CITE???
Thank you for understanding.
VOW, apologies for not being obvious enough. I thought my tags made it clear that I was not seriously proposing that we actually kill off elderly people. In case it is not clear, I also do not approve of killing and eating poor people. I’m nice that way.
I disagree, although I can be convinced otherwise. If we had caught this early enough we would be doing contact tracing with quarantine of those who are infected. It’s different from quarantining the at-risk population but if the former can be effective I don’t know why the latter can’t be at least somewhat effective.
Reductio absurdum mixed in with a false dichotomy. We can try to come to some middle ground without pretending we’re bringing out the death panels.
Not by any purposeful intent but what the OP is what the US seems to be falling into. Assuming the rates does not spiral past health system capacities.
It has been pointed out in other threads - new infections are increasingly occurring in younger adults, especially those in their 20s and 30s. And that is just the ones getting diagnosed. If 9 out of 10 weren’t being diagnosed when it was skewed to older and sicker individuals, what is the number now? They are going about their lives, albeit too often not bothering with even moderate precautions often enough. And those who the OP suggests should stay the fuck home are, to a much greater extent, doing so, and getting infected less often. Maybe even we can hope that nursing homes and other congregate living facilities have developed and implemented better policies and procedures and infections can be kept out of those closed facilities to much better degrees?
Euphonious_Polemic actually protecting the highest risk populations to very great degrees probably does not actually require sending them off to live on isolated islands or something. It does require some focused modest effort though.
Plus, it’s the young ones that are the most tender.
You must not be a parent. Kids are tough.
This is potentially the biggest flaw, although it would be interesting to break it down by age group. For example, is the risk fairly low for those younger than, say 55? Is it possible to break out the risk factors? (I’m not necessarily asking you; I’m sort of wondering out loud.) Someone says below that obesity is a risk factor but how much?
I disagree. If the at-risk population is fairly low (which admittedly is open to debate) then I think it’s possible to severely lower contact with help, possibly like Fiendish_Astronaut suggests.
Which is not an argument I have made. If a non-trivial number of at-risk people are self-isolating then that hurts the economy. What I’m trying to achieve is some balance of protecting as many lives as possible while minimizing the number of people we throw into poverty.
I don’t think that your country is capable of focused modest effort. At all. At this point, your country is not capable of having people wear a simple cloth on their face without 40% of the population losing their shit because “freedom” or some other idiotic crap that Fox News told them.
Keeping at-risk individuals safe is simply not possible. The infected population will in turn infect them. Period. You can’t keep them all in bubbles.
This is simply a polite way of saying that they are expendable.
Like this:
https://a.msn.com/r/2/BB1611Fm?m=en-us&referrerID=InAppShare
…
“Why is this so complicated?” a frustrated Rep. Jamie Rasking, D-Md., said at one point in response to Republican intransigence, speaking through what appeared to be an N95 respirator. “There’s one thing we can do to try to protect other people when we’re together, which is put on a mask. It doesn’t cost us anything; Why would we not do that? Why is it some kind of macho thing, like, ‘If I don’t wear a mask, I’m tough?’”Republicans did not appear to be moved by his appeals, or those of other Democrats. The charge against mask-wearing was led by Rep. Mark Green, R-Tenn., a physician who was also a major in the U.S. Army. Green said that he could “cite many other professionals” who advised against protective face coverings.
Green did not proceed to cite any such professionals.
Why didn’t he cite “any such professionals”? Because THERE AREN’T ANY.
If that’s true then a general lockdown is pointless. If you are an at-risk person you’d be stupid to go outside and trust your life to that 40%.
Let’s go with this presumption. Americans are incapable of any focused action no matter how focused and modest.
Do you then believe that the enough of the population of the United States will be cooperate with the prolonged focused efforts of sustained more dramatic shutdowns, giving information to strangers for contact tracing, and self-quarantine for 14 days based on being told they were exposed?
Seems to me that someone who believes in American inability to do any effort at all would be more more hopeless about Americans doing that than the former.
Mind you I am not too hopeful myself. And I’d prefer a more controlled staged opening than has been occurring. But to me the lack of priority given to protecting those at highest risk (at least accepting that failure of Americans to keep overall rates low is a possibility) is the message of expendability.
Definitely something to be concerned about. Do we have any numbers? My understanding was that it this is quite rare but I haven’t heard anything recently so there may be better data.
Even if he took FMLA leave, it’s not going to get us through the pandemic. And we both have this crazy idea that we like to eat and have a roof over our heads.
