The infection curve is exactly as I predicted - the brakes on social distancing were taken off especially by Red states and heartily ignored by Reds in Blue states, the unlock pretty much got into full swing in the third week of October and now its skyrocketing just after the election.
This was a calculated risk by the Reps, they hoped that some semblence of normality would help them get their vote out on the day - which it did, and they also knew that by the time the numbers of deaths followed the same trend the election would be over.
They knew it would happen and they decided their electoral hopes were more important than the lives of their electorate - it is as simple and as brutal as that.
…the correct scientific term to describe the New Zealand strategy is eliminate, not eradicate. The distinction is important and relevant and understanding the difference is a key to understanding the science.
New Zealand has perused an elimination strategy. You can read about it here.
I’ve offered a very simplified version in this thread, but if you want to understand the long version then the PDF is a great way to start.
The authors of the document:
And the paper was peer reviewed.
So with the paper as a starting point: would you care to point out what the scientific team (and the peer review process) got wrong?
That would be one of the goals of the elimination strategy, most definitely. Eliminate from community spread. Keep the virus at the borders in managed isolation.
Yep. It kinda is less of a thing here. That isn’t a bad thing. There is a promising vaccine on the horizon. And even if that doesn’t pan out, we can wait. There is almost universal approval for our strategy here.
The science disagrees.
I literally don’t understand what you mean by this.
New Zealand used an evidence based scientific approach to our Covid-19 elimination strategy. And we watched it play out in real time. At every step of the way the scientists (here in NZ) explained what would happen next. At the start of the lockdown we would continue to see cases rise, and they did. Then we would start to see cases fall, and then they started to fall. Then some of the people being treated for Covid would die. And we started to lose some people.
And the cases continued to fall, exactly as the scientists said they would. Until the cases fell to zero. And New Zealand opened back up again.
In August we had a major new outbreak: the Americold Cluster. To this date we still haven’t determined the source of that cluster: it didn’t match the genomic sequence of any cases in managed isolation or any historical cases. The mystery nature of the cluster and the late identification of that cluster meant New Zealand had to use their resurgence strategy. Because elimination isn’t eradication. The distinction is important.
What that meant was a regional lockdown. Ramping up testing, tracing and isolation. In the first lockdown New Zealand were barely prepared for the pandemic: not enough ICU beds, only enough testing reagents for six days, limited contact tracing, no real plan for isolation. With the second outbreak this had changed. The labs worked overtime to process hundreds of thousands of tests. The contact tracing teams contacted 100% of close contacts. People with Covid-19 and where appropriate their immediate families were moved into Managed Isolation facilities to better manage their care.
The Americold cluster was stamped out in a couple of months. Since then we have had a number of limited outbreaks through border facilities, all of them contained without having to escalate to regional lockdowns because of the infrastructure we set up during the initial lockdown in March.
But you seem to think that you know better. You hold a different opinion to the New Zealand COVID-19 Public Health Response Strategy Team. So I would really love to hear what it is you have to say. Where did they go wrong? Can you be specific? And if it wasn’t the elimination strategy that was responsible for the elimination of Covid from community spread, what do you think it was that did it?
The ultimate triumph of the New Zealand approach is that the New Zealand government listened to the real and true science and adopted a strategy that prevented a deadly pandemic from ripping through the country.
The real tragedy is that is it so easy for random people who claim that complex, scientifically robust strategies to combat global pandemics “don’t work” to get their voices amplified. To be absolutely clear here for anyone in doubt: the assertions made here in this thread by SayTwo are contradicted by the science.
Punishment for lack of masking would be sweet - too bad the Texas Governor has forbid it.
Hell, I wish at work I could even tell people to remember their mask needs to cover their nose, too. We can remind them at the door that there is a mandatory mask order and offer them a mask, but that’s it. In the store, we’re not to bother them. 
Yes, because there were reactionaries who were pointing at the Chinese and blaming them, and consequently blaming Chinese Americans. There was a counter effort to reduce the hostility to innocent Americans for something the Chinese Government handled poorly. It wasn’t the smartest thing, given what we know now, but that’s hardly the initial source of transmission. New York got it from Europe, not China directly.
Plus, that was when the President was calling the coronavirus a hoax and publicly saying things like “We have a handful of cases and by next week those will be gone” or whatever the quote is. Even though privately he knew it was more severe, more dangerous, air transmissible, and was bragging about that knowledge to a reporter.
Blaming Chinese New Year celebrations for spreading the virus is also a distraction, because whatever happened in January, it’s now November, and we’ve had plenty of opportunities to damp out the spread, but failed to act in the centralized coordinated manner that would make a difference. And we’re seeing a huge upswing RIGHT NOW, but some people are acting like it’s January and all they know about coronavirus is how to spell it - “the 'rona”.
This I can agree with. Well, I’m not sure if it is the third, but it’s pretty high on the list. But I think we disagree on the sources and means of the discrediting of science.
The reputation of science only got mangled in so much as people that don’t understand science don’t trust it. Typically, if you get sick, you go to a doctor, get some medicine and get better. What you didn’t see is all the failed attempts to cure that illness before you got it.
