NSR: Corona Virus - You Can Start Panicking Now
Re: NSR: Corona Virus - You Can Start Panicking Now
The small hands man is gone. Time to move on. Things are looking up.
And the sea will grant each man new hope . . .
-Christopher Columbus
-Christopher Columbus
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easyrider16
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Re: NSR: Corona Virus - You Can Start Panicking Now
"Laura Ingraham slams CDC’s ‘doom and gloom’ outlook on coronavirus: Medical left is ‘holding onto power’"
https://www.foxnews.com/media/laura-ing ... onto-power
This kind of thing is the absolute worst, in my opinion. Politicizing the pandemic is not helpful to anyone, and accusing medical professionals as being in some sort of left-wing conspiracy to hold on to power is slanderous and a bit outrageous. It's also stupid on its face. If by the "left" you mean democrats, they just won the Presidency, House, and Senate. They don't need BS excuses to "hold on to power" because they're in power right now, and will be for four more years at least. Yet so many people on the right side of the aisle buy into this conspiracy nonsense.
Canada just shut down Whistler because of Covid. Places in Europe just went into lockdown. There are new strains that seem to be causing this new wave, and cases are trending up here. Is it any wonder the CDC is urging people to continue taking precautions? Look at the damn science, people. Listen to the scientists who have spent their entire lives studying infectious diseases. Don't listen to talking heads who have zero expertise in anything but stirring people up to capture ratings.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/laura-ing ... onto-power
This kind of thing is the absolute worst, in my opinion. Politicizing the pandemic is not helpful to anyone, and accusing medical professionals as being in some sort of left-wing conspiracy to hold on to power is slanderous and a bit outrageous. It's also stupid on its face. If by the "left" you mean democrats, they just won the Presidency, House, and Senate. They don't need BS excuses to "hold on to power" because they're in power right now, and will be for four more years at least. Yet so many people on the right side of the aisle buy into this conspiracy nonsense.
Canada just shut down Whistler because of Covid. Places in Europe just went into lockdown. There are new strains that seem to be causing this new wave, and cases are trending up here. Is it any wonder the CDC is urging people to continue taking precautions? Look at the damn science, people. Listen to the scientists who have spent their entire lives studying infectious diseases. Don't listen to talking heads who have zero expertise in anything but stirring people up to capture ratings.
Re: NSR: Corona Virus - You Can Start Panicking Now
Forever .. Goat Path
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XtremeJibber2001
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Re: NSR: Corona Virus - You Can Start Panicking Now
I'd say we're getting real close to normalcy ... 222 COVID deaths reported in the US yesterday, which is the fewest since March 23, 2020. If current rising case numbers don't translate into hospitalizations / deaths, we should probably resume normalcy. Hospitalizations are still a bit high, but the next month or so will tell us a lot.
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easyrider16
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Re: NSR: Corona Virus - You Can Start Panicking Now
Unsurprisingly, emails have come out showing how Trump administration officials pressured the CDC to edit its recommendations and reports for political reasons:
It's this sort of thing that got him unelected - he bungled the biggest (arguably the only) crisis of his Presidency.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics ... d=msedgntpThen-science adviser Paul Alexander wrote to then-HHS public affairs chief Michael Caputo on Sept. 9, 2020, touting two examples of where he said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had bowed to his pressure and changed language in their reports, according to an email obtained by the House’s select subcommittee on the coronavirus outbreak.
Pointing to one change — where CDC leaders allegedly changed the opening sentence of a report about spread of the virus among younger people after Alexander pressured them — Alexander wrote to Caputo, calling it a “small victory but a victory nonetheless and yippee!!!”
In the same email, Alexander touted another example of a change to a weekly report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that he said the agency made in response to his demands. The weekly Morbidity and Mortality Reports, which offer public updates on scientists’ findings, had been considered sacrosanct for decades and untouchable by political appointees in the past.
Two days later, Alexander appealed to then-White House adviser Scott Atlas to help him dispute an upcoming CDC report on coronavirus-related deaths among young Americans.
“Can you help me craft an op-ed,” Alexander wrote to Atlas on Sept. 11, alleging the CDC report was “timed for the election” and an attempt to keep schools closed even as Trump pushed to reopen them. “Let us advise the President and get permission to preempt this please for it will run for the weekend so we need to blunt the edge as it is misleading.”
It's this sort of thing that got him unelected - he bungled the biggest (arguably the only) crisis of his Presidency.
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Bubba
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Re: NSR: Corona Virus - You Can Start Panicking Now
From the New York Times morning e-mail
By David Leonhardt
Good morning. Why do so many vaccinated people remain irrationally fearful? Listen to the professor’s story.
