@Irishman – Oh, intellectually I get all that. It’s just that emotionally it’s started to feel to me like the goalposts are perpetually moving, and there are a lot of people in my immediate social circle (well, nowadays it’s mostly a social media circle, which may be a big part of the problem) for whom there will never be a time when it’s “safe enough” – their fear of the virus is very, very extreme, and they seem unwilling to revisit or moderate those fears in the light of new information, whereas anything that seems to tend toward “maximum doom and scariness” gets shared and repeated uncritically. There also seems to be a real reluctance to acknowledge that there are legit tradeoffs – that, for example, making school online-only indefinitely WILL exacerbate the achievement gap between children with well-educated, very involved parents and those with parents who can’t or won’t supervise their children’s education effectively.
The point is not that that the dead would be numerous enough to be significant. The point is that if people are scared of COVID, of catching it, of giving it to their vulnerable loved ones, they aren’t going to go out and do economic things. 20% of the people behaving irresponsibly will radically suppress the economic activity of the rest. Schools are technically open in my city, but only 40% of people are sending their children. They are scared to. Teachers are quitting because they are scared to work; other people are leaving workplaces they consider unsafe, as well. Everyone I know has substantially reduced their economic activity more dramatically than required by law, because we don’t trust the authorities to give guidelines that are actually reasonable and and have the best interest of the people at heart.
The problem here isn’t that governments are regulating masks and prohibiting behavior. The primary problem is COVID. The secondary problem is people behaving so recklessly that we can’t keep numbers suppressed. Two people I work with–out of 30–had COVID last week, in unrelated cases. I’ve lost count of the friends-of-friends who have had it. It’s not regulations keeping me out of restaurants and movie theaters.
Here in Dallas we are on our third surge. Numbers go up. Most people bunker down. Restrictions are put in place for the ones who won’t. Cases go down a little, people loosen up, and 5 weeks later, bam. It happened in May, and it’s happening again now. Our county was at 1000 new cases a day for much of July and we got really, really close to being overwhelmed. State finally put a mask mandate in place, and after a month or six weeks, numbers dropped back down to 200 a day. County went to Orange, school started up–and now it’s growing again. Hospitalization rates jumped 40% last week. This is the same county @bump lives in, and the context of his bafflement. We don’t seem to learn that the numbers going down is because of the restrictions and when we remove them, they come right back up.
Were we willing to really close the bars and the indoor dining and so on, maybe we could have safe schools. If we hadn’t, through malice or incompetence, underreported positive COVID cases by 10s of thousands for most of the summer, if our state government hadn’t made it clear that protecting economic activity was the first priority, maybe we could find a safe, middle ground that threaded the needle and allowed for reasonable economic activity while maintaining low transmissions rates–and maybe people would trust it. But people don’t trust their government on this, with very good reason. The sheer incompetence and misplaced priorities of those in charge has made it pretty much impossible.
Not what I meant.
What I meant was, what specific restrictions are being required in your area that you think are having that effect?
I don’t know where you are, or what’s in place there. And I have no idea whether what you mean by “not . . . in any kind of normal way” means ‘while wearing a mask’ or means ‘while not being allowed outside the house’.
The reason the deaths were kept to that level is because of the measures that were taken. ‘See, the dam didn’t break and flood the town, we didn’t need to spend all that energy and money repairing it!’ is not a very good argument.
And deaths aren’t the only relevant measure. Weeks in a hospital on a ventilator with possible permanent lung and heart damage will discourage anybody from going out partying, or even going out to dinner. Even weeks sick at home feeling like one’s been hit by a truck and worrying the whole time about winding up in a hospital on a ventilator will discourage people from going about their business in a normal fashion – as well as discouraging many of their friends and family, who don’t want to be in the same shape.
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You only talk about deaths. You didn’t address what @thorny_locust was talking about. This includes a large number of people who have to take time off work because they’re sick. This includes people who have to go to the hospital and can’t afford the bills. This includes people who voluntarily refuse to go out into society for fear of the virus. All this affects the economy.
