Coronavirus thread

[Speaker to Animals]

I am resigned to the fact that some kind of killer variant has to kill a lot of people before we actually do anything. I am just kind of bored today and thought I would post here. I think you guys should consider you are talking each other up about the wrong things. The vaccines and all this cable news nonsense is not really worth getting upset about. I think this pandemic might be really dangerous to us. Even at the practical level, I really don't see how we can afford the mass disability wave we will suffer if we don't manage the infection rates better.

What do you think of the 9 pages of Side Effects of the Jab ?

I think my first case was pretty bad, man. When the immunologist finally figures this out, and if he says all I need is the immunoglobulin therapy and to redo the vaccines, then I will. I am not risking that shit again. People can do whatever they want. I don't want to die like that. That shit was scary.

I don't trust Pfizer either. It's a shitty choice. I admit that. It's not a great situation by any means.

[SuburbanFarmer]

I never said covid has a .03% case fatality rate. Don't make shit up and quote me as saying it. You can't even talk about "the virus" like that. Which variant? Omicron has a lower case fatality rate with huge infection rate. Delta had over 3% case fatality rate. Now in the aftermath of the omicron wave, our total case fatality rate dropped down to about 2%. You need to get statistics straight here. Are you talking about infection fatality rates or case fatality rates, what are you even talking about here?

.03% case fatality rate is on par with a typical influenza strain. I think you are confused.

He said fatality rate, not case fatality rate. They are very different things. Case fatality rate is irrelevant with covid because there is a low rate of diagnoses. The majority of covid infections are never diagnosed, and therefore never become a case. Using case fatality rate is disingenuous meant to misrepresent how many people actually die from covid.

There is no fatality rate. There is a case fatality rate. There is an infection fatality rate (which is kind of a bullshit figure). I am hard-pressed as to where he could possibly have come up with a figure of 0.3% for either an IFR or a CFR for covid. I am also annoyed by him making up statistics and quoting me as posting his made up statistics.

0.3% is basically like an influenza IFR. That's not even close to the CFR of influenza. We had like maybe 7k-14k confirmed influenza fatalities each year on average before the pandemic and the influenza cases were pretty much on par with what we now have for covid. We have lost a million Americans now at least to covid in just over two years. Did SuburbanFarmer become some kind of truther or something or did he just confuse statistics? This shit is really weird to me and I am bit confused.

The government DID used to lie all the time about influenza deaths. They used the IFR to claim like fifty thousand people died from influenza, but that number was totally cooked. The actual number of confirmed deaths would be very small except for a few notable years. But that lying is what undermined their credibility in this pandemic.

We’ve been through it for a few hundred pages.

Easiest thing to point to would be common sense though. Did an extra 3% of Americans die in the past 2 years? Nope. These are easily found statistics.

Then you get to the ‘wtf is going on stage’.

The answer is that hospitals have been directly incentivized to diagnose patients with Covid, to the tune of $3,000 per case. There’s a bonus for hooking people up to ventilators at max pressure and blowing their lungs out. Also easily found.

The testing has been found absolutely useless, and quietly phased out. The case numbers are meaningless. The death counts are inflated.

All we know for sure is how many Americans actually died over the past 2 years, versus the past 20. Look it up for yourself, because I’m not playing the source pedantry game.

[Speaker to Animals]

Easiest thing to point to would be common sense though. Did an extra 3% of Americans die in the past 2 years? Nope. These are easily found statistics.

So let's start with that.

(1) You are making a statistics mistake again. The statement delta has a 3% case fatality rate does not imply 3% of Americans will die because not even 15% of Americans caught the delta variant. A 3% case fatality rate means that, at the given time at which that rate was measured, 3% of confirmed cases (people with positive PCR tests) ended up hospitalized and then died.

(2) That mistake set aside, you further questioned whether so many people died during the pandemic. As of 15 Feb 2022, The United States surpassed one million excess deaths. That is, when you look at the chart of deaths of Americans year-by-year, these pandemic years have this huge bump. Most of those deaths are from covid. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2 ... -pandemic/

If you want to engage with me on this, you need to articulate what variant we are talking about, what kind of statistics you are using, and where you are getting your data. Your math is all mucked, man.

[SuburbanFarmer]

Easiest thing to point to would be common sense though. Did an extra 3% of Americans die in the past 2 years? Nope. These are easily found statistics.

So let's start with that.

(1) You are making a statistics mistake again. The statement delta has a 3% case fatality rate does not imply 3% of Americans will die because not even 15% of Americans caught the delta variant. A 3% case fatality rate means that, at the given time at which that rate was measured, 3% of confirmed cases (people with positive PCR tests) ended up hospitalized and then died.

