Anti-vaxxers aren’t the cause of America’s dropping vaccine rates
Doctors are ready for a bigger role in the vaccination campaign
Raising social involvement, self awareness and self improvement topics, because our communities are the sum of our personal beliefs, behaviors, action or inaction. Only "we" can improve our family, work place, school, city, country, etc.
37 comments:
Too bad there isn't a vaccine against wildly disproportionate government responses.
The recollections of mobile morgues parked outside hospitals are still too fresh.
--Hiram
One of the great abusrdities is that Republican voters who felt they were disrespected and condescended to thought the solution to that was to support Donald Trump for president. Now after a half million of us have died from a disease partly because of the famous incompetence of their choice, Donald Trump, now they want to tell us our response, while not wrong, is "disproportionate".
--Hiram
When was the last flu epidemic in which we closed all businesses, closed all the schools, ran out of toilet paper, and required everybody to wear a stupid mask? That's disproportionate. I should also point out that "excess deaths" due to Covid have now resulted in /lower/ than normal overall death rates. Governor Walz imposed his lockdowns to avoid 70,000 dead in MN. In almost 18 months, we've had about 10% of that number. That's disproportionate. A huge warehouse morgue bought by the state sits empty and never used. That's disproportionate. About 60% of MN deaths occurred in nursing homes, which could have been protected without shutting down the schools and putting at least 30% of kids a year behind-- generally the ones that needed it the most. Protecting only the nursing homes would have avoided the disproportionate burden on the kids, and on everybody else.
When was the last flu epidemic in which we closed all businesses, closed all the schools, ran out of toilet paper, and required everybody to wear a stupid mask? That's disproportionate
Policy should not be set by precedent.
--Hiram
Neither should it be set by panicking and power-hungry politicians, with no real basis in reality.
I sure am happy that I live in MN instead of ND, SD and IA.
Of course Jerry apparently would have preferred a higher death rate like Florida and Texas.
Of course, you will have to prove that the thing you believe made the difference-- government mandates-- had a basis in statistical fact, and not just correlation. I'm betting you cannot. You might have said, more correctly, that you are happy you live in MN rather than New York, Massachusetts or New Jersey.
And I might have preferred freedom, to go to school, to work and make a living, to associate freely with other human beings so as to avoid depression, drug use, etc.
The performance of the Nordic countries is probably a better look at this.
COVID Deaths per million: Sweden 1377, Denmark 428, Finland 167, Norway 143
GDP % Change, 2020: Norway -2.5%, Finland -2.8%, Sweden -3.1%, Denmark -3.3%
Sweden traded thousands of lives for essentially nothing economically.
Sean,
There definitely was a cost for Jerry's desired freedom.
As noted here, if MN had performed as poorly as SD we would have buried another 5,484 residents.
New Study Estimates More Than 900,000 People Have Died Of COVID-19 In U.S.
Moose
Moose,
To some extent you are helping Jerry make his case. COVID directly killed people, but how many people died because of COVID precautions? We may never know...
"Our approach to estimating the total COVID-19 death rate is based on measurement of the excess death rate during the pandemic week by week compared to what would have been expected based on past trends and seasonality. However, the excess death rate does not equal the total COVID-19 death rate. Excess mortality is influenced by six drivers of all-cause mortality that relate to the pandemic and the social distancing mandates that came with the pandemic. These six drivers are:
a) the total COVID-19 death rate, that is, all deaths directly related to COVID-19 infection;
b) the increase in mortality due to needed health care being delayed or deferred during the pandemic;
c) the increase in mortality due to increases in mental health disorders including depression, increased alcohol use, and increased opioid use;
d) the reduction in mortality due to decreases in injuries because of general reductions in mobility associated with social distancing mandates;
e) the reductions in mortality due to reduced transmission of other viruses, most notably influenza, respiratory syncytial virus, and measles; and
f) the reductions in mortality due to some chronic conditions, such as cardiovascular disease and chronic respiratory disease, that occur when frail individuals who would have died from these conditions died earlier from COVID-19 instead.
To correctly estimate the total COVID-19 mortality, we need to take into account all six of these drivers of change in mortality that have happened since the onset of the pandemic."
We'll continue to see unnecessary deaths and variants of the virus in perpetuity because morons like him think it's a hoax and, like a friend of mine, call the vaccine "experimental" even though decades of work have gone into it.
Moose
It is so strange and sad... Stopping a deadly virus should be easy, I mean it has no legs of it's own by which to travel. And yet due to stupid and stubborn people it freely wanders and kills.
My parents jumped from how sad they were that a ~50 year old friend of ours died from COVID to when is that MN governor going to stop requiring masks... It was surreal.
"Stopping a deadly virus should be easy, "
Name one, and how. We're still suffering the common cold, you know, and it is a coronavirus.
