I'm from California and what blows my mind is that places like gyms, bars, and restaurants were allowed to have people indoors before places personal care places like hair and nail salons, barbers, waxing centers, and tattoo parlors because all these professions (for the most part) follow good sanitization practices. And unlike restaurants and bars, these are not places you'd bring large groups as the services rendered are 1-on-1 typically. Liquor stores are still open, why are bars needed? I cannot cut my own hair (well) for example, and tattoo parlors, waxing centers, and salons all have specialty tools and services you simply cannot do at home.
Also, why are we not focused on making sure education is able to start back up in the fall? Why did we prioritize opening restaurants (who already has a revenue stream: togo orders) and bars? I get recreational stuff is needed, but the bars, for example should be among the last to open. It sucks for the business owner, and they need more federal support to stay afloat. How are paying this much in tax and getting nothing when we need it the most?
I agree with most of your points, but not some of the conclusions.
Re-opening schools is very high priority, and very very difficult (some say not possible until we have a cure, full stop). Re-opening a restaurant is fairly low priority, and very very easy.
This isn't a board game where a player can only make one decision every turn. Opening restaurants and bars now does not mean that schools open earlier, or later, or at all.
("re-opening will cause another spike, which is pushing out the epidemic longer" Re-opening is going fine in NYC, terribly in the sunbelt. It can be done safely or it can be done badly.)
This is what I was getting at. Eventually, we're likely going to give teachers the same treatment as doctors and essential workers.
> You are essential!
> You are a hero!
> You are giving your life to teach these kids!
If it's any repeat of the last few months, teachers would be expected to return with districts refusing to hand out hazard pay or anything else that actually matters. I guess putting one's live on the line is payable via thoughts and prayers?
Sorry, if the people in charge really thought these things, they would be paying them more for danger they're being put in.
>How are we paying this much in tax and getting nothing when we need it the most?
Corruption. Just look at the types of organizations that did get enormous PPP "loans" (actually grants, free money when used spent at least 60% on wages).
> Just look at the types of organizations that did get enormous PPP "loans"
Given that the state of California isn't the the entity that's handing out PPP loans, I'm not sure what this has to do with anything.
> Corruption
Agree with your broader assessment of what's wrong with California. Ultimately, the people in charge have realized that they can continue their corrupt ways and as long as they keep the NIMBY landowner class happy with low property taxes and the limousine liberal crowd happy with virtue signalling moves, they will get their votes.
The nature of PPP seemed to be "just get it out there" by leveraging the banks but it didn't occur to government how big the influx of applicants would be and smaller business got shafted since they don't have the same resources as bigger businesses.
So, you have situations where mom&pop sized businesses are constantly on the phone trying to get into PPP while trying to keep their business afloat by last minute transitioning to pick-up/delivery models. Meanwhile, bigger institutions can sic a dedicated team to PPP. By the time m&p get the PPP (if ever) it's already been exhausted or the amount was trivial.
This is a classic example of "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." The problem congress had was simple: Businesses need help keeping staff and paying bills. The solution was also simple, give the businesses some cash asap.
To implement this solution would prove to be tricky as magically poofing billions of dollars into the hands of these businesses requires a lot more than just handing a check to people who filed taxes and thus were on record. They thought they would leverage an institution that already issues money to their audience here: business loans.
This sounds great, right? Fed says (not a direct quote), "Go ahead and issue money to (almost) any business who asks for it and we will guarantee it" and, "Businesses who qualify will have it forgiven." It uses a system already in place to get cash out fast to people, rather than the law requiring a website to be built out among other bits of infrastructure as by the time this is done, many businesses would have likely gone under when this cash could have helped them prevent that.
The problems, however, present themselves very quickly. First, banks were reluctant to loan money out to organizations with no credit, but the fed guaranteed all of these loans, right? Well, kind of. They guaranteed up to an amount issued but if banks loaned out more, they would be on the hook for servicing that loan to a business that is already struggling. The information as how this would be divided amongst banks was also unclear. In short, banks did not trust that congress would have their backs if something got messed up with the interpretation of the language and delegation of available funds. The second issue was where they favored large businesses who would likely have been able to weather the pandemic and thus they could collect the loan from if Uncle Sam did not end up backing it for technicalities. It's also easier to make 100 large loans of $100,000 than 500 small loans of $20,000.
Small businesses represent more than 2/3 (fig. might be outdated) of all businesses, they are typically among the top employers in rural areas, providing livelihoods to people living in smaller communities and this shit has screwed them big time. Many have closed, and more will close, that will never reopen again.
1) Helping to make sure business (specifically bars and restaurants) don't keep closing
2) Getting people off unemployment
And just telling restaurants to stay on to go orders doesn't pay the bills. Most of these also sell alcohol. So revenue alone from to go may not pay the rent, not to mention you don't have the same amount of staff on either.
Schools aren't going to close if we keep kids out of them longer, and in theory teachers can still be paid because it comes from property tax money. Unless of course people can't pay their taxes anymore because they're unemployed/broke.
