None of this would have happened if we'd dealt with it like China/Cuba/Vietnam instead of prioritising the magic money line :doomjak:
Yeah, it's fucking crazy how casual our lockdown/precautions was in the grand scheme of things. And you just know that the Tories won't have another one even if hospitals are literally overflowing with dead. The UK is just a broken, bad joke masquerading as a country :ukkk:
Oh well, at least Labour are focussing on the important issues like expanding our military industrial complex and cracking down on people doing whippets.
Archduke Keith Starmer is owning Bozza with facts and logic in PMQs though, so glad to have that instead of any tangible policy that would ever help an ordinary person
Ps: we need a John McDonnell driving a tank emote
Margins are so thin that those types of compromises would impact the bottom line for the management at the top, which means it's obviously unacceptable
It's unreal, how anyone could have gone through this shit and not come out a leftist is beyond belief.
Indeed, and it's not even like Coronavirus is some Kobayashi Maru with no solutions, it's just that Capitalism was, and will continue to be, completely unprepared/unwilling to deal with it.
Not to say that the 'rona is easy to deal with, but the completely illogical, anti-human efforts done by Capitalist countries made it a hundred times worse.
Because as is often said, people have an easier time imaging the end of the world than they do the end of capitalism.
What did the Left do that looked good? If you weren't already on board with China, what about the Covid-19 pandemic would actually convince you to be a Leftist, if you're an everyday person?
"Staying home" is not about the money, it's about being able to consume (and longer term, to be able to be a social being and visit family/friends without complete media-induced alienation). The richest people in society, who could get fired at any time and still be financially set, have jobs that let them work from home, and they were begging and whining for Covid lockdowns to end after 6 weeks.
the ghouls are never shutting down again, instead they will let the hospitals break this time
there won’t be any impetus to take it seriously until it’s so bad that it’s obviously really fucking bad, and by then it’ll be too late to meaningfully take it seriously.
What was that? Climate change you say? We're a little busy thinking about dealing with a pandemic, we'll get to that later.
Biden is literally saying he can only focus on one thing at a time lololol...
Came here to echo this sentiment. Along with the fact I'm routinely mocked for being one of the only people at work who continues to wear a mask, the only other ones who don't are unvaccinated and not necessarily by choice.
The virgin beta variant vs the chad delta variant
:this-is-fine:
I’ll take the contrarian position here.
If 50 percent of the population is vaccinated and even the most mild amount of mask wearing for whatever reason it won’t shoot up in cases to badly even among the vaccine reluctant/mask reluctant. Also you wear a mask not to protect yourself, but protect others. Your risk of this is if your unvaccinated and loiter around other unvaccinated non mask wearing people but because of the relatively high rate of vaccination this will probably just appear as sporadic outbreaks.
Edit: The other thing is this is describing the world that already exists. This variant already has overtaken others, if you look at the current uptick in cases we see a small but ignorable bump compared to the gross incompetence that was normalized earlier. I don’t mean to be that person, but covid will kill people for the rest of our lives. I don’t mean this as a doomer, but we should expect some level of increased death forever. That increase will hopefully be minimal after the vaccine campaign giving everyone a baseline resistance, but it’s not going away. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be lockdowns forever either.
This. Everyone saying "well we're just going to have to return to normal and just live with it and it'll be mostly fine" haven't been paying any fucking attention to this nightmarish 15-month-long lesson about harmful viruses and the inability of neoliberal capitalism to stop situations spiralling into much worse situations than they ever needed to be.
Getting rid of non-pharmaceutical interventions at this point in time is brazen, reckless and risking mass death through an escape variant. All for some asinine feel good shit around July 4th.
When I was working on Covid software last year, the non-profit I was working with was adamant that a return to normal wasn’t on the cards for 2021 as the risks were simply too high. These were people with deep experience of epidemics and public health policy. The Biden admin is rolling the dice and hoping for the best for some headlines.
You’re just being a doomer, it’s probably all gonna be fine what with fully vaxxed dying from this variant and the reproduction rate escalating. Not to mention people are likely not getting as tested as much as they’re vaxxed and there’s no way they can possibly catch it….
