Why do you think they're good and smart, why do they think Covid19 is a hoax? Surely a good person would try to do the safe thing even if they had doubts.
Not the original poster, but I would imagine it echos what I have seen (and believe myself) in that it’s not a hoax as is normally defined, but a mass hysteria fueled by a media that needs clicks to survive. The risks are real for certain demographics, we need to take precautions to help vulnerable people, etc. however the unintended consequences of drastic policies are economic hardship, creating a new generation of homelessness, drug and alcohol addiction, and deaths of despair.
I have been called a denier, and have had my beliefs references as “believing COVID is a hoax”, which is far from the truth. From what I can tell a huge portion of the United States is engaged in a mass delusion, and is actively handing over all the prosperity for the next decade to large corporations who benefit from COVID, while risking the future of kids with mostly worthless remote learning.
Focus the effort required to create lockdowns / restrictions on providing relief for elderly, unhealthy, immunocompromised people, etc.
If some misguided old people in the Midwest want to pretend they are not at risk, it’s their life and their body to do that with. Sucks for the healthcare workers tasked with dealing with that, but you can’t legislate away life, risk, etc.
> the unintended consequences of drastic policies are economic hardship, creating a new generation of homelessness, drug and alcohol addiction, and deaths of despair.
None of these things are inevitable. For example China arguably implemented some extremely drastic policies and they are doing just fine now. New Zealand did the same. In the United States we are just doing an incredibly bad job at this.
Too many people talk about controlling the virus and protecting the economy as if they are polar opposites but the aren't. A month or two of drastic lockdowns early on would have saved the years of slow bleeding we are currently facing.
The way China controlled the virus is legally impossible in the United States. You simply can't confine someone to their home without due process.
New Zealand is an island that, for all intents and purposes, closed their ports to human travel.
Early in COVID, everyone suddenly became statisticians and had opinions on exponential growth, and while most of their proclamations were ill-informed, the truth remains that one infection can spiral out of control quickly. With a disease that exhibits nearly 40% asymptomatic rates and is aerosolized, there is no eradication. It will be with us in waves until we are immune via natural immunity or vaccinations.
If New Zealand opened their ports today to the same levels as the United States' ports, they would quickly see a spike.
> New Zealand is an island that, for all intents and purposes, closed their ports to human travel.
Firstly, New Zealand is not closed to human travel. It has mandatory quarantine for inbound travelers.
The US can do the same. It is in an even better situation to do so than New Zealand, because its economy is less dependant on tourism and imports.
It would be utterly pointless, of course, because nearly anywhere in the world has less COVID-per-capita than the US. A random traveler from Kentucky, or New Jersey is just as likely to be a COVID carrier as someone flying in from Paris. Keeping Parisians out isn't doing anything to stop spread, at this point. [1]
As for the legality of locking people in their own homes, the US is no stranger to blanket curfews during a state of emergency... Or for imprisoning symptomatic, or asymptomatic carriers of a disease.
[1] In a stroke of brilliance, travel from China to the US is still banned. Can anyone puzzle out how this policy is currently helping improve American health outcomes?
New Zealand has really 2 truly international airports (Auckland and Christchurch). The United States has over 50. In 2017, the United States saw over ~70,000,000, tourists through her ports of entry, while New Zealand saw 3,700,000 . These statistics are for tourist entries, so they don't even include repatriating citizens who traveled internationally. To institute the same quarantine rules in the United States would be untenable. Furthermore, inbound travelers to the United States _are_ supposed to quarantine for 14 days, there is just no enforcement mechanism.
And regarding the per capita infections, the most important figure is tests/1M population. We both know that testing doesn't cause infections, and tests only tell you what already exists. However, it is equally as true that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So just as some nations may be reporting lower per capita infection rates, they also have a lower per capita test rate. You can't, with a straight face, say that India, which has performed 91,359 tests per 1m has fewer cases than the United States, which has performed 516,656 tests per 1M population. Put another way, 50% of Americans have been tested at one point in the past year, whereas only 9% of Indians have been tested.
Before just shitting on everything and having strongly held opinions strongly held, actually research the data and understand the tectonics underlying the world's response. It is not nearly as black and white as you and others seem to think it is.
The number of tests isn't the only relevant factor. Positivity is, as well. When positivity is near zero, either health authorities are incredibly, shockingly bad at picking who to test... Or Covid is not very prevalent in that community.
Per capita, the tourism numbers you cited are similar across the two countries. I am not sure what your point is.
> There is just no enforcement of quarantine
Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner. This is why the virus is out of control in the United States. Even when rules are put in place to control it's spread, enforcement of those rules is incredibly lax.
> If some misguided old people in the Midwest want to pretend they are not at risk, it’s their life and their body to do that with. Sucks for the healthcare workers tasked with dealing with that, but you can’t legislate away life, risk, etc.
