Q12543 wrote:My Dad (longtime Wolves season ticket-holder by the way and one of the main reasons I follow this team) just died from Covid not that long ago. While he was no spring chicken, he was in good health, of sound body and mind. You damn well better believe it can be serious and deadly.
As for the man-made/government conspiracy angle, pandemics and viruses in particular have been around forever. They really don't need us men to create them!
(By they way, Ted Turner hasn't had anything to do with CNN or TNT for years, as he sold off his stake in those entities a long time ago. So if he was in on this vast conspiracy to boost ratings and kill off old people - like himself I guess? - then he's certainly missing out on any of the gains).
Sorry to hear that Q. I'm glad to hear it sounds like you guys had a chance to share an interest in the Wolves. At its best, sports can definitely bring people together.
That is why I don't want to alienate WolvesFan21, TheFuture, and anybody else who raises doubts about or downplays the seriousness of COVID (go back to the March thread on this and you'll see there were at least a couple others early on). I hear your skepticism. There are legitimate reasons for questioning authorities. The CDC changed its recommendations on masks early on. The spring lockdowns in retrospect look like a knee-jerk reaction rather than a carefully scaled response. When Trump downplayed the severity of the illness, Democrats played it up in response, which leaves you wondering who to believe.
But at the end of the day, facts are facts. The reports that hospitals are falsely labeling deaths by COVID to make money can't account for
https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covidthe rates of excess deaths. In fact, if you look at those excess deaths charts, stats show we are actually
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking-covid-19-excess-deaths-across-countriesundercounting the number of people who have died due to coronavirus. Some of those people died from other causes, but they died from those other causes because hospitals have been so full of people very sick with COVID, many of whom died from it. So the pandemic has not only directly killed people through the virus itself, but the saturation of health care systems worldwide has also had an indirect affect on mortality too.
I'm not sure if that's the explanation for the kind of study you mentioned, Future. But if it's true there were a Johns Hopkins study like the one you describe that was pulled, it probably wasn't for nefarious reasons, but because peer review determined it was not verifiable or misleading. Alternatively, and sadly likely, what you heard about a study indicating that deaths were down due to other causes (suggesting over reporting of COVID deaths) was likely an example of the kind of
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/covid-misinformation-is-killing-people1/misinformation that has spread online since the pandemic. There have been a ton of studies that indicate that the pandemic has prompted the largest outpouring of misinformation in history, some of it exaggerating it, some of it peddling false cures, but the vast majority of it has downplayed the pandemic or claimed it was some sort of conspiracy or caused by some crazy shit like 5G networks. Some of this misinformation may be based on some kernel of truth, but it been spun out to the point of full-blown conspiracy theories. None of it is helpful.
Authorities have made mistakes. But that's much more likely because we're dealing with something for the first time than because they have no idea what they are doing at all or are covering something up. When the CDC at first said not to buy masks, it wasn't mostly because they wanted to keep the supply for medical workers available. In the U.S., authorities have been too quick to shut down schools (and not quick enough to shut down bars and restaurants). I teach in a school in Germany, and we've been open all fall with only 3 cases--but that's also because Germany has kept rates low by enforcing smarter lockdowns of indoor restaurants and bars, mandating--yes, totally mandating--masks in all public places, and because in our school we follow those rules--all with masks, socially distanced, windows open. Plus Germans largely follow those rules and don't see them as some sort of crazy infringement on their liberty. The countries that have dealt with this crisis best have treated steps as a sort of throttle, slowly up and down as needed. They've also made careful decisions about cost-benefit analysis to decide which measures are best to take. This is why Germany has kept schools open--because it's so important and the risk relatively lower
if everybody follows certain relatively stringent practices in school--but shut down most restaurants, bars, and indoor social gatherings. That's the kind of data-based conversation we should be having. The U.S. does seem to be getting better at it. New York City opened schools back up and that makes sense. There have been smarter rules about masks (IMO, these should really be mandated--there's no health or economic reason not to do so until the vaccine gets us to herd immunity) and closing places where large numbers of people gather in small spaces indoors. There's room to disagree on certain steps. But suggesting that deaths are exaggerated or worse, that there's some kind of conspiracy behind it all, just isn't supported by reality.
My great uncle, who was basically like my grandpa, died a couple weeks ago in St. Paul. Then my dad's cousin a week later, also in St. Paul. This week I heard my step-mother's mom (my step-grandma) got it in Fargo. Of course I'm unhappy about these things, and I can empathize with Q and others who've lost loved ones. At the same time, even if you set that aside and just focus on the situation honestly and completely, it's clear that it's a real and serious pandemic that requires serious measures. We should be talking reasonably about how to deal with it, and remembering those we've lost, rather than casting doubt on reality.
