9 ms·

The problem is much media, and especially social media, is using things like these unused field hospitals to justify that the problem was never that bad to begi

The problem is much media, and especially social media, is using things like these unused field hospitals to justify that the problem was never that bad to begin with. Which is exactly what people said would happen if stay-home orders managed to flatten the curve. I hate this all so much. I am honestly super depressed about how short-sighted many people I know are proving to be.

Grimm1 7y ago
I'm with you on how depressing it is, my biggest take away from this entire thing so far is that people's ability to link cause and effect is much lower than I had previously estimated.
- jtbayly 7y ago
  Have you seen any attempts to actually put cause and effect together for stay-at-home orders and number of deaths? The only attempt I've seen to quantify it found no statistical connection between the two, but high connection between population density and deaths.
  - ashtonkem 7y ago
    Any attempt to blame fatalities solely on population density is going to run into problems the moment they look at Southeast Asia.
    - jtbayly 7y ago
      Please. That's not what I said. I said that there was a measurable connection between them. Any epidemiologist will acknowledge this. The point is that it could be seen and measured in this case. But when they attempted to find a connection between shutting down early or late (in the USA), no effect was found. The point being, the shocked horror that people already "forgot" the lessons learned last month is silly if that lesson wasn't learned and wasn't even true. The claim could do with some actual evidence. And I'm not even saying it's not true. I'm just saying this is the only attempt I've seen to actually analyze it, and it came up the opposite way. Can you point me to anything that shows the claim is true? https://www.wsj.com/articles/do-lockdowns-save-many-lives-is-most-places-the-data-say-no-11587930911 https://www.wsj.com/articles/do-lockdowns-save-many-lives-is...
      - stefan_ 7y ago
        New York City alone is #6 on the worldwide ranking for confirmed cases in countries.
        jtbayly 7y ago
        And? How does that relate to my comment?
  - Grimm1 7y ago
    Just a quick search on scholar shows me at least 5 studies into the impacts for a more rigorous analysis. Plus anecdotally I'm in NYC and since the stay at home order reached full strength the 3 day rolling average of infections has been decreasing. I can only see that being attributed to two things -- mask wearing and stay at home. Mask wearing came later in our lockdown so I'm going to say stay at home has been effective especially with what I've seen the infection number for COVID, I believe that's the R0 (Rt?) number, was something like 2.5 to much higher.
    - jtbayly 7y ago
      I did a search but didn't find anything. Not sure exactly what to search for. Can you link to some of them?
      - Grimm1 7y ago
        https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2004/2004.06098.pdf https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2004/2004.06098.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.14621.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.14621.pdf That's two, I think the second one is better though as it uses more recent data and from more states and they raise a point that I think speaks to why the studies are not more prevalent and that is that many stay at home orders went into effect middle to end of March so the effects would only really be seen at the end of April. I imagine you'll see more of these popping up in the coming weeks.
    - beerandt 7y ago
      >I can only see that being attributed to two things Two more things: 1) introducing (or the halting thereof) infections to at risk populations (the whole NY nursing/retirement home fiasco, or the Italy hospitals being points of transmission, or dorm style living in Wuhan) and 2) approaching ~50% of herd immunity. 1) When did NY state stop putting exposed/infected patients into those facilities? That's going to have a outsized result in the stats, given the segment vulnerability. Same for Italy hospitals being overwhelmed without PPE. 2) Not saying it's what is at play (yet) here, but infections will naturally decrease as a greater percentage of the population gains immunity. It's what has to happen as the population approaches herd immunity. (So about 30% if herd immunity is 60%, which is plausible, given the recent estimates of 20+% of the NYC population with antibody presence.) It's why exponential growth (for resource limited kinetics) ends up being an S curve and not a runaway exponential curve. The inflection point might not be at exactly 50% for a number of reasons, but it's good for a rough starting point. Additionally, it will be difficult to distinguish if the stay-at-home orders are effective due to the entire population participating, or if it's tied to specific population segments. Meaning the percent of the population active vs stay-at-home isn't independent of transmission numbers. The active sub-population might be closer to herd immunity than the stay-at-home crowd. This gets more complicated as you take into account the risk levels of particular patients. There's potentially a lot more going on. We need some scientific causation, not just correlation.
- ashtonkem 7y ago
  Slow burning respiratory diseases are pretty much the nightmare scenario specifically because they are so good at tricking human risk calculations. Compare that to diseases like Ebola, which we typically clamp down hard and fast on.
  - Grimm1 7y ago
    Tell me about it. I'm now very mildly asthmatic and had pneumonia and bronchitis often as a child. I know what not breathing, and chronicly not having a strong respiratory system can be like and most people don't. I think that really factors into why people aren't taking it as seriously, going out whatever. Contrast that with the fact I basically haven't left my Brooklyn apartment in 8 or 9 weeks even though my asthma and breathing issues largely subsided years ago and I would be considered less than mildly asthmatic now, I imagine other people with my profile are acting similarly.
