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?
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You seem sincere, but to give the devil his due -- why should I believe you? My covid experience was 'wake up feeling like shit, find that the horses are out, drag myself through fixing the fence for a couple hours then go back to bed -- sore throat but more or less fine the next day, 100% better by start of day 4'. I do know people that had it somewhat worse than this, but nobody died or came close to it. (for reference, like most of my friends I am solidly middle aged, and my previous-gen relatives are early boomers if not older)
Naively, it seems surprising that nearly everyone I know had this deadly disease, and many of them barely noticed it, and nobody even went to the hospital. If medical authorities hadn't lied about everything else, I might assume that their figures are accurate -- but that is not the world we live in.
I am far from alone in this situation -- I fully realize the conspiratorial thinking required here, but if I accept only evidence that I'm 100% sure of veracity-wise, that is what I am left with.
Yeah your circumstances aren't conducive, but for me with older but still living relatives.....it cut through a lot of em (and that's independent of healthcare involvement.
It's moon landing grade conspiracy theory work. Death rates, mortality figures and so on are stupidly hard to fake.
Ya know what lets use an example. COVID skepticism like the gay communities relationship with AIDs, especially these days. Did it kill a fuckton of people in the past. Yep. Does it seem like that to young gay people now? Nope. The meds are great. They don't take it seriously. As a result all kinds of STDs are going around like crazy and you end up being the one person whose organs won't let you take meds and it's death and everyone forgets about you.
But for most AIDs isn't real anymore.
What do you mean? I'm mid genX, my peers are spread from around 40-60 and my (still living) parents and aunties and uncles and shit are like 75-85. I've got one grandpa still trucking in his late 90s. You are not talking to some zoomer here.
If covid is not a serious threat to my middle-aged (charitably; some of us are passing our prime) peers nor my Boomer+ relatives, who's circumstances exactly would be conducive?
I'm not saying that I quite believe this to be the case, but if again if I trust only what I can directly observe (which is becoming both more sensible and more common these days) -- that is what I'm left with.
Huh.
Do you live somewhere very rural or like Florida or something? (can decline to answer b/c opsec).
I'm kind of shocked you haven't run into more.
Rural-ish Canada -- lots of friends & family in the big city though. I don't even know anybody who lost a relative to this. One guy at work (which is remote and had a lot of people in hard-hit areas) had a dad get pretty sick, but he recovered AFAIK.
Virtually everybody got sick at some point though, so I'm not sure that location makes much difference? I don't recall any attempts to correlate infection severity with population density.
Like I said, I'm not quite prepared to believe that the whole thing was made up, but these experiences are just not consistent with a generational plague. And I can't really blame people who are prepared to connect those dots, given the verifiable lies that ~everyone believes due to government reporting/propaganda yet I know to be 100% false. (basically anything to do with the truckers, for starters)
It doesn't need to be a generational plague to overload the medical system, which it did to some extent. If we ever get a generational plague again we are absolutely fucked.
Rural probably does it though, most of the people who had a bad experience were in the city - likely due to close proximity etc, which probably also is why it's way more of a blue tribe concern.
So be it -- if the medical system wants me to care about it, it needs to not jerk me around. Sorry-notsorry.
You think that proximity makes infection severity worse? Frequency, sure -- but I don't think I've heard anyone assert that IFR is worse in cities before.
If the generational pandemic only kills people in the city (not including my relatives there apparently, who were fine) I am ambivalent at best. Most of our current national issues are driven by overcrowded cities, and 'plague' might be close enough to 'natural attrition' for me...
You can say haha fuck you doctors lose your careers but you do run the risk of having people die unnecessarily which is my worry (and did happen, but mostly in unsexy ways like missing cancer screenings and dying 5 years later, or being lost to psychiatric follow-up and dying of a heart attack in 15 years that would have been avoided with better medication management).
I think it makes sense for a higher initial inoculation (like being trapped in a train or city bus with a sick person) to result in more severe illness than walking past someone on the way into a grocery store and catching a whiff.
That is the place I have been driven to, yes -- I stand by it. Maybe next time the doctors won't be so chickenshit and will stand up for the right thing.
I think different doses were tested in the challenge trial, and don't recall that correlation being noted -- the thing about viruses is that the replicate really fast and exponentially. So a couple of infected cells becomes a couple of zillion not much more slowly than a couple of thousand would. But even if this were the case, I am not a literal woods-dwelling hermit -- I know lots of people in cities, some of which were noted hotspots. I myself was in a couple of those cities right up until travel was made difficult in Spring 2020. I did not get covid until for another year or so, and none of those city denizens died; none of them went to the hospital.
How many celebrities could you name, if pressed? I think I could name hundreds, many of whom are pretty old and live in big cities; the only one I could name offhand who is said to have died of Covid is John Prine. This also seems inconsistent with the idea that it was ever an extremely dangerous thing.
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