unfortunately it’s not a monolithic group. You have the whiners who have to be unfettered and then you have people staring financial ruin in the face.
I’ve been through the fear of financial ruin during the last economic downturn. It took 6 grueling years to get back to something that resembled my former life. I understand the need to go back to work.
What everyone needs to understand is that today is not the same as yesterday. As we go forward we have more people who have survived the virus and we know more about how to deal with it once someone gets it. That will hold true each day going forward.
We HAVE to go back to work and we HAVE to maintain control of the rate of infection. It’s not an either or. We need to do both.
I agree with this. When I look at the linked chart, it looks like the classic “higher highs” in a volatile stock. If you were investing, you wouldn’t short the stock unless you had other information, because it looks like it is still on the rise. Other states, like New York, have a curve that does in fact bend over, with lower lows and lower highs after the peak. For Texas, one could draw curves that peak at any number of dates in the future.
And why is the curve several days out of date in its actual data curve? Aren’t these numbers updated daily?
"PSD [Paid Sick Day] access is associated with the CDC-recommended behavior of staying home from work when sick for an employee’s own illness/injury, [influenza-like-illness], or influenza – Paid sick days and stay-at-home behavior for influenza
About half (47%) of working Americans told pollsters they went to work sick in the past twelve months, usually because they couldn’t take time off or felt they shouldn’t – Huffington Post/YouGov poll
What is this word “if” you use there?
Surely you meant “when” “after” or some such words.
Well, people will get sick. People will die. The usual. More than if lockdown was sustained, but less than in the initial wave.
Partly due to a measure of sustained social distancing, partly because the medical infrastructure has a better understanding of what they will be facing and are thus better prepared. Partly, sadly, because the truly vulnerable segment of the population is no longer available to get the virus.
And eventually, we will get through it.
As the old adage says, “this too shall pass”
(of course if you have kidney stones, that phrase evokes horror not comfort)
We might get there eventually, yes: everybody vulnerable already dead. I really hope we don’t (and not only because I’m probably one of them.) We certainly aren’t anywhere near there right now.
Fucking hell, stop using the IHME model, which assumes a Gaussian distribution of death counts in their state forecasts. It’s fucked, it’s been proven to be fucked, it is continuing to be fucked. Fucked. Hell,even the right has called them garbage. Now, I’m not claiming that they are intentionally distorting shit. I find them to be a reputable group who simply can’t seem to get this one right (I believe it is due to the fact that they are way too optimistic about how the US will continue to social distance properly, whereas many states have already started to say “fuck that noise”). Perhaps no one else can, but when the states’ daily death numbers are outside of your 95% confidence interval 70% of the time, you have no business being listened to until you fix that shit.
The unknown in all this allows people to just say, “fuck it”, bc human brains are not really wired to handle the deep void of a uncertain future. So, everyone just gives into their need for relief. I recall my grandmother telling me that people were quite heroic during the WW2, at least at the beginning. As it continued, there began to be more crime, more black market, etc. When something begins to become long term, that is when humans begin to lose their taste for fighting onward, lose their belief in a better outcome, and are more interested in doing whatever it takes to end it or seek to dominate the situation so that they survive . That last part makes me fearful.
But I am not so sure we haven’t been at that point for quite awhile, now. The virus just brought much of it to the surface of society.
The Families First Coronavirus Response Act does not apply to most private companies with more than 500 employees (as noted by your cite). Most of the meatpacking plants are well over that size limit, so what is the relevance of the law to the particular situation we are discussing?
You forgot obesity, that’s a major factor in mortality. Anyone who thinks only old people are fat…well, let’s just assume nobody is THAT deluded.
There are a couple of factors with this virus that throw a big monkey wrench into our usual handling of sick workers. One is that people tend to STAY sick with it, sometimes for several weeks or even a couple months. Those people are infectious the entire time so who the hell has enough sick leave to cover two months? Not the kind of people who don’t also have savings and resources sufficient to cover two months of not being able to work.
