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I think health experts are over estimating how long Americans are willing to have their lives disrupted.
by treis 7y ago
I think health experts are over estimating how long Americans are willing to have their lives disrupted.
- ls612 7y agoI think whether or not they are willing is not a major concern in these governors’ minds. They have all activated the national guard for a reason...
- onetimemanytime 7y agoThe state cannot hold back the majority with the army
- retrac 7y agoSo far, there's strong public support up here in Canada for the measures. According to polls, the great majority believe breaking the public health orders should be a crime, at least in serious cases. There may be period of time where the government still has a strong, popular mandate to enforce distancing, but there is increasing non-compliance and resistance. Just the folks who start to snap mentally over the next weeks and months will be a serious and growing problem, even if everyone who stays mostly-rational wants to continue to maintain distancing.
- ls612 7y agoI’m sure for now people are willing to go along (also who would tell a pollster they want people to die, but that’s a separate point). If this goes on for months expect public opinion to change.
- retrac 7y agoThat's kind of my point. The public opinion may change, but until it mounts to a point that government policy changes, they'll probably keep enforcing the distancing measures with increasing heavy-handedness. It may also become increasingly polarized with strong "I don't want to die!" and "I just want to talk to someone!" factions becoming increasingly set in their beliefs. Civil unrest could occur at that point.
- munk-a 7y agoSo, unfortunately, I think as soon as actual force is necessary we lose - but while increasing heavy-handedness involves fines and parking a patrol car outside someone's house to make them adhere to self-isolation I think we'll be alright.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoI feel like that's a strong differentiator of Canada and the United States - America seems like it's always holding its breath and waiting for the next revolution which will change everything, while we here in Canada just want things to get back to normal.
- munk-a 7y agoI agree - up here folks are being quite cooperative, someone even recently painted a mural of Bonnie Henry & Dr. Tam[1]. That all said, some parts of America are quite different from Canada with some churches openly protesting the orders[2] (and putting the most vulnerable at risk). My big concern down there in America is, if folks get crazy and LEOs need to step in and enforce quarantine it will make that quarantine ineffective and LEOs will become the new disease vector. Additionally if any significant portion of the population decides to violate the order than the LEOs, National Guard and even standing army won't be sufficient to enforce the peace - because the peace can't be enforced, peaceable society can only be accomplished through voluntary social contracts. 1. https://www.citynews1130.com/2020/03/31/fans-paint-murals-dr-bonnie-henry-theresa-tam-gastown/ https://www.citynews1130.com/2020/03/31/fans-paint-murals-dr... 2. https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/coronavirus/article_04c781d0-74f4-11ea-a121-0709e0594622.html https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/coronavirus/art...
- pinkfoot 7y agoNoth Korea begs to differ.
- onetimemanytime 7y agowilling to bet that the vast majority of NK agree with the Dear Leader if polled. Why is a different story
- yongjik 7y agoWhat majority? If the majority of people are stupid enough to rise against the tyranny of social distancing, they deserve what they get. At least, I hope that doesn't happen.
- onetimemanytime 7y agoDistancing for what, months, years? Lose businesses, homes, future because there's a risk that 1% might die?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ivankolev 7y agoLives will be disrupted either way, lifting restrictions too early will result in more deaths, which is the ultimate disruption of life.
- pathseeker 7y agoYou'd be surprised how many people are already willing to let the death rate increase. The perception is that this virus mainly wipes out sick people and boomers. If there's one thing millennials hate, it's boomers.
- bpodgursky 7y agoExcept most of the people willing to take the risk ARE the boomers and elderly. The millenials are the ones sheltering in place and posting about it on Twitter.
- fermienrico 7y ago20% hospitalization rate is what everyone should focus on. CFR is 3% but hospitalization of young adults is extremely high. When young people have to get treatment and they can't - they'll suffer and have serious consequences if not death. Edit: Listen to the person replying to me. It is not 20%, but 3.3%. I am off by an order of magnitude.
- draw_down 7y agoUnfortunately for them (and probably the health officials as well), the pandemic is not interested in ideas like "freedom" or "jobs" or "the economy".
- dx87 7y agoThat's what I'm thinking. People all over the world knowingly make unhealthy decisions because it makes our lives more enjoyable in the short term, at the expense of usually shortening your lifespan. I don't see people putting up with forced isolation for very long, especially when the vast majority of people won't die from it.
- DapperZoom 7y agoExactly. We all make these tradeoffs all the time and sacrifice lives for convenience and financial reasons. For example, close to 40K die in the us in traffic accidents every year. That number could be reduced to almost nothing with a 5 mph speed limit. of course, we've decided to take that calculated risk - the benefits of driving at speeds up to 65 or 70 outweigh the low number of annual deaths.
- mehrdadn 7y agoThe problem is the risks are orders of magnitude more than the "tradeoffs we make all the time", and clearly not enough people understand this. 40K/300M is 0.013%. It's nothing compared to coronavirus hospitalization or even death rates.
- treis 7y agoThat's an annual number while Coronavirus is one and done. A better comparison would be lifetime risk of dying in a car accident.
- mehrdadn 7y agoOkay, feel free to slice and dice it however you want and share the results.
