> But that also means that it is on us who have benefitted the most to work harder and invest to address some of these troubling issues.
2021 was a bad year for me. My stocks didn't increase in value at all (bluechip tech), my house down-payment cash savings decreased in value by 20% (~$20K value just GONE in one year: That's two years of savings for me), my 15 year old car is too expensive to replace right now, and it's leaky/moldy. I've also been locked down in my comically small apartment for YEARS.
This upcoming year I am 100% NOT going to 'address troubling issues' or anything like it. I've fallen lower on Maslow's hierarchy than I have been since before I started my career. I'm going to try to increase my comp, and get into the "good side". People are making serious money during this pandemic, and I'm so jealous that I missed the boat. I could really use some gains to offset the absurd increase in housing/transportation costs, but it appears there's no relief on the horizon for me.
> But that also means that it is on us who have benefitted the most to work harder and invest to address some of these troubling issues. We are doing that with our first climate fund
I’m a bit disappointed with statements like this. “Here is what’s wrong with the world: Climate change and COVID”. It’s such a limited view of the world and unfortunately shared by most of my colleagues and friends, that will likely lead to a lot of suffering when we get punched in the face by a war or human rights tragedy.
For example, no mention of the biggest events in 2021 in “What happened in 2021”, such as the authoritarian and increasingly dangerous China dismantling democracy in Hong Kong, no mention of the complete takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban in the Middle East. No mention of broken supply chain or the economic catastrophe we are facing, inflation, or the energy crisis in Europe.
While I’m a believer in combating Climate Change, there are real world crises happening right now that people should care about. Not in 10, 15, or 20 years… but standing up for them would take some personal conviction. Ah but hey, look on the bright side, at least crypto is up.
Financial markets are more than just the SP500. The sentence before that is talking about both stock markets and crypto markets. Crypto (BTC specifically, but also others) dropped ~30% in December.
> I predicted that vaccines plus immunity from those who had been infected would end the pandemic by mid-year 2021.
Me too. I'm still wondering why, in most first world countries with free vaccines, we are still having authoritarian crackdowns and culture wars. Does the media just love perpetuating a state of constant crisis? If widespread vaccine availability didn't trigger a return to normalcy, I don't know what will. Seems like we will be doing pandemic measures for years to come at this rate since scaling healthcare in any way is off the table for some reason.
Nope, still going to kill a bunch of people and that will curb any real growth. Here's what will happen: April/may cases will be much lower, end of may people will party into June. June/July there will be a uptick until august just before school starts. September cases will climb, get slightly lower in October, then spike the second week of November and then continue until April/may. This is an infectious disease functioning in/on a human system and we well know how this works out. Everything I described above is the schedule for the Spanish flu, and coincidentally, covid. Because that is how humans work and do things. We have not progressed enough in the last 100 years to change this due to the luddite/zealot problems we have.
>Does the media just love perpetuating a state of constant crisis?
Constant catastrophosizing drives engagement, it's that simple. This is the reason you'll never hear 'stay calm' messages that are not tempered by a 'but'. Anger and fear are powerful emotions, and the media will hammer those buttons as hard as they can (unless given a powerful incentive not to), the effects on society be damned.
Exactly and that's why for me personally all media is biased trash driven by money/power/greed directly or indirectly to be ignored.
For covid news I get it directly from my medical friends working in hospitals or this time around all the people (two handfuls) I know and they know dealing with Covid. Personally worst I've experienced first and second hand since it started but each person who isn't OLD recovers quickly vaxed or not.
> Does the media just love perpetuating a state of constant crisis?
Yes, of course. More clicks for little effort.
Many other interests are also aligned. No need for a conspiracy, it's just that if you ask a pharma company or a hospital "how's the pandemic going? the right answer will mean more resources and/or prestige for you!" you can already guess the answer.
