Sad for Tooth his post history exists. It is so funny reading some it now. So many examples I could cite as his views change constantly over time, contradicting his prior view. What did he call that prior when I quoted tow contradictory statements by him "normal evolution of position with new data" FLOL.

Here are two excerpts from arguments he was having where Tooth was arguing how even with a hard and strict lockdowns France's cases soared and they did far worse than the US with no lockdowns and yet now lockdowns are the magical cure for the US now Biden is in charge.

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I suspect he will try to backpedal here by saying it was a comparative comment but what he cannot escape is his point was that the hard lock down did not work and NOW he is pretending it is a magic type slam dunk for Biden.

For fun I could quote all the times that Tooth says the POTUS is powerless to institute lockdowns in the US as yet another example of the garbage he spews that changes whenever he is trying to support Trump or disparage someone else.


Just let me know if you guys want examples and how many?

My buddies wife is a traveling nurse. Back in 2019 and earlier she usually traveled to hospitals that had nurses on strike, and she'd cross the picket line to keep the hospital functioning until the strike ended.

In 2020 and 21 she's been a covid nurse (when an area is "overrun" she has been going there to help with the increase in patients).

Right now she's on a 6 week stint and the hospital she's working at has 30 covid beds. 10 beds are being used, 20 sit empty. 0 people are in serious jeopardy. She's bored out of her mind, and spends most of her day on the internet/online poker/goofing off instead of actually doing work.

The patients get an IV drip, can't leave the room or have visitors, and just watch tv all day (for 10ish days straight). Most patients say they wish they didn't even come in for testing and had just stayed at home and chilled on the couch. Checking on the IVs is basically all she does all day...and has been for months now. (prior to this trip, she was home for 2ish weeks, and was on a different 6 week trip, similar experience)

I know it's a sample size of 1. But the local news media is talking about how "covid specialist nurses had to be called into the area." "Out of state nurses come to save the day"...etc. etc. etc.

Grossly misrepresenting what's going on. That's a real problem, the media is nowadays just a bunch of click bait bullshit artists that can't be trusted to semi accurately report on anything.

In similar news, my friend got Covid and he's fine now. Score another point for team hoax!

cant really take a scab seriously tho. lowest of the low.

Grossly misrepresenting what’s going on.

Sample size: 1.

Checks out.

I’ve never seen such arrogance paired with poor memory and logical reasoning. It would make Trump blush.

The best part is he thinks he’s actually winning the argument, right up until he’s confusedly helped into the padded room.

Like I said, it's obvious at this point that you have actual serious cognitive impairment when it comes to reading comprehension. I've never met anyone so impaired.

Nothing in those posts argue that lockdowns don't work. Of course they work in reducing death and infections, rapidly. There's not a single person here who thinks otherwise and your pages of insane ranting against strawmen are sad (for you). The question is whether they work over the long term and whether restrictions and lockdowns over the long term are better than "let it rip, lock down when approaching overwhelmed but otherwise not". You're too cognitively impaired to even enter the debate because you can't even understand what's being discussed.

Biden situation is unique however, in that this the end of the pandemic, with a currently very high daily death rate. The long term is finished - there's only the short term now. Lockdowns and restrictions now will likely lead to far better death outcomes, whereas they wouldn't have made much difference earlier because the second wave would have been far worse without the "let it rip" over the interim. It's a completely different calculus 1.5 months from spring with a vaccine rolling out than it is in summer, autumn or at the start of winter.

If you weren't such a cognitively impaired idiot, we could be discussing actual things of interest rather than having your spew all over this thread tilting at windmills.

Biden is making the right decision and I support it. Good on him for making it, he deserves the same praise as Trump. Compare that with you and Godgers and others ripping Trump and talking about "a 9/11 every day", while praising Biden for the same policies, proving you're just partisan politics forum losers rather than people with honest or thoughtful positions.

Yeah the media is completely broken, it's really sad. You can't get a straight take on anything. They create the rabid idiots like Cuepee as well, a mixture of fake news and moralizing and activism that fills the void that churches used to fill.

The weirdest thing of all was the Californian news that hospitals were about to overwhelm and have to triage, and then suddenly a week later the governor is cancelling his recently implemented restrictions. Um, what? Nice job media.

You really can't trust anything but hard raw data. Certainly not expert opinion and claims and certainly not anything the media claims.

I have zero experience with finance/investing and have been reading this thread mostly because of interest in the pandemic etc. Biden (and Trump before him) decides to (imo correctly) not enforce lockdowns and keep as much of the economy in tact as possible, meanwhile here in Europe several countries undergo for many weeks-months very strict lockdowns which is continuing to severely hit their economies. Is there any way that you could capitalize on this difference (USA eco > Euro eco) in terms of investments?

Any info on whether or not the the UK or South African strains are more lethal than earlier strains? And if yes, how much more so?

Saw Boris Johnson announce some evidence new UK strain could be 30% more lethal (13 deaths per 1,000 infections for new UK strain, vs 10 / 1,000 for earlier strains). Don't know the characteristics of the sample population, or the strength of the evidence.

Evidence seems weak to me, it's so confused by the hospital situation in the UK. To me somewhat higher lethality makes sense given low to medium strength evidence for severity worsening with a higher initial infectious dose. A more transmissible strain likely means higher effective doses.

