A.C. Flory's Blog, page 38

Covid Deaths in Context

I have very personal reasons for wanting the pandemic restrictions precautions to remain in place, but I realise that most young, healthy people have no such concerns. They know they’re immortal so the death toll from Covid is simply a number…right?

Wrong. The numbers shown on the graph below are for the US only, and while the great majority of Covid deaths occur in the 50+ age brackets, there are some eye-wateringly large numbers in the younger age groups as well:

The numbers shown in the graph above are already out of date but they provide a useful snapshot of who’s been dying in the US. As a mother, I can’t look at 795 children dying of Covid without getting a lump in my throat. Covid is an awful way to die.

And what about the young adult age group? 5,581 deaths doesn’t seem like a lot in a population of 360+ million people, but what if we compare those deaths to military personnel lost by the US in the last 100 odd years?

Afghanistan

‘Only’ 1,928 young lives lost during the 20 years the US military spent in Afghanistan:

Covid 5,581 vs Afghan War 1,928.

I’m not going to bother working out the yearly average. These numbers speak for themselves.

Iraq

Click on the pic below to see the full sized version. There you will see that ‘only’ 4,431 young people died in the Iraq offensive.

Covid 5,581 vs Iraq War 4,431.

Vietnam

Going further back in time to a period in which I was a young adult, the Vietnam war resulted in 58,220 deaths from a range of causes:

That’s a lot more than the 18 – 29 year olds [5,581] who’ve died from Covid thus far, but the Vietnam war went on for roughly ten and a half years – from August 5, 1964 to May 7, 1975 – and the youngest soldiers to die were only 16 while the oldest was 62:

I don’t want to create shifty numbers by counting those Covid deaths under 19 or those in the 40 to 64 year old age brackets. Instead, I’ll just add the 18-29 year old group to that of the 30-39 year olds – i.e. 5581 + 16,343.

Why? Because 18 to 39 is a realistic age range for people fighting in wars, and if I’m going to compare Covid deaths to military deaths then I want it to be as accurate as possible.

So, combining those two age groups gives a total of 21,924 Covid deaths. Divide 21,924 by 2 [ie the two years of the pandemic], and you get an average of 10,962 Covid deaths per year.

If you now divide the total number of Vietnam deaths [58,220] by 10.5 [i.e. the number of years of the war], you get an average of 5544.762 deaths per year.

Covid = 10,962 deaths per year
Vietnam = 5544.8 deaths per year

Korea

Further back still, US forces suffered a total of 36,913 military deaths in Korea from 1950 to 1953:

Although the Korean War never officially ended, active fighting only lasted for three years so I’ll base my calculations on the 3 year number. If you divide the total number of deaths in Korea [36,913] by 3 [ie the number of years], you get an average of 12,304 deaths per year.

Covid = 10,962 deaths per year
Korea = 12,304 deaths per year

For the first time, we get a war that’s been more deadly than Covid, but we had to go back almost 70 years to do so.

And finally we go all the way back to World War II.

World War II

In World War II, the US lost 407,300 military lives from December 11, 1941 to September 2, 1945. That’s a period of almost 4 years. If we divide the total number of military deaths [407,300] by 4 [i.e. the number of years of the war], we get an average of 101,825 deaths per year.

Covid = 10,962 deaths per year
WWII = 101,825 deaths per year

Another war that has beaten the number of Covid deaths…or has it?

What if I add up all those military deaths and average them over the total number of years in which wars were fought?

The screenshot above is from an Excel spreadsheet I created. The Covid deaths by age group are eight days out of date but they were the only ones I could find so I inserted a more up to date figure in the final Totals row.

To me, two things almost leap off the page:

there have now been almost twice as many Covid deaths in the US as all military deaths combined [since 1941],the military deaths in the US took place over a period of 45 years. The Covid deaths occurred in just two years. And the pandemic isn’t over.

If the US lost this many people in a war, the nation would be in mourning for a century. Why do these Covid deaths not inspire the same sense of horror…and respect?

A lot of people say that restrictions cannot last forever. They say that people have to be given their personal freedoms back.

I say there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Personal freedoms are not a right. They cannot exist without a society to support them. The social contract says that individuals give up some things in order to receive the protection of the ‘group’.

What kind of protection? Education, healthcare, law enforcement, a justice system, public transport, roads, jobs, homes, high tech gadgets, nightclubs, parties, power, food, clean water to drink and flush indoor toilets…

Now think about what would happen if all electricity stopped being produced for two weeks. Would you survive without light, aircon, heating, food delivered to supermarkets, rubbish removed from the streets, street lighting, access to hospitals, public transport etc etc.?