The key was quarantining.
Where we went fundamentally wrong was treating that virus as a political rather than a health problem. We saw it as a "Chinese" virus, something that carries a passport, I would imagine. We saw it as coming from a country instead of people. Wes saw the virus as governed by not logic, but by logical fallacies. Among other things we did not anticipate the natural human tendencies toward denial. Once the mobile morgues started going away, started to normalize the problem to see it and rationalize the way we do health concerns like chronic diseases, car accidents and gun violence. Terrified people felt better if they could just persuade themselves that covid was a manageable threat like we perceive the flu to be.
At the beginning, we had a choice between eradication and herd immunity, and eventually we chose neither. So now we have a virus that is universal and mutating uncontrollably. We say to ourselves that the vaccine in which we invested so much, will be effective in dealing with mutant strains, and we search for experts who will tell us that. And if they turn out to be wrong, will it's the experts' fault. After demanding far more than they could reasonbly provide, we no longer expect anything from them at all.
--Hiram
Hiram,
On the upside, the folks like Jerry who deny the COVID death rate are most likely to die since most of us normal folks valued social distancing, masks and now vaccines.
First these folks destroy the GOP by supporting Trump and his lies...
And now they are working to kill themselves off...
It is like watching a political party commit suicide... :-O
I don't know if the GOP is destroying itself so much as it is metamorphizing into something else. It's like a butterfly which is changing into a worm.
--Hiram
"stopping a virus should be easy." It is not, never was. Where is your cure for the common cold? We have a vaccine for the flu, but it changes every year, and the vaccine is not that effective nor does everybody get it, mostly seniors. I was not convinced that the death toll for CV wasn't just substituting for the normal flu deaths every year. Then I was shown the numbers for "excess deaths" and indeed there was a clear spike last year, over the normal. Now, however, excess deaths are BELOW normal, as if all CV did was accelerate the death of people who soon would have died anyway. Had we effectively quarantined congregate care facilities, deaths would be about half what they were, and the rest of us could have gone on with life.
"Name one, and how."
Influenza 2020-21. Masks and distancing.
Moose
So many opinions, so few facts.
Moose it was interesting how simple COVID precautions also helped slow the spread of the flu.
On the other hand, COVID may have already killed those folks who were susceptible to the flu... :-O
It's not just deaths, though. It simply didn't circulate in the population.
Moose
That is what I meant by this...
" how simple COVID precautions also helped slow the spread of the flu."
You forget, we had a vaccine for the flu. And we never put on masks for the flu before, let alone had them mandated.
"And we never put on masks for the flu before, let alone had them mandated."
And now we have an entire flu "season" (there wasn't one) as evidence that masks work to prevent the spread of airborne viruses.
Moose
Jerry,
The death rate of COVID was 10 times that of the flu.
And killed people in many age groups.
And there was no vaccine to slow it's spread.
Of course social distancing, mask, etc were needed. They were all we had for almost a year.
Or do you still deny this simple truth?
What am I denying? You admit the flu vaccine was 90% effective, so having no vaccine for a very similar virus might reasonably result in 10 times the cases. And we never before used mask mandates and mandated distancing to stop the spread of flu; we said "if you are sick, stay home." All you are really proving is that masks and shutdowns did almost nothing to stop the spread. How else to explain last fall, with all those measures in place, when incidence of this SEASONAL virus suddenly jumped? How do you explain the early winter DROP, rather than seasonal increase, well before the vaccines were widely available, other than some sort of herd immunity?
Good news! Toilet paper is back on the shelves.
Your math is so strange.
"And we never before used mask mandates and mandated distancing to stop the spread of flu"
It's not as contagious, or deadly, as COVID.
"How do you explain the early winter DROP, rather than seasonal increase"
This isn't the flu, and as we've seen elsewhere in the world, it isn't seasonal.
Moose
Maybe Jerry thinks it is Winter in India?
Maybe India is just all open spaces, with nobody there?
Sorry, I guess my math must be "racist." Though it never was before. I always thought math was math.
You're 3/5ths correct.
Moose
Add 14 and you get 5/5.
"Though it never was before. I always thought math was math."
But I just showed you that math can be racist and not just math. Racist math is in the founding document of our Nation and was the law of the land for close to a century.
And perhaps you've heard of redlining and poll taxes, both post 14th amendment.
Moose
And perhaps you have heard the actual results of the "math is racist" theory, which is that black kids are not the basic math needed to participate in the economy. "Getting the right answer" is, apparently, just white supremacy.
And what you are arguing isn't math. 3/5 is still 60% or 0.6. It is not 42, or 12, some 3-digit number that blacks need not comprehend.
I will give you this: innumeracy in the population is widespread and dangerous. I see no reason to make it worse, either by keeping kids out of school or by telling them they don't need to go.
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