The Corona Pandemic

It’s so weird. Doesn’t want her husband’s COVID death to lead to “fear and vaccination.”

2 Likes

You really have to despair for humanity, don’t you. What a pair of idiots.

4 Likes

Only 183,000 new cases recorded in the UK yesterday.

Explosion Reaction GIF

1 Like

Thankfully, hospitalisations staying relatively low (Omicron related), and of those in hospital with Covid, 80% are in for a non-virus related matter (i.e. incidentally have covid).

1 Like

Such tenacity to cling to this idiocy, even in the face of the most devastating possible refutation of those beliefs.

Still, forgive me the dark thought, but with the struggles we’ve got ahead of us, through climate change and ecological breakdown etc, a general thinning out of the parts of the human race probe to believing in anti-science, conspiratorial fucknuttery is perhaps no bad thing.

2 Likes

I am not in fact observing it thinning. Quite the opposite, I have watched a cousin slide into that pit over the past 18 months, from rural ‘keep government away from me’ attitudes to full-on conspiracy belief.

3 Likes

Sadly I’ve been patiently waiting for that special moment when I can utter the words “told you so”, but I feel that by the time I get the opportunity it will be far too late to have any real value.

So many poor decisions by so many people in a full on divided population right now. We are broken.

1 Like

The newest ratlicker word is ‘endemic’, which is becoming an opportunity for those who were arguing we should do nothing and get it over with to declare they were right all along. The only ones who might possibly admit they were wrong in any way are those that don’t get the opportunity to, and it would appear from the story above that not all of them would either. It is the nature of public health measures that they seldom produce the ‘I told you so’ success case. The 2009 swine flu pandemic was a case in point, because measures successfully blunted what would have been the worst wave, it all became a colossal overreaction.

3 Likes

Yeah, I have a couple in a my local area one of which is happy to boast that his entire family circle has had Covid, and it was very mild, of no particular consequence. Therefore the entire pandemic is a massive overreaction and the average age for people dying from Covid is 80. The science etc. is all wrong.

It’s become pretty clear to me that no matter what the problem those that resist it will always win out to the point where everyone suffers in some way, while they can shout from their roof tops at the success of their crusade, while ignoring the actual damage done.

1 Like

So now we are calling for a thinning out of the population for those who don’t believe everything we are told by our governments?.. fucking hell

1 Like

No-one is ‘calling for’ anything. It’s an observation. I would have rather the most recent unfortunates avoided whatever lunatic websites they have been reading, had their vaccinations and not died.

There is no doubt at all that those refusing to be vaccinated, like the kickboxing lad above, are dying as a result of their own stupidity, but also risking the wellbeing of everyone else at the same time.

And you are also not being told this by ‘the government’. You are being told it by all governments, and the entire medical and scientific communities. People have every reason to be sceptical of their government, but it takes a conspiracy theorist to be sceptical of the whole world.

3 Likes

I’m watching a movie called Don’t Look Up on Netflix right now. Meteor coming to end life on Earth and nobody giving a shit. At the way we’re going its playing out almost like real life instead of satire.

2 Likes

That’s exactly what would happen. People would be screaming that there is no meteor even as the atmosphere set on fire.

Ah if only @cynicaloldgit were here…

1 Like

To be fair that is part of the problem. In the UK no one (other than Nadine Dorries and Pritti Patel) trusts a single word from Boris Johnson’s mouth so why should they actually bother to listen and then actually follow what he says? Same for those that went before him. The next step is to start listening to people like the Barrington Declaration after a few nudges from Facebook or whatever.

With Swine Flu, while it looked like an over reaction, the Obama administration actually viewed their response as a failure because they were judging it based not on the virus we eventually encountered, but on the one we were scared we were going to see. They used that realization to bolster the so called Pandemic Playbook. Yet the fascinating thing is if you go back to Spring 2020, one of the most common arguments from the right for not employing public health measures was based on the supposed failures of Obama’s Swine Flu response. It was never a coherent argument that fully elicited the point on which they were standing, yet it gained a lot of traction among the fox/maga crowd.

I think for some, it was akin to what we get in Florida every hurricane season, that all warning are dismissed because we’ve been here and seen this before and it turned out to be no big deal. For some it was a case of equating the virus in a 1-1 way, saying that if we didn’t take these measures for swine flu why should we do it for a completely different infectious agent. I think for many that played into the sense this was being hyped by the elites to hurt Trump politically, which in turn played into that administration’s response. I think for many they used the words of one of the senior people in Obama’s team that I alluded to above, I think that was maybe even Ron Klain (Biden’s CoS), that they got lucky the virus wasn’t as bad as we feared it might have been. I was never sure what the angle was with this argument, other than just the rhetorical trick of throwing shit at a wall and hoping something sticks, but I think it was along the lines of armor against criticism of Trump because Obama’s own people admit they fucked up their pandemic (they didnt, they just did an honest retrospective analysis to see what we could learn from the experience, like any responsible competent administration would)…and if you cannot criticise the president then I can do whatever I want.

It was a fascinating early case study of the motivated reasoning that has driven much of the attitude to this pandemic. I start with a position I want to be true and then from there will create a Frankenstein’s monster of arguments to rationalize that position, despite them individually making no sense, and often contradict each other when used in combination. The biggest take home though was how commonly the exact same combination of arguments were being used by different people. They were basically a regurgitation of trigger words they’d heard on Fox/OAN/from the president himself that they had no understanding of but could put together into a sentence they felt in their gut meant something.

1 Like

The last few years has driven home that there is a need to bolster the civics education in our schools in both the US and UK. What Corona has made clear as well, is the need for a basic course on public health. I think so much of the fucked up attitude we’ve seen is from people is due to the lack of understanding of the difference between personal medicine (what I do related to my own personal health) and public health (how the actions of other people, often crowds, affect your health). I think most people intuitively understand that if I have a toxic substance I want to dispose of, I cannot pour it into a community well and justify it on the basis of that is not where I get MY water from. Actions in a pandemic of an infectious pathogen need to be viewed in the same light, but for a significant number of people they cannot get that to register. This has never been about “am I going to be ok if I do this?” It has always been about “am I going to contribute to the continued transmission of a potentially lethal virus within my community if I do this?”

And the problem with this is, as can be seen from the toxic waste disposal analogy, it often only takes a small number of people to contribute to problems for the many.

2 Likes

Not calling for. Failing to shed a tear over.

3 Likes