This suggests younger cohorts need robust efforts to protect their rights when continued curtailment is attempted by those who aren’t offering up sufficient compensation and recourse for the impacted.
Can’t expect a generation to go through two economic catastrophes (GFC, Covid) without support and expect positive results. Things will just go from bad to worse.
Ah but that’s the irony. In the US the young overwhelmingly vote for the side that supports these authoritarian shutdowns. I remember when the authoritarians were on the right and the freedom lovers on the left. Oh, how times have changed.
(Compare South Dakota, right-leaning and NEVER locked down, to my home state of California, which is so democrat-leaning that we’re a de facto single party state)
Enforcing sensible public health policy in the middle of a raging, deadly, global pandemic is hardly authoritarian. We are being asked to put a little piece of cloth over our faces and to stay at home when we don’t have to go out. Yet people are acting like we are being loaded onto the trains. Have we so completely lost our sense of perspective?
It is not without precedent. Courts have upheld government's power to enforce curfews, which limit gatherings of adults, to protect public safety and property. I would like to see a court weigh in the constitutionality of a curfew for the narrow purpose of protecting the public from a pandemic. You may end up being right. I don't think the SCOTUS has weighed in on curfews yet.
I'd argue that younger people are less likely to vote because they're less likely to find politicians who they want to vote for, so just telling them to vote largely misses the point.
> I'd argue that younger people are less likely to vote because they're less likely to find politicians who they want to vote for, so just telling them to vote largely misses the point.
So vote and get active in a political party, then?
The level of involvement in politics required to influence who's on the ballot is quite a big commitment, and I think it's entirely reasonable for people to expect representation even if they don't have time for that.
The young can never outvite the old because the old are 65-90, but the young are 18-25 at best. The latter cohort is by definition several times smaller.
Why are 16 year old 'too immature' to vote by 90 year olds eligible? You can vote even if you are mentally ill.
Do schoolchildren have no interests at all that deserve at least some representation? Imagine we had a few representatives in parloament talking about their issues, that would probably improve discourse.
Colorado is not like that. You have mail in ballots in CO and can register along with a driver's license. You need only one piece of mail addressed to you to do so.
At 21 I was out of university with master's degree in physics, working full time and providing for my family (however small) and making all kinds of life choices. Where would I be in your book?
I was not the only graduate ;) There were many others like myself. In the old and long gone Soviet Union some people (myself included) went to University straight after school and at that time one would finish school at 17 (sometimes 16).
It's interesting how we can use age (selectively) as a discriminator, but within a certain range and in certain contexts, it's seen as "bad" to discriminate.
Most wouldn't say the concept of a retirement age is discriminatory, nor the concept of age of consent or minimum age to purchase alcohol, or pricing insurance rates differently based on age.
Somehow this application of age discrimination seems to cross the line for many people, though. I'm genuinely curious as to why.
Fun fact: In the US, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act forbids employment discrimination based on age against people over 40. It’s legal to discriminate against young people based on age.
It’s often legal to discriminate by age (that is literally what the drinking, driving, and smoking age limits are), but I believe that the government must have a compelling interest in the restriction. This one seems extremely shaky to me, but as is common it’s likely that a lot of people will end up paying fines since they can’t afford to fight an order that may not stand up to judicial scrutiny.
The problem is while technically Jacobson v Massachusetts is supposed to declare unreasonable restrictions unconstitutional, in practice it has allowed forced vaccination, forced sterilization, and forced detention. Oops!
Sorry for not making the connection clear enough. You mentioned a “compelling interest”; this is the same logic that was decided in Jacobson v Massachusetts which is the foundation for US case law regarding this topic.
My point is that this does fall under that reasoning.
Is the implication here that subdivisions of humans on attributes should all be equally valid or invalid, irrespective of the attribute? Because that seems silly.
Persons within the age range of 18-22 are not a protected class, so this does seem legal. Effective, maybe? I assume this is based on the idea that this age group is acting as super spreaders.
Ethical? That's a judgment call. I say yes, personally.
I don't see how it isn't agains the 1st amendment right to peaceably assemble. I could see it if it was a blanket lock down, maybe even on just 18-22 year olds, but it still has carve outs for going to school or work. Maybe someone with more experience could chime in, but I don't see how the government restricting how people can gather is constitutional. Only being allowed to participate in government approved activities is a slippery slope I'd rather we don't get started down.
> I don't see how it isn't against the 1st amendment right to peaceably assemble.
I assume that there are a number of factors here, most notably that the assembling, while peaceful, poses a considerable danger to the public. Certainly it would be nice to see some sort of carve out for explicit protesting but there you go.
All allowed activities are government approved activities.
>I don't see how the government restricting how people can gather is constitutional
None of the rights in the bill of rights are absolute. For better or for worse, the courts have decided that pretty much every right you have can be limited in the name of public safety.
If I'm in jail, the warden has no obligation to let me out if I want to go to my best friend's birthday party. If I try to stage an unpermitted protest in the middle of the street, I will eventually be removed
What's the point though? There were 2 options. Pay the equivalent of $10 USD or dig graves. AKA make poor people dig graves.
Plus, the article says it was only 8 people which won't have any actual impact.
I can't imagine any rational person thinking this would be effective. "Oh, I'm digging a grave for someone who has lived 3x more than me." If that were successful nobody would smoke, drink, eat bad food.
This strategy, ignoring human rights for a second, increases the proportion of at-risk individuals who must get sick before herd immunity is reached.
If you have a population of 100 people, and the HIT is 20% (assume homogenous mixing), of which half your population is high-risk and half is low-risk, you can enforce universal lockdown and end up with 10 high-risk and 10 low-risk infections, or you can encourage just the at-risk to isolate and end up with like 18 low-risk and 2 high-risk. It should be self evident which course is better.
Unfortunately the world has been tricked into viewing “herd immunity” as a dirty word as opposed to an emergent phenomenom.
Arbitrary and capricious regulations like this aren’t just ethically wrong, they’ee bad public health.
Unfortunately the disastrous Jacobson v Massachusetts decision laid the groundwork for this stuff. The Jacobson decision was later used to justify forced sterilization of the mentally retarded, as just one example of where a collectivist, “for the greater good” mentality inevitably takes you.
Jacobson v MA also formed the basis for Korematsu, the case that justified the suspension of Japanese Americans' human rights on the basis of their ethnicity.
Jacobson and its descendant Buck, then Korematsu, are among the most shameful moments in the history of the law in America.
I saw that too. I'm not sure how to feel about it. I know that lower courts are bound to uphold precedent via vertical stare decisis, but it sounds like even with the precedent as a given, she might have stretched it in a way she wasn't forced to. Do you have any thoughts here?
ACB seems like the perfect candidate except for exactly what you mentioned. So I am very curious how much of that was her hands being tied versus her being unusually authoritarian. Because if it's the latter, I absolutely share your concern.
One thing that amazes is me is how the individual rights objections to these orders get so little credit. People go into deep discussions of whether the cost/benefit makes sense (do you save sufficient lives with a measure to offset the cost of the restrictions).
As you point out, this is collectivist, utilitarianist thinking, and it gets us to a bad place. There is a very simple reason why these restrictions are outrageous: individuals have a right to gather with their friends if they so choose.
"collectivist, utilitarianist thinking, and it gets us to a bad place."
You can't proclaim this as a universal principle. Modern civilisation requires a significant amount of collectivism.
Think of the justice system. Back in 18th century England prisoners were charged for being in Jail and by judges to be judged - with massive corruption. Courts were not open to public.
There was no police or detectives - they were seen as totalitarian and opressive. Arrests depended on hue and cry and violent criminals openly boasted of their deeds in pubs
>There is a very simple reason why these restrictions are outrageous: individuals have a right to gather with their friends if they so choose.
I agree that "being able to gather with your friends" is a great thing, but I don't see why it's a sacred right that is "outrageous" to restrict no matter the consequences.
Like a lot of these debates, this sort of things comes down to your personal beliefs in the relative importances of:
- "The right as an invididual to do X"
- "The right as an individual to not be negatively affected by someone else doing X"
Most actions all on the spectrum somewhere:
"Society has decided it's acceptable for me to drive a car, even though it puts pedestrians at risk of being run over"
"Society has decided that it's not acceptable for me to drive a car when intoxicated, even if's really inconvenient for me to get a taxi home, because the risk of me killing a pedistrian is too high"
"Society isn't quite sure what the maximum speed that I can drive a car at on a surban street (and get to my destination faster, while increasing the risk of killing someone), but it's not 'as fast as I can go', and it's not '2 MPH'".
Its the same with "the right to gather with friends, and in the process increase the chances that I'll get COVID and pass it on to someone who dies from it". Simply declaring it "outrageous" not to maintain that right is overly simplistic, and I think that actually, some form of utilitiarian thinking is very helpful.
In short, you can't just reject utilitarian thinking just because your utility function is different to that of society's.
It’s a sacred right because the right to peaceably assemble has long been protected under the bill of rights. The 1a was incredibly clear on this. And despite the wording, it applies to states too.
To me, a "right" should be considered on the basis of what it actually provides to people.
This might be an unpopular opinion that I hold as a non-american, but I don't really see "because it was decided so a long time ago" as particularly good reason to ordain something as a sacred right.
I'd be curious to know your take. Is it because you uphold that "decisions should be made based precedent" as being critical for stable society? Or do you consider the document to be literally sacred in its own right like the Ten Commandments or the Quran?
The Constitution is the source code of our country. It literally describes what rights we have (edit: it is not an exhaustive list to be clear), thus why we have a document called “the Bill of Rights” which is a set of constitutional amendments that enumerate a set of rights that the government does not have the power to infringe.
So, respectfully, I actually see your confusion as a non-American; most countries don’t treat the concept of a constitution with any seriousness.
> but I don't really see "because it was decided so a long time ago" as particularly good reason to ordain something as a sacred right.
That is, again, literally how it works. For example, that is why here in the United States it is not illegal to deny that the holocaust happened, whereas in Germany or France you will get fined and thrown in jail.
Specifically Supreme Court decisions rely on precedent from previous cases; this is called Stare Decisis. Precedent is only to be overturned when clearly the wrong call was made (for example the SCOTUS decision permitting Japanese internment camps)
—-
To summarize, the genesis of America lies in the notion that we have inalienable rights that are not granted by the government but rather given by God (I think of this metaphorically since I don’t believe in a god). Thus the constitution just makes it explicit to the government that we have these rights and always did; as opposed to the government graciously extending these rights.
So in conclusion, despite the implication of your “Quran” question...yes, it really is a sacred document. Not just bevause it is the source code for our country, but because the ideas contsined within it are revolutionary and beautiful. For evidence of how revolutionary they are, I submit your (good-faith) incredulity with the entire concept :P
The 9th amendment is saying "just because we said we have rights X and Y explicitly, doesn't mean that we don't have Z just because we didn't say it". That's what it's saying.
All I'm saying is the bill of rights describes rights that the government cannot infringe upon (with the exceptions established via judicial precedent, for example guns can be taken away from violent felons, etc)
I never said that the Constitution was an exhaustive list of our rights so your snarky dismissal doesn't strike me as fair.
Your exact words are It literally describes what rights we have.
The US constitution doesn't do that, it enjoins the government from infringing certain rights. If you are going to endlessly bloviate about it, do it with some clarity.
Thanks for engaging with this, I really appreciate the insight, and definitely see the merits of the position.
>Thus the constitution just makes it explicit to the government that we have these rights and always did; as opposed to the government graciously extending these rights.
This in particular makes a lot of sense to me, and kinda what i was getting at with the comment about stability, though perhaps introducing the word precendent was a bad idea given its existing judicial meaning. There's a certain protection that this provides against governments implementing whatever happens to be "in vogue" at the time (abuses of ethnicities that are currently associated with "the enemy" for example).
For the record, I wasn't trying to imply anything negative with the "Quran" question - I respect the decision to use religion as the fundemental basis for law (well to the extent that it doesn't violate what I'd consider more fundemental human rights, such as the right not to be raped, but that's a different discusion).
Hypothetically, if you were against banning of public gatherings to protect against COVID only the grounds that it violates 1a, if you were to repatriate in a country that didn't enshrine 1a, would your position on this policy change?
For the record, considering it myself, if I think i were to reptriate to america, I think my position WOULD change, and I'd be against public gatherings, on the grounds that the long term damage caused by violating 1a is far worse than the short term harm by allowing further spread of COVID (once again in a hypothetical world where the only thing that I have against the ban is 1a), but I'm not sure.
> Hypothetically, if you were against banning of public gatherings to protect against COVID only the grounds that it violates 1a, if you were to repatriate in a country that didn't enshrine 1a, would your position on this policy change?
Great question. My reasoning would change, but my position would not. The issue is that the research I've done has convinced me that SARS-CoV-2 is literally the worst possible virus to lockdown over (and furthermore there's really not a virus out there where lockdown makes sense anyway).
BTW, the way we've done it in the USA is the worst of both worlds because we ate all the costs of containment, yet are actually practicing mitigation. It's like the opposite of the pareto principle.
Before I get into the health stuff, since we do have the 1A here, I will always argue the 1A over the health stuff, because arguing the merits of the policy on public health grounds means implicitly ceding the first amendment argument. Anyway, let's begin:
The reason I would still be against it if I were in, say, Europe, is because from a public health standpoint, I believe these measures worsen mortality over the long-term (and indeed the medium-term, and possibly even the short-term).
