Random Rant Thread

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I can assure you that in a few years, we'll actually analyze all the mortality data in all countries, and prove comprehensively and definitively that all of these "excess deaths are few everywhere!" morons were laughably wrong.

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We will have to deal with Covid-19 for years and years to come no matter what. SARS-CoV-2 is a coronavirus. It won't just disappear, even with the vaccines.

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There are a few places in the hot spot countries in Europe that have been doing relatively well in this second wave, and Bergamo is one of them.

In that Lombardian region, nearly one out of 150 people have already died of Covid-19. Everyone in Bergamo knows someone who passed away due to Covid-19. Everyone. The spring fatality rate was about as bad as it was back in 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic.

And, with that, they only achieved partial herd immunity, around 40-50%. The region's positivity rate is about half of the national average in Italy, which means not even close to zero. So, people are still testing positive, and dying, albeit on a much smaller scale than in the spring.

Chew on this.

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We should talk about ventilation, quality masks, dining etiquette, and all the other precautions, but also remember one very important thing: Healthy lifestyle.

Not in the spiritual woo-woo sense, but in the "don't eat crap" sense, "sleep well" sense.

Just be as healthy as possible. Most of the long-haulers that I know got Covid when they were stressed/overworked/tired. It really matters.

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The funny thing is that those anti-lockdown warriors casually disregard individual choices despite talking incessantly about "individual liberty." They argue as if people only react to whatever the governments say. That's basically what they inadvertently argue when they bring up instances where cases fall without lockdowns in order to prove those measures "don't matter," that Covid-19 is merely "seasonal" and thus totally beyond our control.

When cases rise, people react. They stop doing some of the things that they normally would do. Mobility goes down, to varying degrees, even without local measures. And at some point, cases start going down due to what is in effect a massive voluntary social distancing campaign, which does amount to a lot in aggregate even if all each individual does is reduce their daily activities a bit. And in the communities where the population are slow/reluctant to react, they end up paying a huge price in the form of government-enforced sever restrictions or/and health care collapse/deaths.

This "voluntary action" pattern is fairly acute, and clear to see in countries like Japan, where the government doesn't even have the authority to impose business closure. The Japanese react to spikes very quickly and change their behaviors accordingly. Mobility goes way, way down as soon as they occur. The data show that this factor of voluntary mobility decline is much larger in Japan than in most other countries.

Lockdowns are basically state-mandated powerful social distancing, the ultimate mobility killer when you can't rely anymore on the population making sound decisions on the individual level as the health care system would be clearly pushed to its limit soon. They are performance enhancing drugs against an epidemic - well, actually, it's worse than that. It's a cheat, bringing a sword into a kickboxing match.

That lockdowns don't matter because cases "naturally" go down without them is a stupid argument; There is nothing "naturally" about the decline unless you think people don't make individual choices voluntarily in response to the environment. If everyone just gallantly carries on with their normal life, it won't go down "naturally"; Well, actually it will *eventually*, but at a tremendously huge cost. The case (and fatality) trajectory would look like a nasty sigmoid curve that drags on and on forever.

Cases tend to plateau relatively quickly in Japan because the population act almost like there was some kind of tacit mild lockdown after spikes of cases, and even then the cases fall more slowly in Japan than in the countries that enforced an actual lockdown, demonstrating the limits of voluntary actions. The "ambient" infection level (undetected virus carriers) has been probably fairly high in Japan throughout this pandemic, a lot higher than in South Korea for example, but the people here have been repeatedly doing the outbreak whack-a-mole to prevent them from going completely out of control, at least so far.

Can that be described as cases "going down naturally"? I don't think so. A lockdown would definitely help Japan too if it were economically viable and legally possible.

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No one wants to do a fucking lockdown. Be damned if you do, and damned if you don't. Be damned even if successful, because then they would start bitching about how it was an "excessive measure" in stupid hindsight. They can say that as a lockdown fucking succeeds in slowing the spread and lifting the pressure off the health care system.

"You said the hospitals would be overrun, but they aren't!"

Good grief.

Who the hell would bother to do a lockdown just to take your useless fucking "liberty" away from you? Stop being hysterical children. Adults are busy.

