Back in March, I caught a bit of grief both here and IRL, for questioning the reasonableness of some aspects of social distancing. I thought it made perfect sense to avoid certain activities, such as coming in close contact w/ large numbers of other people - especially in confined spaces. But I thought measures such as locking tennis courts ridiculous. I thought there was negligible - if any - risk in having another couple over for drinks, or a small group playing music in a large room. And I fully supported isolating those at risk.
Now, we are at “Phase 3” around here - whatever the hell that is supposed to mean, and whatever the hell science is supposed to be behind that. From my point of view, people are acting as tho all bets are off. There are large yard parties in my neighborhood, etc. And they unlocked the tennis courts and opened the golf courses! Not to mention unmasked protest gatherings.
Meanwhile, my position is pretty much the same. Avoid certain activities, such as coming in close contact w/ large numbers of other people …
I thought institutions and individuals were exercising extreme and unreasonable precautions then, and I think they are practicing irresponsible (or borderline irresponsible) activities now. Meanwhile - I don’t see what has changed - at least in terms of me and those I care for getting/transmitting the disease.
Wondering if anyone else feels similarly - or itf you would explain to me why I had my head up my ass then, now, or both!
I seem to recall feeling much of the lockdown stuff was hysteria, especially the viral stuff that hit SM. The tennis courts, solo kayakers, Sunday drives, fishing, sitting on park benches, taking down basketball hoops was all meant to make a zero tolerance policy easier to enact. No judgement calls needed. Ranks right up there with seizing little Bobbie in 1st grade lunch with the dangerous weapon because mom put a popsicle stick in it to spread his jam and he held it like a knife to do so. (apocryphal legend, no cite) Most zero tolerance policies never look good in hindsight.
I think one of these things is actually the consequence of the other. There was an article in the Atlantic a while back (sorry, paywalled) that basically argued that much of the pro-social-distancing messaging has been the equivalent of abstinence-only sex education, and the problem with that is 1) most people won’t, realistically, follow it for very long; and 2) it leaves people without a clear sense of the relative risks of different activities, so they end up making it up as they go and, in many cases, making bad choices.
(But also, of course, even if it feels like “everyone” in March was shaming people for going for a walk outside, and “everyone” in June is having wild parties, those are in fact different subsets of “everyone” – the hyper-cautious people are mostly still hyper-cautious, even if they’re venturing outdoors a little more, and the less risk-averse were mostly already less risk-averse in March, even if they were more inclined to cooperate with the new rules when they were newer, stricter, and billed as extremely temporary. People’s perception of what other people are doing often depends a lot on which voices the media is amplifying at any given moment.)
Also, though, I think one thing really has changed, which is that nobody seriously believes the fatality rate is 3.4% any more (let alone 20%, which was a fairly common claim floating around on the Internet in March, from people who were using the naive method of looking at the “closed cases” chart on Worldometers and comparing the number of patients listed as “recovered” to the number of deaths).
One thing frustrates me: at the end of the day, it may be “enough” to have half the people be super-cautious and half the people much more lax. The lax people will take this as evidence that the super-cautious people were basically cowardly wimps who over-reacted and as vindicating their own choices. But the reality is that those choices are less dangerous because the super-cautious took themselves out of the chain of transmission. So you can’t win.
No point in shaming those who want to jump back in, (they won’t change anyway.)
Think of those willing to move forward like it’s no big thing, as a canary in a mine. I don’t want to do that, but I’m kinda glad someone else is willing.
Leave them be, if they want to be canaries good for everybody. If things spike terribly as a result, well, they can rethink then I suppose. If nothing untoward happens then we can admire their foresight and applaud their willingness to go first.
I mean if we randomly assigned someone to be the sacrificial canary, they’d be rightly outraged.
Somebody has to test the waters, why not those volunteering?
As I mentioned in one of the other threads, I think the big protests are going to make people complacent. For months, we’ve been told to avoid large gatherings, to avoid making outings unless really necessary, and to take a lot of precautions if we do have to go out. I’m afraid many folks who’ve been adhering to the guidelines, even if wearily, will look at footage of thousands marching in the streets, without epidemiologists making much of a fuss (or even in some cases endorsing the gatherings), and think that we’re in the clear, throwing caution to the wind.
And I’ve already started seeing a more carefree attitude. When I went to the grocery over the weekend, there seemed to be a lot fewer people wearing masks than there had been a week before.
One thing I find curious - and in a way amusing - is folk saying such-and-such activity is OK “Because we are in phase 3!” Reminds me of the Sherwin-Williams color chart of terror. They’ve got no idea what science supposedly supports the various phases. And how the hell conditions today drastically differ from those in March-April.
And I’m amazed that people are still sticking with the ridiculous term “essential.”
My thought is that in the beginning there wasn’t enough known about the virus - transmission, effects, cures, etc - and the easy and quickest answer to keeping everyone safe at the time was “Shut it all down!” Coulda been that this was overkill but there’s no way to know that. It’s confusing that people were so against these measures, as heavy-handed “easy” answers seem to be what people want these days (see: “Build a wall” and “Abolish the police”). Practice extreme caution and don’t go anywhere for a while seemed like a pretty easy to follow directive without requiring much thought. Even “give everyone $1200” and “add $600/week to unemployment” weren’t very nuanced solutions, but people were fine with those measures.
