No injunction against restaurant defying COVID restrictions

Someone who gets it. Thank you.

 

Wow, now you're incurring in the SAME mistake you battled against, up there, and I praised you for it but you're doing the same. You're using stats to justify your point of view, but again, like I said in post #75, the reason why using stats to justify one's political position is misleading, is that you often don't look at other intervening factors.

It's the same story of saying, "shark attacks increase in the summer; ice cream consumption increases in the summer, therefore I conclude that ice scream consumption causes shark attacks."

So you're saying, "Italy had big death stats per million of inhabitants; Italy wore masks; therefore I conclude that masks are useless."

So you ignore a bunch of intervening factors.

1) Italian authorities made the blunder of locking down isolated parts of the country while leaving others open, AND announcing in advance the date and time for the lockdown. It made all the yuppies from Milano to flee the city before the deadline and go stay with their parents and grandparents. They thus seeded the virus among the most vulnerable population.

2) Italy has a very old population. Paradoxically, by virtue of having one of the best healthcare systems in the world, Italians live long lives (also helped by the mediterranean diet). So, the virus preferentially killing the elderly, the death rates skyrocketed.

3) Italians have the habit of living in multi-generational households. Grandpa and Grandma continue to live at home with their sons and daughters and grandchildren. So if a younger person got infected, the vulnerable ones in the household got infected too.

4) Italians are very gregarious, like to party, like to gather in large crowds after work, and practice little social distancing, being prone to hugging and kissing others when they meet and greet.

5) Italians are notorious for being rebellious against laws and regulations and not following them if they can get away with it.

6) The Italian healthcare system was caught by a huge surge of SIMULTANEOUS cases due to the factors above and rapidly ran out of capacity (despite having a hospital bed by 100,000 of the served population ratio better than the American ratio). This multiplied deaths because many were left without adequate resources to be treated.

7) The early peak there, which happened right after Wuhan, made the bulk of the serious cases be treated at a time when we didn't yet know how to treat serious cases of Covid-19, making the death toll much worse. Other countries that got later surges, benefitted for example of the knowledge that dexamethasone significantly decreases deaths in severe cases, and invasive ventilation should not be started too early because it can cause premature fibrosis in the lungs.

Anyways, there were LOTS of factors making the Italian death toll worse than in other countries, so your attempt to correlate it negatively to mask use, is the same disingenuous use of statistics that you were advocating against, as recently as in post #68.

 

That's actually WHY I made that particular post. I was going to say essentially the same thing after the reply that was inevitable and did happen. The postings of some around here are quite predictable. Sad thing is I don't even look at peoples names. I just read what is said and can tell what their next line of "reasoning" is going to be.

Your thinking is too one dimensional. X=Y therefore Z. Nevermind that there was a whole alphabet of reasons before X and Y. Look to Centerfields post as to what I am talking about. He said it much more expansively than I probably would have. Only difference is I would have mentioned culture directly.

 

Yes, my points 3, 4, 5, and 6 have to do with Italian culture. My list is not all-inclusive; there were other factors in Italy but I stopped at those 7.

Culture is of course a very important factor. See Japan, for example. They are in the habit of obeying rules and regulations and being cooperative with the government, with a strong sense of community over individual freedoms. So, the central government merely *asked* the population to wear masks, and the immediate response was that 97% did.

In America, the culture is suspicious of government, and people value individual freedoms above community. That's interesting in many other ways and I love America, but it is not good when you need consistent community action to stop a public health threat.

Also in America we faced a cultural/political divide - half of the population finding masks to be an efficient way to protect themselves and their loved ones, and the other half feeling that masks were an attempt to control them and to impinge upon their freedoms. This divide sharply overlapped with the left/right spectrum. It seems like it is spilling over to vaccine hesitancy, given recent surveys showing that 50% of male Republicans are against accepting the Covid-19 shots, the highest proportion among all demographics.

So these different cultural traits were factors in the vastly different way the Japanese and the Americans responded to the pandemic.

Then you have other differences that explain Japan's low death rate versus America's high one: obesity has been postulated as the second most important risk factor for severe Covid-19, right after age. Well, America has the world's biggest obesity rate, with 40% of the adult population being obese. In Japan, however, obesity is almost unheard of.

Comparisons between countries are tricky because different countries differ a lot in culture and health indicators. A pandemic is a very complex animal. If we want to draw meaningful comparisons then we need to look into a large number of factors and analyze them very closely, and try to be as inclusive in terms of number of intervening factors as possible.

This is why, when your initial post addressed Italy and the UK, I only replied about Italy, because I know very well the situation there, but I don't know much about the situation in the UK, so I'd defer to our British friends such as @Montegriffo to talk about factors that made the outbreak there have a high death toll.

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My style is that I talk about what I do know. Sometimes I come across as arrogant because I tend to have little patience with people who speak about medical matters, often with the most absurd notions, and won't back off when I explain the real thing. But I speak about medical matters because I do know Medicine, from being a medical doctor with uninterrupted 40 years of practice. But if there is, for example, a legal matter, I will immediately defer to the lawyers we have here, such as Death.

When I speak about something I do know, I'm very precise and I'm always prepared to back it up with citations and links. I do not BS my way through things. That's why often those who try to defy my medical knowledge end up with egg on their faces. Then they turn ugly and insulting, at which point I move them to my Ignore list, because like I said I have little patience for stubborn ignorance.