(2) That mistake set aside, you further questioned whether so many people died during the pandemic. As of 15 Feb 2022, The United States surpassed one million excess deaths. That is, when you look at the chart of deaths of Americans year-by-year, these pandemic years have this huge bump. Most of those deaths are from covid. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2 ... -pandemic/

If you want to engage with me on this, you need to articulate what variant we are talking about, what kind of statistics you are using, and where you are getting your data. Your math is all mucked, man.

What is 1,000,000 / 350,000,000?

[SuburbanFarmer]

Also keep in mind the elevated numbers of suicide, undiagnosed cancers, and overdoses while we instituted a policy of mass panic and unemployment for 2 years.

[Speaker to Animals]

Easiest thing to point to would be common sense though. Did an extra 3% of Americans die in the past 2 years? Nope. These are easily found statistics.

So let's start with that.

(1) You are making a statistics mistake again. The statement delta has a 3% case fatality rate does not imply 3% of Americans will die because not even 15% of Americans caught the delta variant. A 3% case fatality rate means that, at the given time at which that rate was measured, 3% of confirmed cases (people with positive PCR tests) ended up hospitalized and then died.

(2) That mistake set aside, you further questioned whether so many people died during the pandemic. As of 15 Feb 2022, The United States surpassed one million excess deaths. That is, when you look at the chart of deaths of Americans year-by-year, these pandemic years have this huge bump. Most of those deaths are from covid. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2 ... -pandemic/

If you want to engage with me on this, you need to articulate what variant we are talking about, what kind of statistics you are using, and where you are getting your data. Your math is all mucked, man.

What is 1,000,000 / 350,000,000?

Yeah, I still think you are getting some math wrong here.

Do you not understand that only a fraction of the population has been infected? Is that the problem?

[TheOneX]

Also covid is not going to evolve into something more deadly any time soon, if ever. For starters there is a reason why most coronaviruses are considered common colds, because it simply is not in the nature of coronaviruses to evolve to be deadly in humans. It either takes artificially changing the virus or a zoonotic jump to be deadly. Secondly, this variation of covid essentially has the maximum compatible spike protein, which means it is essentially impossible for it to become more transmissible or deadly with its current means of entering cells. In order to become more deadly it would need to essentially evolve a completely different type of spike protein which is not something that is remotely likely to happen any time soon. Add to that the nature of human immune reactions as more people have it the more protected people will be to future variants, making it more difficult for future variants to spread rapidly and be deadly.

(1) I would like to point out that "coronavirus" refers to a suborder of viruses and generally describes a vast number of viruses. The ones that cause the common colds are totally different. It's like saying "well, I'm not afraid of sharks because we all had goldfish when we were kids and we they weren't all that dangerous, right?". These are totally different things.

(2) These meme that viruses necessarily evolve to become benign is fake science bullshit. Sometimes they do. Other times they don't. Examples of when they don't: smallpox, polio, cholera, hantavirus, ebola, marburg virus, and now... *dun* *dun* *dun* *dun* sars-cov-2. With the exception of a single variant (omicron), all the other variants have been more virulent. Alpha was more virulent than the original Wuhan strain; delta more virulent than alpha.

(3) Your analysis mistakenly characterizes the evolution of sars-cov-2 as this linear line; as if the original Wuhan strain became alpha, which became delta, which became omicron. That's not what happened. Obviously the original strain is the common ancestor, but these variants are all branched out now and doing their own things. Maybe omicron will continue spawning off less virulent variants, but that doesn't stop delta from spawning off even more virulent variants, and nothing stops brand new variants from emerging, especially from all the other animal reservoirs out there.

(4) If you want to look at a ceiling of how bad this can get, all of sars-cov-2's nearest cousins, viruses like MERS have case fatality rates near 50%. Nobody knows how many mutations away one of these variants might be from unlocking that kind of potential.

(5) The idea that this virus is merely limited by the spike protein is silly. I know virologists right now are trying to figure out just how omicron can spread so fast. It seems to have found another way to infect cells besides the ACE2 receptor. You are not considering all the possibilities here by assuming the virus can only use the spike protein to infect cells via the ACE2 receptor. Omicron shows us that probably is not true. It seems to be abandoning the ACE2 receptor.

