I’m well aware that the plan is probably not doable from a practical standpoint; just saying it should be done, though.
…this thread is just too painful to read. 
I can’t tell you how frustrating and sad I feel for the people of America right now. This is devastating.
Except we don’t appear to know. People ages18-25 are at low risk for getting serious cases of COVID, right? Except 1 in 3 ARE vulnerable to serious COVID. A large-scale new study shows that 32% of adults 18-25 are at high risk of serious cases of COVID. Those who smoke and/or vape account for about half of those cases. And even without smoking/vaping, you still have about 16% of young adults who are at high risk for serious cases of COVID. So do we have all young adults who smoke or vape nicotine “stay the fuck home” until they’ve successfully kicked the addiction? How about the other 16%?
We have to do the best we can with what we know, but what we do know is too uncertain to determine with any certainty who should “stay the fuck home.”
Australia, however, has not had to go back to lockdown. One city has. Yes, it’s a big city, and yes it’s a downright pain in the arse, but next time there’s a flare-up it will probably be somewhere else, and we’ll be the ones able to pretty much go about our daily lives while Sydney or Brisbane gets the pain.
This seems to gel with experiences in other places that have wrestled down the virus to very small numbers … mostly, at that point, reopenings have proceeded without major incident. And in some cases, there has been an incident. But the second time around, we don’t have to be quite so draconian with the restrictions in order to squash it back down. Maybe in time we manage to get as good at this as South Korea, which can manage to squash a very nasty flare-up caused by an idiot superspreader without even doing stay-at-home orders at all. I don’t see why we shouldn’t be able to manage to do that, but you have to actually work at it and figure out what the trigger points are for your own society.
I don’t think it’s a point of contention that sufficiently damaging the economy will damage health. I think there are points of contention about how much damage to what specific sectors of the economy will damage health more than opening those specific sectors in the middle of an epidemic will; and about what specific mitigations might allow certain types of opening; and about public funding to provide money so that the health of people who can’t do their usual jobs in their usual fashion won’t suffer; and about public funding to provide money for protective measures so that people who must do essential jobs will be less likely to get sick.
Almost nowhere in the USA has actually had a general lock-down. People have been going to the grocery (which has been taken to include any big-box store that sells groceries but in which people have been doing general shopping), to the gas station, to get takeout food and alcohol, to get their cars fixed, outdoors to exercise, outdoors to garden, outdoors to walk their dogs, and in most areas quite a few other places; and, in places with public transport, taking public transport to do those things, as well as to get to work at the many jobs considered essential.
Almost nobody’s arguing for a serious lockdown. What most people who want restrictions to continue in the USA are arguing for is to continue to prevent large gatherings and to continue to prevent non-essential businesses that require close contact.
And doing so for everybody is the only way to also protect the highest-risk people. Because, as has been said over and over again, very few of the highest risk people can be entirely isolated from everyone who isn’t in that category. Because, as has been said over and over again, most of the high risk people need to be taken care of in person by people in other categories; and/or live with people in other categories; and/or are themselves essential workers who can’t do all their work in isolation. It just flat out does not work to say we can protect the high risk people while simultanously letting the supposedly low-risk people (some of whom are high risk but don’t know it) go back to living as if it were 2019.
Absolutely will not work, for two reasons:
One, if you make everybody stay in their houses for a month, a shitload of people will die. Some of them will die for lack of essential care from people outside their own households. Some of them will die because they couldn’t get to a doctor. Some of them will die because they couldn’t afford or didn’t have room for that stockpile of food and their particular health means that no, they can’t survive starving for a couple of weeks. And a whole lot more people will die over the next year or more because you’ll have shut down most farms in August. Farm work needs to be done when it needs to be done and you can’t just do August work in September instead.
And it won’t work because within those locked down households somebody who had just caught it on day 0 will infect somebody on day 14 who will infect somebody else on day 28 who won’t have any symptoms yet on day 30. So the virus won’t disappear entirely; it’ll just be knocked back; and we’ll still need precautions to keep it from building right back up again.
Yes. That’s a lot of the problem. There are people who think that as long as Grandma stays home everybody else can just do whatever they please. Sometimes Grandma thinks she can too.
And the UBER drivers, and all the people who work at the stores supplying the food to the UBER drivers, and all the people who work transporting the food between cities so the store can supply the UBER drivers, and all the people who work at the packing houses so the people who transport the food have something to transport, and all the people who work growing the food and taking care of the livestock so the packing houses have something to pack. And all the people keeping transportation systems going so that all those other people can get to work. . . . And all the people who live with any of those people will be exposed to them, of course.
The stuff doesn’t magically appear in a warehouse around the corner from you. It really doesn’t.
Look: we cannot do a total lockdown. And we cannot identify everybody who’s at risk. And we cannot isolate from all other contact everybody who we do know is at risk. And we cannot magically make the virus go away.
What we can do is drastically reduce infection rates by masking, distancing, limiting gatherings to small numbers and having people mask and distance at those, avoiding nonessential gatherings, and not opening business that don’t work under those conditions and which people can live without; and, in specific places that are nevertheless having serious outbreaks, coming as close to lockdown as possible; and limiting travel between places having serious outbreaks and those that are not.
But that means everybody. It doesn’t work if large numbers of people who are thought to be low risk are considered exempt from all of that.
