The US likely has something like 50 million people with acquired immunity (14.5 million have tested positive) and another 50 million people are slated to be vaccinated by March (this estimate is assuming weeks after the second doses), with tens of millions more each following month, so it can be sometime next year that the pandemic is waning here.
I’m skeptical that vaccine production and distribution will in the US will scale that well. I certainly hope that it will happen, but given that the country has failed on just about every other pandemic related front tempers my perspective.
The cold chain for the Pfizer vaccine is tougher, but otherwise it's not radically different than flu vaccination (we do ~150 million of those each year in the US). The production estimates are coming from the vaccine companies also, so less likely to be victims of the administrative decline.
Even achieving something comparable to prior year’s flu vaccination would not bring us anywhere close to the herd immunity threshold though. I’m not as concerned with production of the vaccine itself as the logistics involved. I find it hard to believe that a country that otherwise can’t deliver the basic protective necessities to frontline workers is suddenly going to pull out a logistical miracle out of their hats.
Something like 5 or 10 million people are acquiring natural immunity each week right now (it's maybe not that high, but there are 1 million+ positive tests each week, with quite high positivity rates, which indicates testing isn't sufficient to find all cases). It's a grim statistic, but the raging spread of the virus is accelerating the timetable for reaching herd immunity.
140 million vaccinated (approx the number of flu vaccinations administered last year) + tens of millions with natural immunity does put us close to the herd immunity threshold (the number of people that have immunity from an infection has big error bars of course, and there will likely be overlap)
The 14.5 million are cases that have been identified with a positive test. There are certainly more people that have been infected than that, the only question is how many.
Distributed, probably so. I don't see any reason to doubt the manufacturers statements yet, and I'm not including the potential/likely J&J vaccine.
And while we don't know how long acquired immunity lasts, it's pretty clear that it lasts a good while (it's still a freak occurrence when someone tests positive after recovering from a first infection).
It seems right now we're at 10-15% positivity on PCR. And I think that probably maps onto society... So there's a vague guess how many will test positive with PCR.
Unfortunately a PCR result at a 35 cycle threshold (which the vast majority of tests in the U.S. are) does not prove that a person was infected and has immunity, only that there was exposure that is detectable. It may never even have entered the bloodstream.
Only antibody testing will show if there was a immune response and if there is immune memory. We're not doing that at scale.
It’s not going to scale at all. There were three hour lines just this month to get the rapid test, and we’re months into this.
Unless the federal government gets real with it, and releases an app that leverages scheduling systems to mass coordinate a roll out, this too will be a clusterfuck. The healthcare administrative staff (your standard hospital/clinical administrative staff) is not innovative enough at the moment to adapt to the challenge.
No Politicians framed the issue like this. Canceling school in 3 month bursts is a political move because it's much harder to tell a generation of parents their kids won't return to school for 2-3 years.
Shame on our politicians, shame of Fauci for not making this clear.
I think we’ve gotta start thinking about how to make people more comfortable with living freely post-vaccine. I’ve always been concerned about this as a downside of the “this is a super terrible disease” messaging - there’s a huge range of outcomes where the disease spread is merely mitigated rather than halted, and we’ve trained a lot of high-conscientiousness people to not accept that as a success. When I see experts talking about how they won’t ever go back to normal, I’m concerned about how much of the population will get stuck in that rut with them.
The experts are full of it if they say they’ll never return to normal. This is akin to saying “I’m never drinking again” after waking up with a hangover. Humans are programmed to quickly forget rare or non-recurring negative stimuli. It’s called fear extinction, and it does its job very well to keep us taking risks and seeking reward.
Epidemiologists likely do know something about human behaviour.
One quote from this article:
“For some, it has gone back to normal, and because of this, it will be two to three years before things are back to normal for the cautious, at least in the U.S.”
In the US, the rate of passport holding is pretty low.. life can return to “normal” here without a lot of international travel. Those who travel internationally may be a different subset when it comes to “back to normal”.
Edit: “According to Census and State Department data, 21.4 million passports were issued in 2016, which is the most ever. That means 42 percent of Americans hold a passport, a growth of 15 percent since 2007. In 1990, only four percent of Americans had one.”
It's also not like international travel is zero at the moment, although it's certainly way down. Although I don't know for sure, I expect to be traveling internationally next fall.
I don't know the date it changed but you didn't used to need a passport to go to Mexico or Canada. (Technically you just need a passport card today but birth certificate is no longer enough.)
Why should our goal be a return to normal? Why not normalize wearing masks during flu season or when you have a cold? Why not mandate payments to let contagious workers stay home rather than spread infection all the time, not just during a pandemic? Why not mandate flu vaccines to attend school or take public service jobs?
I don’t think those kind of changes are what they mean. Many of the quotes seem to be expressing reluctance to socialize or be in large groups.
