This is wrong and misleading. You're quoting the average fatality rate for "healthy" people, but the distribution doesn't look like that at all. Then, you cherrypick 10% out of nowhere for "parents and school teachers". 10% is the rate for people in their 80s.
Real data: "[t]he estimated IFR is close to zero for younger adults but rises exponentially with age, reaching about 0.3% for ages 50-59, 1.3% for ages 60-69, 4% for ages 70-79, 10% for ages 80-89."[1]
[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160895v...
a realistic calculation of risk should be looking at your risk of dying, your risk of serious illness, your risk of permanent illness and/or long-term effects, _and_ your risk of medical bankruptcy. one dude got a bill for a million dollars when he finally was able to leave the ICU.
COVID-19 is going to have a long tail...
[1] Outcomes of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Patients Recently Recovered From Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), Puntmann et al, JAMA Cardiology, 2020
Yet we know that while heart attack risk is elevated for a few weeks after a bout of flu, it reverts to baseline for virtually all otherwise healthy patients.
The myth of long-term COVID heart damage is, as of the evidence yet, media scaremongering. We have no reason to believe that COVID behaves any different than any other common respiratory infection in this regard.
[1] https://academic.oup.com/cardiovascres/advance-article/doi/1...
https://www.smh.com.au/national/seizures-and-battered-heart-...
[1]https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/irv.12470
So... not like the flu in scale or scope.
Where is proof of causality between coronavirus and these afflictions?
I’m not arguing for total lockdown. I’m arguing for avoiding the more risky activities that involve heavy breathing in close quarters so total lockdown can be avoided. Local governments mostly know this, and have set policies accordingly. In general they should do a better job of compensating businesses in the short term since it’s not the gym owner’s fault (for example) that his business happens to have been risky right now.
I don’t think it’s good behavior to go out of your way to circumvent a public health policy based on a personal risk tolerance.
Obviously there is not going to be a total lockdown in the the US no matter what happens. Regardless of the potential benefits, that option isn't even remotely politically feasible. People simply won't comply, and there aren't enough police to enforce it.
Obviously the political situation and what’s feasible is different, but I hope restrictions on group sizes and a small number of activities is not infeasible. They are not “lockdown”, they are the way to avoid lockdown.
Again there is no political possibility of a future strict lockdown in the US. So for better or worse it has already been avoided.
There are some obvious ones, like: no new cases in the city/county reported in 14 days.
For some reason, it seems people thought this would take a month or two, and then everything will be back to normal. But it wouldn't. Two months is a ramp-up period, a default if you do nothing. "Flattening the curve" measures were always going to extend the partial lockdowns until late this year. We knew that in March.
The "more trivial things" like normal social interaction, employment, and healthy exercise?
I've never seen a more pointed example of most people's abject inability to perform utilitarian reasoning than this pandemic. If you think causing at least tens of thousands of suicides since the start of the lockdowns, impoverishing millions of people for years to come, and drastically reducing almost everyone's quality of life is a reasonable tradeoff for buying (on expectation) an extra few months of life for geriatrics, you are not rational.
Yep, me neither. If more people could, we wouldn't have this problem, because people who could would stay home. And going to the gym is indeed one of the "more trivial things".
I suppose the problem is that it's hard to impress on people the seriousness of the situation. If instead of a virus, you had a madman or enemy soldiers going through the street and shooting every two hundredth person at random (even with a heavy bias towards the elderly), everyone would stay home and keep crying the government needs to do more.
If a single-basis-point-scale increase in annual death rates is enough to make you “stay home”, you should never go outside in the first place.
On expectation, my marginal increase in risk of death from depression from becoming a shut-in is higher than the marginal increase in risk of death from contracting covid.
The primary problem with this disease is the asymptomatic spread.
I've included everyone I come into contact with. The risk to them is insufficient to justify me becoming a hermit. If they have a vastly different risk profile from me, they'll become a hermit of their own accord and I don't have to worry about them catching it from me.
> The primary problem with this disease is the asymptomatic spread.
If that's the "primary problem", then it's probably not something to worry about, don't you think?
If you think an 85 year old dying 3 months earlier is the same as a 27 year old killing themselves, you’re beyond help.
> Again, wow. I'm sorry you hate your gramma... You're the one that's not rational, and I expected the HN crowd to be better at digesting statistics.
Absolutely moronic emotional appeals and accusations of being irrational within a few sentences of each other? You are a hopeless midwit.
Have you ever seriously contemplated death? If you have, those numbers don’t seem very good, not at all.
Not to mention these are stats for DEATH. Meaning these are the worst case scenario. Dead. The chances of getting seriously ill, like major suffering, are much higher. Would you want to experience that? Would you wish that on others in your community?
Suck it up and do some pushups for gods sake.
I know this is a morbid topic, but it gets to a fundamental truth. How valuable is a human life? Is it worth significantly damaging the future of the young through economic depression and increased social isolation and mental illness to extend the life old old people by a year, 5 years?
There is no easy solution. We can hibernate as much of the non-essential economy with lock-downs and mandate the wearing of masks. But this, will extend the economic hardship we are under, which will put further economic strain on young people, who now have had to contend with the great recession and now likely a depression. We can do like sweeden and try and isolate and protect the vulnerable, and keep the economy open, or we can do nothing. Each of these choices has trade-offs in terms of economic hardship and lives. Not just the lives of people who get COVID, but those who commit suicide due to social isolation, economic hardship, and other factors related to COVID.
American's can't have this discussion in a mature manner because it has been poisoned by politics.
I’ve been comparing flu stats for Australia. 2019 a BAD flu season was over 400 deaths. A NORMAL season is roughly 150 deaths. I think 146 in 2018. 2020 has 36 deaths.
Melbourne deaths peaked at 25 for a single day. The current outbreak in VIC totally blows past the flu death rate for the entire country.
Total COVID deaths in Australia (450) already matches a bad flu season in a “locked down” environment and we still have 5 months to go for 2020.
Thankfully in Australia it’s possible to make mask wearing mandatory.
https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/Lookup/by%20Subject...
When I was trying to google data I don’t think I ever came across the ABS site in the results. 2016 was also 400ish deaths.
The flu certainly makes for a better comparison for discussion's sake than something like smallpox or the bubonic plague. Let's not forget the Spanish flu was also a flu.
When you look at overall mortality it's not similar to the flu. It's worse. Covid is a bigger killer, with a major reason being the lack of population resistance, vaccination, treatment protocols etc.
I think most discussion misses this point, it is similar in some ways and not in others.
In my view a rational and evidence-based approach would have focused on protecting vulnerable populations from day one. Such policies received little emphasis. Instead, we panicked and implemented measures that destroyed the jobs of healthy people who were living paycheck to paycheck. It's hard to imagine a worse response than one that fails to focus on the core problem and injures millions in the process.
Saying its just a flu, also discounts the potential life long impacts of a COVID infection, which appears to damage the hearts and lungs of some people who survived.
