One can believe it's real, and also believe scientific evidence that masks don't help much (or at least don't offer the level of protection many believe).
Similarly one can know it's real but have a different perception of risk.
For instance, a recently published controlled trial doesn't show a statistically significant difference between mask wearers and non.
> Limitation: Inconclusive results, missing data, variable adherence, patient-reported findings on home tests, no blinding, and no assessment of whether masks could decrease disease transmission from mask wearers to others.
I don't think you're taking away the complete story of the paper you mention. There are two fundamentally different ways in which masks could help: protecting the wearer from others, or protecting others from the wearer.
They state:
"These findings do offer evidence about the degree of protection mask wearers can anticipate in a setting where others are not wearing masks and where other public health measures, including social distancing, are in effect. The findings, however, should not be used to conclude that a recommendation for everyone to wear masks in the community would not be effective in reducing SARS-CoV-2 infections, because the trial did not test the role of masks in source control of SARS-CoV-2 infection. During the study period, authorities did not recommend face mask use outside hospital settings and mask use was rare in community settings (22). This means that study participants' exposure was overwhelmingly to persons not wearing masks."
By suggesting that this paper concludes that masks don't help much, it totally ignores the community benefit of widespread mask-wearing.
The Atlantic article bungles this point, too, as do most people both opposed to and in favor of masks.
I think it is harmful to say that masks protect the wearer (unless they are N95 or better). This is a big and easily attacked surface that only serves to obscure and discredit the real point of wearing masks.
Instead the messaging should focus solely on the fact that they protect others from the infection carried (likely without knowledge) by the wearer, and that people without symptoms can be contagious.
This point needs to be drilled into people's heads until everyone gets it. People also need to be taught to wear masks properly. Wearing one with nose sticking out is darn near useless.
> Instead the messaging should focus solely on the fact that they protect others from the infection carried (likely without knowledge) by the wearer, and that people without symptoms can be contagious.
Given the prevailing attitude towards personal freedom and personal responsibility in the US, I wonder what sort of an effect would such explicit messaging would have on the level of mask wearing.
I'm of the opinion that most people in the US good people who could be convinced not to endanger their neighbor, and wear masks voluntarily, if the messaging is right, and if they aren't forced to do it. If forced, a lot of people won't comply, and rightly so. Governments here have no right to force any such thing.
> For instance, a recently published controlled trial doesn't show a statistically significant difference between mask wearers and non.
Umm...doesn't show a statistically significant difference between recommending mask wearing or not.
Ironically, when that study was posted here (yesterday?) people were saying in the comments the 'anti-maskers' would jump on it to 'prove' mask wearing wasn't effective.
That’s a huge extrapolation from “many people aren’t wearing masks” to “complete denial that this is real”.
Beginning of August the deaths per capita in the 7 county Twin Cities area were four times the rate of the rest of the State. It has reduced to only 2.5 times now.
Basically for the first seven months, the COVID fatality rate in the rest of the State was comparable to the 17-18 flu season, perhaps a little better. Folks would reasonably ask why worry...
Given the Twin Cities have had over twice the COVID fatalities per capita is spite of an arguably superior health care system, the city folks themselves aren’t in much of a position to preach what works...
"Complete denial that this is real" comes from... literally people denying that it's real, all over the place. You'd have to be under a rock to not have seen this being said. My own father is one of them.
As to the rest of your point, yes, in a large urban area the virus will spread faster and sooner than out-state. However, I've been watching the weekly change per-capita per-county map in the Star Tribune and Hennepin county has been lagging everywhere else for quite some time now, so I think we are in fact in a position to preach about what works.
It depends entirely on who you talk to. Urban America is taking this threat seriously and locking down for the winter while rural America thinks it's a hoax. In Virginia, our cities are keeping the curve flattened, while the virus is surging off the charts in our rural communities.
Nothing convinces them. When a loved one dies of asphyxiation, they shrug it off and say that person died of obesity, old age, or a lack of vitamins. We have nurses telling stories of patients struggling to breath, but who still refuse to believe this virus is real and only cease gasping about the "fake news" when they are intubated.
