Again you are missing the point, that is not a problem, the problem is to claim that it is a falsehood to showcase several Asian nations as models for how well they managed with the shutdowns and quarantines. Pointing at them for using lockdowns, masks and testing massively are not false things; until evidence comes that those things do not make a difference, claims of falsehood are just opinions.
They become false things when it become apparent that other forces are at work keeping the numbers low. maybe at first they weren’t but to me it has become apparent that no longer applies here as a model. It has become politicized.
The virus doesn’t care about politics. It will infect and spread any chance it gets. And reducing the restrictions will give it more opportunities and result in more infections and death.
Allowing the virus to spread while protecting the vulnerable would result in less deaths. More right off the bat but far fewer in the long run. Besides collateral damage that can never be calculated reducing the time to herd immunity would give far fewer opportunities for the virus to reach the vulnerable. Tight controls protecting those who need protection would also greatly reduce the demand on hospitals. I don’t think there is a good argument against speeding it up. What if the people in these skilled nursing homes tend to last less than a year. We could have 2 or 3 generations of them under attack instead of just one.
Until we have adequate testing, your plan risks millions of lives. Maybe if we have the capacity to test a million a day or more, this might work, after some rigorous testing and tracking to locate the latest hot spots. But we’re not even close to that.
How about a safety net that is more hole than net? How about the government doing jack to help people stay at home without the risk of losing that home, or going without food or medicine? Or do you think the more vulnerable don’t need to eat and aren’t paying rent/mortgage?
Wow, where did you pull that out of? Please provide an actual cite that the majority in “skilled nursing homes tend to last less than a year”. Or have you succumbed to the myth that all those who died were so feeble they probably would have expired shortly anyway? Because - newsflash - you have have diabetes or heart disease or high blood pressure for decades. Most of the people who have risk factors are NOT, in fact, likely to die within a year.
The way to protect the economy is to issue payments. Yes, it will create more debt. But mass death is even worse for the economy. During the Spanish flu, the cities that maintained restrictions the longest had the best economic recoveries. The cities that lifted them first had the worst.
A possible cause is that there are two or three pretty reasonably justifiable ways of reporting per-day cases - a) assign them to the day on which the central reporting agency becomes aware of them, b) assign them to the day on which a positive test comes back, c) assign them to the day on which the patient starts showing symptoms.
Worldometers and, I believe, the Google site, are using method a). Chessic Sense’s link appears to be using method b) - which is why it explicitly says the last few days are unreliable.
Method b) is a perfectly sensible one, particularly for looking for long term trends, but it does have the danger if you’re roughly in the region of ‘peak’ zone, the peak will generally look earlier than it should, until you’re a way past that point. Meanwhile, method a) will always make the peak look a little later than it should, because it adds that extra delay step
With the conditions you mentioned you have an elevated risk but still not particularly high unless you are in very bad shape to start with.
What makes you think there are other forces at work keeping the numbers low in Asia? It seems to me that most countries in Asia have extremely strict quarantining measures compared to western countries, and are far ahead in contact tracing measures as well as social acceptance of mask wearing. I’m not sure what “other forces” you are suggesting might be the cause of lower death rates in those regions - genetic or environmental factors protecting the population of those areas? That’s a possibility but I don’t know if the science is advanced enough to shed much light on that.
I agree with you that the region merits close attention, but if you think we should be trying to emulate them you’d think that you’d be proposing stricter contact tracing and quarantining measures, not lesser.
i think we are too far gone to make contact tracing even worth while. Use what we know about risk and just go back to living life like we always have.
Many states are starting to relax the lockdowns, but the thing I hear from all of them, even the most lenient is something to the effect that “social distancing will continue indefinitely.”
I’m not arguing with that per se, but in what universe will restaurants, bars, casinos, tourist destinations, and the like be able to survive long term? For several reasons:
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Many will stay at home because of continued fears about the virus.
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With social distancing, all of these places will have to be at 25% capacity at best. No business can survive on that when they have based their future profits and fixed costs at 100%.
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Even people who are fearless and don’t care about going out won’t want to do it in this environment. For example, I enjoy going to restaurants. But if I’m forced to stay in a certain area and being served by someone wearing a face mask, there is something not enjoyable about that. Again, it’s all fine for safety, but no thanks, I’ll just eat at home.
Or maybe I was going to Vegas this fall. But blackjack tables are spread out and two slot machines between players? I want the cheers and the high fives. The check-in lines at Vegas hotels are long anyways. If we all have to stand six feet apart, we’ll be lined up back to McCarran Airport. No thanks, I’ll wait until next year.
