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I’m actually surprised at how compliant citizens were in general. I would have expected more rioting or pushback but I guess that’s what we are seeing right now

I’m actually surprised at how compliant citizens were in general. I would have expected more rioting or pushback but I guess that’s what we are seeing right now. It’s been 6 weeks and I’m surviving but my wife and kids are not doing as well. I can only imagine how bad some people have it, especially those in apartments. At some point people are going to do the math and figure that 80% mild symptoms rate that leads to immunity and a decent job is worth the risk rather than starving to death alone. I think that breaking point will be reached before end of June and I hope there are measures to deal with that. Personally I would give everyone $2000/month and drop prices of marijuana to keep the masses from rioting.

mrfusion 7y ago
Well the hospitals have plenty of excess capacity now. We’ve very successfully flattened the curve. It might be time to ease up. I thought this doctor explained the idea better than I could: https://medium.com/@jbgeach/eight-reasons-to-end-the-lockdowns-as-soon-as-possible-b7bb0bc94f00 https://medium.com/@jbgeach/eight-reasons-to-end-the-lockdow... But I’m just winging this like everyone. I could certainly be wrong.
- ajross 7y ago
  Only in some areas. New York is still teetering right at capacity. Active cases have not dropped much at all, in fact. It's the rate of new infections that has leveled off. This is good evidence that the exponential growth has been halted. No, it's not time to ease up. Unlike in February, we have effectively zero buffer in many areas. A sudden increase in cases (which is what "easing up" means!) would push us right over the edge. We ease up when the outbreak can be sustained. It can't now, and won't for several weeks, maybe two months more. Stay home.
  - mrfusion 7y ago
    Wow that’s a much worse outlook than I’ve been hearing. Do you have a source on the zero buffer areas? I’ll have to read up more. I know in Florida we had to furlough a lot of medical staff because they didn’t get as many cases as expected and elective procedures are banned.
    - ryankemper 7y ago
      It really is highly ironic that by instituting a national lockdown and telling citizens to avoid the hospital across-the-board (instead of specifying high-impacted areas like New York), we destroyed tons of jobs in the medical industry. I dislike citing news articles, I'd prefer to cite real research, but here's a crappy source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/04/02/coronavirus-pandemic-jobs-us-health-care-workers-furloughed-laid-off/5102320002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/04/02/corona... -- When I first started hearing about the Coronavirus and figuring out the situation, my initial reaction was that we need to foster herd immunity, and avoiding exposure is near-impossible over the long run therefore we should just "get it over with" - not going out of our way to get infected but also not hiding. Then as we heard about Italy, France, etc, my view shifted, and I viewed the lockdown as a necessary evil. I've now swung back the other way. Time will tell, but I really think that subsequent research we'll show that we took a huge problem - a covid pandemic - and turned it into two huge problems - a pandemic along with significant swaths of our economy getting destroyed. The argument to flatten the curve, beyond preventing exceeding hospital capacity, which is absolutely a critical goal, was also that those of us who are not at serious risk could spread to those who _are_ at risk, and therefore everyone needs to act in lockstep. Well, if you take a systems-level view, absolutely the best thing a non-at-risk person can do is get exposed to covid, fully quarantine themselves, and then return to daily life. Having a huge swath of the population with immunity is the best way to protect our at risk population. (In a perfect world, we could culture sars-cov-2 and voluntarily expose ourselves - basically a vaccine except you're exposing yourself to the real deal and not a virus rendered inert) Also, back on the "exceeding hospital capacity" point, it is precisely those at-risk who are filling up hospitals and needing intubation or ventilation. So we can have a huge portion of the population who is not at risk still living their lives (with some adjustments), and the effect on hospitalizations would really not be that bad as a result. I'll be closely following Sweden's data over the next months. I'm very curious how their strategy pans out.
      - pdonis 7y ago
        > if you take a systems-level view, absolutely the best thing a non-at-risk person can do is get exposed to covid, fully quarantine themselves, and then return to daily life The problem with this kind of "systems-level view" is that individual humans are not cogs in a system. What you propose here is asking every non-at-risk person to take an unknown, but possibly as high as a percent or two, risk of dying. I doubt many people will take you up on that. I certainly won't. I think the best you're going to get along these lines is to find out, once widespread antibody testing is available, how many people have already been exposed to the virus without knowing it. If that number of people turns out to be large enough, it will be a lot easier to get things back to something approaching normal.
  - ryankemper 7y ago