In the end I'd be happy to say that the practical result is a little more overall population lethality from this strain (but not case-matched lethality). Reason being is that a more contagious strain will find more isolated, careful and less social people who are hard hit and avoided the last strain (like the old) and will harm the hospital care situation more.

Upvote.

I wish mods could keep these types out of BFI. Zero value add.

Ignore list helps but you lose context, and as juan said the overall quality of discussion suffers immensely anyway.

Yeah it's not hard. Ban the people with zero worth/without the intellectual capacity to contribute in any way. Keep everyone else. It's nearly 100% non BFI politics forum guys who fit in that category anyway.

Trouble is we have no active mods who actually read these forums.

As for the UK, this horrifying:



Deaths almost tripled in 3.5 weeks from December 29 to now in a populace already 15-25% immune. I know the new strain is more transmissible but damn, you have to think a higher death rate (effective or actual case-matched) might play a part. This is under fairly strong restrictions in some areas too.

Coming to a country near you?

Agree it's tricky with confounding factors. I also don't know much about the mechanism for the higher transmissibility of the UK strain. Is it higher effective dose or something else? No idea.

It seems to go almost without saying there'd be higher population lethality for a more transmissible virus (unless something else changed); but the case-matched lethality is more difficult for me to grasp.

That graph is concerning.

Someone linked me to an epidemiologist in the UK who predicted (a month or so ago) a higher case-matched lethality for the new strain, and at the time I thought he was wrong, or speculating wildly, but he may have been bang on.

On a brighter note everything I've read suggests the vaccines are effective against the new strains.

I have it's pretty fascinating looking at how the data clusters. There are four quite distinct categories:



1. Large first wave countries with high international traffic and lots of nationwide lockdowns (2-3) and ruined economies from those lockdowns. Belgium, France, UK, Italy, Spain, etc.

2. Smaller, more isolated countries who avoided the first wave most thanks to timing but got killed on the second wave with an ultra rapid spike because they had no immunity and trusted masks to control it thanks to the dangerous claims of experts and the media about mask effectiveness. (Czechia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovenia)

3. Countries who either got lucky (Slovakia) or handled it well (Germany) first wave and avoided the bad spikes on the second wave, performing inline with the first wave hit countries on the second wave. Compliant populaces and excellent technical responses (good contact tracing) synergizing with compliant populaces were key. Greece, Germany, Slovakia, etc

4. Countries that avoided broad lockdowns and stayed open (USA). Far lower R thanks to burn through immunity and far better economic and personal outcomes, yet similar death rates.

(3) and (4) seem to be the optimal strategies.

Unfortuanatly a large winter catastrophe has been inevitable in the UK for some time. Seems very likely the new strains have made it far worse but it's still hard to tell by how much. Care is being restricted which likely accounts for some of the deaths.

Have to ignore Boris & co as they are trying to make out they had it all under control if it only wasn't for those pesky new strains. The scientists are still working on it.

So three prolonged lockdowns + major restrictions in between (enough to trash the UK economy far worse than the US) wasn't enough for you? Would you have preferred four lockdowns?

It seems you have a Boris hardon just like other lefties have a Trump hardon. It's pretty obvious the UK was hit hard by the new strain and that's the reason for this soaring. The UK actually performed better than the European average on deaths through the second wave, so it's quite reasonable to claim the UK was doing better than most and it is indeed the "pesky new strain" that's causing this soaring. But don't let that get in your way of your raging Boris boner.

No and let's not play that game. I've no particular issue with boris for the spin - more or less any poliician would do the same but let's not listen to the spin over the substance.

But there is simply no way we weren't having a major winter crises given the number of cases when we came out of the last lockdown. R went straight back up and then it's just maths. It's also in no doubt that the new strains have compounded that. The analysis is yet to come

Cases don't matter, R does. For example, the rest of Europe came out of lockdown with more cases than the UK on average but didn't have the soaring that the UK had. If anything the UK is more strict.

UK's soaring numbers are 90+% down to the new strain imo. And it's a question that really matters for what the world is going to look like in two months. I think blaming the new strain is reality, not spin.

So now your argument, looking at your statement and data you provided is that the lockdown in France at that time was very effective?

Is that really your position?

Are you saying if Biden does the same thing and gets the same result that will be a huge success for America?

I want everyone to be clear of Tooth's new position on what equals success.

He is saying this (France chart) is a shining of example of Lockdown success NOW despite mocking it prior as a failure.

Oh trust me, they do.

They just had to be educated that the TS of this thread is the biggest politard.

Imagine giving him his safe space where he can post Trumpboosterism at will but then get anyone banned from the thread who replies. We know that is what you want, but it did not take long to SHOW them, via quoting your posts that you almost always originate the politarding in this thread, and when you do not you always enflame it.

What you guys need to do is talk amongst yourselves in PM form only. Then you will truly get the safe space you are crying for.

In the short term R and the number of cases both matter. But yes I'd totally agree that the focus should always have been on keeping R comfortably below 1.

It's going to very hard to entangle and we may never know what it would have ben like without the new strains. BUT worse new strains was not some unlikely scenario. It was always quite possible and a reason for being over cautious rather than over hopeful.

You're just straight up too stupid to have a conversation with. You have the reading comprehension of a 10 year old special needs child. There's no one at this point who would take the over on you getting a 140 LSAT.

Read those posts you quoted again until understanding dawns and you feel the cringing embarrassment of your wasted time on this topic. You're not even a person, just worthless brain dead madlibs born of basic cognitive inability to follow a discussion.