14 ms·

The plans to reopen the economy are scary

69 points by Farbodkhz 7y ago

desc 7y ago
Bad shit happens to a minority of people every day, permanently disrupting their lives and forcing them to abandon long-term plans. The majority remain oblivious and see an enduring status quo. Suddenly a Black Swan craps on everyone at once, and a great many people are whining 'why is this happening to me' and 'when will someone fix this so I can go back to my routine'. Guess what? Your routine is probably fucked. Throw it out, get used to the new normal, and accept that no one knows how to fix this (yet?), just like every other time we get hit by a context-changing problem. Of course some people get too attached to their context, and those who come later and find their remains might label such events as 'out-of-context problems'...
elephantscan 7y ago
When are we just going to admit that our choices are: 1) indefinite lockdown 2) everyone gets the virus Between a 0.5% chance of dying, and life imprisonment, I'd take my chances.
- greedo 7y ago
  Because you're leaving out the third choice: control the rate of infection so that the chance of dying is lowered.
  - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    In practice this seems to be a subset of the first choice. Everyone who has a proposal to control the rate of infection also says we need to lockdown indefinitely until their proposal is fully implemented.
- fuckknows 7y ago
  Here's the thing though, that binary choice is predicated on what we know right now, tomorrow we may know more, and we will definitely know more in a few weeks, in a month or two we may know enough that we have better choices to make. Our ability to treat this virus is very limited right now, but that may not be true in a month, so just throwing up your hands and saying let everyone die now when we don't have good treatment options is basically just signing peoples death warrant for no good reason.
  - mcfunk 7y ago
    This, precisely. Maybe we find better treatment (especially treatment that reduces the incidence of patients needing hospitalization or ventilators). Maybe we get testing technology widespread enough that we don't have to treat everyone like they're positive unless proven otherwise. Maybe we get antibody tests that allow us to figure out who isn't immunologically naive to the virus. Maybe we learn more about how it spreads. Maybe we learn more about why some people are asymptomatic. Basically there are countless ways in which quality of life can be improved over time as we continue to maximize efforts to contain spread.
  - elephantscan 7y ago
    Yeah sure. a month, a year, a decade. How much of my life are you willing to steal? The fatality rate for octogenarians is 15%. Octogenarians also have a 10% chance of dying every year anyway. At 18 months of lockdown 15% of them are dead anyway and you took a single digit percentage of my life away
- alkonaut 7y ago
  Your chance of getting a severe case of you are infected is 5-10% or something similar. That’s a case that you want to have a hospital bed for, maybe an ICU bed. If all beds are taken then many of those severe cases will kill people. Say mortality is 3% instead of 0.5% once hospital capacity runs out. Assume 60% need to get it before we have herd immunity. I don’t think 3% mortality without healthcare is pessimistic. Unfortunately we’ll soon find out if the disease hits Syria and similar places. Not only that, thousands would also die from strokes and heart attacks and other things that they wouldn’t die from if hospitals weren’t full. Hospital staff will simply quit when their job becomes a constant struggle to keep the hallways clear of corpses instead of saving people. It’s not “0.5% dies why are we doing this?”, it’s “we do this so only 0.5% die”. Between a 0.5% chance of dying and a 3% chance of dying I’d happily observe some measure of distancing for 12 months to get 0.5%.
  - elephantscan 7y ago
    This state of affairs is not life. I would kill myself if we have to do this for a year.
    - alkonaut 7y ago
      I’m sorry. You should try to talk to someone about that. My restrictions at this point (Sweden) shows that with luck, perhaps restrictions don’t have to mean house arrest. Complete lockdowns aren’t sustainable. I think countries will converge on a “new normal” which is far from lockdowns, while not “normal”.
  - redis_mlc 7y ago
    The data on the Santa Clara (California) stats site shows that 10% of those tested are infected. https://www.sccgov.org/sites/phd/DiseaseInformation/novel-coronavirus/Pages/dashboard.aspx#hospital https://www.sccgov.org/sites/phd/DiseaseInformation/novel-co... What your comment is missing is that the mortality of ventilators is 66% - 90%. So they're not a good solution for most patients. ICU doctors have been recommending using non-intrusive methods like cannulas as long as possible before intubating. However, that causes aerosolization of corona, so quarantine buildings are needed. Please see my links for more detailed info.
- deleted 7y ago
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- asdff 7y ago
  The whole plan is number 2. We are waiting until this burns out through the population, most people get better, and move on with their lives. The purpose of social distancing is to slow the burn so our hospitals aren't overwhelmed, and won't have to triage coronavirus patients vs. people with any other sort of emergency coming to the hospital. This practice will save thousands of lives of people with a bad case of coronavirus, but also the people who get into car crashes, or have problems with giving birth, or heart attacks, or any other reason that requires immediate emergency care.
deleted 7y ago
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makomk 7y ago
One of the things the press seems to have had trouble grasping is that there are no good options, and quite possibly never were. (Short of stopping the virus from spreading out of Wuhan in the first place, which might barely have been possible if the world acted fast enough - but that was never going to happen.)
- wbl 7y ago
  It certainly could have if other countries had closed border with China early. But some news outlets were running unfortunate headlines.
  - roywiggins 7y ago
    The US never really closed their border with China. Americans returning from China were let back in with minimal checks, and some were probably presymptomatic. Not only would it have had to be earlier, it would have had to strand American citizens abroad until they could be tested, which was never on the cards.
    - makomk 7y ago
      Quarantining all the Americans returning from China might've been sufficient, though that would be politically (and maybe even legally) dicey.
Mediterraneo10 7y ago
The author considers letting the epidemic run its course on the demographics most at risk, to be the most unrealistic outcome. He writes: > I care about my privacy, but not nearly so much as I care about my mother. Most people care about their own mother. But if lockdowns, unemployment and poverty continue, I can definitely imagine people saying, "I don’t care about your mother, so why should I stay unemployed and confined to my home just to keep her safe? I’m sure my mother will be fine." Of course, believing that one’s own parents will escape the epidemic might be mere wishful thinking, but this is the way that human beings rationalize things in times of crisis.
- mattmanser 7y ago
  In the UK they're now making noises about letting the 20-30 year olds who live alone go back to work first. I imagine this is really code for "if we infect all these low-risk people first, we get a large proportion of our workforce immunised, for a fairly low hospitalisation proportion". I don't know enough about the models, but I also guess having a large chunk of your low-risk population already immune reduces R0 for later waves too. I can also see it back-firing when these same people think it's alright to nip round Mum's to say hi and give her a quick hug, it's only 5 minutes after all. I've also heard that a large fast food chain estimates it will take up to 8 weeks before they can get supply chains up and running again. As an example the sheer quantities of lettuce they need aren't being planted because there's no demand for them, and you can't just magic them out of thin air when someone says 'you can open your stores again'.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > I imagine this is really code for "if we infect all these low-risk people first, we get a large proportion of our workforce immunised". I think it’s really code for “let’s repeat the mistakes we made early on when we adopted ‘herd immunity’ rather than isolation as an I itial strategy and spread this as rapidly as we can and create another critical peak”, because those people aren't completely isolated from the rest of the population, and spreading it more rapidly in that segment of the population will also spread it more rapidly in the rest of the population. But I guess it's good to know the the incompetence of the present British government is resilient enough to survive the temporary incapacitation of the PM as a fairly direct result of the incompetence on the very same issue. I'm not even sure the US federal administration would be that committed to it's own (otherwise more complete) incompetence on the issue.
