7 ms·

The article is presenting this as some sort of scandal, that we spent a lot of money to urgently build things that we didn't end up needing. This way of thinki

by jefftk 7y ago

The article is presenting this as some sort of scandal, that we spent a lot of money to urgently build things that we didn't end up needing. This way of thinking about things is why we are generally not well prepared for unlikely disasters: most work you put in will not be needed. Instead we should see this as really positive: we were working to make sure that if stay-at-home (which has cost far more than $600M) didn't work we would have space to treat people, and then we kept the infections low enough that we didn't need to use it.

mc32 7y ago
Right? Moreover they were lamenting that CN was building prefab hospitals in 10 days .. and we were unable to do that and that would leave us with a bed shortage...
Consultant32452 7y ago
I watched most of the Coronavirus Task Force briefings. Several times Trump suggested Dr. Birx was telling him that these things would not be needed. And she confirmed that she felt they weren't going to be necessary. So it appears the scientists/experts knew it wasn't necessary from a medical standpoint. One could argue whether or not it was politically/emotionally necessary. Edit: you can see from several posts here that building these things really did bring a lot of emotional comfort to people, which is an important part of dealing with a crisis. People really underestimate psychology in an emergency.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  Trump suggests all sorts of things, often directly contradictory, or contradicted shortly thereafter by his own experts. I'm not sure why you'd put any stock in those suggestions at this point.
  - Consultant32452 7y ago
    The expert in question was about 4 feet away from him and confirmed what he said immediately, and repeatedly.
    - ceejayoz 7y ago
      I mean, this is hard to productively discuss without the actual quote and/or video in question. Trump has demonstrably had live disagreements with his experts at these things (hydroxychloroquine, disinfectants, etc.). https://theintercept.com/2020/03/20/trump-disagrees-top-immunologist-untested-drug-treatment-covid-19/ https://theintercept.com/2020/03/20/trump-disagrees-top-immu... I suspect most of us have had the experience of biting your tongue while your boss is chatting with a client, too.
    - Terr_ 7y ago
      That's because the experts who blatantly contradict the boss are quickly moved to a much greater distance.
      - Consultant32452 7y ago
        Trump claims experts were right. Trump acknowledges he defied the experts and potentially wasted a bunch of money. What, exactly, are you imagining is the scandal here? That Trump is lying, he didn't defy the experts, and the potential wasting of money was the fault of experts and not Trump? Is that the scandal you're imagining?
- s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
  That seems to be the case, seems that's also why Cuomo wanted 30k ventilators, only got 2k and a lot of those went into storage unused. As a leader you really have to take a deep breath and not let emotions get the better of you. Over-preparedness and knee-jerk reactions can hurt you. I'm glad we didn't fulfill the request for 30k ventilators and take away from other states/countries that needed it.
- standardUser 7y ago
  "So it appears the scientists/experts knew..." The primary theme of this pandemic is that we don't know almost anything about what is happening or what is going to happen. The list of wrong predictions can and has filled thousands of column inches and hours of briefings. We expanded our healthcare capacity because of Italy and the humanitarian crisis that was occurring there. It had nothing to do with emotion. If it made people feel nice then I suppose that was a minor unintended benefit.
  - Consultant32452 7y ago
    I agree with your sentiment and I would go one level deeper down the rabbit hole. A lot of what we've been led to believe were blatant lies. Just look at the way people are talking about reopening. There's all this talk of vaccines and testing. Those aren't going to be real solutions. A vaccine is a year away. Closing everything for a year+ would be the end of civilization. As far as testing... think about the scale of testing we would need. You'd have to basically isolate everyone, test them, and then keep the infected isolated. And you'd have to do that over a very short period of time, like a few days. We're not delivering 300+ million tests in a few days. It's not happening. Testing is useful. It's not going to be some panacea of perfection, or even particularly "good." The hard truth is we're going to eat a lot of deaths from this. And none of the experts can possibly know what is the exact right recipe to minimize deaths, either from covid or economic disaster. Any state/country/whatever that gets better results will have done so totally by luck and their solution might not have worked elsewhere for a myriad of reasons. It's all false confidence. Just look at Remdesivir, or however it's spelled. The news corps are pushing that as a possible treatment. Except guess what? It doesn't seem to reduce your chances of dying. Worth noting, pharma companies are major advertisers for news networks. It's all been bullshit.
