Multigenerational households are more common among poor households than well-to-do ones. I think it is reasonable to surmise that multigenerational households are more common in rural areas than urban. One hypothesis for the heavy death toll in Italy compared to other places is that elderly Italians are more likely to live under the same roof as their viral-particle-shedding grandkids. We’re being told to avoid elderly folks as much as possible, but what do you do if one of your housemates is elderly? There isn’t much you can do.
You are not understanding the concept of signaling. The average person, unsure of the facts, checks to see what leaders say and do - especially do. Someone saying follow the rules and then not following the rules signals that the rules are worthless. Why they do this is unimportant, what is important is that they are doing (or not doing) it.
Basically why “do what I say, not what I do” seldom works.
I’ve been making this point for a while now. New York made it through because they have a huge and robust hospital system.
What happens if 30 seriously sick people show up at a rural hospital with 1 ventilator and 5 ICU beds? I guess they’d try to transfer them, but what if all the other rural hospitals in the state were full, if not overwhelmed. You aren’t going to need the NYC level of cases to encounter serious problems.
Outbreaks in more rural areas also have outsized impacts on the supply chain, as we are already seeing. There are lot of professional service businesses located in urban areas as well as businesses (retail, food, healthcare) that support the local population. But what urban areas tend not to have is large nation industrial and manufacturing concerns and outbreaks in those areas make the supply chain more vulnerable.
I’m actually in favor of lifting some of the restrictions responsibly. I’m OK with hairdressers and retail stores reopening with distancing and masking. I feel that the definition of essential service needs to expand as lockdown times increase. I’m OK with going 6 days or 6 weeks without being able to get haircut, replace a broken small appliance or buy some new pants that fit my lockdown expanded butt. But 6 months, not so much.
What I find irresponsible is the people refusing to adhere to basic and easy masking and distancing protocols because freedom. The argument that rural areas are less vulnerable falls apart if the residents of these areas start traveling around the country attending a large protest rally with no distancing and masking a few times a week.
Of particular note:
*The latest cluster in Wuhan demonstrates how hard it will be to measure whether any location is truly free of coronavirus. The new cases there suggest the virus can flare up in patients up to 50 days after they have apparently recovered, said Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, in an interview with state broadcaster CCTV.
“The course of disease could last 30 to 50 days for some patients,” Wu said. “The virus could take longer to manifest itself in patients with weak immunity, who are also prone to ‘ons’ and ‘offs’ of symptoms.”*
In rural areas with lower population densities it may take longer for the contagion to get a solid foothold and infect a large enough population to witness geometric growth but absent of physical distancing and isolation measures it will develop at a comparable rate. And while it is true that some people in rural areas are truly isolated, most of what is considered ‘rural’ are actually towns of less than a few thousand people who often interact. The demographics of rural populations are notably older, often with poorer nutrition and overall health, often with high rates of underlying conditions such as hypertension, and typically with little access to preventative or emergency health care.
If there are even a small percentage of people who can express and shed the virus for weeks, it is enough to ensure sustained transmission through such populations, and between the cofactors making them more susceptible and lack of critical care facilities we can expect to see case fatality rates rising to the high end of the range. This is not just an ‘urban disease’ like cholera or typhus that requires high population density and lapses in sanitation to maintain spread; even brief non-contact exposure to an infected, often asymptomatic person have been evidenced as sufficient to transmit the virus.
And it doesn’t take a large number of people to spread this. Just a single person bringing the contagion back to their town or neighborhood and then going to a community gathering could be enough to nucleate an infection node. And to be clear, in absence of a vaccine this is going to happen sooner or later, but if it happens at many communities all at once the already undersupported and fragile regional health care systems are going to be quickly overwhelmed.
I see you’re back in the prediction business. Isn’t this at least the second time now you have spelled the end for these folk? Wasn’t it a month or more ago that hospital receptionists ‘everywhere’ were going to be dropping dead from this?
Not all rural states are poverty striken. New Hampshire is very rural and one of the wealthiest states in the country. Other states in the top 20 by median household income are also rural too, particularly in the northeast and great plains regions.
It depends on if the conservative message that this is mainly an “urban” or immigrant issue keeps gaining momentum. If it remains successful then the reaction will be gleeful to indifferent.
I live in such a town, several miles outside the nearest village. My nearest neighbor’s house is something over 700 feet away from mine; some in this area are further than that from their nearest neighbor. But in anything remotely resembling normal times, nobody or next to nobody stays home all the time and never interacts with anybody; or even interacts with only a few people. Children go to school, visit each other’s houses, visit their grandparents and aunts and uncles. Everybody goes to the grocery store. Many people go to church. Many people go to sports events and shows put on at the school, to car races, to county fairs. Many people go to meetings, on one subject or another. People go to the movies, and yard saleing, and to the library. People have family reunions, and neighborhood parties, and Fourth of July parties, and so on. Just about every town has at least one festival, and many people go to festivals in more than one town. People go to bars, and restaurants, and over to the winery to hear a band, and to fundraising dinners.
