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Anonymous wrote:FTR - this is the result of trying to prevent transmission at all costs, indefinitely:

Feigl-Ding seems to see this as proof that zero COVID policies need to stay which seems crazy to me. They can't be sustained long term. They have massive human costs. And now 1 million + people are going to die very soon, many simply because the healthcare system is completely overrun. What was the point of it all?

Is their population not highly vaccinated? Ding is a fear mongerer. If he ever made accurate predictions, we’d all be dead of monkey pox by now.

No they do not have much immunity from vaccines because the Chinese vaccines were not great and there is a lot of vaccine hesitancy in the elderly population.

Ding is not the one predicting 1 million+ deaths, btw, he's just stating a widely reported projection.

The Chinese painted themselves into this corner. A population without much previous exposure to the virus, low vaccination rates (especially among the elderly) with a not-great vaccine, and insufficient hospital capacity. They screwed themselves with their policies, and now they have to live (or die) with their choices.

You really are not getting it. We are also going to be living with this. How much of the stuff in your house comes from a China that can't produce those things in an outbreak like this?

Okay. What do you want me to do about it? The Chinese screwed us at the beginning of the pandemic with their lying, and now they're the ones getting screwed. They have their government to blame for the mess they're in.

No. Now we are ALL being screwed. You can point the finger elsewhere as much as you want, but we are going to have impacts from this. We're in it together. That's how pandemics are.

At a certain point very early on it became impossible to contain the virus. Social distancing was a very costly way to reduce death while waiting for the vaccine. We could have reduced death more and possibly variants by getting more vaccines out to other countries. Beyond that there is no endgame. The virus surges and falls in ways that are largely out of our control without extreme, unsustainable measures.

Vaccines are not 100% so you need a combination of distancing, masking, vaccines and people staying home when sick. Denial isn't working.

Denial? That's the pot calling the kettle black. You're obviously still in denial about the future of Covid. No level of masking or isolation will make Covid "go away." There's no scientific advance on the horizon that will significantly reduce risk below what we can already do through vaccination. When it comes to Covid, this is, roughly speaking, as good as it gets. It doesn't make sense to continue with measures that we wouldn't be willing to put up with forever. For the vast majority of people, that means no masks. And it means staying home for fevers and other *clear* signs of a communicable infection, but carrying on with mild cold symptoms. When you look at China right now, and to a lesser extent the US with RSV last month, you see the problem with the indefinite infection avoidance strategy: you can't avoid it forever. You just delay it. And the longer you delay it, the more people there are that are vulnerable to reinfection with increasing levels of severity.

You're intellectualizing your anxiety to be back in "normal time" here, which is an understandable defense. It's a stark and unpleasant thing to know that we in fact are going to be living with COVID for the foreseeable future, and that it's going to be killing more people and disabling others and disrupting life quite a bit. The fact that it is stark and unpleasant and that the measures to mitigate all of these bad outcomes are a PITA have nothing to do with the fact that they are a good idea. They are.

You should work on intellectualizing your anxiety a bit more, rather than letting your emotions dictate your thinking. Yes, it is "unpleasant" to think about covid being with us for the rest of our lives. Worrying about it won't change it. Mitigations won't change whether or you get it-- just the frequency with which you get it. At the same time, we're not in bad place. Daily covid deaths are at <400 right now. That's roughly equivalent to the number of daily influenza deaths in the winter during a moderately bad flu season. That's not great, but most people haven't felt it necessary to change their lifestyle in previous winters due to the risk of the flu. And perhaps more significantly than the number itself is that it has been stable since May, which no reason to expect another Omicron-(or even Delta)-like surge. Barring a significant change in circumstances or risk, it is entirely rational to approach covid in a similar manner to how we've approached the risk of cold/flu season in the past.

Your accounting of what is to be weighed doesn’t mention long COVID. And that is a meaningful risk, not o ly to individuals but to the society as a whole.

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:FTR - this is the result of trying to prevent transmission at all costs, indefinitely:

Feigl-Ding seems to see this as proof that zero COVID policies need to stay which seems crazy to me. They can't be sustained long term. They have massive human costs. And now 1 million + people are going to die very soon, many simply because the healthcare system is completely overrun. What was the point of it all?

Is their population not highly vaccinated? Ding is a fear mongerer. If he ever made accurate predictions, we’d all be dead of monkey pox by now.