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Speaking of deaths, you seem to think that 10-15% of all deaths being attributed to one thing is a small number. That’s a huge number. And that’s with mitigation and people changing their behaviors. Before we shut down, it was the leading cause of death per week. https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/8B3FC1F4-599C-4946-B43846E35E965CFF_source.png?w=590&h=800&372E3A12-EF7C-4702-B6F62AD777DEDAA7
It’s funny, experts look at the data and trends and say, “If we don’t do anything, it could be this bad.” So we do something, and the results are better than the prediction. So then people start saying the experts are alarmists and their predictions are no good because things aren’t as bad as they said. But these people are ignoring the fact that the basis for the prediction was deliberately changed because of the prediction.
It’s not alarmist to say “Lots of people will die” - lots of people have died. It’s not alarmist to warn the hospitals could be overwhelmed - some have been, some are close, and other countries did get overwhelmed. It’s not alarmist to project 300,000 deaths by Christmas - that’s saying our current behavior patterns are not keeping the spread under control.
As for the lack of confidence in our organizations and lousy response as a nation, I don’t blame the doctors and researchers and medical experts. It is the political appointees kowtowing to the Ignoramus In Chief that are undermining the response.
I mentioned this way back in March:
A discussion ensued comparing it to Y2K, or rather discussing how other people compared it to Y2K. When nothing happened on 1/1/00, people complained that all the panic was for nothing, when in reality, nothing happened because of the endless hours that programmers spent patching software and then collectively crossing their fingers while they were on call when that night.
It’s unfortunate that Covid spreads the way it does. It would be a lot nicer if the protections we’re using (specifically masks) helped to prevent you from getting it rather than prevent you from spreading it. That way when people said ‘if you’re so scared YOU wear a mask/stay home, I’m not going to’ and it would be fine, because they’d catch it, not spread it.
If the point you are aiming for is that there are no laws preventing them from engaging in those activities, enforcing the “ask”, well, that is not the issue. I suggest that you recall what being in your 20s was for you and what you and those you know now did during that phase of your life, how you met people and developed your social networks romantic and otherwise, and talk to a bunch of current 20-somethings about what they are doing. And think about how so many here at least judge those of them who do anything more than that.
But hey you had your 20s to love and play so screw you grandkid. (Facetious but only slightly.)
Exactly. For example, I’m looking in the opening schools thread and there’s an article saying that “opening” schools wasn’t as bad as predicted. Well, how many schools have completely reopened like nothing happened? As far as I know, many schools are completely remote, some hybrid and most completely F2F have major mitigation strategies.
OK; what specific restrictions do you think are being asked?
The ones I listed. Again, think about what of you and your peers did to develop your romantic partnerships and social networks in your twenties. Most of what I did is now on the list that current twentysomethings are being asked to not do both explicitly and implicitly with most complying despite the fact that the risk to them is relatively small. What on that list is actually still open to do without restrictions either made explicitly or implicitly?
You listed no expectations at all. You only listed what you think are the effects of these unlisted expectations.
First of all, my hat is off to those young people voluntarily complying with the quarantine restrictions (like my adult son quarantining at home with us).
However, it’s not so different from some of the privations people have borne in our nation’s past. In WWII, for example, people were either serving in the military or dealing with rationing and shortages on the home front, despite the fact that the risk to them individually from the Nazis or Imperial Japan was relatively small. After all, why do you think there was a baby boom after the war? People had put their lives on hold.
For me personally, I spent a large part of my mid-20s on a nuclear submarine cut off from the world. Over the course of my assignment, we were at sea about 90% of the time. Granted, it was more or less voluntary, although a case could be made for the fact that I didn’t fully appreciate what what I was signing up for.
Regardless, if I had to choose between a tour on a submarine or quarantine due to the current pandemic, I’d go with the quarantine.
