Edit: This was in Orange County CA, not rural. And when I say "rallies" I'm talking thousands of people, not small gatherings.
So are the vast majority of people, and greater population density makes it harder to control the spread of communicable disease. So you’d expect, all other things being equal, not only thr vast majority of cases but the highest per capita cases to be in the metro areas.
But, actually, the highest per capita infections (both total and current) were mostly in rural, not metropolitan, counties.
Can you please cite your sources for this claim? I just did the math using the numbers of infections[0] and the county populations[1] and it doesn't really seem to match up with your claim at all.
There are 58 counties in California.
San Bernardino, LA, and Riverside counties are numbers 4, 5, 6 respectively for highest cases per capita and all have populations above 2.2 million.
Of the bottom 10 counties in cases per capita, only 2 have a population larger than 100k (SF, Humboldt)
[0] https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spr...
But I don't think that SF's 62 deaths/100k (compared to e.g. 240 for LA and 232 for Miami) is solely explained by that, and that the tighter (and more adhered to) restrictions did play a role.
Without the poorly considered relaxations in Oct/Nov, despite clear indicators for a worsening situation, it'd have ended up better...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...
All it takes is a single spreader moving from outside of the metro area to negate the effect of the lockdown, specially if a considerable portion of the population is quite militant in their refusal to follow even the most basic health and safety precautions.
I had to go do business in LA specifically around Manhattan Beach and Inglewood, and the folks that live there were taking me to strip malls where all the businesses looked closed but we're all actually open.
They just had their windows covered. I'm talking about an MMA gym next to a hair salon next to an Ethiopian restaurant.
Another study in Eur J Clin Inv had similar findings comparing countries: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13484
COVID went wild basically everywhere. There were a few strong exceptions: China (apparently), Australia, New Zealand and some others. What these had in common was very strict police enforcement, which led to some dramatic scenes like people getting welded into their houses in China, or houses in Australia getting broken into by police on suspicion of too many people gathering.
In my _opinion_, lockdowns didn't work elsewhere because most cases are not from casual public transmission in places like stores, restaurants etc. Rather, events like kickbacks, dinner parties, and practices like in-home workers (nannies, cleaners etc) continued throughout the pandemic, or resumed shortly after the original March 2020 shockwave. While strident police enforcement of physical distancing could eliminate cases, and seemed to in a few places, the half measures used by most of the world did little-to-nothing positive while being an economic and cultural disaster.
Personally, I never caught COVID and rarely socialized during the pandemic. All the cases I heard of stemmed from the kind of thing I mention above: private dinner parties, nannies and so forth, rather than casual public transmission.
You, or any individual may have taken social distancing seriously but it's clear many or most did not, including people on both political "sides", up to and including governors, members of congress etc.
Further, as a comparison, Tokyo Metro has 38 million people, California has 38 million people. Tokyo Metro has ~6500 people per square mile, California has 240 per square mile. Tokyo Metro had and still has people commuting in very crowded trains every weekday. California mostly people drive cars. California closed restaurants. Tokyo Metro never closed restaurants.
Yes, Tokyo is going through a "spike" right now but compared to California it's still tiny. Compare Tokyo Metro's current "spike" (~2k people per day) with any of California's spikes at 40k per day, 20x more.
Some people will claim testing but that doesn't fit the facts either. Deaths from COVID in Tokyo Metro. California 62k death, Tokyo Metro, 2k dead. And, if you believe the attribution of death by COVID is bad then all you have to do is look at the death rate from all causes and see that Japan is doing much better than the USA
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat...
I have no idea what Japan did right or got lucky with. Various speculations abound. Japanese don't shake hands, hug and kiss friends. Japanese may be commonly taking some medicine for unrelated things that happens to provide protection. Japanese might have more people with genetic immunity. Japanese mask compliance might be higher. Japanese aren't obese (I'm sure there's some other non-obese country they can be compared to). Japanese have a different diet (not sure what other countries have similar diets)
I recognize that even with restaurants open it's possible just the various other factors are/were enough to keep R low enough.... I really have no clue. Personally I mostly stayed locked up. I live alone. Saw less than 1 person a month in person, usually an outdoor walk with masks on.
My guess is that the low obesity rate is the critical factor, but that remains somewhat speculative.
If you can act earlier, maintain a external boundary, and maintain a low enough level to trace then I think you can stay in a very good state with minimal inconveniences. But once the infection rate has passed a certain level, more stringent strategies are needed to get back to the same low state.