Perhaps more importantly, I think “let’s never go back to normal” is catastrophically bad messaging for those kinds of changes. A lot of people are desperate to go back to normal as they understand it; if we tell them “let’s never go back to normal”, they’ll tell us to shove it, even if they would have been fine with masking when you’re sick and excited about mandatory sick leave.
Uh, you've gotta do the exact opposite: you have to make people aware that they will have to wear masks and maintain social distancing even after the vaccine, for who knows how long.
Will depend on vaccine adoption, availability, etc.
Makes you wonder if stricter measures shouldn't have been taken right after the initial spread, just like many countries did and are currently in economic recovery.
But I think this is a good reflection of the attitude I’m concerned about. If you don’t know how long people should maintain social distancing, how can we tell whether it’s the right decision and how much compliance can we really expect?
It is the right decision for an highly infectious virus, that's passed through via small particles like aerosols and affects your respiratory system.
I know that no government has came forward to say it: but the decision to live with this virus was probably the most stupid mistake of the past 100 years, and comes in the time where politics and politicians were already seen for bad leadership and for being detached from the everyday reality.
For example, in my country, Portugal, we've been struggling with this and some weeks ago stricter measures were set in place - that came very late, after the national health system was on the verge of collapsing... what's the decision for the time of the year where most mobility is registered, Christmas?
"Let's stop the measures for 2 days, but be careful."
I shit you not. The most critical time for spread is when they let everyone go to each other homes.
The reason is simple, so no one can say they didn't let us celebrate Christmas, and they warned us to be careful - this is politics, it's not dealing with a pandemic and an health system on the verge of colapse.
---
So replying to your question, until there's no spread it's the right decision. Because living with the virus isn't good for the economy, and proof is countries with the virus controlled or with little to no cases, are in economic recovery (like we needed that data to know this, but still, there's something).
Having a disease ravage a country, kill friends and family, while the government does almost nothing to help, with millions upon millions of people say it’s a hoax or conspiracy, tends to have that effect on people.
The consequences of living in a failed state are something very few Americans are equipped to deal with using anything besides denial or extreme precaution. Maybe we can ask some people who survived Russia in the 90s what the right course of action should be.
When ussr collapsed there were periods of complete anarchy such as working for the railroad that the ussr guaranteed workers pay and pension. Suddenly it was on the states to decide how to handle that. Someone’s lively hood was ripped from underneath them and they had to continue working for nothing if they even had a job to go back to.
That seems very similar to people today who have an eviction looming over their head in a few weeks and no job to go back to.
Another example is 1932 America during depression times. Hardship is all around us, step off social media for a minute..
Miles long breadlines, widespread homelessness, mass deaths from disease and despair, an indifferent, ravenous oligarch class, enough money spent to solve all these problems on pointless war in literally the exact same place where the USSR conducted a pointless war that bankrupted them...
This virus has only killed 20,000 people under the age of 55 in America. That's way less than car accidents and the flu, etc. This is not a pandemic if you're under the age of 55 this isn't even the flu.
So any epidemiologist under the age of 55 who is fearful... I wouldn't trust their math skills.
Comparing the entire flu population during completely unlimited movement to COVID in a healthier group during restricted movement is fraudulent and you should be ashamed of yourself and your propaganda.
All kinds of not-so-good people believed they did "a public service" when they shamed or did horrible things to others.
I won't even mention a great example, lest I invoke a famous internet law.
All it takes is believing your side has all the truth, that is absolute and can't and shouldn't be unchallenged, and that the other side is necessarily not just misguided (they could not be merely having a different information and/or opinion, as your have all the truth), but also malevolent.
How about let's fucking DO compare "the entire flu population during completely unlimited movement to COVID in a healthier group during restricted movement" and the you can just point why you think it's fradulent, and the other side can point why they come to see the light and agree, or why they still disagree for this and that reason?
Something doesn't need to be false to be propaganda, such as the selective reporting of facts.
Just because I personally will likely be fine catching COVID doesn't mean I should be wanton with my actions that affect its spread. Such reasons include a personal responsibility to help prevent others from getting COVID, or how the strain on the medical system could affect my ability to access medical care for an unrelated issue (example, a car accident or the flu).
Another factor you're not looking at is long Covid - https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4470 - affects the young, and total consequences not yet known because this is new.
I am sympathetic to effects on the economy, schools, etc. of lockdowns. However, it seems that those that are against lockdowns are also against actions like mask wearing that would limit spread if more universally practiced.
Personal attacks are not allowed on HN, so please don't post like this, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. We're trying to avoid the online shaming culture here.
They don't have to fear for themselves to be fearful.
Yes, senior citizens are at higher risk. That does not mean the young have to stop living. Just that you have the opportunity to be nice to senior citizens.
It could also be that those epidemiologists just know in practice what it's like to not be lucky with COVID. See you in a month with your new and shiny tracheostomy.