ddevault 7y ago
Oh my god, the system described by the CAP plan covered in this article cannot be allowed to come into being. Instant dystopian nightmare state. This kind of tool can't be un-made.
- miscPerson 7y ago
  Emergency powers to protect us after 9/11 are still in place — two decades later. Emergency powers to fund world wars are still in place — eight decades later. It never goes away.
  - jeffrallen 7y ago
    The DP-3T system explicitly calls out the fact that it dismantles itself after the epidemic as a feature.
- mattmanser 7y ago
  And if it's law that you can uninstall it when you've been vaccinated? It can be unmade.
  - csense 7y ago
    The government will like being able to track every citizen too much for that to happen.
- altoidaltoid 7y ago
  But think of the ad revenue you can drive off this data set!
- jeffrallen 7y ago
  It does not have to be built that way: https://github.com/DP-3T/documents https://github.com/DP-3T/documents This is what we'll hopefully be using in Switzerland.
  - Mediterraneo10 7y ago
tgafpc2 7y ago
Meh, it's just Ezra Klein. Vox just pissey that Bernie dropped out and they'll have to actually work again.
redis_mlc 7y ago
I started studying the US news reports of Covid-19 related to ventilators weeks ago when I realized there were no interviews with survivors, and ignored the speculation around partial testing results and R0 calculations because of the lack of hard data, and exponential rate of infection making analysis moot. Essentially, ICU admission for ventilators, and subsequent deaths, are the most complete and factual data we have. The solid information we have is that 66% - 90% of ventilator patients die, as reported for both China and the US. Interviews with doctors all report that ventilators are supposed to be used for up to a week, not 3 weeks. Although the occasional patient makes it off a ventilator, from a public healthcare policy standpoint, ventilators just don't work well enough, so there's no reason to "flatten the curve" now (April 10, 2020) aside from accumulating PPE (masks, gowns, gloves for hospital staff.) (A cure will likely take 18 months to invent and approve, so that's not something to put on a roadmap.) The plan should be this: 1. have our healthcare policy experts (CDC, etc.) study today's reported data on patient mortality and PPE supplies for a couple days 2. inform seriously ill, high-risk corona hospital patients about the risks of ventilators (ie. you're probably going to die on one anyway, and horribly) 3. have dedicated quarantine and palliative buildings for moderately ill confirmed corona patients with O2 available (like the Javits Center in NY, as an example for discussion, or an anchored cruise ship moored off each major city). Recovered people can work there safely it appears. 4. have dedicated hospitals for corona ICU patients if they choose to try a ventilator (China has dedicated hospitals) 5. lift the US lockdown and treat corona like any other seasonal flu, mainly because it is, and also to avoid destruction of our economy and related uncertainty 6. the exception is passenger airline flights, which should be grounded until further notice. develop a plan to make airliners safer to fly (hepa filters, etc.) Cities shouldn't be under lockdown, but airlines are almost certainly a major disease vector and need to be treated as such. (FYI: Wuhan has an international airport only 2 hours flying time to Shanghai Pudong International, which is a major hub. So that's likely how it spread world-wide.) The impediments for the US to implement this plan are: 1. as a society, the US has lost the ability to formulate and execute policy at the highest level, whether healthcare, hurricane response or infrastructure. At this time, we need experts (like the CDC) to lead. 2. Trump should not be involved in any way, since he doesn't care about facts. (The reasons California Governor Newsom broke contact this week with the federal government are essentially the above.) I'll add my collection of supporting links later today. They are all consistent with each other, so the facts I outlined above are not in dispute. Although the information from China was publicized late, it appears overall to be accurate and helpful. They used their previous experience with corona and bird flu infections to move fairly assertively on Covid-19 - a far better response than the US or Europe. Please leave a comment if you want an area of my outline above to be fleshed out more. If somebody could look into how Sweden and Germany have fared with less social distancing, that would be helpful. Please leave a comment about that. AMA.
vearwhershuh 7y ago
If we tolerate any of these plans, we get what we deserve. Louis CK's "OF COURSE... but maybe" skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLGzFQg_1xc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLGzFQg_1xc
- csense 7y ago
  What's the alternative? Let the virus rage, totally overwhelm the medical system and kill a whole bunch of people? Stay on lockdown for years until a vaccine's ready?
  - vearwhershuh 7y ago
    That's a false dichotomy. We could have locked down the vulnerable (60+ and those with pre-existing conditions), and anyone with a temperature, focused our healthcare efforts on them and let everyone else go about their business with more caution (masks + hand washing). We would have built societal (cows are a herd, humans are a society) immunity by this point and could slowly return to normal for the at-risk crowd. As it stands, we haven't built up any social immunity and will have to wait over a year for a vaccine which, by definition, we will not know the long term effects of.
altoidaltoid 7y ago
Cynically, since the morbidity is mostly in the elderly parts of the population vs. the younger ( a la 1918 ), I can see the Lt. Gov of Texas's attitude of " let the olds make their sacrifice" be the driving principle...
- deleted 7y ago
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- threatofrain 7y ago
  Not simply just old people [1]. Texas has also categorized religious gatherings of 50 as an essential service, whereas abortion clinics have been closed. Texas is taking a very different approach from California.
coliveira 7y ago
> Any feasible plan starts with massive testing, completely subsidized by the government. And yet just yesterday the president claimed we don’t need mass testing. This is something I've been saying from day 1: short of universal vaccination, the only way to get back to some form of normalcy is widespread testing of the population. Any government with some sense of reality would spend billions in testing, to avoid losing trillions in the economy. Unfortunately it doesn't seem that the US government has any notion of how (or desire) to do this.
- _red 7y ago
  >widespread testing of the population So you mandatory test everyone and determine that 28% of the population has been exposed to the virus. Now what?
  - Hermel 7y ago
    Cheer! Because with 28%, you are close enough to herd immunity that you can push R0 below 1 with social distancing. In fact, herd immunity does not require 70% of the population to be immune. It just requires 70% of all potentially transmitting contacts being eliminated. And if those 28% who contracted the virus first are also the ones that have more contacts than average citizen (which should be the case, because that is why they probably got it before the other 72%), we might already be fine. Let's these 28% have 72% of all human contact (because human is -like almost everything - not distributed equally), then we would already be there and have reached herd immunity. There would still be sporadic local outbreaks, but nothing dramatic any more.
- eloff 7y ago
  If they had just closed their borders earlier could this have all been avoided? Seems like that would have been a lot cheaper. Definitely border restrictions plus testing seems to be effective in keeping it out, see Taiwan. Once you get enough local transmission going then it didn't matter anymore. Every western country reacted too slowly in this regard.
  - 7y ago
whatshisface 7y ago
He's saying that such-and-such is politically unviable, but that's what we were all saying about business shutdowns, too.
- frockington1 7y ago
  In my state (Ohio) at least, protest are starting to form on the legality and length of shutting down businesses. It's still only a handful of people but seems to be growing every day. There is a very slim chance the government can enact shut downs for long and still maintain authority
  - vturner 7y ago