Complicating this is our HIPAA regulations. The media can't show you what's happening inside our hospitals right now. They can only show the refrigeration trucks for bodies and roads closed for oxygen trucks outside the hospitals. So the conspiracy theorists claim these are for show and that the hospitals are actually empty.
With the complete abdication of leadership at the federal level--where some of our officials are openly urging citizens to fight against policies slowing the spread of the virus, we can do nothing but stay inside and hope to ride this out.
I think that's pretty accurate, but even in Urban America there's a divide between people who aren't taking any chances vs people who are wearing PPE but are living their best life.
For me, I'm just not going anywhere or doing anything. It turns out that I can have everything delivered, and my risk is essentially 0. I'm going to wait it out until there's a vaccine. If the numbers dip very low in my area, I might try to squeeze in a doctor and dentist visit. I'm not immunocompromised, but it's not that hard to live as if I was. I'm considering this whole thing a bit of an experiment to see how self-sufficient I can be.
Conversely, I have coworkers that are traveling all over the country (wearing masks), and staying at cheap airbnb's. Some are relocating because of the changing housing market. If you don't mind taking on a minimal amount of risk, you can get a lot of good deals on flights/hotels/airbnbs/apartments/etc right now. Personally, even a little risk isn't worth it when I know there's 95% effective vaccine being manufactured.
At this point, it's obvious that we'll never get rid of COVID-19 entirely as a disease. Hopefully it'll become a disease only for the people that believe in "fake news" and "anti-vax".
The rural-urban divide comes down to the understanding that death is the price for life, which has vanished in the urban millieu, but it's still visceral to those living closer to nature and its ubiquitous birth-life-death cycle. Covid is yet another disease that's going to take away a certain (small!) fraction of the population, for little fault other than being born with the wrong genetic makeup. Given the extreme infectiousness, everybody is going to get it within a span of a few years. Those that will die, will die. Most will survive. Life goes on. Covid is nothing new, 100 years ago, before antibiotics, pneumonia was significantly more deadly, and yet here we are. The answer to death is birth, not cowering in a basement.
The astute reader will retort 'BUT VACCINES'. This deserves a special note. The cold logic of natural selection is that descendants of organisms naturally resistant to disease inherit the Earth. We can supplant disease resistance with artificial means, of which vaccines are amazingly effective. To a point. Beyond which we realize that we've inadvertently cultivated a debilitated fragile population that can only survive through sophisticated technological methods. Any disruption of the technological supply chains then brings swift and large scale catastrophe. Hoping that our Andaman and Amish brothers and sisters will still be around at the time of reckoning.
Let's have a bit more charity. People worry and suffer and grieve like the rest of us. They just don't surrender their lives, as short or long as they will end up being, to fear of a disease that, by now, it's obviously not anywhere near as deadly as the Plague.
This is sophist crap, reverse-engineered to justify your dislike of urbanites. If the situation were reversed-- people in urban areas behaving carelessly and dying in droves while in rural areas people were taking appropriate precautions-- you'd be screaming about how it just proves that the "urban milieu" is atomized and doesn't care about anyone but themselves, while in rural areas people still care about their community above the individual.
> The rural-urban divide comes down to the understanding that death is the price for life, which has vanished in the urban millieu, but it's still visceral to those living closer to nature and its ubiquitous birth-life-death cycle.
This is a thought provoking viewpoint that could be explored better.
Beyond that though, the point of the first paragraph seems to be that "everybody is going to get it... those that will die will die". I disagree.
You anticipate one of the most concrete rebuttals to the first paragraph, vaccines, and then proceed to argue that vaccines are bad because they disrupt natural selection. This is an absurd argument. Are you opposed to children's hospitals because they disrupt natural selection? Your rebuttal is not relevant. What you have argued is a small and theoretical downside to vaccines, but it is not a rebuttal. Vaccines have completely eliminated multiple diseases. They will help with Covid and save lives, and the fact that they have a small downside by disrupting natural selection does not change the fact that they will help and save lives.
