Not sure if tests like this would be considered unethical or inhumane but suppose we had about 5,000 paid volunteers from all walks of life that agreed to live in close proximity to one another for about 4 months. Infected would wear red shirts, immune would wear blue shirts and uninfected would wear white shirt. We could seed the experiment with about 500 known active cases. I would be very interested to know if there may be a large subset of the population that may have some kind of natural immunity. I was reading that east Asians are largely unaffected by the virus. Could we acquire much beneficial data from tests such as these?
We already have a case study for contagious people forced to live in close proximity, i.e. the USS Roosevelt. It will tell us much about the absolute infectiousness of disease, and because of the demographics of military service members should provide whatever information needed on susceptibility of different ethnicities. The test you suggest is not only unethical but unworkable as well without the kind accurate antigen and antibody testing we lack, notwithstanding your whole “red/white/blue” shirt scheme that serves no purpose beyond reproducing Jane Elliott’s infamous experiment.
As far as your “reading that east Asians are largely unaffected by the virus”, please provide a citation that gives some kind of basis for this claim.
Stranger
The link was in the thread here that listed all the variants of this virus. I will try and find it again. I honestly don’t know what countries east Asians would include. The USS Roosevelt was not allowed to play out until a conclusion so would not be useful info when testing to see if some populations have natural immunity.
The problem is people would stay far away from those with the red shirts, which would reduce transmission. Germs are invisible to the naked eye which is part of what makes them so dangerous and easy to spread.
I don’t know anything about east asians and their infection rate, so I googled and found this. According to this, east asians are at higher risk due to higher concentration of ACE2 receptors in the lungs.
Since you keep popping up on these threads with your…unique…suggestions for how to handle a pandemic and your accusations that “the news” and public health estimates are misleading the public for their own ends (whatever they may be), maybe you could illuminate the rest of us as to your expertise in epidemiology, public health, and treatment of infectious disease?
Stranger
As I am sure you know I have no expertise in any of those fields and fail to see why that would be required when simply discussing an ongoing public health issue. I do have somewhat of an obsessiveness nature when it comes to looking for patterns and trends that might be useful and this did serve me well in my unrelated career. None of my suggestions or opinions that I have put out would be considered outlandish in anyway shape or form. I try to remove myself and those I love from my thinking process so as to maintain some objectivity. I have always enjoyed your posts and have the highest respect for you in general as a poster but on this particular topic you don’t seem to be maintaining objectivity and not many people are. A lot of this comes from hatred for the current administration and a lot of it I imagine just comes from fear. I have never seen a topic in my life that has become so polarized when there is no need for it. All I have been doing is putting out opinions to see if others might have similar views.
'E’s a doctor . . . kinda, sorta, if you squint really hard, or maybe a surgeon,
CMC fnord!
Isolating a group of people and identifying as infectious or susceptible by shirt color in order to identify some hypothetical “natural immunity” by “East Asians” (who you admit you don’t even know how to identify by national origin, presumably from an inability to look at a map) which no immunologist expects to find because this is a novel virus that has not previously been found in any human population is not “outlandish in anyway shape or form”?
You identify yourself as maintaining objectivity while painting others as expression irrational “hatred for the current administration”, which is a textbook case of the tu quoque method of argumentation. In fact, there are plenty of demonstrable objective criticisms for the way this administration and Trump in particular have handled the pandemic, from ignoring public health officials recommendations and failing to make preparations, downplaying concerns and claiming the virus would disappear “like a miracle” with warmer weather, holding back necessary medical and protective equipment from particular states out of a fit of pique with the state governors, attacking news media outlets and reporters for presenting factual information and asking question that he didn’t want to answer, promoting untested treatments as miracle cures and claiming that there are no harms in mass prescription, and of course retweeting a suggestion to fire the chief public health official not only leading the federal government response to this pandemic but who has been involved in the response to every national epidemic and many pandemic threats for decades.
Your ‘just asking questions’ rationale that you are just “putting out opinions to see if others might have similar views,” lost any sense of validity once you started railing about how the media is lying and everybody who disagrees with you by presenting factual evidence is just engaging in some kind of polemical opposition to legitimate questioning. And when you don’t have a leg left to stand on you pull out the “Y’all just hate on Trump” card with the knowledge that this will turn the thread into the very polarized discussion that you claim to wish to avoid. I call bullshit on this entire line of argumentation, and on your nonsensical “field experiments” and other “questions” that you claim to be purely motivated by some objective intellectual curiosity.
Stranger
I seem to be more aligned with your thinking in terms of how to get by this than I am with most other opinions, but I have to say, the notion that people want to keep things from opening at a faster pace is strictly politically motivated is not at all what I’m seeing.
I think attributing the motives of those with differing opinions to be due to hatred of the present administration is missing the rationale of the opinions by a wide, wide margin. The people you are saying are lacking critical thinking skills are, beyond a doubt, the most critical thinkers you’ll find.
Try taking a step back and realize the opinions and those you are disagreeing with are actually factually and scientifically based.
