It absolutely does not. Most people who got it during Thanksgiving travel have only been feeling first symptoms in the past couple days. I fear for how bad things will get by Christmas. I only hope that enough people react appropriately to the spike we're about to see in the coming weeks, that there isn't an even bigger spike in early January.
From what I've read in financial news, optimists place the vaccine rolling out in December, but more conservative guesses are towards Q1/Q2.
Note that in the US and most countries, it'll be folks working in hospitals and other healthcare settings that get it first, then likely high risk elderly (nursing home patients, etc). The UK has a very extensive set of guidelines on who gets it, the US does not yet but those policies will happen at the state level.
It is reasonable to think that the first vaccine will be approved next week and a few million people will have their first dose. The second dose (3 weeks latter) will be next year, and it is a week after that before full protection arrives.
The FDA has not yet approved it, and that approval may be as late as the 17th. I do not believe the vaccine can be shipped to doctors until it has been approved, and logistics of a cold vaccine takes time.
The 17th when the advisory board meets for the second vaccine. For this the board meets on the 10th. Though you are right that we don't know when (or if) it will be approved, it seems unlikely they will wait that long after the board meets.
It really depends on vaccination rates and the transmission rates of vaccinated people. Vaccines aren't going to reach mass distribution until February or March at the earliest. It's an open question just how much vaccination reduces low-level infection and retransmission. The published vaccine trials have been focused on incidence of symptoms and reduction in mortality in the vaccinated group.
It remains possible that the death rate may climb among the unvaccinated if others' vaccinations is used as an excuse for risky behavior.
>Also vaccinated people can still catch and transmit covid, though they are not going to experience severe symptoms.
This is stated with far too much confidence. It may be true that vaccinated individuals can still transmit COVID. It may also be true that they can't. We don't know yet.
Isn’t this a fact though (just not in the way OP meant)? The current vaccines have a ~90% success rate. That means that 1/10 people might still get COVID-19 and possibly transmit it.
The vaccine trials did not test whether people who did not get COVID-19 might nonetheless have been infectious. The assumption is that it reduces or even eliminates infectiousness but that hasn't actually been tested for AFAIK.
The statement as originally written implies that all people who are vaccinated can still transmit the disease. That may be true, but it's unlikely and we don't have enough data to say one way or the other yet.
It's unlikely the US will maintain strict social distancing restrictions after a vaccine rollout. There's every reason to believe that the vaccine will stop the spread, but if somehow it doesn't, I expect most laypeople will just accept the world's become a deadlier place.
That sounds about right. I expect the holidays will see people relaxing in any case. And once individuals are vaccinated, they may maintain some masking etc. for a while just because it's easier to comply with rules than get into confrontations. But I see people getting more casual in general already and when they're vaccinated I expect it will be pretty much flipping a switching as far as activities are concerned.
If the “protect thy neighbor” narrative falls apart after a vaccine is narrowly available then much of that was shenanigans and/or virtue signaling all along.
Looks like no one knows for certain if the vaccine will prevent the spread.
What if the vaccine does not have a significant impact on the spread? I wonder how the “protect thy neighbor” group will change once people feel genuinely comfortable their personal risk is lowered.
For the death toll, very soon - vaccinations are expected to start in the US next week, and nursing homes which drive almost half of the deaths in the pandemic are very high on the priority list. Hospitalization and case numbers won't be affected by vaccination so quickly, but most sources I've read expect that general vaccination will start by springtime and end the crisis by summer.
It’s truly sad to see the amount of people smugly not covering their noses or wearing such a loose mask it’s obviously not doing anything, even here in the Bay Area. If we can’t learn to work together, we are doomed to repeat 2020 with the next pandemic.
I think in some sense it's just basic human nature. Over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, humans seem to have been generally tuned to avoid specific, concrete, short-term threats to their own life/health individually, or perhaps extending very slightly just to their own family/group/tribe, but anything that's a threat more generally, more abstractly or longer-term tends to fall off the radar quickly, even if there's a high probability that those things might turn into an existential threat to the individual at some point in the future.
I'm also curious how (or if) we're going to learn to collectively solve some of these long-term problems before many of them really start to turn into those specific, concrete, short-term threats to us as individuals, at which point many of the "easier" solutions may no longer be effective anymore.
Very true. Also having public officials flaunting the rules, isn’t helping either. It’s just gives more power to the anti-masking crowd to point and say well they don’t take is seriously either.
I've said this all along - the problem is the lack of credible, consistent leadership.
From flat out denying, to "we have to quarantine, no Thanksgiving!" from mayors who are then caught at fancy dinners and restaurants! Hard to sell the "we're in this together" narrative when you think the rules don't apply to you if you're rich...it's sad.
"the problem is the lack of credible, consistent leadership."
The problem is a highly transmissible, deadly virus, and people reacting to it relative to how others act, regardless of wealth or political affiliation.
My point is that it is a societal sickness that we calibrate our reaction to a non-sentient virus based on what some person is doing. A sibling comment talks about the mayor of Austin being in Cabo. The choices that the president, the mayor of Austin, or a councilperson in San Fransisco has no bearing on the mortality and morbidity rates of this disease, how transmissible it is, or how many hospital beds are available to treat the very ill.
It's unproductive and distracting to focus on a few people, even if they are leaders, making poor personal decisions in a crisis. It is not about them, it's about sars-covid-19 and the thousands of people dying from it every day, and the hundreds of thousands that will die if we don't get our collective act together.
If public leaders don't take it seriously enough to follow the protocols they've advised/recommended, how can anyone take it seriously? This leads to more deaths. I'm not focusing on them to vilify them - I'm calling it out as a contributing factor, which it is. And I think it's very productive.
The virus is clearly the problem but it isn't solvable until a vaccine comes which takes time - in the meantime you have to enter the realm of sociology. Messaging matters.
But you are focusing on a few exceptions. At large numbers and over time, you will always find an exception. If 99.9% of leaders advocating social distancing, not traveling, and mask wearing are following the advice and setting a good example - as they are - a few dopes don't negate that.
One moron in Austin doing something has zero bearing on the pathology of this disease. I wish they were not hypocrites, but looking more broadly, a mayor or councilperson isn't the problem in the large scale response to this epidemic.
Message matters, and saying "why do I have to do something smart if at least one person in a person of power is doing something dumb" is itself a message, and not a productive one.
concretely: hypocrites will exist for any principle or situation imaginable, so you can take it as a given, reason about a situation independently of them, and ignore them.
> Message matters, and saying "why do I have to do something smart if at least one person in a person of power is doing something dumb" is itself a message, and not a productive one.
EXACTLY. That is the message being sent - it's unproductive! That is my exact point. Our leadership sends unproductive messages all the time -and when half the country doesn't think it's a big deal, they see rich people doing whatever, their confirmation bias kicks in and says "see if it was bad they wouldn't be doing X"
> concretely: hypocrites will exist for any principle or situation imaginable, so you can take it as a given, reason about a situation independently of them, and ignore them.
You can't ignore hypocrites if they have influence. If Trump was pro-mask a good deal of this country would have been too.
I'll go you one better. Neil Ferguson, the Imperial College professor, whose "models" were the basis of the draconian lockdowns were pretty sure they did not apply to him [0].
Wearing a mask during a pandemic is just common sense, it is not that complicated to understand. Why do we need leaders to tell us this basic stuff?
people should take a bit more responsibility for their own safety. We aren’t all children to be told every single common thing to follow. Especially after quarter million deaths!!!
There's an old saying that comes to mind "in theory both theory and practice are the same, in practice they are not." The fact of the matter is anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers both exist and both endanger the health of those around them. This issue pits individual rights against community needs and as such it often goes awry. There are those who will make small personal sacrifices for the communal good and there are those who won't. The problem is communities are comprised of both kinds of people. That's why this notion you've expressed doesn't work as well in practice as it seems it should in theory.
All research I can find shows that masks are largely ineffective, i.e. 100,000 people have to wear a mask to prevent 1 infection. Some research suggests masks make things worse by creating a moist cloud in front of your mouth. For example https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/4/e006577
Where can I find research that confirms masks work?
"The authors of this article, published in 2015, have written a response to their work in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. We urge our readers to consider the response when reading the article. https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/4/e006577.responses#covid-..."
New to me, but did you read their response? It says "The study found that cloth mask wearers had higher rates of infection than even the standard practice control group of health workers" but they say that health care workers should follow guidance.
Would not standard practice be to wear proper masks?
Yes, here we go: "some subjects in the control arm wore surgical masks." And indeed, someone comments "The control arm had less than 1% of no mask use".
I don't think this article is saying what you think it says. It's cautioning against cloth masks, like bandanas. It actually affirms that medical masks, those typically used, do work.
I think the point that the parent is making isn't that medical masks (N95) don't work, it's that the cloth masks aren't as effective as people think they are.
It doesn't even say that! There's no no-mask control group to compare against. (And FYI not all medical masks are N95, probably most aren't. It appears that the ones studied there are not N95 but rather the standard disposable surgical masks.)
My understanding is that [cloth] masks are largely not about preventing you from catching COVID, but from preventing you from spreading COVID (as you may not be aware you are infectious due to being presymptomatic/asymptomatic).
It's clear at this point that masks are not the panacea. Countries with mask mandates still have a big spread. Masks should be a complement to social distancing and other more effective measures.
>Japan which had a strong culture of wearing masks
Which is only sorta true in the sense that people who are sick often wear them and they're not almost unheard of like in the West. But pre-pandemic, go out on a crowded street in Tokyo and you probably wouldn't see more than a few masks if you saw any.
The numbers in Japan are most likely severely underreported. It's extremely hard to get tested. You pretty much need to have been in contact with someone confirmed infected or hospitalized to get a test. It's a catch-22.
With that said, I absolutely think the mask culture in Japan has dampened the surge a lot. In countries without this people just do the bare minimum to be compliant, so we have all these chin-wearers and nose-flashers. We're simply hopeless at wearing masks even with the strictest of mask mandates. So even if masks could reduce the spread significantly we're not likely to see the effect of that here.
Wearing a mask is the only halfway feasible change that has an effect on virus spread that enough people are willing to do in the US. The virus is largely under control in other countries, but they were able to enforce much more draconian measures.
But, as a European, I must say that the strong focus on masks on the other side of the Atlantic feels a little dangerous; over here the regions with a mask mandate have not fared significantly better than those without.
So here is the more complete CDC advice: "Wear a mask, stay at least 6 feet apart, avoid crowds, and wash your hands often."
You do not really need a mask if you are out for a walk and are maintaining social distancing. It has been proven time and time again that the main culprit is people crowding indoors without masks.
If you are downvoting, please provide evidence that wearing a mask outside while maintaining social distancing has any substantial effect.
Call it whatever you want, but if I see someone who can't be bothered to wear a mask, I'm not going to just "take their word" that they have been maintaining social distancing.
If they aren't doing the bare minimum, that I can see with my own eyes, I have no reason to believe they are also social distancing.
Then it is literally "virtue signaling" but in this context it's entirely appropriate to require people to virtue signal.
It's also an interesting illustration of why things like virtue signaling are a sociological phenomenon to begin with. They're hard-wired into us, for good reasons.
I mean, yeah, wearing a mask whenever you're outside sends a signal that you're virtuously helping to control the pandemic. That seems like a pretty good thing to me! I'd argue it's actually pretty critical; strong signals that everyone else is with you make it a lot easier to observe painful but necessary restrictions.
It sends a signal that you don't want to risk asymptomatic transmission to others, even if the likelihood is low, because the cost to you in infinitesimally small.
I'm not downvoting, but you're limiting what OP is saying. They never limited themselves to "out for a walk and... social distancing".
I wear a mask outside while walking and social distancing and I'm not virtue signaling. I simply personally find it harder to futz w/ a mask when coming up on people or going inside a building.
