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Thank goodness at least someone with credentials is saying what is obvious. The lockdown approach is not sustainable for much longer out of basic economic conce

Thank goodness at least someone with credentials is saying what is obvious. The lockdown approach is not sustainable for much longer out of basic economic concerns and the virus will absoluteley start spreading again when the masses break and go back to work. Protecting the most vulnerable while the rest of the society works to support them is the only sensible approach and should have been the plan all along. I'm personally very sad that so many will sustain great economic damage on top of this reality, but this is what happens when people run scared. I just hope this reality is recognized and accepted before even more damage is done.

DennisP 7y ago
If you use your lockdown time to set up solid testing and tracing, it can work out pretty well.
- jdminhbg 7y ago
  That’s a theory, but nothing more. Nobody has successfully done that yet. The testing and tracing success stories started before they needed to lock anything down.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - yongjik 7y ago
    They (South Korea, Taiwan, etc.) did not need lockdown because testing and tracing were successful! Of course there's no success stories with lockdown and successful tracing - the early successes didn't need full lockdown (unless you count China), and the ones going through lockdown now will need weeks or months to contain it. Sigh.
    - jdminhbg 7y ago
      Right, but that still does not tell us whether testing and tracing will work once it got past the point of lockdowns. Hopefully it does, but we don’t know if it’s possible to do once the scale of tracing gets so huge.
      - DennisP 7y ago
        That's why if you've got significant spread you have to do a long hard lockdown first, instead of jumping straight to test and trace. Get the effective R0 below 1 and you can reduce your current infection count.
        nradov 7y ago
        But that's a moot point because it's simply impossible to do a hard lockdown in an open society like the US. There are too many essential activities, and the government lacks the resources to strictly enforce orders.
        DennisP 7y ago
        R0 is currently less than one in many states: https://rt.live/ https://rt.live/ So right now they actually are locking down sufficiently to shrink the number of cases.
      - rstuart4133 7y ago
        > but that still does not tell us whether testing and tracing will work once it got past the point of lockdowns. Well I can tell you the answer to that, because in Australia I watched it unfold in real time. We have an aggressive tracking and tracking regime. Our most populous state published the figures on it - lettings us know new cases, overseas infections and local infections (which was the real number that mattered). Overseas infections dominated, and we got most of them from the USA. Extraordinarily, we watched as the doubling period of people infected in the USA dipped below 2 days, while at the time the USA was saying it was a flu that would blow over in summer. In the end it became too much. The USA become too dangerous for us, and because were weren't prepared to single out the USA like we singled out China for bans, we shut down the border completely. During the peak of that period, the "untested" number in those tracking and tracing figures grew exponentially. In case it isn't obvious that means it's failing: the virus has overwhelmed the resources of the nation-state. But it turned out they were mostly foreign infections being imported, and so after 14 days when that ended new infections plummeted, and we caught up. Now we are down to 50 new cases a day and are opening up the economy again. What it takes to overwhelm you depends on how much work tracking and tracing each infection requires. In Australia, it's all manual. In South Korea the co-opted the banks, mobile networks and other sources of