You only address vaccines while ignoring other counterpoints: I live in an area where our hospitals are at capacity. There are dozens (dozens!) of ICU bed available for millions of people. Only a couple dozen ICU beds for the entire state, and these beds need to serve not only the worst Covid cases but all other patients who have had heart attacks or any other health issues. I strongly disagree that "those that will die will die", but instead say that "those that don't have to die will die" if we don't wear masks and follow community guidelines.
You then close by asking for more charity. After having said "everybody is going to get it... those that will die will die... life goes on" you ask for others to have more charity...
That's the point. Live your life being ready to depart next week. Live your life being ready your loved ones to depart next week. That's not to say it's something to look forward to. Or not take reasonable precautions to avoid it. You will know worry, you will know suffering, and when the inevitable happens, you will know grief. Know that death is natural and inevitable. And yet here we are. We are here because our ancestors had the strength to raise the next generation, not because somehow individual death was defeated.
On the urban side, we are acting as if we have somehow become immortal, and that everybody must sacrifice everything, school, work, family, friends, so that some can live to 85 instead of 77. That is an unprecedented high price to ask.
Natural selection, it's cold and harsh. It doesn't fix individual, aside that the immune system is a natural selection mechanism within the organism level natural selection. It simply selects fit individuals to reproduce. We are well atuned to this mechanism, witness 'youth' or 'beauty'. Think of dental braces. In old times, without orthodontics, would be a visible marker of less than optimal fitness. Ugly. Negative selection pressure. As orthodontics becomes more prevalent, in the beginning everybody gets a beauty boost. Let's celebrate. Yet, in a few generations, in absence of any selection pressure, a larger and larger fraction of the population now needs dental braces. Teeth simply don't fit on the mandible anymore. We can handle this with technology, but it's a growing problem. Should we close orthodontics clinics tomorrow? Probably not, but that should not prevent us from recognizing the long term hidden costs of medical technology. 'Use sparingly, mostly for emergencies'.
Ultimately this is just the same old argument over personal freedoms, personal inconveniences, saving lives, and balancing it all.
> We are here because our ancestors had the strength to raise the next generation, not because somehow individual death was defeated.
Yes, no individual life (save one's own ancestors) is responsible for where we are now. But I would help a dying man on the sidewalk, I would be in favor of criminal charges against myself if I just passed him by. I would participate in a large scale search for a neighbor lost on a hike, and I would support the fuel and maintenance costs of helicopters and other search vehicles, and I would support those several rescuers who risk their lives to save one. I would support spending $400,000 to perform a quadruple bypass on a 77 year old man so he can live to be 85. I would take on personal inconvenience along with 50 of my neighbors to save a single life. I would follow community health guidelines. I would wear a mask.
Sometimes I wonder if people have been hurt so bad emotionally that they feel they need to project a lack of empathy as a way of showing others they are strong. That they are not a target. It's subconscious, probably. Thank you for patiently trying to get them to see your side of things.
> Beyond which we realize that we've inadvertently cultivated a debilitated fragile population that can only survive through sophisticated technological methods.
Can you think of a causal mechanism that would make the population more fragile because of vaccines? Or is it just some inocent poetry from the same old book than "everything that does not kill us makes us stronger"?
(From another answer I wrote in this thread) Think of dental braces. In old times, without orthodontics, misaligned teeth would be a visible marker of less than optimal fitness. Ugly. Negative selection pressure. As orthodontics becomes more prevalent, in the beginning lots of people get a beauty boost. Celebrate! Yet, in a few generations, a larger and larger fraction of the population now needs more and more sophisticated dental braces. Teeth simply don't fit on the mandible anymore, because there is no selection force to prefer people with good teeth as marriage partners. Everybody has visibly good teeth! We can keep this illusion going with technology, but it's a growing problem. Should we close orthodontics clinics tomorrow? Probably not, but that should not prevent us from recognizing the long term hidden costs of medical technology. Use sparingly, mostly for emergencies.
Sorry but arguing that it's better to let people die from illness rather than fight a virus with medicine will require more than an analogy.
I asked for a mechanism that would make the population more fragile overall (not only less resistant to a specific strain of a specific virus) if we train the immune system with a vaccine. Also keep in mind this is an age disease, ie those who are more likely to die from the virus will do so after their reproductive period.
