That’s good. Hopefully more studies confirm that and it’s well publicized, not politicized and not blown off as ‘see, scientists keep changing the rules because they don’t know what they’re talking about’ by the anti-maskers.
Luckily, it’s becoming less and less important as we see the light at the end of the tunnel. As more and more people get the vaccine, the less and less of an impact an anti-masker can make since they’re less likely to catch and therefore spread the virus.
Hell, a lot of us are still working.
I’m not as sure of that as you. In this CNN poll, the percentage of people as of Oct 1-4, 2020 who were willing to get vaccinated was at 51% and dropping from May. 51% is not likely to be enough to get the kind of herd immunity that would allow things to go back to how they were.
Whether people are Trump or Biden supporters, the willingness to take the vaccine has dropped.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/05/health/covid-19-vaccine-willingness-cnn-poll-wellness/index.html
I’d take pre-election feelings with a grain of salt. Late October both sides might have had some creeping feelings that any vaccine was a political stunt.
You have to wonder how motivated to get vaccinated will be those people who’ve already been infected, particularly if they had a mild or asymptomatic case. To hear some tell it, that’s an awful lot of people.
By “they,” do you mean the government, the citizens, or both? I think this statement takes on a somewhat different angle depending, especially how much I agree with “easily.”
I get what you’re saying, but the fact remains that what New Zealand has accomplished seems pretty remarkable, which I feel like it wouldn’t be if it were that “easy.” I mean, we deal with the hand we’ve got, right? And I just don’t think the model would’ve ever worked with America, even under a Democratic president, which is to our discredit. With Europe, it’d really depend on how many countries simultaneously would be able to stick to it; I’m honestly not sure what the likelihoods are there. (Great Britain has less excuse, now that I think about it; they are geographically perfectly set up to follow the NZ model, but…)
True that. Retirement age is creaping upward, and many people enjoy their jobs and don’t want to retire. Others aren’t financially able to retire, or have to go back to work to supplement their income. Retirement isn’t what it used to be.
Then there are folks like my parents. Mom volunteered for a long while at a charity using her social worker skills to help run the place. Dad had a long active period playing grandad to my nephew, doing things with him multiple times a week. He was a Scout leader and avid camper.
Now the boy is an Eagle Scout and off to college, and dad’s age is catching up with him. He’s not as active as he was and can’t walk for long stretched or stand for too long without pain. And he takes a lot of naps, not necessarily planned ones.
I work at Walmart, and it’s a bit sad to me to see the number of employees over 65 trudging along doing physical jobs, probably not financially strong enough to retire. 70 year old men pushing carts around the parking lot. Good that they can, bad they have to. (Also makes me think about my own eventual retirement finances.) Little old bent-backed ladies who can barely walk pushing a stocking cart around and loading shelves. :sad:
But it’s not easy - that’s the point. It takes a dedicated, committed population to comply and a serious financial commitment to pay everyone to stay home and still meet all their financial obligations. It takes extensive financial support to businesses large and small to keep them afloat so they are still there after the lockdown.
Europe does have the additional problem of having so many different countries with very active borders on close proximity. Coordinating the level of cooperation and support for that would be a huge challenge.
That’s doesn’t mean the method wouldn’t work, it just means the method is substantially harder to implement.
The quote I responded to said it was, which was my point.
…the thing is, I’m not really sure that you do.
For starters my post was deliberately bereft to match the bereft nature of the post I was responding too. It was only ever intended as a rebuttal to that specific post: it wasn’t a thesis statement. I am under no illusions that in the real world America is incapable of doing what needs to be done to bring the pandemic under control within its borders. Biden has already ruled out a national lockdown. It isn’t going to happen.
But what made the NZ strategy successful are all things that, with the right political will, any member of the OECD could implement, if they really wanted too. Lets look at the key elements of the model:
-Pay everyone to stay home for at least 3 incubation periods of the virus
-Secure the borders
-Develop a national testing regime
-Make sure hospitals have all the PPE they need
-Develop gold-standard contact tracing
-Develop a system so that people can safely self-isolate
-Effective, simple, public communication
I never said it was easy. I said that the model could be easily followed.