The other is the asymptomatic carrier. Many of these cases might actually be PREsymptomatic carriers, but what if it happens that some people can carry and shed the virus at a brisk rate but never show so much as a sniffle? You want to work right next to people who might be passing virus to you with every breath, virus that they’re apparently resistant to but that you might not be? And how do you KNOW that Claudia the office manager is a carrier or not? Answer is that unless we get crackin’ with some fucking comprehensive testing of people who AREN’T already on death’s door we never will know and everyone will be playing Virus Roulette every time they go to work.
It really bothers me that there isn’t a more comprehensive push toward global testing. We’re just playing casino games with poor people’s lives because a few elites don’t want to spend money helping the poors even when that help is beneficial to them as well.
I feel like a huge missing component is a massive, coherent, consistent public awareness campaign. Like WWII propaganda, but about public health. We need some sort of consistent messaging on what is safe and what isn’t. There needs to be social pressure toward hand washing constantly, wearing masks, minimizing contact. There are a lot of people who are not taking this seriously and don’t know anyone who really is. We need to figure out some advice we can give people that is somewhere between “quit your job and stay inside and starve” and “go back to work, go everywhere you used to, but be sorta kinda careful not to get too close, only not really”. Even here, I’ve seen a lot of people talk about this as if it’s all or nothing: if you do anything risky at all, it’s as if you have taken no precautions at all, which I do not think is really the case. The “open up” mantra seems to be “let people decide for themselves” but they are getting precious little information to make decisions on.
I’m pretty sure shaking hands is pretty much going to be out for a long time.
On flare ups its not a matter of when but how much and who will it affect? Hopefully, most of the most vulnerable people in say nursing homes are already under quarantine and should be safe from a new flareup. What I am worried about is August when the schools are supposed to reopen.
Many with diabetes, high blood pressure or asthma or a smoking habit have been leading active productive lives in the absence of the coronavirus pandemic. That’s because up until now, going to work wasn’t a gamble that your office mates aren’t silent carriers for a disease that has no vaccine or treatment.
We live in a society where being me-first-and-fuck-you is not only the norm but is a highly admired characteristic. Now we’re supposed to place our lives and wellbeing in the hands of people we know for a fact are amoral self centered assholes. This does not promote prosocial feelings and confidence in our fellow humans.
“Businesses with the least financial assets,” however, is not a good description of the behemoths that dominate the food processing industry today, especially meat packing. The Smithfield hog processing plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, alone accounts for four or five percent of all the hogs processed in the US; the JBS beef plant in Greeley, Colorado, slaughters 5400 cattle a day. When these plants close, that’s when the supply chain has problems, which was your initial question.
That same Colorado plant was chastised by the local health department for its "work while sick” culture; the Weld County Health Dept analysis showed that 64% of the COVID-19 cases there had worked while symptomatic, hence sharing the virus with coworkers and leading to more than 200 cases at the plant (the Sioux Falls Smithfield plant is now up to 800+ cases). At a certain point, of course, too many people are too sick (or too afraid) to show up for work, then the plant can’t operate at full capacity, or maybe can’t operate at all, and then whichever distributors and grocers are supplied by that plant can’t get adequate supplies, and the supply chain is in trouble even if nobody died.
Because the Families First Coronavirus Response Act does not extend paid sick leave to employees at these mega-plants, its existence is irrelevant to the discussion of how and why supply chain problems are already happening in meats.
Where in the US are farmers prevented from leaving their houses?
That ship sailed years ago. I see no others steaming toward us.
Especially when too many of those “fellow humans” don’t care who lives or dies and demand the liberty to spread contagion and misery. We have the right to kill or be killed and that’s about it. Still, I foresee repercussions. Survivors may not be kind to enablers.
No question that they have been the worst possible model … except for all the others!
There’s a great graphic in this NYT article tracking the different projection and their changes over time. The very first IHME projections turned out to be not so bad to date of the article, and far better performing than any of the others. They’ve been all over the place.