There are base facts that we can agree on such as the pandemic exists and is a legitimate threat.
Once there we can debate how to best mitigate the danger it poses.
But we can’t even get that first point settled.
We are not supposed to wait until our hospitals are collapsing under the burden of sick people. We are supposed to work to stop it when the numbers are low. Why you would wait until the other half of the country is also sick is mystifying.
And it doesn’t even have to be only about work. Stop going to events that are not necessary.
We know how viruses propagate. This is not rocket science. We know what to do.
You realize that people are dying specifically because of mitigation methods? Suicides and drug overdoses are way up. Are they expendables?
Now you are just making stuff up. The evidence on this is scant and what is there does not paint the picture you are telling.
Supposition, however, is no replacement for evidence. Timely data on rates of suicide are vital, and for some months we have been tracking and reviewing relevant studies for a living systematic review.6 The first version in June found no robust epidemiological studies with suicide as an outcome, but several studies reporting suicide trends have emerged more recently. Overall, the literature on the effect of covid-19 on suicide should be interpreted with caution. Most of the available publications are preprints, letters (neither is peer reviewed),91011 or commentaries using news reports of deaths by suicide as the data source.12
Nevertheless, a reasonably consistent picture is beginning to emerge from high income countries. Reports suggest either no rise in suicide rates (Massachusetts, USA11; Victoria, Australia13; England14) or a fall (Japan,9 Norway15) in the early months of the pandemic. SOURCE
I’m gonna go with the CDC recommendations on this. You should too.
Lol, a fall in suicides in Japan. Social distancing is keeping them from the suicide parks, I guess.
I just saw this:
I deleted that because I didn’t want to get in a big argument but I guess I should show I wasn’t just “making stuff up” as you so cordially described it:
This despite the CDC March 2020 press release noting a decline in opioid deaths in recent years.
Look, there’s no getting around it. If you think direct personal interaction can help suicide and drug overdoses from happening, social distancing rules impacts it.
We shouldn’t be comparing the number of people who died from Covid with the number of people who died due to side-effects of social distancing. The comparison should be between how many deaths social distancing prevented vs how many it contributed to. Unfortunately, of course, it’s hard to determine how many deaths were prevented by the distancing, and easier to get an idea of the number of deaths caused. But it’s still the only proper comparison to make - the other comparison (deaths due to Covid vs deaths due to distancing) makes distancing look better the less effective it is.
More people died in Japan in October than all of covid deaths in 2020.
In Japan, government statistics show suicide claimed more lives in October than Covid-19 has over the entire year to date. The monthly number of Japanese suicides rose to 2,153 in October, according to Japan’s National Police Agency. As of Friday, Japan’s total Covid-19 toll was 2,087, the health ministry said.
That’s a legitimate and useful comparison to make. But we were on the subject of “expendable” deaths. So even with your calculation, people were expendable.
I wouldn’t say so. I’d prefer to say that once we decide that a problem is serious enough to do something about, we mitigate as much of the consequences of what we do as much as possible. People are harmed by social distancing - more people would be harmed by a lack of social distancing; therefore, find ways to mitigate the harms of social distancing.
No, you’re right - that did get a lot of attention. But fortunately, these fears weren’t completely realized. However, there is a very real concern about what a surge upon a surge does to the system’s capacity.
This is not my wheelhouse but according to some of the sources I’ve read, some rural communities are going to lose healthcare completely as a result of hospital closures. Other hospitals in larger cities will simply be unable to keep up with the surges because even if the national guard helps out with supplying more beds and medical supplies, we still need staff to actually provide the treatment. COVID is resource intensive.
I’ve honestly tried to not be an alarmist, and I probably wouldn’t be as alarmed about COVID if ordinary people would just do their part and have a healthy fear of this virus, self-isolate, and wear masks. I actually agree with you in one sense (I think I do anyway): the disease itself is probably not as horrific as other viruses we could acquire. But the degree of contagion and the sheer numbers are the problem.
The problem that is unique to COVID - and the reason it’s a national emergency - is that unlike flu, unlike wars, unlike regular natural disasters that are budgeted for and manned with bureaucracy and infrastructure that predicts disaster in advance, COVID was not factored into our healthcare system these last few years. We’re sick and dying in ways our system didn’t anticipate, prepare for, budget for, hire enough personnel for, and develop vaccines and treatments for.
