BF2S Forums Pandemic thread

Dilbert_X wrote:

It worked for Australia, we shut the borders and were OK for two years

uziq wrote:

australia is a very remote island nation with 0.3% of the global population. this is a bit like that thing where you keep pretending that SA's measures can somehow be extrapolated to megalopolises with populations 5x greater than the whole state.

and taiwan, which ya know is also an island.

Cybargs wrote:

uziq wrote:

australia is a very remote island nation with 0.3% of the global population. this is a bit like that thing where you keep pretending that SA's measures can somehow be extrapolated to megalopolises with populations 5x greater than the whole state.

and taiwan, which ya know is also an island.

i mentioned taiwan and south korea (which is also, to all intents and purposes, an island, and furthermore a country whose two nearest neighbours took extremely hard stance on covid-19; not much chance of japanese coming to RoK). not at all similar to the fluid and open situation in europe, with dozens of countries with 5-6 easy land borders each.

on top of their geographical good luck, they both had systems in place that were ready to go because of SARS. that's obvious enough.

and more generally, both have immensely collective cultures, extremely strong (not to say military dictatorial) states, and people generally do what they're told to do – even at the most fundamental level of labour and profession. the 'miracle economies' in east asia are all creations of a very specific political economy (call it Listian). none of which really applies to much of the rest of the world.

Last edited by uziq (2022-11-18 03:39:57)

uziq wrote:

they never had it licked, you just very selectively believe their self-reported 'cases' when it suits you. despite the fact that their curve flattened from a realistic trajectory to a dead-flat 'all clear' and stayed that way for years ... lmao. another victory for the rational scientist brain, there.

... your cherrypicked narrative courtesy of the ultra-open and honest CCP ... lmfaoooooo.

OK, to summarise:

uziq: We must believe the Chinese data - covid originated in the Wuhan market, its cast iron, there's no doubt about it, you can trust chinese scientists

also

uziq: We must ignore the Chinese data on case numbers, they're corrupt and totalitarian and you can't believe a word they or anyone in china says.

except multiple, large-scale studies have been published in (double blind, anonymous) peer-reviewed journals on covid’s origins.

what’s your source dilbert? science man? a vanity fair article?

i’m beginning to think that all this self-celebratory engineering shit is a distraction from the fact that the engineering corps just aren’t actually very good scientists. let the real intellectuals get on with their research, dilbert. you’re not a patch on a virologist.

uziq wrote:

except multiple, large-scale studies have been published in (double blind, anonymous) peer-reviewed journals on covid’s origins.

Except they were based on data supplied by China, no-one has been allowed to go in and gather anything.

Invalidates the whole thing no?

Information out of China is valid, when it suits him. Rejected when it doesn't.

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

Information out of China is valid, when it suits him. Rejected when it doesn't.

You're referring to uziq

i am not the one citing china as a case study as to what to do in the west or anywhere else. that's you. i have continually called their model a joke and said that emulating a totalitarian autocracy who are currently engaged in genocide, amongst other things, is probably not a good shout. but here we are: every single nation in the world, never mind the 'free world', except 1 has abandoned zero covid ... and you're here still crying out for it.

you alternatively say 'serves them right' when bad news comes out of china, or when their zero covid policy displays palpable failures; but then at other times you're linking us their case/death numbers, as if they're gospel truth? you should make up your mind. i am not confused at all w/r/t my stance on china's example. i think it is a categorically Bad Example.

it doesn't matter what they've lied about. read the fucking metastudies. the early evolution and development of the virus has been pretty well studied and reconstructed. you are the self-styled SCIENTIST here, are you not? why do you whisper conspiratorially so often about vaccines and everything else?

Dilbert_X wrote:

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

Can China be trusted or not, dilbert? Did zero covid work, or were statistics fudged?

Zero covid did work for China, and Australia, but they/we've been reinfected by the moronic rest of the world, at this point - three years of failure later - zero-covid is futile.
Personally I would shut down travel in and out of Australia - this worked extremely well and is the single best thing any country can do.
Shut down travel, 4-6 weeks lockdown and the country is pretty well clear.
The rest of the world allowed travel to continue and had endless half-assed lockdowns and had the deaths to show for it.

uziq wrote:

the early evolution and development of the virus has been pretty well studied and reconstructed

Base on whose data?
China had about 3-4 months to fudge it all.