    - javagram 7y ago
      South Korea, Taiwan, China, Vietnam, and other countries all used Test, Trace, and Isolate to contain the virus with few cases and deaths. You don’t actually need 300 million tests if you can stay on top of the virus, so I don’t think this is blatant lies like you’re talking about - in theory we’ve just spent 6 weeks locked down to reduce the number of active virus cases and now could transition to the test/trace/isolate approach we should have taken in February like the successful countries did. That said I agree the opening seems to be coming too fast and no one I have seen is presenting a model where test/trace/isolate succeeds in the USA - due to political polarization there is no national plan for it. China took 87 days to lift the lockdown on Wuhan and we are going much faster than they did, while having had a much less strict lockdown in the first place. It’s true that Redemisivir has not been scientifically proven to save lives yet, just to reduce the length of hospital stays (which means hospitals will have more capacity since each individual case stays in the hospital for a shorter time), but scientists think it may be able to reduce death rates if given earlier in the course of infection - clinical trials are still ongoing to see if this is true.
ProAm 7y ago
If people are really upset about this, they should take a look at the US Defense/Military budget. We prepared for a worst case scenario for a developing situation we knew very little about, and ended up not needing it. This should be viewed as a good thing.
- artificial 7y ago
  Which is a giant jobs program and subsidizes international trade. Look at how much of it is pork.
the-pigeon 7y ago
Seems like we were able to build them quickly enough that we prematurely built them. Wasting tax payer money that could've been invested in things like increasing PPE production for existing hospitals. The core of the issue is that we couldn't ramp up testing fast enough, leaving us completely blind and then we relied on models that believed the infection was moving far more aggressively than it was.
- jefftk 7y ago
  When you're dealing with exponential growth and high uncertainty, anything you do is likely to either look like a large underreaction or large overreaction in retrospect.
- milesskorpen 7y ago
  I think there was/is near-infinite money available for Covid-related projects, and spending was more limited by identifying them or bureaucracy or political will. I don't think we would have taken the $660mm and spent in on PPE without this hospital construction; instead, our national debt would just be that much lower.
rhacker 7y ago
Yes, I had the same thought. I was actually surprised and happy that we managed to pull that off. All my life I have had this weird thought: If someday aliens will come down and tell us to move some random huge mountain 10 miles to the left, in one month (it doesn't have to look the same). If we can't do it they will wipe us out. I wonder if we would be able to pull together and somehow do it. And then my mind thinks through all the crazy iterations of ways to start trying. I keep thinking that we will globally waste 2 weeks planning it. I guess not everyone is threatened by death in Covid, but it does seem amazing some of the things we have been able to pull together during this.
- dmurray 7y ago
  An earth-destroying asteroid is the more realistic form of this. We could get anywhere from days to years of notice it was going to hit (if years, it would just be a probable hit) and have to put together our Armageddon/Deep Impact mission to divert it. There are plenty of papers published on what we could do and the idea has had millions of dollars in funding, but it would need billions. We're screwed if the notice period is days, but we'd have a good chance to build something in months.
  - zzleeper 7y ago
    TBH given the failures of the last months, I wouldn't be surprised if we are completely unable to execute, even if we get a couple of years. A pity.
- mydongle 7y ago
  Easy one. We all come together to agree that the mountain will be mapped 10 miles to the left relative to its current position. Everything else will also be shifted slightly to account for that.
switch007 7y ago
