Biden 2021 - A Mediocre Middle Ground

So Biden is dealing with the oil crisis he created, by giving a supply for 2 days from the national reserve. He is an excellent problem solver it seems

Lol.
You should give him some English lessons.

Maybe some graphs analysis lessons, too.

Oh and epidemiology. Can’t forget that.

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Without a “massive government overreaction” Australia would have had 50k+ deaths, assuming PFR roughly equal to US and EU.

Your guess is wrong. They haven’t gone up. But these are 2020 denialist talking points that have been debunked for a while now - suicides and comparisons to flu.

I think the goalposts of the pro-virus advocates changed to “discrimination of the unvaccinated” so I suggest you update your talking points.

The non-Americans are running the show for a few days while you all celebrate a disneyfied holiday that exults the frankly stunning naivete of Native Americans which ended up costing them dearly.

Would you go into a bit more detail in how you’re calculating your 50k + deaths? Is that per season, or combined seasons?
900 deaths in the first year(nearly 2k for 2 seasons), vs potentially 50k+ if nothing was done, for a disease with a 99.7 %or so survival rate seems like a very longbow to draw.

No … around 500-1,000 people die every year from the flu in Australia, that’s due to vaccinations though. Without vaccines the death rate would be considerably higher

2019 was the second worst flu season on record

Just under 900 deaths… And that’s the second worst on record. 2020 recorded under 100 influenza mediated deaths.

Don’t quote me on this, but I believe the death rate for all cause pneumonia + the flu is around 4-5000/year.

Are you thinking about pneumonia perhaps? Pneumonia is awful, an old friend (only 18 at the time) caught it around 1.5 years ago and was in hospital for weeks having fluid drained out of his lungs. He lost almost 20 lbs!

I’d talk to him on the phone/through FaceTime while he was in hospital and you could see he was really struggling… He was eighteen, think about someone 80-90 getting pneumonia…

Covid has killed around 0,18% of all Americans so far and 0,21% of all Brits. And that’s with the boogeyman that is the L-word being utilized in 2020.

Assuming that similar measures to the ones applied in the UK or the ones in the US (and Western European countries) you’d get 50k+ deaths from Covid in Australia with a 0,2% PFR.

So less stringent measures would have resulted in 47k+ more deaths, almost twice the WW2 bodycount.

Here’s the article I read the other day ,supposedly based on ABS stats Australia - Influenza & COVID Death Statistics - 2009 to 2020 (universallifetools.com)

Pneumonia, well you don’t get it unless you first get a respiratory infection, especially from a cold/flu/covid virus(perhaps fungal, bacterial, or allergon but that’s not very relevant to this discussion). I would assume most people that die from covid, flu, colds are going from pneumonia stopping their ability to breath, or at least a combined heart /lung stress? If not, how does it directly cause death, and how is it different apart from severity and transmitability than other common viruses.

My brother had a friend that died from pneumonia. He was only 19 or 20. He had what he thought was just a bad cold, tried to let it take its course, wait it out. His housemates went away for the weekend, came back to find him dead, in his bed, from fluid filled lungs.

And to bring it back around, the southern border shows that Biden didn’t learn anything from their mistake.

Bacterial pneumonia, pneumonia mediated from fungal infection also exists.

That actually does make mathematical sense, when you include the whole epidemic as opposed to say one year. So I would technically agree your estimate would potentially be possible, just not necessarily inevitable.

Whilst Australia has had pretty hard lockdowns, both USA, Europe etc have had lockdowns, mask measures. Its not like they did absolutely nothing to prevent spread.
In that sense we aren’t comparing apples with apples.

Also for nearly half the epidemic we have had supposedly miraculous vaccines. Despite this, in Australia at least we still have roughly the same amount of fatalities as occurred in the first year when no vaccine was even available.

Not really sure what your bodycount comparison with WW2 is supposed to be about. That’s comparing a 2 year "epidemic vs a world war that spread out over 6 years, where everyone was actively trying to use everything from small arms to weapons of mass destruction, to kill everyone else, plus typhus, malaria, etc and starvation to boot.

Interesting discussion, don’t think for a minute that I don’t appreciate your perspective.

Yes, if there was a Legionaire’s disease outbreak, or you were living in house with mold infested ceiling that could cause deaths but it probably wouldn’t come anywhere near numbers dying from secondary pneumonia infection after a cold/ flu.

However when you account for fatalities in proportion to case load, we are seeing less death… We aren’t in lockdown either, whereas for the better part of the last two years we have been in undergoing endless cycles of prolonged lockdowns.

These vaccines were modelled after the original strain of sars-cov-2. They’re less effective on delta as they don’t account for the mutations present between the original strain and the delta strain.

These vaccines (particularly if young/middle aged) dramatically decrease the chance of you ending up in hosptial, and hospitals cannot cope with say… 0.5-1% of the population requiring hospitalisation within a three month timeframe.

If you are old … You’re still not in a good place if you catch covid. An unvaccinated 18y/old is still far more likely to only acquire mild illness relative to a fully vaccinated elderly individual. An unvaccinated young person is still more likely to die relative to a fully vaccinated geezer

Chances are this will be somewhat like the flu. One shot will be required every year, and the vaccines will be constantly tweaked to accommodate new strains.

