Topic: Coronavirus outbreak

@Tasuki @Eel You're right. Good looking out, guys

I don't think there's actually as many people who don't believe its a thing as you suggest at all (though there's WAAAAAAY too many people who do, don't get me wrong). I think a lot of people genuinely don't think they're gonna catch it. "eh, I probably won't, it'll be fine, what are the odds?" Doubly so when you make the "reasonable" assumption that healthy people who aren't too old generally survive it. (some of you should look into the health issues people have had beyond surviving the virus...)

Even as someone who IS being careful, I kind of have a similar mentality that I'm probably gonna be fine, even if I wasn't. But I'm not an idiot either. Especially thinking about things in hindsight. Like I went to Pax East when this was really becoming a thing (Pax East would've been cancelled had it happened 2 weeks later, keep that in mind), and I got sick...somehow. Because its PAX, that's just expected. But it was thankfully a normal cold, and I think about how lucky I am about that.

@NEStalgia The economy in America no longer makes any sense to me. It's not free market capitalism - not how I learned it. The government wont allow Wall Street to fail. They'll loot tax payers and print money until the sun cools, if that's what it takes. 13-14% unemployment? Nation wide protests? 112k dead from a pandemic that's put hundreds of thousands more people than normal into the hospital system? National debt soaring through the stratosphere?

Stocks rise! Everyone buy buy buy!

I have to say the America I was taught about in school and the America I faced as an adult when I graduated 10 years ago are not the same nation. When I left my bubble I learned that the shining city on the hill is a lie. American Exceptionalism is nothing but propaganda, and the US is just another player on the board, with some strengths, admittedly, and some very serious weaknesses too. One of the latter being an inability to even talk about those weaknesses without simply being labeled "anti-American".

This pandemic really drove the point home though. There are serious, fundamental cracks in American culture that I don't know if society will ever be able to overcome.

Take this with a pile of salt, but I've heard through the rumor mill here that the virus might have been in my general region way earlier than it was thought. Before everything was shut down and wide testing was only a dream, a woman and her husband both fell ill. They thought it was the flu, but all results came back negative. The doctors just put it down to one of those random seasonal bugs, and they both recovered over time. They were tested sometime later after they started thinking about their symptoms and were found to have the antibodies corresponding to Covid.

Interesting news that reinforces my idea that shutting down for awhile was a wise move, but now I'm worried that some will take such news as "See? It was already here. Most people didn't die. It isn't that critical" and go about their merry business. And maybe, to play devil's advocate for a sec, in some areas it may have been a bit much. But isn't playing it safe more preferable to being sorry that you accidentally passed the virus to your neighbor's best friend's cousin's grandpa?

@Heavyarms55 You might have something there with the tinfoil hat theorists and believers being less of a minority than they should be, though I do think it's still a minority overall. A very loud, vocal minority that unfortunately believes everything they read on the internet. Because everything online is true! DoctorMcSantaConspiracy told me so!

Honestly, while I'm not a fan of the governor of my state by any means, I do believe he has handled this pandemic well. I have some disagreements about how his reopening plan is proceeding (which I believe I've mentioned in here before), but overall I think the cautious approach he's taking is wise. Part of that is due to how critically hard the major city nearly everyone can point to on a map has been hit.

I do appreciate the sentiment sir, there are plenty of ignominious hills to die on but free speech looks pretty nice in the evening. Certainly there is also a place for healthy moderation of said discussion, to best serve the communal good of these message boards. Diversity of perspective in recent times has been seen increasingly as problematic, which is odd considering nobody can alter the neurons in the brain subversively through a message. As some have pointed out: it's much better to give platform to those voices which are most disagreeable, in order to give them the space with which to destroy themselves through bitter invective. I don't therefore see any decency in silencing or shaming others for their viewpoints. The latter is more prone to create permanent stratification in how human beings view each other. If you will not grant your compatriot the decency and platform to be heard, it essentially castrates his inner expression. Which leads to irreparable divides - when the pen becomes dull the sword and arm begin to see eye to eye.

