Totally agree with this. Except, only around 15% of unvaccinated people become seriously ill, or require hospitalization. So, definitely not most. Our immune response is the same, whether you are vaccinated or not. Except it's response is a little quicker. History and the population stats, do not support the theory that there is any direct causal relationship between even the strictest lockdowns and the spread of any virus. And remember, all mutated strains of the original virus will always be weaker in some respects, from its original virus.
If you want these things to happen, simply tell your leaders this. They actually work for you. Aren't all vaccines free to the public in the US?
No person in their right mind would agree that locking down 26M people indefinitely is a good and practical solution for stopping/reducing/diminishing the spread of this virus. Yet, this is what the government's intelligent solution has been for the last 19 months. Once people started realizing just how intrusive, restrictive, and invasive these policies were, cops needed to received new mandates to force people to comply. New laws were created to be enforced.
No matter how many tautologies you can come up with, you can't have it both ways. Either you support this manufactured idea that this virus is so dangerous, that any government action or policies are completely justified. Or, you believe that our personal freedoms are far more important than any threat of our being infected. Especially from a virus that is no more lethal than the measles. Or, a virus where only around 1% of the population is even infected(in Australia). Of which 98% have fully recovered. Once you can see past all the fear-mongering, half-truths, and theatrics, this insanity will become much clearer.
This is so good to hear Seth. I seriously doubt that any real cop with any social consciousness would ever consider not wearing a mask, keeping 2 meters apart, congregating in groups(churches, weddings, birthdays, funerals, etc.), or refusing to be vaccinated, as a criminal offence. So, good on them. And, I hope that their actions will speak louder than their words.
With respect Seth, you are just making another argument from ignorance. Do you really think that in Australia, we can enforce the wearing of masks, or the monitoring of social-distancing, any better than you can in the US? I will agree, that we seem to have far more sheep in Australia, than in America. But, more and more Australians are starting to come out of the closet and resist this nonsense. This is the raw verifiable data.
45.4M total infected in the US / 330M total population of the US = 0.137 Or 13.7% of the US population.
The rest would just be speculation without facts or data.
I just don't get it. What are you clinging to?
You have a mortality rate of 1.6%(1.1 in Australia). This means that 98.4% of Americans will recover(99.9% in Australia). This fact should end any argument of how deadly this virus is.
Noting that 86.3% of 330M Americans(99.5% in Australia) are not even infected, should have ended any argument about this virus's virulence over the last 22 months.
The sheer numbers of unvaccinated recoveries(before/after vaccines), should have ended the argument regarding the effectiveness of vaccines.
Mandating vaccines for even recovered Covid-19 victims, who already have the best antibodies for Covid-19, makes this argument even more ridiculous.
The idea of man fighting to protect people against a microorganism smaller than the wavelength of light is just ludicrous at best.
The understanding of genetic-based vaccines, and artificially-induced antibodies, makes the choice of using this vaccine almost a no-brainer. Except for those in the high-risk categories.
What are people clinging to? Certainly not the facts. I just don't get it. Why are you peddling compliancy in spite of these facts? It is the people who have the power to change things. The government is counting on the people's apathy, ignorance, and indifference. And, through their media and print outlets, they will continue to control how the people think, and what the people think. Remember, their political livelihood depends on keeping the people confused and ignorant. The less the people know, the better for them. But I can only, "..lead a horse to water...".
So I bolded and colored the things I want to respond to. I think you'll find that my responses are somewhat nuanced rather than being just black and white, yes or no, answers. In order ...
First one: My understanding of how the virus lives and spreads is that it is transmitted from person to person through the droplets we exhale. My understanding is that the virus cannot live very long outside a living body. So it's not like it just floats around like pollen or dust, covering large distances and continuing to live. If I am infectious and I exhale, I don't think the virus I exhale is going to float 20 miles and infect someone on the other side of the county. My understanding is that there needs to be some level of proximity between the exhaled virus and the person who inhales the virus from that person for it to cause an infection because, outside the body, the virus has a short life span.
If this is true, then it is simply logical that limiting interaction between people will result in fewer infections than by not limiting those interactions. Oregon is a good case study. Last summer, the rate of infection got low enough that our governor ended virtually all precautions - masking, distancing, gathering. People breathed a sigh of relief and started going back to normal. Almost immediately, we saw infections, hospitalizations, and deaths spike up, and she reinstated the restrictions. You may recall me talking about overloaded hospitals and ICUs a while back. That was during that spike. That was also when I got Covid. Since then, infections have gone down to a more manageable level. Nationally, we saw the same thing in Nov-Dec of 2020. What were people doing? They were traveling and gathering for the holidays. They had been locked down for most of the year, and they wanted to get together for the holidays, and unsurprisingly, infections spiked up.
And finally on this point, is there any country in the free world with more draconian restrictions on its population than Australia? And is there any country in the free world with a lower rate of infection than Australia?
So for these reasons, I don't agree with you that there is no causal relationship between lockdowns and infection rates. I think that the more you limit contact with other people, the lower the infection rate.
Don't take that as blanket approval of these measures. I'm going to get to that. For the purposes of this part of our discussion, I think it is just an objective fact that by limiting contact with other people, you reduce the infection rate.
Second one: This is that black and white assertion you make. "Either you support ... or you don't." It's not that simple.