- umanwizard 7y agoThe lifetime risk of dying in a car accident is about 1% in the US, according to https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-mortality-risk https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-mortalit... .
- danaliv 7y agoLet's get the virus on the phone and explain that we don't wanna. I'm sure it will be understanding.
- evanlivingston 7y agoWhich is why we won't ever fix climate change.
- cardamomo 7y agoI agree with you in that the climate crisis and pandemics are major emergencies that require species-level thinking in order to mitigate effectively. That said, your comment could use some context.
- evanlivingston 7y agoYeah, you're right. Mostly I was trying to spur conversation and perhaps I wasn't giving enough context to do so. What we're all doing globally right now is only a small step in the right direction for tackling climate change. We could stay on this path right now, and continue to work to restrict ourselves and reimagine what an economy could look like and end up with some really impactful change. But we don't seem to be interested in doing any of that; instead we're more interested in how to get back to commuting to work, buying more stuff, getting supply chains back in order, manufacturing cars, extracting cobalt from the earth and on and on.
- Natsu 7y agoI think we'll have to find ways to loosen things, though. Maybe everyone, or almost everyone, just wears a mask in public and we use the defense production act to keep the supply up. Maybe sick leave becomes mandatory and businesses restructure to stay open while keeping people physically apart. Maybe we phase in and out restrictions and get rid of the ones that have the most harm and least impact. Maybe that drug Trump was pushing really does enough to keep people from dying from this. I dunno, but we probably can't just hide for two years and let half of the country be out of work. Hopefully we do a lot more vaccine work, too. Ideally we'd wipe out some other scary threats like Ebola while we're at it.
- mathnovice 7y agoApproximately 200,000 people will die. All of us will know someone that got sick. Most of us will know someone that died. I think Americans will get over it.
- vkou 7y agoThat is the number that will die if the lockdowns continue. If they don't, a hell of a lot more will.
- alexandercrohde 7y agoI don't know where these numbers come from. But given a the current 1.1% case-fatality-rate in America (even before hospitals are overwhelmed) and that more than half of the population is estimated to get it, I don't see how it'd be less than 1% * .5 * 350million = 1.75 million people, with or without lockdown. I suspect politicians are trying to "ease into" the honest numbers, because I guess "a million" sounds like a lot to people. It's hard to say anything with certainty, but I personally can't find any math that explains how social distancing can reduce that by more than 10%, short of a cure or vaccine being developed within 60 days. Plasma would be the best hope of this.
- smhinsey 7y agoI have seen a few seriously sourced articles discussing the possibility of various forms of airborne transmission during certain stages of certain strains. If stuff like this is the reality then the truth is that social distancing can't be as effective as we'd like, even on top of whatever inherent flaws it has, but it's probably still the best/only advice that can actually be given, taking our woeful preparedness into account. Masks probably should have been the recommendation from day 1 but clearly economic priorities and lack of skilled preparation and leadership overruled longer term judgment. It seems to me some are expecting business as usual to resume quickly because under normal circumstances, where the heads of each department hadn't been chosen for their desire to shut it down ASAP, that is probably more what would happen, but the reality of today's government is vastly different. I completely agree they're trying to slow roll the actual truth here.
- baron_harkonnen 7y agoIt doesn't matter how long the period of isolation lasts, we're emerging from it to face a economic crisis that will far exceed the great depression. That crisis hasn't even started to materialize yet. There's no normal to return to, and the immediate future after this will be bleaker than the time we're all in isolation. While isolation continues people won't be kicked out of their apartments, communities will help those in need with food, and nobody will have to worry about those bills that are pilling up. The second everything starts again, all of those debts will be unpaused, all of that community support will dry up, and people will be back to fending for themselves rather than in this together. There will someday be a normal again but it won't resemble the normal we had in February in US any more than the world returned to "normal" after 9-11, of WWII for that matter. The second isolation ends then reality will really set in. edit: Can someone explain the downvotes? Is there anyone that thinks the claim that the economic consequences of this will be horrific is downvote worthy?
- exothermic 7y ago"Our baseline forecast does not see GDP reverting to its pre-virus levels until late 2021 in the US and Europe." [0] [0] https://www.fitchratings.com/research/sovereigns/deep-global-recession-in-2020-as-coronavirus-crisis-escalates-02-04-2020 https://www.fitchratings.com/research/sovereigns/deep-global...
- godelski 7y agoI mean this is hard to say. I'm in grad school and I don't really feel that disrupted. Instead of hiding in my office all day I just stay home. Meetings and classes are all over Zoom, which means my advisor actually has more time to talk (WOW!). And I do CS, so all my work is on a computer anyways, where I'm usually remoting into another machine to run my experiments. I can still get takeout. I have more time to cook. The only real disruption is that I'm not going to the climbing gym. On the other hand, my cat is super excited that I'm around more often. And as a millennial, I'm already used to living in existential dread. I'm just trying to say that it is hard to measure what this disruption means for a lot of people. If I was in a big city, like NYC, I'm sure this would be completely different. I don't think this is an easy topic and in such "Americans" is far too broad of a term to have much meaning.