data, built a system in under 60 days to tie it all together (as an I professional, colour me impressed). So they are _much_ more efficient at it than we are. Nonetheless it's not strictly true they didn't have lock downs. They didn't ever have a country wide lock down, but they did lock down regions for a few weeks when tracking and tracing was looking like it might be overwhelmed. Such small lock downs are very cheap compared to what everyone else is going through of course. I suspect it's even cheaper than the "let it burn" approach of Sweden. In Australia we now have it under control. Since we are an island I think they are pretty confident if we can eliminate it internally, we have it beat. The only thing that would have to remain in place is the mandatory 14 day quarantine for international travellers, and even that could be reduced to a few days with good early detection tests. But eliminating it internally is going to be very difficult with a 30% asymptomatic rate even with our current tracking and tracing effort, as many local infections are of the "we have no idea how they got it" variety. In fact I think they've decided it isn't possible, since they are now rolling out bluetrace. They recon if 40% of the population takes it up, we can eradicate the thing.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
usaar333 7y ago
> start spreading again when the masses break and go back to work I don't see why this must be true. R before the lockdown in northern CA and WA (heavy voluntary measures but people "working") was ~1.45. [source: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.12.20062943v1.full.pdf https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.12.20062943v...]. SoCal was higher at R=2.1, possibly due to less voluntary restrictions. Add on a functional testing and contact tracing (built up during the lockdown) and you should be at r < 1.
_vertigo 7y ago
You’re ignoring the possibility that the lockdown bought us time to prepare a more effective strategy we can implement as we open society again. Also, there are still a lot of unknowns about this virus. * It has been reported to cause long term organ damage. How common is that? How severe is it? * It has killed lots of people who are not frail. * We don’t have a good idea of how widespread it is, so we don’t know what the true death rate is. The Santa Clara serological study suggested that 48k residents have been infected. Santa Clara currently only has 73 deaths, which gives a death rate of .15%. We only had access to this serological data yesterday, so how would we have made decisions using it last month? And even if the death rate is low, that’s the death rate with a health care system that’s not at capacity thanks to social distancing and lockdown measures. * We don’t know how effective a policy of “protect the old and frail” would be because it’s never been tried. * etc etc All of these unknowns together should give you pause. It’s tiring to hear people confidently promoting their unfounded opinions on the virus grounded in nothing more than a know-it-all attitude and a generous helping of Dunning-Kruger.
- erdos4d 7y ago
  What have we accomplished in this time? We know basically what we knew a month ago, we have no vaccine or treatment, and we know very well that the old and compromised are at much higher risk than the young. We also know that every passing day gives those with capital to withstand this more leverage within the society as more businesses go under and more people are thrown to the dole. This we can be certain of, especially in the US, where it seems to be repugnant to provide serious assistance to the poor. Maybe you are one of those with great wealth, but the rest of us would be happy to put grandma in an empty house somewhere and get back to work, before there is no work to be had. I personally feel this way and am happy to take my chances with the virus rather than the "goodwill" of the rich. I suspect mine is rapidly becoming a majority opinion as savings dwindle and businesses go under.

