Most people in the right don't disbelieve the coronavirus exists, they just think it's not dangerous enough to warrant massive government impingement on people's rights to free movement, association and commerce.
While anti-science exists at both ends of the political spectrum, only one of the major us political parties seems to embrace conspiracy theories with gusto. And that party has a not insignificant number of adherents that accept the belief that covid is a hoax.
But notice that you've shied away from the climate change claim; the scientific consensus has not gotten softer in the last 20 years, but as recently as a few years ago one party denied the existence of climate change. Even recently a considerable majority of the strong adherents of one particular political party disbelieve that climate change is happening.
One more data point in terms of political parties' views on science: there are two people in the White House now who believe that evolution is a hoax, Mike Pence and Mark Meadows, both of whom derive that belief from their religious practices.
Does a leader need to believe that evolution is a process that happens to be an effective leader? Not necessarily, though it may hinder their ability to make informed choices when, e.g. dealing with a pandemic whose causal agent is evolving.
(Does a leader need to accept a heliocentric model? Again, probably not, very little in the way of political life depends on the leader's cosmology at that scale, but for some reason it would make me deeply uncomfortable if we ended up with a president some day who insisted the sun revolved around the earth.)
There's also a large percentage of the population whose religious beliefs preclude a belief in evolution, especially in certain regions of the country. In a democracy, you don't get to suppress certain viewpoints or beliefs because science disagrees with them. You get a representative of the people.
I’ve read it. Like I said, total conspiracy theory. Nothing in there to suggest Trump was involved in anything, and we know now that the infamous Steele dossier was bogus.
> Nothing in there to suggest Trump was involved in anything
No. But so many members of his immediate circle are named as being involved.
> we know now that the infamous Steele dossier was bogus
This is a weird thing to say. The Steele dossier was presented as a set of unsubstantiated claims which required further investigation.
Disproving a limited number of them (eg, Michael Cohen doesn't seem to have been in Prague when one of the claims said he was) doesn't show much except that specific claim is unproven.
Additionally, many of the allegations have been proven!
Notably - and amusingly - the "pee tape" part of the dossier hasn't been disproved at all. Given the huge amount of attention that has gained one would think holes would have been found by now. The Mueller report actually adds some weight to this story, noting how a Russian associate of Cohen had claimed to have "stopped the flow of tapes" from the owners of the hotel Trump stayed in.
yea, the silly thing is that we all really underestimated or at least accurately estimated the involvement of Russian actors in the rise of trump in 2016. This is cannon, and the report was written by republicans.
> people ... don't disbelieve the coronavirus exists, they just think it's not dangerous enough to warrant [quarantine]
That's operationally the same thing.
In other words, if that belief is wrong they're still killing people.
Let's be cautious. Once we have good testing we can know where the virus is and contain it without such a drastic quarantine. That's the rational, non-partisan thing to do.
We know where it is. It's everywhere, because huge parts of the country have given up on even trying to keep it contained.
As of today we're at about 10 million cumulative cases (a full 3% of the country's entire population), 132,000 cases per day, and the cases-per-day count doubling every 20-30 days. That's a progression that gives you millions of new cases a day just by May.
132000 cases per day, doubling every 30 days, would be about 328 million additional verified infections by the beginning of May. You may note that exceeds the total number of Americans who have not already tested positive, which gives a pretty good hint that model can't actually reflect reality for that long.
Additionally, the 10M number is the number of people who have tested positive, not the number who have been infected, which is probably several times higher than that even.
So yeah. I doubt we have even two more doublings ahead of us, at least as measured by hospitalizations (positive tests are a bad measure because early testing was very lacking). Less than one wouldn't surprise me.
Known cases. True numbers are likely to be much higher than that. For starters, the estimated percentage of entirely asymptomatic infections is around 18% to 80%(1), with many more getting only mild symptoms. Many if not most people with mild symptoms will never bother to get tested.
It would not be surprising if 100 million Americans have in fact been infected already. That's the kind of ratio of known to actual cases that antibody testing has repeatedly found. And even that may be an underestimate, as antibody testing doesn't measure T-cell response.
