More than half of people with strong Covid infection are asymptomatic, new figures show:
More than half of people with a strong Covid infection did not report any of the major symptoms, new figures from the Office for National Statistics have revealed.
This underlines the risk of people spreading the virus without knowing they are infected which is thought to be one of the main ways the coronavirus pandemic has been able to spread so easily around the world.
The ONS said 53 per cent of people with a strong positive, or high viral load, between December and March did not report having any symptoms compared to 47 per cent who did. It excluded patients likely to be at the start of their infection when transmission and symptoms are thought to be less likely.
Fatigue, headache and cough were the most commonly reported symptoms amongst people who had a strong positive test for Covid-19.
[...] "Around half of those we tested did not report any symptoms even whilst having high levels of the virus present in their body. This underlines that people in the community may unknowingly have the virus and potentially transmit it to others."
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @01:49AM (25 children)
to put on the damn mask in public.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Friday April 09 2021, @01:56AM (19 children)
I'm going to keep wearing mine in public even after my vaccination takes hold. I know the difference between 90% and 100%, and I choose to minimize the chance of my being in a chain of transmission that hits somebody vulnerable.
It's after case rates go way down that I'll reconsider.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @02:00AM
Careful, that makes you a decent human being and that rigamarole ain't tolerated round these parts!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @02:29AM (8 children)
Vaccine doesn't prevent infection - it helps you to fight it off if you get infected.
Some new research suggests vaccination also helps to prevent spread of infection.
But all researches are preliminary at this point, and your call is what a decent human being would do.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Friday April 09 2021, @02:41AM (4 children)
Infection isn't a binary thing: Viral load (i.e. how much of the bad stuff is in your body) also matters, and that's why vaccination also helps prevent the spread to unvaccinnated people.
It makes total sense when you think about it: Vaccination means your body has antibodies to the virus. The antibodies help by preventing the virus from invading your cells and reproducing with your cells' organelles and proteins. Which means that there's fewer copies of the virus floating around your body, which means that there's less that you can expel onto somebody else. And as an added bonus, if you get vaccinated, you aren't helping the virus mutate into a new version as easily, because mutation requires reproduction to turn into a new strain or variant.
It's the difference between trying a password-guessing attack from 1 machine, or a password-guessing attack from a botnet of 100,000 machines.
And yes, keep wearing a mask and socially distancing in public places too. This isn't an either-or.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @02:47AM
That's what I said, but bit more succinctly, windbag.
Whatever, I'm in total agreement.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @03:49AM
Vaccination also puts selection pressure on the virus that is different
than a non-vaccinated immune response.
So vaccination is not just "all good".
And these new vaccines have an "emergency use" qualification.
What about 10 years down the road?
So I'd say there are still BIG unknowns with the covid vaccines.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @08:46AM
Not necessarily. This isn't proven yet for any of the covid-19 vaccines being used. Some vaccines on some people could just make them more like those asymptomatic people who still shed lots of viruses.
It may well be that some covid-19 vaccinations reduce spread and others don't. See the case of the whooping cough vaccines for an example:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/06/150624071018.htm [sciencedaily.com]
(Score: 2) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Friday April 09 2021, @03:16PM
Sound point, and I'll amplify by passing along that the Israelis have put numbers on the reduced viral load. Among vaccinated people with breakthrough infections, it averages a quarter what would have been expected in unvaccinated people.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @09:31PM (2 children)
it's not a vaccine. it's an experimental gene therapy that just happens to sterilize you and make sure you don't ever collect your retirement benefits. good luck with that, slave..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 10 2021, @06:05AM
are these two things supposed to be connected? lol
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 14 2021, @04:14AM
Oh, look! It's TMB's demented "real" Doctor! Remember? The one going on about the "demon semen"?
(Score: -1, Troll) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday April 09 2021, @02:34AM (6 children)
The vaccine does not stop you from contracting or transmitting the virus. It's not that kind of vaccine.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by https on Friday April 09 2021, @05:32AM (3 children)
There is exactly zero reason to trust anything from you.
It does exactly that. [nbcnews.com]
It bears repeating: you have murder in your heart. You contribute (with lies) towards a world with more people dying untimely deaths.
Offended and laughing about it.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @10:04AM
Damn. I don't think I've ever seen or heard someone get called out like this, without it being exaggeration. Just... damn. True, and cold, but that's fitting.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @12:54PM
If the same type of study was about a vitamin you'd call it observational and unreliable. Instead it is "real world data" and you take it as fact.
Pfizer's marketing has really done a number on you.
