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My big takeaway from the pandemic - and the 'climate emergency' - is life mandated by the models and the modelers is a recipe for disaster
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@Catogrande said in Coronavirus - UK:
Stochastic modelling = current best guess*
*may be liable to multiple changes
Chicken Little's best guess
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@Victor-Meldrew said in Coronavirus - UK:
@Windows97 said in Coronavirus - UK:
Ironically given what we know now this probably would have resulted in better outcomes for most.
Hindsight again. Leaders just didn't have that option. They needed to balance decisions & statements against their effect on public perception and behavior. If they were brutally honest and said "we don't know", there would likely have been panic - a point Dawkins makes really well.
Could things have been handled better? Absolutely and probably will be if we get another pandemic.
Leaving them free to make different mistakes
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@canefan said in Coronavirus - UK:
@Victor-Meldrew said in Coronavirus - UK:
@Windows97 said in Coronavirus - UK:
Ironically given what we know now this probably would have resulted in better outcomes for most.
Hindsight again. Leaders just didn't have that option. They needed to balance decisions & statements against their effect on public perception and behavior. If they were brutally honest and said "we don't know", there would likely have been panic - a point Dawkins makes really well.
Could things have been handled better? Absolutely and probably will be if we get another pandemic.
Leaving them free to make different mistakes
Probably - as the variables will have changed too.
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@Catogrande said in Coronavirus - UK:
Ironically using the “given what we know now” stance actually supports his statements.
As to the “better off” and “biggest transfer of wealth “ statements, any actual assertations, measurements, numbers, facts? Or is it just opinion?
A simple google search should help you out there and you can draw your own conclusions. But a few examples are below.
https://www.reuters.com/business/pandemic-boosts-super-rich-share-global-wealth-2021-12-07/
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/04/cramer-the-pandemic-led-to-a-great-wealth-transfer.html
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@Victor-Meldrew said in Coronavirus - UK:
@Windows97 said in Coronavirus - UK:
Ironically given what we know now this probably would have resulted in better outcomes for most.
Hindsight again. Leaders just didn't have that option. They needed to balance decisions & statements against their effect on public perception and behavior. If they were brutally honest and said "we don't know", there would likely have been panic - a point Dawkins makes really well.
Could things have been handled better? Absolutely and probably will be if we get another pandemic.
Who actually created the panic however?
People went to extraordinary lengths to make covid out like it was a killer virus akin to the one out of Stephen King's "The Stand".
Most of the justification was based on predictive models that turned out to be hopelessly inaccurate and seemingly never updated with real data to determine the accuracy there-of, or if the responses based off these increasingly inaccurate models were proportionate.
In short people over-reacted and panicked and this kicked off a chain reaction.
What's most odd about it is that we supposedly live in a world where "social justice" is top of mind...
So for the people adversely effected by covid are there going to be reparation's for them, some form of social justice in restoring what they lost, apologies for the rights that got taken away?
Yet people don't seem to care, or it's brushed away as hindsight.
None of this makes sense to me, the response, the lack of adjustment based off data, the lack of empathy when proven "they were wrong" and the fact that many, many people got incredibly rich of the enforced suffering of others.
None of this seems right or just.
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100%
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Covid killed almost 7 million people (so far) and continues to kill - even with the vaccines & measures that people called draconian and unnecessary. I shudder to think what that total might be if people's rights hadn't been temporarily restricted.
People in power had to make rapid decisions to save lives with minimal data and the need to manage public behaviors. They got some things wrong (and many right) and overall have nothing to apologise for.
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One minor quibble, how much do you trust that number? Two things to consider, first is that the reporting in the US was over reporting Covid deaths (for funding reasons). If you had covid and died in a car crash, it was reported as covid death.
Second, I've seen reports showing flu death comparisons. Flu was zero, Covid was similar to the previous flu reporting (slightly higher).
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Aren't you conflating two different things here - wealth inequality and the ability of bigger business to survive economic shocks - in this case Covid?
And the Oxfam report has been debunked so many times it's embarrassing. Anyone on the average wage in NZ or the UK is in their top 1% or global elite according to them.
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According to *The Economist'*s analysis, the true Covid death rate is much, much higher at 23m.
"We find that there is a 95% chance that the true value lies between 17m and 30.4m additional deaths".
