I fear we have lost the collective will to conduct pandemic mitigation. The next time something bad comes round, we're just going to have it wash over us and Black Death it. It's a shame
kleton 17 days ago [-]
It was clear to people paying attention to the hard numbers by February 2020 that Covid was no threat to children and non-elderly adults without risk factors like obesity, which led to the rational decision to treat it as a non-risk. If something bad comes around that is actually killing healthy adults, they would stay home.
snowwrestler 17 days ago [-]
This comment is a great example of why it is so hard to fight pandemics. It is incredibly tempting to give in to the post-hoc rationalization of how things worked out. Which then leads to a high degree of public complacency prior to the next pandemic.
On an individual basis, people who survive the pandemic (by avoiding infection or by surviving infection) are tempted to reason that the fear, doubt, and mitigations were all in fact overblown. After all, most folks got through it ok, right?
The reality is that COVID worked out way, way worse than even pessimistic guesses in early 2020. It killed over a million Americans, many of whom were in fact healthy adults without obvious risk factors. And the long-term legacy of “long COVID” impairment is still being learned.
cogman10 17 days ago [-]
It nearly killed my sister-in-law who is a (relatively) healthy 20 something. Definitely gave her long covid and she definitely treated it with ivermectin.
To this day, her and her husband will rant and rave about how dangerous the vaccine is (which my family and I all the boosters for).
I've been told about the millions that will die any day now from the vaccines. And while I've yet to actually hear of a single person that took the vaccine who's died from either covid or the vaccine itself, I have multiple family members and friends family members that I know died from covid.
I don't even doubt that there are people that have received the vaccine and later died from covid, I just don't personally know anyone that is in that category.
motohagiography 17 days ago [-]
calling high quality decisions about risk post-hoc rationalizations is like saying an athlete is just dumb and lucky.
snowwrestler 17 days ago [-]
Thinking we “won” COVID like a skilled athlete seems like an example of the complacency I’m referring to.
motohagiography 17 days ago [-]
that's about the understanding of athleticism as well. people who take risks have a high performance mentality. a lot of covid policy was exploitative, and principled and intelligent people knew. some just don't fall in as easily.
it was the imperious attitude that forfeited the credibility of institutions and will weaken another social response, and not the people who wouldn't be lied to. people talked about the unvaccinated as a risk, what about the people who for their eagerness to submit, their fearfulness, and their profound contempt for honesty, failed to be persuasive and credible in a crisis?
some people used a flu to run a society wide milgram experiment and everybody knows now. nobody will listen again.
doubleg72 16 days ago [-]
What experiment? The irony of your comment on intelligent people is not lost on me.
17 days ago [-]
WarOnPrivacy 17 days ago [-]
> It was clear to people paying attention to the hard numbers by February 2020 that Covid was no threat to children and non-elderly adults ... which led to the rational decision to treat it as a non-risk.
I found that the risk of supplying a deadly contagion to a loved one is a risk that mattered to me. Even if my loved one were elderly or burdened with a health issue.
I also realized some concern for the lives of people I didn't love. FF to now and I mask up when I do service calls in medical buildings (because of high risk patients).
SalmonSnarker 17 days ago [-]
covid infection in children increases their rate of acquiring type 2 diabetes in the 6 months after infection (RR 1.58 for most children, 2.0 for obese, 3 for hospitalized) [0] but sure, "no threat to children", go off king.
This seems like hindsight bias. Much less was understood about COVID back then and maybe you forgot how uncertain it was?
mike_hearn 17 days ago [-]
It really wasn't that uncertain. SARS-CoV-2 behaved exactly like what it was (a novel coronavirus). Public health officials and those on their side tried to play it up as a totally unknown thing that could do literally anything, but that was just a way to obfuscate their bad decisions combined with a general tendency to engage in fear mongering.
skybrian 17 days ago [-]
It doesn't seem like other novel coronaviruses filled the hospitals like COVID did.
mike_hearn 17 days ago [-]
Coronaviruses can certainly do that. The Russian "flu" at the end of the 19th century is now believed to have been caused by a novel coronavirus:
(BTW, take all death estimates for old pandemics with a giant pinch of salt).
But at any rate, COVID didn't fill the hospitals. New York had a problem temporarily due to bad management of their very limited morgue capacity, but look at most other places and there was no issue. Even in Bergamo early on, in the period when doctors were accidentally killing patients with unnecessary intubation, they never actually ran out of hospital capacity. Go check the reports at the time if you don't believe me.
Unfortunately, almost everything that people believe about COVID and what happened during it is wrong. When it came to hospitals what you'll see if you review the historical evidence carefully is that media reports and online commentary frequently blurred the line between "it is predicted that hospitals will overflow" and "hospitals are actually overflowing". The former rapidly became reported as the latter with no actual change in the situation. This kind of problem of predictions/reality getting mixed up cropped up many times in different contexts.
Then on top you have the problem of outright fake or misleading reporting. For instance, there was a brief period when TV news crews simply faked reports of full hospitals. They often liked to do this by reporting on a local hospital and claiming it was straining/at the limit etc, then showing video footage of an ICU in Bergamo from months or even years ago without informing the viewer of where it was, leaving viewers to infer it was a video of what was actually happening. This trick with that specific video happened so frequently it became something of a meme. In another case, a news crew turned up and organized doctors and medical staff at the (in reality fairly quiet) hospital to get in their cars and pretend to be patients queuing up to enter the hospital. Someone local got suspicious and visited the hospital a day after the report, discovered there were no queues or overload problems anywhere and asked around what had happened, which is how the news crew were found out.
If you remember, this blew up when bored medical workers started uploading videos of themselves dancing to Tiktok. This revealed the true situation at a time when people were being told to stay home to save the hospitals from overload.
I remember getting into an argument with my German teacher about this topic, because the Swiss health minister (Berset, ugh) actually went on TV and claimed hospitals were overflowing. The Swiss government's own dashboard showed that there was no unusual level of hospital load, there were lots of free beds all over the country and there were no problems to report. He literally just made up a non-existent crisis. They do this because it works, she had no idea he was lying and when I tried to show her the actual graphs just got distressed, saying "I'm not a data person".
skybrian 17 days ago [-]
There may have been bored medical workers somewhere and conditions varied by country, but I think it's generally understood that there was a shortage of medical professionals? Travelling nurses were making lots of money, for example. There was also a backlog from postponed medical procedures.