(Score: 2) by dak664 on Friday April 09 2021, @02:27PM
Well it's NBC and the quote is "real-world data from Israel suggests that their Covid-19 vaccine is 94 percent effective in preventing asymptomatic infections, meaning the vaccine could significantly reduce transmission."
Whatever they did there, it isn't science.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 09 2021, @03:13PM
Most things risk management things we do, reduce risk, they don't stop it. Here, these vaccines would reduce the contracting and thus, transmitting of the covid virus (well, covered strains that is). Enough people get immunity from either vaccines or having the disease and we can stop it for real.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 10 2021, @12:23AM
Is that before or after you guzzled a bunch of hydroxychloroquine?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @02:48AM
That is not enough. You must wear the correct mask in the correct fashion.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11 2021, @06:29AM
Did you cum from the sense of selfsatisfaction as you typed this, or after you hit submit?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday April 09 2021, @01:58AM (3 children)
If the headphone are any good, I'll take this one [abc.net.au].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Friday April 09 2021, @02:47AM (1 child)
That looks really cool, and if I thought I might need one I might buy one. Fortunately my neighbours and I all agreed right at the beginning that this might get serious, so we locked down hard for six weeks, and I don't need a mask anymore.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday April 09 2021, @04:34AM
Hey, that's not for the protection factor - I expect it to be as lousy as a $0.5 surgical mask in this respect (lousier if you can't disinfect it between two uses - the electronics in it will certainly make the task way harder).
It's rather a fun way to push back on facial recognition. Need to be cheaper tho' to have it used by a lot many - won't quite work otherwise [xkcd.com]. Hmmmm... on a second thought...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Interesting) by coolgopher on Friday April 09 2021, @02:51AM
Does it survive the daily wash though?
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @08:00AM
A lying journalist twisted "did not report any of the major symptoms" into "asymptomatic".
A brainless cretin (you) failed to read beyond the headline.
A few brainwashed pussies and/or propaganda workers lauded your useful idiocy.
Congratulations, chief.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by crafoo on Friday April 09 2021, @02:02AM (52 children)
Everyone goes on and on and on about over population and the environment. And here we have a perfect, natural, 100% certified organic solution and everyone loses their god damned mind! It kills the fat, sick, and old. It's far humane than any war or genocide. Where is your humanity?! Welcome Saint COVID with a warm embrace.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @02:16AM
This guy FUCKS
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @02:33AM (6 children)
weirdly compelling argument.
Do you publish any newsletter?
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Friday April 09 2021, @05:21PM (5 children)
I do not. I am however writing a book tentatively titled, "My Life With The Progressive Death Cult". Look for it on Amazon trash self-publishing later this year.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @07:15PM (4 children)
trash is right, if you look at reality you'll find the GOP championing all the death, from pollution and police brutality to scared man-children murdering minority groups
hard to care about your whining when you're busy being so totally hypocritical
no wonder hillary triggered you so badly, can't have a woman telling it like it is ;-)
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @09:46PM (2 children)
"scared man-children murdering minority groups"
What the fuck are you talking about, you dumb Neo-bolshevik's bitch? Noone is murdering "minority" groups, you brainwashed retard. Monkey hybrids attack everyone, especially Asians. Stray Mongoloid dogs are pouring through the southern border and whites are busy praying to Jewsus and con artist politicians to do something about it, all while the Talmudic Jew media brainwashes morons like you into thinking Whitey is to blame. You wouldn't have food, clothes, running water, transportation, knowledge of the modern world, anything without White inventiveness. You will miss us if the Jews are successful in replacing us with dumbed-down mud people and you idiots starve to death in the crumbling infrastructure Whites built.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 10 2021, @12:25AM
Sounds like you have trump's cock loged in your brain, still working on that fine motor mouth control? Ended up with some mushroom peen up da nose?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 10 2021, @06:03AM
when this is what you post when trying to convince someone you *aren't* crazy
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Saturday April 10 2021, @01:00AM
I don't know, this is such a random amalgamation of attacks I'm not quite sure which you expect to evoke an emotion? I mean, if you understood my values and my purpose you might be able to land one of them?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday April 09 2021, @02:36AM (13 children)
It kills less than 0.1% of the people infected. If you're doing "N.M billion people on earth", it's not even a rounding error.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @03:57AM (4 children)
Actually if many are asymptomatic, that drives the death rate down.
Likely that affect on the "cited statistics" will not be factored in.
