If the choice is between 3.5 million dead, and the rise of authoritarianism and censorship, then yes the former is much less tragic than the latter and therefore the more acceptable option. And that's before taking into account that the survival rate is quite a bit higher than 99%, so it won't be 3.5 million dead. And also before taking into account that the vast majority of the dead will be the very old, and people who took extraordinarily poor care of their health.
Of course the choice isn't that simple or binary in the real world, but there's elements of that choice at play and I stand by the point I'm making.
What about people who can't get medical care like cancer treatments, because hospitals are firing people with natural immunity who don't need (and thus refuse) the vaccine?
Vaccine mandates aren't new. You weren't protesting them 3 years ago, but now you are willing to take the side of 3.5 million members of the community slowly dying so you don't have to get a shot. Your persecution complex is out of control.
The absurdity of peoples' accusations of world-ending authoritarianism and censorship is baffling.
No. But mandating a brand new vaccine is new. We don’t know what the long term effects are. Nothing about COVID or the way in which tyrants around the world are using it to seize new powers is normal.
People at the FDA are resigning left and right [1]. Nobody wants their name on this thing.
Your comment has been flagged, but beyond that, I said nothing about being hesitant about the vaccine. I am vaccinated. I believe the mandates are flawed, largely because they don't take natural immunity into account. I have said none of the things you're accusing me of saying.
I flagged that comment for wishing me and my children dead, and this one for calling me a "dumbfuck". And nothing I have posted is FUD, nor is it anti-vaccine.
How many years, and how many people have to die while going from 99% to 99.9% sure of a vaccine's safety, before you would say it's safe? In your professional opinion as an epidemiologist?
You're willing to sacrifice people that you consider "expendable", because you think vaccination and masks are more dangerous than a highly infectious disease with long-lasting detrimental health consequences even for survivors.
Such a severe lack of empathy is disturbing.
> the vast majority of the dead will be the very old, and people who took extraordinarily poor care of their health.
This is incorrect, the Delta variant is hitting young people hard, including children.
Scandinavians countries just suspended Moderna for kids.
But keep ranting how the science is _settled_ and everyone just needs to fall in line. Give me a break.
As for your lame "lack of empathy" argument - the only way for an unvaccinated person to be a risk to anyone else with COVID is if they are symptomaic - i.e. if they have a fever. However, as a vaccinated person not only can you have COVID, you can be shedding (spreading) it without any way of anyone around you knowing unless you have been
recently tested.
That's what's beyond crazy - the vaccinated represent a bigger threat for covert spreading than the unvaccinated! An utter 180 from the popular narrative.
So yeah, keep on your high horse about empathy, denial, etc. At this point there is very little science in these discussions - you are espousing dogma and propaganda.
Age, obesity and health conditions play a massive role in the hospitalizations and deaths. When the vaccine isn’t preventing catching and spreading the virus, it makes absolutely zero sense to have mandates. And based on Israel and Australia, the mandate doesn’t stop at 2 shots.
Additionally, the Delta variant (currently the most prevalent by far) hits young people and children hard.
Even if you consider the elderly, the obese and the chronically sick to be "expendable" (which is an absolutely abhorrent worldview), your claims simply are not correct.
Edit: your CDC link is outdated. It uses data from December 13, 2020 to April 10, 2021. That’s ancient and even before delta was around. The second link also doesn’t use delta data.
Look at more newer data or just look at Singapore, Israel, Iceland. That proves my point.
Your last statement shows you aren’t interested in this honestly because you are more interested in virtue signalling and claiming moral superiority. How you came to the conclusion from my statement about me be young fit and healthy (and thus very low risk) to somehow mean I consider elderly, obese and sick to be expendable is beyond me.
I looked at the data for my age group and found that there’s 5-7x more deaths and a lot more serious injuries from car accidents than Covid.
Also you are wrong. Even in asymptomatic or mild cases, the viral loads is the same and you can spread the virus. The virus grows in your nose and pathways and can spread even if you are vaccinated and within the 3 month period after which the effectiveness drastically declines.
How people expect every young person to keep getting injected every 6 months is beyond me.
In Ontario, 36.6% of the cases on October 8 were fully vaccinated and 34.5% of deaths in Canada in the week of September 4-11 were fully vaxxed. We had under 10% fully vaxxed till June 10, so vast majority of our vaccinations occurred in last 3 months. The vaccine effectiveness decline is clearly visible as the weeks go by.
In Iceland, their recent outbreak started from fully vaxxed individuals even when they had around 60% of population vaxxed.
