We had the strictest of lockdowns, stricter than anything going on in LA at the moment. And Christmas this year for us is proceeding as normal. International sport is happening, we are going over to other peoples houses for Christmas dinner, we are partying, we are clubbing.
Was it the lockdown, combined with massive testing, gold-standard contact tracing and exemplary communication’s along with closing the borders, maintaining continuity of the economy and managed isolation that broke the chains of transmission, or do you think it was something else?
And if it was something else, would you care to present the data and the science to back up your theory?
You talk about believing in science and yet you make assumptions about populations without any evidence. California can follow the rules? Maybe, but are they? And what effect does that have on the infection rate?
This article says that 30% of people in LA, based on a survey, will defy stay at home orders. Hospitalizations are raging out of control, as one might expect from people defying stay at home orders.
Yeah, I’ve long thought that kind of thing would be the case. Despite some of the arguments I’ve read to the contrary here on this board, I think people are generally well suited enough to broadly assess risk and observant enough to notice if bodies are stacking up on the streets. I’ve not heard of too many countries that have been able to mandate lockdown policies yet not need to police them. It’s not uncommon to read about countries, and not big ones at that, issuing hundreds of citations a day, if not thousands. As the scientist from UCSF put it, people just aren’t buying it.
So, if they aren’t buying it and they aren’t falling in line, we’re left with theoretical NPIs, I guess we can say, that have no real connection to practice in the real world. So it’s not a question of, say, whether it would help if the streets were empty after midnight (still highly debatable, I believe), but rather it’s a question of whether curfews work, and those aren’t the same thing. It’s not enough to think in the abstract about whether masks work. It’s whether mask mandates work. It seems very clearly that state after state and country after country are trying NPI after NPI and they are all failing, whether it’s for lack of compliance or something else. I don’t find it all that useful to deal in hypotheticals about what would happen in alternate reality where people were able to behave in a way that they very clearly are unable to behave in now.
But I really do think that even that kind of argument begs the real question, which is whether such hypothetical or theoretical perfect compliance is good enough in the first place. There seems to be a widely accepted notion that people wouldn’t be getting sick if there were perfect compliance to the NPIs. But the NPIs have never aimed to keep everyone at home. In fact, I think everyone, as in every single person, can find a legitimate reason/allowance to still get out and interact with others under even the most stringent NPIs. To me that seems like a major weakness in the theory. Like, the people who don’t get infected because they weren’t out after 10 pm, it’s not like that guarantees they won’t get infected before 10 pm. It’s just really, really incomplete, or shallow, reasoning. And it’s not backed by any data of any kind.
Nope, this is silly because at least the US is advanced enough to have people dying in hospitals. Yet, even then, I still do remember seeing CTs with cameras trying to convince many others in the internet that it was a hoax that people where dying even there.
You only have shown that sure, there is dissent, but not good reasoning about what it should be recommended to keep reasonable people safe. This position you have is analogous of discouraging the use of vaccines, the fact that there are a minority of doctors that are advising against their use does not avoid that most doctors and epidemiologists are looking at the evidence and advice on the best thing to do.
Like in the vaccine case, there will be people that will ignore what the preponderance of evidence says about what needs to be done, it does not logically follow that therefore the best solution will be to jump from a bridge.
I’m not really sure all the ins and outs of this, and maybe they don’t have the staff now that they did in July, but this isn’t the first we’ve heard of this, and so far it doesn’t seem to be all that unusual a set of numbers. To wit, here’s a story from June 29:
The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health announced Monday that key metrics are revealing “alarming” rates of community spread and the county is moving quickly toward “overwhelming” its hospitals.
The county announced 2,903 new cases of COVID-19 today, the single largest one-day case count since the pandemic began. The county’s seven-day average of daily reported new cases is nearly 2,000, compared to an average increase of 1,379 two weeks ago. As of Monday morning, 1,710 people were hospitalized, a jump from the hospitalization numbers that hovered between 1,350 to 1,450 in recent weeks.
The Los Angeles Times reported Monday that if precautions aren’t taken to stop the spread and cases continue to rise, the county could run out of hospital beds in two weeks. “Likewise the number of intensive care unit beds could be exhausted sometime in July,” according to the Times.
“The alarming increases in cases, positivity rates and hospitalizations signals that we, as a community, need to take immediate action to slow the spread of COVID-19," Ferrer said in a statement. "Otherwise, we are quickly moving toward overwhelming our healthcare system and seeing even more devastating illness and death.
Now, you can go here to look at the LA County COVID-19 Dashboard. You can see that in the week of June 28 - July 4 they had 10,274 non-COVID patients in hospital beds, looks like about 1600 confirmed or suspected with the virus, and about 700 beds free, for something like 12,500 beds in total. You can see that from December 13-19 they had 6291 non-COVID patients in hospital beds, 3633 confirmed or suspected with the virus, and 301 free for, what’s that, about 10,200 beds in all.
