Lockdown Protestors

For philosophical reflections on the COVID-19 pandemic. How can philosophy help us to understand it, to combat it and to survive it?

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Sculptor
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Re: Lockdown Protestors

Post by Sculptor »

Of course in the USA, everyone who gets the disease, and everyone who dies from it ALL has a least one underlying condition: they are Americans
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vegetariantaxidermy
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Re: Lockdown Protestors

Post by vegetariantaxidermy »

Sculptor wrote: Sat Apr 25, 2020 2:13 pm Of course in the USA, everyone who gets the disease, and everyone who dies from it ALL has a least one underlying condition: they are Americans
What a hypocritical racist penis you are. Someone dares to mention that the virus comes from China (which it does) and you spew forth all your righteous PCfuckturd indignation. Ughh! PCturds are the most loathesome vomit on the planet, and such conceited sociopaths that they don't even care and would rather die than admit when they are wrong (the only decent thing about them).
You are such a cliche. Why don't you try thinking for yourself?
Gary Childress
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Re: Age

Post by Gary Childress »

Sculptor wrote: Sat Apr 25, 2020 9:55 am
Gary Childress wrote: Sat Apr 25, 2020 12:08 am
VT is not from the US. Looking at the stats from the website above it appears that VT may be right. It looks like even in the US the vast, overwhelming majority of deaths have been people with underlying health conditions. Although that's still pretty saddening and concerning.
VT did not say "vast majority", she said "ALL"
Yes, but my point is, where she lives it could very well be that all of those who died had underlying conditions. It's not outside the possibility presented by the data on that site you linked to.
commonsense
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Re: Lockdown Protestors

Post by commonsense »

Up-thread, HQ has lobbied more than once for the idea that we didn’t have to quarantine in response to Coronavirus, because we have prolonged the time it will take to get past this virus and because there has been only one healthcare system that has been overwhelmed by the volume of Coronavirus patients. (Please correct me, HQ, if I have grossly misrepresented your point of view.)

HQ is almost entirely right.

If it were not for mitigation, there would have been more care providers who were under-resourced to meet demands.

But if we had just advised diligent isolation for the elderly, the immunocompromised and those with debilitating chronic medical conditions, then we’d have protected those who are most vulnerable while allowing the economy to carry on unhindered for the most part.

We would have faced the resource crisis with the same urgency we’ve seen ‘til now. The healthiest among our human populations would have borne the brunt of the disease and survived as a better percentage than would be the case for the sick and elderly among us.
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vegetariantaxidermy
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Re: Age

Post by vegetariantaxidermy »

Gary Childress wrote: Sat Apr 25, 2020 8:43 pm
Sculptor wrote: Sat Apr 25, 2020 9:55 am
Gary Childress wrote: Sat Apr 25, 2020 12:08 am

VT is not from the US. Looking at the stats from the website above it appears that VT may be right. It looks like even in the US the vast, overwhelming majority of deaths have been people with underlying health conditions. Although that's still pretty saddening and concerning.
VT did not say "vast majority", she said "ALL"
Yes, but my point is, where she lives it could very well be that all of those who died had underlying conditions. It's not outside the possibility presented by the data on that site you linked to.
That wanker will never admit when he's wrong. My comment was perfectly clear. There was nothing to 'misinterpret'.

'' I don't know about the US but here all of the deaths have been older people with serious underlying medical conditions.''

