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We’ll see. I’m still waiting for developments. I am not as confident as you in the speculative contagiousness or mortality numbers tossed around. The wide ranges from respectable opinions should give you pause.
Exactly. Next year, it won’t be new.
I know you’re mostly in auto “it’s not just a flu” mode here but I know it’s currently more deadly and contagious. I know that we had to take extraordinary efforts to blunt the damage. I’m saying things will get better and no way is this defining the world for the next two years. Screw that.
I don’t agree with that sentiment, but I think some varient will end up happening.
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If you ask me it’s gotten pretty old already, but reality keeps refusing to conform to my wishes.
What makes you think it will be less contagious and less deadly next year? I’d love to have something to make me optimistic here so if you know something the rest of us don’t please share.
Look, I’m sorry reality doesn’t want to conform to your wishes, either, but if you look back in history large-scale epidemics/pandemics tend to last at least 18 months to 2 years, and in some cases will return multiple times in the first decade they hit an area. If you have some reason to expect this virus will be different please share.
It will be less deadly and contagious next year because there’s likely at least some holdover immunity, we’ll be more knowledgeable about the virus and we won’t be caught unawares. Kinda obvious stuff.
Reality will conform to my wishes if people thinking similarly to me express themselves to their representatives. I’m sorry, I’m not willing to hide in my cave forever. If this is going to last two years, well you better get ready for us to not be self isolating for most of it.
There are options for improving treatment, as well as actual vaccination.
A friend of mine is involved (doctor, not patient) in this clinical trial of coronavirus treatments which should have some results fairly soon. And I’m sure other major hospitals around the world are pursuing their own lines.
No word yet on how it’s going, but this is the same bunch who did the first reproduction of coronavirus in the lab outside of China, so they’re pretty competent.
Being “knowledgable” about a virus doesn’t make it less dangerous. We know a lot about rabies but it’s no less deadly if it’s not caught intime.
The only people with “holdover” immunity will be those who caught the virus and recovered - everyone else will be exactly as vulnerable as they were in January if there is no vaccine.
There is a spectrum between “self isolating” and “completely back to normal”. If we do suppress it enough to open things up we’re still going to need checkpoints for travelers, increase distance and sanitation, and so on.
Holdover immunity and knowing more about the virus won’t mean shit if it’s still putting a significant number of people into the hospital with severe acute respiratory distress syndrome. I get the sense that you’ve never seen someone gasp for air - it’s not fun to experience or to watch. It’s a brutal death and it’s a brutal near death experience. Not to mention it puts severe stress on other organs, which can easily give out.
No, trust me: the moment people say “Screw this, it’s been 6 months, I’m living my life however the fuck I want” – that will last about as long as the next cluster occurs.
Or maybe self-isolation continues and we just get used to living this way. I don’t believe we’ll be necessarily self-isolating to this extreme, but there’s a good chance that we’ll have to change our definition of ‘normal’ interaction until we get vaccines or until the virus just evolves into something less scary.
For those who really can’t abide isolation - get a job at a grocery store. I guarantee you’ll get lots of interaction with other people. It may not be all positive, but you’ll get a LOT.
I’ll just go back to my old job, thanks.
We’ll see who’s right. The idea that we’ll be self isolated six months from now is so detached from my reality, I don’t even know what to say
Hey, my store took on a bunch of temporary workers who fully intend to go back to their old jobs when they open up again.
But do what works for you.
I doubt it pays much more than my government cheque, so no thanks. I’m not worried about being “isolated”. I want to start making money to pay my bills.
I’m not worried about being “isolated” either. I just want to still be breathing at the end of the year.
CMC fnord!
Don’t put words in my mouth. I realize it makes it easier for you to win arguments in your head when you do, but it isn’t fair to me or others on this board.
I never said we would have heard immunity by the end of May. I said
or, to say in exactly the same way, by the end of May, I expect that we will be seeing that the number of active cases in the US will be dropping. That means, fewer active cases than the day, week, month, before. That doesn’t mean everything is OK. It does mean that our healthcare systems can start to retreat from the panic mode they are currently operating under and be able to develop protocols and procedures for addressing the situation. That is the reason for the restrictions. Not that people might get sick and die, but that the number of people getting sick and dying is overwhelming our healthcare systems.
We will be facing restrictions from this for the rest of our lives. There is no mistake about that. And, restrictions will be relaxed and we will have additional outbreaks and restrictions will be reinstated, then relaxed again. But, if we’re lucky, each time the outbreak will be less severe and our healthcare system will be better prepared to deal with it.
Good luck! What are your underlying conditions?
It will be both, and other things too.
Note that even the current set of restrictions doesn’t drive deaths to 0. It just reduces them. We could implement more restrictions and reduce deaths.
Any sane policy response is going to result in some excess covid deaths because the costs of driving them to actual zero is prohibitively high. While the desirable number of deaths is zero, the societally optimal number is not.
We make calculated risks for economic and quality of life reasons all the time. That doesn’t mean that we’re callous, or that each death isn’t a tragedy. It means that life is risky, and the proper goal of public health policy is managing that risk, not eliminating it.
For example, I would probably* not be in favor of a policy where police took the temperatures of anyone they encountered, and anyone with a fever was arrested and held in quarantine until they got two negative tests a few days apart. Such a policy is not that far off what China implemented, and it would reduce COVID deaths.
*hedging because certainly things could get bad enough that I would think that policy is justified.
Change that policy to requiring home-quarantine, and I’m more in favor of it. That change will result in more COVID deaths. That is a tradeoff I’m probably ok with.
You are correct in that it is more contagious (I think that is the word you want) than the flu (although that is misleading, since “the flu” is not a single disease or infection, but a “family” (if you will) of diseases. In that sense, this is just another variant of “the flu”, that is a viral disease that results in the patient developing respiratory issues, high fever, and, in some cases, death. A more severe variant, to be sure.
And yes, the death rate is higher than we usually see with other “flu” outbreaks. Is that a result of it being more contagious, or because people who are infected are more likely to die from it? I am not sure we have enough information to know that answer at this point. Unlike other outbreaks, this one seems to hit older people harder, but is that inherent to this bug, or simply a result of the fact that 100 years ago, the older people who are dying now would have died from other causes before the flu of 1918 had a chance? But, if you look at the death rate of people aged 20-40, I don’t think you can say the death rate is higher. Probably, lower. Much lower. The death rate of 23-35 year-olds from the Spanish Flu in the US was about 1000/million. That’s not 1000 people dying per 1,000,000 people infected (0.1% death rate), that’s 1000 people dying per 1,000,000 people. We’re not approaching that, yet. I am not sure we will. I hope not.
Finally, as far as
goes, that is absolutely incorrect. Many, many people exposed to the virus are asymptomatic. While we have no idea what percentage of people are like this, it is most certainly non-zero. Some people have an innate resistance. We don’t know why, but it is obvious that some do.
This makes me think some people think the lockdowns and “shelter-in-place” restrictions were enacted to prevent COVID deaths. I don’t think that was ever the intent (and probably not even realistic). The lockdowns were enacted to prevent the COVID deaths from overwhelming the healthcare system. The number difference is that spreading the COVID deaths out over 6 months is better than having them occur in 2 months because, if spread over 6 months, the healthcare system might be able to handle the extra load. If it all occurs in two months, then people with ear infections will die simply because they can’t be treated in a timely manner.
How are the governments going to keep people at their home? I can easily imagine that they will get bored and might start rioting by the end of May.