Let's save all the philosophical discussions about American freedoms and castration for another forum, y'all. If this forum gets problematic or political, I'll have to close it.

@ Zelda fan person, please stop. If you insist on posting with the intention of provoking other users, you'll receive a temporary ban.

Yeah fair enough, banter aside I'm not sure there is much else I would or should add to the discussion.

It's usually not very convenient to make detailed points in the comment section nor am I particularly a presence on the forums. Usually when engaging with a topic my brain works through all the odd synonyms it has collected, which has the split effect of making my point while occasionally alienating the same audience. But mostly it's therapeutic to write, especially after a long day of working.

EDIT

The motion to chill discussion is well heeded; I was hoping that Zelda fan was in fact the NES admiral... Essentially about 5 paragraphs of calling him a jerk, a bit of a murderer, and indifferent to his family and the world at large.

Yes oh great and wise moderator i shall withdraw my opinions and retreat to whatever dank pee pee soaked heck hole i crawled out of! My profound apologies!

Btw please do close this topic! It's no better than a religious discussion or otherwise controversial topic. These formus should be about gaming!

@Zeldafan79 thanks, glad we could get to an understanding.

I'll leave it open for people who want to stay informed and talk about the evolution of the situation.

However if the need arises, of course we will close it.

@OptometristLime haha guess you read my post before I edited it. Hopefully it didn't seem too jabby, sometimes my comments come out like that and I end up editing them.

@Tyranexx yeah, I don't think they are the majority by any means. Just that they are a far greater number than logic might suggest. And too many to simply brush off.

@WoomyNNYes Alot of people blur the lines which is very annoying. Stupid conspiracy theorist think because the government asks something of you it's obviously evil. Like for some stupid reason wearing a mask during a pandemic is taking away people's rights. But yeah I agree if people are going to be stupid might as well close this thread.

Well that theory now has 10 times the amount of force behind it, given how many people in places of "authority" supported the various protests going on, and failed to criticize them at all for the lack of social distancing.
A lot of people lost complete trust due to that, and it really has made it look like there was always some kind of insidious motivation behind the shutdown. (I'm not agreeing that there actually was, but it's certainly possible to interpret it that way now)
This only applies to the US of course. Other countries have been more consistent.

@kkslider5552000 I agree, and that's really more of what i meant. Yeah there are the people that really think the whole thing is a fictional entity of the NWO, clearly people that haven't been where it's been bad and seen for themselves. But mostly it's the people that think it's nothing but flu and they won't get it and everything will be fine when they do. I think this made up the majority. A mix of as heavy and i discussed early, the media has cried wolf for over a decade. So now that the wolf is here, everyone's trained that a media screaming wolf is something to ignore that represents no real threat to you. That's the biggest problem. The other problem is wishful thinking. "I want it to be over, i want it to be safe now, i want it to go away for summer, i want it to only affect old sick people so it won't affect me.". And there's always some wing of media that will confirm for them with some accredited professional whatever they want to believe. Just a few weeks ago a top doctor at who said asymptomatic spread is very rare. The same who who didn't recognize the threat at all in china for 3 months. Then they walked it back when it was pointed out there's no evidence of that and endless evidence to the contrary. Specifically: it wouldn't have spread around the world in 2 months if that were true.

But you bet people watched onto that. I know people in more rural states that never understood the problem. Set vacations for summer because it would be gone then (even after endless testimony that it would have no effect, and florida and nola demonstrated that very clearly). People genuinely believe there is no threat. And that means its more dangerous now than any time since Feb, but people don't want to believe that because it looks fine.

And yeah the mentality is "so I'll get sick".. they don't seem to know what misery that entails of you're one of the bad cases, and the death numbers don't tell you that. Even if you "live" you might wish you didn't. But the numbers don't show that.

