Each module is 3.2kWh. Can start with a small stack of 3 modules (9.6kWh), knowing this can be trivially upgraded 2.6x later without blowing out the cost.
Yep nothing to see here, this commentary was maybe notable for the iPhone 4 -> 4s. I went from iPhone 5s to iPhone X and even that jump felt like slightly improving on a good thing. This next jump will be the same again. The incremental improvements do accumulate nicely over 5-7 years between upgrading.
Apple may be more on the pulse for consumers hopes and dreams than NYT when considering what they are incrementally improving. The iPhone 13 camera being the best yet for low-light photography does matter to this non-professional.
The Queensland experiment: how 70 days of lockdown led to 448 days of paradise
The Telegraph's title glosses over other factors, so hey: This one ^ does too!
I am relieved by my region's luck and the collective will to move the goalpost of success to be 'limiting the number of people dying of COVID'. It has been basically normal life domestically besides scattered lockdowns for 5 million people, without losing parents, grandparents; 1 death per M here compared to Sweden's 1425, USA's 1895.
National vaccination rate is lagging, on track to be sufficient in October, when the national modelling (Doherty) shows we will be sweet to test, trace, isolate, quarantine our way to control/suppression without need for further lockdown ad infinium. Just one precarious month in the way...
Maybe power from further away could help toward replacing the base power. A little more sunlight for the east coast peak. Less chance of a cloud or a still day on the east coast causing an issue like Callide coal exploding the other day. Yeah it is a stretch (literally thousands of kilometres).
If we're being ambitious, I'm excited about off-shore wind. If end game for NEM is 2/3 wind and 1/3 solar (with storage/hydro/gas in single-digit percentages filling the gaps) there are many inevitable projects and growing pains to come.
> Herd immunity has been well-documented in the Brazilian city of Manaus, where researchers in the Lancet reported the prevalence of prior Covid-19 infection to be 76%, resulting in a significant slowing of the infection.
> Some medical experts privately agreed with my prediction that there may be very little Covid-19 by April but suggested that I not to talk publicly about herd immunity because people might become complacent and fail to take precautions or might decline the vaccine. But scientists shouldn’t try to manipulate the public by hiding the truth.
Does he hear himself? You can't really liken wild guesses that lead to complacency/death as hiding the truth. It sounds like this guy should really stick to surgery.
It should be noted that WSJ’s opinion section is extremely politicized. Their regular news desk is separately edited and maintains decently high journalistic standards.
It's pretty weird actually. The news desk for the WSJ is among the best out there. Their news stories tend to be really dry in a good way - full of facts and figures, with very little in the way of click bait hyperbole. Their subscriber model is all about business people who want the details and not opinion...
Which then makes the opinion desk at the WSJ a real oddball. It's consistently right-leaning, sometimes to the point of absurdity. I would think that a more varied field of opinion would resonate better with their target reader... but what do I know.
Isn't that the point of Op-Ed sections, at the end of the day? It's always been a way for newspapers to host what's effectively a glorified collection of Medium posts. Even the New York Times' Opinion page is consistently partisan.
I'm not sure the New York Times is a good example here. It's definitely not just their opinion page that is partisan these days, and whilst this does seem to have gotten worse I'm not sure there was exactly a golden era - they seem to have always been particularly keen on pushing narratives.
Yeah, I don't disagree. My question was targeted more at folks that specifically find the WSJ Op-Ed to be objectionable; in my experience those same people tend to consider the NYT's Op-Ed to be less objectionable (caveat: I'm operating on an N of like 4).
The most internally consistent position, IMO, is that Op-Eds are all partisan and should all be abolished, in every paper. They once served a useful purpose, but are arguably no longer necessary in a world where everyone can post an opinionated blog post on Medium/Substack/etc and broadcast it out to the world via Twitter/Mastodon/etc more or less for free.
This article we're commenting on is just an interesting (if potentially dubious) blog post by a surgeon, and nothing more than that.
The weirdest part is this leads to frequent items where the Op-Ed page makes factual claims that are directly contradicted by the news section in the same issue.
This isn't particularly unusual. The opinion section is a fine place for dissenting views. Consider a news article covering the abuse of elderly in a nursing home, with an opinion piece defending (or explaining, or whatever) the nursing home - this could be good.
There's a difference between explaining and defending the abuse the news-side reported, and saying that the abuse never happened and the news side is wrong/lying/etc.
IMO, the Financial Times is a good alternative to WSJ.
Global perspective but still does deep dives into American issues; not owned by Murdoch; opinion desk not insane; soothing peach background color in both paper and online editions.