A) Japan has a more temperate climate
B) Japan is an island and was pretty strict about locking down travel and forcing everyone entering the country to quarantine for 14 days
C) Japanese culture seems to promote very rigid adherence to rules and proper social etiquette.
At least in hindsight, the closing of schools might have been a huge mistake.
But I don't follow the science closely enough. I hope they're making the right call, because it's really hard on the kids. I'm just glad my own little guy is not of school age yet, and in fact is young enough to be mostly oblivious to the whole thing.
There are a lot of confounding variables in these analyses. It’s going to take years to tease them apart, and we may never truly know for certain in some cases.
The point is not "is it wise to take precautions"; that's obvious. The point is we don't necessarily have great data on which precautions work better than others because they're largely all being put into effect at the same time.
We actually do, though, and it's preventing close contact of non-household members and preventing sharing enclosed spaces with non-household members for long periods of time.
People spread the virus before they even know they're sick, and a subset of sick people either need to go to work despite being sick, or they just don't care.
It's going to take time and years of research to tease out things like "did closing schools specifically help".
It wasn’t until we closed schools that the trend reversed.
People are so quick to blame fear without actually looking at the data
The other way to think about it is that it wasn’t until things got bad that people got cautious.
Kind of how people take homeopathic drugs when they are sickest.
In Nov-Feb, I was losing 40-60 employees a week to infection or quarantine. Mostly people in essential IT support positions
My sons school was open most of the year, but shutdown for a month due to teacher quarantines.
> Hospitalization rates in children are significantly lower than hospitalization rates in adults with COVID-19, suggesting that children may have less severe illness from COVID-19 compared to adults.
Less severe response to it, not "less chance of getting it." And then just two lines later:
> Recent evidence suggests that compared to adults, children likely have similar viral loads in their nasopharynx,7 similar secondary infections rates, and can spread the virus to others
I don't know how you arrived at your opinion here.
Unfortunately, some of the things done were disruptive, and if they were also ineffective, that will lead to blame. But our mission should be honesty first, and have faith that reasonable people can accept that the best decisions were taken with the information available at the time.
Regardless, school is being done online. Kids that needed laptops got them.
Right, I forgot University of Phoenix regularly matches their in-person counterparts in terms of quality. Keep telling yourself that teachers who were never trained to do remote teaching are anywhere near the same effectiveness as before. You ever dissect something virtually? Somethings can simply not be learned through a screen. Physical education, dealing when your crush looks at you in the eye, literally anything "hands-on" like swinging a hammer at a nail, the of useful skills that can only be developed in the presence of another human are tremendous. Funnily, most of the useful things learned at school for most people are not the curriculum and it is these things that are missing.
How do you isolate when there's more members than actual rooms in the home & only one one restroom?
Of course, I'm not an epidemiologist or public health expert, so while I have some guesses I'm not sure what exactly they did that was more effective - but there's no question that it was more effective. If I was going to look for case studies to understand what to do next time, I'd start there. If I was going to look for case studies to understand what not to do next time, well...
Australia had a major outbreak in Victoria in July last year. Victoria has a 2,550km land border with other states, including with South Australia, which peaked at 10 active cases over the same time period.
The evidence shows that strict quarantining and early lockdowns prevent spread even when there's an outbreak on the other side of a land border, and it also shows that being an island doesn't help at all if you don't do this (see also: the United Kingdom). I don't know why people constantly act like Australia and New Zealand only succeeded because they're islands when they were locking cities down at single digit case counts while the United States and India were packing stadiums full of people when they were getting tens of thousands of new infections a day.
It also had the largest exodus of people ever seen. About 11,000 leaving per quarter.
The fallout from businesses isn't know yet either, that'll become apparent after EOFY.
(Despite not being an island, AK is still highly comparable to OZ.)
Maybe not perfectly, but surely the vast majority of traffic across land borders is at managed border crossings. The US could shut those down, put the army on any unmanaged roads/routes (don’t know if this is a thing) and stop 95% or more of land border traffic?
Maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference to Covid - I don’t know about that, but I do question the impossibility claim.
Even with full legal closure, the borders are porous enough for a border wall to have been a talking point in some previous election debates. Build a mile-tall wall out of mithril, and you'd still be left with a ton of unsecured coastline, connected by some rather convenient oceans...
Canada did greatly restrict the border!
