Spending some time visiting friends and family, in small numbers at different times, masked and distanced and possibly outdoors. Not daily, not everybody once a week. But not never.
Not holding a large family gathering with multiple households, then sitting down indoors to a meal and socializing, hugging, getting close to everyone and mingling - you know, the typical social celebration kind of thing.
Not going to bars or restaurants to sit with your friends or family from other households, even outdoors. Eating and drinking necessitate taking off the mask. Bars and restaurants are cross-mingling with people who aren’t even in your group, nevermind the multiple households within your group.
Visiting with and hugging grandchildren from time to time is okay, provided you are masked and with good cleaning afterwards - at least washing hands, perhaps changing clothes as well.
Grinding with strangers at a dance club is right out - even masked.
Is that enough of a response? What do you consider reasonable?
I don’t see anyone arguing that masks eliminate spread altogether. Just that they have a strong impact on likelihood of spread.
And there is not universal mask wearing, and even people who comply when in public will let down their guard with family and friends, reduce their protections. It’s socially and psychologically something we inherently do, and it’s difficult to not do it.
I also don’t see the medical professionals arguing to get the transmission rates down to zero before opening up. Rather, they argue for smaller rates than what we currently experience, because we do not have as widespread of compliance as you seem to think.
Could you define your acronyms when you use them? NPI’s? No Pun Intended? Narcissistic Personality Inventory? National Provider Identification? Nonpublic Personal Information?
It would help for people to clarify what they mean by “the system”. I think there are multiple different definitions at play here, which causes disagreement by confusion.
@SayTwo, to what system were you referring? The system of our economy? The system of our social interactions? The system of the pandemic disease and how it spreads and effects us physically? Society as a whole?
Again, what system? Society as a whole? You don’t think a raging pandemic with no mitigations causing overflowing hospitals and morgues, overwhelmed medical workers, clearing out nursing homes and assisted living facilities, decimating some communities and wiping out multiple family members in some households, and preventing medical care for any other kind of reason because the hospitals are full would have any impact on society and how we live? Or the economy?
The pandemic is the destabilizing agency. It arrived, it spread, it continues to spread. Our reactions certainly affect the results of what the disruptions to the system are, but the root cause of the disruption is the existence of the pandemic.
Getting sick is not a malicious act. Being asymptomatic and contagious is not malicious. However, choosing to behave in a reckless manner is certainly negligent, and given the information available and recommendations by health professionals, choosing not to follow their advice just because you don’t want to is malicious.
Similarly, that different jurisdictions and locales have different numbers itself isn’t the issue. That cases spike here and there is not necessarily a judgement on the governments involved. However, it is definitely fair to blame the government for inaction, poor coordination, deliberate undercutting of the messaging from the health agencies and professionals, and plenty of other actions they choose to take or not take.
It certainly is negligence when the government gets rid of the team set up to monitor for and respond to any emerging pandemic, and when they discard the pandemic response plan generated by the previous administration just because. It certainly is negligence, at a minimum, when the President refuses to enact national coordination of requests for valuable medical supplies and instead leaves states to compete on the open market. And then confiscates their deliveries.
It certainly is fair to blame governments or jurisdictions when they deliberately ignore advice from infectious disease experts on how to slow the spread and reduce numbers, and do the exact opposite of that advice, and then the numbers spike. How is that anything but malicious? “If you do X, we predict Y will happen.” You do X, and amazingly Y happens.
On the one hand, you are arguing that people are responsible for their own choices in how to protect themselves, and then you turn around and say that people and governments are not responsible for their own choices in how to protect others. That seems like a contradiction. Are people responsible for their choices or not?
I don’t know what you are trying to say. Can you rephrase?
Yes, the economy, society, the big picture. Sure, it would be affected if 2-4% of the folks in the world died, but especially how skewed the effects are toward the elderly if we all just gave a collective meh and went on with our business then I think most of the worldwide economy would be fine. As the pandemic spread, local medical facilities would be overwhelmed temporarily, some people would die, and the survivors could move on.
