I agree, telling people to attend parades and then sending people with the virus to nursing homes was bad leadership. But we’re not opening up without restrictions so you’re posting strawmen. If you’re moving between parallel universes then take it up with the one that is opening up without restrictions.
If my parents were alive they would be sheltering in place. They’d expect me to work for a living in the controlled reopening of the economy if I had lost my job.
Bullshit argument. When’s the last time hospitals were overwhelmed by the flu and bodies had to be stacked just wherever?
Better broke than dead. You can always earn more money.
Clearly, you have no valid arguments.
Because most of humanity has adapted to the flu. Most health systems have adapted to the flu. Not so with COVID-19, which is also mutating as we speak. It’s not that we don’t care about flu; in fact perhaps the great worry now is that COVID-19 will still be widely circulating and gradually mutating to inflict misery across a wider range of people at a time when flu season is at its peak. That would bankrupt rural hospitals. It would overwhelm the hospitals that survive.
And people wouldn’t exactly feel like going to bars, restaurants, or barber shops, either. It’s fine that you have accepted the possibility of shaving a decade or two off of your lifespan, but most people haven’t, and you shouldn’t expect them to.
You’ve been told time and time again that this is not flu: what’s your deal?
Great, let me know how we’re going to have a structured return to work when health insurance is tied to employment. See that’s something that hardly gets discussion in the news but it’s the reason we’ve been locked down in the first place. It’s why a lot of people - we can debate the percentage, whether it’s 40, 60, or 70% - don’t really want to go have a lot of contact with other people right now.
Flu deaths may be overstated also (piece by an ED doctor … it’s possible I may have picked this up from another thread on this board, in which case … thanks to whoever)
Even with the best data, getting a precise count of a virus death toll and number of infections is educated guesswork; it’s not exact.
I’m asking what the death count has to be before we shut things down and how much money we assign to that number.
No argument has been made that the coronavirus is the same as the flu nor have I argued that we shoudn’t have shut things down. We have seriously throttled the economy for 8 weeks and the numbers have improved greatly.
Despite all the social distancing we have a significant number of people who got the virus and survived. That means a significant number of people are likely immune to it going forward which means the metrics have changed substantially from the beginning of the pandemic. We are not going to have the same rates of infection. This combined with a structured return to work means the rates should be manageable. We’ve also made progress with treatment protocols which improves the survival rate.
A better question to ask is what happens if we reopen and then end up getting hit with another wave that’s even worse than this one. This is particularly relevant considering that one of the countries touted as having ‘tamed’ the disease South Korea has seen a spike in cases. A small and controllable spike, but a clear indication that we’re going to be wrestling with this for a while.
If we open up too early, if hospital systems are allowed to get overwhelmed, people will stay home, and whatever economic activity that resumes between now and then will trend downward, and fast. Only this time, there will be less hope that experts anywhere ‘got this’. We will have spent trillions of dollars and spent half a year, and we won’t have shit to show for it.
The mood in this country would be dark, and we’d be psychologically radioactive.
Thank you for that—I had never heard of this. It will be interesting to see which of the two has more and more significant longer-term effects in the long term; too early to know now, of course.
But since Magiver seems to have missed it: I’ll reiterate the point: recovery from COVID-19 doesn’t necessarily mean “all clear.”
Also, re: the 28-year-old and the 84-year-old, I think it really depends. There are a lot of people at 84 whose knowledge and experience are uniquely valuable, and there are a lot of 28-year-olds who have closed off most of the good options for their future. I will never be in a position to decide, but age alone is a terrible criteria for value, as is wealth alone. But yeah, if it were nothing but age we’d probably all off the 84-year-old, but I hope not with a clear conscience.
Yes, we have, and I don’t think anyone here is unsympathetic to that reality. A number of us are living it, and many among those who are living it still think we can do better than being treated like we’re expendable.
Nope, not even remotely close to herd immunity. What we’re seeing is that we started lockdowns a little later than we should have. We didn’t implement them as widely as we should have. We got way, way, way behind on testing. And because we have a terrible health insurance system that is tied to jobs that have been shed by the millions and wasn’t really that good to begin with, people are likely avoiding the health system and avoiding testing.
Back economics is also part of the problem. Growing economic inequality in our society forces millions of workers to choose between getting potentially hospitalized (and broke) or losing their home. Bottom line: The US is uniquely positioned to do poorly in responding to COVID-19 relative to other countries.
Clearly you can’t face the fact that there is a cost to throttling the economy and we have refused that cost for other diseases that kill tens of thousands of people a year. I’m asking you why they don’t count? I’ve already answered that. I’m asking you to do the same.
What is your metric going forward to throttle the economy and how would you apply it differently than the structured return of those who are unemployed.
Hundreds of thousands of people per year are different than tens of thousands of people per year.
A disease to which 100% of the people are vulnerable is different from a disease to which a much smaller percentage of the population is vulnerable.
We have been promoting flu shots heavily as the best means of preventing needless flu deaths; the way flu viruses behave is known and studied and the combination of preventative methods means a quarantine wouldn’t be helpful. We have zero means of preventing COVID other than physical distancing and PPE.
Again not defending Magiver’s argument but responding to the dismissive attitude on some subjects. 2017-18 came close to overwhelming hospitals. Many had tents set up and were creating makeshift ICUs. A little bit more and bodies stacked up would have been a real thing.
Worldwide the broke will be many dead not able to earn more money. Covered in other threads but the result of economic shut downs will be a global hunger pandemic. Trade feeds much of the world. Perhaps they should eat cake? There will be hundreds of thousands of children worldwide over the next year and beyond dying from diseases related to malnutrition and from vaccine preventable diseases not prevented because the ongoing global collapse is halting many vaccine programs to lower income nations … dead in their tracks.