Given that until recently the US was quite militant in refusing to act upon the outbreak, and it's a country comprised of hundreds of million of people among which about a third showed themselves to be quite defiant towards even the most trivial emergency public health policies, I don't think it's fair to refer to border control as a relevant factor in the US's death toll.
Factually untrue. The US was the first country to shut down China travel. And we got called Xenophobic for it. The mayor of Florence even held a “hug a Chinese” day in response.
https://rmx.news/article/article/fears-of-being-called-racis...
Singapore started severely restrict travel and quarantining arriving citizens a couple days before the US ban.
https://www.gov.sg/article/how-is-singapore-limiting-the-spr...
A faster travel ban for Italy and other EU countries would have done the US more good.
Just because we have two neighboring countries on north and south borders doesn't mean we couldn't lockdown people from coming in...
Literally do not get this argument.
If there was one thing Trump was all in on, it was closing the southern border. His motivations were obviously not COVID for most of that, but the fact is he was nowhere near able to control that border (let alone close it) despite his best efforts.
Before you downvote me, I'm not saying I agree with Trump's policy on the matter, just pointing out that he did try.
Is there any source that even suggests that the US's "southern border" played a remotely relevant role in the US's pandemic?
I mean, COVID spread like wildfire in the US throughout a timespan where the US's central government was quite militant in either denying or downplaying it's gravity. Even today we see states and cities taking militant stances in refusing to implement basic public health precautions. Why is the US's "southern border" suddenly relevant regarding covid-19?
What western government could pull off welding doors shut the way they did in China? Even if the government had emergency powers that "allowed" it, would they have had willing workers to do it?
Western governments have pulled all kinds of restrictions themselves, from curfews, closed borders, and "let's close all retail businesses" restrictions, to mandatory movement monitoring.
Heck, Italy might not have welded doors, but had the Army patrol to enforce strict lockdown, and citizens in northerns cities stay inside.
Sometimes this even meant closing them in-house with the corpses of their dead (from covid) relatives for several days. There were several such reported cases, e.g.:
https://7news.com.au/lifestyle/health-wellbeing/coronavirus-...
https://7news.com.au/lifestyle/health-wellbeing/coronavirus-...
There are not enough police in most of the US to actually enforce closing businesses, let alone confining people to their homes. Especially not when half the populace sees it as a political infringement of their rights.
There's not enough police to enforce no traffic violations at all either (what would that be, a traffic cop for every street or car?). That's not how laws work, you just need to make a law/rule and collect fines from the businesses that violated it. If there wasn't the political will to do so in the states, that's another thing.
But in at least a couple of countries in the EU I know of, all businesses were closed (by government decree) except explicitly whitelisted "necessary" shopping (like groceries, drugstores, and such) for months on end.
You say you "just need to... collect fines". And that is the OP's point.
Without enforcement you do not get relevant levels of compliance. Just upping the fines seems easy but if your enforcement percentage is 0 (or close enough to 0 as felt by citizens) you will not get compliance.
Theres a balance if you ask me. If it costs $5000 to be caught after curfew but police go home when curfew hits too instead of patrolling the streets, you will likely have no compliance. If you get caught at least 50% of the time then $5000 probably isn't even necessary and say $1000 will be 'enough' for most people.
I don't know that we would have done anything similar for this one if we were ground zero, but hopefully we would have for something like aerosolized Ebola with a contagious yet symptom-free incubation time.
We did come close to doing some similar things to welding to the Grand Princess cruise ship early on.
That gives the West an independent source of information about what is going on in China. China can still fudge the numbers, but those independent observations place a limit on how far China can fudge without getting caught.
Australia: Island, hot climate, pretty heavy travel/quarantine restrictions
New Zealand: Island, rural with very dispersed population, heavily restricted international travel
People may argue that the UK is also an island but fared much worse. To that I would say 1) Much colder climate 2) did not heavily restrict travel like AUS and NZ did.
However... at least for Taiwan that doesn't feel like it adds up:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/taiwan
They've had fewer than 1700 cases, and that's including a recent massive outbreak. They peaked on March 26th 7-day average with 21 cases a day. Granted, the US took maybe a couple more weeks to ramp up to its first plateau, so maybe if it was caught here a few weeks earlier it would have made all the difference. But it feels a lot more like Taiwan just didn't have a lot of travel to and from Wuhan?
The current Vice President of Taiwan, Lai Ching-te, has a Master's degree in Public Health from Harvard. The previous VP, Chen Chien-jen, has a Master's degree in Public Health from National Taiwan University. Taiwan takes public health seriously, especially after the original SARS experience.