Please be a little less reflexive when it comes to this stuff. I'm sure people are "virtue signaling" by wearing masks. But coincidentally they're also limiting the spread of COVID-19. Let's focus on the latter here.
I am responding to the complete CDC advice. The comment before that is the virtue signaling I am talking about. They focus on mask wearing only without also advocating for social distancing.
They're lamenting people wearing masks improperly, not giving advice or advocating for anything.
It really seems like you're just reflexively jumping on this stuff. Mask wearing is good! Even if you're not social distancing it's better than not wearing a mask and not social distancing.
It's also worth saying there's nothing wrong with "virtue signaling". It's indistinguishable from... actually having the virtue.
I frequently see people walking off of the sidewalk for a few seconds to maintain social distancing. They don't seem to have any issue doing this, as there is usually enough space between sidewalk and car lanes to not have to walk into traffic.
edit - If you need to take a walk through downtown Los Angeles or somewhere where it is physically impossible to social distance, then yes wear a mask.
The sidewalks here in the UK are often so narrow your can only just fit two abreast. We seem to have quietly understood the need for one to step into the road to pass, these days. I am not sure I can even recall someone walking past me in close proximity.
hi - US Citizen in College Town with low covid19 and high compliance here.. One liners, either from Public Health Advocates, trendy social media people, or well-meaning neighbors who exercise control statements as a method of interacting with others, are not going to "fix" the problems of covid19 today.
As an avid bicyclist I do not wear a mask on long distance solo bike rides, and I get harsh or worried looks from seniors. However, I understand the details and am not exposing myself or others.
A major challenge in public health messaging is the intractable problem of lack of context and lack of intellectual effort by all parties. Mix in serious consequences and you have a recipe for conflict quickly.
So "virtue signalling" is a one liner, my post is a one liner (almost) and, public health officials face millions of inconvenienced, ill or panic'd people with their "one liner"
Please wash hands, be mindful of others, take it seriously and no, I do not wear a mask on my long distance solo bike rides.
Maybe true but tell me, is it really that bothersome to just wear the mask, even outside?
What bothers me more is not having clear rules/instructions. So I just resort to wearing the mask everywhere, doesn't hurt me or bother me and shouldn't be controversial.
I think it's inconvenient in a number of cases - if you have an injury on your face that the mask irritates, if you're trying to eat or drink while walking, or if you're wearing glasses which fog up.
The glasses thing is actually a pretty critical issue. I've seen people wearing masks and glasses by themselves in cars while driving with the windows closed. In that scenario fogging glasses makes wearing the mask more dangerous to people around you than not wearing the mask...
Of course, none of this is to say that in all these cases, even outdoors, that you shouldn't wear the mask if you can't social distance or need to go indoors. You totally should! But giving people the stink eye when they're 30 ft away from everyone else and outside and mask-less seems a bit much. It doesn't seem like there's any justification for that outside of shaming non-conformity.
Other commenters here are saying things like - if there's a .0001% chance this pre ents harm to you or others, then it's your duty to not do it. I'm a teetotaler; I wonder if these folks drink alcohol.
This is one of the few things I draw a line at. I absolutely wear a mask indoors in stores etc. And I'll pull up a mask/neck gaiter outdoors if I'm approaching other people, even if I'll be somewhat distanced from them, especially if they are wearing masks. But, no, I don't if I'm on deserted forest trails or if I'm 50 feet away from anyone else.
I've rarely eaten at an outdoor restaurant since March, I haven't eaten indoors at all, and have been generally minimizing trips to stores so I'm conservative. But I'm not going to do something just to send a signal that I'm a "good" person.
It's not virtue signalling, it's awareness signalling.
Wear the damn mask, and wear it properly. This tells the world that you get it, that you take it seriously, and that you're probably doing all the other trivial but necessary things also.
Yes, it's slightly inconvenient. But generally no more so for you than for everyone else. So get over it.
Also, use your turn signal, even if there are no other cars within 100 meters of you.
Also, don't leave your shopping cart in the middle of the grocery aisle while deciding which product to select, even if no one else is presently trying to get past you.
Do all the simple things that signal "it makes more sense to be courteous and clear, than to demonstrate disregard for others (whether purposeful or oblivious, because they are often hard to tell apart)".
I actually sort of agree with always using turn signals, if not really the other point. There are a lot of behaviors that make sense to do reflexively because, if you have to think about whether to do them this time you may forget or incorrectly decide not to another time. Presumably you wouldn't think it was OK for them just to go through a red light because they don't see any other cars around.
The idea is to establish the habit, so that you do it automatically every time, including the relatively few times where it really matters.
It's easy, it's never harmful, frequently helpful, and occasionally saves lives.
I ride motorcycles, so I have had more opportunity to think about the importance of turn signals than others might. But I also drive cars, and I believe the benefits are universal and have zero negative consequences, so I include this as a minimal-effort suggestion.
In addition, it can be awfully hard to ensure that what started out as a well-distanced walk around the neighborhood remains well-distanced the entire time.
When I'm walking early in the morning, I carry a mask with me in case I encounter other morning joggers/walkers and can't easily cross the street at the time.
Emphatically yes. It's always possible that your assessment might be incomplete, or that the situation could change.
If you can allow for that possibility, at low or zero up-front cost, then -- I don't know, maybe it's the adulthood speaking here, but -- why would one not do so? :)
CDC specifically states that transmission occurs with prolonged (15+ minutes) contact in close quarters (less than six feet).
I would love to see confirmed cases of transmission from merely walking by someone when outside.
I seriously don’t get the pull up the mask thing when I walk by someone outside. I’m not going to do it and I have zero expectation the other person do that either.
> CDC specifically states that transmission occurs with prolonged (15+ minutes) contact in close quarters (less than six feet).
No, that's not correct at all. But if I may take a guess at what you meant to write..
Those are guidelines based on estimated inflection points where more time or less distance increases the likelihood of transmission.
They are presumed to be good-faith estimates, but they are based on difficult-to-collect data. It's probably reasonable to draw the conclusion that, if fully observed, the guidelines would drive R0 below 1.0 and the trendline would follow.
But that doesn't mean that no transmission occurs in other situations. People sometimes sneeze unexpectedly. It takes a fraction of a second to put on the mask that prevents that event from becoming risky, or at least uncomfortable. Cheap insurance.
It's also important to realize that "walking by someone while outside" can take many forms, so it's not clear that we're all talking about the same thing. Jogging on a narrow path is very different from strolling on a beach.
Different measures are appropriate for different cases, but it's never harmful to use the mask, it's a reasonable habit to get into, and it makes people around you more comfortable. What's the trouble?
Part of our current issue with covid is that you can find virtually anything to support whatever you want to believe. Myself included.
So I guess it’s 15 minutes of cumulative exposure over the course of 24 hours.
Indoors, sure wear a mask. I wear a mask where required indoors. But outdoors no thanks.
What’s the trouble? A behavior devoid of reason is nothing more than a ritual. Furthermore, it sets the expectation that the behavior does actually provide tangible benefit leading to a false sense of security and lead to riskier behaviors than what would have otherwise occurred. Finally, masks are not created equal. How do I know the mask “you” are wearing is actually worth a damn?
> A behavior devoid of reason is nothing more than a ritual.
Absolutely. But we're not in "devoid of reason" territory here, we're in "with complex and sometimes impossible to quantify reasons" territory.
So here are two people:
- Person A is an epidemiologist-statistician who has run the numbers rigorously for his part of his county, factored in the likelihood of inter-county travel, and concluded that there's no benefit for any party to be wearing a mask in the specific situation they expected to be in when they left the house this morning, and that that situation is perfectly aligned with the reality of the day.
- Person B is an average underinformed conspiracy theorist who thinks COVID is all a scam perpetrated by the medical establishment for more funding and to undermine Dear Leader and that it would go away like magic in the summer, no the fall, no the winter if only the media would stop talking about it and 5G.
Neither person is wearing a mask. Neither person is wearing a baseball cap.
How can you (random sidewalk passerby) tell the difference between these two people?
I wear a mask, no matter how smart I'm feeling that day.
(Note that this is not a response to why one should wear a mask, just a light observation of a positive side effect! But there is value in signalling, even if it's just to normalize the behavior so that the reluctant just stop bothering to protest about such a simple thing, and thereby get a jump on any asymptomatic spread that occurs semi-randomly in populations.. :)
CDC guidelines are about likelihood of transmission, not certainty.
It's considerate and respectful to wear a mask when around other people. If you're not going to do it, then all I ask is that you stay far away from me and mine.
How should I know what type of mask to wear to make you feel comfortable? Every mask is different, you know.
Because that’s ultimately what this 24/7 mask wearing is about - demanding others engage in specific behaviors to make yourself feel better.
I view this as personal responsibility and that’s how I conduct myself. I should draw boundaries for myself with what is and what is not okay and operate accordingly. I don’t expect anyone to change their life to account for my insecurities.
That's a really bizarre takeaway, and a huge switch from "I'm not going to do it," which is what I was responding to.
If I see a person wearing a mask, even one of those single-ply gaiters that seems to be much less effective than three-ply cotton masks, I still understand that they are not one of the radical science-denying people that make zero effort to avoid infecting themselves and others, and are therefore dangerous.
Personal responsibility sounds great, and is a good start. But also, we live in a society, so personal responsibility includes doing what you can to avoid spreading COVID-19 to others.
Epidemiology is not "insecurity." That's... wow, I'm not even sure how to respond to that.
If you were being at all honest about looking for evidence of transmission from incidental contact, here's an interesting study from Korea[0] revealing COVID-19 transmission in only five minutes from more than six feet away. Indoors, in this case, but an actual bonafide case that suggests airflow is airflow, and being outside might or might not be the magic we all hope it is.
Here's the conclusion from the study that was linked: "Droplet transmission can occur at a distance greater than 2 m if there is direct air flow from an infected person. Therefore, updated guidelines involving prevention, contact tracing, and quarantine for COVID-19 are required for control of this highly contagious disease."
Walking by someone is an interaction measured in seconds. If that person is infected and shedding via aerosol then a plain cloth mask does not offer much protection. The cloth mask would offer some level of protection if the infected was shedding via droplets from sneeze/cough/etc.
If there's direct evidence that wearing a mask on my walk around the neighborhood offers significant benefits then I will reconsider. To this point, I just haven't seen anything that supports this behavior.
People should just shut up and wear a mask. (And social distance. And wash their hands. And refrain from touching their face. And, and, and)
If there's even a 0.000001% chance that you could prevent the spread of a rampantly spreading disease that has hospitals in many regions at or above capacity, by putting a damn piece of cloth over your face, then just do it. It's not burdensome.
I think about past generations in the US that had to sacrifice mightily in the great depression or WWII, and then I look at today and how many people are whining over petty nonsense like this, and I shudder at what the country has become.
"Virtue signaling" is the all-purpose response to anything they don't wish to do solely because you wish them to do it. They don't have to engage with whether or not it's a good idea. They don't have to engage with whether you're being serious or not. It's just a two-word dismissal: if you care about it, it must be wrong, and no further thought is necessary.
For me, it has a convenient counter response: nobody using the term "virtue signaling" has anything useful to say, on any topic. It's "vice signaling", their call-out to their buddies that they, too, don't like anything you say solely because you say it. They're not listening to me, except for the purpose of rejecting it reflexively, so there's no point in talking to them.
I see a lot of talk about "virtue signalling" when it comes to mask wearing. The implication is that those who wear a mask outside do so to broadcast their left-leaning world view to others, and those who don't wear a mask outside are taking a neutral stance and not broadcasting anything at all. But I think the reality is that non-mask wearers are also wanting to send a signal: something like "I'm not a sheep. I think for myself. You can't tell me what to do". Is there a name for this kind of signalling?
Yes, I should have been more specific, but the issue here is if they don’t even care to properly wear a mask to prevent accidentally spreading if they are asymptomatic, then probably aren’t staying at home, avoiding crowds, or even washing their hands as well as they should be. Not wearing a mask or wearing it improperly is a pretty good indicator that person is not taking covid seriously.