This also strengthens the argument to protect those at risk and
let most others live their lives and get to herd immunity.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @07:19AM (3 children)
But not down from 0.1%. Let's consider real numbers this time, instead of the ones from TMB's ass: 3% confirmed IFR [worldometers.info] * 47% of cases symptomatic [soylentnews.org] still means it kills 1.5% of cases, so TMB is off by one order off magnitude. Which is actually pretty low error for his ass, we've seen worse,
And of course, the above assumes that all of the non-symptomatic cases never get a Covid test, which is obviously untrue as per this story. So let's be charitable and assume that the non-symptomatic positives from this story are the only ones to ever get a positive Covid test without having symptoms, and TMB's 0.1% figure is accurate: given that Covid has already killed 0.2% of USians [worldometers.info], that must mean the entire population has been infected twice already on average, which conclusively proves that reinfection does occur. Widely. So what are we vaccinating for?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 10 2021, @06:06AM (2 children)
If you break that down further though: the UK doesn't compare to the US. One state to the next doesn't necessarily compare well, in many aspects but of special consideration is health (e.g. diabetes incidence by state can double). A second point to be made is selected sample, I can't find methodology, it just seems like random population sampling - which is good for us. We'll discount the huge breach of social difference between US and UK. Now let's talk about fatalities: the information I'm pulling from ( https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#SexAndAge [cdc.gov] ) shows fatality to be approximately 4.4% for people below the age of 50, 50-64 appears to hold the turning point, that particular age group has an increased risk, ~15% of total fatalities. 64+ holds 80%. This is reasonably well known in any case. What it illustrates, and why I'm reviewing it, is that COVID19 alone seldom inflicts fatalities. That COVID19 increases the incidence of fatality in groups that are quite probably equally susceptible to expiry due to a host of diseases. We can't realistically attribute fatality solely to COVID19. It is in fact increasing the likelihood of death, but we need to look at base rates of every complicating illness and the difference between then and with COVID19. And then we could approximate the disparities. What I would conjecture you would find is a relatively small increase in the probability of fatality when compared directly against diabetes fatalities pre-pandemic, a 7-8% risk multiplier against diabetes alone which killed ~150k people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11 2021, @01:56AM (1 child)
The simplest way to get a baseline is to compare the death rate for the same group in 2020 vs 2010-2019. If the claimed death rate for COVID-19 matches with the deviation from previous years then it is likely accurate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11 2021, @07:32PM
This doesn't work. Lots of things are changing. Dramatically increased death rates from deaths of despair (drugs, suicide, etc), flu deaths nonexistent, motor vehicle deaths way down, etc, etc, etc. And as people eat themselves into even bigger blobs, cardiovascular deaths will increase imminently if they haven't already.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by choose another one on Friday April 09 2021, @03:03PM (3 children)
> It kills less than 0.1% of the people infected
Pick a mid sized currently covid-prevalent country, lets say Czech Republic (Czechia), lets look at the deaths:
Ok, fatalities 27617, population 10.65m - check e.g. worldometers, or ourworldindata or the EU situation update.
10million should be big enough real world test sample size, right?
Problem is, that is more than 0.25% _whole population_ fatality rate - or in other words, if your numbers are correct, everyone in Czech Republic has had it over 2.5 times, in a year.
So, either it is a lot deadlier than you say, or it is as you say but you get infected several times a year with 0.1% chance of dying _each_ time.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday April 10 2021, @06:12PM (1 child)
You can analyze it on a macro scale. Ignore the covid thing and pretend we haven't invented the germ theory of disease yet etc.
For the last 40 years the total death rate in the USA has been in the 8-10 range. Last year 2020 we finished around 9.7
So where's my pandemic at? I don't disbelieve for a second that 90+ year old people are dying of lung infections, they've been doing that for decades. I mean where's my end of the world zombie pandemic I was promised?
Supposedly Feb 2019 had 233195 USAians die and Feb 2020 had 295084 die. So last February when the talking heads were saying not to wear masks and its no big deal, an extra 61889 people died that month before covid was supposedly here and a serious threat.
Supposedly Nov 2019 had 277986 USAians die and Nov 2020 had 260404. So last November when the talking heads were saying repent for the end is near, covid killed an extra negative 17582 people compared to 2019. Huh? Where my pandemic at?
Let me put it to you this way... If 53% of people with covid have NO symptoms at all, that means 53% of people killed drunk driving next month are going to show up on a COVID dashboard somewhere as having died while infected with covid. But if they're asymptomatic when they died, does it really matter?
Another interesting thought experiment. Say a "very large" nursing home has 10 people die of pneumonia per year. This year 10 people die of pneumonia, but 5 of them died with a positive antibody test result. Does that mean we have a public health emergency?