The broader point is, that there is no one right answer, all answers cause pain and suffering for different groups. To dumb it down to a black and white response does a massive disservice.
Can't really make a comparison with a long standing disease when covid19 is still doing its first rounds.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/12/us/covid-deat...
How many more quarter millions of souls is a sufficient amount to sacrifice on behalf of gym fetishists?
(I was planning a return to the gym following an involuntary multi-year lapse this past January. On advising my doctor I was delaying plans, their first response was to dismiss my concerns as germophobic. They've since apologised.)
However, I do want to address the young and increased social isolation and mental illness. Took my toddler for an annual checkup recently and asked about all this as he's been out of daycare since March and had concerns about development.
The pediatrician's answer, which I found compelling was: this is a big deal, and it's going to have an impact, and therefore we should be a little lax to help create some comfort around the house. That said, all the psychologists in the world are looking at this and starting to work on the impact and how we get kids back to "normal" or ease the harm this has on them. There is going to be expertise and guidance on this.
Of course, that likely doesn't apply to the anti-science crowd.
I am remarkably lucky. I am fairly resilient and being stuck working from home hasn't negatively impacted my mental health. I've been promoted during the crisis. I am financially secure.
Not everyone is like me. Many people have suffered horribly due to the crisis, becoming unemployed, unable to see friends, they don't have their usual coping mechanisms. My point was, how we choose to deal with this is a choice, each choice has consequences. Currently we are saving older lives, at the expense of damaging the futures of younger generations. Is this the right balance? I don't know. I don't claim to know. But as a society, this is what we need to answer, how valuable is each human life.
Should we choose harsh lockdowns to extend the lives of older people by x years on average? What is the cost in economic and mental health harm to younger generations? How do we balance these needs?
These are the discussions we should be having, instead of decrying anyone who disagrees with the harshest of measures as a witch.
Looking at current number of deaths as the outcome for the decision to open stuff up only makes sense if you think we would have seen the same infection rate.
If the infection rate is high enough and fast enough, we surpass the healthcare system's capacity to help with hospitalization, and then we see a large increase in the mortality rate for those infected, as some of those with bad, but not fatal infections that recovered in the hospital don't recover out of the hospital. The faster the spread, the worse (higher) that number is.
> The economic impact would be roughly that of everybody taking a really long vacation.
People come back from vacations. The economic impact would be more like those people all quit at the same time.
> it does not seem like that is the calculus going into our policy decisions here in August.
It is. They're looking at worst case scenarios for COVID-19, and how likely they are, compared to worst case scenarios for the economy, and how likely they are.
Worst case for the economy is a depression, which may take years or decades to recover from, but the workers are still there, still trained, and we can hopefully get them back to work with stimulus, even if it takes a long time.
Worst case for COVID-19 is that instead of hundreds of thousands of dead, we see millions of dead. What's the economic impact of one of every 50 or 100 families loses a parent, and how that affects they flexibility and ability to recover from financial bumps? What's the impact to Apple or Google if a high level exec that's spears a division dies (what's happened at Apple since Job died, and he had plenty of time to groom a successor)? What about the 20 employees of small business that was struggling but surviving when the owner dies? The economic impact of people actually disappearing forever is sometimes equivalent of the cost and time to train a replacement (which is generally multiple months of salary for any non-trivial position), and that's when it can actually be replaced adequately.
Even if you want to completely ignore the humanitarian aspect of it, there's good economic reason to not want people to die, and why locking things down, while economically disastrous, maybe still be less economically disastrous than NOT doing so.
That's fine. People are going to do what they're going to do. I'm not quite willing to let them do it behind nonsense arguments and justifications though.
If someone's unwilling to give up going to the gym, so be it. When they couch it (as some have here) as them actually doing it for the benefit of everyone else by helping the economy, I'm going to loudly and vehemently call bullshit.
If they say they just aren't willing to change and don't care about any of the data, well as long as they actually know the data, then I'll have nothing more to discuss with them.
That said, I don't think this is how people are. I think people are living in a deep cognitive dissonance and refusing to see the facts, not acknowledging them and saying they don't care.
That's not a policy problem, that a problem of educating people that do not want to be educated. Should the rest of the populace just shift our views away from reality so people that don't want to face it can get a better deal out of some policy? That won't lead to an acceptable outcome either, when the policy in question is about public safety.
Preventable deaths.
> American's can't have this discussion in a mature manner because it has been poisoned by politics.
I would say it's deeper than that. American society has been poisoned by individuality to the point where no one wants to do anything to help one another if it doesn't benefit them. It feels there's no concept of civic sense or societal good. Everyone just wants to do whatever they want, regardless of the consequences.
Ask me to inconvenience myself for someone else? Fuck you buddy I got mine /s
Here are the chances of dying in a year, for a given age, from actuarial tables:
25 year olds: 0.16% chance of dying
35 year olds: 0.2% chance of dying
45 year olds: 0.3% chance of dying
55 year olds: 0.7% chance of dying
65 year olds: 2% chance of dying
75 year olds: 3.5%
85 year olds: 10%
95 year olds: 26%
How about, if you’re worried, stay home, stay in. If you’re not worried, go out. Let’s not impinge on freedoms of any groups. Not just little freedoms. Pretty basic ones like, freedoms of assembly.
But there's a few big problems here:
a) As we've seen, some of the most vulnerable people are in situations where "staying in" without letting the virus in is very difficult. This will be worse the more widespread in the wider community?
b) Even if the vulnerable can perfectly protect themselves, this assumes a very selfish calculus of unconcern for everyone else. If your hospitals fall past the tipping point in a "get it over with ASAP" yolo policy, people not only die faster than in a world where there's never a vaccine or effictive treatment, more of them die too due to reduced ability to treat.
c) Who's gonna pay for all the non-wealthy vulnerable people to stay home? Especially in cases where they need to be more isolated, such as those with healthy roommates who will be acting normally, so they need to relocate too? I haven't seen anyone proposing answers to this in the states like TX or GA.
Economic-cost-wise, why is this cost the one that gets people so riled up?
Is it because it also comes with personal inconvenience, and so much of the other ways we spend money fighting death - or trying to extract revenge for death like after 9/11 - doesn't?
Driving, for instance - the government makes us spend a lot more to have safer cars, but other than styles and types of car available as a result, we don't really get impacted by it. It just makes the cars more expensive, and few people care.
Or maybe we're just bad at dealing with adversity without having someone to blame? So we go reaching for "bad guys"?
The ability of politicians to control transmission by making decrees, even dramatic ones, is limited, yes.
The ability of ordinary people to control transmission by taking obvious common sense precautions is not. And those obvious common sense precautions should include, yes, not engaging in activities that have a high risk of transmission.
One problem with age-based stats like this is that it gives the impression that the way to think about risk is along the lines of russian roulette: when someone gets infected, the great actuary in the sky rolls a D100, consults the tables, and if their roll is good, they don't die.