I think we do legislate away life and risk quite a lot. I imagine you may have already heard the arguments about laws for seatbelts, motorcycle helmets, and more. Even suicide is illegal.
> From what I can tell a huge portion of the United States is engaged in a mass delusion, and is actively handing over all the prosperity for the next decade to large corporations who benefit from COVID, while risking the future of kids with mostly worthless remote learning.
For me, this hits on where I think the US government has failed the most. I believe we should treat this virus seriously and I also believe we should treat the economic crisis seriously. I believe we need not only medical interventions but economic ones and it baffles me the US Congress has not created and approved a new stimulus package.
In summary, I think some people only focus on the medical crisis, others focus on the economic crisis, and that we would probably resolve this a lot better if we provided help both medically and economically.
Fine, we believe that you believe it's not a hoax.
But calling it a manufactured mass hysteria/delusion is just as absurd and conspiratorial. Was AIDS a manufactured mass hysteria in the '80s? People are rightly concerned about COVID because it is relatively new, we don't have super great ways to treat it yet, and in addition to being deadly, there is good evidence of lasting health impact to people who survive it. It doesn't sound like you're denying the disease, but you are downplaying it.
The public health guidance isn't just about protecting a handful of "elderly, unhealthy, immunocompromised people." People in all age groups, with and without pre-existing co-morbidities are getting the disease and dying of it--albeit in smaller numbers. And if not, they're spreading it to people who are dying of it. Even if we just for simplicity's sake, pretend that only the "elderly, unhealthy, immunocompromised people" are literally the only people who are at risk from it: you still need to have everyone observe the same precautions, or you risk infecting the at-risk group.
If this were like seatbelt wearing, I'd be totally on your side. If someone chooses to put their own life at risk, fine, it’s their life and their body. But it's not like that with a highly contagious disease. People's personal choices are having a direct effect on other people's health. Your right to do something personally risky should end when it puts others at risk. There's a reason we don't let people fire guns around randomly as long as they don't happen to hit others.
The economic hardships are temporary. You can't bring people back from the dead and you can't (as far as we know now) reverse the long-term damage done to survivors.
I strongly disagree. “Some misguided old people in the Midwest” are not like heroin addicts quietly overdosing and dying out of sight, they are drunk drivers careening down the highway in a twenty ton truck.
I worked with a guy named Danny many years ago. He was one of the smartest programmers I'd ever met. Not only did he write great code, but he also always maintained an excellent connection to the his customers who would use the programs he wrote. This was in a hospital.
Personally, he was kind, generous, excellent family man. He never really talked too much about politics, didn't care too much for it. He also helped me order the parts for and showed me how to assemble my first intel based desktop computer, an amazing 486-DX2-66!
It's been years but I recently communicated with him, and we had a great e-mail exchange, caught up. He was surprised and pleased that since I left I'd not only gotten married but now have an adult son. Surprised because back >25 years ago when we hung out I was very much not a "family man" kind of person.
I asked him in passing how he'd been holding up with the pandemic, and suddenly, there it was.
Covid19 was a hoax perpetrated by China to help Joe Biden get elected.
It broke my heart. A smart, good, kind man that I knew had been brain damaged. Like some kind of fucking psychological cancer.
As the old saying goes, There but for the grace of God, go I.
You and I can't imagine falling prey to such a thing, but I can assure you that my old friend Danny had and has the same mental facilities as you and I.
He caught this particular cancer, and you and I didn't.
What's worse? He doesn't even know he has and is subject to this psychological malignancy.
I wonder if there are any psychological cancers you and I are subject to, right now, that we don't even know about or suspect?
One thing that I have noticed myself and some other engineers I know being susceptible to is the desire to view the world as systematic, ordered, certain, and understandable. It’s a desire to find the root cause to everything, to understand the reason behind everything, and to package that up into a chain of causality that fits within my mind.
The positive side of this is that many of these attributes are needed to be a good engineer. The negative side is, at least for me, trouble dealing with chaos or ambiguity in the world or anything that has an unclear explanation.
Maybe this contributes to being more susceptible to conspiracy thinking. I am not sure; that’s a question for social scientists to uncover.
Thanks for the answer mate. I now understand what you mean. I guess we need to just reach out to people more and see if slowly we can cure them out of their thought cancers and they can cure us of ours. Different perspectives make all bugs shallow. I very much like this & thank you for giving me a new way of thinking about something today!
Snow Crash refers to a virus, that in the book, only works on "hackers", since their brains understand code, and just need to see the raw bitmap of it for their brain to stop working.
The book contains alot of analysis on the nature of information and how it spreads, and the methods in which you can literally re-program a person with language.
I think its an apt analogy, your buddy is a programmer that has been exposed to Snow Crash, a virus of misinformation, and has shut down a part of his functioning.
======
"You're a hacker, that means you have deep structures to worry about, too."