Another strange thought experiment. I had a grandfather die a quarter century ago of lung cancer. Well you know WWII gen and smoking and how that ends. He was in and out of the hospital quite a bit toward the end. Imagine if he caught covid from being in and out of contaminated hospitals for months. Well, lets face it, terminal lung cancer is why he caught covid but did he die of terminal lung cancer or covid? In the USA, Americans get 50% of their lifetime health care spending in their last couple months of life, which includes dr visits, which implies hospital transmitted covid. So essentially "everyone" who dies is going to die infected of covid. But I'm young and don't go to the hospital on a regular basis so I can't catch covid; then again I also don't smoke so whatever gets me probs wont be lung cancer.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Saturday April 10 2021, @09:07PM
Your pandemic in excess deaths is right here, I think it displays US by default: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-death-count [ourworldindata.org]
If the numbers aren't high enough for you, well I guess that sucks, maybe the bioweapons folk'll do a better job next time.
Biggest impact from Covid IMO has not been the deaths, it's always been the hospitalisation rate, which is far higher than flu and I get the impression it's far more resource intensive once you are in. Additionally the survival rate once hospitalised is very poor compared to anything else we are used to seeing in western-world hospitals (not for decades or a generation at least) - which I think will lead to major problems in future with medical staff and PTSD and similar, the impact on them has been huge.
On your deaths and thought experiments, the real answers are always in the death certificates which (speaking UK at least) are required to state primary and contributory causes. It's not an exact science though, in the same way that if someone with massive heart disease and a boatload of drugs in-system dies after a knee on the neck, what did he die of, the disease, the drugs or the knee? If he would have lived through the disease and drugs that day without
the knee does that mean he died of the knee? If he would have lived through the knee without the drugs does that mean it was the drugs? What if both those are true?
In the UK stats they are using a much-maligned death-within-28days-of-positive-test - but that is just for the headline death rate, the real figures are in the death certs, produced by doctors under penalty of perjury, it's just that they take several weeks to sort out so they are no use for seeing how things are _right now_ (in our real-time-data must-know-right-now world). Here's the thing - the simple estimate is still _lower_ than the figure from the death certs. Even if you take only the death certs where covid is stated as _primary_ cause of death, not just contributory.
Here's another thought experiment - if you have cancer and you go to the cancer surgeon and she says there is nothing she can do and then explains it is because there are no ICU beds for your post-op because they are full of covids, she has no anesthetist, because they are all ventilating covids, and if she could find one she has no operating theatres because they are all being used as ICUs to treat covids (something which, by the way, has never happened before in the history of the hospital). So you die of cancer, or did you actually die because of covid? - because in normal times with surgery you would have had a chance?
I know that doctor. For some people the above has not been a thought experiment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11 2021, @07:54PM
This doesn't work, because Covid deaths are very much NOT randomly distributed. In particular it has a very near 0 mortality rate for people below the age of 65, yet it is reasonably dangerous for those above 70 with it. This is a big part of the reason that Africa has basically shrugged off COVID when early on it was expected to just completely devastate the continent.
Here [wikipedia.org] is a list of countries by median age. The youngest countries in the world are pretty much all in Africa. The youngest is a shocking 14.8 years in Niger. The Czech Republic is one of the oldest countries in the world with a median age of 43.3 - about 5 years above that of the US.
There's also the weird weather stuff. COVID gets toasted in UV, and hotter countries have generally had better results. If this turns out to be causal (and not just confounded by hotter countries being younger or whatever), then you have yet another issue you'd need to control for. The Czech Republic not only being one of the oldest, but also one of the coldest countries in the world.
The point of this being that looking at a single country is generally insufficient to assess the overall death rate.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 09 2021, @03:16PM
Not if you're over 70. I'm hearing death rates of 9% in that case.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @03:22PM
The brain damage this virus will do you will result in no difference for casual observer.
Some of the dumb things you say are beyond idiotic.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday April 09 2021, @03:49PM (1 child)
.1% and 2.9 million deaths would mean that almost 40% the planet has already caught covid. You sure about those numbers?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday April 10 2021, @06:16PM
If half the victims are asymptomatic that means the number of people who caught it is twice the number reported, at least for young healthy people (the vast majority of the population).
In my state the untrustworthy official government statistics are already well over 10% of the population. I don't think it far fetched that in other countries or other states that count might be higher like the 20% you suggest.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday April 09 2021, @02:57AM (16 children)
1. Please explain the moral difference between your plan and biological warfare on a population you have arbitrarily decided is undesirable for some unspecified reason.
