First of all, stop, take a long breath, and calm down. It is easy to imagine the absolute worst consequences, and to be fair, we’ve been seeing a lot of terrible, worst-of-the-worst consequences in the last few years, but nearly all were almost solely due to poor decisions by leaders elected by the poor decisions of voters. Picking out a couple of examples of family protection and mental health calamities–which are real epidemics in their own right, but ones that have long been endemic to our society–and then spinning them out into waves of mass murder/suicide/domestic violence is not doing anything but feeding panic and paralysis in the face of a manageable epidemic.
Students have missed significant portions of their high school years and still managed to “makeup for the educational deficit” and thrive. We’ve recently faced the crisis of an economic bubble and the most severe recession since the Great Depression, and while it had significant impacts on many people the economy as a whole rebounded. We haven’t had to face this kind of public health crisis in several generations–which can be chalked up to both the work of professional epidemiologists and the work of the World Health Organization, and not a small amount of luck–but this is a comparatively mild epidemic compared to how bad it could be. If we collectively keep our head and use past experience as a guide to better decisions, we can avoid those “horrible unintended consequences” you fear. This means, however, taking useful measures and holding leaders accountable instead of spinning out wild apocalyptic projections and just hoping the problem will go away.
I have a Ph.D in biology. My twin sister (who is a Doper, but has been kept busy by current events) is an epidemiologist with a DVM and a MPH. We both work in public health fields (her at the federal level, me at the state).
It doesn’t take a Ph.D to understand the concept of risk. There is little individual or public health risk to refraining from jamming with your friends. Jamming with your friends in meatspace raises your risk by a non-zero amount. If you are fine with taking on that additional risk, then go on and jam. But if you or one of your friends get sick (or worse), you had better not complain about it around here. And you probably shouldn’t complain if the state of alert we’re under (and economic slowdown) persists for a long time. The more people flirt with risk, the more this thing is going to spread.
I decided to stop working in the office because one of my coworkers suggested I was being stupid for ignoring the strongly worded recommendations from our employer. I don’t agree that I was stupid for working in a half-empty office, but it is hard to argue with the fact I was flirting with risk unnecessarily. And lookit, turns out that working from home isn’t the bad thing I thought it would be. I’ve adjusted to this new normal and found a way to make it tolerable, daresay kinda enjoyable. There are things you can do in lieu of hanging out with your friends in meatspace that are also enjoyable, even if they fall short of the ideal.
Its only been 2 1/2 days socially isolated and I am already going stircrazy and rife with anxiety/worry for the people I know. Life like this isnt life. I would rather risk the minuscule chance of contracting the virus than live like this. This is like being in prison. Not having comfort entertainment like sport makes it surreal and worse.
Oh, puh-lease. 2.5 days isn’t even a heavy snowfall isolation.
If you don’t care about yourself, care about your friends. You could be a carrier and not know it. Is your “need” for in-person social interaction worth killing your friends over?
I think most folk take unnecessary risks all the time. Smoke? Drink too much? Eat the wrong thing - or too much? Exercise too little? Speed or text while driving? All of those and countless other actions increase the chances of costs to the individual and society. But people take such risks all the time.
I don’t plan on complaining to anyone - or looking for sympathy - should I get this thing, whether it was from avoidable social interaction, my boss requiring that I come in to work, or a quick run to the grocery.
BTW - when you make your limited necessary supply run, do you walk up and down all of the aisles, or do you don your mask and gloves, beeline to the most nutritional food, grab it, and get out using the self checkout? Risks involved in each choice you make.
I’m wondering if the media’s practice of over hyping the impending disaster of the moment - Snowpocalyse!!! Polar Vortex!!! - has caused me to be dubious of a more real problem.
Because the news and social media (presumably) are full of coronavirus panic and its economic sequelae, one can overlook that there are reasons for hope.
Most students will still be able to study, in some cases due to online connectivity. It’s not the same as being in a lab or classroom. But it is temporary. More educational resources are available now than at any other time in human history.
Some treatments developed for HIV and SARS have apparently been shown to be effective.
The economy can and will recover from the damages. There may be some increase of nationalism and isolationist policies, and some industries will be restructured for the better. There will likely be some more emergency and critical care capacity in the future as the right lessons are learned.
I think the Canadian government has adopted fairly sensible measures. I think they will be effective in reducing the health burden. Faith will triumph over fear. That said, there are lessons for later. Take bold action quickly and back off quickly when it is reasonable to do so. My worry is the “backing off” part will be too slow as too much attention is given to SARS-CoV cases and too little to cases needing hospital care, too many headlines seem scary and officials grow overcautious.
This started in December. Loads of Canadians travel. We now have 9 deaths, which needs to be put in proper perspective. If things look manageable in two weeks, the sacrifices will be worthwhile. I’d like to go to the gym. But I can easily work out at home. This isn’t exactly the Blitz. It’s a love tap in the long human history of epidemics at this point. We will persevere. I hope we learn the right lessons.