Nobody in Taiwan thinks the virus is a "scam" or that masks are a "tool of oppression." Even before the pandemic masks were totally common. There is complete public buy-in on masks without even having to be asked. Some of my friends work in a clinic in Taipei so I hear updates. I was also in Taiwan last year for a month. The difference in attitude between the US and Taiwan is startling. If the US had acted like Taiwan, instead of acting in a way that was indistinguishable from sabotage, we'd have a lot fewer deaths and would have avoided a recession.
That’s bad, it might get a lot worse, and we’re all nervous — but just wanted to add the context because “massive” can mean a lot of things with orders of magnitude difference.
BTW is there a vaccination drive over there? That's got to calm things down somewhat right?
There are all kinds of effective measures (e.g. contact tracing, quarantining of unconfirmed suspect cases) that work when you have 20 cases a day and don't work when you have 2000 cases a day, so going all-in while you still have just a few cases works, because by the time you have many cases, it's too late.
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/08/china-...
What would even be framed in the media when these were really user videos without journalists. Journalists couldn't report live, so i don't think there's something else than opinion pieces.
I agree that there could be a way for this to work in the US but it would be a long slog. South Korea seems like they could pull it off. So I'll grant you them for sure as being superior.
and no geographer either apparently :D
These countries are also far poorer and in the case of Thailand especially that has been a major contributing factor, as they've been less able to afford closing their country to tourism.
Also, the vaccinated population in either country is at low single digit percentage, so no end in sight for the harsh measures. Compare that to the US or Europe where 50% of population is (partially) vaccinated and, as the result, gradually reopen.
"highest number of cases" here meaning between 1 and 2 cases per million people per day.
For context, the United States is currently at its lowest daily case count since June last year, which is slightly above 100 cases per million people per day.
"Even with various levels of lockdown both countries have 1-2% of the case count of countries that didn't treat this seriously" isn't quite as dramatic of a statement though I guess.
(all figures using the typical 7 day rolling average and data available from Mackuba)
At least here in the UK, lockdown meant not seeing friends or family (unless you lived with them). Was that not the case in the US? Of course if people flout the rules then they won't have any effect.
Outside of those times there were restrictions on meeting indoors (at times max 6 people, at other no meeting indoors at all) pretty much continuously since last April.
Masks in public are not all that burdensome, so imo the mandates were reasonable regardless of the actual impact, but I wish they would have re-evaluated closing businesses a lot sooner, since that did a ton of economic damage, and the benefit there seems very questionable. I doubt the CA statistics would have been any different if they had never banned outdoor dining, for instance, or even just kept most businesses running normally but with an indoor mask requirement.
Comparing CA to TX and FL, it's also pretty hard now to argue that closing playgrounds and schools made much difference either, and that has had a severely negative impact on kids. I understand doing it in the first place when everything was unknown, but they should have been quicker to revise in response to new information.
Are you insane? There are tons of countries that are not totalitarian, with big land borders, that have done far better than the US. There are countries (SK, Japan) with tiny numbers of cases.
There are obviously thousands of things that could have been differently and or better.
One key area I think the US did really badly on was messaging - basically, having Trump drawing the whole thing into his orbit made everybody feel like it's just business as usual. It's hard to take something really seriously when the nation's highest elected official talking nonsense about it on Twitter, so obviously people don't follow rules. Public health messaging is really easy to get right, and the nations that have done really badly (Britain, the USA, Brazil) all had heads of state who did the worst possible kind of messaging.
The latter part doesn't follow logically from the first. It can be that performance is essentially random, or determined by geographical factors, or by the pre-existing health of the population, and so on. The assumption that governments can control respiratory viruses like SARS-CoV-2 is at the heart of all of this but needs very strong evidential support, given how strong the evidence against this belief is by now.
If you look at the data then there are no obvious explanations for why some countries did better than others. It's far from insane to observe this. There are a lot of plausible sounding explanations but they all fall apart due to exceptions, e.g. Japan did very little for a long time and yet has hardly been affected. In fact Asia in general has not been strongly affected (Taiwan is another example) despite a wide variety of response severities, which raises the question of whether Australia/New Zealand's relatively good performance is due to location rather than behaviour. Meanwhile Latin America was very hard hit despite some truly totalitarian responses by the authorities.
