Biden calls for 'immediate ceasefire' in Gaza
The US will begin air dropping food aid to the people of Gaza, President Joe Biden announced on Friday, as the humanitarian crisis deepens and Israel continues to resist opening additional land crossings to allow more assistance into the war-torn strip.
Speaking in the Oval Office, Biden said the US would be "pulling out every stop" to get additional aid into Gaza, which has been under heavy bombardment by Israel since the October 7 Hamas terror attacks.
"Aid flowing to Gaza is nowhere nearly enough," the US President said, noting "hundreds of trucks" should be entering the enclave.
Biden said the US is "going to insist that Israel facilitate more trucks and more routes to get more and more people the help they need, no excuses".
He also noted the efforts to broker a deal to free the hostages and secure an "immediate ceasefire" that would allow additional aid in.
Just had to wait for there to be 30,000 Palestinian deaths first.
9/11 had 2,996 deaths for a little bit of context. Just imagine what would be happening right now if there were 30,000 dead Americans.
America has 9/11s of covid deaths monthly, long after Biden "ended covid" with Trump's strategy of "just stop reporting the numbers". That's what our journalists also do with all of the people murdered by Israel. Keep them out of sight, out of mind.
To be fair, it is medically hard to determine whether elderly people die with covid or from it.
I'm sure that it is, but it's not just elderly dying, plenty of kids and their parents are suffering. I just read a NPR puff piece about a landlord who finally got their investment property 'back' by evicting their tenant... a recently widowed healthcare worker with a child. It's almost like we shouldn't be trying to just return to 'normal' with an uncontrolled pandemic raging.
As many people die from covid as do from influenza or RSV at this point. I'm not saying it's not a serious illness but I am saying it's very far from "an uncontrolled pandemic" and saying it is is hyperbolic to the point of disregarding any other point you made.
I understand you don't feel affected by covid anymore, but you're incredibly wrong.
CDC estimates for influenza deaths in the 2022-2023 flu season: 21,000
CDC cumulative covid deaths from Sep 9, 2023 minus Oct 1, 2022: 84,560
Honestly, I'm not seeing a death count for RSV, but based on this RSV Burden Estimates, it's at most: 10,300 per year.
And this is all shown pretty well in the Trends in Viral Respiratory Deaths in the United States graph.
Not denying covid is more deadly than influenza or RSV, but you still have to account for the fact that covid might kill an old person that would otherwise die to influenza in a month or two (or something else, they are old and their bodies are degrading inevitably). That is why sustained increased death rates in corrolation to covid numbers is a better qualifier for the argument that we have to take precautions to limit people dying. I have been of the understanding that after the major initial waves, death rates are not higher than usual and hence unsustained.
Even if I ignore you moving the goalposts, would you really look at a graph like this
that's a few years out of date and assume the total deaths settled back down into the old pattern?
I'm not finding a more up-to-date data source for deaths per month, but it's not like you're providing any kind of data that covid isn't still killing a lot of extra people per year.
I am not from the US, but here are the statistics from Norway where no covid measurements have been in place since the start of 2022. The table below is official statistics on mortality nationwide:
Also, I got this first from discussions with some newly graduated medicine students. It is not like I was pulling it from my ass in the first place.
If there is any discrepancy in mortality rates, it could very well be caused by different ratios of vaccinated populace:
It looks like you're getting the data from here (except the Norwegian language version), so I have to ask: is there a reason you're cutting off the part of the graph showing "Deaths per 1000 mean population" spiking in 2022?
This new table is from here, and you can click "Choose variables" at the top if you want to see different data. But even just the graph you provided shows that total deaths for both sexes jumped up dramatically in 2022, the year you say covid restrictions were lifted. What are you trying to prove here exactly?
The population is slowly increasing but for the purposes of calculating the mean mortality can be treated as a constant, which is why I did not care about the weird cut off caused by me using my mobile phone and the table not adjusting for it. The increase of 2022 and 2021 was expected due to general decline of normal viruses (caused by covid measurements), which in turn made the general populace more susceptible to being sick later through decline in antibodies (due to smaller contagion, not some collective breakthrough in immune systems) through large parts of the pandemic. Either way, the point that I am making is that vaccines and effective health care to those sick with covid provides a highly effective measurement against it. This so much to the point that there is not, by Norwegian consitutional law, enough reason to keep the temporary measurements going any longer.
It was right to stop social contact. It was right to vaccinate everyone that could and wanted to (should have made it mandatory for all that could in my opinion). Then, afterwards, it was right to open schools and other parts of society gradually.
That it was right to open up after a critical percentage of the populace had been vaccinated with what has proven to be highly effective vaccines (better than we could have hoped, to be honest). Also I want to discredit the point that there is a raging pandemic. Even if it was raging in the US, which is not strictly true either, it would be more correct to call it an epidemic at this point caused by ineffective vaccination rates and shitty access to public health care for way too many people.