(Note: do you seriously believe today's teeth are more troublesome and less fit for the job than in the past ?)
A bit melodramatic. However I'd say the hoax folks will reap what they sow. The truth always comes out eventually. Personal responsibility is a thing as well.
Collateral damage is a shame, but there's a limit to how much you force other people to do what you want. So be it.
It might seem so, but I'd say it's accurate, for exmaple:
“Their last dying words are, ‘This can’t be happening. It’s not real,’” Doering said, adding that some patients prefer to believe that they have pneumonia or other diseases rather than covid-19, despite seeing their positive test results.[1]
It sounds harsh, but people die every day, many because of their own negligence. We can warn them ahead of time the best we can, but that's about it.
Keep in mind the general urge to call them morons has the opposite effect. Not saying anyone in the thread specifically has done that, but melodrama/hand-wringing is in the neighborhood.
In general, never count solely on East Coast media to provide an accurate pulse on the entirety of the US. For anything. Europe trips up on this a lot.
Especially in the case of COVID, where NY, NJ, MA and CT have per capita death rates two to three times worse than the National average. In early May, over half of all US deaths were in the Boston to DC corridors.
The sort of folks who don’t care much about COVID aren’t posting on HN. Typically. So you will get a sampling bias towards the (over?) aware, or those who have an agenda for or against a particular position on COVID response.
How will locking my family in our home make an obese person not obese?
The US is currently at 42% obese. This is now the forecast for the entire world for 2040 - 42% of all humans obese. That tells me the future will be filled with lockdowns.
Once socialized healthcare arrives in the US, things will be worse - the obese will have access to pills, treatments and surgeries that extend their lives even further, allowing them to become even more obese on the public's dime. People with normal BMI will be referred to as "body fascists" and the world will reformat itself to accomodate Rascal scooters as the primary means of mobility.
I am wondering why humanity was able to learn from two world wars to never have one again, but was not able to learn from past respiratory pandemics (e.g. Spanish Flu) how to deal with and shape societies, how to educate people into infection prevention in order mitigate widespread.
If anything - I believe the most lasting lesson from the world wars was to avoid attempts to “shape societies” at almost all costs - for better or for worse.
I disagree. We founded institutions like the United Nations, fostered global trade and integrated globally and internationally which shaped societies very much.
But we were apparently not able to throughout educate people to minimize infectious potential. To me it seems like common spreaders of respiratory diseases are completely ignorant about infection and don't even consider that by their actions (and presence!) they might infect others.
Because generally speaking people enjoy living life and as a species that means socializing. Actions required to limit the spread of infectious airborne diseases are directly counter to that. Fostering global trade and free travel directly increase the spread of certain diseases but overall improve living standards. As a species our behavioral patterns have evolved to prioritize socialization & personal contact as more beneficial than disease risk, despite the impact of even more deadly diseases historically (e.g. black plague in Europe killed 1/10 people for hundreds of years in europe).
Before all this, I thought that people WERE educated in such a way. I thought that no matter what, eventually people's sense of self-preservation would kick in. I believed that what they observed with their own eyes (sickness and death) would cause them to modify or alter their behavior, in order to avoid such an outcome. I was wrong on all counts!
>they observed with their own eyes (sickness and death)
that's maybe not true with Covid-19.
The perceived risk might be just too low in order to reach emergency protocols in many people. Apparently it's not enough to show trains filled with dead people in Italy.
This assumes that people would act differently if the death was visible with their own eyes, e.g. with Ebola. But at this moment 2020 made me so pessimistic that I believe somebody here will post a study how even Ebola didn't bring up the change in people we would like to see.
I don't know yet how to deal with the fact that apparently my whole view on the world and the nature of humans was wrong my whole life.
Global COVID-19 deaths - 1.3M (November 2020), mostly old
From the standpoint of QALY, there’s at least two orders of magnitude difference in the impact of the events.
Include the fact that the world population has basically tripled since 1950, making the impact proportionally less, and we are in three order of magnitude territory.
