Plague Inc: The Cure DLC coming in early 2021 and free until COVID-19 is under control

Quoting: Dorrit

Quoting: Purple Library GuyIncidentally, I read an article today

Oh! listen to Library Guy, he read an article!

So just to be clear, are you calling me a liar? Or are you just trying to be vaguely disparaging without implying that your comment actually meant anything whatsoever?

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: tuubiHaving to stay home a lot for a while (and to wear a mask when I don't) are inconveniences, moreso for some, but worth it to me if it prevents a single death. Same goes for people losing jobs or money, as long as their government makes sure nobody ends up in the streets or has to go hungry. As long as you don't kill off a significant portion of the consumer base, businesses will bounce back and so will jobs.

I'd agree though (and it's probably the only point where I agree with them) that losing your job and the like is not named appropriately with "inconveniences". It's just... that it's necessary.

That's fair. For me personally (as an introvert who is married to another introvert and whose income hasn't been affected at all) this hasn't been a huge problem. The worst I've had to do is avoid properly visiting elderly family who depend on me, which sucks. I also had to cancel my summer vacation plans, but that's definitely just an inconvenience.

Of course I sympathize with those who have bigger problems, and there'll be a bunch of financial as well as psychological trauma to solve after this, but some evils are necessary, and better than the alternative.

I do think that if the government is going to say "It is necessary for public health that you stop earning a paycheck/your small business has to stop making money", it also has a responsibility if it is at all fiscally capable of it to do whatever it takes to make sure you don't end up on the street from complying with that order.
The US government in this is much like large sections of the US people--wanting privilege without responsibility.

Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: Purple Library GuyActually, I think there's quite a lot of evidence that it can. Not that government regulation can make people immortal, but it can sure as hell make them die somewhat later on average, whether it's seatbelts, or not allowing poison in our food or water or air, or safety standards at workplaces, or insisting that people stop at the nice red light.

The government might be able to reduce certain types of injuries and deaths through regulation, but overall human death rates do not rise or fall based on government mandates. And in the case of the Chinese cornoavirus, the "cure" -- reducing human socialization through fear; destroying economies; forcing people to stifle themselves with face coverings that have their own associated health risks quite apart from any influenza and don't actually prevent the transmission of illness -- may, in fact, be worse than the disease when all is said and done.

As Benjamin Franklin famously said, "Those who would give up essential liberties for a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Overall human death rates do in fact rise or fall based on government mandates. For instance, when the USSR fell apart and the Russian government imploded, the death rate rose dramatically, and then fell again after Putin got the house in order.
Not all of those mandates have to do with admonitions and control, mind you--a big part has to do with plumbing and garbage collection, for instance. Not to mention health care. Government provision of public goods is I think usually a bigger deal for death rates than enforcement of regulations, which in turn makes a bigger difference than "law and order".

Meanwhile, if you want to claim that "not wearing a mask" is an essential liberty I don't know what planet you're supposed to be from. And I hate to tell you, but wearing masks does significantly reduce the spread of the disease (and various others, for that matter). At this point there's plenty of studies and they are quite clear. And honest to God, what motive is anyone supposed to have for falsifying this? What possible good is it supposed to do the perfidious Democratic technocrats to fool their opponents and supporters alike into wearing masks?! Perfidious Democratic technocrats fool people for one motive only: Money. And the mask business is small potatoes and nobody has a monopoly.
And health risks? Really?! I think bajillions of Muslim women, skiers and so forth and so on would have noticed by now. Look, it's just a frigging piece of cloth; my wife made one at home, I got a couple at Aritzia, they're not fiendish engines of destruction with weird chemicals sneakily inserted.

Finally, China. China wiped the disease out within their borders. They eliminated it, before any vaccine arrived. They're already back to economic growth and living normally. Because they didn't fuck around.

Quoting: DorritIf governments hadn't intervened and hospitals and doctors were free to work with patients this would have been solved by now and without the need for vaccines because there are therapies effective enough.
It's not that governments minimized the problem; they created it. Central Power is the problem, always is.

You do realize that's completely ridiculous from start to finish, right? And you do realize that hospitals, doctors and nurses are basically unanimous in wanting strong public health measures from government?

Look, I'm sympathetic to suspicion of government . . . especially the American government. The government is interested in spying on us. The government does tend to grab more policing powers, circumvent rules intended to protect people's rights, and so on. That does not mean that every time anything goes wrong, it was the government that did it. You have to look at things case by case. There are plenty of other reasons for stuff to go wrong, from private profiteers to shit just happening. Covid just happened, although there are things about our economic setup that are making such things more likely overall.

The other thing you gotta keep in mind is, modern governments are the handmaids of plutocrats. They do things for the interests of those plutocrats. Trashing the economy by making everyone stay home from their jobs and not shop is not something anyone would expect to be good for plutocrats, so there's no way the government would want to do it.
In the specific US case, the government also does things to maintain the empire (mostly because there's a big sector of plutocrats that's good for). Covid has also been bad for the American empire--the world has seen the US look like an unreliable basket case and fail to lead while it sees China take care of business and pay significantly more attention to helping elsewhere in the world. The publicity has been just terrible.
Ergo, the government didn't do Covid; they don't have a motive.
(It so happens that the very rich have so far made out very well from Covid while everyone else got shafted, but nobody expected that--it was a weird result from a very complex set of circumstances. And it's probably not sustainable; elite wealth can be decoupled only so far, for so long, from general economic growth, no matter how much money you print for them)

Quoting: Purple Library Guythe world has seen the US look like an unreliable basket case and fail to lead while it sees China take care of business and pay significantly more attention to helping elsewhere in the world.