What about the 10's of millions of people in poverty in America. And the millions more that are entering poverty due to Covid shutting down their places of work.
This unfair trade-off only exists because people, and especially americans, are totally unable to respect simple and rational rules to avoid transmission. In addition to that there's also the "mask issue" which is plain ridiculous.
People are getting poorer because they are stupid.
At risk for what? We literally don’t know what damage is inflicted to a body that recovers from COVID-19, or how that may affect near and long term health.
Too many people think you can get this disease and get over it like chickenpox. We just don’t know if that’s remotely true.
Well, I'm quite confident that death is a possible answer to that question. Also quite likely: a year of horrible suffering in rehab with good-intentioned people sticking needles into you regularly before dying from mundane bacterial pneumonia.
Doesn't that go both ways? What about the actions that affect younger people? Seems like you virtue signal for one side while ignoring the suffering of others.
No, they just see it as a societal problem instead of a personal one.
If everybody saw it that way, we'd probably be closer to Taiwan than the shit show we are running. At least another 200,000 deaths are more or less built into the current US situation (but it will probably be worse than that). That it isn't slaughtering younger people doesn't really offset that.
The difference is that they (China/Korea/Taiwan/&c...) learned their lesson the first time around, and had the policies, systems, and general training in place to stop this early.
My suspicion is that the reaction of a US/EU/ect... to the 'next' pandemic will be the same regardless of how bad this one turns out, simply because they will have the time (as in, years & decades) to get their policy responses in order.
Sure, if you have no parents or grandparents or other relatives over the age of 55 that you care about. No friends, co-workers, doctors, mentors etc over 55 who you care about. And not caring about anyone over 55 in general, as fellow human persons.
And also not relying on anyone over 55 in an indirect sense - those working in and managing hospitals, legal systems, physical infrastructure, schools and universities, banking, agriculture, industry and so on.
If you truly are a person like that, for you there is nothing to be concerned about - and you are probably enjoying the reaction you are getting here.
How long until we end this myth that hospitals will be overcrowded?
That's been propaganda for the better part of a year and it hasn't happened yet, even in places with basically no Covid restrictions like Sweden and Utah.
That's just not feasible. "Those people" still have to eat, so they still have to come in contact with grocery store employees, for example. They still need medical care, so they still have to come in contact with a variety of medical personnel. They don't live in a bubble.
I know "staying away from people over 55" seems logical, but it hasn't been possible in practice to segregate by age. The problem is transistive closure.
For example, in aged-care homes, the workers live in the general community, and if the virus is in the community, they get it and pass it on. Could the workers be segregated, in a bubble with the aged-care home? Their outside life would be cut off: the above social/services/supplies. Should their own families be with them in the bubble - or cut off from them? Where do you draw the line? Can it be drawn?
This same issue of transistive closure occurs for all over 55. Everyone is connected, and an epidemic follows those connections. This has been better put:
No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
> The epidemiologists have almost entirely avoided other parts of pre-pandemic life — including activities that many Americans are doing now. Almost none said they had attended a sporting event, play or concert; met up with someone they didn’t know well; or attended a wedding or funeral.
Sorry, where are these people living where it’s even possible to do these things?
Are you asking in the sense, how are they accomplishing this, or how are they even given the choice of this? Because in the US, a lot of those things are still on the table.
Well Europe has people in soccer/football stadiums. The US has people in football(American style) in stadiums. The states has "famously" had several country music concerts that, well probably not a wise idea to attend, were packed.
And I feel pretty confident saying that practically every country on the face of hte planet has atleast one wedding a day.
I mean, I've been to 4 funerals over the summer and I live in Canada.
Where are you that there are no funerals or visitations to attend?
I see you don’t live in the south. Just got off a FaceTime with my sister in law who is currently at a farmers market with her kids. I am intrigued how others would respond to this, I just had to watch on in disbelief (these kind of actions are the norm down here)
It's not a "farmers market" but the local small farm stand and other local farm store type places have been open all summer where I live in the Northeast. Why wouldn't they be if grocery stores are open?
There are drive-in concerts in my city in the US. Weddings are allowed to be held outdoors. Some states have allowed limited spectators of professional sports.
> Of 23 activities of daily life that the survey asked about, there were only three that the majority of respondents had done in the last month: gathering outdoors with friends; bringing in mail without precautions; and running errands, like going to the grocery store or pharmacy.
> Almost none said they had attended a sporting event, play or concert; met up with someone they didn’t know well; or attended a wedding or funeral.
> Three-quarters of respondents said they planned to spend Christmas, Hanukkah or other winter holidays only with members of their household, or not celebrate at all, similar to how they spent Thanksgiving.
> Most scientists say around 70 percent of the population will need to be immune for the United States to reach herd immunity, when the virus slows down significantly or stops.
