What number of predicted dead puts a mask on your face? Same question for loss of your company or job?
You were responding to something I said to Bump regarding young people being selfish. I’m asking you for a number.
OK, but the problem with that is that there has been no shortage of public health authorities (and even more random people on the Internet) predicting doom at EVERY turn, and back in the spring the ones being quoted on the news were mostly saying “don’t count on this to be seasonal” (and, judging by the fact that the US got its big swell in cases over the summer, they may have been right, although it might also be the case that coronavirus season is “anytime people are more comfortable indoors than out”). Now, all of a sudden, everybody is equally confident that it IS seasonal and that winter means impending doom? And at the beginning of the summer, there were a ton of people saying “why is everybody opening stuff up before there’s a vaccine?” but now that it’s looking like a vaccine may actually be close, it feels like the message has shifted to “don’t count on a vaccine to save you, we’re still going to have to do masks and social distancing for years and years and maybe forever.” It’s starting to feel like the only answer to the question “when is it time to open up” that we will EVER get is “not now.”
I’m not arguing, by the way, that opening everything up is necessarily the right thing to do; I don’t know what is the right thing to do, and I’m glad that it isn’t up to me to make any of the hard decisions. But this is way more complicated than “just listen to the experts,” given that 1) there’s a lot we don’t know and no general consensus among the experts about the answers to questions like “how seasonal is this?” or “can we count on medical advancements to make this situation significantly better in the relatively-short-term?”; and 2) when regular people say “listen to the experts,” a lot of the time what they really MEAN is “listen to the MOST dire prediction at any given time.” (That might actually be good advice, to be clear; there is a value in planning for worst-case scenarios – but I think we also have to be honest about the tradeoffs in terms of the effect on people’s livelihoods, education, mental health, physical health conditions other than this one, etc.)
I was responding to your comparing covid-19 to the flu.
A specific number? Like 12,472?
I don’t know a specific number; though apparently it’s something over 12,469 in 12 months, which is the number for the 2009 flu. You asked whether people masked for that flu, and I didn’t. I did, however, get a flu shot, which was readily available.
So we’re currently talking about roughly 17 times the deaths in a bit over half the time, and what the total will be overall nobody knows yet.
Whatever number it takes to get me to wear a mask, it’s a good bit less than 215,000, because I’ve been wearing one since, I forget exactly, sometime in April. [ETA: and it’s a lower number for something there’s no vaccine for than for something against which I can get vaccinated.]
And people will lose their jobs and businesses because their workers and their customers are getting sick, are dying, or are not coming to work because they’re afraid of getting sick or dying or of infecting their loved ones, or are out for funerals of their loved ones. This is not a choice between a nice lively economy with no pandemic and a screwed up one with a pandemic. It’s a choice between a screwed up economy with a lot of people dead or permanently damaged, and a screwed up economy with fewer people dead or permanently damaged. The latter version will most likely recover faster.
So much to respond to!
I appreciate much of your post but this needs comment. Actually it is tragic that so many have bought that claptrap put forward by the nursing home industry. I think by now most who read here appreciate the fact that those infected with SARS-CoV2 are most contagious a day or so before symptoms and the first few days of illness. Once someone is all of 10 days out from symptoms onset, afebrile 24 hours or more, and improving with their symptoms, they may be considered of low enough risk as to be released from restrictions. No need to retest and a retest might find dead nonviable viral remnants that do not mean they are still contagious. The risks incurred by returning an older resident to the home “recovering”, fever free, improving symptoms and 10 days or more after onset, were tiny and SAVED LIVES when the alternative was not having hospital beds open for the acutely ill. Staff poorly trained and poorly equipped with PPE, taking care of the intimate activities of daily living of many people in the same home and in multiple homes, was how it spread.
I’ve cited many sources that placed the share at 40% plus. Here’s another source with numbers from a month and half ago: “The virus has proved particularly deadly among people in long-term care settings, accounting for more than 70,000 deaths of residents and staff as of mid-August”. Total deaths in the United States had gotten to about 170,000 by mid-August. Again coming to 40%.
