> Australia had a manhunt over 3 teenagers who escaped the quarantine camp which made international news.
Thanks, I didn't hear about that.
> Over what is essentially a flu, which we knew from the data at the time.
Maybe 1000 people had prior exposure to a SARS clade coranavirus. And if you think they are essentially the same you certainly haven't been reading the news and analysis that I have.
In the US, over the last 30 years approximately the same number of people have died "with" COVID as have died "with" the flu. COVID's only been around 1/10th the time.
> I also remember CNN not touching the lab-leak "because Trump" and with a straight face they claim it's his fault they're not doing their jobs and getting to the truth.
Yes, CNN is biased up the wazoo. But at that point it rationally didn't matter the cause, but nipping this in the bud the best we could. The cause, and even lists of potential causes, are important to prevent future patient zeroes. And given all of the crap that's happened with wildlife to human transmission in the past (SARS 1, MERS, metapneumovirus, bird flu, swine flu, mpox, hemorrhagic viruses) there are other important avenues of transmission to deal with in addition to safe laboratory and sample collection practices.
> I remember press conferences telling vaccinated people not to hug their unvaccinated loved ones. Why not when it's 100%, 95%, 90%, kind of%, maybe% effective?
Injected vaccination (getting a shot into your muscle) was only really going to help with duration of symptoms (potentially shutting COVID down when it's just the sniffles, if you're lucky). It's much worse at preventing transmission than mucosal vaccination is. If you want to protect others, wear a mask. If you want to protect yourself, a quality mask is better, but a vaccine is okay.
> and there's a reason it just disappeared almost overnight.
Yeah, I was really pissed when the California government dropped both masking and social distancing at the same time, just in time for Delta to hit, once the first vaccines had been out for ~ 3 months.
I'm also pissed at the wishy-washyness of talking heads when asked whether masks are recommended again around the holiday season. Well fitting and well used masks are superior to vaccination. If you're willing to use them, then use them! If you're only willing to use them when someone else says it's a good idea...I just really don't get it.
> Australia had a manhunt over 3 teenagers who escaped the quarantine camp
Various Australian states isolated from each other, Australia as a whole isolated from the world - anybody that chose to travel across the international borders or across the particular state borders knew in advance they would have to isolate for 10 to 14 days.
The vast majority of Australian citizens had no issue with isolation and saw it as neccesary to prevent worse outbreaks (which it did) a large proportion of isolation was self isolation at home, or in hotels.
"The quarentine camp" wasn't where three teenagers "escaped from" (where "escape" == left when they shouldn't have (no evading armed guards after scaling barbed wire topped walls with search lights)) it was a facility set up as an airlock for international travel - dongas (transportables) in the outback and despite looking a bit grim was entirely comfortable for anyone used to FiFo (Fly In | Fly Out) work (ie. many Australians) - I stayed there twice having chosen to travel overseas for work.
There were a lot of youtube | social media supercuts of horrific conditions in Australia put together by people that didn't like the measures taken - these were pretty much all highly selective presentations with tight shots of relatively small groups of protesters and some Olympic level whinging.
I see you're trying to downplay the situation, but these teens literally had to climb the barbed wire fence that surrounded the camp. According to this article[1] they even tested negative the day before, yet couldn't leave.
If I recall the situation correctly they weren't traveling, but Aboriginals with no means to self-isolate from their families so they were taken into quarantine.
Your efforts to downplay this is what is so extremely scary about humans today. Before covid I thought another Hitler (yes I went there) was impossible, but now that I've seen how quickly people turn on each other and shut off their brains I'm not so sure. It taught me a lot about fascism for "the greater good" and how otherwise reasonable and sane people turn bat-shit insane with enough fearmongering.
There have been plenty of people who, proportionate to what they could do, were worse than Hitler. Whenever a group of people assert that their rights can only come about through the policing of another group of people you face this possibility.
I'm surprised you didn't come to this conclusion beforehand given the large history of people being retained in custody or prison despite being innocent or the state otherwise not having the right to detain them.
False negative tests do exist. But yes, power differentials of any sort do easily lead to 'letter of the law' situations.
My point is not about the individual, it's about the average Jane and Joes putting them in charge and asking them to commit atrocities. I used to have faith in humanity but I lost it in those years.
I spent the majority of "the COVID years" within Australia and overall relatively few people were held anywhere with barbed wire fencing, most people understood why quarentine periods were required to stop the spread of infection despite which there were multiple instances of little pockets here and there of people that either didn't understand or were determined to break quarantine for whatever reason.
An isolation period is exactly that - a period of time in which checks are made to ensure there is no infection.
These particular teens that you linked to could have waited a few days and walked out or broken quareantine - they chose to break quarentine.
( At this point there's a massive essay to insert on the clumsy handling by NT authorities of most things indigenous and the perspective on jail held by local communities - this was never going to end well without the kind of support that anybody local to NT | outback Australia can be sure wasn't provided https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubxZsfyEwWY )
Your comments about Hilter and facism are more than a bit Over The Top .. you might recall that Buchenwald did not have a 14 day waiting period for release.