It makes sense in a “game theory” kind of way. Writers/influencers will want a pulpit and a huge chunk of the population wants to read political rhetoric rather than dry news. I think I prefer this approach to something like NYT or (esp) WaPo where the news is so intermixed with the agenda that they are almost indistinguishable.
BBC with more extensive coverage (more than just the breaking news) would be my ideal model.
isn't OP-ed synonym for what they generally disagree with (e.g. to allow them to claim they're "listening to both sides") ?
relevant example from this week is Australia, where editor in chief for the Murdoch conglomerate has no answer to why they banish all articles about climate change science to the Opinions sections.
"op-ed" derived from "opposite the editorial page", i.e. recto to the editorial page's verso. In general, the op-eds do not vary that much from editorials. The NY Times always has conservative columnists that it runs, but they are not necessarily that far right.
> It should be noted that WSJ’s opinion section is extremely politicized.
All opinion sections of every major news outlet is extremely politicized. In almost all cases, the non-opinion sections are edging towards being extremely politicized as well.
> What, the linked study proves the opposite. A massive amount of death in Manaus in 2021, despite 'herd immunity' measured in October 2020.
That is not a study. It is an editorial. It "proves" nothing, and instead advances a few alternative theories that might explain the discrepancy. However, it is not a complex situation. The following quote from the editorial is consistent with my personal belief after reading the original paper [1] that made the herd immunity claim:
"The 76% estimate of past infection might have been biased upwards due to adjustments to the observed 52·5% (95% CI 47·6–57·5) seroprevalence in June, 2020, to account for antibody waning."
This is true, but it understates the extent of the authors "adjustments". If you look at the original paper (Figure 2; linked below), they adjusted the raw data upward by a factor of about 3x. It is an...aggressive...modification to the raw data.
The parsimonious explanation for what is being observed in Manaus is that the Science paper claiming herd immunity was wrong. The authors of this Lancet editorial go to great lengths to advance alternative explanations involving "variants", but these are all unfounded, convoluted alternatives. The simplest explanation is that the original paper was wrong.
I definitely found an epidemiologist on Twitter giving out about that study. The Science study used a convenience sample, which makes me believe that it's a very biased estimate of sero-prevalance.
Yeah, there are possible issues with the way the Science paper collected their sample, as well. The authors of the Lancet editorial allude to this in the next sentence:
"furthermore, comparisons of blood donors with census data showed no major difference in a range of demographic variables, and the mandatory exclusion of donors with symptoms of COVID-19 is expected to underestimate the true population exposure to the virus."
Here, the Lancet writers are trying to argue that the sample wasn't that biased, and therefore the Science paper was right, and therefore the current infections are due to "variants".
It's a very weird and convoluted argument. Comparison to demographic variables is irrelevant, and the second sentence doesn't address the actual concern with the Science paper (i.e. testing in Brazil was rare at the time of the study, so people with Covid sought out the study). Regardless, I think it's a red herring. It doesn't matter if the sample was biased or not -- you can look at the data as collected, and see that the upward adjustments were so aggressive that the conclusion of the Science paper is likely to be wrong.
The economic damage is being done by the pandemic: people aren’t going to congregate when it’s risky and many businesses can’t survive without high in-person volume. Having lockdowns can get you back to the point where businesses can safely operate with community spread control measures (see e.g. Australia or Taiwan).
What won’t work is attacking medical precautions or dissembling about vaccine effectiveness — and on that latter point, if you are really worried about variants the best way to stop them is carefully following medical advice to prevent community spread because each person who gets infected is something on the order of 10e9 chances for a new mutation which is more competitive. If people had worn masks and locked down a year ago this wouldn’t be anywhere near as bad a situation.
"Having lockdowns can get you back to the point where businesses can safely operate with community spread control measures (see e.g. Australia or Taiwan)."
How do you explain Florida, not locked down, vs. California with some of the strictest lock downs in the country having similar rates of death/infection?
It's even more of a puzzler for those pushing lockdowns since Florida has a population tilted way more in the elderly direction and per capita CA has a population tilted way more in the younger direction. Even if both were locked down you would expect Florida to have more infections simply from the age of its population. Instead they aren't locked down so it should be the apocalypse, no?
All as we pass the year anniversary of "six weeks to slow the spread" :p
The US hasn’t tried anything like a strict lockdown anywhere in the country – we came close for a few weeks last spring but relaxed several weeks too soon – so I think what we’re showing is that this works as well as cutting a course of antibiotics early.
In particular, we didn’t have a good economic plan for people who couldn’t work from home. Absent some alternative, economic necessity will force people to leave their houses and that will ensure community spread goes up without more care than was in evidence in much of the country.
I’m sorry that you haven’t followed the topic carefully but it’s hardly a logical fallacy to say that not doing what epidemiologists recommended doesn’t mean following their advice wouldn’t have worked, especially when you can look at countries like Australia which did a harder lockdown and have seen the predicted benefits.
