Recording of deaths UK

[Chris152]

I personally believe all religion is bonkers but I'm not anti it as it gives people faith often gives them direction and forms a good moral compass.

Causes an awful lot of wars too, though.

 

[selectortone]

Is his belief any different to believing in God, religion etc, not really.
I personally believe all religion is bonkers but I'm not anti it as it gives people faith often gives them direction and forms a good moral compass.

He's the same age as my son. How would you feel if your son started talking about aircraft contrails seeding mind-controlling chemicals, or 5G phone masts linked to coronavirus, or 9-foot shape-shifting lizards running the world?

 

[Jameshow]

I have a handful of these guys on my books. Smart guys lost thier way in life / bitter at the hand that life has given them, hooked on internet conspiracy theories....

Cheers James

 

[Selwyn]

Do you think we could have an adult discussion about this without the usual personal attacks and puerile comments ...

No.

Yes for sure

 

[doctor Bob]

He's the same age as my son. How would you feel if your son started talking about aircraft contrails seeding mind-controlling chemicals, or 5G phone masts linked to coronavirus, or 9-foot shape-shifting lizards running the world?

I'm not disagreeing, my point was why is religion acceptable but as bonkers ideas are poo poo'd.

 

[Artiglio]

We live in an odd world, there will be millions of people fixated on dieing from covid when the chances of them actually doing so are statistically tiny, yet those self same people will be making many other choices that will have much greater life limiting effects on them, (including increasing their risk from covid) smoking, lack of fitness, diet, bmi, drink , drugs etc etc. But they’ll pay no interest to those whatsoever.
The covid numbers will be whole careers for hordes of statisticians either showing what has/will happen/ed or showing it didn’t.
The societal changes covid has put in motion and the debt incurred will most likely make things very different in the future.

 

[doctor Bob]

We live in an odd world, there will be millions of people fixated on dieing from covid when the chances of them actually doing so are statistically tiny, yet those self same people will be making many other choices that will have much greater life limiting effects on them, (including increasing their risk from covid) smoking, lack of fitness, diet, bmi, drink , drugs etc etc.

Yeh but, drink and drugs are good fun whilst they work. where as lockdown is not a lot of fun.

 

[RobinBHM]

Numbers schmumbers. A singificant number of people have had quite a few years knocked off their life expectancy permanently. It is an incontrovertible fact that our healthcare system, and almost certainly other systems which keep us alive, would have become overwhelmed and ceased to function without lockdown(s).

Over the 11 months of the pandemic, I reckon I've lost almost a year of my life

 

[Jameshow]

If it weren't for lockdown I wouldn't have improved my woodworking, learnt to build bike wheels, converted a can to a camper, got chickens.

Not has to commute or sit in boring mtgs..

Enjoyed my kids, gone for walks and staycations.

Not that covid is a good thing at all rather it's an awful virus, but it does remind us to treasure the good things in life rather than chasing money / ambition.

Cheers James

 

[RobinBHM]

It is very difficult to allocate a single primary cause of death.

That uncertainty gives a lot of wriggle room for conspiracists to build their argument.

It is why lockdown sceptics love to use death rate metrics....to twist.


There is one unassailable fact however: hospital admissions rates.

 

[RobinBHM]

The govt have used daily: case numbers, hospital admissions, deaths, R value.

They've done it to give simplistic information to the public, but:

1 Deaths numbers don't mean much as primary cause is hard to know

2 case numbers don't mean much as it depends on testing numbers. % positive rates are more useful.

3 R value is almost impossible to calculate.

4 hospital admission...the most relavent metric really.

The Zoe app also gives a good idea of trend

 

[fixit45]

Has anyone in this discussion ever hear of burying your head in the sand!

 

[Glitch]

The good news is that 'flu related deaths have all but disappeared. Every cloud......

 

[Rorschach]

The good news is that 'flu related deaths have all but disappeared. Every cloud......

Likely we will have bad flu outbreaks in the next winter or two though.

 

[Trainee neophyte]

I took a dive into the mucky end of the pool this morning, to have have a look at some of the nonconformist (or conspiracy-theorist, if you prefer) info to see where things are - it's been a while since I last did it. A few fun things cropped up, particularly this bit of satire: The Vaccine (Dis)Information War

There are some great links in the article to things like mainstream media (!) propaganda claiming not wearing wearing a mask proves you are a psychopath, critical thinking is a bad idea, and just believe the nice man from the Ministry, because he always tells the truth.