But in any case, I think you kind of proved the point that if what you say was true, it wasn't generally known.
mike_hearn 16 days ago [-]
I don't think there was any shortage of medical professionals. There was a shortage relative to the demand predicted by models, but as that demand never materialized neither did the shortages (for COVID treatment).
Medical procedures were postponed because some governments emptied out hospitals in anticipation of huge influxes of patients, they believed this would happen due to academic models with no validity. So this then did lead to backlogs for non-COVID treatments, but it was an artificial backlog and how bad it was depended on how quickly governments realized the academics were charlatans. In Switzerland hospitals were only emptied out for a period of weeks because the private hospitals started going bankrupt and laying off medical staff due to lack of work which played very badly with the "we will be hit with a huge wave of demand" narrative, so they quietly reversed the policy and hospitals went back to work. In the UK OTOH the NHS stayed emptied out for months. With no bankruptcies to deal with the problem was able to remain ignored for longer, and so they ended up with unsolvable backlogs. They're working their way through it slowly now, but partly by just letting people die whilst waiting. Catastrophic :(
Everything I'm saying was widely known in the community of "sceptics" who realized that the government narratives were built on lies early on, but admittedly in 2020 when this was going down that community was quite small.
JumpCrisscross 12 days ago [-]
> There was a shortage relative to the demand predicted by models
This is wrong. My friend who is a New York City plastic surgeon was pressed into monitoring a floor full of patients on ventilators. Meanwhile in Idaho, the hospitals were full.
skybrian 16 days ago [-]
Saying that hospitals in the UK National Health Service “stayed emptied out for months” in the middle of a pandemic is a rather remarkable claim. What evidence is there for it?
kleton 17 days ago [-]
I had recovered from it in about January 2020, so it was not one bit uncertain to me.
WarOnPrivacy 17 days ago [-]
>>> it was clear to people paying attention to the hard numbers by February 2020
> I had recovered from it in about January 2020, so it was not one bit uncertain to me.
We learned a lot of lessons in the 18 months after Feb 2020, including about long COVID and who was impacted. Were any of your conclusions reshaped in the face of later broad, consistent medical evidence?
If you were to consider your process of understanding COVID, was there ever a point where it could be fairly described as working backward from a conclusion?
kleton 17 days ago [-]
One thing remained clear from the time I got Covid the first time- people with natural immunity should be allowed to return to going about their normal lives.
WarOnPrivacy 17 days ago [-]
> One thing remained clear from the time I got Covid the first time- people with natural immunity should be allowed to return to going about their normal lives.
I'm going to parse this and offer some personal impressions.
"One thing" (variant = "All I know") signals to me that my question - are you working backward from a conclusion - can't be considered at this time. It's a reasonable response and I hope you will consider my Q at a later time.
In considering your whole response, I get a vibe that you were justified or maybe vindicated. In my experience, those are markers of clinging to a conclusion and waiting for evidence of it. If I'm off base, help me out here.
I also think you're being forthright with me and not subversive.
skybrian 17 days ago [-]
How do you know it was COVID and not some other disease with similar symptoms? Also, why would you be confident that your experience generalizes?
Getting to “not one bit uncertain” from what you could possibly have known then shows poor reasoning skills.
kleton 17 days ago [-]
There was only one thing going around in the Bay Area in January 2020, and the symptoms clearly lined up for everyone in my network.
skybrian 17 days ago [-]
How could you know that there was "only one thing going around?" That would be kind of weird. Maybe you and your friends got a cold?
kleton 17 days ago [-]
If there were two things going around January 2020, I would have gotten both of them. This is common sense to anyone who has had school age children.
charlotte-fyi 17 days ago [-]
> without risk factors like obesity
40% of Americans are obese.
bdangubic 17 days ago [-]
42% after the holidays :)
17 days ago [-]
Izkata 17 days ago [-]
I'm not even that confident about obesity being a risk factor. Obesity rates in hospitalizations were often a little lower than the population rates (implying a slight protective effect instead of a risk factor), and almost all the reporting on it either compared "obese" to "overweight and obese" to massively inflate the apparent risk, or shared the obesity rate with no comparison.
Even assuming it was, it would only have been a fraction of a fraction of the risk from age.
wumeow 17 days ago [-]
That’s cool, when do I get my lost white matter and sense of smell back?
OptionOfT 17 days ago [-]
I'd also like the tinnitus to go away.
tsimionescu 17 days ago [-]
Oh, sure, a disease that killed more people than tuberculosis or HIV/AIDS those two years was not a big deal. This is so absurdly silly to say now that I can't fathom how someone who can work a computer well enough to post a message online is still able to believe such drivel.
blharr 17 days ago [-]
Only 40% are obese (US) so it affects a minority of the population, therefore it should be disregarded?
bfdm 17 days ago [-]
This is a whole lot of wrong information and eugenicist thinking, yikes.
1) healthy adults and children were and continue to be killed by covid, even if at lower rates.
2) this is horribly devaluing the lives of people with confounding vulnerabilities. Are you suggesting it's fine if they get decimated or worse?
3) This ignores the long term disabling effects population wide where patients survive but suffer awful quality of life for months or years
I'll probably get downvoted into oblivion for mentioning long covid and eugenics, but I'm fine with that. I've been very disappointed in the shift observed in HN commenter population lately. I used to think this was a group of intelligent & thoughtful people but am no longer suffering that illusion.
kleton 17 days ago [-]
Quarantine, voluntary or otherwise, the elderly and at-risk then. In the Bay Area, anyone who had children in daycare had already gotten Covid and recovered from it before the lockdowns began. A rational policy needed to recognize natural immunity.
bfdm 17 days ago [-]
That is impossible, their lives depend on complex care networks of family and staff that would also need to isolate, but cannot for need to interact with other parts of the world.
It is a fantasy to consider your suggestion as a solution. Even if it were possible, you're condemning those people to a life of isolation and slowly dying alone.
