From the Office of CA Governor Gavin Newsom:
ETA: What they ought to have been doing for the homeless all along anyway.
I hope thee kinds of measures become permanent.
Also I’m hoping for the death of the ultra-polluting and environment-destroying giant cruise ship industry.
Let’s say there’s enough political will to let old people die. Hospitals are mandated to only reserve hospital beds to people who are younger than 70.
Do you think this is going to fix the crisis?
Do you think suddenly a bunch of hospital beds are going to be freed up?
I’m trying to appraise your level of understanding of this crisis.
When grandma runs out of drugs, you must unplug.
If grandpa’s cough is great, you must terminate.
If mommy has a fever, you had better leave her.
If daddy’s eyes go dark, feed him to the sharks.
If sister is a Trumper, chain her to the bumper.
There must be 50 ways to grieve your mother.
Wow. That was amazing
Nicely done.
Purely anecdotal here, but I have a friend who posted on Facebook that he went out for a walk last night in his neighborhood, and didn’t get far before he someone having a big cookout in their backyard. And then he saw someone else having a party on their porch. So, yeah, it looks like after about a week, people are saying “To hell with it.”
Those morons get their names put on a list of people who are the last to get medical treatment and supplies.
No way. You really think any of those people were self isolated 2 days ago?
We were just discussing the food issue. We have allergy concerns in the house, and need to sort our food ideas accordingly.
My family grew up hunting and fishing, and while I am now physically handicapped, mrAru isn’t, nor are the 2 roomies. We have an assortment of gear - vermin rifles in .22, rifles with several types of ammo, shotguns with several gauges and types of ammo, and fishing rods and tidewater nets.
While there is not a legal hunting season running, squirrel are open season and fishing season opens in about 10 days. I know several areas that are currently having overpopulation issues with deer and rabbits, and I personally have no issue at the idea of poaching, but I would feel better if they would do some sort of opening of the season to allow subsistence hunting of the tastier critters. [not interested in skunk, coon and possum are ok but I prefer bunny] And let us discuss Canada goose … they are effectively an overpopulated invasive species. I haz recipes for goose …
Do people actually think this is sustainable? I think within a couple months is something I could see happening, although even that would have devastating impacts. Not to mention, the government would probably have to use dystopian levels of force to actually make it happen.
The damage to the economy is the most obvious, and I’m seeing some people being shamed and called “greedy fucks” for simply mentioning it and not agreeing to indefinite shutdown. But a severely damaged economy itself will cause massive suffering, if nothing else, for people not being able to provide for themselves.
Secondly, damage to mental and social health of citizenry. It’s being trivialized in the rhetoric of, “Your grandparents fought a war, and you’re simply being being asked to stay home.” But it doesn’t consider the fact that legitimate human interaction is an irreplaceable need for most. And this is not just at any other time, but in a time of great uncertainty and panic, where this sort of contact is even more so naturally sought out. Add in conditions like depression, anxiety, OCD, etc into the mix, and mental health professionals not being able to assist, and you really start having problems up to and including an increase in suicide rates.
Mind you, I’m not using these reasons to justify violating social distancing recommended measures or even advocate for others to do so, especially for now. I’m admittedly in a privileged position of being a college student living with my family who’s pretty well-off. And I’m staying home with them. But I think there’s a limit to how long realistically society as a whole will tolerate the implementation of such measures. Personally, my hunch is 6-8 weeks will be the breaking point in western societies.
I think most people will be seriously burned out by the beginning of April, people are really going to suffer out there financially.
My mother is inviting a guy over for dinner tonight. She’s known him like two weeks. Today she was bitching to me on the phone how tough it’s been. It’s been a WEEK.
My prediction that people would be okay with 3-4 weeks and then start fraying at the edges might have been way too high a guess. I was assuming people would start to panic based on the economic burden of all this. “Spoiled Boomer retirees” was a cohort I had not properly accounted for.
No, it’s not sustainable, and it’s worrying me that we’re going into it without a clear sense of what the endgame is supposed to be. “Everybody stay home until we get a ramped-up testing program going and we can identify and isolate people who actually have this disease” = fine. “Everybody stay home and forego human contact for an indefinite length of time” is not going to work, no matter how zealously and enthusiastically people are pursuing it at the moment. (I suspect public opinion will shift against it as quickly and as violently as it has shifted toward it over the last ten days, as some of the real-world effects become apparent.)
That long a time period isn’t needed. If everyone around the world stayed home for 3-4 months we would knock out the virus. It amazes me how even a few weeks seems to be an issue. From what I gather some people in Italy are still not participating in their lockdown despite the severity of the illness there. If people won’t agree to it when the medical system around them is falling apart, they probably never will.
The death rate for the population as a whole, if infected, is less than 1% (that’s the number based on populations that have been extensively tested; the higher numbers you see bandied about are subject to a selection bias, because people with more severe symptoms are more likely to be tested). The people who die are biased strongly towards the old and those who have severe pre-existing health conditions. It would be a reasonable approximation to say that, for the most part, those who die from coronavirus are those who would only live about another year anyway.
I’m not saying that those deaths aren’t tragic. Heck, when my grandmother died peacefully of natural causes and surrounded by family at the age of 93, that was tragic. But people dying a year earlier than they would have will not wreck the world economy, or have other significant second-order effects.
The measures put into place now will already have effects lasting for at least a decade. Kids are going to lose at least a month of schooling, and even if they come back this semester, any remaining educational time is going to be of severely diminished quality. It takes at least a couple of weeks to get students back up to speed after a break, and it’s only going to be worse for a break that wasn’t scheduled in advance.
Those months make a difference, all through a student’s educational life. Even in high school, you can see differences in overall performance, based on where student ages fall relative to the cutoff date between the grades. All students who have lost school from this are going to perform more poorly than they should have, and that’s going to especially make a difference in trained fields. Two or three decades from now, we might see a shortage of trained professionals. Like, say, doctors and epidemiologists. What happens then?
That’s the problem. If it was actively followed by everyone, then it could be contained and eradicated on a much more reasonable timeframe. But instead, it’s inevitably going to get half-assed, only marginally improve health outcomes, and still devastate the economy. The only positive outcome is if it buys enough time for a good treatment to come out in a few weeks.
I think everyone would be OK-ish with a message like, “We’re going to stay home for three months as we try to increase our hospital bed capacity as much as possible. It’s going to be a hard three months and everyone’s going to have to make sacrifices on all fronts. We will all have to make some difficult choices. But if we all dig in for the next three months, we will likely have the infrastructure we need to go back to a state of near-normalcy.”
We would be OK with this because there would be interim goals to assess progress with. At each presser, the president could announce how many hospital beds and ventilators had been added to the running total. The media could show footage of all the construction and then show footage of the hospitals filling with relieved and grateful patients. It would counterbalance the depressing death statistics we’re almost certainly going to be bombarded with. And people would feel hopeful knowing that there was a hospital being built in their city or county. It might empower people to fundraise and bring additional resources to the table.
Right now we don’t have any interim goals. The only statistics we hear are grim ones. And they are only going to get grimmer as this thing continues.