    Where in Ohio is this? I'm not doubting, just like to read local news on it as I'm in Ohio too. I applaud DeWine for acting quickly, but I'm concerned that maybe for rural and small city locations the shut down was too much. I wonder if we are creating a cry wolf effect for non-metro areas. All the mass effects in my area are purely from the response. Of course, one may say, what if we hadn't a shut down; but, I think that argument is going to be harder to make to the small businesses in a small city or rural area next time around.
    - davidw 7y ago
      If it feels like 'too much' it means it's working. Rural places don't have great health care structure in a lot of places.
    - itgoon 7y ago
      https://www.nbc4i.com/community/health/coronavirus/dewine-acton-address-protestors-heard-shouting-during-thursday-coronavirus-update https://www.nbc4i.com/community/health/coronavirus/dewine-ac... Hope this helps.
  - floren 7y ago
    When I see that small businesses get shut down, but Walmart gets to keep selling everything because they have a grocery section, I get a little disgruntled too. New Mexico just shut down standalone liquor stores... but Walmart will be allowed continue selling liquor. If I owned a store, I'd be pretty upset that the governor appears to be enriching the very biggest "everything" stores while driving me out of business.
basch 7y ago
This will be a good chance for state governments to show how well they function and coordinate absent federal guidance. Maybe they will form their own federation to circumvent the current federations ineffectiveness. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-09/governors-consider-supply-consortium-to-skirt-fema-dysfunction https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-09/governors... That's at least one emergent non-California nation state coming to be. Maybe we could call it the Great States. Toronto can come too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Megalopolis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Megalopolis Culturally; North Central, The North, Midland, St Louis Cooridor, Inland North, W. Pa.; make a nice package. https://www.wbez.org/stories/_/9054d7a4-f876-4c53-8ce1-08adae048d28 https://www.wbez.org/stories/_/9054d7a4-f876-4c53-8ce1-08ada...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- frockington1 7y ago
  States shouldn't need federal guidance and should prefer not to receive it. Without federal oversight, states and municipalities can tailor policy to their own area
  - basch 7y ago
    I don't disagree, absent a well stocked National Stockpile, the Great States should build their own emergency reserve for Natural Disaster and Pandemic. Each state building its own stockpiles of some things that don't hit all areas equally could be wasteful. Keep close relationships with manufacturing firms who are prepared to be ready on short notice. This is as much a failure of planlessness as it is policy.
    - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
      Although it should be noted that many states did have adequate stockpiles and haven't had their health care systems overloaded.
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deleted 7y ago
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siscia 7y ago
For how much I understand the need to lower the curve and reduce the R0 of the infection, I start to see also another argument. We are basically pausing the life of younger people, indefinitely, to protect the elders. Again, since the quarantine started in my area I exist twice to buy groceries and that's all. So I understand the need and the importance of it. But should I really throw away on year of my life? Shouldn't we quarantine only the elders? Would your opinion change if you were living by yourself with your significant other locked up somewhere too far away to meet in two months? And yes I am aware that also younger people died from the virus but the chance are so much smaller that I don't believe is fair to compare it. The opportunity cost is so much different and nobody is addressing the issue.
- wbl 7y ago
  Young people die also when the health system is overloaded.
  - siscia 7y ago
    Still much less than the elders and I am not sure what your comment means. Again, what I am saying is that the lockdown punish purple differently, the most punished are the least affected by the virus itself
    - sosborn 7y ago
      Young people will die not just from the virus, but from inadequate medical care caused by overloaded hospitals. It’s a shit situation for young adults, but sometimes life isn’t fair.
      - siscia 7y ago
        Sure, but younger have less need of medical care in general. Moreover, lock down all the elders and the ICU won't be so busy...
        7y ago
SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
I'm extremely skeptical of any analysis that discusses political non-viability at this point. If you asked any commentator 2 months ago whether it was politically viable to issue general stay at home orders, or to give every American a bunch of free money, or to pass a multi-trillion dollar stimulus bill, they would have told you no.
- ztjio 7y ago
  Giving every American a token cash handout is something Republicans have done before, it's hardly unbelievable if you actually have historical context. And by far most of that bill is corporate handouts. And the oversight has been fired. Everything about this aligns exactly with what you'd expect politically. It's a debacle. Furthermore, while there has been a lot of shutdown, it's not equal across the board. Tons of places are taking half measures or no measures still, and the reasoning is entirely politically biased (business more important than people, etc.) It's clearly a case of more right leaning areas taking less cautious measures in favor of money. In fact, I'd argue that everything that has happened, especially all the horribly obvious "mistakes" (read: intentional, corruption riddle, failures in the case of the federal administration) aligns with political viability as expected and confirms in retrospect the claims about viability.
  - austingulati 7y ago
    I have seen a few click-bait headlines stating that the "oversight was fired" but it is not exactly true. There is some politics going on about who is chair of the PRAC but the other ~20 members of the committee have not changed.
    - ztjio 7y ago
      The procession of a dictator is more nuanced and complex than people realize. A totally typical tactic is to repeatedly fire anyone who will take up the role in a fashion that does not directly benefit said dictator. That anyone was fired from this duty without a clear explanation and justification is cause for alarm. It doesn't matter if there are 20 or 2000 more ready to step into that position. Dictator will keep firing until he sees a loyal drone in the slot.
chapium 7y ago
As long as our political leaders are elected for ignoring science, society will face big problems that we rely on science to keep at bay.
mattmanser 7y ago
Trump flip-flops within one briefing, let alone over a few days. He'll be saying America's got the bestest, most wonderful, mass-testing that he helped invent and he'd always said mass testing was the way to go within a week or two and everything else is fake news.
- tom-thistime 7y ago
  The political food fight is hogging bandwidth to the point that it's difficult to discuss how to restart the economy... or even how to get protective equipment to medical professionals. We're all tempted to feed that, but please resist. Thank you.
  - mattmanser 7y ago
    Daring Fireball's argument is that "Trump is saying X". So of course it's relevant, you can't trust a single thing that man says because he changes his mind within hours if not minutes. It's a pretty objective truth if you watch any press conference he does.
IanDrake 7y ago
As we enter summer, the question no one is asking is: Can mosquitoes transmit this virus like they do malaria?
- gumby 7y ago
  Interesting question although unlikely. Certainly it's not possible with the mechanism of malaria transmission which uses a multi-species cycle.
- catalogia 7y ago
  I don't know enough about them to say for sure, but I haven't heard of any sort of virus being transmitted by mosquitoes. Malaria is caused by a parasite, not a virus.
  - IanDrake 7y ago
    EEE then. That's a virus transmitted by mosquitoes. Malaria was a bad example.
- LyndsySimon 7y ago
  My understanding is that no, they can’t, because the virus does not reproduce in mosquitos. Similarly to HIV, it is theoretically possible for a mosquito to feed off someone with the virus then within minutes feed off someone else, be killed, and the infected blood contain enough remaining particles to cause an infection... but to my knowledge this has never been shown to happen in practice. I’m more concerned about stray cats. It has been shown that felines can both host 2019-nCoV and get COVID-19.
DanielBMarkham 7y ago