If we instead set & raised indoor air quality standards and established social norms of staying home when sick or masking when that's not possible, then life could go on mostly as normal. But fuck me for asking people for small inconveniences to help others.
I would say it's reasonable to suggest vulnerable folks avoid indoor public dining, but not to remain alone indefinitely.
Anyways, bring on the downvotes.
kleton 17 days ago [-]
If you lock down everyone, or just lock down the elderly, what is the difference to the elderly person locked down? Either way they are isolated.
bfdm 17 days ago [-]
I'm not suggesting "lockdowns" here. I'm advocating for indoor air quality regulation: maximum CO2, minimum fresh air ACH, deploying upper room UVGI ~everywhere. Universal masking (N95+) in healthcare settings.
Acute and specific things we could do to mitigate H5N1 right now, in particular, are deploying the vaccine we have to all poultry and dairy workers to reduce animal to human crossovers.
kleton 17 days ago [-]
You literally said "isolate". Now you have retreated to the motte of common sense hygiene that nobody ever objected to.
bfdm 17 days ago [-]
I was responding to your flippant suggestion to "Quarantine, voluntary or otherwise, the elderly and at-risk then."
Which I pointed out is not possible, because those people depend on many other healthy people to care for them. Either those people also need to join the "at risk" bubble (not feasible since they have jobs, school etc) or you don't really have the at risk population isolated as you suggest.
If you don't understand this then you have no idea how care networks function, with duties spread across facility staff, families, volunteers, visiting caregivers etc.
Suggesting you cut off one or more legs of those support networks isn't practical or humane. It would mean people without adequate support for basic needs like feeding, toileting & bathing, leaving aside mental/physical exercise and socialization.
terminatornet 17 days ago [-]
guess you're not planning on getting old huh?
kleton 17 days ago [-]
I'll stay home
WarOnPrivacy 17 days ago [-]
> I'll stay home
This implies you have the means to have every need met at home. It's not the most common scenario.
WarOnPrivacy 17 days ago [-]
> I'll stay home
This response (and a few others here) hints that your concern for well being might not extend much to other people.
This isn't a condemnation. I have HFA relatives who struggle with this limit, particularly those who are especially gifted elsewhere. Demonizing them is wrong.
However, views without empathy might necessarily be downgraded - that is, they may carry less weight where empathy is needed.
sincerecook 17 days ago [-]
Yes, anyone who isn't hysterical about the possibility of old people dying is autistic.
WarOnPrivacy 16 days ago [-]
> Yes, anyone who isn't hysterical about the possibility of old people dying is autistic.
That's an interesting perspective. I don't share it, however. My perspective is this.
After several decades of autistic folks being deeply embedded in my life, I've come to view the spectrum as a normalcy that all of us reside on. Our challenges aren't equal but our list of possible factors is.
In that view, HFA is a shorthand we use to indicate someone exhibits enough degrees of enough factors. I see HFA as a pointer to a cluster, not a person.
Two of those factors are a dearth of connection and authenticity. I believe our poster exhibited both. The reason I referenced HFA: It's the term I know that also points to a strong presentation of both of those. If you have a better, I might adopt it.
Regarding a dearth of connection, it's something I'm intimate with. I've managed to develop some empathy but it's like trying to grow a garden without seed, soil, air or sunlight.
But if someone is there, I know they've already brought what they have to the table. I need to adjust my expectations.
kleton 17 days ago [-]
In previous generations there was a sense that the elderly had already lived their best years, and the young should be prioritized in emergencies. "Women and children first" The American Boomer generation flipped this on its head, with them demanding the young make sacrifices for them.
cudgy 15 days ago [-]
Old women are not women?
skrebbel 18 days ago [-]
I'm not sure we ever had it.
agilob 17 days ago [-]
Back around 2007-2009 there was a risk of bird flu in central Europe. We had a local ban on washing cars except in fully automated car washes, it wasn't controversial at all. We just went along with it.
vanattab 17 days ago [-]
That's very different then shuting down the economy and locking people in their houses. I am not saying I think the response was unreasonable (at least initially) but many people cleary did.
matthews2 17 days ago [-]
What is the link between car washing and spreading bird flu?
dist-epoch 17 days ago [-]
Car visits a farm with infected chickens, picks up dirt with viruses on the wheels, brings it into cities.
This is one way how it spreads from farm to farm.
agilob 17 days ago [-]
We have lots of trees in the area, it was said not to get close to bird poops and avoid contact with water where birds pollute.
tim333 17 days ago [-]
I'm presuming birds poop on cars, spraying the cars with a hose puts droplets of it in the air.
arwhatever 17 days ago [-]
If I recall, the decision to quarantine people who had contracted Ebola was totally uncontroversial, but I can’t speculate as to how that willingness would scale.
trescenzi 18 days ago [-]
Yea I was in college during Swine Flu and it was mostly treated as a joke. It became an excuse to miss class and the closest the college came to taking it seriously were some strongly worded recommendations to not leave your dorm if you have it.
Of course that _might_ be because it wasn’t that bad. But if you get to the point that it’s spreading that regularly you’ve already lost the ability to control it regardless of severity.
teeray 18 days ago [-]
My armchair theory is that it’s partly a marketing problem. Covid was treated with more fear because it was “the coronavirus” at first. Everyone has had “the flu” before, but nobody had had the spooky “coronavirus” at that point (even if they had—they just hadn’t heard of it). “It’s just the flu bro” is a difficult mindset to overcome.
The same marketing problem existed with CVEs before Heartbleed. CVE-2014-0160 just doesn’t sound as frightening.
archagon 17 days ago [-]
Covid was treated with fear because it was massively contagious.
mike_hearn 17 days ago [-]
COVID was treated with more fear due to the impact of academic modelling, and in particular the models by Neil Ferguson's group at Imperial College. I remember the sequencing quite well here, the massive freakout and sudden interest in extreme lockdowns appeared immediately after Ferguson went to the press because his models predicted sky high casualty rates if lockdowns weren't implemented immediately.
