And in reality, it’s impossible. What about the at risk person who needs to eat and lives alone? What about the not at-risk person who lives with one or more at-risk people? What about the person who works in the meat processing plant or hospital? What about the bar next door to that meat processing plant or hospital and the people who work there, serving those employees after they get off work, and others?
Americans are selfish, privileged babies who feel entitled to “freedom” and feel no responsibility to their communities. It doesn’t matter if people die, they just have to get those haircuts. I don’t blame any of those other countries who won’t let us in. Trump wanted a wall but he didn’t tell you that it was one keeping us in or that we deserve it.
Far too many are selfish; others, though, are people who are just getting by and have little choice but to keep running on the economic treadmill in this just-in-time efficiency machine we refer to as the American economy. For them, if they don’t go out and work in their service job, they’re screwed.
In fact, there are probably millions of these workers who are already screwed but haven’t made it official yet. Restaurants across America - including some really popular ones - are in danger of closing forever, or already have. And that’s a lot of wage and tip earners who have to hit a massive reset button, not to mention restaurant managers and owners. There are industries besides restaurants that are in a similar situation.
Collectively, it’s an argument for a new type of economic system. At minimum, we may need to look at another ‘new deal’ to get ourselves out of this, and I hope that this new deal also involves universal basic health access and insurance.
The latter is key, IMO. Most older folk I’ve known or know of are worried about the disease and well aware of their risk. It’s the low-risk population that doesn’t understand or doesn’t really seem concerned about their role in spreading the disease. Consequently, we’re seeing an explosion of incidence in low-risk individuals. Over time, if a substantial number of low to low/moderate risk individuals gets the disease, the sheer number of vectors represents a threat to everyone else. Quarantines on a mass scale are rarely perfect.
Moreover, what people are forgetting is that low-risk may mean low risk of death but not necessarily low risk of hospitalization. If the disease spreads in a population that’s at low risk of dying, that might seem innocuous, but it’s not when even a small percentage of this large volume has to go to the ER and ICU. They overwhelm the system. They also make it dangerous for healthcare personnel who work in that environment. This is what happened in Wuhan, Lombardy, and New York, and it’s what’s happening now in Southern California, Arizona, Texas, and Florida.
That’s why we really need to be careful about how we characterize low risk. There’s risk to the individual at the point of disease transmission between individuals, but then there’s another type of risk once you have a raging pandemic.
Then maybe we all need more than $1,200 and lawsuits to take away our healthcare insurance from the government whose job it is to handle these things.
It’s like we’re buried under four feet of snow and people are unable to drive to work and ignoring the fact that the government was tasked with plowing the roads and they aren’t doing it.
I have so many questions for the people that believe this is the way to go.
Even if you are young and likely to survive, do you really believe that being deathly ill for 2-4 weeks is no big deal?
The phrase I keep hearing is that “we have to just let the virus wash over us”. But what is a business owner supposed to do when all her employees get sick at the same time? Do you really think that massive unplanned and uncoordinated closures of businesses, both essential and non-essential- will have a smaller economic impact than the planned and coordinated closures of non-essential businesses only?
Yes, the shutdowns were and are economically devastating. But by closing down the less than 20% of businesses that enabled public interaction and, by extension, disease spread, we are able to keep the 80% of business that are essential operational.
I joined one of the largest private “ReOpen” social media groups via deception. The stuff there was pretty horrifying, the first post I read was a woman complaining about her Constitutional rights being abridged because she had tested positive and was sent a letter instructing her to quarantine and she had no intention of doing it. Because freedom.
There was broad agreement and no pushback on her opinion.
People that want to get back to work should be “all in” on masks and distancing, a couple of trivially easy things that are our only hope of getting the economy back on track. But instead a huge segment of our population has been infected in another epidemic, a presidentially induced Oppositional Defiance Disorder- which is going to derail any chance of economic recovery.
The plan of the OP was not my ideal approach but I can still answer some of those questions in its defense.