A reminder: 70% number is probably based on the estimates of R_0~3.0 for Covid-19 (1-1/3). Even with partial vaccination some activities can be carefully resumed as long as R_t stays under 1.0.
No... they are the correct norm of cautious, it's the rest of us that are blithely charging around recklessly with wild abandon. It's like how on Star Trek they were always beaming to new planets in their regular uniforms with no spacesuits or anything. The gimmick or conceit there was that the transporter filtered out nasty bugs during rematerialization. Until we have "magic" bug filters jet-setting is a disease vector.
People are talking about "returning to normal" but there's no normal to return to: mass international rapid transit is not normal. Huge cities with millions of people are not normal. Nothing about the last ~N centuries is normal (for whatever value of N up to about 120 or so? Younger Dryas happened about 12Ky ago, eh? The Potbelly Hill dates from around the 10th millennium BCE[1]. Somewhere around there we started in with farms and cities. This has been the blink of an eye in evolutionary and geological timeframes. Everything we're doing is new and radical!)
What I'm getting at is this: this won't be the last virus. Remember swine flu? SARS? Ebola? Zika? Hantavirus? Heck, Lyme? Polio is making a comeback, that's the one that paralyses children.
We keep expanding into new wilderness. The "attack surface" of humanity is growing exponentially.
There's no normal to go back to.
(I really do hate to be such a downer, but I just don't see a lot of people taking the long view. Everyone is understandably eager to get back to pretending that viruses don't exist, but they do. Connect the goddamned dots.)
I mean, sure, if you define "normal" as something other than what was there before, okay, but then it becomes a moot point. There is a clear meaning to what "normal" means when people say it, and it's "whatever we were doing before".
That's what I mean, what we were doing before was exponential growth and the Industrial Revolution resulting in, specifically, mass international travel and huge numbers of people crammed together into mega-cities. The recent viral outbreaks aren't a one-off: they are the beginning of the new normal. We're victims of our own success.
Epidemiologists are the experts, I'm baffled why so many people are asking physicians about coronavirus.
Physicians are not scientists, they aren't supposed to make policy decisions.
It goes to show how few people understand what Science is and probably more dangerously that Medical is mistakenly thought as Science. (Medical is older than the scientific revolution,it's a hybrid of Tradition/Authority/Art/Science)
Epidemiologists are also MDs. And epidemiology also is a hybrid of the kind you mention. Dogmas exist in every science, and although it is true that clinical medicine is far behind other disciplines regarding getting rid of dogmas, things are improving steadily.
Epidemiologists don't always understand better regarding what to do in practice. They understand things in their own manner shaped by their profession and that's exactly what we ask of them.
Some are MDs, but most have a Ph.D or MPH (Master of Public Health) instead or in addition to a MD. Epidemiology is a science and one that is not well covered in medical schools.
Epidemiology is a science as much as for instance infectiology is a science. An aggregate of best practices relying only partially on hard (experimental or mathematical) science. For example IMO, the Bradford Hill criteria are backed by informal reasoning and although seemingly trivially logical, are very much dogmatic in nature.
It's true that many epidemiologists are not MDs, though. I formulated my thoughts badly in that regard.
Epidemiology of COVID-19 has been a train wreck. Indeed we must ask if epidemiology is a science at all.
Interviewing 700 epidemiologists is a fool's errand providing no useful information. One might as well simplify the selection criteria and interview 700 (or better, simply 30) people of above-average intelligence.
ree2OSS says>"Physicians are not scientists, they aren't supposed to make policy decisions."<
I agree with the first sentence but not with the second. Most medical organizations/hospitals/institutions/clinics are headed up by physicians who make policy decisions all day long.
“Interviewing 700 epidemiologists is a fool's errand providing no useful information.”
Do you seriously believe there is “no useful information” from such an exercise? None? Methinks you are being facetious.
I agree you shouldn’t necessarily follow what they say they do, but even realizing there is a diversity of responses among those who have some formal training is surely of some value. Especially among the target audience of the NYT that tends to believe what an authority tells them more than the average American.
> Scientists don't make policy decisions either. Politicians do.
Even politicians aren't that good at solving this issue clearly.
It's because centralization is bad at responding to the needs of individuals.
> The reason that this top-down bureaucratic management approach does not work is because the knowledge we need to plan is local, widely dispersed, and held by individuals. Hayek’s point, which won him Nobel honors in 1974, was that there is no such thing as a centralized repository of knowledge from which epidemiologists, policy-makers, or anyone else “in charge” can pull any required data at any time and then — poof — solve societal problems. He further warned that we must treat economic problems differently from scientific problems. Truer words have not been spoken regarding how we should think about the COVID-19 pandemic. Successfully containing COVID-19 is a problem that both requires scientific investigation and economic thinking.