Good question, but in my experience (anecdata, sorry) this was not the case: in the Netherlands the government advice notably did not include mask wearing throughout the first wave (public transport excepted) and indeed very few people wore them.
"So here is the more complete CDC advice: "Wear a mask, stay at least 6 feet apart, avoid crowds, and wash your hands often.""
It is unbelievable that this list of behaviors does not include airing out or ventilating indoor public spaces.
Here in sunny California, where the weather in the Bay Area has been mild and warm through December 3, I find myself walking into shops or offices every day that have operable windows and doors: all shut tight.
Many of these spaces could be indistinguishable from the outdoors in terms of fresh air flow. For reasons I cannot fathom this simplest (and healthiest) mitigation is not practiced.
Do you know what the actual compliance rates are? That does not seem like a problem with mask wearing, but rather a problem with the idea that it can be mandated.
Spain has been wearing masks for half a year with 99% compliance rate (I'm not exaggerating), but you can check the numbers yourself. Masks are definetly not some panacea so many want to believe they are.
Even CDC says masks are required when you’re within 6 ft. Studies show the spread is limited outdoors. But we have a blanket rule to wear masks outside all the time. The first priority is and continue to be social distancing. Avoid indoor gatherings at all. Then comes masks.
What if you have had COVID and recovered, now test negative with antibodies. Should you still have to wear a mask?
If we are following the science, you should be fine to not wear a mask due to immunity, right?
Should these people also be allowed to live a normal life, gathering with others indoors, etc? I’ve never heard people giving the previously infected a pass to return to normal. I think everyone thinks it’s only fair to make them continue to suffer too, despite having immunity and ignoring the actual reason for social distancing and mask wearing.
The first concern regarding test inaccuracy, sure, that’s the same as saying false negatives should also still quartantine because, hey, the test could be wrong. But we don’t require that.
As to your second point, would you also be saying we should still mask and social distance after vaccination, because just in case?
Not an epidemiologist, but from my laymen's understanding: No, because vaccines will be available to the whole/most vulnerable population, so if you spread you have a fairly high degree of confidence others are immune with zero harm having been done to them.
No. How would you prove it? As soon as there existed some document allowing one to "get back to normal" in some way, I guarantee you there will be a black market for those documents, to the point where they become useless. Oh, wait, it's already happening [1].
Is that more useless than the person just choosing not to mask in the first place?
Yes people may break the laws or not follow the rules, that doesn’t mean there is no value. There’s surely a black market for passports, ids, etc, does that mean those documents are useless?
I agree on mask usage, but it's clear from all available data that areas with aggressive mask mandates and widespread public compliance are also suffering horrible spikes. We knew there was a big November spike coming months ago. Rather than pinning it ALL on mask misuse and blaming a hypothetical Other, we should seek to understand every factor contributing to virus spread. Unfortunately, the more politicized it gets, the more difficult it becomes to have honest and truth-based conversations.
When I read this I just think "how American", and I am sad but with a dark smile. It seems like as a nation we are a group of psychological outliers that are a bit messed up. It makes me think how much "DNA" is shared between behaviour like this and entrepreneurship/art/creation? Can America exist without this bullshit and still capture a significant part of our national ethos?
I seriously doubt that there is meaningful overlap between anti-maskers, entrepreneurs, and artists.
The issue is that misinformation and conspiracy theories are thriving on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, and they're received the illusion of legitimacy from one of our minority political party that controls 2 out of 3 branches of government.
Americans were able to make huge, selfless sacrifices during WWII. The only reason they can't do it now is that several very large companies profit from outrage, conspiracy, and polarization, and they have optimized our media to generate as much of those as possible.
"Americans were able to make huge, selfless sacrifices during WWII. The only reason they can't do it now is that several very large companies profit from outrage, conspiracy, and polarization, and they have optimized our media to generate as much of those as possible."
“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”
It's not about freedom though, it's just about discipline. By making some short term sacrifices earlier in the year, life in the US could have been back to normal by now.
Forced to do things, HUGE difference. They made it a political issue by enforcing it with government, I didn’t want this fight at all. In the absence of coercion, I would have no problem with measures that have even a slight chance of helping.
Many countries made serious short term sacrifices earlier in the year but are not back to normal now - including places like Korea, who've been consistently (and correctly!) praised as models of good pandemic response.
There's an element of personal risk assessment that is allowed in American culture that you're not acknowledging.
Some people jump out of planes, others prefer to stay grounded. Some start companies and risk their life savings, others prefer the safety of salaried position.
Even when in agreement on the correctness of the data findings, our risk assessments and individual actions will very wildly.
If it were just about people willing to risk dying, I would have no complaint. But since this is a contagious disease, it's actually about people willing to risk killing. That's what I find morally objectionable, and indicative of deep rot in our society.
None of those remotely compare. Covid just became the number one cause of death in the US, in terms of deaths per day. Unlike heart disease and cancer, this was entirely preventable. Compared to banning cars, the safety measures are minor inconveniences, and only need to last until vaccines are widely available, which will happen in a few months.
What you see as “risking killing” we see as “living a free life”. Same problem as with CO2 and global warming, we will only ever respond to negotiation and persuasion, you will never be able to walk over us like we are doormats. It doesn’t matter if there is a way to rationalize how leaving us free might harm others, we generally do not trust your judgement and we will never entrust you with the power to enslave us.
I can see some of those being in effect in the short term (not lockdowns for any and every public health problem - that would be suicidal) but assuming the COVID vaccine works out, I see no reason for any of them to be in effect in the long term.
I agree, there might even be a correlation between "incorrect confidence" and creativity. It's important to note though that other countries have been dealing with the fallout of their bad mistakes for centuries, while the US is still relatively young.
Honest question: How unique is the U.S. vs. other countries, in terms of the fraction of population unwilling to take effective measures to avoid spreading to others?
I've seen occasional headlines about super-spreading events in Europe, but I have no idea how much their attendants are representative of their fellow countrymen.
I'd say not at all, but then I live in the north where we have very few cases and at least in my city there is no mask compliance problem at all. I tend to hear worse stories from further south.
>It seems like as a nation we are a group of psychological outliers that are a bit messed up. It makes me think how much "DNA" is shared between behaviour like this and entrepreneurship/art/creation?
This isn't an emergent phenomenon caused by some unique quirk of American psychology, nor is being an anti-masker a sign of greater creative, artistic or entrepreneurial spirit. I feel like we're drifting dangerously close to historical revisionism here.
Had it not been for the current Presidental administration's actions and the efforts of his party and supporters, there would be no significant anti-mask/anti-quarantine movement in the US, nor would the country's response to COVID have been as disastrously hamfisted as it was. We had a plan and infrastructure ready. But it came from Obama so, of course, it was tossed into a trash bin and burned, and then turned into a partisan football.
I realize Hacker News hates any mention of politics, much less partisan politics, but it's important to remember how much of this is explicitly the fault of a single Administration's efforts to maintain its power base in light of an upcoming election. Not everything, mind you, because there has been a lot of incompetence and malfeasance to go around, but a lot.
What's amazing is that Trump could have been re-elected in a landslide if he had just stayed in character and gone all-in on a MAGA mask grift, selling them on AM radio and late night TV infomercials. You wouldn't find one single person in N. Dakota who wasn't wearing one.
I don't know about "re-elected in a landslide" but not making refusal to wear a mask a symbol of Republican solidarity and identity would probably have killed fewer of his potential voters and not turned every one of his events into a superspreader event.
I think media (especially social media) is to blame for a lot of what is going on. By lending a voice to irrationality, they sow confusion and resistance.
Don't bother. You can't tell Americans anything. For every aspect of American society there is a great example of some other country that does it better.
This source[0] shows the rate of mask wearing in public in the US far exceeds the average of Europe. I'm not sure it's "how American" insomuch as it's "how unfortunate this virus was allowed to spread so long before the world was told about it".
The initial U.S. response to the virus was to do nothing. It will go away soon. We can blame it on China for not communicating it sooner, but what would we have done? Things would be better if we had done nothing, sooner?
Doing nothing? There was a rapid mobilization of emergency military hospitals (that were not used at all), ventilator development, vaccine development, therapeutic development, lockdowns, travel restrictions, and so on. And, here we are with multiple vaccines being deployed in record time.
Also, China could have locked down travel from China that might have helped.
>how unfortunate this virus was allowed to spread so long before the world was told about it.
Blame China. I'm frankly shocked at how few international repercussions they've gotten. Any sane rational nation would be issuing economic sanctions left and right for their inept, pathetic handling of the pandemic.
If by "inept, pathetic handling of the pandemic" you mean the cover-up or data fudging accusations, I highly recommend the four part series in Quillette that examines the merit of these charges:
"Again, I know that many of you are skeptical, but this essay has required a ridiculous amount of work and I'm really confident about the conclusions I reach, so I hope you will read it with an open-mind. I will post the other parts in this thread as they are published."
The author also has very helpful comments on the recent CNN leak
I am currently living in Portugal, and was in Spain for the last 12 months. Mask use in Portugal is 100% on a day to day basis unless doing sport, Spain was the same where I was.
During the summer we did an outdoor road trip through 5 countries. There were no mandates for wearing it outside, but I didn't see a single person not wearing one inside in Italy, Austria, Slovenia, France...
I understand. The underlying issue is that conversation feels intimate here but is actually broadcasting to thousands if not millions of people. Spontaneous comments that are harmless and add life to conversation between two or three friends have entirely different effects at this scale. It's something we all have to deal with here.
Everything is a partisan issue now, even something like a virus that has killed more than 250,000 people in the US, and at it's current pace will blow past 300K before the end of the year. How do you convince people that live in an alternate reality that this thing is real?
I'm working on a COVID data website using public data from the New York Times. It's on my list to make the code open source but I'm just not there yet.
FWIW, based on county test results and my anecdotal poking around the US - most counties in the US have 1% or less of their population getting a positive COVID test in the past two weeks. In the grand scheme of things, I contend we have only a handful of people infectious in any two week period.
Queue the hug of death. Using ASP.NET Core and Digital Ocean droplet for hosting.
I have some really specific biases about the COVID response in the US that I shall not dwelve in to here. You can read about them on the About and Resources page. The other day I posted my site as a comment to something else COVID and you can read that discussion thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25255589 just search for my username in the comments.
Right now this is the most upvoted thing in this thread, once people actually see the point of this website, they will flag it and down vote it into oblivion, as it does not fit their narrative.
People not agreeing with you is not censorship, or at least not the kind anyone should worry about. Let us know if the government has restricted your speech in any way.
Maybe because you need to learn basic statistics... You need to compare the number of tests to results, not the total population where nobody is getting tested. C'mon man...
I don't disagree with the spirit of self directed data exploration, but you need to be careful.
Facts? I don't have anything cite other than common sense.
We know that case counts generally do not have wild swings. In other words, prior performance indicates future behavior. If the two week moving average of positive case counts is 500 - then we can roughly predict what to expect the following day for positive case counts plus or minus the current infection trend.
My experience has been that people who simply get tested are already isolating/quarantining. That has been my approach. So if 500 people tested positive then I generally believe those 500 people isolate themselves and they are no longer infecting people because of their quarantine. Then 500ish people show up tomorrow to take their place.
That's my point. Once people are identified as sick then they aren't spreading the disease because of "hey don't be a giant dickhead".
Nice try at trying to frame others who disagree. There's possibly many reasons its getting downvoted. The site is some aggregated stats and armchair analysis on cherry picked data.
My moms co-worker got it. Now 2 of his family is dead after he spread it. One of those was a 24 year old athlete. Can we PLEASE stop adding to noise on the internet with our opinions and pet projects?
Young, healthy, fit people are getting this and dying. Your hypothesis may be accurate overall, I do not know, but frankly it's noise nobody needs.
