BF2S Forums Pandemic thread

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

Let's not kid ourselves, vaccines are an overwhelmingly important component here.

Exactly, a component, useless in isolation.

Dilbert_X wrote:

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

Let's not kid ourselves, vaccines are an overwhelmingly important component here.

Exactly, a component, useless in isolation.

except they're literally not useless in isolation, are they? because they have a proven effect, across a huge number of studies and datasets, of reducing serious illness and death. you might want to look up the definition of 'use' there chap. the vaccines work to do what they're designed to do.

again: the vaccines are highly effective for their designed purpose. booster shots are in the pipeline. it's not within the scope of a vaccine to 'reduce transmissibility' or 'reduce r-numbers' in a given community. for that you need wider epidemiological strategies.

and but who is proposing vaccination only as the solution, anyway? that's not how any country is approaching covid from a wider public health point-of-view. again, hospital treatments, steroid treatments, anti-viral treatments, etc, have all come a long way since the first and second waves. social distancing, hygiene and safety practices in businesses or public places, etc, are all readily available and easy to implement. temperature checks, QR code contact tracing, quick-turnaround lateral flow testing, etc, can all be rolled out or reactivated at short notice and in a targeted manner. i could go on.

all of which makes infinite amounts more good sense than lockdowns, economic self-harm, and tight restrictions on people's freedoms.

the picture could be far, far worse. and instead you're scaremongering, yet again, about 'vaccines not working' and calling for eternal 'zero covid' lockdowns. covid is here to stay. zero covid is an impossibility. even a complete 4-week global lockdown wouldn't eradicate it. be thankful for the vaccines (evidently you are; you've had them).

Last edited by uziq (2021-10-08 01:26:16)

you continually demonize 'tourists' and people who want to 'go and lie on a beach somewhere' as if that's the real critical issue in this pandemic.

it's bizarre. another weird fixation in your head full of weird fixations.

you downrate vaccines as 'a component, useless in isolation' but then go on and on about ... closing borders to tourists? lol. the very definition of something that is USELESS in isolation. without meaningful vaccination in a population, tourism really makes no fucking difference at all. covid can firestorm within the borders of a hermetically sealed island, dipshit.

and where is the 'absence of a vaccine' in australia and NZ now? it's almost like ... the government's current proposals ... make sense.

Last edited by uziq (2021-10-08 02:08:41)

wow, great argument.

'total lockdowns worked before vaccines. because i am arbitrarily skeptical of vaccines, let's keep using total lockdowns!'

travel restrictions and lockdowns are not 'essential'. vaccines, antivirals, testing + tracing, and quarantines can obviate them.

a person who has been 2/3x vaccinated can travel countries in a perfectly safe manner. they take a test before getting on the plane and perhaps have a quarantine period and additional test(s) upon arrival. it's really not that complicated and has worked, as we have spoken about here at TEDIOUS length, for korea/taiwan/etc for the majority of the pandemic's duration. shit works. 'travel bans' or demonizing tourists makes no sense when HIGHLY effective vaccines and EFFICIENT tests are in the mix.

your weird and sadistic desire to restrict people's travel and freedom is merely a symptom of the fact that you're a sad-sack billy-no-mates. you don't want to see people go on vacation and have a nice time because your life is generally not a nice time. sad!

Last edited by uziq (2021-10-08 05:08:01)

More people died of COVID this year than 2020. It still feels like the pandemic is over now that we are vaccinated and back at work and in schools. I don't know about mask mandates in schools and workplaces. But it should still be something people do voluntarily.

I still take notice of people coughing, sneezing, runny noses etc. Disgusting knowing people still send their kids to school knowing they are sick with something. Disgusting having to stand next to someone who should be home until they get that cough checked out

You will have to take my facemask from my cold dead hands.

Dilbert_X wrote:

OK, lets rely exclusively on vaccines and nothing else when they aren't 100% effective we could do plenty of other things to help.

Don't bother with masks, handwashing, distancing, capacity limits etc - so stupid and gay and get in the way of a good time

Vaccines!

N O  O N E is proposing this.

you saying 'vaccines only make a marginal difference' is WRONG. black-and-white. statistically, provably WRONG.

your obsession with borders and international travel is fetishistic. you are a nut.

Why does real America die so young?

because there is no endgame to ‘we managed fine with no vaccinations’. lockdowns and closed borders are not sustainable you nitwit. we live in a global world not an era of hermit kingdoms and medieval city states. they are precisely referred to as EMERGENCY measures. you being fine with them because they didn’t affect you personally all that much is not the point, precious pearl. a great number of people have been immiserated and wiped out by them; placed under heavy debt burdens or rent arrears; seen their businesses fail.

to say NOTHING of the unprecedented levels of government debt and deficit in order to furlough and rescue vast tranches of the economy, which are going to cause untold problems and further suffering for the next decade or generation. britain’s deficit is nearing WW2 levels of emergency spending. shall we prepare ourselves for a decade of rationing and privation because ‘dilbert doesn’t like travel’? it is NOT sustainable on a human or macroeconomic level and hardly justifiable when there are HIGHLY EFFECTIVE vaccines and a wide range of other measures available (and, again, i have advocated for local and targeted lockdowns as part of contact tracing). 