Not young but self-perceived as likely to survive so maybe I can answer. Those who are least likely to die are also those least likely to be deathly ill and least likely to need hospital care per person infected. There is every reason to believe they are the most likely to not even know they were sick. No, no one thinks that being deathly ill for 2-4 weeks is no big deal. They do however believe that some number will get infected over time and would rather that number be more weighted to those least likely to get sickest or die, and at a rate that does not risk overwhelming healthcare systems capacity, that does not result in all employees getting sick at the same time, and in a manner that causes the least harms for the greatest goods.
The phrase “we have to just let the virus wash over us” has nothing to do with the plan suggested in the OP.
The positions you describe in the “ReOpen” group are NOT that of the OP, which explicitly and “aggressively” states “wash your hands, work from home if you can, and wear a fucking mask.” Not explicitly stated but pretty sure the OP would agree “try to keep your fucking distance” as well.
In the OP’s call for an end to general lock-downs, I think there’s too much emphasis on segregating vulnerable and those assumed to be less vulnerable. This has already been proven (in Sweden, for instance) to be rather difficult to achieve. If a more collectivist culture like Sweden couldn’t effectively prevent the more vulnerable from dying, I find it hard to believe we’re not going to do worse in that regard.
What might be a better idea is to end the general lock-downs in areas where the incidence is pretty low and have a graduated system of open/closed approaches based on the number of known (and maybe estimated) cases in the last 2-3 weeks. If, right now, Pierre, South Dakota has few cases, why close everything down now? Close down bars when the incidence is rising and indicates a problem in another 7-10 days. I think that might be a better way to strike a balance between those who want to keep ‘Mericuh’ open and going into lock-down to fight off a quantifiable public health threat. That’s a much more sensible approach than just telling old people to “stay the fuck home because…”
Trying to enforce a local lockdown in UK is proving to be difficult - we have situations where Wales is locked down but England is not and there is a real challenge dealing with people simply driving 5 or 6 miles to get to an area that it more open.
Worse is Leicester which is having lockdown reimposed due to a local spike. People live and work across the control and less controlled zones - very hard to manage, and remember we don’t have masses of people with guns and constitutional idiots who wish to throw themselves and everyone they know under a bus - even so it is hard to manage.
Trying the same thing in the US is going to be magnitudes harder, travel is almost certainly going to be used as an idiot Constitutional protest call.
There isn’t going to be a perfect solution. There will almost certainly be people who are willing to drive a few hours for a weekend of fun.
To make it less appealing, it could be that states could coordinate lock-downs with each other so that someone in, say, Delaware can’t just go over to Maryland or Pennsylvania. But if they want to drive a few more hours, there’s nothing stopping them. Hopefully, the number willing to do that is relatively small.
I think that we’re probably limited to the best of less than ideal options and we will have to accept that some people will end up doing their own thing. Local or regional lockdowns are still better than encouraging the lifting of restrictions nationally or state-wide and hoping we can keep the elderly or those with preexisting conditions safe. I can live with efforts to do the right thing that maybe aren’t as successful as they could be
Protecting the most vulnerable most and “a graduated system of open/closed approaches based on the number of known (and maybe estimated) cases in the last 2-3 weeks” are not mutually exclusive things.
Funny. Back in mid-April such a proposal was discussed (and panned by many) on this very board. Regional criteria for not just known cases but a variety of criteria to all have continued downward trajectory for 14 days, adequate proven hospital capacity, and testing capacity, before passing through the next set of gates, while keeping the more vulnerable more protected until later stages had been entered.
Governors though made their own plans up and mostly they were “gates, we don’t need no stinkin’ gates.”
Agreed, as long as we’re actually attempting to do both and not just one or the other. Going back to that thread, I think it probably got subjective for the fact that the ones proposing different kinds of ‘reopenings’ had some credibility problems. By that I’m referring to nobody on this board but rather to the administration, republican governors, and their acolytes in the right wing media.
There are gradations of sick with COVID. Between strangling to breathe on a ventilator in ICU and asymptomatic carrier, you’ll find all ages, all levels of health, and all manners of suffering from the coronainfection.
There are many people, especially hard-hit areas where the ICUs are at capacity, who are sent home. The pain, especially the headache, is crippling. There are personal stories flooding youtube from young people who just wanted a night out to have fun, and ended up immobile at home.
