Ryan754326

19 minutes ago, Lacessit said:

LOL, Mexico recorded just under 50,000 new cases either today or yesterday. Thailand was a bit over 8000.

 

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

 

In addition, Mexico is probably one of the world's rectums as far as kidnappings, murder and other violent crimes go.

 

Yes, I am enjoying my safe space in Thailand, thank you.

I’m quite happy to take my chances in Mexico if it means being able to live a somewhat normal life.... It feels quite safe here, but I’m glad you’re enjoying Thailand. 
 

As far as case numbers in Mexico are concerned, I’ve had two jabs and recovered from covid already, so it’s no longer something that I worry about. 
Concerning case numbers in Thailand and the rest of SEA, all of the people I know there (Thais, Vietnamese, Cambodians - not expats) who came down sick in the past two years, were too terrified of the consequences to report it, so the official numbers are meaningless to me. 
China, as an example, is still only reporting slightly over 100,000 total cases, and still less than 5000 total deaths. It’s amazing how good you can make things look when you have the power to arrest and imprison people for reporting bad news. 

9 minutes ago, placeholder said:

Because the vaccinated spread less of the virus for less of the time than do the unvaccinated.

Is there a new study concerning Omicron to comfirm this? Because everything I was reading about Delta a few months ago was saying that the vaccinated could be just as contagious as the unvaccinated when infected. I can’t see any reason why Omicron would be different, considering that it’s even more contagious than Delta, but I’m happy to be shown that I’m wrong. 

3 minutes ago, Lacessit said:

 

Who knows, the next variant in the COVID series may paralyse its hosts like polio. Do you feel lucky?

If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen. The vaccines don’t do a good enough job of stopping infection to prevent new mutations from popping up. 

If you’re infected, the virus is replicating inside your body, and mutation is possible. Vaccinated or not. 

33 minutes ago, placeholder said:

And if they are not self-isolating as in cases of the asymptomatic?

Why don’t you acknowledge the vaccinated asymptomatics?

On 1/19/2022 at 5:30 PM, Tony125 said:

 

 

And what should people who are a litttle overweight or obese do, starve themselves , take a crash diet course so they don't get covid? Or get vaccinated and hope the vaccine will work for them.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/08/health/covid-fat-obesity.html

 

 

 

Yes, they should get vaccinated, and be happy knowing that they are well protected having done so… Then stop worrying about what everyone else does concerning their own health.
 

If we’re going to make it about overcrowded hospitals and wasting public resources, then we’re opening the door to the government having control over a lot more aspects of our lives than just vaccinations.  
 

If the vaccine mandate crowd was calling for unvaccinated covid patients to be given last priority at hospitals, then I’d be just fine with that, but if we’re going to start creating a hierarchy of who gets medical treatment first, based on their poor health related choices, then there’s going to be a lot of people finding themselves somewhere near the bottom of that list for many other reasons besides refusing the vaccine. 

On 1/20/2022 at 1:18 AM, Chomper Higgot said:

I’ve said many times, I’m very grateful to have spent the period of the pandemic in Thailand.

 

 

The fact that you feel safer living in Thailand tells me that, aside from covid, you probably don’t have much to worry about. I guess it just comes down to lifestyle. 
As someone who drives a truck for a living, I’d feel much better working in the covid infested USA where the roads are relatively safe, than in Thailand where covid is less of a threat. 
 

Sorry to keep beating the road fatalities horse, but some of your posts seem to be suggesting that Thias are these responsible and compassionate people who put the safety and well-being of others ahead of their own interests. This might be true in the case of covid, but when they get behind the wheel, that sense of social responsibility disappears, and it becomes every man for himself. 

On 1/19/2022 at 6:27 PM, Chomper Higgot said:

You seem to have missed the cultural attitudes Thai people exhibit towards the vulnerable people they know, their parents and grand parents.

