fujiwara79

Many people have left the workforce due to chronic covid issues. It disproportionately affects women between the ages of 20 - 50, and in nearly all cases their acute covid illness was very mild, but chronic lingering symptoms afterward were much worse. The business elites are actually more terrified of this because it could impact the labor force for years. The medical community will probably gaslight these people, telling them it's "psychosomatic", just like they do for conditions like fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, or chronic lyme. meanwhile, many of them will go on disability, even though they count as a "recovered" case in our casedemic.

LOL @ the anti-maskers on this forum. Looking forward to mask field reports again. It was pretty obvious masks would come back; that's because the CDC new guidance from May made no sense. we should find out what drove the CDC to go from one extreme (recommending masks outdoors, even for vaccinated) to the other opposite extreme (no masks needed anywhere) - all within the span of two weeks. no doubt some chamber of commerce lobbying money was involved.

I predicted this more than a month ago and was weenie'd. But now people are coming around to the idea that mask ordinances might come back. LOL. Told ya.

Philosophically, that's true, but in reality many of voluntarily unvaxxed people that are currently hospitalized or in the ICU are getting their medical bills paid for by either the CARES act or the recent covid relief bill (especially if they are uninsured). Instead of offering lottery tickets and cash prizes to get vaxxed, the federal government should instead stop subsidizing hospitalizations for these people. Make the hospitals and insurance companies figure out how to pay for it. If this happened, you'll start seeing insurance companies compel employers to require vaccines for their workforce. Suddenly they'll realize that insurance companies are not as nice and coddling as the goobermint.

yeah, I mean not being able to dine-in at applebees for a couple weeks is just brutal. it's a human rights violation. worse than gitmo. worse than abu gharib. the only thing that would make it worse is being asked to wear a mask.

The resurrection of the 'Wuhan lab leak' story in the media was because of an intelligence report that was "leaked" (pun intended) to the media about a month ago. Now the intelligence agencies are supposed to conduct an investigation and come back with a report in 90 days (circa end of August). The lemmings will believe whatever these intelligence reports say if it affirms their pre-conceived narrative. Nothing is better for their funding apparatus than another cold war.

I think the 'natural immunity' probably exists for one particular variant, but the resurgence occurs when new variants arise. All the resurgences in areas with high seroprevalence were due to a new variant. That tells you two things: 1) natural immunity is very narrow and doesn't exist for the entire variant spectrum; 2) this isn't like measles or chicken pox, where you get it once and then you're immune for life.

tens of millions of people in brazil, south africa and india are evidence your "belief" in "conventional wisdom" is wrong. not to mention that people get re-infected with other coronavirus all the time, so why would this particular 'Rona be different. https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(21)00183-5/fulltext

the vaccines aren't anywhere near 95% efficacious against these variants, but if they prevent serious illness then they're still doing their jobs. israel just reinstituted their mask mandate and a lot of vaccinated people got infected. the 'wild' form of the virus doesn't exist anymore.

he was likely to lose regardless. a general rule of thumb is that the incumbent needs to be at about 47% approval rating to have a reasonable chance of winning. he was in the low 40s for practically his entire presidency, even when the economy was great. he 'surged' to 45% in the closing weeks of the campaign, which made it closer, and the dems voluntarily handicapped themselves by not knocking on doors or doing in-person registration events because of covid (understandably so). the only way to win with such low approval ratings is to have some third party candidates in the mix to siphon votes, or to have an equally unlikeable opponent, ala 2016.

are you kidding me? i've seen tons of people that ride motorcycles without helmets. you live in jersey? that's probably why. i believe new jersey requires helmets by law. not all states are like that. the "muh freedumbz" crowd has always been adamantly against having states require motorcyclists wear helmets. they were against seat belt laws back in the day too.

yes, we have a consumerist culture. although I don't think it was always this way. we used to have more of a savings culture, but low interest rates, free trade and no anti-trust enforcement changed that. policy might have influenced culture or the other way around -- but the changes happened around the same time.

JIT is great for nominal conditions (no major wars, no pandemics, no massive natural disasters). it's terrible for off-nominal conditions, like a pandemic, where they have no reliable means of predicting demand. you may want to stick with dogecoin advice.

not really. over-reliance on "just in time" manufacturing is a much bigger reason.

Yeah, good luck with that. zombie reaganites will fight tooth and nail to never let this happen. after all, the sole purpose of a corporation is to maximize shareholder value (Friedman doctrine), and the sole objective of antitrust law is to minimize consumer prices (Robert Bork doctrine). this toxic value system has been indoctrinated in our business schools since the 1980s and it's going to take a while to undo that.

keep those mask fields reports coming! Maybe we should set up a CoCoRaHS network for mask reporting.

a biased website (summit news) reporting on a purportedly biased journal (lancet). that about sums up our news ecosystem today.

Fixed it for you.

LOL. would a social animal voluntarily choose to live in randolph, NH, Kingsville MD or Milville DE? you must really hate being around people. keep projecting, bro.

always a pleasure to login and read the mask field reports! I'm really sorry this wasn't the berlin wall coming down, or the V-J day times square moment, for the anti-mask ragers. this surely means we are slipping and sliding on that slippery slope towards totalitarianism.

it's very rare for an incumbent President to lose re-election, so I guess the american people must've thought the orange man was really, really bad. it's time to move on, buddy.

aww, he misses the orange demagogue. so cute.

yes, this is probably true, but i would argue that seasonality plays a big part here. the northern latitudes (northern US and europe) had low covid prevalence last summer - and that's without vaccines. in fact, i would willing to bet that the positivity rates were < 1% in the new england states last summer. seychelles and maldives are two of the most vaccinated countries in the world, yet they are having their biggest outbreaks right now. vaccines help prevent serious outcomes, which should be the main point, but it wouldn't surprise me if mask mandates come back locally or regionally in the winter as prevalence rises again.

i don't think you read my post carefully. I said if you're unvaxxed, and you knowingly don't wear a mask after you read the sign at the door, you are also virtue signaling.

yes, virtue is subjective. unvaxxed people who aren't wearing masks in stores are also virtue signaling. their virtue is "the gubmint" can't tell them what to do. unfortunately we have to smell their halitosis while their virtue is signaled.