But what if the die was already rolled for some individuals? What if, say, one in 100 people carry a genetic risk factor that means that if they get COVID, they have a much higher risk of dying - regardless of their age? That hypothesis is also compatible with the statistical data we are looking at.
You could also consider, what if some people have particular predisposition to become a superspreader and infect many more people?
If the population contains individuals for whom their individual outcome risk, or their potential impact on other people, is significantly above the average, then by reducing the spread of the disease we reduce the number of such people who ever get infected. You can prevent the D100 having to be rolled for as many people, including people who need to roll much higher to survive.
Why does the timing of the roll matter?
The point is more to get people to think about the difference between aggregate average mortality, vs the individual prognosis of one unlucky COVID patient.
This winds up being a trolley-problem kind of reframing of a moral argument. Philosophically, should you change your behavior between the following two scenarios:
- a group of 100 people all have a 1 in 100 chance of dying of a disease
- a group of 100 people contain one person who will definitely die if they get the disease
?
Does your answer change if you are the one person?
People only looking at fatality rates and so on are taking unknown risks. Many people who have healed from COVID including younger people cannot even climb a flight of stairs. People suffer from fatigue and brain fog months later. Many need lung and kidney transplants. This is not a flu. It causes heavy clotting of the blood and organ damage all over the body which the flu doesn’t.
I urge people to do more research before taking such risks.
Are you referring to this study[0] and possibly this article[1]?
(In my experience, telling people to “do research” instead of giving them links to primary sources isn’t great if you want to educate people or have a high quality discussion.)
[0] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/...
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/08/long-haul...
highly recommend /r/COVID19 (stay away from /r/coronavirus) for well moderated discussions that aren't politicized/sensationalist and are based on research/science/numbers.
How about -- what's the max viral load one can sustain for it not to pass the 1st layer immune system? Is there really a 1st and 2nd layer? Can I resist it without getting antibodies? How much more effective is a KN95 / N95 mask in terms of viral load vs the others?
And why don't we have more high powered venting fans and permanent outside events and require building to open their windows or remove their walls in climates where that'd work?
You can do one thing to reduce your viral load. Wear a mask. N95 will do better than a surgical mask. But even mask wearing seems controversial. These things are really hard to study so you need to err on the side of caution.
If the price of soybean, or wheat, or pork goes up 15% internationally as a result of US supply disruptions, that doesn't starve any Americans, but it absolutely causes deaths in Yemen, which is already in the middle of a famine.
I think your concern is real and well placed. When the economy is frozen for a pandemic, you have a demand shock and a supply shock, what happens to prices? I think this was genuinely unclear early in the pandemic. Interesting additional details here [4,5]
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSOYBUSDQ
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PPORKUSDM
[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PWHEAMTUSDQ
[4] https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/articles/2020-05-27/pa...
[5] https://mobile.twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/12416894220909...
I think in US everything is polarized and politicized. To the point that wearing masks is somehow considered against freedom. I believe health officials have some blames to share. They still have not come clean for their initial mask guidelines that was blatantly wrong. I think health authorities will have long time to regain trusts in US.
I also feel we don’t quite understand the transmission mechanism fully yet. It’s airborne, at least we know that part but the clusters in nursing homes and indoor parties also indicate there is some mechanisms in play when indoor.
Yet despite this, United States has 4 TIMES the cases per day.
Europe can relax because they worked hard in the beginning to get everything under control. The US never did that, most states (like my home state of Texas) did a half-assed closing for 3 weeks, so the numbers never really got under control.
I have seen recently that serology tests in Italy have shown the same outcome for people who were locked down than essential workers who were not locked down (and mortality stats in the UK told a similar story a couple of months ago).
Also the evolution of deaths in Sweden followed the same shape and timing than all the other european countries who locked down, suggesting the peak had more to do with the natural evolution of the infection than as a result of a lockdown.
And as far as I know, the WHO does not support lockdowns.
I suppose things like how well care homes were protected probably mattered a lot more.
No, this is absolutely wrong, every single sentence. Lockdowns definitely help. New York was hit hardest because, despite closing the earliest, they still closed way too late. Cuomo resisted calls from his health experts for almost three weeks. By the time he gave the order, there were 5,000 daily cases reported and the virus was practically out of control.
New York doesn't have herd immunity - not even close. Majority of New Yorkers were not infected. https://patch.com/new-york/new-york-city/nyc-hasnt-built-her...
Wasn't there a study showing 40% of people have generic coronavirus anti-bodies from prior colds and it is believed that these help? Though the extent might not be known.
https://mobile.twitter.com/yinonw/status/1295152579941249024
Thank you ! I am all for the lockdown. I am all for wearing masks. Contact tracing is great and d=should be done more rigorously. I am all for proven methods working well for a disease that is both more and less well-understood than we think.
However, amidst genuinely useful health policy, we also have a seriously large amount of security theater. As of this moment, any stance outside "covid is the next coming of the black death" is met with a lot of pushback.
The disease primarily kills and affects older people. We still haven't seen any age specific policy come out of any govt. Close down old age homes. Ensure social distancing at all costs. Let other things come back to normal slowly. It is near impossible for it to spread via surfaces.
WHO has claimed that truly asymptomatic patients (not pre-symptomatic, not making that distinction initially caused push back) patients rarely transmit, and another study found that about 80% of patients in the 10-30 range are asymptomatic.
From my POV, America failed with Covid due to the South, Republicans and many refusing to take basic covid precautions. Shouting at those who are already doing their bit, for not going above and beyond is not going make this any better. People need to stop with purity tests, and directing their misguided anger towards those who are already doing more than enough. This is knowing what we know from countries that have beaten covid.
Probably because anything less and everyone thinks they're special enough that special health measures don't apply to them.
Not that I'm ordinarily in favor of dramatizing things, but I'm at a loss about how to handle the lot of regular people that I know personally, who aren't capable of nuance and instead will use any excuse to justify ignoring lockdown & social distancing measures. The pictures coming from Italy in March scared the shit out of everyone, but now that we don't see trucks full of bodies in the news on a regular basis, this significant fraction of the population is back to ignoring all safety measures and whining about "covid craze".
The difference between the 'black death hysteria' and the 'invisibility' of the disease on the ground has only emboldened conspiracy theorists, republicans and idiots.
While Trump certainly made it worse, the medical community is to blame as well.
The death estimates (with or without lockdown) from the highly influential ICL study turned out to be completely bogus. The mixed messaging on masks, ventilators and spread via surfaces were all major missteps. The right wing support of Hydroxychloriquine, the disgraced study opposing it printed by respected medical and journalistic outlets and then its eventual disappearance into obscurity was another major blow to the establishment's credibility.
Breeding resentment among those abiding is never a good idea. Adding even more rules for those who aren't is even worse. The moral and practical choices are almost never the same. If the US had found a middle ground lockdown, that everyone was willing to follow, maybe it would have worked out better.
