I wonder if "Contagion" was propaganda. It really made me believe that if a SARS pandemic ever happened, a bunch of incredibly competent scientists and government agents would swoop in and save us all.
The "Olympus Has Fallen" series also made me believe that if a mob ever stepped foot on the White House lawn, a bunch of auto turrets would pop up and gun them all down.
The last few years has shown that the world is run by a bunch of jokers, no different than me. That's comforting in some ways, horrifying in others, and sadly has ruined the illusion of some of my favorite movies.
This is actually the difference between a hacker trying to save the world and someone on his rear end complaining about how the world is.
When I learned this at the age of 20 that I am an adult now and no one can say any longer I am too young, my persona shifted from "tell me what to do" to a "i already know what to do but go ahead and tell me why i shouldn't"
Contagion got things pretty much spot-on. Conspiracy theorists with fake cures, political officials who fight mitigation measures, contact tracing, panic buying, at-home substitutes for school events, fairly rapid vaccine development and the initial scarcity of it.
The major difference was the mortality rate; the movie's virus killed something like 25%. One of the odd difficulties with COVID is it's deadly enough (especially pre-vaccine) to make a serious pile of excess deaths on a population-level scale, but low enough people can just get used to it.
The inaccurate part of the movie is that all that stuff worked. In real life, what "ended" the pandemic was a combination of mother nature and the human willingness to accept a lost cause and move on.
Are you deliberately ignoring vaccination? I genuinely can't tell if I'm being trolled into a conspiracy argument or not. But just in case:
The vaccines turned an extremely dangerous pandemic into a tolerable-if-still-worrisome endemic disease. This lancet paper represents a pretty good consensus belief that vaccines saved 14M lives. Our "willingness to accept a lost cause" was informed heavily by the justfied belief that it wouldn't kill us.
> The vaccines turned an extremely dangerous pandemic into a tolerable-if-still-worrisome endemic disease.
Effective vaccinations were pretty much limited to the first world countries. Third world countries either did not have access to vaccines or used subpar ones like russia's sputnik. I would like to see a scientific study comparing the duration of pandemic in vaccinated vs non-vaccinated countries. It would be apples to oranges comparison but there are be some interesting insights to learn.
It says that most Haitians are young (see the population pyramid for example to get an idea how young) and were not affected much by the virus and they don't care (about their old) that much because they have their own difficulty to stay alive and not starving.
> The findings, based on data across 2,558 counties in 48 US states, show that counties with high vaccine coverage had a more than 80% reduction in death rates compared with largely unvaccinated counties.
We're going to need to determine the cause of the unexplained spike in recent all-cause mortality before we can have any sort of meaningful conversation about the risk/benefit analysis of the covid vaccination program.
What's even more alarming is that this increases in all-cause deaths were present in the vaccine clinical study data. The vaccine group had fewer covid deaths but had significantly more overall deaths that the non vaccine control group.
Well I poked around, I’m not sure exactly what you’re seeing. One would expect more covid deaths in the placebo, and that is the case. Most of the deaths in both groups are indeed unrelated to Covid at all. You can see exact cause of death for all participants here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/medrxiv/early/2021/07/28/202...
I suspect the number your focusing on is the 4 cardiac arrest deaths. At a glance it seems 4x higher than the one reported placebo death. But the number is 4 vs 1 for over 20k people. Why not instead focus on placebo group having 2 vs 0 myocardial infarction? The reason why not is that dying is noisy business, and things like cardiac arrest have a pretty high baseline, and this is such a small sample the variance is likely noise.
Perhaps you could present a proper statistical analysis to convince otherwise? Something similar to the methodology for determining Covid vaccine’s effectiveness in preventing Covid deaths. After all, the data is all there. I didn’t see anything resembling such an analysis in your linked source. Just the confused ramblings of someone nontechnical, clearly out of their depth in reading a fairly basic research paper.
The issue isn't the possible noise in non-covid deaths. It's this rather bold statement:
"None of these deaths were considered related to BNT162b2 by investigators"
How would they know? What investigators and what criteria? If there was a 20% increase in seemingly-unrelated deaths, would it be detected? These are the questions that Pfizer should have explained but instead we just got this one pithy sentence. Also remember, this is industry with a history of fraud and criminality. GSK was fined billions for covering up heart deaths in a diabetes treatment only a few years earlier and Pfizer is up on the list too. Our FDA needed to be our advocates and a lot of people feel let down seeing this rubber-stamped.
Definitely a big win, but 80% reduction means it prevented fewer than half of the vulnerable from death, when the hope had been much closer to preventing virtually all deaths. Those are not pandemic ending numbers, certainly not to those who espouse a zero COVID strategy.
> 80% reduction means it prevented fewer than half of the vulnerable from death
What are you trying to say here? That math doesn't make sense to me at all. Pretty clearly the reduction in deaths comes primarily from... those who would have been vulnerable to dying.
It was at first but we're at the point now where that's been dropped too. Here in Spain I haven't even been able to get it anymore in the last year and a half. I've had COVID twice, one time recently, and it was mild. Same with everyone else. Last week in the Netherlands there was nobody even in the ICU anymore in the whole country with it.
Even without the vaccine we would have got here but it would have taken longer and cost more lives.
> The inaccurate part of the movie is that all that stuff worked. In real life, what "ended" the pandemic was a combination of mother nature and the human willingness to accept a lost cause and move on.