These vaccines are only a potential symptom mitigator. That doesn’t mean it should get mandated.
What’s wrong with people getting vaccinations every 6 months until Covid isn’t an issue? It only takes a few minutes, it’s hardly a big deal. I’m not sure what your Ontario stats have to do with anything.
Have you been looking at the VAERS database and the spike since the emergency authorized vaccines were issued? You want to keep those spikes going every six months?
And what makes you think it will only be every six months. COVID viruses are the family that contains the common cold. Why have we never tried to vaccinate for the common cold? It mutates too fast and too often!
You aren't going to shelter in place or vaccine away this virus. It's here, it's a permanent part of our existence and we better figure out more sane ways to deal with it that don't also destroy the economies of the world.
Sweden never locked down - their curves match pretty much everyone else. New Zealand finally gave up on their extreme quarantine policy and admitted that the virus is there too. So much for being the darling for how to handle the virus and the rest of the world being idiots.
Luckily 1% IFR is an over-estimate by around 10x, may 5x if you use pessimistic assumptions, especially now with the vaccines. UK govt admitted in Parliament a few weeks ago that IFR is now <0.1%
Moreover that number assumes everyone will get infected, but there's nothing deep driving that belief. Scientists don't understand to what extent the immune system can recognize and fight viruses based on prior exposure to other similar viruses, so they just ignore the possibility and assume no such ability exists at all. Yet it's been nearly two years now and I never got infected even after I spent 10 days self-isolating with someone who had it and had symptoms. Most of the population hasn't tested positive despite saturation levels of testing. The assumption of 100% infection doesn't seem to be a very good one.
Dunno why you are getting downvoted - I've been on dozens of flights from coast to coast in the US during COVID and never contracted it. I'm a routine blood donor and have come up negative for COVID every time. I'm not claiming some sort of special invulnerability, just pointing out that I'm either VERY lucky or this thing isn't nearly as transmissible as our darling media is flogging it to be.
Great upheaval brings great opportunity, if you are ruthless enough to exploit it.
There are unfortunately many actors around the world who - for various reasons - desire to create instability, because they see it as a way to profit or to gain political power.
Exactly, things have a purpose and more often than not, that purpose is to be used up, possibly repaired and then used again, until it finally wears out or breaks completely.
I tend to baby new things until the feeling of novelty wear off, then I just use them. I don't abuse them, but I stop trying to avoid normal wear and tear. Repairing things is also something I find relaxing and interesting.
As a consequence, I tend to stick to things that are durable and can be repaired, designs and materials that have stood the test of time, and I keep them for as long as I can.
A well-worn patina on an obviously beloved object is hard to fake.
I didn't have COVID, and I also only had a day or so of fever after my J&J shot in June. My girlfriend had a similarly mild reaction, and we've both been tested regularly for various reasons, we're pretty certain that we haven't been infected.
I just got my recommended booster shot of Moderna yesterday, now I'm waiting to see how hard that will hit me.
There are no certainties, but I know that here you would also been considered immune if you had previously been infected, but not yet vaccinated.
Bad public policy unfortunately exists, same with the thing about not accepting the J&J vaccine as valid. It works about as well as the mRNA vaccines against hospitalizations and death, but with somewhat less efficacy against base infection, and of course a slightly larger risk of complications. That doesn't make it a bad vaccine, so countries not accepting it is completely insane.
Good to know. I was basing my opinion on the fact that the actual infection (confirmed via PCR) had me very fatigued for a week, with a fever for about half of it. And online reports for J&J showed several days of response effects.
I could've opted for Pfizer, but the wait time for it to arrive and to get the full two doses was too long. J&J is one shot, and some say it works better than "older" vaccines.
I did get into the country that didn't have it on their list to be fair. They probably added it later, AZ was on there.
We're not seeing empty shelves in supermarkets just yet, groceries are still available, because most places have reasonably local production available.
But electronics, cars, machinery, the kinds of things that are produced more centrally in just one part of the world are facing shortages. It's a small thing, but there was a 3 week wait on the access point I bought recently, where in normal times that would have been a day-to-day delivery. The mechanical keyboard I was looking to buy took a full year to get back in stock before I could order it.
These are of course small things, luxuries in the grand scope of life. But industries are facing component shortages that are going to last for years.
Even then, supermarkets being stocked isn't a self-sustaining vacuum. Not all goods sold are produced within 100 miles. The fields are cleared with industrial equipment, sourced with semiconductors and parts produced across continents, the grain is processed in a facility, the product is delivered by a driver, and some point later a 99¢ box of pasta is on the shelf. Very few items can carry on forever due to complete sourcing, production and distribution occurring as closed systems. We simply don't have that level of vertical integration.
