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> Encourage at-risk groups to self quarantine, and utilize testing to protect them...Those with obesity and COPD Author suggests self-quarantine for the obese

> Encourage at-risk groups to self quarantine, and utilize testing to protect them...Those with obesity and COPD Author suggests self-quarantine for the obese instead of quarantine/lockdown for everyone. The CDC suggests that +42% of the US adult population is obese [0]. Are we really going to isolate or quarantine 4 out of 10 US adults and imagine the economy can get back on track? [0]: https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html

cies 6y ago
> Are we really going to isolate or quarantine 4 out of 10 US adults and imagine the economy can get back on track? It's a good start. Also "encourage" is different from "enforce".
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  "Encourage" is different from "enforce", but very similar to "doesn't work". Once isolation becomes voluntary, the job market will make sure that people won't isolate even if they wanted to. A common thread of the current pandemic measures is that people get to protect themselves in ways that would destroy their careers if they weren't mandated top-down by the government.
  - imglorp 6y ago
    I wonder if it becomes an EEO issue (in the US). They can't compel a vulnerable WFH person to rejoin an open plan sardine office, nor can they fire them for not rejoining without attracting attention for discrimination. I know a tech worker who used to wheel an oxygen tank to the office: I imagine that person is more than a little concerned right now. It also implies that a partly WFH workforce cannot be sidelined: once one person is remote the whole culture needs to be organized around remote process.
  - cies 6y ago
    > Once isolation becomes voluntary, the job market will make sure that people won't isolate even if they wanted to. Depends on your labour laws, and facilities more than on the market IMHO.
yostrovs 6y ago
"Are we really going to isolate or quarantine 4 out of 10 US adults and imagine the economy can get back on track?" Better than everyone pulling their hair out at home. Plus, why not have people choose themselves whether they're healthy enough to take chances and go out to work?
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > Plus, why not have people choose themselves whether they're healthy enough to take chances and go out to work? Because people who chose to take that risk will still go back to their homes and infect people who'd rather not, or can't afford to.
  - lloeki 6y ago
    Because "healthy enough" doesn't mean not contagious. Because people go to work sick otherwise they can't put food on the table, especially in a country where not going to work massively means losing your job in a country without a sensible, humane healthcare system.
- yakshaving_jgt 6y ago
  Because whether or not the virus affects them, they can still become a carrier and pass it on to others.
- jedimastert 6y ago
  > Plus, why not have people choose themselves whether they're healthy enough to take chances and go out to work? Three reasons immediately spring to mind: 1. It's a very well established fact that C19 can transmitted by asymptomatic people. "Healthy enough" does not mean "safe" 2. Ignoring that fact, I know can personally name several people who would absolutely go to work sick. 3. I've have several employers who would say "Do totally have a choice...come in or you're fired and I'll find someone else who will do it". This includes a very vivid memory of a manager telling one employee that she doesn't not have a valid excuse to miss her shift while she was still weeping because her grandmother had died.
wegs 6y ago
Hey, I switched to working from home seamlessly. Many other people did too. There's plenty of at-home work. If I bought the assumption that getting COVID19 was relatively safe for me, I'd gladly swap jobs to keep someone else safe, especially if it meant moving up in the world. An at-risk individual could do my job, and I'd take their in-person job. While I think there are better mechanisms, free markets could take care of swapping people around. If you're self-quarantining, and you have a better job than I do, I'll take your job. My job is now vacant for you. That's far from ideal -- you've just taken a pay cut -- but it's far better than mass unemployment. What we'd need from there would be much cheaper than the successive stimuli (e.g. support for at-risk low-income individuals: like a stimulus check, bigger, but only to people who need it). Now, to be willing to do this, I'd need to believe COVID19 is relatively safe for me (e.g. <1% odds of death _or significant long-term complications_). That's an assumption I don't buy. By looking at IFR/CFR numbers, we've ignored the much bigger question: how many people end up with permanent lung damage or other organ damage. Until we have a clear answer, I'm in lock-down mode unless I'm forced out.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  What you describe would work if jobs were so commoditized that everyone could jump between them without any kind of onboarding or training. As it is, a new employee almost always provides negative value to the company for the first weeks or months, depending on the job particulars. So what would happen in many (most?) places is companies preferring to force the existing employees to come to work, rather than let them swap the job with someone else.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    Fortunately at will employment works both ways. I can't be forced to come to work. They of course can refuse to allow me to come back in a few years after this is over but if they want someone today they need to entice them somehow. If things are now risky than they may need to offer hazard pay. Note that a company giving a bad reference because you refuse the terms is likely to lose a lawsuit (in the US) since courts will find it reasonable for someone to refuse to come into work given the experts advice at this time. Thus the company will probably just confirm your dates of employment and refuse to say anything more about your performance while working there.
ashtonkem 6y ago
Also, advocates of re-opening vastly overestimate their ability to make that happen. I don’t feel safe going outside, so any suggestion that for the good of the economy I should do so will be met with a string of naughty words and continued quarantine on my part. If they want me to go back out and resume regular economic activity, they need to focus on what’ll make that feel safe again.
- hkai 6y ago
  That can change very quickly once the fearmongering on the news stops reaching you. Here in Hong Kong, people who were obsessively sterilizing everything and were scared to go outside 2 weeks ago are now taking off their masks and going to the beach.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    I think the differences between HK and America are quite a bit more than “fearmongering”.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    That is not because they've stopped listening to "fearmongering", but because the thing to fear - new infections - has receded! https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/society/article/3081701/coronavirus-hong-kong-reports-no-new-cases-covid-19-second https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/society/article/3081701/... By the sound of it most people are wearing masks most of the time. (Boilerplate warning about news reliability in nonfree countries)
- driverdan 6y ago
  > I don’t feel safe going outside Why? So long as you're not close to other people there's no risk in being outside.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    The implied detail is “and doing the regular economic activities that ‘opening up’ would entail”. The kinds of economic activities that I have stopped doing during this pandemic are relatively hard to social distance. I of course actually do go outside, but only to my patio, not to go back to my old gym or coffee shops.
rootusrootus 6y ago
> The CDC suggests that +42% of the US adult population is obese For what it's worth, this is the same CDC that suggests that the level of obesity that increases COVID risk is BMI 40+ [0], which is more like 6-7% of the US population. [0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/need-extra-precautions/groups-at-higher-risk.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/need-extra-precaut...
- docdeek 6y ago
  That's a good point. The OP didn't specify a BMI, just obesity. Still an enormous number of people but far lower than 40ish percent.
  - ryankemper 6y ago
    Yes, I should have used more precise language. I should have made it clear but I wasn't attempting to construct an exhaustive list of risk factors, but more give an example of what that might look like
- xienze 6y ago
  Exactly. “Obese” is a very broad term that could mean anything from 10 pounds overweight to “fused to your couch because you can’t stand up.”