As for the potential receivers of those infectious particles, Barclay suggests that Omicron’s transmission strength might be linked to how it enters cells. Earlier versions of SARS-CoV-2 relied on a cellular receptor, ACE2, to bind to the cells, and on a cellular enzyme called TMPRSS2 to cleave its spike protein, granting the virus entry. Omicron has mostly abandoned the TMPRSS2 route. Instead, cells swallow it whole, and it lands in intracellular bubbles called endosomes2,6.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00428-5


I am resigned to the fact that some kind of killer variant has to kill a lot of people before we actually do anything. I am just kind of bored today and thought I would post here. I think you guys should consider you are talking each other up about the wrong things. The vaccines and all this cable news nonsense is not really worth getting upset about. I think this pandemic might be really dangerous to us. Even at the practical level, I really don't see how we can afford the mass disability wave we will suffer if we don't manage the infection rates better.

1. Yes, coronaviruses is a large family of viruses. Covid is specifically of the beta variety. Other than SARS, MERS, and COVID in humans they all result in just colds. SARS and MERS are both zoonotic cases where transmission was not very good resulting in SARS going extinct and MERS being this enigma that pops up occasionally, but never really catches on.

2. This is one big lie. If you remove all nuance and context you might have a point, but we aren't talking about smallpox or ebola. We are talking about coronaviruses. When we talk about the class of viruses that spread very easily like flus, coronavirus, rhinovirus, and other common colds yes they typically evolve to become less deadly over time. This isn't some meme or fake science, it is rooted in science. There is evolutionary pressure that is applied to these viruses that encourages them to become less deadly. Occasionally, you will get a random mutation that results in a drastic increase in deadliness, but over time it will slowly move back to normalcy. That is why H1N1 isn't as deadly today as it was when it was known as the Spanish Flu.

3. I didn't characterize the evolution in any way. The purpose of my 3 paragraph comment was not to provide a detailed analysis of how the different variants evolved. If I wanted to do that it certainly would take more than 3 paragraphs. This is just a deflection from the actual points I am making, and a non-sequitur.

4. All of sars-cov-2 nearest cousins live in bats and pangolins not humans. MERS is not a close cousin and only has a 35% case fatality rate.

5. Don't quote me shit I already know if you are not able to understand what you are reading. Entering the cell is a multi-step process. The first and most important step is using the spike protein to connect itself to the cell. This is why antibodies and vaccines attack the spike protein to prevent the coronavirus from even attaching itself to the cell in the first place. This step cannot be skipped. The omicron variant still uses the ACE2 receptor to attach itself to the cell. What has changed is the second step in the process. Instead of using the cleavage site it uses a different process, which is what the quote states that Omicron has stopped using the cleavage site, but it never says Omicron has stopped using ACE2. What science has actually shown is that the omicron variant has the most perfect spike protein for attaching itself to ACE2 that we have seen to date.

You can resign yourself however much you want, but you clearly have been listening to liars and fearmongers. A virus evolving to become noticeably more deadly and transmissible. It happens with flus maybe a few times in a century, usually amounting to the swine flu scare from a decade or so ago. You get maybe one big one a century, but societies don't usually collapse over it. Worrying about a black death like scenario is like worrying about the super volcano under Yellowstone going off. Sure it technically could happen, but the likelihood of it happening during your lifetime is so small it says more about your mental state that you are worried about it than the actual chances of it happening. I would highly recommend turning off all media and going to see a psychiatrist or a psychologist, you clearly have some mental issues going on. Watching any news, commentary, or visiting these kinds of sites are doing you more harm than good.

[TheOneX]

I never said covid has a .03% case fatality rate. Don't make shit up and quote me as saying it. You can't even talk about "the virus" like that. Which variant? Omicron has a lower case fatality rate with huge infection rate. Delta had over 3% case fatality rate. Now in the aftermath of the omicron wave, our total case fatality rate dropped down to about 2%. You need to get statistics straight here. Are you talking about infection fatality rates or case fatality rates, what are you even talking about here?

.03% case fatality rate is on par with a typical influenza strain. I think you are confused.

He said fatality rate, not case fatality rate. They are very different things. Case fatality rate is irrelevant with covid because there is a low rate of diagnoses. The majority of covid infections are never diagnosed, and therefore never become a case. Using case fatality rate is disingenuous meant to misrepresent how many people actually die from covid.

There is no fatality rate. There is a case fatality rate. There is an infection fatality rate (which is kind of a bullshit figure). I am hard-pressed as to where he could possibly have come up with a figure of 0.3% for either an IFR or a CFR for covid. I am also annoyed by him making up statistics and quoting me as posting his made up statistics.

