This tactic of yours, which you resort to time and time again, doesn’t appear to me much different than playground kids parroting ‘I know you are, but what am I’? I find it unpleasant. It doesn’t make me want to carry on a dialogue with you, because it implies that you are unwilling to listen to and consider my questions or allow me any right to a point of view.
I also don’t find the constant preaching about New Zealand’s approach particularly relevant to the discussion about how best to deal with the problems in the US. And I find your attitude about what can be done in the US naive. I suspect you haven’t spent a lot of time there, or perhaps even lived for any great length outside New Zealand. You seem to be more or less an expert on what’s going on inside New Zealand, which seems valuable when it’s relevant to the discussion. But I’m not sure it extends much past those borders, as best I can tell.
But at least this morning, or early afternoon, you aren’t firing F-bombs at me, so I guess that’s progress. Thanks for the discussion. You’ve given me some things to think about. Enjoy the day. And stay safe out there. Stay very safe.
It’s funny you mention grocery stores, because in the supplementary discussion, they explicitly looked at grocery stores in Philadelphia versus other cities.
They used the data from SafeGraph to establish where people were and for how long. They compared the results against Census numbers to verify the population density variations. They didn’t make up numbers to fit the data, they used the data to determine how the people were behaving in each location, and then summarized what that data was for each location. Then they examined why those numbers might be different between the different locations.
So I went back to refresh myself on this whole study discussion, because I think we’re getting lost in the weeds and distracting from the point of the thread. So what do I find? You were the one who cited this study in the first place.
So then you were saying they were making a strenuous effort to do something besides guess, now you say there is a problem with their model. That doesn’t seem consistent.
I think this whole study discussion is a distraction. Let’s get back to the point of the thread - which apparently has moved on from looking at the Dallas/Ft.Worth metroplex and timing of reopening to a more general discussion of the merits of strategy to fight covid.
If you close places so people cannot go there, then by definition any infections will come from other places. But yes, the goal is to keep people who would have been infected from getting infected. Of course if those people choose to engage in risky behaviors at other places, the closure itself didn’t reduce their risk of getting or spreading it. Because their behavior didn’t change.
So, the goal is to reduce infections. The premise is that certain venues being open encourages risky behavior, and encourages socializing that is known to spread disease. They also provide unnecessary interaction, and all interaction poses some risk. The desire is to reduce risky socializing and thereby reduce spread. The method is to close the venues, and then also educate people on disease spread and encourage they choose to stay safe and not socialize.
That people choose to ignore the directives and education to limit interactions and continue to engage in risky behaviors in alternate venues, i.e. 3 or 4 family gatherings in private dwellings, etc., does not justify keeping venues open.
Bingo. It’s “every man for himself”.
But that’s part of the problem - the assumption that we desire to cut socializing indefinitely. The extended shutdowns and limitations are precisely because we did not act strongly and comprehensively enough the first time, when people were mostly trying to comply. We squandered the time when people weren’t yet burned out by not actually “doing the work”, as Banquet Bear puts it. We failed to adequately shut down, to do so for long enough, and to follow up with the other “layers of cheese” we need - effectively speedy accurate tests, contact tracing in 24 hours, isolation and quarantining of exposed cases. Instead, we got a test kit rollout that was faulty, replaced by a second test that took a week or two to get results, and inadequate testing numbers, followed by negligible and ineffective contact tracing, combined with incomplete shutdowns that were reversed counter to the instructions of the epidemiologists in what numbers to use as guidelines for reopening. It was a total failure of response when people actually tried to stay home.
So yes, people no longer want to comply with shutdowns, and that makes them ineffective, which forces stronger measures, but then compliance is reduced, and so we still have surging numbers. All because the government failure from the top down to actually have a comprehensive and complete approach to this disease.
See, this is not a problem with a curfew or a shut down, this is a problem with compliance and an attitude that doesn’t take the situation seriously. Because the messaging from the top has been abysmal. The fucking President of the United States says it’s no big deal, “I’m young and my risk is low, fuck it I’m gonna party one way or another.”
You can’t fix that with more shutdowns, sure, but you can’t fix that by opening up, either. Trying to enforce masking and social distancing in bars and restaurants is a fool’s errand when the customers don’t believe the controls are important. They congregate in the streets waiting to get in. They don’t socially distance or mask even when told to. And then states like Texas tell everyone that no business can force them to wear masks, that the local governments cannot hold individuals accountable, but can hold businesses accountable. Which means the businesses are caught between a rock and a hard place where they can’t make people comply but failure to enforce gets them fined and shut down.