cies 6y ago

> Are we really going to isolate or quarantine 4 out of 10 US adults and imagine the economy can get back on track? It's a good start. Also "encourage" is different from "enforce".

TeMPOraL 6y ago
"Encourage" is different from "enforce", but very similar to "doesn't work". Once isolation becomes voluntary, the job market will make sure that people won't isolate even if they wanted to. A common thread of the current pandemic measures is that people get to protect themselves in ways that would destroy their careers if they weren't mandated top-down by the government.
- imglorp 6y ago
  I wonder if it becomes an EEO issue (in the US). They can't compel a vulnerable WFH person to rejoin an open plan sardine office, nor can they fire them for not rejoining without attracting attention for discrimination. I know a tech worker who used to wheel an oxygen tank to the office: I imagine that person is more than a little concerned right now. It also implies that a partly WFH workforce cannot be sidelined: once one person is remote the whole culture needs to be organized around remote process.
- cies 6y ago
  > Once isolation becomes voluntary, the job market will make sure that people won't isolate even if they wanted to. Depends on your labour laws, and facilities more than on the market IMHO.

yostrovs 6y ago

"Are we really going to isolate or quarantine 4 out of 10 US adults and imagine the economy can get back on track?" Better than everyone pulling their hair out at home. Plus, why not have people choose themselves whether they're healthy enough to take chances and go out to work?

