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I think I've mostly gotten opinions from people who think that the virus is real, but the danger is exaggerated and thus not worth shutting down the economy (Group 1), and those who think the danger is high and thus worth mitigating by widespred action (Group 2).
If there's any one who personally identifies as believing this is a "hoax" I'd still like to hear your opinion and the logic that lead you to your conclusion (Group 3).
I know some of you have suggested that Group 3 and Group 1 may be the same, with some using the word "hoax" to refer to "exaggerated." But I am curious to hear more from Group 3 about whether they identify with Group 1 or have a separate opinion.
The thing is, Group 2 ("the sky is falling") is extremely powerful: they own all the MSM channels, they flood the advertising billboards, and they get sponsored by the Democratic Party. (I don't know any anti-Covid groups that the Republican Party sponsors.) So Group 1 ("exaggerated") and Group 3 ("hoax") start to form an alliance with each other to help push back against Group 2. This results in a partial merging of the two groups; they don't care so much about their ally's actual opinion, as about the Democrats hijacking Corona to rig the election and their lack of concern with people's mental health.
To answer your action question, the longer Group 1 sees the inflated statistics put out by Group 2, which contradict what actually happens in real life (hospital parking lots are empty), the more they start believing that Corona never existed in the first place (Group 3).
Last edited by MillennialUrbanist; 07-13-2020 at 06:54 AM..
The fundamental issue is that government organizations, whether they are local, state, federal or international, have done enough shady stuff over the decades that for a certain % of people their credibility is so undermined that they will readily believe the worst about them and their intentions.
On the very extreme end of that you get the literal tin foil folks hiding 'off the grid', but of course there is various more moderate shades of that which have influence even in mainstream sections of society. And of course, it is probably not the worst idea in general to be somewhat skeptical of government actions. Blindly following their governments didn't exactly do Germans or Russians many favors in the 20th century.
The problem is of course that a public health emergency requires people to a certain extent to 'fall in line'. That requires people trusting those who tell them to fall in line. Politicization of course reduces that trust as political enemies don't trust each other. So the culture wars in the U.S. definitely helped lay the foundation for an overall culture where 'official' America centered in NYC and D.C. says one thing, and a significant % of the country not just ignores it but has open contempt for it.
The majority of Group 3 may have morphed into Group 1 over time as this thing has progressed. It is hard to keep thinking something is a hoax with 137,000 dead bodies unless you are a black helicopter conspiracy theorist or can't figure out how to work a keyboard. The ones on C-D using the word "hoax" are parroting Trump or misusing the word. Trump's phrase "this is their new hoax" referred to criticism of his early perceived inaction on the virus. Trump likes to toss that word around so his devotees tend to also use it.
If you really have to ask those questions, then you haven't been paying attention other than to some wild orange haired dude.
Does it not seep its way into your brain that this is not an American hoax, that it's being handled on a world-wide basis?
What happens in other countries around the world---with a possible exception of Israel, since I'm Jewish---is of low concern to me. I live and work in America, so I'm worried about my own country first and foremost. And it's in America where the Democratic Party is milking the Corona goat to the point of dehydrating it.
What happens in other countries around the world---with a possible exception of Israel, since I'm Jewish---is of low concern to me. I live and work in America, so I'm worried about my own country first and foremost. And it's in America where the Democratic Party is milking the Corona goat to the point of dehydrating it.
Maybe you ought to be more aware of what is happening in our interconnected world. If you did, you'd learn that in several countires that reopened their schools early, they have had to shut them back down again.
I find this a fascinating topic. The pro-hoax arguments that have some reasoning behind them looks at the low mortality rate, and think that that is the whole story. They also look at the impact of things, and say "hey why are we shutting down, this is only about 10X the flu"
Lets stop for a second. yes its only 10X more deadly then the flu...but its far far FAR more contagious. Like wildly so. And more importantly it is in fact mildly deadly....when the hospitals are available. But we are about to see some states get overwhelmed as their governors continue to fail to face reality. And once they really are forced to do so, it will literally take weeks for them to make any impact on the numbers. So look for the death rate to get nuts. And not just from covid, but from other things requiring medical care as well.
