”/Trump-will-kill-us-all angle. You can say “both sides” are gaslighting but everyone knows Joe Rogan and his ilk are morons - it’s a shame to see the NYT become just as nonsensical, albeit in the opposite direction. |
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Not as annoying as the 8 pm one, but still having an annoying impact occasionally. I was taking care of non-urgent building repairs yesterday, and had to quit everything I was doing at 8 pm because I was two hours away from home; I had to drive faster than usual and managed to get in my driveway at 9:59 pm. I was thinking while driving, it would be ironic if I hit a deer and ended up in the hospital because I was paying less attention to the road (I was paying a lot of attention to the clock, to calculate the time I had left and the distance I still had to drive, in order to constantly readjust my speed upwards) and driving faster. |
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All they can do is "flatten the curve" and to the extent that they flattened the curve they'd "conserve energy" for spread upon relaxation. If they had been highly effective, releasing them when there's significant prevalence just a bit below the peak would cause cases to go up again, perhaps to a new even higher peak. |
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I would argue that if your public health policy requires 99% of people to carefully follow your elaborate multi-year rules and not 95%, you have bad policy, not necessarily a bad public (here in Canada we have one of the most compliant populations anywhere). Eventually we have to get a grip with reality. The vaccine rollout gets us 95%+ of the benefit for < 1% of the cost of the other stuff. |
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Omicron's going to rip through the population quickly, curfews or not. May as well not destroy the economy gratuitously, given that it won't change much. |
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I do think the wheels are falling off of this a bit, and fewer and fewer people think this approach is reasonable. But I still know a lot of people who are basically in the #zerocovid camp or at least say it's "irresponsible" not to adapt behaviour a lot based on variants/cases/whatever (although TBH I notice many of these people don't behave very differently, they just say they are more concerned but do what others do). |
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I still have friends (or really acquaintances at this point) in the US who are posting things in their IG stories to the effect that the CDC “isn’t doing anything” as Omicron “ravages” the country. They live in places like Brooklyn and LA, so I know they can’t help it, but honestly. They’ve given you a very effective vaccine and you can wear a mask or not go out if you want. What the fuck do you want, to be told to stay home again? Jesus Christ. |
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