Even relatively informed people don't understand that physicians aren't members of the scientific class and in practice are closer to car mechanics than fuel chemists.
A person with a DMA, DPA, or a DMM are all still called "Doctor" colloquially, but not people with a JD.
A Doctorate of Science should by the sound of it be the one that members of the science class have, not a PhD, but it curiously represents both an award that's equivalent, beyond, and less than a PhD depending on who awards it and how it's awarded -- and is curiously often the degree of choice for medical doctors and other health practitioners but almost never the degree for chemists, biologists, physicists or other sciences.
Most people don't even know there are doctorate degrees other than PhD.
>Most people don't even know there are doctorate degrees other than PhD
I think you sort of answered why institutions often award a PhD rather than ScD/DSc/etc. (And there are some related examples related to Masters degrees.) If there's an industry job opening for a PhD, how many ScD resumes end up getting filtered out because the candidate doesn't have the "right" degree? I've definitely heard this type of thing on occasion from graduates who don't or at least didn't award the standard degrees. Even my undergraduate degree isn't quite "normal" (SB vs. BS) so I use the standard form on my resume not that it matters at this point.
I can't remember at the moment, either Harvard or John Hopkins was phasing out the ScD because it didn't have the "brand" recognition of the PhD and for years both degrees had exactly the same programs.
These epidemiologists have some strange priorities in life. Only about 3% of them would have, if needed, attended a wedding or funeral. Ten times as many would have gone for a haircut.
A haircut exposes them to probably one person in close contact, with precautions like masks. A wedding or funeral has potentially a large number of close contacts and presents ethical issues of supporting the event even if the epidemiologist participating will take personal precautions.
All this tells you is that they believe weddings and funerals are likely higher risk than getting a haircut. I would agree that's a sensible assessment.
The question though was what they had personally done.
I am a bit surprised haircut was so high, not because a haircut is likely especially risky but because--to me--it seems so unnecessary, especially without being out and about a lot. Going to a dentist for a cleaning or whatever is maybe higher risk (more contact but medical professionals) but it also seems more important to stick with your schedule than getting your hair cut is.
(Their answers also are presumably influenced by how frequently they would normally do the activities in question as well as the degree to which they're available at the moment. During normal times I'd be much more likely to have recently flown someplace than gone to a wedding or even a live sporting event.)
Their predictions of future human behavior are bunk. First, look at the heterogeneity in behavior across the epidemiologists - indoor dining, hanging out without social distancing and going to gyms! This lack of consensus indicates that epidemiologists do not think alike and hence that field is not a settled science. Second, life has mostly returned the normal in the far east where they have successfully contained the virus so far. This is before a vaccine. Human beings have short memories otherwise humans would not indulge in repeated destructive behavior on an individual (alcoholism) or societal level (bubbles, mass hysteria). Finally, after past pandemics like the Spanish flu, life did return to normal. The great depression more scarred human behavior than the Spanish flu ever did.
Epidemiologists are essential during a pandemic to help us understand the virus, the properties of its spread and build models of human behavior along with risks/costs. We need to factor in their input along with advice from others. However, the notion that Epidemiologists are the best mediators of our behavior during and after this epidemic has been falsified. Why?
Exhibit 1: Masking
The consensus at the beginning of the pandemic and through most of the summer was that masks are not essential because we lack the evidence of it. Folks like Taleb et.al, Zeynep, Balaji, Howard et.al in the US who understand complex systems argued for masks back in Jan/Feb. This skepticism of masking because of lack of evidence probably bumped up death count by 50-90%.
Exhibit 2: Epidemiology Models
The models have been greatly off and as a modeler in an unrelated field, I could see the heterogeneity in the model predictions across models and intra-model volatility. When a bunch of models differ, the question is not which is right but are they all wrong? A lot of the models like the one from Imperial had predictions that moved by a lot and never converged to the observed behavior.
"...look at the heterogeneity in behavior across the epidemiologists - indoor dining, hanging out without social distancing and going to gyms! This lack of consensus indicates that epidemiologists do not think alike and hence that field is not a settled science.
Scientists exhibiting different personal behaviors has very minimal connection to scientific consensus. Is settled science that smoking causes lung disease and yet some doctors smoke. Just because you know what the "safe" behavior is doesn't mean you're going to do it. And if the question is, which of these have you done and not which of these do you think is safe to do, then the question isn't about best practices at all.
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[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 905 ms ] threadhttps://news.yahoo.com/700-epidemiologists-living-now-think-...
140 million vaccinated (approx the number of flu vaccinations administered last year) + tens of millions with natural immunity does put us close to the herd immunity threshold (the number of people that have immunity from an infection has big error bars of course, and there will likely be overlap)
Also, acquired immunity might not be forever. Could be possible to get reinfected.
And you have a very optimistic understanding of how many vaccines can be manufactured and distributed, I would guess.
