News COVID-19 pandemic

[Face]

Ok, so maybe I see this wrong. You are not intending to say that. You are just unaware of the consequences of what you say.

I think you are still wrong. The point is: not only did I not intend on saying the things you thought I said, I never even said it to begin with. You are interpreting things into it, that simply are not there. The consequence of having somebody interpreting my words to a point where he gets upset about it is something I am totally aware of, but I can't help it in any way. Otherwise I might have to think "Urwumpe is complicated and always gets upset if I say something, so I better not say anything to him at all, or just always agree". I don't think that you would want such a social interaction at all, and I have good news on this: I'll continue to communicate disagreement or differing opinions here, even if that means that you jump around like Rumpelstiltskin about it.

Of course its about damn morals. If you don't feel like you are something special on this planet, some Übermensch without the ballast of being a weak part of a human society, you will always have to think about the other human. Why should somebody die for me, is for example a very classic philosphical and moral question. Why should old people die for you?

Are you not intending to grow old? Would be a fair point then. Would you write a pact with Mephistoteles, that you will happily die of the next pandemic virus at a medium age, for... for what anyway? For the economic perspective of your children? Despite you not even knowing at all, if they would profit from that? Or that anybody else would actually profit, except maybe some few people.

I agree that classical philosophical and moral questions are important to pursue, but I also think that only focusing on moral questions is wrong. If you go into that general direction in terms of COVID, you quickly come to a point where you discuss at which point the freedom of the one person is restricting the freedom of the other. E.g. should we ban cars, because why should people die for your means of transportation? Should we restrict ecologic foot-prints, because why should millions die of global warming for your life-style?
What I see in this kind of discussions, though, is the trend to extremism. "Either we do that now, or we all gonna die!" We will all die if we stop living, that one is for sure.
What I'm missing in these discussions is a reasonable middle ground, just like we had in society for many years. Smoking is banned for a reason, with economic and moral arguments established alike. Driving is not banned. You still can buy sugar and consume it, but you can't do so with heavy drugs.
This is why I tend to keep out of discussions that take a medical problem like COVID and try to moralize it with the high index finger and injected emotions. I also never was a great fan of Faust.

"Its natural that older people die, because they did in the past." is a very weak argumentation for somebody, who is on this planet in first place instead of dying before or during birth or within the first 10 months of his life. Which is because medicine prevented it for most of us. Also, old people, as you might notice, are not useless. And have quite many years left to live, without COVID-19 happening. Also, its also natural that more women die at young age - because without medicine, any birth can be the last. Does that justify to let women die?

But who brought up this argument? I did not. Do you somehow refer to me presenting the argument of older times having a different age distribution? Or did somebody else here bring it up before?

So, discussing about some historic circumstances is just luxury for people who have too much time. We are not living in the middle ages, where a simple microbe can kill millions quickly until somebody finds out how to prevent this. We are not living in the wake of the first world war, where most countries had been too ruined to act against an particle, whose existence is completely unknown. We are here. And now.

Yes, being able to discuss things is a luxury. Seems like both of us have too much time at the moment.

And we have to find the best way to make use of our skills, technology and knowledge for creating the maximum gain for humanity. All of it. Even for those who will die despite all this, don't let their deaths be futile, some weird act of God, despite us knowing, that this isn't the case.

Who says that we have to do that? I mean, yes, you do it right now, but who declared it to be the only noble goal for everybody to use his skills to create maximum gain for humanity? We might agree on that this is probably the best course of action in order to bring humanity forward and make life count, but is it the best in order to make people happy? I doubt the later, and I think many people won't even agree with us on the former. No matter how often we declare them mental inferiors, social misfits or whatever.

 

[Urwumpe]

Well, I'll try again another day. ?‍

As long as you pretend, that "I don't want to kill any human, if I can avoid it" means "We all gonna die if you are not following our orders", its impossible to perform a reasonable debate with you. And as long as that condition in your head persists, appealing to reason and social behavior will only mean establishing an totalitarian dictatorship to you.