No they do not have much immunity from vaccines because the Chinese vaccines were not great and there is a lot of vaccine hesitancy in the elderly population.

Ding is not the one predicting 1 million+ deaths, btw, he's just stating a widely reported projection.

The Chinese painted themselves into this corner. A population without much previous exposure to the virus, low vaccination rates (especially among the elderly) with a not-great vaccine, and insufficient hospital capacity. They screwed themselves with their policies, and now they have to live (or die) with their choices.

You really are not getting it. We are also going to be living with this. How much of the stuff in your house comes from a China that can't produce those things in an outbreak like this?

Okay. What do you want me to do about it? The Chinese screwed us at the beginning of the pandemic with their lying, and now they're the ones getting screwed. They have their government to blame for the mess they're in.

No. Now we are ALL being screwed. You can point the finger elsewhere as much as you want, but we are going to have impacts from this. We're in it together. That's how pandemics are.

At a certain point very early on it became impossible to contain the virus. Social distancing was a very costly way to reduce death while waiting for the vaccine. We could have reduced death more and possibly variants by getting more vaccines out to other countries. Beyond that there is no endgame. The virus surges and falls in ways that are largely out of our control without extreme, unsustainable measures.

Vaccines are not 100% so you need a combination of distancing, masking, vaccines and people staying home when sick. Denial isn't working.

Denial? That's the pot calling the kettle black. You're obviously still in denial about the future of Covid. No level of masking or isolation will make Covid "go away." There's no scientific advance on the horizon that will significantly reduce risk below what we can already do through vaccination. When it comes to Covid, this is, roughly speaking, as good as it gets. It doesn't make sense to continue with measures that we wouldn't be willing to put up with forever. For the vast majority of people, that means no masks. And it means staying home for fevers and other *clear* signs of a communicable infection, but carrying on with mild cold symptoms. When you look at China right now, and to a lesser extent the US with RSV last month, you see the problem with the indefinite infection avoidance strategy: you can't avoid it forever. You just delay it. And the longer you delay it, the more people there are that are vulnerable to reinfection with increasing levels of severity.

You're intellectualizing your anxiety to be back in "normal time" here, which is an understandable defense. It's a stark and unpleasant thing to know that we in fact are going to be living with COVID for the foreseeable future, and that it's going to be killing more people and disabling others and disrupting life quite a bit. The fact that it is stark and unpleasant and that the measures to mitigate all of these bad outcomes are a PITA have nothing to do with the fact that they are a good idea. They are.

You should work on intellectualizing your anxiety a bit more, rather than letting your emotions dictate your thinking. Yes, it is "unpleasant" to think about covid being with us for the rest of our lives. Worrying about it won't change it. Mitigations won't change whether or you get it-- just the frequency with which you get it. At the same time, we're not in bad place. Daily covid deaths are at <400 right now. That's roughly equivalent to the number of daily influenza deaths in the winter during a moderately bad flu season. That's not great, but most people haven't felt it necessary to change their lifestyle in previous winters due to the risk of the flu. And perhaps more significantly than the number itself is that it has been stable since May, which no reason to expect another Omicron-(or even Delta)-like surge. Barring a significant change in circumstances or risk, it is entirely rational to approach covid in a similar manner to how we've approached the risk of cold/flu season in the past.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:FTR - this is the result of trying to prevent transmission at all costs, indefinitely:

Feigl-Ding seems to see this as proof that zero COVID policies need to stay which seems crazy to me. They can't be sustained long term. They have massive human costs. And now 1 million + people are going to die very soon, many simply because the healthcare system is completely overrun. What was the point of it all?

Is their population not highly vaccinated? Ding is a fear mongerer. If he ever made accurate predictions, we’d all be dead of monkey pox by now.

No they do not have much immunity from vaccines because the Chinese vaccines were not great and there is a lot of vaccine hesitancy in the elderly population.

Ding is not the one predicting 1 million+ deaths, btw, he's just stating a widely reported projection.

The Chinese painted themselves into this corner. A population without much previous exposure to the virus, low vaccination rates (especially among the elderly) with a not-great vaccine, and insufficient hospital capacity. They screwed themselves with their policies, and now they have to live (or die) with their choices.