An emotional anecdote conveys the personal impact of an issue. It helps with empathy, something OP is not demonstrating. Statistics do back that it is possible for young people to die of COVID, albeit less likely than older people.
I have a significant amount empathy which is why I have invested personal time and actual dollars in building this site and engaging in professional discussions.
My empathy is primarily towards the people who have worked hard for what they have only to have it ripped away because of arbitrary government decisions.
Regardless, the people who have passed directly from and because of this disease is a tragic story in the history of our country.
I'm just gonna skip a bunch of steps here, which may be unwise but whatever.
Your argument is that if you're fit and healthy, you shouldn't have your behavior dictated by people who aren't. They've made poor choices, they're the ones who should bear the consequences. You further argue that the low per-capita positive tests indicates that COVID-19 doesn't deserve the response we've (so far) given it.
Here's why you're wrong:
- Fit, healthy people do die from COVID-19. They can also suffer long-term effects.
- There are people with high vulnerability to COVID-19 through no fault of their own. They can have autoimmune disorders, or simply be old. You acknowledge this. However, you generally can't choose to transmit COVID-19 only to the obese and not the old (for example).
- Further, you broadly can't choose to contract COVID-19 and not transmit it to others. It's possible to be asymptomatic and shedding for days. To be clear: you can have COVID-19, not know it, and infect dozens of others who can do the same.
- Tests are a poor measure of the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic. They do lend themselves very well to manipulation and motivated reasoning, which I would guess is why people who are motivated to diminish the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic like using them. The only stat that matters is death count per capita.
First, I appreciate the thought you put in to your response.
Every possible demographic has experienced some type of negative outcome from COVID. Most people make a full recovery. Have the fit and healthy passed from COVID? Absolutely, albeit at a staggeringly lower rate than others.
Personally, my wife and I made a decision back in the summer to get back to living our lives and accepting the consequence because we are a family of four healthy individuals. We workout several days per week. Our children are healthy. We don't eat like assholes. We are not licking doorknobs. We have stayed at home when we knowingly came in to contact with someone who tested positive. We respect others' decisions who have decided that stricter measures are right for their situation.
On the site I acknowledge asymptomatic transmission of COVID. If I am worried about getting sick then I should be taking all possible precautions to minimize my risk including self isolation, etc.
A large part of my personal motivation for starting this in the first place is because of the terrible way the media currently reports COVID which is almost exclusively through number of confirmed cases. I'd argue that stat means very little.
It seems true to reason that the sick and unhealthy are the group who suffer the largest impact from COVID. Health is a choice (obviously there are exceptions). Millions of people die every year in the US from otherwise preventable causes like heart disease, lung disease and various forms of cancer. Therefore my thesis is that we are punishing the responsible people in the world to prioritize those who have willfully neglected their health for a significant portion of their life. It's really straightforward to not be significantly overweight and workout 2-3 days per week.
Thanks! I think your viewpoint is one shared by lots of people for valid reasons, so hopefully I'm not coming across as too argumentative or whatever. But on the other hand stakes are high, so I don't want to sugarcoat anything either.
> Have the fit and healthy passed from COVID? Absolutely, albeit at a staggeringly lower rate than others.
The end of this argument is "the mortality rate for X people is/isn't worth response Y", e.g. "the mortality rate for fit people isn't worth lockdowns for everyone". This seems like a good analysis to engage in, but it isn't, because you can't pick who gets COVID-19. The rejoinder here is "it is worth lockdowns for everyone because fit people can still infect other groups with a much higher mortality rate with COVID-19." Another rejoinder would be "the current mortality rate is 1-2%, which means if we're all infected millions of people die."
> On the site I acknowledge asymptomatic transmission of COVID. If I am worried about getting sick then I should be taking all possible precautions to minimize my risk including self isolation, etc.
You are essentially saying you accept the risk of contracting COVID-19 and infecting others. I think that's the crucial point you're missing: infecting others. You may be in a position to make that choice for yourself, but many others aren't and can't avoid you. They could be essential workers, or dealing with a situation that forces them to take a risk. Many, many health workers or their family members have died because people like you infected them with COVID-19 after they got sick and sought care. Many of them quarantine themselves away from their families during outbreaks for exactly this reason. Please reconsider your stance here.
> A large part of my personal motivation for starting this in the first place is because of the terrible way the media currently reports COVID which is almost exclusively through number of confirmed cases. I'd argue that stat means very little.
But your chief data source, the New York Times, is already doing this. Their README [1] gives the exact same motivation you do. The difference is they don't highlight a stat that downplays the severity of the pandemic. Given this, I think your site is deeply misleading, and a prospective user would gain more valuable insight simply by loading the NYT's CSV into Google Sheets.
> It's really straightforward to not be significantly overweight and workout 2-3 days per week.
It may be for you, but many others struggle with weight for completely valid reasons (disability, mental illness, hormone disorders, metabolic and dietary disorders) and you can't distinguish them in the grocery store. I would also argue more broadly that we shouldn't value the lives of the overweight of obese less than others, no matter the cause.
It's also worth saying that while you keep focusing on obesity as the chief comorbidity, in truth it's age, and no amount of personal responsibility can let you avoid that (the opposite, actually).
---
I don't want to imply that I don't want to get back to life. Despite being misanthropic and super privileged, lockdowns and precautions haven't been wonderful for me--and it's been even worse for people I'm close to. But to be blunt, your position is selfish. I urge you to change your behavior. Many people and their loved ones are vulnerable to COVID-19 through no fault of their own, and you are putting them in danger. We should have vaccines in the next few months. It doesn't feel like that much to ask to try and stay in your home as much as possible, wear masks and socially distance when you can't, and wash your hands frequently until then. Compared to the potential consequences, I just can't see any justification for not doing so.
You appear to be a completely reasonable person. Given that we each have so much to say I'd be up for an in-person conversation via FaceTime/Zoom/etc. if you're interested.
You make several valid points for which there is little argument. I feel I do the same. At this point we simply have a different frame of reference on what is important to each of us.
3100 people died in a single day, and your response is:
> My bias is that the COVID-19 response in and across the United States is overblown and hysterical. In other words, the juice has not been worth the squeeze.
These are the kind of statements that people in future generations will look back on in embarrassment. "How could people be so purposefully blind to what's happening right in front of them?"
Also this;
> I argue that getting sick is a human right and that no one can deny you this right.
Do you not realize the fundamental issue with this statement?
Edited to add: 3,100 deaths reported in a single day, not necessarily all dead on the same day.
Realistically 3,100 people died over several days, possibly weeks, and due to reporting delays caused by the Thanksgiving holiday, the numbers were all reported on one day.
There's never a more important time to follow the seven-day rolling average than around a major holiday. A lot of people died of covid yesterday, and a lot of people will die of covid today, but not 3,100 people.
We have a significant number of people in this country (including the person you replied to) who sincerely believe that covid is overblown. Obviously incorrect statements like "3100 people died in a single day" reinforce those beliefs and are counterproductive.
You're right, thanks for the correction. Either way, the fact is still that we're at nearly 280k thousand deaths in just the US, and are very likely to hit 400k or more, and people are still out there saying we're overreacting. It's absurd.
What would be your response to the small business owners who lost their livelihood because government arbitrarily decided to cut off their revenue stream?
The kids who are being left behind because schools across the country have gone virtual?
The increases in domestically violence? Suicide and depression rates?
The unavoidable health decline because people have been forced in to their homes and apartments for several months?
There’s a boatload of problems in the US. COVID is a symptom - not the cause.
Health is the antidote to COVID - not lockdown. And as we see, far too many people have spent years upon years sacrificing their health and now suffering consequences.
My response is that we should be mad at the government for failing to enact policies to actually eradicate COVID, who instead decided that it's hopeless and that we should only use halfhearted, ill-enforced methods of questionable effectiveness. And further more, we should be mad at them for failing to take more effective fiscal measures in response to the pandemic to actually support people who are hurting financially as a result of it.
The rough price of a human life in estimates of cost-benefit analysis is on the order of $10-100 million. That puts the cost of pandemic in lives lost in the US alone as of this date to a couple of trillion dollars. Were the pandemic to infect everyone in the US, the resulting death toll would have a calculated cost of approximately 100% of yearly GDP. The economic costs of a lockdown are a bargain in comparison.
>My response is that we should be mad at the government for failing to enact policies to actually eradicate COVID, who instead decided that it's hopeless and that we should only use halfhearted, ill-enforced methods of questionable effectiveness. And further more, we should be mad at them for failing to take more effective fiscal measures in response to the pandemic to actually support people who are hurting financially as a result of it.
You seem to think I'm advocating for hard lockdown, which I never said.
I see this pattern in COVID discussions all the time. Someone claims COVID is overblown, people push back, then the response is always "yeah but lockdowns are horrible!". It's largely a strawman.
Lockdown and restrictions have been the primary means to control the spread of COVID.
COVID, as a disease, should be taken seriously. It is absolutely more serious for some than others. Ultimately every person needs to exercise personal responsibility instead of demanding that others change their behavior.
I know my state tracks case data and death data by date of test/death, not by date of report (which generally means that the last ~2 days in the daily report are undercounts, although annoyingly, the running averages don't stop a few days early).
I don't know how well other jurisdictions do at distinguishing between day-of-report versus day-of-event, nor how well aggregations do at tracking the disparities here.
In any case, at current trends, "3100 people died in a single day" will shortly be true if it is not true already.
Nobody would have predicted the current response based on that graph. It fits a trend where people become less and less willing to accept physical risks.
Why can't we discuss this without calling one another "purposefully blind"?
Why do people keep making this argument that the numbers are so low and don’t warrant a response without addressing or considering that the world has taken MAJOR steps to curb the spread and impact of the virus. If we all lived our lives as normal, it would likely be way worse.
Not to mention that if we were to have lived our lives as normal and not cared, then deaths outcomes would rise even more in proportion to hospital admissions since the more overloaded a hospital gets, the harder it is to get proper care.
It’s really not rocket science. Epidemiologist and doctors are saying we should take significant measures to stop this, I think I trust them. I wouldn’t want a doctor telling me how to engineer a web service.
Yeah, when your hospitals are operating at 100% capacity, the argument "but excess deaths this year aren't actually much higher" doesn't really work.
And then if, through heroic effort and sacrifice the hospitals don't get overrun, people say "why were we worried? The hospitals never went over capacity!". Like if a team of engineers spend a week mitigating a security attack, then all of the non experts at the company say "well, nothing ended up happening, guess the whole thing was overblown".
We know how to beat this virus, other countries have done it (South Korea, Taiwan, NZ). The solution is incisive contact tracing, short effective and targeted lock downs, social distancing, etc...
The problem is that in the US our institutions have failed us so badly that those solutions are not an option. Because of the delayed (and insufficient) response and our hollowed out institutions the virus has become so widespread (and our institutions so rickety) that we can’t effectively apply the solutions we know exist because it’s too late.
This is where the problem lies. Instead of talking about the solutions we know work, we are forced into a position where our only options are extreme (full lock downs and such) and they can't even fix the problem, only mitigate the damage (with significant collateral damage). Our binary choice is essentially death or destruction, and that is a direct result of our own failures. These are not the only two existing options, they are just the only ones presented to us in the US.
I am not trying to say that epidemiologists all agree on full lock downs. But no epidemiologist worth their salt will say we should do absolutely nothing about this virus, they will argue over specific strategies and their collateral damage, but they will not say that we should do nothing.
You're being dishonest however in saying "look the excess deaths are so low" without considering that their have been significant measures put in place to reduce that death count. That's logically equivalent to saying "see we don't need seatbelts because the number of people dying is not that high" after seat belt laws have been implemented. In this case, the reason excess mortality is lower is not because the virus isn't deadly to many people, but precisely because the measures we have taken.
