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On November 30 2021 22:28 RKC wrote:
Of course no government has promised that vaccination will end the pandemic.
But the manner in which governments have been pushing laws on lockdowns, travel bans, and vaccination at an unprecedented scale and speed (at least in recent history) signify that the extreme measures were the best and fastest way out of the pandemic. The governments didn't say "Okay, please get jabbed and stay home, so everyone can be good for the next 3 months or till the next variant hits, whichever earlier."
It's up to governments to be crystal clear on resorting to extreme measures that drastically change the status quo - why, when, how long, etc. It's not up to the public to read the small print or to understand the implications on what's left unsaid by the government. The problem is they can't tell you how long because there are to many variables. For most 'extreme measures', aka lockdowns the 'how long' was until numbers were pushed back down enough for healthcare to be able to take a breather, but not really because there is so much catching up to do and how long that takes is part modelling, part guess working and hoping people actually follow the recommendations.
And most importantly the variables keep changing. There was a plan for dealing with Covid, and then Delta happened and all the variables changes and getting an estimated 70-80% vaccinated was no longer enough. So to deal with Delta countries are now turning to boosters. But now Omicron is here to potentially screw all those variables up again.
The problem is people want a neat fixed and predictable schedule, which is understandable, but a global pandemic is a dynamic and changing scenario and those 2 concepts don't mix well.
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Omicron mutations in the spike protein compared to Delta.
outbreak.info
User was warned for this post.
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On November 30 2021 21:28 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On November 30 2021 10:24 BlackJack wrote:On November 30 2021 00:56 WombaT wrote:On November 30 2021 00:29 rel wrote:On November 29 2021 08:40 BlackJack wrote:On November 29 2021 07:59 Sadist wrote:On November 29 2021 07:32 BlackJack wrote:
It doesn't help when the virus was politicized by leaders from both sides since Day 1. The people that run our country care a lot less about how to best serve the American people and a lot more about how to personally benefit themselves. I think that's quite apparent to most people. See I disagree with this both sidesism. At least with regards to the US. Trump politicized it from the beginning because he was worried about the stock market/reelection. I dont think you can say the democrats politicized this. This is only a political issue because the republicans made it one. You can just look at Biden and Kamala's tweets on Trump's travel bans or on whether the vaccine is rushed and whether people should trust it. I mean open travel and vaccine hesitancy during a pandemic should be bad across the board, not just bad depending on who is in charge. People acted like Trump could have stopped a highly contagious virus from spreading just by saying or doing a few things differently. They beat him up on it and it accomplished the mission of getting him out. True, but it doesn't matter, because Orange man bad, and Left can do literally no wrong. At least in here Trump wasn’t getting slammed for not being a miracle worker, but being beyond bloody terrible in so many aspects of what a decent Presidential response would look like. Even on travel bans, which I tend to agree with he was terrible. Banning travel because it’s judicious vs incorporating it only because it fits your anti-China posturing, they’re a bit different. None of this was guided by actual sensible policy, if Trump had deferred and just executed sensible policy I’d be still against his politics but give him credit here, he just demonstrably didn’t do that. My memory of the overall timeline is not particularly great but there were periods I’m pretty sure where various European countries had travel restrictions to the US and the U.K. didn’t, when the U.K. had considerably worse numbers and should have been the prime candidate for restrictions. Do the ostensible ‘left’ make political hay from it? Yes, absolutely I mean I know it’s a sarcastic meme but orange man bad, well yes? Biden bans travel from African countries after new covid variant discovered = judicious Trump bans travel from China after novel coronavirus discovered = only done because it fits his anti-China posturing There's such a fine line between saving the world and racism/xenophobia When weighted amongst everything else, yes I don’t think it’s an unfair characterisation. When much of your tenure in the pandemic is spent butting heads with the CDC, undermining and fighting with governors etc etc, but you’re on the ball with one thing, one has to wonder why you’re on the ball with that specific thing. I was not saying Biden was judicious, I was saying a hypothetical judicious Trump implementing a Chinese travel ban is different from well, actual Trump doing the same. A more sensible response could/should have been ‘we question the motivation here but it seems a sensible idea’ as opposed to ‘let’s not do the sensible thing because it’s xenophobic’, I wouldn’t have any arguments here. As I said (and stressed was from memory, so this I could be wrong on) there were discrepancies in travel restrictions between various EU nations and the U.K. from the US, which only made sense given the UK’s terrible numbers through the lens of countries the Trump administration likes and doesn’t. I don’t even particularly agree with how travel bans, by and large have been handled, across the world at all. And the lack of vigorous testing and quarantining measures. I don’t even think I need to pull data, I’m pretty sure there’s less travel to and from the south of Africa than there is and has been from Europe, the Anglosphere and more affluent corners of the globe. Restricting that, or allowing that with the proviso of people actually quarantining has been (largely) neglected throughout big periods of the pandemic, restricting travel from Southern Africa now seems akin to closing the stable door after the horde has bolted.
