6 ms·

Yea it’s like buying a fire extinguisher and then being mad that you never had to use it

calvinmorrison 6y ago
I think people are more upset with the fact that they are unemployed and their states are locked down. The initial request from my governor was "2 weeks to flatten the curve". After two months, and hearing we never reached near capacity, and our local emergency hospital is also winding down, why are we still closed? Now we're told it could until June
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  Because the metrics for “we don’t need this emergency hospital” and “the epidemic is beginning to burn out” are different.
  - jaywalk 6y ago
    But the whole point of the lockdowns was to "flatten the curve" meaning to prevent the hospitals from becoming overwhelmed. That's been done.
    - ashtonkem 6y ago
      The risk of a second wave is still known, and cases are still rising in quite a few states.
      - calvinmorrison 6y ago
        And the risk seems fairly small if you look at the numbers. But then you're some sort of conspiracy nut. In Philadelphia, half of the cases are in nursing homes, and more than half are of people older than 60 years of age. There is risk to opening the country, but telling old people to stay home seems more sane than keeping people from being able to make ends meet
        ashtonkem 6y ago
        At least 0.16% of NYC is dead from COVID-19, and that number will rise as both the disease continues and we go back and discover cases we missed. If those numbers hold nationwide, you’re talking about half a million people dying or more. I personally wouldn’t want to argue for putting half a million in an early grave for the sake of opening up.
        taurath 6y ago
        I don't think you're a conspiracy nut, and you're right that the risk is fairly small right now in places where there have been few confirmed cases. But an exponential growth rate means the risk not small for very long. Covid-19 is the leading cause of death in the US right now. That we don't have the ability to test people before they go back to work is a huge problem. We can't even catch when someone has a fever. > In Philadelphia, half of the cases are in nursing homes, and more than half are of people older than 60 years of age That has little to do with the infection rate and a lot to do with who gets tested. In nursing homes people are getting monitored all day. There are many countries that are far more dense than the US that are currently open, because they test everywhere and prevent people effected from being out.
      - vkou 6y ago
        They are still rising in a few states that have locked down. I have to wonder, what do the people pushing to re-open expect will happen in those states?
        greedo 6y ago
        "It'll disappear, just like a miracle."
      - ryankemper 6y ago
        The risk of the second wave is precisely the indication that our indefinite containment strategy was fundamentally flawed. We didn't actually avoid mortality in a permanent sense, we just postponed it. Which is why many on the side that you are advocating for are beginning to express the notion that we need to be on guard for the next _months-years_. Not just the next _weeks_. As briefly as possible: Containment only has real utility if we can develop a game-changer that drastically alters COVID-19 outcomes, and that we don't have to wait so long for it that lockdown-induced mortality eclipses the time-adjusted benefit. It's a risky strategy that requires waiting for an uncertain, temporally-unbounded event, which in turn means that the "indefinite postponement" strategy incurs unbounded cost. We simply don't know enough to make definitive predictions about upper bounds on time-to-discover-incredible-treatment. Whereas in a no-lockdown, natural herd immunity strategy, we are experiencing a fairly well-bounded spike in short-medium term mortality. I've been using Ferguson's 2.2 million figure for the US which is based off 82% population infection with an IFR of 0.9%, with the population equally susceptible at the physical level (behavioral differences are modelled, I believe). That's an excellent upper bound, it's certainly not the mortality we should _expect_. So we have a much tighter certainty, we will experience somewhere between 200,000-2.2 million deaths due to COVID-19. When weighed against the alternative, which again is to incur unbounded risk from lockdown-associated mortality, the correct path becomes quite clear in my opinion. A very marginal increase in all-cause mortality in the whole population could very easily offset the spike in COVID-19 mortality which is constrained to fairly limited subsets of the population overall.