All of that perceived overreaction gave scientists and physicians time to gather more data and make better models. Now we can use those models going forward.
Is there too little being done now? Probably. But it seems like there is a balance being figured out as to what people need to do and what people are willing to do. Maybe a second wave will help reel it in going forward. Or as Manda JO pointed out, the efforts of the people trying “too hard” will protect those who aren’t trying hard enough.
Here in Australia, we were getting people coming in from Europe and the USA with C19, and later from cruise ships, and later from small numbers of returning citizens from all over. So we had large numbers of cases, and activity restrictions were imposed. And family members of cases were still catching the disease.
Now we have endemic disease in Australia, with a small number of cases.
It appears to me that our activity restrictions have been and are based on the number of people in hospital, not the number of people in our community who have the disease. This appears to be only partly based on the fear of cases overloading our hospital system, and mostly based on the shear stupidity of equating our risk with the number of people counted in the daily counts in the media.
(1) Restrictions on travel from Europe and the USA were introduced too late.
(2) Quarantine of arriving people was introduced selectively and too late
(3) Activity restrictions were introduced too early and too widely
(4) Now, when the disease is endemic instead of introduced, is the time to continue exactly the restrictions that business wants relaxed: bars and restaurants.
I wouldn’t consider the Oz restrictions as too much too soon. I don’t think that that is actually possible. Prior to the restriction coming in here everyone was just waiting for the hammer to fall, and people were already drastically restricting their activities. Restaurants were nearly empty before any restrictions.
We have had two new cases in the last day nationwide. This is much better than we were attempting to get to. What we were attempting to get to, and what the population might expect are two different things. NZ has claimed it is now virus free. They were hoping for that, and they got there. Here in Oz that was put forward as a worthy goal that might, with luck, be attainable, but was not considered to be the main game. Now NZ has made it, and some states, but not all, are virus free, I think the hopes and expectations of the populace have changed. Victoria and New South Wales were always going to be harder, simply because of their populations. So there are tensions.
Without doubt, actions that let the infection rise in those states is not going to end well. If all of Oz could actually make it to being virus free we could join the regional bubble. Until it is, even internal restrictions will continue on cross border travel.
Here in South Australia we were lucky. It could have been nasty, but it wasn’t. However we are simply back to where we were at the start of the year. Which isn’t great.
It’s only “too little” if the hospitals are overwhelmed. Flattening the curve doesn’t mean somebody doesn’t get it ever. It means when they do get it, they’ll be able to get the proper treatment.
Here in SW Michigan where nearly 10% of the people who had COVID-19 died people for the most part are still wearing mask in stores, even the vast majority of our protestors are doing so. Still things like haircuts, massages and bars are opening up next week so it will be interesting to see how people get back into the water. Some good signs are that a few hospitals are saying they have no COVID-19 patients in their facilities anymore. So I am starting to think that a combination of actions taken by our Governor to shut things down and promote social distancing actually worked and that now the virus ***MAY ***be going into a lull for a while. Of course only time will tell on that last one.
For me I will put a toe into the water and not dive into fully until July if everything looks good.
I don’t ever remember hearing 20% from anyone who knew what they were talking about. There are lots of idiots on the internet, though, so I’m sure there were people thinking/saying that.
What do you think the IFR in the absence of proper medical care is?
You mean, nearly 10% of the people who were diagnosed with COVID-19 died. Vastly different statement. Nowhere near 100% of the people infected are being identified and counted. Not anywhere. Nowhere is 100% of the population being tested. So we have not got any idea whatsoever what percent of infections result in death. So we should stop basing any decisions whatsoever on the percent of deaths.
Are people forgetting that over 100,000 Americans died in two months from this disease? And this was with the “unreasonable” shutdown. Over 1000 people dying per day unfortunately has become normalized, and many people act as if it’s no big deal.
If people back in March knew that this many people would die, there would have been hysteria. I remember people saying it was no big deal because 12,000 people died from Swine Flu, and only a handful of people died from COVID. Then, as the numbers grew, it became “well, the flu kills 60,000 Americans per year!” (it doesn’t). And as the numbers continue to climb, it’s now, “as long as the hospitals aren’t overwhelmed, it’s ok if thousands of Americans die every day.”
Back in March, the health officials were saying that if the shutdown worked, then people would complain that the shutdown was unnecessary or too strict. And if people were saying “whew, it’s a good thing we shut down”, then the shutdown was too late. I bet they never thought that with this many deaths, people would still be complaining about the shutdown.
So, no, the shutdown was not too strict back then, and yes, things are opening up too quickly now.
I don’t know. I have seen wildly varying estimates of how many people are infected per diagnosed case, so I don’t think anybody knows the IFR for sure yet, let alone what it would be in the absence of proper medical care. (And yes, there were definitely a ton of people on the Internet trying to use the deaths-to-recoveries ratio to estimate the death rate – for example, thesethreeexamples posted to Quora. I don’t think these people are idiots so much as naive; it seems to be a fairly common misunderstanding.)
I’ll upfront state that my understanding is that IFR without medical care is 3-4%, but with huge error bands because we don’t really know the I in IFR with any certainty. With medical care seems to be more around the 0.5% range, and it seems like we can keep the actual IFR to that as long as we can keep the curve flat. I am open to better information.