The PCturd's response to that? ''FALSE''
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FlashDangerpants
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Re: Lockdown Protestors

Post by FlashDangerpants »

commonsense wrote: Sat Apr 25, 2020 9:17 pm But if we had just advised diligent isolation for the elderly, the immunocompromised and those with debilitating chronic medical conditions, then we’d have protected those who are most vulnerable while allowing the economy to carry on unhindered for the most part.
Sorry, but that is utter bullshit. What would happen is a disorderly and rampant spread of a disease that still kills a lot of people while leaving many with lasting damage to their lungs, kidneys, hearts and/or brains. All sorts of horribible headlines about nasty shit happening to people would result in panic, people would stay at home and hunker down and there would be an economic collapse, it would just be a disorderly one, which is not an improvment. This collapse would be further magnified by the widespread belief that the authorities have no control over the situation at all. You can expect much more significant rounds of consumer panic than the pointless acquisition of mountains of arse wipes in those circumstances. You would be lucky if there wasn't a run on the banks (well technically there has been a small one in Russia anyway).

In that circumstance, the governments that failed to protect you with social distancing would get blamed, and people like you would just kid themselves that the sensible distancing measures would have had a lower economic impact as well as a lower death count. Recessions are manageable using the tools to hand at the central banks and other arms of state. Collapsed health services - which would still be a guaranteed outcome of letting this disease run wild - cannot be fixed so easily. You can print money in unlimited quantity, but you can't print nurses.
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vegetariantaxidermy
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Re: Lockdown Protestors

Post by vegetariantaxidermy »

commonsense wrote: Sat Apr 25, 2020 9:17 pm Up-thread, HQ has lobbied more than once for the idea that we didn’t have to quarantine in response to Coronavirus, because we have prolonged the time it will take to get past this virus and because there has been only one healthcare system that has been overwhelmed by the volume of Coronavirus patients. (Please correct me, HQ, if I have grossly misrepresented your point of view.)

HQ is almost entirely right.

If it were not for mitigation, there would have been more care providers who were under-resourced to meet demands.

But if we had just advised diligent isolation for the elderly, the immunocompromised and those with debilitating chronic medical conditions, then we’d have protected those who are most vulnerable while allowing the economy to carry on unhindered for the most part.

We would have faced the resource crisis with the same urgency we’ve seen ‘til now. The healthiest among our human populations would have borne the brunt of the disease and survived as a better percentage than would be the case for the sick and elderly among us.
Some countries have done just that. Old people are also free to isolate themselve as much as they want to. Quarantining an entire country to keep a few sickly ones 'safer' is another thing altogether. Sweden carried on almost as usual and so far it's doing better than the UK. Now that the Northern hemisphere is coming into summer then numbers will probably start to go down.
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Robot Overlord

Post by henry quirk »

Please correct me, HQ, if I have grossly misrepresented your point of view.

You're close enough to win another no prize.

#

Flash,

social distancing

So much wrong here, but I'll just focus on this one lil bit.

Social distancing, at least here in the U.S., is for shit. Haphazard, unevenly enforced, unevenly abided.

If beer virus is the bio-Apocalypse, social distancing ain't done diddly to avert or diminish it.

If beer virus is not the bio-Apocalypse (and it isn't), social distancing, and other indiscriminate mitigation was, is, unnecessary, and counter-productive.

Thing is: we won't have to wait long to see if I'm right.

Come year's end: we'll see what's what.
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henry quirk
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Re: sumthin' old, sumthin' new (bump)

Post by henry quirk »

henry quirk wrote: Sat Apr 25, 2020 4:17 am From George Avery, PhD. MPA

Dr. Avery has a PhD in Health Services Research from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, and has conducted significant research in the area of public health emergency preparedness, including five journal articles and two book chapters on the topic. He has served on several CDC advisory boards, including a panel on preparedness and emergency response centers, and consulted for the Defense Department on Medical Civic Action program doctrine. He has edited a special issue of the research journal Bioterrorism and Biodefense and served as a reviewer for the Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management as well as Disaster Medicine and Public Health. He is a health services researcher with a medical analytics firm in the Midwest, and has formerly been a professor with the public health program at Purdue and worked from 1990-2000 with the Arkansas Department of Health’s Division of Public Health Laboratories.