 

[Face]

Well, I'll try again another day. ?‍

As long as you pretend, that "I don't want to kill any human, if I can avoid it" means "We all gonna die if you are not following our orders", its impossible to perform a reasonable debate with you. And as long as that condition in your head persists, appealing to reason and social behavior will only mean establishing an totalitarian dictatorship to you.

Again something I never said or even implied. But as long as this condition persists in your head, I guess you will be unhappy discussing with me. Have a nice day, then!

 

[mahdavi3d]

 

[Urwumpe]

German politics in the nutshell: If achieving a incidence of 35 for easening the restrictions is getting impossible at the current lockdown because it is neither really enforced nor sensible and a 30% more contagious strain further ruins this strategy, the polit bureau .... I mean, the conference of the minister presidents of the states suggests that an incidence below 100 is also OK for ending many measures....

While they obviously busy pretending to be politicians, some more earthly news.

After merely 5 days in Kindergarten in 2021, the Kindergarten of my son had to revert to emergency child care only because one child is a first-grade contact of a person tested positive and many other children of the affect group had been reported ill this week... These children will only go to a doctor if really ill, will not get tested unless somebody insists on it, many parents will likely try to avoid it (For example for avoiding quarantine or problems with their employer).

A few states further away, a friend of me is slowly recovering in ICU, after dropping to merely 70% oxygen saturation with COVID-19 at home. I am still dodging the bullets here.

 

[TheShuttleExperience]

I am neither afraid of the pandemic, nor surprised. I don't even follow it since I am occupied with much more important stuff in my personal life. But I have to admit that I am in a good position, having a safe job and no children. So it doesn't really effect my life. But what actually concerns me is the role of the "social" media and how it changes and shifts electoral base by spreading pseudo scientific desinformation and fake news.

 

[TheShuttleExperience]

I agree that classical philosophical and moral questions are important to pursue, but I also think that only focusing on moral questions is wrong. If you go into that general direction in terms of COVID, you quickly come to a point where you discuss at which point the freedom of the one person is restricting the freedom of the other. E.g. should we ban cars, because why should people die for your means of transportation? Should we restrict ecologic foot-prints, because why should millions die of global warming for your life-style?
What I see in this kind of discussions, though, is the trend to extremism. "Either we do that now, or we all gonna die!" We will all die if we stop living, that one is for sure.
What I'm missing in these discussions is a reasonable middle ground, just like we had in society for many years. Smoking is banned for a reason, with economic and moral arguments established alike. Driving is not banned. You still can buy sugar and consume it, but you can't do so with heavy drugs.

I think the difference here is that cars are not infectious and don't produce a pandemic. And if I would consume as much heavy drugs as I consume sugar (and salt), for sure I would be very ill or probably dead already.

I for one like to look at the cientific and empiric facts. And when I do so, it seems very obvious and rational to wear a mask, keep distance and get a vaccine. There is no other way to get rid of something like SARS-CoV-2.

Covid is probably not a threat to me. But it is to some others. And so I do my best to safe the weak. This is not about me. It's about my fellow beings. I'm living in a solidary society.

 

[Face]

I for one like to look at the cientific and empiric facts. And when I do so, it seems very obvious and rational to wear a mask, keep distance and get a vaccine. There is no other way to get rid of something like SARS-CoV-2.

Well, the scientific and empiric facts today show that wearing a mask (doing that since a year), keeping distance (almost a year as well) and getting vaccines (since around December last year) did not eradicate the virus. Perhaps this will happen in the future, but this is a prediction based on a model, not a fact.

If you personally behave in a way that minimizes the risk for other people, this is noble, no question. Everybody should behave like you do, I try to do so myself as well. However, to believe that everybody else in the society will be just like us, and will do the same things as we do, is a fallacy.

