Permanently Deleted

    • WranglesGammon [comrade/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      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.

    • BigLadKarlLiebknecht [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      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.

        • BigLadKarlLiebknecht [he/him, comrade/them]
          ·
          3 years ago

          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:

            • NeverGoOutside [any]
              ·
              edit-2
              3 years ago

              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?

              • Segorinder [any]
                ·
                3 years ago

                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.

                • NeverGoOutside [any]
                  ·
                  3 years ago

                  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.

          • NeverGoOutside [any]
            ·
            3 years ago

            If it’s happening in terf island I’m all for it. Nature is healing.

    • Express [any,none/use name]
      ·
      3 years ago

      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.

        • Express [any,none/use name]
          ·
          edit-2
          3 years ago

          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.

            • Express [any,none/use name]
              ·
              edit-2
              3 years ago

              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.

              • comi [he/him]
                ·
                3 years ago

                Which is why mask wearing is important then lol and normalizing it is also net good. also both of you need to chill out.

                • Express [any,none/use name]
                  ·
                  3 years ago

                  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.

      • comi [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        3 years ago

        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.

        • Express [any,none/use name]
          ·
          edit-2
          3 years ago

          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.

          • comi [he/him]
            ·
            3 years ago

            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.

            • Express [any,none/use name]
              ·
              3 years ago

              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.

              • comi [he/him]
                ·
                3 years ago

                That is actually unlikely though, as bat pools will have different mutation pressures, away from human transmissibility

                • Express [any,none/use name]
                  ·
                  3 years ago

                  Yes, but if it already crossed the big barrier. Crossing back and staying away is the rare type of mutation right now.

                  • comi [he/him]
                    ·
                    3 years ago

                    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

                    • Express [any,none/use name]
                      ·
                      3 years ago

                      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

                      • comi [he/him]
                        ·
                        3 years ago

                        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: