Many Americans are underestimating how disruptive a mass uncontrolled pandemic is going to be to their lives. If hospitals are completely overflowing and most people who get serious symptoms die for lack of available treatment capacity, and everyone knows friends and family members who've already died form it, do you think life isn't going to be massively disrupted anyway? People will hunker down and go nowhere out of a sheer sense of self-preservation, without the government needing to tell them to.
The pandemic itself is what's causing all the disruption and economic hardship. The social distancing measures are NOT the cause -- in the absence of them we'd be doing even worse off in the long run.
> The social distancing measures are NOT the cause -- in the absence of them we'd be doing even worse off in the long run.
I don't share your high level of certainty about that.
I don't believe an uncontrolled pandemic would have caused the amount of business closures and layoffs and mass unemployment the lockdowns have already caused. It would certainly be bad for business, and there would be some layoffs, and we would almost definitely have a recession, but many businesses that are now closed would have remained open, motivated purely by self-preservation.
Even now we see people out and about, even though the government tells them to stay home, and I don't believe that would change very much if the disease was uncontrolled. The rich can afford to stay at home, but the poor need to go to work. Self-preservation includes the desire to earn an income.
Hopefully we don't find out later on that the total amount of human suffering caused by the lockdowns outweighs the suffering caused by the disease. I think it probably won't, but we need to consider the possibility.
That is likely true but if this runs it’s course naturally we will see an enormous peak and then just as rapid a drop as we reach herd immunity in a couple months
The true choice here is between a lot of deaths and a couple months of staying at home and fewer deaths but years of staying at home.
> That is likely true but if this runs it’s course naturally we will see an enormous peak and then just as rapid a drop
And millions of preventable deaths, just in the US alone. You're underestimating the psychological and economic impacts that would have.
In reality we wouldn't experience such a sharp peak because people aren't stupid; many will start self-quarantining anyway as the pandemic rips through the nation. The economic disruption isn't a choice we're making; it's going to happen one way or the other with this pandemic. Don't think people are going to continue merrily going out in society when it's a guaranteed ticket to a terrible disease.
Hate to break it to you, but hospitals are going to be overrun either way. 70-year-olds outnumber ICU beds 1,000 to one in many counties, some counties have no ICUs, some counties have no hospitals! [1]
Because hospitals will be overwhelmed by a factor of 10 or so, social-distancing to slow things down by 50% is not going to change that.
The numbers paint a pretty clear picture, for those who bother to look at them.
> but hospitals are going to be overrun either way
Only if COVID patients are prioritised.
What's the point of assigning an ICU bed to a 79yo with two potential comorbidities who will be dead within the week regardless of how much treatment is given? Compared to a 30yo who has been in a car crash and has a chance of survival.
How many of those friends and family members died of causes that could be prevented through temporary social distancing? And how many years was that spread over, vs the single month we'd be looking at here with an uncontrolled coronavirus pandemic?
Saying Americans is possibly too broad because from the looks of it, there really are some attempts to walk a different route. The same is with some nations.
Let’s see, for example, if the Texas more relaxed approach performs better than California. The nuances between approaches may blossom into a wider difference. It’s not obvious that Americans are all sailing in the same boat.
The societal cost of covid19 vs social distancing depends on the time scale. Three to six months? Covid19 is almost certainly worse. Nine to twelve months? Fifteen months? Two years? Strict social distancing will be much much worse at those time scales. People will starve and segments of the logistical network necessary to sustain the medical industry will be in danger of collapsing. Not to mention the enormous strain on governments and services caring for tens if not hundreds of millions of people.
Lucky for us, South Korea has shown that this thing is beatable, even without a vaccine. Exhaustive testing, contact tracing, and enhanced hygiene measure are a great follow up for social distancing (though I have no idea what's going to happen in southeast Asia or Africa). But larger countries will require more supplies and time to manage the virus. The question I haven't heard the answer to yet is how long can the shutdown last before it effects our ability to treat covid19 and provide for basic necessities? I'd rather not we not figure that one out the hard way. We need to be looking for active solutions and this article provides some good ideas.
Disruption from Spanish Flu was short-lived, and yes the damage caused is from the lockdown, not the pandemic.
In the worst-affected areas (except maybe on small city level), the deaths are still a blip. If there was no media circus around it, everybody would still be mostly unaware; any kind of reaction would just be starting now with some areas having issues in hospitals, and even then judging by how people ignored the lockdown in Seattle when it was partial, it wouldn't be as bad as now.
Then, by CA govt's own admission in the worst case they'd be near herd immunity (iirc they listed 56% infected) in 8 weeks. That includes the times where the deaths are still a blip compared to flu, and hospitals are not overwhelmed. So let's say 5 weeks of panic. And then that's it.
Hospitals are not overflowing. We have 6,100 hospitals,989,000 hospital beds available. And my best friend is a Registered Nurse (California) and says they are not even close to capacity. She also stated what is presented on the news is 100% a lie.
Okay. I also have a friend. He is 35yo and has COVID and his blood oxygen saturation is at 80%. The UCLA hospitals refuse to admit him. They’re already over capacity.
I've been telling my wife and friends I expect this to last well over a year. I've been told I "sound like an idiot" and that my negativity isn't helping. We'll see.
Back in January, my friends were trying to convince me to do a spring break type vacation in Miami in March. I said, I dunno if we should book just yet, this Coronavirus in China is certainly going to become a global pandemic. They thought I was a tinfoil hat lunatic.
Then, in early March, right when SF starts it's social distance / lockdown, and SXSW and stuff like that starts getting canceled -- the Spring break thing we wanted to do in Miami is canceled, too. No surprise.
Immediately after, my friends try to convince me that we should do this thing in Chicago in early May. Flights and hotels are stupid cheap right now, they say. We should take advantage.
I'm like, guys, there is enough data from China, SK, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Italy, and Iran to know that this is going to be at its worst by early May.
They think I'm insane. This will be over in a week or two at best, they say.
Now there's yet another event in October. They're trying to convince me to do that now! I'm like, GUYS! Hopefully the world is somewhat back to normal by then, but who knows? Why don't we just wait a bit. The deals will be around for a while.
It really seems like Fusion energy. Instead of always being 40 years away, everyone seems to think Coronavirus is always 2 weeks from just going away in its own.
You can still go if you are not taking orthogonal risks. We just cancelled our rock climbing vacation because we intended to do some stuff that's hard for us and I don't want to end up in a hospital for unrelated reason and take up the capacity. Otherwise (e.g. if we were going for a beach vacation), viewing lockdown as hugely net negative I'd totally go.
As far as I'm concerned, violating lockdown right now is basically civil disobedience - I normally run about once every 2-4 weeks, but if they close the park next to my house I'll make sure to go do it as often as my legs allow.
I'm just curious. Where do you live that you are not allowed to leave your home? I know different places are implementing social distancing differently.
The current nearly total shutdown of retail businesses cannot and will not last for a year. If it needs to last for a year in order to contain the virus, it still can't and won't, and people will die from the virus.
I think it should last between 18 to 24 months too, but the confinement measures will be lifted much sooner. Once the epidemic curve is going down and its well under control, people will be allowed to go back to work with face masks, slowly industry by industry before the end of the year. This should only take a couple of months.
There's no reason to expect "Once the epidemic curve is going down and its well under control"
before there's a vaccine deployed or everyone has been infected and paid the personal cost of their viral lottery ticket.
Best bet might be a modifier herd immunity plan, of infecting healthy people with a miniscule viral load and hoping the immune system can handle it better than a heavy load from getting sneezed on or spending all day at a hospital.
Well the Chinese have been able to successfully contain the disease after a 60day lockdown so it shouldn't take more than that. Unless of course there's an agenda we're not aware of.
The Chinese lockdown is much more severe than anything being enforced in the US. They track everyone's movements with their phones, large areas of the cities where cases have been reported are sealed off with checkpoints at the exit points. Your temperature is checked almost everywhere you go, the temperature of anyone working in food production is checked every 30mins, to board the subway you must scan the QR code in the specific carriage. It's very hard to explain just how drastically different the measures China are taking compared to the rest of the world but here is a good video that gives some insight: https://youtu.be/YfsdJGj3-jM
Can you imagine this happening in the US? What happens if this is what it takes to avoid the 60-80% infections required before herd immunity kicks in?
You might want to compare the strictness of the Chinese lockdown to what western countries are doing.
The goal of the lockdown must be getting the case numbers low enough that contact tracing works again. To do that you need to get the replication number well below 1 and hold it there for two months or so. The measures we're currently taking are totally insufficient for that. R is still closer to 3 than to 0.5.
This is a lie. China now has another outbreak, and several country's intelligence agencies have suggested that their original numbers were completely made up.
> Well the Chinese have been able to successfully contain the disease in 60days so it shouldn't take more than that.
Though they did seem to delay action, when they took it they went hard. Some of the US is past the point that China threw the brakes on, and the rest of the country continues to accelerate. We can't expect the timeline to align in any way.
Western leaders aren't even trying to contain the disease, and they readily admit that. It's all about flattening the curve, and a flat curve stays flat a long time.
The chinese are also using mass surveillance to keep the problem under control. You need to show a qr code on your phone that proves you are allowed out at many checkpoints.
My take is that if my government managed to successfully lie about the number of deaths (assigning COVID-19 as the reason only in cases where the patient had no chronic illnesses) then China is more than capable of doing the same and has a major incentive to do so.
China's can more effectively control people's movements than the US, which helps with containment.
But at the same time, as in the US, reported infection rates are probably much lower than the actual rates, since both countries' administrations have an interest in minimizing the reported rates, or when that fails, minimizing the timeline for normalization of life.
Public health authorities are the only people who have no incentive to exaggerate or suppress information.
There is nothing close to a lockdown currently in place anywhere in the US or Canada. Not to say that that's what's needed, just pointing out that China's policy was more extreme.
So what? The rest of the world is still a hot zone. As soon as one infected person slips through your net—tomorrow or six months in the future—you have an outbreak again.
It is just as likely that health experts are overestimating how long Americans can stop the economy. This happened so fast that most people really could not even wrap their head around the changes. I would love for us to keep working from home, reduce travel, and get this thing under control, but at least up until now, I have a salary, and am not being adversely impacted.
The number of Americans being adversely impacted is in excess of 10 million today, likely closer to 20 million, and pretty soon almost everyone is going to share some level of pain.
I am reminded of the factoid about how airlines will often announce a extended delay by first announcing a shorter delay and then continuing to push it back several times. That is supposedly done to increase moral. Apparently several smaller disappointments are easier for people to process, accept, and forgive rather than one large disappointment. I wonder if this is the government's approach, because no one looking at the facts of the situation could have believed resuming things by Easter or anytime in the next few weeks was likely.
> It's the fault of the American people for voting these morons into office.
Eh, not so much. Americans are forced to express their complex ideas and preferences through a system that consists of a handful of essentially binary choices. And most voters probably don't even strongly approve of any of the choices they're given.
If it's the fault of anyone, it's the fault of decades of clever sociopaths realizing that humans will swallow simple lies more easily than complex truths, and exploiting the trait to gain power.
That's a complex truth, and I don't like it either.
There's some blame to go around, but I put most of it on the CCP. Their early coverup and subsequent actions have contributed the most to making this situation as bad as it is. They arrested doctors[0] and continue to lie about their case totals[1].
This is a dangerous attitude. Yes, leaders should be held accountable, and also people need to take responsibility for themselves and their communities by working together and rejecting poor leaders.
Placing all of the blame on others is how you end up with poor leaders in the first place as you follow people who share that same trait.
South Korea and the US had the first reported case of corona on the same day. Both countries took polar opposite approaches. What’s most optimistic timeline for US to get handle on the covid to lift shelter in place rules? At least two months?
I don't think that is entirely fair. They are operating on what they know at the time, maybe underestimating themselves. Situation is constantly evolving.
Then they speak with that level of confidence. "This is what we believe, but it's not confirmed", "There's a high level of variability and unknowns here".
Instead Trump and cohorts are speaking in horribly over-optimistic platitudes that are based on his _hopes_, not his knowledge - and he doesn't have the oratory nuance to make one sound different to the other.
I guess on an emotional level it makes sense for people to believe that if we do a good job of social distancing, we will be rewarded by finishing it sooner. That's usually how hard things work. But according to my understanding, there is no such thing as a local end to the coronavirus. Even if some locality (city, region, country) implements such effective measures that the virus stops spreading there, they will still be vulnerable to outbreaks so long as they have enough unexposed, non-immune people to sustain person-to-person spread. Unless you hermetically seal your borders a la Plague Inc., the way for a community to go back to normal life is for a critical percentage of people to be exposed so we get herd immunity under the conditions of normal life.
In short: It's flattening the curve, not shrinking the area under the curve. The better we do it, the longer it will take.
P.S. Since this is inevitably political: in my personal experience the misconception that "the better we do it the sooner we can stop" is being spread by liberal/lefty people who are in favor of strict social distancing for as long as it takes. I think they're trying to rally enthusiasm for compliance, but the fact that this optimistic spin coincides with the political rhetoric from certain conservative ideologues should give them pause. Some politicians are anticipating and subtly fomenting a loss of patience with social distancing, and anything that raises unrealistic expectations plays right into their hands.
I don't agree with this. Right now we're locking down to get R0 well under 1.0. With its super strict lockdown, Wuhan got it down to supposedly 0.3. That means number of cases goes down by 70% or so roughly every five days. The goal is to get the case count down to in the range of dozens. The better job we do of stopping transmission, the quicker we get out of this phase.
Once the case count is sufficiently low, we just need R0 to be less than 1. 0.9 is sufficient. That means that each case infects 0.9 people on average. To do that, we're going to need everyone to wear masks, stop having big gatherings, aggressive rapid testing, and electronic and human contact tracing.
The low case count we're going for with the lockdown does two things. First, it stops mass death and hospital overload. Second, with fewer cases, you can actually allocate the manpower to trace all of them thoroughly.
> Once the case count is sufficiently low, we just need R0 to be less than 1. 0.9 is sufficient. That means that each case infects 0.9 people on average. To do that, we're going to need everyone to wear masks, stop having big gatherings, aggressive rapid testing, and electronic and human contact tracing.
Right -- which is why that isn't a sufficient condition for restoring normal life, where people can go to weddings, concerts, festivals, church services, sporting events, and other large gatherings. To get back to that, we need the virus to be gone, or we need herd immunity. The only way we are going to get there fast is if we fail badly and let tons of people die unnecessarily. The goal is to do it slowly so we can take care of sick people properly.
> Once the case count is sufficiently low, we just need R0 to be less than 1. 0.9 is sufficient
Consider that it takes days-to-weeks for patient-zero to show symptoms, another couple weeks for symptoms to appear in spreadees, and still more days for the government to responds with strict enforcement. This kind of feedback loop will make this kind of control impossible.
This part of your message does not help. To divide and radicalize people it will just make society weaker and individuals more irrational. For the virus there is no party lines nor nationalism. For the virus we are all together on this.
Social distancing, washing your hands and face masks are effective. And, I hope that next time we will be better prepared for this kind of emergencies. Humanity learns from each challenge.
I would include myself in that "liberal/lefty" group. I saw that several of the comments made prior to mine were blaming calculated conservative manipulation, and I wanted to point out that the misconceptions are also arising naturally on "our side" out of desire to promote compliance and optimism.
I didn't expect this issue to become political until I observed it happening. The political aspects of the issue have to be addressed, including the assumption that made-up facts can be benign if they're spoken by the right people with the right intentions.
I wonder how many people will die from the economic impact of a prolonged shutdown. I wonder how many lonely older folks will wish they were dead now that they can no longer receive the few visitors they had.
I'd be willing to bet it's more than the actual numbers affected by a virus and an overburdened hospital system.
Older folks? I have a mid 30's coworker who used to get most of social activity from the office and tech events and meetups (which is bad for a whole other set of reasons) but even from our fairly active work and friend group chats and you can tell he's really feeling the loneliness and depression.