> Global WWII deaths - 60M, many or most young
> Global COVID-19 deaths - 1.3M (November 2020), mostly old
I have issues with comparing things this way. We easily could have had higher magnitude of deaths but we chose to use preventive measures to not have that. Hence, it does not yield a conclusive comparison and deriving anything from that is void.
The times of comparison are also not valid, as we are now just at the beginning of the 2nd or 3rd wave and compare that to the sum of all WWII related deaths at the end of WWII.
This is the reason why people are cynical when they say the measures are too excessive because we wouldn't see enough deaths. The only reason we don't see excessive deaths is due to the measures.
It depends on what you mean by learning. If you look at the literature it is clear that lockdowns and quarantines are no use against fast spreading infections which need population wide safety measures and tracking of clusters. The primary approach we have taken is a dramatic departure from established epidemiology.
We did have a group focused on looking for and responding to epidemics, but it was disbanded by US leaders who find science uncompelling and inconvenient. Japan responded to CoV2-SARS by attempting to identify and focus on clusters and have had far greater success than the US, so your glib reference to "humanity" and "societies" probably needs finer detail to be completely accurate.
I am not talking about lockdowns or quarantines, but I am talking about the disregard or ignorance a vast number of individuals show regarding their own infectiousness towards others. For example, it's unsettling to repeatedly hear about these super spreading events where individuals who know that there is something not right with their health, they do feel sick, they are coughing and show other symptoms, yet go into e.g. the elderly homes for visits or other places with many people and infect everybody.
To me this seems to be a cultural issue that could have been educated out of people. Just as in Asian countries masks were a everyday sight before the pandemic but in western societies not, as they integrated it into everyday culture and we didn't.
And I am also talking about other cultural issues, such as your mentioned refusal of science. We know from the past that measures regarding personal safety such as e.g. masking (or seat belts!) form loud counter-protest movements, see e.g. the Anti-Mask Leagues [1], which can undermine efforts to stop a pandemic. Yet, we did not work towards dealing with these cultural issues and anticipate or prevent the existence of these movements since the last pandemic.
This leads to further impacts. I am wondering if there are any analyses about how the inability of governments and people to deal with the Spanish Flu impacted the susceptibility of people to fall for totalitarianism which eventually lead to WWII.
> it's unsettling to repeatedly hear about these super spreading events where individuals who know that there is something not right with their health, they do feel sick, they are coughing and show other symptoms, yet go into e.g. the elderly homes
Err, what? You’re going to have to back that claim up with more than a Wikipedia link about a 100 year old event. I’ve not heard a single story like the one you appear to be claiming is commonplace...
Looking at the data here in LA county, we haven't seen a change in deaths for a while now (looks like ~10day). I do see some big lines of people getting tested here in my area. I spoke to some of them in line, and they were getting tested because their employers were making them do so. I have a feeling that here in California, we are testing a lot of the population compared to other states/nations.
Being careful is good, but this article goes too far.
> The best way to prepare would have been to enter this phase with as few cases as possible.
That is not entirely clear. It is possible that having more infections during the summer might actually be good overall because there was lighter load on medical facilities and immunity does appear to hold for a while after infection.
> In exponential processes like epidemics ...
That is way off. There is no need for exponential spread to trigger an epidemic. Currently the most accurate model for the spread of CoV2-SARS is from Michael Levitt and shows that exponential spread is completely impossible. That does not rule out fast spreading or mean we should relax, but it is important to understand that exponential spread is really bad and we have not seen that.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threadThere’s still a huge number of people in complete denial that this is real.
Similarly one can know it's real but have a different perception of risk.
For instance, a recently published controlled trial doesn't show a statistically significant difference between mask wearers and non.
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817
I don't think you're taking away the complete story of the paper you mention. There are two fundamentally different ways in which masks could help: protecting the wearer from others, or protecting others from the wearer.
They state:
"These findings do offer evidence about the degree of protection mask wearers can anticipate in a setting where others are not wearing masks and where other public health measures, including social distancing, are in effect. The findings, however, should not be used to conclude that a recommendation for everyone to wear masks in the community would not be effective in reducing SARS-CoV-2 infections, because the trial did not test the role of masks in source control of SARS-CoV-2 infection. During the study period, authorities did not recommend face mask use outside hospital settings and mask use was rare in community settings (22). This means that study participants' exposure was overwhelmingly to persons not wearing masks."