You really are not getting it. We are also going to be living with this. How much of the stuff in your house comes from a China that can't produce those things in an outbreak like this?

Okay. What do you want me to do about it? The Chinese screwed us at the beginning of the pandemic with their lying, and now they're the ones getting screwed. They have their government to blame for the mess they're in.

No. Now we are ALL being screwed. You can point the finger elsewhere as much as you want, but we are going to have impacts from this. We're in it together. That's how pandemics are.

At a certain point very early on it became impossible to contain the virus. Social distancing was a very costly way to reduce death while waiting for the vaccine. We could have reduced death more and possibly variants by getting more vaccines out to other countries. Beyond that there is no endgame. The virus surges and falls in ways that are largely out of our control without extreme, unsustainable measures.

Vaccines are not 100% so you need a combination of distancing, masking, vaccines and people staying home when sick. Denial isn't working.

Denial? That's the pot calling the kettle black. You're obviously still in denial about the future of Covid. No level of masking or isolation will make Covid "go away." There's no scientific advance on the horizon that will significantly reduce risk below what we can already do through vaccination. When it comes to Covid, this is, roughly speaking, as good as it gets. It doesn't make sense to continue with measures that we wouldn't be willing to put up with forever. For the vast majority of people, that means no masks. And it means staying home for fevers and other *clear* signs of a communicable infection, but carrying on with mild cold symptoms. When you look at China right now, and to a lesser extent the US with RSV last month, you see the problem with the indefinite infection avoidance strategy: you can't avoid it forever. You just delay it. And the longer you delay it, the more people there are that are vulnerable to reinfection with increasing levels of severity.

You're intellectualizing your anxiety to be back in "normal time" here, which is an understandable defense. It's a stark and unpleasant thing to know that we in fact are going to be living with COVID for the foreseeable future, and that it's going to be killing more people and disabling others and disrupting life quite a bit. The fact that it is stark and unpleasant and that the measures to mitigate all of these bad outcomes are a PITA have nothing to do with the fact that they are a good idea. They are.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:FTR - this is the result of trying to prevent transmission at all costs, indefinitely:

Feigl-Ding seems to see this as proof that zero COVID policies need to stay which seems crazy to me. They can't be sustained long term. They have massive human costs. And now 1 million + people are going to die very soon, many simply because the healthcare system is completely overrun. What was the point of it all?

Is their population not highly vaccinated? Ding is a fear mongerer. If he ever made accurate predictions, we’d all be dead of monkey pox by now.

No they do not have much immunity from vaccines because the Chinese vaccines were not great and there is a lot of vaccine hesitancy in the elderly population.

Ding is not the one predicting 1 million+ deaths, btw, he's just stating a widely reported projection.

The Chinese painted themselves into this corner. A population without much previous exposure to the virus, low vaccination rates (especially among the elderly) with a not-great vaccine, and insufficient hospital capacity. They screwed themselves with their policies, and now they have to live (or die) with their choices.

You really are not getting it. We are also going to be living with this. How much of the stuff in your house comes from a China that can't produce those things in an outbreak like this?

Okay. What do you want me to do about it? The Chinese screwed us at the beginning of the pandemic with their lying, and now they're the ones getting screwed. They have their government to blame for the mess they're in.

No. Now we are ALL being screwed. You can point the finger elsewhere as much as you want, but we are going to have impacts from this. We're in it together. That's how pandemics are.

At a certain point very early on it became impossible to contain the virus. Social distancing was a very costly way to reduce death while waiting for the vaccine. We could have reduced death more and possibly variants by getting more vaccines out to other countries. Beyond that there is no endgame. The virus surges and falls in ways that are largely out of our control without extreme, unsustainable measures.

Vaccines are not 100% so you need a combination of distancing, masking, vaccines and people staying home when sick. Denial isn't working.

Denial? That's the pot calling the kettle black. You're obviously still in denial about the future of Covid. No level of masking or isolation will make Covid "go away." There's no scientific advance on the horizon that will significantly reduce risk below what we can already do through vaccination. When it comes to Covid, this is, roughly speaking, as good as it gets. It doesn't make sense to continue with measures that we wouldn't be willing to put up with forever. For the vast majority of people, that means no masks. And it means staying home for fevers and other *clear* signs of a communicable infection, but carrying on with mild cold symptoms. When you look at China right now, and to a lesser extent the US with RSV last month, you see the problem with the indefinite infection avoidance strategy: you can't avoid it forever. You just delay it. And the longer you delay it, the more people there are that are vulnerable to reinfection with increasing levels of severity.

