| RolStoppable said: The biggest danger of the coronavirus is how much misinformation went around and how it was blown up into an illness that is an existential threat to humanity. That's how we've arrived at the current situation that even people who should be intelligent enough to grasp the magnitude of it aren't capable of doing it anymore. Facts have been handpicked to justify the measures being taken by governments, yet despite the distortion we've still witnessed many rules that were illogical or outright nonsensical. However, despite how the media and politicians put the facts forward, there remain limits to how much they can control. When there's training for employees to learn the full capacity of the actual danger of the virus, there's an obligation to inform properly, because otherwise the state could and would get sued for deliberate misinformation. So the actual facts are: 1. In a good year of living with the virus, 80% of the known infections have resulted in no or only mild symptoms. 15% have been cases where the infected had to stay at home to recover from the symptoms. It's only the remaining 5% who had to seek medical care of which a portion has been hospitalized and an even smaller fraction had to put in intensive care. 2. Of the people who died of COVID-19, it's important to point out that in almost all cases they didn't die of COVID-19 alone. Rather it is more probable that they died because of a combination of multiple things, including previous known problems with their heart or lungs, or obesity. These previous diseases and illnesses are usually caused by unhealthy lifestyles, such as smoking, too much alcohol and/or intake of processed foods. So if there was actual concern about people, then the solution to COVID-19 and its variants would not be vaccination, but preventive measures to keep people healthier overall. This means that governments should have clamped down on holes in the laws concerning food processing, but I am not aware of any country taking any steps like that. So what corona is, is not an existential threat to humanity, but merely an existential threat to the way of life and production. But this same existential threat to our current way of living already exists in the form of climate change. The ultimate answer to these threats cannot be bandaids like vaccination and measures like social distancing, but a sincere willingness of humanity to bend to the rules of nature instead of the other way around. Because if we collectively subscribed to the thinking that the current way of living can be preserved, we would be just digging a deeper hole which would make the eventual and inevitable course correction all the harder to achieve. Corona has served as a great distraction for the last ~1.5 years. Ironically, if it hadn't been for corona, the world's climate goals for 2020 would have been far out of reach. In a way it's hilarious that humanity has been more afraid of corona - an illness that poses first and foremost a risk to only the chronically ill - than the reality of climate change which has resulted in an increase of natural disasters that take lives by the hundreds with no distinction between perfectly healthy and vulnerable people. Not to mention all the additional damage that comes with natural disasters, like people losing their homes. Corona has received attention that is disproportional to its actual threat. Perhaps the media and politicians should employ the same tools to get something done as retaliation to climate change, because apparently the population is willing to make concessions to their standard of living if it's perceived to be necessary.
Yup, it's exactly all these exceptional cases that have been used to instill fear in the population by portraying them as something that can occur regularly. I do not deny that these cases exist and it's sad that they do, but we shouldn't allow it that the sight of the big picture is lost. |
However 1. has put hospital systems across the world on the brink of collapse with all the measures in place. Go talk to a healthcare worker if you think it's all a storm in a glass of water. My wife has not been able to get the medical care she needs because the healthcare system has been overloaded with Covid-19 cases since April 2020.
You might not see it happening right around you, yet the fallout is everywhere. A close friend of my wife nearly died because cancer diagnosis was postponed half a year due to the hospitals and doctors being overloaded. She ended up needing most of her left lung removed (would have been far less drastic if caught on time with regular screenings that were cancelled) and is still in recovery.
And still policy makers are only looking at how stressed the hospitals are and let it get to the point of saturation before halting further spread. Surgeries here are being cancelled and postponed again due to Covid.
an illness that poses first and foremost a risk to only the chronically ill, That's a blatant lie.
Climate change still gets plenty attention btw, has been getting attention for the past 20 years. Corona is not to blame for the general apathy to the dangers of global warming. The problem with global warming is, it happens too slowly for people to take note. Just like Corona was only 'interesting' during the early exponential growth. Now we sort of have it contained to linear growth it's not 'interesting' anymore, while the active cases are as high as ever. 10,000 daily deaths (at least the official count) a day is now considered normal.
But Corona did help global warming by reducing air traffic 90% during lock downs, got far more people to work from home instead of commute, reduced unnecessary travel in general and even reduced the amount of E-waste by global shortages :p. So if you want more to be done about global warming, you should be all for more lock downs and restrictions.