So I think they're two separate problems. The issue with school at this point is most likely a societal one which consists of:
- Parents who will have to go back to work at some point, have to have a place to send their children during the day (this is a whole other WFH conversation where appropriate).
- Parents who do WFH but have no time to do learning during the day with their kids (or being unwilling for whatever reason).
- Parents aren't teachers, so learning/development will probably suffer anyway.
- Not all districts were setup to work like this. Think about underfunded urban schools or rural ones where technology might be a problem.
As vibernum mentioned[1], tax revenue comes into play as well.
My municipality's school budget, as an example, is heavily reliant on a portion of local sales tax proceeds in addition to property taxes. So at a time when they're having an unanticipated spike in immediate expenses (increased sanitation/facilities costs, pppe costs, widescale elearning investments and implementation, drastically increased administrative burden, capital purchases for student technology, etc), they're also seeing an unanticipated drop in revenue.
It really is a shame the federal government isn't stepping up more in this area. Even with the relatively small amount of relief funds allocated to primary education, states are having to sue the Education Department to even keep their hands on what they've been allocated[2].
> 1) Helping to make sure business (specifically bars and restaurants) don't keep closing
I don't disagree with this, but I would like to pose the question: What makes them more valuable (and thus worth saving) than other types of businesses?
The taxation structure is the most likely explanation which show you exactly were priorities are. Officials allowed open a very risky type of business as far as transmission goes (bars) for cash flow.
Personal care places involves the employee being in extremely close proximity to the customer for tens of minutes, which is impossible to socially distance. The risk of transfer is going to be much higher than places like gyms and restaurants, where you can separate patrons, and employees are in close proximity only for very brief amounts of time.
It is still (so far as I'm aware) unknown just how effective the masks are versus social distancing, so the comparative risk of a maskless-but-distanced restaurant environment versus a masked-but-not-distanced barber shop is unknown to me. Were we more focused on actually dealing with coronavirus, we'd be aggressively testing and tracing these places to find out the answers, but the US seems to have generally forgotten that testing and tracing matters.
IMO, a big issue is people forgetting or actively eschewing the customary precautions - going into social mode and stopping paying attention to distancing, or wearing their mask on their chin because nobody will call them out. In this regard, restaurants and bars are much worse than service businesses where participants remain specifically focused on the task at hand.
Opening restaurants and bars just seems to be pushing for some forced return to normality, so that the non-risk-adverse can pretend the epidemic is going away on its own. Restaurants themselves, like much of the economy, would be better served by a rent moratorium than this impatient rush to get the treadmill moving again.
As we are discovering with SARS-CoV-2 being transmitted in aerosol form, the limits of masks and social distancing become apparent. If everyone wears a mask (cloth, not n95 grade), they emit X number of aerosols. So the longer you're around someone, even masked, the higher the risk. And aerosols can linger for quite a long time in an enclosed setting.
Social distancing can help, but limiting how many people are emitting, but neither it nor masks are adequate if a significant portion of the population you're around is shedding virus.
Because restaurant and bar owners have a lot more political connections than hair and nail salons, barbers, waxing centers, and tattoo parlors. This isn't particular to California or the US, it is true worldwide.
In Texas, a salon owner basically broke the Governors business shut down order, then became a conservative celebrity, and ended up having the whole thing removed resulting in accelerated re-opening of the state. A lump of the blame for the current spike of COVID cases in the state finds its root in that salon owner's stunt.
School starting is going to be such an unmitigated disaster. With the utterly inept handling of this pandemic (not just Trump, but our entire rotting neoliberal government) it just won't be feasible. Even if they do open, many teachers won't show up, and many parents will keep their kids home.
Talk of social distancing in schools is just ludicrous. It makes one wonder whether these officials have ever stepped foot inside of a school. Resources would be far better spent on trying to do remote learning passably well. For example, making sure that all schoolchildren have access to fast and reliable internet on a real computer, etc.
My wife actually wondered why they don't just "skip" this year - let everybody stay home and pretend this school year never even happened, and everybody who would have graduated in, say, 2023 will now graduate in 2024. I'm not sure that's such a bad idea - maybe better than remote learning.
Interesting idea - particularly for those that can manage it with their jobs. But then do you just keep paying everyone in public education for a whole year to take the year off, too?
Here in Seattle, the last 3 months of school the kids were enrolled in was a complete and utter joke. I have two kids, one in middle school and the other in elementary. When the kids got online to talk to teachers it was never about actual instruction, course work, etc. It was almost entirely kum-ba-yah sessions where the teachers would ask the kids what they were doing and how they were feeling. School was essentially put on hold. Grades were sent out and based mainly on the 1st half of the year.
The prospect of remote learning is very promising, but at least in 2020 there seems to be an utter lack in leadership or will to implement a quality product. It's a race to the bottom.
Skipping a year? Honestly, I think even if my kids wind up doing remote learning in the Fall they'll be going through the motions but intellectually skipping a year anyway. It's a mess.
> It was almost entirely kum-ba-yah sessions where the teachers would ask the kids what they were doing and how they were feeling.
