The Trump administration has already decided to surrender to this pandemic. They're just betting that enough voters in key swing states are on board with their alternative reality that they won't notice or care about their grandparents and elderly neighbours dying.
I'm not sure if this is meant to be snarky, but it's 100% true.
>They're just betting that enough voters in key swing states are on board with their alternative reality that they won't notice
The propaganda that is digested by Trump supporters solidly claims that: (a) covid isn't that bad, it's just the flu, (b) people who are scared of it are not really Americans, and (c) any noise about it being dangerous is just the liberal left trying to undercut Trump.
This is the world we live in. Put on Fox or any AM right wing station - those are the talking points. It's all so disheartening and just, I don't know, depressing maybe is the word?
I know this issue is all political at this point, but if you want an honest answer, I personally believe most of the points you laid out. Here's my rationale for the points you mentioned:
1) All of the actual data and figures I've seen indicate that yes, it's worse than the flu, but that the reaction to it has still been insanely out of proportion. I'm basing that viewpoint on the data I've seen. I'm not basing my viewpoint on an emotional basis. I'm not basing my viewpoint on just whatever people on reddit/twitter/facebook scream at me. If I'm presented with different data (actual factual data, not opinion pieces) I'd be willing to change my viewpoint. But so far I have yet to see anything that would change my position.
2) This is a pretty large strawman/exaggeration and obviously I don't believe in that.
3) It's demonstrably, factual, obvious that the economy was one of Trump's selling points, and if the economy tanks, that removes one of his selling points and hurts him politically. That's undeniable. It's fact that the more chaos and perceived problems there are, the more it hurts him politically. That's undeniable. Where the argument could be is whether the left is intentionally trying to press those buttons or if they're acting in good faith. When I take how I've seen them act over the past few years (one such example being the partisan impeachment fiasco), combined with the fact that their reaction is entirely out of line with the actual data/facts (point 1), it leads me to believe that they are indeed intentionally overplaying it for political gain. Their political party benefits if they overplay it. They have means, motive, and opportunity.
I don't watch Fox news. I don't watch CNN. I don't make my viewpoints match what the hive mind screams at me is true. I base my viewpoints on the data I've seen. I'm entirely open to changing my viewpoint if better data comes in.
The dark side of this is that evolution works by culling the unfit to survive. Might want to choose another term (or maybe that's exactly what you intended)
No it doesn't. Evolution occurs due to change in allele frequency in a population over time. Relative death rate of certain organisms in a given environment is certainly a mechanism for this change in frequency, but it is not necessary for evolution to occur.
The Trump administration was/is in a no win situation. The democrats are intent on getting Trump out of office one way or another. Had he tried more on the national level, they would have fought him tooth and nail until the data indicated they had no choice and we would still be in this situation. When Trump issued the travel ban, the narrative was Trump was using the virus to invoke fear and distract from his impeachment. Well, it looks like they were wrong.
In fact, when Trump said he was going to take steps nationally, people screamed (correctly) that that was not authority given to the national government, and that Trump was trying to rule as an autocrat.
The result was that we got 50 different responses, not coordinated with each other. And to some degree that was appropriate - New York City needs a very different response than Loving County, Texas. That would be better handled at a state level than a national one.
The problem is that the state responses were too political and not enough medical. That might lead you back to thinking of a national response. But a national response would likely also be political rather than medical (for which Trump does deserve the blame). Even more, it would be perceived as political rather than medical (for which Trump also deserves some blame).
First, the "outdoor activities" seem to be a big part of the problem right now. People hanging out at the beach, the playgrounds, the parks, eating in groups in outdoor seating at restaurants, protesting, etc. all accelerate the spread.
It may well turn out that people doing fewer of those things means that we don't have a heavy second wave in the fall. I hope that's the case.
Second, the window isn't "closing," it's pretty much slammed shut. The genie is out of the bottle for the U.S. and likely the planet. We're in the ballpark of 50k diagnosed cases per day, plus between twice and ten times that number of undiagnosed cases, if not more.
Contact tracing 50k cases a day would be a massive undertaking, and we'd still be doing nothing about the 50k+ undiagnosed cases out there, most of which represent people who are still spreading the virus.
The political will for additional lockdowns and preventative measures is all but spent.
I hate to say it, but absent a very effective vaccine, COVID-19 is most likely here to stay.
I don't know why people keep talking about this "second wave" in America. Countries that have a second wave have one because they ended the first wave and are on the look out for more. America has not ended the first wave, at all. There can't be a second if the first is still here.
