But when does behavior become “idiotic”? My 73 year old mother goes to the grocery store some, when she could restrict herself to pickup. She wears a mask, of course, and washes before and after. But she just goes stir-crazy stuck in the house all the time.
I let my son play with his 3 cousins (one household). They are the only kids he’s seeing and both households are being disciplined about all of this. After 3 months of literally not seeing anyone but his mom and dad, I decided the risk of COVID was low enough. Am I an idiot? Am I complicit in murder?
We need real guidance on how to manage risk, not just “stay the fuck home”.
Mando_JO- I’m sure this is tough on younger, or teenage kids being forced to stay home. And folks that are just used to more social face to face.
One of my co-workers has a 4 year old that is driving her a bit nuts. She would like to go back to work to get a break. She and I both start very early online. Myself because I like it, and she because she can get some work done while kiddo is still in bed.
Myself, I hope to continue working from home. Works out great for me. My Wife and I live remote and chose that lifestyle anyway. I have plenty to do and keep myself happy.
Of course this is frustrating and limiting. But we need to have discussions about what a reasonable risk profile is, instead of just telling people to stay the fuck home. Not all actions are the same. We are quite possibly looking at another couple years like this.
Until we get locked in info about transmission methods, contagiousness of asymptomatic people and length of immunity the guidelines we got are the best we are going to get.
Also, people need to stop acting like person who gets sick = person who was a fool who did something wrong and deserves to die. Because even if it might be true in a few cases, it isn’t universally true.
And even for cases in which it is true, it is a harmful way of looking at things. My mother got sick after attending a party. Was she a fool for going to the party? Yes. I sympathize with her desire to socialize and get out of the house, but it is also true she shouldn’t have gone to a party knowing good and well that Atlanta is surging and knowing good and well she’s got all the risk factors. But once she started feeling sick, she didn’t tell anyone. She didn’t tell anyone until after she’d been sick for three days. I think she kept her mouth shut out of feelings of shame and embarrassment. When she finally told me, she was quick to blame it on my sister (who threw the party), because she thought my sister was the source of the contagion (it was actually my cousin, who was probably asymptomatic at the time of the party). My mother was thinking she’d be safe as long as she stayed six feet from everyone at the party. But we all know that it’s easy to overestimate how far apart from someone you are. And that social distance thing breaks down when someone coughs right in front of you or they made the potato salad that you’re gobbling up.
I wish people who stop thinking that following the guidelines means that you’re immune. I also wish people who stop acting like if you get sick, it must mean you didn’t follow the guidelines and that you must have been doing dangerous activities. I’m in self-isolation mode. The only public places I go to are the grocery store, which I only visit once a week. But I still go outside. I still go for walks and ride around on my scooter. I wear a mask when I’m coming close to someone, but masks aren’t perfect. I know I could still get sick. If I do, I’ll feel mad at myself, but only a little bit. I’ll be more mad at the virus. “Stay fucking home” is working for me 90% of the time, but I still need to be able to go places for stuff. I hope that if I do get sick, I won’t have people asking me what I did to deserve it. (My mother would have been one of the people asking this kind of victim-blaming question before she got sick, so I guess there’s is an upside to her getting the virus before me…)
But we wouldn’t have to be looking at another couple of years like this if we could actually do a relatively brief hard lockdown, like in Spain or Italy, and make it stick. Things are in many respects back to normal there. But because people in this country can’t manage to do what’s necessary in a coordinated and consistent way, they just drag the pain out longer for everyone.
That’s if you think the virus will be gone after a few hard lockdowns. That isn’t realistic, imho. Australia was quiet for weeks, then suddenly hundreds of new cases started popping up. No reason at all to think that couldn’t go on indefinitely. Forget it when international travel starts up again.
This disease is pretty perfectly built to last forever. The majority of carriers are asymptomatic but, as far as we know, still contagious. Even a vaccine that is flu vaccine level effectiveness won’t rid us of it, as evidenced by the flu still being around.
And on the other hand, the Spanish flu was done in about a year with no hard lockdowns per se nor vaccine.