The few epidemiologists that have spoken out against the measures have been ordered to stop talking publicly. Studies have been accompanied by lengthy apologies for the facts they found. See for example https://www.wnd.com/2020/11/major-peer-reviewed-study-finds-...
I don't know a lot about viruses, but I know groupthink when I see it. Suppressing competing opinions is the opposite of science.
I'm not sure your data rhymes with your interpretation. Having 0.5%~1% of people having a positive corona test in the last two weeks means that every week 3.2~1.6 million people are walking around with Corona. I would not call that a handful of people. (This is even the lower bound as it excludes untested people which are positive)
With a fatality rate of 2% (source: https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid?country=~USA) that means 64~32 thousand die every two weeks. This translates to 1.7~0.8 million people dying every year. With that I'm obviously ignoring the large spectrum between 'no lasting symptoms' and 'death'.
With one of the most lax responses in the western world I cannot see how you conclude from this that the US's response is 'overblown and hysterical'
I wish people would have the smallest amount of empathy and civic virtue to stay the course for just a little while longer-to let up your guard this late with the vaccines right around the corner seems criminal.
It's a lot to ask the whole country to do a half-assed but still really inconvenient year-long thing. We should have done the right thing, which is a proper month-long strict stay at home, then we could have returned to normal life like Taiwan or Vietnam.
Not to poo-poo this headline, but with a growth curve, your expectation is that every single day will be the worst (until herd-immunity/vaccination). I've seen this headline at least 12 different times on youtube.
It can be deceptive depending on your local area, as well as just exhausting to hear so many times. For example, if you live in New York, yesterday's death toll was 7% of the highest day its ever been.
We have see again and again that people don't take common sense measures to protect themselves and others until scared by climbing death rates. Once this happens, positivity rated decrease. Then they get COVID fatigue, relax these behaivors and the numbers climb once again.
I love that term: COVID fatigue. We may be tired of COVID, but COVID is not tired of us.
Even when the death rates are super scary, people still don't follow common sense measures. Remember the so-called lockdowns in the USA? Everyone was still out horsing around, getting together, buying their khakis, eating at whatever restaurants they could find that were open. There was no enforcement, so nobody followed the rules. What a surprise!
Even now, where the disease is arguably worse than it's ever been, local governments are talking about opening up schools and other indoor super-spreader businesses like bars and night clubs. In most places, churches, with their saliva-fest indoor singing and chanting, are fully open. Nobody is taking sane measures at the arguable height of the pandemic!
If we learned anything from this pandemic, we learned that we can't rely on people voluntarily acting collectively to make things better for everyone.
It's not a simple growth curve though. Yesterday was the first time we surpassed the daily peak from April. There was a surge in April, then a smaller brief peak in June, then a smaller slower surge in August, and now we're peaking even higher than any of those.
Edit: While deaths yesterday are only a little above the deaths from the April peak, cases yesterday are 6 times as high.
That's a good point the local variation. I think it's significant to note that for a while after the spike in the summer, the U.S. wasn't in a growth curve. A lot of people thought that the worst was behind them. This article shows that the current spike is now worse than the previous spike.
Not enough people realize that these waves are almost completely regionally isolated, with a bit of spillover everywhere.
Wave 1: NY + NJ (some other northeast)
Wave 2: Florida + Texas + Arizona (most of south)
Wave 3: Midwest
You can even see this within California. Wave 1: Bay Area, Wave 2: Some LA, Wave 3: All SoCal
Each wave basically amounts of when that population gave up distancing, and once you’ve undergone your wave, you don’t really get it that bad again. (unless you have a small wave that misses much of the population, like LA)
Texas’ wave 3 is popping in different cities than wave 2 (Texas, like Cali, is just huge).
There are a ton of narratives that lump regions together, impute a bunch of political and/or cultural factors, etc. and I suspect that, at the end of the day, we'll look back and a neutral examination will have trouble consistently mapping outcomes to controllable (or at least explainable) factors. What did Belgium do to piss off the COVID-19 gods?
I am not sure about this specific metric but based on my experience with government metrics you will be waiting until closer to April than January for those numbers.
This is the only question that matters in the context of covid deaths, at least at a high level. After the initial shock, it's dropped to around 10%. I expect that this will continue to drop as we lose our most vulnerable.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
The CDC has an excellent visualization for this. 2020 is a major outlier in the last few years in terms of excess deaths. If you drill down into the local data, you can see some really stark visualizations: for example, the tremendous increase in deaths in New York City in spring of 2020.
It's astonishing that New York managed to halt that. Some is surely getting better at treating people with the disease so that they don't die, but they must also have had totalitarian levels of compliance.
Exponential growth means that even a small amount of non-compliance will still be explosive, and with so many cases already there were enormous opportunities for somebody to fail.
We got hit hard here and New Yorkers are tending to take it seriously going forward. You see really sharp mask compliance, you can actually get a test and a result in a day, and they give out free masks everywhere. Doing a little traveling recently it just kind of seemed that other parts of the country were effing around, kind of going through the motions, but people would be weird about masks, focus on odd things like putting shrink wrap on food between the kitchen and the table, stuff like that. There were a couple weeks here in April where it just seemed like the city was dead and people remember that.
The herd-immunity threshold is probably around 20% -- enough to stop exponential growth in cases, but not enough to get the virus to self-extinguish.
It also helped when front-line doctors figured out the treatment they were told to use ("invasive ventilation") was a death sentence. They stopped ventilating all their patients, and their patients stopped dying so quickly.
The sun also provided progressively more adequate illumination (providing Vitamin D and red light), starting with the vernal equinox on March 20.
Covid Season has returned this fall, like clockwork. The only factor that really matters is light exposure.
There's a column for percentage of expected deaths too.
I imagine the total deaths over the next 2-3 years will be below average based on the deaths experienced this year in older people and/or those with co-morbidity.
368,000 excess deaths so far in 2020, with 7k to 10k excess deaths coming every week as of late November. I.e. more than 400k excess deaths by the end of the year.
This is so sad to see and from looking at the number of people who travelled for Thanksgiving last week I think it is almost certain that these kind of daily death numbers will continue into the new year :(
Honestly I don't really know what to say when I see these headlines anymore. I am in France but have many friends and family in the US and hearing the stories from them is both saddening and infuriating.
Sadly my own friends and family that I used to respect and look up to have shown themselves as fools this year. People I used to think of as very intelligent falling for the most insane conspiracy theories and other such nonsense. It has been really eye opening in an increasingly depressing way.
And on top of that as someone from the UK (but now living in France) I also have the stupidness of Brexit to deal with.
People talk about the impact of lockdowns on mental health but honestly that wasn't a big deal to me, the biggest impact to me this year has been the stupidity and selfishness of so many people. It is draining having to listen to people talk about 5G spreading the virus or Bill Gates wants to microchip you with the vaccine or going on rants that surgical masks lead to a dangerous build up of CO2.
There is something seriously wrong with the human race. A shocking lack of education and rational rather than emotional thinking for starters.
Sorry I guess my comment doesn't really add to the discourse. Guess I just needed to just put something 'out there' rather than it just rattle around in my head right now.
> Sadly my own friends and family that I used to respect and look up to have shown themselves as fools this year.
This has been the most astonishing fact of life that has come out of Covid. Blown away by discovering the same. I think a whole lot of humans must have discovered this fact for the first time in their life.
The thing is I am without a doubt a person of average intelligence and what I don't "get" is how people whom I know are more intelligent that me doing the most stupid things.
I try to listen to as many different perspectives as possible, look up claims I hear being made, listen to experts in the respective fields and err on the side of caution.
Back in March when medical experts said masks are unlikely to help I was like "okay well that sucks but they know much more about this kind of thing so I will just keep my distance, etc". Then when some data showed that actually masks do seem to help I didn't argue. I listened to the reasons for the change in advice and it all sounded, to me at least, perfectly reasonable. Yet I still hear people saying medical experts are "flip flopping" on masks as if changing ones advice based on new, scientifically backed information is a bad thing.
Highly intelligent people I know have made comments to me about masks, 5G, Bill Gates microchip vaccines, "Plandemic" and all that kind of stuff.
Sadly I have a (second) aunt that has been sucked into the QAnon madness. She honest to god believes the election was stolen from Trump. She isn't even American! She is a lamb farmer in Wales that still believes Brexit is going to be the best thing ever. But that is a conversation for a different thread.
I am just mentally exhausted from it all. I miss the days of moon landing and what really goes on at Area 51 conspiracies.
Intelligence is pattern recognition, and the ability to understand and process complex ideas. Many other things inform decision making - emotion, tribal allegiance, ego, paranoia, perspective, etc. And so, a more intelligent person can definitely come to a worse conclusion. And can even do so selectively: they may come to an excellent conclusion on one topic, and a foolish conclusion on another.
> The thing is I am without a doubt a person of average intelligence and what I don't "get" is how people whom I know are more intelligent that me doing the most stupid things.
And here I keep getting told IQ is the measure of competence
I have not seen much new evidence seen the super-early SSC mask review, which concluded that the masks probably help a tiny bit and are worth wearing but not game-changing. So the authorities did flip flop, and I suspect it’s because they needed some bullshit magic to sell to people to make them feel in control.
Some things blow my mind: fellow good earning engineer uses subway few times a week he goes to the office. Afterward his corona app tells him to go and do test. He does test like every 2 weeks. And he owns a car:-/
My colleagues never wear masks in the office. My manager starts always with “this is another flue” story, but he at least wears a mask.
Given the prevalence of conspiracy theories suggesting Covid is a man-made virus, Democrats cheated to steal the election, and companies making vaccines waited until after the election to publish their results, I'm surprised that a conspiracy theory that liberals are trying to keep the vaccine for themselves hasn't been floating around. Receiving the vaccine "they don't want you to take" would be a great way to stick it to the liberal elite Deep State. /s
The US will probably never recover from this pandemic. The sociological harm done by this virus (normalizing anti-expert sentiment) is far greater than the physical harm in the long run.
I’d argue that’s not a new phenomenon by any extent. Climate change denial has had a strong following for over a decade. We’re just seeing how devastating the effects of this sort of behavior can be in a short timeline (I agree with Chomsky that ultimately Covid is a blip and climate change is far more catastrophic long term).
You assume that experts are completely impartial. Or ethical.
They aren't.
See "Inside Job" - an excellent documentary about the 2008 financial crisis.
Highly credentialed Harvard, MIT, Columbia professors produced reports for Wall Street to convince buyers to buy their toxic financial products (while collecting enormous fees).
I am all for science, but one needs to watch out for $cience.
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[ 1415 ms ] story [ 3685 ms ] threadNote that in the US and most countries, it'll be folks working in hospitals and other healthcare settings that get it first, then likely high risk elderly (nursing home patients, etc). The UK has a very extensive set of guidelines on who gets it, the US does not yet but those policies will happen at the state level.
It remains possible that the death rate may climb among the unvaccinated if others' vaccinations is used as an excuse for risky behavior.
This is stated with far too much confidence. It may be true that vaccinated individuals can still transmit COVID. It may also be true that they can't. We don't know yet.
What if the vaccine does not deliver the expected results? What does the average layperson expect the results to be?
What if the vaccine does not have a significant impact on the spread? I wonder how the “protect thy neighbor” group will change once people feel genuinely comfortable their personal risk is lowered.
https://thehill.com/news-by-subject/healthcare/528619-pfizer...
https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4037
I'm also curious how (or if) we're going to learn to collectively solve some of these long-term problems before many of them really start to turn into those specific, concrete, short-term threats to us as individuals, at which point many of the "easier" solutions may no longer be effective anymore.
From flat out denying, to "we have to quarantine, no Thanksgiving!" from mayors who are then caught at fancy dinners and restaurants! Hard to sell the "we're in this together" narrative when you think the rules don't apply to you if you're rich...it's sad.
Sure, bud, that'll make people believe you believe your own messaging.