You're intellectualizing your anxiety to be back in "normal time" here, which is an understandable defense. It's a stark and unpleasant thing to know that we in fact are going to be living with COVID for the foreseeable future, and that it's going to be killing more people and disabling others and disrupting life quite a bit. The fact that it is stark and unpleasant and that the measures to mitigate all of these bad outcomes are a PITA have nothing to do with the fact that they are a good idea. They are.

DP you have done your own cost-benefit analysis and determined that these measures are unambiguously worthwhile. Great! I have also done one and decided they are not worthwhile for long periods of time. Which one of us is right? Who can know?

I am. And I know that I can know. So I am not suffering from your problem of believing that it's hard to know who can know.

Knowing what you don't know is part of what makes really smart people as smart as they are.

That's true. But knowing what you DO know--and not allowing the fear, wish or aspiration for things to be otherwise to mislead you--is also a smart thing.

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:FTR - this is the result of trying to prevent transmission at all costs, indefinitely:

Feigl-Ding seems to see this as proof that zero COVID policies need to stay which seems crazy to me. They can't be sustained long term. They have massive human costs. And now 1 million + people are going to die very soon, many simply because the healthcare system is completely overrun. What was the point of it all?

Is their population not highly vaccinated? Ding is a fear mongerer. If he ever made accurate predictions, we’d all be dead of monkey pox by now.

No they do not have much immunity from vaccines because the Chinese vaccines were not great and there is a lot of vaccine hesitancy in the elderly population.

Ding is not the one predicting 1 million+ deaths, btw, he's just stating a widely reported projection.

The Chinese painted themselves into this corner. A population without much previous exposure to the virus, low vaccination rates (especially among the elderly) with a not-great vaccine, and insufficient hospital capacity. They screwed themselves with their policies, and now they have to live (or die) with their choices.

You really are not getting it. We are also going to be living with this. How much of the stuff in your house comes from a China that can't produce those things in an outbreak like this?

Okay. What do you want me to do about it? The Chinese screwed us at the beginning of the pandemic with their lying, and now they're the ones getting screwed. They have their government to blame for the mess they're in.

No. Now we are ALL being screwed. You can point the finger elsewhere as much as you want, but we are going to have impacts from this. We're in it together. That's how pandemics are.

At a certain point very early on it became impossible to contain the virus. Social distancing was a very costly way to reduce death while waiting for the vaccine. We could have reduced death more and possibly variants by getting more vaccines out to other countries. Beyond that there is no endgame. The virus surges and falls in ways that are largely out of our control without extreme, unsustainable measures.

Vaccines are not 100% so you need a combination of distancing, masking, vaccines and people staying home when sick. Denial isn't working.

Denial? That's the pot calling the kettle black. You're obviously still in denial about the future of Covid. No level of masking or isolation will make Covid "go away." There's no scientific advance on the horizon that will significantly reduce risk below what we can already do through vaccination. When it comes to Covid, this is, roughly speaking, as good as it gets. It doesn't make sense to continue with measures that we wouldn't be willing to put up with forever. For the vast majority of people, that means no masks. And it means staying home for fevers and other *clear* signs of a communicable infection, but carrying on with mild cold symptoms. When you look at China right now, and to a lesser extent the US with RSV last month, you see the problem with the indefinite infection avoidance strategy: you can't avoid it forever. You just delay it. And the longer you delay it, the more people there are that are vulnerable to reinfection with increasing levels of severity.

You're intellectualizing your anxiety to be back in "normal time" here, which is an understandable defense. It's a stark and unpleasant thing to know that we in fact are going to be living with COVID for the foreseeable future, and that it's going to be killing more people and disabling others and disrupting life quite a bit. The fact that it is stark and unpleasant and that the measures to mitigate all of these bad outcomes are a PITA have nothing to do with the fact that they are a good idea. They are.

DP you have done your own cost-benefit analysis and determined that these measures are unambiguously worthwhile. Great! I have also done one and decided they are not worthwhile for long periods of time. Which one of us is right? Who can know?

I am. And I know that I can know. So I am not suffering from your problem of believing that it's hard to know who can know.