Thing is, though, that it’s much more complex than this. I’m not saying that I agree with the OP, but your formulation of economy versus lives is far too simplistic. In a whole variety of ways, for example, the economy represents life, or perhaps more specifically, life-years. That is, the economic hardships that millions of people are facing as a result of the shutdown will have significant effects on their short,-, medium-, and long-term mental and their physical health and well-being. And I’m not just talking about getting annoyed at being at home, or putting on a bit of weight because they can’t get to the gym.
Public health scholars are starting to make estimates of the number of life-years that could be lost by people as a result of economic hardship. Those figures might not show up right here and now, but they will be no less real when a person, for example, dies at 69 instead of 73 because of the long-term detrimental effects on their life caused by the massive economic depression we’re in. And the people most likely to suffer from these effects are people who, in many cases, are already poorer than average, with worse health outcomes and fewer resources to deal with a crisis.
And let’s not kid ourselves: we make the economy/health trade-off all the time as a society.We could require cars to be safer than they are, and regulate cars so that it would be illegal to drive any car without all of the most modern safety equipment. We don’t do that, though—despite the fact that over 30,000 Americans die every year in car accidents—because it’s a matter of weighing costs and benefits to society as a whole.
Even when it comes to disease, over 40,000 Americans die of the regular old flu each year, and we accept that this is an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of living in a society with large amounts of human interaction. Why haven’t we been practicing social distancing, or wearing masks, every flu season? I heard an epidemiologist on the radio, early in this crisis, saying that if every human on the planet could spend agree to spend one month not leaving their house, we could even eliminate the common cold, but we don’t do that because we can’t.
Yes, this pandemic is more dangerous than a cold or the regular flu, and more lives are at stake, but the underlying principle is largely the same.
I’m not pretending that there are easy answers. I’m lucky enough to be among the people (so far, at least), who has not suffered any real economic hardship as a result of the lockdowns, and if they continued for even another six months I could probably do it without any real problem. But I also recognize that people calling for new strategies are often facing very real hardships, and that while we might describe those hardships casually as “economic,” they have an impact on people’s lives in areas that are central to the whole debate over public health and wellbeing. To dismiss this debate as just economy versus lives fails to recognize that, in very real ways, the economy keeps people alive.
Good luck – hopefully your husband can get permission to work from home. Top brass at my employer are talking publicly about the likelihood they will allow most staff to WFH most of the time for the foreseeable future. Basically, “it’s working much better than we anticipated, and it greatly reduces everyone’s exposure to covid”.
Yeah, that’s the annoying part - everyone else I know who has a job that can be done remotely is doing so with no issues from their employers. Most are being told not to expect to go to the office through at least the end of 2020, and one friend says his employer is actually disciplining people who go to the office unnecessarily. If he worked in the mailroom or something, it might make sense, but he doesn’t.
I think there’s a conception out there that governments could just shovel money to its people and keep them afloat until this is all over, and the only thing keeping the U.S. from doing so is political will. So of course from that lens, the current state of affairs is pretty monstrous.
Yeah, if people can work from home, they should be.
My university has already announced that almost all classes will be online-only next semester, with some exceptions for labs and other classes that require students to be on campus. I don’t like that much, for a pedagogical and work-satisfaction viewpoint (I much prefer being in the classroom), but I recognize that it’s probably the right thing to do.
My wife is going in to her office on Monday for the first time in over three months, but she’s going in because she needs to do some things that she can’t do at home, and she had to get prior authorization from her work so they can make sure that only a few people at a time are in the building.
Meanwhile, at Bloomberg Opinion today, Max Nisen writes:
The alarming chart has been making the rounds. It illustrates the poor job the U.S. has done in containing Covid-19 compared to the European Union, a bigger region of independent countries that suffered an earlier outbreak. Why the big difference? What is America doing wrong?
[O]ne particular difference stands out between the American and European approaches. Many states were happy to reopen after simply “bending the curve” — that is, slowing upward growth and ensuring spare hospital capacity. These states went on to expand economic activity at an elevated plateau with lots of ongoing transmissions. In contrast, European countries mostly waited to reopen until they crushed the curve or reached its far slope, with substantially lower incidence or dramatic reductions in the viral spread. It’s not the only explanation for a growing gap, but it’s a compelling one.
So while some - including the OP - want us to reopen, the fact is that reopening is making things a lot worse. It’s one thing to fiddle while Rome burns; the “reopen now, fuck masks, I want a haircut” crowd actually are throwing gasoline on the fire.
I don’t think we should say Fuck masks and open everything. The problem is that the people giving the haircuts, running the cafes, etc., need income. They can’t afford not to work, especially the self-employed ones. The difference with Europe is that many European countries have a social(ist) safety net so people can stay out of work without losing income and health insurance. Over here, it’s every person for themselves and don’t expect the gummint to have your back.