A fable for our times
Guido Calabresi, a federal judge and Yale law professor, invented a little fable that he has been telling law students for more than three decades.
He tells the students to imagine a god coming forth to offer society a wondrous invention that would improve everyday life in almost every way. It would allow people to spend more time with friends and family, see new places and do jobs they otherwise could not do. But it would also come with a high cost. In exchange for bestowing this invention on society, the god would choose 1,000 young men and women and strike them dead.
Calabresi then asks: Would you take the deal? Almost invariably, the students say no. The professor then delivers the fable’s lesson: “What’s the difference between this and the automobile?”
In truth, automobiles kill many more than 1,000 young Americans each year; the total U.S. death toll hovers at about 40,000 annually. We accept this toll, almost unthinkingly, because vehicle crashes have always been part of our lives. We can’t fathom a world without them.
It’s a classic example of human irrationality about risk. We often underestimate large, chronic dangers, like car crashes or chemical pollution, and fixate on tiny but salient risks, like plane crashes or shark attacks.
One way for a risk to become salient is for it to be new. That’s a core idea behind Calabresi’s fable. He asks students to consider whether they would accept the cost of vehicle travel if it did not already exist. That they say no underscores the very different ways we treat new risks and enduring ones.
I have been thinking about the fable recently because of Covid-19. Covid certainly presents a salient risk: It’s a global pandemic that has upended daily life for more than a year. It has changed how we live, where we work, even what we wear on our faces. Covid feels ubiquitous.
Fortunately, it is also curable. The vaccines have nearly eliminated death, hospitalization and other serious Covid illness among people who have received shots. The vaccines have also radically reduced the chances that people contract even a mild version of Covid or can pass it on to others.
Yet many vaccinated people continue to obsess over the risks from Covid — because they are so new and salient.
‘Psychologically hard’
To take just one example, major media outlets trumpeted new government data last week showing that 5,800 fully vaccinated Americans had contracted Covid. That may sound like a big number, but it indicates that a vaccinated person’s chances of getting Covid are about one in 11,000. The chances of a getting a version any worse than a common cold are even more remote.
But they are not zero. And they will not be zero anytime in the foreseeable future. Victory over Covid will not involve its elimination. Victory will instead mean turning it into the sort of danger that plane crashes or shark attacks present — too small to be worth reordering our lives.
That is what the vaccines do. If you’re vaccinated, Covid presents a minuscule risk to you, and you present a minuscule Covid risk to anyone else. A car trip is a bigger threat, to you and others. About 100 Americans are likely to die in car crashes today. The new federal data suggests that either zero or one vaccinated person will die today from Covid.
It’s true that experts believe vaccinated people should still sometimes wear a mask, partly because it’s a modest inconvenience that further reduces a tiny risk — and mostly because it contributes to a culture of mask wearing. It is the decent thing to do when most people still aren’t vaccinated. If you’re vaccinated, a mask is more of a symbol of solidarity than anything else.
Coming to grips with the comforting realities of post-vaccination life is going to take some time for most of us. It’s only natural that so many vaccinated people continue to harbor irrational fears. Yet slowly recognizing that irrationality will be a vital part of overcoming Covid.
“We’re not going to get to a place of zero risk,” Jennifer Nuzzo, a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, told me during a virtual Times event last week. “I don’t think that’s the right metric for feeling like things are normal.”
After Nuzzo made that point, Dr. Ashish Jha of Brown University told us about his own struggle to return to normal. He has been fully vaccinated for almost two months, he said, and only recently decided to meet a vaccinated friend for a drink, unmasked. “It was hard — psychologically hard — for me,” Jha said.
“There are going to be some challenges to re-acclimating and re-entering,” he added. “But we’ve got to do it.”
And how did it feel in the end, I asked, to get together with his friend?
“It was awesome,” Jha said.
By David Leonhardt
Good morning. Why do so many vaccinated people remain irrationally fearful? Listen to the professor’s story.
A fable for our times
Guido Calabresi, a federal judge and Yale law professor, invented a little fable that he has been telling law students for more than three decades.
He tells the students to imagine a god coming forth to offer society a wondrous invention that would improve everyday life in almost every way. It would allow people to spend more time with friends and family, see new places and do jobs they otherwise could not do. But it would also come with a high cost. In exchange for bestowing this invention on society, the god would choose 1,000 young men and women and strike them dead.
Calabresi then asks: Would you take the deal? Almost invariably, the students say no. The professor then delivers the fable’s lesson: “What’s the difference between this and the automobile?”
