I agree, far too many of them anyway.

The strangest thing for me is watching shows/films with crowds of people in public places with no masks. It already feels like ages ago that that was the norm. I hope we can return to that some day, but I'm not hopeful that it will be anytime soon.

dunno
I don't even get what's the point of youtube live or twitch live
of you can chat with the streamer, anyone seen one of those crowded chats know that is unusable

this lockdown is bs
people die all the time anyway, and it doesn't look like population is dropping

The answer is sadly "yes" for the forseeable future if anybody has any sense (and even if they dont).

Hello, how you all doing?

Post has been edited due to safety reasons. :)

You may find that what you thought was true... is not

In general there's probably truth to his/her comment. But of course it looks now quite possible, even likely, that this particular pandemic originated due to dangerous lab experiments and lack of sufficient safety precautions.
Highly interesting article about this (imo credible, with disturbing implications):
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/

Ethics aside, there is some validity to this idea because human demand for products by commerce is what's fueling industrial activities that are displacing animals from their natural habitat and into closer quarters with humans. However, even if you Thanos snapped 50-80% of the population, the same meat demand per capita would be kept constant. So yes, there'd be a decreased in frequency of outbreaks as a function of population, but doesn't solve the root issues. Also, scientists and doctors are supposed to be ethical to be seen as credible and trustworthy. Any expert advocating for people to die, without increasing quality of life of these victims, isn't very trustworthy.

Unfortunately, if you want to curb these zoonotic diseases and mutations, it will be a multi-pronged effort requiring cooperation for everyone involved:

- Governments to invest more in ecological disease and epidemiology research and technology: $105 billion USD spent on this research from 2000-2017 from G20 countries yet this pandemic is estimated to wipe out $8.5 trillion in global economic output from this May 2020 estimate. The same sentiment is also supported by this NGO zoologist, who also estimates the impact of the pandemic is two orders of magnitude higher than increased research spending.
- GIve WHO supranational authority to conduct their own independent research and mitigation techniques free from all political intervention like what they did in West Africa's ebola epidemic(s), contrasted with China with respect to SARS and COVID-19
- Mitigate the externalities of naturally destructive industrial activities like urbanization, deforestation, mining, etc. so animals and their diseases can stay where they are
- Banning wet market trades and enforcement of the black market bushmeat hunting and trade
- Banning and enforcement of relocating animals from their natural habitats (e.g., exotic pet ownership)
- Banning all high-risk animal tourism (e.g., bat cave tours/spelunking, bringing animals to agricultural shows)
- Improving technology and reducing production costs of lab-grown meat to increase its accessibility
- Remote ecological disease expert dispatch efforts to farms who suspect there are new diseases with their animals
- Push for lower population growth in developing countries by increasing more spending in education, sex education, and expanding economies (increase GDP/capita)
- Changing human market behaviours by encouraging high-density living spaces compared to cheaper suburbs
- Increased regulations on the cleanliness and crowdedness of intensive animal farming
- Improving general population's understanding of these causes in their educational curriculum or campaigns to increase their awareness

Some people may not like some of these ideas especially if their livelihoods are at stake are violates their political ideals. Unfortunately, zoonotic diseases don't respect human emotions. The less outbreaks becoming pandemics, the better it is for everyone involved.

Yes, everyone's interested in the findings. When the past ~13 notable outbreaks in the past century weren't directly manmade and there's plenty of coverups and disinformation, the rest of the world didn't know there was a possibility it was a result of a lab leak.

Never believe a narrative that does not in fact invite dissent and rigorous argument

That's simply not true. Meat consumption has always been a very variable factor, depending on wealth, environment, culture, climate and lots of other stuff.
In the Western civilisations meat consumption is extreme compared to the past, and also other, contemporary cultures. We fucking eat way too much meat. Because we don't know what it takes, and don't want to know.

Even my parents still remember times when meat was for the weekends - and it was fine. Nowadays it's on most people's* table every day. It's and industrial product available in abundance.

If we, as a society, could could cut down meat consumption, it would help the environment, our health, and the cattle too - and a great deal. But most people are too strung up in their own problems to even think about it.


*Western world, obviously

Western civilization has always had a good portion going against the lockdown mentality, but as more and more people are getting vaccinated the idea of maintaining this against 6000 to a couple million years of human evolution is not going to fly. Governments can control international travel (and that is their job), however, internally, this is an absolute mess that's already greatly falling apart, especially within the US.

EDIT: And i want to be clear here: the fact that all this happened at the scale that it did was the result of governments failing to do their job as international travel controllers. We know this for a multitude of reasons, one of which is SARS-CoV(-1) back in 2003. What changed between 2003 and 2019 that resulted in this? Clearly we need to figure out what that was.
Historically, we also had stunted growth, brain damage, and other things due to our diets. I'm not saying that we're certainly better off now with our consumption of meat, but I don't think we actually bothered to figure out what the levels of each food we need really is, especially in regards to activity. We have some very, very loose standards, but they're not nearly as scientifically rigorous as we'd like to think, as evidenced by the fact we have a good portion of "experts" on "both sides" of certain debates arguing over things such as eggs. And frankly, there's too much money ni this to get some real science. However, i'd suggest against going with some obscure standard and saying "they were fine," because i'm sure we could find situations when they actually were not.

Yes, of course. That practice completely violates the current practice of how scientific knowledge is disseminated to community knowledge by experts through intensive scrutiny, skepticism, and peer review. It's obvious with the recent findings from that US intelligence report that the Chinese government still hasn't been transparently sharing the full timeline and its series of relevant events.

Had this critical info been known a year ago, some scientists would've been as keen then to get to the bottom of the true origins as they do now. Let's wait on the report's findings to confirm suspicions before we jump to any conclusions since the wet market hypothesis is still very likely. The rest of my post is all still very relevant with respect to the other non-COVID-19 zoonotic diseases in the past century.

There's no evidence of human to human transmission. I'm just going to point out that ethics seems to have left the conversation a long, long time ago with science.

However, i do agree with your ethical standpoint, except that "quality of life" is probably not something our current scientists would be a good judge on.

That said, there are things we can do about this industrial activity without cutting down production, as well. New in the news, Donald Trump is the reason why we didn't take the Wuhan Lab theory (not "conspiracy theory" anymore) seriously. While the jury's not out, the evidence from the very, very beginning suggests it was from the lab. More evidence is coming out as such. I've been learning new things, too, like how the coronavirus project in the Wuhan lab (which we know was going on because they admitted as much numerous times, and they even admitted to attempting to make chimeras that could potentially infect humans [to be fair, this was part of the research of predicting outbreaks of actual zoonotic strains]) actually wasn't taking place in the level 4 area, either. I could go on, but I don't think it's worth it at this point. I'm actually pleasantly surprised that people are actually taking the time to throw personal interests in China aside to actually investigate it finally. I don't have much hope, because of those interests, but it's a nice start.

most likely a result of rationing.
up until WW2 (and im talking post industrial revolution here and even preceeding it) meat was on the plate at least once a day in most households across eastern europe at least (yes, even the poor ones - though the quality and source differed greatly).