COVID retrospective: what has surprised you?

The Public Square
101

I wouldn’t retract just yet.

When the government response to the pandemic began many of us were reminded of 9/11. And what’s been true since 9/11 is that the new restrictions at airports became permanent fixtures of life. Based on that alone, right wingers like me began to assume that we were entering a new normal. Because overreacting in a spirit of fear is a sign of a decadent, immoral and declining nation. Sodom was immoral and also easily frightened and beaten in war.

I would love to be proven wrong. I believe I eventually will be. But I will wait and see. What’s being done to schoolchildren is just awful, but if you think about it, that too is a sign of our decadence. Nobody thinks of the children.

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102

Yeah. 12 months ago I would have agreed with you. And I still kind of think that the restrictions have to come off at some point. But as Ben points out, I still take my shoes off at airport checkpoints and everywhere I travel. I think they have a point.

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103

I think, in a sense, that’s up to the response of the populations of various countries. I very honestly believe that fundamental transformation of society is the desired endgame. The change of human society into a technocratically administrated global governance structure that affects all of its parts. Economic, governmental, cultural and even human (biology and otherwise.)

One may ask, “Who in their right mind would desire that type of endgame?” Skepticism of such things is understandable. I think the actual answer is hardly anybody in terms of numbers. Therein lies part of the issue, so much of the actual structure of things at the present time allows for a situation where a very tiny tail of psychopathy (in a human society bell curve of sorts) ends up as a kind of rudder for the long term direction and course of many institutions that are not populated by people bent on anything like planetary tyranny. I think bringing these things about takes far fewer men and women desiring such things and acting in concert in ways that are far less cartoonish in their coordination than we tend to imagine.

They will, of course, fail. Like those who defied God at Babel it may be when they believe they’re closest to their objectives.
I think and state all these things with cheerful calmness and no fever of mind. I just think it’s the best explanation for so many things. Perhaps better put, I think Lewis’ “Space Trilogy” is one of the most profoundly meaningful works of fiction I’ve ever read. Hence my titling of my other thread. (shameless plug :grinning:)
I also think that there are dangers involved in recognizing the brilliance and extreme applicability of Lewis’ work there. And dangers in the best and most truthful research into the inter-relationship of some of these topics. In some ways, more so than in less-than-accurate research and discussions on the same topics. Not that I’m an expert. I’m certainly not.

I try to maintain a Biblical balance and faithfulness in thinking about these things, though. Even from a seemingly less than mainstream view of the current COVID stuff. My own view is that those who actively desire the full-scale change of human society with medically centered justifications as part of the means to do so have already suffered severe setbacks. Their attempts to continue their program in our era, though, are very far from concluded.

104

The optimistic endgame is that eventually everyone who’s left will have some degree of immunity, either through infection or vaccination. At that point Covid will be just a minor nuisance like the common cold, and there will be no more reason for protective measures. The pessimistic scenario is that the virus continues to mutate faster than our immunity can keep up, in which case there is no end. Bottom line, God will continue to pour out judgment until He is finished.

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105

Freida,

Am I provoked? I think I’d rather say ‘concerned.’ My concerns are twofold.

First, there is the emphasis that keeps popping up in your posts. While there has been engagement and discussion between various viewpoints in this thread, simply posting articles that justify (perhaps even rightly!) a skepticism of all things vaccines/lockdowns/restrictions is neither engagement nor discussion. I don’t doubt the validity of skepticism, but how do the varied ‘gotcha’ articles justifying skepticism help the conversation here? Have you engaged at all with the articles or posts that give the opposite perspective? What is it you feel the rest of us are missing that your articles provide? And how do these articles help us honour those whom God had set in authority over us (even if we end up disagreeing with them)?