If there are huge amounts of young people at risk of dying from COVID-19, why haven’t we actually seen this? Am I taking crazy pills? What data are people seeing that I’m missing?
Velocity, in countries where the lockdowns were effective, the government went above and beyond their normal role. In South Korea, everyone who was in self-quarantine received two-weeks worth of food. The government also brought food to people in Wuhan. Can you imagine that happening in the US? Because I cannot. Not even in the most progressive city can I imagine the government sending workers door to door with boxes of food, all gratis.
We had a play-play lockdown. To have a real-real lockdown, the government can’t just say “Stay home, y’all!” It actually has to help people stay home.
Apparently you have been missing that, besides dying, all those young people can become VERY ill, and all those young people can spread virus to others. What I am wondering is how, what with all that has been said about these very real problems in this thread, other threads, other forums, in the news(online and otherwise, you keep missing these facts.
Actually no. All that study documents is that 32% of young adults are more vulnerable to serious COVID-19 than the other 68% of young adults are. (Actual article here.)
In fact we do appear to know.
For actual relative risk you can see this Nature article published a few days ago. Looked at 17 million patients. See fig. 3 and the tables that follow. Adults who currently smoke are more vulnerable than those who never smoked - by 14% not adjusting for other confounders - but weirdly less at risk by 11% when controlling for confounders. Controlling for confounders the morbidly obese are at 92% greater of a risk. But using 50 to 60 as the reference point and controlling for confounders, those 18 to 40 had 6% of the risk and those 70 to 80 had 6 times the risk.
We really do have a pretty good sense of the largest group of those who are at highest risk, and 24 year old smoker is not in the group. And of those who are at the lowest.
What percentage of <30 year olds get extremely ill? What is the source of these claims?
I made no claims. This is the SDMB - I don’t feel bad about asking for a cite.
This seems a serious misunderstanding of what you’re citing, with the article sharing your problem. The CDC made a list of risk factors. The University of California looked at a survey and calculated how many 18-25 yr olds had those risk factors. That doesn’t mean 32% of that age group is actually at high risk.
well in ca the govenor issued this rebuttal to the discussion …
Here in New Zealand, where we have completely stopped community transmission we still have incoming infected people “returning home”
Anybody returning to New Zealand from overseas goes into a 2 week enforced quarantine in motels.
There are guards at the gates etc to monitor / enforce this.
And this has VERY broad based support from all of us - we sacrificed a lot to be where we are, and don’t want to see community transmission take hold again.
Are you prepared to do that for potentially years to come? (Assuming the eventuality that many experts belief, that even with a vaccine COVID-19 will become an endemic disease worldwide.)
Tourism for the ski resorts alone is an over $10.3 billion/yr industry for the ski resorts alone $42 billion/yr over all.
Serious question. I suspect your answer is yes but I’d like to know for sure.
…abso-fucking-lutely. My business lost all of its bookings pre-lockdown. A lot of it was dependent on overseas conference visitors. That entire slice of the market is gone. I’m dealing with it. I’m pivoting. I just picked up a job today that is completely outside of the scope of things that I used to do and I’m going to get paid well for it. If NZ were not Covid-free I wouldn’t be able to do that. I just came from a meeting at the Museum of New Zealand and its school holidays and its full of children running around, the carpark was overflowing, the cafe (with zero social distancing) was standing room only.
Why would anyone want to sacrifice that? It would be unthinkable.
Genuine question: New Zealand does not need any short term visitors to survive in any way? Perhaps not, but I just wanted to ask, because there’s the unlikely but nonzero possibility that (unless you think the entire world can follow your lead) that the country might have to be “shut off” for good.
…it’s a question that I can’t really answer at this stage. Everybody is preparing for the long-haul, at least a year, probably two. The businesses that relied on short term visitors have already had to pivot, get support from the government or go under. Exports are up. Once we get managed isolation at the borders under control I suspect that the movie and television industry here will really pick up as the 14 day quarantine will just be added to the “cost of doing business” for productions. Things are ticking along here. Not every business is going to make it. But I think we all accept that.
But we don’t really have any other choice. There is no appetite here to open the floodgates, and any particular lobby group that starts motioning for change (typically the “Plan B” crowd) get shouted down pretty quickly.
I should clarify the reason I asked: I’m sure that a big part of the national unity is that people there are generally reassured that they won’t starve (see all the discussion about how the American health care system is making things worse here). I was wondering if you were confident that the country had the money and the money sources to keep things going for the long term, if not forever. Exports going up definitely helps.
A year or two is very optimistic. There is a strong possibility that COVID-19 could be the new normal in the world, endemic. “Long-haul” is possibly forevermore, not a mere two or three years.
Thank you for the answer.
Right now in San Antonio, we’ve had 2.4% of young people (< 40 yr old) go to the hospital. However, we’re still fairly early in the surge so I expect that percentage to go up. Once a critical patient goes to the hospital (needs ventilator), it takes an average of 3 weeks to succumb. As Czarcasm states, the problem is when it moves into the older population (41-65 yr old). In San Antonio, the hospitalization rate jumps to 7% with a death rate of 0.9% so far. The elderly do much worse. About 18% of those tested positive go to the hospital. About half of them end up in the ICU. Almost half of them again end up on a ventilator. It looks like many don’t even make it to a ventilator before dying because 7% of all senior covid patients die so far. Again, we’re at the start of the surge. Experience