2 ms·

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 f

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
    > 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. This is a complete farce. 1-2% of dying in not-at-risk individuals? We know that the diamond princess, the cruise where we tested everybody, had around a 1% mortality rate, and that was with a bunch of at-risk individuals (the elderly, in this case). That basically gives us an upper bound IFR, and other data coming out from places like Germany is putting us closer to .2-.6% IFR. But yes, if someone has extreme anxiety that they are going to die from covid, even despite evidence to the contrary, they should absolutely stay at home. No one should be forced to go outside, but unfortunately in many parts of the world people are being forbidden from going outside practically at all. The important thing here is the individual needs to be empowered to make an informed decision based off their personal risk tolerance. If someone decides that the unknowns are too overwhelming and they want to remain at home until a hypothetical future vaccine is hypothetically released, that's totally fine. But critically, I don't want to be living in a society that is forcing me to stay inside for reasons that are not based on evidence-based public health policy. And unfortunately so much of what we've seen (e.g. closing public parks, banning jogging, disallowing drive-thru church meetings until the decision was overturned) is not grounded in sane policy, but instead in panic-driven reactionism.

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
  > 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. This is a complete farce. 1-2% of dying in not-at-risk individuals? We know that the diamond princess, the cruise where we tested everybody, had around a 1% mortality rate, and that was with a bunch of at-risk individuals (the elderly, in this case). That basically gives us an upper bound IFR, and other data coming out from places like Germany is putting us closer to .2-.6% IFR. But yes, if someone has extreme anxiety that they are going to die from covid, even despite evidence to the contrary, they should absolutely stay at home. No one should be forced to go outside, but unfortunately in many parts of the world people are being forbidden from going outside practically at all. The important thing here is the individual needs to be empowered to make an informed decision based off their personal risk tolerance. If someone decides that the unknowns are too overwhelming and they want to remain at home until a hypothetical future vaccine is hypothetically released, that's totally fine. But critically, I don't want to be living in a society that is forcing me to stay inside for reasons that are not based on evidence-based public health policy. And unfortunately so much of what we've seen (e.g. closing public parks, banning jogging, disallowing drive-thru church meetings until the decision was overturned) is not grounded in sane policy, but instead in panic-driven reactionism.