I don't subscribe to any side, but on this topic I much prefer the freedom of movement that I get to enjoy in the U.S., especially in some states. I'd hate to be locked up like they were in Australia and now Europe. Even the bay area was getting a bit much for me with their random restrictions on outdoor spaces.
There is no doubt that the virus is deadly, and more deadly for certain age groups, but let's not treat it like the great plague. On top of that, with mask use and distancing the spread is negligible, especially outside.
When did we get so risk-averse where every death should be prevented no matter the cost? Many people die for various reasons. You can maximize your age by sitting inside a cushioned room all your life to limit injuries, but I prefer to not live that way.
You should get your numbers straight before you write things like this "like the great plague.".
Do you really think there is any politiction out there who likes to shut their country down because of anything? Tanking the economy just because of some flue?
No.
Pandemic Experts (our experts, your experts) estimated that if we wouldn't do this, we would see a very bad outcome and Politictions decided that its more important to not hit this scenario and tank the economy instead.
Now your expert expertise on this is something like 'but let's not treat it like the great plague.'?
Funny enough, i'm in Europe and i do feel fine sitting at home. I'm quite happy that we don't have that high numbers as USA has.
The problem in the USA is not 'wearing masks outside and having no other restrictions' but 'coronavirus is a hoax' 'i can't breath with a mask' 'a mask is against the amendment' 'my freedom'.
And yes we have this stuff here as well. 20k people demonstrated because of masks. Like since when did our society became so antisocial or dumb, that people think wearing a facemask mandation made their lives so much worse that they want to demonstrate it?
Text does not convey tone. You are ascribing tone in your mind. Text is language and does not bring along gestures, facial expressions, or eye contact.. things your brain uses to detect tone and subtleties in the words
For instance based on this text your “tone” is combative, but I bet you are reading it in your mind with eye brows raised and hearing a different accent on syllables. Maybe you would say that first sentence a little bit quieter to show compassion, but I’m reading it as if you had an attitude on the words “your tone is”
> but on this topic I much prefer the freedom of movement that I get to enjoy in the U.S.
Well, that didn't take long. Or are you assuming that's not a side?
In my social circles, it very much is. My understanding of facts leads me to believe COVID-19 is a great enough "plague" to warrant lockdown measures.
People who share your opinion often write these responses out as "extremely risk-averse", but many disease experts vehemently disagree.
To put that in context, let's consider your next statement:
> Many people die for various reasons.
In the United States, we keep track generally of how people die. The top three causes of death[1] in 2018 were heart disease at 655,381, cancer at 599,274, and accidents at 167,127.
So far, COVID-19 has surpassed accidents at 229,238 deaths[2].
This isn't about preventing death no matter the cost. It's about taking reasonable measures to slow what has become the third leading cause of death for Americans.
How many deaths were caused by the lockdown? I know we cant easily measure this but the number is surely substantial and by not keeping this in mind we are implicitly saying the number is zero, which leads us to make bad decisions.
The primary risk of covid is getting to the point of the exponential curve where hospitals are completely overwhelmed. People with unrelated problems and injuries struggle to get treatment, accident and emergency wards become full past capacity.
That is what the lockdowns are to prevent, and as a European I much prefer taking a month at home to prevent such a catastrophe.
I mean, I read your post, but it basically sounded like you wanted a full reopening like Texas but allowing the people who want to wear masks to wear masks. Is that not what you're advocating for?
You whittled down this persons post to a basically sounded. When you discard information you create your own vacuum. The person said nothing about a full reopening and instead was pointing out how travel should not be limited like other countries who have and are still in worse situations.
>is that not
And talking in weird negatives doesn’t help your case either.
It is indeed not a 1 on 1 copy of words but it was the contents, and trying to shy away with 'that's not what he said' is just dishonest and wilful dissonance.
