Covid-19 Are we being told the truth ?

[Grachan 6,788]

12 minutes ago, Star Lady said:

Anything over 100 years old is considered an antique AFAIK.

Doubt anything can be considered both modern and antique.

I just felt like adding my twopennarth

Oh, I don't know!

Home | Modern Antiques

Edited January 4 by Grachan

[iris123 14,423]

18 minutes ago, Star Lady said:

Anything over 100 years old is considered an antique AFAIK.

Doubt anything can be considered both modern and antique.

I just felt like adding my twopennarth

The trouble is using the term modern compared to what ? 

Compared to 1818, for sure 1918 was far more advanced, but compared to today, you strugge to really say it was modern

Had a sort of similar discussion, well Blu doesn't really discuss much, about forest fires in the US

You look back 100 years ago and you just can't compare the Fire Brigade back then, to today

And it is the same with medicine and hospitals in 1918 even in advanced countries. But we are talking world wide here.....

This was written in 2017 !!!

In 1918, medicine had barely become modern; some scientists still believed “miasma” accounted for influenza’s spread. With medicine’s advances since then, laypeople have become rather complacent about influenza. Today we worry about Ebola or Zika or MERS or other exotic pathogens, not a disease often confused with the common cold. This is a mistake.

We are arguably as vulnerable—or more vulnerable—to another pandemic as we were in 1918. 

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/journal-plague-year-180965222/

Edited January 4 by iris123

[Humphrey Appleby 11,051]

11 minutes ago, iris123 said:

We’ll never end the COVID pandemic if politicians keep making same mistakes

 

Five hundred and eighty one days ago, I wrote a column that appeared in these pages with a headline on the cover that read “It Needs To End. NOW.” In May 2020 there were no COVID vaccines, and limited treatments, and yet already, many voices had begun to call out the excessive illiberal measures enacted by gubernatorial despots in our bluest states. A year and a half later, the results are in. The critics of lockdowns were right. 

Take a look at Sweden. Remember when it refused to lock down and liberal news anchors gravely warned that half the country would be dead by next Tuesday? You don’t hear much about Sweden these days because, in fact, the Scandinavian naysayers had the lowest excess mortality of any European country this year — approximately 785 per 1million people. By comparison, the United Kingdom had 1,657 per million in excess deaths. 

Sweden decided to do what other countries refused to: focus on protecting the most vulnerable while letting the vast majority who were not in mortal danger live as normal a life as possible and trust their sense of personal responsibility. 

 

God willing, we will never again see the barren glass and steel valleys of abandoned Midtown Manhattan, nor walk again in the middle of wide avenues devoid of cars, but what has replaced those extreme measures in Gotham is in its own way more insidious. 

Quarantine rules make for a stealth lockdown, with visitors and workers out for more than a week if they happen to be near someone who had COVID. Mask rules that still make no sense — wear it coming through the door, but take it off at the table. Our kids outdoors, masked, distanced school lunches look like something out of a prisoner of war film. 

And why? Why hasn’t New York gone back to relative normalcy like so many places our citizens are fleeing to? Now we are told to believe it is because of the Omicron variant. Never mind that this variant appears to have mainly mild symptoms akin to a common cold, especially in the vaccinated. Three new studies show that hospitalization is down as much as 80% with Omicron. But we refuse to accept the good news. 

 

And while the government performs theatrical mandates and throws more curveballs to small businesses, we still haven’t learned the most important lesson of the pandemic: Protect the elderly. It never made any sense to keep children, who are low risk, out of school, but it was Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s edict forcing nursing homes to take COVID-positive patients that caused devastation. The vast, vast majority of deaths from COVID are among older people, especially those with comorbidities. People over 65 account for 80 percent of COVID deaths in the United States. 

We’re making the same mistakes all over again. We shouldn’t have widespread lockdowns or mask mandates, but we should say you need to be tested to go anywhere near a nursing home. 

Right now, you can walk in with only a vaccine and see a relative, but we know that people with vaccines can carry Omicron. 

The inability of New York’s leaders to free themselves of pandemic hysteria, and all the broad power that comes with it, is eroding the city on every level. 

If enacting overly strict measures in May 2020 was a mistake, and it was, then doing so now, when anybody can get a vaccine and the extremely dominant variant is mild, is flat-out incompetence. Mayor de Blasio and Gov. Hochul have learned a lesson from COVID, but they haven’t learned what is best for New York. Instead, they have learned how much New Yorkers will withstand, and by extension, how far their power reaches. 

Teachers unions are pushing again for schools to close, again. Shows on Broadway are shuttering, again. Businesses are suffering, again. All when WE SHOULD KNOW BETTER. 

Emergency’s over 

This is not an emergency anymore. Emergencies don’t last two years. The science tells us we should be sweeping away the bureaucratic tangle of contradictory and confusing rules and regulations that strangle our society. Even Democrat Jared Polis, governor of Colorado, acknowledged this last week in a rare outbreak of nonpartisan common sense. 

