[HN Gopher] The Plague Year
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The Plague Year
Author : jsomers
Score : 52 points
Date : 2021-01-02 20:09 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| andred14 wrote:
| Enough with the lies.
|
| This has nothing to do with "COVID".
|
| For example, the Irish government has admitted they have no proof
| that it even exists:
|
| https://gemmaodoherty.com/defending-our-freedoms/hse-admit-t...
|
| And here, STATISTICS show that in fact the emergency of 2020 is
| FAKE:
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...
|
| You are wasting your time here. Us computer scientists do not buy
| into your lies...
| paulpauper wrote:
| this must be the longest article ever. the audio version is 3.5
| hours, or about one LOTR movie
|
| TBH, I don't think it matters that much. The virus is a serious
| situation but the stock market is acting like the worst is long
| over. I know the stock market is not the economy , but I think it
| is no longer a catastrophe but rather more like a wildfire. It
| could have been a far worse situation if the IFR was 2-4% as
| originally feared back in Feb-March. Then we would probably be
| seeing the S&P 500 about 50-70% lower than it is now, cuz when
| you got airborne cancer, that is not exactly something you can
| patch over by throwing stimulus money at it. Now it's more like a
| bad flu in terms of IFR for middle-aged people, but worse though
| for elderly, so I don't want to dismiss that. But it could have
| bene sooo much worse, and we were spared that.
| Exmoor wrote:
| For what its worth, this article is the best thing I've read on
| the pandemic in the USA in the last year and I'm glad it finally
| hit the front page. It's incredibly long, but I found the part
| 25% or so that focused on the USA's early failures at detecting
| the virus most enlightening and horrifying. I'd suggest reading
| at least that part.
|
| In case you hit the paywall: https://archive.md/on1X2
| tomohawk wrote:
| > The first occurred on January 3, 2020, when Robert Redfield,
| the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
| spoke with George Fu Gao, the head of the Chinese Center for
| Disease Control and Prevention
|
| By this time, Taiwan had already started quarantining travelers
| from China (starting Dec 31). They were bitten by the lack of
| transparency and paranoia of the China government with SARS in
| 2003, so had developed a focus on outbreaks in China so as not to
| be caught unawares again.
|
| The US CDC failed to learn from SARS and we're paying the price
| now. No one should trust that China will be forthcoming and
| transparent about these matters. The CDC needs to learn to
| "trust, but verify". They didn't verify, and they trusted a
| source with a long history of not being truthful or timely in
| divulging information.
|
| Also, by this time, Dr Li had been hauled down to the police
| station and forced to recant his warning that this was human
| transmissible. So, the wheels of CCP governance were already
| grinding the truth under foot.
| thepangolino wrote:
| "plague"
|
| Diarrhea probably ended up killing more people than SARS-CoV-2 in
| 2020.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Ageing probably will kill more people. But the problem is
| phycological. People tend to not fear things they think they
| can prevent through willpower. For people in developed
| countries, diarrhea deaths are preventable... airborne viruses,
| not so much.
| ianlevesque wrote:
| In the United States 50,000 more people died of COVID-19
| directly in 2020 than died in World War 2. I don't get these
| comments.
| leereeves wrote:
| I'm sure thepangolino was talking about deaths worldwide, and
| it's probably true.
|
| "Diarrhea kills 2,195 children every day--more than AIDS,
| malaria, and measles combined."[1]
|
| "In 2016, diarrhoea was the eighth leading cause of death
| among all ages (1 655 944 deaths, 95% uncertainty interval
| [UI] 1 244 073-2 366 552)"[2]
|
| 1: https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/global/diarrhea-
| burden.html
|
| 2: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473
| -3...
| thepangolino wrote:
| World population was also much smaller.
|
| The Spanish flu killed 50 million people. That's 5% of the
| word population at the time. Now 50 million would barley be
| over half a percent.
| rgovostes wrote:
| For subscribers to the print edition, this article spans 40 pages
| and space in the issue is dedicated to little else. I haven't
| worked through the entire thing yet to decide if this is due to
| the gravity of the reporting or is typical of an end-of-year
| slowdown at the publisher.
| pdar4123 wrote:
| Read it, listen to it, share it, discuss it. This is one of the
| most important pieces of journalism in American history.
| zeofig wrote:
| 40 pages! That's intriguingly long. There's also a nice audio
| version.
| rgovostes wrote:
| Yes, if you have 3.5 hours to spare!
| andirk wrote:
| Give us the 5 paragraph essay summary! Although 2021 will also
| be the plague year.
| Exmoor wrote:
| I know you're mostly joking, but here were some of the
| takeaways I took from the article:
|
| * China lied about the virus. They banned investigators from
| outside the country and tried to cover everything up. Experts
| knew they'd lied previously about SARS, but rather than
| assuming the worst they more or less assumed it probably
| wouldn't be a big deal.
|
| * The FDA _completely_ dropped the ball on testing kits and
| it took an incredibly long time to resolve the issue. Its
| unclear that people in power even realized this. Back in
| January and February when we were hearing about a case here,
| a case there there was almost certainly rampant community
| transmission and death occurring.
|
| * CDC leaders were very slow to consider that the virus might
| transmit through the air. This led to the early advice being
| misguided (6ft of distancing and washing your hands protects
| you) and just flat out wrong (wearing a mask does nothing).
|
| * Inside the executive branch, people who gave bad news were
| forced out and people who gave good news got promoted.
| Predictably this made things much, much worse.
| IfOnlyYouKnew wrote:
| Somebody on Titter mentioned that the initial submission was
| 7X,000 words, and they cut it down to half that to fit within a
| single issue.
| teeray wrote:
| While I get that some folks like The New Yorker's long-form
| content, I would greatly appreciate a Cliff Notes version of
| many of their articles.
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