We are seeing a panic reaction towards the newly emerged SARS-COVID-2 [Wuhan] epidemic, marked by panic buying of items including the much-joked about toilet paper, drastic action by political figures that often impinges on basic civil rights, and potentially devastating lasting economic impact. Much of this has been fueled by naïve and sensationalist reporting of fatality rates, such as a March 10, 2020 report by the Bloomberg news service that implies that 3.4-3.5% of infected individuals die (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... rus-update ). This has caused comparisons to the 1919 Influenza A:H1N1 pandemic and its 2.5% case fatality rate, which would qualify as a level 5 event on the CDC’s Pandemic Severity Index (PSI) and has led to a panicked overreaction worldwide. This case fatality rate, however, to a trained epidemiologist is obviously a significant overestimation of the actual fatality rate from the disease.

Ascertainment bias is a systematic error in statistical estimation of a population parameter resulting from errors in measurement - usually, in undermeasurement of a parameter. In this case, we are underestimating the actual number of cases in the population, which is the denominator in the calculation of the estimated case fatality rate. We are accurately estimating deaths, but to get the case fatality rate, we divide deaths by our estimate of the number of cases. Because that it too low due to measurement error, the estimate of the case fatality rate is too high.

For example, for a hypothetical disease if we have three deaths and observed ten cases, then the case fatality rate is 30% (3/10=0.3 or 30%). If, however, there were actually 300 cases, and only 10 were observed and reported, ascertainment bias has led us to underestimate the cases and overestimate the case fatality rate, which is actually 1% (3/300=0.01 or 1%).

In this case, in the absence of population-based screening to more actually estimate the total number of cases, we are only counting cases who are sick enough to seek health care -- almost all disease reports are made by healthcare professionals. We are missing people who have no more than a cold or who are infected but show no symptoms, individuals who almost certainly make up the overwhelming majority of actual cases. Thus, as in my hypothetical example, we are overestimating the case fatality rate for the disease.

There is, however, data available on SARS-COVID-2 [Wuhan] that allows us to get a better grasp on the actual case fatality rates for the virus.

One case is that of the cruise ship Diamond Princess, which achieved some notoriety from the well-publicized outbreak among its 3711 passengers and crew in January and February of 2006. Held aboard in constricted quarters, the population was subject to 3068 polymerase chain reaction (pcr) tests, which identified 634 individuals (17%) as infected, with over half of these infections (328 ) producing no symptoms. Seven infected passengers died, all of them over the age of 70. Adjusting the data for age, researchers at the London Institute of Tropical Medicine have estimated a fatality rate per infection (IFR) for the epidemic in China of 0.5% (95% CI: 0.2-1.2%) during the same period. This is far below the earlier estimates of 3.4% or greater that were promoting panic over the epidemic. See Russell et al, Estimating the infection and case fatality ratio for COVID-19 using age-adjusted data from the outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, MedRXIV 2020 at https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101 ... 2.full.pdf.

South Korea has also implemented far wider population-based screening than the US, expanding their screening past suspected cases to voluntary population screening in geographies frequented by identified cases. As of March 15, as Stanford University economist Richard Epstein has noted, they performed over 235,000 tests and identified 8, 162 infections with 75 deaths (CFR=0.91%). Again, only about 10% of the deaths were in the population under the age of 60. See https://www.hoover.org/research/coronav ... t-pandemic . While their population screening efforts were far better than that of the United States, this was still not a broad-based screening effort (such as was used on the Diamond Princess), being biased because while it looked at a broader population, it still was enriched with cases by looking only at a segment of the population with a higher risk. Still, the case fatality rate is significantly below the 3.4% rate that caused the public panic.