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates
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@Victor-Meldrew. Excess deaths at the moment are not due to the Covid virus right? So what are they attributing the excess deaths too? Undiagnosed cancers, disease not treated in a timely fashion or the vaccine? There are excess non covid deaths all over the Western world but because of what?
I have deleted the rest of my post because it will be pissing in the ocean.
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@broughie said in Coronavirus - UK:
Excess deaths at the moment are not due to the Covid virus right?
I think the various methodologies aim to show both. E.g direct deaths from Covid (pretty accurate) and deaths caused by Covid. The latter seems to have a lot of variables - which may vary by country, health system capacity etc.
As Chris Whitty kept telling us, we won't know the full impact for 5 or more years.
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In truth those articles are little more than opinion pieces, cherry picking some data points in an attempt to give credence to those opinions. As an example they liberally use the data showing the growth in wealth inequality during and after the pandemic but do not offer a comparison to times before, suggesting that it was the pandemic that caused a widening wealth inequality. The simple fact is that wealth inequality is normally increasing. The times when this is not so are really the outliers. It is economics 101 that if you have more income than you need, like you know, the rich have, then this allows a greater opportunity for increasing wealth. Conversely if you have less income than you need there is little opportunity for increasing wealth.
Mention was made about the recovery in the stock markets, which tends to assist the better off, being so much better than the recovery in the general economy, well duh! the two are nowhere near complete correlation- the economy didn’t tank to anywhere near the same amount as the markets. No mention of that though.
FWIW I have no doubt that there were many instances of businesses and people getting rich off the back of the pandemic but in truth that is so small as to be of no relevance.
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@Victor-Meldrew "I had to come back"
https://unherd.com/2023/01/why-are-excess-deaths-still-so-high/
This is of most concern I think:
there is one outlier: people between the age of 0 and 24 registered lower-than-average death rates in 2020 and 2021. Throughout 2022, on the other hand, they have been dying at higher rates than expected. In other words, more young people are dying today in Britain than before, or even during, the pandemic — and we don’t know why.
Or my take is they don't want to know because it's against the narrative that the vaccine was safe and that would open Pandora's box. Let just sweep it under the rug.
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That's an interesting article and does raise some valid questions. Linking anything to the vaccines will I think prove difficult as there are so many variables. For certain we cannot be swayed by the "this happened to a young guy in my neighbourhood" as an indicator, it will have to be by the overall trend. Individually, so much is coincidental and not necessarily causation. A case in point (and this goes against my statement about using individual occurrences as an indicator but I feel it does illustrate a problem in regard to coincidence). A doctor friend of a friend was vaccinating a patient who suddenly dropped down dead of heart failure. Fortunately for the doctor he had yet to administer the vaccine but if he had done so five minutes earlier the anti-vax brigade would have been all over it.
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@Windows97 said in Coronavirus - UK:
Most of the justification was based on predictive models that turned out to be hopelessly inaccurate and seemingly never updated with real data to determine the accuracy there-of, or if the responses based off these increasingly inaccurate models were proportionate.
Statistically you simply cannot compare a prediction that says if we do nothing this will be the outcome with a result that is based on a different set of factors.
So, without getting into an argument about who was right or wrong, or by how much with regard to the pandemic, as it is 3 years later and I'm over it, but purely from a logical argument perspective...
It is false reasoning to argue that the experts were wrong in saying "if we do nothing we will have x many deaths" because we had only had y; because we didn't do nothing.
By locking down and running aggressive vaccination programmes, we changed the landscape.
It is possible that the experts were totally right, or totally wrong, or most likely somewhere in the middle. Where in the middle they fall is largely a matter of conjecture and everyone has their entrenched positions based on their own experiences of, and reaction to, the pandemic response.
There is plenty of evidence either way but much of it is anecdotal and even when it is empirical there are still massive demographic influencers.
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As with the recent 'heat index weather warnings' in the UK, the information coming from the Government and other agencies is being directed at the greater population when it should be aimed squarely at those at risk
This would suggest that they've learned fuck all in the past 3 years
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@MiketheSnow said in Coronavirus - UK:
As with the recent 'heat index weather warnings' in the UK, the information coming from the Government and other agencies is being directed at the greater population when it should be aimed squarely at those at risk
This would suggest that they've learned fuck all in the past 3 years
Basically what you are saying here is the government were fucked either way with what they communicated. People in this country have never listened and never will.
Coronavirus - UK