The argument of " healthcare services have been stripped to the bone and the scraps sold to the highest bidder" might hold true in one national example, but to argue that ALL NATIONS have gone this route is false. — ssu

Really? What nation did you have in mind whose health service is run primarily with the health of the nation in mind, without demands of greater efficiency being laid on it to either increase profits or reduce government expenditure, whose health industry is not suffuse with influence from multi-national pharmaceutical companies? I may well like to move there.

Deal with it? I think we've already established you're the one who is having a hard time accepting the fact that other views exist. And that is your problem, not mine.

Projection seems to be becoming a theme in our conversation, no?

I'm not happy about a virus. I'm also not overly worried. People should relax, newsmedia should stop scaring old people, and the experts should just do their thing.

You don't seem to have much understanding of humanity. After all we are primates with a complex social and economic structure with a long history of warfare, exploitation, poverty, genocide etc etc. All that is required to upset the relative equilibrium we have enjoyed over the last 70 years, in the West at least, is something like a global pandemic.

There is an acute tension developing between healthcare objectives and economic objectives in many countries. Both are experiencing great loses, with catastrophe just around the corner. Those sitting on great wealth, or in ivory towers will be getting worried to the extent that they will stop caring about the vulnerable and the old.

There are rumours going around the UK that the government is secretly happy that many thousands of old people will die, saving a great deal of expenditure in health and social care, as a vast social care crisis was looming before Covid, due to a population with to many old people.

The debt bubble could fracture at any time now, as the economy feels like it is on a rollercoaster with no controls.

Are you going to bury your head in the sand, or remember what humans are like when the pips squeak?

Maybe it's just worse due to the vacation? — frank

They were able thru network theory and contact tracing to identify the many origins and source of the new clusters... over 80% were linked to the vacations themselves and activities where the vacationers upon their return came into further contact with social grouping... most of the grouping also in violation of a whole number of guidelines and rules.

While indeed there were mild cases that went undetected that wasn't the real catalyst for this shit show.

btw... the vacationers were not just younger people at beaches. The elderly have taken up the charge to 'spread the good word' by bus vacations as usual. It's a collective failure.

Apparently, 'human nature' is a COVID-19 risk-factor. — 180 Proof

There's no cure for the willfully stupid. To be honest, I'm not too sure how to prevent it.

I have to say one things I've noticed in all of the 'freedom at all costs' apologetic replies...

... 'existential crisis' has really been dumbed down in the past few years.

'Give me convenience even if it gives them death'.

There are rumours going around the UK that the government is secretly happy that many thousands of old people will die, saving a great deal of expenditure in health and social care, as a vast social care crisis was looming before Covid, due to a population with to many old people. — Punshhh

This seems incredibly implausible to me.

1. The majority of the Tory vote is in the older population, they'd be killing off their own support.
2. The costs of their response are predicted, even by their own think tanks to far exceed the temporary and minor drop in pressure on the social care budget.
3. The biggest threat to the social care budget comes not in the form of the current elderly and vulnerable, but the immediate future elderly and vulnerable coupled with a relatively smaller working age population.

'Give me convenience even if it gives them death'. — Mayor of Simpleton

:confused:

I hear you, but I'm not so confident that they engage in any joined up thinking.

One would think that the Tory's would want to keep their older voters alive to keep voting for them. But that relies on some kind of normal political balance, like what we have experienced over the last generation. In reality, I suggest, the Tory's are grappling with an existential crisis, in which they can see the younger vote abandoning them and their reliable voter base inexorably dying off. Resulting in their only hope of survival as a political force requiring them to veer hard to the right and hope to convince the population that that place is normality, while the left are communist lunatics. This course relies on a healthy economy. It is of course doomed to failure, now.

I hear you, but I'm not so confident that they engage in any joined up thinking. — Punshhh

Ah, yes. I made the mistake of presuming any rational basis behind this clown-show of a government... As it is I'm now prepared to entertain that they might have any of a dozen crackpot theories behind their 'strategy'. UFOs may even feature.

:lol: I'm not exactly enamoured of your opinions either but at least you have a sense of humour. :kiss:

Dominic Cummings is Davros, the leader of the Darleks.

I have to say one things I've noticed in all of the 'freedom at all costs' apologetic replies...

... 'existential crisis' has really been dumbed down in the past few years.

'Give me convenience even if it gives them death'. — Mayor of Simpleton

It's an interesting experiment, how so many people will give up moral responsibility at the drop of a hat, for the sake of insignificant pleasure. It seems like if one individual person does not follow the rules, for the sake of "freedom", then the next will see this transgression as an excuse not to follow the rules, quickly producing a cascade, until a large portion of society falls into that hole. Monkey see monkey do.

