You’re right. I’ve been frustrated by the board delays or I would’ve responded sooner.
I typed this post initially in the SDMB software, instead of notepad like I usually do. And the page glitched and deleted my work. And I had to redo it. And I omitted a few things.
I meant to say, after I offered up the 90% number
“That number is high, I know. There are people that are out of work that have not yet applied for unemployment. There are people who are still getting paid by their employers even though they aren’t working. I suspect the real number is around 75%. Maybe even a little lower. But that still means WELL more than half the workforce is still employed.”
And I think the definition of essential employee is still pretty broad, overly broad even. Pretty much everyone in construction is considered essential. Producing TV commercials is apparently more essential than ever. Those commercials assure me that home remodeling is an essential business and this is a perfect time to refurbish my old bathtub. All food is essential, even a hundred varieties of bagged candy and dozens of flavors of cheese-stuffed pretzels and snack mixes.A friend that manages the greeting card displays in drugstores is still employed, her company “supplies products to pharmacies and drugstores” and is considered essential.
I was going for something between sarcasm and irony there and it didn’t land. Of course I don’t really want this to happen.
But I’m fed up and furious with the gaslighting, with this Republican administration making (or recommending)policy with one hand then turning around and signaling to their supporters that their own recommended policies are somehow the fault of Democrats and should be ignored. I just think if they’re going to tell people to ignore and protest the lockdowns they need to own the results.
As an aside, the latest dog whistle we’ve noticed is “nurses”. Whenever some Republican starts talking about how if you expand unemployment then “nurses” won’t want to work or suggesting that maybe “nurses” are stealing PPE instead of using it, we laugh out loud because it is such obvious code for another word that starts with “n”.
Do you have an example? I mean, PPE is going missing and some hospitals are putting it under lock and key. That’s happening here in Ontario where that other word that starts with “n” isn’t really a vote getter.
People get exponential growth. What they struggle with is opportunity cost.
Specifically, what we have here is a struggle to understand the “what would have happened” thing and project it forward. Because lockdowns have reduced the rate of infection, many people look and say “Huh, it’s not as bad as people said.” (Some people go as far as to say it was all lies and conspiracy.) Therefore, they want to get outside; the fact that it WOULD have been dreadful had we not locked down is much harder to comprehend, but one must comprehend it to understand why opening up a few weeks too early would be worse than opening up a few weeks too late.
All of this was highly predictable. People do not like being stuck at home. If the lockdown works people will see that as a reason why it was overkill.
I mean, I’m in Canada, where people are much likelier to play nice and trust the government, and all levels of government are cooperating on this… and we are juuust starting to see people’s patience fray. It’s not crazy-as-shit demonstrations like in Michigan or anything like that, and no politicians are claiming lockdowns aren’t needed, but individuals are starting to carp about the cops being too strict, rumors are beginning to bubble up, and both the Prime Minister and various provincial premiers have felt it recently necessary to publicly remind people we are some distance from letting up on the lockdown. The reason they are suddenly emphasizing that is because smart advisors are telling them people are starting to get impatient. Public opinion is still overwhelmingly “Let’s do lockdown” - the strains are just barely starting.
But it’s only been four weeks. There ain’t any way people are going to just calmly go about this for four months. It is going to get contentious.
I think some people are a little too confident in “what would have happened”. That was all based on projections with extremely limited knowledge. It was wise to be careful of the worst case scenarios projected. But you and Francis are acting like those projections were lock solid truths. Why? Some of the scariest projections were 70% infected, 1% of those die. Do you still think it likely this disease will kill 53M people?
Trump advanced the story in the US. I don’t believe he specifically said “nurses”, he just implied that health care workers were stealing it - but I promise that some of the conservative commentators were dog whistling about nurses when they were discussing the story.
Sens. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) said Wednesday they may oppose fast-tracking the Senate’s coronavirus stimulus package because they fear that it could incentivize layoffs, as well as entice people to quit their jobs because they could make actually make more money from the enhanced unemployment insurance.*The notion that people can “actually make more money from the enhanced unemployment insurance,” then that is a clear indication that something is deeply wrong with our economy and the minimum wage.
As for Lindsey Graham, is there still anyone who takes him seriously?
For me at least, I can fully acknowledge that the lockdowns undoubtedly saved many, many lives. But the question becomes why should we trust the models (or experts) that predict what will happen when restrictions are lifted when they were so far off before? I’m not saying we can lift all the restrictions because “only” 35k have died and what is the big deal?