0.3% is basically like an influenza IFR. That's not even close to the CFR of influenza. We had like maybe 7k-14k confirmed influenza fatalities each year on average before the pandemic and the influenza cases were pretty much on par with what we now have for covid. We have lost a million Americans now at least to covid in just over two years. Did SuburbanFarmer become some kind of truther or something or did he just confuse statistics? This shit is really weird to me and I am bit confused.

The government DID used to lie all the time about influenza deaths. They used the IFR to claim like fifty thousand people died from influenza, but that number was totally cooked. The actual number of confirmed deaths would be very small except for a few notable years. But that lying is what undermined their credibility in this pandemic.

Let's make this simple. According to the CDC between Feb. 2020 and Sep. 2021 (prior to Omicron) there were an estimate 146.6 million cases and 921,000 deaths in the US. If we do the math that comes out to be 0.6% fatality rate. Not 0.03% low, but still very damn low, especially considering 76% of all deaths were to people >65 and 93% of all deaths were to people >50. In all likelihood the only thing that made this virus more deadly than the typical flu is that it was novel. The older generations didn't have prior exposure to similar coronaviruses therefore were unable to muster a strong enough response.

[Speaker to Animals]

He said fatality rate, not case fatality rate. They are very different things. Case fatality rate is irrelevant with covid because there is a low rate of diagnoses. The majority of covid infections are never diagnosed, and therefore never become a case. Using case fatality rate is disingenuous meant to misrepresent how many people actually die from covid.

There is no fatality rate. There is a case fatality rate. There is an infection fatality rate (which is kind of a bullshit figure). I am hard-pressed as to where he could possibly have come up with a figure of 0.3% for either an IFR or a CFR for covid. I am also annoyed by him making up statistics and quoting me as posting his made up statistics.

0.3% is basically like an influenza IFR. That's not even close to the CFR of influenza. We had like maybe 7k-14k confirmed influenza fatalities each year on average before the pandemic and the influenza cases were pretty much on par with what we now have for covid. We have lost a million Americans now at least to covid in just over two years. Did SuburbanFarmer become some kind of truther or something or did he just confuse statistics? This shit is really weird to me and I am bit confused.

The government DID used to lie all the time about influenza deaths. They used the IFR to claim like fifty thousand people died from influenza, but that number was totally cooked. The actual number of confirmed deaths would be very small except for a few notable years. But that lying is what undermined their credibility in this pandemic.

Let's make this simple. According to the CDC between Feb. 2020 and Sep. 2021 (prior to Omicron) there were an estimate 146.6 million cases and 921,000 deaths in the US. If we do the math that comes out to be 0.6% fatality rate. Not 0.03% low, but still very damn low, especially considering 76% of all deaths were to people >65 and 93% of all deaths were to people >50. In all likelihood the only thing that made this virus more deadly than the typical flu is that it was novel. The older generations didn't have prior exposure to similar coronaviruses therefore were unable to muster a strong enough response.

Total confirmed cases for the US right now are 81,043,895. You can literally look the stats up in real time these days. Total deaths: 988,555. Omicron brought us down to about 2% case fatality rate if you treated all the variants as the same. Unfortunately it's difficult to get running numbers of stats on individual variants because our government deliberately curbs testing. We really have no idea. We've been flying blind under two administrations now. The PRC is more transparent than these two administrations.

[SuburbanFarmer]

So let's start with that.

(1) You are making a statistics mistake again. The statement delta has a 3% case fatality rate does not imply 3% of Americans will die because not even 15% of Americans caught the delta variant. A 3% case fatality rate means that, at the given time at which that rate was measured, 3% of confirmed cases (people with positive PCR tests) ended up hospitalized and then died.

(2) That mistake set aside, you further questioned whether so many people died during the pandemic. As of 15 Feb 2022, The United States surpassed one million excess deaths. That is, when you look at the chart of deaths of Americans year-by-year, these pandemic years have this huge bump. Most of those deaths are from covid. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2 ... -pandemic/

If you want to engage with me on this, you need to articulate what variant we are talking about, what kind of statistics you are using, and where you are getting your data. Your math is all mucked, man.

What is 1,000,000 / 350,000,000?

Yeah, I still think you are getting some math wrong here.

Do you not understand that only a fraction of the population has been infected? Is that the problem?

I’m not even going that far. I’m simply pointing out that 1 million deaths is relatively nothing for a population of our size - even IF all of them were caused by a novel virus.

Then I prompted you to think about how many of those excess deaths were due to the insane government reaction. (Suicide, cancer, overdose)

Then I provided you the breadcrumbs to explain that insane reaction. The hospital diagnosis incentives. The failed testing regime.

I’m not even flexing on this. Just giving you the opportunity to find out for yourself what’s been done here.