So in that case, you're willing to say that under current conditions in the US, mask wearing and restrictions on things like dining are pointless, right? If "lockdown" can only be expected to produce results in its strongest form and we can't do that, that seems like the logical conclusion.
Any improvement over nothing is worth having. Just because the large number of lockdown deniers make the kinds of lockdowns seen elsewhere in the developed world impossible, doesn’t mean the level of compliance that is possible isn’t worthwhile.
The experience from the Spanish Flu, which seems to have similar overall lethality, is instructive. Many developed countries managed to lock down to some extent and keep the death rate from around 0.5% to 1.5% of the population. India failed to manage any significant lockdown at all and the death rate was a staggering 5% of the population.
Sure, only if you completely disregard the massive costs to these mitigations. The costs in terms of lost educations, lost careers, mental health, isolation, etc, etc, etc.... those all have to be factored into the equation. Sadly we are 11 months into this and people are still pretending like there are no costs.
To make lockdowns worthwhile, you'd have to demonstrate orders of magnitude fewer hospitalizations and deaths. Haggling over which country or state did better than the other by 5% or 8% simply means that even if the lockdowns worked, their benefits are almost certainly not worth the costs.
The impacts of lockdowns (or any NPI) should be clear as day to the common person looking at the data. Thus far, all I see are people nit-picking tiny differences between regions. Which to me is a very strong indicator that they were not worth the cost at all.
In short, your line of thinking is a perfect demonstration of covid myopia. Nothing else but covid has mattered for 11 months. I strongly assert that covid myopia is a disease far worse than the virus. Civilizations in the future will remember this period for our myopic focus on one specific risk to the exclusion of everything else--the virus itself will be but a small footnote in history.
> Sure, only if you completely disregard the massive costs to these mitigations.
As far as monetary costs go this is really easy to do if you just force businesses to close and send them on their way with a pittance. Is there anything you can’t afford, as long as someone else is picking up the tab?
> Any improvement over nothing is worth having. Just because the large number of lockdown deniers make the kinds of lockdowns seen elsewhere in the developed world impossible, doesn’t mean the level of compliance that is possible isn’t worthwhile.
Great, so we agree that at any given level of lockdown, we should see some kind of marginal benefit vs less lockdown, right? So it does in fact make sense to compare outcomes between California, New York, and Florida?
It makes sense given the level of actual compliance with lockdown restrictions yes. It's the behaviour that matters not the rules. As I said previously and we seem to agree, rates of compliance in the US generally are relatively low and that varies even within the US. Demographics is an issue, for example California has several very large low income urban sprawls where lockdown compliance was minimal.
I'm making no moral judgement here, people are under severe hardship and we all have to make our decisions on our own circumstances, but it is what it is. What we do also has an impact on others.
I’d be hesitant to call the issue preventing simply closing up for a few weeks (which I agree should have happened) “lockdown deniers”. We’re had mass protests and riots by the same people apparently for the lockdowns and the more recent scandals with politicians of all stripes caught breaking their own restrictions on indoor dining, not wearing masks, or breaking travel recommendations to fly to vacation homes. The problem there’s a myriad of problems, the most original likely being that covid got politicized in the first place.
That’s like saying that failing to stop your car before you crash means you shouldn’t bother braking at all. Masks have repeatedly been shown to work, indoor dining has repeatedly been shown to be high risk in addition to being an optional luxury, and there’s no world in which we want more spread even if we’d prefer less.
All those things could be true and perhaps banning indoor dining does slow the spread. But is it worth the cost? Why do all these discussions focus only on solving for covid and completely ignoring the costs?
If banning indoor dining across the state of California results in one fewer person getting hospitalized is it worth it? What if it keeps 10 people out of the hospital?
More generalized, how much benefit does a blanket lockdown have to provide for it to be worth the immense costs. I'm using "cost", by the way, inthe most holistic hippy way possible. Costs include:
-- destroyed mental health
-- Peoples life work getting shut down by the government
-- careers development stalled
-- childhood education
-- Cancer research getting sidelined
-- Preventative healthcare checkups being skipped
-- Lost milestones like prom, graduation, awkward teenage dating not happening
-- pets not getting routine care because vet appointments are now a pain in the ass
-- car oil changes being deferred by 3 months
-- adoptions not being performed
-- dating lives being put on hold
-- people putting off having kids
-- infants not seeing human faces can't be good news
-- physical health being put on hold (closed gyms)
-- and on and on and on. It doesn't take much imagination to see the costs are tremendous.
