Random Rant Thread

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I actually paid attention to Sweden's Covid policies from Day One. That's why I know Sweden counts deaths in a very different way from other countries in Europe, causing significant reporting delays, and you shouldn't compare those numbers to other countries' on the real time basis. But those herd immunity fanclub members haven't a clue. I cared a whole lot more about Sweden than any of those clueless fools. I may criticize the Swedish government for its flawed assumptions, but Swedes should understand *I* - unlike those fools supposedly idolizing Sweden - am their actual friend. Those idiots don't care. I say that Tegnell's stance on masks is inexcusable, because I actually care.

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I don't pretend that I've never flirted with the idea of natural herd immunity. You can even see some evidence of me kind of doing that in this thread. But I've been trying to be a good Bayesian. I update my belief based on new information. In other words, I've been trying not to be a hack. The best definition of a hack is an anti-Bayesian. A hack refuses to revise/change their belief/theory regardless of new information. Unfortunately there have been many "hacks" in this pandemic, and some of them actually run national/regional policies on Covid-19.

It's been months since it has become obvious that the idea of natural herd immunity is complete rubbish.

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I know for a fact that the field of medical science is actually surprisingly sloppy. AstraZeneca and Oxford clearly failed at their first step for winning confidence, but people shouldn't keep dunking on them like that. At least we should wait for a bit. Unless the vaccine turns out rubbish after more scrutiny, which I doubt, it is likely to play a significant role globally. Yes, AstraZeneca and Oxford only have themselves to blame, but I think it's counterproductive to jump on them as if they had committed felony or something. We should wait.

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The biggest problem with the vaccines is very, very obviously the fucking patents.

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You look at what's going on in Washington D.C. right now, and tell me the US presidential system - with its absolutely malfunctioning election procedures - is substantially different from The Ancien Régime. It relies so incredibly much on the personality of Mr. President. When it's a mega narcissist like Donald Trump, the whole government gets paralyzed. Just look at how pathetic Republicans are. Do they seem any different from Stalin's men back in the days?

The US presidential system has always been a fucking joke. It's a fucking Ottoman Empire in the New World. Donald with his utter idiocy exposed that fact very clearly.

And LOL at all that "pardon" business. 

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What's happening in the US is a sort of class warfare that is so dumb and unfortunate as to make Karl Marx highly depressed.

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If you lose more than 2,000 people a day for a single reason in the country that you govern, and don't even bother to lift a finger for that, you literally have no legitimacy whatsoever as government.

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The idea that a country with a Senate that has so much veto power while standing on the massive voter inequality on the scale of 40:1 is "anti-aristocratic" couldn't pass the giggle test, but that's what we have been forced to believe.

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One thing that many people don't seem to understand is the reasons for why the case number stays high for a very long time post-lockdown.

One reason is obviously that it takes time to reach the symptomatic phase. Today's numbers were baked in a while ago.

But even more importantly, lockdown doesn't stop household transmissions; It can rather accelerate them as everyone stays home.

Household is the single most reliable transmission setting, where people not only are close to each other for a very long time but also share various things including meals and the toilet. The general rule of only 20% reliably infecting others doesn't apply there. It's hard not to get infected by your sex partner, for one.

If you got infected a little before the first day of lockdown, it will take 3 to 14 days to reach the "window" - the period during which you are most infectious. After you start feeling symptoms and test positive, your wife/husband/child/parent/dog/cat will also be subsequently tested as "close contacts" of yours, and chances are that at least some of them also turn out positive.

That's how the case number stays high and refuses to come down for a while.

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This is a very important thread if you are American:

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This is extremely alarming. This means the actual situation there is a hell of a lot worse than the daily case/fatality numbers suggest.



I'm afraid that Sweden is once again failing to protect its elderly population. I hope the improved treatment will save the lives of most of them.

I know the government has been trying to shield elderly people, but it's not working. I know why it's not working.

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If everyone wears a mask, you'd only have to care about restaurants/bars, health care facilities, and household transmissions (and home parties), pretty much. Now, that wouldn't make it easy to deal with Covid-19, because those are the main infection factories with or without masks anyway. That's why every country except for some notable ones is struggling hard now.

But you can simplify your strategy with masks as they can eliminate random factors, and that can save tons of lives in the end. You KNOW where the clusters will occur, and can calculate how they would lead to more household transmissions and so on and on down the road. Health care facilities are the trickiest of all, but unless your country's system is as flawed as Japan's, if your hospitals have been streamlined to deal with Covid-19 patients completely separately, taking care of the clusters in restaurants/bars and household transmissions would naturally lift much of the burden off them.

That's the biggest thing about masks. They can simplify your strategy whether you do hard lockdown or not.

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I really don't know what to make of the mink issue in Denmark. It's impossible for me to blame the government.

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What a bunch of fools we were back in the late spring, talking about "partial immunity" and crap like that.

Come to think of it, there was no evidence at all for that "theory." We simply took it for granted that it works as neatly as it seems on paper.

With no evidence at all.

You can argue that it does slow down the spread to a degree, but tons of people are dying in Lombardy anyway. The difference is almost meaningless.

Everyone utterly misunderstood the *scale* of the things. To put it simply, even after so many deaths and tragedies, we STILL utterly underestimated SARS-CoV-2.

I realized the folly of the natural herd immunity theory back in the summer as I looked at the data from India and elsewhere (things simply didn't add up at all), but everyone should understand it as a huge, huge lesson on the danger of wishful thinking.

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Fully agreed.