My personal view, which is US-based, is that our government is filled with second-rate people from top to bottom. They have continually failed to communicate clearly about the virus, testing, masking, and vaccines throughout the past two years. They are still not providing good masks. They still talk about "washing your hands". They are not building better ventilation systems. They are not providing good rapid test kits. They are not passing laws that address our countless medical system inefficiencies. And so on, and so on. Anything they are doing feels imperceptible from doing nothing.
I think the sad reality is that we're going to have a lot more needless deaths in 2022. People with disabilities that are impacted by COVID will need to keep locking themselves up indefinitely - no government agency will help them, and their communities will ignore their problems. Vaccines will still not be taken by ~1/3 of the population. Is it even worth trying anymore with them? I guess yes, however frustrating, but only because it makes everyone else safer to do so. I do not see how 2022 is terribly different from 2021.
I'm an American. I find modern American society to be borderline braindead in regards to mathematical literacy, scientific literacy, economic literacy, and being able to fluently speak more than 1 language other than English. It is clear to me that older generations of America are more skilled than the younger people now. Back in the past, most older generations of America were much less overweight, obese, unhappy, illiterate, criminal, violent, lazy, spoiled, unprofessional, anti-family, anti-leisure time, etc. They were the ones that actually made America great. But now that American civilization has collapsed because of increasing wealth inequality and decaying infrastructure due to antisocially greedy oligarchs that economically abandoned the working class many decades ago, America is crumbling while China and Russia grow stronger economically, intellectually, and politically. China and Russia will defeat the U.S. in regards to geopolitical power because working class Americans are too poor to afford resources for improving themselves intellectually, financially, emotionally, and physically. Working class Americans have to illegally riot against the ruling class in order to get human rights back and get American civilization to stop collapsing because of increasing wealth inequality and decaying infrastructure. Because the ruling class is ruthless towards working class Americans now. This is why COVID deaths usually happen to working class Americans more than most Europeans for example. Because most Europeans have a social safety net at least.
Most disabilities in general don't increase the fatality rate for COVID-19. Besides advanced age, the real risk factors are chronic conditions like obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and hypovitaminosis D. Those conditions aren't usually classified as disabilities. Governments and communities can help to an extent by facilitating healthier choices but ultimately the patients have to commit to permanent lifestyle changes if they want to reduce their risks.
> Most disabilities in general don't increase the fatality rate for COVID-19.
That is correct. And most cases of COVID don't result in death or even severe illnesses. But the point isn't that we should just be happy with the majority we have. I work directly with someone whose disability requires them to take immunosuppressants, and so now the pandemic has forced them to either (a) isolate from the rest of the world, (b) risk their body destroying itself, or (c) risk a more severe infection from COVID than someone else like them might have.
> Governments and communities can help to an extent by facilitating healthier choices but ultimately the patients have to commit to permanent lifestyle changes if they want to reduce their risks.
The point isn't that the governments and communities directly help those who suffer disabilities that make COVID far more dangerous. They point is that things in the US are far, far worse than they need to be, and there are very real things that the government could do starting right now to make it better, but it isn't.
Sadly, the U.S. oligarchs profit from the enslaved suffering from the working class through increasing wealth inequality, water pollution, carcinogenic junk foods, carcinogenic alcohol, carcinogenic junk drinks, broken education systems meant for indoctrinating poor people, elitist healthcare systems meant to protect only the oligarchs, media companies owned by oligarchs, war propaganda in Hollywood to make oligarchs wealthy through blood money, etc. The U.S. is founded on slavery and genocide. It was founded by greedy monsters who promoted misogynistic religion while robbing the natives' land with military puppets. Which the U.S. culture allows religious institutions that promote misogynistic scriptures to make trillions of dollars now. When you get a society influenced by all of these things, it inevitably has poverty, homeless people, crime, domestic violence against women, illiteracy, lower I.Q's, mental health illnesses, personality disorders, health illnesses, sadists, con artists, incels, fascist politicians disguised as democrats or republicans, heavy political corruption, human rights violations, lack of happiness, committed suicides, etc.