There was a big acceleration of cases in March (largely in NYC), and a second, even bigger acceleration (mostly in the Southern and Western regions) in June. Your point is valid, but there were two large increases in new cases that some people are calling waves, what would you prefer they be called?
I would assume a "second wave" means that it has crested in the same place twice. as opposed to calling Wuhan the first wave, Iran the second, Italy the third, Spain the fourth, NYC the fifth, and so on.
If NYC is bad again I'd call that a second wave. Florida is 1500 miles away and is experiencing their first wave, some time after NYC had theirs.
The optimist in me has noticed that no locality experiencing a bad first wave has had a second wave yet. Perhaps that is a sign of herd immunity (helped by T-cells, if so). Time will tell...
It's more like each population center in the country has its own (mostly) independent wave. Those waves then stack up on top of each other to produce a single national wave.
From what I've read (and there's no shortage of opinion and new facts floating around), indoor transmission is the bigger issue. The explosion in cases in the south is linked to reopenings of bars, restaurants, etc, and indoor crowds; whereas the protests (outdoors) caused relatively little movement in case numbers in those states.
This is consistent with recent findings of the virus being "airborne" (for various definitions of the word airborne) - indoor, poorly ventilated spaces are much worse than outdoor spaces, which have both UV and circulating air.
Otherwise, I agree with you about the window being slammed shut. Turning it around now would require political willpower and coordination that the US simply doesn't have.
But at least in some places, officials are pushing to reopen schools amid all this. A couple schools have already opened, with the result you’d expect.
So for me, the yelling about people having parties rings hollow.
What I find so crazy about America's response is that it's been totally all over the place with half-measures. America shut down 50% of the economy instead of 90% like European countries -- enough to devastate the economy, but leave COVID unscathed. Then, many people started to go outside anyways, giving COVID more gas, which then triggered them to go back into the 50% lockdown state that wasn't doing anything anyways.
This meant the end result was a devastated economy AND full-on COVID, worse than anywhere on Earth other than Brazil.
You can make a case for a full-on economic shutdown, like the Europeans, Australians, New Zealanders and even to a lesser extent Canadians. It seemed to work out there.
You can make a case for leaving the economy open like Sweden did, knowing they'd potentially have to pay a penalty in lives greater than countries that got a vaccine before everyone caught it -- and they are down to zero deaths now too. Sweden didn't shut down and COVID is done for them now. A total of 6,000 deaths for a population of 10,000,000.
But what you can't make a case for is HALF shutting down the economy -- not enough to let people make money, and not enough to stop the virus, and not really paying people enough to stay home, but somehow more than they were making anyways. That's literally the worst of all worlds. Devastated economy. Many dead people. It's a global embarrassment.
> Sweden didn't shut down and COVID is done for them now, too.
Whoa, I don't think it's safe to say that it's done anywhere. Just look at Melbourne, for an example of an outbreak in a country that supposedly had COVID19 under control.
Otherwise though, yes, the half measures in the US - and the limited compliance with even those half measures in many states/regions, has set up the US for a worst of all worlds scenario.
> Whoa, I don't think it's safe to say that it's done anywhere. Just look at Melbourne, for an example of an outbreak in a country that supposedly had COVID19 under control.
In Melbourne, they shut down in an attempt to stamp out COVID, keeping people from catching it, leaving a large population still prone to infection.
In Sweden, they did not. Their goal was not to stop people from catching COVID in Sweden, it was to let it happen at a rate they could manage, and treat people who caught it to the best of their abilities. That's why they aren't at risk of a second wave, but countries that shut down are at risk of one until a vaccine can be deployed to a herd-immunity level of the population. Sweden is there already.
Sweden is likely the only place on Earth it is safe to say it's done.
> herd-immunity level of the population. Sweden is there already.
The claim that Sweden has reached herd immunity is far too strong to be taken at face value without any supporting evidence ... evidence that simply doesn't exist at this time.
However, their daily death rate is much higher then their neighbors:
The jury is far from being out on Sweden's approach, and unless they lock down their borders in perpetuity (unlikely for a country so dependent on international trade and commerce), they will still have incoming cases from elsewhere in the world.
Their death rate is now zero, and daily confirmed cases is zero. [0] It's been ~1 per day since July 25th. At this point in time their death rates are the same as their neighbors.
Sweden doesn't have to lock down their borders because they didn't lock down their interior. It's all the other countries that need to lock down their borders. If it's not spreading inside the country, that's because it can't, due to herd immunity. Bars and restaurants are open, people are going to work. Life is approximately normal there now. It has been approximately normal there the whole time.
A few key points from your article:
> "There’s a lot to indicate that SARS-CoV-2 is a virus that needs to be controlled and not passively waited out."
