Exactly, Doug. Taiwan never even locked down and their domestic economy is doing rather well considering. NZ wasn’t as prepared, had a hard lockdown for a couple of months, and their economy is now doing quite well too. Compare this with Australia, which has so far been almost comically inept in handling this thing in my view, and the US is orders of magnitude worse even after all the focus on “reopening the economy.”
The key to getting the economy back on track is to get the virus under control. You can’t have consumer confidence if people are afraid to do normal stuff.
@VirginiaEdie, your point was that storms eventually pass. I think that’s a rather banal point to make. The question is, how do you minimize the damage during the storm?
Please don’t conflate Spanish flu (between 20-50 million dead of a far smaller global population) with COVID which has so far added about 4.6 extra days worth of deaths worldwide (690k) We are 6 months in and its nowhere near as bad.
If you want to panic and be fearful then that’s fine but the poverty from the economic chaos resulting from the various governmental overreactions will be far worse (and that’s assuming there isn’t a “big plan” behind it all).
You’ve followed the immunity conversations happening around COVID? It doesn’t seem like we need COVID-19 specific antibodies to fight off the virus, and it’s likely that the virus has been in circulation since last fall. There are 18 million confirmed cases worldwide. That =/= 18 million cases total, and it definitely doesn’t mean only 18 million people exposed to COVID. All of which might be why known cases are rising but deaths are dropping.
What data I’ve seen doesn’t support your fears, but I think that you should have the right to act accordingly. If you believe that going out for a coffee will put your organs in danger, you should definitely stay inside!
I just wish that policy makers were more focused on protecting those that we’ve seen are vulnerable - we have enough data now to know who those people are - and then open up the rest of the society. What you call “economic” concerns are human concerns and are hitting the most vulnerable segments of society - the poor and our children in particular. Just on the immunological front, we’re looking at a generation of children who have had a relatively long time with much reduced exposure to microbes of all sort. That spells disaster down the road for them.
Profoundly disagree. The death rate stands at 6% of resolved cases globally. You’ve (@Madeleine and @MarkGossage) given me unproven assertions but no evidence, no facts at all. You’ve said:
The economic impact will be worse than the impact of the virus – according to whom? I know of nobody saying this
“What data I’ve seen doesn’t support your fears” – we have no idea about the long-term effects of contracting this virus, and the news is increasingly worse, not better.
" It doesn’t seem like we need COVID-19 specific antibodies to fight off the virus, and it’s likely that the virus has been in circulation since last fall." – No idea what any of this implies. Infection rates are growing fast.
“Please don’t conflate Spanish flu (between 20-50 million dead of a far smaller global population)” – you’re comparing, with perfect hindsight, the total number of dead of the Spanish Flu with our situation at the VERY BEGINNING of Covid. Conflate I will.
"and then open up the rest of the society. " – they’re running this experiment in the US. If anything, the results of “opening up” are far, far worse than rolling lockdowns have been.
Besides which, none of us ever argued for endless lockdowns. We needed a short, sharp, extreme, draconian lockdown to strangle the virus at birth. Instead, we had worldwide dithering, worrying about “jobs” and “the economy” and “freedom” – all of which are now worse off in the long run because of the lack of decisive action right at the very start.
Looked at any economic markers recently… huge unemployment and never before seen drops in GDP?
Disagree completely, the virus is reducing in both hospitalisations and deaths. More testing obviously leads to more cases (plus increases the absolute number of false positives)
See above// testing is growing fast so more “cases” are being found but fewer people are dying and being admitted to hospital ever wonder why that might be?
OK fine be afraid… be very afraid …
Look at Ivor’s work on the differing styles of virus progression in different regions and comparisons of lockdown and no lockdowns and you’ll see that lockdowns make little to no difference.
Look, I don’t want this thread to get any more animated than it already has. I think we disagree with each other. There is excellent reason to be cautious, if not fearful. I understand that you do not agree with me on that.
The trouble is, people who say with great confidence that the virus death rates are dropping (they may or may not be) or that lockdowns didn’t work (they did; look at New Zealand) or that this virus isn’t that big of a deal are really telling you that they aren’t afraid to advertise their unwarranted hubris.
This virus has been around for a matter of months, whichever way you slice it. Imagine if someone told you in 1918 that the flu wasn’t a big deal really, it hasn’t killed all that many people, we get flu every year, the economic consequences would be disastrous, we can’t change our lives because of it. (The Spanish Flu then ended up killing 50-100m people, and was followed by the Roaring Twenties, so such economic fearmongering was beyond misguided.)
Or imagine if someone had told you in 1981 look, there’s this AIDS thing, but it seems like only gay people get it, so you’re probably safe.