I assert for a lockdown to be worthwhile it has to have such a profound impact on the trajectory of the virus that it is indisputable to the common person. Not only that, but it has to be orders of magnitude better than no lockdown.
If somebody is going to argue "see, lockdowns work... this region did 5% better than that region"... I just roll me eyes. It just means we flushed 11 months of people's lives down the toilet for almost no real gain.
It’s not like saying that, because nobody has claimed that crashing into another car at 5 mph is the same as crashing into it at 60. When you claim that only “hard lockdowns” (and note the circular reasoning inherent) can have the measurable effects claimed ahead of time, that’s what you’re saying.
If one football team got beat 8-0, and another football team got beat 9-1, should we really be spending time arguing about which team is better when they're both pretty obviously not very good?
If we're coaching the team that lost 0-8, we shouldn't try to run the playbook of the team that lost 1-9 in the next game. Especially when that playbook cripples our players in other ways--perhaps academically (to expand your analogy).
It's not about teams, it's about attempting to evaluate the counterfactual. If the difference between the US and Australia is primarily due to lockdowns, you would expect to see areas with more lockdown do better than areas with less. Much better, to a degree that drowns out any noise, since the overall difference is so vast. And that really doesn't seem to be what we observe.
You're acting like there were parts of the US in 100% lockdown vs 0% lockdown, when the difference is a lot more like 20% (max) vs 10%, and it's a lot harder to suss out any difference in result when the difference in practice is that small.
If lockdown explains most of the variance between Australia's 1k deaths and America's 500k deaths, then the difference between 10% and 20% lockdown should still be very visible.
That doesn't follow. Imagine the effective spread ("Re") of a disease averages 1.5. Certain external factors, such as climate, population density, access to medicine, diet, etc. can cause a 0.2 plus or minus variance in Re. So, 1.3-1.7 range. Each 10% of lockdown will cause a 10% reduction in that amount. So if Florida does a 10% lockdown, its Re will be somewhere in the 1.3-1.7 range reduced by 10% or 1.17-1.53. If California does a 20% lockdown, its Re will be in the 1.04-1.36 range. California, if "unlucky" can still have a worse Re (1.36) than Florida if "lucky" (1.17). Meanwhile Australia at a say 70% lockdown would see numbers in the 0.39-0.51 range, well below sustained transmission levels even if "unlucky."
Sure, but there's a point where the hypothesis just becomes unfalsifiable. Is there any evidence that would convince you lockdown policy isn't the primary factor here?
I'm not sure what you mean. That was the "if" that started this comment thread - an assertion that the US would be back to normal already if only it had done what Australia did.
What this seems to hint at is that doing the absolute laziest possible, mostly-voluntary "lockdown" (ala the "lockdowns" we've seen in America) does not accomplish very much.
It's like claiming a brand of toothpaste isn't very effective because you brushed your teeth once a week and still experienced the same level of tooth decay as somebody who never brushed at all. Is it the toothpaste's fault, or your fault because you were too lazy to brush your teeth more than once per week? There's not enough data to say. Maybe it was a truly ineffective toothpaste and no amount of brushing would have helped. You don't know enough to say.
Calling anything we've tried in America a "lockdown" is laughable, considering how voluntary and unenforced it was. Lockdown, my ass. More like a polite suggestion to stay at home that most of the country ignored whenever they felt like it.
Perhaps, but meanwhile we're forcibly closing certain businesses and hurting those. I would know, I own one that has been greatly affected (a bar).
For reference, my customers starting hanging out at the strip club instead, which didn't have the restrictions imposed (it was based on liquor licenses, which they don't have in my state).
So, the lockdown was ineffective at controlling the population or spread, but it still managed to smack my business around.
I don't recall denying that this lockdown has been disastrous for many businesses. You typed that out as if you were disagreeing or offering a counterpoint. Is anybody on Earth even denying the impact this has had on businesses?
I work in the restaurant industry, FWIW. Nobody needs to tell me how disastrous this has been for certain businesses.
More importantly than my post, though: I'm truly sorry your bar has been nailed by this while local strip clubs, of all things, have been allowed to operate. That is freaking absurd. I hope your bar can survive and prosper again soon. I have lost a business myself, prior to the pandemic. It's beyond heartbreaking.
Seconding your point: I think hard lockdowns are the only way to halt spread prior to mass vaccination and that’s devastating for businesses if we don’t do anything to help make up lost pay for workers, assist businesses with rent, etc. In some cases you might be able to soften it – pay restaurants to make delivery meal packs for high-risk people, etc. – but something like a bar, movie theater, mall retail shop, etc. in most cities probably doesn’t have an option to pay their rent in most areas without close to normal levels of customer traffic even if most of their staff are laid off.