nobody is talking about superfluous travel as the number one priority. but in countries like spain, with 12% of people employed in some connection to the tourism industry, obviously there’s a huge economic question and impetus to finding a ‘way out’ of perma-travel bans. countries like south korea successfully kept their borders open to travellers, in one form or another, using a system of testing and quarantine, plus an effective contact tracing system in the population generally. these systems have worked and are still working, and are a hell of a lot lighter touch than 'closed borders and travel bans'.

nobody is saying we should hurry up for the sake of parties and festivals. but in countries like the united kingdom, after mass testing schemes piloted by the NHS at stadium-sized events, the spread of covid in double-vaccinated people showing negative test results upon entry was shown to be minimal.

spain and portugal have high rates of vaccination and low rates of death. their healthcare systems are by no means rich or world beating. looks like it’s working. the U.K. did atrociously in the first two waves of covid and made blundering, hideous mistakes that led to 100,000+ avoidable deaths. now we have widespread vaccination and have cobbled together - mostly through the initiative of the hospitality, nightlife, retail, etc, sectors rather than government - a patchwork system of distancing measures, the deaths are way down. looks like it’s working.

you are obsessed with tourists. it’s weird. i honestly don’t get it. ‘it seems you’re selfish and uncaring bla bla bla’. i spent 12 months sweating in anxiety worried about vulnerable relatives being killed off in hospitals/nursing homes. i sat on my hands in total isolation for a year and followed all measures to a T. i follow the science; fuck off.

Last edited by uziq (2021-10-13 18:04:22)

closed borders cost literally something to a huge number of countries. spain itself is right there as a case in point in the 'better on covid, worse on economy quadrant'. as you'd surely expect from a country that has nearly a fifth of all its workforce tied up in tourism or hospitality. what the fuck are you talking about?

in the desirable top-left quadrant of your diagram there are plenty of countries which had open borders with testing/quarantine. hardly any other countries in that quadrant, possibly with the ironic exception of china (and japan, which i can't see) had totally closed borders for an extended period. the aus-NZ model is clearly not the only effective one. i feel we've been through the 'you could fly to korea and taiwan with the right tests and paperwork' discussion about 13 times now.

plus GDP growth/shrinkage is not tied exclusively to covid and there are any number of other factors at work here. case studies like vietnam are hard to extrapolate from with their particular economic growth. that plus the fact that you well know the knock-on effects of huge govt borrowing/money printing aren't likely to be felt in the first 12 months. many economies were kept afloat for the first year with seemingly limitless state largesse, with a 'we'll cross that bridge when we get to it' mentality. none of the european states in that 'successful' green bit had totally closed borders for any meaningful amount of time, and all of them were making the money machine go brrrr for the first 12 months of the pandemic.

... and we are looking at a data set from 2020, which says almost nothing about mass vaccination, surely the BIGGEST deciding factor in public health policy. the almost total irrelevance of that graph to the matter at hand is astounding. 'let's keep totally closed borders! vaccination is nearly useless! look at this graph, which shows GDP growth during a period of emergency government spending before any vaccines were available and any economic consequences were felt'. 2020 was an unprecedented year in which basically half the population of every rich country on earth were paid a living wage by their government to sit at home and order things off the internet. if you think anything about that year is evidential or sustainable, i've got a few communist utopias to sell you.

Here we had practically normal lives - thanks to closed borders -

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-n … -the-world
How Melbourne’s ‘short, sharp’ Covid lockdowns became the longest in the world

https://www.smh.com.au/please-explain/m … 58xch.html
Melbourne’s lockdown a world leader as daily cases hit record high

LOL OK. yes, closed borders really fixed the world's longest lockdown in melbourne, which, despite business-destroying and socially exhausting lockdown measures, took forever to contain a cluster outbreak. again: you speak only for yourself. 'i'm alright, jack'. i imagine the inhabitants and business owners of victoria or melbourne, experiencing their 7th lockdown or the world's longest ever continuous lockdown, feel rather differently.

'zero covid', with its perma-closed borders and month's long, city-wide lockdowns, is a totally insupportable strategy in the medium or long term. even the CCP has tacitly admitted it with their discussion of vaccination goals.

Last edited by uziq (2021-10-13 18:40:28)

States which were organised and efficient haven't had these problems.

literally not true. even new zealand is pivoting away from a 'zero covid' strategy with the tacit admission that they are unsustainable indefinitely. which leaves only china as the exemplum of a 'total control, total containment' model (for now; even they have recently made gestures towards reopening when vaccination levels reach 80-85%). sure, if you want to live under the technocratic eye of the CCP, be my guest.

and what states outside of totalitarian-authoritarian, ruthlessly technocratic ones, are perfectly 'organized and efficient' all the time?. bungling and inefficiencies in melbourne just cost its citizens over 245 days of continuous lockdown. that's not negligible and nor is melbourne some exceptionally corrupt and inept case; it could just as easily happen in NSW (untraced community leaks happened in NZ on several occasions).

so these systems are hardly 'without problems'. you are literally ignoring the suffering and economic wipeout of millions of people under lockdown regimes; ignoring the inevitable economic meltdown of limitless government spending; and being sanguine about the massive amounts of CCP-lite level overreach into freedom, even on the level of 'freedom to see loved ones' or 'freedom to visit friends in a city a state over'. it's so blithe as to almost be comedic. 'i'm alright jack', 'life here has practically been normal', 'international tourists are selfish beings'. LOL.

