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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2808 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 29, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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This seems like an easy thing for a relatively young and healthy person (I assume) to say.

This seems more like a shallow dunk than an attempt to acknowledge the terrible job pretty much every Westernized government did at responsibly balancing the right of ordinary people to go about their lives versus the actual increased risk to the actually significantly more vulnerable population, rather than pandering to overblown fears stoked by social media culture and letting a bunch of low-information healthcare officials with no accountability to the actual population play tin-pot dictator.

I'd also like to know - many people have stoked fears about supposed healthcare "collapse", but did any healthcare systems anywhere actually do anything that could be described as collapse during the entire Covid era? Exactly what does a "collapse" look like, what are the real consequences of it? I mean things that actually happened, not somebody speculating about what could happen. I think this is a "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero" thing - if no healthcare system anywhere actually "collapses", then we're being too restrictive and over-cautious, and we should ease up until there are a few.

I'd also like to know - many people have stoked fears about supposed healthcare "collapse", but did any healthcare systems anywhere actually do anything that could be described as collapse during the entire Covid era?

In the west, probably Bergamo and nowhere else. At least in the UK, the politics of the decision to lock down were driven by media coverage of events in Bergamo.

Honestly, I kind of wonder whether the last century of health care have been like the 20th century fire prevention/suppression effort and humanity would be much healthier overall if pandemics were a more regular selection factor in reporduction.

I’m not even sure it’s entirely a reproductive issue instead of a general fitness one. It seemed like every time I heard about some perfectly normal, healthy young person dying of Covid, it turned out he or she weighed 300 lbs.

While I won’t deny that, I’d rather put it that it’s an easy thing for anyone who saw the competency with which almost all Western governments handled Covid to say. After living through 2020–2022, do you really trust the CDC, the WHO, the federal and most state governments, the major medical journals, or any other group to get this one right?

No, but I suspect that the costs of not even trying would be higher than the costs of ham handed attempts at containing it or delaying it. It's not just about the virus itself, but about healthcare system collapse. If you get appendicitis at that point, good luck surviving.

If you get a novel virus for which no good medical treatment exists you’re left to live or die as fate demands, if you come in with acute appendicitis you’re operated on and live. I have just solved this supposedly impossible conundrum.

It probably won't work out as nicely and cleanly as that. There will be several treatments of dubious efficacy that will be given/experimented with on the many virus patients, while all sorts of other types of doctors get drafted in to deal with them.

Refusal to follow triage best practices in order to try to make people care says more about the medical system than it does about anyone victimized by that choice.

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