Or maybe I was going to Key West. You mean I can’t do the Duval Crawl? Those tiny restaurants could hold maybe 8 customers if social distancing is enforced. I want to party. Again, I understand the need for social distancing and support it, but I’ll save my money for a Key West Trip next year.
Short version: I’m all for social distancing, but I think that very large sectors of the economy are absolutely screwed until it is lifted.
You did not respond to my question earlier. Please answer now: Where did you learn that COVID deaths are overcounts? What evidence have you that counts are overstated? Cites, please.
Which press? Which Democrats? Cites, please.
Who asserts that more deaths now mean fewer later? Cites, please.
Return to normalcy? That’s what Harding campaigned on a century ago. Didn’t happen then, won’t happen now. Why do you think otherwise? No cites needed but an unsupported argument won’t get you far.
MrsRico and I would rather distance and sanitize than be intubated in ICU. Many other cautious folk probably feel likewise. Meanwhile, 1918 showed that locales closing soonest and hardest recovered economically fastest. Those seeking early opening thus seem either uninformed or anxious for extended economic collapse.
So no, no cites to support your opinion then…
I don’t understand your response here. The point is that hospitalization numbers by themselves are insufficient to draw conclusions.
Say for this county there were 50 hospitalizations today, 50 yesterday and 50 the day before. Can we infer from that whether the virus has just infected many more people who are not yet symptomatic?
Correct, but again, hospitalizations is a downstream result of prior decisions.
Yes hospitalizations and deaths are the bottom line that we care most about.
But we need more proximate information to base our decisions on.
It’s like trying to base a cancer treatment on whether the cancer has metastasized to the brain yet. If it hasn’t, that doesn’t mean it won’t. If it has, that’s probably too late.
As I said in my previous post, yes the states should open up separately at different times and different degrees, but IMO this should happen in a coordinated way where we’re all using similar robust indicators of when the time is right to do X, Y or Z.
And of course it matters that that leadership and coordination is not there, because you’re advocating this as a course of action.
You’re agreeing with me that there’s a major problem with this plan, but choosing, I guess, to just focus on the aspects where there isn’t a problem.
Unfortunately the lack of coordination could bring down the whole thing if several states open up prematurely.
Ok, I will tell you why America has such a high death rate and where I am from (Korea, originally from Canada), has such a low death rate.
There are both good and bad things about America and South Korea. I’m not saying who is better than the other. I will state points in favor of US and points in favor of Korea, as well as their drawbacks.
You have to trust me on this, or someone can try and fill in the details that I don’t mention because I’m mainly just focusing the bigger picture.
When Korea got its first outbreak from that shinjeon church (cult), it spread in a very localized area/city. Korea was able to contain it very quickly for a few reasons and why America was slow and poor to contain theirs:
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Korea is a much smaller country by landsize compared to US. Much more difficult for US to contain.
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US has a much bigger population.
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US has a very obese population (1/3 of Americas are obese and obesity is considered an underlying health issue and that’s why so many Americans die from covid19 because they are already
unhealthy and obesity is a bad thing to have when it comes to fighting off colds, flus, pneumonia. -
Korea’s population is better educated per capita. People understand exactly what it is, what to do, and how to do their part. Americans had no clue, even after being told still had no clue, and it took them some 2-3 weeks to finally figure it out. Koreans understood this literally 24 hours after it was reported in the news.
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Korea as a mostly homogenous nation work together and think alike almost like a “hive mind”. Once the news spread of the outbreak, everybody, and I mean everybody responded like they were all
machines and just doing exactly what everyone else was doing…putting on masks, staying home, washing hands, using hand sanitizer, shutting everything down etc. No protests, no complaints, just instant transformation mode. In Americ.a, you have 50+ states, each fighting with each other, all fighting with the President, politicians bickering back and forth, race wars because blacks were getting it worse than whites, more trump attacks, more fake news, more b*tching about Trump on the news, and some more attacking Trump on the news, and they are just so diverse and divisive that nobody was on the same page, everyone was crying on the news, hospitals and health workers shouting angrily blaming this that thee and thou etc…Korea, none of that. Instantly everyone cooperated, everyone reacted the same way and there was no complaining, no attacking, no politicians bickering, no time wasted with fake news, no health workers crying and angry…day and night difference. -
America’s poor infrastructure and Korea’s advanced. The systems in America are old and outdated for the most part for the general public. You have too many people, not enough hospitals. The systems get log jammed and stacked and everything becomes a bottle neck. In Korea, the medical system is fast as lighting. I go into the hospital, there’s literally no line up. You get treatment as fast as you can blink. Efficient.
