People are idiots. We’re gonna get hit just as hard as Italy did.
As usual, the people doing stupid sh*t make the news, while the many other people doing the right thing don’t. The pictures of full beaches are more than matched by the pictures of near-empty streets.
It only takes “enough” infected people to spread a pandemic.
The problem is that the full beaches make the empty streets a lot less useful. What you’re basically saying is “the people starting forest fires make the news, not all those people who don’t start forest fires”.
And I also should note, the relatively empty streets of New York have made the news from my viewing.
This thread is gonna read very differently in a few months. I hope with all my heart that it will read differently because those of us who are worried about this were wrong. I’d love to be wrong. But I’m worried it will read differently because of how insane the rest of us will look.
Depends. If you’re out of work and they haven’t passed something that will get you through whatever time period this takes, I doubt 2 months.
Sure, but this thread isn’t about the necessity of extreme measures. It’s about the public, political, and economic tolerance to them. Are you saying that’s all irrelevant? I don’t think it is, especially in this country.
Of course it’s irrelevant, when it comes to making a decision about how to act. What if people in England got fed up with taking shelter every time a siren warned them that German bombers were coming, so they decided to pack the beaches instead? Would you be telling people who think they are fools, “but you’re not considering the public tolerance when it comes to extreme decisions like staying indoors and using blackout curtains!”. Screw THAT.
Okay, fine, what financial and other kinds of assistance do you envision the federal government having to offer individuals, families, and businesses of all sizes for the entire duration? Or is that irrelevant too? What happens if the nation does shut down for six months, but there is a refusal to provide the envisioned assistance (which is more than a distinct possibility)?
Also, the Blitz lasted for two and a half months, with very obvious, immediately dangerous conditions outside. Using that as an analogy for a duration four times that with a nation as large as the U.S. with a “delayed danger” like disease isn’t very useful to me.
That’s ridiculous, of course it’s relevant. How people will behave is immediately relevant in trying to control their behaviour.
Then they would have been blown up, and had that been a serious problem, the manner in which air raid warnings were made would have had to be changed.
I honestly don’t think you’re quite comprehending what the thread is about. It’s not about how long the lockdown SHOULD be. You seem to think it should be extremely long; okay, that’s your position. But the thread is not “How long should the lockdown be” it’s “How long/much of a lockdown will people tolerate?”
of course that’s not irrelevant – the government needs to be making sure everyone is fed and supplied (ideally by piggybacking off of our already existing resource distribution chains), ensuring essential work is done, and enforcing the quarantine. There is an enormous amount of work and aid for the government to do. And the idea that the government would just refuse to provide assistance is laughable. If that happens, then the government needs to be replaced.
That’s a statement about how bad people are at risk assessment, not a factor we should use to make decisions. Coronavirus will kill hundreds of times more people than the bombing of England did, yet we will not react nearly strongly enough.
People are stupid. That there will be idiots complaining about the quarantine and trying to find ways around it is inevitable. The government will need to enforce quarantine – or tens of thousands, at a minimum, will die.
The quarantine doesn’t need to be LONG. It needs to be THOROUGH. A total lockdown for 3 weeks would totally starve the virus of new patients, but is basically impossible in the US.
What YOU are missing is that everything that scares you about a lockdown will happen anyways, when millions are sick and tens of thousands are dead. That will disrupt our economy just as much as a quarantine would. So the answer to the question, “how much will the people put up with”, is “whatever it takes, or thousands will die”.
If you’re asking, what WILL happen, rather than what needs to happen? Then the answer is, it’s already too late. The “quarantine” instituted in the States is a total joke (and not even happening in most of the country). Waaaaaay too little, way too late – and people already won’t put up with it. We are beyond boned.
A sincere thanks to all for enlightening me with your posts. Between those and what I’m seeing around me, I now recognize there’ll be little or no mitigation of the human and economic catastrophe that lies ahead. Desperation will force even those who have self-isolated back into society and what remains of the work force, which will be most but not all of it.
I don’t think people recognize the economic devastation this will bring even if businesses reopened tomorrow. The false notion that, as Chronos said, the only people dying will be the extremely elderly and those with severe underlying diseases is a common one. Too bad for them, but they were gonna die in a year anyway; I need to feed my family. The fact most of “them” weren’t going to die soon and that one doesn’t need a severe underlying health issue–mild asthma will do–to become fatally ill will understandably get tossed to the winds. We can’t reasonably expect people to care about the bigger picture when the smaller one is so dire.