If $1tn had been spent on extra capacity, would that have been really positive? Was the extra capacity good value? Was there any corruption? During these highly emotional times I think it's more important than ever to stay rational, and question our governments.
nck4222 7y ago
Did we read the same article? It praised the actions of building the hospitals, while stating what you said in that it shows we weren't as prepared as we should be for a pandemic. >we kept the infections low enough that we didn't need to use it. The article specifically said the hospitals were needed despite being unused. The problem was existing hospitals didn't have policies in place to use them, so instead doctors were treating patients in overrun hallways while these beds lay empty.
undersuit 7y ago
I think the article takes a very balanced stance. It is pointed out multiple times the that people are glad the hospitals are mostly unused, that they now exist if there is a surge, and that the excess bed capacity is very helpful during a crisis like this. The real criticism is nothing like you've paraphrased. > They praised the Army Corps for quickly providing thousands of extra beds, but experts said there wasn't enough planning to make sure these field hospitals could be put to use once they were finished. >The Army Corps limited the competition in awarding the projects to speed the process, which usually takes six to nine months, according to agency documents. Officials noted they were able to complete the contract award for the Stony Brook project in a "little more than three days." >The two Long Island field hospitals were completed in late April. They never opened to the public and didn't treat any patients. >The plan was for the Javits Center to take patients from overwhelmed hospitals in the city. But in practice it wasn't that easy. Some hospitals complained that the intake process was too complicated. And they sent few patients to Javits — even as they resorted to treating patients in the hallways. Seemingly like all of the US coronavirus reactions we dragged our feet at multiple points, had no reliable central coordination, and large sums of money was made against the backdrop of human suffering.
- 1234letshaveatw 7y ago
  the Detroit area "field hospitals" (convention centers) had very strict restrictions on who could be admitted- you had to be sick, but not too sick. In practice only a handful of patients were eligible and admitted before they closed. I am starting to suspect that the whole exercise amounted to a giveaway to the convention center owners who previously were forced to shut down.
  - leesalminen 7y ago
    And yet the Denver Convention Center laid off the vast majority of their staff shortly after converting to one of these field hospitals.
- fsckboy 7y ago
  Speaking only of the headline, it should be a banner ad for successful preparation and containment; it should not hint at overkill or wasted money, which it does (unless there actually was money wasted on overkill that the article wishes to expose). Even on a psychological basis, it made the populous feel more secure that the authorities were doing their best to cope. And economically speaking, it's standard economic theory that injecting money into the slowing economy will have a near term beneficial effect beyond just the direct recipients of the money. That's just the headline, and the people who write the articles famously don't write the headlines, but still, the headline is a bad headline.
jwally 7y ago
Ditto nukes
cm2187 7y ago
The cost of these field hospitals is negligible and I am not upset about them. But I am upset that the healthcare system seems to have been nowhere near capacity. Which means we are paying the full cost of the lockdown while not getting the full return in term of herd immunity, which we will pay later on with more lockdowns probably starting in fall. In other words we overreacted and flattened the curve too much.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  > In other words we flattened the curve too much. For the first go-around, with minimal available data, that seems like the much better way to err - it would've been very, very difficult to fix a mistake in the other direction. We've got more data now, and can do a better job of toeing the line with upcoming waves. It's not like we can't unflatten the curve if we really want to.
  - cm2187 7y ago
    That is a reasonable objection. But now that we have this data, there doesn't seem to be any appetite to bump up the curve, i.e. it's not about flattening the curve anymore, it is targetting zero infection until an hypothetical vaccine. Very different objective, no debate about it. And no herd immunity.
    - ceejayoz 7y ago
      There's plenty of appetite for opening back up, which'll almost certainly bump up the curve. No one's saying outright "let's have more infections!", but it'll be the end result of the reopening policies. Even hard-hit NY is looking to do it fairly soon; most of our regions just need more tests and contract tracers hired. https://www.governor.ny.gov/programs/new-york-forward https://www.governor.ny.gov/programs/new-york-forward