So are the chinese the tragic victims or the conniving perpetrators? You've been pushing both angles when it suits you. Cheering when bad things happen to Chinese people, yet bemoaning when zero covid doesn't pan out because of, er, foreign interlopers (in the same breath as calling zero covid totally actionable).

Which the heck is it, in the long list of which-is-its.

Dilbert_X wrote:

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

Can China be trusted or not, dilbert? Did zero covid work, or were statistics fudged?

Zero covid did work for China, and Australia, but they/we've been reinfected by the moronic rest of the world, at this point - three years of failure later - zero-covid is futile.
Personally I would shut down travel in and out of Australia - this worked extremely well and is the single best thing any country can do.
Shut down travel, 4-6 weeks lockdown and the country is pretty well clear.
The rest of the world allowed travel to continue and had endless half-assed lockdowns and had the deaths to show for it.

uziq wrote:

the early evolution and development of the virus has been pretty well studied and reconstructed

Base on whose data?
China had about 3-4 months to fudge it all.

china was sharing the serology data from the earliest weeks. the sequencing data. not the epidemiological data. you really are having a hard time with this, aren’t you? drug serology is shared on medical databases. china volunteered this from the start.

it’s so funny that you’re the only person still prosecuting utterly insipid ‘STEM vs humanities’ culture war bullshit, in response to anything in the news, like some sort of trapped and repressed redditor from 2014 … and yet your approach to science is distinctly whiffy.

whenever the scientific proof that you put so much personal stock in delivers a proof/outcome that you don’t like, you start muttering darkly about ‘scientists being paid off’, ‘they’re all colluding with the CCP or david nutt’. it’s like you don’t even understand the basics of how research is done on a professional level. you rely on adventitious and fanciful newspaper cuttings and ‘investigative journalism’ in glossy magazines instead. lmao.

very funny chap. read a study once in a while instead of ranting about how everyone else is sooo stupid and how the world is being ruined by vague humanities thinkers. just a suggestion.

i have been trying to explain to you for years that there is a necessary lag between even earnest hospital officials noting a new disease and it being sequenced. hey, megabrain: every person presenting at hospital with flu-like symptoms or dying of pneumonia isn’t sent off for lab testing and serological analysis. that’s just not how everyday medical practice works, in hospitals in china or in the UK or anywhere else. it took days, perhaps even weeks, before medical professionals on the frontline would have noticed an uptick or a trend in their communities. we subsequently may have back-traced the earliest cases to november; but that's not at all the same thing as testing/analysing the very first cases and potentially deploying pandemic emergency measures immediately.

yes, early studies (they’re known as letters/bulletins or pre-prints in the scientific literature) were published, by teams of chinese medical workers/lab researchers, very early in the pandemic. these studies shared serological data, when they acquired it, on a novel pathogen. that happened. they didn’t sit on it. there was twittering and discussion going on, albeit in the more limited circles of medical and virological literature. go and do some fucking research, i think you’re a little hazy on the details and chronology at this point.

otherwise: lmaooo at the basic lack of commonsense in your proposals. you simultaneously admit that zero covid now is ‘futile’, even totalitarian china can’t keep it out of their borders. then you propose ‘shutting the border of australia and a lockdown for 4-6 weeks’. how will shutting the border curb the rates of infection WITHIN the population? idiot. or if you have a FULL lockdown for 1.5 months, what will you ultimately achieve by closing the economy and civic society down for that huge chunk of time? if, by your own admission, it’s going to leak across the borders pretty inevitably after lifting such draconian measures? WHAT will you have achieved for this immense trade-off? perhaps 2 weeks, in all, of a flattened curve and reduced case/death rates? amazing.

what if i told you that you can deliver similar appreciable improvements and flattening of curves in case/death numbers if you ... roll out a new booster with good timing? mind blown !

again, look at the economic and social costs in china if you want to see what this immensely attritional, and apparently 'futile' (in your own bloody words), strategy really achieves. and, no, you don't get to cite their own self-reported cases/deaths numbers as evidence of their 'results'. to really gain an overall picture of the strategy's costs/benefits, you'd have to see things like their GDP stats and economic outputs. which, funnily enough, since adopting zero covid ... china have stopped sharing with the world, for the first time in decades, since it became a member of the global marketplace. really make u think ! ! !

jesus christ it’s like arguing with a half-demented uncle over his tapioca pudding.

Last edited by uziq (2022-11-20 15:07:17)