The need for employer-provided insurance alone will drive people to ignore that bigger picture and go back to work…or try to. Yet tens of millions of hospitalizations (at an average of 11 days per) and the tumbling economy (which hurts insurance company investments) mean some insurance companies will go bankrupt. Rates will skyrocket. Medicare and Medicaid will cover some of those hospitalizations, but the expected expense will blow past Medicare and Medicaid’s $582 billion budget.
Nope, we’re in for unprecedented and unmitigated disaster.
And that ‘enough’ could just be people going to the grocery store.
I complained earlier that shutting down restaurants was a mistake cause they were shutting down places with -70% attendance to funnel everyone through germ-infested choke points.
For myself, I quite like being in my own home. I’ve spent decades making sure it was filled with stuff I like to have and like to do. As a kid, I didn’t mind getting sent to my room for the same reason.
Those pictures of yahoos out swimming and partying on boats are sickening to look at, no pun intended. How could anyone be that stupid? This is exactly how a potentially controllable pandemic becomes runaway out-of-control.
I think tolerance of a lockdown depends very much on individual circumstances. For most people financial considerations are foremost. I’m OK in that respect as I’m retired anyway, but many will need financial relief in the form of government aid as well as things like mortgage and rent deferrals. That’s probably the biggest constraining factor. Another is mobility – if there is a medical reason for self-quarantine, then typically the entire household is affected (our own Prime Minister self-quarantined when his wife tested positive) and one is essentially immobilized and dependent on the goodwill of friends and neighbors for essential supplies – even where grocery delivery services exist, they’re currently badly backlogged.
BTW, I forgot to pay one of my credit card bills last month, which is very unusual for me as I usually pay them in full. I got the typical annoying collection call today, which pissed me off because it was as if they were completely ignoring the crisis and many people’s financial plight. I was pleasantly surprised when what the lady (at the call center of a major bank) said was, “I see that you’ve been a very good customer, and we were wondering if there’s anything we could do to help if you’re having financial difficulties”. I thought that was commendable. I told her thanks, but mainly I was having memory and mental health difficulties, and would pay the full amount today. 
When do you think the US will overtake Italy in number of cases? US is currently #3 and closing fast.
You must be confusing me with something else. There is no “anyways.” The nature and length of a lockdown has a huge, huge impact on what will and won’t happen.
But having said, that, the question posed by the OP is how long a lockdown people will tolerate. I’m curious as to whether you have an opinion on that.
How many tests are being done in the USA now, and are more being rolled out? That’s really the only thing that matters. The USA almost certainly has more people actually carrying the virus. The number of officially infected people would skyrocket is you could actually test a lot of people; that’s not actually how fast it’s spreading though. If they have the tests ready to go the USA could be up two two million cases by Thursday, but that’s just better visibility, not contagion.
The USA is so short on tests as opposed to the current need that what will likely happen is that the official number of infected will continue to rise after the actual number isn’t rising anymore. The last number I can find is that 170,000 people have been tested, a ludicrously tiny number in a country of 350,000,000 people. That’s not even a good portion of people with symptoms consistent with the disease. Canada has tested half that many people in a country with one ninth the population, and as a Canadian I find our efforts frustratingly short.
I don’t think what is happening now comes close to how stringent a “lockdown” will need to be. And it seems to be that people aren’t tolerating the current situation – plenty of complaining and plenty of people ignoring the situation.
So how long would people tolerate a real lockdown, like what was just announced in England? I think if we had competent leadership that wasnt afraid to explain how dire things really are, we could tolerate it for a few weeks. As is, I don’t think we will tolerate it at all until so many people are sick and dying (see: italy) that it will be too late.
The more I read others’ opinions about this, the more I see the related questions: how much are you personally willing to sacrifice to save lives? How much is the average person? Is it easy or difficult for human beings to social distance or quarantine themselves for extended periods of time? Is it easy or difficult to for authorities to force human beings to do so? What enforcement measures would be necessary to force an extended stay at home order? What would be the reaction when the breaking point is eventually reached? Is the economy relevant or not? When does it become “evil” to prioritize “money” over lives? Do any of these answers change outside America, and if so, how significantly?
Wow. There’s a lot to this. Some folks seem to think it’s a fairly simple concept, but I’m having my doubts that it is.