I don’t doubt it. Speculation is commonplace. Agendas are derived from motivations. “Keeping everything closed” isn’t really the agenda, though. Reducing the spread of infection is. Keeping things closed is just the only tool we seem to have in the toolbox, since people won’t mask and won’t voluntarily stay home and we don’t have any infrastructure to support contact tracing and mass-testing. Well, the testing thing is getting better, but it’s not where it needs to be. And keeping things closed isn’t even being done very effectively, being undermined by government officials like the governor of Texas.
Okay, I’ll rewrite your agenda from “opening things up” to “removing inconsequential restrictions”. The dispute then just gets hung up on if the restrictions are inconsequential or not. You are arguing they are, others are arguing they are not.
I don’t see how you can say that. I spell out what actually is happening in this very post.
We are going on a full year because it was bungled in how it was handled from the beginning.
The fact that doing so has been proven to work. But instead, the U.S. has just been looking for a bigger hammer.
And I’m saying that if overall public health with a big-picture point of view is the goal, and saving the economy is a strong second, then the best approach is much more solid and controlled lockdowns for a finite time using all the other tools to get the pandemic down and then keep it down as things reopen. We only half-heartedly shut down and then completely failed on the other techniques. Including the economic support side of the equation to keep people and businesses financially sound through the shut down.
You say why use all the tools? I say we didn’t use enough of the tools.
You are accusing him of behavior that he is pointing out is your own behavior. If the mirror’s glare hurts your eyes, consider it’s not the mirror that’s the problem.
My attitude about what can be done in the US is also naive, because I thought we were a country that respected each other, stood up to help in times of crisis, pulled together and sacrificed for the greater good. But then I keep encountering people who refuse to wear a mask or wear it wrong (i.e. chinstraps), people refusing to socially distance, people who are more interested in going to a bar or a Halloween dance party or a mega-biker rally than protecting their friends and neighbors. People disparaging our national epidemic experts like Dr. Fauci because they don’t like what he’s telling them needs to happen to save lives. People who discount that hospitals are stressed to the breaking point and medical workers are bearing the brunt of this pandemic, trying to downplay the numbers and say they are normal for this time of year. People more afraid of phantom socialism than the pandemic that is killing nearly 4000 Americans a day. What do I know?
There is much to chew on in your post, but I think it all comes down to this. What proof is there that these tools work, if by ‘work’ we mean be effective consistently, across countries and cultures and continents? It seems to me that any ‘proof’ one could find is confined to very narrow situations, calling its broad applicability into question. Rather, it seems apparent, if one takes a global view, that if the evidence leans in one direction, it is that the tools have been proven to not work. Or what else would account for the in-your-face case and death statistics from all over the world? Let me guess? A no-true-Scotsman defense is in order, am I right? They would work, if only people would (or could) follow the rules. Well, good luck in hoping that reality ever comes to pass.
Where’s the ‘coming together’ in demanding that schools and businesses be closed, with livelihoods shattered, so that we might be able to save some at the expense of others? I know it’s very, very uncomfortable to entertain a notion that maybe there isn’t much we can do, in the face of a threat from the natural world, that doesn’t cause the same kinds of threats from our own hands, meaning there is an ethical and moral argument to be made that our unnatural actions are murderous in their own right. But if we were to collectively decide that the damage we were doing to our children, and to those among us most marginalized and dispossessed, was not worth the benefits we might receive, I ask you: would that not constitute a sort of coming together?
I’d be careful about casting those sorts of aspersions. There is a growing sentiment, as far as I can tell, that these lockdown policies benefit a certain class of people at the expense of others, and the tables have been turned on the kind of progressive thought we’ve encouraged for the past few decades. I don’t think it will have a pretty ending. It’s certainly not been helpful so far.
…science is science. And science works effectively and consistently across countries and cultures and continents.
Social distancing works. If the virus can’t find a new host during the incubation period: it “dies.”
Managed isolation works. Moving people to facilities where they can be looked after, monitored, fed and housed safely with very little risk to infection to those looking after them and strict protocols in place to reduce the risk of further transmission.
Genomic sequencing works. Sequencing allows specific strains of Covid to be identified which means we can see which cases are linked to which cluster which helps to control the spread.
Contact tracing works. If you can find the close contacts fast enough you can get them isolating before they potentially spread covid to other people.
Testing at massive scale with reliable tests (not the rapid tests all too common in the US) work. It allows you to identify new close contacts so they get isolated and get tested as well.
