[HN Gopher] The Plague Year ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-01-02 23:00 UTC)