Maybe in the middle of a pandemic, when you’re trapped at home, away from your friends, with parents who are busy working — what you really need is a little kumbaya?
At some point we need to transition away from “crisis mode” but making sure kids are doing ok, when their worlds have been turned upside-down, seems like a completely reasonable use of time to me.
I understand this. And honestly, a part of me believes in several years we (my wife and I) will look back on this time with fondness as we've never been able to spend this much time together as a family unit.
But what I meant in the OP was how - across 3 months - school was put on hold even though my kids would dial in a few times a week. I could tell some of the teachers _wanted_ to teach but I am certain there were orders from above not to. If there's one child who didn't have access to a laptop or internet across the district, I think the idea was that no one would be taught material as a result. I don't have the right answers - I just know that if that's what school looks like in the Fall, it will only deepen class divides where the well-off pay for private tutors, and the rest of the kids simply drift.
I have one friend who has a daughter here who - across 3 months - only had 2 sessions with her teacher. That was it. Effectively, school _was_ cancelled, if not officially.
Hence why the idea of just lobbing off a whole year's worth sounded intriguing.
But at the end of the day this is really all about economics and why there's a push to get kids back in school no matter what, plan or no plan. The economy won't start to heal until kids are under the in-person daycare of schools. It's just a fact.
This is all going to be very messy for at least another 12-18 months.
EDIT:
My dad taught for over 50 years at the high school level. He is now 81. He taught well into his 70s. I imagine there are quite a few teachers who are terrified of being forced back to work in-person unless significant changes are made, and even then... This may force a lot of early retirements.
My son did that for university — he was class of 2021, so now will be class of 2022. He shifted his job from part time to full time.
The university was very resistant (normally you can’t take a break unless you are in academic trouble or have health issues) but he convinced them to cave.
For regular schooling it’s harder as one function of school is to keep the kids busy while the parents are working. Plus the teachers And other school personnel need paychecks as well.
It's inevitable that the parents that care will still homeschool their kid and those kids will do better than the ones that don't. Humans are a sponge for knowledge when they are young. Eliminating an entire year of education during that period is a lost opportunity.
Public school is daycare, the pandemic has made that abundantly clear. We'll be sending our kids to school because even with two parent's working from home distance learning just doesn't work.
One of the massive secondary effects is the huge rise in alcoholism. Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) cannot meat in many States during lockdowns. Something like substance abuse accountability cannot be done effectively via video conference. They need to happen in person, without masks, where you can look into each other's eyes and tell people it's going to be alright.
Liquor stores and weed stores (in places where it's legal) are open, but AA is not. Child abuse ER visits have gone up 35%[0], and keep in mind, when a child goes to an ER for child abuse--they've been abused to the point where they have broken bones or critical injuries.
The current death rate for all Americans is 0.0022% if you look at a pure population vs fatality rate, even including the inflated numbers (and they are inflated; people with gunshot wounds who die with CoV-2 are COVID-19 deaths). The idea the lockdowns are stopping the spread just doesn't pan out when you compare countries across the planet with their different methods and levels of lockdowns and how they haven't really done a damn thing. I wrote a post on all the secondary effects recently: https://battlepenguin.com/politics/secondary-effects/
I wish our leaders would stop dicking, around, stop making this political, and realize nothing is going to stop this spread, hospitals aren't being overrun and Gates/GAVIs mythical vaccine won't show up before this thing has already burned through the entire population.
In general, I’m not swayed by blog posts that claim I might not be capable of “critical thinking” because I disagree with your interpretation of data. Who’s your audience here, exactly?
For others who might take your post at face value, I offer the following food for thought:
> The current death rate for all Americans is 0.0022% if you look at a pure population vs fatality rate
Look at NYC instead. Death rate is 0.29% of total population of NYC. Serology testing suggests 25% of NYers were infected. Extrapolate this to the country and you have ~4 million dead, if everyone is infected. That’s the scenario people in public health are trying to avoid.
Yes, there are huge errors bars on all those numbers. It could be just a few hundred thousand dead. It could be 10 million if everyone gets sick at once and hospitals are swamped. We definitely don’t have a lot of certainty — but you have to have a very loose interpretation of the data to say that lockdowns “haven’t really don’t a damn thing”.
But, it’s true that the negative effects of lockdown are very high, and we need to do more — much more — to mitigate the other negative effects, including unemployment compensation, strategies to reduce loneliness, getting kids out of the house, etc.
Claiming that the lockdowns only have costs and not benefits, and citing, for example, the case of Sweden, which didn’t impose a lockdown but has a similar infection / death curve as places that did, ignores that Sweden also didn’t just “stay open” — people stayed home due to fear of the virus, and the economic costs were just as high too. In the USA, many people stayed home long before the official lockdowns were imposed.
The upshot is that this is a humanitarian and an economic disaster whether we impose lockdowns or not, because many people will self-lockdown out of fear. Official lockdowns might help us beat it a little faster, but any kind of lockdown / fear of virus is really hard on people, and as a society we should do more to mitigate that.