:trump-anguish:
The cult of the individual is so deeply ingrained in us, it’s horrific. Thatcher would be proud.
Yeah but the kulaks had to die for the Soviet Union to survive. You think we can save every single life in a society of millions of people? There are always levels of “acceptable death” even if we don’t want to acknowledge it.
The question is: who makes those decisions, and how do we get to judge whether those decisions were acceptable or not?
Yeah, as socialists, we're going to have to think really hard about how many thousands of deaths are acceptable to enable the neoliberal empire to spin back up to full speed a few months sooner.
As socialists we don’t have power so yeah we are all just circle jerking here.
Eco-fascism is when people decide to grow food in a famine instead of working on a cure for a rare disease that one person has.
half-assedly vaccinating some of the population while relaxing every single incredibly mild measure in place to reduce transmission is going to guarantee that it continues to circulate and, as we’ve seen, likely continue to mutate into new variants, for which there will be a selective pressure for the spread of variants resistant to the immunity conferred by the current vaccine and/or prior infection
The “west” completely botched the whole response, but if you think the Middle East, Africa, or huge fuck ups like India are all going to hide in their homes at this point I don’t know what to tell you. Covid spreads too well. It’s staying with us in some capacity the moment it escaped wherever it came from. In my second home country everyone I know has either had covid or has family that did, but the average age is super young so most people have just shrugged it off and have to live with the long term consequences if any. On the world chart, the recorded cases is very low because the government doesn’t track at all because it’s bad optics.
Yes, there is no guarantee of further mutations which increase transmission, vaccine escape, etc., but seeing as we’re up to what, four or five major variants exhibiting those traits so far? It seems pretty reasonable to assume.
Ya we are probably going to get an escape variant. We are probably also going to get another shot for that in a year. Hopefully it’s lethality is decreased if you have partial immunity. They already are thinking about this and will probably treat it like they do with the flu by predicting escape variants and preemptively doing some work to get a new batch of vaccines ready.
I’ll tell my family to not catch covid. Thanks for that. Let me inform every shit government in the world that they should press the covid removal button in their country as well. I’m sure with many of them having internet penetration rates in the low double digits they will be able to do a bang up job. The west botched this but at least your countries don’t completely cook the books.
Literally just wishful thinking “the experts are on it, don’t worry, they’ll have a magic new vaccine” without considering “what if they don’t” or “are they going to have it ready for widespread distribution, for free” or whether an escape variant would fuck up its production,
This isn’t wishful thinking their are experts who study viruses on it and they have gobsmacking amounts of money on it. They don’t have a distribution plan even right now. COVAX is a mess, the US is going to have a hard time vaccinating 50 percent of its population because of its nonexistent system.
whether these “experts” can be trusted to “be on it” when they’re the same ones bringing you such great decisions as “open schools back up without even vaccinating teachers, let’s just redefine social distancing as 3ft, it’ll be okay” while still refusing to recognize that covid can aerosolize and become airborne
Your confusing “experts” with experts. The people who want to make money push for making the line go up, they will be content with a modest increase in deaths if you can make the line go up faster in your country. In isolation maybe you can stop that in your country like China has for the most part. The problem is not every country is that good and I don’t even mean your fancy first world places.
There are actually people out there who can put the fact there is a potential escape variant together and start working on yet another vaccine. We do that every single year for the flu. It’s s pretty common thing. I already saw a few people I follow talking about getting this started back almost half a year ago at least.
What the hell are you going on about and why are you moralizing this at me like some /r/politics poster.
to prevent this from being a necessity
You are not going to be able to control the movements of everyone in in the world. Some governments are ineffective even if they are not evil. You have this as a reality you have to accept which is why vaccination is important and even countries like China which had this under control still are focusing on vaccination and distributing vaccines to the rest of the world. A certain level of covid is expected as vaccinations get rolled out.
It’s Just a Flu
I didn’t say it’s just the flu, I am saying that we do this sort of action for the flu a bunch already. The basics of biology haven’t changed.