I agree they are factually and scientifically based opinions but none of them seem to be offering an acceptable conclusion or way to live with this virus.
We know the virus is not going away, most agree that not overloading the hospitals is our main goal. The big points of difference seem to come in when we talk about restarting a normal way of living. All I have been doing is proposing strategies based on lower risk groups re entering first while protecting those more at risk.
My beef with the news is that I feel too much energy is being put into bashing the administration when now more than ever people need information they can work with and statistics. They do put these things out there but they don’t get much time. At this time we don’t have factual answers when it comes to how many are infected and have not been counted for whatever reason. I would think by now there has been enough testing to at least generate some reasonable estimates. Hopefully this would lower death rate projections and alleviate a bit of fear in the people. I feel the news should spend more time talking about what is known about current risk factors. This can be useful to a person who is trying to make a decision about exposing himself to the virus or not. The media could be very helpful at this time and I am just not seeing it.
In the post I quoted you outright stated Stranger is basing his thoughts on his hatred for this administration and then open this post by saying the opinions are factually and scientifically based. You can’t have it both ways. You also then want to divert the discussion into the press and their handling of it, which is not what this is about. I’ve no intention of discussing the handling of this by the press. That is a very different topic and one you and I would disagree vehemently on.
I’ll again offer the opinion that if so many people are offering thoughts and ideas that are counter to your own, instead of just assigning that to ignorance or blindness for whatever reason (in this case political), I’d suggest reassessing your own biases and determining if those are making you blind to the realities.
I think you will see that as we speak trends are leaning more into my way of thinking and handling this case. My main interest is in collecting more data. I feel we have failed miserably there all over the world.
Why do you feel that way? What exactly is the data we are lacking, that your proposed experiment would provide? The disease is spreading in every country, so we already know that no group is completely immune to it.
No we don’t know that, there very well may be large groups that are less prone to catching it. I don’t believe we know much about that aspect. It appears that everyone can catch it but not enough people have contracted it yet to make those kind of determinations.
You completely ignored the point about how you are assigning political motivations to all this.
I ignored it because to say otherwise would lead no where. I believe what I see is obvious.
There is a variant of the virus which seems to only affect East Asians. That could be because East Asians are uniquely susceptible to that variant, or just a random thing in that the variants that jumped to other groups happened to be other variants or mutations of the East Asian only variant.
We don’t have factual answers to many questions because we are not able to get them at the moment. Testing is still not widespread enough to give good answers about how many people are infected. Right now, the antibody tests seem to work poorly, or are just complete scams. This is not the fault of the media. There is very little real and new information for the media to provide, so they rehash old things, disguise opinion as fact, and all of the other faults of the 24-hour news cycle. These things have been going on for 25+ years, we should be used to it for now.
This whole thing is happening in slow motion compared to a TV drama. People need to get used to the idea that there are no answers to lots of good questions. Answers may come eventually, but it could take years. Some things may never be answered. A news broadcast that says, a few more people died, a few more got infected, and a few recovered, otherwise no new news, is going to be awful boring, and over quick.
Another thing people need to get used to is that the low risk groups are not no-risk groups. Lots of people who were otherwise young and healthy end up in the ICU or dead. What is the risk? We don’t know. What risk level would you think is acceptable for people to deliberately infect themselves? 1 in 100,000 of ending up in the ICU? 1 in 1,000? 1 in 100?
So you see no scientific or fact based rationale for thinking that opening things up without extreme caution might lead to overwhelmed systems? Those thoughts are strictly politically based? People who are advocating for a slow return to “normal” are willing to sacrifice millions upon millions of jobs and many, many lives all just to get a new President?
Even I don’t go that far. As I said, I’m more aligned with you than most, it would seem, but even I can see that the thoughts counter to it have a sound scientific basis to them. I don’t necessarily agree, but I can see they are based on facts and not just a blind dislike for the current administration.
I think most people would actually be willing to have the present administration stick around if it meant saving lives and jobs, particularly on the scale we are talking about. The willingness to sacrifice the health, happiness and stability of millions of people simple to “get” the opposing party it not generally one that plays into the Democrat’s playbook.
You are changing what I said completely, I did advise extreme caution. I am against tracking down carriers once the transmission rate slows to an acceptable rate. I would put a lot more resources into protecting the vulnerable. I would see how things played out just using social distancing and eliminating large events. As transmissions slowed down open things up more and more. I am in favor of seeking herd immunity as quickly as is safely possible. This depends a lot on finding out how many carriers have never been diagnosed. If risk factors are low enough I see no reason to avoid this thing.
Good question about what are acceptable risk factors, I would say 1 in 10,000 life should go on like normal. 1 in 1,000 go to great lengths to identify and protect the vulnerable. The bottom line is we won’t get rid of this virus so we might just have to learn to live with it.
San Marino had a mortality of over 1000 per million population. They did have a much older than typical population and possibly other risk factors that were not published. But that is a scary number regardless.