    Hmm. You seem to have repeatedly said that we should stay home, but didn't really make much of an argument for it, the one exception being this point: > we have effectively zero buffer in many areas. A sudden increase in cases (which is what "easing up" means!) would push us right over the edge. -- I think that this is not the best way to think about it. We need to contrast the benefit of lockdowns (decreased transmission of the disease) with the economic costs. And just to be clear, this isn't about investment returns, the stock market, etc, it's about the very real fact that poverty, stress, and economic uncertainty all eventually lead to deaths in their own right (either indirectly due to being reluctant to seek medical care, or directly through suicide). If you're willing to discuss further, can we see if we agree on these points? (1) This is a highly transmissible respiratory virus, and thus eradication is impossible (2) Given (1), the purpose of lockdowns and other measures is primarily to prevent us from exceeding our hospital capacity, at which point the number of deaths would go up dramatically (3) The vast majority of the globe will be exposed to this. Avoiding that is not possible, so it's just a matter of when Therefore, we should work to mitigate the _impact_ of Covid (NOT with the goal of eradicating it, which is impossible), but there is a point where the economic damage will far exceed the cost of lifting lockdown. BTW, it's not like ending lockdown means everything goes back to normal. We would still be banning large gatherings, at least for a short length of time, and we would still be advising at-risk individuals to self-isolate (and for a country like the US, I don't have any hard numbers here but that could easily still be 30-50% of the country who's considered at risk). Last point I want to make. Many of us here work jobs that allow us to work from home, and so we kept our jobs during this. We need to recognize that not only have tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs, but a significant chunk of those jobs will not be "coming back". Real value was destroyed. And those who lost their jobs are exactly those who are likely to be in lower socioeconomic classes and thus are much less equipped to weather events like this. (Sorry, the above was pretty rambly, so I hope there's still some value you can get out of it :P)
    - lifeformed 7y ago
      To prevent poverty and stress, it seems much safer and effective to just pause debt (not furlough) for a few months, than force everyone back into the mix and risk a new outbreak.
- nimchimpsky 7y ago
  but the curve will just steepen when everyone goes back to normal ... angela merkel summed it up nicely I thought : https://twitter.com/BenjAlvarez1/status/1250563198081740800 https://twitter.com/BenjAlvarez1/status/1250563198081740800
- maxerickson 7y ago
  Hospital capacity doesn't really help the most severely impacted: https://apnews.com/8ccd325c2be9bf454c2128dcb7bd616d https://apnews.com/8ccd325c2be9bf454c2128dcb7bd616d It's also not the case that reducing government mandated restrictions will just snap the economy back. Plenty of people are going to avoid sitting in restaurants and the like, regardless of what the government says. And hopefully businesses will keep lots of people working from home, so that we can limit the spread as much as possible while working towards better treatments and a vaccine.
  - eru 7y ago
    > It's also not the case that reducing government mandated restrictions will just snap the economy back. Plenty of people are going to avoid sitting in restaurants and the like, regardless of what the government says. Yes. And that's a good argument in favour of gradually lifting government restrictions: the private sector will do some of its own lockdown as necessary.
Der_Einzige 7y ago
Pot prices in the original legal states are already very low (with the possible exception of California which is double that of Oregon or Washington). There is a massive oversupply of the stuff on the west coast. I wouldn't complain about 80$ oz's turning into 50$ oz's, but it doesn't seem all that necessary. Also, folks shouldn't be smoking or even vaping right now (what's the point of making your possible lung complications from COVID worse???) Just make edibles.
viklove 7y ago
It's so messed up to me that we would rather see food rotting on the shelves of supermarkets (ag output has barely slowed down at all), instead of just providing American citizens with the UBI they need to feed themselves through this pandemic. Why are we all so willing to risk our lives to prop up Q3 earnings reports for useless corporations that aren't necessary during this crisis?
- clairity 7y ago
  most of us don't care a lick about corporate earnings. we risk our lives every day just by waking up and doing anything, to the tune of 8000 american deaths a day (for example). should we just remain socially isolated for the rest of our lives instead? life is risk, and so risk is not a reason to forgo life.
  - viklove 7y ago
    Are you trying to imply that all risk is equivalent? I'm not saying we should "forgo life," I'm just wondering why so many people are rushing to get back to driving Ubers, flipping burgers, etc. in the midst of this pandemic. It's not worth the risk of COVID, which is much, much higher than the baseline risk of everyday life.
nradov 7y ago
Just because people aren't rioting doesn't mean they are actually complying. And compliance will only decline further as time passes. I'm not endorsing this behavior but it's inevitable.

