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We Must Start Planning for a Permanent Pandemic (bloomberg.com)
33 points by amichail on April 12, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 32 comments



Modern democracies want arbitrary lockdown privileges and the freedom to forever 'track and trace' people using public health as the excuse?

Color me shocked.

I guess 'terrorism' has lost its luster in the eyes of the military industrial complex. Now we have to pivot to 'domestic terrorism' and 'public health'. Like an overactive immune system, our war machine has no more enemies to fight and now must turn on itself.


> "Modern democracies want arbitrary lockdown privileges..."

that's arbitrarily specific. any state wants power, and lockdowns are exhibitions (and also legitimizations) of power. the 'democracy' or 'modern' specifics add no additional information.

what's more interesting about the 'modern democracy' bit is that power has found a way to subvert masses of people collectively in our modern democracies, and that's something, as citizens, we should be wary of and thinking deeply about.


No we shouldn't. Hate to be the Hardline realist but in 20 years nCov19 and it's variants will look incredibly similar to influenza. Despite this idea being cancelled for good reason early on this is the reality we face.

Covid has fully become.political theater and the CDC has been publishing articles about not quarantining or locking down since mid 2020. Stop listening to politicians and start listening to epidemiologists and health professionals please.


Where does one find good information?

[Omitting rant on how to find truth on the internet these days, and how sad it is that has been a huge breakdown in trust in our leaders.]

Similarly, is there a good place to, say, find Covid data science? I for one would like to know where the disease is actually being transmitted. It would be nice to be able to determine which interventions a state should reasonably make to fight the virus, and which look good but do nothing.


> "Where does one find good information?"

skepticism should always follow money or power--or frenzy, their more easily recognizable proxy, as in this case. there's no magic answer to your question, and finding answers in the real world is not easily outsourced to a textbook or to 'expertise'. we each must put in the work to tease out the good stuff for ourselves, as best we can (what skepticism impels).

as a broader example, democracy is premised on the idea that each citizen will do at least some work discerning fact from fiction, and by the collective wonder of crowd wisdom, we'll find an optimum. democracy, or any collective action really, doesn't presume each person will individually be right, as that's obviously an impossible expectation.


r/Covid19 is a good resource. It filters out news articles and political topics, only allowing scientific papers, press releases, etc. There's a lot of users there in virology, epidemiology, medicine, etc. Its by far been the most valuable source in keeping me grounded regarding the information surrounding the pandemic.


Broke: permanent pandemic lockdown.

Woke: permanent climate-crisis / energy-shortage lockdown.


> Most epidemics disappear once populations achieve herd immunity and the pathogen has too few vulnerable bodies available as hosts for its self-propagation.

This makes it sound like most pandemic diseases reach a point where they essentially go extinct, but my understanding is that's not really accurate. They typically just reach an equilibrium where the negative effects fade into the background noise of general illness. This is what happened with the four human-endemic Coronaviruses which likely caused major pandemics in their time, but now fade into the background of cold season.


Consent status: manufactured.


Want to know why people are anti-mask? Because they saw this coming the second we crossed the "15 days to stop the spread" line.


Refusing to wear a mask because you hate lockdowns has the same energy as refusing to provide birth control or sex ed because you hate abortions.


It depends on the country. In some countries, governments have chosen to relax restrictions or avoid tightening them further, precisely because the general public was so blatantly flaunting them – refusing to wear masks, not social distancing, etc. If this involves enough of the general public, than a pro-restriction government risks losing the next election. Obviously COVID doesn’t go away then, but it could be that both government and society simply accept higher mortality.


This sentiment is a curiosity to me. I don't remember any public advisories claiming that a 15 day lockdown would be sufficient to stop the spread.

When I think about it, such a claim doesn't even make sense, because for it to be true, all transmission would have to be stopped, instantaneously and completely. But that would be impossible, as there would still be transmission within bubbles, and transmission through all the essential work that continued where social distancing was not an option. That would reset the clock, and since the infectious period was thought to be about 15 days, such a statement could not possibly have been true.

Does anyone have any examples of public health advisories claiming that the lockdown would only last 15 days?


Every single announcement by my county at the first lockdown was about a short sacrifice to ‘flatten the curve’. Once we were past that, it became clear that the government officials would say whatever they thought would be most palatable to the public to get their policies enacted.