Your own explanation is especially weak because it appears to be based on a cartoon New York Times interpretation of what happened outside the USA. The British government's messaging was the polar opposite of Trump's. The PM appeared next to two chief scientists every single day, and the government was basically replaced by SAGE, the scientific advisory board. The SAGE scientists took total control of the messaging including designing large scale ad campaigns specifically designed by behavioral psychologists to provoke as much fear as possible in the population. The UK also has by far the highest vaccine uptake in the world. The whole thing had a singular focus, the messaging was very well organized to an extent that evokes people's worst fears of competent totalitarianism and so the idea that the UK was somehow doing the same things as Trump just has no basis in reality.
Yet, in the end, it didn't seem to matter. Sweden has had lower excess deaths despite consistent year-long messaging of chill, relax, it's no big deal. Hence, politics can be pretty conclusively eliminated as the source of any differences.
Anybody who thinks the UK represents competent totalitarianism needs to really think about where they are getting their news from. The UK's response was objectively worse than similar countries, in that more people died per capita, and this was because of two late lockdowns, both late because top politicians ignored scientific advice.
The success of the vaccine rollout is arguably the result of the government's procurement efforts, but also deserving of credit are the UK population (overwhelmingly non-skeptical), and the NHS, which allows for a highly organized and centralized rollout.
As for your cited quote, would you like me to cite the thousands of other things government leaders have said over the course of the year that support my point? Yes, the PM is a naturally optimistic guy. None of the people around him are, and they've all been ramping the fear factor to 11 continuously, and in particular they controlled the public messaging not the PM. With the result that there is now a serious problem in the UK with people who are afraid to leave their own homes.
Strictness and timeliness are unrelated characteristics.
Being afraid to leave your home has, for large parts of the last year, been very reasonable behaviour. The coronavirus has already killed 5 times more people than the blitz. Being an at-risk person in the middle of one of the UK waves was about as dangerous as regularly riding a motorcycle without a helmet.
You seem frankly a bit divorced from reality. If you go to a chart of the daily incidence rate before either the first or the second wave, then mark on it when the lockdowns occurred, it's clearly visible that they occurred too late.
I had to discourage my at-risk mother from going to a choral Christmas concert last year, at a time when they were clocking 40,000 new cases every day and that number was doubling every few days. That chart is etched into my brain because of how worried I was, and at the time, conservative ministers were still going on TV and talking about a five day christmas.
If you go to the deaths graph, you can see that as a result of this awful mistake, tens of thousands of people died. This is plainly visible in the statistics. Whatever political axe you have to grind is frankly irrelevant, and to be honest, facetious.
You can also look at the different performance of US states (none) despite very different measures.
That chart is etched into my brain because of how worried I was
In other words you were terrified and forced that fear on your family, based on a mis-understanding of how to use data to draw scientific conclusions. And now you're accusing anyone who points out the truth to you of political axe grinding, although it's you who just threw in a random mention of "conservative ministers" implying their politics is responsible for lots of deaths. That's a political talking point!
Vaccine skepticism isn't based on a question or challenge towards experts - questions or challenges exist within a specific framework, a specific body of knowledge. Rather, it is based on a challenge to the value and nature of expertise itself. As such, it's absolutely compatible with docility, totalitarianism, and antipathy towards questioning. In fact, since experts are experts by virtue of their existence within a specific body of knowledge, they are always by their very nature open to questions and challenges. Attacking the idea of expertise can as such be a way of attacking these areas of open questioning and challenge.
A good example of this is how authoritarian governments are typically hostile to academic institutions.
there are a plethora of open questions in vaccine science and epidemiological policy that naturally allow for skepticism. it’s not only political or partisan. you can strip away the political and still be left with plenty valid skepticism.
and yes, skepticism challenges the notion of expertise itself. it suggests humility is undervalued, that an ‘expert’ knows so little against the backdrop of the world’s knowledge (much less the world itself), especially when the ego becomes intertwined with the ideological. experts over time trend toward surety rather than openness and inquiry, especially as stature rises in a field. it’s so common that the out-of-touch know-it-all is a storytelling caricature.
while it’s not always a valid line of attack, questioning the basis of “expertise” can certainly unveil erroneous assumptions, poor methodology/data, and faulty reasoning. the raison d'être of skepticism is to push knowledge forward, not hold it back, and this sort of challenge is just as valid as any other in this regard.
finally, authoritarian governments are hostile toward academic institutions due to concerns over its power and legitimacy as embodied by... skepticism (of the state and its propaganda).