2. Please explain how death by Covid, which largely involves an incredibly painful period of labored breathing, is more humane than, say, the methods devised by Jack Kevorkian.
3. Please explain why you think it's a great idea that the generally not-fat, not-sick, and not-old medical professionals that necessarily get tasked with attempting to save lives should also be sacrificed.
4. Please explain your moral justification for why the fat, sick, or old should be killed rather than yourself.
Because I've heard rhetoric like this before, but most of the time it was either black-and-white footage and everyone was speaking German, or coming from cartoon villains.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @03:04AM
After CPAC and all the other blatant Nazi symbolism the GOP likes to use I don't think there are any excuses left. The Nazis were brought to America, where they had quite a few allies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism_in_the_Americas [wikipedia.org] One of the not-so-secret secrets of the US.
(Score: 5, Informative) by krishnoid on Friday April 09 2021, @03:58AM
Killing the fat, sick, and old is something nature itself does, amorally (but not immorally). Where modern medicine and civilization was able to raise the threshold for survival, COVID-19 is lowering it back to ... the 1900s? 1800s? Earlier?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @08:13AM
Economic warfare on the same population is somehow better?
The excess deaths without any COVID are well on the way to surpass the total deaths with COVID detected, if not surpassing them already, and this was only the first year; people started to die off only after exhausting their financial, health, and hope reserves.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Friday April 09 2021, @08:55AM (2 children)
The "you ... decided" part. Google "agency".
You've also overlooked the fact that his post was a joke. He was literally playing the cartoon villian. And now you want to criticise him for doing it so well.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @03:44PM (1 child)
and yet somebody modded him insightful
poe's law
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday April 11 2021, @09:30AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @10:39AM (9 children)
Morality is bullshit, just as much a tool of top-down control as religion which usually comes packaged with it. If your goal is to maximize human lives and minimize human suffering, covid is obviously something to take seriously. If you have other goals, the situation may appear very different. Realistically, people are going to die, and a very high proportion of covid deaths are in the "already past the average EOL" cohort. I don't think it's worth discussing any topic like this with "human life is sacred" types, as it's never productive.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @05:59PM
Morality serves a purpose in cultivating a shared value system. The lack of a shared value system is where a the lot of our modern ills stem from. From that value system we derive a sense of social direction. If a society is an organism we're pulling it into a thousand pieces, and I don't think I need to explain what happens when you shred man into a thousand pieces.
As to any utilitarian argument, this whole thing, the last year - nothing has been allowed to manifest. Economics have been manipulated as if a face with a swinging hammer. The same could be said of the people. We've precipitated a world-class disaster, we're just trying and failing to catch it in 12000 frames a second. It's quite probable that we'll try to rationalize the decisions we've allowed to percolate to action. The reality is, we've damaged the vast majority of peoples future to save an infinitesimal count of people. There was no right answer, don't get me wrong. I don't want people to die needlessly, but I don't want billions to live in squalor under a system of entrapment for 70 years either. Death is a punctuation, the relief of the incredible strain of life, but to the living the palpable suffering is still continuing and worsening. I'd say from that perspective the allowance of death is the rational and moral thing to do.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday April 10 2021, @12:37PM (7 children)
Morality is not only NOT bullshit, it's an inevitable emergent product of any group of social, intelligent sentients. Even if you want to cynically define it as "whatever produces a stable local maximum of happiness and cooperation given the ambient environmental conditions and resources," that's not bullshit at all. It's not even purely human: read some de Waal sometime and you'll get quite an education.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 10 2021, @04:47PM (5 children)
Morality may not be bullshit, but it absolutely is a matter of opinion. Even the observation that it could be an emergent result of societies to establish rules of interaction doesn't automatically convert it to a good/evil description of the world, which is what morality is under the hood.
Bear in mind: you can have rules of conduct without a good/evil judgement, but you can't go the other way.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday April 11 2021, @03:11AM (4 children)
It's a bit more than "just" a matter of opinion, if nothing else because it emerges from some very fundamental aspects of what it is to *be* human...or, for that matter, what it is to be a social, intelligent, group-living primate! So yes, it's going to be *somewhat* relative, but relative to the environment and the physiological parameters *all* humans find themselves bound by, which is why so-called "moral universals" exist.
In no group of social, intelligent, group-living beings is it ever going to be helpful for murder, theft, or child molestation to be tolerated. If we evolved from a solitary predatory species, for example some sort of big cat, our morality (if we would even have any!) would look very different. In particular I suspect we'd have no problem with killing others of our species if they stepped into our territories. Had we evolved from wolves instead of apes, we'd likely have an even more group-centric morality than we do now given how wolfpacks operate. And so on.
