Ah yes, same straw man.
That shows that you still miss a lot, there are still very inadequate levels of testing with also inadequate contact tracing. And then we have a declaration here from you of what to do with retirement facilities and there not much being done indeed. So yeah, there are many more things to do.
So you are fine with making people pay tens of thousands of dollars, if not more, for multi-state air ambulances when local hospitals run out of space to treat them? Some of them will suffer permanent ill effects, and some of them will die. Wouldn’t you rather spend that money keeping them from getting sick in the first place, not to mention infecting other people? I sure would.
Where I live, case counts and hospitalizations have roughly doubled over the past month. ICU admissions, ventilator use, and deaths will logically follow. Contact tracing here is revealing many cases coming from social gatherings. The increased restrictions make a lot of sense in that context, and I’m fine with them.
This is an emotional non-sequitur. We use these helicopters every day. They transport people where they need to go. But that’s different somehow because… covid?
And where I live It’s not. What’s your point?
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Yes, because COVID. It’s a communicable disease, not, say, a severe traumatic injury where you might need to transport someone to a trauma center.
My point is…it’s a highly communicable disease. It doesn’t respect city or county borders. COVID was largely restricted to a few geographic areas, until it wasn’t.
I was going to ask the same thing.
yes, it was localized in China until they deliberately allowed it to travel by air all over the world. We’re the most traveled nation on Earth by a considerable amount. The horse was out of the barn before the first confirmed case in the US. We turned the country upside down and hid under rocks while politicians sent covid patients to nursing homes instead of isolating them. People on this site argued that masks wouldn’t stop it unless they were N-95 rated.
We just had a series of covid deaths in a couple of nursing homes and the governor is contemplating new restrictions on the surrounding community. The problem isn’t the community. The problem is the nursing home. THAT’S where resources need to be focused.
I agree. Pack your dufflebag and move into a staff barracks there and start providing care there so staff don’t need to travel back and forth between their home to work (often for min wage and meaningless benefits) and then carry Covid back to their family home. Be sure to study on line for and pass your certified nursing assistant certification first. Of course a food handler’s permit so you can prepare and serve resident’s meal would also be useful. Those are usually two 4 hour split shifts a day. You should plan on not leaving the grounds for any reason until Covid is under control-probably a year. Bring extra socks, you’ll be on your feet a lot.
The same reasons you can’t prove any other counterfactual, when you can’t demonstrate effect through controlled experiments. And what observational data exists seems very much to run in the opposite direction.
I think I addressed this before, but I don’t mind saying it again. If we decide as a society that it’s worth it to upend an industry in that way, we’d be wise to do it in a careful and fair manner and not at the same time we’re upending countless others. And just as in the seat belt example, we’d normally do that sort of thing through broad deliberation, public debate, and passing of legislation, none of which seem present in the current crisis.
Were restaurants having the same hard time of it before? I don’t know – I hear it’s a hard industry. Maybe it was time for it to go, in the way we knew it. I don’t know. I’m certainly not arguing we should bend over backwards to save it. Major events do tend to have effects on things, which we may not be able to do anything about even if we want to. But I am saying we shouldn’t suffocate it with our own hands.
The government saying anything is ‘not okay’ without proper scientific, data-based, evidentiary argument is a powerful signal that their restrictions are not worthy of universal endorsement. I’m glad your area is nowhere near a crisis at the moment. Nor is the exceedingly vast majority of the planet. If we woke up on January 1st of this year with the health threat we face today, our day-to-day lives would be unaffected.
And I think there’s a lot of agreement that it’s time for our leaders to start getting back to what they were elected to do, to stop abdicating all their responsibilities and obligations to the virus and ‘the science’, to show some courage and begin to consider the entire scope of health – physical, mental, and otherwise – for all its people, not just that of a privileged few. And that if they ever thought they could ‘beat the virus’, they chose the wrong enemy.
…can you be clear here: are you talking about theories or counterfactuals? Because this isn’t a philosophy matter. Its a matter of epidemiology.
The observational evidence clearly doesn’t run in the opposite direction. I could go through the effort of proving that to you (again). But I’m not going to do your work for you. So can you demonstrate how the observational data run in the opposite direction?
It clearly does, at least for anyone who bothers to look at it with an objective, rational, data-based point of view. Apart from the special cases where places were able to keep from being seeded significantly, the local epidemics have run more or less their same course regardless of measures enacted. Over and over and over again.
…it clearly doesn’t, at least for anyone who bothers to look at it with an objective, rational, data-based point of view.
The “seeded significantly” theory of yours is absolute tosh. That isn’t how pandemics work. If places were able to stop “significant seeding” its because they did exactly as Joey_P posited. We didn’t live our lives as normal here in New Zealand. We shut down harder than anywhere else in the OECD. If we didn’t shut down would we have been “significantly seeded”, yes or no?