Some of you would, 99.9999999% of us wouldn’t.

All the protections I’ve listed plus thousands more are our reward for contributing to society and abiding by its rules. If we don’t want to abide by those rules we are free to find a desert island and live like savages.

If we can’t survive on our own, we have to accept that personal freedom, individual freedom can only exist within the context of a society of some sort. But that freedom must be earned.

How? Through social responsibility towards all members of society, even those you don’t personally care about.

Why? Because everyone will get old and sick eventually. If you want to be cared for when your time comes then you have to pay your dues now.

And finally a word about restrictions. Wearing a mask to protect yourself and others is not fun, but it’s miles better than dying of Covid. It’s also preferable to having your economy collapse because everyone is off work being sick.

Good hygiene is something everyone should practise all the time, not just when a pandemic hits. Not washing your hands after pointing percy at the porcelain, or wiping your bum, or picking your nose is disgusting. Only creeps do that. Yuck.

Keeping your distance from others so as not to spread the virus may not be ‘fun’. In fact, it can crimp your social life if clubbing or getting pissed at the pub are your favourite things in life. But keeping your distance from others won’t kill you. It could kill me, and dying is no fun either.

More to the point, dying is permanent. No coming back from the grave. No miraculous resurrections. Dead is dead is dead. Forever.

By contrast, missing out on your social life is temporary. Equating the two is like saying that stubbing your toe is as bad as having the whole leg amputated.

With the greatest respect, grow a pair and grow the fuck up.

Meeks

p.s. most of my data came from Statista.com or Wikipedia. Information on the oldest and youngest Vietnam death is from : https://www.uswings.com/about-us-wings/vietnam-war-facts/

BA.2 may be worse than BA.1

Bananas in Pajamas? No, BA.2 is a sub-variant of Omicron and it’s mooted to be even more infectious than other variants. Now there’s research coming out of Japan that suggests it could also be a whole lot more virulent:

‘When the researchers infected hamsters with BA.2 and BA.1, the animals infected with BA.2 got sicker and had worse lung function. In tissues samples, the lungs of BA.2-infected hamsters had more damage than those infected by BA.1.’

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/17/health/ba-2-covid-severity/index.html

The CNN article contains a link to the actual journal article so I clicked it. Doing so gave me access to the PDF of the research. I understood the abstract, kind-a, and the discussion, kind-a, not much in the middle, but what impressed me was the dogged persistence of the researchers. Every time their experiments came up with unexpected results, they changed the focus of the experiments to investigate the new leads…like detectives.

That dogged persistence, and the quality control the Japanese are known for, convinced me that this is no error-riddled study dashed off between breakfast and lunch. And that makes their conclusion even more chilling:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.02.14.480335v1.full.pdf

If the Japanese research is confirmed, BA.2 could become our worst nightmare at a time when most states here in Australia are easing up on restrictions and opening their borders.

In NSW :

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-17/nsw-eases-covid-19-restrictions-face-masks-to-be-scaled-back/100839260

In Victoria, some restrictions on density and QR codes will be eased but ‘… mask requirements are to remain in place for the time being.’ https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-17/victorian-government-covid-restrictions-new-deaths-cases/100838490

Thank you, Dan Andrews. At the rate that BA.2 is spreading, there should be definitive data available long before we throw caution to the winds.

“It looks like we might be looking at a new Greek letter here,” agreed Deborah Fuller, a virologist at the University of Washington School of Medicine, who reviewed the study but was not part of the research.

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/17/health/ba-2-covid-severity/index.html

Since the beginning of February, 2022, Denmark has removed all pandemic restrictions. Denmark also happens to be the only country in Europe where BA.2 is well and truly the dominant strain. This is a graph of the death toll in Denmark:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/denmark/#graph-cases-daily

If you click the worldometers link and hover your mouse over the very end of the line on the graph, you will see that the data is for February 18, just two days ago. Only time will tell exactly how virulent BA.2 really is, but I’m not dumping my mask any time soon.

My thanks to Mole for bringing the Japanese research to my attention…our attention. Stay safe my friends.

Meeks

Something to make you happy…

My good friend Carol, from Carol Cooks 2 introduced me to this video and the two glorious voices in it. Good things do happen. Enjoy.

The first time I saw this video I had no idea who either of the singers were, but I was so impressed I literally searched until I discovered that the girl – Celinde Shoenmaker – was actually playing the role of Christine in the Phantom of the Opera at the time.