It’d be expensive but other parts of the economy are booming and one point of having things like government debt is recognizing that it helps smooth the impact of disasters. We should be doing a WWII victory bond campaign investing in local businesses.
Thanks for the well-wishes. We've been established a long time (about to celebrate 11 years) and I am very financially conservative, so the business had enough capital to go multiple years if we were closed down (no payroll, minimal utilities) and still re-open.
We've sporadically been able to open normal hours, reduced hours, reduced capacity, and all kinds of other restricted levels of activity, which has resulted in terrible sales, but smaller losses than we would normally have.
It truly is a very small business (9 employees) so its operational cost is pretty low.
I pointed out the strip clubs, but of course the casinos are allowed to continue operation as well. They avoided literally all of the regulations we had to obey: capacity, forced social distancing, reduced hours, etc. And of course they don't have the taboo aspect that some people feel with strip clubs, so they've been nice and busy. I have to imagine they're lining the governor's pockets to enjoy such a privileged status.
laughable or not, the American lockdowns certainly destroyed plenty of livelihoods and devastated a thriving economy where wages were finally rising for the majority.
what would a proper lockdown look like to you anyway? I uniformed officer at your front door forcing you to remain inside?
I work in the restaurant industry. I definitely understand how disastrous this has been for particular sectors.
Do you think that I was somehow denying that?
When I called our "lockdowns" laughable, clearly I was referring to their effectiveness w.r.t. stopping the virus.
Clearly I was not referring to business impact. That was a point I didn't mention. Is anybody even disputing this has been rough on certain businesses?!?!
California does have twice the population as Florida and a much, much larger economy.
It could just be that all the elderly Floridians sit at home in gated communities, while Californians are more likely to be going-in to work surrounded by a much larger, more dense population.
Could also be an effect of prevalence of multi-generational housing. Perhaps the elderly Floridians are more concentrated in gated community-type housing, and not living with extended family in a smaller living space.
It’s an island and regularly shut down air travel to control infections coming in?
The “lockdowns could work if we just tried” view is falsified by the situation in Germany. If Germans lack the discipline to do it, then nobody can do it. Some countries like Australia got lucky because their geography made it easy, but it’s not practical elsewhere.
I'm not sure why you think that it being an island has anything to do with anything. It doesn't. Yes, the fact that they LOCKED DOWN had a lot to do with why their infection rate is so low. That is exactly my point; thank you for acknowledging that it is correct.
Where I live, people pay little attention. Restaurants, bars, gyms, and grocery stores are all packed. In the latter case most (not all) people wear masks. I think lockdowns are impacting the economy much more than the pandemic itself. Most people do not seem to be that worried in the absence of government policies.
> I think lockdowns are impacting the economy much more than the pandemic itself.
Well of course.
The USA is at nearly 500K deaths. But we've got a population of 328 Million. The economy won't notice the loss of on 0.15% of the population. It's nothing more than a rounding error.
But isn't that a terrible way to think of it? Think about what you're implying here. How many people should we allow to die just to keep the economy afloat?
I’m not implying anything, I was addressing the GP claim that the pandemic was the primary factor impacting the economy rather than lockdowns. I suspect what what I’m saying I see locally would likely end up the same nationally: eliminate restrictions and economic activity will return to near pre-pandemic levels with only a slight hit from people too worried to go out even with a mask.
My personal feelings are actually simultaneously that we worry way too much about economics rather than human factors but also that personally, I don’t feel that the measures we are taking to counter Covid are worth it for noneconomic reasons, but I can respect that other people feel differently.
Ah. The ‘it works on an isolated island with 5 million people’ fantasy.
Except it doesn’t work on continents with billions of people with multiple governments.
And then the magical mask fairytale. If only people had worn masks this would all be over. Except now it turns out people have to wear three masks on top of each other. How could that be if masks had solved all the problems? The answer is clear: they don’t.
There is no point in blameshifting to people that ‘didn’t wear the masks and didn’t lock down’.
Also it is 100% clear that tons of people can’t wait to be allowed to visit each other. Claiming ‘people aren’t going to congregate’ is simply a lie. In the Netherlands we had one test event with 1500 tickets and over 100000 people applied for a ticket. They can’t wait to congregate.
And no, land borders don't matter that much. They aren't a strong infection vector. You can just close the borders. The vast majority of infections come from air travel, not land travel that is essentially zero.
Were also not taking about the EU here, the Article is American, and there aren't a billion people neither in Europe nor in North America.
Incidentally, the modalities for the Schengen zone allow authorities to close down borders in such circumstances.
The island argument is a mirage. We're in 2021, land travel can be brought to ~0 and air travel always was the dominant vector of infection.
I presume you have never been in Europe. There barely any borders to close and a lot of people live in one country and work in another. You can’t block that for a year.
