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Corona / Covid-19 Virus - General Discussion (politics go to the Off Topic / Politics thread)

dublinpilot wrote:

Those who want to be protected are, and those who aren’t protected aren’t.

It’s not that simple. A noticeable number of people can’t be vaccinated, for medical reasons.

ESKC (Uppsala/Sundbro), Sweden

The genuine % is actually miniscule, and anyway the Q becomes: how much cost can be tolerated? In medicine it is normal to apply various cost-benefit formulae to this. All national health services use that as a criterion to decide whether to treat, or not. In the case of CV19, the media (and political opposition) frenzy has suspended this assessment, but it will have to return eventually.

The only Q is when. When does sanity return?

I should be free tomorrow, day 5 early release test Completely pointless, with 2 x vacc. £380 spent on tests. GBP 37BN spent on a track and trace system which was contracted out to Indian call centres. Same in every country in Europe, I am sure. Except the smarter smaller ones.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

In medicine it is normal to apply various cost-benefit formulae to this. All national health services use that as a criterion to decide whether to treat, or not.

Actually only if all “national health services” only refer to those entities that call themselves NHS. Because in most other countries you do not find that NICE approach.

In Germany, e.g. a new therapy “only” has to prove it is better than existing ones (sounds like a low hurdle but actually one too high for 95% of new drugs) you could actually ask for (almost) any price. No cost/benefit analysis.
Obviously there is an “informal” c/b analysis included in many medical treatment decisions, but rarely a formal one and most often done by individual physicians on individual cases…

Germany

No cost/benefit analysis.

That’s impossible.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

The reason I pay more for health care is because I can

I’m smiling about @Malibuflyer ‘s analogy between the scale of a national military force and national government attempts to control domestic individual behavior and borders using a healthcare issue as justification. The reason to have a strong military is for action overseas to prevent elimination of individual freedom within your own borders, either by foreign invasion or by the necessity for wartime domestic policy. It’s amusing that some in a foreign country where the US has helped eliminate that kind of government might subsequently conclude that the role of the US military would be to combat issues within the borders of our own country. The US doesn’t even have a significant national police force, and for very good reasons, and is generally intolerant of e.g. domestic National Guard actions. Thank God that’s the case, and for relatively weak Federal power, when seeing what US state governments did as a reaction to CV-19.

The US military in its current form was created to eliminate totalitarianism within the borders of your country, not ours, three times. Looking at Europe now the possibility of there being a fourth episode does not look entirely impossible, although I have a funny feeling that if that were to occur, the US would today choose to leave Europe ‘to the dogs’.

Last Edited by Silvaire at 10 Jun 15:30

Silvaire wrote:

The reason to have a strong military is for action overseas to prevent foreign powers from eliminating individual freedom within your borders, either by invasion or by the necessity for wartime domestic policy.

The reason to have a strong “covid response force” is to prevent a foreign virus from eliminating individual lives within your borders by the necessity for virustime domestic policy.

;-)

Germany

Malibuflyer wrote:

The reason to have a strong “covid response force” is to prevent a foreign virus from eliminating individual lives within your borders by the necessity for virustime domestic policy.

Huh? The ‘covid response force’ enacted by European governments, including the UK, is to shut down normal life, give themselves enormous new powers, impose unprecedented (for the UK at least, perhaps not for all) restrictions on individual behaviour, cripple the economy and spend many billions on chasing ghosts.

This is also the ‘virustime domestic policy’ to which you refer.

The point being made (I believe) was that a strong military force helps avoid your citizens at home being caught in the middle of a war and losing their freedoms. No European country’s virus response has done anything to keep the problem overseas or keep their citizens free.

EGLM & EGTN

dublinpilot wrote:

Those who want to be protected are, and those who aren’t protected aren’t.

Not that easy.

dublinpilot wrote:

The difficulty might be in the hospitals, but if there is a policy of “if no space capacity, then those with covid who refused the vaccine are at the back of the queue for a hospital bed” it might solve that.

That would be the way to do it but we all know it won’t happen this way. Hospital overload was the main concern for measures and if half the population snub the vaccine, then that problem is not solved. That btw is also the opinion of our health folks here. That is why those snubbing the vaccine will create a massive problem for everyone.

As long as the testing regime needs to stay in force, travel can’t resume anywhere close to what it used to be.

Silvaire wrote:

I’m laughing at the idea of educated journalists in 2021. I think anybody with reasonable intelligence and education has stopped listening to most of the nonsense they produce.