As somebody who has been tracking and interested in this story since late January, the one thing I can without qualifications is that whatever seems true now will change in a few weeks' time. In general the outlook has gotten better as the data got better and we were able to compare notes, although there have been some setbacks, too. I don't think we'll ever, ever get back to "normal" as this is the pandemic we've been reading about and planning for over the last century. Nobody [alive today] has ever lived through something like this and it is bound to have lasting consequences. But I would be cautious about reading long-term plans. I know everybody wants to know how the story ends, but people who have engaged in long-range planning over the last couple of months have consistently had to re-plan. I would expect that trend to continue. We don't know exactly what small changes might have large consequences. For instance, monitoring temperatures at points of entry and exist for all businesses could have a major effect, or forms of "frontier testing" No doubt this is a period for the history books. We'll probably have to live through it to finally figure out how it's all going to end.
- abfan1127 7y ago
  what do you mean "nobody has ever lived through this?" We've had huge pandemics in the past: the plague, Spanish Flu, measles, polio, smallpox. I agree we should be cautious about reading long-term plans.
  - DanielBMarkham 7y ago
    I meant nobody alive today. I guess now we could argue about smallpox, measles, and the like, but I am working from the general definition of the last pandemic being the Spanish Flu. I have added the two missing words to my original post for clarification. Thank you.
  - nostromo 7y ago
    Thank you, this context is important. Swine flu killed between 150,000 to 575,000 globally in 2009, and almost nobody even remembers it. HIV is a recent pandemic that many living people have lived through, from discovery to treatment. And of course the flu, which is different than SARSCoV2, kills between 250,000 and 500,000 each and every year. If you're 30 years old, between 7 and 15 million people have died from flu in your lifetime.
vl 7y ago
This article should have been titled: “There is No Plan”.
mymythisisthis 7y ago
Lots of business are converting to delivery. I think this is good. The warehouse style of store, prevalent since the 1960s is an outdated model. Schools are moving more courses online. Another major upgrade. The restaurant experience hasn't been rewarding for a long time. People should learn to cook at home. Experiment with fancier cuts of organic meat. Movie theaters have been terrible for decades. Sticky floors, too many commercials, overpriced food. Now many film festivals are moving online. Fast fashion was just a way of getting people to buy poorly made clothes from sweat shops. So much of the crap people bought recently was just excessive junk; causing an environmental disaster. We should just pay people to stay home and learn new skills. Why not pay people to taking online biology courses though the pandemic? There should be a startup that pays people to stay home and take biology courses. Exams can be online and for real verification done over video conference with an examiner. The startup then can get a % of your salary when you start working. Or, be paid through advertising from medical companies.
- jmt_ 7y ago
  But isn't there something to be said about the kind of human experiences each of the "outdated" industries you mentioned provide? Namely schools, stores, going to movie theaters with friends, etc. People like seeing and being around other people. Some really, really don't, but most do. Moving the majority of activities indoors forever will have a negative impact on the psyche of the most people. I agree that what most people buy is junk and that there is waste in the spaces you mentioned. But I'm not sure how "natural" is will feel for people to do all that isolated in their homes with a small amount of people indefinitely...
  - mymythisisthis 7y ago
    What I see happening. People are indoors and pursing something that they are really interested in. Maybe knitting, trumpet playing, etc. They are connected with new people online who share the same interests as them. In a few months people will be connecting in person with these people. Modernity will do what modernity always does...connect people who have distinct, unique, interests together. As a society I think that we've outgrown the idea of just going to a movie theater and hanging out with friends. I think that the older model society will re-emerge...fraternities, social clubs, members only places, hackerspaces. Let's say you get passionate about a hobby right now, lets say playing an instrument. You'll want to find a safe space to meet. Maybe a few people will pitch in some cash and just rent a space to turn into a private hangout club. With the coming recession space will become cheaper.
Barrin92 7y ago
>"The CAP and Harvard plans both foresee a digital pandemic surveillance state in which virtually every American downloads an app to their phone that geotracks their movements, so if they come into contact with anyone who later is found to have Covid-19, they can be alerted and a period of social quarantine can begin." If this refers to the bluetooth supported apps I've seen developed by several institutions, does this not sound like a horrible idea? Let's say two people walk past each other on the street or stand close in a shop, as far as we know the risk of transmission is non-existent or extremely low. Are you just going to build a connected graph and then ping everyone if one person gets sick? You'd be pinging half the population of a dense city after one day. Before putting these surveillance measures into place I'd like to know if they're not causing more harm and paranaoia then they help.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  I don't mean to rip on you, it's important to notice problems, but that seems very solvable. Just require some minimum duration of proximity before you alert.
  - Barrin92 7y ago
    It's not that easy. Social networks, particular urban dense ones have the characteristics of small world networks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_network). The distance between every person in a city is maybe 5-6 individuals. You can imagine how many hundred people you stand next to, how many people they stand next to, and so on. So if say, the chance of being infected in an interaction is say 5%, then the chance at a distance of two is 0.25%, the chance for someone at a distance of 3 is merely 0.01%, etc.. Do you really think it's a rational use of resources or your attention that if you're one of the countless 'distance 3' people to alert you? Unless you had some mysterious ability to determine with extremely high fidelity that infection has occured from metadata alone, which doesn't exist, it's a tool for mass panic. Bluetooth will give you a match for up to 10 meters. The official safe distance is 6 feet. You can't even tell from a bluetooth match if people were close enough at all.
KoftaBob 7y ago
Maybe I'm just fed up with how the news has been handling this situation, but I find usage of words like "scary" in a title to be incredibly worthless. If I can't even get to the end of the title without being told how to feel, it speaks volumes about the intentions of the post. This is just one of the numerous examples of lazy and bad intentioned attempts to use anxiety to convince readers to click the article. The entire journalism industry should be ashamed of how the absolutely miserable way in which they've handled this event. You need to take a hard look at yourself if your industry revolves around damaging people's mental health in order to draw page views.
- jmercouris 7y ago
  Very well said.
alkonaut 7y ago
What level of normalcy? Free domestic movement, business open, schools open? That will probably work with some restrictions if social distancing works. Countries are trying different levels of restrictions so it will soon be obvious what works and what doesn’t. International travel, sports events and other large gatherings I’m not optimistic will be back to normal in 2020 unless something big changes.
naveen99 7y ago
It’ll be interesting to see if public k—12 schools will let older teachers teach from home, while forcing students to show up to the physical virus breeding grounds.
- threatofrain 7y ago
  I think this whole phenomena has led to a nuanced discrimination of age in the essential services workforce.
indymike 7y ago
This is a silly article. Every plan made to date has been laid to waste by reality.
credit_guy 7y ago
For what it's worth, CUNY (City University of New York), which has more than 250k students, decided that their Fall semester will be online. At least in New York City, things will not go back to normal in 2020.
LocalH 7y ago
“Normal” is a wild goose chase. Society is too fluid to call “normal” at any time. It’s just different.
RickJWagner 7y ago
It seems 98% of all people who get Covid-19 recover. Some countries like Sweden are doing fine, open for business. I don't think it's quite as dire as the author thinks.