In Baarle Nassau in the Netherlands there is a store, and half of it is in the Netherlands and half of it is in Belgium.
By the way, air travel has been ~0 for a year now. Unfortunately it has not in fact stopped the pandemic. Must be the no true lockdown: if it doesn’t work we just say it wasn’t strict enough.
Canada closed some of the internal borders between its provinces; something that has never happened before. Some road blocks, some of its based simply on the honour system. Here in Ontario, I cannot legally visit anywhere east of Quebec right now without quarantining on arrival for 2 weeks. And some remote communities are literally barricaded from entry.
The regions that did quarantine themselves like that (the Atlantic provinces) are in fact doing much better than the rest of the country. Newfoundland is in near-total suppression. Though unlike some others in this thread I do believe being an island is helpful, even if just psychologically.
Last time I checked, Australia is a continent with 26 million people, mostly urban, and strong travel ties throughout the world. Taiwan isn’t big but they’d be at the top of the list of countries you’d expect to get hit by an outbreak in China given travel patterns.
Nobody is saying masks are 100% effective but the scientific consensus has been clear since last spring that they sharply reduce transmission rates. Epidemics are all about cutting those rates, and a minor inconvenience is about as cheap as you can buy a reduction. Certainly better than getting advice from someone who’s going to claim South Korea is a sparsely-populated island to avoid having to admit credulously repeating untrustworthy sources.
"Also it is 100% clear that tons of people can’t wait to be allowed to visit each other. Claiming ‘people aren’t going to congregate’ is simply a lie. In the Netherlands we had one test event with 1500 tickets and over 100000 people applied for a ticket. They can’t wait to congregate."
I'm not up to date on the situation in the Netherlands. Is it that you can do anything you want if you have a negative test? Because otherwise, I don't think that anecdote means what you want it to mean.
No, they are going to run an event with 1500 people as a test, a small dance festival. They also had a football match with two low ranked teams playing for a live crowd. The papers proudly proclaimed that that football match had trouble selling its tickets, as proof of the ‘nobody wants to congregate’ theory. It’s unsurprising though, considering this game wouldn’t quite sell out in a normal situation. To those people it did come as quite a surprise that a dance festival that offered 1500 tickets got over 100000 reservations.
People can’t wait to get together and while most people do follow the measures many would stop the second it was no longer required. But some people have locked themselves in their home for a year now and think everyone is like that. That’s not quite true.
I give up. First it's hoax, then it's just a bad flu, then it's going to disappear like magic, then a second wave is impossible, then it's that vaccines aren't necessary and don't work. Meanwhile, people die in their thousands per day and the death toll piles up and hospitals get over-run with dying patients.
As for lockdowns, we know from analysis of the Spanish Flu epidemic that cities with successful lockdowns suffered less economically, because cities that didn't lock down had worse outbreaks that lead to longer lasting deeper economic damage. China had the mother of all lockdowns and is back to robust economic growth, and yes comparing the US or Europe to small island states makes no sense, but China isn't a small island state.
You know what, I don't care. There's no vaccine required to be immune to facts. Whatever you claim to believe, when it's proved wrong and predictions based on it fail to happen you'll just come up with some other bullshit to believe instead. Whatever.
> Spanish Flu epidemic that cities with successful lockdowns suffered less economically
You realize that during no time when the Spanish Flu was around did they lockdown for 11 months right? The lockdowns you are taking about there are small, localized events. Not huge ones that affected large regions and had year long durations.
The only reason we were able to keep this lockdown afloat is because privileged people like you and me get to work from home and have zoom. Had Covid hit even two decades ago, we wouldn't be doing any of this at all. We'd have sucked it up and got on with our lives as best we could.
> There's no vaccine required to be immune to facts.
You are arguing morality, something which science can help guide but cannot dictate. Science doesn't tell us to lockdown for a year. Society does. Science might provide insight as to what effects a year long lockdown might have (hint: science hasn't a clue... we have no priors to this at all). Science cannot tell us to lockdown. It cannot even tell us to wear masks. That too is a values thing and is guided by what society values.
Even if lockdowns worked and were proven so by a bunch of statistically valid random studies (which don't exist, by the way)... it is still upon a well informed society to decide if it is worth doing (note: I don't think most people are well informed about covid at all... the average person overestimates their risk of covid death by about 1000x).
Trying to compare now to >100 years ago is full of all kinds of bad assumptions. Life in 1918 hardly resembles life in 2020 in any discernible way.
> China had the mother of all lockdowns and is back to robust economic growth
Believing this means you have to trust information disseminated by the Chinese Communist Party, which would be a foolish thing to do. They are 100% committed to saving face, not to saving lives.
