Nice diversion. Did I say anything about President Trump being a better source?
I pointed out that de Blasio made an asinine statement that may have cost residents of NYC their lives and you bring up the President.???
I’ve been advocating for this from the start. Often shouted down and told I’m not arguing in good faith or using a scientific basis.
I’d be very curious to see the mortality rate in the US for people over 65 and those in other places that had their medical systems overrun. Why? Because I’ve read that the recovery rate for people on ventilators is, at best, 35% or or so.
Also, the stats that x% of the people in the ER, ICU or hospital are of a certain age group only works if you know the number exposed. Expose 10,000 people to the virus, 2 of which are over 80 and the rest under 65, where 1 person over 80 and 1 person under 65 ends up in the ICU, 50% of your patients are under 65 and 50% are over 80. Trying to draw conclusions from that data is naive. Maybe it is a fair assumption that an equal number in each age group were exposed. I don’t know. But I do think younger people are more likely to be moving around and more likely to have been exposed, so it is more likely they will end up in the ICU. Without knowing the exposure rate, though, all bets are off.
Yep.
Possibly, by some miracle, we’ll actually break the back of the disease - globally - through shelter-at-home and everything. But that seems pretty unlikely minus centralized planning - which would usually be the role of the USA. And it just takes a small group of infected, somewhere on the planet, to start things going again.
The more people are immune the slower each outbreak should spread, but it will still be exponential growth at a lower power, until we start to approach herd immunity.
In theory, if we identified nations which are more infectious and keep them blocked off from the world, then we might be able to continue to slow things down. But I don’t think we’re going to keep airplanes grounded until summer of next year and, even if we did, Mexico is right there (for us Americans) and Europe is connected to all of Asia and Africa by land, so there’s no real stopping things.
The Federal government is a mess. It’s on the states to identify at risk populations and start figuring out ways to protect them from the rest of the world for a year. They should have done that, starting in February, when community spread was reported.
If I was New York or California, I’d be sending out questionnaires to people that ask them a series of questions that allow them to identify which risk group they’re in and then start telling them to go back out and live life in order from least-at-risk to greatest. The larger a percentage of the population which has been exposed and gained immunity, the more it will slow down each outbreak and provide a buffer to protect the next wave.
The problem is that arguing this “from the start” was a reckless argument. At the start, how contagious this disease was and the exact mortality rates were even more mysterious than they are now. The idea that we could have flipped a switch a month ago and protect all our elderly while letting the rest of the world click along, is also quite a reckless suggestion.
The fatality rate has been around 1% since at least the beginning of March.
More importantly, it’s very apparent who is the most at-risk. If you’re on the verge of death, you’re at risk. If you have diabetes or some underlying condition you’re most at risk. If you have bad lungs, you’re more at risk. That’s all just basic biology and was already reported a couple of months ago.
Usually, we would also expect the very young to also feature in there. That they aren’t is still a bit of a mystery, but we already knew about that a couple of months ago.
Except they weren’t. The data from China matches what we are seeing in the US and in other places. Additionally, I never said the rest of the world should click along. The plan all along was to protect the elderly and vulnerable. Imagine if we had spent 2T dollars on that instead of bailing out Boeing and cruise ships. How much protection do you think we could have bought for those people? I’d say a shit ton.
What does your end game look like? I haven’t heard a single authoritative person say we can’t get around this baring herd immunity (50% exposed), a vaccine (12+ months away), or the very unlikely event it just dies off for some reason. It is pretty easy to just say, “My god!! We can’t just let people die! We need to do something! Everyone stay inside forever!”
Also, I’d really like to hear from some of the 10 million or 15 million that are now without jobs and healthcare and are likely to be without jobs for the next 6 months or more to see if they feel we should continue this lock down as is.
You may have already been exposed to the virus. You may already have anti-bodies against it in your blood. There is no way to tell unless/until widespread testing can be done.
Many people have had no symptoms or weak symptoms. Most people who have been exposed are not being hospitalized. I work in a very people rich environment, at least until a few weeks ago.
One day about 3 weeks ago I had stomach cramps and chills. Did not feel good, like I was coming down with the flu. So even though I had got a full night sleep, I just went back to bed and after another 8 hours I was fine and went to work that night.
