I think people are throwing around “risk factors” as if they are the same as “at risk”. An obese 10 yr old has basically zero chance of dying of this disease. Obese children will not have to be isolated. Pretty similar all the way up to age 40.
People using proper safety protocols.
As a forty two year old ex-smoker who is just this side of morbidly obese, would you recommend that I join the isolation group, or that I stay out in the workforce?
I tell you, if you want to give me another couple month vacation, I’ll take it, so long as the bills are paid for not only myself, but for my business.
I pay out about $50,000 a month in payroll, another $10,000 in rent, utilities and mortgages, and I take a couple grand of that for myself. So, I can put my employees back on unemployment, and take money for myself, so we’ll call that 50k a month. Or, I can pay my employees, along with about 20k in taxes.
And then I’m going to need someone to bring me food and supplies. We are going to need to make sure that the person bringing them is not infected, and that no one who has had contact with my delivery is infected.
You can do all that, then sure, I still have some work I need to do on my house, and there were a couple anime I was thinking about getting into.
Otherwise, I got a business to run.
The flaw in this thinking is that the focus is strictly on the population that is low-risk, which ignores the fact that people who are themselves not at risk pose a risk to others who are at much greater risk. Yes, we get it – college kids are part of a low-risk demographic. But they inevitably come into contact with others who have underlying conditions or who are older and more vulnerable.
What public health experts are saying is that we don’t want to get this wave of the epidemic up to the point where it becomes utterly impossible for older people with underlying conditions to avoid coming into contact with “low-risk” idiots who don’t want to have their social lives interrupted.
People who are crying like little children over the impacts of the shutdown are just making this situation much, much worse.
Given that almost everywhere I go, I see people wearing masks as chin guards, if they wear them at all, I’m not sure if I trust my life to others using proper safety protocols.
Why would you ask for my recommendation? That’s for pros in the actuarial industries. My guess is that you’re rather safe though so run that business! Good luck!
Maybe low-risk of dying, but now this group is getting the virus, too, partly because they HAVE disregarded precautions.
But doesn’t that mean the cat’s already out of the bag and we should pivot to some kind of “guard the vulnerable strategy”? The 20 somethings seem determined to get it.
How the HELL is such a plan feasible? How are you going to keep families apart?
Isn’t keeping families apart in the current plan? Or do you mean “it has to be all or nothing”?
The closer to “all” we get, the better off we will be.
I see what you’re saying but it just seems more realistic to enforce/suggest “Don’t hug Aunt J because X” rather than “don’t hug anyone because it could possibly kill anyone”.
You can present all the hypotheticals you want as an excuse not to stay put, but there is no “opting out” of this pandemic at this time.
Hypotheticals?
As I said in another COVID thread, there is no such thing as “safe” or “unsafe”; there is merely “more safe” or “less safe”. That applies to driving and it applies to COVID.
We’re all looking at a multi-dimensional tradeoff between several goals:
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The poorer your personal prognosis is were you to catch COVID, the more you probably want to establish your own protections to make yourself safer.
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The poorer the prognosis of anyone else in your household, the more everyone in your household wants to establish more protections to make y’all safer.
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The more retired / rich / single / childless you are the easier that will be. And vice versa.
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The more others in society around you fail to take precautions, the more counter-precautions you need to take in response to maximize your own outcome.
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Some precautions you take make life better for others; e.g. mask wearing. Some precautions, e.g. having groceries delivered, just transfer your share of the risk to somebody else more economically desperate than you are. That’s morally ambiguous (at best) unless they’re demonstrably in a much lower risk status than you are. And some precautions make life worse for others; my reluctance to eat out the last 4 months has cost the local economy probably $8K. Somebody is unemployed now because of my decision. I don’t know her name, but she is real.
The end result in a society lacking in any sense of community is the foolish & the young take no precautions, the public-facing workers defend themselves as best they can and many of them will take one for the team. Meanwhile the elderly / sickly live in a plastic bubble or die trying.
A more socially optimal outcome is available. After all, if the total infected headcount is lower, the total need for precautions is correspondingly lower. The USA collectively probably won’t take it.