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We are extremely lucky that SARS-CoV-2 is basically an ordinary coronavirus in itself, not some avant-garde weird-ass virus like HIV. That's why those drugmakers were able to produce the vaccines almost immediately. The labs already had near-sufficient knowledge thanks to SARS (SARS-CoV-1) and MERS too.

And throw in the fact that we sucked at slowing the spread, which made it possible to finish vaccine trials very quickly as the volunteers got Covid left and right everywhere in a short amount of time. Quite a few volunteers in the placebo group had to get real sick for the Phase III trials to finish so soon. That couldn't be easily done with the flu and other viral diseases.

You never know we will be this "lucky" next time.

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It's telling that the arguments made by anti-lockdown warriors and anti-maskers are remarkably similar in structure to the ones made by anti-vaxxers to "prove" that vaccines raise the child mortality rates. They are both rife with cherry-picking data from all over the place and most importantly endless streams of ecological fallacies.

The fact that many scholars and even Nobel laureates in science (just a few, though) easily fall for them and end up ruining their credibility ought to be a lesson for everyone. It's particularly tragic because those scientists/scholars are the last kind of people who can say, "I'm sorry I was probably wrong." They simply keep doubling down all the way into the crank hell.

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Sweden's Covid death figure almost always seems on the decline because they report deaths in a peculiar way. The government reports deaths by the date on which they occurred, not by the date on which they were reported (which is the orthodox way everywhere).

That may be a good way for accurate public registration, but an extremely awful way for real-time data analyses.

Since there is a lag between the time a person dies and the time the death is reported, the death counts for the most recent period are ALWAYS incomplete.

For example, the deaths on Nov. 5-7 were as follows on Nov. 10:

4 5 5

Then they were updated retroactively on Nov. 17:

13 16 14

Then on Nov. 24:

22 25 26

You can never trust their recent numbers - even as far back as two weeks ago! - because they are always incomplete, often VERY incomplete. Sweden is the only country that does this as far as I know.

That confused the hell out of me earlier this year. This is what I was talking about in a previous rant. People who talk about Sweden without even knowing this are basically clueless cranks.

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There are just so many cranks everywhere. Denying this, denying that.

Think of climate change, for which there will be no vaccines. These motherfuckers will be at it again, and multiply like cockroaches.

Part of the reason why I've been ranting a lot about anti-lockdown warriors and herd immunity twits for the last couple of days is that I'm increasingly worried about the future.

It's a gigantic irony that Greta's Sweden happens to have become the magnet to attract the kind of contrarian dipshits many or even most of whom will definitely attempt to fuck up our policies on climate change as well.

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Most of the people who voted for Trump genuinely liked his tax cuts and other very Republican policies. They voted for George W., McCain and Romney. It was no brainer for them to vote for Trump too. They didn't give a shit about his stupid tweets.

It's hilarious that most of the hot takes out there on Trump effectively erase tens of millions of such people.

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One thing that I've never publicly admitted but will admit here is that Hillary Clinton was pretty spot on about Obama's flaws in 2008 primaries. She pointed out a lot of negative things about Obama that would turn out to be true later during the Obama administration.

She basically called Obama a shallow poser who is reluctant to rock the boat and doesn't really have a fight in his heart. Harsh, but kind of nailed it to be honest.

Not that I couldn't see Obama's problems, and I think she would've been a worse president than Obama, but credit where credit is due.

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Yes, Belgium is the world's worst Covid shithole according to the official deaths per capita, although it has clearly turned the corner now.

But like I said many times, never forget that Belgium counts "suspected Covid-19 deaths" as well. Your country most likely doesn't.

It is definitely one of the worst hotspots, but you must take the figure with *some* grain of salt.

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Tegnell is STILL going on with the "false sense of security" crap, even on PPE for staff at nursing homes.

What the fuck are Swedish sociologists doing? How come they let him get away with that crap?

Incredible. He's killing elderly people with that nonsense. The guy's really something else. He should have no credibility left whatsoever.
 
I don't expect people like him to ever back down on their own unless there's social/political pressure to force them to, but I suppose that's strangely absent in Sweden now. That's why I called it a mass delusion. That can happen without authoritarianism/totalitarianism. Tragic.

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