And yet, New York’s leaders are doing the exact opposite, clamping down once again on the city that has borne the harshest brunt of the pandemic. Yes, de Blasio and Hochul have said no more lockdowns, but they will push it as far as their political polling figures will allow. 

Sadly, while some of that punishing brunt was a natural result of our density and lifestyles, much of it was self-inflicted by our government of self-important bureaucrats and power-hungry politicians. 

he hard truth is that a sprawling bureaucracy has attempted to minutely control the lives of everyone, yet dropped the ball on properly protecting the minority most at risk. An army of officials tasked with drawing up myriad rules for justifying masking children could have spent time more constructively studying how to keep nursing-home patients free from infection. 

In May 2020 I wrote that COVID “needs” to end now, not that it should, but that it needed to. That was because if restrictive measures went on too long, they would start to metastasize, become a part of the system. That has happened. We have crossed that bridge. Who will have the courage to go back? Who will have the courage to call it first? 

It didn’t end five hundred and eighty-one days ago. And today, there is reason to fear that it never will

https://nypost.com/2021/12/23/well-never-end-covid-pandemic-if-politicians-keep-making-mistakes/

Whilst a certain degree of overreaction may have been forgivable in the early days of the pandemic, governments and their advisors have now had plenty of time to understand the nature of COVID and implement proportional measures. The problem though, is that UK and most other countries seem to be now in the grip of a number of factors:

1) Government advisors - some of whom have undoubtedly been aggrandised by the pandemic - are reluctant to predict anything but the worst case scenarios in case they get it wrong and get thrown under the bus by the politicians. 

2) The media for whom the pandemic is a fertile and easy source of news sources, who seem to be intent on both reporting and preaching doom because it makes headlines, which clearly influences government policy.

3) Business interests with close connections (i.e. donors) to ruling parties who are doing very nicely indeed out of the pandemic, especially those government contracts that never went through usual public procurement processes that check whether they are value for money. 

4) The NHS now having the ability to hold the country to ransom on the grounds of a lack of resources, even though this has happened every winter for as long as anyone can remember. Yes, the government is partly responsible for not properly resourcing healthcare now and previously, but now there's even more of an excuse for the horrendous absentee rates that have always bedevilled the NHS. 

5) A sizeable proportion of the public who have swallowed the scare stories, propaganda, and skewed reporting and who actually believe the government measures are protecting them from death. 

6) Regional politicians indulging in oneupmanship to demonstrate they're more 'effective' than national governments to which they're politically opposed. See 5) above.

7) Most governments have had an increasing tendency towards control freakery over the past 2 or 3 decades, which has only partly been limited by libertarian opponents. You only have to create some sort of scare - whether terrorist, illegal immigrant, paedophile or <insert any other moral panic> and the majority of the public can be convinced to support draconian measures every time. COVID is the perfect emergency to implement all of the control freakery that governments have wanted to implement for years, without much public debate or scrutiny.

Post-war rationing was exactly the same thing. There was absolutely no reason why it had to last 10 years after WW2, but far too many interests came to be vested in it and it only ended when the public finally realised it was a complete nonsense and it became an election issue. Even then, there were economic consequences for a couple of decades afterwards thanks to measures that had been put in place and effectively wiped out certain businesses. A lot of parallels with COVID... 

[iris123 14,423]

6 minutes ago, Humphrey Appleby said:

Whilst a certain degree of overreaction may have been forgivable in the early days of the pandemic, governments and their advisors have now had plenty of time to understand the nature of COVID and implement proportional measures. The problem though, is that UK and most other countries seem to be now in the grip of a number of factors:

1) Government advisors - some of whom have undoubtedly been aggrandised by the pandemic - are reluctant to predict anything but the worst case scenarios in case they get it wrong and get thrown under the bus by the politicians. 

2) The media for whom the pandemic is a fertile and easy source of news sources, who seem to be intent on both reporting and preaching doom because it makes headlines, which clearly influences government policy.

3) Business interests with close connections (i.e. donors) to ruling parties who are doing very nicely indeed out of the pandemic, especially those government contracts that never went through usual public procurement processes that check whether they are value for money. 

4) The NHS now having the ability to hold the country to ransom on the grounds of a lack of resources, even though this has happened every winter for as long as anyone can remember. Yes, the government is partly responsible for not properly resourcing healthcare now and previously, but now there's even more of an excuse for the horrendous absentee rates that have always bedevilled the NHS. 

5) A sizeable proportion of the public who have swallowed the scare stories, propaganda, and skewed reporting and who actually believe the government measures are protecting them from death. 

6) Regional politicians indulging in oneupmanship to demonstrate they're more 'effective' than national governments to which they're politically opposed. See 5) above.