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Korea has this awful tracking system which is perfect for situations like this but horrible for someone if you believe in liberty, privacy, freedom etc. Korea uses a central text messaging system that sends out information to EVERY single person in the country at the same time instantly. So everyone knows exactly what happens, when, where, who got it, etc. It’s scary but in this situation, great for tracking the virus and contact tracing, finding people. In America, I don’t believe they have such a nation wide messaging system. Everyone just gets their information from 100 different sources all saying different things and more work to get on the same page.
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Confucian history. Confucian roots is all about the whole and not the individual. That’s why Asians in general are more shy to stand out alone because the nail that sticks out gets hammered. The philosophy of asian societies is more of a hive. Individuals do not exist. Only the whole / nationhood matters. Individuality is sacrificed for the sake of the people / country. Of course, that is changing over the last 50 years or the westernization of Asia, and now more asians are coming out as individuals, pursuing more individuality and individual success…whereas America on the other hand was made this way. It was forged by individuality. It was built on the backbone of the idea that the individual is of prime importance, your rights, your freedoms, your liberty etc…that’s why so many Americans are great at individual achievements etc and big egos (haha), whereas Asians were conditioned not to be that way but to focus only on the group success with no recognition for individuals.
Now if you recall the Sewol incident in Korea many years ago, the sinking of the boat that killed 300 Korean students on board, this was a prime example of why Korean way of being obedient and orderly was very bad. When the boat was sinking and taking on water, the students were all ordered over a PA system to stay in their rooms. WTF? So as the boat went under, the students all with life jackets, just obeyed and drowned as they got caught underwater in little air pockets with no way to get out once the air pocket ran out air. 300 dead just like that. Huge tragedy and mistake…exposed a huge flaw in Korean thinking. If American high school students were on a sinking boat, do you think they’d all listen to a stupid PA announcement from the captain saying to stay on the boat and stay in your rooms? HELL NO. American students and their individual mindset, break the rules, every man for himself attitude would rebel and disobey that rule, put on the life jackets, and get off the boat (there were nearby fishing boats that came to rescue some that were floating on the surface). Haven’t you seen Titanic?
There was a scene in Titanic where the poor people (steerage…this is America) were told to stay put and the gates were locked by the abnoxious titanic employees of White Starline as water was freaking filling up in the boat they wouldn’t open the gates because it was policy or rules (that’s Korea). Jack and Rose and all the steerage people shouting "OPEN THE F**ING GATE!! and they all proceeded to break the rules, disobey and ram the gates open with a bench. Then as they came through the guard says, “YOU CAN’T DO THAT!” and gets punched in the face. Well that’s Korea for you…you can’t do this you can’t do that and everyone obeys. But America is like Jack Dawson, hell with your rules, the boat is taking on water, I need to get to the surface, and punched authority in the face (think Buster Brown…the first american comic cartoon). This is where America would do well in a situation like Sewol…and Korea’s way is shit.
But when it comes to a virus / contagion, all of a sudden Korea’s way of obedience and orderly conduct THRIVES and contains the situation like a boss. America’s strength in individuality and breaking rules would not work well.
This is why back in late February, when Korea was approaching a few thousand cases and growing rapidly and America only had like 20 cases, I made this bold prediction. I said that America is going to be the worse hit and they will get 1 million cases. Everyone thought I was mad crazy. I said Korea will actually be the best place and model example for the world (but at that time they were ranked 2nd highest after China).
Now we see the bigger picture and the clearer picture.
Korea literally has no new cases within the country anymore (majority come from abroad stopped at the airports) and has been under 20 new cases a day for the last 20 days. Far below the CDC recommended threshold of 40 per day. Even still, Koreans are so paranoid and still insisting on keeping schools closed and wearing masks, social distancing, etc…it’s so ridiculous now the pendulum has swung too far to the other side. In America, they still have rising cases approaching 1.5 million and they want to start re-opening and relaxing social distancing laws etc LOL. So you can see the difference. The great thing about America is they take big chances, they are risk takers, it is the source of their greatness but also danger. Korea is too paranoid, too scared to take chances, they play it safe, which is the source of their greatness and also problems.
cornflakes I broadly agree with your points.
In fact I was going to include your point 5 about culture in my list about China. But thought it would just prompt people to say “People obey government in China because otherwise they end up in prison or worse” – which is of course true, but it’s much more than just that.
