The state of Rotten Tomatoes turned out to be a very accurate bellwether for the state of the (US-centric) movie industry in general. It really is a shame what happened to one of the little bastions of human-centric freedom of expression and opinion.
I have a working hypothesis that a very large number of people don't personally know anyone who has died of Covid, except maybe for an elderly relative and "they were getting on a bit anyway". It's true of me and anyone else I've had this conversation with.
Do you live in a first world Western country and is your social circle comprised of people who do the same? In my experience when you go outside of that circle you start finding people who have personally experienced loss from COVID very quickly.
Covid seems to be, physically and emotionally, a primarily Western disease. And as bad as the fallout has been where I live, it seems to have been particularly damaging in the US (on both of those counts).
Seriously, the Indian variant (I forget which letter they gave it) was pretty devastating over there. I have many colleagues and they all know people who died, if not in their own family.
The official statistics on Covid deaths in India showed a mortality rate 1/10th that of the US. There would need to be more than an order of magnitude error in reporting for their death rate to exceed that of the US.
FWIW, calling it the "Indian variant" is apparently not ok. Do you mean Delta?
> More than 4.7 million people in India - nearly 10 times higher than official records suggest - are thought to have died because of Covid-19, according to a new World Health Organization (WHO) report.
> Three large peer-reviewed studies had found that India's deaths from the pandemic by September 2021 were "six to seven times higher than reported officially". A paper in The Lancet by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), an independent global health research centre, uses subnational all-cause mortality data from 12 Indian states. They come close to the WHO's estimation.
I'm aware of that, which is why I made the point that it would only bring India's Covid death rate to around the same as the US and other Western countries. It is also of no help to the discussion around my original point, which is the idea that a very large number of people don't personally know anyone who died unexpectedly of Covid.
Statistically, a social circle comprised of first world, Western, overweight and inactive and generally older folk should have the most susceptibility to death from Covid.
It's probably coming for us all. The increasingly saturated smartphone market will not provide the sales that manufacturers need to maintain the current economies of scale. That is, unless they perfect the art of phones engineered for a very particular lifetime.
I've never heard "traige" used with such negative connotations! FWIW, the term used by the NHS is "QALYS", or "Quality-adjusted life year". Yes, these calculations are made at all levels of health care.