Masking works. Masks help protect you, they help protect other people in case you are affected.
Multiple layers of defense, variations implemented in countries as diverse as China to Australia to Taiwan to Vietnam, many of the African countries have death tolls under a thousand.
I’ll point you again to Victoria, which at one stage had 6768 active cases in its second wave and managed to drive them down to zero over the course of four months by using every “tool in the box.”
Each tool individually work. Each individual tool is a layer of cheese.
And its the layers that are important. If you only have one or two layers of defense then Covid will have an easier job overcoming those defenses. But the more layers of cheese you have the more difficult it is to break through.
Can you be specific here and what “narrow situations” are you talking about?
The evidence actually leans in the other direction. It leans overwhelmingly in the other direction. The tools, when implemented properly, consistently, in combination with other tools has been shown to work over and over again.
Incompetent and corrupt leadership? Disinformation campaigns? Ignorance? Prioritizing opening the economy over effective pandemic controls? A lack of trust in science?
Absolutely incorrect. Bad guess.
This isn’t a “people” problem. It never has been. Everything flows from the top. And a common element with many of the places that have managed some degree of control over the pandemic is strong, decisive leadership. I have never blamed people for not following the rules. Why would you even think this?
Can you be specific here?
Because nobody is demanding schools and businesses be closed where I live. Everything is situational. So maybe these places that are “demanding” schools and businesses close are places that have uncontrolled community spread, maybe they have clusters based around the local schools, maybe they have limited contact tracing going on with limited testing and maybe those demands are completely appropriate. So where exactly are you talking about?
Why would you entertain the notion that “there isn’t much you could do?” Especially in the face of evidence that there is plenty that you could do but you just don’t want to do it?
As I said before. You just don’t want to do the work.
You need to quantify that damage. The trauma of a generation that is loosing grandparents and parents and uncles and aunts is something that you don’t seem to want to consider. In many places they have to say goodbye over an I-pad. They can’t go to the funeral. What about that damage? Shouldn’t you be considering that and weighing that up against a couple of months learning at home? Which do you think would be more traumatic, doing school work over a computer monitor or losing your dad?
Make a case for that then. Quantify the damage. Then show us how that damage is objectively worse than what is happening to marginalized communities that are being ravaged by the pandemic. The racial disparities are stark. In August black Americans were infected at a rate three times that of white people and were twice as likely to die. So perhaps you aren’t really in touch with what marginalized communities are doing, or what needs to be done.
Most lockdown policies don’t benefit the rich, the privileged, the certain class of people one could call “the elite.”
Lockdown policies do benefit the marginalized that in many places have no other protection from the global pandemic.
So do the rich elite believe lockdown policies benefit a certain class of people like the poor, the elderly, black and brown people, and people that don’t have a good quality of life? I could believe that.
Are the rich elite winning? I think they are. Will it have a pretty ending? There were over 3000 covid related deaths today in the US. So probably not.
I’m not ignoring that. I’m facing reality and looking it square in the eye. We’re nearly a year into this thing, and we don’t have any such comprehensive plans. You’ll forgive me if they seem a little pie in the sky, in light of the devastation surrounding us.
I’ll put it this way. We can wish for removal of restrictions in one hand and such a comprehensive plan in the other, and see which one fills up first. I know what I’d bet on.
Man, I have no idea what informed this point of view. This reads like something from bizarro world. The poor and marginalized are the ones getting the benefits from school and business closures? In what possibly conceivable way? And what it is about the rich that keeps them from benefiting?
Can you point me in the right direction? Maybe a newspaper article our an online story that shows that this sentiment is remotely significant?
Because you left the key details blank. So I filled in the blanks. You think I’m wrong? Then an argument from incredulity isn’t strong enough. Fill the gaps in. Tell us how you really see it. Be specific.
Abso-fucking-lutely.
In the absence of universal healthcare, widespread accurate testing and results in a day, in the absence of a robust contact tracing regime, with the absence an effective response from either the Federal or the State governments social distancing and masking are the only things that are left to offer them any protection at all.
Its not the marginalized who are protesting and demanding the economy opens up. The marginalized are demanding government relief. They are already in the most danger. The statistics prove this. The people that we hear demanding the economy opens up are the rich, they are the privileged.
It only makes sense that this is what your little story was alluding too. But you seem to disagree. So feel free to provide some evidence.
The poor and marginalized are getting doubly damaged because they are losing their livelihoods in greater proportion and getting infected at a higher rate. By that I mean, let’s just say they aren’t in the ‘work from home’ class. And if you need cites from me to be convinced that those from lower socioeconomic strata have disproportionately borne the brunt of viral spread, then you need to start back at the very beginning.