Was it something I ate? I didn’t get sick to my stomach, just cramps and the chills you get when you have a fever. Was it the flu? Covid19? There really isn’t a way to know. 8 hours in bed and I was fine again. Cramps lasted 2 days more.
The ever expanding list of symptoms makes it impossible to know unless you are hospitalized.
Oy. Maybe the thread moved too fast for you.
- HoneyBadgerDC said:
- Stranger replied
- You asked
I answered that quite a few young people who were healthy before getting COVID have been hospitalized and that researchers, who realize now that youth is, in fact, not protection against the disease, are exploring other factors.
No straw man, no either/or fallacy. I assumed your “How many” question was asked in good faith and responded accordingly.
Well, I am out of a job. Luckily, my country has universal health care.
I am not advocating a six month lockdown. I am defending the more cautious approach most Western countries have begun with. As we go along, we can soon start starting up again as we know more - despite some thinking we’ve got it all figured out already.
What has been the EXCESS mortality rate? Not only those attributed to COVID but all the others because COVID patients took resources. Victims of overwhelmed health systems. What has the actual impact been and where is it going?
No, a veritable firestorm is not about to sweep the US south.
I get that their governors have been making dumb, politically-motivated choices, and many secretly hope the consequences will be a teachable moment, but social distancing has been in the cultural DNA of the South for almost half a millennium. It’s mostly not the densely-populated, walkable, transit-utilizing metros where people routinely make international or interstate trips. There’s a ton of isolation, whether we’re talking rural plantation land or endless tracts of sparsely-zoned McMansion subdivisions.
New Orleans blew up because they held Mardi Gras. Atlanta is a hotspot because it’s a large-ish city with a world-class international airport, same with Miami. Other than that, places like Tupelo, MS are mostly going to experience it indirectly via economic decline, a situation that comes and goes with depressing regularity.
It would take some guesstimation from Italies numbers to figure out how much lack of hospital space affects outcomes.
A simple comparison of their fatality rate to South Korea gives something like 3X, but Italy hasn’t tested the same number of patients, so that’s a very suspect metric.
Though, on the other hand, not all of Italy has gone over the tipping point (I don’t believe) so that might balance it out.
It would be complicated to figure it out without looking up a lot of numbers and asking a few different people to guesstimate from them, and then use the wisdom of the masses to grab a best-guess value. That should be pretty possible to do among academia. It’s harder for me to do on my lonesome.
The problem with all of these intentional-exposure schemes is that they don’t work without strict sequestration. The virus isn’t going to limit its spread to people who filled out questionnaires. All of these voluntarily exposed people increase the chance of spread, and also of accidentally ending up in the ICU. Maybe they have an underlying condition they didn’t know about, maybe they’re just unlucky.
Everyone needs to sit down and have a good think about the appeal-to-consequences fallacy. If the best-case scenario is brutally bad, that doesn’t automatically imply that there must be some easier way out. It’s entirely possible that we’re just well and truly screwed with no palatable solution.
Yes. People will die because of poor luck. That’s called triage. The perfect solution doesn’t exist and chasing it leads to more death.
Um… no, that’s not triage.
Yes it is. It’s accepting that there are limited resources and capabilities in the world, and strategically prioritizing things to minimize death, based on probabilities and best guesses, knowing that sometimes you will have guessed wrong based on the statistics.
I spent 8 years in Army field medical services, and the definition of triage never included adding unnecessary medical risk to otherwise healthy people.
Do you have some other medical experience or documentation that says differently?
They aren’t otherwise healthy people.
Triage: "the process of determining the most important people or things from amongst a large number that require attention. E.g., ‘a system of educational triage that allows a few students to get help while the needs of others are neglected’ "
Triage is a larger concept than just a small group of doctors with patients on beds. It can also be employed at the level of, for example, health system planning and pandemic response. Saving the many at the expense of the few would be an example.
I’m really sorry about your job. I hope it doesn’t last long and that you can get back to it before too long or before there is too much stress for you. Good luck. I can only hope we get some sort of truly unexpected break in all this. I see no good end to the path we are on and I’ve not heard anyone who is advocating for “protect the most vulnerable at all costs” proffer any kind of end game.
And those people would be? Name some names.
CMC fnord!