Now, I don’t know why their why their number of staffed beds, used or available, went down so much from July to now, but I feel like that’s some sort of piece to this puzzle. I just don’t know. When you look at the trends on that dashboard, you get the feeling that maybe things weren’t as dire as they were made out to be at the time. I do not know. I wonder what their number of staffed beds was in December of 2019. Let’s just say that it would not surprise me much to learn that LA County normally has about this many patients in their beds this time of year. Doesn’t feel like a stretch.
Who jumps from bridges? Reminds me of that old saw, the one about if everyone else jumped from a bridge would you do so too. But ‘everyone else’ doesn’t jump from a bridge. A tiny, tiny minority of people jump from bridges. For the rest of us, self-preservation is an instinct we possess.
When it gets to the point where people en masse start tuning out the public health authorities, if indeed it ever does get to that point or already has, it will be because the preponderance of evidence, to those without an agenda to drive, has made it clear that those same public health authorities are seeing monsters under the bed.
That’s not to say anything about vaccines, which I imagine will end up being accedpted just fine. It’s to do with curfews and golf course closures and bans on outdoor dining and all the rest of the flying saucer science that people just aren’t buying, and people are smarter than they are given credit for.
Here’s what I don’t get. If none of these NPIs work, how come many intelligent people think they do? How is it that so many people of medicine and science are getting this so wrong?
Are they really that stupid? Or are they just having a lark? Are they doing it on a dare? For revenge? I really don’t understand. Have you tried telling these experts that they are completely wrong? I’m sure they’d be mad at first but after you educated them I think they’d be relieved and eventually thankful.
What is it that you’ve got that those hapless experts with advanced degrees don’t?
Well, how many of these NPIs were part of the playbook pre-COVID? My reading is that the playbook has changed (I know, I know, because this virus is novel and the old rules don’t necessarily apply), making this year a sort of grand experiment. The experiment appears to be having disastrous results, but my guess as to the answer to your question is that it’s really, really hard to admit you got it wrong when the stakes are this high. Just my speculation, though. Good questions, to be sure.
Also, you miss the point, but hilariously you get it without noticing. Yours is not the majority opinion that most experts or epidemiologists have.
Again, you are pointing at a minority of people that are not really smart, because, once again, there are more people getting infected at golf courses. They are more real and numerous than the evidence of UFOs.
BTW that was noticed already, so repeating that denial as it was very clever is really underwhelming.
Like the masks and social distancing? I imagine most everything we’re doing now to prevent the transmission of SARS 2 (or whatever it’s called) have been in “the playbook” for some time. Take influenza for example: that was around pre-COVID, right? OK. So if one winter there was extra super bad strains of flu going around how do suppose scientists and medical professionals would advise that we fight it?
Try to get more people vaccinated, sure, but also…
facemasks, social distancing, school and work closures, etc. Isn’t that what you would suggest? Or maybe not, no. Because you’re not suggesting that for COVID. Hmmmm.
Scientific consensus on the COVID-19 pandemic: we need to act now
…
In the initial phase of the pandemic, many countries instituted lockdowns (general population restrictions, including orders to stay at home and work from home) to slow the rapid spread of the virus. This was essential to reduce mortality, prevent health-care services from being overwhelmed, and buy time to set up pandemic response systems to suppress transmission following lockdown. Although lockdowns have been disruptive, substantially affecting mental and physical health, and harming the economy, these effects have often been worse in countries that were not able to use the time during and after lockdown to establish effective pandemic control systems. In the absence of adequate provisions to manage the pandemic and its societal impacts, these countries have faced continuing restrictions.
This has understandably led to widespread demoralisation and diminishing trust. The arrival of a second wave and the realisation of the challenges ahead has led to renewed interest in a so-called herd immunity approach, which suggests allowing a large uncontrolled outbreak in the low-risk population while protecting the vulnerable. Proponents suggest this would lead to the development of infection-acquired population immunity in the low-risk population, which will eventually protect the vulnerable.
This is a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence.
How does that work again? These daring renegades are so much smarter than the fancy-pants PhDs gave them credit for, right?
In fact it’s the PhDs that are actually very dull-witted, is that it? Because if that’s not the case then what’s the explanation for these wacky facemask-proscribing and school-closing stunts?
I’m not the one calling anyone dull-witted. I am simply observing that there’s hardly a place in the US that has managed to ‘control’ the pandemic, according to any criteria for ‘control’ that it appears to me the public health authorities have been aiming for. Not a single place. Not…a…single…place. And it’s certainly not been for lack of trying.
I’m afraid I’m not following you here. This year is the first in my lifetime I’ve seen mask mandates, mass school and business closings, or even much in the way of social distancing. I’m not sure I even can think of isolated school or business closures. If those were routine for influenza or anything else in other parts of the country, then I guess I was blissfully unaware.
