ruggedjackal46 said:Spot on. My issue isn't even with the current political calls—which, let's be honest, mostly align with what the rest of the Western world is doing anyway—but rather that we're paying the price for mistakes made years ago. For instance, if the University Hospital had actually been finished (it wasn't, thanks to some political maneuvering) or if the Immunology Institute had been running properly instead of being sidelined by politics, we wouldn't be sweating low public health capacity right now. We wouldn't have to shut down the whole damn country the moment ten cases pop up. But hey, every bad political call comes with a bill, and you usually don't see the invoice until the disaster hits the fan.
I can't say for sure if this is 100% accurate without double-checking, but in the movie *The Big Short*, the character played by Brad Pitt mentions that every single percentage point increase in US unemployment leads to an extra 40,000 deaths. Since unemployment jumped from 3.5% to over 10%, do the math yourselves. Hunger, homelessness, addiction, drugs, alcohol, poor nutrition, domestic violence, stress... millions of people are going to feel the sting, and they'll be the ones left holding the bag. Do you really think Trump was being cautious with his moves for no reason? Their economy moves fast. It climbs quickly, but it crashes just as hard. One day your house is worth a million dollars; the next, it's worth a hundred grand.
Yeah, that's the reality facing the USA and plenty of other nations, and almost certainly us too. Is this the fallout from today's political choices or the ones from yesterday? Who knows. But it looks like governments and economies globally are going to need a massive overhaul if we want to avoid a total meltdown.
Eric Fox7 said:Fair enough, but if that's the case, it means the mortality rate is actually much lower. Which implies my numbers are closer to reality than that 10% death rate Branko was throwing around.🙏
The thing is, both your math and Branko's math are technically correct for the specific ratios you're looking at. 🙂
GQ actually dropped some recent studies suggesting that unemployment doesn't hit mortality rates nearly as hard as people claim, and it definitely isn't the massive deal they made it out to be in The Big Short.
I mean, looking back, nobody was really paying attention to that H1N1 swine flu pandemic either, which honestly took a ton of people with it, but that all went down when the world felt like it had much more pressing issues on its plate, whereas now we're living through this era of sustained economic growth where everyone seems way more preoccupied with climate change, transgender rights, and the whole political correctness debate.
Look, I’m not claiming to have some magical mathematical genius going on here, I’m just pointing out how fundamentally flawed this whole calculation is because the sample size they used is way too small to be taken seriously by anyone with half a brain.
It feels like a massive translation error or something, honestly, because there is no way in hell these results actually came from even 500 participants.
Eric Fox7 said:But honestly, that number doesn't mean squat—it’s not giving us the full picture at all.
The only real, accurate figure we have right now is that the mortality rate here in the United States is sitting at a fucking 1.4%... everything else is just the Golden State Warriors guessing in the dark.
We won't know the actual, definitive number until this whole epidemic is finally over, but it's going to be way closer to my estimate than to whatever nonsense Branko is peddling.
That number is basically meaningless anyway because it’s just showing the ratio of deaths to positive cases, and honestly, given the way testing is being handled—I mean, we're running through mountains of samples, including that last instance where they didn't even bother testing semi-mobile people with high fevers in nursing homes for ten days straight—that percentage doesn't tell us much more than Brankov's ratio of deaths to recoveries.
He didn't say anything wrong at all, because the whole thing hinges on that phrase 'at this rate.' Once you put the emphasis on those two specific words, the math actually checks out perfectly. ☕
“The American Wuhan,” the town of Heinsberg right near the border with the Netherlands, was actually one of those very first hotspots where this whole coronavirus thing really started kicking off.
So here’s why: people in Germany just love their carnivals, and they went ahead and held theirs in Heinsberg on February 15th this year. Right after that, they hit this massive wave of infections—like a full-blown epidemic that eventually spiraled into the global pandemic we all know. They clocked 1,281 confirmed cases and saw 34 people pass away out of a population of 250,000, with just over 550 folks having recovered at that point.
Since the outbreak in Heinsberg happened about two and a half weeks before the virus really started spreading through the rest of Germany, scientists jumped on it immediately to launch the "Heinsberg Protocol." The whole idea was to deep-dive into how the virus evolved within that specific community so they could figure out lessons to apply to the entire country. They focused their lens on the Gangelt area, which has about 12,529 residents, and studied 1,000 people from 400 different households who filled out questionnaires and were tested for antibodies like IgG and IgA.
On Thursday morning, they finally dropped the first set of results from this study covering 500 of the participants, and honestly, some of these findings are pretty interesting:
- they found that 14% of those who caught the virus had developed immunity - about 2% are currently infected - the infection rate sits at 15%, counting both current and past cases - the mortality rate is 0.37%
I can’t even begin to wrap my head around what kind of COVID-related nonsense we're going to be dealing with in the coming months, and honestly, it’s just going to be one of those "I told you so" moments once everyone realizes they were wrong, though of course, the loudest people in the room right now—the ones acting like the economy doesn't even exist—are definitely going to be the ones shouting the loudest about it all later on.