There are people that find it ridiculous what governments do to contain this pandemic, and people that are personally stripped off their savings, their future, not because of the virus itself, but because of the measures against it, that get imposed on them because they should be "solidary". These people will not take it anymore, no matter how cleverly you explain the facts, how urgently you press the fear-mongering or the peer-pressure, or what ugly names you call them for not having the same opinion like we do. They grew "immune", if you want. If I take a look at what happens today in Vienna, with thousands of people demonstrating for freedom from the measures despite the government explicitly forbidding these demonstrations, I can't really believe that these people will suddenly follow a ZeroCovid strategy (or something similar) to get rid of the virus, just because the government says so.

Solidarity is something you can have in a society, but it is not something you can enforce in it. Currently it looks like the later is what we try to do. As soon as people will have no job, no education, and no perspective for a future, solidarity will vanish into oblivion, no matter how hard governments try to enforce it. By then, the word "solidarity" will just be another example for Orwellian newspeak, meaning nothing else but "obedience".

I think that the theory of getting rid of the virus by the means of hard lockdown measures sees humans as robots, which they are not. People - and if only a few - will stop following the measures, and therefore the goal (getting rid of the virus) is not achievable. So there is no way to get rid of it anymore, but there are many ways of how to live with it. Of course wearing masks, keeping distance and getting a vaccine is a way to do so.

 

[TheShuttleExperience]

Well, the scientific and empiric facts today show that wearing a mask (doing that since a year), keeping distance (almost a year as well) and getting vaccines (since around December last year) did not eradicate the virus. Perhaps this will happen in the future, but this is a prediction based on a model, not a fact.

If you personally behave in a way that minimizes the risk for other people, this is noble, no question. Everybody should behave like you do, I try to do so myself as well. However, to believe that everybody else in the society will be just like us, and will do the same things as we do, is a fallacy.

There are people that find it ridiculous what governments do to contain this pandemic, and people that are personally stripped off their savings, their future, not because of the virus itself, but because of the measures against it, that get imposed on them because they should be "solidary". These people will not take it anymore, no matter how cleverly you explain the facts, how urgently you press the fear-mongering or the peer-pressure, or what ugly names you call them for not having the same opinion like we do. They grew "immune", if you want. If I take a look at what happens today in Vienna, with thousands of people demonstrating for freedom from the measures despite the government explicitly forbidding these demonstrations, I can't really believe that these people will suddenly follow a ZeroCovid strategy (or something similar) to get rid of the virus, just because the government says so.

Solidarity is something you can have in a society, but it is not something you can enforce in it. Currently it looks like the later is what we try to do. As soon as people will have no job, no education, and no perspective for a future, solidarity will vanish into oblivion, no matter how hard governments try to enforce it. By then, the word "solidarity" will just be another example for Orwellian newspeak, meaning nothing else but "obedience".

I think that the theory of getting rid of the virus by the means of hard lockdown measures sees humans as robots, which they are not. People - and if only a few - will stop following the measures, and therefore the goal (getting rid of the virus) is not achievable. So there is no way to get rid of it anymore, but there are many ways of how to live with it. Of course wearing masks, keeping distance and getting a vaccine is a way to do so.

That's why we have rules and laws.

The biggest threat to the future is a mindest of denial. The opinion of individuals is one thing. A pandemic is another one. But the vast majority does take and understand the measures. At least here in Germany. More than 98% of employed people did not lose their Jobs last year, and not everyone due to the pandemic. There is a lot complaining on a very high and populistic level.

Masks and distance did significantly reduce the spread of flu and other infectious deseases last year by the way. So even without scientific knowledge it's not hard to imagine how the covid-situation would extremely likely look like without measures.

In the past we got rid of some nasty deseases. And the life expectation has doubled since 1880. And this is not due to people with a different opinion.

 

[Face]

That's why we have rules and laws.

The biggest threat to the future is a mindest of denial. The opinion of individuals is one thing. A pandemic is another one. But the vast majority does take and understand the measures. At least here in Germany. More than 98% of employed people did not lose their Jobs last year, and not everyone due to the pandemic. There is a lot complaining on a very high and populistic level.

Masks and distance did significantly reduce the spread of flu and other infectious deseases last year by the way. So even without scientific knowledge it's not hard to imagine how the covid-situation would extremely likely look like without measures.