…are you surprised that the US has been unable to control the pandemic?
I mean, you’ve been subject to a disinformation campaign from the highest levels of the executive branch since the start of the pandemic. Trump and co were literally stealing PPE from the states, essentially gifting them to private corporations who then onsold them for massive profits back to the states that they were stolen from. The President of the United States of America has been lying about the pandemic every day. Heck: Ivanka Trump was one of many unqualified people was screening advice from the CDC on schools. This isn’t a political statement. Its an objective observation of things that actually happened, that contributed to the disaster that is the American response to a pandemic.
The pandemic has been mismanaged at both the Federal and the State level by pretty much everyone. Point to any state or federal response and I could probably point out to you exactly where they went wrong. Where you are at now is pretty much where I expected America to be right now.
This doesn’t mean that lockdowns, social distancing, managed isolation, masks, this doesn’t mean that those things don’t work. Its just that you can’t look at the effectiveness of this outside of the context of the mismanagement, the disinformation, the outright corruption and blatant disregard for peoples lives. This all matters.
This year is the first year in my lifetime having to live with a global pandemic of the size and the scale of Covid-19. It only makes sense that the typical measures to control influenza have been adapted and applied at scale.
Here are the CDC recommendations on mask wearing to control seasonal influenza virus transmission. Last updated in 2019.
Masks. Social distancing. Isolation. PPE.
Does any of that sound familiar to you?
And temporarily closing businesses and schools to break the chains of transmission if done correctly, works. We’ve seen this done at scale in Victoria Australia, we are watching as in NSW they are doing it again.
If 333,000 dead Americans is with people being in your opinion well-suited to broadly assess risk, how many more dead people would it take to convince you that they are in fact not well-suited to properly assess risk?
I have seen this kind of argument before. It is like the tobacco companies claiming that since health authorities can’t eliminate tobacco use entirely that they should give up. Or telling climate scientists to give up because several countries are missing the targets of the Paris accords (while there is evidence of getting better if more do the right thing like other nations are doing)
Like Covid-19, other issues show the gross flaw in your argument here. Not following what most of the experts recommend is wanting to turn into reality the worse scenarios that they are also aware are likely as a result of not making efforts to limit the contagion. Doing the best we can is very, very important so as to avoid the worse scenarios that your arguments are missing.
What I think it would take is not so much the number of deaths, as a number in that range can look very large or even pretty small depending on the context. For example, I ask again to consider the number of hospitals in the US, which I’m told is around 6000. So if you think about it as 60 deaths per hospital, over the course of nine months, it’s less than two deaths a week a hospital on average. I don’t think people would get especially alarmed if they looked at it that way.
At any rate, people generally aren’t good with large numbers, probably for the reason that they lack the context for them in their everyday lives. It took a long time, for example, for many cultures to even develop words for numbers bigger than they could count on their hands. But that’s not really the big issue here. The big issue is less the amount of deaths than the distribution of them, from which we can arrive at something like a ‘likelihood’ of death, or ‘risk’.
So to answer your question, what it would take in this case is for people to start dying in a distribution that differs markedly from that of ‘natural’ rates of death, meaning that which we have observed for some time and come to expect. What seems to be the case with COVID is that a given person’s chances of dying if they contract it are not markedly different from their (statistical, I mean, at a population level) chances of dying if they don’t. (To see this you can look at an age stratum and observe the percentage who die from COVID with the percentage who die of any cause in a given year.)
If that were to happen and people didn’t notice it, it would mean that they incorrectly assessed their risk of dying from COVID, as it compares to their risk of dying of anything else at all. So that’s the answer to your question. But I still maintain that people would be likely to notice that! If folks are beginning to ignore the monsters under the bed, it’s because the deaths they know about from COVID, in their own personal lives and experiences, don’t come as that great a surprise.
The number of cumulative deaths itself, though? Naturally it will go up over time. Is it any more shocking now, at 330,000 or whatever it is, than it was at 100,000 far earlier on? Would 500,000 be more shocking if it came next summer? I don’t know what a cumulative deaths-per-day graph would look like, but that’s the proper way to look at your question, not with an absolute number alone.
Same here. My Wife and I canceled our vacation to Key West that was scheduled for last April (postponed it really) and are going to cancel it again this year. I fully expect things to still be a mess in April 2021.
I live in a winter vacation area. Ski areas. It’s kinda nuts. Seems as crowded as ever. The County Gov (which I’m part of) is trying to mitigate things with many, many more inspectors making sure that restaurants are only at 25% capacity.
We shut down main street so that restaurants could set up tables outside. But that doesn’t work to well in the winter. We had a high of 4 degrees F yesterday.
Everyone is bored in the city and wants to come up to the mountains to play. Many can’t afford it of course, but the usual suspects still can.