Am I missing something here? (re: reopening of bars, etc... now)

The Quarantine Zone
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If it is indeed true that they are too scared to come out (there are other places that aren’t suffering the same loss in head count, under similar circumstances), it is not necessarily the case that what you propose is in fact the reason why. (I myself would suspect that those same people would behave in the exact same way even if they were fully assured that no one would come near them and no one would be without a mask.)

But if it is the reason why, we should also consider that very few, and hardly any non-professionals in the relevant fields, would have come to those conclusions on their own. If people believe that, it’s because they believe the messaging they hear.

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It’s not THEIR risk that they need to be assessing. That’s the entire point. Otherwise you get morons who say “Eh, I’m 23. I’m not at risk personally. PARTY!” along with a bunch of other like-minded fools. And then go give it to their parents, co-workers, public transit riders, Uber drivers, grocery store workers, etc… Or worse, people who are asymptomatic carriers spreading it around without even knowing it. I mean, you could get it from someone at a restaurant who was pre-symptomatic, be asymptomatic yourself, and then give it to someone else without even knowing you did it. Would you want to risk that, just for the sake of a beer with friends, or a restaurant meal? I know I wouldn’t.

It’s not like mask wearing and social distancing is some sort of panacea vs. COVID-19. It’s a mitigation step. And all the public health authorities are advocating what several of us in the thread are saying as well- stay home and don’t do any unnecessary socializing.

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But for how long? What is the endgame of this plan? When will we know it’s ok to gather again?

Any demarcation line you set is likely to never be met.

When this all started, we thought that by everybody staying home we could contact trace the few cases and stamp this thing out. Now we’re stuck in a frustrating limbo where so many of us are doing everything right, but the disease continues to spread, and there’s no clear path to and end. “Never see your family again” is not a reasonable plan.

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Unfortunately, some people still think it is and clearly act like the simple act of having gloves or a mask on makes them invincible. You see people wear gloves into a store…and then get in their car and drive away with them still on. You see people wear a mask, but pull it down to talk to people. Fortunately, while it doesn’t make them invincible, it still falls into the ‘something is better than nothing’ category.

Then there’s the people that are just being jackasses about it. The ones that say ‘why do we need plexiglass in front of the cashiers when masks protect us?’ or ‘why should I bother with a flu shot, I couldn’t possibly catch the flu since I’m 6 feet away from everyone har har har’. Those people, they’re not helping anyone. Surely they understand that wearing a mask and having plexiglass is better than either one alone or that washing your hands and getting a flu shot is better than just washing your hands etc. But the sarcastic comments still become a rallying call for the like minded facebook friends.

If everyone could just get with the program, we’d get through this so much faster. I keep thinking back to March/April when schools got cancelled and people were both complaining about having to deal with that AND complaining about wearing a mask. There were memes going around that essentially said if you don’t stop whining about a mask and start acting like this is a serious threat, your kids won’t be going back to school in fall…and here we are.

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The minute we have a reliable vaccine that’s readily available to anyone who wants it, that’ll be the end of all these restrictions (or at least the beginning of the end).
People keep comparing it to the flu, right. But anytime someone compares any covid stats to flu stats, I remind them that the flu stats are where they are because we have a vaccine for it. Can you imagine how much worse it would be without one?

I’m not saying a vaccine is going to eradicate this in short order, but it’ll get it under control, reduce loads on hospitals, give officials the ability to start safely lifting bans on gatherings etc.

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While the vaccines in development are promising, there’s still no guarantee they will work to anything like a useful degree. If ‘vaccine’ is the only endgame then this statement

is wrong. All this staying home isn’t helping the vaccine trials go any faster.

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Who thought that? Nothing that was published or any news stories actually said that. They all implied a disease that nobody has much natural immunity or defense against, that we don’t know anything about, and that there are no vaccines for. And the only real historical yardstick we have to go by was/is the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, which took a couple of years to end.

Maybe I read different stuff, but back in say… April, it was pretty clear that it was going to be a year or two worth of restrictions and what-not.