Second, I will admit that comments to the effect of ‘because science….and conspiracy theorists,’ ‘the claims of the pharmaceuticals,’ and ‘big pharma’ make me very uncomfortable. Do we know that ‘big pharma’ is really behind all this? Is the current vaccine really just about money? And what’s the record among political conservatives regarding conspiracy theories (kraken anyone?) in the last few years? Of course there are valid reasons for questioning the current narrative, just as there are valid reasons for submitting to these restrictions without feeling compelled to rebel. But reductionistic and dismissive comments don’t help advance the conversation among Christians.

I think @Joel made this point earlier, but our response to these things is not really about covid or a vaccine - for any of us. I rather suspect you have had concerns about vaccines well before this crisis came along, just as I have had concerns about governmental overreach. Yet as Christians we have the responsibility to be thinking theologically and ethically first and foremost, above even thinking medically/scientifically. As I mentioned earlier in the thread, for many of us, to get the shot or not is not primarily a medical/scientific decision. Most of us simply aren’t qualified to make an informed judgment on the scientific side of this discussion - and we need to be willing to admit it. But there are plenty of other grounds that we are qualified to use as our basis of judgment. For some it’s a submission to the governing authorities issue. For others it’s a loving the body of Christ issue. For others still it’s a loving your neighbour issue. A continual stream of skepticism undermines the validity of these decisions.

Maybe it’s not your intention, but the ‘here’s why you can’t trust big pharma’ approach seems to paint those who might disagree (or who don’t disagree but have chosen differently anyway) with the ‘unthinking masses’ brush.

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106

Dear Freida,

First, thank you for sharing the source link with your post.

Second, @aaron.prelock has really done a lot of the work I should have done as a moderator with you, and he has my thanks. To illustrate why, let me first respond to this latest link you posted about a change to one of the Covid tests, and then I’ll say a few words to you personally.

I think you are reading way more into that link than is warranted. It appears to me that they have newer, better Covid tests, and now there are multiplex tests available that can test for both flu and Covid at the same time, rather than having to run separate tests. That’s how I read that webpage. I don’t know how you read it, but clearly you are getting something very different from it. Regardless, one thing is clear: that page doesn’t implicate any flu tests as problematic, and the flu tests, many of which are simply run in a doctors office, did not suddenly stop working correctly, regardless of what this particular change in Covid tests means.

So let’s just take a look at the flu tests.

Here is what the 2017-18 flu season test results looked like:

Screen Shot 2021-07-28 at 09.18.08
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Whereas, here is what the 2020-21 flu season test results has looked like:

Screen Shot 2021-07-28 at 09.19.00
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So the conspiracy theorist immediately declares that they must have basically stopped testing for flu, since everybody was focused on testing for Covid. But the investigator of facts looks to see whether that is true. And what does he find? The first chart above says in its footnote that over the course of 33 weeks, 1.21 million flu tests were administered. So how many were administered this season? This table, (which is the data behind the second chart above) shows 1.27 million flu tests administered (1.11 million if we narrow it down to 33 weeks, to be the same as the previous one).

Conclusion: flu has basically disappeared. Essentially a 0% positive test rate vs a peak of over 25%. A peak of about 125 cases vs 20,000 cases.

So far I’ve seen no evidence the conspiracy theorists were on to anything. And this is yet another example of sharing misinformation that has been driving me nuts from both conservatives and liberals for the last year and a half.

Frankly, I do not see you as a canary in the coal mine, but rather as the boy who cried wolf. You are gullible for accepting this conspiracy theory and spreading misinformation, when the slightest bit of research shows it should be ignored.

My recommendation to you is to stop reading and talking about Covid, Covid shots, masks, or anything related. You’ve made up your mind. Nothing will change it. That’s fine. So live your life, submitting to the authorities God has placed over you without bitterness, honoring them by appealing to them when you think they are wrong, with the channels God has given you to do that. You’re not interested in learning or being taught, but only in justifying your position, and you are working yourself up needlessly and being led astray by those with ulterior motives who are seeking to gain from you. No, not Big Pharma, but those “conservatives” who are looking to have a following for themselves.