To be clear, if I was a dictator, the lockdown would have been far more severe. But, the US is the country of freedom, where neither the central or the state govts. have much power to enforce anything. They have to negotiate with the citizens,
Covid cases in the US far exceed those of nations where the lockdown requirements (at least those imposed by NE states) are far less stringent. Clearly, the severity of lockdowns was not the problem. It was the complete inability of the experts to get a vast section of the country onboard.
(It is also possible we are arguing the same thing from different points. In Boston, where I stay, I haven't seen a single person without a mask for weeks, everyone socially distances, we have readily available free testing and I getting a bit annoyed at gyms being closed in all capacities despite the per-capita rate being about as low and everyone doing their due diligence.)
WHO is corrupt, and has been politicized. They were also against masks at the beginning, and also said COVID does not transmit from human to human.
Can you put that canard to rest? On January 14th (when virtually nothing was known about this yet), the WHO tweeted (my highlights):
> Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus
So, note:
a) this was very early days, and the understanding was in flux.
b) the WHO didn't itself claim anything about the virus and its transmission, but it reported on a study. The WHO doesn't conduct their own studies. The WHO reports and aggregates information from the member states. Here, these were investigation reports from the Chinese authorities, and that's what they said at the time.
c) these were preliminary studies, not a final conclusion.
d) the claim wasn't that there is no transmission, but that at the time no clear evidence for it had been found.
The tweet was maybe ill-advised, and it didn't age well, but it is by no means indicative of corruption.
That is not to say that the WHO doesn't have major problems. But this tweet is not one of them.
Professor Plum works for the WHO. —-
Miss Scarlet : I hardly think it will enhance your reputation at the U.N. Professor Plum, if it's revealed that you have been implicated not only in adultery with one of your patients, but in her death and the deaths of five other people.
Professor Plum : You don't know what kind of people they have at the U.N., I might go up in their estimation.
When this is over, I bet the entire planet will have rates similar to Sweden. My theory is lockdowns delay the inevitable. We should protect the most at risk (95% of fatalities in the US are ages 55+), but we also need to realize there is no way to really stop a virus in circulation.
I wrote a while back about how we just need to come to accept our life expectancy is just lower now:
https://battlepenguin.com/politics/this-is-not-a-time-of-hon...
The reason that the "second wave" (if that's what it truly is) is coming now is because of easing of restrictions more than anything else. This is summer, and Europeans religiously go on vacation during summer.
This second rise in Covid-19 is more related to groups moving between borders, and those borders having had their restrictions lifted, than some "lockdowns don't work" conclusion. If you looked at the data for different EU nations, a few weeks after moderate lockdowns were introduced, the curve did in fact flatten and cases began to plummet. And as countries open up their borders -- and gyms have reopened where I live -- cases go up.
I was in Greece a few weeks ago, and the cases in the entire nation were pretty OK. On the island where I was, it was pretty good. But their borders with their neighbors were open -- Croatia, Albania, etc. -- and the uptick came largely from their neighbors. Now, at least last time I checked, current cases are higher than from the "first" wave.
In total - I'd say it's more a result of the vacation mindset and opening of borders here in Europe that is resulting in this summer uptick than a failure of lockdown measures.
New cases were expected, and planned for. There is active investigation into how the virus got into the community, and efforts to improve the resurgence plan. New cases coming from elimination can't really be compared to "we have community spread, but the cases went down so we are going to open up again".
https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/diseases-and-conditions/...
Sure there is, a vaccine.
Pharmaceutical companies have never made a successful vaccines for coronaviruses before. I've heard the argument, "Well we have more people working on it." If you hire nine women, you can't make a baby in a month. There is no way, no matter how much money you throw at it, to safely do 5~10 years worth of testing in less than a year.
That was a beautiful strawman, and even one of the replies your comment walked right into it.
There aren't many human coronaviruses circulating to begin with. And they're not dangerous, aside from SARS-CoV-2. Of course there aren't any vaccines for them. Got pretty close on SARS & MERS before they fizzled on their own.
> It takes 5 to 10 years to create a safe and effective vaccine
How long do you think the leading SARS-CoV-2 vaccines have been in development? Years. It's not like they were dreamed up since February.
Absurd argument. You can't parallelize the birth of a baby but you can do that for testing a vaccine.
So basically dose tens of thousands of people before you even know it's safe?
Not just some, but surveys show something like 40% of Americans say they won't take it
Europe is getting tired right now, and I'm not talking about economies but about people. You can't lock people for months and expect them to to obey indefinitely. It's unsustainable. It's more reasonable to apply some proportional restrictions than to lock everything down. Eg. limit users of a gym and require disinfection. That's how a legal state should work: effective and proportional restrictions, rest is a human right.
I believe it's the decision not to reopen indoor dining and bars, and to mandate masks, that saved NYC the resurgence that the rest of the country has seen. You absolutely can control COVID even during the current period of social unrest; the US largely chose not to. COVID doesn't seem to like to spread that much during largely masked, outdoor protests. It loves to spread in bars and parties.
School is opening soon, so things will probably get worse, but nevertheless: NYC demonstrates that in an American context, COVID can still be controlled pretty well.
(NYC government has a lot to answer for w/r/t the initial response in March, but that's not the same issue)
Where do you see that COVID19 is over?
> under control
A very steep second wave of infection is, to me, the opposite of "under control". Do you actually check data?
https://covid19.who.int/region/euro/country/fr
Also, just routinely mentioning:
"No country knows the total number of people infected with COVID-19. All we know is the infection status of those who have been tested."
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-testing
Also, the US tests about twice more (per thousand people) vs the rates of testing in Europe, so you should expect at least 2x more cases discovered in the US just by this mere fact.
Most of Europe also has only a "symptoms-based" testing policy, while the US also has an "asymptomic" testing policy.
But a major factor is that deaths have consistently been a lagging indicator for this disease, both because the progression is quite long and because the most active spreaders tend to be younger and healthier. It's likely that they'll see a matching resurgence in deaths over the next few weeks, as other areas of the world with case surges have consistently seen.
It will be interesting to see the death rate once this is all over. It might be much lower and the initial numbers were skewed by cases in the elderly.
We are getting better at treating COVID19. We are not as clueless as 6 months ago.
> Population 746,419,440
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe
> Population 328,239,523
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24216964
and EUROPE population is 746 million, as I already said:
So what is your point? Just throwing out random facts? And even if you just talk about EU, its still embarassing. EU still has 35% higher population than the US, while the US has 4 times the daily cases.
European Union ≠ Europe
What’s the accuracy of the tests?
You can't compare cases
Where?
Poland took some early actions but there are no covid free areas. Infections rates have plateaued but remain on a more or less constant levels. And people are getting upset. It will be really hard to keep them homes during the second wave... Same seems to be true for Czech Ostrava region.
I'm not sure I follow here - what is missing on that front? They have explained why the mask recommendation changed and how they got to their initial recommendation. Not sure how much more they could do there.