It’s how it looked to the virus that really matters. Large urban populations, massive global movements of people, no vaccine. I think from an epidemiological point of view it really wasn’t all that different. Was it really all that different in terms of day to day economic contact either? Urban sprawl, shopping centres, industry, trains, trucks, telecommunications, global freight. Businesses losing workers and customers had basically the same problems.
Sure the Chinese government can’t be trusted, but there are plenty of foreigners in China these days, including journalists. My wife is Chinese and we’re in almost daily contact with family over there. When it comes to general movements of the population and public or industrial policy these things come out eventually.
Do you really believe that journalists, of any nationality, in China feel free to express their honest take on this (or any) event that affects how people view the CCP?
Foreign Journalists come and go in China all the time, they’re not locked up in the country permanently. If what you say was true, direct first hand reporting of the Uighur situation would be impossible, yet even that happens.
Do you think reporting on factory activity in Guangzhou is that much harder? China has incredibly vibrant industrial reporting, businesses running just in time supply chains and making investment decisions need accurate information. Your just making up excuses and I suspect you know it perfectly well.
Well executed lockdowns with high compliance rates work. They did it, it happened and there’s plenty if other evidence too. There’s no refuge left for the lockdowns don’t work brigade except “Laa Laaa I’m not listening”. Where they don’t work it’s precisely because the lockdowns don’t work brigade won’t let them, with low compliance rates.
Are regions with the harshest lockdowns doing worse economically?
A cursory analysis says no. Places like Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Vietnam, China that had very strict lockdowns are doing well economically.
Then maybe the worst is intermediate lockdowns? Also no. There are few differences between regions with essentially no lockdowns and those with moderate lockdowns, though they fare worse than strict initial lockdowns across the board.
It is very hard for me to put myself back in the mindset of figures being real. In the last 12 months we have been routinely lied, and many political leaders believe misleading the public “for the greater good” is an act of leadership.
Simplest example is the 30 members of the government saying masks are useless as a form of protection in April 2020. Uniform message, no exception, not temporarily, not on a subset, just the blanket message repeated on all newspapers and TC channels, “masks are entirely useless as a form of protection.” (France, by the way). Obviously their goal was to keep stocks for medical personnel, but they chose the lie as a form of getting to their point. Same goes for all the other figures, I know how easy it is to fabricate statistics; Every Monday they tell us figures have jumped since yesterday — obviously because there are fewer tests on weekends. After all this, I have as much confidence in the figures as agricultural production figures in 1970 USSR - For me Covid is like the default checkbox on all death forms, which explain most of the high figures. Newspapers are under state of emergency anyway, so they probably don’t have the choice in what they write. Some succeeded to print articles about how journalists are not allowed to observe the democratic process of decision anymore, but that’s probably all they are allowed to print.
Sorry for the personal anecdote but I’d like to generalize it into “Maybe it isn’t good to tell lies as a routine form of governance.”
As for myself, it’s a pain to not have trust in anything, and I’ll probably spend years cautiously recovering trust in any figure from doctors as genuine and not fabricated for political power.
Looking back at the strategies that different countries have pursued over the last year, the most effective strategy has undoubtedly been to implement a strict lockdown for several weeks, nearly completely eliminating the virus, and then following up with aggressive contact-tracing whenever any case pops up.
Countries that have done this have had far fewer deaths and have suffered less economically. The alternatives (doing nothing, implementing mild restrictions, or implementing strict lockdowns but opening up too early and failing to follow up) have all been far worse, in terms of both lives and money.
No, the only solution that has worked is being an isolated nation and blocking international travel from the beginning.
For 90% of countries that was never an option anyway and for most of the rest that ship has long sailed.
The countries that have tried, like Israel, have seen so much success with that strategy they are now in their third lockdown. And that’s with the best vaccination numbers of the world.
That's for Jewish residents. Apartheid states direct all benefits to the favored class. That works, until pandemic time. Palestinians are human too, and since they haven't been vaccinated at all they are a persistent source of covid.
The only apology on that page is for playing a recording of a foreign language that contained some sort of homophobic slur. On the topic at hand, it has this:
We note that whilst there has been some dispute about the Israeli government’s responsibility for vaccinating Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, those Palestinians who live in East Jerusalem, or who hold Israeli citizenship, are covered by the roll-out of the government’s Covid-19 vaccination programme.
That is, the Israel government only claims that a small minority of the Palestinians subject to its tyranny will be vaccinated. We may expect that claim will also turn out to be mostly false.
That's the entire point - that Israel vaccinates its citizens regardless of ethnicity, and the data doesn't exclude non-Jews.
As for the West Bank, the article itself notes the legal responsibility is 'disputed',
that is nobody save some activists thinks there's one - which is why no state in the planet has called Israel to take over West Bank or Gaza healthcare.