It's not just about the death rate, the long-term/permanent damage being caused (lung damage, senses, brain damage) and the fact that immunity doesn't seem to help much (perhaps a year) are other factors to consider. Long-term damage (months or maybe forever) are, unlike fatal complications, being seen extensively in non-vulnerable populations.
> the long-term/permanent damage being caused (lung damage, senses, brain damage)
Do you have any actual evidence for this? I keep hearing people bringing up 'permanent damage' but it's impossible to say something in 'permanent' when this has been around less than 6 months. Lung damage from pneumonia takes 3~4 months to heal (I had pneumonia in University, as well as one of my good friends. It took me out for over a month and he had to drop out for the semester. My lungs did not fully recover for 3 months, but they've been fine in the 20 years since).
Every article I've seen is either vary vague, or it's talking about elderly people in care homes with other existing conditions. The permanent damage narrative feels like straight up fear-mongering.
You're of course right that it's hard to know (but not impossible to know) the permanent effects of a novel virus (because the damage could be like other diseases/conditions we've seen).
Brain damage is just as concerning to me as lung damage. The lung damage at least seems to be more likely to be long-term rather than permanent (brain damage seems less clear). I've seen some articles also taking about kidney and heart damage.
Your attitude (and people with similar) are the problem. If we isolated for four weeks, wore masks, and focused on contact tracing early on, we wouldn’t be in this predicament. But suddenly, we have a whole crop of arm chair doctors and statisticians who disregard basic instructions by medical experts and attempt to minimize (or dismiss outright) the threat of this disease.
Worse yet, we now have a sizable portion of our population that honestly believes that the economic damage is worse than losing 1% (or more) of our population. Given the unpredictability of how people cope with this virus, you are telling me I should risk my family because we are too stupid and/or lazy to do basic things like wear masks and observe a quarantine?
This, emphatically. All that will happen is places will explode with plague: the way to prevent that happening is to lock down completely, and the way to keep it within 'we still have sort of an economy' parameters is to cope with severe economic hits due to the change in people's behavior.
Otherwise, it's arguing with physics, which seems to be in fashion and has really predictable results with no outliers or exceptions.
We've already made sure the 'before times' economy is gone forever. We're now working out what we can have, instead. That's an interesting design challenge and we're certainly not out of ideas, but 'keep the old economy' is simply not on the table.
We have this incredibly long history of taking short term gain at the cost of long term loss that far outweighs it, and yet we continue to make the same mistakes time and time again.
The countries that spent the most and locked down the hardest took the smallest hit because they were able to mitigate most of the damage, which is much more expensive.
People have to stop pretending countries are people economically, the cost of locking down is something developed countries can bear, and should.
Of course, this is all a microcosm of the same problem we face with climate change. It'd be really nice if we could finally learn the lesson and start paying the price now, rather than waiting and paying far more down the line.
1. If we believe the flatten the curve rhetoric, Sweden is behind the worst of it, and Norway, Finland, and Denmark will see slightly elevated excess deaths for a while, bringing the disparity closer.
2. Sweden may have staved off the some of the economic losses of locking down.
We still need more time to see what happens and evaluate the above.
One thing to note is that Sweden's excess death percentage is by no means a catastrophe compared to other countries. It's a data point of what the ceiling for mortality may look like if a country does nothing.
One other important thing to note, the percentage of non-covid excess deaths seems much higher for countries that lock down compared to Sweden for example [1]. It's possible that lockdowns spread covid deaths out over time instead of decreasing them, while creating non-covid excess deaths that you otherwise wouldn't have.
I think it would be hard to designate deaths so differently that we couldn't draw some insight from those graphs, but in case they are designated that differently, the only thing we can do is to keep an eye on excess deaths for Sweden and its neighbors, and see if Sweden has a consistency lower excess death proportion over the next several months.
I keep seeing and hearing this sentiment, but I think it is a false dichotomy. There have been places that responded effectively to the crisis without lockdowns (Iceland, for example). The choices are not strict, widespread, extended lockdowns or no response at all, with nothing in between. We may yet find that those who undertook either of those strategies have both poor economic and health outcomes.
There's also the fact that people are not robots -- just because you tell them to do something doesn't mean they will do it.
As an example -- even among people that are wearing masks consistently, how many of them are actually following the correct protocols around mask resuse or fit?
Those protocols are designed for surgical masks where the objective is to protect the wearer from droplets. The objective of cloth masks is to protect other people from your droplets (although there is a small protective effect for the wearer too). Even cloth masks with poor fit around the nose have great cost/benefit ratio for reducing transmission.
Strange, I first read this as "Governments that try to trade the economy for safety will end up with neither" and wholeheartedly agreed. I think both versions are right, unfortunately.
The larger economy is unavoidably global and local policy can't do anything about that being destroyed, it's a consequence of pandemic disease.
But, locally of course elimination means you can open safely. We know that's not just theory because New Zealand did it in June. They have stadium-filling events, because they can now, and so why wouldn't they?
