Government being government, I understand why this doesn't work, but states literally have a list of people without jobs and their occupations that they're already paying. If the health department could/would just talk to the unemployment department...
Northeast states like NY, NJ, CT, Mass were able to mobilize after the initial crisis and rapidly hired and got systems in place to do contact tracing.
In the south, you have the conflict between municipal and county authorities managing the crisis on the ground while the obsequious governors are busy sucking up.
It’s depressing that the tragedy of what happened in April didn’t result in more intelligent actions in other places based in the lessons learned.
My parents who are about to retire do not want this.
The only reason for it was because offering spam blocking service was a cash cow for phone companies, so hey lobbied against any effective governance to stop it (finally some was passed in late 2019). If people have an interest in something, the government is barely responsive, it took years and years. Special interests that can pay to lobby for it get their way right away unless there is pretty huge backlash.
Why does the roll need to be performed by boots on the ground (exclusively?).
I could just be ill-informed here. We have one active case in hospital quarantine here is Tasmania who is a resident returning from Victoria, and I’m not really paying much attention so.
Why don’t we do this? It’s a jobs program, not an entitlement, so, theoretically, Republicans should eat it up. And, I don’t see Democrats opposing it, either. Instead, we’re pointing fingers, calling it the “China flu,” or the “Trump virus,” while over 130k have died, and many more get infected by superspreaders who could easily have been identified and isolated were there enough contact tracing in place. Even California, which I thought was handling the crisis well at first, has faltered by prematurely reopening sectors of the economy.
I’d like to say it’s a lack of leadership, but I think it’s more that our leaders are serving interests that are not ours. This is a nonpartisan statement — Trump is to blame for a lot of it, but Democratic governors and mayors, by and large, haven’t stepped up, either. It’s time to ask cui bono? It’s time to really drain the swamp, instead of continuing to vote for the mosquitoes who suck the life out of the American people.
I don’t think the other ones exist in significantly large amounts to be meaningful and even then, keep in mind that furloughed people are not getting paid. The money has to come from somewhere to start paying them for whatever again, and states and cities have limited funding resources even before COVID blew a hole in most tax revenues.
The only entity capable of nationwide deficit spending is the federal government, which seems unwilling to step up to the plate.
The feds have decided to prioritize the economy in an election year, for some short-sighted definition of a good economy. And the party in power has never liked a strong federal government anyways.
They can issue bonds to raise capital and, last I heard, the Fed is buying.
But at the same time, there were health officials being given PUBLIC DEATH THREATS by people who insisted that wearing a mask was dangerous to their health.
Ultimately, I suppose you have to give into politics and public pressure. A mandate that nobody respects and can't really be enforced has no value at all. It's plausible that responding to political pressure and trying to reopen, or give dates and phases, would result in better adherence than just telling the whole state "sorry, stay home indefinitely".
A mandate is essentially unenforceable, yes, but it's valuable regardless. It's about setting social norms and expectations. If public figures had put forward a consistent message regarding masks from the beginning, we'd have seen better compliance and fewer people would be dead now.
True, and that was impossible once CDC decided to lie to the public in an attempt to preserve supplies for hospitals.
https://www.ncsl.org/research/fiscal-policy/state-balanced-b...
That is no longer true: https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/muni.htm
On April 8, 2020, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
(the Board), by the unanimous vote of its five members and with the approval of
the Secretary of the Treasury, authorized the establishment and operation of the
Municipal Liquidity Facility (MLF) under section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve
Act (12 U.S.C. § 343(3)). The MLF is intended to support lending to state, city,
and county governments.
Under the MLF, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (Reserve Bank)
will commit to lend on a recourse basis to a special purpose vehicle (SPV). The
SPV will purchase eligible notes directly from eligible issuers at the time of
issuance.
[...]
The Department of the Treasury, using funds appropriated to the Exchange
Stabilization Fund under section 4027 of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and
Economic Security Act (CARES Act), will make a $35 billion equity investment
in the SPV in connection with the MLF.
Paying to millions of unemployed people to do contact tracing - does not mean effective contact tracing.
I was recently (a year and a half ago, time flies) out of work, and I did get a solicitation about a contact tracing job since the epidemic started. I didn't think my experience was applicable, nor am I free, but somehow they found me. Maybe they have indeed been trying to recruit pretty widely?