He started drinking more during the week and has mentioned several times that he is very sad and can't wait for this to be all over. I know that there are thousands of people in the exact same scenario.
You shouldn't be downvoted. The economy is not some abstract separate thing that can stopped and started at will. A prolonged economic depression will kill people just as surely as the virus. They will die deaths of despair from suicide, substance abuse, and chronic disease over months and years but in the end they'll be dead all the same.
Governments can mitigate the problem to a limited extent through temporary measures like giving people money and halting evictions, but that will only help at the margins.
Older folks seem to be having the most polarized reactions, to be sure. My mother is terrified and letting her next-door neighbor do her shopping for her so her contact is limited to a single person. There's certainly no consensus among older people that they want to take their chances for the sake of the economy.
But the better we do, the sooner the crisis will be over. Sure, there will be a drawn-out painful phase of figuring out how to reboot the economy while maintaining social distancing, but it will be much less painful for most people if they don't personally know someone who died.
(I said "for most people" because apparently some commenters here think it's fine for people to die as long as they are old.)
In South Korea, people have already shifted to complaining that the government didn't prepare well for online school curricula, because that's what people are worried about now. Their children's education.
"It's flattening the curve, not shrinking the area under the curve"
That's not necessarily true. Numberphile recently did a piece on "The Coronavirus Curve." It describes "the so-called SIR Model being used to predict the spread of cornavirus."
At https://youtu.be/k6nLfCbAzgo?t=920 (15:20 into the video), they point out that in the model, if the infection rate is reduced hugely, not only does the peak get smaller, but so does the total number of infections.
That model doesn't account for other countries not following the same (presumably strict) procedures. We aren't islands, and even if there is a short term suppression in your current country, it seems unlikely you're going to quarantine every incoming flight (and its crew!) for 2 weeks per flight. I suspect any model that doesn't result in the majority of the population getting it eventually is probably wrong.
Thanks for the link, that was a fascinating watch, but I don't think they're modeling a return to normal life there. They assume a transmission rate that is decreased by social distancing measures, and they leave the transmission rate constant over time. I think that means they are modeling what happens if we continue the same social distancing practices indefinitely, rather than a return to normal life.
Another way of looking at it is that they are modeling herd immunity under social distancing, which is achieved at a lower infection rate than herd immunity under normal social behavior.
The biggest problem isn't political, it is that we're limited in how many people can be infected at any given time by our health care system. The capacity of our health care system must be taller than the height of the curve to limit the number of deaths.
> In short: It's flattening the curve, not shrinking the area under the curve. The better we do it, the longer it will take.
That's too narrow of a view -- it assumes that we can't raise hospital capacity, that supplies shortages are permanent, that treatments won't be developed, that vaccines are vapourware. The point of flattening the curve is to give enough time for those things to be developed such that we can get hospitalization/death rates down and manage a higher rate of infections.
I agree that effective medicines and/or vaccines would shrink the area aka total percentage of the population that eventually become infected. Although both remain unknowns, let's assume one or two years.
Neither adequate supplies nor hospital capacity would shrink the area. But they would increase the maximum tolerable infection rate. That is, the infection rate that wouldn't overwhelm resources, and increase the death rate.
Given all that, it seems pretty clear that disruptions will last at least a year or two. Perhaps we could move everyone at risk into isolation camps, and let everyone else get infected and recover, hopefully with some lasting immunity. And then perhaps use antiserum from them to help protect the isolated at-risk populations.
However, said isolated at-risk populations would likely be at huge risk of mass die-offs, unless there was substantial compartmentalization. Maybe tent cities?
By that point almost everyone will have been exposed anyway no matter what quarantine measures we take. At this point we're just trying to slow the spread, but essential activities have to continue (food, transportation, utilities, healthcare, infrastructure, military, emergency services, etc) and so everyone involved in those is going to act as transmission vectors. Once the vast majority of people have been exposed, any further widespread quarantine measures will become moot.
The airline industry is going to be crippled though, and might still be operating at limited capacity in October.
What do you think 80% normal will look like? I'm currently planning a small (30-50 people) event in October and I'm trying to figure out if I need to postpone/reschedule.