      - cm2187 7y ago
        I am not sure that it is the policy. In the US or Europe, all governments have warned that they would back down from opening up if they see a rise in new cases.
malandrew 7y ago
What I don't understand is that this disease becoming globally endemic is pretty much a forgone conclusion. With that in mind, when did the goal posts move from flattening the curve to keeping things shutdown indefinitely with no clear criteria for slowly returning to normal and allowing an economic recovery to happen. With flattening the curve I suspect we'd want to keep the field hospitals due to the lag time in knowing the actual infection and hospitalization rates.
- Mountain_Skies 7y ago
  Authoritarian politicians are drunk on power they've only dreamed of before. They won't give it up easily.
  - easytiger 7y ago
    I fear particularly for a subset of countries for whom this could easily be an opportunity for highly punative destruction of rights that has been forming in the background already. South Africa for example.
    - malandrew 7y ago
      It's not even a subset of countries. It's all countries, the US included. We're being conditioned to roll over on rights that we've fought hard for over 244 years.
      - easytiger 7y ago
        Indeed. But in SA this could result in the government stealing your property. Literally.
- lazyasciiart 7y ago
  I don't know where you're from, but here in WA we do have clear criteria. What changed is that we realized that we aren't capable of testing people. Everyone expected tests to be easy to create and widely available well before now.
jhwang5 7y ago
The question is - was the egregious price the contractors charged a good price? I have the right to care about that as a tax payer
keiferski 7y ago
Your analysis misses an important point, which is opportunity cost. Every action has costs and putting resources toward one area means taking them away from another.
- kosievdmerwe 7y ago
  Hindsight is 20/20. Could you or anyone have said this a few months ago? EDIT: let me make it clear what I'm saying/implying. Saying stuff about opportunity cost means that you think that this wasn't necessary. Given the fears of overrunning hospitals, I can't see anyone being able to justify not doing this except in hindsight.
  - keiferski 7y ago
    No, I’m not saying that it wasn’t necessary. Simply that a more intelligent analysis would have factored in various costs and benefits, as well as the likelihood of actual events vs. perceived ones. Every action has unintended consequences, but this simple fact seems to have been total forgotten with the response to the coronavirus.
    - kosievdmerwe 7y ago
      Fair. :) I feel like I'm seeing this with the "lock down until vaccine/forever" viewpoint as one of the most recent examples.
- specialist 7y ago
  Hedging is NPV + risk management, right? Policy makers should adopt some of the modeling tricks from Wall St. and Silicon Valley. Manage risk. Assess sure things and long shots, feed in the parameters, then allocate resources appropriately. We need better financial instruments, novel forms of insurance, put a price on resilience, to counterbalance the drive towards lean efficiency. So that key suppliers can maintain capacity without assuming all of the risk, for instance.
xwowsersx 7y ago
Perhaps I missed it, but I don't see anywhere in this article where it implies this is a scandal in any way. There's no axiological statement here, just a pretty decent overview of the facts. I agree with you that not having a need for these field hospitals is a good thing (obviously) and I don't see the article implying otherwise.
spamizbad 7y ago
Right. This obsession with government is austerity is part of why we're in this mess to begin with: A more robust response in January and February would have saved tens of thousands of lives and could have greatly reduced the scale of any lockdown measures. It would have meant spending tens of billions of $$$ towards testing and tracing infrastructure which in the age of trillion-dollar bailouts seems like a bargain.
- onemoresoop 7y ago
  I agree but unfortunately that response didn’t happen. We gotta learn a lesson here
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
Moreover, the point of the shutdown was to keep the virus from spreading, and yet the number of cases is still rising in most places in spite of it. As states are talking about reopening, it's just going to rise faster. The article notes that the field hospitals aren't being taken down, in case we need them. Since the spread seems likely to accelerate soon, it seems to early to say "we didn't use these field hospitals."

