So Glock, and with respect and not confrontational), why is it you think the naysayers (purposefully chosen word to not offend you personally) think the experts are not to be trusted? Please don't regurgitate political speil, I'm delving a little deeper than that. The treatment for rabies is painful, but most decide to undergo in light of the consequences. Rabies prevention from pets (I did not say wild animals) is fairly simple and cheap and mandated in most localities. Why not take cheap, minorly inobtrusive measures (no, I do not mean closing the economy, just doing smart distancing, etc.) until things are clearer?
Originally Posted by reddog1951
I won't dig into my personal life too much, but I have what I would call a "technical job". Having a technical job, I witness things that happen that are similar to what's happening with COVID. On my side, it complicates and slow things down. With COVID, I believe these problems are killing people:
1.) Unwillingness by the experts to admit they're still "figuring it out".
Due to egos and positions held, sometimes technical professionals won't admit that they're out of their depth, bamboozled, or just plain still working something out. Common belief is that it's bad for the morale for the populace, but I'm of the opinion that optimistically-painted honesty is more helpful.
For example, the ventilators people wouldn't shut up about 6 months ago are actually fucking useless now that they understand better how the virus works. You can't pump air into lungs that are so inflamed that they're physically incapable, and you can't get oxygen into your brain when your blood has thickened up into gravy.
2.) Non-Technical People Making Technical Decisions.
Putting COVID Patients in Nursing Homes in NY is an extraordinary example of this.
I don't besmirch Trump's response to COVID because I think he handled it the way he should have - This is something that should be handled at the state level. (Dems disagree, but usually Dems want a big and strong national government.) The problem then was that we then had 50 Non-Technical People making technical decisions, and a lot of them went poorly for a lot of reasons.
3.) Fucking armchair experts.
Jesus Christ. Literally this whole debacle about people and the masks are people not minding their own fucking business. The no-maskers are literally doing it to antagonize the maskers because they don't like being told what to do, and the maskers are doing it because they like being a bunch of nosy, bossy assholes.
4.) The media sensationalizing every.little.thing
Remember "covid toe"? Remember "murder hornets"? This brood of vipers are so hungry for a story that they'll take any little side comment made by a nurse somewhere and print it like it's God's truth. They did nothing but exacerbate the problem.
Then there's social media, which is such a fucking wild west and in my opinion a social disease that there were good, honest voices out there getting silenced because they didn't perfectly align with the social media company's understanding of the facts.
Let me repeat that one more time - LEGITIMATE voices were being silenced on SOCIAL MEDIA, because SOCIAL MEDIA, who is non-technical, DECIDED that the LEGITIMATE voice was wrong.
This is Dr. Seheult, who runs a Youtube channel called "MedCram":
https://www.youtube.com/user/MEDCRAMvideos
He figured out how this thing works on the chemical level months before the CDC and WHO came forward. Google decided that he was telling "alternative facts" and blew away a bunch of his videos.
So in the end, you have experts who're out of their depth and need time not willing to admit it, world leaders making detrimental decisions, the media blowing everything out of proportion, leading to people fucking assaulting each other over a simple disagreement.
And this isn't even going into the bullshit political maneuvering that happened because we're in an election year. That didn't help either.