I'd just assume it needs to be rescheduled into 2021. Should group gatherings resume before the end of the year, which seems unlikely, it seems a safe bet that turnout would be rather low just due to people not wanting to risk it. On top of that, we're most likely going to be neck-deep in a pretty painful recession (at least) by then.
I was actually wondering about Christmas yesterday. I moved across the country a decade ago and go home for two weeks at Christmas each year. Assuming there is no vaccine by then (which seems to be the most likely case), I was wondering what was worse: 2 4+ hour flights and the airport time or taking the 3 days and 2 hotel stays to drive (or even sleeping in my car at a rest stop if that is even allowed). And that's all assuming there aren't travel restrictions in place in 8 months.
Part of this is due to many institutions, companies, governments, etc, just closing 'for the next month or so'. Then after a few weeks, they extend it another month, and so on.
It seems like many expect the pandemic to just magically disappear when you do a very low-effort quarantine and sit back and relax for a bit.
Remember, this entire pandemic started from one person being infected. As long as there exists one person with this virus, it can start back up and easily scale to millions of cases all over again. Victory is not easy, and some of the main reasons we are doing quarantine are to learn a lot more about treatments, cures, how to cope with these changes to our supply chain, and many other things; that is, to buy us time. The levels of quarantine most countries are doing obviously slow the spread down, but are not sufficient enough to completely stop it. This is a long-term event and will be with us for a long time.
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The pandemic itself is what's causing all the disruption and economic hardship. The social distancing measures are NOT the cause -- in the absence of them we'd be doing even worse off in the long run.
I don't share your high level of certainty about that.
I don't believe an uncontrolled pandemic would have caused the amount of business closures and layoffs and mass unemployment the lockdowns have already caused. It would certainly be bad for business, and there would be some layoffs, and we would almost definitely have a recession, but many businesses that are now closed would have remained open, motivated purely by self-preservation.
Even now we see people out and about, even though the government tells them to stay home, and I don't believe that would change very much if the disease was uncontrolled. The rich can afford to stay at home, but the poor need to go to work. Self-preservation includes the desire to earn an income.
Hopefully we don't find out later on that the total amount of human suffering caused by the lockdowns outweighs the suffering caused by the disease. I think it probably won't, but we need to consider the possibility.
The true choice here is between a lot of deaths and a couple months of staying at home and fewer deaths but years of staying at home.
And millions of preventable deaths, just in the US alone. You're underestimating the psychological and economic impacts that would have.
In reality we wouldn't experience such a sharp peak because people aren't stupid; many will start self-quarantining anyway as the pandemic rips through the nation. The economic disruption isn't a choice we're making; it's going to happen one way or the other with this pandemic. Don't think people are going to continue merrily going out in society when it's a guaranteed ticket to a terrible disease.
Where did the years part come from?
Because hospitals will be overwhelmed by a factor of 10 or so, social-distancing to slow things down by 50% is not going to change that.
The numbers paint a pretty clear picture, for those who bother to look at them.
1. https://khn.org/news/as-coronavirus-spreads-widely-millions-...
Only if COVID patients are prioritised.
What's the point of assigning an ICU bed to a 79yo with two potential comorbidities who will be dead within the week regardless of how much treatment is given? Compared to a 30yo who has been in a car crash and has a chance of survival.
You're underestimating how bad things can get.
Let’s see, for example, if the Texas more relaxed approach performs better than California. The nuances between approaches may blossom into a wider difference. It’s not obvious that Americans are all sailing in the same boat.
Lucky for us, South Korea has shown that this thing is beatable, even without a vaccine. Exhaustive testing, contact tracing, and enhanced hygiene measure are a great follow up for social distancing (though I have no idea what's going to happen in southeast Asia or Africa). But larger countries will require more supplies and time to manage the virus. The question I haven't heard the answer to yet is how long can the shutdown last before it effects our ability to treat covid19 and provide for basic necessities? I'd rather not we not figure that one out the hard way. We need to be looking for active solutions and this article provides some good ideas.
Dead Comment
Then, in early March, right when SF starts it's social distance / lockdown, and SXSW and stuff like that starts getting canceled -- the Spring break thing we wanted to do in Miami is canceled, too. No surprise.
