Covid infection rates are near what they were in the initial outbreak. But go ahead and see your movie. Send your kids to school unmasked. No problems there

@BetaCuck4Lyfe So what im hearing is, despite almost bankrupting the economy and making suicides and other mental health issues skyrocket due to quarintines and mandates....it has had absolutely no effect of any kind.

Pretty good argument to make sure we dont make that mistake again I guess.

@freemo 1,127,152 human American lives lost.

Who cares about THEM, amirite? Or their surviving families?

No effect, yep. Perfectly sane thing to say. Tell me, where'd you get your virology diploma?

@BetaCuck4Lyfe

Why would you say nonsense like that? I care deeply about them, which is why after you pointing out all those deaths would be exactly the same with or without the quarintines in the end, since eventually quarintines end and as you point out they changed and would change nothing...

The real question is why dont YOU care about all those dead people who have now died for absolutely nothing other than to be leveraged to bankrupt everyone? That sounds like a huge disgrace to those lives, to let them die for less than nothing.

@freemo the quarantines kept people alive until vaccines and treatments could be developed. It also provided time for the respirator industry to catch up to demand. The respirators, vaccines and treatments saved lives. Wouldn’t you say that was worthwhile?

@hozhoogoo

Yup sure was, which is why this thread is about me being upset someone implied all that effort had no effect on the numbers, particularly when its objectively a lie.

from where I stand, it looks like you misread the initial post. "Covid infection rates are near what they were in the initial outbreak." doesn't mean the measures had no effect as you took it, it just means that the risk is high *again*. and then, "But go ahead and see your movie. Send your kids to school unmasked. No problems there" is meant as ironic counter-advise, but you seem to have taken it literally. and then, once you signaled disagreement to each other, you both have been stabbing at each other as if the other was an irresponsible ignoramus, but what I get from both is violent agreement and misreading of each other. try to read it as if you'd written it yourself, maybe; there has to be some way for you both to see that you've been misreading each other

@lxo

Except that the current infection rates arent even half of what they were at the begining in the UK nor 1/10th of what they were in the begining in the USA.

So this is a lie that ultimately helps the anti-vaxxers since it suggests the vaccine did nothing, when in fact it made a HUGE difference in rates.

are you both talking about the same rates? infections/day, infections/exposures, or something else? also, how far back are you going when you say "the beginning". I insist, violent agreement, possibly with jargon getting in the way.

@lxo

I'd be happy to hear if the other party had some facts to back up their claims of course or if they meant something obscure...

but infections per day is what i was talking about with th enumbers I stated, though my statements would also be true if we talk about "total number of people infected at any one moment" and even infections per exposure... none of these even approach pre-mandate levels.

I am a COVID research scientist and am intimately familiar with the numbers around COVID and there is **nothing** about the current numbers to suggests they are at or near pre-mandate levels... not infection rate, nor infection count, nor any other metric... As a scientist I am happy to hear someone is making a fact based argument, but there is no indication of that being the case here.

Worse yet when called out for being wrong I saw no effort on their part to either correct themselves or clarify.

pre-mandate =?= initial outbreak

@lxo

The rates were even higher on day one since no immunity had formed in anyone yet... so even then they would be factually wrong.

erhm... there was a day very early in the outbreak when the rate was a few infections per day, before it spread and grew. it depends on how far back you go. I still recall the dread with which I heard of the first few cases in Brazil, then the first deaths in Brazil. it was no different elsewhere, except people weren't watching it as closely yet when it got to some other places. but it did go through a phase in which there were fewer infections per day than we have now, and there were times when they were much higher, therefore there was a time when they were about the same as today. and who are we to say that that wasn't just the time when someone started paying attention to it, and so refers to it as "the initial outbreak"?

@lxo Oh your talking about the total number of people in the world infected... In that case the number at the begining of the pandemic was 1... so at that point its just nonsensical a statement to make at all. So still not really a honest statement to make in any useful way.

That said the issue here is not if you can somehow twist what he said into something that can be technically true or not... its the fact that it is a harmful statment, misleading at best, flat out wrong at worst. And instead of making any attempt to actually discuss it they went straight to personal attacks...

It is their behavior and response to the criticism, very valud criticism, without any care for the facts, that leads me to have issue with this. Someone simply being mistaken or presenting misleading information unintentionally in and of itself isnt the issue.