Look at the model I’ve laid out. Is there anything there the the US Federal government (in cooperation with the states) couldn’t implement if it really wanted to? Does it have the cash to pay everyone to stay at home? Is it capable of providing enough PPE? Are the American people somehow incapable of staying home for 6-8 weeks?
There is nothing in the strategy that isn’t easily duplicatable. That doesn’t mean that the strategy was easy to implement. Far from it. It took almost superhuman efforts to bring it all together. We had to reinvent how society functioned from the ground up.
Lets understand the distinction between “America has the money and the ability to pay everyone to stay home” and “America is so fundamentally dysfunctional that even though it has the money and ability to pay everyone to stay home it is incapable of doing what needs to be done in order to make that happen.”
Lets look at how NZ did this and compare it to how it to what happened in the United States.
To get money into people bank accounts in NZ they focused on providing cash to employers so that they could continue to pay their employees. This had the dual effect of both getting money into the hands of employees and allowing businesses the security to know they could keep payroll going while their business locked down. When NZ got to the end of lockdown those businesses were able to open up and hit the ground running. The money could only be used for payroll and couldn’t be directed elsewhere.
The scheme was extended to include the self-employed and freelancers like me. The process was simple. I had to answer five questions online: one of those questions was “what is your bank account number” and the other was a statutory declaration that everything I said was true. (It was.) The money was deposited in my bank account before I got the email to say that my application was accepted. It was a huge relief and meant that all I had to worry about for the next 6-8 weeks was staying home and catching up on my paperwork.
Compare that to the US. A mismatch of corporate relief (with no obligation to pay staff) and stimulus cheques (that sometimes took days/weeks/months to arrive through the mail, if they arrived at all) . There is no strategy at play here. No big plan. No infrastructure to streamline payments to people and no political will to provide any further relief.
Its a clusterfuck. No plan. No idea. No strategy. No political will. America is physically capable of reinventing how society functioned from the ground up, just as we did. But I am under no illusions that the people have the will to do so. America is now averaging 2000 deaths a day. and with almost no effective nationwide mitigation strategy that number is only going to go up.
You repeatedly claim that people don’t ‘get’ what you are saying. Well, when you (repeatedly) say things like this, I can only take away that you yourself don’t really ‘get’ the full implications of what you advocate for. You don’t seem to make much allowance for the possibility that two societies of immensely differing scale may not be able to get the same results from similar actions.
I cannot prove you wrong and don’t want to even try. But I don’t think you’ll find many buyers of the theory that America can ‘reinvent how society functions from the ground up’ in the span of a few months. Frankly, I think it comes across as embarrassingly naive.
But we did. At least some areas locked down pretty hard. We closed public activities, we limited groups to tiny numbers, we closed nursing homes, we forced schools onto zoom. We stuffed hospitals and put staff on ungodly schedules. We made temporary hospitals out of convention centers. We advocated keeping in touch virtually and avoiding physically. We pushed for work from home and telecommuting where possible. And we pushed wearing masks, we ramped up PPE production. We created emergency ventilators that could be mass produced more quickly than standard ventilators and are easier to operate, not requiring the level of certification that a regular system does. We created huge food banks and distribution centers for all the out of work people who weren’t getting paid. We created covid testing sites.
We did a hell of a lot of the reinventing, we just did it poorly and haphazardly and without a real philosophy of what we wanted to accomplish and without a real plan or goal. And we had pathetic leadership actively undermining elements of the plan, like mask wearing and staying home. And we had a Congress incapable of figuring out the basic economy of scale needed to fund this venture.
Make no mistake, our failures are not an inability to replicate what New Zealand did. It really does boil down to political will - the will of the people to understand and accept the necessity and comply, not out of some fear of government crushing freedoms, but out of a sense of communal responsibility and a respect for our society as a whole. The lack of political will of our leaders to do the right thing by listening to the infectious disease experts and enforcing closures and mask policies. The lack of political will of the Congress to do the right thing and kick in the necessary funding on a humongous scale, knowing the financial burden for the country it would impose on the future, and knowing their constituents would definitely complain and might not recognize the necessity of their actions and might not vote for them next time around.