Exactly. Ideally there would be an evidence-based analysis ranking best guess of most benefit for least risk, each region opening in order methodically, and then following the metrics only going through the next gate as hitting metric targets allowed. Instead we have bars open and schools closed.
I hope you have some awareness that perception of time is not judged against the yardstick your sense of how much time you likely have left, but against the yardstick of how much your life has been to date. You remember maybe how a summer was forever when you were 5? Now a year is a blink.
If all that was being asked of them was to avoid large indoor parties it would be one thing, but that is not what is being asked.
Overall trends from there. Deaths dropping since early August. Hospitalizations dropping too. Cases rising. COVID-19 can be asymptomatic or mild, having more of those cases is not a bad thing, so long as it does not lead to more who get much sicker. Fewer deaths and fewer hospitalizations is the success metric.
Yup. See below.
No question that unmasked in a water park is not zero risk, just like a large outdoor protest is not. But I am unaware of any super spreader events associated with either. Outside moving around not too close to people outside your bubble for too long at a time (spaced out in lines for example) is a fairly low risk activity.
There simply is no actual data that shows that children are driving infection into vulnerable adult populations. See the recent posts in the Opening Schools thread for details. Kids can and do transmit some, but they do so fairly ineffectively and in general they get infections from adults while uncommonly (not zero) spreading it to them.
Nursing homes are NOT the only vulnerable population, but they are by far the most vulnerable, with per capita death rates that far exceed those of other elderly and other high risk groups. And society IS doing better at protecting them now than they were, the biggest reason why we have higher case rates but still overall dropping death and hospitalization rates, even in the face of irrational approaches to opening up and seasons change that is expected to cause numbers increases.
Credibility is in the ICU and may not survive. That is the fault of those who felt that declaring the worst that might happen as a certainty, who presented one month of outcomes as end of story, and who failed to clearly communicate the need to hedge against the uncertain possibility of the worst in rational ways. That is not a defense of irrational opening approaches but a plea to prioritize rationally as we develop a sustainable methodical approach that will change along the way as data and knowledge does and progressing as predetermined metrics are met. (Fauci’s team offered one early on, although he did not defend it much when it was misrepresented as Trump saying open everything up now, and we instead had a chorus of saying no, states are in charge, who then opened up instead slapdash with no rhymes or reasons.)
It’s ALSO the fault of those who declared it was no big deal, it would disappear, masks are for wimps, bars were perfectly safe at 50% capacity. Its the fault of those who decided to downplay the risk and refuse to help because they perceived it as a political advantage to let voters in blue states die. It’s the fault of those that pressured formerly reputable agencies to fudge or downplay their recommendations, leaving everything they say suspect for the next generation.
Don’t put this at the feet of alarmist talking heads. The actual fucking authorities that were supposed to offer nuanced, reputable guidance dropped the ball.
One more big one. The trust took its first huge hit when tests were unavailable and unreliable well into the summer, and when test results were still routinely delayed for a week or more for even longer than that. No one trusts data because it was, rationally, untrustworthy . It may still be. In Texas, we had tens of thousands of positive cases not reported for weeks and months. For all I know, there are tens of thousands more.
To be clear I completely agree. The responsibility “to clearly communicate the need to hedge against the uncertain possibility of the worst in rational ways” laid not with the talking heads but with leadership. A bigger failure in that regard is hard to imagine. Certainly this degree of failure at that level was not something that was within the scope of my imagination as this was on the horizon.
What is your impression of what they are currently being asked?
This is false, we did not do the exact opposite of that, nursing homes were isolated shortly after we understood there was an uncontrolled pandemic of a respiratory disease, and they remain isolated.
No I’m pretty sure this was the president who insisted on having mass undistanced rallies and attending a debate when he was infectious.
The Trump administration… just among its own staff… produced more COVID cases this past week than Taiwan, Vietnam, New Zealand, Japan… lord I could go on. Do you think those countries destroyed their economies, or millions of lives?
