Re: COVID and probabilities
Le 2025-08-02 03:47, gregor herrmann a écrit :
On Mon, 28 Jul 2025 14:11:23 +0200, Julien Plissonneau Duquène wrote:
There must certainly be good reasons that explain why an overwhelming
majority of health authorities around the world relaxed or dropped
their isolation policies.
For health authorities? Probably lack of political support.
Not sure about that one, they were already used to lacking political
support anyway and in many countries they are pretty good at resisting
undue (and sometimes due...) political pressure.
Subtitle: How politicies cave in to Business wanting workers back at
factories and offices (no matter if they are sick or contagious for
others) and right-wing lunatics (carrying Russian flags on their
anti-vax demos) in the vain hope to keep their votes.
There is a good potential for many discussions in that subtitle ;)
The current RTO and sick leave reduction trends are indeed problematic.
But missing a few days of work that will still be there when you are
back is not quite the same as missing most of a social event that you
are not sure to be able to attend again soon if ever, and for which you
made sacrifices (e.g. money or vacation days).
And lobbies, politicians and various crackpots (including some actual
scientists) contributed a lot to the loss of trust in scientific
authorities that occured in most places in the last few years. Most
people can't understand the massive uncertainties in the current
scientific knowledge of the disease, there is a lot of disinformation
that is sometimes relayed by politicians and "experts", and many people
end up with suspicion and a fairly biased perception of risks as a
result. And by that I mean the same kind of bias as in the fear of
flying, where one is orders of magnitude more likely to die on the road
to the airport than on a commercial flight, but they don't even realize
that it's that part of their trip that they should fear.
There is a good example of the issues at stake in this article [1],
which is a read that I also recommend to the Community Team ;)
[1]:
https://theconversation.com/game-theory-explains-why-reasonable-parents-make-vaccine-choices-that-fuel-outbreaks-256975
PS: Talking about science here's an interesting blog post by an
Austrian MD summarizing new research on brain damages by COVID-19:
https://allcoronavirusesarebastards.digitalpress.blog/covid-19-strukturelle-schaden-des-gehirns-und-die-kognitiven-fahigkeiten/
(Text in German but the papers are of course in English.)
It's interesting that he acknowledges that one of the hypotheses for the
things that contributed to measurable brain damage in people is the
effect of lockdowns and isolation policies. Some others are happy to
promptly dismiss that as "nah, all these people who pretend they didn't
get COVID just got COVID like all the others and they just didn't test
or didn't have symptoms, and so that's obviously the COVID that explains
all the damage".
Cheers,
--
Julien Plissonneau Duquène
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