TeMPOraL 6y ago
> Plus, why not have people choose themselves whether they're healthy enough to take chances and go out to work? Because people who chose to take that risk will still go back to their homes and infect people who'd rather not, or can't afford to.
- lloeki 6y ago
  Because "healthy enough" doesn't mean not contagious. Because people go to work sick otherwise they can't put food on the table, especially in a country where not going to work massively means losing your job in a country without a sensible, humane healthcare system.
yakshaving_jgt 6y ago
Because whether or not the virus affects them, they can still become a carrier and pass it on to others.
jedimastert 6y ago
> Plus, why not have people choose themselves whether they're healthy enough to take chances and go out to work? Three reasons immediately spring to mind: 1. It's a very well established fact that C19 can transmitted by asymptomatic people. "Healthy enough" does not mean "safe" 2. Ignoring that fact, I know can personally name several people who would absolutely go to work sick. 3. I've have several employers who would say "Do totally have a choice...come in or you're fired and I'll find someone else who will do it". This includes a very vivid memory of a manager telling one employee that she doesn't not have a valid excuse to miss her shift while she was still weeping because her grandmother had died.

wegs 6y ago

Hey, I switched to working from home seamlessly. Many other people did too. There's plenty of at-home work. If I bought the assumption that getting COVID19 was relatively safe for me, I'd gladly swap jobs to keep someone else safe, especially if it meant moving up in the world. An at-risk individual could do my job, and I'd take their in-person job. While I think there are better mechanisms, free markets could take care of swapping people around. If you're self-quarantining, and you have a better job than I do, I'll take your job. My job is now vacant for you. That's far from ideal -- you've just taken a pay cut -- but it's far better than mass unemployment. What we'd need from there would be much cheaper than the successive stimuli (e.g. support for at-risk low-income individuals: like a stimulus check, bigger, but only to people who need it). Now, to be willing to do this, I'd need to believe COVID19 is relatively safe for me (e.g. <1% odds of death _or significant long-term complications_). That's an assumption I don't buy. By looking at IFR/CFR numbers, we've ignored the much bigger question: how many people end up with permanent lung damage or other organ damage. Until we have a clear answer, I'm in lock-down mode unless I'm forced out.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
What you describe would work if jobs were so commoditized that everyone could jump between them without any kind of onboarding or training. As it is, a new employee almost always provides negative value to the company for the first weeks or months, depending on the job particulars. So what would happen in many (most?) places is companies preferring to force the existing employees to come to work, rather than let them swap the job with someone else.
- bluGill 6y ago
  Fortunately at will employment works both ways. I can't be forced to come to work. They of course can refuse to allow me to come back in a few years after this is over but if they want someone today they need to entice them somehow. If things are now risky than they may need to offer hazard pay. Note that a company giving a bad reference because you refuse the terms is likely to lose a lawsuit (in the US) since courts will find it reasonable for someone to refuse to come into work given the experts advice at this time. Thus the company will probably just confirm your dates of employment and refuse to say anything more about your performance while working there.

ashtonkem 6y ago

Also, advocates of re-opening vastly overestimate their ability to make that happen. I don’t feel safe going outside, so any suggestion that for the good of the economy I should do so will be met with a string of naughty words and continued quarantine on my part. If they want me to go back out and resume regular economic activity, they need to focus on what’ll make that feel safe again.

hkai 6y ago
That can change very quickly once the fearmongering on the news stops reaching you. Here in Hong Kong, people who were obsessively sterilizing everything and were scared to go outside 2 weeks ago are now taking off their masks and going to the beach.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  I think the differences between HK and America are quite a bit more than “fearmongering”.
- pjc50 6y ago
  That is not because they've stopped listening to "fearmongering", but because the thing to fear - new infections - has receded! https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/society/article/3081701/coronavirus-hong-kong-reports-no-new-cases-covid-19-second https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/society/article/3081701/... By the sound of it most people are wearing masks most of the time. (Boilerplate warning about news reliability in nonfree countries)
driverdan 6y ago
> I don’t feel safe going outside Why? So long as you're not close to other people there's no risk in being outside.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  The implied detail is “and doing the regular economic activities that ‘opening up’ would entail”. The kinds of economic activities that I have stopped doing during this pandemic are relatively hard to social distance. I of course actually do go outside, but only to my patio, not to go back to my old gym or coffee shops.

rootusrootus 6y ago

> The CDC suggests that +42% of the US adult population is obese For what it's worth, this is the same CDC that suggests that the level of obesity that increases COVID risk is BMI 40+ [0], which is more like 6-7% of the US population. [0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/need-extra-precautions/groups-at-higher-risk.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/need-extra-precaut...

docdeek 6y ago
That's a good point. The OP didn't specify a BMI, just obesity. Still an enormous number of people but far lower than 40ish percent.
- ryankemper 6y ago
  Yes, I should have used more precise language. I should have made it clear but I wasn't attempting to construct an exhaustive list of risk factors, but more give an example of what that might look like
xienze 6y ago
Exactly. “Obese” is a very broad term that could mean anything from 10 pounds overweight to “fused to your couch because you can’t stand up.”