Notices by John (johnzajac@dice.camp), page 2

I love how COVID aware people are basically in three groups: insurance adjusters, very accomplished scientists, and disabled/chronically ill people.

The thing about conspiracies is that we're living through so many obvious ones and so many previous ones have been revealed to be true that it's really hard to continue to accept the "common sense" idea that they don't exist.

https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/nytimes-invents-increasingly-bizarre

Aggressive, uninformed skepticism is the most powerful political force on the planet.

It's important to keep an eye on the shift. What I mean is that "5 day isolation" is insufficient; it actually releases infected people into the population at the height of their infectiousness.

The CDC has rightly taken huge flack for their "5 day" policy, based not on science but on the demands of their real masters.

Enter the floated "1-day" policy. Suddenly, everyone is talking about how 5-day is much better than 1-day, not how 5-day is an absurd abdication of duty.

Watch the shift.

@feld

🤷♂️

The WHO itself says that 1 out of 10 *infections* will lead to long-term illness. If we keep infecting ourselves with ever-increasingly dangerous variants, eventually we'll all be chronically ill or disabled, or at least most of us will be.

It seems to me like the options are buckle down and stop it, or it will stop us (in the more ominous sense of the term). I prefer the former to the latter, is all.

@feld I was referring to recent reporting (post US emergency declaration ending).

Personally, I've never thought death counts were the best measure of the pandemic's severity anyway. Long COVID incidence is much more concerning to me, because it's 10-20x more likely than dying, and the underlying mechanisms are only now starting to be understood, and there are no proven treatments.

But showing death counts going down is a great way to get more people infected and more Long COVID.

@feld They're no longer *required* to test or report. Some hospitals are still doing it. It's a data clusterfuck being cited as legitimate. At least in the US. Every country has their own thing.

The point is that the number - regardless of what it is - isn't a reflection of anything. It's could be 3,000 or 100 and it would still mean very little.

I guess you could see it as a minimum?

I am *begging* COVID advocates to stop citing the precipitously dropping "official death" numbers when they try to remind people of the pandemic.

The reason weekly deaths are now at 1,300 is because *hospitals no longer test or record or report COVID deaths*. Not because deaths have just stopped happening.

Playing into that by citing those numbers as legitimate will bite us all in the ass in the end.

All we have is excess deaths and wastewater, now. And wastewater's on the chopping block.

In case you wanted dispositive proof that COVID minimizing is an organized conspiracy of paid-off experts, peddling disinformation at least as dangerous as the right.

"Another reason things are different this spring is that there have been no new, game-changing variants — “no new Greek letters,” as Dr. Wachter put it — for the last year and a half."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/24/well/live/covid-cases-deaths-spring.html

Cases are down because we stopped collecting data, something these "experts" know.

Hospitalizations are down because...we stopped testing people who are hospitalized.

Deaths are down because...we created tons of "alternative" categories to put people who died of COVID into.

Note, however, that wastewater is consistently *very high*, hospitals are *full*, and excess deaths oscillate between 20% and 100% higher than before the pandemic.