What we are likely seeing, in my estimation, is an epidemic with a real case fatality rate between 0.2 and 0.5%, which is similar to the 1957 Asian Influenza A:H2N2 or 1968 Hong Kong Influenza A:H3N2 pandemics, which were also essentially virgin field respiratory epidemics. These pandemics rate, not as PSI5 events, but as PSI2 events on the CDC scale. They are certainly atypical and more severe than a PSI1 event (such as a routine seasonal flu epidemic), but not a shattering event like the 1919 influenza A:H1N1 pandemic. These earlier pandemics essentially tripled the number of deaths due to influenza experienced annually, and were posed little long-term economic or other damage to the population despite being handled without the extreme measures that are currently being adopted or proposed by political figures. Like those pandemic events, SARS-COVID-2 [Wuhan] has its most significant impact on elderly or otherwise compromised individuals, with few fatalities observed in the population under the age of 60. From what we have observed, half of those infected show no symptoms, 40% show mild symptoms such as a cold, and only about 2% advance to serious or critical illness. What is needed now is for politicians and the population to pause, take a deep breath, and address the epidemic with rational measures, such as social distancing of the older population, ring screening around identified cases, quarantine of identified infected individuals, and adequate hospital triage systems to protect other patients and health care staff rom infection in order to preserve our ability to treat the most severe cases. This is a strategy identified by myself and colleagues at Purdue in 2007 to ensure adequate capacity to deal with another true influenza pandemic, and it applies to this one as well.

-----

Scott W. Atlas, MD, is the David and Joan Traitel Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the former chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center.

The tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be entering the containment phase. Tens of thousands of Americans have died, and Americans are now desperate for sensible policymakers who have the courage to ignore the panic and rely on facts. Leaders must examine accumulated data to see what has actually happened, rather than keep emphasizing hypothetical projections; combine that empirical evidence with fundamental principles of biology established for decades; and then thoughtfully restore the country to function.

Five key facts are being ignored by those calling for continuing the near-total lockdown.

Fact 1: The overwhelming majority of people do not have any significant risk of dying from COVID-19.

The recent Stanford University antibody study now estimates that the fatality rate if infected is likely 0.1 to 0.2 percent, a risk far lower than previous World Health Organization estimates that were 20 to 30 times higher and that motivated isolation policies.

In New York City, an epicenter of the pandemic with more than one-third of all U.S. deaths, the rate of death for people 18 to 45 years old is 0.01 percent, or 11 per 100,000 in the population. On the other hand, people aged 75 and over have a death rate 80 times that. For people under 18 years old, the rate of death is zero per 100,000.

Of all fatal cases in New York state, two-thirds were in patients over 70 years of age; more than 95 percent were over 50 years of age; and about 90 percent of all fatal cases had an underlying illness. Of 6,570 confirmed COVID-19 deaths fully investigated for underlying conditions to date, 6,520, or 99.2 percent, had an underlying illness. If you do not already have an underlying chronic condition, your chances of dying are small, regardless of age. And young adults and children in normal health have almost no risk of any serious illness from COVID-19.

Fact 2: Protecting older, at-risk people eliminates hospital overcrowding.

We can learn about hospital utilization from data from New York City, the hotbed of COVID-19 with more than 34,600 hospitalizations to date. For those under 18 years of age, hospitalization from the virus is 0.01 percent per 100,000 people; for those 18 to 44 years old, hospitalization is 0.1 percent per 100,000. Even for people ages 65 to 74, only 1.7 percent were hospitalized. Of 4,103 confirmed COVID-19 patients with symptoms bad enough to seek medical care, Dr. Leora Horwitz of NYU Medical Center concluded "age is far and away the strongest risk factor for hospitalization." Even early WHO reports noted that 80 percent of all cases were mild, and more recent studies show a far more widespread rate of infection and lower rate of serious illness. Half of all people testing positive for infection have no symptoms at all. The vast majority of younger, otherwise healthy people do not need significant medical care if they catch this infection.

Fact 3: Vital population immunity is prevented by total isolation policies, prolonging the problem.