Do you think Dr. Fauci, the surgeon general, and the president have been “over hyping”? Cuz to my eye, the media has been in lockstep with them. Even down to “It’s just a flu/Democratic hoax” bullshit we had to listen to for several weeks.
The media has focused on this thing a lot, true. But this is the biggest event to affect the globe since WWII. What you are calling “over hype” is actually waking up a lot of people. Just a couple of weeks ago, a lot of people had no clue that Italy was in the massive shit that it is in because the media was fixated on Biden vs. Bernie. We need the media to cover this thing to death, unfortunately, because otherwise people won’t understand what’s going on or why experts are so worried.
The problem with “I’m young and healthy and I want to party and I’m gonna!” is that this isn’t about you. NOT ABOUT YOU. Write that down two thousand times and maybe it will penetrate. It is about the community. It is about the fragile, the elderly, your parents, your grandparents. Not you. It isn’t you, young healthy and selfish, that your isolation is for, it is for OTHERS.
Others who will die, because of the young heathy and selfish, the willfully ignorant, who won’t even know that’s what they did. That is what is so intolerably infuriating.
It is not necessarily hyping, although this definitely does happen to sell newspapers or get clicks.
Th government saying ‘the hurricane is coming - take precautions - hundreds could die’ is not hyping, but when most people follow the advice and only 10 people die it is wrong, but very human, to think the reason the death-toll was so low was because you were lied to. Rather, it was the cumulative effect of people actually paying attention and doing what they were told (or, more correctly, a proportion of people and businesses doing the right thing and passively minimising the risk to those unable, lazy or stupid).
There is a strong dimension of trust that comes into this. If know your senior leadership is cynical and known to wilfully lie and dissemble about the little things you could be less likely to trust anything emanating from any arm of government, even if they are giving you the correct information
Italy isn’t exactly a great match for the US. An older population, for one. So track 1, not doing extreme social isolation will likely lead to an overrun healthcare system, millions of lives lost and secondary or tertiary deaths due to the lack of accessible healthcare while this is spreading hard and fast. We would see the downhill part of the curve in about 4 to 5 weeks. By then many people will be immune due to having the disease and we can protect those that are sill at high risk.
The other track is a big unknown. We do extreme social isolation, we end up in a depression that makes the great depression look like a small hiccup, millions upon millions out of work and without healthcare. Thousands, 100s of thousands?, die because of a lack of affordable healthcare. Despite not overrunning our healthcare system, 100s of thousands, perhaps millions still die as they were just too compromised to survive this even with plenty of ventilators around. Given the virulence of this, they caught it despite our efforts to keep it from them. Maybe even up to a year later since spreading this out means the virus exists and continues to be passed around. We have secondary and tertiary deaths, but not as many, since those hospital beds are now being occupied for months at a time and are filled to capacity or just under the limit for months instead of weeks.
I don’t see any way anyone can say we’ll save X number of lives by these extreme measures. Everyone “just knows” we’ll save lives, but how many is unknowable. Thus, we have no idea which track leads which way. What percentage of the patients require a ventilator to recover? Some will die regardless of the ventilator. Some will recover even without one. Do we trash the economy for the fraction of people who fall into the category of those that would survive if and only if a ventilator is available for them?
Death is inevitable. The best we can do is delay it. Every patient we save in the next 4 months will be dead in 50 years. Most, a lot shorter than that given how this strikes those over 65. Is it worth putting our kids, and our grandkids, through a 20 year depression so grandma can live another 3 years?
Do not misinterpret my remarks. I’m not saying, in any way shape of form, we toss the weakened and susceptible on the fire and walk away. As I’ve been saying, there is a balance, a real balance, that needs to be considered. People are looking at the immediate and not the long term. There is a cost to all this. A real cost and I’m not sure the difference in lives saved is as starkly different as some are saying.
We can talk all day long about what our government should or should not do for affordable healthcare, righting the economy, preventing a recession or depression, but in the end, we have a buffoon leading the greedy and corrupt who don’t give a damn about what is the right thing to do, er, I mean, I don’t trust any government to be concerned with anything except retaining their own power.
if you made an attempt to even be minimally informed, you would know that you shouldn’t wear a mask unless you are showing symptoms. Seriously, we’re trying to have a civilization here, could you make the slightest effort to give a shit?
I’m going to respond to this by quoting myself upthread: “Notwithstanding the economic fallout or the fact that a shit-load of people won’t have their jobs anymore, we’re not being asked to do anything that difficult - stay in your house unless you have to get necessities, try to keep a distance from others, wash your hands. FFS it’s not like we have to forage for squirrels and wild mushrooms and berries to survive in our crude mud huts while we drink out of puddles.”
Though you would “rather risk the minuscule chance of contracting the virus than live like this…”, how do you feel about risking that you contract the virus and, thanks to this belief, several others contract it from you. Have you (or any other dopers who think that this is all a crock) read the news lately about what’s happening in Europe? Do you want to see, in a few weeks, a world in which one of your friends or neighbours gets denied treatment because there are just too many patients?