 

Point three is possibly one of the factors that led to higher death rates amongst black and Asian ethnic minorities in the UK.
Point seven might also explain the initial high rates of death in the UK. The first cases appear to have arrived here via people returning from skiing holidays in Italy.
Possibly the early infection of Boris Johnson explains the severity of his illness and the duration of his treatment compared to Trump who got ill much later when the illness was better understood and more treatments were available.

 

Can you imagine needing the governments permission to sell food and drink? Damn how we have f***ed up our country.

 

So you've stopped having sex and riding in automobiles?

 

So most humans most of the time. Gotcha. And we don't need to get to zero risk to lose the masks and open the stadiums to capacity. It's IDIOCY to claim otherwise (I understand you didn't explicitly make that claim).

 

No, but I also wear a mask

 

Yeah, talk about a straw man! Actually I made the OPPOSITE claim. What part of "Not even with excellent masks with a good fit and good social distancing, the risk is zero" you didn't understand?? And what about this, "none of these activities will have a risk zero." What part of this you didn't understand?

So, no, I didn't explicitly made that claim. I DIDN'T IMPLICITY MADE IT EITHER. Actually I EXPLICITLY SAID THE OPPOSITE. DAMMIT!

Sure, at least you accurately did add that *I* never said so (and of course I wouldn't; I'm no idiot), but pray tell, who did? Who is talking of risk zero? This doesn't exist. Nothing in life is risk zero. One of these days a small airplane fell on a car, badly injuring the two car occupants, a mother and her young daughter. What's the odds? Still, it happened. Just being alive is a risk of death. This virus won't ever go away (we missed the chance), it will be endemic and we'll need yearly vaccination with updated vaccines, much like it is done for the flu. There will never be risk zero regarding the SARS-CoV-2, and life will need to go on.

I wasn't even addressing any opening up of anything. I was just saying, there is no risk zero (something you conveniently forgot to mention, by quoting me selectively which is disingenuous), and the closer the distance between people and the lousier their masking, the higher the risk. That's a FACT that is not in dispute, so your hyperbolic and tangential answer was totally uncalled for.

For your information, since May of 2020, almost one year ago, I haven't advocated for lockdowns. During the lockdowns, I said, if we do have a lockdown then we need to do it well or else we'll get the worst of two worlds: we'll damage the economy AND fail to control the pandemic. Well, we never enforced anything, we did it in very heterogeneous way, and then relinquished too soon, so we got the worst of two worlds... but once this was done, I said, "this ship has sailed; too late now; restarting lockdowns wouldn't work and would damage the economy even more for little gain" - so ever since I've been FOR opening up.

The difference is, I'm for opening up WITH precautions. Not like the TRULY IDIOTIC people, those who refuse masks and now refuse vaccines too, and keep minimizing the virus and doubting that the fairly accurate number of deaths is real (with idiotic conspiracy theories that we doctors fake Covid deaths and falsify death certificates to make more money).

And I've always advocated for better masks, saying, if we did have proficient masks instead of the pitiful cloth masks that were only supposed to be a stop-gap measure, we would be able to reopen more sectors much faster and much better, thus improving the economy while ALSO controlling the pandemic (the best of two worlds). We should have had months ago domestic production of N95 masks through the Defense Production Act, and distribution of the masks to the population, coupled with a strong educational campaign teaching people why it's important to wear them, and how to achieve a good facial fit. No mandates, mind you, but rather, good educational campaigns (one catches more flies with honey than with vinegar).

But no... we had to be stupid (I mean, we as a people, because personally I'm very far from being stupid). We had to keep minimizing the danger (one taken seriously in pretty much all other 210 countries), we had to keep politicizing it (when it's merely a public health issue that hits equally all sides of the political spectrum), to keep mocking masks and screaming "my freeeeeeeeedoms!!!", keep spreading misinformation, fake news, and conspiracy theories such as anti-vaxxer crap, and so on and so forth.

Look, 1 year and 4 months into this, we've NEVER had a widespread educational campaign... So the IMBECILES continue to refuse masks and now to refuse the vaccines. Great.

We kept misunderstanding the FACT that uncontrolled pandemics are much more damaging to an economy than the side effects of the measures to control them.

So, you get my post, filled to the brink with real facts, and non-partisan facts (given that I'm blaming both sides), and all that you get from it is that I must be implicitly thinking that we need zero risk to reopen stadiums to full capacity, and you quote ONE phrase of it, out of context, to make your point? WTF?

Obviously reading comprehension is not your strongest skill. Or else, non-disingenuous behavior, refraining from malicious selective quoting, and refraining from using straw men are not your strongest skills. You pick what the case is.

 

Then throw the murdering creep in jail...

 

Holy f***, I bet you LOVE to hear yourself talk, but I should have been more clear. My point was that because people are human and the masks they are wearing were not very effective even if worn correctly (a bandana? c'mon...) they are nearing obsolescence as more people recover and get vaccinated.
While YOU may not be calling for zero risk others ARE, thus my parenthetical.

 

And do you think I don't know that? I've been saying forever that bandanas and neck goiters are no good.
And no, you did imply that I was just not EXPLICITLY saying so, which, if you had any English comprehension, you'd have known that it also means that you implied that I was IMPLICITLY saying so, while I was saying the opposite.
You know what? No time to waste with someone like you. Have a nice and long life. Farewell.

 

You may believe that risk doesn't need be zero before mask mandates are lifted but there are people who think it does, some right here on this board - I was speaking to them in that statement! You need to comprehend this is a group discussion and sometimes people are responding to the group even when quoting an individual post. It's an easy mistake to make when you think everything revolves around your words.