We know from decades of medical science that infection itself allows people to generate an immune response — antibodies — so that the infection is controlled throughout the population by “herd immunity.” Indeed, that is the main purpose of widespread immunization in other viral diseases — to assist with population immunity. In this virus, we know that medical care is not even necessary for the vast majority of people who are infected. It is so mild that half of infected people are asymptomatic, shown in early data from the Diamond Princess ship, and then in Iceland and Italy. That has been falsely portrayed as a problem requiring mass isolation. In fact, infected people without severe illness are the immediately available vehicle for establishing widespread immunity. By transmitting the virus to others in the low-risk group who then generate antibodies, they block the network of pathways toward the most vulnerable people, ultimately ending the threat. Extending whole-population isolation would directly prevent that widespread immunity from developing.

Fact 4: People are dying because other medical care is not getting done due to hypothetical projections.

Critical health care for millions of Americans is being ignored and people are dying to accommodate “potential” COVID-19 patients and for fear of spreading the disease. Most states and many hospitals abruptly stopped “nonessential” procedures and surgery. That prevented diagnoses of life-threatening diseases, like cancer screening, biopsies of tumors now undiscovered and potentially deadly brain aneurysms. Treatments, including emergency care, for the most serious illnesses were also missed. Cancer patients deferred chemotherapy. An estimated 80 percent of brain surgery cases were skipped. Acute stroke and heart attack patients missed their only chances for treatment, some dying and many now facing permanent disability.

Fact 5: We have a clearly defined population at risk who can be protected with targeted measures.

The overwhelming evidence all over the world consistently shows that a clearly defined group — older people and others with underlying conditions — is more likely to have a serious illness requiring hospitalization and more likely to die from COVID-19. Knowing that, it is a commonsense, achievable goal to target isolation policy to that group, including strictly monitoring those who interact with them. Nursing home residents, the highest risk, should be the most straightforward to systematically protect from infected people, given that they already live in confined places with highly restricted entry.

The appropriate policy, based on fundamental biology and the evidence already in hand, is to institute a more focused strategy like some outlined in the first place: Strictly protect the known vulnerable, self-isolate the mildly sick and open most workplaces and small businesses with some prudent large-group precautions. This would allow the essential socializing to generate immunity among those with minimal risk of serious consequence, while saving lives, preventing overcrowding of hospitals and limiting the enormous harms compounded by continued total isolation. Let’s stop underemphasizing empirical evidence while instead doubling down on hypothetical models. Facts matter.
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FlashDangerpants
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Re: Robot Overlord

Post by FlashDangerpants »

henry quirk wrote: Sun Apr 26, 2020 3:44 am Thing is: we won't have to wait long to see if I'm right.

Come year's end: we'll see what's what.
You said it would be forgotten by the end of April last time.
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FlashDangerpants
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Re: sumthin' old, sumthin' new (bump)

Post by FlashDangerpants »

henry quirk wrote: Sun Apr 26, 2020 3:54 am
henry quirk wrote: Sat Apr 25, 2020 4:17 am What we are likely seeing, in my estimation, is an epidemic with a real case fatality rate between 0.2 and 0.5%, which is similar to the 1957 Asian Influenza A:H2N2 or 1968 Hong Kong Influenza A:H3N2 pandemics, which were also essentially virgin field respiratory epidemics. These pandemics rate, not as PSI5 events, but as PSI2 events on the CDC scale. They are certainly atypical and more severe than a PSI1 event (such as a routine seasonal flu epidemic)
Make your mind up Henry. You have repeatedly claimed that this thing is "less than the flu".
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FlashDangerpants
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Re: Lockdown Protestors

Post by FlashDangerpants »

Neither of those last two things makes much difference to my case as put anyway. You and Veggie, and now commonsense, are making very bad claims about economic expectations in the light of a still very uncertain public health situation. When consumers, suppliers, lenders and workers lose faith that a public health situation is being properly managed, they all take their own action and hunker down. That is human nature, and the economic consequences are liable to be just as bad as the current situation but much less orderly.