As a society, we’re used to ‘science’ having the correct answer on the first try, but since covid-19 is new, we watched the science play out. We saw mistakes, we saw course changes as new information was learned, we saw various medications come and go. All things that are going to happen with any new disease, just not typically in the public eye.
However, people upon finding out the first thing they heard from the scientists (often it’s the ‘don’t wear a mask’ comments) has been changed or updated or shown to be incorrect will decide that science is always wrong or that the scientists don’t know what they’re talking about.
Of course, they also can’t reconcile ‘the scientists said not to wear masks so I’m not going to wear a mask’ with ‘the scientists said to wear a mask and they don’t know what they’re talking about so I’m not going to wear one’.
Another place you see this play out is the common sentiment when it comes to food. How often have you heard someone say ‘now they say _____ is bad, but they used to say it was good’. Same thing. In the past it may have been considered good, but then 30 years of studying it’s effects and scientists will do what scientists to, change their views on a subject in light of new evidence.
Agree overall. Well said. Ref this:
The easy “reconciliation” is this: In the presence of conflicting advice I’ll simply do whatever I want to as if I was receiving no advice at all.
Some of us were wearing masks from the git-go while CDC was still waffling. Far more of us simply want to pretend COVID doesn’t exist. So no masks carries the day for that crowd. Damn sure there’s a lot of selective listening going on.
There’s a perceptual danger to any sort of pandemic mitigation, one that the scientists were well aware of.
Emails from the government agencies responsible for handling the pandemic during the first quarter of this year have been published online. Like most government email chains, they manage to be both boring and fascinating at the same time.
One of the dangers of successful mitigation, and one that was mentioned several times, is that to some extent the more successful you are, the worse the optics are. If you do your distancing and limiting of crowds and masks and not that many people get sick, it looks like you overreacted.
So, I’m going Trump on this one and I’m saying “We’ll see in two weeks”, it’s easy to blame a high case count on more testing, but deaths seem to be escalating sharply. But I fear the widespread rallies and celebrations over the last two weeks are going to exact a heavy toll.
“Can’t reconcile” may have been a poor choice of words on my part. It’s more that they can’t logically defend both points. I supposed I should have called it cherry picking.
Oh yeah, it’s definitely that. Or at least it is when they say “I choose to believe this, but not that”. Which is psychologically / emotionally different from “I choose to believe neither and just do what I want.”
Both are ignorant, but they’re distinguishable flavors of ignorant. Pedantics of the world go forth and distinguish!
To be fair, the turnaround on a lot of food is more than an inconvenience. People literally went out of their way for decades to eat stuff loaded with trans-fats like margarine and to avoid fat in general. They did this because they thought it was the healthier option- that’s what the medical community was telling them - fat bad, saturated fat doubly bad. Literally for decades.
Then we find out that fat’s not that bad and neither is saturated fat. Instead, it’s now sugar and trans-fats… which all the foods people were eating for decades were chock-full of. Same thing with artificial sweeteners too.
I can totally see why people might feel a bit betrayed and skeptical of what the medical/nutrition community has to say, and I’m a big believer in science and the scientific method.
But this time around with the pandemic, with the exception of the early intentional misdirection about masks (was that Trump or the scientific community?), it’s been pretty up-front and not even all that contradictory. Wear masks. Masks protect others. Masks protect others, and we’re finding out they protect you too.
The big issue with mask wearing has always been that the President explicitly made it a political issue for re-election purposes. So you have a big cohort of people who aren’t wearing masks because it’s an identity thing- not manly enough, it’s a wimpy liberal thing, I’m not afraid of no 'rona, whatever…
Now there’s a second issue that I think the public health authorities haven’t been forceful enough, and the politicians haven’t stepped in to help, and that’s the spread from small gatherings of friends and family. People seem to believe that they can trust their family and friends to know if they have the coronavirus, and to stay away if they’re sick. IMO it reeks of cowardice on the part of the politicians- they are loath to tell people not to go visit at Thanksgiving, or to stay home and not go visit friends and family, because they’re afraid of looking like assholes. But because we have such dramatic spread going on right now, and a pair of major family holidays coming up, we’re very likely to have a dramatically bad time of things come mid-December through probably the end of January at the least.
I finally found my ‘source’ for what I said up thread. I read it a while back and it made a lot of sense.
How many “reactionaries” killed someone? How many people in NYC died of covid because politicians invited them to parades and restaurants?
There is a lot of truth to that. I’ve observed before that the 20th century was a massive transformation of health care. We went from the doctor mostly coming over to your house to tell you how you were going to die* to creating the expectation that if you got sick, they could (1) immediately tell you what was wrong, and (2) immediately cure it. Neither was true, but it was widespread expectation.
As far as the reputation taking a hit, I was thinking more about the deliberate efforts of various parties to undermine confidence in science and scientists. It’s a frustrating trend
started by the tobacco industry, picked up by the oil industry, and fostered by the individualists whose skepticism of big government transformed into a paranoid rejection of anyone telling them what to do.