There’s just far less individualism here so, let’s hypothetically say the government didn’t tell people to wear masks but many communities were choosing to wear masks. If you lived in such a community you would wear a mask; nobody here wants to be the black sheep, you’re supposed to make an effort to fit in.
However, I don’t like your points 1 and 2:
I don’t like these because they are used as excuse all the time for just about every area where the US is failing. The combination of these two things works well as an excuse, because while there are many populous countries, and many big countries, there are relatively few big and populous countries.
However this is one situation where the excuse doesn’t stand up so well, since the origin of the outbreak, China, is comparable in size to the US and has a much bigger population and has handled the outbreak much better (even if people are still scoffing at the Chinese official figures I doubt anyone at this point is seriously suggesting the outbreak has been comparable in severity to the US and yet somehow has dropped to effectively zero at this point).
Nobody is suggesting anybody open early. The argument is whether right now is early. Depends on where you ware.
I would say it doesn’t really matter how many have the virus at that point, because the important number is known already. It’s 50, and it’s holding steady.
Assuming 50 is well below capacity, then you should be in favor of easing restrictions so you could keep that number at 50 or maybe even bump it up to 70 (or whatever), so long as you’re well below your ceiling. If there are thousands of asymptomatic people out there, great. They’ll be immune soon without a heavy social cost of getting them there. Does that suck on a personal level? Yeah. But I think everyone in this thread agrees we need to be thinking of society as a whole, not the individual.
If you had 500 customers in a store, and you’re in charge of cash registers, and you had 10 cashiers clocked in, would you put only 3 on registers? No, you’d get as many as safely possible clearing the queue so that new customers can come in. If you keep it too low for too long, new customers entering the store would grow the queue to 700, then 1000, then 1500, and then you’ve got pissed off customers dropping their items and leaving.
Hospitals are the same way. We have 300 million Americans that need COVID servicing, all with different and unpredictable needs. So we need to be applying the resources we have to that problem in the most efficient way. And keeping everything closed when we have 7 cashiers standing around chewing gum isn’t going to help things.
Right, so you meter it. Open a little, see what happens. Open some more, see what happens. If you only let a trickle through the faucet, we all die of thirst. Open the tap a bit, see if it floods.
Except it’s more like we know the cancer is nowhere near big enough to metastasize yet. So we don’t need to be so aggressive in our treatment that it poisons the patient.
Staying closed isn’t going to make the leadership appear. I didn’t say there was no leadership, I said the states are leading this. They can be the ones to handle the reopening. It’s like you’re suggesting we either get Federal leadership or we stay closed forever. Those are not the only choices.
I didn’t say asymptomatic, I said people who are not yet symptomatic. And even if we’re talking about asymptomatic cases, those people can give the virus to others who may get sick and die.
So you don’t get to keep saying it doesn’t matter. Of course it matters. The number of people in an area with the virus right now is the critical information that tells us how many will become sick and need hospitalization. *Not *the number of hospitalizations now, which can be very misleading, given that many different scenarios might look the same in terms of today’s hospitalization figure.
Frankly, I just don’t get why so many want to treat the US as a special case on this. Countries that are controlling the virus well are using quarantines aggressively, implementing frequent testing and contact tracing apps. Just do the same thing and save lives.
You think hospitals right now are under utilized?
And when it floods, you’re screwed. That’s the point.
It’s funny you’re making up a false dilemma and then saying those are not the only two choices. Damn straight they’re not!
What I am suggesting is staying closed while testing capacity ramps up and tracing apps roll out, so we know that it’s safe to open up.
That is exactly what this POTUS and his toadies are suggesting, and ordering. Dickhead-in-Chief said Americans must “be warriors” and accept massive casualties. Subtext: to make billionaires richer. Sacrifice Granny to keep Larry Ellison solvent. :eek:
I be very ware. As for timing: US infection and death rates still rise, and many states, mostly (R)-run now, have demonstrably poor medical treatment and reporting systems.* Expect cases and deaths to spike again, and again, with yet further economic calamity. Poor blacks and LatinXs will suffer most but to the (R) base they’re expendable. The Coronavirus Was an Emergency Until Trump Found Out Who Was Dying. Remember when Urban Renewal was called Negro Removal? An ethnic breakdown of 2020 excess deaths will be really ugly.
So yes, it’s much too early.
- WalletHub lists the worst as Alaska, North Carolina, Mississippi, South Carolina, Arkansas, Georgia, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, Arizona, West Virginia, and Florida. See a pattern?