You probably will never fully eliminate it since it’s zoonotic. It’s going to take a few years to roll out vaccines to the whole world. Till then you are going to see some level of COVID and people who get vaccinated still can catch COVID. It’s not a 100 percent protection.
Which is why mask wearing is important then lol and normalizing it is also net good. also both of you need to chill out.
I’m cool as a cucumber. I never advocated not wearing a mask, I just pointed out even in complete failure at this point in countries like the UK we are seeing an uptick in deaths, but not full blown doom. The potential from full blown doom is an escape variant which I think is inevitable, but is already being well tracked. There is also potential for mild hopium with an escape variant having less lethality against vaccinated people based on deaths of vaccinated people in variant cases.
Damn I was hoping it was someone’s internet debate minecraft friend list.
Who is this we getting the new shot? and what is this weird shit, you can’t predict where new virus will develop, but vaccine resistant virus have some very high pressure to develop in exactly mildly vaccinated countries. the goal should be to eradicate it, not to continue to half ass it, cause masks are hard.
Covid is zoonotic and probably has an animal host in addition to humans. Elimination is probably impossible because of this. Vaccination is our way out of it, but will require regular upkeep.
We already have an idea how the spike protein will mutate since about last November based on variations already discovered. You can’t predict where a virus will mutate, but you can predict how it will.
It being zoonotic doesn’t change human to human transmission, a lot of shit is zoonotic, doesn’t mean you have to help it. Like ffs, we’re leftists, wearing masks should be just common courtesy to fellow humans until it’s squashed one way or the other.
Have I advocated against masks at any point? I advocated against doom while acknowledging that ya we are going to see some increased amount of death. What I mean is we wont ever eliminate it because we could vaccinate everyone in the world and suddenly a bat sneezes on someone in the world 5 years from now in between boosters and we suddenly have COVID back again.
That is actually unlikely though, as bat pools will have different mutation pressures, away from human transmissibility
Yes, but if it already crossed the big barrier. Crossing back and staying away is the rare type of mutation right now.
If bat contact is inevitable yeah, if it stays there for the next 10 years and gets recombined with other corona viruses, non-transmissible to humans, why would it :shrug-outta-hecks:
I mean, your initial point was virus is here to stay (?), but that’s something that can be influenced and having defeatist attitude to it is kinda meh, realistic/pessimistic maybe, but it’s changeable
The problem is there are 8 billion of us. Someone out there is going to get it again. Even in places that handled this almost perfectly like China still get outbreaks the have to squash from time to time which is why vaccination is our only way out to prevent those outbreaks from becoming epidemics.
My point is that for the rest of our lives we are going to have some level of covid death. That level depends on the rate of vaccination. The long term goal is going to be doing enough vaccination to lower the death rate to an “acceptable” place for society to function. I don’t think it’s defeatist, more just recognizing this is the world we live in and we can beat this back but it doesn’t ever go away.
My original point was that even now with this new variant and everyone misbehaving we can see that it hasn’t effected the trend line to much which is a good case for hope and anti-doomerism
See, what I get from this (if it’s true) - I will wear a mask for the rest of my life in the cities, cause I don’t want some old lady to keel over :shrug-outta-hecks:
Counterpoint: variants already exist that make vaccines less effective. South Africa had to send back it's shipment of AstraZennica/Oxford vaccines because they cannot provide effective protection against the South African variant of Covid 19. What if one of these variants ends up on your country? By removing mask restrictions before herd immunity is achieved (67-75% of the population being fully vaccinated), you are creating the conditions for such an event to occur. Masks don't only protect others, they also protect yourself to a certain small extent, even fabric masks. Also n95/ffp2 grade masks that seal do protect yourself very well. Please still wear a mask in public. I understand not wearing a mask when everyone around you is fully vaccinated, in that case yeah go for it and go maskless, but you can't have that knowledge in public.
I addressed this point that I expect this, my point is that it’s a worldwide problem and we just have to assume that countries are going to botch their response enough we will get that variant which is why people are already looking at making vaccines that target those. My dumb hope is that if you had a vaccine and you catch an escape variant it might lower lethality at least, that would be a huge boon although one we can’t count on.