Maybe back off with the bat-shit insane fearmongering?
A couple of tents is a camp. More so if there's a fire and a bit of a sing a long.
The implication being pressed in social media by anti-vaxxers was that it was equivilent to a Boer War internment camp, a German work camp, a Nazi death camp, etc.
> In the US, over the last 30 years approximately the same number of people have died "with" COVID as have died "with" the flu. COVID's only been around 1/10th the time.
I don't know about the US numbers, you have a bigger obesity problem and might've had more deaths. But where I'm from one flu season a few years before 2020 was worse and deadlier than any of the years with covid. Here an overwhelming amount of the deaths were people 85 and above, those below are almost a rounding error. Same as the flu.
> Yes, CNN is biased up the wazoo. But at that point it rationally didn't matter the cause, but nipping this in the bud the best we could. The cause, and even lists of potential causes, are important to prevent future patient zeroes.
But it did matter, us so-called conspiracy theorists knew everything about Fauci, Daszak and the Wuhan gain-of-function research from the beginning. We were screaming our lungs out for people to listen but were ridiculed, and WE were blamed for the spread because we knew the vaccine wouldn't prevent transmission and was useless for most people below 50-60.
Given how many people and agencies knew from recent news I wonder how they all kept quiet. How is it even possible if the western countries are democracies? I want indictments and jail time, but I'm not holding my breath. Psychopaths run the world.
Are you from Australia, or any other place that was able to successfully quarantine against COVID for an extended period of time? Even so I'd like to know so that I can look at the data.
An important point from that link comparing the two is that if you get hospitalized with COVID your death rate is close to twice that compared to if you get hospitalized with the flu.
And I don't see how mentioning obesity rates matters. If COVID is effectively the flu then obesity should effectively matter the same for both of them.
If you don't live in the US I don't understand why you're focusing on the US.
>and WE were blamed for the spread because we knew the vaccine wouldn't prevent transmission and was useless for most people below 50-60.
AGAIN Masking and distancing mattered, and still matters. Regardless whether one got the vaccine. I know those aholes at CNN and the like were saying that only the vaccines mattered. From my point of view, as a person who wanted to shut down this viral attack against the entire human species, a pox on both your houses.
We'd actually know better if China, not the US, but China, had been more forthcoming as to what exactly happened at the Wuhan Institute of Virology . Do we blame the people who hire contractors for the contractors' screwups, or the contractors who had stated (through BSL-4 certification) that they were competent to do the job?
Gain of function research is one thing, but it's not definitive evidence that the virus leaked from the WIV. As I discussed in this thread almost a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34753613
I live in Sweden. We had very little quarantine, other than WFH. Vaccine passes existed but was up to organizers to decide. Our problem is our culture of conformity, we even have a word for it The Law of Jante[1]. This is why we were able to be so lax, because people generally just follow rules and very rarely questions authority. Our people are predisposed to make eachother conform so there's no need for a police state.
I do not focus on the US, the issue was international which only makes it scarier to consider the scale of it. But it was a US program, to do research illegal in the US, and I mainly blame Fauci and Daszak. Daszak was in the team the WHO sent to investigate the lab leak and even mentioned his conflict of interest in an interview before.
While all this was public data, the lab leak was ridiculed, by who? The people who had everything to lose if it was public. Then we're supposed to get the vaccines these same people push on us for the virus they modified to transmit to humans. Yeah fuck off with that bullshit.
And there was 0 discussion about this. We were called crazy, evil and all kinds of words. We were dehumanized, just because we wanted a sane discussion. I'm still waiting for an honest port-mortem of those years.
Don't try to blame China, they're a dictatorship acting like expected. We (as in the west) had people funding and performing the research in charge of our responses. Fauci smirking behind Trump on press conferences disgusts me.
> Our problem is our culture of conformity, we even have a word for it The Law of Jante[1]
I think in Australia this is known as cutting down the tall poppies. The presence of this effect in Scandinavia and Anglo-Oceania, places commonly thought of as egalitarian, makes me wonder whether this effect is in any way related to the observation that they have higher gender role self-segregation (particularly Scandinavia) than do less gender-equal countries.
> But it was a US program, to do research illegal in the US,
NIH funding of gain of function research was only banned from October 2014 - December 2017 by NIH moratorium [1], and might only now be in the process of getting a more general ban [2].
> And there was 0 discussion about this. We were called crazy, evil and all kinds of words. We were dehumanized, just because we wanted a sane discussion.
I agree. Ad hominems make really easy soundbites, and both the left and right media have been using them for a while now.
> Don't try to blame China, they're a dictatorship acting like expected.
