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Birdjaguar

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It is Jan 2022 and you are in your lab next to your Wayback machine. It can send a message back to an influential person in February 2020. It cannot send back any actual details of the future though. So if you were to send back a message to 2020, what would you tell them to do in light of what you know now about covid. You cannot reveal any of what you know; only give them your best advice on what they should be doing and telling others to do in the spring/summer of 2020.

EDIT: For now let's stay with covid. Thanks.
 
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It is Jan 2022 and you are in your lab next to your Wayback machine. It can send a message back to an influential person in February 2020. It cannot send back any actual details of the future though. So if you were to send back a message to 2020, what would you tell them to do in light of what you know now about covid. You cannot reveal any of what you know; only give them your best advice on what they should be doing and telling others to do in the spring/summer of 2020.
Before we get started, is this thread meant to be general, or only about covid?
 
For now just about covid; Certainly list some other topic you think might be interesting for later. but for now, I'd like to stay with Covid.
 
"Pssst. You might want to buy stock in Pfizer and Moderna."

They'll figure out from that how bad it's all going to get.
 
It is Jan 2022 and you are in your lab next to your Wayback machine. It can send a message back to an influential person in February 2020. It cannot send back any actual details of the future though. So if you were to send back a message to 2020, what would you tell them to do in light of what you know now about covid. You cannot reveal any of what you know; only give them your best advice on what they should be doing and telling others to do in the spring/summer of 2020.

EDIT: For now let's stay with covid. Thanks.

Invest in Pfeizer stock.

"Pssst. You might want to buy stock in Pfizer and Moderna."

They'll figure out from that how bad it's all going to get.

Damn, I need another time machine!

It is hard to achieve temporal supremacy.
 
"Dude, just trust me on this one; you're gonna want to stock up on toilet paper."
 
OK, but I was hoping for how one would approach the soon to be expanding virus. :) BTW, the low in mar 2020 was $28.50 and the recent high was $58. Had you recommended Apple, it went from $58 to $180.

You know...what have we learned
 
Wear masks or not?
Close borders like China?
Prepare for lockdown?
Spend dollars for vaccines?

What would your tell Fauci to recommend?
 
Like, a pandemic do-over?

Honestly, it went pretty well.
We got a vaccine in less than a year against all odds.


I might have locked down all the nursing homes and forbidden infected people from going into them.

Lockdowns in general besides Australia and New Zealand didn't do squat.

Masks are 10% or 20% effective I'd say, but that is still 100,000 less deaths ultimately. So a good idea.


How many children actually died from covid?
I don't think closing the schools after teachers could get vaccines was a good idea.
We are going to have a generation of people who can't do anything if the schools stay closed.
 
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Didn't China close some ports again a few days ago?

Time to go shopping before the shelves are empty!


Omicron is so infectious that it doesn't matter how many people they weld into their apartments.

Plus, I'm not sure how good the vaccines are in China.

Omicron might hit them the hardest of any country. :hmm:
 
China has several cities, including Xi'an, locked down. Omicron is starting to show up. the Olympics will be interesting.

Like, a pandemic do-over?
Yes.
 
"Undecided between seeing 'Call of the Wild' in the theater or just waiting for DVD? Catch it in the theater."

Sorry I'm not playing the game the way you want us to, Bird.
 
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If we're limited to a message, then this is almost entirely meaningless. Who are you going to talk to in Trump's America that will not only listen but also convince Trump to do anything? It's not like Fauci could overrule Trump. We were there when we saw him flail helplessly in a Trump administration. Not sure "masks mmkay" would have had a meaningful impact on the state of affairs.

If there's some guarantee of being listened to, I might not bother with America myself. I'd keep it local and tell Trudeau to immediately re-invest in our healthcare system and production capabilities. Our hospital capacity has gone down to something absurd like two beds per thousand people, and it's really shown during the pandemic. We also still have mask shortages here and still have close to no vaccine production. It takes a minimum of two years for any kind of lower-tier education to come through, so major re-investment would at least see us coming into 2022 with less of a dire shortage in nursing and support staff.

Also, we had plans for emergency beds and such for COVID patients. Essentially, pop-up facilities to handle bodies. We never ended up going through with that. I think I would try to make sure those happened, just as a front-line approach to COVID patient care. It would clear up a lot of wards/floors in our hospitals for other patients.
 