Honestly, Republicans think the entire world is in on a conspiracy to make them look bad, when most of the world doesn’t give two thoughts about them.
You can’t say it didn’t happen and then go on to say it happened. The “shortly” you refer to is many thousands of lives.
Exactly! If there had been a concerted push from the top to wear masks from the beginning (let’s not forget the sleight-of-hand with mask-wearing early on), and do all the other stuff like handwashing, sanitizing, etc… as well as have clear, unified guidelines for who needs to be tested and when, as well as a unified data reporting mechanism, we’d be a lot better off.
And most of that is stuff they SHOULD have known about all along- once they realized it was spread by airborne droplets, it should have been all masks, all the time for EVERYONE in the Federal and state governments. And there should have been unified and clear messaging about it. That sort of thing should have been worked out ahead of time- there are only SO many ways diseases spread, and most of the pandemics are respiratory ones like the flu, COVID-19, SARS, MERS, etc…
But they gutted the preparedness staff and apparently put zero effort into having a plan for when this would eventually happen. It’s like they were unaware or didn’t care about the multiple flu pandemics in the 20th century, including the big 1918 one, or the various very deadly plagues that hit the world from antiquity forward. It’s not like this wasn’t ever going to happen again- we saw some of how it might have gone with SARS and MERS, but we got a lid on those early.
And then to make it worse, the people at the top got fixated on the economy, and have stayed so, despite the fact that we’ve already lost about half as many people as in ALL of WWII- in the span of about 8 months. So right there, this is bloodier than ANY given year of that war for the US. We’re actually losing people at about TWICE the average rate (400/day) than we lost Marines at the Battle of Iwo Jima (~7000 dead over 36 days = about 200).
This is not just “a flu”. It’s not something we should fiddle with.
This is gibberish, it sounds like someone missed a dose or two of coumadin.
Yes, but it’s more than the actual impact on the virus. If we’d had honest communication and a good sense of the actual scope of the problem then, we’d trust our government now. I think there’s a real case to be made that with masking and handwashing, for example, school could be safe in areas with relatively low community spread. But people won’t believe any authority that tells them that, because those authorities have lied. Are lying.
@Dseid, you keep waving cites and studies about schools being safer than we think, and fixating on getting the facts out, but this isn’t about facts. This is about people not trusting their institutions anymore. They don’t believe the science, because, frankly, the scientists that were supposed to be most dependable and apolitical–the CDC, state health departments, etc–lied, and when they weren’t lying, they were just wrong. In a lot of these here Red States, local communities weren’t even allowed to take self-evidently reasonable measures to protect themselves: the city of Atlanta got sued by the state for mandating masks, and we had our own shenanigans in TX. I feel like in a lot of your posts you are frustrated with “the people”, and I get that, but the bigger problem is that utterly rational distrust. I don’t know how we get past that. People are RIGHT not to trust their government right now. It’s still on-going.
you made a nonsense statement and then turned around and refuted it. Nursing homes were deliberately filled with covid patients and many thousands died because of it.
This.
Would you be okay with a 21 year old doing all that you did at 21 other than “routine gathering in large groups of people”? That the only ask is no concerts or huge parties? Do you think that others are not bemoaning what 20 to 30 year olds are doing within the “social interaction in small groups”? I’m far from that age myself now but my four kids cut across the age groups, 19 to 34. I am aware of more impacts than exclusively not “routine gathering in large groups of people”. You aren’t?