In reality his models were full of bugs, stupid assumptions and were generally unvalidated garbage tier work that didn't match reality at all. A few other epidemiologists pointed that out at the time, but governments are completely undiscerning when it comes to "science" and the press love bad news, so they went with it. End results were wildly off what he predicted.
tim333 17 days ago [-]
I think it was more watching people die gruesomely on ventilators in the early days and worries that could be widespread. In fact most people had already had the "four known seasonal coronaviruses (non-Covid-19)" but not really noticed as they are like the common cold.
dist-epoch 17 days ago [-]
I guess you missed the part with overwhelmed hospitals and grave yards.
sadboi31 18 days ago [-]
The US government was also recorded (and confirmed) as dumping TONS of covid misinformation throughout the entire world. Leaks from a defense contractor showed as much.
Helping a local org give thousands of covid shots to seniors, people living in congregate housing, etc# was not easy because there was a lot of resistance from these communities due to the massive amounts of scary information out there.
It really felt like there was literally nothing wholesome on anyones feeds for almost an entire year. Limited exposure from all non-profits i know of in my community. Significantly reduced views, deleted posts, erroneous flags, etc#.....
Meanwhile, everyone in every neighborhood gets nothing but images + videos of people dying or getting sick from "the jab", "5g", "the mark of the beast", etc#
Most of the women running these non-profits are former executives, local gov't officials, or workers in DHS or other like agencies. They're not stupid and incapable of "getting a message out". Something is and was seriously wrong w/ operation lightspeed.
panarky 17 days ago [-]
Apparently we had the capability for collective action at one time, but most of us weren't around then.
The political order of the New Deal lasted from roughly the Great Depression until about 1980. It wasn't just about government actions, it was more about how most people understood the world what it means to live a good life. That way of thinking about the world enabled collective action to improve the standard of living for most people, reduce poverty and inequality, give most people better health, housing and longer lives, faster and safer transportation, dignity in old age, etc.
But that political order was replaced by neoliberalism, which started in the 1980s and probably ended at the 2008 financial collapse. Again, it was not only a new political order, it was a shift in how people understood the world and their place in it. It was a time of deregulation, globalized commerce and capital flows, and the supremacy of market-based solutions. We got dramatic increases in inequality, unimaginable individual wealth combined with tent cities and a resurgence of infectious disease.
It's hard to imagine accomplishing big collective goals like building an interstate highway system, or implementing social security, or winning a world war against fascism, if all that hadn't been done already.
We might not even be capable of maintaining what previous generations were able to build from nothing.
I've spent my life swimming in the water of neoliberalism so it's almost impossible to imagine that there are alternatives. It feels like effective collective action for the greater good has never been possible and never will be.
sincerecook 17 days ago [-]
Maybe we could just try some more rational measures, like not forcing people who are at low risk to take an experimental treatment and weighing the severity of the of the threat against the freedoms we want to remove.
tim333 17 days ago [-]
We're better with vaccines than in the Black Death days. And with flea killing. The UK government has already ordered five million doses of H5 vaccine just in case it come in handy.
77pt77 17 days ago [-]
Just study it, deploy whatever vaccine or mitigation procedure exists and let those that don't want it die.
Just let them die.
Do not want a ventilator because 80% of those placed in ventilators die? (humans are awful at reasoning)
Great! Die.
Enough with this nonsense.
draw_down 18 days ago [-]
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gotoeleven 18 days ago [-]
Yeah if only people had put a fourth layer of cotton over their faces and refrained from blowing out birthday candles.
paulcole 18 days ago [-]
Yes, it quickly became clear that at least in the US the majority of the population will not accept any restrictions until (at least) there are bodies literally piled in the streets. And probably not even then, IMO.
Will be a grim scene.
phkahler 18 days ago [-]
People in the US followed until the government got stupid, lied, caved to corporations, etc.
If you want people to follow instructions, you need to demonstrate competence first.
paulcole 17 days ago [-]
Reread my comment carefully. I don’t care why people won’t obey. It’s just clear that they will not obey.
indigodaddy 17 days ago [-]
And why should they if it doesn’t make sense?
paulcole 17 days ago [-]
Reread my comment carefully. I don’t care if they obey or not. It’s just clear they will not obey.
indigodaddy 17 days ago [-]
But your comment implies they should blindly obey (does it not?)
paulcole 17 days ago [-]
No. More like a Rorschach for whatever the reader wants to believe.
marxisttemp 17 days ago [-]
Yep. Starting things off by lying about masks set a terrible precedent. Much blood on Fauci’s hands.
stephenitis 18 days ago [-]
Austria got tired of mitigation strategies they still obeyed the rules better than much of the US, but I am doubtful next time a lockdown or restrictions are needed
17 days ago [-]
draw_down 17 days ago [-]
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enraged_camel 17 days ago [-]
I think the only exception is that if the pandemic kills primarily children, and at high rates. We don't care much about the elderly or even the middle-aged, but our society as a whole has a pretty strong "think of the children" attitude that would guarantee strict and prolonged lockdowns in that scenario.
paulcole 17 days ago [-]
You are more hopeful than I am. The think of the children attitude is only when it’s politically advantageous. 16% of kids live in poverty. We’ll do whatever we can to protect children before they’re born then go like, “good luck” once they’re born.
HeatrayEnjoyer 17 days ago [-]
Twenty children were shot in their elementary school and that wasn't enough to make the US take action.
bdangubic 17 days ago [-]
but our society as a whole has a pretty strong "think of the children" attitude that would guarantee strict and prolonged lockdowns in that scenario.
in the US this cannot be further from the truth. we allow our children to be slaughtered in school, be hungry, be without health insurance. US cares more about 8754 other things before children
vanattab 17 days ago [-]
Don't forget we also use our knowledge of science and psychology to capture and destroy the attention spans of the our children for the "short term" enrichment of elite shareholders. I say short term because I think the whole country is soon to face very real issues as a result.
77pt77 17 days ago [-]
> we allow our children to be slaughtered in school
Even though this is true, it's not at the same scale.
Covid was killing more people in one week in Florida than nationally in school shootings the decade prior or something like this.
It was not even close.
But you are right. The "think of the children" is mainly performative and depends tremendously on who the children are.
bdangubic 17 days ago [-]
The "think of the children" is mainly performative and depends tremendously on who the children are.
agree with your post except this part… I honestly do not think it matters at all who the children are - the US entire system is setup to do exactly the opposite of thinking of the children. if there is money involved in any way children will get fucked (the most recent example being KOSA which was voted in senate almost unanimously only to then be killed by zuck paying everyone off…). I find all “think of chidren” garbage very amusing (though of course it is no laughing matter)
77pt77 17 days ago [-]
I partially agree.