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But this didn’t “all start” in April, that was at least a month in, when it was becoming clear this was entirely out of control. Don’t you remember all the talk of a “V-Shaped Recovery” for the economy, because we were going to get this thing beat and all that pent-up demand would come roaring back? That didn’t last long, but was predicated on a belief this was a short-lived disruption to our lives.

Yes, I was quickly disabused of the notion, and maybe your sources at the time were different from mine, but when I started working from home I was very much under the impression that this was going to be a few weeks to a few months. Partly this was a false sense of security from having lived through SARS, Swine Flu, Bird Flu, etc. and the naive feeling that, “These things are not a problem here in the US”.

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Yeah, and I remember the President saying it also. Which means my bullshit detector needle pegged into the red right then, regardless of the pandemic’s stage.

I never had the impression that this would be anything less than six to nine months, and that was if we got really lucky and somehow managed to stamp it out in the early lockdown stages.

270

That’s why I specifically said ‘a reliable vaccine that’s readily available’ instead of just leaving it ‘a vaccine’.

You can’t take a quote from a reply to someone else and act like it was an incorrect answer to an entirely different question (that you asked).

These aren’t methods for having a discussion in good faith.

271

Ok, let’s review. First, you said

But then in answer to my question “What is the endgame…When is it over” you answered

But these are incompatible! Getting with the program does not get us through ‘faster’, if “getting through” means waiting for a vaccine. Less physical suffering and death in the meantime, sure, but it doesn’t get us through ‘faster’

For the record I share your frustration with those who won’t wear masks or distance in public, or who are gathering without regard for bubbles/circles etc. for events.

All I’m saying is that I’m also frustrated with such a costly plan that depends on a vaccine which may not even be possible.

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The notion here is that an unvaccinated-against flu would be, or is, much more damaging than COVID? I’d be surprised if you conceded that point in a debate.

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You’re still applying a comment that had nothing to do with your question and acting like it was an answer to your question.

Bump made a comment about wearing a mask and social distancing not being a panacea. I agreed with him and stated that we’d get through this so much faster if everyone would get with the program.

That comment was unrelated to your statement of “Any demarcation line you set is likely to never be met.”, where I answered it by saying a vaccine.

I’m not going to pick apart my exact phrasing in the earlier statement, but my point still stands, if everyone got with the program, we could get through this, but you wanted a ‘demarcation line’, so instead of a number or percentage that will continuously have to be readjusted as what we learn changes, I gave you my answer of a vaccine. IMO, things will readily begin to return to normal once we have a reliable vaccine that’s readily available to everyone.

In other words, there’s a difference between my vague perception of what ‘getting through this’ looks like and where I’d put an actual line in the sand. And, we can do both at the same time. We can ‘get with the program’ AND work towards a vaccine.
Just like if someone had said less than X% sick means we’re through this and also mentioned that less than Y% death rates means we’re though this…we can work towards both goals at the same time.

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I don’t suggest how much worse the flu would be, simply that this isn’t the flu and it’s not a fair comparison. If anything, it’s an anchoring bias. Way back in March it was suggested (don’t remember if it was Trump or Fauci) that this is similar to the flu and people latched on to that. I did at the beginning, but quickly learned I was wrong and stopped saying it. People are still comparing a novel virus that we know very little to the flu. The flu being a virus that we know A LOT about and have a vaccine for.

And, they’re using this as a reason to argue that we don’t need masks (or anything else) since we don’t wear masks during flu season. Well, I for one, got a flu shot this year, I’m very unlikely to get the flu and even less likely to spread it. There’s little need for me to wear a mask. And, there’s a lot of people like me around. There’s enough of us that if you choose not to get a flu shot, you’re likely protected due to herd immunity.

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Well, I’m pretty sure Wuhan and Bergamo put a little more ‘anchor’ in ‘anchoring bias’.

