Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

BIG GOVers love their fear porn.

 

Why do things like this always seem to start in China ? Tendered: the Chinese always marine themselves as being ill …

In China, every cough and sniffle is a crisis - The Conservative Woman

 

oh well if Chuck Callesto on twitter says so. Lol good lord man. How many stupid tweets are you going to post?

 

Health officials in Ohio are warning about an increase in pneumonia cases among children — but experts say there isn't a connection between this outbreak and the one happening in China.

In a press release Thursday, officials in Ohio's Warren County (located between Cincinnati and Dayton) shared an update on the outbreak there, noting 145 cases have been reported in children aged 3 to 14 years old.

These cases of pediatric pneumonia — which some have referred to as "white lung syndrome" — most typically cause cough, fever and fatigue. Doctors say most cases of bacterial pneumonia can be treated with antibiotics and most don't require hospitalization.

Officials also said the recent illnesses are "not suspected of being a new/novel respiratory virus," but instead appear to be an uptick in the number of "typical pediatric pneumonia cases."

"There has been zero evidence of this outbreak being connected to other outbreaks, either statewide, nationally or internationally," the statement said.

Ohio "white lung" pneumonia cases not linked to China outbreak or novel pathogen, experts say - CBS News

 

But, twitter.....

 

One of my teens thought every teacher was out to get him with the same level of logic used here. He outgrew that. The GOP is just a whiny ass teen boy party.

 

I process things like this, and I remember how many times the medical consensus changed on COVID. There could be merit to this, but a lot of trust in the institutions surrounding public health has been damaged.

At first Trump was a big racist because he blocked travel to and from China. Trump was right. Then everyone had to mask because that stopped the spread of COVID. That ended up being false. Then everyone had to get the vaccine because that prevented people from getting and spreading COVID. That ended up being false. It really seems like whatever is most expedient narrative at a political moment time is the narrative.

“Science,” especially in the arena of public health, has a strange tendency of falsifying its own claims.

FWIW, you could be right here. Maybe this is right wing Twitter disinformation, but the track record of damage left in the wake of MSM and state approved misinformation counterbalances that here. We are going to have to wait and see how this develops.

 

As far as I can tell, the main appeal of “this was China doing this” is that we don’t have to reckon with the disturbing fact that people simply mad.

 

Sometimes experts are wrong. Sometimes experts just don’t know. Sometimes even “science” as we know it is wrong. But not usually.

It begs the question, if you are going to dismiss experts and science because it is occasionally wrong, then how are you going to inform the opinions? The answer I see is cherry pick fringe sites and conspiracies that there is no solid evidence to support.

To me this distrust of experts and science is mostly just rationalization for people to believe whatever they want and fits their preferred narrative.

 

I think the solution here is to properly represent your confidence level in a claim, which based on the track record of COVID would be something like…

“This is what we think, but we could be wrong.”

Based on everything that has happened since 2020…we are not talking about the probability that you’ll win the lottery. We are talking much higher probabilities than that. It happened enough since 2020 that we could describe it as frequent.

 

Sometimes experts get it wrong … and multitudes die. *shrugs shoulders*

Add: in Haiti voodoo shaman are experts.

 

I don’t think most of the claims were wrong. Some were. Some you have to take in context. Some things were true with the original variants but not later variants.

Also there was a lot blurring of what experts said and what the media later repeated.

You can find videos where experts making seemingly incorrect assertions. Some were wrong. Some were out of context. But they ignore thousands of communications that were substantially correct.

Also, there were some things they just didn’t know. It was a novel virus.

 

Recall from early covid, the far right trolls were the ones hyping up COVID bigly as it was initially ravaging China. Posting images of “mass graves” and emptied streets and such. We saw several posters doing that here. This was when the virus was believed to be a China problem, before New York and Italy.

Amazing how quickly the very same ecosystem of political social media trolls flipped to “it’s just a flu” once they realized the economic pain a pandemic would cause here.

 

I remember Trump shutting down travel, to China, and Democrats shrieking “Xenophobe!”

I also recall Democrats expressing alarm about a rushed vaccine.

Basically, if Trump appeared wearing a mask, Democrats removed theirs. And when Trump appeared without a mask, Democrats wore two.

They were less interested in stemming mass-derangement than they were gainsaying Trump every step of the way.

 

Pulled this off of google … “I have the sniffles. Am I going to die ?!?!?”

Since COVID-19 has killed many people all around the world, individuals' levels of death anxiety due to COVID-19 are likely to be promoted often resulting in increasing the levels of fear during the pandemic. Death anxiety, also known as thanatophobia, is anxiety produced by thoughts of one's own death (fear of death).

 

Trump didn't shut down travel to or from China. He only stopped people with a Chinese passport from entering. But there v were still 7 flights a day landing in the US that originated in China, even after the v Chinese travel ban. And no testing or isolating of these passengers after landing. Like a virus really cares about what passport a person holds?

 

And that little bit elicited wild shrieks of “Xenophobia!”

 

“It’s usually quite a bad idea to wear a mask if your healthcare provider hasn’t asked you to wear one.”

Setting aside the non-existence of viruses, the chief takeaway here is don’t be out of step.

Even more so than the fear of sickness and death, I suspect the main reason why mandates were so effective is the fear of being out of step.

Even in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave we learned that people were, at point of crisis, essentially cattle.