Just ignore this stuff. I know, you’ll have to pay attention to what the latest rules are. And you and/or people you love may well have to choose between getting a shot or losing a job. If you truly are bound in conscience that you think it would be wrong to get this vaccine, then suffer the consequences of refusing it joyfully for Christ as 1 Peter teaches. (Though I tell you it is needless, since your conscience is bound wrongly. Nevertheless, as a weaker sister, I do not condemn you for refusing to get a shot. If it helps to hear it, I haven’t gotten one either.) If you are not bound in conscience, then if it comes to it, get the shot without fear, not because you trust your boss or the medical establishment, but because you trust God. And you know that He knows that every authority He has placed in your life is sinful and has the capability and inclination to abuse their authority. Yet you know just as surely that He will take care of you, because He has promised to. Even though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, you should fear no evil, for He is with you. Though every man be proved a liar, God’s word will be proved true.

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107

I know you haven’t gotten the response you want to that topic (yet?), but it really is another topic, so please keep that stuff over there unless more directly related.

In fact, let’s all try to reign this topic in a bit. We moderators have let it get a bit out of hand. Though it’s a wide-ranging topic by nature, and thus hard to see obvious lines of “off-topic,” I think we’ve let it go too far.

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108

I looked into this a bit a few months ago, and one proxy metric I found fascinating was that the number of children hospitalized for respiratory problems went from normal during 2019-2020 to essentially nil in 2020-2021.

The decline in flu also seems to date to very, very early in the Covid crisis, March of 2020.

It does indeed appear that Covid drove influenza out of its ecological niche, and I’d love to know why. A parallel example in my mind is deer ticks driving wood ticks out of their ecological niche in the New England woods. How does this happen?

Germane to the OP, this surprises me very much.

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109

Could some of that have been to do with what sort of patients the hospitals were accepting? Genuinely asking. Here hospitals were urging people not to come in for almost anything, and people didn’t. A&E (ER) wards were virtually empty for months at a time. Part of that is from people being stuck at home (so less opportunity to get hurt or fall ill from catching something from others). But there was also pressure not to come in and fear that going to hospital would expose you to covid.

110

Full disclosure: my husband got all the shots, including anthrax. He’s not getting this one because he doesn’t see it as “benign vaccine technology”.

“Have you engaged at all with the articles or posts that give the opposite perspective?”

The prevailing ideas are so prevalent I did not see a need to contend with them.

“What is it you feel the rest of us are missing that your articles provide?”

My intention certainly wasn’t to imply that. I apologize for giving that impression.

“Do we know that ‘big pharma’ is really behind all this? Is the current vaccine really just about money?”

I don’t know. Again, I’m sorry for implying that I do know. If it’s just another “vaccine”, I think there’d be less debate.

I am on here because I think this is the least “unthinking masses” on the planet. I don’t know how that got across but it obviously did so I’m signing off.

111

I think a much more plausible reason is that the self-imposed and government-imposed isolation very much reduced transmission of the flu.

112

Pastor Bayly,
I hear you. This is my last post.

113

I didn’t read through all the responses but I see this thread has a ton of them. I will just answer the OP.

The thing I didn’t expect was how Covid would divide brothers that are so close on many other issues. I also didn’t expect people to be so fearful for so long.

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114

I am not an expert on this and I’m not at all sure I could turn up what I was looking at months ago, but I doubt it. Influenza really wallops kids and Covid just doesn’t. Lots of kids get really acute respiratory problems from influenza, the types of things that aren’t really optional from a health care perspective.

I thought that too, but influenza’s R0 and Covid’s R0 are very similar, and Covid wasn’t having much trouble spreading last spring, summer, fall and winter in spite of the various restrictions on interacting. If memory serves, flu rates started to fall pretty fast, even before there was much in the way of even self-imposed restrictions. It’s possible that the two diseases vary enough in their transmission (e.g. maybe flu via fomite and Covid via aerosol or something like that) that the restrictions affected flu transmission but not Covid. I don’t hold to this theory as a conviction, but there’s something to the whole thing that I’d love to see a thorough explanation of someday.

