Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

Statistics can be very hard.

 

You mean everyone who got a haircut over the past year wasn't a reprobate grandma killer?

 

It always takes two sides to stir the pot.

"The right may have staked out some awful opinions about COVID, but the left decided that the only thinking they needed to do was to be the opposite of the right."

Just how many original stances is the Right taking these days? Did they have something solid in place if they got rid of Obamacare? Did they prove that masks were ineffective? Did they notice, more than a half-million deaths later, that this is NOT just like the flu?

The Right has nothing but grievances and their "cancel culture" needs to go away yesterday. To use your terminology, much of their BS has been nothing but "be the opposite." No substance. No legitimate reasoning. Has all the substance of a toddler's tantrum. Toddlers probably are more rational and intelligent.

The Left is not an exercise in idealism and perfection. But what has the Right constructively done ... especially when it comes to the pandemic (probably need to stay on topic so as avoid spilling politics excessively onto another thread)? I'll hang up and listen.

 

Thank you for proving my point yet again that people do not care about the pandemic so much as they care about their chance to bludgeon the right.

 

I don't care about the pandemic? You really think you know what I think about the pandemic?

You didn't prove anything. But thanks for playing.

 

I think that every time you've been given a chance to talk about it, you respond with a generic laundry list of all your complaints about the right.


It's definitely worse than the flu, but the left is currently horrified that experts are saying schools should be open even without vaccinations for teachers.

 

I'm baffled as to why any leader thinks that schools are anywhere near safe.

Lots has been made of student safety. Rightfully so ... but almost implying that teacher safety just doesn't matter. How many teachers are of advanced age? How many of them have comorbids that, combined with COVID, could far too easily finish them off?

Those thoughts are unsettling. Matters not one's political preference, but you keep trying to politicize a pandemic ...

 

Other mis-steps of the left in the pandemic:

1) Downplaying the asymmetric risk of the virus, where the elderly are severely more at risk than almost everyone else.

2) Not using the fact that outdoor transmission is extremely rare, and in fact trying to shame people into not using the outdoors

3) Repeatedly relying on "models" that turned out to be hilariously wrong

4) Trying to counteract downplaying misinformation with fearmongering, as if you could scare people out of denial.

5) Resisting early attempts to shut down the borders

Lots of people died in blue states with blue governors and blue legislatures who had pretty much full control over what happened in their state. Most of the time, their reaction was "well, we closed down more businesses than the red states, what more do you want from us?"

 

Because schools are safe, with minimal reasonable precautions. You'd be hard-pressed to find an expert who doesn't think so, even in Biden's CDC.

But it's being derailed because the left has convinced themselves that the only way to be safe is to be closed, because the right wants them open and we must be the opposite of the right.

Well, that, and teachers have imported their general beef of being underappreciated by society into this specific discussion.

 

Stopped by Circle K to pick up some soft drinks on the way home and noticed all masks and hand sanitizer are now marked Buy 1 Get 2 Free. Really hoping Rick’s theory of the case bears out, because either way the public at large is just about done with any pretense of precautionary measures. It’s fairly miraculous things have stayed stitched together this long, however loosely.

 

Can I engage a few of these points?

I'd disagree with that blue-state governors have downplayed the asymmetric risk of the virus, but that they've been putting weight on different asymmetries. They've put so much weight on factors such as intentionally directing vaccine or testing or treatment resources into underserved (normally code for "minority") communities with decidedly mixed results. Though I think you're right that a 75-year-old lady is much more likely to have a hospitalization or worse out of this than me (37-year-old man), I think there is a lot of data, anecdotal maybe (for example, the fact that Detroit got its ass kicked in the pandemic well before it was even an issue in most of greater Michigan), that a 55-year-old poor black woman is as likely to have that bad outcome as the 75-year-old lady if the latter is in a comfortable suburban situation with good access to care.

I'm not sure I follow the "shame people into not using the outdoors" angle. I live in a very touristy area of Minnesota and the resorts up the North Shore had killer years, both from 'Citiots' who wanted to get away and from rural types who couldn't get across the Canadian border to make their annual walleye trip. The only reason our tourism sector had a bumper year across the board was because of the cancellation of big events (in particular, the local marathon, which was kind of a no-brainer epidemiologically).

As for item 4, I think the right accused the left of murdering businesses and the left accused the right of murdering grandmas. But since fear is the only way anyone seems to be able to motivate anyone to do anything these days, I'd argue that it's easier to start another business than another grandma. Now you can certainly say that neither was reasonably true but I think the intensity of the messaging (flawed as it was) was the only way that people were going to take it seriously as long as they did, which wasn't that long.

 

I’m impressed people have been as vigilant for as long as they have. Our attention span is nonexistent and even a year later, people are still masking up and washing their hands.