69 points by Farbodkhz 7y ago

desc 7y ago

Bad shit happens to a minority of people every day, permanently disrupting their lives and forcing them to abandon long-term plans. The majority remain oblivious and see an enduring status quo. Suddenly a Black Swan craps on everyone at once, and a great many people are whining 'why is this happening to me' and 'when will someone fix this so I can go back to my routine'. Guess what? Your routine is probably fucked. Throw it out, get used to the new normal, and accept that no one knows how to fix this (yet?), just like every other time we get hit by a context-changing problem. Of course some people get too attached to their context, and those who come later and find their remains might label such events as 'out-of-context problems'...

elephantscan 7y ago

When are we just going to admit that our choices are: 1) indefinite lockdown 2) everyone gets the virus Between a 0.5% chance of dying, and life imprisonment, I'd take my chances.

greedo 7y ago
Because you're leaving out the third choice: control the rate of infection so that the chance of dying is lowered.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  In practice this seems to be a subset of the first choice. Everyone who has a proposal to control the rate of infection also says we need to lockdown indefinitely until their proposal is fully implemented.
fuckknows 7y ago
Here's the thing though, that binary choice is predicated on what we know right now, tomorrow we may know more, and we will definitely know more in a few weeks, in a month or two we may know enough that we have better choices to make. Our ability to treat this virus is very limited right now, but that may not be true in a month, so just throwing up your hands and saying let everyone die now when we don't have good treatment options is basically just signing peoples death warrant for no good reason.
- mcfunk 7y ago
  This, precisely. Maybe we find better treatment (especially treatment that reduces the incidence of patients needing hospitalization or ventilators). Maybe we get testing technology widespread enough that we don't have to treat everyone like they're positive unless proven otherwise. Maybe we get antibody tests that allow us to figure out who isn't immunologically naive to the virus. Maybe we learn more about how it spreads. Maybe we learn more about why some people are asymptomatic. Basically there are countless ways in which quality of life can be improved over time as we continue to maximize efforts to contain spread.
- elephantscan 7y ago
  Yeah sure. a month, a year, a decade. How much of my life are you willing to steal? The fatality rate for octogenarians is 15%. Octogenarians also have a 10% chance of dying every year anyway. At 18 months of lockdown 15% of them are dead anyway and you took a single digit percentage of my life away
alkonaut 7y ago
Your chance of getting a severe case of you are infected is 5-10% or something similar. That’s a case that you want to have a hospital bed for, maybe an ICU bed. If all beds are taken then many of those severe cases will kill people. Say mortality is 3% instead of 0.5% once hospital capacity runs out. Assume 60% need to get it before we have herd immunity. I don’t think 3% mortality without healthcare is pessimistic. Unfortunately we’ll soon find out if the disease hits Syria and similar places. Not only that, thousands would also die from strokes and heart attacks and other things that they wouldn’t die from if hospitals weren’t full. Hospital staff will simply quit when their job becomes a constant struggle to keep the hallways clear of corpses instead of saving people. It’s not “0.5% dies why are we doing this?”, it’s “we do this so only 0.5% die”. Between a 0.5% chance of dying and a 3% chance of dying I’d happily observe some measure of distancing for 12 months to get 0.5%.
- elephantscan 7y ago
  This state of affairs is not life. I would kill myself if we have to do this for a year.
  - alkonaut 7y ago
    I’m sorry. You should try to talk to someone about that. My restrictions at this point (Sweden) shows that with luck, perhaps restrictions don’t have to mean house arrest. Complete lockdowns aren’t sustainable. I think countries will converge on a “new normal” which is far from lockdowns, while not “normal”.
- redis_mlc 7y ago
  The data on the Santa Clara (California) stats site shows that 10% of those tested are infected. https://www.sccgov.org/sites/phd/DiseaseInformation/novel-coronavirus/Pages/dashboard.aspx#hospital https://www.sccgov.org/sites/phd/DiseaseInformation/novel-co... What your comment is missing is that the mortality of ventilators is 66% - 90%. So they're not a good solution for most patients. ICU doctors have been recommending using non-intrusive methods like cannulas as long as possible before intubating. However, that causes aerosolization of corona, so quarantine buildings are needed. Please see my links for more detailed info.
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asdff 7y ago
The whole plan is number 2. We are waiting until this burns out through the population, most people get better, and move on with their lives. The purpose of social distancing is to slow the burn so our hospitals aren't overwhelmed, and won't have to triage coronavirus patients vs. people with any other sort of emergency coming to the hospital. This practice will save thousands of lives of people with a bad case of coronavirus, but also the people who get into car crashes, or have problems with giving birth, or heart attacks, or any other reason that requires immediate emergency care.

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makomk 7y ago

One of the things the press seems to have had trouble grasping is that there are no good options, and quite possibly never were. (Short of stopping the virus from spreading out of Wuhan in the first place, which might barely have been possible if the world acted fast enough - but that was never going to happen.)

wbl 7y ago
It certainly could have if other countries had closed border with China early. But some news outlets were running unfortunate headlines.
- roywiggins 7y ago
  The US never really closed their border with China. Americans returning from China were let back in with minimal checks, and some were probably presymptomatic. Not only would it have had to be earlier, it would have had to strand American citizens abroad until they could be tested, which was never on the cards.
  - makomk 7y ago
    Quarantining all the Americans returning from China might've been sufficient, though that would be politically (and maybe even legally) dicey.

Mediterraneo10 7y ago

The author considers letting the epidemic run its course on the demographics most at risk, to be the most unrealistic outcome. He writes: > I care about my privacy, but not nearly so much as I care about my mother. Most people care about their own mother. But if lockdowns, unemployment and poverty continue, I can definitely imagine people saying, "I don’t care about your mother, so why should I stay unemployed and confined to my home just to keep her safe? I’m sure my mother will be fine." Of course, believing that one’s own parents will escape the epidemic might be mere wishful thinking, but this is the way that human beings rationalize things in times of crisis.

mattmanser 7y ago
In the UK they're now making noises about letting the 20-30 year olds who live alone go back to work first. I imagine this is really code for "if we infect all these low-risk people first, we get a large proportion of our workforce immunised, for a fairly low hospitalisation proportion". I don't know enough about the models, but I also guess having a large chunk of your low-risk population already immune reduces R0 for later waves too. I can also see it back-firing when these same people think it's alright to nip round Mum's to say hi and give her a quick hug, it's only 5 minutes after all. I've also heard that a large fast food chain estimates it will take up to 8 weeks before they can get supply chains up and running again. As an example the sheer quantities of lettuce they need aren't being planted because there's no demand for them, and you can't just magic them out of thin air when someone says 'you can open your stores again'.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > I imagine this is really code for "if we infect all these low-risk people first, we get a large proportion of our workforce immunised". I think it’s really code for “let’s repeat the mistakes we made early on when we adopted ‘herd immunity’ rather than isolation as an I itial strategy and spread this as rapidly as we can and create another critical peak”, because those people aren't completely isolated from the rest of the population, and spreading it more rapidly in that segment of the population will also spread it more rapidly in the rest of the population. But I guess it's good to know the the incompetence of the present British government is resilient enough to survive the temporary incapacitation of the PM as a fairly direct result of the incompetence on the very same issue. I'm not even sure the US federal administration would be that committed to it's own (otherwise more complete) incompetence on the issue.