And yet.
> "It’s still unknown whether they have short term immunity for about a year like with other coronaviruses, or any immunity at all."
Obviously people develop an immunity, their immune systems are responsible for clearing the virus out. If the immune system wasn't able to clear the virus out, they'd be dead. It's also fair to say that the more serious coronaviridae like SARS convey antibody-based immunity for >3 years [1] and T-cell immunity for 17 years and counting [2] so it's not exactly a shot in the dark.
Since we're a wildly speculating about herd immunity (without concrete evidence like widespread antibodies testing and a clear proven link between antibodies and long-term immunity), in all likelihood, Sweden can afford to be lax because all of its neighbors are not being lax.
If Germany decided to adopt Sweden's or the US's lax approach, the virus would have ravaged Germany like it is the US, and would have rapidly spread into small neighboring countries like Sweden. This isn't just the case for Sweden, It applies to all the small Nordic countries that are seeing good outcomes. The policies they enact are ultimately a rounding error compared to the impact of policies enacted in large neighboring countries like Germany and France.
This is basically what happened in the US, where states like Texas and Florida appeared to be doing well early on, but only because lockdowns in New York and other areas with early outbreaks temporarily protected them. Once everything reopened, those states were inundated with the pandemic.
Canada is only doing better perhaps because it still has entry restrictions on visitors from the US. If they open up their borders to US citizens before the pandemic is brought under control in the US, their efforts will be for naught.
"You can make a case for a full-on economic shutdown, like the Europeans, Australians, New Zealanders and even to a lesser extent Canadians."
The US is a Federal Republic so it's not a fair comparison with our Federal Government. I think the equivalent would be the EU mandating member countries shutdown. (I'm not that familiar with the EU charter but this is my understanding).
"worse than anywhere on Earth other than Brazil."
That seems to be subjective based on the metrics of comparison. If you want to make a claim like this, please be more specific and account for key variables such as population densities, count criteria, and ability to count/likely undercount (which applies to the US as well).
The EU - as political body - had nearly no say in the measure in Europe.
Germany - a EU member - is itself a federal republic. Here, it's not the federal government but the state and local country/city governments who managed the crisis (e.g. the government agencies tasked with ensuring public health as largely organized on the city/council level).
This sometimes results in diverging rules, but at the height of the crisis, everyone (even across party lines) sat together under the moderation of the federal government and came up with common rules to minimize irritation by differing rules.
To summon up, I don't think its fundamentally a problem of the political organization but of the political climate. The US seems to be far beyond the point where anyone would expect the people in power to actually come to a consensus across party lines.
> What I find so crazy about America's response is that it's been totally all over the place with half-measures
There also appear to be profound misunderstandings of how the world works among large swaths of people, from the idea that people will voluntarily do as they are told en masse (downright hilarious to anyone who has any understanding of compliance in healthcare at least in this country); to the notion that falling case rates ~= we have beaten the virus and can resume normal behavior (this all started from a handful of cases); to the notion that messaging doesn't matter (why parrot "masks protect other people from you" when you can truthfully say "masks protect you and others", and why say "young people should be concerned about putting old people at risk" when you can truthfully say "everyone is at risk of life altering complications"?); to the notion that it's acceptable to flip flop on facts for political expendiency without losing credibility; to the idea that concealing data about risk makes people more risk tolerant (it's the opposite); to the idea that John Doe consumer is somehow responsible for global supply chain management instead of governments, manufacturers, vendors, militaries, et al (how is it my responsibility to not buy masks through consumer channels instead of politicians' responsibility to order masks redirected to hospitals?); etc
Saying that for Sweden "Covid is done for them now" is extremely disingenuous. They have an incredible high CFR, and are averaging 400 new cases a day, with 72K still infected.
I was off in my math however, I'm seeing 250/day since 8/1 [1]. Yeah, I do consider that to be negligible, since it's going down or staying flat, not moving up, and the death rate remains zero.
There have been 23 deaths so far this month, a death rate of 2.3/day. Which aligns CFR of 10%. And I'm sure the families of the dying consider all of this "negligible."
I'm sure you'll come back with more "stats" that you misinterpret or perform bad maths on. Normally I don't engage in ad-hominem, but your entire comment history on COVID has been one of denial/dismissal/diminishment that one can't help to assume you're commenting in bad faith.
1. I don’t believe CFR is at all a useful metric. It’s not comparable across countries or across time. What is it capturing? If Sweden isn’t testing anyone who isn’t deathly ill of course it has a 10% CFR. If Singapore tests everyone of course it has a 0.05% CFR (both numbers from your link). Same disease, equally fatal in both places, yet you’re looking at a metric with a range of 3 orders of magnitude. If at this point those numbers haven’t started converging worldwide it’s a bad metric.