    - ryankemper 7y ago
      I think it totally makes sense why you would feel that way. I do want to mention that we know that somewhere between 25-50% of COVID-19 cases appear to be entirely asymptomatic (as opposed to pre-symptomatic). So almost half of people who get it won't even realize it, of those with symptoms, only a small fraction will go on to experience the serious respiratory issues that characterize COVID-19. So it makes sense that you know first-hand how horrible breathing problems are. But I just wanted to be clear that, it's actually not irrational for someone to not want to stay inside for months to avoid a disease that in their specific case would almost certainly be mild. It just goes into what a person's priors are.
      - Grimm1 7y ago
        For sure and to be completely clear, I don't want to stay inside, I just think it's the most responsible move. Like you said though it comes down to priors, and I'll add risk tolerance, and some pro-social behavior (I won't risk my neighbor even if it might be fine for me). I work in startups and have a few failed companies under my belt my risk tolerance in business is very high but not with health, you read that as 25-50% of cases are asymptomatic and an even smaller percent develop the very horrible symptoms, I read that as there is a 75%-50% chance I'd be symptomatic and a non 0 chance I'd be seriously ill with symptoms I'm already averse to through experience with them even though I'm otherwise young and healthy. Edit: I'll add in, besides the above my biggest motivator for staying inside is that even if I was fine, to me its untenable to potentially spread it to someone who has a higher chance of not being fine through no fault of their own.
clairity 7y ago
or, you could be angry that it became highly politicized and many media outlets absolutely overhyped the danger for clicks and political points. if we'd been more levelheaded, we would have suggested the public should either 1) physically distance, or 2) wear a mask in enclosed spaces and face-to-face situations. if you're an essential worker or particularly vulnerable, you'd do both where possible. that's it. that likely would have provided all the risk reduction we needed to get the spread under control. the message would have been simple, the effects likely as good, and we wouldn't have left a hundred million poeple on the edge of (or in) economic and psychological collapse. but that doesn't punch the emotional and neurochemical pathways the way politicians and news peddlers want.
- ashtonkem 7y ago
  Those would’ve been excellent suggestions in January, yes. But by mid March we’d missed the opportunity to use less intense measures.
  - clairity 7y ago
    no, the virus didn't somehow get more contagious in march, it had just spread farther/deeper. the same measures would have reduced risk equally in either case. only the likelihood of need (that those measures would have non-trivially helped prevent spread) would have gone up on a per-interaction basis.
    - ashtonkem 7y ago
      The same measures have wildly different levels of impact based on how deep the virus has gotten into the community.
- _jal 7y ago
  > but that doesn't punch the emotional and neurochemical pathways the way politicians and news peddlers want Every discussion involving advertising or app marketing here inevitably attracts tons of comments adopting a let's-be-real-here, this-is-just-how-it-is tone about the realities of the industry. And yet these same people are also experts on the news industry and know the exact opposite is true there, that "de-politicized" or "balanced" news is somehow a thing that is not only possible but stupidly trivial to produce. I mean, I get it, I utterly despise crabbed, shoddy, stupid journalism, too. But don't pretend there's some trivial fix. It is the way it is because of a combination of economic and ultimately social pressures. It is as much a symptom as a cause.
malandrew 7y ago
That's the rub though. You want these to be used. The original goal we were sold is to flatten the curve, which means to use up all the base load capacity, but not exceed the base load capacity. Riding the line of base load capacity was going to be imperfect and we would see usage of these field hospitals as a signal that we are redlining our capacity and need to pull back. The problem is that the only experts we're listening to are doctors and epidemiologists, when we should also be listening to economists. Both sets of people should be in a room together hashing out policy through an adversarial process that charts a middle ground between two bad outcomes. Flattening the curve to well below capacity at the expense of further suffocating the economy, just means that we're completing ignoring economic externalities that is going to take years or even more than a decade to fully recover from.
- evultrole 7y ago
  "Economists need to be part of the planning, so we can determine exactly how many deaths is best" is the worst take anyone has ever had and you should be ashamed. You're literally saying that someone deserves to die so that rich people can continue to extract wealth. Name them. Name the people who get to die for your economic prosperity.
  - megaman821 7y ago
    I am not sure you put much thought into this. A life's worth is not infinite, so there must be some value associated with it. If the cost of doing something exceeds the values of the lives it is saving it is prudent to stop doing it. This is not unique to COVID-19, choices like this are made every day. We could prevent a lot of deaths by limiting the speed limit to 15 mph, but we don't because we value quicker transport more than those lives lost. Also poverty lowers life expectancy. If we are not careful about how and when we open the economy back up, we can cost the hundreds of millions of people months to years off their lives. This has to be weighed against the amount of lives that are being saved right now.
    - lostlogin 7y ago
      > A life's worth is not infinite, so there must be some value associated with it. If the cost of doing something exceeds the values of the lives it is saving it is prudent to stop doing it. This gets ugly fast. How much do you value your life versus how much an economist who has never met you does? Then run that same test on your young child or elderly grandparent. It might be the best measure we have, but it’s a terrible one.