I think your answer points out fairly well just what happens.

And if the virus infection rates have been low (as here in Finland), then there is the factor of a single event turning the stats up. One example of this happened in a small city called Vaasa located in Northern Finland. The city has a small university and of course, as usual, it was a large student party that was the reason for the spreader event. Some time later the city turned red with all indicators with over 600 new infections in a region with typically well below 100 cases since the start of the pandemic. The city went to lock-down and forbid any meetings over 10 people.

Yet I think the ordinary flu season has caused people to be alarmed as anybody showing signs of flu will typically take a corona test. My son in school said he had a sore throat and off he went home and to take a virus test. Schools are easily shut down if there is a covid-positive case. A lot of people have been off from work to be getting a test, hence I assume these usually negative tests will keep people on guard.

Really? What nation did you have in mind whose health service is run primarily with the health of the nation in mind, without demands of greater efficiency being laid on it to either increase profits or reduce government expenditure, whose health industry is not suffuse with influence from multi-national pharmaceutical companies? I may well like to move there. — Isaac

Likely the countries that score the highest points in various studies with the public health sector.

Japan for example has a quite well performing health care sector and it has scored in many investigation top places with it's health care sector compared to others. And it's doing just fine with the pandemic: see How Japan’s Universal Health Care System Led to COVID-19 Success

Needless to say, in such rankings the US ranks quite low.

btw... the vacationers were not just younger people at beaches. The elderly have taken up the charge to 'spread the good word' by bus vacations as usual. It's a collective failure. — Mayor of Simpleton

Bus vacations would be loony. I understand the desire to get back to normal, though.

Likely the countries that score the highest points in various studies with the public health sector.

Japan for example has a quite well performing health care sector and it has scored in many investigation top places with it's health care sector compared to others. And it's doing just fine with the pandemic — ssu

That doesn't have any bearing on the point I'm making. There are key components of a healthcare system which cannot be bought in a short timescale no matter how much money you throw at them. It takes years to train as a nurse, doctor, researcher...and if you don't have enough you can't handle the task properly. Even if Japan's health system is in good shape, it doesn't mean their research facilities are, nor does it mean they wouldn't equally benefit from more robust and well-established interventions than a wild scramble to find Phizer's next golden goose.

I think from contact to symptoms is around 5-7 days. In the hospital we stop treating infected people as if they're contagious after 21 days (though I think the real number is around 14 days). — frank

Thank you for helping me understand :up:

Thankfully I am Covid-19 negative.

Component Results
SARS-CoV-2, NAA
Your Value
Negative
Standard Range

:smile:

Did you test while having symptoms? The PCR test requires a minimal viral load that might not necessarily have been reached if you're still asymptomatic.

If I'm reading Bloomberg correctly, elderly people were specifically refused access to intensive care in the first months of the pandemic.

Some of them may have just been dehydrated, so I dont know how to process that information.

Negative — ArguingWAristotleTiff

Yay!!

This is just like 100% wrong. — frank

Lot of that going around. Do they have a vaccine for it?? — Hippyhead

These comments are so low quality and from people of such low analytical abilities -- and I would wager worth as human beings as well -- that they do not merit my attention; a general theme of the forum as of late.

However, for fun, and when I have the time of course, I'll post in my next comment a few jewels of Covid denialism these lowly-esteemed contributors made in the past, so further contrast the irony that they are now on the side of "science".

However, if others of better faith, sharper whit, more honorable character, to paraphrase my argument: it's simply fact now that vaccine technology did not stop Covid before major damage, and the idea pandemics can simply be ignored in a calculus of public health investments is absurd; given the disruption to society that pandemics engender they should be weighted not only in deaths but the cost of social disruption particular to them; already the pandemic has cost trillions; trillions that could have been invested before the pandemic in things that would actually prevent, stop, or significantly reduce the severity of said pandemic. Other policies could have prevented the pandemic or limited it's severity: vector control, outbreak protocols and general public health.

This does not say that vaccines would have no place in an optimum public health strategy, only that investments in vector control, outbreak protocols and public health as a primary defense against infectious disease would, by definition, displace funds for vaccines, but more significantly, reduce the chances and severity of not only pandemics but existing endemic infectious diseases, thus affecting the cost-effectiveness calculation for any particular vaccine (i.e. if a primary investment already deals with a problem, there is less reason to invest in other solutions to the same problem).

Also notable, I seem to be in very close agreement with on this issue, who brings up some good points I also agree with, and I am glad to see we share common ground on the foundational issues of public health and only disagree on some details as it turns out; the forum never ceases to surprise.