All true. However, there is a difference between "reduce the spread" and "get rid of". There is a difference between an infection and getting ill. A difference between SARS-CoV-2 (the virus) and COVID-19 (the disease). I think what we will be able to do is to live with the virus, but get rid of the disease, or in other words: don't look at infection numbers anymore, but to heal the illness.

Rules and laws are only effective as long as the majority is understanding and living them. I don't know about the situation in Germany and how you derived that number (98%), but I know about Austria and my immediate surroundings. Literally everybody I talked to here does not fully know about or even understand the currently effective rules and laws, because they change too fast and are not logical. Some have developed some guesswork to get along, mostly around the cornerstones you already mentioned (wear mask, keep distance, get vaccinated), but I found nobody who can really explain what is allowed and what not, i.e. what are the rules and laws. This is a pretty dire situation IMHO.

We have ca. half a million people without a job now. Around 100.000 more than in 2019. Austria has around 9 million people. And this is with state programs that help employers to keep people employed, which will soon run out of steam due to budget being a limited resource. Of course you can say that there is complaining on a very high level, but isn't that a dismissal of the fact that there is complaining? Isn't this also a mindset of denial? I think if we deny the collateral damage of the current measures, we will soon be in for a surprise.

In the past we got rid of some nasty deseases. And the life expectation has doubled since 1880. And this is not due to people with a different opinion.

I don't understand that argument. We made scientific progress precisely because of people with different opinions. If there were no different opinions, nobody would have the idea to develop a different hypothesis to the established consensus, which would make progress effectively impossible. If there were no different opinions, scientific discourse would not exist, because everybody would have the same opinion, anyway.

BTW: one of the different opinions on the life expectation is that if we had not doubled it, we would not have such a bad situation currently, because there would be fewer old people (or people with pre-existing conditions) to suffer from it.

 

[Urwumpe]

There is a difference between an infection and getting ill.

Can you choose if you just get infected or get ill?

(And I hate Social Darwinism. In case you ever wondered.)

 

[Arvil]

We in the US certainly have their naysayers. I know people who just don’t believe in vaccination. The Amish here don’t wear masks, but they sell them. They call the Coronavirus the “political virus”. One Amishman was asked why the Amish don’t get Covid, he said “Why, that’s because we don’t watch TV”. lol

 

[Face]

We in the US certainly have their naysayers. I know people who just don’t believe in vaccination. The Amish here don’t wear masks, but they sell them. They call the Coronavirus the “political virus”. One Amishman was asked why the Amish don’t get Covid, he said “Why, that’s because we don’t watch TV”. lol

Yeah, that basically underlines my point. Do you think that your government can do anything to make these people understand what the situation is? Of course it can try to force them to get vaccinated or test every other day with rules and laws, but will that change their mind? I think not. And I bet that these hypothetical Amishman will find ways to fake vaccination passports or test certificates if it is making their life easier, because it is only the "political virus", anyway. And therefore, even the tightest lock-down in the US would not eradicate the virus itself, because it would circle around these people. And if the virus keeps on rumbling in the US, it is only a matter of time until it spreads to the world again, just this time without a POTUS calling it the "China virus".

So IMHO the better approach would be to find a way to heal those who get ill from the virus infection. Unfortunately, I have not seen much press about medics or therapy to heal the disease, only big letters for vaccines and lockdowns. And only big money for the later, of course.

 

[Urwumpe]

So IMHO the better approach would be to find a way to heal those who get ill from the virus infection. Unfortunately, I have not seen much press about medics or therapy to heal the disease, only big letters for vaccines and lockdowns. And only big money for the later, of course.

If you are not caring about looking for those reports, you will possibly simply ignore them - most of them happened around April-May 2020, BTW, currently only few new therapy methods emerge that seriously improve on the first advances. But especially the experiences from Italy allowed reducing the lethality of the disease a lot for patients in ICU. Also, you might be missing the whole "LongCOVID" discussion, which is mostly about treating survivors of even weaker infections that have lasting organ damage and now also starts to include children, who had been "just a bit ill" but are now found with organ damages in MRT studies.