These are statements of ignorance made out of sheer arrogance.
We need to have some humility. We know very little about this thing, but we do understand how pandemics work – and they get really damn bad really damn quickly when people get complacent.
With all due respect, I no longer have time for “low carb experts” who’ve been irrationally militant about covid. They have disqualified themselves, imho, as a serious source of information, and in my view they’ve problematized everything they ever said about any subject as a result of their radical behaviour on this issue. I suspect quite a few LCHF/keto folks are reconsidering their association with them, having them at conferences in the future, and indeed are probably regretting having had them on their podcasts/youtube channels in the past.
@gabe You’re wasting your time with MarkGossage because he always plays games and never takes anything seriously. He doesn’t see how this virus is different from the flu and how far we’ve come with hygiene. Many people will die from organ failure down the line.
I was infected and still have symptoms of organ damage.
As a gay man who was around in the 1980’s then…
Then, as now, I took responsibility for my own health and any risks that I chose to take were mine and I would happily have borne the consequences. I’m still here!
If you want to tag someone you need to put the @ in front of their name but if you just want to be passive aggressive then…
OldDog
(Gregory - You can teach an old dog new tricks.)
#96
I think this is a great take away…
This pandemic is changing the the way we live; economically, socially and scientifically.
Regardless of what has happened in the past, the present is what we have to live with.
The LCHF gurus have always had a limited audience when they were espousing good nutritional science. I don’t see why they would have a bigger following if there is now some bad science thrown in.
No one in authority listens to them with regard to nutrition, why should they start listening to them regarding this pandemic.
The politicians are going to follow their political noses no matter what. National policy will only have a scientific basis incidentally.
Gabe, this was only part of what I wrote. The full sentence was
I think our challenge right now is doing both of these things, not just one of them.
Honestly, if there were a way to do this I would agree with you - in fact I spent a fair amount of time in my circle of friends arguing for exactly this approach - but by the time the virus was in circulation it seemed the main (and only realistic) goal was to flatten the curve. That didn’t mean fewer deaths from the virus; it just meant slowing down the spread of something that had already made it to every continent by then so that hospitals wouldn’t be overwhelmed.
Unfortunately we would have needed those kinds of lockdowns before we had fully recognized the virus. It now looks like COVID has been in Europe since the late fall (here’s a case of a French man whose late December swab has since discovered to be positive for COVID 19 but hadn’t been traveling abroad, which means it was already in circulation in France by then).
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Mostly, I have started to tune out health officials who don’t mention metabolic health (which unfortunately is most of them). Insulin resistance starts to reverse incredibly quickly with diet and lifestyle changes, and there are definitely measures that folks can take that reduce their likelihood of having a poor outcome if - or more likely, when - they encounter this virus.
New COVID-19 cases in Sweden vs. Europe in past 14 days
Source: World Health Organization (as of August 2)
Sweden: Down 46 percent
The Netherlands: Up 205 percent
Belgium: Up 150 percent
Spain: Up 113 percent
France: Up 72 percent
Germany: Up 59 percent
Finland: Up 160 percent
Denmark: Up 81 percent
Norway: Up 61 percent
U.K.: Up three percent
I promise this isn’t to start a new Sweden argument! it’s just to look at the curves that a new-ish virus will generally show as it passes through a population. Numbers in the US aren’t going up (wait for the rest of the sentence!!); numbers in some regions of the US are spiking, whereas numbers in the areas that have already been hit have been declining since their peaks in the spring. The states that show rising hospitalizations in the US were barely affected in the spring and they’re currently in the middle of their peak of the wave. (This is not to minimize the tragedy of the deaths… it really sucks…). Based on what we see of most viruses, you would expect a resurgence in the north in the fall and winter but hopefully on a much smaller scale, and the Sweden data above points to some reason for reassurance on this point.
This really stinks - I’m sorry to hear it. The flu can also cause organ damage but I would hope that this is reversible with time (and presumable good nutrition etc). Have you gotten any guidelines about this?
I wasn’t arguing with the COVID diagnosis (I assume you know your diagnosis!); I was just pointing out that unfortunately organ damage can be caused by a number of viruses, including influenza.
Best of of luck as you re-gain your health!
amwassil
(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.)
#103
amwassil
(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.)
#104
According to those charts we (USA) are just prolonging our agony for the sake of hospital beds?
Looks like Sweden’s live and let die approach works, but how?
Is it viral-load-herd-immunity?
This is just a wild guess but If you sectioned out a certain percentage of the populous (no masks or face shields) and made sure their vitamin C and ionized zinc levels were in good standing and of biological tolerance maybe the infection and death rates would drop and immunity would go on the incline?