I also thought widespread vaccination would end the pandemic in the US by mid-2021. I guess vaccination rates have to be very high, maybe > 90%, for that to work? Personally I've redefined my goal for dealing with the pandemic as merely, "I will not give Covid to anyone else," which still seems doable by spacing out social events and testing in between.
Although I also find the media's tendency towards sensationalism to be annoying, the media industry and its audience are so fractured now I'm not sure they're the cause of anything. It feels like no one is in control and they (and us) are merely along for the ride. That is, I feel that, due to decentralized mass communication and targeted media delivery, social phenomena is tending towards emergent rather than directed behavior.
Malta is about at 90%, yet the government is introducing more mandates to the chagrin of residents[0]. There’s been maybe ~three deaths in the entire country over the past couple of weeks; COVID hasn’t even been in the top 5 causes of death for a long time. Yet, you’ll now risk being fined €100 if you’re outside walking by yourself without a mask (of course smoking in restaurants and going to nightclubs is allowed, because that makes freaking sense).
Malta was even touting quite a bit about being the first European country to reach herd immunity..back in May.
In my opinion, anyone who believes continued restrictions have been about anything other than political theatre and positioning are utterly delusional.
So 90% does remove Covid as an ongoing concern? That's encouraging. If you live in Malta, my condolences on dealing with restrictions that, on face value, are overly fearful and internally inconsistent.
Unfortunately not -- look at what is happening in NSW (Australia). >90% vaccination rate, and essentially exponential growth in cases and hospitalisation.
The only things that changed were: omicron instead of delta, and the dropping of restrictions with a new premier.
I can expect that if a sufficiently high body count or death rate is reached (now or in a future variant), certain high-risk activities will require proof of recent vaccination to participate in. See also: seatbelts, child-specific seats, etc. Why should I, a responsible member of the public, be forced to put up with other people's needlessly risky behavior when it directly affects me and mine?
In the real world we accept risk vs reward. My neighbours having a kitchen knife in their house presents a nonzero risk to me, and that's a-ok and I don't wander about wearing a stab vest.
Or, we can do what we've done in the past to address this very situation by giving everyone the following choice: get the vaccine, or forfeit some privileges. It's not hard, and it's not without lots of precedent, so it should not be controversial.
Well, you can. France are doing it. They are having 200k daily cases.
So it's not really "or", it's just "and".
You can either have everyone gets corona, or you can have everyone gets corona plus a miserable digital dystopia, loads of restrictions on everyday life etc.
Either way, unless you manage zero covid which is almost universally considered to be impossible at this point in most of the world, your options are still "hide inside forever" or "get corona". Which brings us right back full circle to risk vs reward.
Very few French are dying of it (like, 300/day), which I'd call a massive success story. Containing COVID is of course out of the question at this point, and I never argued otherwise. However, the risk of life and limb to people who did get vaccinated is nevertheless increased by the presence of those who did not, because the unvaccinated get sick and eat up hospital resources that would then be denied to people who need medical attention for unrelated reasons. Moreover, they increase the risk of spreading COVID to people who cannot get the vaccine (e.g. babies, folks with weak immune systems). So, it really is in everyone's interest to get everyone vaccinated -- everyone's risk of dying a preventable death decreases.
What's the cost of this? Why, it's the very same as the cost of getting most everyone vaccinated for literally anything else we get vaccinated for! No one has a conniption about vaccine regimens for measles, mumps, polio, etc., because the programs for implementing them at scale have been so successful that hardly anyone gets hospitalized or dies from them anymore. Want to attend public school? Get vaccinated. Want to join the military? Get vaccinated. Want to live in a college dorm? Get vaccinated.
The marginal cost of adding one more required vaccine on top of the ones almost everyone regularly gets (and almost no one complains about) in order to participate in normal society is negligeable.