They’ll tweak the vaccines and improve the side effect profiles. The strong immunogenic response elicited from the vaccines currently = you feel like shit for a day after taking them… Not ideal…

Had the delta strain never arisen, changes are we actually could have gotten to “herd immunity”… At the moment the vaccines aren’t quite doing what we hoped they’d do :frowning:

They’re decreasing hospitalisations and deaths in proportion to case load, but the R eff/hospitalisation rate is still too high. In the NL around 80% of those in ICU ARE unvaccinated… That’s shocking considering 90% of the elligable population is fully vaccinated. The vaccines work… They just don’t work very well.

It’ll provide protection… But if you’re already a extremely low risk demographic… Who cares?

Sure… You can pass it on… But you can also pass it on if vaccinated (albeit you’ll be slightly less infectious)… Note I said slightly… so say instead infecting 2 people you’ll infect 1.5 or something… Ooooooooo

From an epidemiological perspective, this makes a difference as less rapid spread = less strain on hospitals.

I see various countries now locking down for winter
… If we are to lock down at 80-90% + of the population fully vaccinated… What then? What about the event wherein natural immunity wanes and the cases shoot right back up? This is a shitty new paradigm if the future of society is based around the precipice of lockdowns to get by.

Interesting question. Then what? Natural immunity however seems to wane as well, but while it waynes, there are almost no people who got covid for the 2nd time. Which means the waning natural immunity has still a pretty good responce to the virus. I dont think there are people that have died from a second covid.

So then what? What are the solutions? It is called threatment, it is called health education.

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There are quite a few who have caught it twice, rather they don’t appear to get nearly as sick

However if a variant develops (perhaps the nu variant) of which has various mutations that allow it to bypass the immune response generated through prior infection from the delta variant and/or immune response generated through vaccines then everyone will catch it again and everyone is going to sick again.

Too much uncertainty. My prediction is rather pessimistic… I think we will find another variant will bypass delta that evades vaccines/natural immunity and wreck havok on the economy. We will see a mass recession world wide as the world loses its shit, much of the world (esp Aus) will impose indefinite, totalitarian measures… We’ve had it fairly easy since WWII for the most part… Now is time for the next significant burden to stagnate society as we know it

I dont think this is how natural immunity works. While vaccine immunity can be bypassed, natural immunity seems to be different. All in all snake oil. And we based our strategies on snake oil sales pitch, instead of reasonable response. Like public health education, supplementation, curing some comorbidities associated with death.

If we allow governments to be authoritarian it is our own fault. Green pass, vaccine mandates - people should have been out protesting and taking down governments. Instead they became sales people for Phizer and Astra Zeneca and promoting lies online.

It’s another vindication of the allegedly dystopian dictatorship approach ™ in Australia, if the measures were somewhat less stringent, there would in all likelihood be 20x more deaths (roughly equal to the US and UK), as the relationship between stringency and bodycount is not linear.

The number of Aussies that died in WW2.

If you want too see how the situation looks when the virus runs unchecked, look at Bulgaria where excess deaths for 2020-21 are closing in to around 1% of the total population (no @ins that is not the mortality rate). So an unchecked virus would have killed 250k Australians in that scenario.

Whatever fancy graph you want to give one thing is important. The same amount of people died in 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021. So in reality yur excess mortality rate graph represents nothing.

The same fucking number of deaths and the same rate of slow and steady increase. Nothing has changed with Covid.

Is that someone ringing your phone? Its probably one of the Australian state governments looking to employ you for their propaganda team. They would pay you a lot of $.
Wouldn’t every single person in an approx’ 25 million population of Australia have to get infected, and the vaccines would need to be 0% effective to get 250k deaths?

That is a very passive-aggressive way to say that you do not have any counter arguments. But I will take the compliment nevertheless.

Yes, this is the scenario when the virus run rampant and when there were no vaccines available. You know, the one the government “hysterically overreacted” to and right-wing pundits and anti-lockdown evangelists claimed in 2020 it could not theoretically happen due to virus allegedly having a 0,1% IFR (err, no) and herd immunity being just around the corner.

Well, as everyone sane (and not a grifter with an agenda) understood, this “impossible” scenario actually did happen in poorly vaccinated countries in Eastern Europe, including Russia.

So Australia with it’s draconian, dystopian measures ™ saved 45k+ people by having a more stringent approach than either the US or the UK or upwards of 150k+ had it done “focused protection” as the “herd immunity” cranks advocated.

Congratulations for again confirming my arguments. Do you know enough English to understand the text in this red box from your link?

It was meant as a genuine compliment. You would be snapped up in a second. I’m still keeping an open mind, and I like your style. Your arguments are better and more plausible than the crap I hear from my government. When questioned they give the same old bully response, trust us, do as your told, and then they avoid actually answering the question. You genuinely answer my questions and I appreciate that.

I’m not saying that your numbers are wrong, but the estimations are just that, estimations. Until the reality starts to look like the prediction I still won’t be even considering any of the current vaccines.
My counter argument was there. Your prediction would need every single person in Australia to become infected to become a reality. An absolute worst case scenario that is virtually impossible in practice.

I don’t know if this is the right place,but my reservations lie not in statistics, more how they are interpreted, and disseminated.
There is also more to the Covid epidemic than just the actual disease, its the attempt to psychologically control the population via propaganda, new laws that are brought in under the guise they are needed to help. . I can’t see any government willfully relinquishing them all.even when the crisis is over. By that time most people have been conditioned to the “new normal”.