I think people are more upset with the fact that they are unemployed and their states are locked down. The initial request from my governor was "2 weeks to flatten the curve". After two months, and hearing we never reached near capacity, and our local emergency hospital is also winding down, why are we still closed? Now we're told it could until June
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Because the metrics for “we don’t need this emergency hospital” and “the epidemic is beginning to burn out” are different.
"Flatten the curve" != "wait until the epidemic burns out"
The fact that the rhetoric started with one and ended with the other makes the whole process feel dishonest.
We literally have to talk about goals as they come up. It's not that complicated. It makes no sense to keep saying "flatten the curve" as a goal once we achieve that goal, and it makes no sense to say "wait for it to burn out" during a period of skyrocketing growth.
Once we get over the exponential growth, we then have to wait for it to drop. Otherwise we'd just go right back to exponential growth.
All you people acting like "oh, the curve flattened, now we can go back to normal" are the kind of people that caused three massive spikes in the 1918 flu.
We're very likely to have a second spike that is way worse than the first because of this attitude.
Literally noone is saying "go back to normal". If the goal was to get it to burn out, the initial statement should have been "we need to isolate until it burns out".
That was not the initial sell to the public.
"The epidemic is beginning to burn out" is also very different from "everything can go back to normal now". We saw how quickly this can get out of hand if left unchecked last month. If people rush to get back to normal and pretend that things are fine, it's just going to happen again.
It’s depressing that people have already forgotten the lessons from last month.
It's depressing that people think 25% of the workforce can be out of work for an indeterminate period of time without massive, potentially society-ending effects.
I can only assume you mean without drastic changes to our current economic system, because otherwise in this modern age of automation that seems entirely possible.
No one thinks that.
I think that.
Specifically, I think that first world societies can afford to give 25% of the workforce a paid sabbatical without ceasing to exist. And I find it depressing that there are people who think this is a shock that rich societies cannot absorb.
Sure, it'll be painful. Taxes will have to go up afterwards, the retirement age might have to rise. But it's possible.
> massive, potentially society-ending effects.
"Society" ending or "Socialism only for the rich" ending?
That's not the result of having "forgotten". It's the dual squeeze of pitiful government response for workers (a single $1200 check vs. near full-benefits in Europe) combined with a hysterical "we gotta open up" corporate funded protest campaign from the extreme right.
Don't forget the gaslighting "100k people dead is doing a good job" BS.
People are being hoodwinked while they're scared shitless.
I do truly believe that almost any reasonable person will look at the death rate and realize that the US has fucked up the response in a big huge way. The conspiracy people saying that the death rates are a lie are not that many. This is one where the silent majority does realize whats going on and how bad the administration is fucking it up.
Anyone can go look and see that south korea, a far more urbanized state is open for business right now.
"examine this discrepancy" vs. "it's fake news" - for some the latter just makes more sense.
Active disinformation campaigns work.
Saying SK is open while we're not leads to "let's open America" for that mindset.
They'll have that mindset regardless of the reasoning for it. We'll just all have to watch as they show up on the news going "I never believed this could happen to me!".
> Don't forget the gaslighting "100k people dead is doing a good job" BS.
It always looked bad and looks worse the closer 100k becomes. It can’t be too long before some measures will say it has been exceeded. Then what will the claim be?
Goalposts can be moved - in fact, hasn't that happened before? Next claim will be 150k, then 300k. It will never be enough to actually do anything until/unless Prince Prospero or his castle gets sick.
Stumbled on the below - just denying covid is the cause of death is another angle.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/09/us/politics/coronavirus-d...
Not all countries in Europe are going full benefits. Mine has given peanuts to all those people who cannot work at all due to the lockdown (and only a tiny fraction got the money). Or worse, it has offered them loans.
> Don't forget the gaslighting "100k people dead is doing a good job" BS.
Now do the per capita numbers and see that we’re actually doing better on a deaths/million basis than several European countries.
Anxiety over an inability to procure resources due to economic uncertainty for the future and lack of income is also an epidemic.
Just to be clear, the epidemic only "burns out" when somewhere between 50-90% of the population has immunity. Almost certainly closer to 80%+ unless we discover that a significant portion of the population is resistant to infection due to genetic differences or possible cross-immunity with other milder human CoVs.
By suppressing the transmission of this virus, we have failed to build immunity in most of the population. As a result any serious lifting of suppression measures will lead to moderate-severe outbreaks.
On balance, I believe that the most effective method is to resume life as normal, and focus on encouraging the at-risk to shelter, along with providing them appropriate government support. Whereas the approach we've taken has destroyed our economy in a very real sense, which will increase mortality even in the absence of a global food crisis.
The suspension of elective surgeries on a broad basis was very clearly a mistake, but unfortunately it's the type of mistake that no-one will admit was a mistake.
We postponed absolutely important surgeries as a result of this, even in areas like, for example, my county in Central California, which has very low prevalence of COVID-19. Here in California we "only" suspended elective surgeries for a month and now have a backlog that we're still working through.
So, just to say it explicitly: the fear that "things will never be normal again" is unfounded, at least in those who are operating off a mental model wherein COVID-19 is 10x as deadly as we previously thought.
The fact that we chose a strategy of indefinite postponement was our mistake. Because now people are beginning to realize that if we "go back to normal" then "the lockdown was for nothing". I consider this to just be a sunk cost fallacy, I believe quite frankly that ultimately the lockdown "was for nothing" (that is to say that, at the time it may have been justified based off the projected numbers, but with what we know now we should know that we only shot ourselves in the foot).