IHME was predicting over 150k deaths just a few weeks ago (if I remember correctly) and that was with lockdowns until August. Today they are at 68k.
The Imperial college paper that apparently kicked off such huge concerns in both the UK and the US looks… a bit off at this point. They have revised their numbers and are saying that the societal changes are the reason the actual numbers are so far off from predicted. Maybe. The original paper included many of the steps we are taking now, and it was still off by a huge margin.
So, again. It is hard to watch 10 million to 15 million people lose their jobs and suffer such angst and turmoil in their lives. If we were saving millions, sure, that is a no brainer. We believed the models once.
Because there is nothing better. The models were (and probably continue to be) off because of a lack of sufficient reliable data to estimate reproduction numbers and transmission rates, mortality rates, rates of asymptomatic infection, rates of various presentations, and more. That’s why widespread testing is so key; we need to know what we’re dealing with, especially since this is a new virus.
So your initial model sucks and has large margins of error but you run with it because, well, what else have you got? Throw darts at a board and pray? Then you get more data in and revise your model and over time, if your data quality is decent, you hope your model becomes a more accurate representation of reality. We’re only 4-5 months into this thing, keep in mind. That’s not necessarily a long time from a research perspective, although I have been rather impressed at the amount of research being churned out in such a short period of time.
I do wish folks reporting this stuff would acknowledge the margins of error though. I mean, I understand why they don’t; people want certainties, not ranges of possibilities. “Well, it could be the case that <most optimistic scenario in the range> so we should all just get back to work already.” “Well, it could be <most pessimistic scenario in the range> so we need severe measures immediately.” But that sort of thing happens anyway, so you might as well just put it out there explicitly.
Ugh, sorry about the board glitches. I always try to copy what I post to my clipboard until I know the POST action has completed successfully, but I don’t always remember. I luckily haven’t had it bite me yet.
25% unemployed is Great Depression levels. It’s still literally true that the majority of the workforce is employed in that scenario, but I think most people would characterize that as the economy having shut down. That’s metaphorical, not literal, of course, but this is mostly untrod territory. We think we’ve learned a lot of lessons since the Great Depression, but frankly the political will wasn’t there in 2009, and it’ll mysteriously vanish again if we have a Democratic president next January (that is, Republicans will suddenly decide they don’t care any more once they’re aren’t trying to secure a second term for a Republican president.) And even if all the political will were there, we don’t really know what will work and how fast. It’s scary times, even without the whole pandemic going on.
You made various good points but especially getting better information on the actual statistical distribution of transmission, which is mentioned much less often than testing, vaccine/cure, tracking technologies and so forth.
For example it may well be that transmission at ‘essential’ businesses, with precautions, is now a very small % of total new infections. If so a general ‘reopening’ of retail stores wouldn’t cause a big absolute number difference in infections. This might also be true of various types of workplaces, but not others. Commuting to work by car would seem extremely unlikely to be a large source of infections, even including gas stations, with precautions. OTOH too bad for my home area (a place a lot of US media thinking tends to center on), NY, it’s harder to see how you could operate mass transit system at high capacity factor without a lot more infections.
There’s likely huge variations in the impact of various types of ‘reopening’. But the discussion IMO tends to be overrun with oversimplifications, I think driven by politics.
I think likewise the word game about ‘shut down’. It’s not literally a ‘shut down’ obviously, perhaps more like a 1/3 reduction in economic activity (maybe even less). But that’s still probably unsustainable for anywhere near as long as vaccine or even non-vaccine highly effective treatments are likely to take, without causing massive long term economic damage. I don’t know of any other country which thinks otherwise. So whatever you call the current situation it still has to change significantly fairly soon. Keep going as now for many more months is not a real world choice. Although neither are ‘do nothing’ or ‘just go back to how things were’.
There will be a mixed path (globally) of ‘opening’ parts of the economy now virtually ‘shut’ based on where there’s the most economic bang for the extra infection buck. It will be helped by human adaptability to get things done with less close contact, also by new technologies to do that, more testing and direct medical advances against the disease at some point. It will necessarily involve trial and error, and what prove to be mistakes. But ‘all the plans are terrible’ tends to imply to me there’s a clearly different alternative and I don’t think there is.
It’s also obvious already that it’s highly possible to be too pessimistic about the pandemic.