One know mechanic is the virus's half life when airborne. We know that the airborne virus can be killed/filtered when there is enough UV light and/or a fine enough particulate air filter in place. In other words, indoor safety can be improved with better filters. Without the proper filtration, HVAC circulation can help circulate the virus, which could be the problem in nursing homes and at parties.
Meanwhile, outdoor air is relatively safe when there is enough distancing as sunlight will take the virus's half life down to 90 seconds at 20% humidity and 70-75 degrees [1]. 20% humidity is pretty low, but the good news is that half life gets even shorter as humidity goes up. Sunlight doesn't even contain the best frequency of UV light to kill the virus, but it's intense enough that it still works fairly well.
1) https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-04-sunlight-coronavirus-...
When people get careless, it flares up, but can (thanks to decent testing meanwhile) typically be suppressed again with regional lockdowns before it gets really bad.
In my "bubble" the experts have been proven right, time and again. Again, the mask thing is about the only piece of bad information I can remember being spread.
And yet, all over the internet, 6+ months into this, we have a bunch of people who deliberately misinformed themselves for months, complaining that "the experts have been wrong over and over again".
No, the clusters in nursing homes and indoor parties indicate that airborne transmission is a lot easier when you have high risk people who can't avoid close contact with others, or a lot of people in close contact in a small space, in a closed environment where air is recirculated.
I don't think they were. There is a 2013 study that shows cloth masks would be ineffective at preventing spread of respiratory illnesses, and posts by UIC Health early on that said they weren't necessary (which they've added a notice to). I wrote about this here:
https://battlepenguin.com/politics/secondary-effects/#masks-...
Fauci originally said masks were not very useful (quite convincingly I might add) and then turned around and said they were. When pressed, he said he was afraid of health professionals running out of PPE. He admitted he made a noble lie. So if he was lying then ... how do we know he's not lying now? How do we know he's not pushing masks because it's causing political strife and fear? After all, his wife has a major role at the NIH for approving emergency drugs and vaccines, and Fauci has vested interested in big pharma. You cannot trust a liar and he admitted to lying directly to us!
In Canada, a man was pepper sprayed at a Tim Horton by a cop for not wearing a mask. Another man refused to wear one, went home, and the cops came to his house. The resulting altercation lead to the cops fatally shooting him. A woman with a medical notice in Melbourne was choked by cops and arrested (granted she did flip them off instead of handing them her note like she should have).
Masks have really torn everyone apart, and have been used as a big source of shame. By mandating them, you break the social contract, and you're asking people to accept certain beliefs, for which there are 10+ scientific papers published on both sides of the fence. They make it harder for us to "see" one another. The hurt our trust because we evolved to depend on facial expressions. And if they don't do very much as far as preventing spread of infection, than they might even cause more harm than good. Am I the only one who sees the normalization of the mask as contributing to those who are rioting?
There are plenty of nations and States within the US without mask mandates and we see similar infection rates based on population density. In the end, I think they'll end up being a political statement. Nothing more, and everything less.
However, the study you referenced states the opposite: "Both masks significantly reduced the number of microorganisms expelled by volunteers, although the surgical mask was 3 times more effective in blocking transmission than the homemade mask." AND "Conclusion: Our findings suggest that a homemade mask should only be considered as a last resort to prevent droplet transmission from infected individuals, but it would be better than no protection."
"However, these masks would provide the wearers little protection from microorganisms from others persons who are infected with respiratory diseases. As a result, we would not recommend the use of homemade face masks as a method of reducing transmission of infection from aerosols."
No. No, no no. Masks have torn nobody apart. They could have brought us together. One segment of the population embraced politics and decided that masks was the last straw among all of the rules they otherwise accept in their lives, and decided to turn it into a public statement. These people are the ones that have torn everyone apart and ripped up the social contract.
The rest of us are just quietly sucking it up and doing what little we can to improve outcomes for all of society.
Let's not pretend that there isn't a "wear masks because of politics" segment in the US, too. It's been turned into signalling on both sides, to the detriment of us all.
Everyone?
In nearly all countries, people simply wear masks when appropriate. The common fight against the virus brings people together, if anything.
To watch the self-destruction of the USA about the "great mask debate" is somewhat baffling.
> There are plenty of nations and States within the US without mask mandates
You need to look at mask wearing, not mask mandates (believe it or not, there are people who wear masks voluntarily); and correct for a whole lot of factors, such as density (compare Hong Kong and Alaska). Then, from what I gather, evidence supports masks.
Please, just no.
Anonymity lets people express their extremes, for both good and bad.
Everybody is a liar.
You don't have to take Fauci's word for it so whether he is or isn't lying, you do or don't trust him, is not a good argument for or against masks.
> Support temporary benefits to your fellow citizens.
What benefits? Support how? Prayers?
Support that small business in your community with your wallet.
> Also congratulations for not caring about a 1 in 200 chance of death.
Where's the data to back up any close to an assertion like this?
You betray an inane non-appreciation of what is actually happening to people economically.
Go out and spend your money, support local businesses.
Edit: To address the claim about the 1/200 rate directly, that number is based on bogus 0.5 - 1% global IFR estimates that haven't been controlled for any demographic group. The IFR for people under 70 is less than 0.1, and likely much, much lower for under 40. And that's not even controlling for anything except age.[1]
1. https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/53c0dc391b...
>> Where's the data to back up any close to an assertion like this?
Latest IFR estimates are between 0.5% and 1.0% (1 in 200 to 1 in 100).
https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/estimating...
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160895v...
Your reference is very good. It is still a pre-print, but the breakdown is very informative. It estimates the IFR (Table 4) for ages between 0-34 as 0.01% (1 in 10,000), increasing exponentially from there. The estimated IFR for the next age group, people between 34-54, is between 0.04% and 0.2% (1 in 2,500 to 1 in 500), one to two orders of magnitude greater. For people over 85, the IFR is 36.8% (~1 in 3).
Note that the population over 34 is about 50% of the total in the US.
I rarely see mentions too that just because the mortality rate is lower for younger/healthy people - why does that exclude them potentially transmitting it to older folk?
It's possible that we mostly exist in different filter bubbles though.
It's good to know it's being brought up when people mention IFR of age groups as if that "proves" we shouldn't worry about it.
I don't understand how this number can be reasonably used to say anything about basically anything.
From the document you site:
> Many such serological surveys are currently being
> undertaken worldwide [10], and some have thus far
> suggested substantial under-ascertainment of cases, with estimates of IFR converging at approximately 0.5 - 1% [10-12].
> Results:
> Age 0–69 Population %: 88.3, IFR: 0.09%
> Age 70+, Population %: 11.7, IFR: 4.29%
People, come on.
1. https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/53c0dc391b...
The data you cite has a large age group as well (0-69), which has the same problem you describe. See the comment by user kmm below for a reference with a better breakdown of estimated IFR by age groups. The reference also shows how the IFR increases exponentially by age.