You can’t see the very beginning of the duet here because the person filming didn’t get their phone working fast enough, but apparently the young busker – Stephen Barry – sang one song from the Phantom and then this strange girl from the crowd asked him to sing another. He demured, saying two songs from the same musical wouldn’t go down well. She said that if he did, she’d sing along with him.

lmao – he asked her if she was any good!?! The rest is history.

Youtube channel for Stephen Barry:

https://www.youtube.com/c/StephenSings1

Have a wonderful day my friends,
Meeks

My conspiracy theory about the ‘freedom’ rallies

All over the Western world, a small but vocal segment of the population is protesting for ‘freedom’, but from what? This is a screenshot of their manifesto:

‘No medical apartheid’???? Interesting. I somehow doubt that your average Tradie – carpenter, plumber, electrician, mechanic – would come up with a phrase like that. I mean, what does it even mean?

Here in Australia, we do have both private and public hospitals, but private hospitals don’t have emergency departments, at all, so if you crash your Lamborghini, the ambulance will take you straight to a public hospital where you will find round the clock care. By contrast, private hospitals don’t have ANY doctors on staff. They only have nurses, and those nurses are not allowed to alter treatment plans during the night.

I know, because I had a very bad reaction to Pethidine after a partial thyroidectomy [in a private hospital]. Your thyroid gland is in your neck, so to cut some of it out, the surgeon has to ‘cut your throat’. Literally.

So there I was, in the middle of the night, with my throat swathed in bandages, throwing up even after there was nothing left in my stomach. Can you imagine what that feels like after you’ve just had your throat cut?

The nurses were allowed to give me anti-nausea injections, but they didn’t work because it was the Pethidine drip that was making me so sick…and they couldn’t take the drip out without the doctor’s say so…and the doctor wouldn’t make his rounds until about 8am.

Public hospitals aren’t swank, but the quality of the care is second to none. So is it the private hospital patients who are being treated as second class citizens? I think not. I also don’t think the people behind the freedom rallies are your average Joe.

How do I know? It’s right there in the public eye, on the freedom rally website:

https://australiafreedomrally.com/

Go ahead, click on the link and see how slick, how professional the website is. This site was not put together by a bunch of amateurs volunteering their skills to help the ’cause’. This is not the website of a grass roots movement.

The Freedom Rally website was put together by professionals. Not just professional webmasters but professional manipulators, the kind of people who work for big ad. agencies creating commercials to hook the unwary.

Everything about this site shrieks ‘money’! But wait, there’s more. This is from the website’s About page:

‘Australia Freedom Rally is a member organization of the World Wide Demonstration team, which coordinates the World Wide Rally for Freedom Internationally.
We support and implement the World Wide Demonstration Platform in Australia.’

https://australiafreedomrally.com/about/

If you click on the ‘World Wide Demonstration team’ link, you’ll be taken to a website that has a lot of admin. stuff – like the popups about cookies – in what looks like German. The site is just as slick as the Australian website, but nowhere is there any indication of who is behind the website…or who pays for it.

I did some digging, trying to find out who was really behind the organisation [spelled ‘organization’ by the way]. Eventually I landed here:

https://core.telegram.org/

I don’t know what ‘Telegram’ is, but it’s up there on the main website page:

https://worldwidedemonstration.com/

…and it offers a very slick ‘tool’ for third party developers. Who created it? Who paid for it to be created? Who is rich enough to give it away for free?

This article from the Guardian talks about an Australian who is helping to organise the local protests:

‘In Australia, a Melbourne-based group has helped promote protests throughout the pandemic. The Guardian has previously revealed Harrison McLean, a 24-year-old IT programmer from Wantirna South, had become a key organiser of the protests in that city.’

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/jul/27/who-behind-australia-anti-covid-lockdown-protest-march-rallies-sydney-melbourne-far-right-and-german-conspiracy-groups-driving-protests

…but who is behind him? And why? Why any of this?

I know there are a great many disaffected people in the Western world. They’re getting left behind as the gap between rich and poor turns into an abyss. They’re getting angry with the status quo. They want their lives to be better. They’re primed to lash out. I understand all that, but if they are the kindling, who is the match?

Who is moulding all these disaffected people into a weapon? Who is giving them slogans? Who is paying for it? And what do ‘they’, whoever they are, hope to gain?

Do I believe the World Wide Demonstration is just about the lockdowns? No.

Do I believe the ‘message’? No.

Do I believe the people behind the movement are ‘pure’? Not in a month of Sundays.

