[News] Coronavirus

A place to discuss the now-global coronavirus outbreak.

Just fyi if farscry gets banned for that I’m walking too. I realize it’s meaningless in one sense but also: Solidarity in the face of evil is never meaningless.

I am sure this has already been mentioned elsewhere, but at this point, we have lost more Americans to covid than combat in ALL of America's wars since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Hell, Florida alone has lost more Americans to covid than we lost to combat in Vietnam. Considering all the hand wringing over flag draped caskets in Dover, the callous indifference over covid by the Faux News crowd has been very, VERY conspicuous.

Seth wrote:

Just fyi if farscry gets banned for that I’m walking too. I realize it’s meaningless in one sense but also: Solidarity in the face of evil is never meaningless.

I made a single edit to the post because it was wrong of me to resort to a sexist slur -- that was a step too low even in my rage and I both regret and sincerely apologize to the community for it.

I make no apology for anything else I wrote, but I also accept any consequences for willingly breaking the community's rules. Please don't walk if I'm banned for that, community rules are meaningless if they aren't enforced. But I'm so godsdamned sick and f*cking tired of dealing with death cultists that I'm willing to pay the price of unleashing my rage.

I'm stepping out for now. Mainly needed to make my apology and clarify my edit. No good will come from my continued presence until I've calmed down (and even then it's debatable).

Fwiw, Farscry, I read your initial line (since edited) as a line directly lifted from the modern Australian National Anthem. I could tell there was no ill intent.

I think the point is:
There is no nuance.
There is no "playing the angles".
There is no devil's advocate.

Wear a mask and get vaccinated.
If you are not vaccinated and get COVID, don't go to the hospital for treatment. This isn't an "oopsie" or "I didn't know" and hasn't been for more than a year.

Farscry - sad indeed to see how you have fallen sir. I had Covid, my wife and daughter had COVID - I've had close friends AND family die from it, I'm vaxxed, as are my family and most friends. So feel free to have a clue (even a small one) when you post what you do not know about!

My comment is the ignorance (EDIT - not of the post individual, but of communities as a whole...) displayed in simply saying 'it's the GOP is why we don't move forward'. I return your gentle discourse and thoughts - we MUST find a way to bridge the gap to ensure we are vaxxed and work to eliminate the virus, and prepare for variances in the future. Your ignoring the facts IS the reason America is divided and refuses to work together - and likely why folks avoid the vax on both sides. I don't watch Carlson, as he's a talking head. I tend to bury myself in research as I work to finish my doctorate. Sorry if a different and informed opinion offends you...well...no...not sorry.

Am sorry for the loss of loved ones...thanks for your compassion in return as well...

DSGamer - the point of those varying topics rests in data-driven research.

Just as with this subject, the intent is not to deny the suffering, or to say don't vax (as mentioned - my whole family is vaccinated with the exception of the 6-year-old who we are waiting on approval for) - nor the wearing of masks, as we often do that and did religiously prior to vaccination - but that we must resist the 'blame game' on both sides to move forward. Blaming the GOP as the sole evil simply divides, ignores systemic issues (where from, variants, the effectiveness of mandates, demographics, party affiliation, etc.) and guarantees we will not look at the facts objectively. How can we come up with solutions if we reject civil discourse? I ask that in frames of this community looking at how polarized we are in Congress. When did it become such a crime to find and accept we have common ground?

Plenty of pages of civil discourse before you chose to begin trolling. I politely reject your offer to play the Victim in these recent posts, Pigpen.

We generally don't ban on first time offenses farscry, esp for the person being baited, and even skimming...Pigpen, the concern trolling isn't going to fly. Knock it off. This is the news thread, stop talking about yourselves and eachother. No one here is new to the internet, playing the bothsides game and decrying the loss of civilized discourse isn't being bought by anyone. Move on and move along.

~mod~ enough. what did I say? - Amoebic

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~mod~ enough. what did I say? - Amoebic

Pigpen wrote:

It always remains my goal that we learn to discuss topics with civility and facts to try to find solutions and understand one another.

Every other post you've made in this thread says otherwise.

Good luck with your counterfactual concern-trolling, though.

~mod~ enough. what did I say? - Amoebic

Stop engaging with amateur trolling hour and drop it. If this pretense at "discourse" continues the thread has lost it's way and we'll look at a lock. Discuss articles, not each other.