      - pnako 6y ago
        We have to start thinking about how, long term, we are going to start managing the 7th and 8th wave as well.
  - gizmo385 6y ago
    "The epidemic is beginning to burn out" is also very different from "everything can go back to normal now". We saw how quickly this can get out of hand if left unchecked last month. If people rush to get back to normal and pretend that things are fine, it's just going to happen again.
    - ashtonkem 6y ago
      It’s depressing that people have already forgotten the lessons from last month.
      - lotsofpulp 6y ago
        Anxiety over an inability to procure resources due to economic uncertainty for the future and lack of income is also an epidemic.
      - leesalminen 6y ago
        It's depressing that people think 25% of the workforce can be out of work for an indeterminate period of time without massive, potentially society-ending effects.
        carapace 6y ago
        No one thinks that.
        mdemare 6y ago
        I think that. Specifically, I think that first world societies can afford to give 25% of the workforce a paid sabbatical without ceasing to exist. And I find it depressing that there are people who think this is a shock that rich societies cannot absorb. Sure, it'll be painful. Taxes will have to go up afterwards, the retirement age might have to rise. But it's possible.
        bigbob2 6y ago
        I can only assume you mean without drastic changes to our current economic system, because otherwise in this modern age of automation that seems entirely possible.
  - malandrew 6y ago
    It's not an epidemic any longer and hasn't been for a while. It's a full blown global pandemic headed towards being endemic long term. All three are very different scenarios that require different strategies and where we should have very different expectations for what is and is not achievable. People are praising countries like New Zealand, but what's their endgame? Be in a situation where their citizens can't even safely travel from their country until global herd immunity is achieved because every vacation or business trip is a chance to end up being sick far from home? This isn't going away just like the seasonal flu and common cold are not ever going to go away.
    - lostlogin 6y ago
      > People are praising countries like New Zealand, but what's their endgame? Be in a situation where their citizens can't even safely travel from their country until global herd immunity is achieved because every vacation or business trip is a chance to end up being sick far from home? Yes. And I’ll have this over every alternative I’ve seen so far. I’m in New Zealand.
  - jsight 6y ago
    "Flatten the curve" != "wait until the epidemic burns out" The fact that the rhetoric started with one and ended with the other makes the whole process feel dishonest.
    - evultrole 6y ago
      We literally have to talk about goals as they come up. It's not that complicated. It makes no sense to keep saying "flatten the curve" as a goal once we achieve that goal, and it makes no sense to say "wait for it to burn out" during a period of skyrocketing growth. Once we get over the exponential growth, we then have to wait for it to drop. Otherwise we'd just go right back to exponential growth. All you people acting like "oh, the curve flattened, now we can go back to normal" are the kind of people that caused three massive spikes in the 1918 flu. We're very likely to have a second spike that is way worse than the first because of this attitude.
      - jsight 6y ago
        Literally noone is saying "go back to normal". If the goal was to get it to burn out, the initial statement should have been "we need to isolate until it burns out". That was not the initial sell to the public.
- zzleeper 6y ago
  Well look at Wuhan, Europe, etc. Had people in the US taken the lockdown seriously, we would have ended with an Rt below 1.0 (ideally WAY below 1) so we would be more than ready to reopen now. Instead, people keep doing crap and getting infected, and here we are stuck at home for two months.
xienze 6y ago
It’s more like experts telling you that models predict you’ll need 50 fire extinguishers to put out a kitchen fire, you express skepticism, and you’re branded a science-denying lunatic.