By suggesting that this paper concludes that masks don't help much, it totally ignores the community benefit of widespread mask-wearing.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/dont-wear...
I think it is harmful to say that masks protect the wearer (unless they are N95 or better). This is a big and easily attacked surface that only serves to obscure and discredit the real point of wearing masks.
Instead the messaging should focus solely on the fact that they protect others from the infection carried (likely without knowledge) by the wearer, and that people without symptoms can be contagious.
This point needs to be drilled into people's heads until everyone gets it. People also need to be taught to wear masks properly. Wearing one with nose sticking out is darn near useless.
Given the prevailing attitude towards personal freedom and personal responsibility in the US, I wonder what sort of an effect would such explicit messaging would have on the level of mask wearing.
Umm...doesn't show a statistically significant difference between recommending mask wearing or not.
Ironically, when that study was posted here (yesterday?) people were saying in the comments the 'anti-maskers' would jump on it to 'prove' mask wearing wasn't effective.
Beginning of August the deaths per capita in the 7 county Twin Cities area were four times the rate of the rest of the State. It has reduced to only 2.5 times now.
Basically for the first seven months, the COVID fatality rate in the rest of the State was comparable to the 17-18 flu season, perhaps a little better. Folks would reasonably ask why worry...
Given the Twin Cities have had over twice the COVID fatalities per capita is spite of an arguably superior health care system, the city folks themselves aren’t in much of a position to preach what works...
As to the rest of your point, yes, in a large urban area the virus will spread faster and sooner than out-state. However, I've been watching the weekly change per-capita per-county map in the Star Tribune and Hennepin county has been lagging everywhere else for quite some time now, so I think we are in fact in a position to preach about what works.
Nothing convinces them. When a loved one dies of asphyxiation, they shrug it off and say that person died of obesity, old age, or a lack of vitamins. We have nurses telling stories of patients struggling to breath, but who still refuse to believe this virus is real and only cease gasping about the "fake news" when they are intubated.
Complicating this is our HIPAA regulations. The media can't show you what's happening inside our hospitals right now. They can only show the refrigeration trucks for bodies and roads closed for oxygen trucks outside the hospitals. So the conspiracy theorists claim these are for show and that the hospitals are actually empty.
With the complete abdication of leadership at the federal level--where some of our officials are openly urging citizens to fight against policies slowing the spread of the virus, we can do nothing but stay inside and hope to ride this out.
For me, I'm just not going anywhere or doing anything. It turns out that I can have everything delivered, and my risk is essentially 0. I'm going to wait it out until there's a vaccine. If the numbers dip very low in my area, I might try to squeeze in a doctor and dentist visit. I'm not immunocompromised, but it's not that hard to live as if I was. I'm considering this whole thing a bit of an experiment to see how self-sufficient I can be.
Conversely, I have coworkers that are traveling all over the country (wearing masks), and staying at cheap airbnb's. Some are relocating because of the changing housing market. If you don't mind taking on a minimal amount of risk, you can get a lot of good deals on flights/hotels/airbnbs/apartments/etc right now. Personally, even a little risk isn't worth it when I know there's 95% effective vaccine being manufactured.
At this point, it's obvious that we'll never get rid of COVID-19 entirely as a disease. Hopefully it'll become a disease only for the people that believe in "fake news" and "anti-vax".
The astute reader will retort 'BUT VACCINES'. This deserves a special note. The cold logic of natural selection is that descendants of organisms naturally resistant to disease inherit the Earth. We can supplant disease resistance with artificial means, of which vaccines are amazingly effective. To a point. Beyond which we realize that we've inadvertently cultivated a debilitated fragile population that can only survive through sophisticated technological methods. Any disruption of the technological supply chains then brings swift and large scale catastrophe. Hoping that our Andaman and Amish brothers and sisters will still be around at the time of reckoning.
Let's have a bit more charity. People worry and suffer and grieve like the rest of us. They just don't surrender their lives, as short or long as they will end up being, to fear of a disease that, by now, it's obviously not anywhere near as deadly as the Plague.
