MeanwhileOnGrad
"Oh, this is calamity! Calamity! Oh no, he's on the floor!"
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Meanwhile On Grad
Documenting hate speech, conspiracy theories, apologia/revisionism, and general tankie behaviour across the fediverse. Memes are welcome!
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Infinitely worse. It’s hard to calculate, but there were countries where they literally had single digit covid numbers during the pre vaccine days, just because they gave the situation the gravity and strictness it deserved
I have a family member who’s in the hospital right now, in a part of the country where practically no one including the hospital staff is wearing a mask. It’s hard to even find them in the hospital to put one on. There are rooms clearly marked with mask and droplet precautions on the outside of the door, and the staff will take a mask from a box next to the door, go inside to deal with that person, and then when they’re done they take their mask back off and go back to walking around treating patients with no mask. What do the people in those rooms have? I don’t know but I can confidently say the hospital is fucking up in a fashion that is actively killing some number of patients and that politics are involved in that.
I am constantly worrying whether Trump’s bullshit will wind up adding my family member, individually and personally, to that 1.5 million surplus deaths
This is pretty standard, and maybe I can shed some light on it. You don the mask as you enter the room and take it off as you leave to avoid spreading the contaminate out of the room. The mask adds a barrier and reduces your risk of contracting whichever disease (and subsequently spreading it to other patients), and all the stuff it's blocked stays in or at the room when you shed it. So the people seen doing that are actually playing their part in keeping whatever that person has limited to the room they're staying in.
As for what people in those rooms have, it can be a lot of things, but it really is what it says on the tin. They have something that can spread by droplet, which ranges from the flu to stuff like whooping cough or, yes, COVID. The system to keep these things contained is pretty consistently updated and has worked well when implemented. We were all wearing masks everywhere for a time because COVID was spreading like wildfire, and concerns of people becoming contagious before showing symptoms with no way to reliably innoculate/vaccinate medical workers
Oh, sure. If they were putting on a new mask when entering those rooms, and then discarding it and replacing it with a fresh one when they exited and dealt with everyone else, that would make perfect sense.
I'm just saying that the system of "let's use literally the most minimal precautions only with the patients that are known to be potentially deadly, and with everyone else just walk around breathing potentially literally anything on literally everyone, like a big squad of Typhoid Marys in scrubs" is potentially in need of some constructive criticism and revision.
So they are putting on a mask for the rooms that require it and then discarding once no longer necessary?
In what world is wearing a mask while walking around in a setting where there are guaranteed to be undetected COVID cases, and guaranteed to be people who will be vulnerable to exceptionally bad impacts if they catch COVID, during a COVID spike, no longer necessary?
I’m aware they are following the hospital’s guidelines. I am saying that those guidelines are killing people.
Tell all that to my family member. Once he’s out of the hospital and not in danger of the exact procedures Trump pushed hard for giving him some kind of currently-life-threatening infection, we can rap about jurisdiction and industrial numbers.
Sure, it’s hard to be precise about the outcomes what some theoretical more competent administration might have done differently. But yes, Trump’s measures killed some number of people, and gave some number more disability that lasts to the present day. Thousands? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Like I say, once my family isn’t actively directly being endangered by the lasting after effects of his malicious policies, we can have a calm debate about it.
It is not an emotional argument to point out that the MAGA bullshit of people wearing masks or getting vaccines making them the enemy is purely a Trump-world invention, with aftereffects continuing to and beyond the present day. Same goes for that stuff being of a totally different and explicitly malicious kind than the simple errors that some government body might commit that was trying to address the crisis, instead of using it simply as another way to pursue its overt policy of going to war with all sensible people everywhere, in any way they could find.
And it happens that I have an example directly and personally relevant to me, but there are plenty of families all across the country who have the same. Quite a lot of them have lost family members. I know some of those families with dead members. It's not just an anecdote.
I think I've spent as long as I need to on this. If you want to say that Trump didn't kill a fuck of a lot of people, as a direct result of prioritizing his culture-war bullshit over literally saving lives (or that that killing of people more or less on purpose is not a problem), I don't know what to say to you.
They never said that, they explicitly stated that trump made it worse, just that he wasn’t the only cause of it.
I seem to remember trump pushing vaccines, if for no other reason than that he could say he helped with their development
Okay
I’m gonna channel all the anger I just felt in a productive direction
Trump did not “fuck up”. He succeeded at what he was trying to do, which goal was horrifying. “This doesn’t mean it’s Trump’s fault” is a load of horseshit, because a large part of the catastrophe was very much his fault. I feel like I’ve spent enough time breaking down why and how. If you want to pretend something else happened in the conversation, so you can keep a disagreement going with me for literally no reason at all, I have no plans to engage with it further.
Productive effort in a productive direction is incoming.
I’ll wait to see your productive effort in a productive direction then
I’ll let you know
Western Australia had Nine Covid deaths prior to 95% population vaccination. Yes, just Nine.
Then we opened our borders and let Omicron in.
Wouldn't it have been easier to just Google "population Western Australia" (2.667 Million in 2020) than to dig up a misleading map that tells an incomplete picture? It's true we are not the most populous state by any means, but you don't need to be insulting with that level of hyperbole.
No matter how you spin it, our pre-Omicron Covid response was nothing short of incredible. While the world suffered, we pretty much nope'd out of the whole thing. I would not be surprised if WA becomes a pandemic response case study in future.
I do agree that the USA probably couldn't pull together enough to put something like that I to action. The USA is anything but united until someone literally invades. It's just a pity they didn't look at the pandemic in a similar light to a foreign invader.
The issue with a statement like "the population density is waaaaaay different then USA or Europe", is it shows how unfamiliar you are with the state. Yes, if you average the population over the area of the state, you'll get an absurdly low number.
But that would only make any sort of point if we are spread all over the state evenly. We are not. 2 Million of us live in Perth, which alone covers about 75% of WA's population. And within Perth, our population density is on a par with just about any other mid-sized city. Beyond Perth, about 20% of the remaining 25% are going to be in a collection of half a dozen regional towns. Again, those towns would feel fairly familiar to someone from a small town in lots of places.
The bulk of that area is nothing. Desert and rocks and the very occasional hole in the ground (mining site).
In the regions we live, we aren't that different from other places. What made us different through the pandemic is the policy of closing the border to outsiders. Most places didn't do that. As a result, we mostly lived through 2020 and 2021 without having to worry about Covid 19. A few times, a case got past quarantine, and we had a mini lockdown for a week or so until it was contained. Then, back to normal.