The flu is “still around” because of antigenic drift (minor mutations) and people not getting vaccinated. The vaccine itself works. In fact, it works well enough to build immunity even for a new flu virus as long as it came about through antigenic drift as opposed to a rare antigenic shift (which is when we get big flu pandemics).
By the way, the 1918 flu lingered for 2 years until the Re got low enough for it to be largely eliminated from the population. It had at least four waves.
The Re rate got low enough because of several factors but significant herd immunity was probably not one of them except in some hot spots. Unfavorable environmental conditions and death make it harder to spread. But, really, it was also due to public health interventions like we have now. Social distancing, masks, shutting down schools and events, quarantines, travel restrictions. They were considered quite effective since there are estimates of how many more lives could have been lost.
Well “mostly done within a year” is a pretty fair statement if you want to be picky. My point about vaccines was simply that even effective vaccines aren’t necessarily a panacea.
Of course it’s not realistic to expect the virus to be gone – nobody advocating a lock-down or questioning the reopening of schools does so with the expectation that it will eliminate the virus. It’s here to stay.
What we’re trying to point out is that lock-downs, delaying the reopening of schools, and other strict measures will probably drive the numbers of infections way down, which allows healthcare providers to deliver critical health services not only to COVID-19 patients but to other kinds of patients. It also allows us to consider gradual reopening plans that eventually allow us to approach semi-normal economic activity, or at least based on what is left of the economy.
Epidemiology isn’t about eradicating a virus completely so the fact that it doesn’t achieve that goal is a moot point. Epidemiology is about math. It’s about controlling the number of disease vectors. How do we control West Nile virus, malaria, dengue, or yellow fever? Not be praying for its eradication but by working with communities to greatly reduce disease vectors (mosquitoes in this case). We know that controlling mosquito vectors involves eliminating standing water, cutting down on weed growth, and other measures. When humans are vectors, the goal isn’t to eliminate them; it’s to modify their behavior. But before you can modify behavior, you have to modify their thinking first. That’s the challenging part, unfortunately.
It doesn’t matter what he thinks, or what you think he thinks. Nobody with any sense believes that we’re capable of eradicating the virus with a nationwide stay-at-home order, which isn’t even seriously under consideration anyway it would seem.
The flu is “still around” because of antigenic drift (minor mutations) and people not getting vaccinated. The vaccine itself works. In fact, it works well enough to build immunity even for a new flu virus as long as it came about through antigenic drift as opposed to a rare antigenic shift (which is when we get big flu pandemics).
The flu vaccine isn’t 100% effective, but if more people would get it, we’d see a major reduction in hospitalizations. The reason we don’t panic about the flu is that most strains aren’t that deadly, and our health system has accurately accounted for the numbers of people who will use the hospital system each year.
Nobody believes that laws against murder will stop murder.
Nobody believes that laws against robbery will stop robbery.
Nobody believes that laws against domestic violence will stop domestic violence.
Nobody believes that laws against pollution will stop pollution.
I suppose nothing is 100% effective but flu vaccines have an added variable in that the flu mutates more than viruses with which we have good vaccines. As far as I know, flu vaccines stimulate a good immune response and the only side effects I’ve heard of is too much of an immune response or not enough in older people. If a virus doesn’t mutate as much as the flu (hopefully sars-covid-2 will not mutate as much), its degree of effectiveness relies on the amount of immune response it generates and maintains with minimal side effects.
By the way, everyone is freaking out because antibody tests are showing that people lose their circulating coronavirus antibodies. However, people may still have memory T and B cells which will generate an immune response if they are exposed again. Then again, I just read a vox article that talked about someone actually catching covid twice. That’s the first time I’ve heard that.
It comes down to economy versus health. Most people will tell you health is more important. The real question is does the lockdown accomplish anything. My answer is no. The lockdown is an appearance of the government attempting to do something. Like most government actions, it causes more harm than good.
If health is sufficiently damaged, that will damage the economy. You cannot save the economy by getting people sick.
What specific things can be done to encourage the economy while minimizing risk is a reasonable and necessary thing to discuss. But trying to pit them against each other is a good bit worse than useless.