The problem is a highly transmissible, deadly virus, and people reacting to it relative to how others act, regardless of wealth or political affiliation.
It's unproductive and distracting to focus on a few people, even if they are leaders, making poor personal decisions in a crisis. It is not about them, it's about sars-covid-19 and the thousands of people dying from it every day, and the hundreds of thousands that will die if we don't get our collective act together.
The virus is clearly the problem but it isn't solvable until a vaccine comes which takes time - in the meantime you have to enter the realm of sociology. Messaging matters.
One moron in Austin doing something has zero bearing on the pathology of this disease. I wish they were not hypocrites, but looking more broadly, a mayor or councilperson isn't the problem in the large scale response to this epidemic.
Message matters, and saying "why do I have to do something smart if at least one person in a person of power is doing something dumb" is itself a message, and not a productive one.
concretely: hypocrites will exist for any principle or situation imaginable, so you can take it as a given, reason about a situation independently of them, and ignore them.
EXACTLY. That is the message being sent - it's unproductive! That is my exact point. Our leadership sends unproductive messages all the time -and when half the country doesn't think it's a big deal, they see rich people doing whatever, their confirmation bias kicks in and says "see if it was bad they wouldn't be doing X"
> concretely: hypocrites will exist for any principle or situation imaginable, so you can take it as a given, reason about a situation independently of them, and ignore them.
You can't ignore hypocrites if they have influence. If Trump was pro-mask a good deal of this country would have been too.
Leadership needs to lead or the message is undermined. What do we want? To stop covid or to fight a culture war?
https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Gavin-Newsom-birthda...
[0]: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/S-...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8289921/Scientist-a...
people should take a bit more responsibility for their own safety. We aren’t all children to be told every single common thing to follow. Especially after quarter million deaths!!!
Where can I find research that confirms masks work?
"The authors of this article, published in 2015, have written a response to their work in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. We urge our readers to consider the response when reading the article. https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/4/e006577.responses#covid-..."
Would not standard practice be to wear proper masks?
Yes, here we go: "some subjects in the control arm wore surgical masks." And indeed, someone comments "The control arm had less than 1% of no mask use".
Surgical masks are widely available and not solely for healthcare workers.
https://georank.org/covid/japan/united-states
Which is only sorta true in the sense that people who are sick often wear them and they're not almost unheard of like in the West. But pre-pandemic, go out on a crowded street in Tokyo and you probably wouldn't see more than a few masks if you saw any.
But even with the confirmed cases the trend in Japan is worrying, especially compared to other countries in Asia. They're setting new records every day: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20201201_36/
With that said, I absolutely think the mask culture in Japan has dampened the surge a lot. In countries without this people just do the bare minimum to be compliant, so we have all these chin-wearers and nose-flashers. We're simply hopeless at wearing masks even with the strictest of mask mandates. So even if masks could reduce the spread significantly we're not likely to see the effect of that here.
That being, said has the working group made any update to their predictions / statements.
https://www.kalzumeus.com/covid19-japan-white-paper/
Genuinely asking - even with the message "we're all in this together", does it surprise you that others don't see it this way?
But, as a European, I must say that the strong focus on masks on the other side of the Atlantic feels a little dangerous; over here the regions with a mask mandate have not fared significantly better than those without.
So here is the more complete CDC advice: "Wear a mask, stay at least 6 feet apart, avoid crowds, and wash your hands often."
You do not really need a mask if you are out for a walk and are maintaining social distancing. It has been proven time and time again that the main culprit is people crowding indoors without masks.
If you are downvoting, please provide evidence that wearing a mask outside while maintaining social distancing has any substantial effect.
If they aren't doing the bare minimum, that I can see with my own eyes, I have no reason to believe they are also social distancing.
It's also an interesting illustration of why things like virtue signaling are a sociological phenomenon to begin with. They're hard-wired into us, for good reasons.
You don't need to shame people who have an overabundance of precaution.
And no, wearing a mask outside is not automatically "virtue signaling".
I wear a mask outside while walking and social distancing and I'm not virtue signaling. I simply personally find it harder to futz w/ a mask when coming up on people or going inside a building.
Please be a little less reflexive when it comes to this stuff. I'm sure people are "virtue signaling" by wearing masks. But coincidentally they're also limiting the spread of COVID-19. Let's focus on the latter here.
It really seems like you're just reflexively jumping on this stuff. Mask wearing is good! Even if you're not social distancing it's better than not wearing a mask and not social distancing.
It's also worth saying there's nothing wrong with "virtue signaling". It's indistinguishable from... actually having the virtue.
edit - If you need to take a walk through downtown Los Angeles or somewhere where it is physically impossible to social distance, then yes wear a mask.
As an avid bicyclist I do not wear a mask on long distance solo bike rides, and I get harsh or worried looks from seniors. However, I understand the details and am not exposing myself or others.
A major challenge in public health messaging is the intractable problem of lack of context and lack of intellectual effort by all parties. Mix in serious consequences and you have a recipe for conflict quickly.
So "virtue signalling" is a one liner, my post is a one liner (almost) and, public health officials face millions of inconvenienced, ill or panic'd people with their "one liner"
Please wash hands, be mindful of others, take it seriously and no, I do not wear a mask on my long distance solo bike rides.
What bothers me more is not having clear rules/instructions. So I just resort to wearing the mask everywhere, doesn't hurt me or bother me and shouldn't be controversial.
The glasses thing is actually a pretty critical issue. I've seen people wearing masks and glasses by themselves in cars while driving with the windows closed. In that scenario fogging glasses makes wearing the mask more dangerous to people around you than not wearing the mask...
Of course, none of this is to say that in all these cases, even outdoors, that you shouldn't wear the mask if you can't social distance or need to go indoors. You totally should! But giving people the stink eye when they're 30 ft away from everyone else and outside and mask-less seems a bit much. It doesn't seem like there's any justification for that outside of shaming non-conformity.
Other commenters here are saying things like - if there's a .0001% chance this pre ents harm to you or others, then it's your duty to not do it. I'm a teetotaler; I wonder if these folks drink alcohol.
I've rarely eaten at an outdoor restaurant since March, I haven't eaten indoors at all, and have been generally minimizing trips to stores so I'm conservative. But I'm not going to do something just to send a signal that I'm a "good" person.
Wear the damn mask, and wear it properly. This tells the world that you get it, that you take it seriously, and that you're probably doing all the other trivial but necessary things also.
Yes, it's slightly inconvenient. But generally no more so for you than for everyone else. So get over it.
Also, use your turn signal, even if there are no other cars within 100 meters of you.
Also, don't leave your shopping cart in the middle of the grocery aisle while deciding which product to select, even if no one else is presently trying to get past you.
Do all the simple things that signal "it makes more sense to be courteous and clear, than to demonstrate disregard for others (whether purposeful or oblivious, because they are often hard to tell apart)".
But if those people are going to be stupid in private, then I still want them to do all the CDC-recommended stuff in the places where we cross paths.
If we could isolate those folks in their bars and churches and let them burn themselves out, I'd be OK with that.
But they are in the grocery store the next day, wearing a mask around their chin because they care equally little in public as they do in private.
So, if you are not one of those people, signal it by wearing the mask properly.
("you" in all of the foregoing is directed generally, not personally!)
You might be slightly unhinged my dude.
It's easy, it's never harmful, frequently helpful, and occasionally saves lives.
I ride motorcycles, so I have had more opportunity to think about the importance of turn signals than others might. But I also drive cars, and I believe the benefits are universal and have zero negative consequences, so I include this as a minimal-effort suggestion.
When I'm walking early in the morning, I carry a mask with me in case I encounter other morning joggers/walkers and can't easily cross the street at the time.
If you can allow for that possibility, at low or zero up-front cost, then -- I don't know, maybe it's the adulthood speaking here, but -- why would one not do so? :)
I would love to see confirmed cases of transmission from merely walking by someone when outside.
I seriously don’t get the pull up the mask thing when I walk by someone outside. I’m not going to do it and I have zero expectation the other person do that either.
No, that's not correct at all. But if I may take a guess at what you meant to write..
Those are guidelines based on estimated inflection points where more time or less distance increases the likelihood of transmission.
They are presumed to be good-faith estimates, but they are based on difficult-to-collect data. It's probably reasonable to draw the conclusion that, if fully observed, the guidelines would drive R0 below 1.0 and the trendline would follow.
But that doesn't mean that no transmission occurs in other situations. People sometimes sneeze unexpectedly. It takes a fraction of a second to put on the mask that prevents that event from becoming risky, or at least uncomfortable. Cheap insurance.
It's also important to realize that "walking by someone while outside" can take many forms, so it's not clear that we're all talking about the same thing. Jogging on a narrow path is very different from strolling on a beach.
Different measures are appropriate for different cases, but it's never harmful to use the mask, it's a reasonable habit to get into, and it makes people around you more comfortable. What's the trouble?
So I guess it’s 15 minutes of cumulative exposure over the course of 24 hours.
Indoors, sure wear a mask. I wear a mask where required indoors. But outdoors no thanks.
What’s the trouble? A behavior devoid of reason is nothing more than a ritual. Furthermore, it sets the expectation that the behavior does actually provide tangible benefit leading to a false sense of security and lead to riskier behaviors than what would have otherwise occurred. Finally, masks are not created equal. How do I know the mask “you” are wearing is actually worth a damn?
https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/2020/10/26/cdc-re...
Absolutely. But we're not in "devoid of reason" territory here, we're in "with complex and sometimes impossible to quantify reasons" territory.
So here are two people:
Neither person is wearing a mask. Neither person is wearing a baseball cap.How can you (random sidewalk passerby) tell the difference between these two people?
I wear a mask, no matter how smart I'm feeling that day.
(Note that this is not a response to why one should wear a mask, just a light observation of a positive side effect! But there is value in signalling, even if it's just to normalize the behavior so that the reluctant just stop bothering to protest about such a simple thing, and thereby get a jump on any asymptomatic spread that occurs semi-randomly in populations.. :)
I logged my thoughts here https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1335634895826087938.html
CDC guidelines are about likelihood of transmission, not certainty.
It's considerate and respectful to wear a mask when around other people. If you're not going to do it, then all I ask is that you stay far away from me and mine.
Because that’s ultimately what this 24/7 mask wearing is about - demanding others engage in specific behaviors to make yourself feel better.
I view this as personal responsibility and that’s how I conduct myself. I should draw boundaries for myself with what is and what is not okay and operate accordingly. I don’t expect anyone to change their life to account for my insecurities.
If I see a person wearing a mask, even one of those single-ply gaiters that seems to be much less effective than three-ply cotton masks, I still understand that they are not one of the radical science-denying people that make zero effort to avoid infecting themselves and others, and are therefore dangerous.
Personal responsibility sounds great, and is a good start. But also, we live in a society, so personal responsibility includes doing what you can to avoid spreading COVID-19 to others.
Epidemiology is not "insecurity." That's... wow, I'm not even sure how to respond to that.
0. https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1334641685154902021 links to https://jkms.org/DOIx.php?id=10.3346/jkms.2020.35.e415
Here's the conclusion from the study that was linked: "Droplet transmission can occur at a distance greater than 2 m if there is direct air flow from an infected person. Therefore, updated guidelines involving prevention, contact tracing, and quarantine for COVID-19 are required for control of this highly contagious disease."
Walking by someone is an interaction measured in seconds. If that person is infected and shedding via aerosol then a plain cloth mask does not offer much protection. The cloth mask would offer some level of protection if the infected was shedding via droplets from sneeze/cough/etc.
If there's direct evidence that wearing a mask on my walk around the neighborhood offers significant benefits then I will reconsider. To this point, I just haven't seen anything that supports this behavior.
People should just shut up and wear a mask. (And social distance. And wash their hands. And refrain from touching their face. And, and, and)
If there's even a 0.000001% chance that you could prevent the spread of a rampantly spreading disease that has hospitals in many regions at or above capacity, by putting a damn piece of cloth over your face, then just do it. It's not burdensome.