Distributed, probably so. I don't see any reason to doubt the manufacturers statements yet, and I'm not including the potential/likely J&J vaccine.
And while we don't know how long acquired immunity lasts, it's pretty clear that it lasts a good while (it's still a freak occurrence when someone tests positive after recovering from a first infection).
Unfortunately a PCR result at a 35 cycle threshold (which the vast majority of tests in the U.S. are) does not prove that a person was infected and has immunity, only that there was exposure that is detectable. It may never even have entered the bloodstream.
Only antibody testing will show if there was a immune response and if there is immune memory. We're not doing that at scale.
Unless the federal government gets real with it, and releases an app that leverages scheduling systems to mass coordinate a roll out, this too will be a clusterfuck. The healthcare administrative staff (your standard hospital/clinical administrative staff) is not innovative enough at the moment to adapt to the challenge.
Shame on our politicians, shame of Fauci for not making this clear.
One quote from this article:
“For some, it has gone back to normal, and because of this, it will be two to three years before things are back to normal for the cautious, at least in the U.S.”
After all, if the world can only produce 2 billion doses of vaccine a year it'll be a few years before international travel is back to normal.
Some of the people surveyed may even have responded before vaccine clinical trial results came out...
Edit: “According to Census and State Department data, 21.4 million passports were issued in 2016, which is the most ever. That means 42 percent of Americans hold a passport, a growth of 15 percent since 2007. In 1990, only four percent of Americans had one.”
Perhaps more importantly, I think “let’s never go back to normal” is catastrophically bad messaging for those kinds of changes. A lot of people are desperate to go back to normal as they understand it; if we tell them “let’s never go back to normal”, they’ll tell us to shove it, even if they would have been fine with masking when you’re sick and excited about mandatory sick leave.
Will depend on vaccine adoption, availability, etc.
Makes you wonder if stricter measures shouldn't have been taken right after the initial spread, just like many countries did and are currently in economic recovery.
I know that no government has came forward to say it: but the decision to live with this virus was probably the most stupid mistake of the past 100 years, and comes in the time where politics and politicians were already seen for bad leadership and for being detached from the everyday reality.
For example, in my country, Portugal, we've been struggling with this and some weeks ago stricter measures were set in place - that came very late, after the national health system was on the verge of collapsing... what's the decision for the time of the year where most mobility is registered, Christmas?
"Let's stop the measures for 2 days, but be careful."
I shit you not. The most critical time for spread is when they let everyone go to each other homes.
The reason is simple, so no one can say they didn't let us celebrate Christmas, and they warned us to be careful - this is politics, it's not dealing with a pandemic and an health system on the verge of colapse.
---
So replying to your question, until there's no spread it's the right decision. Because living with the virus isn't good for the economy, and proof is countries with the virus controlled or with little to no cases, are in economic recovery (like we needed that data to know this, but still, there's something).
The consequences of living in a failed state are something very few Americans are equipped to deal with using anything besides denial or extreme precaution. Maybe we can ask some people who survived Russia in the 90s what the right course of action should be.
That seems very similar to people today who have an eviction looming over their head in a few weeks and no job to go back to.
Another example is 1932 America during depression times. Hardship is all around us, step off social media for a minute..
Take your own advice.
So any epidemiologist under the age of 55 who is fearful... I wouldn't trust their math skills.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
Heres actual recent CDC data showing that only 20k people have died of Covid in the almost year so far.
https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Death-Counts-...
>you should be ashamed of yourself and your propaganda
Rudeness is uncalled for.
I won't even mention a great example, lest I invoke a famous internet law.
All it takes is believing your side has all the truth, that is absolute and can't and shouldn't be unchallenged, and that the other side is necessarily not just misguided (they could not be merely having a different information and/or opinion, as your have all the truth), but also malevolent.
How about let's fucking DO compare "the entire flu population during completely unlimited movement to COVID in a healthier group during restricted movement" and the you can just point why you think it's fradulent, and the other side can point why they come to see the light and agree, or why they still disagree for this and that reason?
It's completely self-evident unless you are so committed to false fairness in dumb internet debates you broke your own brain.
The fact remains only 20,000 people under the age of 55 have died of Covid. 55 years or younge is 80% of the population in America.
Why are we destroying our society and way of life, when we could simply quarantine a fraction of the population until a vaccine comes out?
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
Just because I personally will likely be fine catching COVID doesn't mean I should be wanton with my actions that affect its spread. Such reasons include a personal responsibility to help prevent others from getting COVID, or how the strain on the medical system could affect my ability to access medical care for an unrelated issue (example, a car accident or the flu).
I am sympathetic to effects on the economy, schools, etc. of lockdowns. However, it seems that those that are against lockdowns are also against actions like mask wearing that would limit spread if more universally practiced.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=online%20shaming%20by%3Adang&s...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Yes, senior citizens are at higher risk. That does not mean the young have to stop living. Just that you have the opportunity to be nice to senior citizens.