If you want to see what number applies to you in particular, then you need an specific breakdown. But if you need to see what is the risk for the population in general, then the estimated total IFR, sampled from that same population, is valuable. Think of individual risk vs systemic risk.
However another aspect that is still very nebulious at this point is post-infection sequelae.
Some of the patients who survived SARS-1 infection (in the SARS 2002-2004 outbreak) had lung scaring, loss of VO2 max, and other pulmonary related disfunction, more than 10 years after infection. [0]
We have seen a lot of pre-print articles discussing SARS-COV2 lung damage, heart and blood vessel damage, peripheral nerve damage, etc.
So if we want to be factual and give people a chance of making an informed decision, then we should also take this aspect in consideration.
At this point, we simply don't know enough about who will be affected and how severely but if take what we learned from SARS-COV1, than it is iresponsible not to disclose that life long injury or damage with _varying_ degrees of intensity across potentially multiple systems is very likely for _some_ of the survivors of SARS-COV2.
My point is an informed decision of not following health authority guidelines (which, at this point of social isolation, I do not judge), should not be reduced to something binomial like survival/death, it's just not that simple (as with most things in life).
You realize the impact in the US is dramatically greater amongst the black and brown population?
Possibly due to: the higher likelihood of being in essential jobs in areas with greater population density than Sweden.
Or, you need ethnicity controls because, eugenics?
How about instead of focusing solely on the IFR of young people - bring into the conversation how those same young people may not 100% recover.
What about discussing how those same infected young(er) people may not die but they may pass it to other people that aren't so lucky?
I am empathetic to the situation but that's a limited view on "skin". Those who are or have loved ones (colleagues, friends, etc) in the high risk categories also have skin in the game. The 783,000 COVID-19 deaths have permanently affected tens of millions of lives.
Only in America would people legitimately make the argument that it's ok to expose people to risk because people someone is losing money.
Who are you to put a value on my loved ones lives? 1/100 chance, 1/1000 chance, why does any of that matter? Fuck your business, it won't bring my parents back. It won't replace scarred lung tissue in COVID survivors or heal neurological damage.
Preventable death and disability, especially using easy measures like mask wearing and lockdown, should always be preferred over monetary issues.
Modern American values are morally corrupt and disgusting.
Everything in the world fits along some scale of costs and benefits, and your emotional reaction shouldn't get to ignore that. Your loved ones lives literally do have to balance against the possible consequences to the lives of other people and their own loved ones due to one set of policies vs. another.
By your basic logic of who is anyone to put a value on people's lives due to varying risks of X negative thing happening, we could ban a whole pile of things that people need because somewhere, somehow, these things will indeed cause some people to die. I'm not comparing it to the current severity of COVID, but the flue alone kills tens to hundreds of thousands per year. Does this mean that the whole world should be annually locked down against relatively marginal risks?
The economic debate around the costs of quarantine isn't just about modern american values being "corrupt and disgusting", it's a global consideration that I promise you, billions of people are deeply worrying about in many other countries.. I live moving between two different countries that aren't the United States and which both make many cultural efforts to separate their values from those of Americans, and in both of them, the domestic economic question is causing the same enormous worry and resistance to prolonged quarantines that millions of Americans are also worried about..
I mean, what modern specifically american values? Being able to stay economically solvent? No dude, that's worldwide, and especially among vast parts of the population that don't live under a strong social safety net or with the privilege of enough money or work-from-home opportunities to comfortably sit out the pandemic while criticizing others as greedy.
Filing for bankruptcy will never, ever be equivalent to someone dying from willful negligence because you wanted to keep you business open.
Full stop. There's no argument you could make, it's never going to be equivalent and there's nothing you can say that will balance that out.
I say again, fuck your business. Any size of business. Small family business, large corporation, hot dog stand. If you can't it open, safely, without getting people killed, then you're toast.
Any argument you make is just muddying the waters. This is very clear and unambiguous.
It even works against itself, like so, to rephrase your own words: "If you can't shut down the economy and force all normal social activity to cease without getting people killed, then you're toast"
Since you obviously can't claim that your extreme insistence doesn't cause such a level of harm (and it would, directly or indirectly), somebody else could argue just as forcefully against your own idea because it will destroy their lives or lead to the death of some loved one. This is why I mentioned the very important question of balancing harms and outcomes. How can that be so hard to understand on a rational level?
As the other reply said, virtually any activity can be deadly in some context and it's impossible to promise it can't possibly be. This was the case before COVID and it's the case now too. I assume you participated in normal social and economic activity before the pandemic, thus you could also call yourself a hypocrite in cherry picking your starting point for moral outrage.
This logic does not work. You must make a choice to balance risks, because EVERYTHING has risks. Aggregate economic ruin kills people.
By your logic, you shouldn't be able to sell cars, food, practice medicine, go for a walk, run, play sports, do ANYTHING AT ALL because all of these things could injure or kill you or others.
https://www.amhf.org.au/social_isolation_increases_male_suic...
If I told you to leave your house because it was on fire, would you accuse me of trivializing your daily routine?
"there's a wildfire and firefighters asked you to limit water use to only drinking water, but some people decided to keep taking long showers, washing dishes, etc"
Of course, if you just arse around in the house and don't get out of the goddamn way of the firefighters, it's gonna be a hell of a lot harder to put out the fire and I imagine there's gonna be a lot more damage before all's said and done.
You should see that as a problem.
I don't remember giving my elected officials the authority to pursue such extreme policies, especially based on incomplete science. Scientists didn't realize the virus mutated until months after the mutated version was the predominantly spreading version. They waffled on masks and even know there's evidence to suggest that masks can cause more harm because people do not use them properly (they are not washed enough/at all, they are constantly fiddled with (i.e., people touch their face), etc.). Now the latest excuse to extend the lock downs indefinitely is maybe, just maybe a C-19 infection may have long-term negative health externalities.
Mind you, this is all being pushed by the privileged few who have home offices with webcams and fast Internet, food and groceries delivered on a whim, and a Peleton in their home gym. The whole situation is preposterous; it's like we're living in a Monty Python skit.
Some sources:
https://www.azfamily.com/news/continuing_coverage/coronaviru...
https://www.newsweek.com/arizona-hits-record-high-hospital-c...
So no, the lockdown isn't some moving goalpost made by politicians gone wild. It is an unfortunate necessity given the abject failure of the federal administration and many states in managing a very serious public health crisis.
https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson/status/1291552713004777476
^ Those charts so ICU rates dropping in TX which was supposed to be "Overwhelmed" just like AZ.
Just look through the data here for AZ:
https://azdhs.gov/preparedness/epidemiology-disease-control/...
Similarly for Texas:
https://www.tmc.edu/coronavirus-updates/total-tmc-covid-19-p...
And pretty much any way you slice it, opening up prematurely resulted in a huge ballooning of cases, deaths and hospital/ICU bed utilization by late June, early July. Perhaps you should look to getting your news from more reliable sources than some dude on twitter with a clear agenda...