ddevault 7y ago

Oh my god, the system described by the CAP plan covered in this article cannot be allowed to come into being. Instant dystopian nightmare state. This kind of tool can't be un-made.

miscPerson 7y ago
Emergency powers to protect us after 9/11 are still in place — two decades later. Emergency powers to fund world wars are still in place — eight decades later. It never goes away.
- jeffrallen 7y ago
  The DP-3T system explicitly calls out the fact that it dismantles itself after the epidemic as a feature.
mattmanser 7y ago
And if it's law that you can uninstall it when you've been vaccinated? It can be unmade.
- csense 7y ago
  The government will like being able to track every citizen too much for that to happen.
altoidaltoid 7y ago
But think of the ad revenue you can drive off this data set!
jeffrallen 7y ago
It does not have to be built that way: https://github.com/DP-3T/documents https://github.com/DP-3T/documents This is what we'll hopefully be using in Switzerland.
- Mediterraneo10 7y ago

tgafpc2 7y ago

Meh, it's just Ezra Klein. Vox just pissey that Bernie dropped out and they'll have to actually work again.

redis_mlc 7y ago

I started studying the US news reports of Covid-19 related to ventilators weeks ago when I realized there were no interviews with survivors, and ignored the speculation around partial testing results and R0 calculations because of the lack of hard data, and exponential rate of infection making analysis moot. Essentially, ICU admission for ventilators, and subsequent deaths, are the most complete and factual data we have. The solid information we have is that 66% - 90% of ventilator patients die, as reported for both China and the US. Interviews with doctors all report that ventilators are supposed to be used for up to a week, not 3 weeks. Although the occasional patient makes it off a ventilator, from a public healthcare policy standpoint, ventilators just don't work well enough, so there's no reason to "flatten the curve" now (April 10, 2020) aside from accumulating PPE (masks, gowns, gloves for hospital staff.) (A cure will likely take 18 months to invent and approve, so that's not something to put on a roadmap.) The plan should be this: 1. have our healthcare policy experts (CDC, etc.) study today's reported data on patient mortality and PPE supplies for a couple days 2. inform seriously ill, high-risk corona hospital patients about the risks of ventilators (ie. you're probably going to die on one anyway, and horribly) 3. have dedicated quarantine and palliative buildings for moderately ill confirmed corona patients with O2 available (like the Javits Center in NY, as an example for discussion, or an anchored cruise ship moored off each major city). Recovered people can work there safely it appears. 4. have dedicated hospitals for corona ICU patients if they choose to try a ventilator (China has dedicated hospitals) 5. lift the US lockdown and treat corona like any other seasonal flu, mainly because it is, and also to avoid destruction of our economy and related uncertainty 6. the exception is passenger airline flights, which should be grounded until further notice. develop a plan to make airliners safer to fly (hepa filters, etc.) Cities shouldn't be under lockdown, but airlines are almost certainly a major disease vector and need to be treated as such. (FYI: Wuhan has an international airport only 2 hours flying time to Shanghai Pudong International, which is a major hub. So that's likely how it spread world-wide.) The impediments for the US to implement this plan are: 1. as a society, the US has lost the ability to formulate and execute policy at the highest level, whether healthcare, hurricane response or infrastructure. At this time, we need experts (like the CDC) to lead. 2. Trump should not be involved in any way, since he doesn't care about facts. (The reasons California Governor Newsom broke contact this week with the federal government are essentially the above.) I'll add my collection of supporting links later today. They are all consistent with each other, so the facts I outlined above are not in dispute. Although the information from China was publicized late, it appears overall to be accurate and helpful. They used their previous experience with corona and bird flu infections to move fairly assertively on Covid-19 - a far better response than the US or Europe. Please leave a comment if you want an area of my outline above to be fleshed out more. If somebody could look into how Sweden and Germany have fared with less social distancing, that would be helpful. Please leave a comment about that. AMA.

vearwhershuh 7y ago

If we tolerate any of these plans, we get what we deserve. Louis CK's "OF COURSE... but maybe" skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLGzFQg_1xc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLGzFQg_1xc

csense 7y ago
What's the alternative? Let the virus rage, totally overwhelm the medical system and kill a whole bunch of people? Stay on lockdown for years until a vaccine's ready?
- vearwhershuh 7y ago
  That's a false dichotomy. We could have locked down the vulnerable (60+ and those with pre-existing conditions), and anyone with a temperature, focused our healthcare efforts on them and let everyone else go about their business with more caution (masks + hand washing). We would have built societal (cows are a herd, humans are a society) immunity by this point and could slowly return to normal for the at-risk crowd. As it stands, we haven't built up any social immunity and will have to wait over a year for a vaccine which, by definition, we will not know the long term effects of.

altoidaltoid 7y ago

Cynically, since the morbidity is mostly in the elderly parts of the population vs. the younger ( a la 1918 ), I can see the Lt. Gov of Texas's attitude of " let the olds make their sacrifice" be the driving principle...

deleted 7y ago
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threatofrain 7y ago
Not simply just old people [1]. Texas has also categorized religious gatherings of 50 as an essential service, whereas abortion clinics have been closed. Texas is taking a very different approach from California.

coliveira 7y ago

> Any feasible plan starts with massive testing, completely subsidized by the government. And yet just yesterday the president claimed we don’t need mass testing. This is something I've been saying from day 1: short of universal vaccination, the only way to get back to some form of normalcy is widespread testing of the population. Any government with some sense of reality would spend billions in testing, to avoid losing trillions in the economy. Unfortunately it doesn't seem that the US government has any notion of how (or desire) to do this.

_red 7y ago
>widespread testing of the population So you mandatory test everyone and determine that 28% of the population has been exposed to the virus. Now what?
- Hermel 7y ago
  Cheer! Because with 28%, you are close enough to herd immunity that you can push R0 below 1 with social distancing. In fact, herd immunity does not require 70% of the population to be immune. It just requires 70% of all potentially transmitting contacts being eliminated. And if those 28% who contracted the virus first are also the ones that have more contacts than average citizen (which should be the case, because that is why they probably got it before the other 72%), we might already be fine. Let's these 28% have 72% of all human contact (because human is -like almost everything - not distributed equally), then we would already be there and have reached herd immunity. There would still be sporadic local outbreaks, but nothing dramatic any more.
eloff 7y ago
If they had just closed their borders earlier could this have all been avoided? Seems like that would have been a lot cheaper. Definitely border restrictions plus testing seems to be effective in keeping it out, see Taiwan. Once you get enough local transmission going then it didn't matter anymore. Every western country reacted too slowly in this regard.
- 7y ago

whatshisface 7y ago

He's saying that such-and-such is politically unviable, but that's what we were all saying about business shutdowns, too.