Here in general ny area back in March, nobody cared. Wasn't a problem here. Never would be. Sure cases were showing up. In italy and china and seattle, people were dying, but nobody died on this coast... Therefore there was no problem here! The day one person died on the coast the graphs show the panic shopping kicked into high gear within hours. That's the mentality of the public. Even if the disease is in my cubicle, it's fine here, because the only deaths have been more thean 100 miles from here so nobody's dying here, so the same disease that is here is totally safe when it's here. How do you fix that mentality? Now we have "it's summer so it's safe".

By Thanksgiving well be in total lockdown again. But worse because with no false hope next time, the economy is fully hosed.

@Tyranexx they did that study in NY a while back. They estimated 15% of manhattan had covid at some point. That's a LOT of cases. Yet still nowhere close to letting it get fully unleashed on everyone. And that was a lot of body bags.

Anecdotally in the nyt article on it (back when media talked about it at all) a commenter that's an nyu professor said in feb half his students looked half dead and he was sanitizing everything and not touching papers before they were ever taking covid because he didn't want whatever that was. Numerous other commenters in ny posted about them or their kids really sick, some hospitalized, for weeks in feb/jan and doctors making it down as "unidentified virus". So yeah... If it was everywhere in ny it was everywhere everywhere.

China's timeline didn't match. They said December. But to hit the concentration they hit it had to be sept/oct it started.

But it also shows how few people were hospitalized or dead compared to how many had it.

It's almost like the "authority" figures and "experts" have been completely wrong on so many things these last 4 years, it's hard not to be sceptical. That's not to say don't listen to the experts, but trusting them is a fool's game.

I take it “these last 4 years” is a reference to Trump?

Let's stop that there

@Dezzy i also agree with that, btw. This started with political allegiance determining your reaction to a plague (imagine if black death worked that way. I support king louis, so we'll be fine!) And people were already ignoring things, but once the protests started, media found their new political darling they've searched for for decades and the interest in economy first made a good case for pretending there's no problem, and the public saw that pretending there's no problem is now ok. And for some reason nobody is worried about the nightmare that opens up..... Let's just open the airlines! Their ceo said its fine. And his medical professionals are worried but pfft ignore them book your getaway today!

I'm curious though why it's not ballooning faster than it is. More we don't know about spread still? Or the summer lull is real? (It's winter in brazil and india). Still bodes very badly for fall either way. And as ty said, people are now used to "ignore it, everything is fine"

It's also notable to mention one, non peer reviewed study jointly done with China and a texas university that showed only 5% of medical workers in wuhan had antibodies, while 25% or more of those in the study were likely infected. Meaning the body may not produce long term immunity. Meaning you just keep getting it over and over forever if it's out and about everywhere. If that turns out to be true, it's not the rosy picture of a good life on earth, even if nobody died ever from it and why merely "flattening the curve" was never going to be enough.

I'm still kind of annoyed about the complete NOTHING that was Net Neutrality. The number of people who jumped on that bandwagon to scare monger was insane, and literally nothing happened.

Of course no-one says "Yeah sorry I accidentally sided with loads of big tech monopolies because I was a useless idiot." Everyone just quietly doesn't bring it up.

@Spanjard It's a brand new virus. It takes months to get some understanding of a brand new virus, and takes a year to collect the data for a fuller understanding. It takes "expert" medical researchers to organize very controlled conditions to get reliable info to find safe treatments, or a develop a safe vaccine - which there's still no guarantee a vaccine will work. Many vaccines are being made right now around the world, hoping one, or more, will work.

While we know some things about the brand new virus, expect new found information to refine understanding and help find treatments and ways to get us back to normal. It's not a failure to find new & better information. That's progress. That's dedication and hard work. So, saying "experts" "were wrong", isn't a fair characterization. Historically speaking, finding a treatment for covid's deadly symptoms, or vaccine, could take well over year.