It also doesn't help when the Governor of TX was actively hiding data related to hospital bed availability, etc to mask the complete failure of his head-in-the-sand approach to leadership in the time of a major public health emergency [1]
1 - https://www.texastribune.org/2020/07/02/texas-hospital-capac...
Personally, I think the federal administration has done a fine job--most, if not all, of dealing with this situation should be up to the states, not the feds.
I mean those states are nowhere near the front lines of where COVID would first strike or spread, but the complete apathy to the threat of COVID is going to have consequences. The numbers are already beginning to show that.
1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/national/corona...
Why do you think politicians want to shut things down?
What worldview do you ascribe to people where the view is "wow, this is a great chance to kill off people going to bars and bankrupt our city/state, I've always wanted to do that!"???
One of the most common arguments for schools staying closed is "so you are ok with kids dying".
We have reached a point where as the OP implied, we have become hysterical about any deaths and dems will use that to crucify trump.
Reality Check: It's not different. People should stop from thinking they have a higher moral ground. Nobody does. On the other hand, on a free society, you should not be able to strip people from their freedom, regardless. People should be able to decide if they want to die from Coronavirus or live a semi-paralyzed life in fear. If you are that concerned, then you can confine yourself at home until everything is over.
Also humanity and evolution has a coping mechanism called natural selection. Helping people through medicine is a good idea but I think we are stretching it too much. In a few hundreds year, everyone will be walking on earth on a space suit.
So the phrase "Survival of the Fittest" refers in the abstract to the idea that, given fitness function F, members of a species who pass fitness function F will out-survive members who fail function F and then reproduce in higher numbers. But natural selection itself does not define any fitness functions, and makes no mention of a "universal fitness quality" that can be used to judge the fitness of an individual.
The fitness functions that nature comes up with are pretty arbitrary, and don't necessarily align with cultural ideas about merit, fitness or attractiveness. A disease that weakens bones could kill more tall people than short people, a disorder that exploits muscle tissue might affect people who work out more, and a respiratory disease that spreads through the air could take down more sociable people while allowing introverts who stay inside to survive.
The point of modern medicine is that we recognize these many of these fitness functions have no meaning beyond the immediate danger they present. And we can use technology to say "that fitness function is dumb" and remove it from the equation. In doing so, we aren't "unlearning a lesson nature wanted us to learn", we're protecting ourselves from the meaningless and arbitrary rocks that nature occasionally throws at us, and as a result we are increasing human lifespan and quality of life. (And yes, you can quibble about stretching out the suffering of people with terminal cancer, but the millions of children who don't pointlessly die of infant diarrhea each year would probably push back a bit)
nature's fitness is not arbitrary. it's about survival. culturally accepted fitness is arbitrary or linked to a particular evolution era. nature is constantly evolving, so what's fit in this era is not fit in the next.
> the millions of children who don't pointlessly die of infant diarrhea each year would probably push back a bit
I didn't say I don't like medicine. I do and do visit doctors. My main point was about freedom restrictions and how people should have free will to decide.
The amount of nuance that you refuse to integrate with your worldview is staggering. I'm shocked to see people write comments like this on Hacker News of all places.
I know this point has been beaten to death already (which contributes to my surprise that you'd even make a claim like this), but have you entirely forgotten about people who rely on younger, more able bodied people AND probably wouldn't survive a full blown coronavirus infection? How do these people "decide if they want to die from Coronavirus"?
HN asks you to assume a favorable interpretation of the comments. For me it is very clear that the parent meant the whole spectrum, including all nuances by stating the two extremes.
The fatality rate of a car crash is also about 0.5% [1], but that doesn't prevent us from driving. That means there's a piece of the puzzle missing here, right?
Note that I'm not concluding this means we should go to gyms (or whatever). I'm just pointing out your analysis is missing an important factor, making it faulty/unconvincing.
Edit: Changed the statistic source, because it wasn't measuring what I thought it was measuring. (Which incidentally also gets at the same distinction I was trying to make in my comment.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
That seems a weird statistic to seek out, because your conclusion would then be "...and we don't try to avoid getting in car crashes to avoid that 0.5% risk of death". Which is wrong, we do and we should try to avoid crashes.
I'll bite ... what is your point? Approximately 30000 people die a year in car accidents a year in the US, COVID has killed 170K in six months. What's the missing piece you are trying to bring to the table?
I do wonder how the critical injury vs. lasting COVID complications will workout.
All of which is to say: there's a good case to be made, and I'm not even against it, but (a) on the one hand, it's not nearly as open-and-shut as just comparing the (mismatched) statistics in the original comment, and (b) conversely, when there are more compelling arguments, it's so much better to make those arguments instead of comparing apples and oranges.
If we don't develop an effective vaccine then given immunity seems to be temporary (as with other coronaviruses) most of us will catch this every year so a really high proportion of us will die of covid eventually (where eventually is in many years).
By "near 100% chance" here do you mean the fraction of the population getting the disease, or the likelihood of getting the disease even if you take the appropriate precautions? Or to put it another way: imagine 1% of the population taking all the ideal precautions for the next year (and only going outside fro obvious necessities, like food/groceries/etc.). Will they also have a near 100% chance of getting it in your model? Or does 100% merely refer to # of infections / population?
Then they looked at a new model and realised that if they achieved herd immunity, the predicted number of people who would die, this summer, was going to be massive.
They also realised that some of those deaths would be due to the healthcare system being unable to treat a lot of people, making the number who would die even larger, and avoidably so. Presumably hospitals turning critical patients away would also be socially & politically disastrous. This started the "flatten the curve" strategy.
So they rapidly did a U-turn towards progressively increasing lockdowns, and now decreasing restrictions.
Now with a bit more thinking behind us, we also realise herd immunity might not even work as predicted, because it's not clear what are the long term effects of the virus, including immunity and ability to be infectious to others after new exposure despite having had the virus before.
Like in the USA, people aren't complying with much consistency, and it looks obvious that many people, mostly younger, don't care to protect others. The emerging anecdotes and data about long term damage when surviving do not seem to bother them either.
Nonetheless, it looks like the strategy has made a large difference to the outcome compared with what early models predicted if there were no restrictions.
And now with the emerging data about long term harm (including evidence suggesting asymptomatic carriers who don't know they had it but may have sustained organ damage affecting them in future), we can be confident the strategy, by reducing the numbers of people who get it, will have made a difference to more people than previously thought.
This doesn't stop a few people from saying that the lockdown was unnecessary because there were only X deaths and the temporary new hospitals were not much used, when X is because of lockdown (and is larger than the models predicted). There are people with no brain apparently.
London is a perfect example of how quickly this thing can spread in a modern city and how many people get sick at once. The only reason the death rate wasn't way higher is that many many people self isolated for their own protection in early March.
I know less about New York but it sounds similar.
I don't think that statistic is even close to right. I know exactly zero people who have died in a car crash. Many of them are quite old.
