And as of today the government has suspended the law, saying that the risk posed by the currently dominant variant of the virus no longer justifies the intrusion into individual rights. In the brief time the law was in force, only some 60,000 of the 1,000,000 unvaccinated individuals got their shots. (Figures are reported second-hand and may not be accurate.)
Food for thought…
The United States reported more deaths from COVID-19 last Friday than deaths from Hurricane Katrina, more on any two recent weekdays than deaths during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, more last month than deaths from flu in a bad season, and more in two years than deaths from HIV during the four decades of the AIDS epidemic. At least 953,000 Americans have died from COVID, and the true toll is likely even higher because many deaths went uncounted…
The sheer scale of the tragedy strains the moral imagination. On May 24, 2020, as the United States passed 100,000 recorded deaths, The New York Times filled its front page with the names of the dead, describing their loss as “incalculable.” Now the nation hurtles toward a milestone of 1 million. What is 10 times incalculable?
My bold.
IME its because:
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people dont care (“most of the deaths were old people who would’ve died anyway”)
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people dont believe it (“someone dies in a car crash but they call it covid because evil demmycrats are evil and its all a hoax.” I’ve actuslly heard this one personally from several different people.)
That works for ideologues, the ignorant and the callous.
But plenty of other people are numb to it as well. And I think it is a combination of a couple of things. A variation on the ‘boiling frog’ syndrome where the steady toll has removed the immediacy of the horror and the fact that most if not all people aren’t good at visualizing numbers as large as 1 million. Might as well be hrair. ~3,000 people killed suddenly in a spectacular attack is deeply traumatizing, but 1 million people dying over a couple of years, out of sight and from something approximating “natural causes” just does not have the same visceral impact. It’s just a number. An almighty big number that would be super-alarming to the public if you could have predicted accurately in advance that “in the next couple of years a million of you are going to die from a virus.” But after the fact it just looks like a dry statistic to many and most people don’t spend their day musing on the enormity of it.
Just like most of us don’t sit around thinking about the 32,000 people who die in auto accidents every year. We just get in our big steel machines and get on with driving at tremendous speeds without worrying about the statistical dangers. People compartmentalize.
All states are in the blue, again, including Nebraska (which has a really weird blip recently, but which not doesn’t ascend to record height - evidently they’re trying to minimize whatever data SNAFU was responsible.) The only state in the pink is Connecticut, but only because of a slight rise.
Globally the US is still doing well, with 67,500 new cases per day. At least five countries appear to have higher rates. South Korea , with 250,000 cases per day is doing worse than any other country ever has – except for the US, India, and France
3000 sudden deaths is a tragedy. 1 million dead is a statistic.
– Stalin, paraphrased.
ETA: Also, the fact that a very substantial part of the population has gotten their brains zombied and joined the death cult. The other, more sensible, part of the population doesn’t see this as “normal” at all.
We don’t see it as normal, no, but we’ve had to treat it as nowhere near as big a deal as it actually is in order to be able to cope with the fact that nothing is being done about it. I know I’d be despondent otherwise.
It’s not the case that nothing is being done about it. I mean, imperfect as it’s been, there has been a massive mobilization of healthcare resources, many made available at no charge, at the local, state, and federal levels, as well as by private industry. It’s remarkable what’s been done in a short amount of time, and that a big chunk of the population embraced the challenge of doing what is necessary.
I think what’s starting to happen is that the people who took on the challenges, stayed home made masks, wear masks, tested, quarantined, etc. are realizing that the remaining unprotected people are largely so by choice. At that point, one begins to question how much one is willing to sacrifice to help a person who won’t help themselves. And yes, not everyone who is unprotected is so by choice, but the ones who choose to be unprotected pose a much larger threat. So, people who reject all the measures aren’t doing them anyway, and the people who have been doing them are starting to see a big shift in the cost/benefit analysis in terms of the sacrifices they are willing to make.
Unfortunately, what a lot of us are realizing is that wearing masks, getting vaccinated, and staying home as much as possible, while it improves our chances, can only improve them so much – especially if others insist on saying that everyone who wants to be protected is protected so they can now do whatever they want.
Admittedly, once people reach the point of thinking that we’re probably going to catch it no matter what we do (short of quarantining ourselves forever) because so many others won’t take or won’t keep up precautions, it becomes difficult to attempt to keep up permanently measures that we managed to keep up temporarily, even for those of us who are at high risk.