beerandt 7y ago
They're not mutually exclusive. It could be (is likely) that the problem never was as bad to begin with and that it was lessened by flattening the curve. Even ERs have been seeing only 40-50% of normal patient numbers and have been cutting staff and shifts. You don't see that except for the fact that experts assumed and/or modeled very very wrong. And that the population has been scared to the unhealthy extent such that they think the virus risk is worse than not seeking treatment for heart attacks and strokes. There's much we have yet to learn about this thing. We might not figure it out satisfactorily for years. Remember zika? And it's certainly less severe among those infected than was predicted (at least per capita infections, if not overall). As long as people/ officials/ experts deny that, (or exclusively credit flattening the curve, or fail to admit how wrong they were, where appropriate) don't expect the public to take fear-based guidance from the same sources as credible.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- enraged_camel 7y ago
  >> It could be (is likely) that the problem never was as bad to begin with As of today the USA has 75,000+ dead and counting. That is pretty fucking bad.
  - beerandt 7y ago
    I agree that it's pretty bad. You're sort of making my point, though. People forcing the issue to be binned into either a "bad" or "not bad". No one's saying it's not bad. At least I'm not. It's just a lot less bad than what we were told 3 months ago. Yet very few seem willing to admit that, because (I'm guessing) they think it might mean losing some amount of fear based leverage or control. Or don't want to give people false confidence to disregard rules. Or whatever the motivation. And the public in general is perceptive of that, especially the ones less inclined to blindly trust government. When the original concern was overcrowding hospitals, and the new risk is ERs closing or laying off staff from under-use, the nature and magnitude of the healthcare infrastructure risk has completely changed. Which means either: 1) we were wrong and it isn't as bad as we thought, or 2) that we've been so successful in flattening the curve (and scaring people from going out, including to the hospital for critical treatment), that we've overshot our goal to the point of doing more damage than good. And that's strictly looking at healthcare, before even taking into account economic considerations beyond the hospitals being able to stay open.
yeetman21 7y ago
the problem was not bad to begin with. it was just overhyped by everyone especially the media. Now we have destroyed the economy and futures of millions of young Americans just so that some at risk people can live for two extra months, harsh but true
- mdemare 7y ago
  Callous and false
  - yeetman21 7y ago
    those poor kids graduating in a recession and those 30 million unemployed Americans would disagree
    - chasd00 7y ago
      my wife is a middle school teacher, a handful of her kids were taken by CPS. Kids who were already on the economic edge are paying a heavy price.
- greedo 7y ago
  "some at risk people" Let's quantify that. At risk encompasses people who are obese. That's roughly 30% of the population. It includes people with heart disease, and diabetes. Roughly 30% of the population suffers from that. Sure there's some overlap in these groups, so we'll call it an even 30%. That's over 100M Americans. Have some humanity.
  - yeetman21 7y ago
    ok fatty. those people (probably you included) have no-one but themselves to blame. btw you will never be at a healthy weight so just keep trying buddy
usaar333 7y ago
I don't entirely blame the media. Some of this is over-pessimism on public health officials. For instance in the Bay Area, the SIP's argument was justified primarily from hospital capacity (https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/order-health-officer-031620.aspx https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/order-health-offi...). It wasn't (as has since become) suppress the transmission rate until a test, trace, isolate system can be restored. [1] Even on April 7, Santa Clara (https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/07/coronavirus-santa-clara-county-could-see-2500-to-12000-cases-by-may-1/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/07/coronavirus-santa-cla...) was still projecting 2500-12000 cases by May 1. The higher end of that was highly unlikely even then (that would require cases growing faster than Seattle had been pre-SIP). In retrospect, even the best case scenario was also too pessimistic - at current rates Santa Clara won't hit 2500 until after May 21 -- double the time the "best case" had estimated. Compare the communication to say Germany or New Zealand, where clear numbers, confidence metrics, range of possibilities, and objectives are outlined. [1] Which actually has already happened. I'm not exactly sure what the goal is at this point - we have metrics but it's a bit unclear what they are based on (esp. the hard to reach testing numbers).
tynpeddler 7y ago
I always emphasize to my family that we shut down the whole country, the outbreak was relatively well contained to a few areas, and it has still almost certainly already killed more than 100,000 people and may well kill over 200,000. Given our extreme response, the high death toll should be more shocking to people.
- greedo 7y ago
  And we're not even close to the end of this. If the IFR holds up at what we're seeing, we already have another 50K deaths that will happen in the next few weeks. Then the math gets really ugly. If herd immunity requires north of 60% to have been infected, that means 197M Americans. Of those 197M, roughly 5% will require hospitalization, and 1% will die. That equates to 10M hospitalizations and 1.9M deaths. Even being generous and lowering the IFR to .1%, means 190K deaths. Now this make be spread out over the next 7 months, but the butcher's bill will be paid. Hopefully we'll get a vaccine by then, or some therapeutic drugs, but I'm not optimistic.