I think that the USA is one of the worst places to grow up in the "developed" world.
Countries far poorer and less "developed" do a much better job.
But I do maintain, the right children will be somewhat protected, even though it's overwhelming performative.
77pt77 17 days ago [-]
Not even then.
They'll just assume it was some demonic thing and double down on jesus.
Both the jew and scapegoating their neighbor Jesus from Guatemala.
gotoeleven 17 days ago [-]
Remember week 58 of "2 weeks to slow the spread"? It would be lovely to have a public health establishment that was competent, science based and trust worthy but they showed themselves to be dishonest and beholden to hysterics.
EDIT: And don't forget the spicy dash of left wing politics that they added to all their decisions. BLM riots were ok, church gatherings not OK.
wrs 17 days ago [-]
I don’t think riots were ever “OK” in any official estimation. Are you actually saying the government encouraged riots?
And all indoor gatherings were discouraged, not just church gatherings. Especially gatherings where people sing. Remember the choir rehearsal that killed two people? [0]
BLM protests were outside, with majority of people wearing masks. There was quite a lot of outdoor activities that were allowed. The risk factor isn’t even close to indoor gathering in a poorly ventilated space.
draw_down 18 days ago [-]
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kens 18 days ago [-]
The article talks about how people's immune systems can get synced to the first flu they encounter. Coincidentally, the latest issue of Science has a paper finding that genetics is a more important factor than first exposure in determining which flu strain a person's immune system can fight best.
The prediction markets are mostly illiquid and filled with degenerate gamblers trying to turn a 0.01 into a 1 so they overestimate tail chances because of the financial incentive. Because of the long lock-up period, you can't arbitrage it with better knowledge: i.e. a 7% can't be turned into a 1% because "by 2030" locks you up for a really long time for small value.
y-c-o-m-b 17 days ago [-]
I didn't see this mentioned in the article (or maybe I missed it), but what are the chances that it's already been circulating in the population (h2h) but causing very mild symptoms? It doesn't seem like we're testing for it unless a patient becomes hospitalized (and apparently even then it might take several ER trips before they decide to test). Are we relying on waste-water testing to determine community transmission then?
I have a friend here in Oregon that came down with conjunctivitis for several days and then progressed to flu symptoms. It didn't hit him hard though and he recovered on his own just fine. I'm sure many pathogens can produce this same symptom progression, but it elevated my curiosity for sure.
I see that Canadian teen who acquired H5N1 had a similar symptom progression and initially tested positive for flu strain A, but it wasn't until they did further testing specifically for H5N1 that it was discovered. I suspect these "last-resort" testing scenarios are quite common since most hospitals (particularly in the US) don't give enough of a damn to test further for cases that don't require over-night+ admission into the hospital or ICU.
cogman10 18 days ago [-]
From what I've read, the risk of H5N1 becoming human to human mainly comes from co-infection. That is, a person that is infected both by H5N1 and the flu. In that case, there is a risk that the H5N1 virus trades genetics with something like H1N1 which gives it the extra genetic oomph to spread it around.
The fact that this outbreak is happening during typical cold/flu season is part of what has virologists on edge. Both hitting the right person wouldn't be great.
The best defense here is for people to get their flu vaccine and avoid livestock if possible. If not possible, then it's reporting to the USDA/CDC if your livestock gets sick.
Unfortunately, this all may translate into culling of herds which will translate into higher egg/beef prices to the average consumer.
wumeow 18 days ago [-]
It’s interesting to compare this to the beginning of the Covid pandemic. We’ve been able to pretty effectively track H5N1 as it hops between animal populations and some humans, whereas Covid came out of nowhere.
m3047 18 days ago [-]
Covid, or its immediate analogues, were extensively studied in a lab in Wuhan for exactly this reason. When it became the "Covid" we all know and love then it was a thing and not a precursor.
H5N1 today is a precursor. How would we know whether the strain which finally goes "viral" in humans is a product of "natural" washing or was done in a lab with humanized mouse cells?
cogman10 18 days ago [-]
The difference is H5N1 infections have mostly happened in predictable and (importantly) rural places. That is, among people working directly with the animals impacted.
Covid, on the other hand, had few precursors and hit in a population dense area (Wuhan). It does not help that for a fairly significant portion of the population covid was near symptomless.
H5N1 has been much more severe when it hits humans.
That said, it's not impossible that a variant of H5N1 that escapes will do so because it's more covid like in that it doesn't look or act much worse than a common flu in the first few infected.
tim333 17 days ago [-]
It's impressive what you can do with open science as opposed to secretive lab cock ups.
18 days ago [-]
gatkinso 18 days ago [-]
Tracking was available by Jan 2020 at the latest
18 days ago [-]
17 days ago [-]
FergusArgyll 17 days ago [-]
As a complete aside:
Scotts love of Metaculus over other prediction markets blinded him in this years Presidential race and then wrote the most copium filled article titled "Congrats To Polymarket, But I Still Think They Were Mispriced" [0] even though Metaculus has the worst calibration of any market [1] which should obviously be true because there's no money on the line (even fake money, see Manifold Markets, helps accuracy).
It's nice to see a balanced article on H5N1. A good one to send to the numerate who are panicking about H5N1.
luuurker 18 days ago [-]
And to those who ignore any warnings. After all, there's a middle ground between ignoring it completely and complete panic.
bryanlarsen 17 days ago [-]
AFAICT, at this stage, it's not really actionable for the general population, is it? H1N1 and H3N2 are much more dangerous today, so the general population would be much better served by articles talking about normal flu hygiene.
Other than people who work with birds & cattle. It'd be really nice to see a campaign to get them immunized for the flu to reduce the risk of a co-infection that can hybridize H5N1.
BenjiWiebe 17 days ago [-]
I guess I did my part, then, without realizing it. I work on a dairy farm and I got my annual flu shot already.
Here's hoping our cows don't get sick.