DennisP 7y ago

If you use your lockdown time to set up solid testing and tracing, it can work out pretty well.

jdminhbg 7y ago
That’s a theory, but nothing more. Nobody has successfully done that yet. The testing and tracing success stories started before they needed to lock anything down.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- yongjik 7y ago
  They (South Korea, Taiwan, etc.) did not need lockdown because testing and tracing were successful! Of course there's no success stories with lockdown and successful tracing - the early successes didn't need full lockdown (unless you count China), and the ones going through lockdown now will need weeks or months to contain it. Sigh.
  - jdminhbg 7y ago
    Right, but that still does not tell us whether testing and tracing will work once it got past the point of lockdowns. Hopefully it does, but we don’t know if it’s possible to do once the scale of tracing gets so huge.
    - DennisP 7y ago
      That's why if you've got significant spread you have to do a long hard lockdown first, instead of jumping straight to test and trace. Get the effective R0 below 1 and you can reduce your current infection count.
      - nradov 7y ago
        But that's a moot point because it's simply impossible to do a hard lockdown in an open society like the US. There are too many essential activities, and the government lacks the resources to strictly enforce orders.
        DennisP 7y ago
        R0 is currently less than one in many states: https://rt.live/ https://rt.live/ So right now they actually are locking down sufficiently to shrink the number of cases.
    - rstuart4133 7y ago
      > but that still does not tell us whether testing and tracing will work once it got past the point of lockdowns. Well I can tell you the answer to that, because in Australia I watched it unfold in real time. We have an aggressive tracking and tracking regime. Our most populous state published the figures on it - lettings us know new cases, overseas infections and local infections (which was the real number that mattered). Overseas infections dominated, and we got most of them from the USA. Extraordinarily, we watched as the doubling period of people infected in the USA dipped below 2 days, while at the time the USA was saying it was a flu that would blow over in summer. In the end it became too much. The USA become too dangerous for us, and because were weren't prepared to single out the USA like we singled out China for bans, we shut down the border completely. During the peak of that period, the "untested" number in those tracking and tracing figures grew exponentially. In case it isn't obvious that means it's failing: the virus has overwhelmed the resources of the nation-state. But it turned out they were mostly foreign infections being imported, and so after 14 days when that ended new infections plummeted, and we caught up. Now we are down to 50 new cases a day and are opening up the economy again. What it takes to overwhelm you depends on how much work tracking and tracing each infection requires. In Australia, it's all manual. In South Korea the co-opted the banks, mobile networks and other sources of data, built a system in under 60 days to tie it all together (as an I professional, colour me impressed). So they are _much_ more efficient at it than we are. Nonetheless it's not strictly true they didn't have lock downs. They didn't ever have a country wide lock down, but they did lock down regions for a few weeks when tracking and tracing was looking like it might be overwhelmed. Such small lock downs are very cheap compared to what everyone else is going through of course. I suspect it's even cheaper than the "let it burn" approach of Sweden. In Australia we now have it under control. Since we are an island I think they are pretty confident if we can eliminate it internally, we have it beat. The only thing that would have to remain in place is the mandatory 14 day quarantine for international travellers, and even that could be reduced to a few days with good early detection tests. But eliminating it internally is going to be very difficult with a 30% asymptomatic rate even with our current tracking and tracing effort, as many local infections are of the "we have no idea how they got it" variety. In fact I think they've decided it isn't possible, since they are now rolling out bluetrace. They recon if 40% of the population takes it up, we can eradicate the thing.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

usaar333 7y ago

> start spreading again when the masses break and go back to work I don't see why this must be true. R before the lockdown in northern CA and WA (heavy voluntary measures but people "working") was ~1.45. [source: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.12.20062943v1.full.pdf https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.12.20062943v...]. SoCal was higher at R=2.1, possibly due to less voluntary restrictions. Add on a functional testing and contact tracing (built up during the lockdown) and you should be at r < 1.

_vertigo 7y ago

You’re ignoring the possibility that the lockdown bought us time to prepare a more effective strategy we can implement as we open society again. Also, there are still a lot of unknowns about this virus. * It has been reported to cause long term organ damage. How common is that? How severe is it? * It has killed lots of people who are not frail. * We don’t have a good idea of how widespread it is, so we don’t know what the true death rate is. The Santa Clara serological study suggested that 48k residents have been infected. Santa Clara currently only has 73 deaths, which gives a death rate of .15%. We only had access to this serological data yesterday, so how would we have made decisions using it last month? And even if the death rate is low, that’s the death rate with a health care system that’s not at capacity thanks to social distancing and lockdown measures. * We don’t know how effective a policy of “protect the old and frail” would be because it’s never been tried. * etc etc All of these unknowns together should give you pause. It’s tiring to hear people confidently promoting their unfounded opinions on the virus grounded in nothing more than a know-it-all attitude and a generous helping of Dunning-Kruger.

erdos4d 7y ago
What have we accomplished in this time? We know basically what we knew a month ago, we have no vaccine or treatment, and we know very well that the old and compromised are at much higher risk than the young. We also know that every passing day gives those with capital to withstand this more leverage within the society as more businesses go under and more people are thrown to the dole. This we can be certain of, especially in the US, where it seems to be repugnant to provide serious assistance to the poor. Maybe you are one of those with great wealth, but the rest of us would be happy to put grandma in an empty house somewhere and get back to work, before there is no work to be had. I personally feel this way and am happy to take my chances with the virus rather than the "goodwill" of the rich. I suspect mine is rapidly becoming a majority opinion as savings dwindle and businesses go under.