the best mitigation would have been to get people to generally distance around familiars indoors and don a mask if you’re going to spend time in close proximity or face-to-face for a while. that would have required families to treat each other as threats rather than safeties, which is why that was not tenable. it’s so much easier to treat strangers as threats.
this best mitigation would have led us to violate a visceral belief about the world, creating significant cognitive dissonance, and that’s why we instead focused so much on ineffective measures to protect ourselves from strangers with masks and lockdowns that didn’t tackle the core infection vector through familiars. it’s really not that difficult to unravel what was happening, even at the beginning. watching us dance around this elephant in the room as if it didn’t exist has been no less than maddening.
the US was not mostly locked down, and indeed made noncompliance with safety measures a major partisan identity issue for the faction controlling the federal executive, the upper federal legislative house, most state governments, and much of law enforcement even in the other states. It mostly had modest, inconsistent, uncoordinated, and largely unenforced restrictions. A few jurisdictions did at least nominal lockdowns for fairly brief periods (California did twice, though virtually every county sheriff had publicly announced that they either would not enforce orders at all or would do so only by education around compliance by the time of the second one near the end of 2020.)
They failed to actually achieve 'herd immunity' and did not avoid the eventual virus death toll:
https://www.news.com.au/world/coronavirus/global/sweden-cris...
By comparison Finland, it's neighbor took a much stricter approach and never reached the same level of death.
Finland: 931 deaths at 168 per million with a 1.0% death rate.
https://epidemic-stats.com/coronavirus/finland
Sweden: 14275 deaths at 1406 per million with a 1.4% death rate.
Sweden: https://tradingeconomics.com/sweden/gdp-growth-annual
Finland: https://tradingeconomics.com/finland/gdp-growth-annual
Looking at those charts they show very similar economic outcomes for the two countries.
Of the last 4 COVID effected quarters Finland won two and Sweden won two.
And Sweden actually felt the highest quarterly contraction at -7.7% compare to the -6.1% for Finland.
That 0.4% difference suggests Finland's health system was better than Sweden's at handling the virus, as your chances of dying were much less.
When it comes to actual deaths Finland was doing over 830% better (i.e. 168 per million compared to 1406 per million) than Sweden.
Edit: Fixed my bad math. My 90% better figure was out by a factor close to 100.
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...
Also I've heard the claim that (to be as apolitical as I can here) in Florida they secured the elderly population more quickly and carefully than in New York. You may want to look into that claim.
If New York ONLY ignored the problem that'd be one thing... but they actively made decisions that led to a large number of deaths - and more importantly those decisions were AGAINST the CDC guidelines.
WHY they made the decisions is a rabbit hole... but the facts are simple.
So where would recovered nursing home residents go? Keep staying in the hospital which would mean active covid patients would die in the streets? Or the streets?
This ain't "grandma went to the hospital and got sent back to the nursing home" and it was never about that.
Hospitals were over stressed so they sent sick people to nursing homes.
https://apnews.com/article/new-york-andrew-cuomo-us-news-cor...
"More than 9,000 recovering coronavirus patients in New York state were released from hospitals into nursing homes early in the pandemic under a controversial directive that was scrapped amid criticism it accelerated outbreaks, according to new records obtained by The Associated Press."
Notice: Not "9000 NH patients sent back from the hospital". 9000 individuals NOT nursing home patients sent to NHs
New York, AGAINST CDC guidelines, forced NHs to house sick people that weren't prepared to handle them - and THOUSANDS of old people died because they then got sick from the influx of COVID patients.
You have some seriously confused notion of what happened in New York (and, I think, similar happened in Texas - I may be wrong on that).
Not as I believe initially was case in NY from hospital directly into regular resident floor.
https://www.wxyz.com/news/region/detroit/20-year-old-beating...
And Cuomo has the balls to write a book patting himself on the back for doing such a good job? Utterly disgusting!
Pretty shitty. That people are willing to gaslight around it over politics is shittier still.
And on top of that, the actively hid deaths of nursing home residents that happened in hospitals to further downplay the impact of COVID to the nursing homes.
If you only watch the main stream media it's no wonder you haven't heard any of this :p
To address the parent question - one thing to keep in mind is that states are extremely heterogeneous, and "Did or did not lock down/mask mandate/etc." isn't actually a binary variable, but a very difficult to measure continuous response of both policy and compliance.
This is a bit nuanced because lots of people wore masks without a mandate, but it is also true that many people are pretty anti mask and definitely won't wear one if not forced to.
