oz_karter wrote: ↑Wed Nov 24, 2021 3:33 am
Pokitren wrote: ↑Mon Nov 22, 2021 12:31 pm
oz_karter wrote: ↑Wed Nov 17, 2021 5:11 am
Pokitren wrote: ↑Thu Nov 04, 2021 8:23 am
And what I've noticed is that the death rate from the flu is higher than from covid.
Well that's not true. The death rate for COVID is magnitudes higher.
Interesting fact: Australia hasn't had any flu deaths in over a year.
That shows the restrictions have worked and that COVID is significantly more transmissible and deadly.
What makes you think that?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7952324/ There's an article on a reliable source. Here the author writes that the death rate from influenza is higher than from covid. And he also writes about the uselessness of restrictions to build up collective immunity.
As a scientist, reading that article made my brain hurt.
It's based mostly on opinions and cherrypicks countries for its conclusions.
Many of these opinions have been floated in Australia, but soundly proven wrong. You can have a functioning economy AND low deaths. The long term effects of lockdowns are yet to be seen, but interestingly Australia has had lower suicides in 2020 and 2021 than in preceding years.
The author does not seem to take into account long term health effects of COVID (surviving it does not mean you aren't affected).
The article does not say anywhere that Influenza has a higher death rate. This is completely untrue.
The article reeks of someone who has a focus on economics and little care about the deaths of humans in a population.
I am very thankful that I live in a state and country which put health first. Our lives have not suffered. In QLD we've had only 7 COVID deaths and all of those were from overseas transmission (not local). We've had a few sporadic short lockdowns (3-7 days), but otherwise our lives have been generally normal. We've also been able to stop wearing face masks.
The one restriction that remains is state border closures, but those are lifting as vaccination rates increase. It is very much looking like a normal Australia heading into 2022 and we have lost very few people.
That's the short definition of a science paper, and indeed the short definition of the pro-covid publications too which is why it has been so easy to produce countering papers throughout this thread. An objective observer would find it all very inconclusive which is not the case with things like polio. Instead, the tribalism has made a mess of it all. I've read far to many of these papers as an agnostic and the subject is completely inconclusive. At this point in time, we don't actually have firm evidence of how many people this has affected and if the "it" is the actual virus in question - that is outrageous. The tribalists would vehemently disagree with that but ask them to produce proof and it's all second hand sources by either the institutions making the claims (or their associates like the ONS) or chancing scientists on the other side trying to make a name for themselves. The mod on page 1 said 4m have died - prove it. They can't. I can, however, prove that organisations like Ofcom in the UK are telling media outlets how to present the narrative (
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv-radio-and-o ... oronavirus). It's not a good look. So even if the virus is as lethal as the proponents say, the crime is that the propagandising cried wolf so much that it has put up people's BS meters and lost the trust of the masses. All that universal trust trust and goodwill in March 2020 has been majorly lost now, and that's the fault of the propaganda.
Australia hasn't disproven a single thing. Ask anyone from 4 years ago and they will say it's obvious that locking down a country would reduce a virus. We still have no way of knowing who does and doesn't have what virus.
Pokitren was referring to about halfway down the page that says flu is a bigger killer for
under 50s than Covid (cherry picking again). This "fact" is actually accepted even by pro-narrative publishers - Covid affects the elderly and not nearly as badly the young who die more from the flu.
For ages 70+, Covid is 6.5 times more deadly than the flu
For ages 50-69, Covid is 8 times more deadly than the flu
For ages 20-49, the Flu is 3 times more deadly than Covid
For ages 0-19, the Flu is 3 times more deadly than Covid
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-nc ... arios.html
https://www.businessinsider.com/coronav ... age-2020-6
Disclaimer: the above figures are from two official bodies and are hotly disputed by independent scientists who are highly qualified to dispute them.
Which therefore raises further questions about the massive vax push for the young when even the official data is all over the place, and another example of why trust and goodwill has been lost recently.
I said earlier in this thread that the only use all these second hand statistics serve for you and I as laymen is to ask questions about the claims - they are not evidence in of themselves. The longer this goes on and the longer people go on mass demos without actually dying in droves, the more it seems not as serious as we thought it could be in March 2020. I'm still agnostic to the fact that it's still a dangerous virus and that the governments just made a pig's ear of talking about it to us, but we can rule out certain things using primary observation:
- There are no hoards of dead homeless people scattered on the streets from a deadly airborne pandemic
- Masks block your breath about this much:
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/351210470950465833/
- Or this much:
https://media1.tenor.com/images/f21d79e ... d=12239249
- Or this much:
https://eu-browse.startpage.com/av/anon ... 03de4d15d
- Objecting scientists have not been invited to contribute to government publications, even though they are eminently qualified to disagree with official claims (link earlier in this thread).
- By the blurry and disputed official figures, Covid is still not as big a killer other diseases (
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com ... %3DApi&f=1) and quite small depending on the country (
https://www.stat.fi/til/ksyyt/2020/ksyy ... en_001.gif) and yet the other causes of death are not a political argument warranting mandatory actions to lower them.
- Self-named fact check organisations are being outed as merely opinion pieces by journalists, as if that wasn't already obvious (1.
https://nypost.com/2021/12/14/facebook- ... y-opinion/) (2.
https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/ ... historical)
Again, this still could mean the virus is quite dangerous, but we have our own empirical information to go on nowadays that allows at least us to relax about it compared to March 2020.
All in all, the human condition for tribalism has made a right cockup of what should have been a rational debate, and the debate is now a caricature of itself, a global Brexit 2.0.