 

 

 

 

Many (most?) Thais can’t be bothered to put a helmet on their kids before they stack three of them on the back of their scooter and drive off down some of the most dangerous roads in the world.
They aren’t better people, they’re just better trained. 

If the government hammered them with fear and consequences over road fatalities the way they have with covid, they’d follow those rules too, and many lives would be saved, but the elites don’t care, because their kids ride around in cars. 
 

If the vaccine had proven to be a silver bullet, and completely eliminated the possibility of being infected, the doors would have been wide open to tourism the day after the last rich Thai got their second jab. 

2 hours ago, Chomper Higgot said:

I’m not qualified to address what might be behind someone who has been vaccinated adopting and posting ant-vac messaging,

 

I don’t think my messaging is anti-vax at all, just pro-choice/anti-discrimination. 
 

I also think it should be the responsibility of the individual to protect themselves as much as they deem necessary. If I raw-dog my way through Pattaya and catch AIDS, is it her fault for not making me wear a condom?

Airborne diseases are nothing new, and they aren’t going away. If people plan on avoiding exposure to them completely, they should invest in a bubble. 

27 minutes ago, ozimoron said:

The unvaccinated are still the largest proportion of hospitalisations and are overwhelming the system.

Not true where I live. There’s more vaccinated people in hospitals now than unvaccinated. 

I do understand that as more and more people become vaccinated, they will represent a larger and larger proportion of the total number of people in hospitals, but the fact remains that even without the unvaccinated patients there, it would likely still be too many for the system to cope (basing this assumption on the fact that it couldn’t cope very well before covid came along). 
This brings us back to those people who are vaccinated, but have otherwise neglected their health, and are suffering from other chronic diseases along with covid. Would they still be hospitalized if they were 50 kilos lighter and could jog a few KM without collapsing? What about if they were 35 and not 75?
 

47 minutes ago, watthong said:

We won't force vaccination on anyone, but private business, government premises (including hospital and school) reserve the rights to add "no-vaccination" to their "no shirts, no shoes, no admission/services" sign. In short, you want to reserve the freedom to not get vaccinated, we therefore reserve the right to not do business with you. No one is forced to do anything they don't want to. Vive la liberte'!

So as a private business owner, can I refuse service to those who I suspect might be homeless, if I can prove by showing statistics that they are more likely to steal from my business? 
How about if I just ask them to produce a piece of identification that shows me they at least have a home address? 
 

If someone were a taxi driver in certain American cities, They might look at the statistics involving armed robberies and other violent crime, and conclude that they don’t want to pick up customers who fall into certain ethnic groups. Should that be allowed, if the numbers seem to prove the hypothesis? 
 

I’m sure you can show me plenty of evidence saying that someone is less likely to give you covid after being vaccinated, but you can’t produce any evidence to show that it’s absolutely not possible. I think the evidence at this point shows us that it absolutely is possible. 
 

So if we are going to allow people to discriminate against others on the basis that it’s “more likely” for that group of people to cause harm to others, what should stop the taxi driver in Chicago from discriminating against those who he can prove with statistics are “more likely” to rob him at gun point? 

18 minutes ago, Chomper Higgot said:

Right, so everyone knew hospital over crowding was a problem.

 

But some (thankfully a minority) still chose and choose to refuse a safe vaccination that is demonstrated to dramatically reduce the probability of they themselves adding to the problem of hospital over crowding.

 

Gotchaya on that.

 

 

Got me? I don’t know about that.
 

People choose to drink

People choose to smoke

People choose to eat garbage food 

People choose to spend their lives sitting on the couch while doing all of the above, and they’ve only done more of it since they’ve been locked down in their homes. 
 

We’ve always known why we use more resources than necessary on healthcare: Because too many people have refused to do what we’ve always known is required to avoid chronic diseases caused by poor overall health - Eat better, don’t smoke, don’t drink, exercise once in a while. 
 

I doubt the seasonal overcrowding due to flu would have been the problem it was either, if people simply chose to live healthier lifestyles from the start. 