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115

What is most surprising to me is how hard facts are to interpret.

Take for example, this article, which is very surprising in its own right (to some of us) as it points out some lies about how vaccines are effective:

In particular, I learned that I was wrong to think that by getting the vaccine, if you then went on to get Covid, you’d have lesser symptoms, and be less likely to die. It turns out both of these things are false.

So here’s the fact: A generic vaccinated person who gets Covid is more likely to die than a generic unvaccinated person who gets Covid.

The thing that is most surprising to me is that this fact is still very hard to interpret. In particular, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t get vaccinated, as counter-intuitive as that might seem. I just can’t get over how easy it is to misinterpret facts.

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116

A lot of that article was over my head, but I’m trying to understand what the big takeaway is here, beyond just “Stop selling the vaccines using untrue information.”

Is the big takeaway that the new restrictions are justified in light of the data? That our public health authorities are not being overly cautious but prudent?

I still think adults should, all things considered, get vaccinated. But if the vaccines are not as effective as we think they are, where does that leave us?

117

It’s one of those articles that doesn’t fit into either “side’s” rhetoric. Flagged by the liberals for being “anti-vaxx,” your takeaway is that he’s arguing for masking up. Lol.

My main takeaway was simply that the “stacked” benefit of lesser symptoms if you get the vaccine and then get Covid (probably?) isn’t true.

I find it hard to interpret after that, which is my main point. Sometimes facts are just inconvenient and hard to get a good takeaway from. Even though the vaccine clearly saves many lives. And even though it appears to be less effective as time goes on.

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118

I sort of keep up with two sides of right leaning media. There’s a lot of what I would call hucksterism in conservative media that is telling people the vaccines are very dangerous or a scam or a big plot. I tune that out.

The other side of conservative media which would include National Review, Jonah Goldberg, the Dispatch, Hugh Hewitt – these guys are pro vaccine and they counter the hucksters. They’ve taken Covid seriously this whole time. But a lot of them are saying that upping restrictions now, after we have effective vaccines, is ridiculous.

What if it isn’t ridiculous? This is my question.

119

I know. I wasn’t accusing you of anything. I was just laughing at the reality of how that article is received.

I think the fact is that we have yet to see whether doing anything more is ridiculous, but I expect it is, given the drastic drops in Delta cases in India and Great Britain for no apparent reason.

However, I think we can be quite a bit more confident that some things would be ridiculous (like closing schools.)

120

The quoted Tweet in the article (“If you get Covid and you’ve been vaccinated, you’re about 100 times less likely to die.”) is surprising to me because it makes an unwarranted conclusion if all Dr. Frieden had to base it on was the clinical trial.

In particular, I learned that I was wrong to think that by getting the vaccine, if you then went on to get Covid, you’d have lesser symptoms, and be less likely to die. It turns out both of these things are false.

Thinking that way could be unwarranted but not necessarily false. The Pfizer trial was not designed to test severity of symptoms of vaccinated infected. It was designed to test the safety and efficacy of the vaccine. “Efficacy” is used in its pharmacological sense and is only concerned with preventing symptomatic Covid-19.

So here’s the fact: A generic vaccinated person who gets Covid is more likely to die than a generic unvaccinated person who gets Covid.

I’m not sure where you drew that conclusion from. The key sentence from the article addressing this says: “The death rate if infected was always going to be higher in the vaccinated groups if most of the vaccinated were those likely to die in the first place.”

The Pfizer trial had zero deaths among vaccinated infected so there is no data to infer from. The article says about the UK data that “Without careful control and understanding, one might erroneously conclude the Delta variant is is more lethal if you’ve been vaccinated…” The article does a good job explaining the so-called Acceptable Catastrophic Error and arguing against the use of such in public efforts at vaccine promotion.