Every time I hear someone say it was God’s plan when someone dies I always ask how do you know God’s plan is not to save people by providing masks and a safe and effective vaccine.
So far no one has been able to answer.
I’ve also asked how can they be sure that God didn’t send the virus to test the whole love thy neighbor thing and we’re all failing the test.
Nope, God has a plan but that’s not it. They know, trust them.
I like how the pastor said the three deaths were unfortunate. Is he saying God’s plan is unfortunate? Sounds like he’s questioning God’s plan.
Great commentary by a doctor in Australia on capitalism’s heartless, mindless, oligarch-serving handling of the pandemic.
In a way, “the economy” is really code for movement, the continual displacement of people and things for the purposes of creating profit. Restricting movement – the most powerful weapon against any novel pathogen – impedes the efficient creation of profit. By convincing the bulk of the herd that it is only the weaker animals at the edge that will be picked off by predators, the bulk continues on. No matter that this is not true and that it is a swathe of the bulk itself that is eliminated: population growth will soon fix that in a few years. The essential thing is to keep the herd moving.
Several decades of libertarian political philosophy have resulted in the partial destruction of the idea of collective fates and collective action. All that matters is the individual, who is mendaciously instructed they must keep moving and abandon the weak for the sake of “the economy”, a construct whose purpose increasingly appears to be to deliver excessive profit to fewer and fewer oligarchs.
I always get a sense that when people say “underlying health conditions” there is an element of moral condemnation there, like “It was their own fault for being so fat, or for not getting enough exercise, or for getting AIDS, or for getting lung cancer.” but also “It was their own fault for getting old, or leukemia. They must have done something to deserve those things.”
Yeah, fuck those “well they have underlying” people. Kill poor, kill the old, kill the disabled, kill minorities.
Fuck them. Jacinda Ardern was right when she said none of the people in the state she ran was the correct number to allow to die from a preventable disease.
I read some articles that said that this escalation in the number of cases in Europe was already expected because of the winter and the low adherence of certain groups to the vaccine. These experts also said that we can expect more cases next year here in the Southern Hemisphere. The hope is that the large number of people vaccinated doesn’t let things get catastrophic.
Some people may have expected it, but for the most part the rates really have outpaced the experts’ forecasts. Take a look at https://covid19forecasthub.eu and see what the official forecasts that were issued in early October were predicting. In places like Germany and Austria the current rate is well above the range of forecasts that were presented with an estimated 95% confidence interval.
Edit: you can also check out the forecasts for the US at https://covid19scenariomodelinghub.org which has also been pretty far off. If you look back at previous rounds of forecasts issued in March, May and July the actual number of cases were well above what was predicted each time so I don’t have much confidence in their latest, somewhat rosy forecast that was issued at the end of August.
Predictions are hard, especially those involving the future.
