Coronavirus and You - Page 261

On October 09 2020 06:07 cLutZ wrote:


These two are in contradiction. I'm not criticizing him for getting some things wrong, I'm criticizing him for being worse than flipping a quarter. If you sent me 10 potential inventions and asked me to evaluate which ones were likely to be successful patent applications, and which ones would not be, and then you asked the same question to a flipped quarter, I would beat the quarter 99% of the time, the other time being random chance because there sometimes is an extremely lucky quarter. Fauci has lost to the quarter a statistically improbable amount of times such that he is basically an anti-expert. Like one of those radio sports personalities where you make money just betting the opposite of whatever they pick.

On October 09 2020 06:21 WombaT wrote:

What’s he been wrong on that hasn’t been subsequently corrected? Specifically

On October 09 2020 08:13 cLutZ wrote:


There is little value in correction. Good experts predict.

On October 09 2020 08:13 cLutZ wrote:


There is little value in correction. Good experts predict.

On April 03 2020 11:24 BlackJack wrote:
I am surprised we are 100 pages in and still getting flu comparisons. I do think it's worth weighing the economic ramifications of the lockdowns vs the potential loss of life. A lot of hospitals right now are actually operating below census, mine included. The Bay Area was one of the first areas in the entire country to start getting positive cases and we've had positive cruise ship passengers disembark into our hospitals. My asshole has been puckered for a whole month waiting for the descent into chaos and it still hasn't come. It would seem that the shelter-in-place orders have been super effective which begs the question are they too effective? Are we accomplishing anything here or are we just kicking the can down the road? What's the end game? Waiting for a vaccine? Hoping the warmer weather helps take it out? Developing herd immunity? If nobody is getting it now and developing antibodies then as a community we would be just as vulnerable in a few months than we are now. We're not flattening the curve, we're just kicking the curve down the road. Are we shutting down the economy and accomplishing nothing?

On October 09 2020 19:59 farvacola wrote:
Back then just as now, operating from the presumption that there was some magical alternative world where there were fewer restrictions and a less impacted economy is fanciful thinking; anything involving groups of otherwise unassociated people was going to take a massive hit the moment the rona's spread took a global hold. The timeline where less was closed down, there were fewer rona rules, only a few more people died, and the economy somehow did much better exists only in your imagination. Further, guessing that we could avoid having issues with flu season and coronavirus, if only we'd have let more people die with fewer restrictions before now, is pure speculation. Calling it "kicking the can down the road" is just as speculative, there's plenty reason to believe that flu season was going to be bad this year (and for years to come, it seems) regardless of whether restrictions were put in place.

Edit: I should add that there's plenty to take issue with in terms of the US response, particularly on the economic front, but those criticisms deal in the propriety of financial aid and stanching the losses suffered, not in fanciful alternative worlds where movie theaters are full and Tenet was a box office hit.

On October 09 2020 21:41 farvacola wrote:
There are tons of hidden premises in your criticism that you seem unaware of. The solutions to the harms of people losing their jobs incident to a pandemic, including medical professionals suffering downstream effects of reduced consumption of elective medical procedures, do not deal solely in open or not open, they also implicate wage insurance and other safety net programs that are bogeymen here in the States. The presence and efficacy of those very programs is one of the biggest points of contrast between the US and nations that did a better job managing the pandemic. The PPP was a really shitty placeholder and, surprise surprise, the boatloads of CARES Act corporate welfare didn't really help anyone but the corporations and their shareholders.

As for the notion that what has been done is why we are "fight[ing] the flu and coronavirus simultaneously at their peak," I think you need to take a harder look at the ebb and flow of this pandemic and how pandemics are understood generally. It is absolutely possible, if not likely, that the measures already taken have softened the peak and given the medical establishment time to prepare for what was always going to be a rough Fall and Winter.

On April 22 2020 07:44 BlackJack wrote:
A lot of people don't realize exactly how low the demand for healthcare is across the country right now. I can't speak for other countries but in the USA unless you're in one of the hotspots, e.g. NY, NJ, New Orleans, Detroit, etc. hospitals are operating at an all-time low census. The irony is that while the shelter-in-place orders have bought time for hospitals to ramp out their staffing and preparedness the exact opposite has happened. Hospitals are not willing to pay people to sit around and do nothing. Workers have been furloughed and laid off by the thousands, entire hospital wards have been closed down, and in a few cases entire hospitals have been closed down. I know many nurses that are at home collecting unemployment checks right now. My girlfriend has been getting paid to sit at home and watch netflix for the last 3 weeks because she has been called-off every shift she was scheduled for. They still have me coming in the emergency room but things have been so dead I've basically been sitting around and talking/joking with coworkers for my shift. Someone set up a gofundme to provide food for ERs/ICUs in my area and they've been delivering 40 individualized meals to us every shift. It's like I'm getting paid to have weird social gatherings with my coworkers and eat free food.

So yeah I'm in support of loosening restrictions. Unless you think we should stay locked down for potentially 2 years until a vaccine is discovered then you should be in favor of loosening restrictions as well. If you're of the opinion that the only way out of this is through herd immunity then you should be in favor of loosening restrictions. You should want our healthcare system to be operating at 80-90% capacity. Right now we're probably operating at 50% if even that which means the fewer cases we work through right now means potentially a bigger spike in the future.

On October 09 2020 22:16 farvacola wrote:

Just take the clutz route and claim that you're smarter than public health officials, it's the only way to make sense of the griping.

On October 09 2020 08:13 cLutZ wrote:


There is little value in correction. Good experts predict.

On October 09 2020 22:46 farvacola wrote:
Thank you for revealing how little you're interested in rooting your criticisms in anything substantive.

And criticizing someone for leaning on their puffed up intellect as the sole basis for criticism is not an act of faith, it's a matter of the deference afforded particular kinds of expertise and what should be offered in support of critiquing that expertise in the face of uncertainity. In other words, if you wanna say Fauci and health authorities did the wrong thing, great, where's the support for that? It's certainly not endless complaints, ignorance of hidden assumptions, or alternative histories where there are magical Gordian Knots, if only the BlackJacks and Clutzs of the world were in charge to cut them with their deep insight into the fact that many people lost their jobs and have had a bad time of things.

It's especially incoherent to assert that I'm purely appealing to authority when I just criticized the response of the federal government to the economic hardships of the pandemic. But you do you, mate, times are tough, no doubt about it.

On October 09 2020 19:59 farvacola wrote:
Back then just as now, operating from the presumption that there was some magical alternative world where there were fewer restrictions and a less impacted economy is fanciful thinking; anything involving groups of otherwise unassociated people was going to take a massive hit the moment the rona's spread took a global hold. The timeline where less was closed down, there were fewer rona rules, only a few more people died, and the economy somehow did much better exists only in your imagination. Further, guessing that we could avoid having issues with flu season and coronavirus, if only we'd have let more people die with fewer restrictions before now, is pure speculation. Calling it "kicking the can down the road" is just as speculative, there's plenty reason to believe that flu season was going to be bad this year (and for years to come, it seems) regardless of whether restrictions were put in place.

Edit: I should add that there's plenty to take issue with in terms of the US response, particularly on the economic front, but those criticisms deal in the propriety of financial aid and stanching the losses suffered, not in fanciful alternative worlds where movie theaters are full and Tenet was a box office hit.