And thats one of the things causing us to be the victim of our success. People dont realize that once the hospitals are filled this thing quite literally will be 100X deadlier then the flu. Thats the numbers form countries that had their medical systems get overwhelmed.
Folks are saying open the schools.....when thats quite literally among the worst thing you could do. Kids will often be asymptomatic. Thus is will spread like wildfire through the school population....and then through the general population. And when the hospitals get maxed out we will see this go from 0.7% fatality, up to 3 or 4% fatality. Easily.
Now for the sake of argument lets take a look. 0.7% fatal. 3.1% fatal when hospitals get overwhelmed (See Wuhan and Italy for example, ignore the 7% result from Italy is that occurred after testing started to focus more on truly ill folks, so a ton of folks got missed that had less severe symptoms.
So 0.7% fatal (with older folks mainly the dead ones). Could we just take the 2.1 million dead if everyone caught it slowly, and without overwhelming our medical system? Probably, but it will be a truly bad experience. If it goes to 3% fatality because we overwhelm our hospitals? That is 9 million dead.
And now for the important critical part. The part we CANNOT handle. It now appears that you can catch this over and over. So imagine we infect everyone over and over. Can we handle losing a couple million people every year? Because heres the other thing-it causes pretty serious harm to some folks. damaging thier lungs, etc. And that means each bout of this will be worse for those folks.
Is it a hoax? Well yes and no. It looks that way to some folks because again, 10X worse then the flu is still pretty survivable. and 99% of those infected survive. Yay. But a significant portion survive with long term damage (but still not a big%). And those will have a much higher death rate with round 2 of this. And at this point the deaths have been pretty mild, with the rate of deaths dropping...until recently. the problem in one way is that by "dropping" we dont see much of a drop. Our efforts cause it to flatten....then way too many places said "hey the economic damage sucks, lets get back to work, the deaths have been reasonable, and we've been shut down for over a month." Last week they started to rise again. And the deaths we see now are from infections that happened weeks ago. The infections happening now, are the deaths 18 days from now.
So all these "its a hoax" folks? Well many should be called "Its not serious enough that we should have done all of this" Its unfair to call them "its a hoax" per se I feel. They will start seeing some truly disturbing numbers. How many deaths does it take to make this not a hoax? 137,000 dead so far. At 250K dead will it be something to take seriously? Or do we need to pass a million? Right now 1 in every 100 of us has caught this. And climbing.
I find this a fascinating topic. The pro-hoax arguments that have some reasoning behind them looks at the low mortality rate, and think that that is the whole story. They also look at the impact of things, and say "hey why are we shutting down, this is only about 10X the flu"
Lets stop for a second. yes its only 10X more deadly then the flu...but its far far FAR more contagious. Like wildly so. And more importantly it is in fact mildly deadly....when the hospitals are available. But we are about to see some states get overwhelmed as their governors continue to fail to face reality. And once they really are forced to do so, it will literally take weeks for them to make any impact on the numbers. So look for the death rate to get nuts. And not just from covid, but from other things requiring medical care as well.
And thats one of the things causing us to be the victim of our success. People dont realize that once the hospitals are filled this thing quite literally will be 100X deadlier then the flu. Thats the numbers form countries that had their medical systems get overwhelmed.
Folks are saying open the schools.....when thats quite literally among the worst thing you could do. Kids will often be asymptomatic. Thus is will spread like wildfire through the school population....and then through the general population. And when the hospitals get maxed out we will see this go from 0.7% fatality, up to 3 or 4% fatality. Easily.
Now for the sake of argument lets take a look. 0.7% fatal. 3.1% fatal when hospitals get overwhelmed (See Wuhan and Italy for example, ignore the 7% result from Italy is that occurred after testing started to focus more on truly ill folks, so a ton of folks got missed that had less severe symptoms.