But all we each can do is do the safest thing we can afford for ourselves, our household, and our community in that order. And meanwhile accept that the outcome won’t be good enough for everyone. Possibly including ourselves.
War is a bitch. And this is a war.
I’m writing Netflix immediately to demand they list Contagion as a war movie. Lol.
Having an open mind doesn’t mean letting any old bullshit in.
If your cites suck, it’s not our job to consider them.
It’s your job to come up with better cites.
Or, you know, concede the argument.
Heaven forbid you consider that as the best option.
When I see mask wearing, it’s generally good but it’s an under 25% part of the public.
No it’s not.
For one thing, some of those people are doing essential work, not all of which can easily be picked up immediately by somebody else, and not all of which can be done in isolation.
For a much larger thing, because it almost certainly affects more people: you can’t block the young and healthy from associating with those at risk, because a) many of the people at risk are living with people who are among the young and healthy; and B) many others who are at risk are also in need of care, which they’d have to get from the young and healthy. (Some of those at risk are of course caring for the young and healthy; but that comes more under my first reason why that doesn’t work.)
Aunt J may be taking care of Niece/Nephews C, D, and E so that Mother B can go to work. You think that telling three-year-old C never to hug any of the rest of them is realistic? You think it’s not a problem if C, D, E, and B are all getting hugged by fools whenever they go out the door?
You seem to want some solution that amounts to “lock up a large percentage of the population in total isolation so that the rest can do whatever they please without taking any precautions.” There isn’t any realistic way to do that.
And no, you’re not invulnerable. There are people gasping for breath right now who thought they were invulnerable, that only Those Old People could get sick.
It’s being said a few times does not make it more or less true.
To me this claim of impossibility is trotted as the excuse for why there is no serious effort to protect the population at all, and instead an almost magical thinking belief that prolonged implementation of social distancing and varying degrees of shut downs and contact tracing/quarantine of those exposed, will succeed in keeping rates low forever (or until a widely used safe effective vaccine is out there, whichever comes first), sparing those at higher risk from exposure forever.
Start off with the highest risk, the relatively small percent of the population that resides in nursing homes and other long term care facilities. They make up about 43% of COVID-19 deaths in the U.S.
Taking the position that prolonged social distancing and shut downs and contact tracing with voluntary self-isolation for exposures (need over 70% taking part for it to be effective) is realistic, but having systems improved (by way of rules, oversight, and funding) to dramatically reduce the case numbers within these facilities is not, seems ludicrous to me. Are we doing that? No. Instead there are claims of how impossible it is, don’t bother, just complain. Better to bank on complete suppression and to point fingers when it fails and those in these homes needlessly die.
And for other highish but not as high risk individuals: no dramatically reducing their risk does NOT require complete isolation, even if some may opt for that approach. There are some very specific higher risk activities that they definitely need to avoid doing, and some jobs that would be no go, but jobs that allow social distancing of 6 feet most of the time and mask wearing (insisting on those around them to respect that as well) especially when at risk of that distance not being accomplished, in quiet (no yelling singing so on) environments, even better if with good ventilation, are pretty low risk for them even if someone in the workplace is presymptomatic.
The risk from other activities clearly is non-zero, not risk-free, but it is much much smaller.
Yes, college aged kids, the vast majority albeit not all at very low risk of serious disease, are going to get this, many of them never knowing they did. No they won’t be rigidly compliant with protocols long term. And that will be true if they are in their parents’ homes or on campuses. This seems to me to an unavoidable thing. If they are going to have a certain rate of infection better that they are on campus when they do. Of course try to limit the numbers of them, no big lecture halls, no bars open or big parties, require mask wearing in public as enforceable campus policy, sorry about not having big crowds at the games, so on, but know that there will be cheating despite best efforts, maybe less than if at home, but still.
A goal to eliminate risk is simply not a realistic one. The attempt to achieve it has very real impacts causing morbidity and mortality itself. The lack of effort at specifically protecting those at highest risk has been immoral.