Speaking of trolls wandering into a community and making wild, unfounded assumptions about the vaccination status of minority groups, this video is gold.

I wish I could share it, but alas it's on Twitter. Here's the summary from the tweet of what occurred.

Hollywood Blvd, Saturday, 11:22 AM:

ANTI-VAXX PROTESTER: Do you see all of these homeless people around. Are they dead in the street with COVID? Hell no. Why?

HOMELESS PERSON (walking by): Because I’m vaccinated you dumb f*ck.

So, it's official.

All federal government workers and contractors in Canada must either get double-vaccinated, have a legitimate medical or religious reason preventing them from getting vaccinated, or they get put on leave without pay.

IMAGE(https://c.tenor.com/Vn_K_EjUw-0AAAAM/canada-canadian-flag.gif)

Religious reason?!
No, no, calm down, this is fine, it's fine.

"Legitimate" Religious reason.
Does that mean the religion has to be legitimate or the reason? Or both? ;P

Both.

Canada being **much** less religious than the US, combined with the fact that very few religions actually are against vaccinations (I think some small extreme christian sects might be anti-religion) means that someone would have to show they are actually devote in their religion to be afforded exempt status.

Hopefully it's like that hospital that required people seeking a religious exemption had to prove that they really meant it by forswearing a whole host of common medications that were also developed using stem cell lines.

J & J is the only vax that uses stem cells IIRC?

fangblackbone wrote:

J & J is the only vax that uses stem cells IIRC?

Incorrect.

Pigpen wrote:

I frame it in recognition that the same independent spirit that made the US a world power and a key factor such as in WWII was that spirit - and in this case, that independent spirit works against the narrative of 'do as I say'.

Ah, that famed independent American spirit during WWII where we accepted ration books that sharply curtailed how much sugar, meat, etc. we could eat, where the amount of gasoline we could get--and even who could drive--was also heavily limited and controlled, where we accepted that there'd be no new cars, appliances, and other consumer goods manufactured for years because of the war effort, where we accepted that wages and prices would be strictly controlled by the government. Damn, we were all rebels back then really sticking it to 'The Man.'

Pigpen wrote:

OG - You use your pictures without the focus of the narrative and details and context. I find it so humorous that the likes pour in from folks that likely see the pictures but don't understand the numbers. Remember, I did read both Kff articles, and even cited them to ensure a level playing field of data. Same with CDC. The point being there is the complexity to the data that far passes the simple narrative you all push.

Ah, I see. When you cite KFF.org it's because they provide "real data." When I use that same data in chart form it mysteriously loses all meaning and becomes "pretty pictures."

Again, you claimed "The highest NON-vaccination groups remain core democratic constituencies - not the Fox News demographic by any real data I can find." The KFF.org data showed that Republicans were both the least vaccinated group and the largest group to say they'd never get vaccinated. Other KFF.org data showed that all the groups that make up the Republican party--evangelical Christians, rural dwellers, etc. also had lower vaccination rates than "core democratic constituencies."

For all your insistence that there's complexity in the data, there really isn't. The highest non-vaccinated group is the Fox News demographic.

Pigpen wrote:

A) you clearly ignore, at parity of numbers or even at 290K with 3 months left in the year, Biden has failed to control the epidemic even given the three serums the previous admin placed in his lap. Simple fact. (I should have sourced the numbers above as not digging for the link on parity of numbers within the CDC's 703K deaths - and I should have clarified 2020 vs 2021 numbers, of which Biden did not have those 20 days frontloaded). But Biden can do no wrong...eh?

I'm not ignoring anything, Pigpen. You said "Deaths under Biden (2021) now outnumber those under Trump (2020)." You were wrong.

Now you're moving the goalpost to claim that "now outnumber" really meant "the confirmed COVID deaths up to today (now), plus an unknown number of future deaths that I'm confident will put COVID deaths under Biden at a higher number than Trump even though I currently have no proof of that, but f*ck Biden, right?"

Could COVID deaths under Biden equal or exceed Trump's? Possibly. But the current trend is that delta cases, hospitalizations, and deaths have peaked and are declining while the overall vaccination rate continues to climb.