I think that you're being far too generous by saying that it isn't an unfair characterization. It absolutely is unfair. The only way to rationalize these as comparable statements is if you omit all of the context and reasoning at the core of the critiques of Trump at the time.
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On November 30 2021 22:47 teeel141 wrote:Omicron mutations in the spike protein compared to Delta. outbreak.info
Can you explain why this link makes you think the spike protein changed?
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A tense situation in Australia is playing out where 3 individuals escaped from a COVID quarantine camp. The police have set up a perimeter with checkpoints. They are checking car trunks, car registrations, and searching buses coming in and out of the area. Very scary stuff.
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https://www.npr.org/2021/11/30/1060025081/omicron-variant-netherlands-europe-south-africa
The omnicron variant was in Europe a week before it was sequenced by scientists in South Africa. So Joe Biden said we should lead the way with science and not xenophobia the day after Trump announced a travel ban on China where the COVID originated. Now President Biden has implemented a knee-jerk travel ban on African countries due to a variant that we don't even know where it originated. Science, not xenophobia. 
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On December 01 2021 15:00 BlackJack wrote:https://www.npr.org/2021/11/30/1060025081/omicron-variant-netherlands-europe-south-africaThe omnicron variant was in Europe a week before it was sequenced by scientists in South Africa. So Joe Biden said we should lead the way with science and not xenophobia the day after Trump announced a travel ban on China where the COVID originated. Now President Biden has implemented a knee-jerk travel ban on African countries due to a variant that we don't even know where it originated. Science, not xenophobia.
Well, when a flight from South Africa has ~10% of the people on a flight infected, you'd be tempted to ban flights too. 61/600 is a pretty high number considering sequencing said they caught it prior to boarding the flight.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-59451103
There's quite a bit more data and reasoning backing up the ban this time in comparison to the initial ban on China due to the wider availability of reliable testing.
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On December 01 2021 15:00 BlackJack wrote:https://www.npr.org/2021/11/30/1060025081/omicron-variant-netherlands-europe-south-africaThe omnicron variant was in Europe a week before it was sequenced by scientists in South Africa. So Joe Biden said we should lead the way with science and not xenophobia the day after Trump announced a travel ban on China where the COVID originated. Now President Biden has implemented a knee-jerk travel ban on African countries due to a variant that we don't even know where it originated. Science, not xenophobia.
The ban does not aim to punish the country where the variant originated, as you're implying, but to cut off potential sources of the variant. It's already the dominant variant in South Africa whereas Europe only has singular cases so far. Your jab at the supposed hypocrisy makes no sense.
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On December 01 2021 15:30 Lmui wrote:Show nested quote +On December 01 2021 15:00 BlackJack wrote:https://www.npr.org/2021/11/30/1060025081/omicron-variant-netherlands-europe-south-africaThe omnicron variant was in Europe a week before it was sequenced by scientists in South Africa. So Joe Biden said we should lead the way with science and not xenophobia the day after Trump announced a travel ban on China where the COVID originated. Now President Biden has implemented a knee-jerk travel ban on African countries due to a variant that we don't even know where it originated. Science, not xenophobia. Well, when a flight from South Africa has ~10% of the people on a flight infected, you'd be tempted to ban flights too. 61/600 is a pretty high number considering sequencing said they caught it prior to boarding the flight. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-59451103There's quite a bit more data and reasoning backing up the ban this time in comparison to the initial ban on China due to the wider availability of reliable testing.
Can you expand on that? Why do you think there is more data and reasoning to ban travel from parts of Africa than from China in early 2020? It's not a secret that China was ground zero for the virus. You don't need any testing to know that.
Also I'm pretty sure the travel restrictions went into place before that flight even landed and the passengers were tested at the airport so you can't use it as justification for the travel restrictions.
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On December 01 2021 18:35 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On December 01 2021 15:30 Lmui wrote:On December 01 2021 15:00 BlackJack wrote:https://www.npr.org/2021/11/30/1060025081/omicron-variant-netherlands-europe-south-africaThe omnicron variant was in Europe a week before it was sequenced by scientists in South Africa. So Joe Biden said we should lead the way with science and not xenophobia the day after Trump announced a travel ban on China where the COVID originated. Now President Biden has implemented a knee-jerk travel ban on African countries due to a variant that we don't even know where it originated. Science, not xenophobia. Well, when a flight from South Africa has ~10% of the people on a flight infected, you'd be tempted to ban flights too. 61/600 is a pretty high number considering sequencing said they caught it prior to boarding the flight. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-59451103There's quite a bit more data and reasoning backing up the ban this time in comparison to the initial ban on China due to the wider availability of reliable testing. Can you expand on that? Why do you think there is more data and reasoning to ban travel from parts of Africa than from China in early 2020? It's not a secret that China was ground zero for the virus. You don't need any testing to know that. Also I'm pretty sure the travel restrictions went into place before that flight even landed and the passengers were tested at the airport so you can't use it as justification for the travel restrictions.