I'm sure you're right about the plummeting opinion of the US around the world, but you might be mistaken if you think this has polished the world's opinion on China. We haven't suddenly forgotten about their totalitarian government, their human rights abuses and their expansionist ambitions. As you said, they got the virus under some resemblance of control quicker than some other countries, but that doesn't earn them much goodwill.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyAnd you do realize that hospitals, doctors and nurses are basically unanimous in wanting strong public health measures from government?

No.
But that's leave it here.

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: Purple Library Guythe world has seen the US look like an unreliable basket case and fail to lead while it sees China take care of business and pay significantly more attention to helping elsewhere in the world.

I'm sure you're right about the plummeting opinion of the US around the world, but you might be mistaken if you think this has polished the world's opinion on China. We haven't suddenly forgotten about their totalitarian government, their human rights abuses and their expansionist ambitions. As you said, they got the virus under some resemblance of control quicker than some other countries, but that doesn't earn them much goodwill.

Point. But at the same time, China came out in favour of co-operation and low prices on vaccine development and distribution, while the US was all "Muh intellectual property! Enterprise gotta profit!"
If they follow through, third world's gonna notice.

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: PhiladelphusWhile Plague Inc is certainly a fun game (and this DLC looks interesting), I now find its claims of being a "realistic simulation" especially ludicrous when nearly the entire population of China can be infected with my new disease before a single person in a single other country catches it. Sure, a lot of diseases aren't as infections as COVID-19, but if upwards of a billion people can catch it in the same country surely someone in a nearby border town's going to pick it up, right?

I bet they figured in that China is (or very much was) a very isolationist country. I mean when I play the game, I choose Madagascar and they are an island, and it still spreads everywhere before that whole island is infected.

I just picked China as the country with the largest population*, but it's my experience with every country in the game: unless you take specific mutations to increase air or water spread, you can easily infect 50—100% of the population of any country before a single person in another country contracts your disease. In the real world, though, SARS-CoV-2 spread from China while there were just a few thousand cases in the country at most. And not just to a single other country, but multiple countries had infected people traveling to them around December–January a year ago (which then spread to other countries, etc.). Once your disease is infectious enough to have infected a few tens of thousands of people (at most), it absolutely should start showing up around the world, because people move around a lot these days (or did, at least).

*But also, China is hardly isolationist—people come and go to, from, and through it all the time these days. I flew through Shanghai on my way back to Melbourne from visiting family in California back in January, a Chinese colleague of mine was visiting her family around the same time, and one of my PhD supervisors moved from China just last year. And that's not counting all the non-Chinese tourists and business people who visit China year-round, who would be prime targets for picking up a new disease and taking it back home.

Quoting: Philadelphus

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: PhiladelphusWhile Plague Inc is certainly a fun game (and this DLC looks interesting), I now find its claims of being a "realistic simulation" especially ludicrous when nearly the entire population of China can be infected with my new disease before a single person in a single other country catches it. Sure, a lot of diseases aren't as infections as COVID-19, but if upwards of a billion people can catch it in the same country surely someone in a nearby border town's going to pick it up, right?

I bet they figured in that China is (or very much was) a very isolationist country. I mean when I play the game, I choose Madagascar and they are an island, and it still spreads everywhere before that whole island is infected.

I just picked China as the country with the largest population*, but it's my experience with every country in the game: unless you take specific mutations to increase air or water spread, you can easily infect 50—100% of the population of any country before a single person in another country contracts your disease. In the real world, though, SARS-CoV-2 spread from China while there were just a few thousand cases in the country at most. And not just to a single other country, but multiple countries had infected people traveling to them around December–January a year ago (which then spread to other countries, etc.). Once your disease is infectious enough to have infected a few tens of thousands of people (at most), it absolutely should start showing up around the world, because people move around a lot these days (or did, at least).

*But also, China is hardly isolationist—people come and go to, from, and through it all the time these days. I flew through Shanghai on my way back to Melbourne from visiting family in California back in January, a Chinese colleague of mine was visiting her family around the same time, and one of my PhD supervisors moved from China just last year. And that's not counting all the non-Chinese tourists and business people who visit China year-round, who would be prime targets for picking up a new disease and taking it back home.

Agreed. My only point was that China used to be isolationist. https://www.gavinmenzies.net/ has some interesting books about why / when they became that way. But for sure, not now. Don't have any other explanation to why it works that way in the game. Bug?

Quoting: Purple Library GuyFinally, China. China wiped the disease out within their borders. They eliminated it, before any vaccine arrived. They're already back to economic growth and living normally. Because they didn't fuck around.

China claims they wiped the virus out, but they were also the ones claiming early on that there was no risk of person-to-person transmission despite the fact that they perfectly well knew the truth. They deliberately kept the rest of world in the dark for months about the potential dangers of the Chinese coronavirus, so why are you trusting them now?

As for mask use, there is actually no good evidence that it can stop or even slow the spread of influenza like the Chinese coronavirus. There are actually studies going back for years that prove this, but when it came to this latest "emergency", governments operated on the logic of "We must do something" even if that "something" isn't actually effective. Case in point, there has been high mask and social distancing compliance in my state since at least August of this year, and yet things are supposedly worse now than they were before all the draconian measures were instituted. As the saying goes, if masks, then why aren't they working?