It would take the current average daily deaths (about 2k) to continue over the next three months for deaths under Biden to exceed deaths under Trump. But it doesn't seem very likely that that will be the case, especially as daily deaths have been trending down since late September.

As to your insistence that Biden "failed to control the epidemic" I guess I have to say that there is the complexity to that story that far passes the simple narrative you're pushing.

As you can see from this pretty picture COVID deaths did dramatically decline once Biden took office.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/ukzhgV6.png)

I'm not an idiot who's going to claim that Biden is solely or even largely responsible for the decline. But I am going to note that he came with a plan, unlike Trump who let COVID rage unchecked through the fall and winter because he was far too busy grifting money from rubes by claiming that the election was stolen from him.

It was reported that the Trump administration had no plan for how it would have distributed the vaccine had he won in November. Which is weird, of course, considering Trump had insisted that 20 million Americans would be vaccinated by the end of 2020 (he fell short by 18 million and then claimed he really just meant that he was going to distribute 20 million doses by the end of 2020 and he fell short of that by 8 million).

So it was the Biden administration that spun up the vaccination effort and got millions of doses in people's arms. And the rate of infection and deaths declined.

And then governors in practically every Red State declared that COVID was over and fully opened their states. At the same time Republican-controlled state legislatures passed law after law restricting the power of governors and state public health officials to respond to COVID or any future pandemic. Then they went further and decided that they needed to make sure that common sense public health responses like having people wear masks in public places and schools needed to be banned in the name of hurr durr freedom. Some state's like yours even went further and simply stopped tracking and reporting COVID infections and deaths. Nothing like denying public health officials basic data that's essential for formulating effective responses and policies because you want to pretend the pandemic is over.

And then in the midst of all that the delta variant hit. It is completely unsurprising that it took hold in Red States with their aversion to masks, social distancing, and vaccination.

But you would like everyone to believe that the responsibility for this happening rests solely and entirely on Biden. Except he hadn't acted like Trump and withheld vaccines from Red States because he didn't like their governors or ignored the explosion of the delta variant because it was happening primarily in areas that didn't vote for him. Biden gave them vaccines. They just refused to take them. Because COVID wasn't real. Because COVID was fake news designed to make Trump look bad. Because COVID was just like the flu. Because COVID only killed old people or people who were fat and would have died from something anyway.

Essentially the only thing Biden could have done differently was mandate the vaccine from Day One and diligently enforce it. But if that would have happened then I'd be reading your thread about how Biden was a tyrant who was attempting to commit genocide by forcibly injecting brave patriots with a completely unproven and essentially untested vaccine.

And one more thing. You've twice said that Trump "gave" Biden three vaccines. The Pfizer vaccine was developed independently of Operation Warp Speed (and Trump). It accounts for 58% of the nearly 400 million doses of vaccine administered so far.

And if developing the COVID vaccines (or, really, helping their development) was such a feather in the cap of Trump that you make it out to be you really have to wonder why he got vaccinated in private before he left office and kept his vaccination status hidden until it came out at a CPAC conference months later. I've never known Trump to pass up an opportunity to preen in front of the media or take full credit for something he was barely involved with and yet he did just that when it came to the COVID vaccine. It's a shame, too, because him getting vaccinated in front of reporters very likely would have saved lives.

Pigpen wrote:

B) Both Statista and CDC show much more complex demographic numbers with 86K and 67K being from Hispanic and Black demographics that are larger than their population percentage. Your percentage charts tend to normalize the numbers without the actual data behind it (those numbers are from CDC's site https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tra... )

Why are you showing me COVID infection and death demographics to prove your 'fact' that "The highest NON-vaccination groups remain core democratic constituencies - not the Fox News demographic by any real data I can find"?

The CDC shows vaccination demographics (WARNING: pretty pictures, though you can download the data that make the pictures so pretty). It does not support your 'fact.'

Had you posted your comment back in, say, March or April you'd be right (sort of). Back then vaccination rate for Blacks and Hispanics lagged White people, though that was both do to vaccine hesitancy and poorer health infrastructure to reach those communities. Since then those communities have embraced getting vaccinated and now a greater percentage of them are vaccinated than Republicans (and the demographic groups that make up Republicans).