Then there are the deliberate trolls trying to sew chaos and discord. And foreign governments using our weaknesses to sabotage our success.
- Slight exagerration for dramatic effect.
I’m sorry, I’m confused on your position. You seem to be saying that politicians on both coasts should have started lockdowns in January before any cases were detected in New York and only a couple were known on the West coast, but now politicians shouldn’t be pushing shutdowns when over 250,000 are dead and the death rate is increasing?
Also, how many people in the US died today that weren’t nursing home residents with a life expectancy of 14 months or less? How many in just El Paso, Texas?
Why are you so hung up on what happened 8, 9 months ago and not what is happening today?
People in New York learned from their mistakes. Governors in Texas and South Dakota haven’t.
People make mistakes at the beginning of a crisis. That’s only human. Making the same mistakes - and worse - 9 months into the pandemic is stupid.
Plus, how many Covid cases can be attributed to parades?
San Francisco had a Chinese New Year’s parade in 2020. San Francisco has had 155 Covid deaths. Not this week. Not this month. Since the pandemic began. So I’m not too convinced that allowing the parade was the biggest problem, even in New York.
It was the first time I’d even seen it, too. Thus my earlier remarks about it.
I think you guys are letting the scientists off too easy. Remember, for many people, the CDC is science. That’s the official platform for Americans to turn to for the science on infectious diseases. It has been at best behind the curve and at worst intentionally deceitful over and over–from not having enough tests, to having tests that were no good, to posting guidelines that were desperately out of touch (“Only close schools when there is a positive test”, this spring, when tests were impossible to get and took a week or more to process, if you got one). They were caught flat-footed, without enough PPE–leading to deliberate lies to the American people–and without much of a plan to deal with these things.
Now, it’s easy to say “that wasn’t the scientists, that was the politicians”, but for a lot of people, that’s not a meaningful distinction. The official “face” of science in this country floundered to react to this, and came across as incompetent. Now, I know scientists aren’t gods and it’s not really reasonable to expect them to be able to just control the narrative. This was too big for that. But I think there’s a tendency on this board to deify science as perfect and lump any critique in there with climate change deniers and anti-vax and flat-earth. But the mask things alone represents a serious lapse in science an institution, and that needs to be owned up to.
I think what everyone has to remember is that these were the Trump Administration’s scientists.
As individuals, many of them are career scientists and I’m sure they are very good scientists. But they’ve been hampered by policies and decisions that limited their ability to collect and analyze good data and to reach unpopular conclusions without pushback.
Trump had been trying to hollow out these organizations for three years when the pandemic hit. One thing that amazes me is how willing everyone is to blame the opposition party for the scientific “failures” of the current administration.
A whistleblower named Dr Rick Bright released a slew of emails illustrating the administration’s response in the first quarter of this year. I wish more people read all this stuff.
But that’s politics, and in it’s current form, blindly trusting your leader. Trump blamed Obama for not having the covid tests ready to go (among other things). How much of his base really, truly believes that to be true? How many think that it’s even possible for the lack of test kits to be Obama’s fault?
I understand that the vast majority of right wing voters will always vote right wing, but I would hope that things like that, at least somewhat, eroded their trust in him.
I hope that as he got more and more unhinged, more and more of his supporters thought to themselves “what the fuck is he even talking about?”.
I’d also hope that some of his base sees through the hypocrisy. Look at Trump’s reaction during the Ebola scare (pandemic?)? He was calling for Obama to resign and telling his followers what an awful job Obama was doing. ONE person in the US died from Ebola, ONE. Covid, OTOH, as soon as those numbers started climbing, Trump made his famous ‘i take no responsibility’ comment.
I know he was unloading on Obama as part of the very early stages of his campaign, already trying to very vocally undermine the democrats, but I still hope that some of his (current) supporters see him doing exactly the things he was saying other’s shouldn’t do (or not doing what he told them to do).
I doubt many of them really think that’s true, but they’re more than willing to attribute something to Obama versus admit it was their own chump that dropped the ball, plus it lets them hang one more thing (in their own eyes) on the opposition, because they’re the enemy, as opposed to a competing political party with the same ultimate aim of bettering the nation and making it stronger, only with different concepts and methods of how to get there.
And that’s in a lot of ways, the ultimate problem. Once you characterize the other side as the enemy, as opposed to just another political party or people with differing views, it sets it up as something more akin to a fight to the bitter end, rather than a competition, and it sets people up to accept more hostility and dirty-dealing in service of beating the enemy, which wouldn’t be acceptable against mere competitors or people with differing opinions. All’s fair in love and war, as the saying goes. The trick was convincing the Republican rank and file that they were at war.
Fast forward a while, and you’ve got a big chunk of the population convinced they’re in some kind of cultural/spiritual war versus the Democratic party, and they’re more than willing to swallow whatever the GOP says about anything, and their pet media outlets have abrogated their journalistic duty to be accurate and even handed, and you get the situation where one side is literally living in their own reality, which is only somewhat related to actual reality.