Statements like this always bother me. Which experts? What happens if the value isn’t reached? How did they even arrive at these numbers? The statement makes it seem totally made up on the spot, which isn’t helpful in a time when so much of the “expert advice” is already disregarded (often for good reason! Remember when “experts said” that masks were ineffective at reducing transmission of this disease that has very few asymptomatic carriers?)
The incubation period is usually five days or more, while patients can already be infectious two days before symptoms show. That means there is a window of opportunity of 2-3 days to find contacts of the current case and put them into quarantine before they start infecting even more people.
Where the percentage comes from, I do not know but I would assume that it is meant to push the number of new infections per case (R = reproduction number) to 1 or even better well below it (R < 1 means it would eventually fizzle out). Super sketchy math: if the reproduction number is ~2.5 and you trace and quarantine 90% of the contacts (1 - 0.9) * 2.5 ~= 0.25 new cases will slip through. They might be aiming at such a high number to compensate for other cases where no tracing is done (e.g. because it was not known that the patient was Covid-19 positive) to keep the overall reproduction number low.
Once again - I am not a professional and just offering some thoughts about the problem (and happy to be corrected / to learn more).
I recall it was more about not buying up masks so that healthcare workers had enough. And that masks may not help stop contracting it oneself.
And it was probably the right call based on the information we had then (the real question is what the US government was doing for the many months notice it had and why it did not use its powers to deploy companies to manufacture masks or as in the case of GM agree to pay the at cost rates they were offering the US government for manufacturing PPE and ventilators).
Once it became clear that asymptomatic carriers and spreaders existed, and that the majority of spread was through water droplets emitted during actions like speaking and singing (unlike most other viruses where it’s usually sneezing and coughing), the advice was changed rapidly since regular cloth masks could be effective for this purpose.
This wasn’t a failure of expertise but was the natural consequence of facing a novel threat that was moving faster than we were learning about it.
I'm exaggerating but not by much...
Contrast with the current messaging. They work but are in short supply. If you have a stash of new surgical or N-95 masks, please donate it. If you have a used mask, please continue wearing it. You're encouraged to make, wear, and sell/give to anyone non-medical-grade reusable masks. Anything is better than nothing.
Edit: maybe for clarity I should add that I don’t remember anyone saying it was ineffective, just unnecessary. I witnessed several physicians wearing their own masks be told by higher ups to stop though. I’ll have to look through old emails, things have changed on a weekly basis.
I definitely had a good share of discussions revolving around "scientists are saying different things every week" in the last few months. My closer connections seem to understand now.
Somewhere I read that among the reasons for ordinary people not to wear N95 masks is that the valve lets air out freely, while filtering incoming air. This would make you more likely to infect others if you are infected, than some other kind of mask.
It's not that you increase your own risk per se, but you increase the risk of your class, of civilians, by wearing it.
N-95 masks can be with or without valves.
With the valve they are pointless if the werarer is positive/transmits the illness.
The valveless ones are fine, but both with valve and valveless are not as useful as they promise (filtering 95% or so) because the wearer must be trained to use them AND the masks need to be suitable to the wearer, after a proper "fit test" AND the wearer must be medically tested to be able to breath with reduced flow.
The exact method the fit test (and the medical check) is performed varies by country/norm, but check this:
https://www.osha.gov/video/respiratory_protection/fittesting...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=559&v=D38BjgUdL5...
Basically you choose among 10-12 different models the one that seemingly fits better your face, then you put the mask on, a sort of transparent plastic hood is put over your head and a small quantity of substance is sprayed (usually vanilla or similar highly penetrating odour) under the hood, if you can smell it, the mask is not the proper fit or has not been put on properly and you start again.
Then, the particular model of mask with which you passed the test is "your" mask (and you won't use another model).
And of course you need to be cleanly shaved.
A "surgical mask" has a much lower filtering potential, but unlike the N-95 masks (FFP-2 in Europe) anyone can reach it without issues.
I didn't say they necessarily have valves, but all the ones I've seen do. I had one intended for painting, gave it to a local hospital.
Randomly searched YT of what I'm referring to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gYAka7qSnM
He could have told everyone to wear bandanas or other homebrew mouth coverings but he did not.
I was not speculating in my comment, this is Fauci's own admission.
Source: https://www.thestreet.com/video/dr-fauci-masks-changing-dire...
[1] I'm putting this firmly in the "all models are wrong, but some models are useful" camp
Source needed. It is, for example, what we used successfully to stop SARS from doing what COVID-19 has done.
But you have to get levels low enough first.