I never got tested, but I had covid in a really horrible way. How does good testing help quarantine when there are people who are gettin the virus and not getting tested (some of which still heading out into the public creating more asymptomatic patients)
Further the virus can remain viable on surfaces for days, weeks if frozen. How does testing (combined with the above, ppl not getting tested) help in any way to know where the virus is. I think it will identify hotspots but then what. Texas was a hit spot and still had 4000 cases/day. Testing didn’t help reduce case count, but it did indirectly limit the effectiveness of the emergency room...
Oh well I don’t normally have shortness of breath or chest pains in the middle of the summer. Also had extreme brain fog and couldn’t remember howto code (true story). Also was coughing for the entire month of may. Oh cardiologist said I had a heart attack and partly failed a stress test, but couldn’t find any reasons for a healthy man in his mid30s to have had a heart attack.
Pulmonologist told me I had lung scarring and I had to do breathing exercises. Hmm what else happened. There was also stabbing back pain. My feet and hands were tingly and numb for two weeks, I lost all feeling below my knees....
But the pcr and igG tests all came back negative. Doc thinks pcr test was too late and serology test was false negative. At this point I don’t care about the tests I know what I experienced and it matches up to other bad covid experiences
Forgot to add, I have pericarditis now and have been told to rest and go easy for the remainder of the year
> Most people in the right don't disbelieve the coronavirus exists, they just think it's not dangerous enough to warrant massive government impingement on people's rights to free movement
A little bit like how one could feel about the 3,000 casualties of 9/11 versus one’s rights to free movement over the past 20 years.
Examples such as this suggest we’re not arguing from probabilities but from partisanship.
They are correct in thinking that. For most people it's unlikely that a COVID-19 infection would kill them. The CDC's estimates for infection fatality rate by age are:
38 Million infected, 18 Million visits and 22k death due to influence.
Corona now has 10 Million cases 240k death.
I mean, don't get me wrong, even if its 0.02% for 20-49 year old in USA:
1. Thats still a lot of people if we hit Millions of infections
2. you can also see that the death rate was much higher at the beginning: https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid
3. we are still not trying to get everyone from the street so they are not dying, we are getting them from the street that if they are dying, they are not dying because of full hospitals.
And of course doctors are getting better every day fighting it and learning more about it.
I personally absolutly don't mind sitting around for a year to wait this out. I only have one live and i don't want to have covid right now nor any long term issues from it.
Covid showed something quite interesting to me: You are better of in dooms day scenarios if you can sit it out a little bit.
Are you disagreeing with the CDC's numbers? I gave sources for a reason.
It's obvious why COVID-19 would have killed more people this year than a typical flu season: more people can get infected, because it's a novel disease which we have no prior immunity for. Additionally, infections are likely to be more serious, as immunity isn't a binary. Meanwhile the various viruses and virus strains that we call "the flu" has been around our whole lives.
But the fact is, if you do get infected with the flu, and you're young (particularly children), you're roughly as likely to die as if you get infected by COVID-19.
> I personally absolutly don't mind sitting around for a year to wait this out. I only have one live and i don't want to have covid right now nor any long term issues from it.
You are welcome to make that decision for yourself. But remember, others' will have different priorities. My job is mostly unaffected, so far. Other people I know have lost their businesses and careers. I personally know some people involved in food aid in poorer countries: people are literally starving to death due to lockdown.
The COVID-19 infection fatality rate by age is approximately the same as overall mortality by age. It shouldn't surprise people that many people would decide that they're willing to take that risk, especially when we have examples like Sweden, New York City, large parts of India, etc. to show that even uncontrolled spread is not an existential threat to society, and herd immunity kicks in and things go back to normal. (antibody testing has found about 20-30% of Stockholm, 30-50% of NYC, etc. has been infected, most without realizing it)
> Covid showed something quite interesting to me: You are better of in dooms day scenarios if you can sit it out a little bit.
You are lucky to be in a position where you can do that. A significant chunk of society can not. And the fact is, very few places in the world have been able to control COVID-19 without indefinite lockdown. It's just too contagious in most societies.
I have short term heart damage from covid. Wanting herd immunity is ignoring the suffering a good subset of the infected will experience. I guess your next line will involve something about suffering being better than dying. And I guess its okay that I can’t play with my toddler because of secondary effects because they were highly unlikely to die.