In truth, automobiles kill many more than 1,000 young Americans each year; the total U.S. death toll hovers at about 40,000 annually. We accept this toll, almost unthinkingly, because vehicle crashes have always been part of our lives. We can’t fathom a world without them.
It’s a classic example of human irrationality about risk. We often underestimate large, chronic dangers, like car crashes or chemical pollution, and fixate on tiny but salient risks, like plane crashes or shark attacks.
One way for a risk to become salient is for it to be new. That’s a core idea behind Calabresi’s fable. He asks students to consider whether they would accept the cost of vehicle travel if it did not already exist. That they say no underscores the very different ways we treat new risks and enduring ones.
I have been thinking about the fable recently because of Covid-19. Covid certainly presents a salient risk: It’s a global pandemic that has upended daily life for more than a year. It has changed how we live, where we work, even what we wear on our faces. Covid feels ubiquitous.
Fortunately, it is also curable. The vaccines have nearly eliminated death, hospitalization and other serious Covid illness among people who have received shots. The vaccines have also radically reduced the chances that people contract even a mild version of Covid or can pass it on to others.
Yet many vaccinated people continue to obsess over the risks from Covid — because they are so new and salient.
‘Psychologically hard’
To take just one example, major media outlets trumpeted new government data last week showing that 5,800 fully vaccinated Americans had contracted Covid. That may sound like a big number, but it indicates that a vaccinated person’s chances of getting Covid are about one in 11,000. The chances of a getting a version any worse than a common cold are even more remote.
But they are not zero. And they will not be zero anytime in the foreseeable future. Victory over Covid will not involve its elimination. Victory will instead mean turning it into the sort of danger that plane crashes or shark attacks present — too small to be worth reordering our lives.
That is what the vaccines do. If you’re vaccinated, Covid presents a minuscule risk to you, and you present a minuscule Covid risk to anyone else. A car trip is a bigger threat, to you and others. About 100 Americans are likely to die in car crashes today. The new federal data suggests that either zero or one vaccinated person will die today from Covid.
It’s true that experts believe vaccinated people should still sometimes wear a mask, partly because it’s a modest inconvenience that further reduces a tiny risk — and mostly because it contributes to a culture of mask wearing. It is the decent thing to do when most people still aren’t vaccinated. If you’re vaccinated, a mask is more of a symbol of solidarity than anything else.
Coming to grips with the comforting realities of post-vaccination life is going to take some time for most of us. It’s only natural that so many vaccinated people continue to harbor irrational fears. Yet slowly recognizing that irrationality will be a vital part of overcoming Covid.
“We’re not going to get to a place of zero risk,” Jennifer Nuzzo, a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, told me during a virtual Times event last week. “I don’t think that’s the right metric for feeling like things are normal.”
After Nuzzo made that point, Dr. Ashish Jha of Brown University told us about his own struggle to return to normal. He has been fully vaccinated for almost two months, he said, and only recently decided to meet a vaccinated friend for a drink, unmasked. “It was hard — psychologically hard — for me,” Jha said.
“There are going to be some challenges to re-acclimating and re-entering,” he added. “But we’ve got to do it.”
And how did it feel in the end, I asked, to get together with his friend?
“It was awesome,” Jha said.
"Abandon hope all ye who enter here"
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"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function" =
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Killington Zone
You can checkout any time you like,
but you can never leave
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function" =
F. Scott Fitzgerald
"There's nothing more frightening than ignorance in action" - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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XtremeJibber2001
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Re: NSR: Corona Virus - You Can Start Panicking Now
I'm no fan of Jim Jordan or the way he talks to other people, but he did have a point in last weeks rant to Fauci. Fauci would not offer up any numbers where we could resume normalcy. I get Fauci and the Biden admin don't want to over promise and under deliver, but it's time they share their goals.
Current 7-day daily deaths is ~753, which is far too high for normalcy, but what about ~100-200?
As an aside, heard a figure last week that's not getting a lot of attention:
CDC study finds about 78% of people hospitalized for Covid were overweight or obese
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/08/covid-c ... obese.html
Is the real pandemic obesity? The article above goes on to say over 42% of the US population was considered obese in 2018 (BMI >30).
Current 7-day daily deaths is ~753, which is far too high for normalcy, but what about ~100-200?
As an aside, heard a figure last week that's not getting a lot of attention:
CDC study finds about 78% of people hospitalized for Covid were overweight or obese
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/08/covid-c ... obese.html
Is the real pandemic obesity? The article above goes on to say over 42% of the US population was considered obese in 2018 (BMI >30).