I don’t mean that we didn’t do anything to try and mitigate the pandemic. Many of us did. But there’s a difference between that and doing something about the people who already died.
What I’m talking about is our society’s choice to not hold those people responsible. The one thing we were doing—requiring vaccination to participate in society—has fallen by the wayside. And that’s one of the least we could have done: I’ve argued many times that refusing these mitigations was essentially negligent homicide.
The majority who died are not dead due to the pandemic itself, with everyone doing their best. They are dead due to the actions of people who “rejected the measures.” And, since we reject consequences for them, it’s going to happen again next pandemic.
The thing is, in order to cope, to go on with our lives, we have to kinda ignore that. We have to compartmentalize the people dying, because it would overwhelm us otherwise. We have to treat these people dying like a statistic.
Or, at least, I definitely do. I’ve had to for a long time, really. But I have to try even harder now as I see even the least level of consequences being dismantled. Vaccination should be required, to protect us from the next mutation. But no.
But also, at this point it’s clear that covid isn’t going away. So we have to live with it. Sadly, this many deaths IS the new normal.
| Case count update as of | 3/10/2022 | 12:32 GMT |
|---|---|---|
| Worldwide: | ||
| Total cases | 451,980,414 | |
| Dead | 6,045,589 | |
| Recovered | 386,414,553 | |
| In the US: | ||
| Total cases | 81,064,103 | |
| Dead | 989,473 | |
| Recovered | 55,429,994 | |
| Differences since last time | ||
| Worldwide: | ||
| Total cases | 4,297,702 | |
| Dead | 19,268 | |
| Recovered | 5,042,835 | |
| In the US: | ||
| Total cases | 99,266 | |
| Dead | 3,958 | |
| Recovered | 478,088 | |
| Last Time’s Numbers | 3/8/2022 | 01:18 GMT |
| Worldwide: | ||
| Total cases | 447,682,712 | |
| Dead | 6,026,321 | |
| Recovered | 381,371,718 | |
| In the US: | ||
| Total cases | 80,964,837 | |
| Dead | 985,515 | |
| Recovered | 54,951,906 |
I’m not convinced that that is the case. I suspect the majority who died caught the disease from people who, if asked, would say they were taking all reasonable measures.
Sure, but they are often wrong. My mother caught covid from her caretaker. We were talking as my mother was dying, and the caretaker said, “so many people are catching it, it’s as if it’s in the air!”
Um, yeah, no shit. She was a great believer in clean hands, and I had to push her to get vaccinated, and while she wore a mask when I was around, I don’t think she did at other times, unless it was required, because she really didn’t believe in masks. She believed in clean hands. And pretty much only in clean hands.
Neither she nor my mom ever managed to keep their masks consistently above their noses, even when they deigned to wear them.
no doubt some are but I don’t think we can extrapolate from that fact to say that the vast majority of deaths are as a result of people “rejecting the measures” (not your words but they were the claim I was challenging).
I don’t even know how anyone would begin to even calculate the figures behind such a claim.
This is definitely not true in the US which is why it has the highest death rate of the wealthy nations.
Yeah, there is certainly an element of luck. But in the US, the deaths are really disproportionately among people who chose not to get vaccinated. At least, the deaths since vaccination has been available are. I’m sure most of those people DID feel they were taking all reasonable measures, and thought vaccination was an unreasonable measure.
And that wearing a mask was also an unreasonable measure.
| Case count update as of | 3/11/2022 | 03:44 GMT |
|---|---|---|
| Worldwide: | ||
| Total cases | 453,747,307 | |
| Dead | 6,051,366 | |
| Recovered | 387,662,837 | |
| In the US: | ||
| Total cases | 81,108,786 | |
| Dead | 991,260 | |
| Recovered | 55,600,175 | |
| Differences since last time | ||
| Worldwide: | ||
| Total cases | 1,766,893 | |
| Dead | 5,777 | |
| Recovered | 1,248,284 | |
| In the US: | ||
| Total cases | 44,683 | |
| Dead | 1,787 | |
| Recovered | 170,181 | |
| Last Time’s Numbers | 3/10/2022 | 12:32 GMT |
| Worldwide: | ||
| Total cases | 451,980,414 | |
| Dead | 6,045,589 | |
| Recovered | 386,414,553 | |
| In the US: | ||
| Total cases | 81,064,103 | |
| Dead | 989,473 | |
| Recovered | 55,429,994 |
On what basis do you make that specific claim?