@Akbar2thegreat said in #65:
> ["Which is to say, it's useless."] Like you?
Yeah, I'm useless. Feeling better now, are we? :-)
> You simply don't know difference between epidemic and pandemic. Pretty basic.
Do I know the difference? Let's see. In short: Pandemics are global epidemics.
Etymology: Pandemic is an loanword derived from Ancient Greek πάνδημος (pándēmos), which means "of or belonging to all the people". It's comprised of the prefix παν- (pan-), which means "all, every" and the word ὁ δῆμος (ho dêmos), which means "a people". Similarly epidemic is a loanword derived from Ancient Greek ἐπιδήμιος (epidḗmios), which roughly translates to "upon the people" or "among the people" (the preposition ἐπί [epí] can mean "on, upon" as well as "among").
An epidemic is "the rapid spread of disease to a large number of patients among a given population within an area in a short period of time." It's an infectious disease that spreads among the people.
Any epidemic has the potential to become a pandemic: One speaks of a pandemic, when an epidemic spreads "to other regional countries or even among continents" and when it affects a significant proportion of the population. The distinction is not always clear-cut with some epidemics being labeled as pandemics by one camp of epidemiologists, while some of their colleagues do not view the criteria as sufficiently met to classify it as such.
As Merriam Webster states: "It is worth noting, however, that there is no clear line distinguishing an epidemic from a pandemic. The latter is, from a public health perspective, worse than the former, but there is sufficient overlap between the two that at certain points consensus is unlikely." So there may be semantic ambiguity. This is analogous to the ambiguity in where space begins (see: Kármán line).
I'm not a professional epidemiologist, but I'd say I understand the difference.
> Epidemics are pretty common nothing new but pandemics are rare with hardly once in a lifetime ratio.
Not sure what you consider the average human lifetime to be, but recent pandemics include
- the 1889–1890 pandemic ("Russian flu")
- the 1918 influenza pandemic ("Spanish flu")
- the 1957–1958 influenza pandemic ("Asian flu")
- the 1961–1975 cholera pandemic
- the 1968 flu pandemic ("Hong Kong flu")
- the 1981-present HIV/AIDS pandemic
- the COVID-19 pandemic.
So there were seven pandemics in the last 133 years. Or about one pandemic every 19 years (granted, they were not perfectly evenly distributed). You must be very, very young if you think that pandemics happen at a rate less than once a lifetime. The 2010 world life expectancy at birth was 67.2 years. So the average human is expected to experience 3.5 (either three or four) pandemics in their lifetime. As a recent example, Queen Elizabeth II. (1926-2022) lived long enough to see the five latest pandemics.
Rather than me not understanding the difference between pandemics and epidemics, the problem is that we appear to have fundamentally different standards for what it means for a disease to "wreak havoc". In my opinion epidemics wreak havoc, just not worldwide. While you would likely disagree and say that epidemics don't wreak havoc.
I maintain that: "An epidemic can cause enormous damage through financial and economic losses in addition to impaired health and loss of life." It's comparable to a natural disaster like a hurricane. Neither an epidemic nor a hurricane have global effects, yet they both wreak havoc.
Your vague astrological "prediction" talked of a disease wreaking havoc in 2020. Therefore I pointed out that any epidemic wreaks havoc and that there were several ones in 2020, just as there were in every previous year. You just retroactively decide that the astrological "prediction" must have referred to the COVID-19 pandemic, because it wreaked the most havoc. But had it not occurred at all, you could have similarly claimed the astrological "prediction" to be "correct" on account of the second worst epidemic of 2020 (that's where the vagueness comes in very handy). And had that not occurred either, you could have switched to the third most devastating one.
Hypothesising that a disease will wreak havoc in a given year therefore is an unfalsifiable prediction. Because every year several diseases wreak havoc. You just don't care about or notice most of them, because they usually only affect people far away from you.
Unfalsifiable predictions are useless. I can predict that undetectable, invisible pixies push the Earth around the sun and that it would stop dead in its tracks if they stopped pushing (which they conveniently never do). That's a concrete, unfalsifiable prediction. No test can be performed to show this to be untrue. Yet it does not help anyone better understand the workings of our universe. It's useless to make unfalsifiable predictions.
Likewise vague, unfalsifiable predictions are utterly meaningless: I can predict that there will be a hurricane in 2023. This prediction is vague and unfalsifiable, because there are always hurricanes in a given year. It's trivial. It doesn't help humanity understand the mechanisms of hurricane formation, it doesn't prevent damages caused by hurricanes, it doesn't help evacuate anyone. It's a useless, unfalsifiable prediction. At the end of the year I can always confidently claim that my "prediction" held true. But nobody will applaud. Because it was as true as it was meaningless.
Unless I claim to have gotten the prediction from the planets and the stars. Then the astrology crowd will be wowed: "How could this sage have known that there will be a hurricane in 2023? Amazing, it must have been the magic of the stars! Astrology works!"
> Sadly you are born in this era. Had you born in that time era then you would definitely believe in astrology. Sadly we don't have time machine and if we had we could get to know mysteries.
I agree, had I been born prior to 1609 (when Kepler published the first laws of planetary motion) I probably would have believed in astrology as well. I freely confess to that. How could I have known any better living in a pre-scientific world?
But I'm glad that I wasn't. For humanity has learned so much since then. I wouldn't want to miss out on that. It's not sad at all. Ancient astrology didn't have answers to the great mysteries. At least there's nothing to suggest they did. They just had made-up "answers" as far as I'm concerned. And I'm not interested in make-believe, I want to know what's real.
> No. It's an art which you don't know about.
I do know about astrology. And I agree, astrology is an art not a science. Astrology deals with fictional relationships between anthropomorphised rocks and spheres of ice and gas in our solar system. It is the art of ascribing imagined meanings to the positions those "wandering stars" (οἱ πλᾰνῆται) took at a person's birth and interpreting them along the lines of a age-old doctrine that hasn't changed in centuries.
It is said that art reveals truth and the (only) truth astrology seems to reveal is that humans desire cosmic predetermination, order and security. The truth that humans are really uncomfortable facing the possibility that such things might – just might – not be real. The truth that we are all terrified of chaos and death.
> I don't expect a response but I wouldn't be surprised either. I am now bored by this so I hope it ends soon.
You're not obliged to read my posts. Apparently you were not bored enough not to respond though.
Have a nice day!
T