Nursing homes and assisted living especially. If every single person living in such a facility died tomorrow, it would barely register as a blip in the general economy, arts, convention industry, etc.
Note again that I am in no way advocating any such response. But yes, I believe if we all could ignore the horror around us, we could, on the whole, continue living relatively unaffected. Not a particularly likely hypothetical, but my point is only that most of the wide-scale effects of the pandemic come out of our responses to it, not the actual death and suffering it causes.
Except the NPIs did change. If you look at Google Mobility Data and draw the plot for Argentina, the lockdown had a big effect in mid-March but grocery store visits trended back up to 80% of baseline by mid-May and workplaces by mid-June. Parks, transit and recreation have grown much more slowly but that doesn’t appear to have mattered. If you look at case numbers they also started climbing around May-June which corresponds to NPIs weakening enough that R grew substantially above 1.
All of these things have answers if you bother to dive in deeply enough. COVID is a biological phenomena, it’s governed by rules of physical systems that are ultimately not exceedingly complex, the problem is we’ve been extraordinarily bad at gathering key statistics that help shed light on the key dynamics.
Thanks very much for those insights. I do not know much about Argentina at that level of detail. Do you know if the mask policies changed throughout? I’ve read that they have had stringent mandates from the beginning, but I have no direct knowledge. What about other things by way of mandate, such as enforced closing of businesses or other public places? I certainly take your point about the relatively straightforward means by which the virus spreads. It gets more complicated when we start to trying to translate those things into Non Pharmaceutical Interventions (for @Irishman above). In other words, did people find a way to become more mobile on their own, despite guidance? Or for that matter, did they restrict their mobility on their own in the beginning. That kind of thing.
Oh, also, have you come across any thorough studies that have tried to measure mask usage/compliance in Argentina throughout?
Well, that’s the sticky wicket, isn’t it? If 2-4% of the population just died like a lesser version of Thanos’s snap from the Marvel movies, that’d be one thing. But sick people need treatment, as covid isn’t close to always fatal, so overwhelming medical facilities is not a thing to gloss past with “local” and “temporarily”. Overwhelmed hospitals would not only doom covid patients but make everything in going “on with our business”, from driving and shaving in the morning to construction work and more, more dangerous because people couldn’t rely on getting otherwise-routine medical treatment when something goes wrong. If we’d tried this approach – which I know you’re not advocating – the fear of covid would IMHO been outweighed by the fear when people called 911/999 for an ambulance and none came, or went to a clinic or hospital and couldn’t get in.
The decision to treat covid in hospitals and to dedicate medical staff to treating it is part of our response. Any difficulty obtaining other medical care is because of that aspect of our response to the pandemic. A right and proper response, of course, but the problems obtaining medical care are a direct cost of our response to the pandemic.
The point is we chose the situation as it is, individually and collectively. The only thing the virus can do is make people sick and kill a small number of them (<5%). Everything else is a result of our response. If we had acted differently the current situation could be different. Humans made choices, and we are living with the consequences. It is not helpful to pretend otherwise.
I think your idea of reasonable aligns pretty well with mine. I also think it’s okay to go into retail stores some, but not every day, to go camping, to basically pick a small set of things off the lowest risk category.
But in general, it seems like the conversation most want to have is so vague: "Everyone should be as careful as humanly possible, and any activities that elevate risk to any degree are irresponsible. (except the ones I do, because I’ve decided the risk/benefit calculus makes sense). Or, in other cases, “Any attempt at restrictions shows a callous disregard for the poor and the general economic health of the nation.”