In the long run vaccination will help but throwing away all the benefits of vaccination ...

ffs make fucking sense. earlier this page you were saying '80% vaccination is useless without other measures ...'. now you're saying 'in the long run vaccination will help'. so which is it?!?

more so when most of the world won't be vaccinated for years

and a fine job you're doing of contributing to this, with a 'me me me, i only care about my country's covid stats' attitude and your persistent (and unfounded) vaccine hesitancy and skepticism!

once again, for your poxed and addled mind, NO ONE is proposing throwing away other measures and NO ONE is leaning solely on vaccination as the miracle deliverance from the pandemic. those public events? still will require testing and likely prudent uses of masks. those people travelling internally or cross-borders? still will require testing and likely prudent use of quarantines. you're like a fucking terrier chasing his own tail.

Last edited by uziq (2021-10-13 19:10:43)

that's now. we're talking about the near-future, i.e. when vaccination levels reach that 75-80%. are you really being this fucking obtuse as to quote the current immigration page when we are talking about sustainable or supportable strategies for the future? stop being so thick. australia, new zealand and even china are discussing soon abandoning their zero covid strategies.

On October 4, prime minister Jacinda Ardern unveiled that the country would be moving away from its elimination strategy, as it became clear that its battle with the Delta variant, with the first case found on August 17, was not ending anytime soon. “For this outbreak, it’s clear that long periods of heavy restrictions has not got us to zero cases,” she said.

jacinda ardern's government has vacillated over this issue several times in the last 1-2 months, clearly discussing re-opening their borders to people who have been double-vaccinated and tested, with (it looks like) now next spring being the timeline, after the usual winter challenges.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said New Zealand’s border restrictions would ease starting early next year, allowing vaccinated travelers from low-risk countries to enter without having to quarantine. The country’s borders have been closed to almost all foreign travelers since March 2020.

In a new program beginning in October, vaccinated New Zealanders returning to the country may also be able to self-isolate at home and skip the 14-day hotel quarantine that is currently required.

Ms. Ardern warned, however, that the country’s borders would not return to their pre-pandemic norm, when passengers did not face vaccination or testing requirements.

and so once again we're back to the scenario i've been talking about, since at least 9 months ago, where international travel is perfectly feasible with multiple testing + quarantine + contact tracing. that is, the model that south korea and taiwan used for almost the ENTIRE duration of the pandemic, and which seems readily available and suitable for, yes, australia and new zealand and any other nation that wants to be cautious.

Last edited by uziq (2021-10-13 19:23:52)

you mean like how the cases have ticked up in countless countries with high vaccination? and deaths haven't?

how do you suppose reversing courses from a high level of cases back to 'zero covid'? beyond a certain scale, say, 2500 daily cases, contact tracing loses its effectivity. by that point a good 20-30% of daily cases are 'untraced', i.e. due to public transport systems or passing public contact. that's been the statistical picture here in korea for as long as i've been here. or do you suppose we'll go back to total nation-wide lockdowns? in pursuit of some arbitrary low number of cases, despite the negligible effects on deaths? LOL.

korea is a case-in-point. for the first 12 months anything above 200 daily cases was a disaster. then it became 500 daily cases as the new flashpoint. then, with much hysteria and wringing of hands, 1,000 daily cases became the fearsome new benchmark. now they're constantly at 2,000 daily cases average. want to know what has happened to their death figures in tandem with these increasing cases? now that more and more of the country have been vaccinated? ... i'm sure you know the ending to this story already, genius. in mid-october/early november the korean center for diseases and control are going to roll-out a new system: 'living with covid'.

what the korean example has made clear to me, especially in such a collectivist (or, rather, confirmist) culture, is that one of the biggest barriers with rises in daily case numbers is psychological. it's not borne out by the concrete epidemiological picture. after 18 months of 'zero' or 'low' covid policies, seeing big numbers is basically frightening. but the evidence is clear: high levels of vaccination mitigate serious illness and death. booster shots are further effective. treatments have come a long way. antiviral medication is nearly here. there is really no need for this hysterical approach to lockdowns anymore; with the highly transmissible delta variant, it's not even clear that heavy lockdowns even work themselves.

it looks like the wisdom of the world's governments, including many of its best-performing administrations, runs counter to yours. who woulda thunk it?!?

the pandemic is far from over. it is still overwhelmingly a global health problem, with an emphasis on 'global'. we need to vaccinate the global south asap and to bolster healthcare systems in the most vulnerable places and pinchpoints. it's not about 'making china pay for it', as you have it, but rather about collaboration to get this thing nixxed and properly under control. first-world nations with top-rate health systems and 80%+ vaccinated populations should be the last ones being hysterical, dilbert.

Last edited by uziq (2021-10-14 00:09:42)