Bullet_Proof wrote:
2600 bro wrote:
Is this satire? Just address the points I stated. They are very reasonable ground-truths for the pandemic.
Closing schools for a year in some places was stupid and a total failure of American institutions to prepare/adjust/mitigate the pandemic...
It is not satire.
1.) 800k deaths is quite normal if you look at the history of the human population, the average age of covid deaths, and the average life expectancy, which is 78 years old in the US. Death is always tragic if it touches you or your immediate family. But people dying at an age that is in line with what we've observed for the last 100 year trend is not sufficient enough to overreact and cause more harms to people who are at no risk, especially children.
Life expectancy is projected to GROW through 2100 according to macrotrends.net.
Sure, covid may (or may not) slow the acceleration but it does not change the direction of the trend.
As bad as you want to paint covid, CDC data also show that Americans, regardless of age group, are far more likely to die of something other than COVID-19:
https://datavisualizations.heritage.org/public-health/covid-19-deaths-by-age/Again, no need to resort to mass hysteria.
These numbers get even worse for you, if we take into account other "groundtruths" as you put it, namely the fact of comorbidities. How can you reasonably claim that someone with stage IV metastatic cancer who happened to get covid died exclusively because of covid? In those cases, the person had a much more significant ailment that would have killed them with or without covid. Trust me, I unfortunately know how quickly a person dies after they are diagnosed with stage IV cancer that has metasticized.
2.) The vaccines havent had enough time to prove their worth to us. You can make extrapolations based on current data, but that does not replace 20 years of actual observation and more rigorous testing. Sure, mRNA technology has been dabbled with for the last 30 years, but there is a reason it has not become a widespread medical option.
And with all of your scientific handwaving in this thread, how are you 100% sure that the effectiveness of your magical vaccine isnt due to a confounding variable?
1) It's been a year+ and you still don't understand the concept of 800k excess deaths. You are remarkable.
People at age 75 have on avg 12 years of life left right now. If these people were going to die within a year anyway we wouldnt have 800k excess deaths. This is a fundamental concept that even stupidest COVID deniers on the board have managed to grasp in the past year. It's not a good look that you still havent.
Then you drift toward "death isn't actually bad..." good one.
2) Vaccines have already saved ~1 million lives in the US. You act like mRNA tech is some monolithic idea. There are many facets. The first RNAi drug was 2018. Cheap (ish) non-ezymatic RNA synthesis wasnt available until the late 2000s. It's been an area of remarkable research and growth over the past 15 years and we finally see the dividends.
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2021/dec/us-covid-19-vaccination-program-one-year-how-many-deaths-and