In early 2020 when we were first becoming aware of this disease, we didn't know what we were dealing with. I remember my own thoughts back then. They were sort of "ho hum", another Asian virus that will come and go. Well I was wrong. We also didn't know how lethal this disease might turn out to be. We didn't know if it was like the "black death" that would take out half the population or if it would be like the flu or something in between. We just didn't know, but we did start hearing about deaths, and, of course, there were no vaccines for this. It also sounded like medical science was taken by surprise by this, existing medicines were not effective, and the best thing doctors seemed to be able to do for the seriously ill was to put them on a ventilator, and even then, people were dying.
So it made sense
then to institute precautions like social distancing, masking, and restricting gatherings. Back then, with so little knowledge about this disease, I and the general public agreed with restrictions. I can remember that there was a run on all kinds of supplies because people were planning on locking down in their homes for the long run, without being ordered to by the government. I can remember normally busy freeways during rush hours being almost empty. The government wasn't forcing this; people were locking down because they wanted to lock down.
Now, 22 months later, we know this disease pretty well. We know that it isn't the "black death" that is going to decimate us. We know that most healthy unvaccinated people can survive this. We know that vaccinated people can have shorter illness time and that their survivability rate is very good, significantly better than for unvaccinated people. About 58% of the U.S. is now fully vaccinated and that percentage continues to rise. We also know that just under 14% of the population has had Covid, so whatever percentage of those people are not vaccinated can be added to the percentage of vaccinated people as being somewhat protected from this disease. Now, there are vaccinations for children and booster shots for people who are already vaccinated.
So, as I've said over and over, it's time to get back to normal. We can go back to normal because of what we know now that we didn't know then. We can go back to normal because we can reasonably understand that the majority of healthy unvaccinated people can survive this disease, or you can proactively defend against it by getting vaccinated. And we also understand who is most vulnerable to this disease - the elderly and people with compromised immune systems - and we can take precautions to protect them.
So, you see, it's not a black and white choice between fear of the disease and personal freedom. It is taking reasonable precautions according to the situation. Look, do you want to live in a bomb shelter for the rest of your life? Of course not. But if you were living in London in WW2, and the German bombers were coming, would you go to a bomb shelter? Yes, but you're not going to stay there forever. It's sort of the same thing.
So that is the nuance I mentioned earlier. Then was then. Now is now. They are not the same.
You also stated in that paragraph that Covid is no more lethal than measles. But what I notice is that you didn't compare Covid to the flu. In the U.S. between 2010 and 2020 the number of annual deaths from complications from the flu varied from 12-52,000. But in 22 months we've had 756,000 deaths from complications related to Covid.
So let's not kid ourselves. Covid
is a more serious disease than the flu.
So we were right to take precautions and accept restrictions initially. But that was then, and times have changed.
Third one: Apparently Australia
does enforce the restrictions far more stringently than we do in the U.S. That is my impression from listening to you guys and from reading about it. And yes, your population is far more compliant with those restrictions than Americans are - a cultural difference between our two countries. You are/were an American, and that cultural difference shows in your writings, btw.
Fourth one: I've already pretty much addressed the issue of how deadly this disease is. We know a lot more about it now than we did when it first emerged. It may be no more deadly than measles, as you say, but it is more deadly than the common flu by a long shot. It should be neither underestimated or overestimated.
Last one: You should be able to glean from my writings that I am not "peddling compliancy." I am peddling reasonable, measured precautions to a threat, especially when we don't understand the threat, and when we didn't know if we had any real defense against it. I am peddling that now that we understand the threat, now that there have been medical advances, now that we do have a proactive defense to the threat if we choose to take it, we can and should go back to normal. It's time for your country to take down the roadblocks and checkpoints and police enforcement, and go back to normal.
In the U.S., the big debate now is over vaccination mandates. Basically, people are being told to vaccinate or be fired from their jobs, this being led and backed up by the Biden administration. I heartily oppose this. I am pro
voluntary vaccination, but I am anti-mandate under threat. We understand the threat this virus poses, we have defenses against it, and we don't need to be firing people. As you might expect, there is a lot of resentment and push-back in the U.S. on vaccination mandates.
Final note: I believe the vaccination helped me greatly when I got Covid last July. I felt like my body's defenses were able to go into hyper-drive to wipe it out very quickly. I didn't even pass it to my wife, even though I know I was infected for several days before I felt sick.
I assume I should now have natural antibodies against the disease, but there doesn't seem to be any consensus (yet) on how long those antibodies stick around. A booster shot is now coming available, and I am planning on getting it.
I'm 66, and I work part time in an educational setting. This puts me at a higher risk of infection than people who work alone or in a small group. I worked with a class of 40 students all day last Monday and Wednesday, and on Thursday we were notified that one of the students had just tested positive. It will be interesting to see if more of them come down with it, or if it will be limited to just that one. When that happened last July, 25% of the class all got it (and me), and they postponed the whole class, and sent them all home for a month or so. (Btw, I feel fine 4 days later, so I don't think I got infected again.) But because of the risk I take by working, I'm not going to rely on the waning effectiveness of the vaccination I got last February or my own natural defenses when I don't know how long they will last. I'm going to get the booster.
As far as I'm concerned, the original vaccination did no harm, and it helped when I got sick. For me, this is a calculation of risk/reward, and getting the booster is the choice I'm going to make.
Seth