1 minute ago, ozimoron said:

The vast majority of the anti vax messaging is politically driven. I have posted articles demonstrating this previously. The number of people genuinely concerned about side effects are miniscule in comparison.

It is now, because it’s been made that way. In the old days it was hippy moms who were worried about vaccines causing developmental issues with their children. Hardly a bastion of the far right.

I get you, and I agree it’s become political. Anyone who disagrees with what’s going on is branded a right winger, and when society treats them like outcasts they are pushed further into that box. Those on both sides are making it just about impossible to sit somewhere in the middle of the debate. 
 

I believe that anti-vax sentiment mostly comes form people who rejected the lockdowns and restrictions first, and then rejected what was given to them as the only solution. The right, by definition, claims to be against big government and over-regulation, so it wasn’t hard for a few opportunistic right-leaning politicians to drag those people into their camp. 

With that said, I never understood the connection between Trump and anti-vaxxers. Wasn’t he the one cheering on his “operation warp speed” to get vaccines rolled out faster than ever before? Wasn’t he booed by his own supporters when he endorsed vaccines at one of his own rallies? 
Maybe I just don’t pay enough attention to Yank politics, but I think I’ll keep it that way. 

1 minute ago, Chomper Higgot said:

Except anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, anti-public health measures people are going about, mingling with others.

 

Some go a bit further:

 

https://vancouverisland.ctvnews.ca/anti-vaccine-protester-spat-at-nanaimo-nurse-rcmp-say-1.5571428

 

 

I don’t see a problem with mingling, as the vaccinated shouldn’t have much to worry about. We all know by this stage in the game that you can catch covid from a vaccinated person too. People should just take it upon themselves to stay home if they are looking for a 100% positive guarantee of safety. 
 

Spitting on someone, on the other hand, is, and always was a crime, long before covid ever came along. They should be charged and made an example of…because of their actions, not because of their opinions. 
 

By the way, I happen to live on Vancouver island, two hours north of Nanaimo. My hometown just competed a major addition to our hospital a couple of years ago, and my aunt, who is a nurse there, says that everyone knew it would be too small before they began building it. 

Hospital overcrowding is nothing new in Canada. 

5 minutes ago, Chomper Higgot said:

So long as you don’t take anyone else with you into oblivion, who cares?!

Right. Who cares? So as long as the unvaccinated aren’t going around coughing in other people’s faces trying to deliberately infect them, then what do I care?
Covid is endemic now, so there’s no escaping it. We all just have to adjust according to how much risk we’re willing to accept. 
Right now there are a lot of unvaccinated people in hospitals taking up resources unnecessarily, but before they came along it was flu patients clogging up the ICUs every winter, and if it wasn’t for them, then history indicates we probably would have scaled back hospital capacity to reduce waste.

Eventually those unvaccinated people will either die, or survive and become immune, so I think it will be a short term problem if the vaccines work as well as is being claimed. 
 

17 minutes ago, ozimoron said:

The reason we don't focus on risk is that too many people are at risk. I'm over 65 and quite healthy but my age alone puts me at risk. It simply isn't socially acceptable to discard all us decrepit old useless baggage on society.

 

I’m not arguing for that. Im arguing for people’s ability to make their own choices when it comes to the risks they take in life. 
The vaccines have been here for a year now. The argument that someone else needs to stay home or wear a mask to protect you is wearing thin. 

11 minutes ago, ozimoron said:

About half of all people are overweight and nobody could presume anything before the vaccines came along. Deaths were out of control. You are trying to rewrite history.

Half of all people where? Certainly not in Thailand or the rest of SEA.
The USA, UK, EU, Canada? sure. Half of the people are old there too.
If western countries, who’s populations are old and fat, had a death rate comparable to many third world countries who’s populations are young and skinny, I think we’d probably have forgotten about covid by now. 

