Whoops, I misread. I was scanning quickly because the article is clearly trying to bury the number.
Here’s the proper quote:
“As of 5 p.m. Wednesday, Massachusetts health officials had recorded 23,708 confirmed and probable COVID-19 deaths since the outbreak first began, so that figure is likely to drop to around 20,000 on Monday.”
> According to the AAP’s tracker, 871 children have died thus far in the pandemic
During the 2009 H1N1 influenza season, 1,090 children died. This was over a single season, not an aggregated count from the beginning of time, which seems to be a phenomenon unique to COVID. Until some point late last year, the CDC even had language on their website saying that young children were more likely to experience complications from influenza than from Covid-19.
"health labs" doing a lot of work in this headline. The WHO says they want to prevent "accidental or deliberate release of pathogens." If the pathogens can be intentionally released and cause harm, in what sense are they not bioweapons?
Yes. In 2020 a virus was released in Wuhan, and was weaponized by the host country shutting down domestic flights while allowing infected to fly internationally.
Historically this led to a pretty crazy couple of years and we’re still seeing a lot of disruption from it.
It’s not good for the US to be funding bioweapon research within hostile countries or on the border of hostile countries.
Not necessarily. The "weaponized" anthrax from the 2001 anthrax attack was much deadlier than naturally occurring anthrax. The spore coats were silicon coated and combined with charged nanoparticles for maximum disbursal. It may have been an exaggeration, but it was speculated that one light bulb full of weaponized anthrax could potentially wipe out a small city.
The article says the "deadly pathogens" in question are elements of peaceful scientific research, not bioweapons development, so it can't really be called "admitting it."
I would imagine the parent is referring to some of the more "Freedom Fries"-esque excesses of Russophobia, like canceling Tchaikovsky from symphony programs, discarding Russian vodka, banning Russian cat breeds from competitions, etc
> I would imagine the OP is referring to some of the more "Freedom Fries"-esque excesses of Russophobia, like canceling Tchaikovsky from symphony programs, discarding Russian vodka, banning Russian cat breeds from competitions, etc
all insignificant compared to the suffering Russia is imposing on Ukraine. Russophobia should be the least of people's worries when Russia is dropping bombs on hospitals full of Ukrainian kids.
And before "whataboutism people" come here say "USA does it too", well, yeah, that's why a lot of people in middle east have a visceral hatred for Americans.
> that's why a lot of people in middle east have a visceral hatred for Americans.
we had a lot of visceral hatred for them, too, because our media in the early 00s propagandized us into having visceral hatred for them, in order to manufacture consent for invasion. the rest of the decade was spent telling us that we were morally wrong for having this visceral hatred for them—despite said visceral hatred having been intentionally instilled upon us. now, in hindsight, few are willing to acknowledge what happened, because to do so would be to admit having had, in the past, irrationally visceral hatred for a broad group of people, for ill-defined reasons, only to go on to "unlearn" this behavior later on, and we all want to think of ourselves as good people, so let's just pretend none of that ever happened.
I fully expect this exact same pattern to play out again this time, too.
> Okay, let's use your wording then. Would you say that in the hypothetical described above, that Islamophobia would be "all insignificant" and "least of people's worries"?
My bad, I didn't know Islam was a country with a government that decided to send tanks and jets to invade and bomb a foreign country... /s
That's the absurd parallel you are proudly are making as a sophist. Perhaps you should focus on making the Russian armies get the fuck out of Ukraine instead.
Flamewar comments like this are not ok here. Personal attacks are particularly unwelcome. I realize emotions are understandably high, but you can't post like this to HN and we ban accounts that keep doing it, so please don't do it.
Yeah, about violence against the ethnic Russian populations in eastern Ukraine - doesn't seem that Russia needs any help there. Russians are bombing and killing civilians in those Russian speaking cities even without permission from facebook.
New Zealand has 13 deaths per million residents. The US has nearly 3,000 deaths per million.
Vaccination decouples case numbers from severe disease and death. The calculus on avoiding cases changes significantly once you get the population well vaccinated.
New Zealand is just at the beginning of its first major wave and deaths lag considerably, so it's a bit early to be drawing this comparison. I would agree they're likely to experience a lower death count than the U.S. but not by this magnitude.
Also, presumably the epidemiological factors which are causing Americans to die from COVID at higher rates are also likely to apply to Americans who are infected while traveling to New Zealand.
> New Zealand is just at the beginning of its first major wave...
Yes, and they're entering it with a well-vaccinated population, especially in the vulnerable age groups. Even with variants in play, evidence points heavily to that meaning cases won't lead to significant numbers of severe disease and death.
That's fine, but it has nothing to do with travel warnings. The US state department didn't tell unvaccinated people to avoid travel to NZ, it made a blanket recommendation.
You started this subthread by making a comment about "burning rooms", implying that the US situation is somehow worse than New Zealand in the present moment. Historical trends are what they are, but currently, irrespective of aggregate historical death rate, NZ is doing worse than the US. There's probably a greater risk of catching Covid right now in NZ than there is in the US.
(But this is all a silly discussion. The horse is out of the barn, Covid is literally everywhere, and these travel restrictions do nothing but cause pain. About the best you can say is that state department "recommendations" are the least absurd of an overall absurd response.)
That would not be a correct presumption. Americans who travel to New Zealand are not at all representative of the general population. For one thing they are significantly more affluent on average. I suspect they're also older, and less likely to be suffering from severe chronic co-morbid conditions. For example, end-stage renal disease patients were heavily overrepresented among US COVID-19 deaths. Not many such people would get on a 16 hour flight to Auckland under any conditions.
That's all fine and I am broadly in support of the statement "people without major COVID risk factors should not take any special precautions or avoid travel to areas experiencing high case rates." My comment was simply addressed to the claim that the U.S. is currently doing much worse than New Zealand in some way that is relevant to travel advisories.
I think NZ will fare better by orders of magnitude than the US because NZ had one of the best responses in the world and the US had one of the worst responses in the world.
Case numbers are mostly irrelevant and don't mean much one way or another. Official case counts vary a lot based on the extent of testing and reporting. If you test more then you find more cases. In the US, the CDC estimated that only about a quarter of infections were ever counted as cases.
What actually matters is the rate of hospitalizations and deaths.
And we're all going to be exposed to the virus anyway. Whether that happens at home or abroad hardly matters.
> The CDC and the American Academy of Pediatricians has both said very clearly that there is no evidence linking masks with developmental delays or language deficits.
In what way is this not simply a naked appeal to authority? Have the CDC or AAP conducted long-running randomized trials to determine what the effects of mass masking might be? From what you have linked, this seems like nothing more than that well-worn rhetorical jibe where they just proclaim "there is no evidence" of some thing they're not actually looking for in the first place.
> Instead, they made the issue so incredibly complicated and polarized that almost a million people died.
Is it your impression that more consistent messaging or public compliance would have prevented all of those deaths?
A lot of what people believe about what's happening at the plant is based on the statements of Ukrainian officials, who by some accounts are using it to call for NATO to impose a no-fly zone. A disaster at this plant would cause huge problems for DNR/LNR/Crimea, which Russia does not want. Amid the fog of war it's often a good idea to take a step back and wait for more evidence to present itself.
