Cohomology_ t1_j5ljfzt wrote on January 23, 2023 at 9:27 PM

Reply to comment by 69FunnyNumberGuy420 in The local news when someone blasts a dook downtown by ParkwayWestSunset

Just focus on protecting elderly and higher risk people. At that time we didn't even know if and when vaccines would be around. We basically had to rely on herd immunity. That would mean letting the young healthy people especially live as they wish and start building that immunity. The only time any draconian policy would be necessary is when hospitals are actually stressed. That period was very brief and concentrated in a select few areas. Like NYC where they had huge outbreaks in nursing homes

69FunnyNumberGuy420 t1_j5lk1tc wrote on January 23, 2023 at 9:31 PM

So you're repeating the Great Barrington stuff, which postulated that we'd hit herd immunity within three months and the disease would fade from view.
 
We're going into the fourth year of this disease, it's still killing hundreds of thousands of people every year, and it should be quite clear at this point that herd immunity isn't going to happen.
 
> That would mean letting the young healthy people especially live as they wish and start building that immunity.

 
I know people on their fourth infection. If you can keep getting it over and over, what immunity are they building?

 
Do you own a restaurant or something? Your approach here seems to be "don't hinder businesses in any way, let all the weak die, and if we ignore it maybe it'll go away eventually."

 
We've basically been doing that for the past twenty months, and it isn't working.

 
"If we stop looking at the monster maybe it'll go away" isn't a public health policy, it's just magical thinking. This idea that society, schools, businesses, etc could have just carried on as normal during the largest mass death event in American history is just more magical thinking.

Cohomology_ t1_j5lm00c wrote on January 23, 2023 at 9:43 PM

Yes we've had considerable immunity for a long time at this point. Sweden did a largely hands off approach which the world should have followed. People are going to get COVID forever but it's never going to be killing people to any degree which is worth worrying about. We have plenty of tools to help elderly and at risk people. I don't own a business but am good friends with multiple who do.

69FunnyNumberGuy420 t1_j5lpa8j wrote on January 23, 2023 at 10:04 PM

> Yes we've had considerable immunity for a long time at this point.

 
Obviously not, since hundreds of thousands of people are dying every year and people are contracting covid-19 multiple times.
 
If you can keep catching it, you don't have immunity to it. Fuck's sake.

 
> ut it's never going to be killing people to any degree which is worth worrying about.

 
It has been the leading cause of death in America besides cancer and heart disease for three years running, what are you talking about? It killed ~268K Americans in 2022. It's knocked nearly three years off the American life expectancy since 2020. That is insanely dire and usually only happens in collapsing societies, like Russia in the early nineties.

 
You are engaging in magical thinking. This pandemic isn't going to get better until we do something to make it better. Pretending it's 2019 and ignoring the monster in the room while it eats people is not making anything better.

Cohomology_ t1_j5mwbb3 wrote on January 24, 2023 at 3:09 AM

Sure I should have said resistance not immunity.

My main point is that our reaction to COVID was poor. No matter what we did, many people were going to die. Look at California vs. the worst state in the USA for COVID deaths per capita. CA has about half the mortality after all their absurd COVID policies. Meanwhile some states did almost nothing and probably had a lot of old and at risk people avoiding vaccines, but the end result wasn't much different. While this was impossible to predict in early 2020, we didn't amend our approach to be commensurate with the actual risk as we knew more even later that same year.

The long term consequences of how we and the majority of the western world reacted to COVID are still being felt and will be for a long time. It's not just economic loss. Excess deaths are still elevated, but those attributed to COVID cannot explain all of the excess.

69FunnyNumberGuy420 t1_j5mwojo wrote on January 24, 2023 at 3:12 AM

> Sure I should have said resistance not immunity.

Once again, what kind of resistance actually exists if you're just going to catch it over and over at all? Which infection will infer 'resistance'? The fifth? The tenth?

 
> CA has about half the mortality after all their absurd COVID policies

 
What absurd policies?

 
> The long term consequences of how we and the majority of the western world reacted to COVID are still being felt and will be for a long time.

 
You are assigning the negative outcomes of the pandemic to the reaction to the pandemic and not to the disease that we've permitted to run wild. You are implying that had we done nothing at all and just pretended there wasn't a pandemic raging, things would have turned out better. That is an utterly insane idea.