I wear a mask because my country has almost no one vaccinated at all. I stay inside and social distance as well. I am still very aware that you can’t trust everyone in the world to do this and with a animal reservoir species elimination is off the table so even if we vaccinated everyone it’s probably not going away away. China the country that has handled this best still gets regional flare ups they have to stamp out and not every country is as competent as China even if they are not overtly evil like the line god worshippers I’m the “western” countries.
Yeah it's just all messed up. Hopefully the vaccines work well and stomp everything out, but even then they're taking so long to be available in the global south. I've just pretty much accepted that a terrible 3rd wave is inevitable now.
:doomjak:
Depends on where you are. The big risk in the developed world is a big wave of hospitalizations around the vaccine reluctant. The other longer tail problem is an escape variant, but generally the bad system we have set up is good at immediate problems with clear risk and every lab worldwide is currently tracking COVID variants.
This shouldn’t be a contrarian position, it’s the scientific consensus. I hate that doom porn is such an upvote magnet here.
Every doom porn post about variants on here for the past few months has been demonstrably proven wrong. Every variant has been handled fine by the vaccine. B117 didn’t cause an exponential surge (in the US). Vaccine hesitancy is serious but not destroying any hope of herd immunity.
Death rates are going to increase simply because of math. If you figure humans live to be 85-90 years old on average, and the population is not growing (i.e. births equal deaths), then about 1/90th of the population, 11-12 per 1000, has to die every year. Right now, only about 7-8 per 1000 die every year (even with covid it was less than 9/1000). That's a big change that we're going to have to make in our society, Covid variants or not.
Of 17 deaths up to 31st May, 2 were among people who were fully vaccinated, and 3 among those who had received 1 dose at least 21 days ago.
:deeper-sadness:
Countries that use the AstraZennica/Oxford vaccine better hope to fuck that the South African variant of covid doesn't land in their country, that vaccine is like 24% effective against the South African variant.
Yeah like other vaccines work so it's not an apocalyptic scenario or anything, but damn people are playing with fire here.
Isnt a mutation to the spike protein going to heavily influence the infectiousness anyways? Like a differently coded protein is not going to be able to infect the same cells in the same way, meaning a spike protein mutation is likely to render the virus inert or a completely different vector of transmission?
I mean the Indian and South African Covid 19 variants are pretty different as far as immune response goes, that's why the SA variant doesn't work with certain vaccines.
Call it how it is (Call it how it is)
Hendrix
I promise, I swear, I swear
You heard, spit it, yo
[Chorus]
Percocets (Ya), molly, Percocets (Percocets)
Percocets (Ya), molly, Percocets (Percocets)
Rep the set (Yee), gotta rep the set (Gang, gang)
Chase a check (Chase it), never chase a bitch (Don't chase no bitches)
Mask on (Off), fuck it, mask off (Mask)
Mask on (Off), fuck it, mask off (Mask)
Percocets ('Cets), molly, Percocets (Percocets)
Chase a check (Chase it), never chase a bitch (Don't chase no bitches)
[Verse 1]
Two cups (Cup), toast up with the gang (Gang, gang)
From food stamps to a whole 'nother domain, ya
Out the bottom (Ye), I'm the livin' proof (Super)
Ain't compromisin' (Woah), half a million on the coupe (Gang, gang)
Drug houses (where), lookin' like Peru (Woah, woah, woah)
Graduated (Crazy), I was overdue (I'm on due)
Pink molly (Molly), I can barely move (Barely move)
Ask about me ('Bout me), I'm gon' bust a move
Rick James (James), thirty-three chains (Thirty-three)
Ocean air (Air), cruisin' Biscayne
Top off (Ya), that’s a liability (Big foreigns)
Hit the gas (Gas), boostin' my adrenaline (Big foreigns)
[Chorus]
Percocets (Ye), molly, Percocets (Big foreigns)
Percocets (Ye), molly, Percocets (Big foreigns)