Also, what do you expect how to heal a virus infection? You can only limit the damages long enough until the immune system can handle things itself. As long as the virus persists, there is no cure - see HIV there, which only seems to be better after a short weak initial acute phase with a strong immune reaction (and drop in virus load), while in reality, the damage in the immune system itself progresses over years.

And if you think fully eradicating a virus is impossible...well, if we would have only as many cases of COVID-19 as we have with smallpox today, it would be fine enough for me.

(Which is not fully eradicated worldwide, but did for example not appear in Germany again since 1991)

 

[Arvil]

Correct, ya typically can’t cure viral diseases, just run its course and work on the symptoms. You can poison a bacteria as long as it doesn’t poison the patient, but, viruses don’t eat. Yeah, they eradicated smallpox, but I can’t but fear that there’s a reservoir of it out there somewhere that we don’t know about and we’ll be caught with our pants down when we run into it. Measles hadn’t been seen here in years until someone arrived with it a couple years ago and it spread like wildfire because of the anti-vaccination folks. When I was a kid, it killed 2 or 3 million a year. I foresee the Covid vaccine becoming an annual shot like flu, perhaps they can combine them into one.

 

[Face]

If you are not caring about looking for those reports, you will possibly simply ignore them - most of them happened around April-May 2020, BTW, currently only few new therapy methods emerge that seriously improve on the first advances. But especially the experiences from Italy allowed reducing the lethality of the disease a lot for patients in ICU. Also, you might be missing the whole "LongCOVID" discussion, which is mostly about treating survivors of even weaker infections that have lasting organ damage and now also starts to include children, who had been "just a bit ill" but are now found with organ damages in MRT studies.

Indeed. And because I care about looking for them, I also observed that there were some reports early on, but almost none now. There have been interesting candidates for medics - like e.g. Apeptico - but nothing about their progress (in the press... of course you find it if you know where to look). The LongCovid discussion is unfortunately mostly about how the symptoms exist, but not exactly how to treat them, especially because there seems to be so few interest in healing the illness. I think we (as a society) focus too much on the infection part and too little on the disease part.

Also, what do you expect how to heal a virus infection? You can only limit the damages long enough until the immune system can handle things itself. As long as the virus persists, there is no cure - see HIV there, which only seems to be better after a short weak initial acute phase with a strong immune reaction (and drop in virus load), while in reality, the damage in the immune system itself progresses over years.

Well, at first I'd not expect to heal an infection. As I wrote before there is a difference between an infection and a disease. I'd try to heal the illness. AFAIK, people do not suffer from the infection per se, but from the organ damage the virus causes, like ARDS (Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome). This is where many medics focus on. OTOH, also in the context of HIV, there have been many interesting approaches like phage-therapy.
Then you made an interesting point: the immune system eventually needs to handle it. I'd therefore expect health care to focus on improving this system. The current measures, however, are hardly what improve the immune system of people: restricting movement, reducing social interaction, inducing fear and uncertainty, creating stress.

And if you think fully eradicating a virus is impossible...well, if we would have only as many cases of COVID-19 as we have with smallpox today, it would be fine enough for me.

(Which is not fully eradicated worldwide, but did for example not appear in Germany again since 1991)

Agreed. As you wrote, even smallpox was not eradicated fully worldwide, although we had a compulsory vaccination program for it (at least here in Austria, don't know about Germany). As for bringing SARS-COV-2 to the levels of smallpox: I already explained why I don't think this will happen. YMMV.

 

[Face]

I foresee the Covid vaccine becoming an annual shot like flu, perhaps they can combine them into one.

Agreed. I also think this will be the case, perhaps equally effective as the flu shot now.

 

[Urwumpe]

Then you made an interesting point: the immune system eventually needs to handle it. I'd therefore expect health care to focus on improving this system. The current measures, however, are hardly what improve the immune system of people: restricting movement, reducing social interaction, inducing fear and uncertainty, creating stress.