I believe the Western world is ripe for a social ‘hack’, manipulation on a grand scale. Is it being driven by Russia? By China? By some individual or group with very deep pockets?

I have absolutely no idea, but the manipulation is sinister and very clever. And there’s money behind it, a lot of money. Whoever ‘they’ are, they’re good, and that should concern us all.

Meeks

Myth busting Omicron – or no, we didn’t have to live with the virus.

A lot of conservative governments justify their policies during this pandemic with the mantra that we all have to ‘live with Covid’.

Why? Apparently because we’re all going to get it eventually.

Even a relatively trusted source like Dr John Campbell maintains that ‘everyone will get Omicron’ – supposedly because it’s so contagious. Yet the actual numbers don’t add up, even in the UK.

This is a screenshot I took this morning which shows the total number of people infected with Covid-19 in the UK…since the pandemic began:

The comments in red and green are mine. I wanted to see how many people in the UK had not had any of the Covid-19 variants. The number ended up being 50 million.

Now I know that the official figures don’t include those who were infected but had only very mild symptoms or no symptoms at all, so I’m going to double the official figure from 18 million to 36 million.

Revised estimate of people infected with Covid-19 variants = 36 million

When you subtract 36M from 68M you get 32M who have never been infected with any of the Covid-19 variants, and that’s after two years and multiple variants, including Omicron B1. Curiously, data from the UK seems to show that 68% of those infected with Omicron have been re-infected. In other words, previous exposure did not give them immunity against the variant.

Why am I banging on about stats and who has or hasn’t been infected in the UK? The answer is simple:

I hate grand sweeping generalisations that are not based on actual data and,much of what we do here in Australia seems to reflect the trends happening in the UK… and the conservative government there wants to open up completely, based on the narrative that everyone will get the virus anyway, so they may as well make the best of it.

The truth is a little more nuanced. According to everything I understand about herd immunity, you need to have at least 70% of the total population immune to a virus for the herd immunity effect to kick in. Not just recovered from the infection but actually immune to it.

Why 70%? because that’s roughly the number of immune people you need to stop the virus from being able to replicate – i.e. spread through the community:

Herd immunity ‘ring fences’ the virus

Essentially, people who have already had the infection – and are immune to it – crowd out the new infections, so even if someone is sick and shedding the virus all over the place, that virus is falling on people who are already immune so it can’t replicate. It’s been ring-fenced.

So let’s have a look at the UK. Are they at 70% yet?

No, they’re not. More importantly, immunity gained from earlier variants of the virus doesn’t seem to provide immunity against the current variants.

In other words, having had the virus once does not guarantee you won’t get the virus again, and that means there can be no herd immunity.

The lack of herd immunity means that those who have never had the virus are not protected. Therefore, learning to ‘live with the virus’ has nothing to do with protecting the vulnerable. It is ALL about protecting the economy.

Let me be more specific. The policy of living with the virus is essentially throwing all the vulnerable members of the population under the bus. Some will live, some won’t.

So who are these vulnerable people?

They include all the conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers for sure, but they also include those who can’t be vaccinated for medical reasons – i.e. because the vaccine would have a negative reaction with their particular medication or treatment – or those with compromised immune systems for whom the vaccines are much less effective. But the list also includes those who have been fully vaccinated.

The current crop of vaccines were developed for the earlier variants and are much less effective against Omicron, so in a way, we’re right back at the start of the pandemic when we didn’t have any vaccines at all. Until a vaccine specifically designed to target Omicron and its siblings comes along, even being fully vaccinated is no guarantee of protection.

Yes, Omicron et al., may be milder than Delta, but it’s not mild. Calling it ‘mild’ instead of ‘milder’ was a neat bit of spin to justify opening up completely. Only now are we seeing how deadly this ‘mild’ virus actually is.

So why are our governments getting away with this? The answer is rather brutal: right from the start, they told people that “…only the elderly, the disabled or those with ‘co-morbidities’ will die so…don’t panic”.

The nett effect of this messaging has been to make the age groups most likely to spread the virus resent those most likely to die from it.

Why should young, healthy people have to suffer lockdowns and restrictions to save a bunch of people who are probably ‘going to die anyway’?

I believe that question, and the resentment that goes with it, is why conspiracy theories have gained such traction. People don’t want to admit how they feel so they latch onto mad stories about legitimate targets – i.e. governments and large corporations.