I don't even know what the heck you're trying to say with "much more complex demographic numbers with 86K and 67K being from Hispanic and Black demographics that are larger than their population percentage." The chart you linked to (I guess there's actual data behind pretty pictures now?) is "Deaths by Race/Ethnicity."

I can only guess that you're attempting to move the goal posts by focusing on COVID deaths instead of vaccinations like you were originally concerned about.

Not that the chart you linked to proves whatever argument your now trying to make. It just shows that Blacks were 14.1% of COVID deaths, which is higher than their percentage of the total population (12.54%). Congratulations. You just proved what health officials were concerned about from the get-go and what public health researchers have known for as long as they've been doing research: Black Americans have poorer health outcomes for just about everything and that can be traced to their poorer access to healthcare and the stress of simply being Black in America.

(And you need to look at the chart again for Hispanics: 18.1% of deaths/18.54% of the population. Hispanic COVID deaths were not larger than their population percentage.)

Pigpen wrote:

C) No where do I disagree with the narrative that conservatives are much less in the lemming category of 'do as the government says'. Whereas your freedom is largely based on that same basis - in some cases, and in this case, I concur - get the shot - and I preach the same to my GOP comrades. My point remains the echo chamber (see mic drop picture above based on simply attaching charts with little background data) in the board. Saying the party affiliation is THE single predictor key category is just plain wrong, if not factually biased and ignorant.

I never said party affiliation is "THE single predictor key category" (WFT is that, btw?).

I provided data that plainly said Republicans were the least vaccinated demographic group in America (and also the group that had the largest percentage saying they'd never get vaccinated). This was in direct response to your incorrect claim that it was "core democratic constituencies" that were the least vaccinated.

You know where I got the data from. I specifically used information from KFF.org because you agreed it was "real data" (it is). If you have issues with their survey data then you'd best start showing how KFF--an esteemed health care and health policy charity noted for providing non-partisan information and analysis--f*cked up and how you know what the real deal is.

Pigpen wrote:

Again, you are talking multiple complex numbers (that seem to push from your 'GOP is bad' sophomoric narratives). Many folks don't identify with the traditional party (Libertarians, for instance), so voting data is single layered. Taking the percentages with no context (80 million, 153 million or 350+ million) shows a scientific lack of understanding that, like with climate change and most science based issues, demonstrates a lack of understanding of the systemic complexity of issues from your side of the aisle.

It's really not a complex issue, Pigpen. The available data shows that Republicans (and Republican core constituencies) are the least vaccinated group in America.

How they became that is painfully obvious: they were lied to by Trump and conservative media and they (for the most part) refused to accept any information about COVID from other, much more reputable and accurate sources.

It's not Biden's fault that we're still struggling with COVID now. It's the fault of all the people who refused to get vaccinated and most of those people are Republican or Republican-adjacent.

Stengah wrote:

Hopefully it's like that hospital that required people seeking a religious exemption had to prove that they really meant it by forswearing a whole host of common medications that were also developed using stem cell lines.

This is the exact way my work is handling this. We've got ~10% of the team on an exemption right now (religious/med).

Sorry not coronavirus.

The federal vaccine mandate hasn’t even been implemented yet, and it’s working.

Andre Bastian works as a federal contractor, guarding a prominent government building in Washington, D.C. After a slow start and a lot of opposition, almost all of his coworkers are now vaccinated. Under President Biden's executive order, federal contractors must be vaccinated by Dec. 8.

"What it really comes down to is money," says Bastian, a former Marine, noting that private security pays well, leading even the most skeptical to "just bite the bullet and do it."

I’m convinced that the gulf between what people post on fb and what they actually do when push comes to shove is more evidence of the rotten stink of social media. While a more cynical narrative might try to claim this is evidence of the true lack of conviction conservatives have for any belief beyond “own the libs,” you could also claim that many Americans - especially those already protected from government assault by privilege - view politics as a sport. Outside of Jack Nicholson, few people are willing to risk their livelihoods for a sport.

I think it would be a great experiment to see what would happen if facebook shutdown for a week, or maybe two.

Some slack jawed simpleton murdered his brother and his brother’s wife just a few miles from my house last week. He says he did it because his brother was a pharmacist and was vaccinating people.

The pharmacy his brother worked at is where I get my prescriptions so I am sure I’ve run into the victim.

America is doomed.