In short, this is because universal lockdown increases the proportion of at-risk people that must get sick before we hit herd immunity. Additionally, lockdown is going to reduce a population's sunlight exposure (Vitamin D is INCREDIBLY important for respiratory pathology, but nitric oxide is important too), it's going to reduce the amount people exercise/sleep, it's going to increase fear/anxiety, and it's going to decrease social interaction. Each of those individually are bad for the immune system, but taken together it's disastrous.
Severe COVID-19 seems to be an immunoregulatory disorder. You don't so much die from the virus as you do your immune response to the virus.
A virus like SARS-2, which is adapted to spread well (for example, it suppresses interferon in the early stages of infection which creates a ~2 day window of pre-symptomatic spread where viral load is high enough to transmit and yet there are no visible symptoms), but it is a very poor killer (even the CDC estimates a .65% IFR, and the CDC has a vested interest in using the worst numbers possible).
Furthermore the population targetted by SARS-2 is almost exclusively the very old or the very sick, which means the average years of life lost (YLL) per death is much lower than for Influenza, which actually does kill children in real amounts.
So in conclusion:
- the measures to slow spread don't seem to work to slow spread (this applies to universal masking btw)
- but insofar as those measures do slow spread, that's a bad thing, because it increases the number of high-risk
individuals that will get sick over the long-run, and
- of those who do get sick, if they've spent the last 3 months locked down they are more likely to die
BTW, since pre-existing exposure to non-SARS human coronaviruses produces T-cell cross-reactivity [1], we could have produced a pseudo-vaccine already by just dosing people with live non-SARS human coronaviruses.
- Here, we first studied T cell responses to structural (nucleocapsid protein, NP) and non-structural (NSP-7 and NSP13 of ORF1) regions of SARS-CoV-2 in COVID-19 convalescents (n=36). In all of them we demonstrated the presence of CD4 and CD8 T cells recognizing multiple regions of the NP protein. We then showed that SARS-recovered patients (n=23) still possess long-lasting memory T cells reactive to SARS-NP 17 years after the 2003 outbreak, which displayed robust cross-reactivity to SARS-CoV-2 NP.
Does herd immunity work for COVID-19?
I though we did not yet know whether infection leads to future immunity.
Even better than 18 low-risk and 2 high risk is 2 low-risk and 2 high-risk. I think the intention here is to reduce infections until a vaccine comes out
Good question. Ordinarily I would say that the fact that you're even asking is totally ridiculous, but the narrative has actually been spread that herd immunity is a myth for COVID-19 - which is false - so I absolutely understand your question. Unfortunately there are literally factions out there trying to convince people that this thing is impossible to build immunity to, which again is false. Have some studies:
- Based on these half-life data, we estimate that the median times for IgM, IgA and IgG to become seronegative are 4.59 (IQR 4.12-5.03), 7.78 (IQR 6.71-9.16) and 42.72 (IQR 33.75-47.96) months post disease onset.
- This study suggests that SARS-CoV-2 infection induces robust neutralizing and binding antibody responses in patients and that humoral immunity against SARS-CoV-2 acquired by infection may persist for a relatively long time.
- Here we report that the vast majority of infected individuals with mild-to-moderate COVID-19 experience robust IgG antibody responses against the viral spike protein, based on a dataset of 19,860 individuals screened at Mount Sinai Health System in New York City.
- We also show that titers are stable for at least a period approximating three months, and that anti-spike binding titers significantly correlate with neutralization of authentic SARS-CoV-2. Our data suggests that more than 90% of seroconverters make detectible neutralizing antibody responses and that these titers are stable for at least the near-term future.
--------
BTW, there's something called immunological memory, your memory B/T cells persist for decades. So even if you, say, were only fully immune to reinfection for 1 week, you could still get to herd immunity by building up enough immunological memory since the presence of memory B/T cells will reduce transmission. Anyway, fortunately COVID-19 produces immunity of several months at least.
The best evidence we have indicates that most patients who recover from a SARS-CoV-2 infection will retain a significant level of immunity for at least several years, just like with other coronaviruses. So yes herd immunity would work from an epidemiological perspective. Whether it's preferable to the alternatives is a political question.
Yes there are, they’re just not elevated because the powers that be like the epidemiologists that justify authoritarianism.
First of all, Anders Tegnell set Sweden’s policy and has been a brilliant voice of reason.
Check out Michael Levitt, Martin Kuelhoff, Jay Bhattachargee. There’s a lot more but I’m on mobile and need to get back to my computer first to dig through my notes.
Just be warned, if you actually research this issue - I’ve probably read 40 papers in the last 3 months, you might find it incredibly depressing, because it’s not even that we traded freedom for safety: we traded both away for nothing. Lockdown worsens COVID—19 mortality IMO, let alone the second order ramifications.
Herd immunity is a natural emergent phenomenon and is how ALL infectious diseases stop being a threat. Just remember herd immunity does not mean eradication, it just means no more exponential spread.
But tldr:
- Learn about immunological memory
- Learn about t cell cross reactivity: exposure to non-sars hcovs confers protection
- learn the simplistic herd immunity formula based off of the basic reproduction number, then learn how to think about heterogenity which makes the true HIT lower than the simplistic 1-1/R_0 implies
- learn that severe covid-19 kills vis pathological cytokine release syndrome and thus is an immunoregulatory disorder which logically would be worsened by lack of sunlight (vit d + nitric oxide), lack of sleep, lack of exercise, and excessive stress/fear, all results of lockdown
- read research literature on cloth masks published before the covid mass delusion ever happened; they are unanimous in showing that cloth masks make things worse
A waste management map from my county (Utah County in Utah) reveals that the three waste management districts that were servicing the two universities in the area were absolutely the red hot spots for covid-19. The two University presidents wrote a letter jointly telling the college students if they did not shape up The universities would be closed. Our governor applauded the letter and I don't think he was wrong. I don't care what anyone says. An 18-year-old is an adult and they need to take that responsibility seriously.
At what point does the responsibility shift to the University Presidents if they can predict with confidence (and then confirm with data) that their students will never comply with their directives?
>wrote a letter jointly telling the college students if they did not shape up The universities _would be closed_
I think from this we could infer that they will take responsibility when they think it becomes clearer that students will not sufficiently comply with the public safety directives.
My more cynical interpretation is that the school wanted to shift the onus onto the students, because more effective measures would have affected the schools ability to charge tuition at it’s full rate.
I don't think it's cynical. there is no way schools reasonably and realistically thought they could control COVID in a university environment. If they did they were negligent. It's 100% about cashing the checks before the withdrawal period. Who wants to pay $40,000 for online classes.
Young kids is completely different we aren't doing enough and there aren't a ton of other options but to open schools. But in person college for adults? not a necessity
this was the unstated purpose of calling all the students back to campus in the first place. if there is an outbreak on campus or in the community, just blame the students—not the adults running society.
18-22 year old's in college are self-contained for the most part. They're around people their own age, not known for intermingling with senior citizens etc.
In Boulder the area that students living off campus is called the hill. It happens to be surrounded by the most affluent (read old) portion of Boulder. I’ve seen gangs of students walking up and down Pearl Street with no masks. The students are not isolating
The people in your scenario that are most at risk are roaming the same area freely, so the solution is to ban the least at risk people?
The same people who are the least likely to follow the prohibition?
If you want to protect the most at-risk people and the only way to do it is to divide the high-risk & low-risk the far more logical route would to ban the high-risk people.
CU has a lot of elder care and nursing homes near it. These people are in poor health to begin with. Covid is not doing them any favors.
I know this because I have family in those facilities that I have not been able to see since this all started. We (low risk) have been banned from these facilities (high risk) for months now.
We are lucky in that we are still somewhat healthy in regards to my family near CU. Many other families in these facilities are not and have lost loved ones due to the pandemic. The bans are not working as well as hoped, especially since the start of the school year.
The decisions of the CU community in relation to the larger Boulder community are contentious at the moment. Many parts of the larger Boulder community do not appreciate CU's 'cavalier' policies.
Has the apparent spike in cases led to spikes in case rate for non-college students? Has it led to an increase in hospitalizations? Or do we need to "wait two weeks" for that? It's an extremely low risk population, it's very unlikely any of them will be harmed. As you said, they're adults, perhaps they are taking a calculated risk.
I cant make sence of this post - Waste as in household rubbish? What relevance does it have? How are students meant to "shape up" and what means were they given to do so?
To me this "adult" here reads like "old enough to be thrown under the bus"
Waste as in poop. They sample human waste and can determine how much rna coming from the virus is in the water. This can reveal trends in relative quantities of the virus between different waste management districts.
The Boulder hospitals are full, or strained? Flattening the curve was about keeping the hospitals from being overrun. Putting the strictest measures on the segment of the population that is least likely to get ill seems questionable (testing positive does not necessarily mean one has symptoms). Granted, spread to more vulnerable populations must be minimized -- but I wonder about the real science behind this policy (if it's about science).
>The Boulder hospitals are full, or strained? Flattening the curve was about keeping the hospitals from being overrun. Putting the strictest measures on the segment of the population that is least likely to get ill seems questionable (testing positive does not necessarily mean one has symptoms). Granted, spread to more vulnerable populations must be minimized -- but I wonder about the real science behind this policy (if it's about science).
The scientists seem to say 1) don't send students home and 2) contain them so they don't cause further outbreaks at universities. So the suggestion of ending youth public gatherings at a university seems in-line with the science.
They aren't ending them, though. Just prohibiting them.
It seems comically naive to expect that the population that faces virtually zero downside and has the greatest propensity for risky behavior would obey such an order.
>So the suggestion of ending youth public gatherings at a university seems in-line with the science
I didn't get that out of the article you referred to. The article said that students mingling should be assumed inevitable:
"They're going to wander. They're going to visit each other. They're going to go into town. They're going to sneak off and have a party. This is what they do."
And that sick students should be grouped together, away from healthy students:
"Some colleges have the capability of a dorm or a couple of floors of a dorm where they could keep people who are infected,"
Sounds reasonable, better than sending them home, given the odds.
> Putting the strictest measures on the segment of the population that is least likely to get ill seems questionable
It's less questionable when you look at it a different way: this is one of the segments of the population most likely to behave irresponsibly. It's a common observation that people in this age range often unjustifiably act like they're invincible. Those feelings can lead to bad results for others, like in the case of a drunk driver killing someone else in an accident.
>this is one of the segments of the population most likely to behave irresponsibly
#1, I don't think it's relevant that you think that segment of the population is irresponsible. We are talking about adults and taking away their freedom. I personally would rather see objective facts, not opinion.
>people in this age range often unjustifiably act like they're invincible
#2, I think you are wrong about their invincibility in this case. 330 people under 25 died of covid as of August 20 [0] (most with comorbidities), out of a population of 104 million in the U.S. [1], that is 1 out of 346,000 (edit). This is not high on the list of dangers for that age group.
You should attempt to justify your imposition on them without smearing them. Young people are not in danger from this disease are being forced as a group to make significant scholastic, social, and economic sacrifices for those who are too afraid to self-isolate on their own.
EDIT: Maybe the focus needs to be on vulnerable populations, and not young people? What is the goal here? Are Colorado hospitals overwhelmed? There's no proof that lockdowns otherwise make a difference.
> #2, I think you are wrong about their invincibility in this case. 330 people under 25 died of covid as of August 20 [0] (most with comorbidities), out of a population of 104 million in the U.S. [1], that is 1 out of 346,000 (edit). This is not high on the list of dangers for that age group.
And maybe a drunk driver really is invincible because he has a very safe car that will protect him in any accident. Does that mean he should be allowed to drive drunk?
> So should we ban all driving? Because that is the analogous reaction to prohibiting any gatherings.
That's a straw man: no one is proposing banning all gatherings forever. Drunk people are banned from driving when they're drunk, not when they're sober. People like these students will have to suffer some analogous restrictions during this pandemic, especially in hot spots like Boulder, but those restrictions will stop when the virus is under control.
>Drunk people are banned from driving when they're drunk, not when they're sober.
But they're not just banning gatherings of sick people when they are sick, they are banning healthy people from gathering too. So maybe we don't ban driving every night, just New Years Eve and St Paddy's day, when there's a higher number of drunk drivers out?
A drunk driver is already knowingly drunk and driving one+ ton of metal around at lethally high speeds. Many of these young people, possibly even the vast majority of them, are not knowingly infected, but being treated as if they were all contagious and thus uniformly the equivalents of drunk drivers. Moreover, this is being based on very questionable cause and effect speculation about how much damage said young people are causing in terms of contagion.
Your analogy is just bad. Closer would be banning all drivers between a certain age rubric because possibly, maybe, some of them will get drunk and drive.
If anybody proposed that, it would be rightly derided, but here with politically motivated COVID panic based on still poorly understood evidence is somehow making this absurd restriction seem okay to an awful lot of people right here on HN.
Student are "driving" bioreactors that can easily start manufacturing bioweapon and spread it around. Some responsibility must be imposed if the one they assumed themselves was insufficient.
> Your analogy is just bad. Closer would be banning all drivers between a certain age rubric because possibly, maybe, some of them will get drunk and drive.
You know we already ban all drivers "between a certain age rubric"? Try to get your driver's license from age 0-15.
I was referring to adult drivers or at least those with more or less adult faculties and physiology (and in some rural areas depending on country, farm and country driving for younger 12 to 15 year old's is definitely tolerated or even conditionally legal.) Now you're just entering absurdity by comparing my previous comment to bans on drivers so young that half the ages you mention couldn't even reach a brake pedal in a normal car.