Which industries in particular were shut down for no good reason? In fact we didn’t shut down industries which were at risk, and people got sick because of it. Meatpacking, in particular.
How many more people would have died in March and April with broad deliberation. The Bay Area counties issued shelter in place orders before there was really adequate understanding of what was going on. It was risky - but they were right. New York hesitated. Look what happened to them.
There are times when careful deliberation isn’t the proper course of action. Especially since the virus was not well understood in the beginning, and careful deliberation given what was known might still have come up with the wrong strategy.
Restaurants are a hard industry, made much harder. But do you really want to encourage people to congregate and spread the disease to keep them profitable - or profitable until enough people figure out going to a restaurant is dangerous and stop.
No has it in for restaurants. We had government sponsored ads encouraging people to get takeout. But the facts are the facts.
Some government did use evidence and science. Compare Trump and Cuomo. Who used science?
I don’t understand what you mean by waking up January 1. I fully expect to wake up on January 1 in the same situation we’re in today. I run Zoom meetings for a club which mostly has older members. We socialize, but it is not the same. I’m involved in running a conference that is going to be online next week. We got out of our hotel because they were unable to provide enough space for us to social distance. Plus we’re international, so many participants could not attend a live conference. Not that many would want to.
Tell me again how my day to day life is unaffected? And I’m retired, and feel less of an impact than lots of people.
So, you want our leaders to just say it is too hard to protect our people and let the unlucky die?
What our leaders should do is to provide more stimulus so that those affected won’t lose their homes, won’t go hungry, will be able to afford computers to help their kids and themselves.
We can beat the virus with a vaccine, eventually. Until then we must protect ourselves. So you think it is elitist to support policies which reduce deaths in the most at risk population - the elderly and the poor? Interesting.
It seems to me the ones abdicating their responsibility are the ones saying “We’re rounding the corner,” the ones holding giant unmasked rallies, the ones ignoring the advice of infectious disease experts, the ones rushing to open instead of following the guidelines for opening that the Task Force created, the ones blaming the case counts on testing, blaming the response to the virus as a political ploy. The ones who refused to take the virus seriously, then scream bloody murder that the results are the need for tighter restrictions than if they had taken stronger measures to begin with. The ones who are encouraging gun-wielding lunatics to “take back their state” from the governor, encouraging domestic terrorists to “arrest” and “try” their governor and then kill her. The ones who think wearing a mask in public is a burden the likes of which no one has ever seen, even during WWII. The ones who ordered meat packers to work when conditions in those plants were as dangerous as nursing homes. The ones who cut the enhanced and extended unemployment payments, and haven’t passed any legislation to help people, small business owners, states and municipalities, etc since June.
Here in Chicago they’re again shutting down indoor service at bars and restaurants this weekend. Seems like a good opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of the policy. What’s the best way to objectively assess the effects?
Cases/hospitalizations/deaths in 2/4/6 weeks? This site has a nice visualization of cases and deaths.
Florida’s death count did increase drastically. It’s true that it didn’t increase as much as many people were predicting, but that was the point that people realized that the deaths per confirmed case had dropped dramatically since the initial surge in March and April. In early July, Florida was ranked 26th in deaths per million. In the past few months I watched it climb the charts all the way up to number 11, with GA and SC close behind. Florida was near the top of the dpm per day chart for months on end.
Increased deaths follow increased cases. That has been shown over and over again.
Yes the numbers have risen appreciably.
Yes, it has materialized. You claim to keep track of the numbers, but you seem to be ignoring them. Cases started rising dramatically at the end of September. The 7 day MA for daily new cases has now risen to it’s highest point ever. And right on schedule, 3 to 4 weeks after the increase in cases, deaths have started to increase.
You’re just wrong. Only 30% to 40% of COVID deaths come from nursing homes. What about the other 60% to 70% that are dying? And spread among the community affects nursing homes. You seem to be advocating massive amounts of resources protecting nursing homes, which not only wouldn’t stop a majority of COVID deaths, but would only be stopping deaths in the community that only has on average, 14 months left to live.
The vast majority of deaths are of retirement age. They are easier to isolate. And of that age group it is those with compromised medical issues which further narrows the people to concentrate on.
that’s not really true. The vast majority of people who get it suffer no ill effects. It would be more accurate to say that increased deaths follow increased cases of people with compromised immune systems.
We just have a fundamental disagreement on the extent that we can protect the vulnerable. Has any country successfully fought COVID using your method? Because there are a number of countries who have successfully fought this virus by eliminating community spread and other countries or regions who have low death tolls by limiting community spread.