Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield (Post 532355)

I did not defend his specific statement. I took issue with your reflexively calling him selfish w/o considering he was facing a horrible crisis. I think his criticism of the hospitals was incredibly insensitive and dumb.

I agree with your second point. The sushi guy was wrong. But he was wrong in a moment when he was facing loss of everything (assuming it was pre-PPP). I won't just call him a selfish person. I may give him the benefit of being scared and not thinking straight.

You lived through those early weeks. That was some scary shit. It's not every day one drains all the credit lines to survive through what looked like a financial doomsday. That's a very creepy thing to find oneself doing. Surreal.

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield (Post 532335)

Yes. Metrics from experts would be great. The problem is there is disagreement over who is a truly qualified expert, and those who are trotted out as experts often say conflicting things from day to day.

Originally Posted by Replaced_Texan (Post 532337)

A friend of mine died last week from cancer. The surgery to put a shunt in her brain was delayed quite a few times because of the Covid related staffing issues at the hospital. She probably would have died anyways--it was a bitch of a cancer--but that certainly didn't help. We're getting better here in Houston in terms of capacity, but it has definitely been a dicey thing, and the Omicron surge was just as bad, and worse in some ways, than any of the others. Sheer number of total cases meant that there were going to be a higher number of really sick ones.

Originally Posted by Replaced_Texan (Post 532339)

I actually DO have a degree in public health. Plus have been working in a large academic health center throughout the pandemic, standing up telemedicine practices in weeks that should have taken years, dealing with massive staffing shortages due to illness, opening a vaccination center, yo-yoing with regs regarding vaccination mandates, and doing the daily work of supporting a practice with well over 1500 providers with hundreds of daily patient encounters in clinical and hospital settings.

The interventions that work in public health are the interventions that most people actually will follow. And with respiratory diseases, they always go back to the same thing well over 100 years: wash your hands, stay home when you're sick, wear a goddamned mask, get vaccinated if one comes out. It's been pretty consistent this entire time, aside from the initial masking confusion.

Human beings can be selfish assholes who are terrible at assessing risk, which goes both ways. There are the overly cautious that are practically agoraphobic at this point making visitors quarantine for three days (It used to be a 10!) take a PRC test and verify vaccination before agreeing to an outside lunch of no more than 30 minutes at distance of ten feet. They twitch the entire time. Then, there are the cavalier idiots who have had Covid 3 times and probably killed their grandmother back during Delta, but it could have been church, so why feel guilty? and surely Omicron gave them natural immunity so blathering on about the vaccine makes no sense now. They go to funeral after parties.

Most people are somewhere in the middle. They follow the rules that make sense, ignore the ones that are ridiculous, and seek guidance from trusted sources when they're not sure.

The problem, of course, is "trusted source" has become for some people a perversion. For better or worse, the internet has totally destroyed universal messaging, and public health people were caught off guard because it never occurred to them that there'd be active sabotage of their efforts. They should have known better, because this anti-vax bullshit has been bubbling up for years. OTOH, who the hell would have thought that the White House, would be actively working against public health?

So we end up with dipshits like Joe Rogan becoming "trusted sources", and well regarded researchers like Dr. Hotez having to repel the internet mob because somehow he's supposedly underpants gnome-ing himself rich through vaccine development in the third world.

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy (Post 532360)

You're shitting me. Are you this stupid?

Fauci is an expert. The CDC is an expert.

You need degrees, practice, and recognition in your field. IN YOUR FIELD, MORONS, not from Joe Rogan.

The attacks on their qualifications and abilities are repulsive, Do you really want to be a part of that bullshit?

I mean, really, you can't tell who is an expert here? Really?

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy (Post 532362)

Just catching up here. Is there a way to make RT's tweets show up twice and often and sebby's show up less? Can we have a "vote up" option?

It would really improve the common sense factor here.

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield (Post 532364)

Your developing better reading comprehension, which would preclude your arguing against a point that was not made, would be more productive.