This is how morals can be both relative and objective at the same time. And this is also how we get an ought from an is, the objection to which always surprised me: where *else* are we going to get our oughts except from what is?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11 2021, @11:38AM
And yet, that was perfectly acceptable in many cultures. Nobles held right of life over their peasants, and literal "robber barons" were a thing. Treasuring a jade ring is a crime for a poor person as the saying goes. Children have been sold into slavery forever, catamites and eunuchs and brothels are all normal throughout history.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11 2021, @06:41PM (2 children)
How about this: natural rights are where we start. You're allowed to fuck off, you're allowed to eat, you're allowed the non-aggression principal, and yada yada - this is probably largely instinctual if we can assume that from babies being able to detect shitheads. Then you incorporate a society, and natural rights don't necessarily cover the gamut of shit like property rights, community, marriage and so on. So you naturally construct the domain of morality, which is about maintaining social equilibrium; as vague as that is I could knock a dozen examples of precedence into this, but... What you end up with is a pretty small handful of constants - your thou shall nots. I'm no theologian, but these seem relatively constant from a to z as I know them. From there we build on and on divining countless thousands of laws which define the broadest category of interactions between agents as well as metering the severity of trespass.
"In no group of social, intelligent, group-living beings is it ever going to be helpful for murder, theft, or child molestation to be tolerated."
This is a manifold that's difficult to unravel. I'd conjecture the term "helpful" is out of place, "favorable" would perhaps be more optimal - this is a dumb process, natural selection. Murdering a mad emperor seems like a favorable outcome for the majority (and it was, Claudius rocked it). Stealing from the barony who steals from the peasants seems like a favorable outcome for the majority. But it also shakes the equilibrium of society and that's where it falls into the category of wrong.
We're rooted in natural rights the whole time though. So I don't think your anthropomorphic conjecture holds water, and if it did, there would probably only be a disparity between diets and not social hierarchy. Consider food acquisition between social obligate carnivores and opportunistic scavengers. Certainly the differences would be diminutive in terms of social system. The real trouble with morality is that it is elective. You can elect the eschew the values that society at large operates by. This is where you get your murderous, lecherous, baby eaters; your banksters, politicians, and so forth. Law pollutes morality, it sets benchmarks by which one can act immorally and still be deemed to have been acting justly and rightly (though not morally) and without dissection of the incidents manifest in the world and their network effects, they're unable to gauge the moral inequities of society. Certainly most people are willing to assume that because there was no violation of the law that the actions were just within a fairly wide range, which when reflected upon reveals extreme immorality and injustice.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday April 12 2021, @12:26AM (1 child)
We seem to be mostly agreeing with one another over everything but some of the terminology used, though I take issue with the term "natural rights." What grounds these natural rights?
You're absolutely right about law (at last potentially) polluting morality though. Law really *is* an entirely social construct, or at least far more socially-constructed than morality is. And as you point out, there is no need for laws to align with morals, specifically because laws are more or less a behavioral clause in the social contract backed up by a (supposedly) agreed-upon delegation of violence to be used against those who break them. In fact, I've had a thought along the lines of "the more orthogonal a society's laws get to actual morals, the closer to the end that society is."
That said, the "anthropomorphic conjecture" does still hold water, reason being, there are apparently a lot of ways to reach what one might think of as a (meta?)stable social maximum in regards to morals and laws. Some things do show up basically as universals, which is what makes their exceptions--stealing from the barony, killing a dictator, etc--that you mentioned noteworthy to begin with. In all those scenarios, the underlying thought process is "this system is not functioning properly, and it must be shocked back into alignment."
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 12 2021, @05:42AM
Certainly. I didn't invent the phrase, but there are no grounds. Frankly, such grounds needn't be established - they're natural. Nature itself doesn't subscribe to logic, but rather logic emerges from nature and thus is subordinate to it. Actually defining those rights is a fools errand, but you could spout off a bunch of tautologies about the right to motivate your body, to think, to act in self-preservation using thought and body.