No. I'll blame them too. It's a choice that people make political cultures that preference scapegoating and reaction instead of forethought and the precautionary principle. *If* COVID did come from WIV, then they are to blame. They were under no particular existential pressure. Everyone working for WIV should have been trained in good technique. Protocols should have been in place to identify and inform on any accidental release. And if they played fast and loose with safety that's on them.
> Fauci smirking behind Trump on press conferences disgusts me.
People make odd faces or suddenly think of something inappropriate to the moment all the time.
But you don't, the only reason we're even discussing China now is because you brought it up as "but China!" when I want Fauci and Daszak to get consequences for keeping quiet and lying about what they knew early in the investigation.
Here are your exact words:
> We'd actually know better if China, not the US, but China, had been more forthcoming as to what exactly happened at the Wuhan Institute of Virology
You can think China is equally responsible, they are not mutually exclusive views, but it's not really a response to my statement is it? It's shifting the blame. Fauci and Daszak denied any possibility of a lab leak, and should be prosecuted. The cynic in me even assumes this was outsourced to VIW in an attempt to cover up their tracks if shit hit the fan, don't fall for it.
What did they know that was pertinent? That the NIH had funded some gain of function research at WIV? What does that have to do with dealing with a current coronavirus outbreak?
> Fauci and Daszak denied any possibility of a lab leak, and should be prosecuted.
For what? Giving their opinion? WIV was specializing in this research. For very good reasons given that China was the source of SARS-CoV-1, and has a host of other animal populations and animal-to-human transfer scenarios (e.g. the Wuhan market where live wildlife is kept in close contact with humans for consumption) that the US does not have. Why not hire them to do what they are better able to do than any US institution?
The calculated excess mortality rate per hundred thousand people was 50.5 for during this first COVID wave. You have to go back to the 1931 (presumably flu) outbreak to meet and exceed that death rate.
Which would yield an excess mortality worse than anything but the 1918/19 "Spanish flu" pandemic if considered just one outbreak. And on par with the 1889/92 "Russian flu" double wave pandemic. Though when counting the third wave of "Russian flu" it was probably proportionately more lethal than COVID has been (so far with ~5 Swedish waves).
: Comparison of HCoV-OC43 with the most closely related strain of Betacoronavirus 1 species, bovine coronavirus BCoV, indicated that they had a most recent common ancestor in the late 19th century, with several methods yielding most probable dates around 1890, leading authors to speculate that an introduction of the former strain to the human population might have caused the 1889–1890 pandemic, which at the time was attributed to influenza.[9] The COVID-19 pandemic brought further evidence of a link, as the 1889–1890 pandemic produced symptoms closer to those associated with COVID-19 (the infection caused by the SARS-CoV-2 betacoronavirus) than to influenza.[10] Brüssow, in August 2021, referred to the evidence that OC43 caused the 1889–1890 outbreak as "indirect, albeit weak" and was "conjectural", yet the 1889 epidemic was the best historical record to make predictions about the current COVID-19 path due to the similar "clinical and epidemiological characteristics".[11]
Thanks, I didn't hear about that.
> Over what is essentially a flu, which we knew from the data at the time.
Maybe 1000 people had prior exposure to a SARS clade coranavirus. And if you think they are essentially the same you certainly haven't been reading the news and analysis that I have.
E.g. https://www.webmd.com/covid/news/20230217/covid-versus-flu-w...
> Kills as much, and the same people, what gives?
In the US, over the last 30 years approximately the same number of people have died "with" COVID as have died "with" the flu. COVID's only been around 1/10th the time.
> I also remember CNN not touching the lab-leak "because Trump" and with a straight face they claim it's his fault they're not doing their jobs and getting to the truth.
Yes, CNN is biased up the wazoo. But at that point it rationally didn't matter the cause, but nipping this in the bud the best we could. The cause, and even lists of potential causes, are important to prevent future patient zeroes. And given all of the crap that's happened with wildlife to human transmission in the past (SARS 1, MERS, metapneumovirus, bird flu, swine flu, mpox, hemorrhagic viruses) there are other important avenues of transmission to deal with in addition to safe laboratory and sample collection practices.
> I remember press conferences telling vaccinated people not to hug their unvaccinated loved ones. Why not when it's 100%, 95%, 90%, kind of%, maybe% effective?
Injected vaccination (getting a shot into your muscle) was only really going to help with duration of symptoms (potentially shutting COVID down when it's just the sniffles, if you're lucky). It's much worse at preventing transmission than mucosal vaccination is. If you want to protect others, wear a mask. If you want to protect yourself, a quality mask is better, but a vaccine is okay.
> and there's a reason it just disappeared almost overnight.
Yeah, I was really pissed when the California government dropped both masking and social distancing at the same time, just in time for Delta to hit, once the first vaccines had been out for ~ 3 months.
I'm also pissed at the wishy-washyness of talking heads when asked whether masks are recommended again around the holiday season. Well fitting and well used masks are superior to vaccination. If you're willing to use them, then use them! If you're only willing to use them when someone else says it's a good idea...I just really don't get it.