Grimm1 7y ago

I'm with you on how depressing it is, my biggest take away from this entire thing so far is that people's ability to link cause and effect is much lower than I had previously estimated.

jtbayly 7y ago
Have you seen any attempts to actually put cause and effect together for stay-at-home orders and number of deaths? The only attempt I've seen to quantify it found no statistical connection between the two, but high connection between population density and deaths.
- ashtonkem 7y ago
  Any attempt to blame fatalities solely on population density is going to run into problems the moment they look at Southeast Asia.
  - jtbayly 7y ago
    Please. That's not what I said. I said that there was a measurable connection between them. Any epidemiologist will acknowledge this. The point is that it could be seen and measured in this case. But when they attempted to find a connection between shutting down early or late (in the USA), no effect was found. The point being, the shocked horror that people already "forgot" the lessons learned last month is silly if that lesson wasn't learned and wasn't even true. The claim could do with some actual evidence. And I'm not even saying it's not true. I'm just saying this is the only attempt I've seen to actually analyze it, and it came up the opposite way. Can you point me to anything that shows the claim is true? https://www.wsj.com/articles/do-lockdowns-save-many-lives-is-most-places-the-data-say-no-11587930911 https://www.wsj.com/articles/do-lockdowns-save-many-lives-is...
    - stefan_ 7y ago
      New York City alone is #6 on the worldwide ranking for confirmed cases in countries.
      - jtbayly 7y ago
        And? How does that relate to my comment?
- Grimm1 7y ago
  Just a quick search on scholar shows me at least 5 studies into the impacts for a more rigorous analysis. Plus anecdotally I'm in NYC and since the stay at home order reached full strength the 3 day rolling average of infections has been decreasing. I can only see that being attributed to two things -- mask wearing and stay at home. Mask wearing came later in our lockdown so I'm going to say stay at home has been effective especially with what I've seen the infection number for COVID, I believe that's the R0 (Rt?) number, was something like 2.5 to much higher.
  - jtbayly 7y ago
    I did a search but didn't find anything. Not sure exactly what to search for. Can you link to some of them?
    - Grimm1 7y ago
      https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2004/2004.06098.pdf https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2004/2004.06098.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.14621.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.14621.pdf That's two, I think the second one is better though as it uses more recent data and from more states and they raise a point that I think speaks to why the studies are not more prevalent and that is that many stay at home orders went into effect middle to end of March so the effects would only really be seen at the end of April. I imagine you'll see more of these popping up in the coming weeks.
  - beerandt 7y ago
    >I can only see that being attributed to two things Two more things: 1) introducing (or the halting thereof) infections to at risk populations (the whole NY nursing/retirement home fiasco, or the Italy hospitals being points of transmission, or dorm style living in Wuhan) and 2) approaching ~50% of herd immunity. 1) When did NY state stop putting exposed/infected patients into those facilities? That's going to have a outsized result in the stats, given the segment vulnerability. Same for Italy hospitals being overwhelmed without PPE. 2) Not saying it's what is at play (yet) here, but infections will naturally decrease as a greater percentage of the population gains immunity. It's what has to happen as the population approaches herd immunity. (So about 30% if herd immunity is 60%, which is plausible, given the recent estimates of 20+% of the NYC population with antibody presence.) It's why exponential growth (for resource limited kinetics) ends up being an S curve and not a runaway exponential curve. The inflection point might not be at exactly 50% for a number of reasons, but it's good for a rough starting point. Additionally, it will be difficult to distinguish if the stay-at-home orders are effective due to the entire population participating, or if it's tied to specific population segments. Meaning the percent of the population active vs stay-at-home isn't independent of transmission numbers. The active sub-population might be closer to herd immunity than the stay-at-home crowd. This gets more complicated as you take into account the risk levels of particular patients. There's potentially a lot more going on. We need some scientific causation, not just correlation.