mrfusion 7y ago

Well the hospitals have plenty of excess capacity now. We’ve very successfully flattened the curve. It might be time to ease up. I thought this doctor explained the idea better than I could: https://medium.com/@jbgeach/eight-reasons-to-end-the-lockdowns-as-soon-as-possible-b7bb0bc94f00 https://medium.com/@jbgeach/eight-reasons-to-end-the-lockdow... But I’m just winging this like everyone. I could certainly be wrong.

ajross 7y ago
Only in some areas. New York is still teetering right at capacity. Active cases have not dropped much at all, in fact. It's the rate of new infections that has leveled off. This is good evidence that the exponential growth has been halted. No, it's not time to ease up. Unlike in February, we have effectively zero buffer in many areas. A sudden increase in cases (which is what "easing up" means!) would push us right over the edge. We ease up when the outbreak can be sustained. It can't now, and won't for several weeks, maybe two months more. Stay home.
- mrfusion 7y ago
  Wow that’s a much worse outlook than I’ve been hearing. Do you have a source on the zero buffer areas? I’ll have to read up more. I know in Florida we had to furlough a lot of medical staff because they didn’t get as many cases as expected and elective procedures are banned.
  - ryankemper 7y ago
    It really is highly ironic that by instituting a national lockdown and telling citizens to avoid the hospital across-the-board (instead of specifying high-impacted areas like New York), we destroyed tons of jobs in the medical industry. I dislike citing news articles, I'd prefer to cite real research, but here's a crappy source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/04/02/coronavirus-pandemic-jobs-us-health-care-workers-furloughed-laid-off/5102320002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/04/02/corona... -- When I first started hearing about the Coronavirus and figuring out the situation, my initial reaction was that we need to foster herd immunity, and avoiding exposure is near-impossible over the long run therefore we should just "get it over with" - not going out of our way to get infected but also not hiding. Then as we heard about Italy, France, etc, my view shifted, and I viewed the lockdown as a necessary evil. I've now swung back the other way. Time will tell, but I really think that subsequent research we'll show that we took a huge problem - a covid pandemic - and turned it into two huge problems - a pandemic along with significant swaths of our economy getting destroyed. The argument to flatten the curve, beyond preventing exceeding hospital capacity, which is absolutely a critical goal, was also that those of us who are not at serious risk could spread to those who _are_ at risk, and therefore everyone needs to act in lockstep. Well, if you take a systems-level view, absolutely the best thing a non-at-risk person can do is get exposed to covid, fully quarantine themselves, and then return to daily life. Having a huge swath of the population with immunity is the best way to protect our at risk population. (In a perfect world, we could culture sars-cov-2 and voluntarily expose ourselves - basically a vaccine except you're exposing yourself to the real deal and not a virus rendered inert) Also, back on the "exceeding hospital capacity" point, it is precisely those at-risk who are filling up hospitals and needing intubation or ventilation. So we can have a huge portion of the population who is not at risk still living their lives (with some adjustments), and the effect on hospitalizations would really not be that bad as a result. I'll be closely following Sweden's data over the next months. I'm very curious how their strategy pans out.
    - pdonis 7y ago
      > if you take a systems-level view, absolutely the best thing a non-at-risk person can do is get exposed to covid, fully quarantine themselves, and then return to daily life The problem with this kind of "systems-level view" is that individual humans are not cogs in a system. What you propose here is asking every non-at-risk person to take an unknown, but possibly as high as a percent or two, risk of dying. I doubt many people will take you up on that. I certainly won't. I think the best you're going to get along these lines is to find out, once widespread antibody testing is available, how many people have already been exposed to the virus without knowing it. If that number of people turns out to be large enough, it will be a lot easier to get things back to something approaching normal.
- ryankemper 7y ago
  Hmm. You seem to have repeatedly said that we should stay home, but didn't really make much of an argument for it, the one exception being this point: > we have effectively zero buffer in many areas. A sudden increase in cases (which is what "easing up" means!) would push us right over the edge. -- I think that this is not the best way to think about it. We need to contrast the benefit of lockdowns (decreased transmission of the disease) with the economic costs. And just to be clear, this isn't about investment returns, the stock market, etc, it's about the very real fact that poverty, stress, and economic uncertainty all eventually lead to deaths in their own right (either indirectly due to being reluctant to seek medical care, or directly through suicide). If you're willing to discuss further, can we see if we agree on these points? (1) This is a highly transmissible respiratory virus, and thus eradication is impossible (2) Given (1), the purpose of lockdowns and other measures is primarily to prevent us from exceeding our hospital capacity, at which point the number of deaths would go up dramatically (3) The vast majority of the globe will be exposed to this. Avoiding that is not possible, so it's just a matter of when Therefore, we should work to mitigate the _impact_ of Covid (NOT with the goal of eradicating it, which is impossible), but there is a point where the economic damage will far exceed the cost of lifting lockdown. BTW, it's not like ending lockdown means everything goes back to normal. We would still be banning large gatherings, at least for a short length of time, and we would still be advising at-risk individuals to self-isolate (and for a country like the US, I don't have any hard numbers here but that could easily still be 30-50% of the country who's considered at risk). Last point I want to make. Many of us here work jobs that allow us to work from home, and so we kept our jobs during this. We need to recognize that not only have tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs, but a significant chunk of those jobs will not be "coming back". Real value was destroyed. And those who lost their jobs are exactly those who are likely to be in lower socioeconomic classes and thus are much less equipped to weather events like this. (Sorry, the above was pretty rambly, so I hope there's still some value you can get out of it :P)
  - lifeformed 7y ago
    To prevent poverty and stress, it seems much safer and effective to just pause debt (not furlough) for a few months, than force everyone back into the mix and risk a new outbreak.
nimchimpsky 7y ago
but the curve will just steepen when everyone goes back to normal ... angela merkel summed it up nicely I thought : https://twitter.com/BenjAlvarez1/status/1250563198081740800 https://twitter.com/BenjAlvarez1/status/1250563198081740800
maxerickson 7y ago
Hospital capacity doesn't really help the most severely impacted: https://apnews.com/8ccd325c2be9bf454c2128dcb7bd616d https://apnews.com/8ccd325c2be9bf454c2128dcb7bd616d It's also not the case that reducing government mandated restrictions will just snap the economy back. Plenty of people are going to avoid sitting in restaurants and the like, regardless of what the government says. And hopefully businesses will keep lots of people working from home, so that we can limit the spread as much as possible while working towards better treatments and a vaccine.
- eru 7y ago
  > It's also not the case that reducing government mandated restrictions will just snap the economy back. Plenty of people are going to avoid sitting in restaurants and the like, regardless of what the government says. Yes. And that's a good argument in favour of gradually lifting government restrictions: the private sector will do some of its own lockdown as necessary.

