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I like your optimism, but I expect things to stay divided. Polling on COVID-19 is divided almost right down the middle like everything else in America with Demo

• Silhouette 7y ago
  I have the profile of someone who would support mandatory testing and contact tracking, but I do not as a matter of civil liberty. As a fellow believer in civil liberties, I understand where you are coming from here, and I am extremely wary of governments using this situation to claim "emergency" powers that they may be reluctant to give up afterwards. But as a believer in science, I'm not sure hundreds of thousands of lives lost in the near future in my country alone is a price worth paying for my concerns about what might happen to make lives worse later. The brutal reality is that the virus doesn't care. Fools posing in close proximity to each other with assault rifles but no protection against the virus are simply more likely to get themselves and their friends and families killed. Students who went on Spring Break and then spread the virus all across the country are more likely to get themselves and their friends and families killed. People who listen to politicians like Donald Trump and Mike Pence instead of epidemiologists are more likely... well, you get the picture. Right wingers will point to Italy, Spain, and the UK as failures of socialized medicine. They will point out that the healthcare systems in Democrat cities failed. I'm curious to know in what way(s) the systems in these countries are seen to have failed by those outside. With hindsight they would probably all have instituted lockdown measures sooner, but as they say, hindsight is 20/20.
  • rpiguy 7y ago
    The science, the actual hard number for mortality rate, is very low. It is the anecdotal evidence that is terrifying everyone (the terrible way in which it kills when it does kill, and the rate at which it spreads). I am personally not afraid of it, I wear a mask out of courtesy and not wanting to spread it if I happen to be one of the silent carriers. I've best seen it described by a mathametician as follows (wish I could find the link) - COVID-19 has comparable mortality to the flu, but you are 300 times more likely to contract it. For something with such a low mortality rate I do not support mandatory contact tracking or testing. I certainly would if the number starts sharply going in the other direction. I can't say for sure what will be pointed out specifically about socialized medicine in the UK, France, and Italy, but our numbers for the United States outside of NYC appear to be much better than those countries and I suspect that is where the right wing will come out and say our private system outperformed the public systems (i.e., cherry picking the countries with the highest mortalities for comparison with the US). They will point out that Italy had to triage beds and favored treating younger patients with higher chances of survival, allowing some older patients to die. It was the rational thing to do, but also unimaginable here in the US where you would be sued to high heaven. Can't you imagine the situation in Italy turned into a campaign add in Florida? "The Democrats want a health care system that lets seniors die" or some such with some pictures of overwhelmed Italian hospitals and a sad looking old man not being treated, but coughing and wheezing. I never said these were good arguments, I just know that they will say it, I've been following politics for a very long time. The only crises that bring both parties together are ones that hit everyone. Technically a virus hits everyone (does not discriminate as you say), but in fact it does discriminate. It spreads faster where population is denser and where there is mass transit. So just like everything in the US, this crisis is divided between urban and fly over. The urban people are literally worried for their lives, and the fly over people are worried about their jobs. This is a super broad generalization, but I am trying to make the point that the virus is not affecting all people the same way and it happens to be right down party lines.
    • Silhouette 7y ago
      As far as I'm aware, no-one actually knows the true mortality rate yet, nor things like which demographics are more or less severely affected other than in a few clearly distinct cases. Most of the US seems to be a bit behind Europe in where it is on the curve, so it also seems premature to compare statistics. Until we know when and how different places have implemented lockdown conditions, track-and-trace programmes and other responses, possibly in several stages over an extended period, and how successful each place has been at limiting total excess deaths caused by the virus and at avoiding unwanted side effects from those responses, it will be difficult to draw any reliable conclusions. That seems to be a big part of the problem we face: the data we have so far is still well short of what we'd like to know in order to accurately assess the threat and decide on a proportionate response. Consequently, everyone is basing policy largely on educated guesswork and hoping to avoid any catastrophic escalation happening too fast to react, with some increasing awareness that the more severe responses will probably have serious consequences of their own if maintained for more than a very short period and we don't necessarily fully understand those either.