2. Of course how the disease affects families matters. The conversation isn’t about that, though. Public health decisions impact people one way or the other. People die one way or the other. The goal is to minimize deaths and suffering. This is the kind of thinking that prevents prison reform: “but what if we let someone out and they hurt someone else! Let’s just lock them up forever instead, problem solved.”
3. 1-2 deaths per day in a country of 10,000,000 is not a lot. By any measure. It will never be zero. 1-2 deaths per day is similar to their road fatalities (200-400 per year). It’s in line with their flu fatalities (500 per year).
If 1-2 daily flu and 1-2 daily road fatalities don’t represent a catastrophe, why does this?
4. 200 cases per day in a country of 10,000,000 is not a lot when they’re not trying to contain it. Like CFR though it’s not a useful metric for comparison across countries because it doesn’t factor in testing methodology. I cite this metric at all because of it’s pronounced exponential downtrend.
Factual inaccuracies in my posts preceding are my having looked at a graph wrong, or a poor graph, not bad faith.
Yes, I think it's a serious disease. Yes, I wear a mask whenever I'm outside. Yes, I think masking should be mandatory. Yes, I'll take the vaccine when it's available. I do also think there's been an awful lot of sensationalism at play.
High CFR suggests relatively low testing rates, which aligns with their more laissez-faire approach; they're only testing and managing the severe cases.
Look, 1 death is 1 too many. But let's step back for a moment from this "The world is ending" dialogue.
Global deaths as of 08/10 according to the John Hopkins' tracker is at 732k. It hasn't been a year yet, but lets say the world will be at 1.4mil by New Years Eve. Double the current at a 9ish month rate to a 12 month rate. Just for worst case scenario giggles.
That puts it roughly even with worldwide road injuries and under diabetes. A bit more than the amount of people dying from diarrhea. I said it in another post, 9+ million people die from heart disease due mostly from really poor diets and lifestyles (the fat, lazy kind more than the malnourished kind). And no one cared about any of those. If you're going to cry about the world is going to end, don't you think those would red flag for that sentiment first?
Modern medicine is fucking awesome. This could have been a death sentence for a hell of a lot more people. More people died in others pandemics and the world kept spinning. Let's keep that in mind. Hell, the sheer fact we have germ theory has fucking saved more lives than we can ever imagine. Yea, things are bad, but they're no where near as bad as they could be. If folks in history could see how we're emotionally reacting to our situation right now, they'd laugh.
Yes, don't be stupid, cough into your elbow, wash your damn hands (it scares me how many people did not wash their hands on a regular basis and admitted to that before all of this) but stop crying and pretending the world is going to end. That mentality doesn't help at all and you're equally the problem if you toot around "The end is near" like a hobo on the side of the road with a cardboard sign.
Simple math. Herd immunity requiring 50%. World population 7.6B. So 3.8B infections. Hospitalization rate is roughly 10%, so 380M hospitalizations. IFR is roughly 1%, so 38M fatalities.
So again, 3.8B infections, 380M hospitalizations, and 38M fatalities. Even assuming a magnitude of error, we're still looking at 38M hospitalizations and 3.8M deaths.
Michael Osterholm had a really good analogy into COVID. We're wrong to thing of it in waves; it's more like wildfire. Where it finds fuel, it will burn until the fuel is gone.
No, herd immunity requires >90, if not >95℅. and that assumes that herd immunity is even possible - there are plenty of indications that the covid-19 cured don't have long-term immunity. That leaves only either eradication, which the US, Brazil and Russia ruined for all of us, or that it ends as part of the annual flu family.
It's a little more complex than that. The herd immunity threshold estimates have assumed that everyone is equally susceptible. However the reality appears to be that some people have at least partial immunity, perhaps based on genetics or prior exposure to similar viruses. This is an active area of research, and for now the level and extent of population immunity remains an unknown variable.
The best estimate from the CDC indicates an IFR of 0.65% in the US. That's a major difference from 1%.
A recent sero-prevalance study in Mumbai found that 57% of people in the slums had antibodies, which would put those areas close to the theoretical herd immunity threshold. Despite limited access to advanced healthcare there the IFR was under 0.10%, although it's possible that some deaths weren't accurately recorded.
A change from an IFR of 1% to 0.65% would still mean 25M fatalities. And that's a CDC IFR from a country with vast, vast resources. As this circles the globe looking for firewood, it's going to burn a long time.
I'm extremely skeptical of the link you provided. Small sample size and there's no other supported data to indicate an IFR in line with influenza.