Dr Fauci even admitted to selectively lying about a number of things (masks, herd immunity) because he felt the public couldn’t handle the truth.


He’s not wrong about the average public, who even when faced with the truth will act irrationally and emotionally.


Irrationally doesn’t mean “in a way I don’t like” and it’s kinda rude to paint huge swaths of people with that brush.


Irrational is “I’m not wearing a mask” or “I’m not getting vaccinated”, and I don’t believe there is a need to enumerate the evidence of this at nation state scale in this thread, which can be observed with five minutes of search engine usage. Facts are non-negotiable.


You're still acting like you think your personal concept of rationality is some objective truth.


You're gaslighting into "The sky is blue is just your personal opinion" terrority.


That seems to be the favorite word of people who believe their subjective reality should be objective reality, yeah.


I always understood 'flatten the curve' to mean 'don't overwhelm hospitals'. I don't remember any public advisories suggesting it would be short, and definitely nothing that anticipated how politicized the pandemic became.

Do you have any examples of public health advisories claiming 'flattening the curve' would be short, and not based on the hospitalization numbers?


I never read 1984, but generally would not have been able to guess that 1984ing was going to be a grass roots phenomenon.


I've been enjoying for some time now how people who have never read 1984, or have no actual idea what Orwell was alluding to in it other than "bad government", keep invoking that book. It's funny.


This can't be true. Or, if it was, it would be something very, very odd.

Why? Because we already have 4 Corona-Viruses endemic causing normal colds. Where did they come from? Probably from animals. When? We don't know exactly, but there is a good chance that the 1889-90 pandemic was caused by a corona virus [1]. Pandemics turn into endemics. Why should it be different this time?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1889–1890_pandemic


Because this time politicians need a permanent pandemic. Reality* has a funny way of always serving the needs of politicians.

*As reported by popular media.


Ugh when did alt right crazies invade HN? Multiple comments in the thread from accounts a few months old that have posted nothing tech related, nothing but right wing talking points.

(And lots of it is BS)

Maybe it would be better if we don't allow off topic threads, just to discourage politics bots from invading


Dang, but this sounds distressing like the conspiracy theories my mom keeps telling me about -- the bug was manufactured, but not killing enough people, so expect variants to be introduced, with a goal of keeping people isolated and in fear and/or reducing the earth's population.

As horrific as it sounds, I'd at least consider asking, "what happens if we weight the trade-offs, and decide to mostly resume life as it was, knowing that our health care systems will be overwhelmed and a decent chunk of the population (10%?) would die." Aside from being scarred, would a place like that move on without endless restrictions, or, if a jurisdiction did that, they're still at risks from new variants around the world, aren't they?

On a different topic, I tend to be against forcing people to vaccinate. But I do wonder, how did things go down with seatbelt laws, in which people are forced to wear them? (Although I think there's only 90% compliance, even now). At what point should a state intervene to save lives? Conversely, at what point can a state decide to not intervene, even when it will cost lives?


> knowing that our health care systems will be overwhelmed

I don't think we know that, and frankly I'm reminded of all the counterfactual ranting we get in economic arguments from establishment figures and orthodox, uncritical thinkers (we didn't spend enough, it would have been worse).

In both the US and UK, emergency set-ups (nightingale hospitals, the ship sent to NYC, nevermind Javitts center, etc.) went largely unused. It seems these things are highly localized, and in many places never really pan out. Of course, many people over-weight the power of human agency.


Even if we had no healthcare system at all the death toll from COVID-19 wouldn't be anywhere near 10% of the population.


> knowing that our health care systems will be overwhelmed and a decent chunk of the population (10%?) would die.

That's a ridiculous claim. The hospitalization rate for Covid19 isn't even close to 10%, let alone the mortality rate.


> knowing that our health care systems will be overwhelmed and a decent chunk of the population (10%?) would die

So you accept in your theory that you can die because of an overwhelmed health care that cannot save you from a trivial otherwise treatment, not Covid19


People absolutely die when the health care system is overwhelmed. If you are having a heart attack, say, and can't get to an emergency room, your outcome will be far worse than if you could get to one. Similarly, if you've got an illness that needs treating -- I don't know, strep throat or perhaps diabetes -- and can't get the care because doctors aren't taking new patients, then yes, you might die from that, too.




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