Knowing what you don't know is part of what makes really smart people as smart as they are.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:FTR - this is the result of trying to prevent transmission at all costs, indefinitely:

Feigl-Ding seems to see this as proof that zero COVID policies need to stay which seems crazy to me. They can't be sustained long term. They have massive human costs. And now 1 million + people are going to die very soon, many simply because the healthcare system is completely overrun. What was the point of it all?

Is their population not highly vaccinated? Ding is a fear mongerer. If he ever made accurate predictions, we’d all be dead of monkey pox by now.

No they do not have much immunity from vaccines because the Chinese vaccines were not great and there is a lot of vaccine hesitancy in the elderly population.

Ding is not the one predicting 1 million+ deaths, btw, he's just stating a widely reported projection.

The Chinese painted themselves into this corner. A population without much previous exposure to the virus, low vaccination rates (especially among the elderly) with a not-great vaccine, and insufficient hospital capacity. They screwed themselves with their policies, and now they have to live (or die) with their choices.

So they can mandate people dont leave their homes, but they cant mandate a vaccine?

I’ve never understood this either.

It’s also that their vaccine isn’t great compared to the Pfizer/Moderna/AZ that the rest of the developed world was getting. And even those aren’t GREAT but the SinoVac is worse. And it’s hard to get out to all those rural areas and small towns to get shots in arms.

China, though, stayed with its strategy of elimination within its borders. The Chinese government did roll out its homegrown vaccine but took a different approach than the west. Its vaccination priority list focused on healthy young adults, and instead noted the side-effects of the vaccine to elderly groups. It didn’t promote the vaccine to elderly groups until November 2021, but by this time considerable vaccine scepticism had built up. Rising concerns about the low effectiveness of the non-mRNA Chinese vaccines were also a concern: studies indicated that protection faded fast and was undetectable after six months.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:FTR - this is the result of trying to prevent transmission at all costs, indefinitely:

Feigl-Ding seems to see this as proof that zero COVID policies need to stay which seems crazy to me. They can't be sustained long term. They have massive human costs. And now 1 million + people are going to die very soon, many simply because the healthcare system is completely overrun. What was the point of it all?

Is their population not highly vaccinated? Ding is a fear mongerer. If he ever made accurate predictions, we’d all be dead of monkey pox by now.

No they do not have much immunity from vaccines because the Chinese vaccines were not great and there is a lot of vaccine hesitancy in the elderly population.

Ding is not the one predicting 1 million+ deaths, btw, he's just stating a widely reported projection.

The Chinese painted themselves into this corner. A population without much previous exposure to the virus, low vaccination rates (especially among the elderly) with a not-great vaccine, and insufficient hospital capacity. They screwed themselves with their policies, and now they have to live (or die) with their choices.

You really are not getting it. We are also going to be living with this. How much of the stuff in your house comes from a China that can't produce those things in an outbreak like this?

Okay. What do you want me to do about it? The Chinese screwed us at the beginning of the pandemic with their lying, and now they're the ones getting screwed. They have their government to blame for the mess they're in.

No. Now we are ALL being screwed. You can point the finger elsewhere as much as you want, but we are going to have impacts from this. We're in it together. That's how pandemics are.

At a certain point very early on it became impossible to contain the virus. Social distancing was a very costly way to reduce death while waiting for the vaccine. We could have reduced death more and possibly variants by getting more vaccines out to other countries. Beyond that there is no endgame. The virus surges and falls in ways that are largely out of our control without extreme, unsustainable measures.

Vaccines are not 100% so you need a combination of distancing, masking, vaccines and people staying home when sick. Denial isn't working.

Denial? That's the pot calling the kettle black. You're obviously still in denial about the future of Covid. No level of masking or isolation will make Covid "go away." There's no scientific advance on the horizon that will significantly reduce risk below what we can already do through vaccination. When it comes to Covid, this is, roughly speaking, as good as it gets. It doesn't make sense to continue with measures that we wouldn't be willing to put up with forever. For the vast majority of people, that means no masks. And it means staying home for fevers and other *clear* signs of a communicable infection, but carrying on with mild cold symptoms. When you look at China right now, and to a lesser extent the US with RSV last month, you see the problem with the indefinite infection avoidance strategy: you can't avoid it forever. You just delay it. And the longer you delay it, the more people there are that are vulnerable to reinfection with increasing levels of severity.