You are missing the subtle point that all those deaths occured despite all the measures. Most of Europe and Asia and the reasonable countries of the Americas shut down and took 6-10% off their GDP and still so many people died. And this doesn't even count all the undiagnosed ones from USofBadStatistics to the usual dictators which falsify data to the developing world which doesn't have any decent one.
Not to say the other things aren't major issues and in many cades have rather straightforward soputiopns (soda and fast food tax, massively inconvenience/tax smoking and drinking, actual driving lessons, rule enforcement and road improvements in developing countries, clean water and basic medicine for more places, ... But all this doesn't take away the seriousness of the pandemic. The world continued after black death, but with up to 1/3 and in some places 1/2 the population dead. So life will go on no matter how many die, but this doesn't excuse inaction.
You are entirely correct in what you say, and if this was just a virus that most people get sick then recover from, then I'd agree with the point you are making. But there are reports of lingering after-affects that suggest that many people may take years, if ever, to recover from Covid-19:
According to the WHO, the virus shows no signs of seasonal patterns[1]. This means that the spread and transmission of the virus doesn't change depending on the time of year. So which organization is wrong?
Also, I've seen many posts claiming something like: "Study shows recent protests with 300,000 ppl hanging off each other didn't cause spread of coronavirus". If you believe this (and I actually do btw), why do you think it will spread so easily in public, where basically everyone is wearing a mask and bathing themselves in hand sanitizer?
Not trying to incite an argument, I'm asking real questions that I feel people aren't asking themselves because it intersects with other aspects of their beliefs.
In the first few line of TFA they mention not the seasonal pattern but the fact that it is going to be more difficult to find COVID cases in the background of flu and common cold that do have a seasonal pattern.
So why is this article framed as a doom & gloom coronavirus article if the only thing they're trying to communicate is "it's gonna be hard to pick out the corona patients"?
I don't know about the riots not causing a spike in Covid cases. Here in LA County the spike started on June 15 and hit its highest points in July. That would seem to coincide nicely with the incubation periods of the initial riots and then spreading it to others.
In many areas, mask use isn't mandated, nor enforced. Same with social distancing; a megachurch in California ignored all the social distancing recommendations and even had the chutzpah to inform the authorities. They didn't cite a single violator.
And outdoor exposure is largely immaterial. It's exposure indoors where the research is starting to indicate aerosols as a significant vector (compared to droplets).
You wouldn't known how many cases came from a protest unless you test everyone or a truly representative sample a while after. In any case you wouldn't know until at least two weeks later, and then only with significant effort asking everyone whether they attended a specific protest (assuming they answer truthfully) and/or tracking people.
Realistically the window of opportunity already closed back in March. At this point community transmission is so widespread that to actually "beat back Covid-19" would take a long, strict lockdown (very few "essential" workers), extensive testing and contract tracing, and closing the borders. Even if those steps might leave us better off in the long run, they are simply no longer politically feasible. Wishes won't change that reality.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadThe Trump administration has already decided to surrender to this pandemic. They're just betting that enough voters in key swing states are on board with their alternative reality that they won't notice or care about their grandparents and elderly neighbours dying.
>They're just betting that enough voters in key swing states are on board with their alternative reality that they won't notice
The propaganda that is digested by Trump supporters solidly claims that: (a) covid isn't that bad, it's just the flu, (b) people who are scared of it are not really Americans, and (c) any noise about it being dangerous is just the liberal left trying to undercut Trump.
This is the world we live in. Put on Fox or any AM right wing station - those are the talking points. It's all so disheartening and just, I don't know, depressing maybe is the word?
1) All of the actual data and figures I've seen indicate that yes, it's worse than the flu, but that the reaction to it has still been insanely out of proportion. I'm basing that viewpoint on the data I've seen. I'm not basing my viewpoint on an emotional basis. I'm not basing my viewpoint on just whatever people on reddit/twitter/facebook scream at me. If I'm presented with different data (actual factual data, not opinion pieces) I'd be willing to change my viewpoint. But so far I have yet to see anything that would change my position.
2) This is a pretty large strawman/exaggeration and obviously I don't believe in that.
3) It's demonstrably, factual, obvious that the economy was one of Trump's selling points, and if the economy tanks, that removes one of his selling points and hurts him politically. That's undeniable. It's fact that the more chaos and perceived problems there are, the more it hurts him politically. That's undeniable. Where the argument could be is whether the left is intentionally trying to press those buttons or if they're acting in good faith. When I take how I've seen them act over the past few years (one such example being the partisan impeachment fiasco), combined with the fact that their reaction is entirely out of line with the actual data/facts (point 1), it leads me to believe that they are indeed intentionally overplaying it for political gain. Their political party benefits if they overplay it. They have means, motive, and opportunity.