I think about past generations in the US that had to sacrifice mightily in the great depression or WWII, and then I look at today and how many people are whining over petty nonsense like this, and I shudder at what the country has become.
For me, it has a convenient counter response: nobody using the term "virtue signaling" has anything useful to say, on any topic. It's "vice signaling", their call-out to their buddies that they, too, don't like anything you say solely because you say it. They're not listening to me, except for the purpose of rejecting it reflexively, so there's no point in talking to them.
Could that be because people in regions without a mask mandate wear masks anyway?
It is unbelievable that this list of behaviors does not include airing out or ventilating indoor public spaces.
Here in sunny California, where the weather in the Bay Area has been mild and warm through December 3, I find myself walking into shops or offices every day that have operable windows and doors: all shut tight.
Many of these spaces could be indistinguishable from the outdoors in terms of fresh air flow. For reasons I cannot fathom this simplest (and healthiest) mitigation is not practiced.
"The restaurant owner filmed a city inspector issuing a citation due to the cafe’s open front door"
https://ny.eater.com/2020/10/21/21526832/gravesend-restauran...
We have many laws about fire safety, not so many about COVID-19.
* Offering live streaming.
* Reducing capacity for services to one-quarter capacity and having our ushers enforce 6-foot (4 seats) separation between family groups.
* Constant "wear a mask, please" signs and reminders.
* Reducing childcare room capacity to 6 children and 2 adults per room.
* Opening every window and door possible.
* Keeping the ventilation system running to circulate air.
Our city fire marshal recently threatened us with fines for keeping the interior doors open to improve ventilation.
If we are following the science, you should be fine to not wear a mask due to immunity, right?
Should these people also be allowed to live a normal life, gathering with others indoors, etc? I’ve never heard people giving the previously infected a pass to return to normal. I think everyone thinks it’s only fair to make them continue to suffer too, despite having immunity and ignoring the actual reason for social distancing and mask wearing.
There are two concerns related to post-immunity spread: First, the accuracy of tests, and second, the ability to spread despite immunity.
I believe that some studies have shown you may still be able to transmit the disease if exposed, even though you yourself are immune.
I don't have sources handy, but that is a starting point for your own research.
As to your second point, would you also be saying we should still mask and social distance after vaccination, because just in case?
1: https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2020/11/11/covid-...
Yes people may break the laws or not follow the rules, that doesn’t mean there is no value. There’s surely a black market for passports, ids, etc, does that mean those documents are useless?
The issue is that misinformation and conspiracy theories are thriving on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, and they're received the illusion of legitimacy from one of our minority political party that controls 2 out of 3 branches of government.
Americans were able to make huge, selfless sacrifices during WWII. The only reason they can't do it now is that several very large companies profit from outrage, conspiracy, and polarization, and they have optimized our media to generate as much of those as possible.
Very true, wish more people realized this.
“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”
These are not platitudes.
They see being told to be disciplined as an infringement on their freedom, so it is about freedom to them.
Some people jump out of planes, others prefer to stay grounded. Some start companies and risk their life savings, others prefer the safety of salaried position.
Even when in agreement on the correctness of the data findings, our risk assessments and individual actions will very wildly.
If you participate in any of these activities you are intentionally being reckless with the lives of others.
Yet Scandinavian countries have higher rates of entrepreneurship than the US does.
I don't think so, but I guess we'll see.
Immunity passport for travel (papers please)
Lockdowns as a go-to tool for any public health problem in the future. Bad flu season? New swine flu?
Permanent masks for the non vaccinated?
If you recall the original lockdowns were two weeks to flatten the curve. That has certainly grown.
But like I said. I worry a lot and I hope I’m wrong.
Wow! Did he really liken his situation and lot in life as a free white man in colonial America, to actual slavery?
This is the first I’ve read of his entire speech.
Meanwhile, the actual black slaves were still physically chained, and denied their own freedoms.
Geez! The irony.
I've seen occasional headlines about super-spreading events in Europe, but I have no idea how much their attendants are representative of their fellow countrymen.
Still, I can't really tell how much that crowd's attitude is indicative of the rest of Germany or even of other Berliners.
So the whole state apparatus worked in suboptimal way.
This isn't an emergent phenomenon caused by some unique quirk of American psychology, nor is being an anti-masker a sign of greater creative, artistic or entrepreneurial spirit. I feel like we're drifting dangerously close to historical revisionism here.
Had it not been for the current Presidental administration's actions and the efforts of his party and supporters, there would be no significant anti-mask/anti-quarantine movement in the US, nor would the country's response to COVID have been as disastrously hamfisted as it was. We had a plan and infrastructure ready. But it came from Obama so, of course, it was tossed into a trash bin and burned, and then turned into a partisan football.
I realize Hacker News hates any mention of politics, much less partisan politics, but it's important to remember how much of this is explicitly the fault of a single Administration's efforts to maintain its power base in light of an upcoming election. Not everything, mind you, because there has been a lot of incompetence and malfeasance to go around, but a lot.
Source ? Genuinely interested.
As an American who has traveled, and has friends, in Scandinavia, I would be surprised to learn this ...
[0] https://yougov.co.uk/topics/health/articles-reports/2020/07/...
Also, China could have locked down travel from China that might have helped.
See [1] and [2] for fact checks on this point.
[1] https://www.factcheck.org/2020/05/trumps-flawed-china-travel...
[2] https://danielabell.com/?s=Ferguson&submit=Search
Blame China. I'm frankly shocked at how few international repercussions they've gotten. Any sane rational nation would be issuing economic sanctions left and right for their inept, pathetic handling of the pandemic.
https://quillette.com/category/covid-19/china-syndrome-serie...
Here's the Twitter thread where the author introduced the series and gave some helpful backgrounds:
https://twitter.com/phl43/status/1298053847844368386
As he says:
"Again, I know that many of you are skeptical, but this essay has required a ridiculous amount of work and I'm really confident about the conclusions I reach, so I hope you will read it with an open-mind. I will post the other parts in this thread as they are published."
The author also has very helpful comments on the recent CNN leak
https://mobile.twitter.com/phl43/status/1333563577324761091
During the summer we did an outdoor road trip through 5 countries. There were no mandates for wearing it outside, but I didn't see a single person not wearing one inside in Italy, Austria, Slovenia, France...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
FWIW, based on county test results and my anecdotal poking around the US - most counties in the US have 1% or less of their population getting a positive COVID test in the past two weeks. In the grand scheme of things, I contend we have only a handful of people infectious in any two week period.
Find your state and county at https://thecovidcomplex.com/states
Queue the hug of death. Using ASP.NET Core and Digital Ocean droplet for hosting.
I have some really specific biases about the COVID response in the US that I shall not dwelve in to here. You can read about them on the About and Resources page. The other day I posted my site as a comment to something else COVID and you can read that discussion thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25255589 just search for my username in the comments.
I don't disagree with the spirit of self directed data exploration, but you need to be careful.
If you are not getting tested it’s almost certainly because you’re not actively sick and/or been exposed.
There’s value, in my opinion, to knowing how people people have not have a positive test. This does not imply COVID negative.
I also make the assumption that once you have taken a test you quarantine like a responsible person.
I would say that the amount of people who tested positive is roughly the same as the amount of people who are contagious yet don’t know.
Based on what? Do you have anything to demonstrate that assumption and back it up with facts?
We know that case counts generally do not have wild swings. In other words, prior performance indicates future behavior. If the two week moving average of positive case counts is 500 - then we can roughly predict what to expect the following day for positive case counts plus or minus the current infection trend.
My experience has been that people who simply get tested are already isolating/quarantining. That has been my approach. So if 500 people tested positive then I generally believe those 500 people isolate themselves and they are no longer infecting people because of their quarantine. Then 500ish people show up tomorrow to take their place.
That's my point. Once people are identified as sick then they aren't spreading the disease because of "hey don't be a giant dickhead".
Young, healthy, fit people are getting this and dying. Your hypothesis may be accurate overall, I do not know, but frankly it's noise nobody needs.
My empathy is primarily towards the people who have worked hard for what they have only to have it ripped away because of arbitrary government decisions.
Regardless, the people who have passed directly from and because of this disease is a tragic story in the history of our country.
During the same time period, over 50,000 people under age 25 have died from all causes:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
Can you say more about this? Lots of people have died; if anything my feeling is that our response has not at all been commensurate.
Your argument is that if you're fit and healthy, you shouldn't have your behavior dictated by people who aren't. They've made poor choices, they're the ones who should bear the consequences. You further argue that the low per-capita positive tests indicates that COVID-19 doesn't deserve the response we've (so far) given it.
Here's why you're wrong:
- Fit, healthy people do die from COVID-19. They can also suffer long-term effects.
- There are people with high vulnerability to COVID-19 through no fault of their own. They can have autoimmune disorders, or simply be old. You acknowledge this. However, you generally can't choose to transmit COVID-19 only to the obese and not the old (for example).
- Further, you broadly can't choose to contract COVID-19 and not transmit it to others. It's possible to be asymptomatic and shedding for days. To be clear: you can have COVID-19, not know it, and infect dozens of others who can do the same.
- Tests are a poor measure of the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic. They do lend themselves very well to manipulation and motivated reasoning, which I would guess is why people who are motivated to diminish the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic like using them. The only stat that matters is death count per capita.
Every possible demographic has experienced some type of negative outcome from COVID. Most people make a full recovery. Have the fit and healthy passed from COVID? Absolutely, albeit at a staggeringly lower rate than others.
Personally, my wife and I made a decision back in the summer to get back to living our lives and accepting the consequence because we are a family of four healthy individuals. We workout several days per week. Our children are healthy. We don't eat like assholes. We are not licking doorknobs. We have stayed at home when we knowingly came in to contact with someone who tested positive. We respect others' decisions who have decided that stricter measures are right for their situation.
On the site I acknowledge asymptomatic transmission of COVID. If I am worried about getting sick then I should be taking all possible precautions to minimize my risk including self isolation, etc.
A large part of my personal motivation for starting this in the first place is because of the terrible way the media currently reports COVID which is almost exclusively through number of confirmed cases. I'd argue that stat means very little.
It seems true to reason that the sick and unhealthy are the group who suffer the largest impact from COVID. Health is a choice (obviously there are exceptions). Millions of people die every year in the US from otherwise preventable causes like heart disease, lung disease and various forms of cancer. Therefore my thesis is that we are punishing the responsible people in the world to prioritize those who have willfully neglected their health for a significant portion of their life. It's really straightforward to not be significantly overweight and workout 2-3 days per week.
> Have the fit and healthy passed from COVID? Absolutely, albeit at a staggeringly lower rate than others.
The end of this argument is "the mortality rate for X people is/isn't worth response Y", e.g. "the mortality rate for fit people isn't worth lockdowns for everyone". This seems like a good analysis to engage in, but it isn't, because you can't pick who gets COVID-19. The rejoinder here is "it is worth lockdowns for everyone because fit people can still infect other groups with a much higher mortality rate with COVID-19." Another rejoinder would be "the current mortality rate is 1-2%, which means if we're all infected millions of people die."
> On the site I acknowledge asymptomatic transmission of COVID. If I am worried about getting sick then I should be taking all possible precautions to minimize my risk including self isolation, etc.
You are essentially saying you accept the risk of contracting COVID-19 and infecting others. I think that's the crucial point you're missing: infecting others. You may be in a position to make that choice for yourself, but many others aren't and can't avoid you. They could be essential workers, or dealing with a situation that forces them to take a risk. Many, many health workers or their family members have died because people like you infected them with COVID-19 after they got sick and sought care. Many of them quarantine themselves away from their families during outbreaks for exactly this reason. Please reconsider your stance here.