by jefftk 7y ago

mc32 7y ago

Right? Moreover they were lamenting that CN was building prefab hospitals in 10 days .. and we were unable to do that and that would leave us with a bed shortage...

Consultant32452 7y ago

I watched most of the Coronavirus Task Force briefings. Several times Trump suggested Dr. Birx was telling him that these things would not be needed. And she confirmed that she felt they weren't going to be necessary. So it appears the scientists/experts knew it wasn't necessary from a medical standpoint. One could argue whether or not it was politically/emotionally necessary. Edit: you can see from several posts here that building these things really did bring a lot of emotional comfort to people, which is an important part of dealing with a crisis. People really underestimate psychology in an emergency.

ceejayoz 7y ago
Trump suggests all sorts of things, often directly contradictory, or contradicted shortly thereafter by his own experts. I'm not sure why you'd put any stock in those suggestions at this point.
- Consultant32452 7y ago
  The expert in question was about 4 feet away from him and confirmed what he said immediately, and repeatedly.
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    I mean, this is hard to productively discuss without the actual quote and/or video in question. Trump has demonstrably had live disagreements with his experts at these things (hydroxychloroquine, disinfectants, etc.). https://theintercept.com/2020/03/20/trump-disagrees-top-immunologist-untested-drug-treatment-covid-19/ https://theintercept.com/2020/03/20/trump-disagrees-top-immu... I suspect most of us have had the experience of biting your tongue while your boss is chatting with a client, too.
  - Terr_ 7y ago
    That's because the experts who blatantly contradict the boss are quickly moved to a much greater distance.
    - Consultant32452 7y ago
      Trump claims experts were right. Trump acknowledges he defied the experts and potentially wasted a bunch of money. What, exactly, are you imagining is the scandal here? That Trump is lying, he didn't defy the experts, and the potential wasting of money was the fault of experts and not Trump? Is that the scandal you're imagining?
s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
That seems to be the case, seems that's also why Cuomo wanted 30k ventilators, only got 2k and a lot of those went into storage unused. As a leader you really have to take a deep breath and not let emotions get the better of you. Over-preparedness and knee-jerk reactions can hurt you. I'm glad we didn't fulfill the request for 30k ventilators and take away from other states/countries that needed it.
standardUser 7y ago
"So it appears the scientists/experts knew..." The primary theme of this pandemic is that we don't know almost anything about what is happening or what is going to happen. The list of wrong predictions can and has filled thousands of column inches and hours of briefings. We expanded our healthcare capacity because of Italy and the humanitarian crisis that was occurring there. It had nothing to do with emotion. If it made people feel nice then I suppose that was a minor unintended benefit.
- Consultant32452 7y ago
  I agree with your sentiment and I would go one level deeper down the rabbit hole. A lot of what we've been led to believe were blatant lies. Just look at the way people are talking about reopening. There's all this talk of vaccines and testing. Those aren't going to be real solutions. A vaccine is a year away. Closing everything for a year+ would be the end of civilization. As far as testing... think about the scale of testing we would need. You'd have to basically isolate everyone, test them, and then keep the infected isolated. And you'd have to do that over a very short period of time, like a few days. We're not delivering 300+ million tests in a few days. It's not happening. Testing is useful. It's not going to be some panacea of perfection, or even particularly "good." The hard truth is we're going to eat a lot of deaths from this. And none of the experts can possibly know what is the exact right recipe to minimize deaths, either from covid or economic disaster. Any state/country/whatever that gets better results will have done so totally by luck and their solution might not have worked elsewhere for a myriad of reasons. It's all false confidence. Just look at Remdesivir, or however it's spelled. The news corps are pushing that as a possible treatment. Except guess what? It doesn't seem to reduce your chances of dying. Worth noting, pharma companies are major advertisers for news networks. It's all been bullshit.
  - javagram 7y ago
    South Korea, Taiwan, China, Vietnam, and other countries all used Test, Trace, and Isolate to contain the virus with few cases and deaths. You don’t actually need 300 million tests if you can stay on top of the virus, so I don’t think this is blatant lies like you’re talking about - in theory we’ve just spent 6 weeks locked down to reduce the number of active virus cases and now could transition to the test/trace/isolate approach we should have taken in February like the successful countries did. That said I agree the opening seems to be coming too fast and no one I have seen is presenting a model where test/trace/isolate succeeds in the USA - due to political polarization there is no national plan for it. China took 87 days to lift the lockdown on Wuhan and we are going much faster than they did, while having had a much less strict lockdown in the first place. It’s true that Redemisivir has not been scientifically proven to save lives yet, just to reduce the length of hospital stays (which means hospitals will have more capacity since each individual case stays in the hospital for a shorter time), but scientists think it may be able to reduce death rates if given earlier in the course of infection - clinical trials are still ongoing to see if this is true.

ProAm 7y ago

If people are really upset about this, they should take a look at the US Defense/Military budget. We prepared for a worst case scenario for a developing situation we knew very little about, and ended up not needing it. This should be viewed as a good thing.

artificial 7y ago
Which is a giant jobs program and subsidizes international trade. Look at how much of it is pork.

the-pigeon 7y ago

Seems like we were able to build them quickly enough that we prematurely built them. Wasting tax payer money that could've been invested in things like increasing PPE production for existing hospitals. The core of the issue is that we couldn't ramp up testing fast enough, leaving us completely blind and then we relied on models that believed the infection was moving far more aggressively than it was.

jefftk 7y ago
When you're dealing with exponential growth and high uncertainty, anything you do is likely to either look like a large underreaction or large overreaction in retrospect.
milesskorpen 7y ago
I think there was/is near-infinite money available for Covid-related projects, and spending was more limited by identifying them or bureaucracy or political will. I don't think we would have taken the $660mm and spent in on PPE without this hospital construction; instead, our national debt would just be that much lower.

rhacker 7y ago

Yes, I had the same thought. I was actually surprised and happy that we managed to pull that off. All my life I have had this weird thought: If someday aliens will come down and tell us to move some random huge mountain 10 miles to the left, in one month (it doesn't have to look the same). If we can't do it they will wipe us out. I wonder if we would be able to pull together and somehow do it. And then my mind thinks through all the crazy iterations of ways to start trying. I keep thinking that we will globally waste 2 weeks planning it. I guess not everyone is threatened by death in Covid, but it does seem amazing some of the things we have been able to pull together during this.

