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Old Posted Jan 13, 2022, 1:51 PM
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10023 10023 is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack View Post
I am not a COVID-is-just-the-flu type at all, but the number of people I know who are totally freaked out and paranoid that their (single or double-vaccinated and perfectly healthy) kids are going to get COVID and die just boggles my mind.

Statistically speaking, the drive in a car to the vaccination centre is way more likely to kill your kid than either the vaccine or COVID itself.

(I am also pro-vaccine BTW.)
As a technical matter, Covid (or SARS-CoV-2) is obviously not the flu. It’s a different species of virus. But the danger it poses has been grotesquely overblown almost from the start. I say almost because more caution was justified right at the beginning, when nobody knew what it was, but the restrictions should have lasted weeks, not months (let alone years).

People forget that the flu kills as well, in quite large numbers. There have been flu strains with mortality rates much higher than this coronavirus (and not just the Spanish flu). And many of them posed much greater danger to people who were not, due to age or co-morbodities generally caused by their own indifference to their health, already more prone to die sooner rather than later.

And yet, we’ve never shut down the world, locked people down, banned travel, required them to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on tests, self-isolate at home even without symptoms, etc. It’s been a ridiculous two years.
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There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." - Isaac Asimov
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