You're intellectualizing your anxiety to be back in "normal time" here, which is an understandable defense. It's a stark and unpleasant thing to know that we in fact are going to be living with COVID for the foreseeable future, and that it's going to be killing more people and disabling others and disrupting life quite a bit. The fact that it is stark and unpleasant and that the measures to mitigate all of these bad outcomes are a PITA have nothing to do with the fact that they are a good idea. They are.

DP you have done your own cost-benefit analysis and determined that these measures are unambiguously worthwhile. Great! I have also done one and decided they are not worthwhile for long periods of time. Which one of us is right? Who can know?

I am. And I know that I can know. So I am not suffering from your problem of believing that it's hard to know who can know.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don't buy into the idea that getting sick with anything, much less COVID, makes our immune systems stronger. The immune system is not a muscle.

But it does have a memory. It is problematic to prevent everyone from getting exposed to all these viruses for years on end. We're now seeing kids get three years worth of illnesses at the same time, many kids with multiple viruses (Peter Hotez says there are at least 7 major viruses going around). That stresses the healthcare system and I'm guessing children with multiple bugs (not all of which are getting tested for) are at higher risk of severe disease. And this is happening here where kids have had some exposure to viruses at least over the past year. I would not trade places with a person in China right now. They are getting hit with COVID all at once and quite likely many other viruses at some point.

I love the muscle analogy. It's so original -- have you thought of posting that on Twitter?
Getting sick with a pathogen increases your pathogen-specific immunity through neutralizing antibodies and memory B and T cells.

Anonymous wrote:I don't buy into the idea that getting sick with anything, much less COVID, makes our immune systems stronger. The immune system is not a muscle.

But it does have a memory. It is problematic to prevent everyone from getting exposed to all these viruses for years on end. We're now seeing kids get three years worth of illnesses at the same time, many kids with multiple viruses (Peter Hotez says there are at least 7 major viruses going around). That stresses the healthcare system and I'm guessing children with multiple bugs (not all of which are getting tested for) are at higher risk of severe disease. And this is happening here where kids have had some exposure to viruses at least over the past year. I would not trade places with a person in China right now. They are getting hit with COVID all at once and quite likely many other viruses at some point.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:FTR - this is the result of trying to prevent transmission at all costs, indefinitely:

Feigl-Ding seems to see this as proof that zero COVID policies need to stay which seems crazy to me. They can't be sustained long term. They have massive human costs. And now 1 million + people are going to die very soon, many simply because the healthcare system is completely overrun. What was the point of it all?

Is their population not highly vaccinated? Ding is a fear mongerer. If he ever made accurate predictions, we’d all be dead of monkey pox by now.

No they do not have much immunity from vaccines because the Chinese vaccines were not great and there is a lot of vaccine hesitancy in the elderly population.

Ding is not the one predicting 1 million+ deaths, btw, he's just stating a widely reported projection.

The Chinese painted themselves into this corner. A population without much previous exposure to the virus, low vaccination rates (especially among the elderly) with a not-great vaccine, and insufficient hospital capacity. They screwed themselves with their policies, and now they have to live (or die) with their choices.

You really are not getting it. We are also going to be living with this. How much of the stuff in your house comes from a China that can't produce those things in an outbreak like this?

Okay. What do you want me to do about it? The Chinese screwed us at the beginning of the pandemic with their lying, and now they're the ones getting screwed. They have their government to blame for the mess they're in.

No. Now we are ALL being screwed. You can point the finger elsewhere as much as you want, but we are going to have impacts from this. We're in it together. That's how pandemics are.

At a certain point very early on it became impossible to contain the virus. Social distancing was a very costly way to reduce death while waiting for the vaccine. We could have reduced death more and possibly variants by getting more vaccines out to other countries. Beyond that there is no endgame. The virus surges and falls in ways that are largely out of our control without extreme, unsustainable measures.

Vaccines are not 100% so you need a combination of distancing, masking, vaccines and people staying home when sick. Denial isn't working.