So 0.7% fatal (with older folks mainly the dead ones). Could we just take the 2.1 million dead if everyone caught it slowly, and without overwhelming our medical system? Probably, but it will be a truly bad experience. If it goes to 3% fatality because we overwhelm our hospitals? That is 9 million dead.
And now for the important critical part. The part we CANNOT handle. It now appears that you can catch this over and over. So imagine we infect everyone over and over. Can we handle losing a couple million people every year? Because heres the other thing-it causes pretty serious harm to some folks. damaging thier lungs, etc. And that means each bout of this will be worse for those folks.
Is it a hoax? Well yes and no. It looks that way to some folks because again, 10X worse then the flu is still pretty survivable. and 99% of those infected survive. Yay. But a significant portion survive with long term damage (but still not a big%). And those will have a much higher death rate with round 2 of this. And at this point the deaths have been pretty mild, with the rate of deaths dropping...until recently. the problem in one way is that by "dropping" we dont see much of a drop. Our efforts cause it to flatten....then way too many places said "hey the economic damage sucks, lets get back to work, the deaths have been reasonable, and we've been shut down for over a month." Last week they started to rise again. And the deaths we see now are from infections that happened weeks ago. The infections happening now, are the deaths 18 days from now.
So all these "its a hoax" folks? Well many should be called "Its not serious enough that we should have done all of this" Its unfair to call them "its a hoax" per se I feel. They will start seeing some truly disturbing numbers. How many deaths does it take to make this not a hoax? 137,000 dead so far. At 250K dead will it be something to take seriously? Or do we need to pass a million? Right now 1 in every 100 of us has caught this. And climbing.
I dabble in gambling now and then, and I think most people have a very poor ability to interpret what probabilities and odds actually mean. They look at "1% mortality risk" and "2.5% hospitalization/long term health damage risk" and think that's low.
Across large swaths of the population that is huge.
To use a gambling metaphor, if I could play a game where I could just show up with any amount to play where my odds were 100:1 (1%) to win $1 million or 40:1 to win $250k (2.5%), I'd be RICH and the casino would be bankrupt.
This is a country where people will gamble in casinos or on lottery tickets spending big money for odds infantesimal by comparison. It's no wonder they're not fathoming what 1% mortality to a disease really means.
Last edited by redguard57; 07-13-2020 at 12:41 PM..
Herpes is a virus that never goes away once you get it. You can manage it but its always there.
HIV is a virus. It can cause long term damaging effects even if you survive its initial onset.
We don't know enough about Covid-19 yet to know what impacts it will have over the long term. So even if people get it and
its a mild case that does not necessitate a hospital visit, we have no clue what it may do to them as they age and their immuno response changes over time. Maybe its like Herpes and it only pops up under duress. Maybe its like HIV and in the future a simple illness will hammer your body.
The thing is, Group 2 ("the sky is falling") is extremely powerful: they own all the MSM channels, they flood the advertising billboards, and they get sponsored by the Democratic Party.
And ... Here is our problem as a nation right here. There is a section of the population that will not budge from their misinformed mantra that a global pandemic has been orchestrated by the U.S. Democratic Party for the sole reason of "rigging" the November election.
No one has been able to produce evidence to support their wild-eyed conspiracy theory - beyond tin-foil hat evidence - yet the theory persists.
Where is the evidence that "Group 2" does any of the above that you claim? Do you have photos of the "flood" of advertising billboards and who is paying for the advertising of each and every billboard? Do you have evidence to support that any one group "gets sponsored" by the Democratic Party? Do you have evidence that Democrats have "hijacked" a global pandemic to "rig the election? Do you have evidence that Democrats have a "lack of concern with people's mental health"?
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To answer your action question, the longer Group 1 sees the inflated statistics put out by Group 2, which contradict what actually happens in real life (hospital parking lots are empty), the more they start believing that Corona never existed in the first place (Group 3).
Hospital parking lots???
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