…that isn’t how it works. For starters we objectively do know right now what strategies work best. Lock down hard and early to stop the spread. Ramp up testing, ramp up tracing, put those with covid-19 into isolation. Wear masks. It’s a very simple formula. I live in NZ and life is normal here apart from the closed borders. We had a big community outbreak in August and we stamped it out in a couple of months with only 3 deaths. We have another community outbreak now that we will probably stamp out without having to lockdown again. In Victoria Australia they had a bigger outbreak where at one stage they were having 700 cases per day. Following the very same simple formula they got the caseload down to 1-3 cases per day.
So where do you get the idea we don’t know what the best strategies are? This is the standard pandemic playbook. We can see in real time what happens in the countries that follow the playbook and those that don’t. We can see the nz contact tracing team reach 100% of close contacts during the americold outbreak and we can compare that to the Whitehouse cluster where they didn’t think they needed to do contact tracing at all. Or we could look to the uk where they pumped 12 billion into the centralized private Serco test and trace that can only reach 60% of close contacts in comparison to local health authorities that reach over 90%.
But none of that matters. Because we aren’t evaluating policy responses. Agency doesn’t play a part. We were talking about what disrupted the system. And it wasn’t policy that disrupted the system. It was the pandemic. How we responded to the pandemic can be evaluated. But that is a separate question. If a rock falls off a cliff and blocks the road then people have to do something about it. They could climb over it. They could drive around it. They could push it to the side. They could blow it up. The rock falling on the road was the disrupting event. Deciding to drive around the rock is a response to the disrupting event, not the disrupting event in itself.
I think the issue is that when your society doesn’t opt to stamp it out, are you obligated to behave as they should have, or can you adjust your risk accordingly? Because it’s one thing to say “no one can go see their mom for six weeks so that we can end it”. It’s different to say “Well, we are going to let people do whatever feels safe to them, so this is going to last for a year or two, at least, but we’d like good people to live lives of complete isolation so that they damage done by the others is mitigated. So if you are a good, socially responsible person you’ll leave your elderly mother to spend one or two of her last years on earth utterly isolated, because of some slight incremental community risk and well, the principle of the thing.”
No, we don’t yet. It’s too early to say over the long term.
Just don’t be a poor country:
What’s the end game though? Endless whack-a-mole of open/lockdown? If zero cases is the long-term goal, I don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel. What if we never get an effective vaccine? For the current batch of vaccines, stopping infections isn’t even the primary endpoint being studied.
See Peru, above, as one example. Cases per million is higher in Europe and the UK than the US now despite (based on my understanding) stricter measures in the EU/UK. Italy is getting hammered despite doing it “right.”
There is nothing standard about the global response. This is unprecedented. Nothing like this has ever been done before. The 1957 and 1968 flus caused deaths on the same order of magnitude as COVID-19 and the world hardly blinked. The Baby Boomers partied through it, and undoubtedly passed disease on to grandmas. Comparing the devastation caused by the 1918 flu to COVID-19 is like comparing a nuclear bomb to a bottle rocket.
I’m not saying that the previous pandemics were handled correctly, but saying that the current approach is the “standard pandemic playbook” is not correct.
Well, obviously. Who’s arguing that we had agency in creating COVID-19?
Policy responses are exactly what we can evaluate. We don’t have control over the rock falling, but we have control over how we deal with the rock.
More like how if I died after crashing my car at high speed while driving unnecessarily fast to the hospital, I died because I was driving too fast, even if the trip was only because I had COVID-19.
Vaccines were available for both of them within about 4 months – in large part because we already had experience with the flu. Which covid-19 is not.
The 1957 flu killed about 116,000 in the USA. The 1968 flu killed about 100,000 total in the USA. Covid-19’s already two and a half times that and climbing fast – and we do not yet have a vaccine, and don’t know yet when we will. Most estimates for general availability, presuming that at least one of the current candidates passes testing (which is of course not known yet), are next spring or summer. If we’d had a vaccine by last March or April, we’d be in a totally different position now.