What would your tell Fauci to recommend?
I would tell him not to lie, to say what is known and admit what is unknown.

Alot of people are stupid, it can't be helped, but giving misleading, confusing and contradictory information and guidelines doesn't help matters (nevermind willingly lying).

Don't need a time machine to realize that.
 
If we're limited to a message, then this is almost entirely meaningless. Who are you going to talk to in Trump's America that will not only listen but also convince Trump to do anything? It's not like Fauci could overrule Trump. We were there when we saw him flail helplessly in a Trump administration. Not sure "masks mmkay" would have had a meaningful impact on the state of affairs.

If there's some guarantee of being listened to, I might not bother with America myself. I'd keep it local and tell Trudeau to immediately re-invest in our healthcare system and production capabilities. Our hospital capacity has gone down to something absurd like two beds per thousand people, and it's really shown during the pandemic. We also still have mask shortages here and still have close to no vaccine production. It takes a minimum of two years for any kind of lower-tier education to come through, so major re-investment would at least see us coming into 2022 with less of a dire shortage in nursing and support staff.

Also, we had plans for emergency beds and such for COVID patients. Essentially, pop-up facilities to handle bodies. We never ended up going through with that. I think I would try to make sure those happened, just as a front-line approach to COVID patient care. It would clear up a lot of wards/floors in our hospitals for other patients.
For Alberta? I'd do everything I could to prevent the United Corruption Party from winning the election in 2019 (mind you, I wish I could do that anyway, covid or not). But our anti-science-"it's-only-a-cold" provincial gang of thugs pretending to be a competent government is completely inept, and out of its depth in handling this. Yes, they had to open some things up this past summer due to the heat dome - you have to allow people without fans or AC to access shelter, public spaces that are air-conditioned, cooling centres, emergency health care for heat-related illnesses... but letting even a modified version of the Calgary Stampede go forward was monumentally stupid.
 
I have a friend who was invested in Moderna at the right time, though she sold before it was really the right time, if you get the drift. Still made out decently well.

One influential person? The first person who comes to mind, who might listen if he knew his visitor was from the future, is Herman Cain. Basically telling him to take it seriously, or he would live to regret not doing so, and to encourage others to as well.

Would it change the course of events? Unlikely. But he was at least marginally influential, and old enough to possibly take a different course with some warning of what the future might hold.

As it was, I did write to some of my representatives in 2020, and saw at least one of them implement one of my suggestions, although possibly coincidentally.

The bigger question is, who could have the most impact who misunderestimated the impact in 2020, and might have listened? And what would the greatest impact have been? I can think of a few candidates. Vladimir Putin, or an appropriate deputy, on being more cautious about Sputnik rollout, so the trust in it would be higher and correspondingly its uptake. Winning the rollout battle was not worth it in the end. Someone in the Indian government, encouraging more local vaccine rollout (and highly localized, perhaps?) to try to retroactively prevent Delta? February 2020 means it's already too late to warn someone in China that they should sound the alarm bells sooner; it's in Iran, Italy, the U.S., etc. The Brazilian government is practicing ignorance, and aside from the travel ban from China and the vaccine funding, the U.S. government largely is as well, and the people at the top wouldn't listen anyway. BoJo would start taking it seriously in April and would have limited potential impact on the world at any rate. So in the end, I guess I'd lean towards either someone high up in Russia to try to improve Sputnik outcomes, or someone in India to try to prevent Delta.

Or maybe the CEO of Pfizer, Bourla, to try to persuade him to advocate for universal production of vaccines. Pfizer would already become fabulously wealthy regardless; if they had advocated building factories worldwide earlier, abandoning their patents with knowledge that their investments would be rewarded tenfold or more regardless, perhaps vaccine rollout would have progressed more quickly in 2021, potentially forstalling omicron and blunting the impact of delta. Would he have been persuadable that the net positive impact to society would be worth reducing the profit potential, while still leaving it quite large? Perhaps not, but it seems like a third candidate for someone who may potentially have been able to have a significant impact.
 
Dear Boris,

Do not sign a withdrawal agreement perpetuating EU freedom of movement.
Have the military close the border to all but essential food, fuel and medicine imports.

Edward
 
"Dear Boris - ignore previous message,

It is a good deal for the whole of Europe - you will think so too come december,

Do not - repeat - NOT attend any office parties unless properly disguised"
 
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