From my perspective it is pretty clear that masks did not have a large enough protective effect to show up in aggregate data.
As far as lockdowns go, they work until you end them, at which point you have just delayed the inevitable.
If you want to look at the data yourself, I would highly recommend the following site run by a prof at University of Illinois (use the population normalized graphs): http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/
Having a hard time finding the primary study I mentioned but I have provided links with some (population normalized) data below.
Florida counties (scroll down to second graph near the bottom for the start of the discussion): https://rationalground.com/after-nine-months-we-still-know-m...
Various graphs showing infection rate pre and post mask mandate: https://rationalground.com/mask-charts/
More mask graphs, mostly US states: https://rationalground.com/post-thanksgiving-mask-charts-sti...
Where in the data can you see this? Lockdowns don't appear to work. If they did, then places that didn't use them or cancelled them very early would have had drastically higher numbers than other places that kept them and the curves would be clearly moved around. But that isn't visible in the data.
That said, I'm glad you posted those links and agree with you on the lack of effectiveness of mask mandates. I've been posting links like those and various other studies for the past year because it was clear within weeks that these measures weren't having any impact. Sometimes those posts got upvoted but mostly, down down down. Very interesting that the top comment on this thread is one pointing out that lockdowns and mask mandates don't work: it used to be quite the taboo to point that out in this forum. And just recently there were the threads about the WIV, where again, many posts that a year ago would have been sitting at -4 and near-unreadably gray were sitting near the top. It's good to see that some rationality is returning to these discussions, because the data is public and easy to browse. It's not hard to flip through a bunch of countries and observe that you can't figure out when lockdowns/mask mandates started/ended with any reliability by looking at the data, even though affecting the data is the only justification for those measures' existence.
I also looked into the mask literature when the pandemic first started and agree there is no evidence to support their effectiveness (unless they are N95s). Even the meta-analysis published by the WHO stated there was no evidence for their effectiveness but tentatively recommend their use as the cost of mask usage was low.
I will add that most of the studies had healthcare workers wearing masks, and did not test the combination of both parties wearing masks. It is entirely possible that everyone wearing masks + distancing + limited contact duration may be "effective". In this case it's less about being actually protected (N95) and more about lowering the probability of transmission events, which our common leaky/crappy masks may be able to accomplish under the aforementioned conditions.
I doubt(/hope) no one believes that if I take a healthy and infected person, give them both surgical masks, and lock them in a small room together for a few hours, that the masks will prevent the healthy person from contracting covid.
If you remember, please do post so I can take a look. Because, the evidence I've seen is all completely unambiguous and resolves the question completely in favour of "lockdowns do not work and have no effect". And actually there are now many simple examples of that, of places where restrictions were not applied, or were applied much less strictly, or were lifted, and no differences were observed in outcomes (e.g. Sweden, Florida, Texas, South Dakota, Belarus, Japan etc).
It is entirely possible that everyone wearing masks + distancing + limited contact duration may be "effective".
If that were the case then sudden behavioural changes caused by mask mandates should reliably cause graphs to drop or obviously inflect to a lower growth rate. That should happen everywhere mask mandates come in and are well enforced (which they are, this has been measured). But we don't see that. Of course you can cherry pick a few graphs where there seem to be such inflections, but when you look at lots of them it becomes clear there's no correlation with anything.
I doubt(/hope) no one believes that if I take a healthy and infected person, give them both surgical masks, and lock them in a small room together for a few hours, that the masks will prevent the healthy person from contracting covid.
I see people wearing masks outside all the time, as well as in empty cars. Health 'experts' say nothing about any of this. So, I'm pretty sure lots of people do believe that unfortunately :(
Not sure how possible it is to get accurate info in this environment.
"Widespread assumptions that suicide rates would increase during the pandemic are not supported by the growing amount of evidence coming out of Canadian provinces and other jurisdictions around the world, say experts who study the topic."
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/suicides-alberta-bc-s...
Please let’s remember it is not a simple lever.
Let’s remember the overflowing ICUs and morgues and the very very limited menu of possible immediate actions - all this amongst unprecedented scrutiny, politicization and division.
We’re human. We’re doing the best we can. Lockdowns do flatten the curve.
Please stop spreading misinformation. Rebekah Jones wasn't a data scientist and was never asked to falsify any numbers. She is simply a liar.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/rebekah-jones-the-cov...