I don't watch Fox news. I don't watch CNN. I don't make my viewpoints match what the hive mind screams at me is true. I base my viewpoints on the data I've seen. I'm entirely open to changing my viewpoint if better data comes in.
Lets hope we'll be able to look back on this period in history, and evolve to be better than this.
No it doesn't. Evolution occurs due to change in allele frequency in a population over time. Relative death rate of certain organisms in a given environment is certainly a mechanism for this change in frequency, but it is not necessary for evolution to occur.
[edit] Rather, not the core drivers but the core direction-setters.
The result was that we got 50 different responses, not coordinated with each other. And to some degree that was appropriate - New York City needs a very different response than Loving County, Texas. That would be better handled at a state level than a national one.
The problem is that the state responses were too political and not enough medical. That might lead you back to thinking of a national response. But a national response would likely also be political rather than medical (for which Trump does deserve the blame). Even more, it would be perceived as political rather than medical (for which Trump also deserves some blame).
First, the "outdoor activities" seem to be a big part of the problem right now. People hanging out at the beach, the playgrounds, the parks, eating in groups in outdoor seating at restaurants, protesting, etc. all accelerate the spread.
It may well turn out that people doing fewer of those things means that we don't have a heavy second wave in the fall. I hope that's the case.
Second, the window isn't "closing," it's pretty much slammed shut. The genie is out of the bottle for the U.S. and likely the planet. We're in the ballpark of 50k diagnosed cases per day, plus between twice and ten times that number of undiagnosed cases, if not more.
Contact tracing 50k cases a day would be a massive undertaking, and we'd still be doing nothing about the 50k+ undiagnosed cases out there, most of which represent people who are still spreading the virus.
The political will for additional lockdowns and preventative measures is all but spent.
I hate to say it, but absent a very effective vaccine, COVID-19 is most likely here to stay.
If NYC is bad again I'd call that a second wave. Florida is 1500 miles away and is experiencing their first wave, some time after NYC had theirs.
The optimist in me has noticed that no locality experiencing a bad first wave has had a second wave yet. Perhaps that is a sign of herd immunity (helped by T-cells, if so). Time will tell...
This is consistent with recent findings of the virus being "airborne" (for various definitions of the word airborne) - indoor, poorly ventilated spaces are much worse than outdoor spaces, which have both UV and circulating air.
Otherwise, I agree with you about the window being slammed shut. Turning it around now would require political willpower and coordination that the US simply doesn't have.
So for me, the yelling about people having parties rings hollow.
This meant the end result was a devastated economy AND full-on COVID, worse than anywhere on Earth other than Brazil.
You can make a case for a full-on economic shutdown, like the Europeans, Australians, New Zealanders and even to a lesser extent Canadians. It seemed to work out there.
You can make a case for leaving the economy open like Sweden did, knowing they'd potentially have to pay a penalty in lives greater than countries that got a vaccine before everyone caught it -- and they are down to zero deaths now too. Sweden didn't shut down and COVID is done for them now. A total of 6,000 deaths for a population of 10,000,000.
But what you can't make a case for is HALF shutting down the economy -- not enough to let people make money, and not enough to stop the virus, and not really paying people enough to stay home, but somehow more than they were making anyways. That's literally the worst of all worlds. Devastated economy. Many dead people. It's a global embarrassment.
Whoa, I don't think it's safe to say that it's done anywhere. Just look at Melbourne, for an example of an outbreak in a country that supposedly had COVID19 under control.
Otherwise though, yes, the half measures in the US - and the limited compliance with even those half measures in many states/regions, has set up the US for a worst of all worlds scenario.
In Melbourne, they shut down in an attempt to stamp out COVID, keeping people from catching it, leaving a large population still prone to infection.
In Sweden, they did not. Their goal was not to stop people from catching COVID in Sweden, it was to let it happen at a rate they could manage, and treat people who caught it to the best of their abilities. That's why they aren't at risk of a second wave, but countries that shut down are at risk of one until a vaccine can be deployed to a herd-immunity level of the population. Sweden is there already.
Sweden is likely the only place on Earth it is safe to say it's done.
The claim that Sweden has reached herd immunity is far too strong to be taken at face value without any supporting evidence ... evidence that simply doesn't exist at this time.
However, their daily death rate is much higher then their neighbors:
https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-c...
The jury is far from being out on Sweden's approach, and unless they lock down their borders in perpetuity (unlikely for a country so dependent on international trade and commerce), they will still have incoming cases from elsewhere in the world.
