Irony is not quite dead, yet. I'm still convinced masks (along with hygiene) would have been largely sufficient. If there were enough of them. And there weren't.
Totally relatable! May be lessons are learnt, but decision of politicians are driven more by immediate compulsions of the day!
I can't help thinking that instead of sending $1200 checks around and shutting everything down it might have been better to have send buffs and bandanas to every household instead. Put the bandana over your mouth and nose and get on with life as usual. If you're immune-compromised take whatever additional precautions you deem necessary. It would have been a whole lot cheaper than half a trillion dollars, avoided the enormous human costs of the shutdown and probably achieved much the same thing.
Catching up with some friends over Zoom last night I heard that one of them lost an elderly relative. It wasn't entirely unexpected - they died of a heart attack. What was curious was that the death was recorded as a CoVID death. I wonder why a different cause of death might be recorded. Surely not to boost the virus death toll and thereby stoke public fear. In unrelated news I read an article in the left-leaning media about how the country might open up but restaurants will still be empty while people are too afraid to go out. It used lots of loaded terms like how we might choose not to "risk our life for a meal out". Things that make you go "hmmmmm"
This is a good funny take on zealotry of making good of each and every second. I am often perplexed by such thinking. Why this obsession with being productive? Why we need to be productive every time? Why not take this time to just relax. Why not just enjoy in whatever way we can? Let’s just do thing which we enjoy. Things we always waned to do. Let’s take time out for ourselves and family. Let’s just forget everything and just chill and survive!
You my friend put on a very low price on your life! But, continuing in lighter vein, Pizza is tasty enough thing to die for!
The effort of manipulation is working both ways. So many corona death are being not reported at all. So many politicians and bureaucrats are hiding things to project a rosy picture. The more things change, the more they remain the same!
im not sure that thongs have much room for change, or that thongs remaining the same necessarily is a good thimg!
Sure, maybe some people die of the coronavirus that aren't reported. But the same would apply to any disease, so it's curious that numbers spike while coroners dispute official figures. The idea of deaths being presumed to be of a particular cause makes everything look like there's a reason people need to be kept scared. After all, when death tolls from things like the seasonal flu are presented they are just shown as a number, rather than then finding figures disputed, lots of weasel words spouted before numbers are revised downwards. Sometimes it seems almost as if a person who died in a car crash with a packet of Tums in their pocket should be recorded as having died of indigestion.
It's no where close to that. When we don't know how many have had the virus, (denominator), you can't calculate mortality rate. All we know now is number of deaths ratio to positive tests. That number is mere data without meaning.
And you know that how? I'll accept that it may be overestimated, but I'm not sure how you can make the opposite claim so confidently.
Without knowing the number of infected, you can't know the mortality rate per infection. That's just basic math. Mortality rate per tested person or per hospitalized person is data with no,purpose.