To be honest, my trust in governments and large corporations is pretty damn low, but the bottom line is that the people in these age groups want to live with Covid…because they don’t think it will affect them. They believe they are immortal so they don’t consider the possibility that they might have a ‘co-morbidity’ without knowing it. They don’t think about long Covid, and what it could do to the rest of their lives. They just resent having those lives interrupted for the sake of a bunch of people they don’t care about anyway.

Which brings me to a rather painful question: if a majority of people in a democracy want to let people die, is a government justified in giving them what they want?

I believe the answer is no. Once elected, the representatives of any democratic government are bound to protect everyone in that democracy, even those who voted against them or those who may have become a ‘liability’.

Protecting all members of society is the cornerstone of the social contract our parents accepted on our behalf when we were born: we give a select group of people a certain amount of power over us in exchange for the protection of the group. Why else obey laws or pay taxes?

Once that core promise of society is broken, trust dies and society falls apart.

We don’t talk about trust much, but everything in society depends on it. Trust allows us to use bits of paper as ‘money’. Trust allows us to walk around without being in fear of our lives. At its most basic, trust allows us to trust others.

Trust in government and ‘the capitalist system’ has been falling for decades now. I truly fear for the future of Western democracies.

Meeks

Dieselpunk House – Anpire

I love building things in ESO, and I think I’m pretty good at it, but this house – built by Anpire – is beyond exceptional:

Not only is the building itself incredible, but the ‘cinematography’ is brilliant as well, and the laid back, jazzy music suits the build perfectly.

cheers,
Meeks

Another win for Innerscape – real surgical robots

This is the Mako Stryker:

https://www.stryker.com/us/en/portfolios/orthopaedics/joint-replacement/mako-robotic-arm-assisted-surgery.html

I just stumbled across the Mayo Stryker in an article about ’12 Medical Miracle Technologies’ on Medium. All twelve will save countless lives, but this one made my heart skip a beat:

https://medium.com/predict/12-medical-miracle-technologies-to-watch-23e9b7b6ec52

Those of you who’ve read the first book of the trilogy – Miira – may remember the scene in which an autonomous AI controlled robot pares Miira’s body back to the bits that still work. The process is overseen by a team of surgeons who never touch the patient at all.

That scene was more or less in its finished version by May, 2015.

I don’t have a crystal ball, nor do I have the kind of expert knowledge that results in a breakthrough like the Mayo Stryker, but I am a problem solver, and it seems that my theoretical, fictional solution was logical enough to become real.

Before I get too fat a head, however, I have to acknowledge how much I get absolutely wrong, starting with the speed of development. I think a great many of these logical solutions will become reality decades before I thought they would. Ah well… I’ll take my wins where I find them.

cheers,
Meeks

Do you re-read old favourites?

My thanks to Audrey Driscoll for her post about re-reading The Lord of the Rings and the magnificent song that went with it:

I have re-read The Lord of the Rings, about three times. I’ve also re-read the entire Dune series about eight times and the Death Gate cycle at least three times, the most recent being just a couple of years ago. But… I’ve never re-read any of the books on my Kindle.

Is that because there are so many new books available to read?

In her hugely successful blog posts about the TBR [To Be Read] list, D. Wallace Peach brought a touch of humour to the phenomenon of buying and downloading hundreds of books that people never end up reading. I didn’t contribute because I don’t actually have a TBR. I’m a voracious reader and get seriously anxious if I don’t have something new lined up to read, but now I have to wonder: why does my reading have to be ‘new’? Why don’t I re-read any of the books on my Kindle when I do re-read at least some of my paperbacks?

I know the answer doesn’t lie in the quality of books on my Kindle; a lot of them are as good as The Lord of the Rings, Dune, or any of my other favourite paperbacks. The answer can’t be readability either because my eyesight is not great any more so paperbacks are actually harder for me to read. So what is it?

I have no answers on this one so I’ll throw the question out to all of you:

Do you re-read books and if so, are they print books or ebooks?

Puzzled,
Meeks

From my phone… Update

We’re back! I have no idea what happened or why, but we haz internet again. -dance- Night night.

We lost our NBN last night and have no idea when it will be restored. As a result I have finally had to use my phone to communicate…and I hate it. I feel as if I’m chiselling a message in stone. Anyway I’m alive and well and will post properly as soon as the internet is back. Hugs, Meeks.

From my phone… 😣

We lost our NBN last night and have no idea when it will be restored. As a result I have finally had to use my phone to communicate…and I hate it. I feel as if I’m chiselling a message in stone. Anyway I’m alive and well and will post properly as soon as the internet is back. Hugs, Meeks.