No, nothing lingering. I have this dry cough, but it's something I've had before after getting over other colds etc so I don't attribute it to Covid. I was worried I might feel tired after it was over, but I'm fine.

One day toward the end of it I couldn't taste coffee in the morning and I was worried that I was losing my taste. It was only temporary and my mouth was messed up at the time. By the end of the day I was able to taste things again.

 

Thanks, yeah I was thinking the same thing about what it would've been like without being vaccinated. The thing is that I just fully focused on getting better too, something I wouldn't normally do with a regular cold so I wouldn't want to be that person who tries to push through something like this. You never know.

Another weird thing about this, for me anyway, was that I was extremely hungry throughout. Normally when you get sick you don't feel like eating. But this was the opposite and another advantage I had. I ate better than I normally do. lol

 

I'm extremely careful too. My luck finally ran out and I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I never had an overly optimistic opinion on human nature, but even I never dreamed of people handling a pandemic this poorly.

I read something last month about the concern being a a more vaccine resistant variant later in the year. It's just being allowed to be passed around too much right now and it's evolving.

 

I'm sure the people who couldn't be with their dying loved ones or who lost their businesses because of covid will appreciate these new findings:

"
Lockdowns during the first COVID-19 wave in the spring of 2020 only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 0.2% in the U.S. and Europe, according to a Johns Hopkins University meta-analysis of several studies.

"While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted," the researchers wrote. "In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument."

The researchers – Johns Hopkins University economics professor Steve Hanke, Lund University economics professor Lars Jonung, and special advisor at Copenhagen's Center for Political Studies Jonas Herby – analyzed the effects of lockdown measures such as school shutdowns, business closures, and mask mandates on COVID-19 deaths.

"We find little to no evidence that mandated lockdowns in Europe and the United States had a noticeable effect on COVID-19 mortality rates," the researchers wrote. "

https://www.foxnews.com/us/lockdown...inds-lockdowns-should-be-rejected-out-of-hand

 

Ya. Its not just us. The variants seem to pop up over seas and get dragged over here during travel. Weve been lucky that each variant has gotten milder. Lets hope the trend continues.


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Ah. Two economics professors saying the epidemiologists were wrong about their findings on the epidemic. We know the economy suffered.


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A meta-analysis is a pretty powerful thing. If they were wrong about the number of lives saved/lost by lockdowns, someone should be able to demonstrate that pretty quickly. If no one steps forward to show they were wrong, a lot of people were punished for no reason.

I'm not saying that the initial lockdowns were wrong, btw, I think they were a reasonable precaution at the time.. If no one knows what to do, one does the best one can. However, if we discover they don't work *now* than we should stop doing this type of thing and not keep hurting society.

 

European countries are starting to end covid restrictions:

"Denmark became the first nation in the European Union to lift all rules, including the wearing of face masks, earlier this week.

While cases are still relatively high there, the authorities say the virus no longer qualifies as a "critical threat" with high vaccination rates helping to protect against serious illness despite the rapid spread of Omicron.

Norway has since announced its own relaxation, and Sweden announced on Thursday it would also lift almost all of its own domestic restrictions on 9 February.

"The pandemic is not over, but we are entering a whole new phase," Sweden's Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson told reporters."

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60245273

 

Wait, if no one proves them wrong, how is it proof that the others were right? Common sense says lower exposure equals lower risk. Again the people who refused to follow protocol point to the consequences of that action as proof that they didn’t need to follow protocol. What reports by those in THAT field show that lockdowns did nothing. Even early Republicans agreed that the lockdowns work. Just weren’t worth it economically.


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I never said that if they were proven wrong anyone else was right. What I said was if they were wrong we shouldn't keep doing what they recommended anymore.

And "common sense" isn't necessarily correct. If you lock down households you could be putting everyone else in the house at a higher risk from becoming infected from one sick person in their house, and those newly infected people can go out and by their tangential interactions with others spread the infection as well. You don't really *know* something until you really know it to be true.