> A large part of my personal motivation for starting this in the first place is because of the terrible way the media currently reports COVID which is almost exclusively through number of confirmed cases. I'd argue that stat means very little.
But your chief data source, the New York Times, is already doing this. Their README [1] gives the exact same motivation you do. The difference is they don't highlight a stat that downplays the severity of the pandemic. Given this, I think your site is deeply misleading, and a prospective user would gain more valuable insight simply by loading the NYT's CSV into Google Sheets.
> It's really straightforward to not be significantly overweight and workout 2-3 days per week.
It may be for you, but many others struggle with weight for completely valid reasons (disability, mental illness, hormone disorders, metabolic and dietary disorders) and you can't distinguish them in the grocery store. I would also argue more broadly that we shouldn't value the lives of the overweight of obese less than others, no matter the cause.
It's also worth saying that while you keep focusing on obesity as the chief comorbidity, in truth it's age, and no amount of personal responsibility can let you avoid that (the opposite, actually).
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I don't want to imply that I don't want to get back to life. Despite being misanthropic and super privileged, lockdowns and precautions haven't been wonderful for me--and it's been even worse for people I'm close to. But to be blunt, your position is selfish. I urge you to change your behavior. Many people and their loved ones are vulnerable to COVID-19 through no fault of their own, and you are putting them in danger. We should have vaccines in the next few months. It doesn't feel like that much to ask to try and stay in your home as much as possible, wear masks and socially distance when you can't, and wash your hands frequently until then. Compared to the potential consequences, I just can't see any justification for not doing so.
[1]: hnrodey ↗ You appear to be a completely reasonable person. Given that we each have so much to say I'd be up for an in-person conversation via FaceTime/Zoom/etc. if you're interested.
You make several valid points for which there is little argument. I feel I do the same. At this point we simply have a different frame of reference on what is important to each of us.
> My bias is that the COVID-19 response in and across the United States is overblown and hysterical. In other words, the juice has not been worth the squeeze.
These are the kind of statements that people in future generations will look back on in embarrassment. "How could people be so purposefully blind to what's happening right in front of them?"
Also this;
> I argue that getting sick is a human right and that no one can deny you this right.
Do you not realize the fundamental issue with this statement?
Edited to add: 3,100 deaths reported in a single day, not necessarily all dead on the same day.
Realistically 3,100 people died over several days, possibly weeks, and due to reporting delays caused by the Thanksgiving holiday, the numbers were all reported on one day.
There's never a more important time to follow the seven-day rolling average than around a major holiday. A lot of people died of covid yesterday, and a lot of people will die of covid today, but not 3,100 people.
We have a significant number of people in this country (including the person you replied to) who sincerely believe that covid is overblown. Obviously incorrect statements like "3100 people died in a single day" reinforce those beliefs and are counterproductive.
The kids who are being left behind because schools across the country have gone virtual?
The increases in domestically violence? Suicide and depression rates?
The unavoidable health decline because people have been forced in to their homes and apartments for several months?
There’s a boatload of problems in the US. COVID is a symptom - not the cause.
Health is the antidote to COVID - not lockdown. And as we see, far too many people have spent years upon years sacrificing their health and now suffering consequences.
The rough price of a human life in estimates of cost-benefit analysis is on the order of $10-100 million. That puts the cost of pandemic in lives lost in the US alone as of this date to a couple of trillion dollars. Were the pandemic to infect everyone in the US, the resulting death toll would have a calculated cost of approximately 100% of yearly GDP. The economic costs of a lockdown are a bargain in comparison.
Yeah, agree with all of that.
I see this pattern in COVID discussions all the time. Someone claims COVID is overblown, people push back, then the response is always "yeah but lockdowns are horrible!". It's largely a strawman.
COVID, as a disease, should be taken seriously. It is absolutely more serious for some than others. Ultimately every person needs to exercise personal responsibility instead of demanding that others change their behavior.
I don't know how well other jurisdictions do at distinguishing between day-of-report versus day-of-event, nor how well aggregations do at tracking the disparities here.
In any case, at current trends, "3100 people died in a single day" will shortly be true if it is not true already.
Nobody would have predicted the current response based on that graph. It fits a trend where people become less and less willing to accept physical risks.
Why can't we discuss this without calling one another "purposefully blind"?
Not to mention that if we were to have lived our lives as normal and not cared, then deaths outcomes would rise even more in proportion to hospital admissions since the more overloaded a hospital gets, the harder it is to get proper care.
It’s really not rocket science. Epidemiologist and doctors are saying we should take significant measures to stop this, I think I trust them. I wouldn’t want a doctor telling me how to engineer a web service.
And then if, through heroic effort and sacrifice the hospitals don't get overrun, people say "why were we worried? The hospitals never went over capacity!". Like if a team of engineers spend a week mitigating a security attack, then all of the non experts at the company say "well, nothing ended up happening, guess the whole thing was overblown".
"One epidemiologist told us the environment was “too toxic” to talk to us, even anonymously."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-covid-science...
We know how to beat this virus, other countries have done it (South Korea, Taiwan, NZ). The solution is incisive contact tracing, short effective and targeted lock downs, social distancing, etc...
The problem is that in the US our institutions have failed us so badly that those solutions are not an option. Because of the delayed (and insufficient) response and our hollowed out institutions the virus has become so widespread (and our institutions so rickety) that we can’t effectively apply the solutions we know exist because it’s too late.
This is where the problem lies. Instead of talking about the solutions we know work, we are forced into a position where our only options are extreme (full lock downs and such) and they can't even fix the problem, only mitigate the damage (with significant collateral damage). Our binary choice is essentially death or destruction, and that is a direct result of our own failures. These are not the only two existing options, they are just the only ones presented to us in the US.
I am not trying to say that epidemiologists all agree on full lock downs. But no epidemiologist worth their salt will say we should do absolutely nothing about this virus, they will argue over specific strategies and their collateral damage, but they will not say that we should do nothing.
You're being dishonest however in saying "look the excess deaths are so low" without considering that their have been significant measures put in place to reduce that death count. That's logically equivalent to saying "see we don't need seatbelts because the number of people dying is not that high" after seat belt laws have been implemented. In this case, the reason excess mortality is lower is not because the virus isn't deadly to many people, but precisely because the measures we have taken.
I don't know a lot about viruses, but I know groupthink when I see it. Suppressing competing opinions is the opposite of science.
With a fatality rate of 2% (source: https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid?country=~USA) that means 64~32 thousand die every two weeks. This translates to 1.7~0.8 million people dying every year. With that I'm obviously ignoring the large spectrum between 'no lasting symptoms' and 'death'.
With one of the most lax responses in the western world I cannot see how you conclude from this that the US's response is 'overblown and hysterical'
Where’s the outrage and concern from eating pie and cookies for breakfast?
It can be deceptive depending on your local area, as well as just exhausting to hear so many times. For example, if you live in New York, yesterday's death toll was 7% of the highest day its ever been.
Even when the death rates are super scary, people still don't follow common sense measures. Remember the so-called lockdowns in the USA? Everyone was still out horsing around, getting together, buying their khakis, eating at whatever restaurants they could find that were open. There was no enforcement, so nobody followed the rules. What a surprise!
Even now, where the disease is arguably worse than it's ever been, local governments are talking about opening up schools and other indoor super-spreader businesses like bars and night clubs. In most places, churches, with their saliva-fest indoor singing and chanting, are fully open. Nobody is taking sane measures at the arguable height of the pandemic!
If we learned anything from this pandemic, we learned that we can't rely on people voluntarily acting collectively to make things better for everyone.
Edit: While deaths yesterday are only a little above the deaths from the April peak, cases yesterday are 6 times as high.
Wave 1: NY + NJ (some other northeast)
Wave 2: Florida + Texas + Arizona (most of south)
Wave 3: Midwest
You can even see this within California. Wave 1: Bay Area, Wave 2: Some LA, Wave 3: All SoCal
Each wave basically amounts of when that population gave up distancing, and once you’ve undergone your wave, you don’t really get it that bad again. (unless you have a small wave that misses much of the population, like LA)
Texas’ wave 3 is popping in different cities than wave 2 (Texas, like Cali, is just huge).
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
Exponential growth means that even a small amount of non-compliance will still be explosive, and with so many cases already there were enormous opportunities for somebody to fail.
It also helped when front-line doctors figured out the treatment they were told to use ("invasive ventilation") was a death sentence. They stopped ventilating all their patients, and their patients stopped dying so quickly.
The sun also provided progressively more adequate illumination (providing Vitamin D and red light), starting with the vernal equinox on March 20.
Covid Season has returned this fall, like clockwork. The only factor that really matters is light exposure.
https://www.space.com/vernal-equinox-2020-earliest-spring-12...
It peaked in April at 17,000 in one week.
There's a column for percentage of expected deaths too.
I imagine the total deaths over the next 2-3 years will be below average based on the deaths experienced this year in older people and/or those with co-morbidity.
Honestly I don't really know what to say when I see these headlines anymore. I am in France but have many friends and family in the US and hearing the stories from them is both saddening and infuriating.
Sadly my own friends and family that I used to respect and look up to have shown themselves as fools this year. People I used to think of as very intelligent falling for the most insane conspiracy theories and other such nonsense. It has been really eye opening in an increasingly depressing way.
And on top of that as someone from the UK (but now living in France) I also have the stupidness of Brexit to deal with.
People talk about the impact of lockdowns on mental health but honestly that wasn't a big deal to me, the biggest impact to me this year has been the stupidity and selfishness of so many people. It is draining having to listen to people talk about 5G spreading the virus or Bill Gates wants to microchip you with the vaccine or going on rants that surgical masks lead to a dangerous build up of CO2.
There is something seriously wrong with the human race. A shocking lack of education and rational rather than emotional thinking for starters.
Sorry I guess my comment doesn't really add to the discourse. Guess I just needed to just put something 'out there' rather than it just rattle around in my head right now.
This has been the most astonishing fact of life that has come out of Covid. Blown away by discovering the same. I think a whole lot of humans must have discovered this fact for the first time in their life.
I try to listen to as many different perspectives as possible, look up claims I hear being made, listen to experts in the respective fields and err on the side of caution.
Back in March when medical experts said masks are unlikely to help I was like "okay well that sucks but they know much more about this kind of thing so I will just keep my distance, etc". Then when some data showed that actually masks do seem to help I didn't argue. I listened to the reasons for the change in advice and it all sounded, to me at least, perfectly reasonable. Yet I still hear people saying medical experts are "flip flopping" on masks as if changing ones advice based on new, scientifically backed information is a bad thing.
Highly intelligent people I know have made comments to me about masks, 5G, Bill Gates microchip vaccines, "Plandemic" and all that kind of stuff.
Sadly I have a (second) aunt that has been sucked into the QAnon madness. She honest to god believes the election was stolen from Trump. She isn't even American! She is a lamb farmer in Wales that still believes Brexit is going to be the best thing ever. But that is a conversation for a different thread.
I am just mentally exhausted from it all. I miss the days of moon landing and what really goes on at Area 51 conspiracies.
And here I keep getting told IQ is the measure of competence
Some things blow my mind: fellow good earning engineer uses subway few times a week he goes to the office. Afterward his corona app tells him to go and do test. He does test like every 2 weeks. And he owns a car:-/
My colleagues never wear masks in the office. My manager starts always with “this is another flue” story, but he at least wears a mask.
[1] https://kylebenzle.medium.com/adding-an-air-purifier-to-your...
I feel like you’re lamenting that people don’t follow your experts.
I mean look at all the experts that signed on here: https://gbdeclaration.org/
Why don’t they count?
They aren't.
See "Inside Job" - an excellent documentary about the 2008 financial crisis. Highly credentialed Harvard, MIT, Columbia professors produced reports for Wall Street to convince buyers to buy their toxic financial products (while collecting enormous fees).
I am all for science, but one needs to watch out for $cience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Job_(2010_film)