Yup, again, the long term, heck even immediate level, harms from this loss in credibility will be and are major. But really there has been very little lying by those departments. Lots by the politicians but not by the departments or the scientists. It’s instead been a constant display of the sausage being made in real time, with messy honest mistakes made, hypotheses stated, believed, falsified all in short order, with expectations for definitive answers on time scales that such is not possible, an expectation of revealed Gospel truths instead of the gradual discovery of what is actually happening, and a horrible failure by the leaders of these organizations and many allegedly explaining the science to communicate the uncertainties and the process well. “Might” often became “does” along the way, and failed to also include the “might not”. There has also been a political polarization of the process with, on the one hand, an intentional effort to undermine the confidence in these institutions by political leadership on the right while also undermining them by executive orders and by the power of the purse, and a doubt of them as being tools of that leadership and doing their bidding from the left. Political leadership at the top (and its lack) is most culpable but the media acting in their own best interest, getting clicks, and market share, played a role too. “The people” are the least to blame by my take. I regret that tribalism has made critical analysis of the science as it happens a declaration of membership whichever direction the conclusions go, but it is tempered by the amusement I’ve had from some here assuming I’m a MAGA hat wearer because I think that it is too early to judge how various approaches will play out, because I question the certainty of various pronouncements, and because I “keep waving cites and studies” that aren’t in keeping with what some here already “know”.
I also don’t know how we get past that. I have a sense of what the first steps are but this forum is not supposed go political.
I have literally been told here that the fact that someone of the GOP side thinks something is a reason to conclude the opposite, nevermind what the data says. And was shocked that I thought that my conclusions about the what the studies show should be independent of such things.
It is a bit boggling.
Friend of hubby… his BFF for … 40 years? After poopooing my concerns the last 6 months… just admitted he’s wearing his mask since some of his co-workers have tested positive.
Oh, yeah, he’s worked for ~30 years at a beer distribution company here in Iowa. Cruddy health (Marfan) let alone the other health crap he’s had over the years.
Booze sales are up!
The point is we didn’t and we don’t know if it is seasonal, so it is fair game to remind people that We Don’t Know, so don’t act like it is seasonal when a non-seasonal response will kill more, and don’t act like it is not seasonal, when a seasonal response will kill more.
Even more importantly, even if covid-19 isn’t seasonal itself, we are ramping up flu season, which compounds the risks.
Also, winter means impending doom because everybody is relaxing restrictions and their personal behaviors beyond any reason.
Even if an approved, safe, effective vaccine rolls out tomorrow, it will take months for the vaccine to be distributed across the country (nevermind the world), and for communities to have access to saturation levels to affect herd immunity. So yes, it could take another year.
And we don’t know how long-lasting the vaccine immunity will be, because we don’t know how long-lasting immunity from having the disease lasts. It’s not a simple “you’ve had it, you are now safe forever”. That may be (mostly) so for measles or chicken pox, but isn’t for all diseases. Such as the flu.
I don’t think we’re in for permanent doom and gloom. I think we will get control of this through vaccines and treatment options, and the eventual annual cases will be more in line with losses we have become accustomed to and seem to accept. But it won’t be in 2020, and might take all of 2021 to get there.
This in no way comports with reality. In no way. Deaths from the epidemic in the US are something like ten percent of deaths from everything else – call it fifteen if you like – and, critically, the age distributions of the two are for all intents identical. The only businesses to significantly lose customers in the manner you suggest would, I suppose, be nursing homes. I am certain that the very overwhelming majority of businesses could have, in some counterfactual fantasy world, carried on and seen little more than a slight downturn, if even that, were it not for the measures that were taken and the panic that was not only created but enthusiastically fed and overfed. You can disagree all you like that such a course of action would still have been immoral or unethical or even just unwise, but you can’t make the case that the economy would have had to call off the rest of the game for not having enough remaining healthy players.
I don’t think the difference in numbers is because of the reporting of deaths like you said earlier, but instead who is counted as a nursing home resident. Even your site makes a distinction between nursing homes and long term care facilities.
" A second new analysis from KFF examines the impact of COVID-19 on assisted living facilities, a type of long-term care facility that, unlike nursing homes, is not federally regulated, and for which there is a dearth of data about COVID-19 cases and deaths."
But whichever the case, whether it’s 30% of deaths or 45%, my point stands that solving the COVID nursing home problem isn’t going to solve the US COVID problem.