…that wasn’t what I asked for a cite for. The very post you responded too conceded that lower socioeconomic strata have disproportionately borne the brunt of viral spread. I asked for your cite for your claim of a growing sentiment that the lockdown policies benefit a certain class, who that certain class is, what benefits they get, and who they are doing it at the expense of.
Well, I’m not convinced that any one class gets the benefits of lockdowns, because I think the widespread effects of lockdowns damage entire communities in immeasurable ways. We all lose when kids get thrown under the bus. We all lose when people have to die alone. We all lose when we’re denied to right to gather with our extended families. We all lose when local businesses are destroyed, even if those businesses aren’t ours. We all lose when the arts are taken away from us. We all lose when we can no longer travel beyond our borders. Please let me be clear – I don’t think anyone is winning from this bargain.
But if I’m sensing a growing sentiment that somebody is at least not bearing their share of the costs, it’s for damn sure not the working class who lives paycheck to paycheck – or rather, did live paycheck to paycheck when there was a job to go to. It’s sure as the hell not the food workers in kitchens or the delivery drivers bringing meals to those working from home, if the chance they might catch the virus at work is something you’re at all concerned about – and you yourself seem to be really concerned about it. It’s not the ones without health insurance or a savings account, in case things go bad and there’s no work to keep you going. It’s not the ones who can’t make rent this month, or pay a babysitter because their kid is out of school. No, they are not the ones skating through this relatively unscathed.
Funny that, because Biden has announced aggressive steps. Maybe not aggressive enough when it comes to financial support, but more than the Republican Congress wanted, and more comprehensive than Trump did anything to get.
The reason there was no comprehensive plan is because the guy with the responsibility to get it done didn’t, and the
Republican leaders in Congress refused to provide relief, arguing instead that people needed incentives to work rather than protections when they couldn’t work.
A change in leadership and a change in Congressional control will show what could have been done in the first place. I hope it’s not too little too late, that it can provide some relief to the end of this crisis until the vaccines are finally administered to the bulk of the country. We all damn sure need some relief from the oppression of the virus and all that entails - physically, psychologically, medically, and economically.
Well, I’m certainly very happy to concede that point, if it actually happens and it actually works. I don’t imagine the solution is near as simple as ‘write a bunch of checks’, but I won’t get into that here and I’m happy to allow that if considerable relief is possible, then maybe it can at least make the situation somewhat tenable even if still leaves some unfairly dispossessed. Perfect not being the enemy of the good, and all that.
But even if that does work in the US – and I continue to think it’s a big if – I still think the problem is far greater than that. In our globalized world, economies (and the health and livelihoods that go along with those) are so interconnected, and the knock-on effects in developing nations from sustained border closures and business disruptions are immense. Not that they didn’t participate in that themselves, I recognize, but still. I worry that the way we’ve realigned things on a worldwide scale has created a situation globally that is just like the one in the US writ large, except in this case there won’t be any stimulus checks forthcoming.
People will find a way to survive. They always do. But I hope we learn some lessons here, and next time it doesn’t have to be so hard.
Okay, back on Nov. 27, I predicted some numbers. How am I doing?
Today, Jan 19, Worldometers has the death count at 408,628. It lists Jan 15 as 401,884. That doesn’t quite match the CDC’s numbers for Jan 15 at 390,938 deaths, but they don’t have numbers after the 16th yet. Anyway, we beat Jan 31 and will certainly have 413,000 by then.
Since I’m the only one playing the prediction game, I won’t bother with more numbers. I will, however, point out that while the vaccines are rolling out and that should reduce numbers, the more contagious variant is also spreading and that will increase numbers. Not that it is more deadly, but more cases with the same fatality rate will mean more deaths, and stressed health care systems getting busier will mean more rationing of care and more deaths as a consequence.
I’m registered with my county to get on the list. I will get vaccinated as soon as I can.
The head of the California Health and Human Services says that 3 weeks after the stay at home order, California’s infection rate, hospitalization rate and ICU rates are all stabilizing or coming down.
Well, they certainly wouldn’t be the only place on that trajectory.
I saw a graphic yesterday comparing Arizona to LA County. Curves so close you can hardly tell them apart. Restrictions not so similar, from what I can gather.
I see the title of the slide there in the video preview. One wonders if any of these pros ever took (or passed, I guess) an intro level course in statistics or logical reasoning.