I would think there are huge differences between outlets and who they are. There is still quality journalism around, plenty of it, but quality is expensive and therefore a lot of it is behind paywalls. What is behind paywalls however is getting consumed by a very small readership, those wealthy enough to afford themselfs subscriptions and those intelligent enough to be able to digest the contents.

The large majority however reads free rags which in turn qualify for what you mention: Not necessarily uneducated journalists but the question is what are they educated for. In the days of Chronkite and similar, it was quality journalism, today it is how to generate income = clicks for the advertizers.

And the third cathegory: Those who work for networks with an agenda. They are educated all right but they need to work according to their employers wishes, or they are out. And of course again, there is a tremendous pressure on these chains to generate most of the traffic for advertizing.

I read a very interesting article about the goings on at Fox news after the 2020 election, when Fox at first was one of the first to declare the Biden victory but later on came back to the Big Lie theory with a massive backpaddeling, as they were loosing readership to more radical channels. Only one example, it works the other way around too, say with CNN, who used to be quite useful at one point but has also become totally partisan in recent years.

Add to that the purely entertainment channels whose news are really dumbed down enough that agendas are difficult to include.

The landscape in this has really not improved with Corona, even though at least in Europe, the lines have not been so clear as in other political issues. Mainly because nobody can win with this virus… but the dumbing down of science and exagerations have definitly not helped the situation.

LSZH(work) LSZF (GA base), Switzerland

I reckon I have worked out a couple of things about the UK track and trace system. Can’t prove it yet… will need more time

  • Nobody is checking the pre-return test. This is not surprising because the airline enforces this, with a £2000 fine on the airline if they carry you back home. If you find a way around this, you face a £500 fine. And I have not found any discussion anywhere of what happens to the poor buggers who test positive in say Greece, a day before they are due to fly back. Clearly there is a “procedure” but nobody talks about it. These tests are also difficult; it is a lateral flow test but needs to be supervised, and the kits you buy in the UK before you travel need a video session booked, but when you try to book this you find that … no slots are available for a few days! And I bet most people will leave this until the last day or so, since it must be done in the last 3 days of your stay abroad. Result: panic. But if you fly back GA, nobody checks anything.
  • When you come back, you have the day 2 and day 8 tests, with an additional day 5 test if you want to be free after day 5. These are PCR tests – expensive. You get a phone call every day, starting when you return home. The calls seem to end when they see you register the first negative test. So typically you will get a call on days 0, 1, 2 and on day 3 the day 2 result will be on the database so they don’t call you anymore. That is how I would set it up, for maximum effect. If you were setting up a system for maximum “catchment” (like the police set up speed traps on long straight downhill sections) then you would not bother to phone on any of the early days, and try to entrap people on the last day, preferably by turning up at their house. This reinforces the widespread belief that no prosecutions are actually being done for skipping the quarantine. It also enables the use of Indian call centres for the calls, and “low cost” people (who are too dumb to be usable as witnesses for a prosecution) for house visits. The calls have a CLI of 03001232008 and a google on that digs out all sorts of funny stuff.

I wonder how other countries have organised this stuff.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

dublinpilot wrote:

Those who want to be protected are, and those who aren’t protected aren’t.

Airborne_Again wrote:

It’s not that simple. A noticeable number of people can’t be vaccinated, for medical reasons.

I don’t mean it as callous as I say it – this is unfortunate, but unavoidable.

There is a noticeable number of people who

  • have inherited a propensity to develop certain cancers.
  • have immune deficiencies that makes them susceptible to lethal disease.
  • have allergies which mean they cannot be treated with certain antibiotics and they will die of bacterial infections when others survive

So there will be people who cannot be vaccinated or where vaccination is ineffective, many of which will catch Covid-19, and some of them will die.

We have beaten back Covid to a level where the death rate is just background noise. The EU and US averages are less than 10 deaths per week per 100k, which is around 0.5% of all recorded deaths (of 100k people, around 2,000 die every week). The UK average is 1/10th of that, 1 death per week per 100k, or around 0.05% of all deaths. [all figures as usual from here

The increasingly untenable justification to keep restrictions in place is the increasingly irrational fear of another runaway “wave”.

US vs. UK is a fantastic case example. the US, compared to the UK, has a similar vaccination rate and comparatively few restrictions. It has 10x the death rate, which at 0.5% of all deaths is negligible. Yet we have politicians wringing their hands whether to “open up” in two weeks.

Biggin Hill
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