The odds are greatly in my favor if I drive drunk or or don’t wear a seatbelt. Doesn’t mean that the increased level of risk is one I find acceptable. And the odds of someone in the set of people that matter to me (of which I am one) are not in my favor at all. The odds of my society being damaged from the impact of watching thousands of people that could have been saved dying in hallways approaches one.
It has a two week incubation period. Once you develop symptoms, it’s often another week before they worsen enough that you suddenly need to go to the hospital. We can’t turn this ship on a dime, so we have to leave lots of room for error.
If 15 people that go to the same church show up with COVID at a small rural community hospital with 6 ICU beds and one ventilator on the same day, that hospital will be overwhelmed.
Is the article I was talking about the article you are talking about? Or do you have more cites to back up your claim that “The media is driving our defensive actions not science!”?
Where are you getting these numbers? Science or “the media” that you are watching? The degree of herd immunity that we would need to achieve protection against epidemic is very high. Herd immunity really mostly applies to control of endemic disease; letting an epidemic rage uncontrolled until a degree of herd immunity is achieved essentially means a lot of people dying of whom many of which could be saved by isolation measures, and as a society we generally frown on allowing hundreds of thousands of people to die unnecessarily.
The latency of SARS-CoV-19 means that by the time you see “ indications of a massive outbreak” you are already two to three weeks behind the curve, and therefore, too late to effectively prevent ”overwhelm[ing] the hospitals”.
Do you actually know anything about epidemiology, or are you basing your argument on “the media” you prefer rather than actual science.
Thats all true but for they have to be out there also and possibly exposed. How can they stick a tv camera in front of someone if it puts them at risk?
Also for the print media they are hurting now big time because ad revenue is down.
Both of those are true, but my point is that the media are not restricted by “lockdown” or stay-at-home from getting their news from only official sources. They’ve certainly been interviewing people other than government officials, even if by video rather than in-person, and they haven’t lost the ability to e-mail, text, etc. possible sources of news.
In spite of the fact that there is no case according to Cuomo where someone that needs an ICU or a ventilator isn’t getting one, I know for a fact that covid patients are getting shipped out of state for hospitalizations. I cant tell you how I know that, but trust me it’s happening.
I came across this YouTube video today and it helped me understand the conservative attitude in this situation.
Basically what it boils down to is something like “if there are going to be 100,000 deaths, you might as well do nothing to prevent there from being a million deaths,” whether it’s about reacting to a pandemic, or universal health care, or gun control. What’s important is that you get together to affirm that you are on the correct side morally.
Improving outcomes doesn’t matter. What matters is punishing evil people.
Exactly this. In addition, the media has been sensationalizing diseases throughout my life. We were all going to die from AIDS, Ebola, SARS, H1N1, etc. You are telling me I should bankrupt my business to prevent a disease from which nobody has died? Bullshit. Not going to happen.
This is the same attitude that fucked over a ton of people when Hurricane Sandy hit the NY area. There had been many hurricane warnings and evacuation orders in the past and nothing much happened, so why move this time? Basically, everyone in Rockaway, Queens, who didn’t evacuate, for example, ended up losing their car, everything in their basement, and some lost their lives.
Anyway, hopefully the current outbreak is changing your mind about that.
Also, AIDS killed tons of people in Africa. Also also, no one was telling everyone to shut down because of any of those diseases you mentioned, but clearly there was something about this one that had the experts shitting their pants early on. So, actually, I have no idea why you mentioned those.
I am not saying it was the correct action to ignore the warnings. But that’s human nature and it needs to be accounted for in any response. Hurricane warnings are a great example. I used to live in Florida. A hurricane approaches, people clear the store shelves, put shutters up, and it veers off to the north and out to sea. All for nothing it seems.
And sure AIDS killed tons of people in Africa. But that’s “over there” not here. Call it racist or xenophobic, but that is how people react to things. You ever listen to the radio and hear that an earthquake hit and killed 3,000 people and you lean in and hear, “in Pakistan” and you change the channel? If they had said “in California” you would have said “oh my God!” and read all of the articles when you got home. It is not because you hate Pakistanis or brown people in general. People feel what hits their own backyard.
Fear and know-it-all ism also plays a part. I get to feel superior when I sneer at these lemmings running around putting up hurricane shutters. I know better.
Nobody, including me, is saying that this is the right response. But any proposal must take into account these attitudes. It does no good to propose something that requires a near universal response or to pick out one example of a group of people congregating in a park as the reason why the plan failed. If the plan did not take into account that yahoos would ignore the directive, then it was a shitty plan from the start.
A lot of those strategies rely on very high quantity and quality of data. I don’t know if we have sufficient data to implement any of those strategies.
This sort of “dance” requires two things. Good information and good social agility. People have to be able to switch gears on a dime. We can’t even get people to observe the rules in NYC where thousands of people are dying.
If you have a very robust program of tracking down infections and quarantining infected people, you avoid shutdowns entirely (see Korea where they effectively arrest you if you are infected and put you in quarantine hotels where they bring you food, do your laundry, etc. You get paid while you are in quarantine.
80% is waaay to high. The surge potential of this thing is pretty high
The only way we get to herd immunity is with vaccination. Even left unchecked we were not going to get above 30-40% infection rate. We need something closer to 70-80% to achieve herd immunity.
Nitpick: Exceptions DISPROVE rules. “Proof” in the old saw means “test”, not “establish”.
Ideology abhors evidence. China shut down its economy before Western media of any stripe showed any interest in the story. Events were being shuttered before all the excitement because insurance. The major way any media are driving matters is here: Trump’s Fox News Cabinet Tells Him the Coronavirus Crisis Is Over.
Yeah, the anti-vaxxers are all over this. They can’t grasp what measles and smallpox used to do before vaccines, and they can’t grasp the reality of what “herd immunity” would actually mean. Maybe if they were given shovels to dig the mass graves with.