The text says in part:
""Gathering: more than one individual coming together or being physically near each other for any shared and common purpose, including socializing or participating in any activity together including but not limited to shopping, dining, or exercising. A gathering does not include employees of any business while performing work for that business or any classroom learning activity explicitly permitted by the University of Colorado. Members of the same household while in their shared household space (e.g. a dorm room) together are not considered a gathering.""
They've excluded people at work, so I suppose this allows people in this age range to provide childcare for essential workers, work in health care or at grocery stores, etc.
> They've excluded people at work, so I suppose this allows people in this age range to provide childcare for essential workers, work in health care or at grocery stores, etc.
How kind of our benevolent overlords. We can still partake in the economic machinery! Just none of that pesky “living your life” stuff.
I’m surprised they haven’t banned laughter yet. It spreads SARS-CoV-2-laden respiratory droplets like nothing else.
Oh believe me, I have found the authoritarians. I did not realize how many of my friends would callously and unquestioningly swallow the narrative and obey.
(Many of my closest friends see through the narrative, partially because I wouldn’t shut up about it once I started reading the research and really realized how big of a mistake we’d made as a society)
It’s kind of like how everyone thinks that they would have opposed the Nazis because they grew up being taught that Nazis were bad. The truth is, this experiment in mass collective delusion has made it very clear which among us would have spoken out.
The ones reporting their neighbors for having a gathering or not wearing a mask while watering their lawn would have happily helped participate in genocide. Don’t doubt it.
I think invoking nazism is a surefire way to make sure people hate you. I get what you're saying though and agree.
What's clear to me after the pandemic: most people wouldn't think twice about completely destroying the fabric of normal society (perhaps irrevocably, while also violating fundamental rights) if they believe they're acting morally.
Yeah, I worried the reference to Nazism would set people off. It comes off like Godwin’s law. But I didn’t make the comparison lightly, I literally mean that this type of blind obedience to authority is literally what allows factions like the Nazis to come to power.
In any case, I take solace in the fact that pretty much all of my comments in this thread are more or less equally downvoted :P
I’ve had to stop browsing HN as much during covid because people here tend to be very rabid about this issue. I am
shocked how normalized the idea of forcible business closures and total bans on population movement for years (“until the vaccine”) has become. All to avoid a virus that spreads so well that even literal islands (NZ) have been unable to contain it, which has per the CDC a .65% IFR (I personally think the real figure is .3%), and which unlike Influenza does not kill children.
Honestly this just sounds ridiculous, paranoid, and reactionary. I don't know what else to tell you. Yes, people who believe in making the minor personal sacrifice of self quarantining for the greater good, because they trust public health officials and scientific authority figures, are just mindless sheep and would be happy to ban laughter. If you're going to comment on a serious issue like this, make a serious argument. Otherwise, quit polluting the conversation.
I mean if last December you had told people that we would issue stay at home orders and lay off 20 million people in the span of two weeks then keep all that stuff for six months they would have called you ridiculous and paranoid too. And yet here we are
Yes, completely out of context and without any implied qualifications, such a ban would be too much. But that's not what we're dealing with here, is it? This is not something that will remain in effect for years to come and I think any reasonable person understands that. Yes, I do consider a period of a few weeks or maybe even a couple months of self quarantine a small sacrifice compared with the alternative as I understand it. I was happy to comply with the shutdowns when they were in effect in Colorado earlier this year and I think these young people should also be willing to do it. And I don't waste time kidding myself into thinking I can effectively judge these actions with no expertise in these areas. I'm not an epidemiologist and I'm sure neither are you.
>"There's nothing new about the 'new normal'. Here's why"
>"Normal' has not worked for a majority of the world's population, so why would it start working now?
We should use our discomfort to forge a new paradigm instead."
Also, here's another comment you made in this article:
> It’s kind of like how everyone thinks that they would have opposed the Nazis because they grew up being taught that Nazis were bad. The truth is, this experiment in mass collective delusion has made it very clear which among us would have spoken out.
> The ones reporting their neighbors for having a gathering or not wearing a mask while watering their lawn would have happily helped participate in genocide. Don’t doubt it.
So yes, you're acting paranoid and not contributing meaningfully to the conversation.
I stand by the comment. I didn't say that Nazis were invading the country. I said the same unquestioning deference to authority was at play then as it is now. There's nothing paranoid about a reflection on human nature.
> I mean if last December you had told people that we would issue stay at home orders and lay off 20 million people in the span of two weeks then keep all that stuff for six months they would have called you ridiculous and paranoid too. And yet here we are
Much of the country never issued stay at home orders and almost no place has stay at home orders now, so they would have been right to call you inaccurate if perhaps paranoid isn't the right word, as we largely didn't do that, and where we did we didn't keep it for six months.
We are literally talking about a county that just placed a total ban on gatherings for young people, and you’re arguing that it’s paranoid to talk about? How can it be paranoia to talk about what is literally happening? I’m not speculating about some slope we could slide down, I’m saying we’ve already slid down the slope.
> We are literally talking about a county that just placed a total ban on gatherings for young people, and you’re arguing that it’s paranoid to talk about?
No, I'm saying that the claim specifically made in the grandparents comment about general stay at home orders maintained for 6+ months was false (not paranoid), because much of the country never had a stay-at-home order, and almost all actual stay-at-home orders that were issued were lifted. Had we actually had a hard lockdown nationwide for even a fairly short period of time, we might still be seeing the kind second wave some places are seeing, but we wouldn’t still be in an epic disaster of a first wave, and we probably wouldn’t be seeing the kind of extreme-but-isolated orders you are complaining about now.
Not to mention, all of the so-called stay-at-home orders were totally half-assed and unenforced. They might as well have been called "stay-at-home suggestions". If this one in Boulder is enforced like the rest of the country's "orders" it will be treated as a joke.
The article does not say anything about what if any data was used to make this decision.
Conflating this as a human rights issue as some commenters have tried to on this thread is a dangerous trend.
In other cities, like La crosse, WI for instance college campuses tended to be the hotspots.
The same was true of senior housing a few months back.
So I am leaning towards the public health officials targeting this based on data for hotspots and demographics and not just to ground some group of people.
The virus needs to be quashed and NY is the evidence.
It’s a human rights issue regardless of the data, and your assertion that “the virus needs to be quashed” goes against reality. We’re not practicing containment in the US, therefore this virus WILL diffuse through the population. All we can choose is how many lives we want to destroy before we accept that reality. (By the way, even if we were practicing containment - which we’re not - it would still eventually spread. Look at New Zealand for an example of the folly of human hubris).
They are undertaking this measure because of a spike in COVID “cases” (read: positive PCR test results). A spike in cases without a corresponding increase in deaths or hospitalizations should be a good thing, but we treat it the same as having an equivalent number of centenarians get sick. Completely absurd and it goes against everything we knew about public health before this mass global hysteria took root.
It is a public health issue. What about the rights of people that are vulnerable. Why would public policy risk fatality of the vulnerable population over restricted movement of a few targeted populace in an emergency.
The reality is that compared to March New York city in September has quashed the virus, per data.
Yes, COVID is basically over in New York. You know why? Because it passed the real herd immunity threshold. (Simplistic models overestimate the true HIT due to not accounting for heterogeneity across the dimensions of genetic susceptibility, genetic transmissibility, and social contacts).
Ironically, the hysteria is partially why New York’s IFR is the highest in the world; fears of hospital overrun scenarios that never materialized (and in retrospect never could have, but we didn’t have good data at the time) led to Cuomo sending infected into nursijg homes. And a doctrine of early invasive ventilation led to iatrogenic harm and therefore death. And deprivation of sunlight/exercise/sleep all serve to destroy the body’s natural immunoregulatory mechanisms.
Unfortunately, Jacobson v Massachusetts has given legal precedent for forced sterilization and forced detention based off of race, so I’m sure Jacobson can be used to justify these mortality-inducing lockdowns from a legal standpoint. That neither makes it ethical nor good for public health.
What arrogance to think that New York is not experiencing cases because of the interventions taken. Is it just a coincidence that Sweden, which never locked down nor mandates masks, is also done with COVID? No, it’s all just seroprevalence. Which so many of us have been trying to tell you guys for half a year now. Meanwhile the third world is about to experience an unprecedented mass starvation that will eclipse the COVID mortality by far.
> fears of hospital overrun scenarios that never materialized
You sure about that? I had friends who are doctors there tell me back during the peak (~April) they had run out of anesthesia and had to intubate patients without it.
Yes, isolated cases of specific hospitals running out of certain resources is not really the overrun scenario we were warned about.
Intubating without anaesthesia sounds very not-fun though.
BTW New York followed a doctrine of early invasive ventilation which almost certainly caused iatrogenic harm. So perhaps an over-reliance on intubation contributed to your friends' hospital(s) running out (that's besides the point but just interesting to note)
A spike in cases without a corresponding increase in deaths or hospitalizations should be a good thing, but we treat it the same as having an equivalent number of centenarians get sick.
Lots of people that don't get hospitalized are reporting significant lingering symptoms. An effective vaccine appears to be ~months away. Do either of those things matter at all?
The short answer is that the supposed “long-term impacts” aren’t really real. I recommend reading the literature on SARS-CoV-1, the “original SARS”, which spreads less easily but is far more severe. A normal SARS-1 case is like a severe SARS-2 (“covid”) case.
With SARS-1, there can be lingering fatigue and minor cognitive deficits for a few months post infection, but radiological abnormalities of the lungs, etc clear away within months and are certainly gone at the 1 year mark.
The evidence in SARS-2 is incredibly weak and especially for those who are asymptomatic or paucisymptomatic the chance of lasting harm is essentially zero. Remember that the real damage occurs from the immune response, so if you have no symptoms you cannot have damage. The notion being promulgated of having totally asymptomatic COVID-19 and then randomly showing organ damage (heart, lungs etc) is absurd.
Finally for mathematical purposes we need to consider long-term damage - which again just doesn’t really happen - as not as bad as a death. So we can still work it into the math just fine, whether you want to call it a tenth of a death or half or whatever.
—-
Oh finally, quick point that vaccines are not without risk either. Go read the data on the Moderna trials. Or the history of rushed-out vaccines that caused paralysis (it was either for swine flu or avian flu, I forget which)
There's a difference (a significant one) between vaccines carrying some risk and a vaccine being as harmful as infection.
We don't have that information about a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine yet, but you are just hand-waving here, it's likely enough that one of the many vaccine candidates will be less harmful than a course of infection (In general, vaccines are safe enough that we use lots of them…).
You also aren't working long term damage "into the math", you are doing just what I was getting at, dismissing it.
You haven't really given me any math to dismiss. But simply put, I believe the risks of locking down until a vaccine outpace the risks of allowing SARS-CoV-2 to spread normally in the general population (not in high-risk categories).
Your position also implicitly relies on the notion that SARS-2 isn't spreading right now, but it is, so by the time we get a vaccine we will have a lot of exposure. Data from NY and Sweden implies somewhere around 20% seroprevalence is when we hit herd immunity.
Since you haven't given me much to work on, and I don't feel like digging into the vaccine side, let me give you some research on long-term damage:
["Follow-up Chest CT findings from discharged patients with severe COVID-19: an 83-day observational study"](https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-27359/v1) - First Submitted May 4, Published online May 12
> Radiological abnormalities in patients of severe COVID-19 could be completely absorbed with no residual lung injury in more than two months’ follow-up.
> mortality was higher among more socially isolated and more lonely participants. However, after adjusting statistically for demographic factors and baseline health, social isolation remained significantly associated with mortality (hazard ratio 1.26, 95% confidence interval, 1.08–1.48 for the top quintile of isolation), but loneliness did not (haz-ard ratio 0.92, 95% confidence interval, 0.78–1.09). The association of social isolation with mortality was unchanged when loneliness was included in the model.
You haven't done enough work to tie the second 2 links to the 2020 pandemic. You are just asserting that they apply. You are the one dismissing government epidemiologists, you owe the math, not me.
For the first link, only 40% of the patients had (in the sense of the Chest CT study) recovered after 2 months. But that's a single measure, it would be good to have additional assessments of the health of those folks, rather than just the single factor.
If college campuses are an issue, then maybe something should be done about college campuses instead of drastic measures for everyone who happens to be in that age group? (EDIT: looking at the text of the order, it does have more specific restrictions for students and people living in some specified properties, which makes the general ban on top even weirder)
It's also a very dangerous trend to ignore human rights because it is convenient for your current goals.
The old saying is that Boulder is seven square miles between the mountains and reality. You can buy passports on Pearl St. to get into Boulder. It's kinda it's own little world. The next town over is Louisville, which has pretty much nothing for a 18-22 year old to do. Or Longmonth, which also has pretty much nothing to do. Denver is ~30 min away depending on traffic.
As a 27-year-old CU PhD student and staff member, I just want to say that this is a welcome development. The university recklessly opened this fall without adequate security measures in place over the loud protests of faculty and staff, and (surprised_pikachu.jpg) now Boulder is facing a massive outbreak clearly attributable to campus' opening [1].
My friends, colleagues, and community are being directly endangered by CU's obfuscation of case data, refusal to provide comprehensive testing, and foot-dragging on promised safety measures. It's ridiculous that the city/county are being forced to mitigate the downstream effects of this doomed-from-the-beginning plan, but the "run it like a business" university administration is a lost cause.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - Benjamin Franklin
People seem to forget that the expected total death count from day 1 was, and still is, expected to be the same no matter what actions taken....And the entire point of lockdowns was to not overwhelm the hospitals all at once.
