He's an old, senile, delusional man who doesn't even know what day of the week it is half the time. Crazy how someone could actually lose an election to him LOLL
While I can well imagine that there were sufficient tens of thousands of invalid votes to throw the election ... I can just as easily imagine that there were sufficient tens of millions of voters who were deranged by Trump.
Sounds like you're just imagining more excuses for Trump. So far you've blamed Birx, public health, the media and now tens of thousands of invalid votes and that's just on this page LOLL
I agree with this. Minus the part about when “life” begins. Science and Medicine is clear on that. Now determining when “life” is valuable enough to protect has become an issue of categorizing its importance. But I agree there is no one date on when a disease becomes endemic. Omicron will be the variant that put us there imo…
In the US, we moved into the endemic phase of covid probably somewhere in April or May. Still lots of analysis of what happened going on, but unless a more virulent strain pops up, likely when we look back a few years from now, somewhere in April or May will be the inflection point where this stopped being a threat to our country and became just one of those things that happens sometimes. There were months at a time when covid was the leading cause of death in the US. Now it is down to the levels of things like diabetes and alzheimers. It is fading into background noise as far as leading causes of death. Once we've had a full year of endemic covid, we'll know more about the seasonal cycles it displays and the covid deniers of yesteryear will finally be correct in saying it is like the flu. Outside of the developed world, vaccination rates are still low, and worldwide, covid can still be considered a pandemic. In the developed world it is endemic. These can both be true at the same time. WHO deals with the entire world, Biden is only president of the US. Both the WHO and the US president can be correct when saying different things about covid.
I remember in the first days I was skeptical that this was going to be that big of a deal. My memory was of Carter’s swine flu debacle that ended up being nothing to worry about. But in time my skepticism was replaced with knowing that this was a serious pandemic. I think cautious optimism is the appropriate position now.
You’re not far from the kingdom. The reason 2009 amounted to nothing is because the CDC stopped testing early in the so-called pandemic.
I didn’t think it would be a horror show until the NYC outbreak happened, and I doubt any politician was going to do what was necessary in Jan-Feb. Which was to stop *all* international travel and quarantine returning Americans. That’s why as stupid as Trumps 15 cases to 0 line was, it probably didn’t change the outcome vs what any other politician would have done. However where I think he actively caused deaths (easily six figures) was where he started pandering to the “liberate” anti-public health types as the election approached, this was despite clear warnings that a new pandemic wave was building. It was a period of right wing insanity that lasted all the way through the election and through 1/6 and that last delta wave of the virus. The tragedy of the delta wave almost got buried in the news because of Trumps insurrection… all happening at the same time.
The ‘NYC outbreak’ tightly corresponds to the so-called ahistorical and wildly disproportionate ‘Covid spike’ which commenced just days after the WHO gave the world the go-ahead to go insane.
Actually, since the term pandemic is a human construct, there was a moment it started. March 11, 2020 was when the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic. As far as when the effects of the SARS-CoV-2 virus are felt, and to what extent they impact people, those cannot be determined. However, you most certainly can, and we do declare beginnings and ends of pandemics. Just FYI, but on June 5, 1981 the Global AIDS pandemic was declared. That pandemic has never ended, and I suspect that the COVID-19 pandemic will not end any time soon either. Especially with less than half of the globe being vaccinated.
I don’t think science can ever help us craft a definition, and therefore can never help us know when life begins, because that question entirely depends on our definition of life. Further, even for philosophers, life has been extremely resistant to definition. Here’s a great article that underscores just how challenging this problem has been. https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-life-its-vast-diversity-defies-easy-definition-20210309/
Cmon Phil. If a republican leader had said this the same week that the WHO said what it said, there would be backlash. What if we see an outbreak in the winter? Will it still be "over" ? Nah, this was calculated politics. An outbreak after the first Tuesday of November wont matter to the politicians. This was a calculated political risk.
Notice how it is of little concern that the world rolled up its sidewalks for the first time in history. The only concern is when this so-called pathogen moderates so we can roll out the sidewalks again.