That doesn't have any bearing on the point I'm making. There are key components of a healthcare system which cannot be bought in a short timescale no matter how much money you throw at them. — Isaac

That's your first false idea, as if I'm promoting a short timescale answer. Or that just throwing money to everything is an answer. Believe me, the US is a prime example of how that goes and that with higher costs you don't always get better health care. The fact is that better health care systems do have positive outcomes, but if a pandemic breaks out, likely the best system and the best policy actions just minimize the deaths.

I feel as though the most defining victim of this infamous pandemic, aside from its egregious death toll, has been the socioeconomic mobility developing economies were characterized by prior to it emerging. Incomes have been either erased or diminished, and will not be recouped in entirety for several agrarian and industrial sectors around the world for at least 5 to 6 years.

Food security appears to be perilously on the verge of vanishing at this point. Millions have slid into poverty, or will succumb to insufficient healthcare. It's truly tragic.

We've also seen a very prominent vice of human psychology illuminated. Political dissension in the United States has exponentiated. The two individuals at the forefront of the election responsible for determining how the world's strongest (apparently) country is to be spearheaded, are two near-octogenarians incapable of articulating themselves without a teleprompter, demented comment or racist remark inbetween. Ethno-national governments have expanded their stronghold quite inexorably.

In the midst of all of this, having exploited the nature of sheer capitalistic brilliance, the world's billionaires have generated over half a trillion additional dollars to their name.

The latter, of course, highlights the inevitability of Pareto inequalities in free markets. Apart from Marxists, or adherents to intermediate doctrines such as Fabian Socialism, I don't believe many will reproach the outcome's philosophical nature. Having said that, it has far from constituted a cause for celebration.

If you've ever housed dormant misanthropic proclivities, now would be a fitting time for them to manifest.

I feel as though the most defining victim of this infamous pandemic, aside from its egregious death toll, has been the socioeconomic mobility developing economies were characterized by prior to it emerging. Incomes have been either erased or diminished, and will not be recouped in entirety for several agrarian and industrial sectors around the world for at least 5 to 6 years. — Aryamoy Mitra

This was discussed a few months back in the context of "it's ethical to sacrifice people in rich countries by letting the pandemic run rampant, because the economic costs of lockdowns and social distancing will kill more people in poorer countries."

I completely agree that far more people in poorer countries will suffer and die due to the economic consequences of the pandemic than the disease itself globally, but it's a false dichotomy.

These are not victims of the pandemic, but of a global economic system that kept them poor before and will do little to nothing to help them now.

The solution to wanting to help poor people in poor countries is doing things that effectively help poor people in poor countries, pandemic or not; and, more importantly than that, stop doing things that keep them poor and under corrupt management, such as the full spectrum of neoliberal "market access" policies, debt peonage, as well as simply overthrowing or assassinating any leader that might nationalize resources or repudiate debts accumulated under previous corrupt client regimes put in place and propped up by external money, external intelligence information, external cloak and dagger operations, and external military training of domestic terrorist organizations (aka, the military and police, trained by western military and intelligence to carry out genocides of people with the "wrong political ideas", throw people off planes into the ocean and the like).

I'm not sure if you are or would make such an argument (economy over protecting people from Covid, because poor people suffer from a bad economy), but I feel it useful to paraphrase what has been already discussed on this particular topic, and of course I welcome your thoughts on the above or then continued analysis of simply the socio-economic consequences as such (given that we do live in a neoliberal world policy framework that will do little to help poor people).

Denmark: Mutated coronavirus from mink is a threat to humans

12 people found infected with a mutated coronavirus that doesn't respond to antibodies. All mink in Denmark to be killed.

Why is this not the big topic on TPF? What happened to the big pandemic? Did people stop dying? Or has our new way of life finally set in as the new norm?

Adjusted for population, Europe has twice as many people hospitalized for covid19 than the US. If you get the NYT, it's here.

Wtf? Is it that the US is just behind due to weather? I actually don't know of any reason for this that makes sense.

Adjusted for population, Europe has twice as many people hospitalized for covid19 than the US. If you get the NYT, it's here. — frank

I assume that means twice as many covid fatalities. Or do Europeans simply like hospitals more than Americans? In the United States, nobody gets news about Europe because nobody cares, and that doesn't sell newspapers...bullshit does. And, in the US, nobody gets the news at all because everybody reads at a 3rd grade level and they eat up all the bullshit they are fed on the tools of ignorance (e.g. traditional media, social media).

Wtf? Is it that the US is just behind due to weather? I actually don't know of any reason for this that makes sense. — frank

Maybe people that can read (like Europeans) are more susceptible to being hospitalized for covid...I wonder.

Because we like saving lives. Why don't you adjust the deaths and cases by population as well? Have fun.

Yes, they're doing a great job. Are you anti-lockdown due to that?