Yes, I take risks. But if I eat cheetos instead of cauliflower, no one else is going to get fat. And even if this were to happen, the societal costs of an overweight population do not compare to the societal costs of having no available hospital beds for the indeterminate future. That is the reality we are facing. Not just people getting sick.
Risk-wise, it’s not a big deal if you take a dump in the swimming pool. It’s chlorinated, after all. But if all 300 million of us shit in the pool, then we’re not in a swimming pool anymore. We’re in a cesspool that no amount of chlorine can make safe for swimming. If everyone hangs out with their friends whenever they want because fuckit, then we might as well not even bother having a disease containment/mitigation strategy. We might as well just carry on as usual and just accept the consequences, however shitty, that follow.
Our grandparents were asked to sacrifice in a myriad of ways during all the years of the world wars. Meanwhile, modern Americans can’t even sacrifice a couple of days of hanging-out time with their friends. Even though we have a shitload of technology that can do a damn good job of simulating “meatspace”, we just can’t do it. What the fuck is wrong with us?! I know it’s going to be hard to sustain this for a long time and I don’t blame anyone for having cabin fever, but we can at least try to make it through the first freakin’ week.
Another question. Suppose the US goes to these extreme measures. We knock this thing down to almost nothing in the US. The rest of the world does what they do. In about 6 or 8 weeks the virus has moved into a background noise. In the US, it is because we stopped the spread. In the rest of the world, or most of it, it is because it burned itself out. Most of the US is not immune. We are in exactly the same susceptibility state we are now, only the economy is gone. We open the borders again, because we have to, and in comes 20 people that are carriers from various countries. Boom. We start all over. We have no herd immunity. It spreads like wildfire through the US.
What stops this from happening given what we are doing now? Why won’t this continue to reignite every few months until either:
We don’t start all over from scratch. Once released from shelter in place some of us will have been asymptomatic and hopefully resistant or immune as a result (notwithstanding the debate upthread). Some will still catch it and recover with no problem, some will catch it and be asymptomatic, some will yes become very sick and even die.
But the important things this: goal here isn’t to 100% avoid people getting it, it’s to avoid overwhelming the health system, so that there aren’t 10 people desperately sick and at risk of dying if they don’t get a bed and ventilator…when there are only 5 beds and ventilators available at their hospital.
To be honest, the seriousness of the situation and the need for isolation didn’t really hit me even here in Seattle until a little over a week ago. Once the restaurants and bars shut down, all of a sudden the reality hit me in the face. I’d been more wishy-washy about it up to that point, assuming that going out for a meal or pub trivia would be a controlled risk. Now, I wouldn’t even consider jamming with friends.
The number of lives saved is not “unknowable”, at least not in the sense that you mean. Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team: “Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID- 19 mortality and healthcare demand”. The effect, if we do nothing and based upon what has been experienced in Italy and South Korea, is that millions of people who will need assisted ventilation and other support services. If some of those cases can be delayed by even a couple of weeks and ICU beds cleared or extra ventilators acquired, the number of avoidable deaths could be cut in half or more. And despite your statement about the inevitability of death, there is a real cost associated with the loss of lives that could be saved with relatively simple measures. This isn’t about experimental million dollar treatment as a last desperate measure to stave off chronic disease or piecing together someone badly injured in a skydiving accident to build a cybernetic government superagent; it is relatively straightforward support treatment to allow patients enough time for their immune system to combat the virus. This “20 year depression so grandma can live another 3 years” comes from nowhere but your imagination; even the Great Depression starting in 1929 lasted only a decade.
You seem to be misunderstanding the purpose of the social distancing and isolation guidance. It isn’t to prevent the infection from spreading through the population, which it has already done and no quarantine or pointless travel restrictions will prevent given that it has shown up in every state in the United States (and in fact nearly every nation on the planet). The purpose is to slow the progression and protect the most vulnerable people just long enough to prevent the peak of extreme COVID-19 responses from being so sharp that hospitals will be completely overwhelmed and patients will die in waiting rooms or triage tents who could otherwise be saved by mechanical ventilation for a few days. As treatments for the disease are developed (and a few experimental trials are already in the works with initially promising results) the threat the disease poses will be reduced regardless of the potential for a resurgence, and many people will likely maintain at least partial if not complete immunity, further reducing the tendency to spread.
The economy is something that can be actively managed. This epidemic, at least right now, cannot except by using non-pharmaceutical interventions such as social distancing and isolation. This is the very essence of risk management; identifying the potential risks that can be mitigated by future action versus the active risks that cannot be forestalled or ignored. Spinning out tales of apocalyptic economic doom from nothing is not helping in any way, nor is petulantly arguing that having to spend a couple of weeks without directly socializing is somehow the greatest sacrifice anyone has ever made in the history of the world.