And the suggestion you make here - that she and I are in disagreement of some sort - isn’t any more accurate than the misreading that led to your prior post.

I think you assume (or try to state regardless of accuracy) what I’m thinking because that would neatly fit into a binary argument. I’m usually not thinking what you think I’m thinking. And I’m not disagreeing with you.

The public messaging about Covid was a monstrous fuck-up. Much of that was Trump’s fault, but it was also the media’s fault, the experts’ fault, and the fault of two credulous audiences - the unlettered and dishonest skeptics, and the unlettered and annoying virtue signalers.

Originally Posted by Pretty Little Flower (Post 532365)

What about the audiences who, while not unlettered, still engaged in denial and skepticism, claiming (for example) that the virus was not that big a deal, would be nothing more than a mild flu, and would cause at most 2-3,000 deaths in the U.S.? I’m not sure where they fit into your binary argument. Are they blameless? It seems like they should bear more fault than the “unlettered” — they should have known better.

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield (Post 532366)

They could not have held that view as of late March 2020 and been considered educated on the matter. I would call those people, at the outset, inaccurate prognosticators who later changed their views.

Those prognosticators who retained that view after the bodies started piling up in NYC cannot be considered educated, as to the virus, or probably, generally. They'd be delusional or mentally challenged.

Originally Posted by Adder (Post 532367)

Because I can't tell: you know he means you, right?

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield (Post 532368)

My prediction, made by many early on, had almost no impact among sane people beyond late March, as it was quickly and dramatically proven incorrect. The people who persisted in thinking it was just a flu after late March, despite evidence to the contrary, were and in many cases remain, insane.

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield (Post 532366)

They could not have held that view as of late March 2020 and been considered educated on the matter. I would call those people, at the outset, inaccurate prognosticators who later changed their views.

Those prognosticators who retained that view after the bodies started piling up in NYC cannot be considered educated, as to the virus, or probably, generally. They'd be delusional or mentally challenged.

Originally Posted by Replaced_Texan (Post 532370)

They may remain insane, but they persist.

Part of the problem with COVID is the impact varies on different people. I know long haulers who will never have full use of their lungs again. I know others who barely flinched when they got it. I had a two day headache in early January that I attributed to third trimester of pregnancy, but in retrospect may or may not have been Omicron. I'll never know because I'm triple vaxxed and didn't test at the time.

But the major problem with messaging is the click bait world we live in, which means every utterance, study, debate, speculation, and anecdote about COVID will be breathlessly reported on no matter how benign, batshit or in between it is. And is all given equal weight no matter what the source.

I'm a Star Wars dork. I have acquaintances who work for Lucasfilm. One mildly changed his bio on Twitter last week, and there were no less than four Youtube videos speculating on What Does This Mean. They monetize the shit out of those videos. I know Star Wars dorks who have been able to quit their jobs and full time focus on putting out podcasts, videos, print media, and in some cases appearances at cons and shit. Hell, even I sometimes am on a podcast about legal shit and Star Wars (I get zero out of it other than the ability to spout off on cloning law...)

Anyhow, that's a tiny, teeny part of the clickbait universe. COVID is in the big pool with every single person out there in media and "media" wanting to breathlessly report, tear apart, pander, etc on everything. Like the Star Wars dorks, there are plenty that will fill the time with whatever they have on hand, even it it's wild ass speculation based off the thinnest, most distorted piece of information. And they can see via the clicks and the analytics and the money YouTube gives them what sort of stories sell and what doesn't. Measured, methodical reasonable stories do not dazzle and sell. The histrionic do. And our former President, as god awful as he was at every other thing he did/does, knew this instinctively, fostered it, and encouraged those who want to emulate and/or suck up to him to do the same. He's a fucking master at it and he set the tone for how the messaging was going to be. We're still paying for it and we may never come out of this sort of approach to anything and everything.