Yes, their border has to be essentially closed to non-citizens and there's much more surveillance testing (ie people who have no symptoms getting tested "just in case") than you'd have without a pandemic, but locally it's normal.
And so I think this actually puts a lie to the idea that you can't trade economy for safety. New Zealand shut down, tested and traced, eliminated the disease, opened back up in about three months.
Will they see economic damage? Yes. Largely because everywhere in the whole world gets damaged. Wishful thinking by Trump aside, this won't be put right by November. But are they safe? Zero cases in over two months for a population of around five million sounds pretty safe to me.
The question is whether you actually can eliminate locally. Australia was trying to, but they failed, and now they're starting to send cities back into lockdown. All the Asian and European countries I know of have made it clear that social distancing is here to stay and they don't expect to reach "safe" until a vaccine has been deployed.
Australia failed to lock their border down, and we have all learned from that, hopefully in time. They also never got to elimination.
Here in New Zealand we are aware we are always one selfish idiot or one mistake away from a breakout. We quarantine people but can’t and won’t put them in jails. That’s not kind. But we have slowed border arrivals.
We are collectively reliant on the entire community, including newly returned folks, on behaving like adults. And that’s what is happening so far.
I presented an existence proof. New Zealand did this. So there is no residual doubt that it can be done.
Generally people determined not to learn anything will look for excuses. New Zealand has relatively low population density (outside the cities where it had community transmission...). Or it's further away from other countries. Maybe the virus hates the cold (remember how we pretended maybe it hates the heat? Yeah, good luck with that).
Such excuses don't matter. They might help some politician keep their job, but they won't stop you dying from a disease that those politicians decided they weren't really bothered about eliminating.
I follow infectious disease eradication programmes. Elimination works. Other approaches can reduce the impact of a disease, maybe temporarily suppress it in the First World, but only elimination actually makes it go away and stay gone.
The US ought to know this. It has endemic disease of a wide variety of types otherwise not seen in the First World, because it decided not to give its citizens healthcare. So if you're poor in America and you've got some awful parasitic disease that any other developed country in the world would fix as a priority public health measure, America says "Too bad, get a job" and the disease spreads.
A vaccine is about luck. We do not understand virology well enough to firmly guarantee we can build a vaccine for all the money in the world. So maybe you get lucky in the next few months and an effective vaccine is available in 2021. But maybe you don't ever get lucky, and then what? "Social distancing" forever?
Convalescence in hospitalized patients (about 20 % of patients will end up in hospital) is extremely protracted. You will end up with a torrent of people unable to work for months if not years if the disease continues to spread. The recent JAMA paper from Italy (this one: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2768351) is frankly terrifying.
I mean, the thing that jumps to mind when you say that is that it seems like a myopic view of the issue. Deaths are not the only thing that hurt the economy. There is a lot of evidence of people who survive having long-term health problems that could impact their ability to work for the rest of their lives.
That rate also presumably assumes certain things: if the situation gets worse, that rate could no doubt jump (e.g: if the healthcare system is overwhelmed and no one can get treatment, presumably many more people will die).
It's pretty Orwellian to take a phrase calling out the dangers of trading freedom for security ("Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety") and twist it into the exact opposite.
Something obviously happened in early June that drove new cases up. What worries me is the only place you'll get better compliance with mask wearing and social distancing in the US is NYC, leading me to think "just wear a mask" isn't enough. There's no version of reopening anything indoors that works.
Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, a city that has generally had COVID-19 under control, has just banned gatherings of more than four people. There a case report from China, I think, where people seated more than six feet apart at a restaurant got infected, possibly through fans or an HVAC system.
I also saw the slightly disingenuous (he didn't quite say that) headline that "Dr. Anthony Fauci says U.S. coronavirus cases are surging because nation didn’t totally shut down." Ignoring the bit about a surge, a longer, harder shutdown isn't a fix, either. Look at countries that had stricter shutdowns. Pockets are still popping up.
If the virus is active at all in an area, anything indoors risks spreading it, and there's no escape from whack-a-mole lockdowns...unless you're New Zealand. Maybe.
No, the BLM protests did not cause an uptick in cases. Multiple studies [1] [2] [3] seem to indicate that the coronavirus doesn't spread nearly as well outdoors as it does indoors. In fact, studies have indicated that one of the greatest surge predictors is card-present transactions in restaurants [4].
The reason why we're seeing such a massive uptick in Austin is because of poor state leadership and the fact that we opened too early and with reckless abandon. As the other commentator said, the coronavirus hotspots do not correspond with the protest activities.
If this were primarily related to BLM protests, the COVID hotspots would be the places where BLM protests were biggest, not Arizona, California, and Texas.
> The new research, which was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found no evidence that coronavirus cases jumped in 315 cities in the weeks following the first protests.
I'm sure BLM numbers affected it, but there were also millions of people who went to beaches, bars, and barbecues on Memorial Day Weekend as well who seemed to have moved the needle much more.
NYC, where there were massive BLM demonstrations, just had it's first day with zero COVID deaths in months.
