TOS: A Taste of Armageddon

[AllanO]

I brush my teeth every day (twice), floss and visit the dentist.

... which is demonstrably a pretty effective way to avoid tooth decay and limit the damage when it occurs.

We're discussing a strategy which is NOT effective and has been extremely expensive, especially in ways that aren't measured in money.

Apparently the evidence that flossing works is pretty thin on the ground. I find it easy to do (I use a floss holder) and satisfying to get stuff out from between my teeth though. https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/healt ... se-collide

When you say the costs can't be measured in money the problem is that you also seem to mean you can't offer any concrete evidence that the costs exist. Also the non-monetary costs you can demonstrate (that everyone will acknowledge exist), you can't demonstrate are any different from other costs we happily accept for equal or less demonstrated benefit.

Look I've already said what I think demonstrates the efficacy of the COVID vaccines (both the population wide effects like reducing the rate of hospitalization and death and the particular studies on things like individual hospitalization and transmission) so I can't accept your unargued claim that somehow those demonstrations are not demonstrative.

There is evidence that these protections wane with time but also evidence/indications that a third dose/booster will restore that waning protection.

To what end? How many updated booster shots do you want people to receive, and for how long?

I'm confused is your argument that they will stop working (stop conferring any protection) or are you admitting that actually boosters and the like will work and do indeed have a demonstrated ongoing benefit?

Anyway, I thought my dental hygiene analogy made it obvious, but okay I'll be crystal clear.

There is no clear end point this is not a reason not to do something whether it is oral hygiene, personal health, public health, interpretative dance or anything else. As long as there is a demonstrated net benefit (to myself or others) to getting more shots I keep getting them as long as I live, unless and until it is demonstrated that either something better has come along or the threat has passed.

At the moment the conditions are met I'm alive and there is demonstrated benefits to more shots, nobody has demonstrated a better mouse trap and hospitalizations and so on are at dangerous and disruptive levels, so the immediate future is clear.

[CrypticMirror]

There is evidence that these protections wane with time but also evidence/indications that a third dose/booster will restore that waning protection.

To what end? How many updated booster shots do you want people to receive, and for how long?

Well you know how people get a routine flu shot every year?

[Frustration]

You want the entire population to receive a booster shot every few weeks?

[AllanO]

You want the entire population to receive a booster shot every few weeks?

We've agreed brushing our teeth every day makes sense, so not sure how the frequency matters if the evidence warrants it, but since you seem confused I will try to explain.

I am not saying I will endorse one set of particular actions for all time, on the contrary I'm saying I will be flexible and change actions in the future as the evidence warrants. I expect the evidence to change and so what the evidence warrants to change.

We will accumulate more evidence about the virus, the vaccines and other relevant details (medical treatments, tests, costs of actions, logistics etc.). Characteristics like the prevalence of the virus in my area will change with time and so evidence about those things will change.

Just an important side issue there is not yet clear evidence when a 4th shot would be needed. If it is not needed at all the the 3rd shot would just be the last to complete the course of vaccination (hard to say but I think that remains a possibility if not a likely one).

As Dr. Faust of the University of Southampton who has been studying the effects of 3rd shots on measurable immune response says of the idea that everyone would need a shot every year "anyone willing to answer this in certain terms is just “speculating”. “At this point we don’t know,”...“No one can know at this stage whether we will need boosters every year.”" (source: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-heal ... w-vaccine/ ) (also note the time scale imagined for a possible 4th or + shot is a year which is more than a few weeks)

If you can't trust someone named Dr. Faust who can we trust?

[Frustration]

The evidence thus far tells the same story it told way back at the beginning of the pandemic, only with more confirmation:

We cannot eliminate this disease. The best we can do is keep too many people from getting it and having severe reactions at once, so that they can receive treatment. They won't be protected from getting it again. The virus mutates rapidly, and is being selected for virulence (hopefully not lethality).

We would have been better off accepting that people were going to die and living our lives as close to normal as possible than trying to avoid the inevitable.

The vaccines aren't going to help, long-term.

[CharlesPhipps]

I mean we could eliminate the disease easily if everyone is vaccinated but that would require people not to be terrorists.

[clearspira]

Flu is 1,500 years old minimum. Why anyone thinks Covid is going anywhere soon is pretty funny.

[CrypticMirror]

I mean we could eliminate the disease easily if everyone is vaccinated but that would require people not to be terrorists.

I know. It is trivially easy to defeat if we act together. Funnily enough, it turns out that so is influenza. Last year, when people were actually socially distancing/mask wearing/hand washing, we knocked knocked flu season out entirely. Not only record low numbers of cases, some countries, where they took it even more seriously, didn't have any recorded cases of influenza at all. All these diseases that we thought would be around forever, it turns out we can get rid of a lot of them just with a combination of the same measures that were controlling Covid until a few people willingly chose to be Typhoid Marys. Forcing illnesses on others ought to be a crime.

[clearspira]

I mean we could eliminate the disease easily if everyone is vaccinated but that would require people not to be terrorists.

I know. It is trivially easy to defeat if we act together. Funnily enough, it turns out that so is influenza. Last year, when people were actually socially distancing/mask wearing/hand washing, we knocked knocked flu season out entirely. Not only record low numbers of cases, some countries, where they took it even more seriously, didn't have any recorded cases of influenza at all. All these diseases that we thought would be around forever, it turns out we can get rid of a lot of them just with a combination of the same measures that were controlling Covid until a few people willingly chose to be Typhoid Marys. Forcing illnesses on others ought to be a crime.

I think the idea that flu vanished is bunkum. I think that the flu deaths were going down on the death certificates as Covid. Its not even a conspiracy theory either that the death rate from Covid is far lower than the official figures claim as the only criteria in the UK to get ''death from Covid'' on your certificate is to catch Covid within 28 days of death. You could have a lump in your lung the size of a cricket ball but if you caught Covid and died within a month then you died from Covid.

Frankly, I think any old cough (particularly among the elderly) for the first half of this pandemic wasn't investigated that deeply.

[Scififan]

So to get back on topic this episode is IMO more timely now than before because today some much of our combat is remote. It also reminds me of an old Metagaming microgame called Rivets. It's about a post-apocalyptic war where everyone is dead but the battlebots called Boppers are still fighting a war that is now over.

It seems that in this episode the people have actually forgotten what they were fighting about in the first place and just decided they couldn't stop fighting because it was their nature, so they made it civilized. They just gave up on their humanity.