It's so frustrating watching Democrat leaders (Jill Hunsaker Ryan in this case) put plans into place that aren't backed by ACTUAL evidence, blame others when their plans end up not working, refuse to pivot upon receiving new information, refuse to acknowledge when previous data is found to be inaccurate....all while trampling on the constitutional rights of American citizens.
There is yet no evidence that explicitly ties the use of a face mask to lower rates of SARS-CoV-2 transmission. A lot of the published evidence is either inconsistent, or indirect (measurement of droplets, but that doesn't take physical barriers like nose and mouth, or the viral load required to overcome the non adaptive immune system). In fact, it has been argued that non pharmacological interventions should be evaluated with better evidence [1].
A Danish clinical trial enrolling 3000 people will probably give some more concrete answers.
OTOH, hand washing and distance are definitely useful to reduce spread.
P.S. Feel free to state your disagreement explicitly instead of downvoting.
Did handwashing stop being effective for washing anything off your hands? Sure you could be pedantic and mention some caustic material that reacts with water but that misses the point.
I'm not saying that masks don't work. But whether they are effective at reducing transmission and, if so, in what measure are open questions. The literature is at this point inconclusive[1]. Even the latest Lancet paper on masks and distancing attracted some criticism[2].
Of course,I agree that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But, as the BMJ post I quoted earlier says, instead of just saying "wear a mask", the best idea would also promote trials to verify their effectiveness (like the Danish trial). It's done all the time for drugs, why not masks?
"missing the compounding effect"
- What about the compounding effect of numerous people putting a plague vector directly on their respiratory system?
"Mistaking Absence of Evidence for Evidence of Absence"
- The argument isn't that because there's no evidence it's guaranteed to not work. The argument is that without solid evidence constitutional rights should not be infringed.
It's America's obsession with self righteous indignation. "How dare you not go along with the mob and put on your mask. What kind of horrible person are you?" Americans, of which I am one, have this mentality that if someone disagrees, they are a terrible, horrible person that must be crushed by your rightness.
Yep. Completely agree.
There's very little middle ground anymore.
It's just pure righteous indignation from all sides.
Trump bad, guns good, abortion good, q anon good...and on and on.
I personally blame the media, where most people get their information, for presenting things in an extremely one sided non-nuanced manner, no matter, what party or group you hail from.
It makes it impossible to empathize with the other side or see other ideas if it's presented already by the media as unquestionable ideas.
However, it's also on the population for being intellectually lazy and not validating or verifying what they see on the news media.
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. Posting like this is basically arson, or criminal negligence. I'm sure you don't mean to cause harm, but this has been a problem for a long time:
If you can't or won't fix this, we're going to have to ban you. Most accounts would be banned by now after a lot less than that. Can you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on?
It will do something, in a very complicated way, but compared to things that really matter that we haven't been able to push like mask wearing(you disagree) and social distancing and being outside, hand washing has been a huge distraction, which is the same as saying it's helped increase the spread.
I think parent’s point is that these measures are intended to stretch out the curve so the peak is lower (not overwhelming) but the area under the curve is the same (same total deaths). The hope is of course that a vaccine chops off its right tail.
The basis for it was reducing impact on health care systems, and to limit second, and future wave impact.
Doing the first saved a lot of people because treatment was available. Secondary saves were non covid patients who could get service because capacity remained more available.
Had we had better safety compliance, we would have reduced even more than we did and may have normalized things such that the wave upon us now would be much less.
Death rates are dead/recovered and that is driven by infections.
Lower infections means fewer entering the death equation. More health care available means more recovered and all of that means far fewer dead people.
It actually didn't save anyone because there was never any risk of hospital overload when panic didn't set in: Sweden has one of the lowest ICU capacities in Europe and never saw hospital overload.
A few places did, but that's because they over-reacted and quarantined lots of their medical staff. That's the reaction not the virus.
It does not matter so much if you die in the hospital or in your home, in the end you are still dead.
Deterring people to go to the hospitals, that are destined to save lifes, so they die at home instead, is not brilliant advice. They can (and will) sell it as a success, but Swedden still had much more people killed than their twin country Norway. The fact that those hospital rooms where not occupied despite having some elders in need of specialized care, is a failure, not a success.
> was never any risk of hospital overload
I think that many physicians in the planet would tell a very different history.
Take in mind that the family structure is different in South and North Europe. Southern Europe homes are often multigenerational. Having gransons and grandpas living together increases the risk. Many granpas live alone in Swedden. Their results would be even worse if we remove this structural difference.
If we can't compare Swedden With Norway, maybe you would prefer Denmark?
645 danish killed versus 5875 Sweddish. Even if we correct the difference in population, is still much lower (around 1290 versus 5875). They are not much different populations genetically. Do you have any hypothesis that would explain the difference?
Wheres your evidence that Italy has more multigenerational households than Sweden? Do you have a citation? That's scientifically unsubstantiated and almost like you made it up on the spot based on anecdotal information.
Also, you're cherry picking again to suit your narrative. Sweden is part of Europe and should be compared as such.
It's disingenuous to keep promoting this demon-ization of Sweden narrative with unsubstantiated, and cherry picked comments.
Sweden did the right thing. Other countries did not. It's that simple.
Too busy watching Susanna Hoffs videos in internet currently, (I prefer to choose my own rabbit holes, thanks), but I will make all this studies next year, all of then, each one. Maybe. If I'm very bored. Mortally bored. I promise.
(Homework for the weekend?... LOL, who do you think I am? your secretary?)
Sweden didn't deter people from going to the hospitals. That's what happened in places like the UK, where the government literally told people to "protect the NHS", and the UK has consequently had one of the highest death rates in Europe.
but Swedden still had much more people killed than their twin country Norway.
So what? Zero deaths was not ever a goal of lockdowns, and cannot have been because there's no logical way to get from that policy to that outcome. You've done what lockdown advocates always do when Sweden comes up: not just shift the goalposts but move them entirely out of the field.
At any rate, Norway may simply have not had the disease spread through the population yet, or they may have just got lucky - seasonal flu always hits some countries and not others for unexplained reasons. It doesn't ultimately matter. Sweden disproved epidemiological models, and thus the actions taken on their basis were not justified.
As for physicians, luckily the opinion of a doctor here or there is not sufficient to change actual data or observed reality. Fortunately most doctors are sensible: there are plenty who have been outspoken against lockdown precisely because it emptied the hospitals and clinics leaving them with a huge backlog of patients who they could have saved but now cannot.
Sweden’s compliance and low population density looks very different from most countries.
Social distancing[edit]
On 16 March 2020, the agency recommended that people over 70 should limit close contact with other people, and avoid crowded areas such as stores, public transport and public spaces.[112] At the end of March, 93% of those older than 70 said that they were following the recommendations from the health service to some extent, with the majority having decreased their contacts with friends and family.[113] In May, the agency looked at easening the recommendations for the 'young elderly' of good health, but ultimately decided against it.
The US might be keeping school systems closed, but movie theaters for example are open across most of the country. Mask compliance for example tracks closely with where areas that are currently experiencing outbreaks in the US. That likely says more about overall compliance than the effectiveness of masks.
PS: It’s random mixing between groups that really spreads diseases. Individual classrooms where people see the same people every day may have outbreaks, but that’s all local transmission.
To add context, If Swedden would have the same population as Spain, the number of killed people at the current ratio would be 26907. In Czechia (a country with a similar population that Swedden) would be 2489 instead. Less than ten times lower.
Swedden has not such stellar results as they are trying to sell.
In this demonstration of a simple infection model (the SIR model) you can see this worked out at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6nLfCbAzgo&feature=youtu.be... that "not only do you flatten the curve, you also stop everyone from getting the disease in the long run."
A bit later they point out that flattening the curve increases the chance of getting to a vaccine or viable treatment; which is another way to reduce the total number of infections.
The problem with that is that in real life transmissibility is not a fixed parameter you can keep down forever. People eventually get lockdown fatigue and/or realize the opportunity cost is not worth it for them. So the area under the curve is roughly the same in the long run. That is, unless we can get a vaccine or effective treatment fast enough.
Like I said, "simple infection model (the SIR model)".
Which more rigorous models have the area under the curve as roughly the same, as you describe it?
I believe any model which has herd immunity, where personal immunity comes after a period of infection, must have the possibility of overshooting the minimum heard immunity density when the infection rate is high enough. As in the SIR model.
Lower the infection rate and there's lower overshoot.
My point is that that the argument you made - i.e. that lower transmissibility aka. "flatten the curve" lowers total mortality in the SIR model - doesn't hold unless you assume that you can keep transmissibility down forever (and unless a vaccine or treatment comes out fast enough). That is, I'm not presenting a new argument, merely refuting your argument, over the SIR model you used, adding the assumption that transmissibility can't be kept down indefinitely - which I believe is very reasonable given what we are observing.
I believe it's the burden of the proof is on you to present a new, more rigorous model if you want to argue that slowing down transmission significantly lowers overall mortality - as the null hypothesis is that they are not associated.
On the last point, I am aware that under the SIR model, there's the possibility of overshoot, i.e. exceeding the minimum herd immunity threshold. My understanding is that this isn't a significant effect unless you have uncontrolled, explosive expansion, so that most people get infected simultaneously before others develop immunity and can therefore act as a barrier for herd immunity. I don't believe this is the situation right now given the numbers we are seeing.
That said, I believe that the more realistic future is that a vaccine or an effective treatment will be developed in the next months, and that will be the thing that will have made temporarily lowering transmissibility worth it. What I don't believe, because I haven't found any evidence for it that holds basic scrutiny, is that if no vaccine or effective treatment can be developed in a reasonable timeframe, then keeping the measures to slow down transmission as long as possible will have any significant effect on lower overall mortality.
EDIT: To make it clear so people do not misunderstand me, what I believe has no evidence is that without a timely vaccine or effective treatment, slowing down transmission beyond what is necessary to keep the health system from overloading is associated with lower overall mortality.
The argument I make is that jb775's assertion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24586075 ("People seem to forget that the expected total death count from day 1 was, and still is, expected to be the same no matter what actions taken") is wrong.
I say it's wrong because months ago I heard arguments that models predicted that lowering the curve could also reduce total mortality. And I linked to that video to give evidence that this was part of the general discussion months ago.
The fact that you disagree with that model, or argue that I need to give a stronger evidence for the current information we have, has no bearing on my point.
Eg, when you write "I don't believe this is the situation right now" - that statement is based on knowledge you have now, not knowledge that people had on "day 1".
Fair enough, I understand your point better now. I also remember hearing a lot of arguments for lowering the curve lowering overall deaths back in March - either by heavily suppression or elimination of spread, or by a vaccine or effective treatment.
Nowadays it seems both EU & US hasn't pursued heavy suppression (probably too costly, and legally and culturally difficult), but rather just hoping to keep it somewhat under control until a vaccine comes, hopefully.
I’d guess jb775 saw a clip with a conservative lawmaker or pundit making this point. It’s been floating around the news lately. Take a look at the recent argument between Sen. Rand Paul and Dr. Fauci[0]. Essentially republicans are trying to push this idea that the number of infections and deaths from COVID-19 are inevitable and any government intervention can only impact the timing. In other words the area under the curve is constant.
They don’t want people thinking that if action was taken by the U.S. gov sooner (Feb instead of Apr) we would have dramatically fewer deaths and cases, which is probably a more scientifically accurate view but with all the data being so new this debate is ripe for political distortion.
I only watched the start, but he describes the curve as having number of deaths as the Y axis - every description of "flattening the curve" that I have seen has number of cases as the Y axis. The point being to stop the number of cases overwhelming healthcare so that more people die - not just to rearrange when people who were going to die anyway actually die.
I don't know if that is a mistake or intentionally misleading - I would hope the former.
>They don’t want people thinking that if action was taken by the U.S. gov sooner (Feb instead of Apr)..
Why do you single out "conservatives" when Democratic politicians were telling people during the Chinese Lunar New Year there was nothing to worry about?
Stares like Florida and Texas, which has higher infections than NorthEastern states, had far lower death rates because of what we had learnt about the virus in the intervening months (just a few things we learnt, that ventilators were not very handy, there are several drugs that are more effective than ventilators, even if we are facing a shortage of medical grade PPE cloth masks themselves can be extremely useful, outdoors are much safer than indoors, etc).
The idea that we were always expecting the same number of deaths is nonsensical, but even if someone did believe that in the beginning of the pandemic, it’s been proven incorrect by now.
Even simple models like the one described at https://youtu.be/k6nLfCbAzgo?t=920 (I point to the relevant part) shows that reducing the infection rate can also lead to fewer overall deaths.
UCSF's grand rounds last week discussed the observation that when there are outbreaks it appears that without masks the asymptomatic rate is 40% of those infected. With masks it appears to be 85%. Or to flip it around without masks 60% have symptoms. With masks only 15% do.
Okay, okay, I’m as down with the science as anybody but those numbers sound a lot like cherry-picking. They also don’t jive with the info that’s trickled out suggesting that a plurality of infections are happening in the home, at restaurants, or while attending unmasked gatherings.
This makes more sense with the premise that curtailing citizen's rights and greater central planning has always been appealing to some. Evidence for the effectiveness of lockdowns or lack thereof is incidental. "Climate Lockdowns" are already being proposed.
> People seem to forget that the expected total death count from day 1 was, and still is, expected to be the same no matter what actions taken....