I actually use the term equilibrium very deliberately. As I see it life is generally is fractaline. We've unconsciously built a pantomime of an organism, society mimics features you would see in studying an organism. For instance the exchange of entropy between the environment and the organism. To remain alive it must export entropy. Upon reaching equilibrium, an organism can be defined as dead. There's a degree of necessary perturbation both externally and internally. Extremes in either case are adverse or fatal depending on timescale. And having reached equilibrium the forces acting to maintain the organism cease and it is returned to the environment. In the case I'm making the "return to the environment" is a return to natural rights. All of the organs must act in concert to prevent this, and any failure of a major organ would press the system to its end. So if the rule of law fails, all other organs will fail in time. By "orthagonal" I suspect you mean to indicate the independence of law from morality - and I would agree to that. It destabilizes the organism (internal strife). But I would also assert that beyond the disconnection volume of law plays a large role, I'd posit law determines direction, and with too many laws you spin in place like a silly ciliate, no more life sustaining nutrients. If your disconnection and volume increase slowly enough the organism can adapt up to a point. The problem with law is it never seems to undergo enough autophagy, the volume continues to grow.
I still disagree, but I'll rescind my previous statement and offer a new one: the social structure emerges from diet, and is thus subordinate to it. A lone wolf is hard fought to provide for itself, an ape is perfectly capable alone (physically anyways). With the fitness landscape (can a wolf afford 21% of its metabolism dedicated to brain function?), and the fact that there are no known sapient organisms other than humans while also having had the same time and pressure to develop similar higher cognitive features, I would be willing to assert that the physiological makeup of our ancestors and their flexible diet (and thus it follows: their social hierarchies) have arrived here, being the only species capable of developing complex social hierarchies as a product.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11 2021, @01:03AM
Norms of activity and socialization are not the same thing as morality. Morality is a social construct, you can tell by how it's very different based on where, when, and who you are.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Mykl on Friday April 09 2021, @03:01AM
What you're saying is very true, but the problem with fixing over-population is that it will hit the bottom line of business when they have fewer consumers. Can't have that!
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Friday April 09 2021, @01:54PM (7 children)
Death by lack of oxygen doesn't sound very humane to me.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @07:32PM (6 children)
Neither is death by being crushed by a bus, pinned between traincars, being stabbed or shot, being blown to pieces by a missile, falling from great heights, the various cancers caused by the multitude of manmade and man introduced chemicals, a heart attack, or being forced to carry a rancidifying sack of skin enveloping a shit factory to some opaque probablistically designated finish line. Death by its nature is inhumane, indiscriminate, and if not painful for the sufferer at least those around them but it is one of the few inexorable and definitive constants we face as the living. And having come upon death, the suffering and necessarily the contemplation of it ceases. For all those dying, there is more world for the living. How many of the dead would be respected if they selfishly spake unto the world of the living - as would a despot, demanding their pitiable allotment be fully returned? None, I'm sure, after the warm embrace of the serenity of death has made them supplicant to perfect ceaseless quietude.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 10 2021, @05:59AM (1 child)
...what? Is this your overly-wordy way of saying "death by old age"?
strongly suspecting you just stole most of this post from some book
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 10 2021, @07:09AM
That's a very nice compliment.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday April 10 2021, @11:48AM (3 children)
Have you talked to many dead people?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Saturday April 10 2021, @03:28PM
Most people have talked to a dead person at some point in their lives, and almost everyone can do it. It's not remarkable in the slightest.
Getting a reply from them, on the other hand ...
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 10 2021, @05:29PM (1 child)
Nah, but you can ax the living about dying:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3634122/ [nih.gov]
https://sprc.org/scope/age [sprc.org]
And that's without the countless masses of people traipsing on the razor's edge. The real question I think, is how many people do you know that are living that would turn back death once they'd arrived?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday April 11 2021, @03:24AM
I have very very limited experience with this, nothing more than several years' study of NDEs and (supposed...) mediums, and what appeared to be a conversation with a dead grandfather with the assistance of one of them. That's an extremely small sample size, not enough to generalize from, and almost entirely anecdotal. None of them seem to want to come back, but that doesn't mean there aren't people who would who simply aren't making contact.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 10 2021, @10:36AM
Well I'm not having any kids but that doesn't mean I want my mom or other old relatives to die tomorrow.
Contraception + education is far more humane and might even be more effective- just compare the birth rates in European countries with the birth rates in "developing nations".
Next compare the global covid-19 death rates with the global birth rates. Covid-19 isn't deadly enough to put a dent in the population - just slow the rate the bulge grows. As this article and other evidence shows lots of people are asymptomatic, they have no problems. So even if we didn't do vaccines, masks, quarantines and everyone went around catching and spreading it, what would happen is eventually most surviving people's immune systems would be able to cope with it AND the virus might even evolve to be less deadly and become merely a nastier "common cold" or two.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday April 10 2021, @11:45AM (1 child)
Pop quiz, Sir Genocides-a-lot! Who do you think contributes more toward pollution: a family of 12 farmers in Ghana, or one trolling dipshit whose name may or may not rhyme with "snafu" sitting behind his computer somewhere and wishing death on said family of Ghanian farmers?