404mm 17 days ago [-]
The article mentioned that we already have some limited supplies of a vaccine for H5N1. Just curious, what’s keeping us from adding it to the yearly flu shot mix ahead of time?
tim333 17 days ago [-]
It'd be premature as by the time H5N1 went pandemic it would have mutated and hardly anyone is getting it just now.
chgs 18 days ago [-]
H5N1 was a thing about 20 years ago. Why is today any different?
pm215 18 days ago [-]
The article's answer to this seems to be:
1) over the last 20 years H5N1 has spread from birds to minks and cows and in the last few months also to pigs
2) pigs in particular are hosts to both human and bird viruses, so they're a likely place for an H5N1 virus to do the reassortment with a human flu virus that might make it become human to human transmissible
3) but nonetheless, today is still not that much different -- the risk now is only a little elevated from the baseline ~5% risk of some pandemic flu breaking out that we might get in any year
floatrock 17 days ago [-]
Don't forget the consolidation of big ag / factory farming conditions ever since the Butz/Nixon "get big or get out" era.
Turns out cramming a lot of animals into ever tiner spaces creates more opportunities for pathogenic recombination and evolution.
18 days ago [-]
oldpersonintx 18 days ago [-]
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Uw5ssYPc 17 days ago [-]
[flagged]
m3047 18 days ago [-]
> There are already H5N1 vaccines for both chickens and humans; pharma companies are working hard on cows.
We need another term besides "vaccine" for the class of inoculations which don't prevent disease spread but rather lessen the (statistical) occurrence of severe illness. A lot of the focus on "vaccines" for chickens, cows, pigs etc. is on preventing severe illness: preventing serious illness still allows product to be delivered to market (hopefully post illness) whereas preventing disease spread requires a commitment to culling breakthroughs which interferes with profit!
My general understanding that preventing serious illness, rather than transmission, is the objective with current influenza vaccines for humans as well.
(As long as they're not noticeably sick, I'll keep on hugging my chickens as a source of generalized immunity to both coronaviruses and influenza.)
retrac 17 days ago [-]
Even among vaccines that are effective enough to halt a pathogen on a population level, it doesn't mean it guarantees immunity on an individual level. Some people vaccinated for smallpox or polio or measles caught them anyway back when they were endemic, but usually with milder disease due to the prior vaccination.
watermelon0 17 days ago [-]
From Wikipedia:
> Vaccines can be prophylactic (to prevent or alleviate the effects of a future infection by a natural or "wild" pathogen), or therapeutic (to fight a disease that has already occurred, such as cancer).
On an individual basis, people who survive the pandemic (by avoiding infection or by surviving infection) are tempted to reason that the fear, doubt, and mitigations were all in fact overblown. After all, most folks got through it ok, right?
The reality is that COVID worked out way, way worse than even pessimistic guesses in early 2020. It killed over a million Americans, many of whom were in fact healthy adults without obvious risk factors. And the long-term legacy of “long COVID” impairment is still being learned.
To this day, her and her husband will rant and rave about how dangerous the vaccine is (which my family and I all the boosters for).
I've been told about the millions that will die any day now from the vaccines. And while I've yet to actually hear of a single person that took the vaccine who's died from either covid or the vaccine itself, I have multiple family members and friends family members that I know died from covid.
I don't even doubt that there are people that have received the vaccine and later died from covid, I just don't personally know anyone that is in that category.
it was the imperious attitude that forfeited the credibility of institutions and will weaken another social response, and not the people who wouldn't be lied to. people talked about the unvaccinated as a risk, what about the people who for their eagerness to submit, their fearfulness, and their profound contempt for honesty, failed to be persuasive and credible in a crisis?
some people used a flu to run a society wide milgram experiment and everybody knows now. nobody will listen again.
I found that the risk of supplying a deadly contagion to a loved one is a risk that mattered to me. Even if my loved one were elderly or burdened with a health issue.
I also realized some concern for the lives of people I didn't love. FF to now and I mask up when I do service calls in medical buildings (because of high risk patients).
[0] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1889%E2%80%931890_pandemic#Cor...
(BTW, take all death estimates for old pandemics with a giant pinch of salt).
But at any rate, COVID didn't fill the hospitals. New York had a problem temporarily due to bad management of their very limited morgue capacity, but look at most other places and there was no issue. Even in Bergamo early on, in the period when doctors were accidentally killing patients with unnecessary intubation, they never actually ran out of hospital capacity. Go check the reports at the time if you don't believe me.
Unfortunately, almost everything that people believe about COVID and what happened during it is wrong. When it came to hospitals what you'll see if you review the historical evidence carefully is that media reports and online commentary frequently blurred the line between "it is predicted that hospitals will overflow" and "hospitals are actually overflowing". The former rapidly became reported as the latter with no actual change in the situation. This kind of problem of predictions/reality getting mixed up cropped up many times in different contexts.
Then on top you have the problem of outright fake or misleading reporting. For instance, there was a brief period when TV news crews simply faked reports of full hospitals. They often liked to do this by reporting on a local hospital and claiming it was straining/at the limit etc, then showing video footage of an ICU in Bergamo from months or even years ago without informing the viewer of where it was, leaving viewers to infer it was a video of what was actually happening. This trick with that specific video happened so frequently it became something of a meme. In another case, a news crew turned up and organized doctors and medical staff at the (in reality fairly quiet) hospital to get in their cars and pretend to be patients queuing up to enter the hospital. Someone local got suspicious and visited the hospital a day after the report, discovered there were no queues or overload problems anywhere and asked around what had happened, which is how the news crew were found out.
If you remember, this blew up when bored medical workers started uploading videos of themselves dancing to Tiktok. This revealed the true situation at a time when people were being told to stay home to save the hospitals from overload.
I remember getting into an argument with my German teacher about this topic, because the Swiss health minister (Berset, ugh) actually went on TV and claimed hospitals were overflowing. The Swiss government's own dashboard showed that there was no unusual level of hospital load, there were lots of free beds all over the country and there were no problems to report. He literally just made up a non-existent crisis. They do this because it works, she had no idea he was lying and when I tried to show her the actual graphs just got distressed, saying "I'm not a data person".
But in any case, I think you kind of proved the point that if what you say was true, it wasn't generally known.