Immediately after, my friends try to convince me that we should do this thing in Chicago in early May. Flights and hotels are stupid cheap right now, they say. We should take advantage.
I'm like, guys, there is enough data from China, SK, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Italy, and Iran to know that this is going to be at its worst by early May.
They think I'm insane. This will be over in a week or two at best, they say.
Now there's yet another event in October. They're trying to convince me to do that now! I'm like, GUYS! Hopefully the world is somewhat back to normal by then, but who knows? Why don't we just wait a bit. The deals will be around for a while.
It really seems like Fusion energy. Instead of always being 40 years away, everyone seems to think Coronavirus is always 2 weeks from just going away in its own.
As far as I'm concerned, violating lockdown right now is basically civil disobedience - I normally run about once every 2-4 weeks, but if they close the park next to my house I'll make sure to go do it as often as my legs allow.
I'm highly skeptical of the "economy will just unpause" theory.
before there's a vaccine deployed or everyone has been infected and paid the personal cost of their viral lottery ticket.
Best bet might be a modifier herd immunity plan, of infecting healthy people with a miniscule viral load and hoping the immune system can handle it better than a heavy load from getting sneezed on or spending all day at a hospital.
Can you imagine this happening in the US? What happens if this is what it takes to avoid the 60-80% infections required before herd immunity kicks in?
The goal of the lockdown must be getting the case numbers low enough that contact tracing works again. To do that you need to get the replication number well below 1 and hold it there for two months or so. The measures we're currently taking are totally insufficient for that. R is still closer to 3 than to 0.5.
Americans are not wearing masks universally.
There are no bans on movements between hotspots like New York and the rest of the country.
And Americans expect to successfully contain the disease in weeks.
I'd also be scared if you were welding people into homes too. For a different reason.
There really isn't a great solution here other than masks for all, and people behaving responsibly. Which isn't going to happen. :(
Though they did seem to delay action, when they took it they went hard. Some of the US is past the point that China threw the brakes on, and the rest of the country continues to accelerate. We can't expect the timeline to align in any way.
But at the same time, as in the US, reported infection rates are probably much lower than the actual rates, since both countries' administrations have an interest in minimizing the reported rates, or when that fails, minimizing the timeline for normalization of life.
Public health authorities are the only people who have no incentive to exaggerate or suppress information.
So what? The rest of the world is still a hot zone. As soon as one infected person slips through your net—tomorrow or six months in the future—you have an outbreak again.
The number of Americans being adversely impacted is in excess of 10 million today, likely closer to 20 million, and pretty soon almost everyone is going to share some level of pain.
This is going to be a very tumultuous 2 years.
We're constantly lied to. It's not the fault of the people in America. It's the fault of those in charge.
While that can never be discounted, we also need to factor in disinformation from both China and WHO as late as mid-January [1]
[1] https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152?lang=en
Deleted Comment
> Preliminary (...)
Wouldn't call that disinformation.
Eh, not so much. Americans are forced to express their complex ideas and preferences through a system that consists of a handful of essentially binary choices. And most voters probably don't even strongly approve of any of the choices they're given.
That's a complex truth, and I don't like it either.
Dead Comment
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-01/china-con...
Placing all of the blame on others is how you end up with poor leaders in the first place as you follow people who share that same trait.
Instead Trump and cohorts are speaking in horribly over-optimistic platitudes that are based on his _hopes_, not his knowledge - and he doesn't have the oratory nuance to make one sound different to the other.
In short: It's flattening the curve, not shrinking the area under the curve. The better we do it, the longer it will take.
P.S. Since this is inevitably political: in my personal experience the misconception that "the better we do it the sooner we can stop" is being spread by liberal/lefty people who are in favor of strict social distancing for as long as it takes. I think they're trying to rally enthusiasm for compliance, but the fact that this optimistic spin coincides with the political rhetoric from certain conservative ideologues should give them pause. Some politicians are anticipating and subtly fomenting a loss of patience with social distancing, and anything that raises unrealistic expectations plays right into their hands.