I suspect you have enough savings and/or benefits or other safety net that you are not worried about having to live homeless on the streets in a few months or being able to feed yourself or your children. Maybe you, as a well educated person, have a job that you can do from home. Maybe this is just a prolonged boring vacation to you. It is not the case for many in this country and the impact of the ongoing economic troubles is in fact life and death for many worldwide over the next year. To the degree that such is required to prevent a greater number of deaths, they are deaths that must be accepted. But do not so casually dismiss their reality or their importance.
Not everyone of this planet is in the same position of privilege that you may be in.
Dr. Drake if nothing else the issue will include many more with sequelae from COVID-19 in a short period of time. Even if each one has the same aftercourse as from influenza, if, it is still a larger absolute number in a shorter time period.
It’s not that they don’t count; it’s that even with a bad influenza season, the health system has prepared to deal with flu. The normal range of influenza deaths is somewhat predictable. People can also go out and vaccinated. We know what we’re dealing with when it comes to flu - until we don’t, until we have a really, really bad strain, which is rare.
Again, COVID-19 is deadlier than the flu, and there is no immunity. Even with shutting down commerce and social interaction, we have 80,000 deaths and growing. The infection rate is still growing at 3% even with these unprecedented measures. What do you think would happen if we pretended that COVID-19 were the flu and we just let the virus spread? I think we could be about to find out.
Maybe instead of asking this question, a better one to ask is how can we simultaneously find ways to cautiously reopen while protecting the most vulnerable, and also doing whatever we can to get cash in the hands of the economically vulnerable and protecting vulnerable businesses and local and state governments. Accept that life has changed and that it won’t change back anytime soon and just deal with the new reality.
That also happened to coincide with about a 6% decline in flu vaccinations that same year. Not that it changes the results, but influenza is partly spread by lax and toxic attitudes toward vaccinations.
I don’t make that assumption; I think he wants people to work and shop but do so safely. I don’t know why anyone is speaking from a position of privilege simply for prioritizing public health over economic concerns. There are ways that government can deal with the economic fallout, both in the short term and long term.
Kinda depends how much economic fallout there is. There is certainly a theoretical amount of damage the government cannot effectively deal with.
Governments cannot just pay people to stay home indefinitely. That is something with a time limit on how long it’ll work; money is not wealth, it is only a way of exchanging wealth.
I’ve used the term “structured recovery” since at least post 150. I’ve never suggested we not shelter in place to mitigate the pandemic. I’ve explained why we sheltered in place. But there is nebulous pushback on what the states are doing. It appears to be focused on lives-vs-jobs.
The structured recovery that the states are pursuing is related to my question. Why do we ignore flu victims in the thousands? It’s directly related to why we throttled the economy and why we’re doing a structured recovery of jobs and not opening it up like a light switch.
Our reaction to large scale medical events is not a lives vs jobs decision. It’s not a cost per life decision. It’s about preventing a collapse of our medical system.
When any disease widely overwhelms our health care system for weeks or months on end, then it “counts.” Especially if it is a disease contagious through casual human contact that we have no resistance to, no vaccine for, and with little or no treatment available.
Destructive as it was, the AIDS epidemic wouldn’t count because it’s typically spread through non-casual contact. The 1918 flu and COVID-19 definitely count because they tick off every box. Last year’s flu season would not because we had vaccines and treatments that worked.
The link I presented you with about half or more of potential retirees being unable to meet basic necessities… you seem to be ok with their financial ruin. I mean, the options you presented were retire or get sick and die. Why don’t those people count?
My neighbors who live in the apt next door had a party that included beer pong on their balcony. No one was distanced and no one was masked. This is west LA, not Trump country. And this article appears today:
We have been spared anything like the worst of the pandemic and people are no longer afraid of it.
You first. How much death will you tolerate? 3000/week? 10,000/week? 20k/week is .5 million in six months. Well? Are all those deaths the cost of doing business?
In each of the past several years, the reported number of actual confirmed influenza deaths in the US has ranged from around 3500 to 15,620. The CDC later massages these numbers to get statistical estimates, and figures around six times as many people die of flu (including pneumonia deaths) as are actually confirmed. (See this discussion.) You are familiar with the estimates, including up to 80,000 in the last really bad outbreak.
In the last three months (really, mostly a month and a half), the actual confirmed COVID-19 deaths in the US have numbered over 80,000; at some later point, the CDC will massage this number to get a statistical estimate that includes people who were never tested. Based on some preliminary numbers of excess deaths in New York, the real total of Americans who have died in the current pandemic may already exceed two hundred thousand, and the year is young.
For the flu, we already have some alternatives to shelter-in-place, notably the annual flu shots and the fact that many people already have some level of immunity to various strains of the flu because they’ve been exposed to it before. NEITHER of those alternatives are available for this virus, yet.
If you suffer long-lasting health complications from a bout of this disease, you are probably not going to survive financially anyway, and financial survival means nothing at all if you die.
At this point, we have no idea whether these people really have long-lasting immunity, so no, we don’t know that the metrics have changed all that much. With the original SARS virus, for example, antibody levels decline quite rapidly after two or three years; we don’t know what that means for their immunity. With some of the other coronaviruses that cause common cold symptoms, immunity may be measured in weeks or months. With the virus causing COVID-19, immunity may be permanent, or at least long enough for vaccines to be available, or these same people who have already been infected may be vulnerable all over again by the fall. We don’t know.
This sounds like a wish or a hope rather than any sort of established fact.
Those people getting the new treatment protocols, however, are still taking up bed space and equipment in the hospitals, and if they take up too much space for too long, then we’re right back at overwhelmed health care systems and plummeting survival rates. It’s not enough to improve treatment: we still have to keep the number of people infected and requiring treatment at a manageable number.