There's increasing evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is spread through aerosolized transmission. This means that the longer people are in the same air space, the greater the risk of infection. Masks will help a little with this, but it changes the dynamics of social distancing in indoor spaces dramatically.
The thing that is forgotten in these reductio analyses is that the economy is made of people, so if they die you have no economy either.
The evidence from 1918/19 is that early opening, or failure to close down again when opening fails, leads to stronger economic growth. It’s a shame some wish to learn this from themselves instead of from the suffering of people a century ago.
I've spoken at length with my best friend, a doctor, and a neighbor, also a doctor -- both of whom believe it's not rational to shut down the economy for the risks of this pandemic, particularly w/r/t the demographics of those most at risk given the (relatively low) mortality rate. Neither are Trump/GOP supporters.
I've spoken at length with others.. not doctors.. who think it's not rational to open up at all, and that things need to be shut down further until progress is made.
My workplace recently sent out a survey and asked if we were ready to come back to the office, if there were those who were interested in volunteering for a Back to Office pilot project. My team all voted against, with "commuting on Bart" as the first and conclusive deal-breaker. I also don't want to sit in an office with a mask on all day. So, for now, WFH.
Of course, if I was subject to unemployment... I don't think I'd change my vote but I would have a different emotional response to the question.
(FWIW, I was let go from a contract gig during the first week of SIP, and was hired a week later by a company I'd been in process with for a few weeks).
Where your doctor friends virologists? Doctors are some of the worst people to ask, in my opinion, about what to do if they do not have subject expertise. They have just enough knowledge to speak authoritatively and not nearly enough subject expertise to really know what they're talking about.
The old adage that doctors are the worst patients, I think, rings true.
We are no longer having real honest debates where we talk about all the evidence. Most of the studies can't even be replicated due to the dangerous nature of containing a virus and the limited labs and universities equipped to handle that research. You combined that with the massive political influences of Gavi, the Gates Foundation and others, and we're looking directly in the face of a Orwellian Ministry or Truth.
Texas is talking to other experts (https://www.westernjournal.com/texas-lt-governor-goes-off-fa...) and you can be sure that, since they're a red state, they'll be slammed for not taking the official dose of science from the US federal government, where Colorado can have the same numbers and no one will blame them since they're blue.
Very little of this virus is about "experts" as much as it is about politics. That's the fucked up part.
The answer is yes. Being an "expert" in one field does not make an expert in another. Knowing how to perform brain surgery does not make you an authority on vaccines.
In the case of Karol Sikora, he is an expert who even spent 2 years working as a director at the WHO.
Yet whenever anyone posts anything about him, it's met with immediately criticism, either ignoring his WHO work, stating he's 'only' an ecologist, his exaggeration on his connections to the Imperial College .. but none of those criticisms invalidate his expertise or the fact that he was hired by the WHO and had experience directly in infectious diseases.
Oddly enough, people will immediately attack his character and background, but they won't bring up his involvement in Lockerbie.
I'm in Ann Arbor Michigan, and we've been back in the office for a month now (with lots of precautions). While not as safe for others, an N95 mask isn't too bad to wear if you can get one - about the only issue is the elastic carves indentations into the soft tissue of your skull that takes several hours to return to normal - I'm kind of worried that I'm permanently damaging the bone - but I figure Doctors/Nurses do this for 8 hours/day as well.
Oh, also Coffee can only be drunk on officially (socially distanced) coffee breaks. Which is kind of weird. I figure as long as everyone is wearing a mask, the office is well ventilated (we have open windows), you are socially distanced and clorox-the-hell out of everything a couple times.
And we are also essentially bathing in Ethyl-Alcohol at this point. Dispensers placed around the office and people scrubbing down anytime you touch anything.
I'm honestly curious as to what mechanism could exist on a mask that could filter air in one direction only (and also why someone would build a surgical mask to do that) - surely you want protection in both directions?
> I'm honestly curious as to what mechanism could exist on a mask that could filter air in one direction only
You could have a mask that formed a tighter seal with internal underpressure, but moves slightly away from the face allowing exhalation to escape with overpressure.
Obviously, you wouldn't want that in a surgical mask, but it pretty easy to do. There are more complex variants you could do where the difference in operation is driven by the direction of pressure differential.
Our "leaders" likely know little better than we and we barely know what is happening. Under such circumstances it is difficult to know "the right thing" to do.
The public is so naive that they cannot comprehend a monotonically increasing function (e.g., total deaths/cases). The news daily points out "the total number of deaths/cases is increasing &c...", a trivial truism in an epidemic, yet it engenders fear and panic.
"Who do you want running your country/state when a pandemic hits" is a different axis than most voters have historically decided on. We're finding out that competence matters, not just ideology.
AnimalPuppet says>""Who do you want running your country/state when a pandemic hits" is a different axis than most voters have historically decided on. We're finding out that competence matters, not just ideology."<
I am unconvinced that one should choose leaders based on the likelihood of a pandemic, nor do I believe that one can predict competence under such circumstances given our contentious political environment. Its all a crapshoot and someone has stolen the dice.