The war in Ukraine and the market correction in Nov '21 helped to divert attention from the immense amount of coverage that COVID otherwise got. In fact, Ukraine was doing tracing and the QR code vaccination passports (per EU standards) in the Fall of '21 and it's infection rates and deaths only increased in the Winter due to low vaccination rates [0].
Then the invasion happened and no one cared and all the grifting from things like VC juicing of stocks like Zoom, Peleton, retail getting locked out and losing GME gains etc... also got swept under the rug as intrest rates were on the rise and cost of living rised with it and Putin became the reason for all of it and not the immense amount of fiscal policy repercussions of Quantitative easing, ZIRP and immense spending on all of these fake measures to contain COVID.
Putin is a bastard and a despot and deserves all the ire and hopefully a swift death for the inhumane things in this senseless war, but it also gave the West pre-text to divert the ills of society's occurring since at least 2008 an over-simplified narrative to convince the masses with the abomination of the war footage from Western outlets and get it to be the new normal.
Not to mention the long term effects, such as increased risk of diabetes, heart problems and neurodegenerative conditions. Plus a bunch of other symptoms which get labeled as long covid.
These are not enough to make people afraid of catching the virus. The effects are not immediate and humans are bad at long-term risk assessment. See climate change or smoking as examples.
Contagion also compressed time quite a bit because it’s a movie meant to entertain. It couldn’t show the long months of research, development and testing that actual science requires. Still a great movie.
Fun fact: I worked in the office building where they filmed the CDC scenes (spoiler: it’s not and never was the CDCs real office), was kinda cool to walk the halls and enter the clean room they used.
It wasn’t too bad, the movie spanned 4 months from outbreak to vaccine. Pfizer’s Covid trial started 5 months after outbreak. If Covid was killing 20% like the virus in the movie, we could have matched or beaten the movie timeline.
Although if we do have a pandemic with 20% mortality rates I feel like we would experience societal collapse in a much larger scale than in the movie. Much larger as in: we can’t finish developing a vaccine because world order is severely degraded.
Right, I think it is fascinating that basically the whole world decided to wait for the trials to finish. If death rate had been higher I'm sure some countries would have just started vaccinating and hoping for the best.
I can't tell if you're serious or sarcastic, but a great illustration of the point. It's very possible for a disease to kill a million people in the US and for some folks to not have it kill any of their family and friends personally.
Someone who lived in NYC in March 2020 would likely have had a very different experience than someone in rural Minnesota, for example.
I have a working hypothesis that a very large number of people don't personally know anyone who has died of Covid, except maybe for an elderly relative and "they were getting on a bit anyway". It's true of me and anyone else I've had this conversation with.
Do you live in a first world Western country and is your social circle comprised of people who do the same? In my experience when you go outside of that circle you start finding people who have personally experienced loss from COVID very quickly.
Covid seems to be, physically and emotionally, a primarily Western disease. And as bad as the fallout has been where I live, it seems to have been particularly damaging in the US (on both of those counts).
Seriously, the Indian variant (I forget which letter they gave it) was pretty devastating over there. I have many colleagues and they all know people who died, if not in their own family.
The official statistics on Covid deaths in India showed a mortality rate 1/10th that of the US. There would need to be more than an order of magnitude error in reporting for their death rate to exceed that of the US.
FWIW, calling it the "Indian variant" is apparently not ok. Do you mean Delta?
> More than 4.7 million people in India - nearly 10 times higher than official records suggest - are thought to have died because of Covid-19, according to a new World Health Organization (WHO) report.
> Three large peer-reviewed studies had found that India's deaths from the pandemic by September 2021 were "six to seven times higher than reported officially". A paper in The Lancet by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), an independent global health research centre, uses subnational all-cause mortality data from 12 Indian states. They come close to the WHO's estimation.
I'm aware of that, which is why I made the point that it would only bring India's Covid death rate to around the same as the US and other Western countries. It is also of no help to the discussion around my original point, which is the idea that a very large number of people don't personally know anyone who died unexpectedly of Covid.
Statistically, a social circle comprised of first world, Western, overweight and inactive and generally older folk should have the most susceptibility to death from Covid.
You mean like the flu or something? So basically you are saying in a completely normal course of events and that is my point. Absolutely no reason for mass panic etc. etc..
Cost and risk are a major factor in how things are dealt with. Ebola mobilizes different responses than most diseases and so kills fewer people. Armed gunmen regularly attack the pentagon so it’s well defend against lone gunmen.
The vast majority of government buildings aren’t well protected because they don’t need to be.
The realization that incompetence rules in surplus times and nobody rules in undersupply times is most horrifying. We (society) really fall apart rather quickly when push comes to shove.
Which is why to construct society up keeping constructs like social networks + Panopticon or a knowledge storage like youtube are quite the achievement.
Ahead on virtually any measure of material or social success, and they further consolidate their advantages by functioning multi-generationally, which means that no, they don't die quite like everybody else.
See for example: the Bush dynasty vs the typical "successful" American family. Do you know anyone benefiting from their great-grandfather's Nazi money, plus their grandfather's CIA/oil cartel black ops + presidency + Carlyle group influence trading, plus their father's presidency (and yet-to-be-proven criminal fuckery)? I don't.
The "Olympus Has Fallen" series also made me believe that if a mob ever stepped foot on the White House lawn, a bunch of auto turrets would pop up and gun them all down.
The last few years has shown that the world is run by a bunch of jokers, no different than me. That's comforting in some ways, horrifying in others, and sadly has ruined the illusion of some of my favorite movies.