Equipment keeps on running until it needs to be repaired or replaced. If you can't get parts or new machinery at that point, you're screwed for a while, currently that can be a long while. Those situations will add up and get worse and worse.
Maybe, just maybe we should take a long hard look at just how fragile and easy to topple all of our supply chains are, and actually do something to build in more resilience, to better weather adverse conditions.
With how the climate is changing, we are only going to see more and more instability and disturbances to production and shipping in the future, due to climate refugees and unrest.
We've played a dangerous game of brinkmanship and now we're paying the price.
> how fragile and easy to topple all of our supply chains are
I'd say that our supply chains are pretty resilient if toppling them takes every government in the world shutting down their economies and locking everyone in their houses for months, all at the same time.
That is not what happened though. Oil kept flowing, remember the tankers with no where to port? Container ships kept chugging. Cargo planes and repurposed commercial crafts kept transporting. Factories kept cranking out widgets. Rampant consumerism definitely took a a pause which hurt the industries we all rely on to survive.
Industries need to reevaluate their resilience to disruption and plan for the unthinkable. The feeling of schadenfreude, as I recall the countless canaries enumerating the consequences of fragile supply chains that no one even vaguely understands, is sad and predictable.
I have the opposite feeling. The service sector was forced into shutdown and stay home orders were deliberately applied globally. Meanwhile the uber wealthy could just hop on their private jets and fly to either a country with less restrictions, or their private islands.
It was a good stress test. I think it will take natural disasters with permanent damage to the electric grid and internet infrastructure for it to be crippling.
> Maybe, just maybe we should take a long hard look at just how fragile and easy to topple all of our supply chains are, and actually do something to build in more resilience, to better weather adverse conditions.
hindsight is 20/20. just in time delivery help keeps food waste low, but before covid there were tons of articles lamenting how much food waste there was in america and how we needed to reduce it. I suspect a similar sentiment would exist for hundreds of square miles of valuable land put to non-productive use (warehouses) because we wanted to keep a bunch of inputs on hand just in case.
> Maybe, just maybe we should take a long hard look at just how fragile and easy to topple all of our supply chains are
A global pandemic hasn't taken out the supply chain. So I wouldn't say fragile.
> With how the climate is changing, we are only going to see more and more instability and disturbances to production and shipping in the future, due to climate refugees and unrest.
Global warming is going to open up the northwest passage and the arctic trade routes which would cut shipping times by a huge percentage from asia to europe. It would be the greatest boon to world trade in human history.
> We've played a dangerous game of brinkmanship and now we're paying the price.
Seems like we are always on the brink of something. It's neverending and it's always wrong.
> Global warming is going to open up the northwest passage and the arctic trade routes which would cut shipping times by a huge percentage from asia to europe. It would be the greatest boon to world trade in human history.
Climate change is going to cause droughts and starvation for millions and millions of people, who are either going to die or desperately seek to migrate to the parts of the world that are less inhospitable.
An increase in potential global trade is a drop in the ocean against the instability that large scale climate migrations are going to cause, especially considering how hostile our governments and media have acted against immigrants for decades.
This goes for all big corporations, all of them lie through their teeth and only care about the appearance of caring, because that's a lot more profitable than actually caring.
Reduce your consumption and lifestyle. Buy as little as possible, preferably second-hand. Maintain and repair what you already own. Become politically active or at least vote for people who are not in the pockets of big business.
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
I think that sums it up better than I could ever do.
This assumes that your shopping needs can only be met by shopping malls.
I do all my daily shopping in local shops, I have 5 or 6 in walking distance, 20+ in bicycle distance. The last time I went to a mall was for a specific offer in a specific specialty store, which is certainly not a daily activity.
It's a matter of will and not killing off in-town shopping.
Where do you live? Your comment feels completely disconnected from the reality on the ground.
I agree that shopping malls have killed in-town shopping. But maybe there's a reason for that? In-town shops usually don't stay open late enough for people who depend on public transit for longer commutes, which is the case for many people living in the suburbs. Those people don't usually live there by choice, it's usually because they couldn't afford to live in the city center. That's the case for my parents, for example.
I don't doubt that there must also have been a comfort angle to that, it's easier to just drive to a big store, get everything you need in one place, and drive back. Also, malls are usually much cheaper that in-town stores. Which, again, is important for people who have to live in the suburbs because of limited means.
I'm in the same situation as you, probably even better. I have multiple shops open until 10 PM less than a 10-minute walk away. But I realize that not everyone can afford to live in the city center, so it's not just a matter of will.