The problem being, even in ‘I rule the world’ mode, not considering what ‘stupid people’ would force free societies to do, it’s not a ‘fact’ what would have happened, quantitatively, in a give place with lesser restrictions. It’s a speculative counter factual. Again especially if you realistically introduce the idea of varying restrictions in the details not ‘do nothing’ v what was done. Again minus stupid people, ‘do nothing’ wasn’t and isn’t a real choice either.
Going forward, scalpel has to tend to replace sledge hammer on restrictions at some point well before there’s a medical resolution. Sledge hammer won’t just become contentious, but unsustainable. The world will have to figure out which types of situations/interactions represent the bulk of infections to bring economic activity much closer to normal levels than now (not ‘shut down’ now, but unsustainably slowed down) on some kind of 80/20 rule basis consistent with not overloading the medical system. It will require some degree or trial and error of real experience in the details, modeling will be a limited tool for accomplishing this I believe.
Very soon China will have reopened its schools, albeit just two grades and those are stagggered, so we’ll have an answer to that question for at least one country.
The one thing we seem to have a handle on is that this hits young people a lot less hard. It also seems they might be less contagious. So someone saying “what would the rate be with open schools?” without further comment, doesn’t sound informed.
This deserves highlighting. The models are probably quite good, if only the inputs were good. When the inputs are numbers that no one should have any confidence in, other than as one possibility? Then they are a placeholder showing one potential future, given certain assumptions about inputs are true. Various unknowns were given values and communicated as if they were knowns.
The huge magnitude of uncertainty and lack of confidence in the inputs was not communicated well. Really at all. I can understand why it was felt that the public would not process such uncertainty into support for prudent policies, given the unknowns and the possible horrific outcomes. But the result is large segments of the public believing the models were more than theoretical exercises given sets of hypotheticals that might have been true, and another large segment now having less confidence in what the experts say.
As the inputs become better known with greater confidence, then the models will give results we can believe with greater confidence. Those inputs have been unknown but they are not unknowable. Some of them (not all) will become known with greater confidence fairly soon.
Wait, what? The implication I get from it is precisely the opposite. ALL the plans are terrible. There is NO magic bullet. Whatever we do is going to hurt, if it’s possible at all.
You are clearly well informed on all that is happening with all this and I trust you in your inputs and opinions. I hope you are right that we will have better inputs necessary for more accurate predictions soon. We are 4 months into understanding a new virus and that, to me, seems like an incredibly brief time.
We’ve come a long way in that time, but we are still perhaps years away from truly knowing what we need to make fully informed decisions. The problem is we don’t have years. We’ll need to make those decisions soon, wide error bars and all.
Again, I hope you are right. I hope the pertinent information necessary for less error margin is right around the corner. I realize there are no guarantees, though.
Some countries with more free and reliable flow of information than the PRC didn’t close all schools to begin with. Grade school wasn’t closed in Sweden (higher levels of education were). Taiwan either; very low rate of cases there. But that’s also true in a lot of parts of the PRC to the extent you can believe their stats.
What happens in various countries (or various regions or subdivisions like US states) in response to various measures is useful info to process. But it’s not simple to process since situations vary widely. School reopening specifically in the US will probably be no earlier than the normal start of the fall term in late summer, IIRC a majority of state govt have already prohibited it any earlier. It’s very hard to say what things will look like that far out.
But again I think the tendency toward opposing entrenched political talking points feeds oversimplification here like it does with all kinds of other actually complicated issues, including ones simply too complicated for anyone to accurately predict. It’s really unlikely IMO that ordering a general ‘shelter in place’ has gained anything like a uniform reduction in infections across all areas of social and economic activity it has restricted in all geographic areas of a large country. There’s bound to be significant ‘low hanging fruit’ in modifying those restrictions with new precautions resulting in little impact on total infections. And then some readily foreseeable major dilemmas at least in some areas (like again how do operate the NY subways at anything like normal capacity prior to a cure? 6 inch spacing not 6 ft, and how do you operate NY anything like normally without the subway?). And loads of stuff in between where it will be found out by trial and error by various levels of govt (and in other countries), with possible big downside in case of some of the mistakes which be inevitably be made. How terrible the whole situation will be is impossible to predict IMO.
The implication I get from it is precisely the opposite. ALL the plans are terrible. There is NO magic bullet. Whatever we do is going to hurt, if it’s possible at all.