Sweden doesn't have to lock down their borders because they didn't lock down their interior. It's all the other countries that need to lock down their borders. If it's not spreading inside the country, that's because it can't, due to herd immunity. Bars and restaurants are open, people are going to work. Life is approximately normal there now. It has been approximately normal there the whole time.
A few key points from your article:
> "There’s a lot to indicate that SARS-CoV-2 is a virus that needs to be controlled and not passively waited out."
And yet.
> "It’s still unknown whether they have short term immunity for about a year like with other coronaviruses, or any immunity at all."
Obviously people develop an immunity, their immune systems are responsible for clearing the virus out. If the immune system wasn't able to clear the virus out, they'd be dead. It's also fair to say that the more serious coronaviridae like SARS convey antibody-based immunity for >3 years [1] and T-cell immunity for 17 years and counting [2] so it's not exactly a shot in the dark.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/sweden?countr...
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2851497/
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2550-z
If Germany decided to adopt Sweden's or the US's lax approach, the virus would have ravaged Germany like it is the US, and would have rapidly spread into small neighboring countries like Sweden. This isn't just the case for Sweden, It applies to all the small Nordic countries that are seeing good outcomes. The policies they enact are ultimately a rounding error compared to the impact of policies enacted in large neighboring countries like Germany and France.
This is basically what happened in the US, where states like Texas and Florida appeared to be doing well early on, but only because lockdowns in New York and other areas with early outbreaks temporarily protected them. Once everything reopened, those states were inundated with the pandemic.
Canada is only doing better perhaps because it still has entry restrictions on visitors from the US. If they open up their borders to US citizens before the pandemic is brought under control in the US, their efforts will be for naught.
The US is a Federal Republic so it's not a fair comparison with our Federal Government. I think the equivalent would be the EU mandating member countries shutdown. (I'm not that familiar with the EU charter but this is my understanding).
"worse than anywhere on Earth other than Brazil."
That seems to be subjective based on the metrics of comparison. If you want to make a claim like this, please be more specific and account for key variables such as population densities, count criteria, and ability to count/likely undercount (which applies to the US as well).
Germany - a EU member - is itself a federal republic. Here, it's not the federal government but the state and local country/city governments who managed the crisis (e.g. the government agencies tasked with ensuring public health as largely organized on the city/council level).
This sometimes results in diverging rules, but at the height of the crisis, everyone (even across party lines) sat together under the moderation of the federal government and came up with common rules to minimize irritation by differing rules.
To summon up, I don't think its fundamentally a problem of the political organization but of the political climate. The US seems to be far beyond the point where anyone would expect the people in power to actually come to a consensus across party lines.
There also appear to be profound misunderstandings of how the world works among large swaths of people, from the idea that people will voluntarily do as they are told en masse (downright hilarious to anyone who has any understanding of compliance in healthcare at least in this country); to the notion that falling case rates ~= we have beaten the virus and can resume normal behavior (this all started from a handful of cases); to the notion that messaging doesn't matter (why parrot "masks protect other people from you" when you can truthfully say "masks protect you and others", and why say "young people should be concerned about putting old people at risk" when you can truthfully say "everyone is at risk of life altering complications"?); to the notion that it's acceptable to flip flop on facts for political expendiency without losing credibility; to the idea that concealing data about risk makes people more risk tolerant (it's the opposite); to the idea that John Doe consumer is somehow responsible for global supply chain management instead of governments, manufacturers, vendors, militaries, et al (how is it my responsibility to not buy masks through consumer channels instead of politicians' responsibility to order masks redirected to hospitals?); etc
[1] https://www.coronatracker.com/country/sweden/
I'm sure you'll come back with more "stats" that you misinterpret or perform bad maths on. Normally I don't engage in ad-hominem, but your entire comment history on COVID has been one of denial/dismissal/diminishment that one can't help to assume you're commenting in bad faith.
https://studylib.net/coronavirus#country-se
1. I don’t believe CFR is at all a useful metric. It’s not comparable across countries or across time. What is it capturing? If Sweden isn’t testing anyone who isn’t deathly ill of course it has a 10% CFR. If Singapore tests everyone of course it has a 0.05% CFR (both numbers from your link). Same disease, equally fatal in both places, yet you’re looking at a metric with a range of 3 orders of magnitude. If at this point those numbers haven’t started converging worldwide it’s a bad metric.
2. Of course how the disease affects families matters. The conversation isn’t about that, though. Public health decisions impact people one way or the other. People die one way or the other. The goal is to minimize deaths and suffering. This is the kind of thinking that prevents prison reform: “but what if we let someone out and they hurt someone else! Let’s just lock them up forever instead, problem solved.”