dmurray 7y ago
An earth-destroying asteroid is the more realistic form of this. We could get anywhere from days to years of notice it was going to hit (if years, it would just be a probable hit) and have to put together our Armageddon/Deep Impact mission to divert it. There are plenty of papers published on what we could do and the idea has had millions of dollars in funding, but it would need billions. We're screwed if the notice period is days, but we'd have a good chance to build something in months.
- zzleeper 7y ago
  TBH given the failures of the last months, I wouldn't be surprised if we are completely unable to execute, even if we get a couple of years. A pity.
mydongle 7y ago
Easy one. We all come together to agree that the mountain will be mapped 10 miles to the left relative to its current position. Everything else will also be shifted slightly to account for that.

switch007 7y ago

If $1tn had been spent on extra capacity, would that have been really positive? Was the extra capacity good value? Was there any corruption? During these highly emotional times I think it's more important than ever to stay rational, and question our governments.

nck4222 7y ago

Did we read the same article? It praised the actions of building the hospitals, while stating what you said in that it shows we weren't as prepared as we should be for a pandemic. >we kept the infections low enough that we didn't need to use it. The article specifically said the hospitals were needed despite being unused. The problem was existing hospitals didn't have policies in place to use them, so instead doctors were treating patients in overrun hallways while these beds lay empty.

undersuit 7y ago

I think the article takes a very balanced stance. It is pointed out multiple times the that people are glad the hospitals are mostly unused, that they now exist if there is a surge, and that the excess bed capacity is very helpful during a crisis like this. The real criticism is nothing like you've paraphrased. > They praised the Army Corps for quickly providing thousands of extra beds, but experts said there wasn't enough planning to make sure these field hospitals could be put to use once they were finished. >The Army Corps limited the competition in awarding the projects to speed the process, which usually takes six to nine months, according to agency documents. Officials noted they were able to complete the contract award for the Stony Brook project in a "little more than three days." >The two Long Island field hospitals were completed in late April. They never opened to the public and didn't treat any patients. >The plan was for the Javits Center to take patients from overwhelmed hospitals in the city. But in practice it wasn't that easy. Some hospitals complained that the intake process was too complicated. And they sent few patients to Javits — even as they resorted to treating patients in the hallways. Seemingly like all of the US coronavirus reactions we dragged our feet at multiple points, had no reliable central coordination, and large sums of money was made against the backdrop of human suffering.

1234letshaveatw 7y ago
the Detroit area "field hospitals" (convention centers) had very strict restrictions on who could be admitted- you had to be sick, but not too sick. In practice only a handful of patients were eligible and admitted before they closed. I am starting to suspect that the whole exercise amounted to a giveaway to the convention center owners who previously were forced to shut down.
- leesalminen 7y ago
  And yet the Denver Convention Center laid off the vast majority of their staff shortly after converting to one of these field hospitals.
fsckboy 7y ago
Speaking only of the headline, it should be a banner ad for successful preparation and containment; it should not hint at overkill or wasted money, which it does (unless there actually was money wasted on overkill that the article wishes to expose). Even on a psychological basis, it made the populous feel more secure that the authorities were doing their best to cope. And economically speaking, it's standard economic theory that injecting money into the slowing economy will have a near term beneficial effect beyond just the direct recipients of the money. That's just the headline, and the people who write the articles famously don't write the headlines, but still, the headline is a bad headline.

jwally 7y ago

Ditto nukes

cm2187 7y ago

The cost of these field hospitals is negligible and I am not upset about them. But I am upset that the healthcare system seems to have been nowhere near capacity. Which means we are paying the full cost of the lockdown while not getting the full return in term of herd immunity, which we will pay later on with more lockdowns probably starting in fall. In other words we overreacted and flattened the curve too much.