7) Most governments have had an increasing tendency towards control freakery over the past 2 or 3 decades, which has only partly been limited by libertarian opponents. You only have to create some sort of scare - whether terrorist, illegal immigrant, paedophile or <insert any other moral panic> and the majority of the public can be convinced to support draconian measures every time. COVID is the perfect emergency to implement all of the control freakery that governments have wanted to implement for years, without much public debate or scrutiny.

Post-war rationing was exactly the same thing. There was absolutely no reason why it had to last 10 years after WW2, but far too many interests came to be vested in it and it only ended when the public finally realised it was a complete nonsense and it became an election issue. Even then, there were economic consequences for a couple of decades afterwards thanks to measures that had been put in place and effectively wiped out certain businesses. A lot of parallels with COVID... 

Absolutely 

[Humphrey Appleby 11,051]

7 minutes ago, iris123 said:

And it is the same with medicine and hospitals in 1918 even in advanced countries. But we are talking world wide here.....

Modern medical science arguably started in the mid-19th Century, which is when transmission of diseases and infections, the role of disinfectants, and vaccinations began to be understood. However, in 1918 it was still way behind what it is today, and it was still common to die from things that can easily be treated today (such as broken femur or appendicitis).

You'd probably say the modern era of medicine really began when antibiotics and vaccinations for common diseases became widely available, which would have been the late-1940s or early-50s. The discovery of DNA in the 50s was also a massive leap forward in the understanding of biology, which later enabled the revolution (for better or worse) in bioengineering. 

[iris123 14,423]

1 minute ago, Humphrey Appleby said:

Modern medical science arguably started in the mid-19th Century, which is when transmission of diseases and infections, the role of disinfectants, and vaccinations began to be understood. However, in 1918 it was still way behind what it is today, and it was still common to die from things that can easily be treated today (such as broken femur or appendicitis).

You'd probably say the modern era of medicine really began when antibiotics and vaccinations for common diseases became widely available, which would have been the late-1940s or early-50s. The discovery of DNA in the 50s was also a massive leap forward in the understanding of biology, which later enabled the revolution (for better or worse) in bioengineering. 

Yes. The world was at war, and things were stretched anyway. As the site states, top doctors were looking after troops rather than the popualtion at large. And that was in places like the US, UK, Germany and France. The conditions in other areas of the world would have been very basic to non existent

[MumsieCulpepper 342]

[The Third Man 1,902]

1 hour ago, chris4gillian said:

Whitty (and Sage) advise, the government decide.

Carry on blaming the advisors if it makes you feel superior. 

Whitty has always forecasted the worst possible scenario, which has been admitted, he has never looked at both sides of the discussion, or if he has he has been too scared to put a different from the governments

there have been dissenting voices, but these people are never seen again,

Despite being shown to be wrong on numerous occasions Neil Ferguson is still being quoted as an expert

i don't put Whitty in the same category as Ferguson, but he is not far behind, he definitely doesn't want to lose the limelight he has by going against Boris

 

Edited January 4 by The Third Man

[DC2 10,664]

1 hour ago, chris4gillian said:

I didn't mention modern history, that's yours and DC2's interpretation.

Any house, hospital, school, car, ship etc. etc built 100 years ago is NOT modern (unless it has been modernised in recent years).  Fact.

Well, you could argue that none of those built in the 1970s is modern either.  

[DC2 10,664]

1 hour ago, iris123 said:

The trouble is using the term modern compared to what ? 

Compared to 1818, for sure 1918 was far more advanced, but compared to today, you strugge to really say it was modern

 

And of course Covid “excess deaths” are measured against the last five years.

So are we to take it that this is the worst pandemic of the last five years?

I’ll concede that.  

Otherwise it’s pretty limp and over-hyped.

[Crumpet91 3,419]

It's a testing pandemic. 

[ruffdiamond 5,714]

3 hours ago, The Cheese said:

Saw a chap a couple of weeks ago wearing a disposable one with mould clearly growing on it. Insane. 

Did you not check for a pulse? 

[iris123 14,423]

14 minutes ago, Crumpet91 said:

It's a testing pandemic. 

That is tests.....if you compare Polands deaths to the UK it looks very different

Try it here

https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/poland

Edited January 4 by iris123

[DC2 10,664]

2 hours ago, iris123 said:

We’ll never end the COVID pandemic if politicians keep making same mistakes

https://nypost.com/2021/12/23/well-never-end-covid-pandemic-if-politicians-keep-making-mistakes/

Blimey, it’s come to something when even Iris starts covering his tracks.  

[DC2 10,664]

2 hours ago, iris123 said:

In 1918, medicine had barely become modern; some scientists still believed “miasma” accounted for influenza’s spread. 

Miasma?  

Is that droplet or aerosol transmission?  

Symptomatic or asymptomatic transmission? 

Masks or no masks?

How far had Sage come by 2020?