> Covid showed something quite interesting to me: You are better of in dooms day scenarios if you can sit it out a little bit.
Yeah this is actually really interesting because in a non-pandemic world taking the more conservative (lowercase c) approach to safety is less useful, but in our current world with a lot of genuine uncertainty and numerous catastrophes it actually nets better.
> I personally absolutly don't mind sitting around for a year to wait this out. I only have one live and i don't want to have covid right now nor any long term issues from it.
Yes, Please continue to have discipline and hold out against peer pressure to lower your guard. As someone who got covid, early 20s, exercise daily, low-processed food diet, no history of health issues, I got a mild case of Covid and the post-covid stage for me is much worse than the actual illness period and this phenomenon is very underrated in people’s discourse about risk assessment. Most people on this forum feel great arguing the pandemic on paper but have no lived experience of what this does to your body. 70, 80 days out where you feel super fucked up, new symptoms arise, random shit like pressure in your heart and chest, body aches day after day, extreme sensitivity to the cold.[0]
Imagine if covid were named HIV instead and people said, “look! After 10 months all these young people haven’t died. It must not be a big deal. Probably the flu”. Which is to say we still don’t know much about the virus. Most people in this forum are used to a world where every major disease of humanity has been studied for 20+ years,[1] so it’s sort of a confusion they have that they think the science is figured out. If you aren’t a biologist or studied biology heavily, science all seems like magic to you so it must be hard to tell the difference between something that is understood and not understood yet
> Just like regular flu. It kills lots of people every year
The worst flu killed 80k people in a year, and normally kills about 20k a year. It hasn't even been a year and three times as many people have died compared to the worst flu season, and 1,600+ Americans die every day from COVID. This epidemic so far has been more than twelve times worse than the average flu season.
> So do car accidents - lets just ban driving
About 38k people die in car accidents in the US, and the average person drives 1 million miles before getting in an accident. And that's with practically every person in the country driving that can. In contrast, only 3% of Americans have had COVID, yet 237k of them have died in less than a year. If the majority of Americans get COVID, millions of people will die.
Or maybe let's infringe on your freedoms by: requiring a license to drive, requiring use of a seatbelt, setting safety standards for car manufacturers...
Ok, looking at first reply to my post, they reference "commercial freedoms", which I support. Look at COVID 19, commerce (measured in restaurant reservations and retail purchases) dropped like 90% before the government lockdowns. The way to improve the economy and provide "commercial freedom" is to defeat the virus. The way to defeat the virus is though, amongst other tools like masks and vaccines, lockdowns. You could remove all the restrictions you want and things won't go back to normal for business or their patrons until the risk serious illness from a disease is small enough that you don't need to think about it when making evening plans. Additionally, when you reference "banning cars", cars used to be extremely dangerous. We have cumulatively spent millions of hours and hundreds of thousands of human lives developing engineering solutions to make cars safer. Things like masks are like seatbelts, and "suspending indoor dining" is like adding a crumple zone to the front of the car and we do ban cars that aren't sufficiently safe.
Since this pandemic began, I’ve never understood this line of reasoning. I invite you to enlighten me.
Let’s say we use the governments force to close business down, in order to hinder the virus from spreading there.
When the government later stops applying this force and business can reopen with persecution, will the virus not just continue from where it left off?
In March they said “flatten the curve to not temporarily overload hospitals”, which I get, but the reasoning for keeping the forced lockdown only seems logical if you never reopen.
For this reason I’m glad my country is one of very few that never locked down. More have died here than in the neighbour countries, but I fail to see why they won’t catch up when they reopen.
The virus can't "continue from where it left off" if there's nobody left in the country infected by it.
If it turns out there were a few infections left, or one slipped through quarantine for arriving travellers, the health system has enough capacity to perform testing for anyone with even mild symptoms, and comprehensively contact trace.
> The virus can't "continue from where it left off" if there's nobody left in the country infected by it.