ceejayoz 7y ago
> In other words we flattened the curve too much. For the first go-around, with minimal available data, that seems like the much better way to err - it would've been very, very difficult to fix a mistake in the other direction. We've got more data now, and can do a better job of toeing the line with upcoming waves. It's not like we can't unflatten the curve if we really want to.
- cm2187 7y ago
  That is a reasonable objection. But now that we have this data, there doesn't seem to be any appetite to bump up the curve, i.e. it's not about flattening the curve anymore, it is targetting zero infection until an hypothetical vaccine. Very different objective, no debate about it. And no herd immunity.
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    There's plenty of appetite for opening back up, which'll almost certainly bump up the curve. No one's saying outright "let's have more infections!", but it'll be the end result of the reopening policies. Even hard-hit NY is looking to do it fairly soon; most of our regions just need more tests and contract tracers hired. https://www.governor.ny.gov/programs/new-york-forward https://www.governor.ny.gov/programs/new-york-forward
    - cm2187 7y ago
      I am not sure that it is the policy. In the US or Europe, all governments have warned that they would back down from opening up if they see a rise in new cases.

malandrew 7y ago

What I don't understand is that this disease becoming globally endemic is pretty much a forgone conclusion. With that in mind, when did the goal posts move from flattening the curve to keeping things shutdown indefinitely with no clear criteria for slowly returning to normal and allowing an economic recovery to happen. With flattening the curve I suspect we'd want to keep the field hospitals due to the lag time in knowing the actual infection and hospitalization rates.

Mountain_Skies 7y ago
Authoritarian politicians are drunk on power they've only dreamed of before. They won't give it up easily.
- easytiger 7y ago
  I fear particularly for a subset of countries for whom this could easily be an opportunity for highly punative destruction of rights that has been forming in the background already. South Africa for example.
  - malandrew 7y ago
    It's not even a subset of countries. It's all countries, the US included. We're being conditioned to roll over on rights that we've fought hard for over 244 years.
    - easytiger 7y ago
      Indeed. But in SA this could result in the government stealing your property. Literally.
lazyasciiart 7y ago
I don't know where you're from, but here in WA we do have clear criteria. What changed is that we realized that we aren't capable of testing people. Everyone expected tests to be easy to create and widely available well before now.

jhwang5 7y ago

The question is - was the egregious price the contractors charged a good price? I have the right to care about that as a tax payer

keiferski 7y ago

Your analysis misses an important point, which is opportunity cost. Every action has costs and putting resources toward one area means taking them away from another.

kosievdmerwe 7y ago
Hindsight is 20/20. Could you or anyone have said this a few months ago? EDIT: let me make it clear what I'm saying/implying. Saying stuff about opportunity cost means that you think that this wasn't necessary. Given the fears of overrunning hospitals, I can't see anyone being able to justify not doing this except in hindsight.
- keiferski 7y ago
  No, I’m not saying that it wasn’t necessary. Simply that a more intelligent analysis would have factored in various costs and benefits, as well as the likelihood of actual events vs. perceived ones. Every action has unintended consequences, but this simple fact seems to have been total forgotten with the response to the coronavirus.
  - kosievdmerwe 7y ago
    Fair. :) I feel like I'm seeing this with the "lock down until vaccine/forever" viewpoint as one of the most recent examples.
specialist 7y ago
Hedging is NPV + risk management, right? Policy makers should adopt some of the modeling tricks from Wall St. and Silicon Valley. Manage risk. Assess sure things and long shots, feed in the parameters, then allocate resources appropriately. We need better financial instruments, novel forms of insurance, put a price on resilience, to counterbalance the drive towards lean efficiency. So that key suppliers can maintain capacity without assuming all of the risk, for instance.

xwowsersx 7y ago

Perhaps I missed it, but I don't see anywhere in this article where it implies this is a scandal in any way. There's no axiological statement here, just a pretty decent overview of the facts. I agree with you that not having a need for these field hospitals is a good thing (obviously) and I don't see the article implying otherwise.

spamizbad 7y ago

Right. This obsession with government is austerity is part of why we're in this mess to begin with: A more robust response in January and February would have saved tens of thousands of lives and could have greatly reduced the scale of any lockdown measures. It would have meant spending tens of billions of $$$ towards testing and tracing infrastructure which in the age of trillion-dollar bailouts seems like a bargain.

onemoresoop 7y ago
I agree but unfortunately that response didn’t happen. We gotta learn a lesson here

deleted 7y ago

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6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago

Moreover, the point of the shutdown was to keep the virus from spreading, and yet the number of cases is still rising in most places in spite of it. As states are talking about reopening, it's just going to rise faster. The article notes that the field hospitals aren't being taken down, in case we need them. Since the spread seems likely to accelerate soon, it seems to early to say "we didn't use these field hospitals."