But if you’re young, you won’t be affected as badly. Bullshit. If you’re young, you’ll have a much better chance of survival. Some of these kids though, have been so miserable that survival seems like a poor choice.
Middle aged adults are having almost stroke-type symptoms in recovery, and they need speech, physical, and occupational therapy.
Yup. There was a knee jerk response (and not just here) based on the administration that said it without even bothering to think about, or possibly even read, the what was actually proposed. We’d be in a different place today if the governors had all signed on to that methodical approach as a rubric (before Trump eventually realized what it actually was that his administration was suggesting). Not sure how many states would even be through the first gate which required:
Throw out the contact tracing requirement even, as an unrealistic bar to achieve. Most states are still failing at even decent sentinel surveillance sites. And that is very achievable.
@VOW there is no disputing that there are individuals of all ages and groups who have serious COVID-19 and complications of it. There is also no disputing that given an individual being infected with SARS-CoV-2 someone in their 50s has a greater of a chance being seriously ill than someone in their 20s does, and less than someone in their 80s. This is not new information. Go back even to this analysis, which might very well underestimate the number who are completely asymptomatic in the younger groups.
Any process of opening up that does not provide the means to protect those at highest risk more is morally bankrupt. The only saving grace is that our previous horrible job in nursing homes has resulted in some improved processes, and those at most risk are to no small degrees being more cautious despite the lack of explicit guidance at various levels.
This hits close to home as my very aged MIL lives in such a facility here in SoFL. Her facility is doing an excellent job of protecting the residents.
At the cost of strongly harming their day-to-day quality of life. That’s an understandable tradeoff for the short term. But they have now been all-but confined to their rooms for 4 months with no social activities, no companionship, and no visits from family. The psychological toll is growing rapidly. And there is not only no end in sight, but no hint of when an end might ever come into sight.
The problem, and this is where the “elders stay the fuck home while we go about our lives as pre-COVID usual” crowd utterly misses the point, is that the facility is not trying to protect the residents from something of uncontrollable volume floating in the atmosphere like pollen or post-nuke-attack radiation.
We’re trying to protect them from their fellow citizens, and the more infected the rest of that herd is, the more draconian the precautions need to be to achieve the same statistical level of safety.
Every person who isn’t being COVID-cautious due to their individual youth, politics, ignorance, or sloth is actively adding to the burden on the elder facilities and their residents.
And as a 60+ year old myself, adding to the aggressiveness of the precautions I need to take and will probably need to take for years to come.
In effect, the crowds of heedless kids at the beach mean I can’t go there anymore. The crowds of the unmasked at the mall mean I can’t go there. I’m being pushed into being far more of a hermit than I would otherwise need to be so that other, more selfish and clueless people, can grab all the gusto they want.
I’m nobody special here. This isn’t about “me” as me.
But it is about the WAG 250 million Americans who aren’t under 40 and aren’t citizenship-challenged. And also about the millions of retail & factory workers forced to work in a thick stew of infection when, if our citizens showed a little more citizenship they would be working in a faint whiff of infection instead.
Blithely choosing to inflict that upon your fellow citizens is indeed morally bankrupt.
Actually the restrictions are far more than just the places where others previously crowded together, is ANYWHERE that the people who have crowded together may be present.
So now its not only beaches or malls, and chances are those places are far less crowded now.
You now have to stay away from pretty much everyone everywhere - no-one has a big illuminated sign stating they are infected, they look exactly the same - welcome to lockdown proper.
They US had a choice, lockdown voluntarily and prevention, but the Trumpist states decided otherwise, and now lockdown is not about spread prevention, its now about survival.
Exactly. I’m limited to the restaurants nobody goes to at the times nobody else does. And even then I’m at risk from the staff who’re exposed every day to the rampant excess of infectious idjits.
Relevant to the very parallel thread now running on herd immunity, we don’t need herd immunity.
What we need is herd non-infectiousness. And personal behavior is a huge part of becoming that non-infectious herd. First by being a non-spreader while infected by using masks & correct behavior. And next by, as a result of the first step, there quickly being far fewer infected people to even be spreaders.