frockington1 7y ago
In my state (Ohio) at least, protest are starting to form on the legality and length of shutting down businesses. It's still only a handful of people but seems to be growing every day. There is a very slim chance the government can enact shut downs for long and still maintain authority
- vturner 7y ago
  Where in Ohio is this? I'm not doubting, just like to read local news on it as I'm in Ohio too. I applaud DeWine for acting quickly, but I'm concerned that maybe for rural and small city locations the shut down was too much. I wonder if we are creating a cry wolf effect for non-metro areas. All the mass effects in my area are purely from the response. Of course, one may say, what if we hadn't a shut down; but, I think that argument is going to be harder to make to the small businesses in a small city or rural area next time around.
  - davidw 7y ago
    If it feels like 'too much' it means it's working. Rural places don't have great health care structure in a lot of places.
  - itgoon 7y ago
    https://www.nbc4i.com/community/health/coronavirus/dewine-acton-address-protestors-heard-shouting-during-thursday-coronavirus-update https://www.nbc4i.com/community/health/coronavirus/dewine-ac... Hope this helps.
- floren 7y ago
  When I see that small businesses get shut down, but Walmart gets to keep selling everything because they have a grocery section, I get a little disgruntled too. New Mexico just shut down standalone liquor stores... but Walmart will be allowed continue selling liquor. If I owned a store, I'd be pretty upset that the governor appears to be enriching the very biggest "everything" stores while driving me out of business.

basch 7y ago

This will be a good chance for state governments to show how well they function and coordinate absent federal guidance. Maybe they will form their own federation to circumvent the current federations ineffectiveness. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-09/governors-consider-supply-consortium-to-skirt-fema-dysfunction https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-09/governors... That's at least one emergent non-California nation state coming to be. Maybe we could call it the Great States. Toronto can come too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Megalopolis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Megalopolis Culturally; North Central, The North, Midland, St Louis Cooridor, Inland North, W. Pa.; make a nice package. https://www.wbez.org/stories/_/9054d7a4-f876-4c53-8ce1-08adae048d28 https://www.wbez.org/stories/_/9054d7a4-f876-4c53-8ce1-08ada...

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frockington1 7y ago
States shouldn't need federal guidance and should prefer not to receive it. Without federal oversight, states and municipalities can tailor policy to their own area
- basch 7y ago
  I don't disagree, absent a well stocked National Stockpile, the Great States should build their own emergency reserve for Natural Disaster and Pandemic. Each state building its own stockpiles of some things that don't hit all areas equally could be wasteful. Keep close relationships with manufacturing firms who are prepared to be ready on short notice. This is as much a failure of planlessness as it is policy.
  - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    Although it should be noted that many states did have adequate stockpiles and haven't had their health care systems overloaded.
- 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

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siscia 7y ago

For how much I understand the need to lower the curve and reduce the R0 of the infection, I start to see also another argument. We are basically pausing the life of younger people, indefinitely, to protect the elders. Again, since the quarantine started in my area I exist twice to buy groceries and that's all. So I understand the need and the importance of it. But should I really throw away on year of my life? Shouldn't we quarantine only the elders? Would your opinion change if you were living by yourself with your significant other locked up somewhere too far away to meet in two months? And yes I am aware that also younger people died from the virus but the chance are so much smaller that I don't believe is fair to compare it. The opportunity cost is so much different and nobody is addressing the issue.

wbl 7y ago
Young people die also when the health system is overloaded.
- siscia 7y ago
  Still much less than the elders and I am not sure what your comment means. Again, what I am saying is that the lockdown punish purple differently, the most punished are the least affected by the virus itself
  - sosborn 7y ago
    Young people will die not just from the virus, but from inadequate medical care caused by overloaded hospitals. It’s a shit situation for young adults, but sometimes life isn’t fair.
    - siscia 7y ago
      Sure, but younger have less need of medical care in general. Moreover, lock down all the elders and the ICU won't be so busy...
      - 7y ago

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago

I'm extremely skeptical of any analysis that discusses political non-viability at this point. If you asked any commentator 2 months ago whether it was politically viable to issue general stay at home orders, or to give every American a bunch of free money, or to pass a multi-trillion dollar stimulus bill, they would have told you no.

ztjio 7y ago
Giving every American a token cash handout is something Republicans have done before, it's hardly unbelievable if you actually have historical context. And by far most of that bill is corporate handouts. And the oversight has been fired. Everything about this aligns exactly with what you'd expect politically. It's a debacle. Furthermore, while there has been a lot of shutdown, it's not equal across the board. Tons of places are taking half measures or no measures still, and the reasoning is entirely politically biased (business more important than people, etc.) It's clearly a case of more right leaning areas taking less cautious measures in favor of money. In fact, I'd argue that everything that has happened, especially all the horribly obvious "mistakes" (read: intentional, corruption riddle, failures in the case of the federal administration) aligns with political viability as expected and confirms in retrospect the claims about viability.
- austingulati 7y ago
  I have seen a few click-bait headlines stating that the "oversight was fired" but it is not exactly true. There is some politics going on about who is chair of the PRAC but the other ~20 members of the committee have not changed.
  - ztjio 7y ago
    The procession of a dictator is more nuanced and complex than people realize. A totally typical tactic is to repeatedly fire anyone who will take up the role in a fashion that does not directly benefit said dictator. That anyone was fired from this duty without a clear explanation and justification is cause for alarm. It doesn't matter if there are 20 or 2000 more ready to step into that position. Dictator will keep firing until he sees a loyal drone in the slot.

chapium 7y ago

As long as our political leaders are elected for ignoring science, society will face big problems that we rely on science to keep at bay.

mattmanser 7y ago

Trump flip-flops within one briefing, let alone over a few days. He'll be saying America's got the bestest, most wonderful, mass-testing that he helped invent and he'd always said mass testing was the way to go within a week or two and everything else is fake news.

tom-thistime 7y ago
The political food fight is hogging bandwidth to the point that it's difficult to discuss how to restart the economy... or even how to get protective equipment to medical professionals. We're all tempted to feed that, but please resist. Thank you.
- mattmanser 7y ago
  Daring Fireball's argument is that "Trump is saying X". So of course it's relevant, you can't trust a single thing that man says because he changes his mind within hours if not minutes. It's a pretty objective truth if you watch any press conference he does.

IanDrake 7y ago

As we enter summer, the question no one is asking is: Can mosquitoes transmit this virus like they do malaria?

gumby 7y ago
Interesting question although unlikely. Certainly it's not possible with the mechanism of malaria transmission which uses a multi-species cycle.
catalogia 7y ago
I don't know enough about them to say for sure, but I haven't heard of any sort of virus being transmitted by mosquitoes. Malaria is caused by a parasite, not a virus.
- IanDrake 7y ago
  EEE then. That's a virus transmitted by mosquitoes. Malaria was a bad example.
LyndsySimon 7y ago
My understanding is that no, they can’t, because the virus does not reproduce in mosquitos. Similarly to HIV, it is theoretically possible for a mosquito to feed off someone with the virus then within minutes feed off someone else, be killed, and the infected blood contain enough remaining particles to cause an infection... but to my knowledge this has never been shown to happen in practice. I’m more concerned about stray cats. It has been shown that felines can both host 2019-nCoV and get COVID-19.