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deadheadskier
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Re: NSR: Corona Virus - You Can Start Panicking Now
I don't think it's about over promising and under delivering.
I think it's recognition that there is tremendous Covid fatigue right now and if they give too optimistic of an answer, many folks will take that as a pass to be less vigilant.
Shouldn't Jim Jordan really be challenging his state leadership though? Since the beginning, most rules have been set by the states. Here in NH the governor lifted the mask mandate on Friday. I bet it will be many months though until private businesses follow suit.
I think it's recognition that there is tremendous Covid fatigue right now and if they give too optimistic of an answer, many folks will take that as a pass to be less vigilant.
Shouldn't Jim Jordan really be challenging his state leadership though? Since the beginning, most rules have been set by the states. Here in NH the governor lifted the mask mandate on Friday. I bet it will be many months though until private businesses follow suit.
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XtremeJibber2001
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Re: NSR: Corona Virus - You Can Start Panicking Now
This is wild. So wild. Kids wearing masks is akin to 'Child Abuse’? Call 911 if you see a child wearing a mask? Confront people wearing masks?
This schtick of his can't last much longer, can it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LB_FPFlWSs
This schtick of his can't last much longer, can it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LB_FPFlWSs
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easyrider16
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Re: NSR: Corona Virus - You Can Start Panicking Now
Seriously Carlson is one of the dumbest people in the media. I don't say that lightly. Often the stuff he says belongs on fringe web sites in the dingiest corners of the internet rather than a major network TV channel. I don't think anyone outside of his delusional followers take him seriously.
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XtremeJibber2001
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Re: NSR: Corona Virus - You Can Start Panicking Now
He also hosts the most watched cable news show and holds a record for for highest-rated program in U.S. cable news history (July 2020). He enjoys an average audience of 3-4 million people a night.easyrider16 wrote: ↑Apr 27th, '21, 12:45 Seriously Carlson is one of the dumbest people in the media. I don't say that lightly. Often the stuff he says belongs on fringe web sites in the dingiest corners of the internet rather than a major network TV channel. I don't think anyone outside of his delusional followers take him seriously.
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easyrider16
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Re: NSR: Corona Virus - You Can Start Panicking Now
That's a testament about how successful a person can be pedaling bullsh!t so long as it pushes the right emotional buttons for people. Limbough, O'Reilly, Hannity, Ingram, they all follow the same playbook. Paint a picture of a monolithic, evil empire of liberals conspiring to overthrow traditional American values, then interpret every news story of the day through that distorted lens. People eat it up. It resonates with our human primal tribal nature, with liberals as bad guys (other tribe) and conservatives as good guys (our tribe). It turns politics into a sporting event, my team vs your team.
It does surprise me a little that Carlson is so successful because those other people are actually intelligent and calculated, whereas Carlson is clearly not. But hey, the flat earth society has a following so clearly there's no shortage of dumb people to sell things to.
It does surprise me a little that Carlson is so successful because those other people are actually intelligent and calculated, whereas Carlson is clearly not. But hey, the flat earth society has a following so clearly there's no shortage of dumb people to sell things to.
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Stormchaser
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Re: NSR: Corona Virus - You Can Start Panicking Now
Anyone who regurgitates stories as fact from op/ed news outlets (Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, etc.) is foolish.
Re: NSR: Corona Virus - You Can Start Panicking Now
Now do CNN and MSNBC. Lemon, Maddow, Cuomo, Stelter, Cooper et al.easyrider16 wrote: ↑Apr 27th, '21, 13:16 That's a testament about how successful a person can be pedaling bullsh!t so long as it pushes the right emotional buttons for people. Limbough, O'Reilly, Hannity, Ingram, they all follow the same playbook. Paint a picture of a monolithic, evil empire of liberals conspiring to overthrow traditional American values, then interpret every news story of the day through that distorted lens. People eat it up. It resonates with our human primal tribal nature, with liberals as bad guys (other tribe) and conservatives as good guys (our tribe). It turns politics into a sporting event, my team vs your team.
It does surprise me a little that Carlson is so successful because those other people are actually intelligent and calculated, whereas Carlson is clearly not. But hey, the flat earth society has a following so clearly there's no shortage of dumb people to sell things to.
Russia hoax, impeachment hoax 1 and 2, peaceful protest, etc.
You have no clue.
I get all the news I need from the weather report
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easyrider16
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Re: NSR: Corona Virus - You Can Start Panicking Now
So do you agree that Carlson et. al. do what I describe? Because I agree that there are those in the media on the left side of the aisle that do something similar.