Even the Palestinian Authority (which has ordered the Sputnik V) hasn't called for it or asked for aid. Apparently some people feel Israel should still just take over despite their own wishes! That's an enticing prospect to a Israelis of a certain political bent...
P.S. One fact to note - Israel's COVID statistics are significantly worse. The idea apparently is to redirect vaccination from where there's a barely contained outbreak to a place where there isn't.
You knew that they ordered Sputnik, but you weren't aware that Israel has allowed only 2000 doses through the border checkpoints? Yikes.
You're also wrong about Israel's responsibilities. All signatories to the Fourth Geneva Convention (including Israel, as of 1951) have agreed that occupying powers have the duty to provide available vaccines in pandemic conditions. It wouldn't be a hardship for Israel, since they already provide vaccines and land and homes and UBI for the non-native settlers they import from all around the world into occupied West Bank territory.
* You're mixing up a 2000 dose transfer between the West Bank and Gaza that was approved, and "allowing only 2000 doses" which is strictly false - there were a number of transfers, e.g. the UAE sending 20000 doses to Gaza. Israel won't stop the Sputnik delivery.
* Israel never agreed that 4th Geneva applies, and regardless that has been signed away in Oslo.
* The PA is welcome to import vaccines, but they'll have to pay like anyone else. Given their terrorist payment budget, there's no shortage of money.
Occupied people can't sign away their rights as occupied people. That's basic rubber-hose theory. Besides the PA is a total sockpuppet of Israel government. At least now you're admitting they're asking for help, after I linked to their press release about that. Unfortunately it's very difficult to import medical supplies through Israeli checkpoints. The Oslo process ended in 1999, and was widely rejected by Palestinians even before that. It no longer governs anything.
Yes, negotiating with the PA or the PLO or any Palestinian organization is useless, since their entire stance is to declare in advance any agreement they'd make as invalid or under duress. That doesn't change the legal situation there though.
The PA has requested to transport vaccines between West Bank and Gaza (which was allowed), but never actually requested access to Israel's vaccine stock. They're trying to run a subtle PR campaign* - They need to simultaneously argue to the world that Israel should have been supplying them, while arguing locally that they can do it on their own.
So they make noises about Israel's legal responsibility but when it comes to actually requesting aid or receiving aid they ignore or reject it, like the time they refused a UAE shipment which came via Ben Gurion airport. In fairness, since Corona hasn't spread there as much, they need not hurry.
* Someone has been searching twits mentioning Israel and vaccines, and just sends out bots. My favourite is when they hit on anti-vax twitter. Conspiracy theories about how vaccines are poison even in Israel, suddenly interrupted by 'Israel must provide vaccines to the West Bank!!', the twitters trying to argue with the bots... Just glorious.
China went from having a serious outbreak to essentially zero new cases in just over two months. Australia, Vietnam and New Zealand also brought new cases essentially to nil.
Israel is not a good example. Lockdown application here is very uneven. They have nothing to do with the virus and are mainly used by politicians in power to suppress secular way of life and to redistribute business opportunities.
The poster is not engaged in a good faith argument so there isn't much point in explaining these sorts of details.
My observation has been that in Canada and the UK any sort of selective or regional restrictions have been extremely ineffective and they offer evidence to people who would like to make bad-faith arguments about the power of restrictions.
My opinion is that two things appear to work to get you manageable levels of COVID-19. The first is broad restrictive measures over very large geographical areas that actually reduce time indoors with other people and compel mask use (some of the Canadian provinces did this well). The second is simply letting the epidemic reach levels that scare people into changing their behaviour (many US states).
"Lockdown" can mean anything from closing pubs to mandating that nearly everyone stay home 24/7.
There's no great mystery here. The virus primarily spreads in indoor settings where people breath the same air. A lockdown is only effective to the extent that it stops people from getting into those situations. Closing pubs will reduce transmission a bit, but not nearly as much as telling everyone to stay home.
Good luck telling these other governments to lock down to prevent that (assuming it prevents that, of course). That’s the difference between being an isolated nation and being on a continent. You can’t control what the other governments decide.
> Does he hear himself? You can't really liken wild guesses that lead to complacency/death as hiding the truth. It sounds like this guy should really stick to surgery.
It’s not a “wild guess.” There is data to support it. So what you’re really saying is that scientists should avoid discussing possible interpretations of the data for fear of what conclusions the public might draw. That’s not how science works and it isn’t a good way to build public trust in the process.
when the vehicle is plugged into a regular home socket, Lightyear 0 can still charge 32 kilometers of range per hour
A claim related to solar charging from the article might be the one about the sun sustaining 35km/day for two months.