Conspiracy theories exist because propaganda exists. Governments lie, intentionally and with malice aforethought. If you trust your government implicitly, then all unauthorised information is to be deplatformed. If you know your government lies, then you have to try and sort the wheat from the chaff, which is a difficult path to tread without any help. Some people go more off-piste than others, and don't forget that refusing to believe a truth doesn't make it less true, so dismissing all conspiracy theories out of hand makes you just as badly informed as the chem-trail nutter (and I agree that chem-trail belief is definitely more religion that reality).

 

[Doug B]

Over the 11 months of the pandemic, I reckon I've lost almost a year of my life

Yebbut it feels like two years

 

[Chris152]

I took a dive into the mucky end of the pool this morning, to have have a look at some of the nonconformist (or conspiracy-theorist, if you prefer) info to see where things are - it's been a while since I last did it. A few fun things cropped up, particularly this bit of satire: The Vaccine (Dis)Information War

There are some great links in the article to things like mainstream media (!) propaganda claiming not wearing wearing a mask proves you are a psychopath, critical thinking is a bad idea, and just believe the nice man from the Ministry, because he always tells the truth.

Conspiracy theories exist because propaganda exists. Governments lie, intentionally and with malice aforethought. If you trust your government implicitly, then all unauthorised information is to be deplatformed. If you know your government lies, then you have to try and sort the wheat from the chaff, which is a difficult path to tread without any help. Some people go more off-piste than others, and don't forget that refusing to believe a truth doesn't make it less true, so dismissing all conspiracy theories out of hand makes you just as badly informed as the chem-trail nutter (and I agree that chem-trail belief is definitely more religion that reality).

Absolutely agree. Some of those theories make interesting thought experiments - how do I know the world's the shape we tend to think it is, that men have stood on the moon, that the sun doesn't orbit Earth? Kind of like Descartes' cogito etc. Most of us don't have the understanding to counter flat earthers and all that, but do have a sense of how to weigh the arguments, who's making them, what they know and have to gain etc.
There are plenty of conspiracies visited upon us, ones we don't even see most of the time. They're far more interesting and important that ones cooked up by bored people looking for an alternative view, based on sketchy evidence, on such things as the pandemic.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

Cogito ergo sum? I spam, therefore I pink.

 

[RobinBHM]

We live in an odd world, there will be millions of people fixated on dieing from covid when the chances of them actually doing so are statistically tiny, yet those self same people will be making many other choices that will have much greater life limiting effects on them,

I'm not sure I buy this argument that people are fixated on Covid.

All the people I know that are in the vulnerable age groups, and or have a health condition have been sensible taking precautions to mitigate risk of infection.

I would call that being sensible, not fixated.


I would say though that the govts releasing daily death figures does create a fixated Covid narrative.
Quoting deaths from Covid is rather meaningless and not terribly accurate.

 

[selectortone]

Conspiracy theories exist because propaganda exists. Governments lie, intentionally and with malice aforethought. If you trust your government implicitly, then all unauthorised information is to be deplatformed. If you know your government lies, then you have to try and sort the wheat from the chaff, which is a difficult path to tread without any help. Some people go more off-piste than others, and don't forget that refusing to believe a truth doesn't make it less true, so dismissing all conspiracy theories out of hand makes you just as badly informed as the chem-trail nutter (and I agree that chem-trail belief is definitely more religion that reality).

Oh, I agree. The conspiracy-theory obsessed friend I mentioned did have a couple of things right. He used to cover the webcam on the workshop PC with blu-tac because he said people were watching him. That turns out to have been quite possible - just not the people he thought (he is convinced Apple is owned by the FBI and webcams are for their nefarious purposes).

And 'They' by Robert Heinlein is perhaps the greatest science-fiction short story ever written.

But I stand by my basic point that conspiracy theory websites are evil and exist to mislead vulnerable people and sew discord. Many are not what they purport to be, are doing massive damage, and are unnecessarily making those peoples' lives a misery.

There, that's MY conspiracy theory for a Sunday morning