So no, it's not a case of "everyone gets corona" vs "everyone gets corona and we have a miserable digital dystopia", as you put it. It's a choice of "everyone gets corona and a lot of other people needlessly die for want of medical care" vs "everyone gets corona and/or the vaccine, you have to fill one more checkbox on your vaccine card (which already has a dozen or so), and comparatively fewer people die for want of medical care." Life will get back to normal either way; at this point it's really a question of dealing with the selfish, paranoid, delusional, despicable people who would rather see the mass death of their fellow countrymen over having to fill one more checkbox on their vaccine card.
France: About 150 deaths per day, 200K cases per day.
UK: About 150 deaths per day, 200K cases per day.
Same population size. Massive delta in restrictions.
I would say "have a good day", but after your big old rant about you wanting to force people into doing stuff and how they're all despicable, I mean, meh, look inwards.
I agree that being vaccinated is sensible. I just think that's it. Nothing else besides uberlockdowns have any demonstrable effect on long term mortality (e.g. over the course of a year). We don't need anal vaccine digital ID checks or FFP83 hazmat suits unless you just want to make the world worse because you're grumpy.
This is a false equivalency. Being vaccinated or not is the difference between requiring days/weeks in the hospital or only spending 1-2 days with a mild headache. It's "mildly inconvenienced if you do, damned if you don't".
I was at the hospital yesterday (for something unrelated to covid) and there are 0 rooms available. The hallways are still packed with unvaccinated people with covid laying in every open space they can find. Nurses and doctors are still worked past their breaking point.
We cannot move on until the thick-skulled members of society realize that their unwillingness to get vaccinated is the number one thing stopping us from moving on.
I'll say it again: we cannot move on with it until people are vaccinated. It's not a choice. It's not something where we just say "eh well it looks like it won't get better so let's move on". It physically cannot happen.
I encourage everyone eligible to protect themselves by getting vaccinated, but moving on is an entirely separate issue. We can move on as soon as people stop panicking and decide to accept the risks. In fact that's already happening in some states.
Strong circumstantial evidence indicates that another coronavirus HCoV-OC43 caused another worldwide pandemic starting in 1889. It killed a lot of people. There were no vaccines or effective treatments. The same virus is still endemic today; the only reason it doesn't kill many people today is that most of us get infected as youths and the resulting immunity protects us later in life. People moved on.
Circumstantial evidence - no direct evidence for HCoV-OC43. In fact it is simply conjecture.
It would be instructive to compare the virulence factors encoded in SARS-CoV-2 vs the common cold coronas.
People can move on when Covid stops making people seriously ill and compromising our healthcare systems. That is not yet, indeed the way we are going it may be never. Even if Omicron turns out to be 'mild', the next variant may not be.
I think there's a possibility that omicron may mark the end of this pandemic. Anybody who refuses to get vaccinated will very likely get omicron within the next few weeks. So your immune system will either develop antibodies as a result of being vaccinated, or as a result of being infected. Well, there is the third option of dying from covid, but the current evidence seems to indicate that the risk of hospitalization or death from omicron is lower than from covid-19 or delta.
To be sure, the descendants of the novel coronavirus that appeared in Wuhan in 2019 will float around the human population indefinitely. Omicron isn't the end of covid, but it could be the end of widespread hospitalizations and deaths. At least until the next crisis comes along.
You're still not understanding. We are not "waiting". Waiting implies that we are making some type of conscious choice to put things on hold. But there is no choice. We cannot simply choose to stop waiting. We cannot move on until people are vaccinated. We are blocked, not waiting.
Lol, you act like this is the first time in humanity's history that we've had a virus. Humanity continues despite it and we will continue despite many people choosing not get easily vaccinated.
Eventually people will move on. It's the human condition.
Humanity "continuing" or "moving on" naturally due to the passage of time (which will be quite a long time) is a completely different thing than humanity "choosing" to move on. Your original comments imply/ask that humanity collectively "chooses" to move on and stop letting covid affect us, but again, that is simply not possible. It's not something we choose.
Individuals can individually choose to pretend covid isn't a thing, but society as a whole cannot simply choose to suddenly restore our medical infrastructure, fix supply chains, grow the labor market, etc. Covid's effect on those things won't magically go away just because someone says "you know what, I'm tired of waiting on covid! I'm going to be normal now!"