You apparently don’t want to share how you developed those relationships in your day. Me? I was pretty boring. Maybe not so normal. I went to bars and parties with friends but was too insecure to go up to people too much in that context. But I did connect in coffee shops striking up conversations, in laundromats even, in study groups with people I met in class or talked to afterwards, studying in the vending room after having shared a table. I went out with people to movies, to music venues, got together in groups of strangers to play foosball and watch tv shows in the lounge, or strangers until we met over games.
Young adults today would be pretty much told all of those are being reckless.
@robby maybe your analogy holds maybe not - are they being asked to do similar to signing up for military service, or to be drafted for such, but without shore leaves? And to be looked down upon for not being eager to do so?
I doubt I’m a great example. I spent much of my 20’s out in the woods, seeing a relatively limited number of people; most of whom I don’t know now.
Much of my twenties did fall into that lovely narrow window between the availability of pretty good birth control and the discovery that there were sexually-transmitted diseases that couldn’t be taken care of with a dose of penicillin. Would you recommend to twenty-somethings today that they have casual sex without using any barrier protection? How about in the mid-1980’s?
Situations change; and reasonable behavior in one situation isn’t sensible in another.
Also, when I was in my 20’s, I lost touch entirely with everyone I’d known in high school or grade school, and nearly everyone I’d known in college – because there was no internet. Communication, and the building and maintaining of social networks, at the time was in person; by telephone, which was expensive if you didn’t live close by, and which required knowing where the person was living at the time; or by mail, which many of us didn’t bother with much, and which also required knowing where the person was living at the time; which for most of us was highly changeable for some years. That situation has also changed drastically.
People are still going to laundromats. They’re going to coffee shops, if often outdoors. In most areas they’re now going to class at least some days in the week. I see teenagers and young adults out on the street whenever I go into town. They’re wearing masks, or ought to be – usually they are, if there’s anybody near them. Wearing masks doesn’t mean you can’t talk to people. And you can talk to people online by any of multiple techniques with no masks at all.
In today’s Dallas Morning News- article says predictions of over 1000 cases per day by Oct 20th- we’re at about 400 per day now. And all the other numbers are going up and are predicted to continue.
That’s why I started the thread- in the face of that, why would we be opening up MORE right now? Our brilliant governor relaxed restrictions even more last week.
because the death count is down, hospitals are not overwhelmed and people need to work.
But we don’t seem to be able to stabilize at that rate. We clamped down, rates went down (5 weeks later), we opened up, and now, 5 weeks later, they are climbing again, precipitously. Hospitalizations can’t go up 40% every two weeks for very long before we are overwhelmed. Yelling at us to remember people need to work (which we know) does no good if we can’t find a level of restriction that actually maintains moderate community spread.
Ah, remember the good ole days when the Fed level proposing guidelines for gated phased reopening was condemned here roundly! It was letting 'er rip.
(Elsewhere crisis care was defined by the CDC as hospital and ICU census at 80% or more to start and 70% by later phases.)
Horrible as a place to start wasn’t it? So much better to encourage the states to all make up their own approaches!
Well first off, nobody is yelling at you. I’m just pointing out the current trend. It’s half that of July’s peak. The people who are unemployed are yelling at their legislators just as those who feel as you do are. .
Secondly, and I think this is relevant to what you said, This month differs from previous months. Schools have re-opened. that’s a significant milestone in this pandemic. As these events occur there is a logical expectation they will affect the numbers negatively.
if the death count goes back to peak numbers then there is the option to throttle back the economy just as it’s an option to open up the economy as the numbers drop. If the numbers level off or go up slightly then that has to be weighed against people who need to work.
My point was that maybe we shouldn’t look at this as something to be reacted to, and rather try and proactively manage this stuff by not opening up as fast as possible whenever case counts go below a certain threshold or at a certain rate or whatever.