The Australian statistics suggest that the odds of anyone in Australia dying of a car crash are 0.0000478 per person per year. This is considerably smaller than your statistic and so I am going to dispute it, at the risk of you thinking I am stupid.
Your anecdote is not more valid than mine.
>>The Australian statistics
it seems Australian drive about 30% fewer miles per year on average;
in the US the risk of death in Auto Accident is 1 in 106, or .95% which I think is close enough to 1% to give the Grand Parent a little slack
They were projecting 3 million may have died if we did nothing over a matter of months; 100 years worth of auto fatalities..
What are the current projections on how many deaths would have occurred if we did nothing?
They were. The COVID deaths in the USA are about double what has been reported. Not a conspiracy, just a reality of how the deaths are coded due to testing constraints.
That said I do think it’s possible for gyms to adapt to be covid-safe by moving equipment outside, restricting the max number of people allowed in the exercise area, mandating masks and social distancing, and wiping down every piece of equipment after it’s used. I have seen some gyms doing that in San Jose. But I guess most gyms don’t want to do that even though gyms outside of dense urban area typically have pretty big parking lots they might be able to use with some open-air huts
local gyms (as opposed to chain/bigbox) tend to be extremely tight-knit communities, which means people want to keep each other safe and will go out of their way to do it, within reason. most people don't care about everyone in their city in abstract, but they do care about members of groups they derive camaraderie from. hell of a lot safer than reopening restaurants, imo
My fear is solely that I pass it to someone at higher risk, and to that end I’m working from home, masking up, and there isn’t a single person in my life over the age of 40. But I’m also not holding back on seeing friends my age, and yes even throwing parties. We’re all in the same boat, and if they’re also out and about then they’ve made the decision that they’re comfortable with that level of risk themselves. I don’t think it’s a crazy one, and so I’m not going to make it for them.
The total probability of hospitalization per contact is
prevalence * transmission rate * hospitalization rate
so it is probably something like 1% * .7% * 3% per contact. So your probability of getting hospitalized is quite low per contact.
I personally have a bike trainer and a power cage at home. The one thing I absolutely miss is brazilian jiu jitsu. I see posts from the various gyms that are basically operating in full.
Whats the exit strategy? What has to happen for this to end?
For what I've read there's a good chance this virus will stay with us for the long term, just like the flu. Waiting for the vaccine is kind of like hoping for a miracle, as it might not even work. So when will all this madness end?
Assuming a vaccine doesn't appear, then we're left with herd immunity through community infection. There are problems with that though, because it's not yet clear whether infection with the COVID-19 virus even makes a person immune to future infection.
Amidst all the uncertianty a vaccine is our best hope. Personally I'm assuming this will be with us in some shape or form for many years.
If you don't become immune after getting the virus, how would you become so after vaccination? My understanding is that vaccines have a weaker version or a portion of the virus inside them, and your body needs to make antibodies. But if that doesn't happen?
The exit strategy should be to enough of a lock-down to get rates very low. This would likely have to be combined with quick-turnaround testing and contact tracing. The US largely failed with this. Other countries show what an exit strategy could have looked like. I'm not sure if it's still viable, but maybe.
This is what I wanted a lock-down to bring us, and what maybe still could:
* Access to testing: This has improved a lot. In March and April, I knew people with symptoms who couldn't get tested. Last month, my partner found it easy to get tested.
* Quick-turn-around with testing: This still sucks. My partner's test in July was easy to get, but the earliest appointment was five days out and it was another five to get the results. This isn't good enough.
* Contact tracing: We still don't have this, at least in most places. I would love to install a contact tracing app on my phone, but there isn't one. Seems they're regional, and Texas/Austin hasn't bothered?
* A reduction in growth-rates due to social distancing: We got this! Daily growth rate dropped from 1.3+ in mid-March to 1.06-1.08 in mid-April. (I haven't looked recently, but I don't think this has lasted. Still, we were on track to hit 100k deaths by mid-April without this effect.)
* New information about how to prevent it: We got some important new information! Turns out surfaces aren't a big deal, and masks are. This is the opposite of what we were told early on, and knowing to wear masks (and more recently, not to use gaiters as masks) is a Big Deal.
* Improved treatments: Only thing I've seen is the "proning helps" thing a few months back.
* Vaccines: We've made a lot of progress. More than I think experts expected by now.
So, yeah, we currently seem to have no real exit strategy other than waiting for a vaccine, or for herd immunity. That doesn't mean it's rational to just exit without a strategy.
For now, I'm just going to stay mostly locked down until the vaccine happens or our government decides to step it up and do enough of the things listed above to get the spread under control. Not everyone can do this -- as another commenter mentioned, things that aren't urgent the first week will become so after a month, or six months, and these things are different for different people.
But as much as I liked going to the gym, I'm going to continue to forgo that.
But if you get the infection rates very low, and reopen, the infection rates will go up, unless something fundamental has changed.
Different countries have done different things, but my understanding is that South Korea avoided a lock down for the most part by implementing this before cases were widespread. They occasionally add some temporary restrictions, but I think "sometimes we have to add some restrictions until there's a vaccine" is a livable long-term situation. What we're seeing in the US is that for a lot of people, our current situation isn't.
Ahh the old "essential business" justification.
Every business is essential to the owners, employees and even customers that depend on those businesses. I do not believe it is the proper role of government to tell people what is and is not "essential" to them.
This is with out getting it into the corrupt policies many local government employed where by some businesses where allowed to operate due to political reasons, but other similar businesses were forced to close again for political reasons.
Then there was completely illogical enforcement where small retail businesses where forced to close even when they were doing Online Only sales and the only person in the store was the owner.[2]
Mike Rowe is correct: all workers are essential.[1]
[1] https://fee.org/articles/mike-rowe-is-right-there-s-no-such-...
[2] http://newjersey.news12.com/story/42155935/police-interrupt-...
Where do you get these numbers from?
I also estimate the risks of COVID to be 10-20x of flu (and I had a relative who died from flu complications - maths is still maths), so I take 20x the precautions compared to what I do for flu in a year when I forget to get the shot... 20x of almost nothing is just a little more than nothing.
But that has been discussed above, with much better words and numbers.
I only have one unique contribution. A little bonus that made me happy to go outside to closed outdoor areas during stay-home orders, visit (willing) friends at the height of the lockdown, and hit the gyms and restaurants as soon as they opened with work-to-rule mask wearing and distancing, is that it makes unjustifiably sanctimonious people angry.
My chance of death is vastly less than that - probably on the order of 1-10% that.
Get outta here, you phony.
calling a protest a riot doesn't put it indoors. gyms, shopping, etc are much more dangerous than being outside at a protest.
- give up a few luxuries especially if they involve heavy breathing or eating in close quarters.
- Work from home if you can
- Socially distance
- Wear a mask when you can't socially distance
- Go to work if you need to. Don't go to other people's work if you don't need to
- Support temporary benefits to your fellow citizens as you helpfully avoid going to their place of work.