Denial? That's the pot calling the kettle black. You're obviously still in denial about the future of Covid. No level of masking or isolation will make Covid "go away." There's no scientific advance on the horizon that will significantly reduce risk below what we can already do through vaccination. When it comes to Covid, this is, roughly speaking, as good as it gets. It doesn't make sense to continue with measures that we wouldn't be willing to put up with forever. For the vast majority of people, that means no masks. And it means staying home for fevers and other *clear* signs of a communicable infection, but carrying on with mild cold symptoms. When you look at China right now, and to a lesser extent the US with RSV last month, you see the problem with the indefinite infection avoidance strategy: you can't avoid it forever. You just delay it. And the longer you delay it, the more people there are that are vulnerable to reinfection with increasing levels of severity.

You're intellectualizing your anxiety to be back in "normal time" here, which is an understandable defense. It's a stark and unpleasant thing to know that we in fact are going to be living with COVID for the foreseeable future, and that it's going to be killing more people and disabling others and disrupting life quite a bit. The fact that it is stark and unpleasant and that the measures to mitigate all of these bad outcomes are a PITA have nothing to do with the fact that they are a good idea. They are.

DP you have done your own cost-benefit analysis and determined that these measures are unambiguously worthwhile. Great! I have also done one and decided they are not worthwhile for long periods of time. Which one of us is right? Who can know?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:FTR - this is the result of trying to prevent transmission at all costs, indefinitely:

Feigl-Ding seems to see this as proof that zero COVID policies need to stay which seems crazy to me. They can't be sustained long term. They have massive human costs. And now 1 million + people are going to die very soon, many simply because the healthcare system is completely overrun. What was the point of it all?

Is their population not highly vaccinated? Ding is a fear mongerer. If he ever made accurate predictions, we’d all be dead of monkey pox by now.

No they do not have much immunity from vaccines because the Chinese vaccines were not great and there is a lot of vaccine hesitancy in the elderly population.

Ding is not the one predicting 1 million+ deaths, btw, he's just stating a widely reported projection.

The Chinese painted themselves into this corner. A population without much previous exposure to the virus, low vaccination rates (especially among the elderly) with a not-great vaccine, and insufficient hospital capacity. They screwed themselves with their policies, and now they have to live (or die) with their choices.

You really are not getting it. We are also going to be living with this. How much of the stuff in your house comes from a China that can't produce those things in an outbreak like this?

Okay. What do you want me to do about it? The Chinese screwed us at the beginning of the pandemic with their lying, and now they're the ones getting screwed. They have their government to blame for the mess they're in.

No. Now we are ALL being screwed. You can point the finger elsewhere as much as you want, but we are going to have impacts from this. We're in it together. That's how pandemics are.

At a certain point very early on it became impossible to contain the virus. Social distancing was a very costly way to reduce death while waiting for the vaccine. We could have reduced death more and possibly variants by getting more vaccines out to other countries. Beyond that there is no endgame. The virus surges and falls in ways that are largely out of our control without extreme, unsustainable measures.

Vaccines are not 100% so you need a combination of distancing, masking, vaccines and people staying home when sick. Denial isn't working.

Denial? That's the pot calling the kettle black. You're obviously still in denial about the future of Covid. No level of masking or isolation will make Covid "go away." There's no scientific advance on the horizon that will significantly reduce risk below what we can already do through vaccination. When it comes to Covid, this is, roughly speaking, as good as it gets. It doesn't make sense to continue with measures that we wouldn't be willing to put up with forever. For the vast majority of people, that means no masks. And it means staying home for fevers and other *clear* signs of a communicable infection, but carrying on with mild cold symptoms. When you look at China right now, and to a lesser extent the US with RSV last month, you see the problem with the indefinite infection avoidance strategy: you can't avoid it forever. You just delay it. And the longer you delay it, the more people there are that are vulnerable to reinfection with increasing levels of severity.

You're intellectualizing your anxiety to be back in "normal time" here, which is an understandable defense. It's a stark and unpleasant thing to know that we in fact are going to be living with COVID for the foreseeable future, and that it's going to be killing more people and disabling others and disrupting life quite a bit. The fact that it is stark and unpleasant and that the measures to mitigate all of these bad outcomes are a PITA have nothing to do with the fact that they are a good idea. They are.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:FTR - this is the result of trying to prevent transmission at all costs, indefinitely:

Feigl-Ding seems to see this as proof that zero COVID policies need to stay which seems crazy to me. They can't be sustained long term. They have massive human costs. And now 1 million + people are going to die very soon, many simply because the healthcare system is completely overrun. What was the point of it all?

