[ExI] cumulative cost of shutdown

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On Thu, 8 Apr 2021 at 12:47, Mike Dougherty via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 7, 2021, 8:02 PM Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>>
>> What other explanations are there for the very low rates of COVID, and
>> the relatively healthy levels of economic activity and normalcy in everyday
>> life, in countries such as China?
>>
>
> Low[er] rate is a lie
> Health[ier] economic life is a lie
>
> Oh that sounds deliberate and coordinated; to present their situation as
> better than our situation.  No government is capable of something so
> massively immoral.
>
> Perhaps the noisy data spike keeps combing for signal isn't intentionally
> faulty as much as it is multivariate but displayed in too few dimensions.
> Cases/day vs time is how normalized data is packaged and sold to
> management,  but what isn't being shown?
>
> Where is the money?
>
> What smaller, yet still complex systems could serve as analogous to
> governments as organisms- each trying different strategies to overcome a
> resource/energy  boundary or predator threat?  How would ants or bees cope
> with a covid-equivalent?  Colony-collapse has certainly wrecked many bees.
> Do ants have something similar? Or are ants mostly a trope for too
> insignificant to monitor? (Unless you are spike)
>
> I think my subconscious "what if" pattern recognizer is stuck on
> covid-as-tool. If so, who is wielding it? Was it built for this purpose, or
> is it still in learning/practice mode?  Rafal's suggestion that mass
> deployment of vaccines bothered me not on the antivax front, but on the
> Orwellian/Huxley front.  Maybe money is a secondary target now that meme
> warfare has advanced from musket to machine gun.
>
> If there is any hope it is that humanity's covid fever breaks and we
> emerge weakened but resolute to be healthier than before.  Healthier than
> before in all aspects that covid weakened.
>
> I may be tuned to see the negative, but the fact is the negative extremes
> are just as [un]likely as the positive extremes.  We might have much in new
> positives as new negatives and not even notice because they negate each
> other and leave us with what we view as status quo.
>
> As we are about to enter air conditioning season, I am particularly
> grateful for modern problems and modern solutions.
>

You seem to be incredulous about the situation in China. It’s not just
China but other countries such as Singapore, Taiwan, Australia and New
Zealand that have successfully controlled the virus: people can go
essentially go about their business as per usual, and this has been the
case for months. There is still a strict quarantine for international
visitors, who are locked up in hotels for two weeks, and every now and then
a case leans through, but it is is suppressed with aggressive contact
tracing and in some cases a strict lockdown for a few days. This is what
happened in the Australian state of Queensland a couple of weeks ago, when
there were half a dozen cases originating from a doctor treating
international visitors. The city of Brisbane was locked down fir three
days, masks were required in the rest of Queensland, people travelling to
other Australian states from Queensland were quarantined. There have been
no more cases, and everything has returned to normal. You may not think
that such drastic measures are warranted, but they work.

> --
Stathis Papaioannou
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