Rep the set (Ye), gotta rep the set (Gang, gang)
Chase a check (Chase it) (Ye), never chase a bitch (Don't chase no bitches) (Big foreigns)
Mask on (Off) (Ye), fuck it, mask off (Mask) (Big foreigns)
Mask on (Off) (Ye), fuck it, mask off (Mask) (Big foreigns)
Percocets (Ye), molly, Percocets (Big foreigns)
Chase a check (Chase it) (Ye, ye), never chase a bitch (Don't chase no bitches)
[Verse 2]
Ford or Maybach (Ford or), I drive anything (Ye)
Buy my Range (Ye), make 'em go insane (Ye)
(Oh my Lord, praise him be)
My guillotine, drank promethazine (Drank prometh')
TEC and beams (Ya), go to those extremes (Let's go, let's go)
Parliament (Parliament), calamari Wednesday (Ya)
Parlay in Vegas, we was in attendance (What's good, what's good)
Before the business (Yeah), Theodore lenses
Theo-Dur prescriptions (Ya), focus on the missions (Fo' my)
Intermission (Hol' up), never take a break (We can pull up)
Switch states, touch down, foreign plates (Speech)
Ain't no way, ain't no fuckin' way (No)
We call the play, we didn't come to play (No)
Rob the bank, we gon' rob the game (Gang)
They gang, we gang (Gang)
But they are not the same (Freebandz)
[Chorus]
Percocets (Ye), molly, Percocets (Big foreigns)
Percocets (Ye), molly, Percocets (Big foreigns)
Rep the set (Ye), gotta rep the set (Gang, gang)
Chase a check (Chase it) (Ye), never chase a bitch (Don't chase no bitches) (Big foreigns)
Mask on (Off) (Ye), fuck it, mask off (Mask) (Big foreigns)
Mask on (Off) (Ye), fuck it, mask off (Mask) (Big foreigns)
Percocets (Ye), molly, Percocets (Big foreigns)
Chase a check (Chase it) (Ye, ye), never chase a bitch (Don't chase no bitches)
[Outro]
Mask on, fuck it, mask off
Mask on, fuck it, mask off
Mask on, fuck it, mask off
Gas gone, never nod off
(Cold chills, prison cells)
(Oh my Lord, praise him be)
I’m vaxxed and I can’t hide my beautiful face from my mostly vaxxed classmates any longer
If I, being vaccinated, hang out with a bunch of other people who have been vaccinated and people with negative Covid tests, am I still ok in your eyes?
Look dude I've locked myself in my apartment for the last 14 months with almost no contact with anyone. I'm going slowly insane. I have to at least go out a little bit. I need human connection again. If I know everyone around me has been vaccinated I feel comfortable taking off my mask.
I may start getting tested though, per your warning.
I remember some cynicism to the "mask free if you vaccinated" announcement, that we are being told to go out again to save capitalism.
Idk I fee like there's some truth to that, I'm just so exhausted
Oh God yes the vaccination cards. People all ready flipped there shit over wearing masks, if cards were enforced we'd see even more violence.
I wanna be hopeful but it's hard
Unlike other countries, we've done fairly well with vaccines. I don't think this will be an issue for the US
Honestly just seems like fear mongering for clicks
Well I'm hoping that doesn't happen, but I'm going to take a break from worrying about it being a problem in the US for a moment, because cases have gone down dramatically and people are continuing to get vaccinated.
There is also research suggesting that most of the variants in existence currently don't break through the vaccine.
To be clear though, I am not saying you're wrong, I just don't want to continue taking every COVID fearmongering headline at face value and living like it's post march 2020. But everything I am saying could be invalid as soon as someone discovers there is a variant that turns everything upside down despite the vaccine.
Who said I wasn't wearing a mask? I just think you shouldn't get worked up about potential scenarios until you can guarantee that what you are worried about is going to happen.
Whatever you need to tell yourself to keep yourself from going outside I am good with!
I still get some people that tell me I don't have to wear a mask and I tell them I still want to just in case. Also I don't have to bother showing facial expressions, I can just be indifferent to shit I don't care about. It's good to see a few at work still wearing the mask, and this one lady said she'd wear hers until December. So hopefully someone won't give me shit for continuing.