You can't use non-compliant people as a good comparison with a compliant population though, as they likely represent two different groups of people. IOW, if people are told they are more likely to die if they don't follow this guideline, the people who say, "I don't care I'm going to do what I want" are probably at a much higher risk of engaging in other unhealthy behaviors as well. The only way to really prospectively test whether lockdowns work would be to have one group of compliant people locked down, and another not and see what the differences between them ended up being. If there was no difference between the two groups, then lockdowns weren't effective, and if there *were* differences between them then lockdsowns would be.

 

Right. They initially tried to have people follow guidelines voluntarily. A large population proved they wouldn’t. That FORCED mandatory lockdowns. The proof is in the pudding. When hospitals were overflowing, the imposed lockdowns and infection rates dropped. When lockdowns were lifted, cases shot up. The cycle repeated over and over with predictable results. If everyone in a house got infected but everyone stayed home, it isn’t being spread. The point is everyone wasn’t staying home. They weren’t quarantining. My stepson caught it at work and stayed in his room. He didn’t roam the house coughing on everyone and no one else in the house caught it at that time.


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I don't agree with your remembering of history. In the beginning *most* people cooperated with the lockdowns. The thing is, though, is that the US had more draconian lockdown policies than most other countries yet our infection and death rate was still higher. How do you explain that? I know that I personally was a big believer in distancing, etc., if not lockdowns per se, but if something is shown not to have worked, we have to admit that and not waste all that effort and expense.

On the infected person at home, your family was fortunate. Studies have shown that the air in other rooms of a house contain virus, though, so someone self-quarantining in a room is not proof against contracting the disease.

 

Your assertion that the US had more draconian lockdowns than any other country isn’t altogether accurate.You can use the graphs in the following article to compare various countries and you’ll see for yourself. You need to also take into consideration that lockdowns were determined by the number of cases and vaccine rates.

https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-lockdowns

I am not including the African continent.

 

I'm surprised that China isn't in the dark red. I thought they had undertaken the most severe measures following the initial outbreak.

 

If you use the comparison tool below the map, you can compare China to other countries. The graph is interesting.

 

Thanks, that's really cool. I didn't notice it the first time I looked at it.

 

I did NOT say we had more draconian lockdowns than *ANY* other country, just that we had more than most. We *also* had more covid deaths than most. That was the point, that lockdowns might not have reduced the amount of deaths from the disease.

It also wasn't really the original point of having them, the point was to "flatten the curve" and slow down the rate of hospital admissions so the health care system wasn't overwhelmed. You don't hear anyone talking about flattening the curve anymore, though.

 

Thats because flattening the curve failed due to the sitting president telling his constituents not to follow the guidelines. This is a self fulfilling prophecy. Republicans refused to follow guidelines then complained that guidelines didn’t work. How would they know? Ive said it before “your rules don’t work no matter how much we don’t follow them”. They weren’t draconian and not all states had the same lockdowns if any. Our death toll was high because it spread quickly, you know... because half the country wasn’t following the guidelines.


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So to make sure I'm hearing you correctly, it spread rapidly in NYC, a solid democratic stronghold, because of Trump supporters? It killed off 15,000 people in NYC nursing homes alone not because of Cuomo's "put the infected back with the healthy" policy but because of Trump supporters and Republicans? How about now a couple years in where Biden STILL didn't have enough covid tests, etc., that's Trump's fault, too?

The point being trying to blame Trump isn't a very reasonable assessment of the problem, and since Trump's no longer in office it *definitely* won't help us have a better response next time around.

 

Keeping him and those like him out of office will ensure a better response next time around. Yes rump IS still responsible for rumps actions. Even if he “left” office after those actions. Yes, he was demanding NYC not lock down. He was demanding people don’t follow lockdowns or protocols in NYC. He was trying to legally block Quomo’s actions. He even demanded they stop counting cases to make him look better. NYC was the first epicenter while rump was still lying that it wasn’t even here yet. You keep saying rump is not longer responsible for his actions because he is no longer in office. He will ALWAYS be responsible for his actions. Just like Quomo right?


Wasn’t it a rump policy that residents had to be returned after they were released from the hospital? Where was he supposed to put them? Not enough tests? They are giving them away from free. Maybe they should stop sending them to Florida where DeSantis is just letting them expire.

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