I think people are more upset with the fact that they are unemployed and their states are locked down. The initial request from my governor was "2 weeks to flatten the curve". After two months, and hearing we never reached near capacity, and our local emergency hospital is also winding down, why are we still closed? Now we're told it could until June

ashtonkem 6y ago
Because the metrics for “we don’t need this emergency hospital” and “the epidemic is beginning to burn out” are different.
- jaywalk 6y ago
  But the whole point of the lockdowns was to "flatten the curve" meaning to prevent the hospitals from becoming overwhelmed. That's been done.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    The risk of a second wave is still known, and cases are still rising in quite a few states.
    - calvinmorrison 6y ago
      And the risk seems fairly small if you look at the numbers. But then you're some sort of conspiracy nut. In Philadelphia, half of the cases are in nursing homes, and more than half are of people older than 60 years of age. There is risk to opening the country, but telling old people to stay home seems more sane than keeping people from being able to make ends meet
      - ashtonkem 6y ago
        At least 0.16% of NYC is dead from COVID-19, and that number will rise as both the disease continues and we go back and discover cases we missed. If those numbers hold nationwide, you’re talking about half a million people dying or more. I personally wouldn’t want to argue for putting half a million in an early grave for the sake of opening up.
      - taurath 6y ago
        I don't think you're a conspiracy nut, and you're right that the risk is fairly small right now in places where there have been few confirmed cases. But an exponential growth rate means the risk not small for very long. Covid-19 is the leading cause of death in the US right now. That we don't have the ability to test people before they go back to work is a huge problem. We can't even catch when someone has a fever. > In Philadelphia, half of the cases are in nursing homes, and more than half are of people older than 60 years of age That has little to do with the infection rate and a lot to do with who gets tested. In nursing homes people are getting monitored all day. There are many countries that are far more dense than the US that are currently open, because they test everywhere and prevent people effected from being out.
    - vkou 6y ago
      They are still rising in a few states that have locked down. I have to wonder, what do the people pushing to re-open expect will happen in those states?
      - greedo 6y ago
        "It'll disappear, just like a miracle."
    - ryankemper 6y ago
      The risk of the second wave is precisely the indication that our indefinite containment strategy was fundamentally flawed. We didn't actually avoid mortality in a permanent sense, we just postponed it. Which is why many on the side that you are advocating for are beginning to express the notion that we need to be on guard for the next _months-years_. Not just the next _weeks_. As briefly as possible: Containment only has real utility if we can develop a game-changer that drastically alters COVID-19 outcomes, and that we don't have to wait so long for it that lockdown-induced mortality eclipses the time-adjusted benefit. It's a risky strategy that requires waiting for an uncertain, temporally-unbounded event, which in turn means that the "indefinite postponement" strategy incurs unbounded cost. We simply don't know enough to make definitive predictions about upper bounds on time-to-discover-incredible-treatment. Whereas in a no-lockdown, natural herd immunity strategy, we are experiencing a fairly well-bounded spike in short-medium term mortality. I've been using Ferguson's 2.2 million figure for the US which is based off 82% population infection with an IFR of 0.9%, with the population equally susceptible at the physical level (behavioral differences are modelled, I believe). That's an excellent upper bound, it's certainly not the mortality we should _expect_. So we have a much tighter certainty, we will experience somewhere between 200,000-2.2 million deaths due to COVID-19. When weighed against the alternative, which again is to incur unbounded risk from lockdown-associated mortality, the correct path becomes quite clear in my opinion. A very marginal increase in all-cause mortality in the whole population could very easily offset the spike in COVID-19 mortality which is constrained to fairly limited subsets of the population overall.
    - pnako 6y ago
      We have to start thinking about how, long term, we are going to start managing the 7th and 8th wave as well.
- gizmo385 6y ago
  "The epidemic is beginning to burn out" is also very different from "everything can go back to normal now". We saw how quickly this can get out of hand if left unchecked last month. If people rush to get back to normal and pretend that things are fine, it's just going to happen again.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    It’s depressing that people have already forgotten the lessons from last month.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      Anxiety over an inability to procure resources due to economic uncertainty for the future and lack of income is also an epidemic.
    - leesalminen 6y ago
      It's depressing that people think 25% of the workforce can be out of work for an indeterminate period of time without massive, potentially society-ending effects.
      - carapace 6y ago
        No one thinks that.
        mdemare 6y ago
        I think that. Specifically, I think that first world societies can afford to give 25% of the workforce a paid sabbatical without ceasing to exist. And I find it depressing that there are people who think this is a shock that rich societies cannot absorb. Sure, it'll be painful. Taxes will have to go up afterwards, the retirement age might have to rise. But it's possible.
      - bigbob2 6y ago
        I can only assume you mean without drastic changes to our current economic system, because otherwise in this modern age of automation that seems entirely possible.
- malandrew 6y ago
  It's not an epidemic any longer and hasn't been for a while. It's a full blown global pandemic headed towards being endemic long term. All three are very different scenarios that require different strategies and where we should have very different expectations for what is and is not achievable. People are praising countries like New Zealand, but what's their endgame? Be in a situation where their citizens can't even safely travel from their country until global herd immunity is achieved because every vacation or business trip is a chance to end up being sick far from home? This isn't going away just like the seasonal flu and common cold are not ever going to go away.
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    > People are praising countries like New Zealand, but what's their endgame? Be in a situation where their citizens can't even safely travel from their country until global herd immunity is achieved because every vacation or business trip is a chance to end up being sick far from home? Yes. And I’ll have this over every alternative I’ve seen so far. I’m in New Zealand.
- jsight 6y ago
  "Flatten the curve" != "wait until the epidemic burns out" The fact that the rhetoric started with one and ended with the other makes the whole process feel dishonest.
  - evultrole 6y ago
    We literally have to talk about goals as they come up. It's not that complicated. It makes no sense to keep saying "flatten the curve" as a goal once we achieve that goal, and it makes no sense to say "wait for it to burn out" during a period of skyrocketing growth. Once we get over the exponential growth, we then have to wait for it to drop. Otherwise we'd just go right back to exponential growth. All you people acting like "oh, the curve flattened, now we can go back to normal" are the kind of people that caused three massive spikes in the 1918 flu. We're very likely to have a second spike that is way worse than the first because of this attitude.
    - jsight 6y ago
      Literally noone is saying "go back to normal". If the goal was to get it to burn out, the initial statement should have been "we need to isolate until it burns out". That was not the initial sell to the public.
zzleeper 6y ago
Well look at Wuhan, Europe, etc. Had people in the US taken the lockdown seriously, we would have ended with an Rt below 1.0 (ideally WAY below 1) so we would be more than ready to reopen now. Instead, people keep doing crap and getting infected, and here we are stuck at home for two months.

xienze 6y ago

It’s more like experts telling you that models predict you’ll need 50 fire extinguishers to put out a kitchen fire, you express skepticism, and you’re branded a science-denying lunatic.