We’re playing catch up - and playing catch up is even harder when ordinary people say ‘screw it’ and throw caution to the wind. Imagine that on New Year’s Eve a massive freak hurricane heads for New York City, but instead of evacuating, people head for Times Square to watch the ball drop anyway. That’s pretty much what we’ve been doing and the results are predictable.
We’ve been through this all before. Local hospital issues are mitigated by moving patients if necessary. We have a substantial medical transport system in place for that as well as the ability to rapidly build temporary medical facilities if necessary.
We will be administering the vaccine in less than 2 weeks and that will initially go to nursing homes and first responders. Once these people have been inoculated the death threat will go down by default. The rest of us don’t need it. Vaccinations after that will be as useful as seasonal flu vaccines only in this case the covid vaccine should have a much higher level of effectiveness.
I’ll try this again: you can build the facilities - it won’t matter if you don’t have the manpower. It’s great that we can move people from one hospital to the next, or even one state to the next, but that is not really feasible. In the real world, when you are dealing with exponential growth, the virus surges faster than what the system is equipped to handle. When you get to that stage, healthcare workers are dealing with scarcity on a number of fronts - to the point where it taxes the decision-making process itself. Keep in mind hospitals have to treat more than just COVID. They treat trauma, too. People are still going to get drunk and fall down stairs. Still run red lights and get into head-on collisions. Still get cancer and heart attacks. Are we going to send them across state lines, too? Beyond that, keep in mind that doctors and nurses don’t have an inexhaustible supply of energy.
Right, which is good, but you need to slow down the rate of infection; otherwise you still have a surge.
Sources please.
Are you entirely sure about that? Here’s one thing that’s been on my mind lately. Google tells me we have about 6000 hospitals in the US. I know that some are huge and some are tiny, but for back-of-the-envelope purposes here, that’s about 50 deaths per hospital on average, over the span of eight months or so. (Longer if you believe the recent reports about the virus being in blood samples from December or whatever, but we’ll allow time for it to spread all over, at any rate.) I know the deaths can surge and ebb, but on average that’s about 1.5 deaths per week per hospital. I know that number wouldn’t cause such a grave threat to the system, so surely there must be more to it than that.
You assume that the statistics are evenly spread, which is an absurd assumption.
Lol, why in the world do you think that back of the envelope is of any use whatsoever? My fuses keep blowing but when I average all the houses on my block there should be plenty of capacity?!?
No, I fully recognize, and mentioned so, that there is a great variance in size of hospital and timings of deaths. But still…you can’t get to an overwhelming number of deaths at an overwhelming number of hospitals without driving the averages up.
The fact is that deaths are up about ten percent this year over what was expected. Or at least, I don’t think you’ll find anyone who will argue it’s significantly higher than that. Ten percent. Ten percent does not reconcile with the grave picture that is being painted. Not at all.
Maybe because you don’t really know anything about hospital capacity? Off season hospitals may be running close to 90%capacity, they are often strained during heavy flu seasons. This is worse than that. People can talk about how we should be more prepared but it’s not feasible to always be ready for a massive pandemic. Healthcare eats up enough money regularly that having significantly higher extra capacity just isn’t going to be financed. That goes for both public and private systems.
Agreed - which is why it’s crucial that people do things like wearing masks and maintain social distance.
I think the US has missed chances at a nuanced approach precisely because COVID became politicized. There is growing research that seems to be offering more clues about the lines of demarcation of COVID risks. When the pandemic began, health officials and policymakers understandably assumed that COVID was more contagious than it perhaps truly was. With that assumption, they ordered mass shutdowns, which in retrospect may not have been necessary but there was no way to know that at the time.
Fast forward to now: we know that if you wear a mask, you can probably do a lot of the things we were doing before. You can shop indoors for a short period of time. You can pick up food from restaurants. You can work outdoors and occasionally go indoors. You can socialize in small groups or pods provided you wear masks and stay apart, and most importantly, allow ventilation. The most dangerous activity is staying indoors with groups of people for more than 15 minutes at a time. It might be possible to stay indoors safely much longer if buildings install proper air filtration systems.
If people would just do what they’re supposed to do, a lot of the surge wouldn’t exist. But the single biggest factor in the spread of COVID has been the politicization of the response, and while I realize that this is not supposed to be a political thread, there is simply no way around it. The politicization of COVID is responsible for COVID. This is not just a political statement but a public health reality. And I blame one group of people for the current state of affairs.