3. 1-2 deaths per day in a country of 10,000,000 is not a lot. By any measure. It will never be zero. 1-2 deaths per day is similar to their road fatalities (200-400 per year). It’s in line with their flu fatalities (500 per year).
If 1-2 daily flu and 1-2 daily road fatalities don’t represent a catastrophe, why does this?
4. 200 cases per day in a country of 10,000,000 is not a lot when they’re not trying to contain it. Like CFR though it’s not a useful metric for comparison across countries because it doesn’t factor in testing methodology. I cite this metric at all because of it’s pronounced exponential downtrend.
Factual inaccuracies in my posts preceding are my having looked at a graph wrong, or a poor graph, not bad faith.
Yes, I think it's a serious disease. Yes, I wear a mask whenever I'm outside. Yes, I think masking should be mandatory. Yes, I'll take the vaccine when it's available. I do also think there's been an awful lot of sensationalism at play.
Global deaths as of 08/10 according to the John Hopkins' tracker is at 732k. It hasn't been a year yet, but lets say the world will be at 1.4mil by New Years Eve. Double the current at a 9ish month rate to a 12 month rate. Just for worst case scenario giggles.
That puts it roughly even with worldwide road injuries and under diabetes. A bit more than the amount of people dying from diarrhea. I said it in another post, 9+ million people die from heart disease due mostly from really poor diets and lifestyles (the fat, lazy kind more than the malnourished kind). And no one cared about any of those. If you're going to cry about the world is going to end, don't you think those would red flag for that sentiment first?
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/the-top-10-...
https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/topics/causes-of-de...
Modern medicine is fucking awesome. This could have been a death sentence for a hell of a lot more people. More people died in others pandemics and the world kept spinning. Let's keep that in mind. Hell, the sheer fact we have germ theory has fucking saved more lives than we can ever imagine. Yea, things are bad, but they're no where near as bad as they could be. If folks in history could see how we're emotionally reacting to our situation right now, they'd laugh.
Yes, don't be stupid, cough into your elbow, wash your damn hands (it scares me how many people did not wash their hands on a regular basis and admitted to that before all of this) but stop crying and pretending the world is going to end. That mentality doesn't help at all and you're equally the problem if you toot around "The end is near" like a hobo on the side of the road with a cardboard sign.
So again, 3.8B infections, 380M hospitalizations, and 38M fatalities. Even assuming a magnitude of error, we're still looking at 38M hospitalizations and 3.8M deaths.
Michael Osterholm had a really good analogy into COVID. We're wrong to thing of it in waves; it's more like wildfire. Where it finds fuel, it will burn until the fuel is gone.
The best estimate from the CDC indicates an IFR of 0.65% in the US. That's a major difference from 1%.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
A recent sero-prevalance study in Mumbai found that 57% of people in the slums had antibodies, which would put those areas close to the theoretical herd immunity threshold. Despite limited access to advanced healthcare there the IFR was under 0.10%, although it's possible that some deaths weren't accurately recorded.
https://www.cnbctv18.com/healthcare/57-sero-prevalence-in-sl...
I'm extremely skeptical of the link you provided. Small sample size and there's no other supported data to indicate an IFR in line with influenza.
Not to say the other things aren't major issues and in many cades have rather straightforward soputiopns (soda and fast food tax, massively inconvenience/tax smoking and drinking, actual driving lessons, rule enforcement and road improvements in developing countries, clean water and basic medicine for more places, ... But all this doesn't take away the seriousness of the pandemic. The world continued after black death, but with up to 1/3 and in some places 1/2 the population dead. So life will go on no matter how many die, but this doesn't excuse inaction.
That's assuming lockdown was effective...hint: the most vulnerable/elderly mostly died anyway.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/brain-fog-heart-dama...
https://www.heart.org/en/news/2020/07/06/months-after-infect...
So I think for that reason, maybe we should indeed have a "The world is ending" dialogue...
Also, I've seen many posts claiming something like: "Study shows recent protests with 300,000 ppl hanging off each other didn't cause spread of coronavirus". If you believe this (and I actually do btw), why do you think it will spread so easily in public, where basically everyone is wearing a mask and bathing themselves in hand sanitizer?
Not trying to incite an argument, I'm asking real questions that I feel people aren't asking themselves because it intersects with other aspects of their beliefs.
[1] - https://m.dw.com/en/coronavirus-digest-covid-19-shows-no-sea...
And outdoor exposure is largely immaterial. It's exposure indoors where the research is starting to indicate aerosols as a significant vector (compared to droplets).