So if I'm understanding you correctly, you went from
thinking covid wasn't causing any/many additional deaths per year, just speeding them up a little
to providing a graph that shows thousands of extra people are dying each year
to saying all those extra deaths were because people weren't getting sick from normal diseases, despite us not seeing much of a drop in 2020 from people not getting those diseases during the covid restrictions. But now that the restrictions are lifted and they're being exposed to those normal diseases (and covid) again, all/most of theses extra deaths are from the normal diseases and have nothing to do with covid.
Norway absolutely did a better job at handling covid than the US, but the US's death rate seems to just be permanently higher now as a direct result of covid. Maybe removing all restrictions was the right thing to do, but we shouldn't ignore the fact that it comes at the cost of several thousand more people dying each year, just in Norway.
It was, as I said, not a sustained increase:
From that we can conclude that after an initial burst in death numbers, as covid and other viruses passes through the populace (which is bound to happen without indefinite restrictions), death rates return to normal. Also, with respect to uncontrolled spread in unnvaccinated populace, the increase was very minor. Actually comparable to a few high normal years earlier. Hence we can conclude reopening of society and the vaccines enabling it to be a major success, all things concidered, yeah.
You are very much wrong in saying stuff like each year and so on. There is no data to back your claim.
We've given up on all testing, masking, vaccination and even quarantining at this point. 9/11s of people are dying monthly from all manner of respiratory diseases (after getting wrecked by covid). What exactly would uncontrolled look like to you then?
Uncontrolled would be the very start of the pandemic, with neither masking nor immune people. It's not a wildfire any more, not even in the US with their proclivity to shoot themselves in the foot. It's better controlled than influenza simply because more people got shots against it.
That's all I'm saying. Yes it's a dangerous illness, but ERs aren't overwhelmed by patients like they were late 2020. I think part of the issue is semantics and a lot of people not realizing just how dangerous full-on influenza is, it's absolutely a deadly virus and 10s of thousands of people die from it every year right here in the first world; much less in the 3rd world.
edit: get mad about it but I guess you don't remember lockdowns and toilet paper shortages. I never got to work from home (medical-related field yay), I know exactly what uncontrolled looks like. If you want to panic about something start reading into microplastics, way more long term damage we're only beginning to understand. Plastics are everywhere.
It's sometimes hard to say an individual death was for sure caused by COVID, but it's easy to compare the number of deaths to the historical average and see how many more happened. It's really the only way to get a good count of COVID related deaths, because looking at excess deaths will also reveal how many people are being killed indirectly, such as dying due to lack of medical care because COVID was overwhelming the hospitals.
I agree with you and actually argued for this further down some comment chain. However, mortality increase was temporary in Norway where I am from (and AFAIK mostwhere in Europe), hence indicate that there is no uncontrolled pandemic here.
Here is an infographic from the start of 2023:
You should probably be looking at trends over a longer period of time, rather than just a single month.
From here. There was a dip below the 2016-2019 average in January through March of 2023, but time marches on.
They waited and will wait until the goal is achieved which is destroying gaza and drive as many palestinians away so that israel can extend its state.
Theyve returned the hostages right? Did we forget about the hostages?
Empirically: a pandemic. :(
Jesus you people are never happy.
Biden gave material support to Israel’s genocidal campaign which has killed over 30,000 people. You’re delusional if you think paying lip service to a ceasefire while still actively supporting the genocide is going to satisfy anyone.
How many non-Americans died as a result of 9/11? How many in Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries in the global war on terror? I'm guessing a shit ton more than 30,000.
It's only going to increase every day the hostages aren't returned.
Like a million just in Iraq I think.
Lol no. Most studies are in the 250,000 to 500,000 range and include deaths because of coalition forces, the civil war ("sectarian violence"), and AQ.
This is also over a much larger population, time period, and area.
Bunch of children died due to a reduction in quality of diet, healthcare, education. A lot of it was sanction related. Believe it or not, didn't pull the number out of my arse.
So you're using the study that adds in assumed deaths in the ten years before the Iraq war as a misleading figure for the Iraq war. Just so we're clear that isn't an apples to apples comparison. Unless you want to put the work in to check those numbers for Gaza since the mid 2000's when Israel began it's blockade.
But that would require acknowledging the last 15 to 20 years of Israeli fuckery. So instead you went and found the biggest possible number to tag the US with as some kind of perverse shield for Israeli war crimes.
God, people on Lemmy are weird.
What a stunning fucking number, it isn’t just murder on a mass scale, it is the denial of an entire future reality for a country because of the massive empty spaces all that destruction and death cause.
Well, this is what is happening right now because there were 1319 dead Israelis.
https://www.memri.org/tv/palestinians-gaza-west-bank-celebrate-october-seven-massacre-hand-out-sweets-fire-guns
Be right back, getting popcorn.
Uno Reverse: the actual genocidal and apartheid party operating in Israel was always Hamas! ✅
But what Israel did to Gazans is just as bad as a thousand October 7th.