that or we’re talking past each other. I’m talking about basic resource management. Define the problem properly and focus your resources accordingly. My governor linked nursing homes to specific hospitals so they could coordinate medical protocols. Pretty logical thing to do. He also backed a local company to help them certify mask cleaning equipment. Again, pretty logical.
We have never historically shut down businesses for the flu despite a significant toll on life. In fact, we didn’t do anything in the way of flu prevention beyond the promotion of flu shots.
Things change when a virus spreads faster than we’re accustom to. Our initial response was to prevent the healthcare system from being overloaded. I personally think we should have gone straight to masks as a mandate for box stores but time will tell. The 6 foot rule was probably bullshit because fine particles of it remain airborne for a substantial period of time and no amount of distancing matters in an enclosed area with a ventilation system circulating it around. That’s the express purpose of a good hivac system. to circulate air. But again, time will tell.
where we get into the weeds is the need to collapse the economy. That costs money to prop things up and the money needed for that is reduced by people and businesses shutting down.
So how do you decide where to invest money in reducing deaths? That’s a multi-trillion dollar question. I think we would have done better to keep the tax money flowing and to use that to isolate and protect the vulnerable. We could have built gold-plated nursing homes and secondary living spaces for those not in nursing homes. And by that I mean positive pressure rooms and properly paid/trained/dedicated staff to maintain them.
The other thing we could do is throw money at fast-tracking a vaccine. this we did and will see the first batch probably before the end of the year. Those can go to the vulnerable first.
Those with diabetes are also at risk. Are you going to lock them up also? And how do you plan to isolate me? Lock my door? Put me in a concentration camp? Just to allow some morons to not wear masks?
When a flu outbreak at a nearby military barracks first spread into the St. Louis civilian population, Starkloff wasted no time closing the schools, shuttering movie theaters and pool halls, and banning all public gatherings. There was pushback from business owners, but Starkloff and the mayor held their ground.
In San Francisco, health officials put their full faith behind gauze masks. California governor William Stephens declared that it was the “patriotic duty of every American citizen” to wear a mask and San Francisco eventually made it the law. Citizens caught in public without a mask or wearing it improperly were arrested, charged with “disturbing the peace” and fined $5.
The article you linked took place over a 4 month period. We’re now in our eighth month.
Spanish Flu had three waves, but it was still seasonal. There were times in between when things could open up.
COVID-19 isn’t seasonal, and it appears there will never be a safe time to open up absent vaccine, better treatments, herd immunity, or virus mutation into less deadly form.
I specifically said we have never historically shut down businesses for the flu despite a significant toll on life. I’m not sure what you don’t understand about the sentence as it relates to shutting down businesses for significant flu deaths.
We know the flu is not covid. It doesn’t address the point I made. It was specific to the idea of shutting down businesses in an effort to reduce flu deaths.
30 seconds of looking up what we did during the 1918 flu revealed shutdowns and mask requirements (recommendations?). Here’s a quote from the wiki page: “Social distancing measures were introduced, for example closing schools, theatres, and places of worship, limiting public transportation, and banning mass gatherings”
They even had their own maskholes.
Dude. .
In 1918 several US cities that had naval bases, quarantined them, including NYC, San Francisco and Seattle. no sailors out, no civilians in.
“In St. Louis, Health Commissioner Max Starkloff made the controversial decision to order the closure of schools, movie theaters, bars, and—most devastatingly—public sporting events.”
San Francisco made wearing masks in public the law, and closed schools, banned social gatherings and closed all places of “public amusement.”
They ordered all schools, theaters, and churches closed and prohibited gatherings of more than twenty people. Liberty Loan mass meetings were included in the ban, but planning luncheons were permitted as a military necessity. Saloons and cabarets were not ordered closed, but would be watched closely by health inspectors to ensure that they did not allow more than twenty patrons to congregate at a time nor become a public health menace. . . ordered the Metropolitan Company, operator of Kansas City’s streetcar service, to limit the number of standing passengers on its cars to twenty people. . . sent inspectors to survey each and every saloon in the city; they found all of them to be insanitary. Gannon ordered police to close saloons unless they were sufficiently cleaned that night.4 The next day, Gannon ordered closed all second-hand stores and pawnshops dealing in clothing, as well as all cleaning and dyeing shops found to be insanitary. He claimed that many stores had received clothing from Camp Funston (where the epidemic had started particularly early and had been especially severe), and, although he had not been able to trace the epidemic to second-hand clothing, he believed it had contributed to the spread of the disease
I think by ‘historically’ he might have meant on an ongoing basis, given the mortality caused by ‘the flu’ each and every year.
I see that you guys want to keep screaming ‘covid is not the flu!’ but also seem to kinda want to compare it in certain ways to the great Spanish Influenza pandemic. Which, I might add, might have been about hundred times worse than this thing, on a population-normalized basis.
That’s my fault. I knew I shouldn’t have responded to you, but I did it anyway. I knew you weren’t going to answer the question and just challenge me instead. I’m not interested in playing your stupid game. Maybe someone else does.
If your point is that we dont shut down on a regular basis for the flu, that’s not completely true either. Local health officials routinely “soft quarantine” hot spots of the flu. Often closing down schools and public gathering places when there is a local flareup. And when there is a nationwide flareup (as there seems to be just about every 10 years), they come with travel restrictions and visitor restrictions to hospitals and care facilities. And individual businesses have been shut down as well, from time to time.
And it’s not just confined to the flu. In the 80’s at the beginning of HIV, many cities closed down suspected businesses such as bath houses and gay porn theaters. Businesses are routinely shut down for outbreaks of Legionnaires Disease, listeria, E coli, cholera etc.
So, on a scale of:
flu deaths of 30,000/yr; we do soft targeted shutdowns
and a global pandemic like 1918 that killed over 300,000 (US) a year; we do stringent lockdowns, where would you put covid19 with its 220,000 deaths and counting this year?
Is there a specific threshold for this somewhere? Because I’ve started to wonder when this thing will finally be declared over. It does seem that excess deaths as a measure no longer reflect the kind of widespread spikes that we saw earlier in the year.
Or, will it be one of those cases where we’re always in it, because of what would happen if we ever took our masks off and went back to school and such? Like, it’s still a pandemic, even if people aren’t getting sick and dying at ‘pandemic’ rates. Because they would. If we didn’t stop them.
I would point out again that comparisons to Spanish Flu aren’t really germane any more. It’s been going on too long.
Keep in mind that a lot of us in the USA NEVER have “opened up” since March. I had two kid related activities that we did. One a swimming pool. Both outdoors. Those are done now. School has been all virtual, one of my kid’s teachers got it anyway.
The USA could have done much better. The effort would have been considerable. Given attitudes here probably impossible to maintain. But if you’re going to contain it, you have to be wiling to implement the solutions potentially for years. That is not what Spanish flu was. Spanish flu peaked over a couple of months each time it did, with breaks in between. With Covid-19 in the USA, there have been no breaks for some of us. Different situation.
well, yes that was my point. we don’t shut businesses down on a regular basis for the flu.
I’m not sure what closing down illegal sex businesses has to to with the discussion. the same goes for an individual business that has a known biological hazard that requires cleaning.
We’re talking about a blanket shut down for the seasonal flu that we know will kill thousands. It’s not a function of higher cleaning standards for something that may or may not be contaminating a business. It’s a wholesale shutdown of businesses for the sake of it. We have traditionally not done this.