I think the main thing that separates the response now from the response back in 2020 is the context of everything surrounding it.
Travel restrictions are a delaying tactic. The main criticism of trump at the time is that he was treating it like a solution, and neglecting to do or undermining the efforts of his experts to put into place the systems we actually needed.
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Northern Ireland27150 Posts
On December 01 2021 14:43 BlackJack wrote:
A tense situation in Australia is playing out where 3 individuals escaped from a COVID quarantine camp. The police have set up a perimeter with checkpoints. They are checking car trunks, car registrations, and searching buses coming in and out of the area. Very scary stuff.
Scary or sensible?
Actually quarantining and testing seems the best halfway house between outright restricting travel and enabling unrestricted spread across borders.
I don’t get why you keep trying to bring up the Trump/Biden respective travel bans over and over. It’s a great broken clock example but I’m unsure what wider point can be taken from it.
We haven’t even touched on all the ‘China flu’ rhetoric that was super helpful at the time.
If an administration is absolutely haphazard over a pandemic response, but stumbles upon a sensible thing that just so happens to align with their general political rhetoric, it’s not a certain thing but likely that the political capital is guiding it rather than any sound, evidence-informed pandemic mitigation strategy.
Likewise one could have plot European travel restrictions more accurately using a table of countries Trump likes and dislikes than their Covid numbers, at times anyway.
This is Trump in total isolation.
Biden’s lot well, they don’t come up here a huge amount. I’m assuming because they’re not doing an absolutely shit or amazing job in either direction.
If we are to compare the wisdom of these travel bans, it would have to be through the lens of what was known in the relevant times, and what else they did in pandemic policy terms.
I don’t (think) anyone in here is arguing that a Chinese travel ban was actually a bad idea at that time, I may be wrong on this.
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You're being played Jimmi. Just because you're favorite football team has the ball, doesn't mean they gonna win.
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Northern Ireland27150 Posts
On December 01 2021 23:57 rel wrote:
You're being played Jimmi. Just because you're favorite football team has the ball, doesn't mean they gonna win.
What does this even mean? I don’t get the applicability of this analogy. If my response doesn’t make sense it’s because I’m genuinely unsure or what point you are making here.
From what Jimmy said, his wish sounds very much like if there’s a turnover in possession that the other team throw the ball and play football in a manner that is considered good, sensible football.
Ideally the turnover doesn’t happen, but if it does, play ball. I don’t know enough about football to continue the analogy, but whatever is a ridiculous and ineffective way to play football, let’s not do that.
For myriad reasons I prefer the Republicans in the States to stay away from power, but if they’re in power I’d rather them handle Covid competently than them fuck it up and use it to score political points against them.
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On December 01 2021 21:45 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On December 01 2021 14:43 BlackJack wrote:
A tense situation in Australia is playing out where 3 individuals escaped from a COVID quarantine camp. The police have set up a perimeter with checkpoints. They are checking car trunks, car registrations, and searching buses coming in and out of the area. Very scary stuff. Scary or sensible? Actually quarantining and testing seems the best halfway house between outright restricting travel and enabling unrestricted spread across borders. I don’t get why you keep trying to bring up the Trump/Biden respective travel bans over and over. It’s a great broken clock example but I’m unsure what wider point can be taken from it. We haven’t even touched on all the ‘China flu’ rhetoric that was super helpful at the time. If an administration is absolutely haphazard over a pandemic response, but stumbles upon a sensible thing that just so happens to align with their general political rhetoric, it’s not a certain thing but likely that the political capital is guiding it rather than any sound, evidence-informed pandemic mitigation strategy. Likewise one could have plot European travel restrictions more accurately using a table of countries Trump likes and dislikes than their Covid numbers, at times anyway. This is Trump in total isolation. Biden’s lot well, they don’t come up here a huge amount. I’m assuming because they’re not doing an absolutely shit or amazing job in either direction. If we are to compare the wisdom of these travel bans, it would have to be through the lens of what was known in the relevant times, and what else they did in pandemic policy terms. I don’t (think) anyone in here is arguing that a Chinese travel ban was actually a bad idea at that time, I may be wrong on this.