Only if you assume we'll never have vaccine or efficient specific treatment, which is most likely false assumption.
In all other cases expected total death toll can vary by order of magnitude or more depending on how many people get infected before vaccine and/or treatments are widely available.
The constant surprised_pikachu.jpg is what really gets me. We know what happens when you re-open businesses. More people get sick. It's totally predictable! Yet the media breathlessly reports how shocked everyone is at the "surge" or "second wave" every time a region tries to re-open. And, regions keep trying it! "We're going to carefully re-open bars and nail salons and see what happens..." says the government. Without mask use and social distancing, it is totally predictable what is going to happen, morons!
[For some unknown reason, HN doesn't let me post any more today, so replying as an edit]
Excellent point about having exit criteria. Just to pick a state at random, Pennsylvania [1] explains their criteria pretty well. They're looking for less than 50 new confirmed cases per 100,000 population reported in the previous 14 days. Which seems way too many to me, but what do I know, I'm not an epidemiologist. These criteria need to be open to change if they're wrong, though. If they notice cases increasing after re-opening, they need to 1. close back down, and 2. adjust their criteria downward so not to make the same mistake again.
You can view it not as punishment but as a restriction caused by inability to adequately estimate risks. Similar to prohibiting teenagers and kids from driving cars.
From a legal standpoint, not exactly. For instance, people in the US are prohibited from buying alcohol until 21yo. Do you consider that restriction also unprecedented and unjustified? :)
You've chosen a worthless example. The 21st Amendment gives states the authority to restrict alcohol sales. It is explicitly carved out as a legal exception and thus legally irrelevant to the issue at hand.
Why is it worthless and why does the 21st amendment matter? The 9th amendment specifically allows states to legally preside over things that the federal government is not, so these laws are directly comparable other than that the 21st amendment in this case just specifically forbids the federal government from overriding the states decisions using the commerce clause.
There is clearly legal precedent to age discrimination/restrictions in the United States, from age related employment discrimination protections not applying to those under the age of 40, to the legal age of alcohol and recreational marijuana consumption (the latter of which is not somehow "exempted" by the 21st amendments restriction of the federal government).
So the issue here is really that the university of Colorado has a number of students who are flagrantly ignoring masking rules. They also have a administration that opened the campus. Boulder is a very left leaning city, has a department of health that has decided to be extremely expansive with their mandate in boulder county. Churches and public schools are still closed. But there is a tricky issue in that the state constitution keeps bolder from regulating CU. The majority of cases in Colorado are now from CU. That’s why they’ve structured at the way they have, because they cannot regulate CU directly.
So the question becomes is this a violation of the bill of rights? You’d have to be able to argue that the governments actions are designed to be punitive, rather than protective. As much as Boulder has consistently overstepped itself, I think this still meets that criteria.
As a sidenote, for all of the politicking about red state versus blue state, it is definitely millennials and zoomer‘s that I see without masks. Doesn’t bode well for the future.
Also Boulder and CU have had this war going on for quite a while independent of covid. It got to the point where the University even decided to purchase a quarry to get around Boulder restrictions.
So the solution is to lock the kids alone in their dorms? What a nightmare. Forbidding human contact with anyone is the most extreme covid restriction I've ever heard of. A clear violation of human rights.
I'm just not sure what that has to do with it. If they're engaging in specific risky behavior, maybe it's justified to ban that risky behavior, but you can't just tell an entire age bracket they've been naughty and ground them for 2 weeks as punishment.
There is no evidence that the measures slowed the spread as compared to the natural dynamics of an infectious disease as immunity builds. Compare Sweden’s curve to New York’s for example.
No, it is an exceptionally poor comparison but your failure here is assuming that the person making this comment is acting in good faith. They are not. Downvote, ignore, and move on to discussions with people who are not political tools.
Agree. It's simply not worth engaging with trolls or people who intend to be willfully ignorant. They will just sit there and say "show me the randomized clinical trial for <blah>" even if they aren't qualified to parse the study.
> There is no evidence that the measures slowed the spread as compared to the natural dynamics of an infectious disease as immunity builds. Compare Sweden’s curve to New York’s for example.
Compare the US's curve to China's. If the US hadn't tried to half-ass it's measures (at the personal to the national level), we wouldn't still be arguing about them because the virus would be under control and they wouldn't be necessary anymore.
Indeed. And do we trust China’s numbers? I thought it was an unspoken fact that no one cites their data in legitimate media, since it is heavily manipulated.
Do you trust Taiwan’s data? They contained and eradicated the disease even more effectively than the Beijing regime, without thousands of deaths and millions of infections.
So clearly there are ways to check the spread and cut out 99% of deaths. (They are also not wizardry or witchcraft. Mandatory masks in public, temp measurement at schools and public buildings, quarantines at entry and positive diagnosis enforced extremely strictly by law enforcement, and tracing the infection chain. That’s literally it.)
But I think we're getting off track from the original discussion here. I strongly suspect Taiwanese disease control experts would identify a quarantine policy applying only to a specific 4 year age bracket as what a commenter upthread described as "half-ass measures"; a serious attempt to control the virus would have to apply to everyone, since everyone can spread it.
> Indeed. And do we trust China’s numbers? I thought it was an unspoken fact that no one cites their data in legitimate media, since it is heavily manipulated.
Not particularly, but even if China undercounted by 10x, it's still way ahead of places like Sweden and the US on a per capita basis.
I have relatives there, and their lives are basically back to normal and have been for months. The bungling Western (especially American) response has unfortunately been a huge propaganda win for the Communist party. They're thanking every American asshole who loudly refuses to things as simple as wearing a mask for making them look good.
No, that's a straw man. It's like saying that someone who advocates for an effective police force is also advocating for that force to recklessly kill suspects.
What I am advocating for is mandatory pandemic control measures that are strict enough to work and applied consistently until the job is done, and a population that's willing consistently take efforts to protect the common good rather than complain and resist when things aren't maximally convenient to them personally. That applies not just to first-order responses, but to second and third order responses as well.
How will we know when the job is done? Please give specific numbers.
Does violation of fundamental civil rights like freedom of assembly not also harm the common good? We can't focus narrowly on one objective and ignore everything else.
The Corona Cult is going to baselessly discredit your ideas which are valid and accurate because they have no logical response. Please vote in November! Keep the fanatics from committing additional human rights violations!
He is just claiming no evidence and cherry picking data. I can just as easily point to other countries that have limited their Covid cases to single digits.
Do we really need a controlled experiment to prove to you that wearing masks limit the spread of an airborne virus? That is common sense.
You have no scientific evidence that these students not wearing surgical masks or cloth face coverings has anything to do with covid spread. We have decades, nay a century, of science showing that face covering requirements do not slow the spread of a pandemic. There will absolutely be lawsuits over the rash, panicked, capricious, arbitrary actions of authorities during this crisis.
> So the question becomes is this a violation of the bill of rights?
Seems less like an issue of being "left" and more "authoritarian". I wish there was a pithier word than "Auth" available for this. Some left-wingers still defend the 1st Amendment.
I hope the parties this decree impacts sue and bring this to the Supreme Court. The biggest issue with lockdowns now seems to be lawmakers' fear of making a deadly choice. We need a high court opinion to be clear on what government can and cannot do. IANAL but the language seems clear in 1A that there shall be no law restricting peaceable assembly.
In this case I think the ages are a distraction. This is clearly a violation of the constitution even given Covid due to it essentially banning a large section of the population from something as fundamental as visiting friends.
Credibility goes right out the window when you say "No large gatherings! Unless they're a protest/riot for a cause we support! Or a funeral for a late supreme court justice on our side."
If you want people to follow rules, you have to be consistent in how those rules are applied.
I think it's quite a bit more than a "perhaps". The order is clearly an attempt to target a politically disfavored age bracket; it would never occur to someone without specific animus against CU-Boulder students to write such a narrow rule.
We shouldn’t be trying to prevent cases; a strategy of forcing young people inside, assuming it even worked, would increase mortality by requiring proportionally more at-risk people to get sick to reach herd immunity. But just as far as legal precedent, given this (evil) order is specifically in response to a spike in “cases” (they’re not cases they’re positive tests), it is more than justified under the reasoning used in Jacobson v Massachusetts. Unfortunately.
> increase mortality by requiring proportionally more at-risk people to get sick to reach herd immunity.
This assumes that herd immunity is reached without a vaccine; the whole idea of controlling the spread is to reduce the degree to which herd immunity depends on people getting infected.
The first amendment guarantees the right to peaceably assemble. Visiting friends is assembly, indeed the ordinance calls it a ban on “gatherings” explicitly.
However as I commented as a sibling comment to yours, SCOTUS precedent would hold that this is almost certainly allowed, despite my utter disgust for these backwards policies.
I think a textualist and originalist view confirms your belief that it is unconstitutional. But as far as precedent goes, they can definitely get away with it:
Not to mention this decision was likely made by the UN-ELECTED Executive Director of the Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment, Jill Hunsaker Ryan.
I did a quick search of her background and she was almost indicted for falsifying Covid death data to inflate the total number of deaths[1]. Once she was forced to accurately report the numbers, the number of deaths magically dropped significantly. Won't hear about this in the news!
I also did a quick search. Apparently the CDC required the CDPHE to report the total number of people who died while having COVID-19, which the department did. Then they switched to reporting the number of deaths caused by COVID-19, AND the number of deaths of people who had COVID-19. That caused confusion which led to the threat of criminal charges.
Yahoo comments are disabled, so I will say this here: What a bunch of pussies. Contrary to popular belief, you will probably not die if you catch the virus.
It's pretty disgusting the amount of additional powers we're allowing the government to take during this pandemic.
You might may something to the affect "desperate times call for desperate measures," but have no doubt, the next 'emergency' is right around the corner. Once you give government power, it's quite difficult to take it back. People will be toeing the lines for years on what an emergency is, until it simply becomes the norm.
The authority to order quarantine for every member of a specific demographic group is... well, not exactly new, but the historical instances of it are pretty roundly condemned today. How would you feel if Boulder had selectively imposed this order on all unmarried people, or all Swedish people?
This group which is at so little risk being targeted in such an aggressive way is horrifying. It's really scary to think that I'm the US, without legislative voting, a state can ban people from socializing.
We need to strip all emergency powers now. These were meant for times like earthquakes, where legislatures don't have time to act. It's been 7 months now, that is no longer an excuse. I think a 30 day cap is generous enough.
Precisely the age range which is _not dying from COVID_. Like at all, almost. They should be prohibiting gatherings of those 50 and up, of any size, and offering free grocery deliveries and assistance to those 60 and up so that they don't have to get out of the house. Instead, we get idiotic crap like this.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 267 ms ] threadIs it still ethical? Legal? Effective?
Try cutting the social security COLA by 1%? Get a riot.
Destroy the economic livelihoods of a generation of new entrants to the economy? No problemo, my stocks and real estate portfolio is doing great!
Can’t expect a generation to go through two economic catastrophes (GFC, Covid) without support and expect positive results. Things will just go from bad to worse.
(Compare South Dakota, right-leaning and NEVER locked down, to my home state of California, which is so democrat-leaning that we’re a de facto single party state)
I happen to think mask mandates are ridiculous too but that's besides the point.
So vote and get active in a political party, then?
Why are 16 year old 'too immature' to vote by 90 year olds eligible? You can vote even if you are mentally ill.
Do schoolchildren have no interests at all that deserve at least some representation? Imagine we had a few representatives in parloament talking about their issues, that would probably improve discourse.
> Is it still ethical?
No, it wouldn't be. All young people, regardless of race, deserve equal protection from their own stupidity.
> Legal?
No, it wouldn't be.
> Effective?
For those lucky young people, it would be. But that screws all the young people of other races/religions.
Laws aren't targeted at people who do no wrong, but those people still get protection from those laws.
> Where would I be in your book?
You're safer because the idiots around you who would be doing stupid things have a lower chance of infecting you and your grandma.
Most wouldn't say the concept of a retirement age is discriminatory, nor the concept of age of consent or minimum age to purchase alcohol, or pricing insurance rates differently based on age.
Somehow this application of age discrimination seems to cross the line for many people, though. I'm genuinely curious as to why.
Age limits make sense in some contexts but we need some consistency.
My point is that this does fall under that reasoning.
> No State shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws
Replace 18-22 year olds with 13-17 year olds. Do you feel any different?
I do agree that this is arbitrary and unlikely to be effective.
It's clearly not legal.
Whether it's ethical or effective is in doubt, given herd immunity arguments, Sweden, the Constitution, etc.
Ethical? That's a judgment call. I say yes, personally.
I assume that there are a number of factors here, most notably that the assembling, while peaceful, poses a considerable danger to the public. Certainly it would be nice to see some sort of carve out for explicit protesting but there you go.
All allowed activities are government approved activities.
None of the rights in the bill of rights are absolute. For better or for worse, the courts have decided that pretty much every right you have can be limited in the name of public safety.
If I'm in jail, the warden has no obligation to let me out if I want to go to my best friend's birthday party. If I try to stage an unpermitted protest in the middle of the street, I will eventually be removed
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/09/21/fac...
Plus, the article says it was only 8 people which won't have any actual impact.
I can't imagine any rational person thinking this would be effective. "Oh, I'm digging a grave for someone who has lived 3x more than me." If that were successful nobody would smoke, drink, eat bad food.
https://www.dailycamera.com/2020/09/24/boulder-county-issues...