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/coronavirus/fl-ne-ss-prem-covid...
I think we need something much stronger before we enter into evidence such a powerful allegation.
EDIT: http://www.healthdata.org/special-analysis/estimation-excess... seems to suggest California covid deaths were underreported to a greater degree than Florida. That would be even stronger evidence that Florida had better outcomes compared with the disruption.
Only followers of fringe left wing Twitter believe any of that.
So there was overcounting, but somehow excess mortality in 2020-2021 is higher than in normal years? How?
>with comorbidity being counted as a COVID death even when the patient had 2 or more serious health conditions already
A high percentage of people in the US have "serious health conditions" like diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure etc. If Covid accelerated their deaths then it should be counted as a covid death because they would likely be otherwise alive now. If you want to get pedantic there's a measure called QALY(quality adjusted life years).
Musk said there would be zero cases in the US by April 2020 among other dumb predictions, so I don't think he's the best person to go to for Covid related information since his domain is technology and not epidemiology. https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2021/03/13/elon-musks-...
People dying of heart attacks because they didn’t seek timely care because of fear of going to the hospital. Medical screenings postponed. Undetected cancers. Suicides. There is a direct correlation between unemployment rates and disease. My annual physical, due in July 2020 was cancelled. How many other people’s were as well? Also one also should note increases in deaths of despair. That’s a real thing.
Excess deaths can’t be called “covid,” without proof that they were. How would else know Covid was the cause and not the flu? Are we just assuming excess deaths were Covid? The uncomfortable truth is that lockdown proponents don’t want to admit that their policies may have caused more damage than the disease from which they were claiming to protect us.
I don’t know the answer. My point is that excess deaths aren’t necessarily Covid deaths. That’s an assumption, not a fact.
Most of these will show up at a later time. And some of them were caused by hospital overcrowding, doctors trying to save themselves etc. not lockdown.
>Suicides.
Suicides are down.
>My annual physical, due in July 2020 was cancelled. How many other people’s were as well?
How many people die within a year due to something that's caught in a physical? I'd say barely any. If you're counting them then you should also count the lives saved by reduced pollution due to the lockdowns.
>Also one also should note increases in deaths of despair. That’s a real thing.
Suicides are down.
>Excess deaths can’t be called “covid,” without proof that they were. How would else know Covid was the cause and not the flu?
Because flu deaths are included in normal rate of deaths. If you're saying there are multiple times the number flu deaths than during a normal year with no measures to contain it, and it doesn't show up on the yearly disease surveillance, then you're arguing in bad faith.
>The uncomfortable truth is that lockdown proponents don’t want to admit that their policies may have caused more damage than the disease from which they were claiming to protect us.
The uncomfortable truth that pro-covid(and anti-vax people) don't want to admit is that their attitude of calling covid just a flu or something less harmful has caused death, disease, hospital overcrowding, increased number of lockdowns due to increased cases/deaths, and damage from the lockdowns. Compare the economies of countries that strict lockdowns but were able to open up sooner like Australia, New Zealand, China etc.
Do you think people will keep participating in the economy and crowded events etc. at the same rate if there are scenes like this at hospitals? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0Y1YakG60s
Now that things are opening back up, if there is hospital overcrowding and more covid deaths and cases due to the pro-covid and anti-vaccine people, then who is to blame for the economic damage and death from ensuing lockdowns?
The jury’s still out in my case.
https://tallahasseereports.com/2020/05/20/rebekah-jones-firi...
Densely populated places that would have acted flippantly would have been much worse.
Densely populated places with mixed unit housing had hurt themselves with the strategy they chose.
So basically California and New York could just barely keep numbers as close to Florida numbers by locking down hard. The methods California and New York chose could have been even more optimized, but not possible for a US government to do.
It became more extreme during the Trump era with many historically red suburbs around cities turning blue and some rural areas turning more red.
During the first wave New York and New Jersey got hit really hard. Basically, it was too late to do anything.
"Who do you share a bathroom with" is very important for tracking transmission. In NYC, everyone shares a bathroom.
[0] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/dep/water/combined-sewer-overflows...
[1] https://www.riverkeeper.org/campaigns/stop-polluters/sewage-...
There's no particular benefit to one or the other so states do what match their current constituents. And that's exactly what you'd expect in a democracy.
The places hit hardest were very dense cities... viruses spread very well in big cities, regardless of mitigation steps.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/rebekah-jones-the-cov...
Legitimate question, please no political commentary.