Adjustments to these will happen over time and humanity may "continue", but when that happens is not a choice we make.
Most of those issues are due to choices like quarantine and lockdowns.
In the UK we have issues with driving tests because everything closed down "cus Covid". Except the virus had nothing to do with it and now most of the instructors have already had their mild cold anyway.
0.2% of the population dying, heavily weighted towards the elderly, does not break supply chains.
I mean, there is a third option that neither of you have presented. We could fix the emergency room and infectious disease ward situation with federal money, and then move on instead of using federal money to prolong lock downs. Addressing infrastructure isn't always popular, or the fastest, but it lasts longer and solves the problem of overcrowding.
Yes, it might mean another 9 months to a year of lockdown, but it would be there still when (not if) another disaster occurs. Now, people will get angry at subsidizing private hospitals... but I could go on about how emergency care should be publicly funded anyway. But I digress.
> Yes, it might mean another 9 months to a year of lockdown
Oh goodness no. There’s a supply limit for medical professionals that will take half a decade to solve even with unlimited funding. And as this is a worldwide issue, not just an American one, you can’t just outbid the rest of us for migrant healthcare workers.
Is there a fix for this? Is it just a payment of loans issue, or is it a working conditions issue or is it a lack of interest issue? Or is it some combination of the three, or another, unknown thing (or a known, unmentioned thing)?
Granted, I have zero power. I ask because I'm curious and just want to know.
It takes a long time to train medical professionals, and the current number is for the world 5-ish years ago (the training delay depends on the actual role, but that looks to me like the common one). If you want to have enough to cope with the extra demand from COVID, it will just take a long time.
> I was at the hospital yesterday (for something unrelated to covid) and there are 0 rooms available. The hallways are still packed with unvaccinated people with covid laying in every open space they can find. Nurses and doctors are still worked past their breaking point.
Anecdote: I had to go to the ER in 2017 in San Francisco and my experience was exactly like this back then too. It was a ~4 hour wait in the ER waiting room, then another several hours on a bed in a bright loud busy hallway, then some tests, back to the hallway for a few hours, and then emergency inpatient surgery.
Unfortunately that can vary from hospital to hospital, it also depends on how you're triaged.
If you go to SF General, yes, you're in hell. Its an extremely poorly run city hospital that is where most GSW victims go, its busy. If you go to UCSF or CPMC, you'll get world class care.
Seatbelts and drink driving rules don’t totally eliminate car crashes, but they do reduce their frequency and consequences. Likewise vaccines and masks for COVID.
Indeed, if we had 100% vaccine uptake, or 100% sobriety, then all COVID incidents would be vaccinated just as all car crashes would have sober drivers.
“Learning to live with COVID” ought to imply “learning to live with masks and vaccines”, not “lose your sense of smell and be ill for an extra week each year”.
With Seat Belts & Driving rules we still have 45,000 Driving related deaths a year in the US. We don't ban automobiles because that number isn't 0.
Seatbelts and vaccine's are high impact & low-cost. The same cannot be said about every possible driving or covid restriction. Closing schools has a real cost, sending kid's home from school for a week every time they have a fever has a real cost, requiring kids to wear masks for 8 hours a day has a real cost.
We had 38,680 motor vehicle deaths in 2020. We haven't had 45,000 since 1989; 54,000 in 1972. The rate has been steadily decreasing (with a few ups and downs along the way) for about the last 50 years(1), even though miles driven has been steadily increasing(2). This is because we, as a society, as a government, decided to study the problem and implement changes to improve the situation.
Comment I was responding to is complaining about vaccines being “dammed if you do dammed if you don’t”, so you’re shifting the goalposts a bit here by adding the extra restrictions for e.g. closing schools.
> sending kid's home from school for a week every time they have a fever has a real cost,
Hmm. This is what happened to me as a child in the U.K. in the 90s, but perhaps the increasing frequency of both parents working makes this harder now.