Here in Austin our city had some decent plans to combat the coronavirus and deal with the shutdown. Unfortunately, Greg Abbott decided to override local leadership across the state and force reopening. Now our state leadership is having a slapfight over mask requirements being a violation of our state constitution while our medical groups are begging us to stay home or wear masks [1].
So if you ever wanted to see an example of what a place is going to look like without any leadership versus the virus, Texas is the place to watch.
Likewise, having the millions of people who don't die but end up in the hospital for weeks, get permanently disabled, cognitive damage, etc etc. I think people are over-indexing on fatalities which greatly underestimates the scope here.
I agree completely. Just the way the market is going proves that this society is built on a foundation of pure instant gratification to such a level that they can't even understand the realities of a pandemic. We're FUCKED at this point, and the people who should know what to do are drinking the fucking koolaid. I'm just done with anti-intellectualism altogether.
There's also the greater point in that we have no clue how long immunity is conferred for once someone has caught the virus. There seems to be some indications that people that were asymptomatic or had an otherwise mild response might have shorter term immunity, which means we might revisit this pandemic in a matter of months if we were to simply give up.
It's possible this is something we live with for the next few years or maybe the rest of our lives with hotspots cropping up in various places every couple years or months. In Asia, masks and temperature checks are pretty much a day-to-day thing, I wouldn't be surprised to see this in the western world too.
I totally agree. The death rate is about all I hear about but it's only one part of the risk. For every death there are many people who experience terrible health complications, many of which are long lasting and maybe even permanent.
Only in the context of "for the economy" (moral and humanitarian perspective not withstanding) this sounds like the parable of the broken window. ~95% of death is age 60+? This group largely consumes without producing. Parts of the economy that would be hit the hardest by this would include the health care industry not getting 10 more years of spending from them?
I'm not sure calculations of economic spending is the best way to make the argument "we need to protect the most vulnerable, at the expense of the least," precisely because the least vulnerable are the ones producing most of the economic output, and that output is what is being curtailed to protect those not working. Almost any argument for shutdown would be better than trying to quantify the economic cost/gain of losing a double digit percentage of the elderly, because at the end of the day, I don't think that calculation would go the way the people making the economic argument think it will.
Of 328 million people if 70% became infected, with a .65% fatality rate, we’d have around 1.3 million dead. The typical leading cause of death (heart disease) kills like 600k a year. Seems like racking up the dead to me. And it would probably be higher if we just pretended like things were normal and let hospitals get overwhelmed. That fatality rate is with a huge reaction by the country.
It appears that you don't understand exponential growth. What just began in the USA is an all-but-reversible process now. This isn't just about death count, it's about a complete disablement of any sort of economy or infrastructure. We're basically fucked now.
Re-read your comment in like, a few months. I'd prefer not being prescient here.
0.65% of California is still 260,000 people, even if we assume that only 50% of the population will contract it (a very conservative estimate) it is still a over a 100,000 needless deaths. So far California has reported just over 7000 deaths.
Unfortunately we don't have a choice between unemployment being 20% vs 3%. The choice is between the current unemployment and whatever the rate would be if the govt issued no lock-downs and let the virus run rampant. I don't know what the unemployment rate would be in a world with overflowing hospitals and many thousands of deaths per day, but I bet it would be a heck of a lot closer to 20% than 3%.
My point is the hospital are no more overwhelmed then what has frequently happen in the past. We don't need lockdown back then, why we do lockdown now ?
I mean, even with all restrictions lifted a significant enough percentage of people would engage in behavior to avoid the disease that would have a real impact on the economy.
We aren’t talking about 3.5% unemployment vs 20% unemployment. We’re talking a deep recession in both cases. One with a deeper recession and less death, and a less deep recession but more death. Good luck trying to quantify that. I’m just gonna keep working from home, and avoiding bars/restaurants/shopping until it passes.
We're choosing to not deal with unemployment. Which is to say, we could solve a lot of the issues associated with it very easily but prefer bailing out the stock market over the poor and middle class.
Unemployment will be an issue even if we open up because bars, restaurants etc will go under regardless the moment they have a confirmed coronavirus case. Then they have to shut down, sanitize the place etc which is devastating for small businesses.
> Then they have to shut down, sanitize the place etc which is devastating for small businesses.
Its unnecessary to do all of these. When someone in the workplace get sick, ask them to take sick leave to recuperate, then back to work when they recover, just how it has been done before this "pandemic". No need to shutdown, No need excessive sanitization. Most people who contract the virus don't get sick.
No, it is absolutely necessary and your comment on 'most people don't get sick' is objectively wrong. It's estimated that around 40% of people are asymptomatic, others do get varying degrees of sick after catching the coronavirus. Because it's highly contagious, it can very rapidly spread through an entire company and then we're back to where I just said. Where they have to shut down, sanitize the place and prevent people/customers from getting sick.
Though given your posting history you seem to have a running theme going on of massively downplaying the virus and the fact that you put 'pandemic' in scare quotes indicates that you're probably just an asshole.