This strategy, ignoring human rights for a second, increases the proportion of at-risk individuals who must get sick before herd immunity is reached. If you have a population of 100 people, and the HIT is 20% (assume homogenous mixing), of which half your population is high-risk and half is low-risk, you can enforce universal lockdown and end up with 10 high-risk and 10 low-risk infections, or you can encourage just the at-risk to isolate and end up with like 18 low-risk and 2 high-risk. It should be self evident which course is better. Unfortunately the world has been tricked into viewing “herd immunity” as a dirty word as opposed to an emergent phenomenom.
Arbitrary and capricious regulations like this aren’t just ethically wrong, they’ee bad public health.
Unfortunately the disastrous Jacobson v Massachusetts decision laid the groundwork for this stuff. The Jacobson decision was later used to justify forced sterilization of the mentally retarded, as just one example of where a collectivist, “for the greater good” mentality inevitably takes you.
Jacobson and its descendant Buck, then Korematsu, are among the most shameful moments in the history of the law in America.
ACB seems like the perfect candidate except for exactly what you mentioned. So I am very curious how much of that was her hands being tied versus her being unusually authoritarian. Because if it's the latter, I absolutely share your concern.
As you point out, this is collectivist, utilitarianist thinking, and it gets us to a bad place. There is a very simple reason why these restrictions are outrageous: individuals have a right to gather with their friends if they so choose.
You can't proclaim this as a universal principle. Modern civilisation requires a significant amount of collectivism.
Think of the justice system. Back in 18th century England prisoners were charged for being in Jail and by judges to be judged - with massive corruption. Courts were not open to public.
There was no police or detectives - they were seen as totalitarian and opressive. Arrests depended on hue and cry and violent criminals openly boasted of their deeds in pubs
I agree that "being able to gather with your friends" is a great thing, but I don't see why it's a sacred right that is "outrageous" to restrict no matter the consequences.
Like a lot of these debates, this sort of things comes down to your personal beliefs in the relative importances of: - "The right as an invididual to do X" - "The right as an individual to not be negatively affected by someone else doing X"
Most actions all on the spectrum somewhere:
"Society has decided it's acceptable for me to drive a car, even though it puts pedestrians at risk of being run over"
"Society has decided that it's not acceptable for me to drive a car when intoxicated, even if's really inconvenient for me to get a taxi home, because the risk of me killing a pedistrian is too high"
"Society isn't quite sure what the maximum speed that I can drive a car at on a surban street (and get to my destination faster, while increasing the risk of killing someone), but it's not 'as fast as I can go', and it's not '2 MPH'".
Its the same with "the right to gather with friends, and in the process increase the chances that I'll get COVID and pass it on to someone who dies from it". Simply declaring it "outrageous" not to maintain that right is overly simplistic, and I think that actually, some form of utilitiarian thinking is very helpful.
In short, you can't just reject utilitarian thinking just because your utility function is different to that of society's.
This might be an unpopular opinion that I hold as a non-american, but I don't really see "because it was decided so a long time ago" as particularly good reason to ordain something as a sacred right.
I'd be curious to know your take. Is it because you uphold that "decisions should be made based precedent" as being critical for stable society? Or do you consider the document to be literally sacred in its own right like the Ten Commandments or the Quran?
So, respectfully, I actually see your confusion as a non-American; most countries don’t treat the concept of a constitution with any seriousness.
> but I don't really see "because it was decided so a long time ago" as particularly good reason to ordain something as a sacred right.
That is, again, literally how it works. For example, that is why here in the United States it is not illegal to deny that the holocaust happened, whereas in Germany or France you will get fined and thrown in jail.
Specifically Supreme Court decisions rely on precedent from previous cases; this is called Stare Decisis. Precedent is only to be overturned when clearly the wrong call was made (for example the SCOTUS decision permitting Japanese internment camps)
—-
To summarize, the genesis of America lies in the notion that we have inalienable rights that are not granted by the government but rather given by God (I think of this metaphorically since I don’t believe in a god). Thus the constitution just makes it explicit to the government that we have these rights and always did; as opposed to the government graciously extending these rights.
So in conclusion, despite the implication of your “Quran” question...yes, it really is a sacred document. Not just bevause it is the source code for our country, but because the ideas contsined within it are revolutionary and beautiful. For evidence of how revolutionary they are, I submit your (good-faith) incredulity with the entire concept :P
To say that it describes the rights we have is a fundamental misunderstanding. It even says as much, in the 9th amendment:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
I mean, you could at least try to argue more clearly, and not trip over something so obvious.
All I'm saying is the bill of rights describes rights that the government cannot infringe upon (with the exceptions established via judicial precedent, for example guns can be taken away from violent felons, etc)
I never said that the Constitution was an exhaustive list of our rights so your snarky dismissal doesn't strike me as fair.
The US constitution doesn't do that, it enjoins the government from infringing certain rights. If you are going to endlessly bloviate about it, do it with some clarity.
>Thus the constitution just makes it explicit to the government that we have these rights and always did; as opposed to the government graciously extending these rights.
This in particular makes a lot of sense to me, and kinda what i was getting at with the comment about stability, though perhaps introducing the word precendent was a bad idea given its existing judicial meaning. There's a certain protection that this provides against governments implementing whatever happens to be "in vogue" at the time (abuses of ethnicities that are currently associated with "the enemy" for example).
For the record, I wasn't trying to imply anything negative with the "Quran" question - I respect the decision to use religion as the fundemental basis for law (well to the extent that it doesn't violate what I'd consider more fundemental human rights, such as the right not to be raped, but that's a different discusion).
Hypothetically, if you were against banning of public gatherings to protect against COVID only the grounds that it violates 1a, if you were to repatriate in a country that didn't enshrine 1a, would your position on this policy change?
For the record, considering it myself, if I think i were to reptriate to america, I think my position WOULD change, and I'd be against public gatherings, on the grounds that the long term damage caused by violating 1a is far worse than the short term harm by allowing further spread of COVID (once again in a hypothetical world where the only thing that I have against the ban is 1a), but I'm not sure.
Great question. My reasoning would change, but my position would not. The issue is that the research I've done has convinced me that SARS-CoV-2 is literally the worst possible virus to lockdown over (and furthermore there's really not a virus out there where lockdown makes sense anyway).
BTW, the way we've done it in the USA is the worst of both worlds because we ate all the costs of containment, yet are actually practicing mitigation. It's like the opposite of the pareto principle.
Before I get into the health stuff, since we do have the 1A here, I will always argue the 1A over the health stuff, because arguing the merits of the policy on public health grounds means implicitly ceding the first amendment argument. Anyway, let's begin:
The reason I would still be against it if I were in, say, Europe, is because from a public health standpoint, I believe these measures worsen mortality over the long-term (and indeed the medium-term, and possibly even the short-term).
In short, this is because universal lockdown increases the proportion of at-risk people that must get sick before we hit herd immunity. Additionally, lockdown is going to reduce a population's sunlight exposure (Vitamin D is INCREDIBLY important for respiratory pathology, but nitric oxide is important too), it's going to reduce the amount people exercise/sleep, it's going to increase fear/anxiety, and it's going to decrease social interaction. Each of those individually are bad for the immune system, but taken together it's disastrous.
Severe COVID-19 seems to be an immunoregulatory disorder. You don't so much die from the virus as you do your immune response to the virus.
A virus like SARS-2, which is adapted to spread well (for example, it suppresses interferon in the early stages of infection which creates a ~2 day window of pre-symptomatic spread where viral load is high enough to transmit and yet there are no visible symptoms), but it is a very poor killer (even the CDC estimates a .65% IFR, and the CDC has a vested interest in using the worst numbers possible).
Furthermore the population targetted by SARS-2 is almost exclusively the very old or the very sick, which means the average years of life lost (YLL) per death is much lower than for Influenza, which actually does kill children in real amounts.
So in conclusion:
- the measures to slow spread don't seem to work to slow spread (this applies to universal masking btw)
- but insofar as those measures do slow spread, that's a bad thing, because it increases the number of high-risk individuals that will get sick over the long-run, and
- of those who do get sick, if they've spent the last 3 months locked down they are more likely to die
BTW, since pre-existing exposure to non-SARS human coronaviruses produces T-cell cross-reactivity [1], we could have produced a pseudo-vaccine already by just dosing people with live non-SARS human coronaviruses.
[1] ["SARS-CoV-2-specific T cell immunity in cases of COVID-19 and SARS, and uninfected controls"](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2550-z) - Published: 15 July 2020
- Here, we first studied T cell responses to structural (nucleocapsid protein, NP) and non-structural (NSP-7 and NSP13 of ORF1) regions of SARS-CoV-2 in COVID-19 convalescents (n=36). In all of them we demonstrated the presence of CD4 and CD8 T cells recognizing multiple regions of the NP protein. We then showed that SARS-recovered patients (n=23) still possess long-lasting memory T cells reactive to SARS-NP 17 years after the 2003 outbreak, which displayed robust cross-reactivity to SARS-CoV-2 NP.
["Neutralizing and binding antibody kinetics of COVID-19 patients during hospital and convalescent phases"](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.18.20156810v...) - Published July 18 2020
- Based on these half-life data, we estimate that the median times for IgM, IgA and IgG to become seronegative are 4.59 (IQR 4.12-5.03), 7.78 (IQR 6.71-9.16) and 42.72 (IQR 33.75-47.96) months post disease onset.
- This study suggests that SARS-CoV-2 infection induces robust neutralizing and binding antibody responses in patients and that humoral immunity against SARS-CoV-2 acquired by infection may persist for a relatively long time.
["SARS-CoV-2 infection induces robust, neutralizing antibody responses that are stable for at least three months"](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.14.20151126v...) - July 17, 2020
- Here we report that the vast majority of infected individuals with mild-to-moderate COVID-19 experience robust IgG antibody responses against the viral spike protein, based on a dataset of 19,860 individuals screened at Mount Sinai Health System in New York City.
- We also show that titers are stable for at least a period approximating three months, and that anti-spike binding titers significantly correlate with neutralization of authentic SARS-CoV-2. Our data suggests that more than 90% of seroconverters make detectible neutralizing antibody responses and that these titers are stable for at least the near-term future.
--------
BTW, there's something called immunological memory, your memory B/T cells persist for decades. So even if you, say, were only fully immune to reinfection for 1 week, you could still get to herd immunity by building up enough immunological memory since the presence of memory B/T cells will reduce transmission. Anyway, fortunately COVID-19 produces immunity of several months at least.
https://www.jimmunol.org/content/early/2020/09/03/jimmunol.2...
First of all, Anders Tegnell set Sweden’s policy and has been a brilliant voice of reason.
Check out Michael Levitt, Martin Kuelhoff, Jay Bhattachargee. There’s a lot more but I’m on mobile and need to get back to my computer first to dig through my notes.
Just be warned, if you actually research this issue - I’ve probably read 40 papers in the last 3 months, you might find it incredibly depressing, because it’s not even that we traded freedom for safety: we traded both away for nothing. Lockdown worsens COVID—19 mortality IMO, let alone the second order ramifications.
Herd immunity is a natural emergent phenomenon and is how ALL infectious diseases stop being a threat. Just remember herd immunity does not mean eradication, it just means no more exponential spread.
But tldr:
- Learn about immunological memory
- Learn about t cell cross reactivity: exposure to non-sars hcovs confers protection
- learn the simplistic herd immunity formula based off of the basic reproduction number, then learn how to think about heterogenity which makes the true HIT lower than the simplistic 1-1/R_0 implies
- learn that severe covid-19 kills vis pathological cytokine release syndrome and thus is an immunoregulatory disorder which logically would be worsened by lack of sunlight (vit d + nitric oxide), lack of sleep, lack of exercise, and excessive stress/fear, all results of lockdown
- read research literature on cloth masks published before the covid mass delusion ever happened; they are unanimous in showing that cloth masks make things worse
I think from this we could infer that they will take responsibility when they think it becomes clearer that students will not sufficiently comply with the public safety directives.
Young kids is completely different we aren't doing enough and there aren't a ton of other options but to open schools. But in person college for adults? not a necessity
I mean, they aren't going to expel the students from their university, but they are going to drop the pretense of in-person classes.
18-22 year old's in college are self-contained for the most part. They're around people their own age, not known for intermingling with senior citizens etc.
The people in your scenario that are most at risk are roaming the same area freely, so the solution is to ban the least at risk people?
The same people who are the least likely to follow the prohibition?
If you want to protect the most at-risk people and the only way to do it is to divide the high-risk & low-risk the far more logical route would to ban the high-risk people.
I know this because I have family in those facilities that I have not been able to see since this all started. We (low risk) have been banned from these facilities (high risk) for months now.
We are lucky in that we are still somewhat healthy in regards to my family near CU. Many other families in these facilities are not and have lost loved ones due to the pandemic. The bans are not working as well as hoped, especially since the start of the school year.
The decisions of the CU community in relation to the larger Boulder community are contentious at the moment. Many parts of the larger Boulder community do not appreciate CU's 'cavalier' policies.
Do waste management districts handle epidemiology issues in Utah?
To me this "adult" here reads like "old enough to be thrown under the bus"
Doing some quick Googling about the scientists at the head of US public policy on the subject: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/covid-19-colleges...
The scientists seem to say 1) don't send students home and 2) contain them so they don't cause further outbreaks at universities. So the suggestion of ending youth public gatherings at a university seems in-line with the science.
It seems comically naive to expect that the population that faces virtually zero downside and has the greatest propensity for risky behavior would obey such an order.