The reality check is that in the United States, another 6.6 million people have been left without a job, which brings the total to a staggering 17 million people unemployed over just the last three weeks.
Let’s just be totally real about this whole situation for a second because we have to admit that the journalist actually went out of his way to try and pull off an assassination attempt on Vučić using nothing but a cell phone. ☕
Paul Martinez73 said:What kind of "federal oversight" are we talking about here? Who actually works in that facility? Irresponsible people, that's who. It wasn't the government that brought the Virus into the home; it was some individual who thought they were invincible, walked right in, and infected the elderly.
1. Well, considering China was the only ones who knew anything about the Virus before two months ago, if you had closed the borders back then like you suggested, you would've had the info before anyone else.
2. And who would sell the groceries? Who would pack them or stock the shelves? The military too? Or what? Military DoorDash? Would soldiers be zipping around on bikes delivering food?
3. Regularly tested? So you show up for your shift, get tested, wait for the results, and *then* start working? Is that your master plan? Because you could be negative today and positive tomorrow.
4. No restrictions, yeah, sounds great.
5. And teachers aren't old? They don't have chronic issues? Should they be tested every single day too? Before every lecture or what?
Paul Martinez73 said:And that right there is the core of everything I've been saying for weeks, yet Tijs keeps calling me out—maybe he just doesn't get it...
Because think about it: someone working at that facility goes for a quick walk with a friend who doesn't even know they're positive, passes the virus along, that person comes into work and infects 40 seniors, and then five of them die.
Some people will just shrug and say, "They were old and sick anyway, they would have died regardless," but through sheer negligence and that kind of mindset, you might have actually robbed someone of two extra years of life.
I have a buddy whose whole vibe is just like wiredrider9: "It's no big deal, this virus isn't dangerous, it'll wreck the economy if we don't keep everyone working, the Swedish approach is best, or maybe the Belarusian way." Meanwhile, the guy won't leave his house for two weeks and wears gloves just to go to the grocery store.
I know a guy who tested positive, and I offered a friend to go visit him, bring him groceries, hang out for a bit, and all I got was silence. Total nothingness. I honestly don't get it; you catch a little flu, recover at home, and move on with your life... you can do whatever you want after that, so why act like it's such a massive deal?
So basically, you managed to blame the failures of major institutions on the general public. Do you actually realize how messed up that logic is? That’s a state-run nursing home under government oversight, overseen by the exact same institutions that are demanding massive sacrifices from every single one of us, and this example just proves they’re doing a sloppy job. And somehow, you manage to pin their incompetence on all of us. Brilliant.🙂
Last week they were all bragging about how low the mortality rate was, and now look—they just opened up a new assisted living facility in Miami. All ten of the positive cases are already on ventilators, and honestly, who knows how many more people are going to test positive soon. This whole thing is unfortunately headed straight for a total disaster.
I honestly don't even know where to start with this one... it's just one of those things that stays on the back of your mind, you know? Like, you see something happen and you think, "Wait, is that actually how it works?" and then you spend the next three hours down a rabbit hole trying to make sense of it all... anyway, I was just sitting here thinking about everything we discussed earlier, and it really makes you wonder if we're looking at the whole picture or just the parts that are easy to see... turns out, it's usually the latter...
You only have half the battle won... just thinking back to the old days, because honestly, your sense of humor is pretty terrible...
I was just sitting here thinking about how much things have changed lately, you know, and it really got me wondering about the direction everything is heading... sometimes it feels like we're all just drifting without a compass, almost like that feeling you get when you're watching a game and everyone is just waiting for the whistle to blow, but nothing ever actually happens to break the tension... I was reading some stuff earlier, and it reminded me of what wiredrider9 was saying the other day about how people seem to lose sight of the core values that used to hold us together... it’s funny how that works, isn't it? How one small shift in perspective can change the whole landscape of a conversation... anyway, I didn't mean to ramble on like this, but my mind just kept looping back to it... it's just one of those things that stays with you, like a song you can't quite shake... kaže: Hey Carol Lewis, I swear, I’m gonna lose it if you don't show up soon... seriously...
🙂
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Poor old Pike, his whole business empire is basically crumbling to pieces now, I actually feel kind of bad for him 😢
X is probably gonna have to suspend his account in the next few weeks, because the sheer amount of trash he's about to get flooded with from that total loser is going to be way too much to handle🙂🙂
If anyone out there hasn't been completely kicked out of their house by a caffeine addiction yet, I figured I’d throw this out there just to be helpful...
So this cop pulls over Batman and starts grilling him about what he’s doing with that stick, and when they ask him why he even needs it, he just looks them dead in the eye and says his man doesn't have a mask on 😂😂