Der_Einzige 7y ago

Pot prices in the original legal states are already very low (with the possible exception of California which is double that of Oregon or Washington). There is a massive oversupply of the stuff on the west coast. I wouldn't complain about 80$ oz's turning into 50$ oz's, but it doesn't seem all that necessary. Also, folks shouldn't be smoking or even vaping right now (what's the point of making your possible lung complications from COVID worse???) Just make edibles.

viklove 7y ago

It's so messed up to me that we would rather see food rotting on the shelves of supermarkets (ag output has barely slowed down at all), instead of just providing American citizens with the UBI they need to feed themselves through this pandemic. Why are we all so willing to risk our lives to prop up Q3 earnings reports for useless corporations that aren't necessary during this crisis?

clairity 7y ago
most of us don't care a lick about corporate earnings. we risk our lives every day just by waking up and doing anything, to the tune of 8000 american deaths a day (for example). should we just remain socially isolated for the rest of our lives instead? life is risk, and so risk is not a reason to forgo life.
- viklove 7y ago
  Are you trying to imply that all risk is equivalent? I'm not saying we should "forgo life," I'm just wondering why so many people are rushing to get back to driving Ubers, flipping burgers, etc. in the midst of this pandemic. It's not worth the risk of COVID, which is much, much higher than the baseline risk of everyday life.

nradov 7y ago

Just because people aren't rioting doesn't mean they are actually complying. And compliance will only decline further as time passes. I'm not endorsing this behavior but it's inevitable.