(In case anyone isn’t certain, I do not support this line of thinking. But since authoritarianism is fashionable nowadays I fully expect it to happen)
I didn't get that out of the article you referred to. The article said that students mingling should be assumed inevitable:
"They're going to wander. They're going to visit each other. They're going to go into town. They're going to sneak off and have a party. This is what they do."
And that sick students should be grouped together, away from healthy students:
"Some colleges have the capability of a dorm or a couple of floors of a dorm where they could keep people who are infected,"
Sounds reasonable, better than sending them home, given the odds.
It's less questionable when you look at it a different way: this is one of the segments of the population most likely to behave irresponsibly. It's a common observation that people in this age range often unjustifiably act like they're invincible. Those feelings can lead to bad results for others, like in the case of a drunk driver killing someone else in an accident.
#1, I don't think it's relevant that you think that segment of the population is irresponsible. We are talking about adults and taking away their freedom. I personally would rather see objective facts, not opinion.
>people in this age range often unjustifiably act like they're invincible
#2, I think you are wrong about their invincibility in this case. 330 people under 25 died of covid as of August 20 [0] (most with comorbidities), out of a population of 104 million in the U.S. [1], that is 1 out of 346,000 (edit). This is not high on the list of dangers for that age group.
You should attempt to justify your imposition on them without smearing them. Young people are not in danger from this disease are being forced as a group to make significant scholastic, social, and economic sacrifices for those who are too afraid to self-isolate on their own.
EDIT: Maybe the focus needs to be on vulnerable populations, and not young people? What is the goal here? Are Colorado hospitals overwhelmed? There's no proof that lockdowns otherwise make a difference.
[0] https://fox8.com/news/coronavirus/new-cdc-report-shows-94-of... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
And maybe a drunk driver really is invincible because he has a very safe car that will protect him in any accident. Does that mean he should be allowed to drive drunk?
That's a straw man: no one is proposing banning all gatherings forever. Drunk people are banned from driving when they're drunk, not when they're sober. People like these students will have to suffer some analogous restrictions during this pandemic, especially in hot spots like Boulder, but those restrictions will stop when the virus is under control.
But they're not just banning gatherings of sick people when they are sick, they are banning healthy people from gathering too. So maybe we don't ban driving every night, just New Years Eve and St Paddy's day, when there's a higher number of drunk drivers out?
Your analogy is just bad. Closer would be banning all drivers between a certain age rubric because possibly, maybe, some of them will get drunk and drive.
If anybody proposed that, it would be rightly derided, but here with politically motivated COVID panic based on still poorly understood evidence is somehow making this absurd restriction seem okay to an awful lot of people right here on HN.
You know we already ban all drivers "between a certain age rubric"? Try to get your driver's license from age 0-15.
Here's the text of the order: https://www.bouldercounty.org/families/disease/covid-19/publ...
The text says in part: ""Gathering: more than one individual coming together or being physically near each other for any shared and common purpose, including socializing or participating in any activity together including but not limited to shopping, dining, or exercising. A gathering does not include employees of any business while performing work for that business or any classroom learning activity explicitly permitted by the University of Colorado. Members of the same household while in their shared household space (e.g. a dorm room) together are not considered a gathering.""
They've excluded people at work, so I suppose this allows people in this age range to provide childcare for essential workers, work in health care or at grocery stores, etc.
How kind of our benevolent overlords. We can still partake in the economic machinery! Just none of that pesky “living your life” stuff.
I’m surprised they haven’t banned laughter yet. It spreads SARS-CoV-2-laden respiratory droplets like nothing else.
You want to find the authoritarians among us? Find the people who are unable to laugh and make it known that no one else should.
(Many of my closest friends see through the narrative, partially because I wouldn’t shut up about it once I started reading the research and really realized how big of a mistake we’d made as a society)
It’s kind of like how everyone thinks that they would have opposed the Nazis because they grew up being taught that Nazis were bad. The truth is, this experiment in mass collective delusion has made it very clear which among us would have spoken out.
The ones reporting their neighbors for having a gathering or not wearing a mask while watering their lawn would have happily helped participate in genocide. Don’t doubt it.
What's clear to me after the pandemic: most people wouldn't think twice about completely destroying the fabric of normal society (perhaps irrevocably, while also violating fundamental rights) if they believe they're acting morally.
In any case, I take solace in the fact that pretty much all of my comments in this thread are more or less equally downvoted :P
I’ve had to stop browsing HN as much during covid because people here tend to be very rabid about this issue. I am shocked how normalized the idea of forcible business closures and total bans on population movement for years (“until the vaccine”) has become. All to avoid a virus that spreads so well that even literal islands (NZ) have been unable to contain it, which has per the CDC a .65% IFR (I personally think the real figure is .3%), and which unlike Influenza does not kill children.
But I digress.
Really shows you how far the overton window shifted.
Also doubly ironic that I got called paranoid for talking about what is literally happening right now, not what I fear might happen.
>"But this doesn’t mean we should go back to the ‘old normal’."
https://www.who.int/westernpacific/emergencies/covid-19/info...
>"There's nothing new about the 'new normal'. Here's why"
>"Normal' has not worked for a majority of the world's population, so why would it start working now? We should use our discomfort to forge a new paradigm instead."
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/theres-nothing-new-ab...
> It’s kind of like how everyone thinks that they would have opposed the Nazis because they grew up being taught that Nazis were bad. The truth is, this experiment in mass collective delusion has made it very clear which among us would have spoken out.
> The ones reporting their neighbors for having a gathering or not wearing a mask while watering their lawn would have happily helped participate in genocide. Don’t doubt it.
So yes, you're acting paranoid and not contributing meaningfully to the conversation.
Much of the country never issued stay at home orders and almost no place has stay at home orders now, so they would have been right to call you inaccurate if perhaps paranoid isn't the right word, as we largely didn't do that, and where we did we didn't keep it for six months.
I am genuinely perplexed here.
No, I'm saying that the claim specifically made in the grandparents comment about general stay at home orders maintained for 6+ months was false (not paranoid), because much of the country never had a stay-at-home order, and almost all actual stay-at-home orders that were issued were lifted. Had we actually had a hard lockdown nationwide for even a fairly short period of time, we might still be seeing the kind second wave some places are seeing, but we wouldn’t still be in an epic disaster of a first wave, and we probably wouldn’t be seeing the kind of extreme-but-isolated orders you are complaining about now.
Conflating this as a human rights issue as some commenters have tried to on this thread is a dangerous trend.
In other cities, like La crosse, WI for instance college campuses tended to be the hotspots.
The same was true of senior housing a few months back.
So I am leaning towards the public health officials targeting this based on data for hotspots and demographics and not just to ground some group of people.
The virus needs to be quashed and NY is the evidence.
They are undertaking this measure because of a spike in COVID “cases” (read: positive PCR test results). A spike in cases without a corresponding increase in deaths or hospitalizations should be a good thing, but we treat it the same as having an equivalent number of centenarians get sick. Completely absurd and it goes against everything we knew about public health before this mass global hysteria took root.
The reality is that compared to March New York city in September has quashed the virus, per data.
Ironically, the hysteria is partially why New York’s IFR is the highest in the world; fears of hospital overrun scenarios that never materialized (and in retrospect never could have, but we didn’t have good data at the time) led to Cuomo sending infected into nursijg homes. And a doctrine of early invasive ventilation led to iatrogenic harm and therefore death. And deprivation of sunlight/exercise/sleep all serve to destroy the body’s natural immunoregulatory mechanisms.
Unfortunately, Jacobson v Massachusetts has given legal precedent for forced sterilization and forced detention based off of race, so I’m sure Jacobson can be used to justify these mortality-inducing lockdowns from a legal standpoint. That neither makes it ethical nor good for public health.
What arrogance to think that New York is not experiencing cases because of the interventions taken. Is it just a coincidence that Sweden, which never locked down nor mandates masks, is also done with COVID? No, it’s all just seroprevalence. Which so many of us have been trying to tell you guys for half a year now. Meanwhile the third world is about to experience an unprecedented mass starvation that will eclipse the COVID mortality by far.
You sure about that? I had friends who are doctors there tell me back during the peak (~April) they had run out of anesthesia and had to intubate patients without it.
Intubating without anaesthesia sounds very not-fun though.
BTW New York followed a doctrine of early invasive ventilation which almost certainly caused iatrogenic harm. So perhaps an over-reliance on intubation contributed to your friends' hospital(s) running out (that's besides the point but just interesting to note)
Lots of people that don't get hospitalized are reporting significant lingering symptoms. An effective vaccine appears to be ~months away. Do either of those things matter at all?
With SARS-1, there can be lingering fatigue and minor cognitive deficits for a few months post infection, but radiological abnormalities of the lungs, etc clear away within months and are certainly gone at the 1 year mark.
The evidence in SARS-2 is incredibly weak and especially for those who are asymptomatic or paucisymptomatic the chance of lasting harm is essentially zero. Remember that the real damage occurs from the immune response, so if you have no symptoms you cannot have damage. The notion being promulgated of having totally asymptomatic COVID-19 and then randomly showing organ damage (heart, lungs etc) is absurd.
Finally for mathematical purposes we need to consider long-term damage - which again just doesn’t really happen - as not as bad as a death. So we can still work it into the math just fine, whether you want to call it a tenth of a death or half or whatever.
—-
Oh finally, quick point that vaccines are not without risk either. Go read the data on the Moderna trials. Or the history of rushed-out vaccines that caused paralysis (it was either for swine flu or avian flu, I forget which)
We don't have that information about a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine yet, but you are just hand-waving here, it's likely enough that one of the many vaccine candidates will be less harmful than a course of infection (In general, vaccines are safe enough that we use lots of them…).
You also aren't working long term damage "into the math", you are doing just what I was getting at, dismissing it.
Your position also implicitly relies on the notion that SARS-2 isn't spreading right now, but it is, so by the time we get a vaccine we will have a lot of exposure. Data from NY and Sweden implies somewhere around 20% seroprevalence is when we hit herd immunity.
Since you haven't given me much to work on, and I don't feel like digging into the vaccine side, let me give you some research on long-term damage:
["Follow-up Chest CT findings from discharged patients with severe COVID-19: an 83-day observational study"](https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-27359/v1) - First Submitted May 4, Published online May 12
> Radiological abnormalities in patients of severe COVID-19 could be completely absorbed with no residual lung injury in more than two months’ follow-up.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1440-1843... (SARS-1 pathology)
> Preliminary evidence suggests that these lung function abnormalities will improve over time
and here's just one effect of lockdown: loneliness.
https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/110/15/5797.full.pdf
> mortality was higher among more socially isolated and more lonely participants. However, after adjusting statistically for demographic factors and baseline health, social isolation remained significantly associated with mortality (hazard ratio 1.26, 95% confidence interval, 1.08–1.48 for the top quintile of isolation), but loneliness did not (haz-ard ratio 0.92, 95% confidence interval, 0.78–1.09). The association of social isolation with mortality was unchanged when loneliness was included in the model.
For the first link, only 40% of the patients had (in the sense of the Chest CT study) recovered after 2 months. But that's a single measure, it would be good to have additional assessments of the health of those folks, rather than just the single factor.
It's also a very dangerous trend to ignore human rights because it is convenient for your current goals.
College campuses are the best possible location for herd immunity to take place.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Boulder,+CO/@39.949631,-10...
My friends, colleagues, and community are being directly endangered by CU's obfuscation of case data, refusal to provide comprehensive testing, and foot-dragging on promised safety measures. It's ridiculous that the city/county are being forced to mitigate the downstream effects of this doomed-from-the-beginning plan, but the "run it like a business" university administration is a lost cause.
[1] https://www.bouldercounty.org/families/disease/covid-19/covi...
People seem to forget that the expected total death count from day 1 was, and still is, expected to be the same no matter what actions taken....And the entire point of lockdowns was to not overwhelm the hospitals all at once.
It's so frustrating watching Democrat leaders (Jill Hunsaker Ryan in this case) put plans into place that aren't backed by ACTUAL evidence, blame others when their plans end up not working, refuse to pivot upon receiving new information, refuse to acknowledge when previous data is found to be inaccurate....all while trampling on the constitutional rights of American citizens.
This is so wrong. One has to really wonder what motivates you. Mask wearing alone, a simple action, dramatically lowers predicted infection rates
A Danish clinical trial enrolling 3000 people will probably give some more concrete answers.
OTOH, hand washing and distance are definitely useful to reduce spread.
P.S. Feel free to state your disagreement explicitly instead of downvoting.
[1] https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/08/28/margaret-mccartney-we-n...
Of course,I agree that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But, as the BMJ post I quoted earlier says, instead of just saying "wear a mask", the best idea would also promote trials to verify their effectiveness (like the Danish trial). It's done all the time for drugs, why not masks?
[1] https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/masking-lack-of-evidence-with-...
[2] https://pubpeer.com/publications/6AF113CE946CABB0FBB811697E5...
"missing the compounding effect" - What about the compounding effect of numerous people putting a plague vector directly on their respiratory system?
"Mistaking Absence of Evidence for Evidence of Absence" - The argument isn't that because there's no evidence it's guaranteed to not work. The argument is that without solid evidence constitutional rights should not be infringed.
And on and on.
Trump bad, guns good, abortion good, q anon good...and on and on.
I personally blame the media, where most people get their information, for presenting things in an extremely one sided non-nuanced manner, no matter, what party or group you hail from.
It makes it impossible to empathize with the other side or see other ideas if it's presented already by the media as unquestionable ideas.