If every member of our species is convinced to quarantine for a month, the disease could maybe be eradicated, but this is clearly not realistic. Herding cats is easier.
Even quarantining everyone for a whole month probably wouldn't do it. Did you see that article about the immunosupressed woman who was spraying out viable Covid-19 virus for like 70 days without any visible symptoms of Covid?
> When the government later stops applying this force and business can reopen with persecution, will the virus not just continue from where it left off?
This is the strategy New Zealand followed, and now their lives are back to normal. Here's a pic of one of their sports stadiums[1]. Notice how nobody needs to distance or wear masks because they got control over COVID spread.
Would it be possible to totally close the border to for example Germany, France, or Czechia, like NZ can do? I highly doubt it but am open to ideas. It would certainly be immoral to use force to hinder native citizens from travelling out of the country.
Treatments get better. As we learn how the disease works, we know how to treat it better. This means that if you get sick now rather than at the beginning, you are much less likely to die.
Secondly: people are working on vaccines. If you can hold it until one is available, you might not have to get sick at all.
>Secondly: people are working on vaccines. If you can hold it until one is available, you might not have to get sick at all.
I work in vaccines and I don't believe any vaccine is even close to coming out. The products our company is working take about 10 years from start to final sale.
Its quite likely that the FDA will have to lower their standards to fast-track coronavirus vaccines. I am going to be very skeptical of their safety given that we don't have long-term data, especially with the newer unproven vaccine tech.
In my neighbour countries no one is asking them to “please hold” - the government is using its (violent) force to make them stop living and doing business. In my home Sweden we are spared. I say there is an important moral difference between enforcing such a thing and not.
Or, to be less hyperbolic about it: do a lot more things that change us towards being a society where travel via single-occupant vehicle is not the default, or the highest-prioritized use of a space when many other options are cleaner, safer, more efficient space uses, encourage better health, and are not as environmentally and socially damaging.
So, to link it back to coronavirus: taking steps to mitigate a harm that we know exists, that we can predict coming, and that absolutely involves making changes to how we conduct our daily lives but if a lot of us make a little change, we make a dramatic effect.
9/11 killed a minuscule amount of deaths in comparison and warranted huge cut of freedoms, multiple massive military interventions, the US starting to normalise torture and black prisons, but somehow requiring people to distance and wearing masks is a step too far?
Let's not forget it Trump suggested to slaughter Muslims using bullets dipped in pigs blood, so he is definetly not a antiwar as some here suggest.
It would be a spectacular failure of logic to evaluate someones record on war based on a flippant comment (which you misrepresented) as opposed to, oh I don’t know, maybe if they started any wars. Considering that he is the first president in at least a century to not engage in any new wars, I think that might be a better signal.
The comment was made in response to the Barcelona terrorist attacks and was very specifically joking about what we should do to domestic terrorist groups that mass murder. It was also not his original thought. He cited a myth regarding what he thought someone else famously did to terrorists and said maybe we should do that.
Getting upset about what he actually said and in what context seems like faux-outrage or someone with motivated reasoning to try and find something to get upset about.
> To still try to downplay COVID and act like it's no worse than a regular flu is, quite frankly, willful ignorance.
I've found that it isn't ignorance, it's that they just don't care.
I know highly educated people who are more than capable of understanding the statistics underlying COVID infections, and they still say "it's just the flu".
These were people who knew about COVID in January, and were talking about what a threat it could be. Yet months later they're repeating the President's talking points.
As someone who experienced covid in a bad way, I’m just going to say a lot of Americans on both sides of the political aisle don’t believe the virus is dangerous. They are just worried about their parents or grandparents. Oxymoron, I know, but the inconsistent message and conflicting cross talk from multiple parties has created this situation.
It's very much "dangerous enough" if it completely overwhelms hospitals, which we've seen it do before harsh measures were taken. The people's rights to free movement, association and commerce should not infringe upon the right of others to safely breathable air and to medical care if needed.
Most people in the right don't disbelieve the coronavirus exists, they just think it's not dangerous enough to warrant massive government impingement on people's rights to free movement, association and commerce.