Closing schools, sure, that’s got social etc. costs.
> requiring kids to wear masks for 8 hours a day has a real cost.
I don’t see how this is true. Care to elaborate?
Also, your school days are 8 hours? Mine were 09:00-15:30, plus travel time.
>> requiring kids to wear masks for 8 hours a day has a real cost.
> I don’t see how this is true. Care to elaborate?
Kids are developing and need to learn facial non-verbal social cues. It also directly impacts learning, it's harder to understand the teacher, or for the teacher to understand the child. Do you think wearing a mask makes it easier to learn English as a second language? How about dealing with a speech impairment? And overall masking and other policies also just generally makes school less enjoyable more anxiety driven, which also leads to learning loss. They have a real-cost and just as important it is incredibly low-impact when you have other options like vaccination available.
> Also, your school days are 8 hours? Mine were 09:00-15:30, plus travel time.
The base school day sure, but the commute and morning/afternoon activities means masking up for even longer.
Face masks and vaccines will be the new seatbelts and DUI laws at the rate we're going. I predict that certain activities like flying on an airline, going to public school, or working at a job with close quarters will one day require proof of vaccination and/or masking up to participate. Omicron won't be the last variant, and there is no guarantee that a future variant won't come along that is just as virulent but far more deadly.
> I predict that certain activities [...] will one day require proof of vaccination and/or masking up to participate
I think those policies will slowly go-away in the North East & West Coast as the public and media comes to term with how ineffective they are. 96% of the population of my county (including those not eligible) has had it least 1 covid vaccine dose. At some point you just stop benefiting from continued restrictions.
> Omicron won't be the last variant, and there is no guarantee that a future variant won't come along that is just as virulent but far more deadly.
And the next terrorist attack could be even more deadly - stay subscribed for our upcoming report on why you should be more afraid.
Around here the restrictions only happen when the waves happen. I’m not the person you’re replying to here so I have a slightly different expectation: these will come and go regularly until the combination of vaccine and virally induced immunity is sufficient to stop the spread.
> And the next terrorist attack could be even more deadly
COVID is far less dangerous than in 2020, but it is still a problem - it's not just a "media thing". COVID is still powerful enough to fill our hospitals past their ability to cope, and also we have enough uncertainty about long COVID that it's better to minimize infections. So we are not yet back to normalcy.
Why is COVID still that dangerous? Not enough people are vaccinated, and not enough use masks (especially not good masks like N95s), and new variants are making things difficult.
It is plausible that during 2022 we do return to something close to normal. But it depends on those three factors.
Is it not the case that we essentially need to vaccinate everyone in the whole world within a small time period, like 4 weeks, to prevent mutation and vaccine escape?
That would let us eradicate it entirely. It's worth trying. But we can still get mostly back to normal without that.
If we get enough immunity that the worst COVID causes is a small bump in hospitalization and deaths once or twice a year then we could live with that and just wear masks during those weeks perhaps. We are much, much closer to that goal today than we were a year ago.
It's not possible to eradicate the virus. The vaccines are pretty good at preventing deaths, but they don't reliably prevent infection or transmission. There are also multiple animal reservoirs and those can't be vaccinated at all.
The only human viruses we have managed to eradicate are smallpox and (almost) polio. The vaccines for those are generally much more effective, and there are no animal reservoirs.
2021 was a bad year for me. My stocks didn't increase in value at all (bluechip tech), my house down-payment cash savings decreased in value by 20% (~$20K value just GONE in one year: That's two years of savings for me), my 15 year old car is too expensive to replace right now, and it's leaky/moldy. I've also been locked down in my comically small apartment for YEARS.
This upcoming year I am 100% NOT going to 'address troubling issues' or anything like it. I've fallen lower on Maslow's hierarchy than I have been since before I started my career. I'm going to try to increase my comp, and get into the "good side". People are making serious money during this pandemic, and I'm so jealous that I missed the boat. I could really use some gains to offset the absurd increase in housing/transportation costs, but it appears there's no relief on the horizon for me.