And it’s not an isolated clump of those who only see each other. People go away to college, or to one city or another, sometimes out of state, sometimes even out of country, to visit someone, or for entertainment, or for work, or to go shopping; and they come back home. And then there’s the tourists . . .
Too late to edit, but to clarify: That’s not what we’re doing now; most businesses are still closed, and most people are being pretty careful about distancing. But the point is that just living in a rural area isn’t going to somehow protect us.
I read a very appropriate “if” in there and with that if there is very little in doubt about what was said. Influenza often nearly swamps many rural health systems and something that hits more of the population and makes them sicker than it does would, if hitting many of them at the same time, be overwhelming no question. If.
To get back to the original question, How will people react if Covid-19 flares up when the lockdown ends? I’m thinking of an experience I had in the early 80s living in the Bay Area. There was a fad there* lasting about three months of “investors clubs.” The club members did no actual investing or selling of anything; they paid a fee to join and those fees were then distributed to those who had joined earlier. It was a classic Ponzi scheme except that it was a bunch of little ones instead of one big one with a central fraudster.
The county DA denounced them as such and his office and the police did their best to stamp them out when they were discovered. Nobody actually went to prison, so far as I know, but lists were seized and the remaining assets were returned, as far as they went.
People were whinging about how “The Man” doesn’t want us to be rich and otherwise complaining that their freedoms were being infringed upon and new clubs kept springing up like mushrooms. Inevitably when the clubs began collapsing – even the ones that had escaped detection – their tune changed to, “Nobody told us this would happen,” and “why didn’t you protect us?”
I’m thinking we’ll have the same thing here, only involving dead people instead of just money.
*It might have been a national phenomenon but I recall only local news stories.
If you, as the leader, follow all the rules and procedures, will your employees do so as well? Maybe, maybe not.
If you, as the leader, do not follow the rules and procedures, will your employees? Hell no.
As regards to the OP, I would change out that IF for a when. If we could be even slightly responsible about things, then we could probably lift many restrictions and get back to 80% of normalcy. People being irresponsible is going to cause all of us to have to endure much heavier restrictions than we would otherwise.
Yesterday, I saw some church group marching down the street, all clustered together and not a single one wearing a mask, probably about 30 ish people. I’ve seen them before, so this wasn’t some sort of lockdown protest specifically, but in this time, any time you are not following CDC recommendations and state guidelines, you are making a statement.
When we have a flare up around here, I know who I will be blaming.
People repeatedly say that relaxing distancing will only impact those who freely choose to take more risks. That’s not the case in many areas. I’m in a state with pretty strict lockdown rules, but you cannot buy truly protective masks either online or in stores. Most people are wearing makeshift face coverings like bandanas. These may help protect you from being arrested if you hold up a convenience store, but they do very little to protect the wearer from an infected person coughing in their face. When wearing a mask only protects others,the incentive to wear one is low, particularly for people who don’t think they are at high risk of death from this.
I’d be much more sanguine about opening up businesses again if I could get real PPE, such as an N95 mask and hand sanitizer. I cannot buy either of these things in stores or online right now. I cannot even buy isopropyl alcohol.
My primary care physician cannot get masks for the other doctors and staff. They have one masked worker screening patients in the parking lot and sending anyone who might have covid to go to directly to the hospital.
The result is that, even if the state opened up every business tomorrow, I won’t feel safe going into stores. Worse yet for the economy, I suspect I am in a group of people who have discovered during lockdown that a lot of the shopping I used to do was more for fun than for function. I’m probably going to buy less stuff generally going forward.
Those who think the US death rate for covid is similar to that of flu fail to account for the deliberate undercounting of cases. The shortage of testing is not simply due to incompetence, it was done because the selfish minds at the White House felt that the health of the stock market was more important than tens of thousands of human lives.
Welcome to the Dope!
It is surprising how many people don’t get this. But wearing masks does have an additional benefit - it is a reminder to social distance, perhaps even for those who are too rude to wear masks.
That is a primary value; it signals who is taking this seriously and who is not. I don’t have much faith in woven fabric face coverings in preventing aerosol emission of the virus, but if I see someone wearing one properly, e.g. not with their nose poking out or loose around their neck then at least I know they have heard and probably understood the need for physical distance (which is more important), and that they are probably not going to get offended and physically attack if reminded of the need for distance. I wish there were more reinforcement of proper mask wearing and he need for hand/face sanitation but at least I can weed out the aware from the ignorant and assholes.