"Deep structures?"
"Neurolinguistic pathways in your brain. Remember the first time you learned binary code?"
"Sure."
"You were forming pathways in your brain. Deep structures. Your nerves grow new connections as you use them - the axons split and pushed their way between the dividing glial cells - your bioware self-modifies - the software becomes a part of the hardware. So now you're vulnerable - all hackers are vulnerable - to a nam-shub. We have to look out for each other."
I think it is, but the real virus is the Media and Big Tech. The Ministry of Truth in 1984 was government, but the version we see today is Big Tech + Big Media, backed by the political party that is encouraging the censoring and labeling of information they don't like.
You assume the nam-shub are the conspiracies, but what if it's what MSNBC/FOX/CNN are pumping into your brain?
Sorry, that means they're not smart. They might be a good programmer and a family man, but they're not smart. If you are able to fall for "Covid19 was a hoax perpetrated by China to help Joe Biden get elected" in the modern day, then you are not smart.
It's one thing when you're not able to get information, like way back in the day when we had no real world explanations for lots of things, and had to work with what you've heard from word of mouth. But now? There's no excuse.
> It broke my heart. A smart, good, kind man that I knew had been brain damaged. Like some kind of fucking psychological cancer.
You're applying your view of the world to him. You're also condemning him in your mind.
How about you do this instead: you know he's a smart, honest person. Listen to his argument, see where he's coming from, and try to understand _why_ he choose that conclusion.
Nothing is all cut and dry. I do think CoV2 is a real virus, but I think our reaction to it has been absolutely disastrous. We're seeing lowering fatalities rates. Some of that is due to better treatment (early on doctors were just putting people straight onto ventilators, which was a death sentence. Since then ventilators aren't used immediately and we've seen survival go up).
With all the measures put in place, people who do get exposed are also getting low exposure, which can result in minor infections/cough/cold and quicker recovery and possibly even resistance. We've known for a while the amount of exposure matters. No one is talking about how the NYC/Michigan/Kirkland (Seattle) high death counts were directly the result of issues with elderly car facilities and cramming tons of old people into places not equipped to handle them.
I have a Bachelors and Masters degree, have published several papers, and consider myself a reasonable person, and my person view is that we are overreacting. I've been writing about it just to see if what I write tracks in 5 years:
We've watch the media go into a crazy hyper-overdrive mode on almost all information, with headlines that are contradicted by the actual text of the story. We also see zero coverage of the insane 40~50 cycles used in the current PCR tests, which generate tons of false positives. Every media outlet is focusing on "cases" but what if that "case" had minimal symptoms and required 45 PCR test cycles? That's either a very low viral load or a false positive, a good thing. But no one is covering that data.
Elon Musk found issues with the rapid test; and yes the rapid test is used for antibodies and has its limits. Instead of kindly explaining it to him, someone ranted on Twitter insulting him, implying he was a fool. But many people are buying these tests and are not aware of their limitations, so from that perspective, Elon did something good for bringing the issue to light, and he was insulted by someone who wanted to shame people into a certain narrative.
Things are super complex right now. The truth is somewhere in the middle of all the bullshit we're being fed.
> Things are super complex right now. The truth is somewhere in the middle of all the bullshit we're being fed.
I completely agree. All 'sides' are greatly over-reacting to this and most everything else. Yes, this is a very serious situation, and requires serious and well considered discussions and actions.
A great way to get groups of people who are naturally somewhat suspicious of government mandated activities, like wearing a mask, to never ever consider wearing a mask is to over-act and react irrationally. It's a pretty miserable, self-sustaining cycle.
Having said that:
> You're applying your view of the world to him.
You wrote that in response to my statement:
> > It broke my heart. A smart, good, kind man that I knew had been brain damaged. Like some kind of fucking psychological cancer.
As stated, I was talking about a belief that Covid-19 was a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese government to help Joe Biden get elected.
That's Alex Jones level bullshit.
It doesn't break my heart to see someone I care about having a nuanced, non 'party-line' view of this whole situation. That's healthy.
To believe that people who are actually dying of Covid-19 aren't actually dying of Covid-19 is another matter entirely.
> You're also condemning him in your mind.
Not in the slightest. If you note my other comments, you will see that I'm not condemning anybody. I know that every one of us is subject to and impacted by different kinds of irrational thinking.
Reading your links, I don't agree with all of your conclusions, but that's fine. Like you, I "continually reevaluating the information".
Beliefs don't exist in a vacuum - hoax memes spread much like COVID itself. Media literacy is scarily low among most people, even those who are brilliant in other ways. Metaphorically we are failing to vaccinate against misinformation in primary education, leaving tech giants the impossible task of policing misinformation on their platforms designed to maximize engagement for profitability. 'The Social Dilemma' documentary (Netflix) dips into this if you haven't seen it.
