This shutdown is far deadlier than the virus

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isn't that an appeal to authority?

And I suppose you consider me to be a wing nut for wanting to be a music teacher when I was younger?

I further suppose you consider me a wing nut for becoming a librarian cum information scientist cum information architecht (in the US DoD definition of the job title) before I became disabled?

<sarcasm>Thanks a helluva lot for the vote of confidence (NOT!)</sarcasm>

What a vivid imagination you have!

Perhaps; but what it is not is an Appeal to Irrelevant (or False) Authority.  Remember, and Appeal to Authority is fallacious only when the authority so cited is irrelevant to the argument -- a podiatrist criticizing virologists, for example.

"Drs. Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi, say that after conducting more than 5,000 coronavirus tests they have come to the conclusion that COVID-19 is no more dangerous than a normal seasonal flu and quarantines are not making any difference in preventing its spread."



i don't know how much that's worth, but i wouldn't ignore it just because they aren't virologists.

Sure, don't ignore it; but don't swallow it whole, either.  If anything, those virologists I mentioned -- the real experts -- should examine the data, the methods used to derive the data, and how consistently those methods were followed before endorsing the conclusions of only those two general practitioners.

As an aside, the top response in a Google search for their names was a link to This Page on the "American Institute for Economic Research" websight, and not a medical website, a virology website, or a peer-review journal.  Also, the article was dated only yesterday (2020-04-26).

So, follow the money...

It is certainly was a lose-lose choice.

It is problematic to make claims about how bad the pandemic is at this point. While on a downslope the pandemic is not over. Will it die out over the summer?, will their be a second wave?, Will their be an effective treatment or cure? We don’t know how many people have been really infected, were disabled, or died or is dying.

There is no way to prove what would have happened if we did less or did nothing.

We should clear up some misnomers. This is not just a lung disease as first thought, it is a full body disease. It is leaving people not only dead but profoundly disabled and not only in the lungs but neurologically. While the older people are more vulnerable for obvious reasons this is not just an old peoples problem or #BoomerRemover. Younger people are dying and becoming disabled. They are just finding out people in their 30s and 40s with COVID-19 are getting strokes, and getting the bad kind. While it won’t be, the idea that this is equivalent to a bad flu year should really be put to rest.

That said those that worry about government overreach have good reasons to panic. Government benefits and invasions of privacy usually do not go away once the need for them vanishes - see post 9/11 surveillance state, and militerization of the police. I do not believe the whole country would have been shut down in reaction to coronavirus in a pre columbine, pre 9/11 world because while their were significant restrictions in reaction to previous pandemics nothing remotely at this level ever occurred before. I predict that even in the best case scenario whereby there is a cure or effective treatments, ie no need for any restrictions, future normal flu epidemics will results in targeted lockdowns, social distancing, your temperature being taken at all sorts of times, phone tracking etc etc. Will the next west nile, ebola, or zika unlike in the past cause complete shutdowns?

Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 27 Apr 2020, 11:36 am, edited 1 time in total.

It’s amazing how much overlap there is between the people who think COVID-19 is a Chinese bioweapon, and the people who think it isn’t that bad really

Even at the less extreme end, you see the same people claiming that the disease is simultaneously much more and much less dangerous than the Wuhan figures suggest; the WHO is simultaneously alarmist and implicated in a cover up; and we must simultaneously increase restrictions on foreigners to stop them spreading this deadly disease and ease restrictions on citizens which are preventing the spread of a harmless infection.

It’s a confusing and uncertain time so I can understand a little muddled thinking (I think the average person swung quite quickly from “this is just another swine flu” to “oh crap” in the space of about a week) but if you’re going to try to advance your agenda then at least be consistent about it.

Lately, I am encountering a lot of people (at 6 feet or more distance, of course) who express both ideas.One of the primary indicators of a conspiracy theory is contradictions like these expressed by the same person.That would be nice, but consistency of thought is not important when trying to convince others of The Great Global Conspiracy run by Lab-Grown Lizard People who want to Enslave Us All and Pollute Our Precious Bodily Fluids!

stokes happen with the flu. how bad the flu is gets under rated because we're used to it

https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/pdf/10. ... 110.596783

I was like that in early January when I first heard of the coronavirus on the news.
I wasted so much energy having many meltdowns when it was all the Swine flu 10 years ago, and I then vowed never to get so worked up about new viruses any more, and enjoy living life.

Maybe fate just plays games with me and only turns things into a matter of life and death if I panic in it's early stages. So maybe if I had of panicked about coronavirus back in January it might not have turned into a deadly global crisis.

Oh Joe90. It is not your fault. Do not panic. All is ok.

The point of the shutdown was and has always been to slow down the spread and possible contain it in some parts of the world to buy time for a vaccine. The purpose was to flatten the curve so healthcare infrastructure stays intact and kept from becoming overwhelmed which has worked in some parts of the world thus far. If we did nothing and allowed it to spread uncontested, we would have much more dead since the healthcare infrastructure would be ineffective and the economy would have been damaged either way. The only good that might come from that would be a larger population that would work towards herd immunity, however, we know so little about this virus we don't know how effective antibodies will be in the long run since it has already mutated once as far as I am aware.

You might have 1,500 deaths daily instead of 700 deaths daily if there was no lockdown.

I can't see them ever finding a vaccine for this, and if they do it will be such a long wait that by then the economy would be completely non-existent and everybody would have turned into total internet slaves, and more elderly people would have probably died from loneliness than the virus.

But why haven't they found vaccines for noroviruses or the common cold? I would love life if they'd found a vaccine for norovirus as I'm a severe emetophobe, and colds are a pain too. So if they have never found a vaccine or some other cure for those then who's to say they're definitely going to find a vaccine for a coronavirus?

And what if they don't find a vaccine? Will the world have to be in lockdown for eternity?

Well, it’s still early as far as vaccine research goes: maintaining full lockdown for the entire process probably isn’t the plan.
I’m half expecting that after the initial long lockdown we’ll have a period of alternating between mostly, but not fully, back to normal and shorter incomplete lockdowns.

The common cold mutates so fast that by the time a vaccine was developed it’d be useless, don’t know about norovirus but it may be similar in that regard: CV19 doesn’t seem to mutate as fast as that so it’s more likely that vaccination will be possible.

If a vaccine proves impossible then... don’t know.
Gradually lift the lockdown and hope our immune systems can sort out a heritable response I guess...