Once the case count is sufficiently low, we just need R0 to be less than 1. 0.9 is sufficient. That means that each case infects 0.9 people on average. To do that, we're going to need everyone to wear masks, stop having big gatherings, aggressive rapid testing, and electronic and human contact tracing.
The low case count we're going for with the lockdown does two things. First, it stops mass death and hospital overload. Second, with fewer cases, you can actually allocate the manpower to trace all of them thoroughly.
Right -- which is why that isn't a sufficient condition for restoring normal life, where people can go to weddings, concerts, festivals, church services, sporting events, and other large gatherings. To get back to that, we need the virus to be gone, or we need herd immunity. The only way we are going to get there fast is if we fail badly and let tons of people die unnecessarily. The goal is to do it slowly so we can take care of sick people properly.
Consider that it takes days-to-weeks for patient-zero to show symptoms, another couple weeks for symptoms to appear in spreadees, and still more days for the government to responds with strict enforcement. This kind of feedback loop will make this kind of control impossible.
This part of your message does not help. To divide and radicalize people it will just make society weaker and individuals more irrational. For the virus there is no party lines nor nationalism. For the virus we are all together on this.
Social distancing, washing your hands and face masks are effective. And, I hope that next time we will be better prepared for this kind of emergencies. Humanity learns from each challenge.
I didn't expect this issue to become political until I observed it happening. The political aspects of the issue have to be addressed, including the assumption that made-up facts can be benign if they're spoken by the right people with the right intentions.
I'd be willing to bet it's more than the actual numbers affected by a virus and an overburdened hospital system.
He started drinking more during the week and has mentioned several times that he is very sad and can't wait for this to be all over. I know that there are thousands of people in the exact same scenario.
Governments can mitigate the problem to a limited extent through temporary measures like giving people money and halting evictions, but that will only help at the margins.
(I said "for most people" because apparently some commenters here think it's fine for people to die as long as they are old.)
In South Korea, people have already shifted to complaining that the government didn't prepare well for online school curricula, because that's what people are worried about now. Their children's education.
That's not necessarily true. Numberphile recently did a piece on "The Coronavirus Curve." It describes "the so-called SIR Model being used to predict the spread of cornavirus."
At https://youtu.be/k6nLfCbAzgo?t=920 (15:20 into the video), they point out that in the model, if the infection rate is reduced hugely, not only does the peak get smaller, but so does the total number of infections.
Another way of looking at it is that they are modeling herd immunity under social distancing, which is achieved at a lower infection rate than herd immunity under normal social behavior.
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That's too narrow of a view -- it assumes that we can't raise hospital capacity, that supplies shortages are permanent, that treatments won't be developed, that vaccines are vapourware. The point of flattening the curve is to give enough time for those things to be developed such that we can get hospitalization/death rates down and manage a higher rate of infections.
Neither adequate supplies nor hospital capacity would shrink the area. But they would increase the maximum tolerable infection rate. That is, the infection rate that wouldn't overwhelm resources, and increase the death rate.
Given all that, it seems pretty clear that disruptions will last at least a year or two. Perhaps we could move everyone at risk into isolation camps, and let everyone else get infected and recover, hopefully with some lasting immunity. And then perhaps use antiserum from them to help protect the isolated at-risk populations.
However, said isolated at-risk populations would likely be at huge risk of mass die-offs, unless there was substantial compartmentalization. Maybe tent cities?
At this point I hope to but do not expect to be able to make my normal Christmastime holiday travel, and that's about my horizon.
The airline industry is going to be crippled though, and might still be operating at limited capacity in October.
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It seems like many expect the pandemic to just magically disappear when you do a very low-effort quarantine and sit back and relax for a bit.
Remember, this entire pandemic started from one person being infected. As long as there exists one person with this virus, it can start back up and easily scale to millions of cases all over again. Victory is not easy, and some of the main reasons we are doing quarantine are to learn a lot more about treatments, cures, how to cope with these changes to our supply chain, and many other things; that is, to buy us time. The levels of quarantine most countries are doing obviously slow the spread down, but are not sufficient enough to completely stop it. This is a long-term event and will be with us for a long time.
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