Yeah I was absolutely terrified for two weeks that I had a mild case without knowing it and got permanent brain issues and was going to be fucked. Not a fun two weeks.
Who could have known?
Man, they’re not fucking around in Vietnam.
Before WWI and WWII - the knock on democracy was that it would never fight a war unless attacked or easily winnable.
I think now we realize the knock, at least on the US, is that any collective sacrifice is our polarized state is impossible. Massive weakness has been exposed.
I think the opposite is true. Collective sacrifice has been shown to be horrifyingly easy for the country to endure. 250,000 people are dead and nobody cares.
The draft was and is a good idea. The assholes in charge never face any consequences. They don’t care if other people live or die, let alone what their quality of life is. And it isn’t just Republicans. You think Chuck Schumer gives a fuck, spending his free time sipping champagne with Ivanka and the Kochs?
This might be the hottest of all Riverman takes.
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That’s not a sacrifice it’s being ignorant of consequences.
Wearing a mask in public, the most trivial sacrifice anyone can do, is still a bridge too far for a big chunk of the country.
I mean, we agree here. Those least willing to sacrifice are of course those who benefit most from the sacrifices of others. The people throwing fits about masks are basically all white people with money - the founding members of the “fuck your feelings” club. Their whole lives are defined by resentment and victimhood.
I guess my point is that the country can and does take immense pain as long as it is shouldered by poor people.
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I don’t think it’s this.
It’s truly mind-boggling what fraction of very talented PhDs and MDs have absolute dogshit data presentation skills.
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is it? Like, that’s not close to their primary job.
Also, prob not an md or phd who made that graph
I’m willing to buy that the IFR in Africa is lower due to a younger population, but the number of over-65s in Africa is still comparable to the number in the US. Given how shaky public health reporting is in the US, where there are tremendous resources, it’s hard to believe that there isn’t some amount of underreporting. It’s suggestive that the map of COVID cases across Africa is basically the same as the map of GDP per capita.
I assume Biden will sign the US up to COVAX which will limit US supply (see footnote) - same as other 1st world countries
I’m willing to buy that the IFR in Africa is lower due to a younger population, but the number of over-65s in Africa is still comparable to the number in the US.
I have no idea what the real demographic says but the sentences here would seem to be at odds? Simply the shorter average life span.
The other factor is what is the time spent indoors? Is the spread rate significantly slower in Africa?
It’s also important to note that African countries have drastically more real world infectious disease experience than the old developed world does. Masks are cheap and they live in warm places without climate control to make the indoors significantly preferable to the outdoors.
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errr that experience is not exactly indicative that they can handle things properly. The ebola stuff was/is especially maddening.
I meant the gross number of people in that demographic, given the larger population.
Those kinds of experiences tend to shape people. At least it seems to have done so in most of east Asia with SARS.
But yeah it’s also probably poor reporting. I just also think they have less incentive to cook the numbers than we do.
“push comes to shove” is vague, but, well, people are complicated, there’s lots of identity wrapped up in this, people compartmentalize and rationalize. Some people do surprisingly caring things one moment and uncaring the next. And it’s very hard for people to decide what to do with problems like this that manifest because of the sum of billions of not very significant actions in and of themselves - see climate change. Like, you’ll find people who have adopted disabled children who supposedly don’t care about others?
It’s more or less impossible to depend on most people evaluating the morality of everything they do all the time and it’s not easy to set up norms. People know that spitting all over the place or cutting in line is rude and it’s so internalized that people just instantly know it, but try introducing some new norm of politeness.
I don’t know if I have any kind of strong thesis here, but I think people are generally kind of thoughtless and either behave well because of norms or because something compels them to act thoughtfully and it’s expecting a lot for that to be sustained.
Can’t help but go back to climate change here. We all expect millions of people are going to suffer and perhaps millions die from it in our lifetimes, but we’re not memeing about YOLO every time someone buys disposable stuff, builds a house twice as big as they need, buys a new sports car, eats hamburgers every day, etc.
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Random stat time but this one is crazy to me. 1% of the entire US population will have tested positive for Covid in the past 18 days at the end of today.
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Local hospital is out of beds and down to 13% ICU capacity left. They are stabilizing covid patients and then sending them home.
Shit is bad