BF2S Forums Pandemic thread

how relevant your recent tv watching is to the pandemic.

you really aren’t a very intelligent individual, are you? sub-tabloid ranting about the state of the world isn’t analysis, dilbert.

your ahistorical takes on ‘it worked perfectly fine’ don’t apply at all to post-delta covid. we have been here SO many times before. no, locked borders were not ‘working fine’ for the countries pursuing this path with delta and later strains. why do you have this persistent need to muddle the timeline of the pandemic? nobody is buying it.

ebola is not comparable to covid. i thought covid was comparable to leprosy? make your mind up.

how would closing borders have stopped a highly mutative coronavirus from, erm, mutating? it’s clear enough that even in a small population sample, the virus will mutate a lot. that’s what the early metastudies ably demonstrated: multiple mutations in very short order.

‘if only everyone stayed inside for 6 months, we could eradicate flu, just like we got rid of, erm, smallpox’.

you’re illiterate and repeating the same rants doesn’t give your takes any more validity.

read a book.

Dilbert_X wrote:

As long as its not in my population I don't care how much it mutates.

the whole point is that the variants mutated and gained advantages in transmissibility which defeated border controls. you fucking idiot. how would it stay ‘over there’ in a globalised world? even hermit kingdoms like north korea have been exposed to covid outbreaks. even remote island nations need some notional contact with the rest of the world at some point. how else are you going to get your nerd hobby springs?

https://twitter.com/bci_/status/1595498 … qqHTXOdP7g

the people who make your electronics aren’t very happy. zero covid is going very well.

https://twitter.com/letahong/status/159 … 2kdwBZlNpQ

iT jUst WoRkS

you’re making yet more fatuous arguments.

nobody said covid is harmless or that death is trivial. but vaccines work. china went hard for zero covid and let vaccine skepticism in the elderly in particular harden. you know, like the skepticism you keep promulgating. now they are years into socially and psychologically exhausting zero covid and still looking at mass death from uncontrolled waves. it’s a huge self-own but you keep saying how flawlessly zero covid delivers. evidently it does not.

it’s nice that you’re envious of my lifestyle. but i’m not reading anything in your supposed ‘barbs’ than just that: saltiness. pOstiNg oN iNsTaGrAm. lmao you sad little recluse.

i had some great food today and hooked up with a lovely charming local, an art curator who is taking me to a gallery on tuesday. tonight i’ll take a nice walk by the river. isn’t life just marvellous when you’re living in a society that is managing covid without lockdowns?

Last edited by uziq (2022-11-27 02:34:25)

Vaccines reduce the death rate, they don't stop covid transmitting, mutating, long term health problems etc.

Last week 357 South Koreans dies of covid. I guess unless someone dies a gasping death in front of you they don't matter, whats important is for you to do whatever you like.

Dilbert_X wrote:

Vaccines reduce the death rate, they don't stop covid transmitting, mutating, long term health problems etc.

Last week 357 South Koreans dies of covid. I guess unless someone dies a gasping death in front of you they don't matter, whats important is for you to do whatever you like.

did anyone died driving the cars you worked on before?

lol what? road traffic deaths are trivial and minimised but old people dying of respiratory diseases is the most important thing ever?

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/27/upsh … lists.html

it’s a huge cause of preventable deaths. people can get around by safer forms of transport - and the environment benefits too.

why do you get to have your selfish lifestyle with a car? why is that more important than the trade offs with covid? schools, offices, hospitals and dentists and doctors practices etc, being open aren’t somehow important to society? oh but dilbert likes to drive his toy subaru so driving deaths aren’t important.

Meanwhile South Korea is having a plane crash a week.
People lost their minds when two 737Maxs crashed, but "isn’t life just marvellous when you’re living in a society that is managing covid" at only a 737 full a week dying.

this form of argument is just all so very silly. preventing crowd crushes and plane accidents are relatively simple. reasonable steps can be taken to address both issues to very high margins of safety. shutting down all of society to stop the transmission of a disease isn’t the same proposition as posting some police with crowd-channeling measures or having some engineers run the sums a few extra times. (yes i know aviation isn’t actually simple as a subject before you go off on some boring aside about engineering being the most difficult thing ever).