The hard reality is: Many popular concepts of how to strengthen your immune system won't work. Hardly surprising since we live in a part of the world where a large faction of the population thinks homoepathy works.

You can't train it, except by getting infected or vaccinated. And luckily, it takes a lot of mistreatment to really harm it. For example, short term stressful moments are no problems. Long term stress is it. If you prefer your whole pandemic freaking out - well, your choice. Better don't ask then what 5 years of war did in Europe. Usually, we are talking about loosing a beloved one, as example of what kind of situation can cause long-term stress. The mild lockdowns here sure don't count as anything like that.

And much worse, as said before: You have no control to ensure an infection can't turn into an illness. Except by the classic scientific methods - e.g. vaccination. There is no "a bit of measles", like many people think, it always has the chance to really kill humans. The immune system of children has some special tricks there thanks to having one organ more in their body, thymus, but even this does no magic. It can explain why using tests for adults like searching for antibodies can fail in children, because their immune system can learn to fight new pathogens without resorting to antibodies. Its a very complex topic and really new science - most of the immune system in humans was unknown until the 1960s, a lot of research still takes place there because we still don't know every mechanism there.

 

[TheShuttleExperience]

@Face, the damage caused by the measures is likely minor compared to the damage we would see without measures. I don't want to try it out. If you look how many people are employed in Germany, and how many lost their jobs in 2020, it turns out that 98% did not lose their job. And of the 2% not everyone lost the job due to the pandemic. So I don't see a rational ground for the complaining. And if you lose your job, you are free to chose a new one. People pretend once they lost their job it's all over. But that's not reality. I got a lot of new workmates that were ramp agents and flight attendants before. They just got a new job now, and they are even better off with more salary and permanently employed now.

If we don't look at infections we still got over 70.000 laboratory confirmed deaths within one year, compared to 1.700 during one of the strongest flu seasons in 2017/2018. Actually it is 60.000 deaths within 6 month since the number went from 9.000 to 70.000 since around september.

The problem I see with people that don't agree to measures is they don't have intelligent alternatives to offer. And it's the same with global warming for example. Yes, the climate is always changing, people always die, there will always be infections and alcohol is allowed when drugs are not. But you can't argue that way if you are a doctor, a politician or a scientist. You have to act. And I am very glad to live in a state in which life stands above the individual need of shopping, dining and party.

 

[Face]

@Face, the damage caused by the measures is likely minor compared to the damage we would see without measures. I don't want to try it out.

That's your opinion, sure. However, we don't even see the whole damage caused by the measures yet. And by the things we do see already, I don't share your opinion. I think that the cure is currently deadlier than the disease, so to speak. I would also not compare it to what we would see without measures at all. There are enough examples for how countries get along without strict lockdowns and only moderate measures, we don't have to try it out.

If you look how many people are employed in Germany, and how many lost their jobs in 2020, it turns out that 98% did not lose their job. And of the 2% not everyone lost the job due to the pandemic. So I don't see a rational ground for the complaining. And if you lose your job, you are free to chose a new one. People pretend once they lost their job it's all over. But that's not reality. I got a lot of new workmates that were ramp agents and flight attendants before. They just got a new job now, and they are even better off with more salary and permanently employed now.

Well, I won't tell the people who have lost their jobs that they are free to choose a new one, anyway. That's pretty cynical if they lost their jobs due to the measures, especially if they can't get a new one due to the pandemic still going on. Just as you have your anecdotes about people being lucky to get new jobs, I have my own about people being not so lucky, and having enormous problems now.

The problem I see with people that don't agree to measures is they don't have intelligent alternatives to offer. And it's the same with global warming for example. Yes, the climate is always changing, people always die, there will always be infections and alcohol is allowed when drugs are not. But you can't argue that way if you are a doctor, a politician or a scientist. You have to act.

Of course nobody can have intelligent alternatives to offer in the eyes of those that proclaimed the current measures to have no alternatives to start with (Merkel's "alternativlos"). Politicians already have examples of how different measures work out, they just choose to render them as non-intelligent. That's what they always do, even if they change their strategy later on.