Instead we get selfish, stupid people stealing the George Floyd remembrance/activist chant “I Can’t Breathe” and deploying it snootily against mask wearing. We get leaders like Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick saying that old people can take care of themselves. We’ve got Texas Governor Greg Abbott overriding local governments trying to enforce strict rules in their areas that have surging cases, and preventing local governments from being able to enforce rules like mask wearing and closing businesses. And we’ve got Trump.
I know from your many other posts that you totally get it, but what you said here is an example of very dangerous thinking that lots of people will fall for.
Rephrasing that a bit, I’ll say:
When the tiniest glimmer of light appears as a pinprick at the far end of the tunnel, vast numbers of people will declare “it’s over” and throw away their masks & their distancing in total joy. Then the true calamity will hit right on schedule 6 weeks later. A full 12-18 months before enough vaccine can be manufactured, distributed, and injected to actually deliver the collective immunity that pinprick of light represents.
Imagine being age 5 with all the Christmas presents arrayed under the tree and being told you can open them on the 4th of July in 2022. That’s what we’re going to be facing this Christmas.
I think it’s both. I think it’s what I said, that as more and more people get the vaccine, the less and less damage the anti-maskers can do. Also, it’s what you said, as soon there’s any light at all or even the knowledge that the tunnel has an end, people are going to throw what little caution they had, to the wind.
Agree your facts are spot-on. As the number of vaccinated people grow, the amount of damage any given anti-masker can /will do will decrease.
But IMO along the way we’re going to pass through a valley of (far) greater harm as the publics’ precautions fall away faster than their immunity builds up.
And that’s before we consider any of the politics of the anti-masking party. About which nothing more will be said by me in QZ.
All of that is very eloquently and passionately said, I applaud you for it, and I find much of it persuasive. But it still presumes, fundamentally, a political viewpoint that not all share. Doing things on the ‘humongous scale’ you mention would, I think it’s more than fair to say, definitely qualify as a ‘restructuring of society’ to a greater extent than the list of measures you rightfully point out were indeed taken. It would, at a bare minimum, require the asking and answering of questions we’ve never faced before.
One thing I’ve mused about from time throughout this ordeal is the sort of ‘work from home tax’ that I’ve lately heard is perhaps being considered in some places. Like, how would it go over if the government determined that the crisis was so severe that it required those who still have jobs to support those who don’t. Like, if those working during a dire pandemic would have to pay 50% of their take-home income, or something like that, to support those who can’t. I mean, something like that would truly be a ‘restructuring of society’, right? And it would be ridiculous to even consider, wouldn’t it? Or, would it?
You know those people that like to call everyone that’s left of them on the political spectrum a communist. It would be like that, except more.
I don’t think so. As my income has been entirely unaffected, I would have been quite understanding of a tax to support those that can’t work safely. Especially since my job is ultimately funded thorough taxes (teacher) and a collapsing economy will eventually bite me in the ass.
I think that rather than punishing people that are staying at work (especially those who need to work to support their families), a better idea would have been for the government to incentive people to stay home by paying them to do so. Then the people that are only working so they can eat and pay rent, can stay home and the people that are working because the business can’t continue without their help can reduce their hours.
I wouldn’t make the tax dependent on where people work. I would just increase taxes on everyone who is still working, or increase taxes after the first whatever $XXX, to fund generous unemployment for the people who can not. Continue the $600 a week.
I’d also back some sort of program that funded incentive pay for people that make less than $X and still have to work: grocery store workers, that sort of thing.
It’s not a punishment. It’s a response to a tragedy.
Well, sure. You could increase taxes on the middle class who can work from home. Or you could start taxing banking and credit card fees, since they are certainly raking it in with the stay at home situation. Wonder why Deutsche Bank didn’t explore that?