Is their population not highly vaccinated? Ding is a fear mongerer. If he ever made accurate predictions, we’d all be dead of monkey pox by now.

No they do not have much immunity from vaccines because the Chinese vaccines were not great and there is a lot of vaccine hesitancy in the elderly population.

Ding is not the one predicting 1 million+ deaths, btw, he's just stating a widely reported projection.

The Chinese painted themselves into this corner. A population without much previous exposure to the virus, low vaccination rates (especially among the elderly) with a not-great vaccine, and insufficient hospital capacity. They screwed themselves with their policies, and now they have to live (or die) with their choices.

You really are not getting it. We are also going to be living with this. How much of the stuff in your house comes from a China that can't produce those things in an outbreak like this?

Okay. What do you want me to do about it? The Chinese screwed us at the beginning of the pandemic with their lying, and now they're the ones getting screwed. They have their government to blame for the mess they're in.

No. Now we are ALL being screwed. You can point the finger elsewhere as much as you want, but we are going to have impacts from this. We're in it together. That's how pandemics are.

At a certain point very early on it became impossible to contain the virus. Social distancing was a very costly way to reduce death while waiting for the vaccine. We could have reduced death more and possibly variants by getting more vaccines out to other countries. Beyond that there is no endgame. The virus surges and falls in ways that are largely out of our control without extreme, unsustainable measures.

Vaccines are not 100% so you need a combination of distancing, masking, vaccines and people staying home when sick. Denial isn't working.

Denial? That's the pot calling the kettle black. You're obviously still in denial about the future of Covid. No level of masking or isolation will make Covid "go away." There's no scientific advance on the horizon that will significantly reduce risk below what we can already do through vaccination. When it comes to Covid, this is, roughly speaking, as good as it gets. It doesn't make sense to continue with measures that we wouldn't be willing to put up with forever. For the vast majority of people, that means no masks. And it means staying home for fevers and other *clear* signs of a communicable infection, but carrying on with mild cold symptoms. When you look at China right now, and to a lesser extent the US with RSV last month, you see the problem with the indefinite infection avoidance strategy: you can't avoid it forever. You just delay it. And the longer you delay it, the more people there are that are vulnerable to reinfection with increasing levels of severity.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:FTR - this is the result of trying to prevent transmission at all costs, indefinitely:

Feigl-Ding seems to see this as proof that zero COVID policies need to stay which seems crazy to me. They can't be sustained long term. They have massive human costs. And now 1 million + people are going to die very soon, many simply because the healthcare system is completely overrun. What was the point of it all?

Is their population not highly vaccinated? Ding is a fear mongerer. If he ever made accurate predictions, we’d all be dead of monkey pox by now.

No they do not have much immunity from vaccines because the Chinese vaccines were not great and there is a lot of vaccine hesitancy in the elderly population.

Ding is not the one predicting 1 million+ deaths, btw, he's just stating a widely reported projection.

The Chinese painted themselves into this corner. A population without much previous exposure to the virus, low vaccination rates (especially among the elderly) with a not-great vaccine, and insufficient hospital capacity. They screwed themselves with their policies, and now they have to live (or die) with their choices.

So they can mandate people dont leave their homes, but they cant mandate a vaccine?

I’ve never understood this either.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:FTR - this is the result of trying to prevent transmission at all costs, indefinitely:

Feigl-Ding seems to see this as proof that zero COVID policies need to stay which seems crazy to me. They can't be sustained long term. They have massive human costs. And now 1 million + people are going to die very soon, many simply because the healthcare system is completely overrun. What was the point of it all?

Is their population not highly vaccinated? Ding is a fear mongerer. If he ever made accurate predictions, we’d all be dead of monkey pox by now.

No they do not have much immunity from vaccines because the Chinese vaccines were not great and there is a lot of vaccine hesitancy in the elderly population.

Ding is not the one predicting 1 million+ deaths, btw, he's just stating a widely reported projection.

The Chinese painted themselves into this corner. A population without much previous exposure to the virus, low vaccination rates (especially among the elderly) with a not-great vaccine, and insufficient hospital capacity. They screwed themselves with their policies, and now they have to live (or die) with their choices.

So they can mandate people dont leave their homes, but they cant mandate a vaccine?