It could also be that those epidemiologists just know in practice what it's like to not be lucky with COVID. See you in a month with your new and shiny tracheostomy.
Am epidemiologist, FWIW.
80% of the population is under 55 years old. This is not a societal problem.
It's not a fair tradeoff in my opionion.
People are getting poorer because they are stupid.
Too many people think you can get this disease and get over it like chickenpox. We just don’t know if that’s remotely true.
Well, I'm quite confident that death is a possible answer to that question. Also quite likely: a year of horrible suffering in rehab with good-intentioned people sticking needles into you regularly before dying from mundane bacterial pneumonia.
There's 50 million people in poverty and their children who would benefit from Covid restrictions being lifted.
If everybody saw it that way, we'd probably be closer to Taiwan than the shit show we are running. At least another 200,000 deaths are more or less built into the current US situation (but it will probably be worse than that). That it isn't slaughtering younger people doesn't really offset that.
My suspicion is that the reaction of a US/EU/ect... to the 'next' pandemic will be the same regardless of how bad this one turns out, simply because they will have the time (as in, years & decades) to get their policy responses in order.
And also not relying on anyone over 55 in an indirect sense - those working in and managing hospitals, legal systems, physical infrastructure, schools and universities, banking, agriculture, industry and so on.
If you truly are a person like that, for you there is nothing to be concerned about - and you are probably enjoying the reaction you are getting here.
It's not a societal problem that's an individual problem.
Lots of people under 55 hospitalized. If there is more stress on health care, some of these people won't get optimal care and will die.
That's been propaganda for the better part of a year and it hasn't happened yet, even in places with basically no Covid restrictions like Sweden and Utah.
What about the small businesses and young people trying to get a start in life.
They need to eat too.
For example, in aged-care homes, the workers live in the general community, and if the virus is in the community, they get it and pass it on. Could the workers be segregated, in a bubble with the aged-care home? Their outside life would be cut off: the above social/services/supplies. Should their own families be with them in the bubble - or cut off from them? Where do you draw the line? Can it be drawn?
This same issue of transistive closure occurs for all over 55. Everyone is connected, and an epidemic follows those connections. This has been better put:
Sorry, where are these people living where it’s even possible to do these things?
And I feel pretty confident saying that practically every country on the face of hte planet has atleast one wedding a day.
I mean, I've been to 4 funerals over the summer and I live in Canada.
Where are you that there are no funerals or visitations to attend?
I see the same behavior in supermarkets too. It’s like we can’t be inconvenienced even temporarily because apples..
> Almost none said they had attended a sporting event, play or concert; met up with someone they didn’t know well; or attended a wedding or funeral.
> Three-quarters of respondents said they planned to spend Christmas, Hanukkah or other winter holidays only with members of their household, or not celebrate at all, similar to how they spent Thanksgiving.
> Most scientists say around 70 percent of the population will need to be immune for the United States to reach herd immunity, when the virus slows down significantly or stops.
No... they are the correct norm of cautious, it's the rest of us that are blithely charging around recklessly with wild abandon. It's like how on Star Trek they were always beaming to new planets in their regular uniforms with no spacesuits or anything. The gimmick or conceit there was that the transporter filtered out nasty bugs during rematerialization. Until we have "magic" bug filters jet-setting is a disease vector.
People are talking about "returning to normal" but there's no normal to return to: mass international rapid transit is not normal. Huge cities with millions of people are not normal. Nothing about the last ~N centuries is normal (for whatever value of N up to about 120 or so? Younger Dryas happened about 12Ky ago, eh? The Potbelly Hill dates from around the 10th millennium BCE[1]. Somewhere around there we started in with farms and cities. This has been the blink of an eye in evolutionary and geological timeframes. Everything we're doing is new and radical!)
What I'm getting at is this: this won't be the last virus. Remember swine flu? SARS? Ebola? Zika? Hantavirus? Heck, Lyme? Polio is making a comeback, that's the one that paralyses children.
We keep expanding into new wilderness. The "attack surface" of humanity is growing exponentially.
There's no normal to go back to.
(I really do hate to be such a downer, but I just don't see a lot of people taking the long view. Everyone is understandably eager to get back to pretending that viruses don't exist, but they do. Connect the goddamned dots.)
[1] Göbekli Tepe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
I mean, sure, if you define "normal" as something other than what was there before, okay, but then it becomes a moot point. There is a clear meaning to what "normal" means when people say it, and it's "whatever we were doing before".
Who defines what "normal" really is, anyway?
Physicians are not scientists, they aren't supposed to make policy decisions.