In Berlin, the excessive number of deaths led to corpses being stored in subway tunnels, and in West Germany, garbage collectors had to bury the dead because of a lack of undertakers. In total, East and West Germany registered 60,000 estimated deaths. In some areas of France, half of the workforce was bedridden, and manufacturing suffered large disruptions because of absenteeism. The British postal and train services were also severely disrupted.[9]
You don’t exactly have a normal economy with half your workforce bedridden.
And there was a major recession in late 1957 and early 1958.
So not shutting down doesn’t mean that the economy’s going to carry on without blinking.
– to take another angle on the rock-in-the-road analogy: if the response to the rock off the road is to try to pretend it’s not there and therefore to drive right into it, results are not likely to be good.
I don’t disagree with any of this. I’ll concede “hardly blinked” was a bit hyperbolic. My main point in bringing up 1957 and 1968 was to counter the assertion that the global response to this pandemic is the “standard pandemic playbook.” We’re in uncharted waters here.
…yes we do know whats best. It isn’t too early to say. I can confidentaly say that the United States has objectively fucked this up.
Being a poor country doesn’t change the pandemic playbook. It makes it harder, but the playbook stays the same.
The end goal is to avoid lockdown. Hopefully with this current outbreak we avoid it. By being able to scale up testing, by having a local contact tracing team that can reach almost every single close contact, by having isolation facilities so that people can recupurate and get the treatment they need, we stand a very good chance of not having to lockdown again. And if we do lockdown it will be the same as last time: a regional limited lockdown that allowed most of the rest of the country to essentially carry on as normal.
We are at the light at the end of the tunnel. We are watching the pandemic rage across America and across the UK and we are seeing surges in places all over the world. The light here is fine thank you very much.
Excess mortality is down here by 1500 people. The number of kiwis with the flu fell by 99%. Compare that to the US excess mortality of an estimated 300,000. If we never get a vaccine then obviously there would be problems. But I’d much rather be in the position we are than what America is right now if there is no vaccine in the future. NZ has options. But America needs the vaccine because the pandemic is out of control.
Why are you citing an article from July? First one that popped up in google?
I would argue that Italy didn’t “do it right” and the Daily Beast writer, who argued that “Italy was the shining example” presented nothing in that article to back that claim up. Why are they getting hammered? Read the article. It answers that question.
And the EU is an economic union of independent countries, not at all comparable to a single federal republic. And I’m not holding up the response in many EU nations as the gold standard in pandemic responses. So you are arguing a strawman.
The varied global response doesn’t change the standard pandemic playbook. The playbook remains the same.
I’m not sure what your point is, but your post is certainly increasingly looks like gish gallop to me. Which part of this do you want me to address? Shall I start with the differences between flu and coronavirus?
The standard pandemic playbook doesn’t change regardless of the current approach of various governments. Because its a playbook, and if the current approach doesn’t follow the playbook then it literally isn’t following the playbook.
Why did you decide to engage me to argue about evaluating policy responses when I had said absolutely nothing about policy responses in my original post?
And none of this has anything to do with what I originally said. Perhaps you had read someone elses post by mistake?
…I think by removing the rock and the road and and the entire circumstances of your death you’ve completely forgotten the point of the original analogy.
I don’t see the point of a useless playbook, then. We need other approaches.
I think you’re fighting the hypothetical. What does New Zealand plan to do if, a year from now, there is no vaccine and COVID-19 is endemic in the rest of the world. Continue to isolate from the rest of the world indefinitely?
Peru locked down from March through June. What’s wrong with an article from July? What do you dispute within the article? I was responding to your claim that all that had to be done was a lockdown. They had 71 cases in March and 282,000 by the end of June. It didn’t work/wasn’t feasible there.
During what other pandemic has the world responded this way?
Again, simply pointing out there isn’t precedent for a worldwide lockdown. Where does the claim that this is the “standard playbook” come from?
I guess I interpreted you as saying once the pandemic hit, there was no choice but to pursue the policies that have since been enacted, implying any adverse effects of policies are the direct result of the pandemic. If this isn’t your position, I apologize, happy to drop it.