This all says a great deal about uziq really, four weeks on from witnessing 150 people die "isn’t life just marvellous" amazing.

should i perform my grief better for you, daddy? sit shiva for a month? wear black for a year? why are you persistently trying to snipe at me for not satisfactorily paying my respects - when i have done just that? it’s very, very weird. it makes you look unhinged and pathetic.

otherwise, yes, my life is better than yours in just about every conceivable way. and you clearly hate it. i love living rent free in your head.

Last edited by uziq (2022-11-27 04:59:39)

wow.

I think the focus on China's internal issues regarding zero COVID is a lot of wishful thinking. It will still be interesting to see where the government goes with their response. There is of course a middle ground between "let it rip" and "zero COVID" but that middle ground has a lot of bodies in it. China probably feels that the public unrest is less embarrassing and destabilizing than hospitals with freezer vans. Did we all forget what it was like in March 2020?

i don’t think anyone is condoning ‘let it rip’ in china. it would be a disaster for the world. but the point is that their draconian policies have done nothing to stop this. record waves after 3 years of literally welding their own populace into their (burning) apartment buildings.

they squandered 3 years and turned their country’s authoritarianism up several notches in the process. utterly illiberal measures have stuck around like a bad smell in western countries too: two extremely authoritarian public order bills have entered UK law in the lees of covid-19. arguably inconceivable before people accepted such restrictions before the pandemic. it’s the bush admin patriot act post-9/11 all over again.

and yet there’s still useful idiots in the west, like dilbert, arguing for zero transmission and reducing cases. it hasn’t worked in a totalitarian police state that is inside every single person’s apartment building and phone like a literal big brother figure – but apparently it’s tenable globally? lol go figure.

china isn’t the only place with swathes of the population resistant to vaccines or caught up in hoodoo cures. we have them in the west too. it’s china’s unique failure to deploy meaningful vaccines amongst its most at-risk. you’re telling me the most coercive regime in the world, currently engaged in culturally genociding a population of millions in an entire province, can’t compel the elderly to have a vaccine? they’ve already been forcing mandatory PCRs, lockdowns, etc, on people for years. if a positive case was detected in a shopping mall or a public place, they’d literally seal the MF’ers in there for 3 weeks. no excuses. but they couldn’t deploy vaccines, literally the one thing that will forestall mass death when confronted with the relatively mild omicron?

zero covid has lost all credibility. even amongst a population as patriotic (or cowed and afraid) as the chinese mainlanders. we are seeing the psychological burn-out in real time. students at the elite tsinghua university — the absolute top 1% of chinese society, who would have slaved their entire lives and had their families pull every string in the party book for entrance – risking everything. shared in common with manual labourers and the working poor in places like urumqi, many of whom have been starving to death or surviving on gruel locked inside their own homes. a broad unison of feelings from the underclass to the elite. and all of these people could risk having their families blacklisted for generations for speaking out. the CCP already utilises measures such as denying criminals/dissidents’ children entrance to good schools, etc. these people are risking multi-generational ruin by criticising zero covid.

bUt iF onLy wE tRieD wE coULd hAve nIxXeD iT!

the whole discussion is so long in the tooth in 2022. like come on, fucking really. there’s been covid cases in north korea. covid cases in antarctic bases and research stations. even during the early era it spread to places that were trying their best to keep it out. every country that went to great expense to pursue zero covid floundered miserably after the delta era.

to say nothing of the fact that pursuing a genuinely global effort to bring the disease to heel wouldn’t just require things like the west–china working in (much) closer cooperation: it would involve public health bodies reaching into places like the DPRK, eritrea, somalia, the destabilised afghanistan of recent years, etc. places where central government and health services are practically nonexistent. otherwise they would just become cauldrons of covid and new mutations, ably spitting it out to the rest of the world. just ridiculously unfeasible from any concrete epidemiological point of view. there’s no policy that could achieve it.

the final nail should have been put in this discussion a LONG time ago.