It goes to show how few people understand what Science is and probably more dangerously that Medical is mistakenly thought as Science. (Medical is older than the scientific revolution,it's a hybrid of Tradition/Authority/Art/Science)
Epidemiologists don't always understand better regarding what to do in practice. They understand things in their own manner shaped by their profession and that's exactly what we ask of them.
It's true that many epidemiologists are not MDs, though. I formulated my thoughts badly in that regard.
Epidemiology of COVID-19 has been a train wreck. Indeed we must ask if epidemiology is a science at all.
Interviewing 700 epidemiologists is a fool's errand providing no useful information. One might as well simplify the selection criteria and interview 700 (or better, simply 30) people of above-average intelligence.
ree2OSS says>"Physicians are not scientists, they aren't supposed to make policy decisions."<
I agree with the first sentence but not with the second. Most medical organizations/hospitals/institutions/clinics are headed up by physicians who make policy decisions all day long.
Do you seriously believe there is “no useful information” from such an exercise? None? Methinks you are being facetious.
I agree you shouldn’t necessarily follow what they say they do, but even realizing there is a diversity of responses among those who have some formal training is surely of some value. Especially among the target audience of the NYT that tends to believe what an authority tells them more than the average American.
Neither are epidemiologists.
> they aren't supposed to make policy decisions.
Scientists don't make policy decisions either. Politicians do.
> It goes to show how few people understand what Science is
Ain't that the truth.
Even politicians aren't that good at solving this issue clearly.
It's because centralization is bad at responding to the needs of individuals.
> The reason that this top-down bureaucratic management approach does not work is because the knowledge we need to plan is local, widely dispersed, and held by individuals. Hayek’s point, which won him Nobel honors in 1974, was that there is no such thing as a centralized repository of knowledge from which epidemiologists, policy-makers, or anyone else “in charge” can pull any required data at any time and then — poof — solve societal problems. He further warned that we must treat economic problems differently from scientific problems. Truer words have not been spoken regarding how we should think about the COVID-19 pandemic. Successfully containing COVID-19 is a problem that both requires scientific investigation and economic thinking.
https://spectator.org/covid-experts-shutdowns/
Even relatively informed people don't understand that physicians aren't members of the scientific class and in practice are closer to car mechanics than fuel chemists.
A person with a DMA, DPA, or a DMM are all still called "Doctor" colloquially, but not people with a JD.
A Doctorate of Science should by the sound of it be the one that members of the science class have, not a PhD, but it curiously represents both an award that's equivalent, beyond, and less than a PhD depending on who awards it and how it's awarded -- and is curiously often the degree of choice for medical doctors and other health practitioners but almost never the degree for chemists, biologists, physicists or other sciences.
Most people don't even know there are doctorate degrees other than PhD.
I think you sort of answered why institutions often award a PhD rather than ScD/DSc/etc. (And there are some related examples related to Masters degrees.) If there's an industry job opening for a PhD, how many ScD resumes end up getting filtered out because the candidate doesn't have the "right" degree? I've definitely heard this type of thing on occasion from graduates who don't or at least didn't award the standard degrees. Even my undergraduate degree isn't quite "normal" (SB vs. BS) so I use the standard form on my resume not that it matters at this point.
I am a bit surprised haircut was so high, not because a haircut is likely especially risky but because--to me--it seems so unnecessary, especially without being out and about a lot. Going to a dentist for a cleaning or whatever is maybe higher risk (more contact but medical professionals) but it also seems more important to stick with your schedule than getting your hair cut is.
(Their answers also are presumably influenced by how frequently they would normally do the activities in question as well as the degree to which they're available at the moment. During normal times I'd be much more likely to have recently flown someplace than gone to a wedding or even a live sporting event.)
Epidemiologists are essential during a pandemic to help us understand the virus, the properties of its spread and build models of human behavior along with risks/costs. We need to factor in their input along with advice from others. However, the notion that Epidemiologists are the best mediators of our behavior during and after this epidemic has been falsified. Why?
Exhibit 1: Masking
The consensus at the beginning of the pandemic and through most of the summer was that masks are not essential because we lack the evidence of it. Folks like Taleb et.al, Zeynep, Balaji, Howard et.al in the US who understand complex systems argued for masks back in Jan/Feb. This skepticism of masking because of lack of evidence probably bumped up death count by 50-90%.
Exhibit 2: Epidemiology Models
The models have been greatly off and as a modeler in an unrelated field, I could see the heterogeneity in the model predictions across models and intra-model volatility. When a bunch of models differ, the question is not which is right but are they all wrong? A lot of the models like the one from Imperial had predictions that moved by a lot and never converged to the observed behavior.
Scientists exhibiting different personal behaviors has very minimal connection to scientific consensus. Is settled science that smoking causes lung disease and yet some doctors smoke. Just because you know what the "safe" behavior is doesn't mean you're going to do it. And if the question is, which of these have you done and not which of these do you think is safe to do, then the question isn't about best practices at all.