>It's estimated that around 40% of people are asymptomatic, others do get varying degrees of sick after catching the coronavirus
Alright using your number the asymptomatic + mild symptom will make up the majority of the cases. Nothing to be worry about.
>Because it's highly contagious, it can very rapidly spread through an entire company and then we're back to where I just said
So what if it spread when the majority of the people will be fine.
>Where they have to shut down, sanitize the place and prevent people/customers from getting sick.
It is unnecessary to do so. Its excessive.
>Though given your posting history you seem to have a running theme going on of massively downplaying the virus and the fact that you put 'pandemic' in scare quotes indicates that you're probably just an asshole.
Because the reality is the virus is not as scary as the media reported. The lockdown is way more destructive than the virus itself.
Its your choice if you want to live in fear and paranoia.
Poverty—though deadly—does not come close to the same mortality rate as COVID-19. Also we know how to deal with 20% unemployment (whether we are willing is another issue).
So frankly you are wrong. 20% unemployment is the thing that pales in comparison
We absolutely do not. Many states have been backloged with unemployment requests[0]. Tens of thousands of people are going back to work now, but were unable to get unemployment for 3~4 months. I've read about people spending 5~8 hours on the phone, told to fill out some other forms, and still get a letter saying they're entitled to $0, while others get more money than they got while full-time employed. Those that are going back to work, may never have the time to fight with the state to get the money they were entitled to.
At least in America, we've completely and totally failed at dealing with unemployment.
Well, the knowledge exists. 20% unemployment was seen widely internationally after the 2008 financial collapse. The results were devastating, don’t get me wrong, but some of the effected areas were able to recover fairly quickly. So we do know how to deal with 20% unemployment, but—sadly—we might not be willing to for some reason.
Why don't we....
1. Allow pharmacies to test for COVID (currently illegal in California)
2. Make COVID testing mandatory every 2 weeks via a statewide digital system (like jury duty). California could then partner will pharmacies to allow wider spread testing. We could even create jobs by hiring and training those who are unemployed to administer the actual tests.
3. Make it mandatory that every business/person use the statewide system to scan people to ensure they have been tested recently. That, combined with temperature checks at the door will serve to catch any issues quickly; as well as providing REAL TIME feed back to the state about possible infections and outbreaks
It seems to me that pandemics are the new normal. We aren't going to have a vaccine ready for every virus within 1-2 years; so it seems prudent for us to invest in a good system now with a virus that isn't as deadly.
What does everyone else think? I really would like to create a thread and have some of the best minds (yes that's you) work on a real solution. Let's plan it and build it!
Thank you for posting the CNN text-only version instead of the "full experience" version. For those who aren't aware, https://lite.cnn.com is text only, but has all the same articles/headlines as the main site.. [Edit] Additionally, There's also https://text.npr.org
Mortality is just the tip of the iceberg. A lot more people get hospitalized. Some end up with permanent cognitive disorders. Long term lung and/ or heart damage is also common.
> The UK National Health Service assumes that of Covid-19 patients who have required hospitalization, 45 percent will need ongoing medical care, 4 percent will require inpatient rehabilitation, and 1 percent will permanently require acute care. Other preliminary evidence, as well as historical research on other coronaviruses like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), suggests that for some people, a full recovery might still be years off. For others, there may be no returning to normal.
Strokes and permanent cognitive disorder are also common:
> Blood clots that form in or reach the brain can cause a stroke. Although strokes are more typically seen in older people, strokes are now being reported even in young Covid-19 patients. In Wuhan, China, about 5 percent of hospitalized Covid-19 patients had strokes, and a similar pattern was reported with SARS.
And according to [1] 125,117 patients were admitted to hospital based on 290,133 positive tests. So about 43% of UK people who test positive are being hospitalized. So that's really bad.
For comparison with the UK, Massachusetts has had 111K cases total with approx. 11K hospitalizations [0], so about 10%. The average age of COVID-19 cases is 51, the average age of hospitalization is 68 and the average age of deaths is 82.
NOTE: The state dashboard doesn't seem to specifically show the total hospitalizations, just a graph only over the last 3 months. However, on Page 19 [0] there's a breakdown of total hospitalization by ethnicity that shows a total of 111,827 cases and 11,611 hospitalizations (across all known and unknown ethnicities).
Worth noting, in the US, there are likely people who were never hospitalized because they were afraid to go to the hospital because they lack insurance.
Possibly, although in MA aside from employer provided insurance and ACA insurance, anyone else is covered by the state, i.e. MassHealth (aka Romneycare [0], which was used as a model for Obamacare) and Health Safety Net.
Also, it's kind of a self-selecting population. This statistic is likely skewed towards those with an infection bad enough to warrant getting a test in the first place.
Also, why are we not focused on making sure education is able to start back up in the fall? Why did we prioritize opening restaurants (who already has a revenue stream: togo orders) and bars? I get recreational stuff is needed, but the bars, for example should be among the last to open. It sucks for the business owner, and they need more federal support to stay afloat. How are paying this much in tax and getting nothing when we need it the most?