It ain't about the population, cupcake. It's about the burn rate of non-renewable resources.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Saturday April 10 2021, @03:25PM
The good news here is that said family of 12 in Ghana is far less likely to die of Covid than the troll, since Ghana, like most of Africa, has been far more responsible about preventing the spread of Covid-19 than where Soylentils mostly live.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11 2021, @06:32AM
No, they just want to vaccinate the whole population with a ticking timebomb, that will be more effective than the coof.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @02:15AM
I'll just take my head off and stuff it in my backpack.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @04:41AM (5 children)
If I'm reading this correctly, 53% of people with covid don't even know it. But that number comes from the results of people who were actually tested. If you don't have symptoms you're not just going to walk in and get tested for no reason. So the number of asymptomatic infections will be higher. Much higher. How much higher? What if 90% of the population has covid and we don't even know it.
Wouldn't that make the percentage of people who "die" from covid vs the number of people who have it (and don't have symptons) less than a statistical rounding error?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Booga1 on Friday April 09 2021, @05:00AM
I don't think that's what they're saying.
I think what they're saying is: "Of the people who tested positive for COVID and had no symptoms, 53% of them had a high enough viral load to be considered a 'strong positive.'"
(Score: 5, Interesting) by kazzie on Friday April 09 2021, @05:02AM (2 children)
The ONS are doing their own weekly random testing of individuals; this is separate from people who contact their health service and ask for a test. They've been doing this for almost a year now, with the expressed aim of estimating the proportion of the whole population that's infected. Their methodology was designed specifically to deal with the self-selection issues you've outlined.
(Score: 3, Informative) by PiMuNu on Friday April 09 2021, @06:56AM (1 child)
ps: my family is on the ONS scheme. We got tested every week for the first couple of months, now we get tested every month. A nice person comes round our house and asks a few questions about what we have been up to - e.g. "have you had any social contacts in the last week, have you been wearing a mask, etc etc" and we each do a nose and throat swab which goes off to the lab for testing. They send us a letter each month saying "negative".
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @01:15PM
My employer (large University) has been doing PCR tests for all faculty, staff, and students twice a week since August 2020. They wanted to know exactly where the cases are (even asymptomatic) so they could try to do real contact tracing.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Saturday April 10 2021, @06:26PM
At my kids school, if you're exposed and salaried you're kicked out for two weeks and nobody takes a test to come back earlier. If you're hourly like almost all the support staff and teachers aides then you have a huge economic incentive to take a free test and come back to work a week earlier.
Policies change on a roughly monthly basis but that seems to be roughly recently correct.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 10 2021, @01:51AM (3 children)
I really don't believe this asymptomatic carrier bullshit. Most COVID tests administered are about 60% accurate at best? I don't know what kind of severe acute respiratory virus just decides to hop along for a harmless ride in that many people. If you get the cold, you've got the cold, whether mild or strong. you get the flu, you've got the flu, whether mild or strong.
If there is such a thing as a variance in severity of cases, a variance from no symptoms at all, all the way up to death; then, I'd like to know WHY the fuck that happens. What's the mechanism that allows for such a wide variance.
And quit bitching about masks. Masks are security theatre. You think so many people out there are a threat and are to blame; you have a serious problem with your logic circuits. Believe me, I know stupid people are to blame for all sorts of shit. But ya know what else is stupid? Your damn dog. And you don't make that thing wear a mask do ya? Fuck off with your non-logic.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday April 10 2021, @11:52AM
You could learn a little about medicine and how the human body works if you'd like answers to those questions. You know, instead of sitting here going "I don't understand it, therefore it's a hoax and everyone else is stupid."
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Sunday April 11 2021, @05:50AM
OK, here's a hypothetical, somewhat silly, possibility. Suppose there was a very contagious virus whose only effect was to generate peanut proteins. It would make people allergic to peanuts very sick or even dead, yet everybody else who was infected would have no symptoms.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11 2021, @08:47PM
The simple and accurate answer to your question is that nobody knows the answer to your question.
The more interesting thing is considering how all eras always felt they were on the cutting edge of knowledge. Yet the eras ahead of them invariably look at the eras prior as riled in ignorance sustained in part by hubris; an excess of arrogance in the veracity of knowledge of the time driven by consensus. We will not be an exception.