DanielBMarkham 7y ago

As somebody who has been tracking and interested in this story since late January, the one thing I can without qualifications is that whatever seems true now will change in a few weeks' time. In general the outlook has gotten better as the data got better and we were able to compare notes, although there have been some setbacks, too. I don't think we'll ever, ever get back to "normal" as this is the pandemic we've been reading about and planning for over the last century. Nobody [alive today] has ever lived through something like this and it is bound to have lasting consequences. But I would be cautious about reading long-term plans. I know everybody wants to know how the story ends, but people who have engaged in long-range planning over the last couple of months have consistently had to re-plan. I would expect that trend to continue. We don't know exactly what small changes might have large consequences. For instance, monitoring temperatures at points of entry and exist for all businesses could have a major effect, or forms of "frontier testing" No doubt this is a period for the history books. We'll probably have to live through it to finally figure out how it's all going to end.

abfan1127 7y ago
what do you mean "nobody has ever lived through this?" We've had huge pandemics in the past: the plague, Spanish Flu, measles, polio, smallpox. I agree we should be cautious about reading long-term plans.
- DanielBMarkham 7y ago
  I meant nobody alive today. I guess now we could argue about smallpox, measles, and the like, but I am working from the general definition of the last pandemic being the Spanish Flu. I have added the two missing words to my original post for clarification. Thank you.
- nostromo 7y ago
  Thank you, this context is important. Swine flu killed between 150,000 to 575,000 globally in 2009, and almost nobody even remembers it. HIV is a recent pandemic that many living people have lived through, from discovery to treatment. And of course the flu, which is different than SARSCoV2, kills between 250,000 and 500,000 each and every year. If you're 30 years old, between 7 and 15 million people have died from flu in your lifetime.

vl 7y ago

This article should have been titled: “There is No Plan”.

mymythisisthis 7y ago

Lots of business are converting to delivery. I think this is good. The warehouse style of store, prevalent since the 1960s is an outdated model. Schools are moving more courses online. Another major upgrade. The restaurant experience hasn't been rewarding for a long time. People should learn to cook at home. Experiment with fancier cuts of organic meat. Movie theaters have been terrible for decades. Sticky floors, too many commercials, overpriced food. Now many film festivals are moving online. Fast fashion was just a way of getting people to buy poorly made clothes from sweat shops. So much of the crap people bought recently was just excessive junk; causing an environmental disaster. We should just pay people to stay home and learn new skills. Why not pay people to taking online biology courses though the pandemic? There should be a startup that pays people to stay home and take biology courses. Exams can be online and for real verification done over video conference with an examiner. The startup then can get a % of your salary when you start working. Or, be paid through advertising from medical companies.

jmt_ 7y ago
But isn't there something to be said about the kind of human experiences each of the "outdated" industries you mentioned provide? Namely schools, stores, going to movie theaters with friends, etc. People like seeing and being around other people. Some really, really don't, but most do. Moving the majority of activities indoors forever will have a negative impact on the psyche of the most people. I agree that what most people buy is junk and that there is waste in the spaces you mentioned. But I'm not sure how "natural" is will feel for people to do all that isolated in their homes with a small amount of people indefinitely...
- mymythisisthis 7y ago
  What I see happening. People are indoors and pursing something that they are really interested in. Maybe knitting, trumpet playing, etc. They are connected with new people online who share the same interests as them. In a few months people will be connecting in person with these people. Modernity will do what modernity always does...connect people who have distinct, unique, interests together. As a society I think that we've outgrown the idea of just going to a movie theater and hanging out with friends. I think that the older model society will re-emerge...fraternities, social clubs, members only places, hackerspaces. Let's say you get passionate about a hobby right now, lets say playing an instrument. You'll want to find a safe space to meet. Maybe a few people will pitch in some cash and just rent a space to turn into a private hangout club. With the coming recession space will become cheaper.

Barrin92 7y ago

>"The CAP and Harvard plans both foresee a digital pandemic surveillance state in which virtually every American downloads an app to their phone that geotracks their movements, so if they come into contact with anyone who later is found to have Covid-19, they can be alerted and a period of social quarantine can begin." If this refers to the bluetooth supported apps I've seen developed by several institutions, does this not sound like a horrible idea? Let's say two people walk past each other on the street or stand close in a shop, as far as we know the risk of transmission is non-existent or extremely low. Are you just going to build a connected graph and then ping everyone if one person gets sick? You'd be pinging half the population of a dense city after one day. Before putting these surveillance measures into place I'd like to know if they're not causing more harm and paranaoia then they help.

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
I don't mean to rip on you, it's important to notice problems, but that seems very solvable. Just require some minimum duration of proximity before you alert.
- Barrin92 7y ago
  It's not that easy. Social networks, particular urban dense ones have the characteristics of small world networks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_network). The distance between every person in a city is maybe 5-6 individuals. You can imagine how many hundred people you stand next to, how many people they stand next to, and so on. So if say, the chance of being infected in an interaction is say 5%, then the chance at a distance of two is 0.25%, the chance for someone at a distance of 3 is merely 0.01%, etc.. Do you really think it's a rational use of resources or your attention that if you're one of the countless 'distance 3' people to alert you? Unless you had some mysterious ability to determine with extremely high fidelity that infection has occured from metadata alone, which doesn't exist, it's a tool for mass panic. Bluetooth will give you a match for up to 10 meters. The official safe distance is 6 feet. You can't even tell from a bluetooth match if people were close enough at all.

KoftaBob 7y ago

Maybe I'm just fed up with how the news has been handling this situation, but I find usage of words like "scary" in a title to be incredibly worthless. If I can't even get to the end of the title without being told how to feel, it speaks volumes about the intentions of the post. This is just one of the numerous examples of lazy and bad intentioned attempts to use anxiety to convince readers to click the article. The entire journalism industry should be ashamed of how the absolutely miserable way in which they've handled this event. You need to take a hard look at yourself if your industry revolves around damaging people's mental health in order to draw page views.

jmercouris 7y ago
Very well said.

alkonaut 7y ago

What level of normalcy? Free domestic movement, business open, schools open? That will probably work with some restrictions if social distancing works. Countries are trying different levels of restrictions so it will soon be obvious what works and what doesn’t. International travel, sports events and other large gatherings I’m not optimistic will be back to normal in 2020 unless something big changes.

naveen99 7y ago

It’ll be interesting to see if public k—12 schools will let older teachers teach from home, while forcing students to show up to the physical virus breeding grounds.

threatofrain 7y ago
I think this whole phenomena has led to a nuanced discrimination of age in the essential services workforce.

indymike 7y ago

This is a silly article. Every plan made to date has been laid to waste by reality.

credit_guy 7y ago

For what it's worth, CUNY (City University of New York), which has more than 250k students, decided that their Fall semester will be online. At least in New York City, things will not go back to normal in 2020.

LocalH 7y ago

“Normal” is a wild goose chase. Society is too fluid to call “normal” at any time. It’s just different.

RickJWagner 7y ago

It seems 98% of all people who get Covid-19 recover. Some countries like Sweden are doing fine, open for business. I don't think it's quite as dire as the author thinks.