This is a thought provoking viewpoint that could be explored better.
Beyond that though, the point of the first paragraph seems to be that "everybody is going to get it... those that will die will die". I disagree.
You anticipate one of the most concrete rebuttals to the first paragraph, vaccines, and then proceed to argue that vaccines are bad because they disrupt natural selection. This is an absurd argument. Are you opposed to children's hospitals because they disrupt natural selection? Your rebuttal is not relevant. What you have argued is a small and theoretical downside to vaccines, but it is not a rebuttal. Vaccines have completely eliminated multiple diseases. They will help with Covid and save lives, and the fact that they have a small downside by disrupting natural selection does not change the fact that they will help and save lives.
You only address vaccines while ignoring other counterpoints: I live in an area where our hospitals are at capacity. There are dozens (dozens!) of ICU bed available for millions of people. Only a couple dozen ICU beds for the entire state, and these beds need to serve not only the worst Covid cases but all other patients who have had heart attacks or any other health issues. I strongly disagree that "those that will die will die", but instead say that "those that don't have to die will die" if we don't wear masks and follow community guidelines.
You then close by asking for more charity. After having said "everybody is going to get it... those that will die will die... life goes on" you ask for others to have more charity...
On the urban side, we are acting as if we have somehow become immortal, and that everybody must sacrifice everything, school, work, family, friends, so that some can live to 85 instead of 77. That is an unprecedented high price to ask.
Natural selection, it's cold and harsh. It doesn't fix individual, aside that the immune system is a natural selection mechanism within the organism level natural selection. It simply selects fit individuals to reproduce. We are well atuned to this mechanism, witness 'youth' or 'beauty'. Think of dental braces. In old times, without orthodontics, would be a visible marker of less than optimal fitness. Ugly. Negative selection pressure. As orthodontics becomes more prevalent, in the beginning everybody gets a beauty boost. Let's celebrate. Yet, in a few generations, in absence of any selection pressure, a larger and larger fraction of the population now needs dental braces. Teeth simply don't fit on the mandible anymore. We can handle this with technology, but it's a growing problem. Should we close orthodontics clinics tomorrow? Probably not, but that should not prevent us from recognizing the long term hidden costs of medical technology. 'Use sparingly, mostly for emergencies'.
> We are here because our ancestors had the strength to raise the next generation, not because somehow individual death was defeated.
Yes, no individual life (save one's own ancestors) is responsible for where we are now. But I would help a dying man on the sidewalk, I would be in favor of criminal charges against myself if I just passed him by. I would participate in a large scale search for a neighbor lost on a hike, and I would support the fuel and maintenance costs of helicopters and other search vehicles, and I would support those several rescuers who risk their lives to save one. I would support spending $400,000 to perform a quadruple bypass on a 77 year old man so he can live to be 85. I would take on personal inconvenience along with 50 of my neighbors to save a single life. I would follow community health guidelines. I would wear a mask.
Can you think of a causal mechanism that would make the population more fragile because of vaccines? Or is it just some inocent poetry from the same old book than "everything that does not kill us makes us stronger"?
I asked for a mechanism that would make the population more fragile overall (not only less resistant to a specific strain of a specific virus) if we train the immune system with a vaccine. Also keep in mind this is an age disease, ie those who are more likely to die from the virus will do so after their reproductive period.
(Note: do you seriously believe today's teeth are more troublesome and less fit for the job than in the past ?)
Collateral damage is a shame, but there's a limit to how much you force other people to do what you want. So be it.
It might seem so, but I'd say it's accurate, for exmaple:
“Their last dying words are, ‘This can’t be happening. It’s not real,’” Doering said, adding that some patients prefer to believe that they have pneumonia or other diseases rather than covid-19, despite seeing their positive test results.[1]
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/11/16/south-dakot...
Keep in mind the general urge to call them morons has the opposite effect. Not saying anyone in the thread specifically has done that, but melodrama/hand-wringing is in the neighborhood.
Especially in the case of COVID, where NY, NJ, MA and CT have per capita death rates two to three times worse than the National average. In early May, over half of all US deaths were in the Boston to DC corridors.