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This. And there’s been really very little talk, in terms of official guidelines, about seeing family. It’s all been focused on commercial activity, because the economic impact is the debate. But for actual people on the street, whether or not seeing my mom makes me a bad person and a socially irresponsible asshole is way, way more relevant than whether or not I can safely shop at Kohls.

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I think the point is that all the mitigation in the world won’t fix this. It’s really vaccine or nothing: we don’t seem to be able to pull a NZ. So there’s no point in blaming the people that won’t “get with the program” for our situation.

I mean, do you really think that a person in their 80s who lets her grandchildren come over is a bad person, and that we should be appalled at the selfishness of such an act? Because I feel like their should be some middle ground.

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Warning: long post. But I’ve been thinking about this, and what I’m thinking doesn’t want to fit in one paragraph.

It seems to me that some are reading ‘people who want to see their grandchildren are evil’ when what’s being objected to is the idea that every individual’s entitled to make up their own minds about what risks to take as if only the people at that specific gathering are taking that risk.

Some risks will have to be taken; there’s no question about that. If we locked every individual on the planet up separately for a month, each in their own room with no exchange of air circulation between them, there would be no more covid-19 (and probably no more of a batch of other diseases while we’re at it.) There’s obviously no way we can do that, not only because it would be utterly unenforceable as everyone who could possibly be an enforcer would also be locked up in isolation and unable to enforce anything, but primarily because huge numbers of people would die either from the isolation itself or afterwards due to the huge mess left behind in everything from, among other areas, agricultural production to maintenance of energy production. Again, some risks need to be taken.

If we’re to limit the amount of unnecessary deaths, unnecessary long term damage to individuals’ health, unnecessary disruption to other people’s lives because their loved ones are dead or have long-term damage, and unnecessary disruption to the economy due to all of those factors: we need to consider which risks are necessary, which risks are not necessary, and, importantly, which risks can be ameliorated.

It’s reasonable to conclude that in some cases the risk of personal visits between households is necessary. But there are ways to make such visits less risky, especially to those outside the households doing the visiting.

And ignoring the fact that those other than the people deciding to take the risks are being put at risk means that those techniques – including, for instance, masks and/or distancing during the visit and/or isolation for some time after it – are far less likely to be considered, or to be used.

Therefore getting indignant just because somebody points out that such visiting puts people at risk who are not being given a choice in the decision is IMO both unreasonable and a very bad idea.

The issue isn’t whether Grandma’s evil. The issue isn’t even, should this particular grandma visit with her particular grandchildren – I’d say in most areas at most times that’s a case by case call. The issue is, are all the risk factors being taken into consideration, and ameliorated as much as possible?

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I’m just stating that if everyone fully complied with all the guidelines, we’d get through this a lot faster. I’m not saying we can or will or should, just that it would undoubtedly make a big difference. I mean, in theory, if every single person stayed confined to their own enclosed area (your own house, your own room etc) and with zero contact with another human for the next month, it would be gone, right? But that’s not going to happen, nor would I even expect people do something that extreme.

The problem is that so many people that CAN help this cause are choosing not to.
Grandma is still going to see her grandkids, it’s not helping things, but it’s going to happen. If that was the only restriction people ignored, our curve would be a lot flatter. We still have people going to restaurants, parties, bringing their spouse and 3 teenage kids to the grocery store, ignoring mask restrictions and the list goes on and on and on.

There’s absolutely a lot of middle ground, but we should be saving that middle ground for good reasons. Good reasons beyond being bored. Going to the grocery store to get your food for the week is a good reason. Going to the grocery store to socialize because it’s one of the few open places, not so much.

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I came across this video awhile ago illustrating the “value” vs. “risk” of various activities. It’s an interesting way to think about the dilemma (I do have some issues with the model, but close enough for this discussion).

Towards the end he says, “There’s enormous disagreement as to what value activities have and who gets to decide which activities are worth what risk.” That essentially is the issue. There is no objective right answer.

Like driving on the highway, everyone going faster than me is a maniac, and everyone slower is a moron.