The actual reality of allowing a disease to spread unimpede only among the young and thin, while fatties and oldsters hide in cellars, obviously is insane anyway. In that scenario a vast number of those young thin people will still need to go to hospital, and in your wisdom you have decided that they all must go at the same time, which will screw the system in itself. AND a great many of the fat and insuline dependent will get infected anyway, so you will still have competition for exhausted medical resources. Unless you are willing to openly state that those people have put themselves in harm's way and should be just left to live or die at home, and we'll collect their corpses when we have an available truck.
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vegetariantaxidermy
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Re: Lockdown Protestors

Post by vegetariantaxidermy »

FlashDangerpants wrote: Sun Apr 26, 2020 11:34 am Neither of those last two things makes much difference to my case as put anyway. You and Veggie, and now commonsense, are making very bad claims about economic expectations in the light of a still very uncertain public health situation. When consumers, suppliers, lenders and workers lose faith that a public health situation is being properly managed, they all take their own action and hunker down. That is human nature, and the economic consequences are liable to be just as bad as the current situation but much less orderly.

The actual reality of allowing a disease to spread unimpede only among the young and thin, while fatties and oldsters hide in cellars, obviously is insane anyway. In that scenario a vast number of those young thin people will still need to go to hospital, and in your wisdom you have decided that they all must go at the same time, which will screw the system in itself. AND a great many of the fat and insuline dependent will get infected anyway, so you will still have competition for exhausted medical resources. Unless you are willing to openly state that those people have put themselves in harm's way and should be just left to live or die at home, and we'll collect their corpses when we have an available truck.
Which of my comments are you referring to? I'm the last one to drivel on about 'the economy'. We have global warming. 'Booming economies' aren't going to save us from that. We would have been forced to do this eventually anyway--or become extinct in a few decades. People like Henry think it's all a 'commie conspiracy' to undermine his 'personal freedom'. There are too many lunatics and morons in the human race. It's hopeless. We are doomed.
I don't know what it's like elsewhere, but here, in a very short time, nature is responding to the lack of human activity. Wildlife seems extremely happy to not have humans around (who could blame them?). Sunfish, stingrays and orcas filmed in what is normally a very busy part of the harbour. Deer coming out of the bush. Lots of birdsong. Shame it will be all back to normal soon. What a poisonous pest humans are.
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Re: Lockdown Protestors

Post by FlashDangerpants »

vegetariantaxidermy wrote: Sun Apr 26, 2020 12:27 pm Which of my comments are you referring to? I'm the last one to drivel on about 'the economy'.
Erm...
vegetariantaxidermy wrote: Mon Apr 13, 2020 8:55 pm
Arising_uk wrote: Mon Apr 13, 2020 3:32 pm
vegetariantaxidermy wrote:... One thing is certain though; if the world economy implodes and millions of people lose their jobs, homes and businesses, then there will be a lot more dying than we are seeing now. ...
Bit puzzled here as I thought you heartily disliked the idea of a globalised 'world economy'?
This is what is so annoying about most people. What difference does it make what I supposedly 'dislike'? (Although I'm pretty sure I've never discussed a 'global economy'). Perhaps I should have said 'world's economies'? Either way, they are all connected (mostly to China), and either way its not looking good.
vegetariantaxidermy wrote: Wed Apr 01, 2020 2:53 am all the people who will die as a result of a collapsed economy
vegetariantaxidermy wrote: Fri Mar 20, 2020 6:29 pm I wouldn't be at all surprised if they find that the mortality rate of corona is lower than the flu. There must be thousands of cases that people haven't even bothered to report because the symptoms were so mild. (I wonder if they discover this before or after the world economy has collapsed and the suicide rate has gone up 5000 percent).
vegetariantaxidermy wrote: Thu Mar 19, 2020 10:28 am I'm inclined to agree and I hate conspiracy-theorists. Why the sudden worldwide concern by govts. for the elderly? Why risk the entire world economy and stability for a tiny portion of the population?
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