Medical procedures were postponed because some governments emptied out hospitals in anticipation of huge influxes of patients, they believed this would happen due to academic models with no validity. So this then did lead to backlogs for non-COVID treatments, but it was an artificial backlog and how bad it was depended on how quickly governments realized the academics were charlatans. In Switzerland hospitals were only emptied out for a period of weeks because the private hospitals started going bankrupt and laying off medical staff due to lack of work which played very badly with the "we will be hit with a huge wave of demand" narrative, so they quietly reversed the policy and hospitals went back to work. In the UK OTOH the NHS stayed emptied out for months. With no bankruptcies to deal with the problem was able to remain ignored for longer, and so they ended up with unsolvable backlogs. They're working their way through it slowly now, but partly by just letting people die whilst waiting. Catastrophic :(
Everything I'm saying was widely known in the community of "sceptics" who realized that the government narratives were built on lies early on, but admittedly in 2020 when this was going down that community was quite small.
This is wrong. My friend who is a New York City plastic surgeon was pressed into monitoring a floor full of patients on ventilators. Meanwhile in Idaho, the hospitals were full.
> I had recovered from it in about January 2020, so it was not one bit uncertain to me.
We learned a lot of lessons in the 18 months after Feb 2020, including about long COVID and who was impacted. Were any of your conclusions reshaped in the face of later broad, consistent medical evidence?
If you were to consider your process of understanding COVID, was there ever a point where it could be fairly described as working backward from a conclusion?
I'm going to parse this and offer some personal impressions.
"One thing" (variant = "All I know") signals to me that my question - are you working backward from a conclusion - can't be considered at this time. It's a reasonable response and I hope you will consider my Q at a later time.
In considering your whole response, I get a vibe that you were justified or maybe vindicated. In my experience, those are markers of clinging to a conclusion and waiting for evidence of it. If I'm off base, help me out here.
I also think you're being forthright with me and not subversive.
Getting to “not one bit uncertain” from what you could possibly have known then shows poor reasoning skills.
40% of Americans are obese.
Even assuming it was, it would only have been a fraction of a fraction of the risk from age.
1) healthy adults and children were and continue to be killed by covid, even if at lower rates. 2) this is horribly devaluing the lives of people with confounding vulnerabilities. Are you suggesting it's fine if they get decimated or worse? 3) This ignores the long term disabling effects population wide where patients survive but suffer awful quality of life for months or years
I'll probably get downvoted into oblivion for mentioning long covid and eugenics, but I'm fine with that. I've been very disappointed in the shift observed in HN commenter population lately. I used to think this was a group of intelligent & thoughtful people but am no longer suffering that illusion.
It is a fantasy to consider your suggestion as a solution. Even if it were possible, you're condemning those people to a life of isolation and slowly dying alone.
If we instead set & raised indoor air quality standards and established social norms of staying home when sick or masking when that's not possible, then life could go on mostly as normal. But fuck me for asking people for small inconveniences to help others.
I would say it's reasonable to suggest vulnerable folks avoid indoor public dining, but not to remain alone indefinitely.
Anyways, bring on the downvotes.
Acute and specific things we could do to mitigate H5N1 right now, in particular, are deploying the vaccine we have to all poultry and dairy workers to reduce animal to human crossovers.
Which I pointed out is not possible, because those people depend on many other healthy people to care for them. Either those people also need to join the "at risk" bubble (not feasible since they have jobs, school etc) or you don't really have the at risk population isolated as you suggest.
If you don't understand this then you have no idea how care networks function, with duties spread across facility staff, families, volunteers, visiting caregivers etc.
Suggesting you cut off one or more legs of those support networks isn't practical or humane. It would mean people without adequate support for basic needs like feeding, toileting & bathing, leaving aside mental/physical exercise and socialization.
This implies you have the means to have every need met at home. It's not the most common scenario.
This response (and a few others here) hints that your concern for well being might not extend much to other people.
This isn't a condemnation. I have HFA relatives who struggle with this limit, particularly those who are especially gifted elsewhere. Demonizing them is wrong.
However, views without empathy might necessarily be downgraded - that is, they may carry less weight where empathy is needed.
That's an interesting perspective. I don't share it, however. My perspective is this.
After several decades of autistic folks being deeply embedded in my life, I've come to view the spectrum as a normalcy that all of us reside on. Our challenges aren't equal but our list of possible factors is.
In that view, HFA is a shorthand we use to indicate someone exhibits enough degrees of enough factors. I see HFA as a pointer to a cluster, not a person.
Two of those factors are a dearth of connection and authenticity. I believe our poster exhibited both. The reason I referenced HFA: It's the term I know that also points to a strong presentation of both of those. If you have a better, I might adopt it.
Regarding a dearth of connection, it's something I'm intimate with. I've managed to develop some empathy but it's like trying to grow a garden without seed, soil, air or sunlight.
But if someone is there, I know they've already brought what they have to the table. I need to adjust my expectations.
This is one way how it spreads from farm to farm.
Of course that _might_ be because it wasn’t that bad. But if you get to the point that it’s spreading that regularly you’ve already lost the ability to control it regardless of severity.
The same marketing problem existed with CVEs before Heartbleed. CVE-2014-0160 just doesn’t sound as frightening.
In reality his models were full of bugs, stupid assumptions and were generally unvalidated garbage tier work that didn't match reality at all. A few other epidemiologists pointed that out at the time, but governments are completely undiscerning when it comes to "science" and the press love bad news, so they went with it. End results were wildly off what he predicted.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covi...
Helping a local org give thousands of covid shots to seniors, people living in congregate housing, etc# was not easy because there was a lot of resistance from these communities due to the massive amounts of scary information out there.
If you want an example see this: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/360815298_Foreign_M...
It really felt like there was literally nothing wholesome on anyones feeds for almost an entire year. Limited exposure from all non-profits i know of in my community. Significantly reduced views, deleted posts, erroneous flags, etc#.....
Meanwhile, everyone in every neighborhood gets nothing but images + videos of people dying or getting sick from "the jab", "5g", "the mark of the beast", etc#
Most of the women running these non-profits are former executives, local gov't officials, or workers in DHS or other like agencies. They're not stupid and incapable of "getting a message out". Something is and was seriously wrong w/ operation lightspeed.