The biggest problem since the beginning has been our reluctance to admit who’s actually at a real risk from this disease, and focus on them, rather than the population as a whole. 
Many of us young healthy people, who had to continue working through the early stages of the pandemic when there was no vaccine available at all, have grown tired of the never ending restrictions on our lives now that the vaccines are available for those who want them, and deaths/serious illness in our age group has been brought down to basically zero. 

5 hours ago, ozimoron said:

Nobody should ever have gained the impression that masks or social restrictions were in any way related to the vaccines or wouldn't be required until the virus infections reached a low point which would be declared by medical experts. I certainly was always of this opinion. l Anything else is false right wing political garbage.

we were led to believe that 70-80% of the population being vaccinated would be enough to get those numbers down to an acceptable level, and end the social restrictions and masks. Nothing “right wing” about it.

At one point I even remember an American politician saying that the pandemic could be over in a month if people would just wear their masks. 
 

You might have been aware that the vaccines wouldn’t neutralize covid completely. I was aware, but was called a pessimist (among others things) for trying to tell anyone or show them the evidence.
The mainstream media sure didn’t make it very clear to the general public. 

19 minutes ago, Chomper Higgot said:

 

 

You don’t address the other sides outright lies and Q-duff misinformation.

I don’t address Q because I haven’t met anyone in real life who actually subscribes to all that nonsense; the same as how I don’t know any white supremacists, even though the media would have me believe that I’m surrounded by them, and they are the latest “greatest threat” to our way of life. 
 

Some people think the world is flat, and plenty of people still believe in god. There’s nothing I can do about them, but I don’t think they have the power to change any thinking person’s mind. 
All I see is politicians looking for a scapegoat because the plan hasn’t gone quite as well as people were led to believe it would.
Western countries are well ahead of the vaccination targets that politicians and health authorities themselves set, and implied repeatedly, would be enough to get us out of this mess. They were wrong.  Now that their credibility is being questioned by a good chunk of their constituents, they need someone to put the blame on, and who better to blame than a small segment of the population who is already inherently anti-government?

5 minutes ago, Chomper Higgot said:

 

 

What might have been said in error about the vaccines is all you’ve got.

 

Or rather, one side of what was said about the vaccines is all you’ve got.

 

 

Was it said in error, or was it said because it was politically beneficial? 
 

There were scientists at the time pointing to the effectiveness of flu shots; showing that while they do reduce serious illness and deaths in those who are most vulnerable, they are not (and should not be expected to be) capable of eradicating the disease itself. These scientists (the other side) were pushed to the back of the room where nobody would hear them, IMO. 
 

The impression I get from the VAST MAJORITY of people I talk to, is that they were never all that scared of covid to begin with, but did hope that the vaccines would put an end to all the misery that it has caused. That’s why many of them got vaccinated to begin with. Not necessarily because they thought they’d die if they didn’t get it. 
 

22 hours ago, placeholder said:

Really, that was what was sold to the public? What public health authorities claimed that? Stop making things up.

The fact is that these vaccines dramatically reduce the death rate for those who have been vaccinated and the rate of serious illness.

Whether or not that was really what was sold to the public, it would appear that’s what most of them thought they were buying. I remember having arguments with friends and family at this time last year, trying to show them articles written by scientists who said that the vaccines could not realistically be expected to stop the spread and put and end to covid. They were all planning vacations, weddings, and family reunions for the summer, and I was “just being negative”. 

(I was also accused of “being negative” and “making things up” when I said that these vaccines would be like a flu shot, and require periodic boosters to keep up with new mutations)
 

If health authorities weren’t selling the idea that the vaccines would end covid altogether, they should have been a lot more clear about it to the average news consumer, who doesn’t read medical journals. 
 

This is not to say that the vaccines don’t reduce serious illness and death (gotta throw that in there). What I’m saying, is that politicians would have had a much less patient populace on their hands if they’d been more honest, and told us that the masks and social restrictions would quite possibly have to remain for months, or even years after the vaccines were rolled out.