I was just asking Lmui to elaborate on his statement that there is more data and reasoning to back up Biden's Africa travel restrictions than Trump's China travel restrictions in early 2020. We have less data - we don't even know where this variant originated or how virulent it is. We also have less reasoning - COVID is already widespread everywhere. There was 1000x more reason to have travel bans in early 2020 before COVID was widespread, before we had PPE, before we had treatment protocols, before we had testing infrastructure, do I need to go on? Anyone without a political axe to grind should agree that restricting travel from China in early 2020 makes a ton more sense than Biden's travel restrictions on Africa. The fact that the opposite is being stated here just demonstrates my earlier point that both sides have politicized the virus and made it a partisan issue.
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Northern Ireland27150 Posts
On December 02 2021 21:35 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On December 01 2021 21:45 WombaT wrote:On December 01 2021 14:43 BlackJack wrote:
A tense situation in Australia is playing out where 3 individuals escaped from a COVID quarantine camp. The police have set up a perimeter with checkpoints. They are checking car trunks, car registrations, and searching buses coming in and out of the area. Very scary stuff. Scary or sensible? Actually quarantining and testing seems the best halfway house between outright restricting travel and enabling unrestricted spread across borders. I don’t get why you keep trying to bring up the Trump/Biden respective travel bans over and over. It’s a great broken clock example but I’m unsure what wider point can be taken from it. We haven’t even touched on all the ‘China flu’ rhetoric that was super helpful at the time. If an administration is absolutely haphazard over a pandemic response, but stumbles upon a sensible thing that just so happens to align with their general political rhetoric, it’s not a certain thing but likely that the political capital is guiding it rather than any sound, evidence-informed pandemic mitigation strategy. Likewise one could have plot European travel restrictions more accurately using a table of countries Trump likes and dislikes than their Covid numbers, at times anyway. This is Trump in total isolation. Biden’s lot well, they don’t come up here a huge amount. I’m assuming because they’re not doing an absolutely shit or amazing job in either direction. If we are to compare the wisdom of these travel bans, it would have to be through the lens of what was known in the relevant times, and what else they did in pandemic policy terms. I don’t (think) anyone in here is arguing that a Chinese travel ban was actually a bad idea at that time, I may be wrong on this. I was just asking Lmui to elaborate on his statement that there is more data and reasoning to back up Biden's Africa travel restrictions than Trump's China travel restrictions in early 2020. We have less data - we don't even know where this variant originated or how virulent it is. We also have less reasoning - COVID is already widespread everywhere. There was 1000x more reason to have travel bans in early 2020 before COVID was widespread, before we had PPE, before we had treatment protocols, before we had testing infrastructure, do I need to go on? Anyone without a political axe to grind should agree that restricting travel from China in early 2020 makes a ton more sense than Biden's travel restrictions on Africa. The fact that the opposite is being stated here just demonstrates my earlier point that both sides have politicized the virus and made it a partisan issue.
My mental timeline is perhaps off, it’s difficult to sequence what happened when the longer the Covid stretch, I seem to recall it taking quite some time for it even being settled how the virus primarily transmitted, in work initially we were super diligent on cleaning because it was thought surface transfer played a far bigger role than it did.
As to how things like that dovetail in the timeline, I’m unsure, it’s true that in general we have far more understanding now. Whether that applies, specifically with the justifications for Biden’s specific travel bans being scientifically sound, I don’t know. Someone better versed can illuminate us, I would assume part of the reason they exist is that it’s politically a lot easier to ban travel to poor places than say, Europe, and that’s likely part of it as well.
As probably the thread’s most ‘enthusiastic’ proponent of travel bans and quarantining measures, the frustration has continually been from a lack of joined-up, multilateral cooperation on the issue, which ultimately makes containment impossible anyway.
And subsequently you need good policy and structures in place to detect, contain and manage Covid internally and good coordination and deference to expertise in formulating such structures.
Unless we’re catching it at ground zero, in the absence of the aforementioned, yes a Chinese travel ban still makes a degree of sense but one has to question both the efficacy and indeed motivation of such a measure.
Great we’ve banned travel to China, now what? It’s already escaped that arena anyway. Subsequent haphazard travel restrictions only reinforce my perception that with that administration they were as influenced by political alliances as the situation on the ground.
Sure it’s political now, because attempting to assume a neutral ground of what is the desirable outcome and best way to implement it has been dragged kicking and screaming into being seen as a political position. This is not to say many aren’t happy to use it as an attack vector, but those of us who would prefer to stay above the fray are pulled in against our own volition.
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I'll just put there here and answer since it belongs here more then in the US politics thread.
You either take measures against the unvaccinated or you take measures against everyone and wait for those who do listen and follow medical advise to get tired of it and stop listening, at which point everything breaks down anyway.
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EPT