The political order of the New Deal lasted from roughly the Great Depression until about 1980. It wasn't just about government actions, it was more about how most people understood the world what it means to live a good life. That way of thinking about the world enabled collective action to improve the standard of living for most people, reduce poverty and inequality, give most people better health, housing and longer lives, faster and safer transportation, dignity in old age, etc.
But that political order was replaced by neoliberalism, which started in the 1980s and probably ended at the 2008 financial collapse. Again, it was not only a new political order, it was a shift in how people understood the world and their place in it. It was a time of deregulation, globalized commerce and capital flows, and the supremacy of market-based solutions. We got dramatic increases in inequality, unimaginable individual wealth combined with tent cities and a resurgence of infectious disease.
It's hard to imagine accomplishing big collective goals like building an interstate highway system, or implementing social security, or winning a world war against fascism, if all that hadn't been done already.
We might not even be capable of maintaining what previous generations were able to build from nothing.
I've spent my life swimming in the water of neoliberalism so it's almost impossible to imagine that there are alternatives. It feels like effective collective action for the greater good has never been possible and never will be.
Just let them die.
Do not want a ventilator because 80% of those placed in ventilators die? (humans are awful at reasoning)
Great! Die.
Enough with this nonsense.
Will be a grim scene.
If you want people to follow instructions, you need to demonstrate competence first.
in the US this cannot be further from the truth. we allow our children to be slaughtered in school, be hungry, be without health insurance. US cares more about 8754 other things before children
Even though this is true, it's not at the same scale.
Covid was killing more people in one week in Florida than nationally in school shootings the decade prior or something like this.
It was not even close.
But you are right. The "think of the children" is mainly performative and depends tremendously on who the children are.
agree with your post except this part… I honestly do not think it matters at all who the children are - the US entire system is setup to do exactly the opposite of thinking of the children. if there is money involved in any way children will get fucked (the most recent example being KOSA which was voted in senate almost unanimously only to then be killed by zuck paying everyone off…). I find all “think of chidren” garbage very amusing (though of course it is no laughing matter)
I think that the USA is one of the worst places to grow up in the "developed" world.
Countries far poorer and less "developed" do a much better job.
But I do maintain, the right children will be somewhat protected, even though it's overwhelming performative.
They'll just assume it was some demonic thing and double down on jesus.
Both the jew and scapegoating their neighbor Jesus from Guatemala.
EDIT: And don't forget the spicy dash of left wing politics that they added to all their decisions. BLM riots were ok, church gatherings not OK.
And all indoor gatherings were discouraged, not just church gatherings. Especially gatherings where people sing. Remember the choir rehearsal that killed two people? [0]
[0] https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-03-29/corona...
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adi2396
I have a friend here in Oregon that came down with conjunctivitis for several days and then progressed to flu symptoms. It didn't hit him hard though and he recovered on his own just fine. I'm sure many pathogens can produce this same symptom progression, but it elevated my curiosity for sure.
I see that Canadian teen who acquired H5N1 had a similar symptom progression and initially tested positive for flu strain A, but it wasn't until they did further testing specifically for H5N1 that it was discovered. I suspect these "last-resort" testing scenarios are quite common since most hospitals (particularly in the US) don't give enough of a damn to test further for cases that don't require over-night+ admission into the hospital or ICU.
The fact that this outbreak is happening during typical cold/flu season is part of what has virologists on edge. Both hitting the right person wouldn't be great.
The best defense here is for people to get their flu vaccine and avoid livestock if possible. If not possible, then it's reporting to the USDA/CDC if your livestock gets sick.
Unfortunately, this all may translate into culling of herds which will translate into higher egg/beef prices to the average consumer.
H5N1 today is a precursor. How would we know whether the strain which finally goes "viral" in humans is a product of "natural" washing or was done in a lab with humanized mouse cells?
Covid, on the other hand, had few precursors and hit in a population dense area (Wuhan). It does not help that for a fairly significant portion of the population covid was near symptomless.
H5N1 has been much more severe when it hits humans.
That said, it's not impossible that a variant of H5N1 that escapes will do so because it's more covid like in that it doesn't look or act much worse than a common flu in the first few infected.
Scotts love of Metaculus over other prediction markets blinded him in this years Presidential race and then wrote the most copium filled article titled "Congrats To Polymarket, But I Still Think They Were Mispriced" [0] even though Metaculus has the worst calibration of any market [1] which should obviously be true because there's no money on the line (even fake money, see Manifold Markets, helps accuracy).
[0] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/congrats-to-polymarket-but-...
[1] https://calibration.city/
Other than people who work with birds & cattle. It'd be really nice to see a campaign to get them immunized for the flu to reduce the risk of a co-infection that can hybridize H5N1.
Here's hoping our cows don't get sick.
1) over the last 20 years H5N1 has spread from birds to minks and cows and in the last few months also to pigs
2) pigs in particular are hosts to both human and bird viruses, so they're a likely place for an H5N1 virus to do the reassortment with a human flu virus that might make it become human to human transmissible
3) but nonetheless, today is still not that much different -- the risk now is only a little elevated from the baseline ~5% risk of some pandemic flu breaking out that we might get in any year
Turns out cramming a lot of animals into ever tiner spaces creates more opportunities for pathogenic recombination and evolution.
We need another term besides "vaccine" for the class of inoculations which don't prevent disease spread but rather lessen the (statistical) occurrence of severe illness. A lot of the focus on "vaccines" for chickens, cows, pigs etc. is on preventing severe illness: preventing serious illness still allows product to be delivered to market (hopefully post illness) whereas preventing disease spread requires a commitment to culling breakthroughs which interferes with profit!
My general understanding that preventing serious illness, rather than transmission, is the objective with current influenza vaccines for humans as well.
(As long as they're not noticeably sick, I'll keep on hugging my chickens as a source of generalized immunity to both coronaviruses and influenza.)
> Vaccines can be prophylactic (to prevent or alleviate the effects of a future infection by a natural or "wild" pathogen), or therapeutic (to fight a disease that has already occurred, such as cancer).
Wait, here's a better one: speculative therapy
Also make it invite only