The US response is the worst of all worlds. We do enough to trash our economy but not enough to keep the disease from its inevitable march.
Also, if the things that worked successfully to stop SARS from doing what COVID-19 has done worked for it as well, then it would have been stopped just like SARS. All the western countries like the US, UK, Italy (I think), etc did SARS-style contact tracing starting really early on. It just didn't work this time around. There's not a huge amount of media coverage of this because it doesn't fit the narrative, but you should be able to find some.
Not that I disagree that the US response has been among the worst .. and the bar is pretty low with only a handful of countries (like south korea and Taiwan) having been able to promptly adopt effective strategies.
Anecdote. An acquaintance is a disease export working for NIH near DC who also does contract tracing in the field. Sometimes their contact with the public includes death threats, refusals to cooperate, and even been spit on. They are good people trying to prevent more illness. Some of the public has been coached that the doctors are taking their jobs, closing employers, etc.
Leadership needs to get everyone behind the same spear so we can snuff this out quickly.
This is particularly important for metro areas that span multiple local jurisdictions: a single authority can’t do significantly better (or worse) than its neighbors, so they have to act in concert with each other. Ruling by committee is inevitably slower than by fiat, which makes it harder to handle highly dynamic situations.
The CDC was specifically created because diseases need a nationwide response, the US simply failed.
Right now it would take an atomic mushroom cloud and/or the military in the streets to keep people at home for an extended period of time. And even then we would see 3-6 weeks of exponential rise in case numbers because testing is just so far behind and you will have tons of follow-up cases.
The United States is well on track to becoming the most tested large country in the world, and its testing rate is already the highest among large countries: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-tests-per-thousand-...
This is why the press is not trustworthy.
We sit just between Nigeria and India, but well ahead of Brazil and Mexico.
More concretely, 0.5% of the tests in Germany, the UK, and Italy are positive. For us, between 8 and 9% are positive. So to do the same level of testing per-case, we need to do 15x as many tests as we have been.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-19-daily-tests-vs-d...
The point is that as a nation we don't get brownie points for handling the outbreak so badly that we need to do things that other nations do not.
No one but the US (or Brazil or India, perhaps) has any business having the most tests per day, and few other nations have the need for a significant number of tests per capita, because cases per capita are so low that it's not worth it.
That's why I have to qualify my sarcasm with /s on this site, including my post above: the population density is too high. /s Trump sarcastically suggested it, but there never was such a "plan". Nor could there be one: the president of the United States does not have the authority to shut down (mostly private) testing.
It is unclear to me why this wasn't doable in more countries but this has been one of the very few winning strategies. (not trying to be malicious here, I admit that I don't know the logistics of large scale testing and why it wasn't applicable to more countries).
Honestly, my imagination fails to come up with a remotely plausible math model of containment, say in CA, of further spread from the current 400K (4M after the CDC 10x multiplier with the most being unaware of being a carrier) cases in 40M population.
Georgia is currently tracing just 7% of contacts. They were in the 7-9% range from mid May to early June, then fell slowly to about 4%, then briefly in late June got up to 19%, and then immediately went into decline back down to 7%.
Texas is doing 6%. They were at 19% in mid May, rising to 42% near the end of May, fell to 25% in early to mid June, jumped to 33% by June 11, and then have been on a decline down to the current 6%.
Experts say this needs to be 90% withing 48 hours of infection.
California peaked at 39% in mid May and has followed roughly a declining sawtooth since then, currently at 22%.
Florida is just 3%. They peaked at 40% at the start of June and went steadily down hill since then. They curve looks like a capacitor discharge curve.
The only states that currently either have enough contact tracers or have planned expansions that will get them enough are: Alaska, Hawaii, South Dakota, and everything north or east of Pennsylvania except for Rhode Island, .
Of those, all but New Jersey, Massachusetts, Alaska, and Hawaii currently have sufficient contact tracers on hand.
The remaining ~40 states do not have enough and do not plan to get enough.
A state needs 5-15 tracers per daily positive test. Georgia has 0.33, Texas 0.31, California 1.07, and Florida 0.15. Compare to New York at 13.75. (Missouri and Alabama are tied for the worst here, at a paltry 0.08).
Reading between the lines, I think that several states hired enough to handle the load near the end of lockdown, with perhaps some room to spare for a minor raise as they reopened. When the rise was faster than they anticipated, they failed to slow down reopening or to boost their budget for contract tracing.
Above data from https://testandtrace.com/ and https://covidactnow.org/