The sort of folks who don’t care much about COVID aren’t posting on HN. Typically. So you will get a sampling bias towards the (over?) aware, or those who have an agenda for or against a particular position on COVID response.
The US is currently at 42% obese. This is now the forecast for the entire world for 2040 - 42% of all humans obese. That tells me the future will be filled with lockdowns.
Once socialized healthcare arrives in the US, things will be worse - the obese will have access to pills, treatments and surgeries that extend their lives even further, allowing them to become even more obese on the public's dime. People with normal BMI will be referred to as "body fascists" and the world will reformat itself to accomodate Rascal scooters as the primary means of mobility.
But we were apparently not able to throughout educate people to minimize infectious potential. To me it seems like common spreaders of respiratory diseases are completely ignorant about infection and don't even consider that by their actions (and presence!) they might infect others.
>they observed with their own eyes (sickness and death) that's maybe not true with Covid-19.
The perceived risk might be just too low in order to reach emergency protocols in many people. Apparently it's not enough to show trains filled with dead people in Italy.
This assumes that people would act differently if the death was visible with their own eyes, e.g. with Ebola. But at this moment 2020 made me so pessimistic that I believe somebody here will post a study how even Ebola didn't bring up the change in people we would like to see.
I don't know yet how to deal with the fact that apparently my whole view on the world and the nature of humans was wrong my whole life.
Nuclear bombs?
It became too costly to engage in large-scale warfare after they were invented.
I believe this premise is yet to be proven true. We've had no new world war yet.
Global COVID-19 deaths - 1.3M (November 2020), mostly old
From the standpoint of QALY, there’s at least two orders of magnitude difference in the impact of the events.
Include the fact that the world population has basically tripled since 1950, making the impact proportionally less, and we are in three order of magnitude territory.
That’s probably part of it.
I have issues with comparing things this way. We easily could have had higher magnitude of deaths but we chose to use preventive measures to not have that. Hence, it does not yield a conclusive comparison and deriving anything from that is void.
The times of comparison are also not valid, as we are now just at the beginning of the 2nd or 3rd wave and compare that to the sum of all WWII related deaths at the end of WWII.
This is the reason why people are cynical when they say the measures are too excessive because we wouldn't see enough deaths. The only reason we don't see excessive deaths is due to the measures.
We did have a group focused on looking for and responding to epidemics, but it was disbanded by US leaders who find science uncompelling and inconvenient. Japan responded to CoV2-SARS by attempting to identify and focus on clusters and have had far greater success than the US, so your glib reference to "humanity" and "societies" probably needs finer detail to be completely accurate.
To me this seems to be a cultural issue that could have been educated out of people. Just as in Asian countries masks were a everyday sight before the pandemic but in western societies not, as they integrated it into everyday culture and we didn't.
And I am also talking about other cultural issues, such as your mentioned refusal of science. We know from the past that measures regarding personal safety such as e.g. masking (or seat belts!) form loud counter-protest movements, see e.g. the Anti-Mask Leagues [1], which can undermine efforts to stop a pandemic. Yet, we did not work towards dealing with these cultural issues and anticipate or prevent the existence of these movements since the last pandemic.
This leads to further impacts. I am wondering if there are any analyses about how the inability of governments and people to deal with the Spanish Flu impacted the susceptibility of people to fall for totalitarianism which eventually lead to WWII.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Mask_League_of_San_Franci...
Err, what? You’re going to have to back that claim up with more than a Wikipedia link about a 100 year old event. I’ve not heard a single story like the one you appear to be claiming is commonplace...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25083754
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/iruoh4/update_...
> The best way to prepare would have been to enter this phase with as few cases as possible.
That is not entirely clear. It is possible that having more infections during the summer might actually be good overall because there was lighter load on medical facilities and immunity does appear to hold for a while after infection.
> In exponential processes like epidemics ...
That is way off. There is no need for exponential spread to trigger an epidemic. Currently the most accurate model for the spread of CoV2-SARS is from Michael Levitt and shows that exponential spread is completely impossible. That does not rule out fast spreading or mean we should relax, but it is important to understand that exponential spread is really bad and we have not seen that.