TL;DR: I believe that we need to resume normal operation of society, and make strong efforts to protect the at-risk. Trying to indefinitely postpone exposure to COVID-19 is a loosing battle. We've adopted a strategy of indefinite containment/postponement that relies on hunkering down and waiting for a _temporally unbounded event_. Given that lockdown-associated damage increases the longer containment is maintained, we are trading off a linear component of damage for a speculated future improvement in outcomes due to vaccines/a game-changer treatment. That to me is eminently foolish.
Most decision-making heuristics don't just try to blindly increase expected value (decrease expected loss) but also factor in uncertainy. In general it's acceptable to trade off a little EV for a lot more uncertainty. (Unfortunately in the case of the lockdown, I believe we incurred -EV along with far more uncertainty, for a net loss across all dimensions)
Describe how you expect 100M at risk Americans to shelter, while the remaining 229M party like it's 1999? For example, I work with a team of 9; two have diabetes and are overweight, one has hypertension, one has heart issues. One has a mother with cancer he takes care of. I have two children who in your scenario would be going to school and bring home SARS-CoV-2 for dinner. My wife also works in public service, and prior to the shutdown, interacted with hundreds of people per day. So I'm sure my coworkers will be thrilled that you're willing to sacrifice them up on the alter of herd immunity.
> I believe that we need to resume normal operation of society, and make strong efforts to protect the at-risk.
Nearly half the population is at-risk (age, comorbidities, obesity).
But the whole point of the lockdowns was to "flatten the curve" meaning to prevent the hospitals from becoming overwhelmed. That's been done.
The risk of a second wave is still known, and cases are still rising in quite a few states.
And the risk seems fairly small if you look at the numbers. But then you're some sort of conspiracy nut. In Philadelphia, half of the cases are in nursing homes, and more than half are of people older than 60 years of age. There is risk to opening the country, but telling old people to stay home seems more sane than keeping people from being able to make ends meet
I don't think you're a conspiracy nut, and you're right that the risk is fairly small right now in places where there have been few confirmed cases. But an exponential growth rate means the risk not small for very long. Covid-19 is the leading cause of death in the US right now. That we don't have the ability to test people before they go back to work is a huge problem. We can't even catch when someone has a fever.
> In Philadelphia, half of the cases are in nursing homes, and more than half are of people older than 60 years of age
That has little to do with the infection rate and a lot to do with who gets tested. In nursing homes people are getting monitored all day. There are many countries that are far more dense than the US that are currently open, because they test everywhere and prevent people effected from being out.
At least 0.16% of NYC is dead from COVID-19, and that number will rise as both the disease continues and we go back and discover cases we missed. If those numbers hold nationwide, you’re talking about half a million people dying or more.
I personally wouldn’t want to argue for putting half a million in an early grave for the sake of opening up.
They are still rising in a few states that have locked down.
I have to wonder, what do the people pushing to re-open expect will happen in those states?
"It'll disappear, just like a miracle."
We have to start thinking about how, long term, we are going to start managing the 7th and 8th wave as well.
The risk of the second wave is precisely the indication that our indefinite containment strategy was fundamentally flawed. We didn't actually avoid mortality in a permanent sense, we just postponed it. Which is why many on the side that you are advocating for are beginning to express the notion that we need to be on guard for the next _months-years_. Not just the next _weeks_.
As briefly as possible: Containment only has real utility if we can develop a game-changer that drastically alters COVID-19 outcomes, and that we don't have to wait so long for it that lockdown-induced mortality eclipses the time-adjusted benefit. It's a risky strategy that requires waiting for an uncertain, temporally-unbounded event, which in turn means that the "indefinite postponement" strategy incurs unbounded cost. We simply don't know enough to make definitive predictions about upper bounds on time-to-discover-incredible-treatment.
Whereas in a no-lockdown, natural herd immunity strategy, we are experiencing a fairly well-bounded spike in short-medium term mortality. I've been using Ferguson's 2.2 million figure for the US which is based off 82% population infection with an IFR of 0.9%, with the population equally susceptible at the physical level (behavioral differences are modelled, I believe). That's an excellent upper bound, it's certainly not the mortality we should _expect_. So we have a much tighter certainty, we will experience somewhere between 200,000-2.2 million deaths due to COVID-19.
When weighed against the alternative, which again is to incur unbounded risk from lockdown-associated mortality, the correct path becomes quite clear in my opinion. A very marginal increase in all-cause mortality in the whole population could very easily offset the spike in COVID-19 mortality which is constrained to fairly limited subsets of the population overall.
It's not an epidemic any longer and hasn't been for a while. It's a full blown global pandemic headed towards being endemic long term.
All three are very different scenarios that require different strategies and where we should have very different expectations for what is and is not achievable.
People are praising countries like New Zealand, but what's their endgame? Be in a situation where their citizens can't even safely travel from their country until global herd immunity is achieved because every vacation or business trip is a chance to end up being sick far from home?
This isn't going away just like the seasonal flu and common cold are not ever going to go away.
> People are praising countries like New Zealand, but what's their endgame? Be in a situation where their citizens can't even safely travel from their country until global herd immunity is achieved because every vacation or business trip is a chance to end up being sick far from home?
Yes. And I’ll have this over every alternative I’ve seen so far. I’m in New Zealand.
Well look at Wuhan, Europe, etc. Had people in the US taken the lockdown seriously, we would have ended with an Rt below 1.0 (ideally WAY below 1) so we would be more than ready to reopen now. Instead, people keep doing crap and getting infected, and here we are stuck at home for two months.