However, it's also on the population for being intellectually lazy and not validating or verifying what they see on the news media.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23730601
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23299305
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20135818
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18257769
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16055379
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15695133
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14540750
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13859103
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12995487
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12995486
If you can't or won't fix this, we're going to have to ban you. Most accounts would be banned by now after a lot less than that. Can you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on?
It will do something, in a very complicated way, but compared to things that really matter that we haven't been able to push like mask wearing(you disagree) and social distancing and being outside, hand washing has been a huge distraction, which is the same as saying it's helped increase the spread.
Could you provide some sort of source for this? This seems completely illogical as our goal has never been heard immunity.
Doing the first saved a lot of people because treatment was available. Secondary saves were non covid patients who could get service because capacity remained more available.
Had we had better safety compliance, we would have reduced even more than we did and may have normalized things such that the wave upon us now would be much less.
Death rates are dead/recovered and that is driven by infections.
Lower infections means fewer entering the death equation. More health care available means more recovered and all of that means far fewer dead people.
A few places did, but that's because they over-reacted and quarantined lots of their medical staff. That's the reaction not the virus.
Deterring people to go to the hospitals, that are destined to save lifes, so they die at home instead, is not brilliant advice. They can (and will) sell it as a success, but Swedden still had much more people killed than their twin country Norway. The fact that those hospital rooms where not occupied despite having some elders in need of specialized care, is a failure, not a success.
> was never any risk of hospital overload
I think that many physicians in the planet would tell a very different history.
Sweden had deaths on par with the average of all of European countries less than Italy, Spain, the UK, etc.
If we can't compare Swedden With Norway, maybe you would prefer Denmark?
645 danish killed versus 5875 Sweddish. Even if we correct the difference in population, is still much lower (around 1290 versus 5875). They are not much different populations genetically. Do you have any hypothesis that would explain the difference?
Also, you're cherry picking again to suit your narrative. Sweden is part of Europe and should be compared as such.
It's disingenuous to keep promoting this demon-ization of Sweden narrative with unsubstantiated, and cherry picked comments.
Sweden did the right thing. Other countries did not. It's that simple.
Mean age of youngsters leaving parental home to live in their own home. Data from 2019:
- Italy: 30.1 Years old.
- European Union: 26.2 Years old
- Swedden: 17.8 Years old.
So... Yes, definitely I would say that they are very different societies. This, most probably, saved Swedden several deaths.
> Sweden is part of Europe and should be compared as such.
For your information, Czechia is an European country, same as Denmark
Correlate all of the countries covid death per capita with age youngsters leave the home.
See if that's a valid observation and holds true across countries... or just a single data point that you pulled out of thin air.
Have there been any actual studies to support this hypothesis or are you making this up to support your narrative?
It seems to be just an endless rabbit hole of unsubstantiated correlations and cherry picking.
(Homework for the weekend?... LOL, who do you think I am? your secretary?)
but Swedden still had much more people killed than their twin country Norway.
So what? Zero deaths was not ever a goal of lockdowns, and cannot have been because there's no logical way to get from that policy to that outcome. You've done what lockdown advocates always do when Sweden comes up: not just shift the goalposts but move them entirely out of the field.
At any rate, Norway may simply have not had the disease spread through the population yet, or they may have just got lucky - seasonal flu always hits some countries and not others for unexplained reasons. It doesn't ultimately matter. Sweden disproved epidemiological models, and thus the actions taken on their basis were not justified.
As for physicians, luckily the opinion of a doctor here or there is not sufficient to change actual data or observed reality. Fortunately most doctors are sensible: there are plenty who have been outspoken against lockdown precisely because it emptied the hospitals and clinics leaving them with a huge backlog of patients who they could have saved but now cannot.
Social distancing[edit] On 16 March 2020, the agency recommended that people over 70 should limit close contact with other people, and avoid crowded areas such as stores, public transport and public spaces.[112] At the end of March, 93% of those older than 70 said that they were following the recommendations from the health service to some extent, with the majority having decreased their contacts with friends and family.[113] In May, the agency looked at easening the recommendations for the 'young elderly' of good health, but ultimately decided against it.
The US might be keeping school systems closed, but movie theaters for example are open across most of the country. Mask compliance for example tracks closely with where areas that are currently experiencing outbreaks in the US. That likely says more about overall compliance than the effectiveness of masks.
PS: It’s random mixing between groups that really spreads diseases. Individual classrooms where people see the same people every day may have outbreaks, but that’s all local transmission.
Swedden has not such stellar results as they are trying to sell.
A bit later they point out that flattening the curve increases the chance of getting to a vaccine or viable treatment; which is another way to reduce the total number of infections.
Which more rigorous models have the area under the curve as roughly the same, as you describe it?
I believe any model which has herd immunity, where personal immunity comes after a period of infection, must have the possibility of overshooting the minimum heard immunity density when the infection rate is high enough. As in the SIR model.
Lower the infection rate and there's lower overshoot.
I believe it's the burden of the proof is on you to present a new, more rigorous model if you want to argue that slowing down transmission significantly lowers overall mortality - as the null hypothesis is that they are not associated.
On the last point, I am aware that under the SIR model, there's the possibility of overshoot, i.e. exceeding the minimum herd immunity threshold. My understanding is that this isn't a significant effect unless you have uncontrolled, explosive expansion, so that most people get infected simultaneously before others develop immunity and can therefore act as a barrier for herd immunity. I don't believe this is the situation right now given the numbers we are seeing.
That said, I believe that the more realistic future is that a vaccine or an effective treatment will be developed in the next months, and that will be the thing that will have made temporarily lowering transmissibility worth it. What I don't believe, because I haven't found any evidence for it that holds basic scrutiny, is that if no vaccine or effective treatment can be developed in a reasonable timeframe, then keeping the measures to slow down transmission as long as possible will have any significant effect on lower overall mortality.
EDIT: To make it clear so people do not misunderstand me, what I believe has no evidence is that without a timely vaccine or effective treatment, slowing down transmission beyond what is necessary to keep the health system from overloading is associated with lower overall mortality.
I say it's wrong because months ago I heard arguments that models predicted that lowering the curve could also reduce total mortality. And I linked to that video to give evidence that this was part of the general discussion months ago.
The fact that you disagree with that model, or argue that I need to give a stronger evidence for the current information we have, has no bearing on my point.
Eg, when you write "I don't believe this is the situation right now" - that statement is based on knowledge you have now, not knowledge that people had on "day 1".
Nowadays it seems both EU & US hasn't pursued heavy suppression (probably too costly, and legally and culturally difficult), but rather just hoping to keep it somewhat under control until a vaccine comes, hopefully.
They don’t want people thinking that if action was taken by the U.S. gov sooner (Feb instead of Apr) we would have dramatically fewer deaths and cases, which is probably a more scientifically accurate view but with all the data being so new this debate is ripe for political distortion.
[0] https://youtu.be/Yk2p2oyXxTc
I don't know if that is a mistake or intentionally misleading - I would hope the former.
Note: I'm from the UK.
Why do you single out "conservatives" when Democratic politicians were telling people during the Chinese Lunar New Year there was nothing to worry about?
This wasn't a partisan blunder.
Stares like Florida and Texas, which has higher infections than NorthEastern states, had far lower death rates because of what we had learnt about the virus in the intervening months (just a few things we learnt, that ventilators were not very handy, there are several drugs that are more effective than ventilators, even if we are facing a shortage of medical grade PPE cloth masks themselves can be extremely useful, outdoors are much safer than indoors, etc).
The idea that we were always expecting the same number of deaths is nonsensical, but even if someone did believe that in the beginning of the pandemic, it’s been proven incorrect by now.
Even simple models like the one described at https://youtu.be/k6nLfCbAzgo?t=920 (I point to the relevant part) shows that reducing the infection rate can also lead to fewer overall deaths.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2020/09/23/commentary/w... https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/shopping-i-can-t-real...
Only if you assume we'll never have vaccine or efficient specific treatment, which is most likely false assumption.
In all other cases expected total death toll can vary by order of magnitude or more depending on how many people get infected before vaccine and/or treatments are widely available.
[For some unknown reason, HN doesn't let me post any more today, so replying as an edit]
Excellent point about having exit criteria. Just to pick a state at random, Pennsylvania [1] explains their criteria pretty well. They're looking for less than 50 new confirmed cases per 100,000 population reported in the previous 14 days. Which seems way too many to me, but what do I know, I'm not an epidemiologist. These criteria need to be open to change if they're wrong, though. If they notice cases increasing after re-opening, they need to 1. close back down, and 2. adjust their criteria downward so not to make the same mistake again.
1: https://www.governor.pa.gov/process-to-reopen-pennsylvania/
There is clearly legal precedent to age discrimination/restrictions in the United States, from age related employment discrimination protections not applying to those under the age of 40, to the legal age of alcohol and recreational marijuana consumption (the latter of which is not somehow "exempted" by the 21st amendments restriction of the federal government).
So the issue here is really that the university of Colorado has a number of students who are flagrantly ignoring masking rules. They also have a administration that opened the campus. Boulder is a very left leaning city, has a department of health that has decided to be extremely expansive with their mandate in boulder county. Churches and public schools are still closed. But there is a tricky issue in that the state constitution keeps bolder from regulating CU. The majority of cases in Colorado are now from CU. That’s why they’ve structured at the way they have, because they cannot regulate CU directly.
So the question becomes is this a violation of the bill of rights? You’d have to be able to argue that the governments actions are designed to be punitive, rather than protective. As much as Boulder has consistently overstepped itself, I think this still meets that criteria.
As a sidenote, for all of the politicking about red state versus blue state, it is definitely millennials and zoomer‘s that I see without masks. Doesn’t bode well for the future.
Also Boulder and CU have had this war going on for quite a while independent of covid. It got to the point where the University even decided to purchase a quarry to get around Boulder restrictions.
Compare the US's curve to China's. If the US hadn't tried to half-ass it's measures (at the personal to the national level), we wouldn't still be arguing about them because the virus would be under control and they wouldn't be necessary anymore.
Are you advocating welding people in buildings?
So clearly there are ways to check the spread and cut out 99% of deaths. (They are also not wizardry or witchcraft. Mandatory masks in public, temp measurement at schools and public buildings, quarantines at entry and positive diagnosis enforced extremely strictly by law enforcement, and tracing the infection chain. That’s literally it.)
Not particularly, but even if China undercounted by 10x, it's still way ahead of places like Sweden and the US on a per capita basis.
I have relatives there, and their lives are basically back to normal and have been for months. The bungling Western (especially American) response has unfortunately been a huge propaganda win for the Communist party. They're thanking every American asshole who loudly refuses to things as simple as wearing a mask for making them look good.
No, that's a straw man. It's like saying that someone who advocates for an effective police force is also advocating for that force to recklessly kill suspects.
What I am advocating for is mandatory pandemic control measures that are strict enough to work and applied consistently until the job is done, and a population that's willing consistently take efforts to protect the common good rather than complain and resist when things aren't maximally convenient to them personally. That applies not just to first-order responses, but to second and third order responses as well.
Does violation of fundamental civil rights like freedom of assembly not also harm the common good? We can't focus narrowly on one objective and ignore everything else.
Is putting a device on your face that requires constantly interacting your hands near your respiratory tract common sense?
Everything that follows a cult's narrative is common sense, everything that disagrees with a cults narrative is immediately discarded.
Be aware of your biases.
> So the question becomes is this a violation of the bill of rights?
Seems less like an issue of being "left" and more "authoritarian". I wish there was a pithier word than "Auth" available for this. Some left-wingers still defend the 1st Amendment.
I hope the parties this decree impacts sue and bring this to the Supreme Court. The biggest issue with lockdowns now seems to be lawmakers' fear of making a deadly choice. We need a high court opinion to be clear on what government can and cannot do. IANAL but the language seems clear in 1A that there shall be no law restricting peaceable assembly.
If you want people to follow rules, you have to be consistent in how those rules are applied.
Yes, we should.
> increase mortality by requiring proportionally more at-risk people to get sick to reach herd immunity.
This assumes that herd immunity is reached without a vaccine; the whole idea of controlling the spread is to reduce the degree to which herd immunity depends on people getting infected.
https://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/aboutlawsregulationsquarantin...
However as I commented as a sibling comment to yours, SCOTUS precedent would hold that this is almost certainly allowed, despite my utter disgust for these backwards policies.
If you can forcibly sterilize someone, why not prevent them from gathering? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson_v._Massachusetts (forced vaccination despite history of adverse reaction)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell (forced sterilization)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korematsu_v._United_States (forced detention based off of race)
I did a quick search of her background and she was almost indicted for falsifying Covid death data to inflate the total number of deaths[1]. Once she was forced to accurately report the numbers, the number of deaths magically dropped significantly. Won't hear about this in the news!
[1] - https://www.9news.com/article/news/local/next/gop-rep-allege...
https://koanewsradio.iheart.com/content/2020-05-15-gov-polis...
> Won't hear about this in the news!
Huh? I found lots of news articles about it.
You might may something to the affect "desperate times call for desperate measures," but have no doubt, the next 'emergency' is right around the corner. Once you give government power, it's quite difficult to take it back. People will be toeing the lines for years on what an emergency is, until it simply becomes the norm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_opportunism
We need to strip all emergency powers now. These were meant for times like earthquakes, where legislatures don't have time to act. It's been 7 months now, that is no longer an excuse. I think a 30 day cap is generous enough.