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My parents live in a 20000 people town, so it's not the boonies. The closest non-bakery shop is 20 minutes away on foot. It's open from 9 AM to 8 PM, and it only has your basics. Want anything other than packaged sausage and cheese? Tough. The butcher and cheese vendor close at 7 PM.
By public transit, it's impossible for them to be home before 7:30 PM for my mom and 8:30 for my dad. They can basically only shop on weekends, so they'd have to haul provisions for the whole week. They cannot do "daily shopping".
Of course, my dad's commute is 1:30 each way by transit if there are no issues, or 30 minutes by car, which is what he ends up using.
I will admit that I live in a place that does it right, namely Copenhagen. There is plentiful public transit, local shops and the entire city is extremely walkable/bikeable.
I don't live in the city center, it's a 25 minute bus ride there if there's no traffic, but even here I have local shops everywhere, since we don't have zoning laws that restrict shops in residential areas. Shops are generally open until 21 or 22, some until midnight.
My point is that the dependency on malls is not inevitable, it can be prevented and/or remedied, and changing zoning laws is one of the ways to do it.
My girlfriend lives in a town of 1500 people, and there are 3 grocery stores, several pizzarias and bakeries, as well as other local amenities. Everything is walkable and they have both train and bus connections to the nearest cities. That's how to do it, not the like similarly sized village in Germany she came from, where there are literally no stores, no restaurants, no nothing, and the only transit they have is a bus that runs every hour between 8 and 17 on weekdays. No wonder that town is dead.
I'm not aware of any zoning laws in France, at least not the kind there seem to be in the US. There are technically shops close to where people live, the issue is their opening hours aren't practical for workers.
A quick glance at Wikipedia tells me that the "urban" area of Copenhagen is ten times smaller than that of Paris (292.5 km2 vs 2,853.5 km2). Not sure how comparable those are in practice. But a 25-minute bus ride with no traffic, in Paris, would put you inside Paris proper, not in the suburbs. Public transport is fairly good there.
The issue is many people live and work outside of Paris proper, and transit from suburb to suburb is poor. Most suburban trains go to Paris and bus routes are relatively short. They're working on improving things, but there's still much to do. So the issue is more one of time, rather than zoning per se. People don't have the time to go to the local shops were they live, so towns don't thrive.
Maybe if there was less concentration, so if instead of having one big city in the middle of an enormous suburb, there were multiple smaller cities, the situations would resemble that of Copenhagen. But for some reason, people insist on running all their businesses in the same few spots and bring people in from long distances (relatively speaking).
>The landlord didn't assume the risk that they couldn't remove the resident AND the resident wouldn't have to pay.
Then they assumed wrong. National emergencies happen, in this instance a pandemic (that is still very much ongoing) meant that potentially millions of people stood to lose their livelihoods and their place to live. Millions of people with no jobs and no homes, a catastrophe, to put it mildly. Ordinary rules do not apply the same way in extraordinary situations.
How many landlords lost their homes due to this? How many could sell one of their properties and weather the storm with the profits?
>This was effectively the state seizing property, forcing the landlord to maintain the property and providing it to someone else.
No property was seized. The government did its most important job, namely supporting citizens who are unable to support themselves, those who do not have enough capital to weather a storm.
Someone who rents out a room is not going to lose their home from such a moratorium. It is a deliberately misleading argument to frame it like that, and it is not a common situation.
Some risks should belong to those people if they can't save enough to survive a year or two without pay they don't deserve to rent. They should be out on streets or find place where they can afford to buffer a year or two for rent. It's not up to landlords to take that burden, but instead it should have been on renters.
You don't plan, you get out. Maybe then government can find you some tiny box or tent to live in until you can plan and pay.
You should sit down and calculate the absolutely disastrous consequences for the economy if you put millions of (jobless) people on the streets, during a massive epidemic.
The rise in property values alone over the last 10+ years should have been more than plenty to cover any landlord's expenses due to the moratorium. They did not plan for the bad times, too bad for them. They had the means to mitigate by preparing, renters living paycheck to paycheck have no such possibility, so the government did its job for once and helped out the under-privileged.
So the landlords can just sell some of their properties, downsize and scale back until better times. They gambled on stability and lost.
Why don't renters have to take reasonable responsibility during pandemic? That is have enough funds on hand to cover their living cost in any situation? Being jobless is no excuse as they could have lived cheaper and saved more previously. Maybe by being homeless for a few years or decades.
1% dead means around 3.5 million dead, in the US alone. Do you consider that acceptable?