ashtonkem 7y ago
Slow burning respiratory diseases are pretty much the nightmare scenario specifically because they are so good at tricking human risk calculations. Compare that to diseases like Ebola, which we typically clamp down hard and fast on.
- Grimm1 7y ago
  Tell me about it. I'm now very mildly asthmatic and had pneumonia and bronchitis often as a child. I know what not breathing, and chronicly not having a strong respiratory system can be like and most people don't. I think that really factors into why people aren't taking it as seriously, going out whatever. Contrast that with the fact I basically haven't left my Brooklyn apartment in 8 or 9 weeks even though my asthma and breathing issues largely subsided years ago and I would be considered less than mildly asthmatic now, I imagine other people with my profile are acting similarly.
  - ryankemper 7y ago
    I think it totally makes sense why you would feel that way. I do want to mention that we know that somewhere between 25-50% of COVID-19 cases appear to be entirely asymptomatic (as opposed to pre-symptomatic). So almost half of people who get it won't even realize it, of those with symptoms, only a small fraction will go on to experience the serious respiratory issues that characterize COVID-19. So it makes sense that you know first-hand how horrible breathing problems are. But I just wanted to be clear that, it's actually not irrational for someone to not want to stay inside for months to avoid a disease that in their specific case would almost certainly be mild. It just goes into what a person's priors are.
    - Grimm1 7y ago
      For sure and to be completely clear, I don't want to stay inside, I just think it's the most responsible move. Like you said though it comes down to priors, and I'll add risk tolerance, and some pro-social behavior (I won't risk my neighbor even if it might be fine for me). I work in startups and have a few failed companies under my belt my risk tolerance in business is very high but not with health, you read that as 25-50% of cases are asymptomatic and an even smaller percent develop the very horrible symptoms, I read that as there is a 75%-50% chance I'd be symptomatic and a non 0 chance I'd be seriously ill with symptoms I'm already averse to through experience with them even though I'm otherwise young and healthy. Edit: I'll add in, besides the above my biggest motivator for staying inside is that even if I was fine, to me its untenable to potentially spread it to someone who has a higher chance of not being fine through no fault of their own.

clairity 7y ago

or, you could be angry that it became highly politicized and many media outlets absolutely overhyped the danger for clicks and political points. if we'd been more levelheaded, we would have suggested the public should either 1) physically distance, or 2) wear a mask in enclosed spaces and face-to-face situations. if you're an essential worker or particularly vulnerable, you'd do both where possible. that's it. that likely would have provided all the risk reduction we needed to get the spread under control. the message would have been simple, the effects likely as good, and we wouldn't have left a hundred million poeple on the edge of (or in) economic and psychological collapse. but that doesn't punch the emotional and neurochemical pathways the way politicians and news peddlers want.

ashtonkem 7y ago
Those would’ve been excellent suggestions in January, yes. But by mid March we’d missed the opportunity to use less intense measures.
- clairity 7y ago
  no, the virus didn't somehow get more contagious in march, it had just spread farther/deeper. the same measures would have reduced risk equally in either case. only the likelihood of need (that those measures would have non-trivially helped prevent spread) would have gone up on a per-interaction basis.
  - ashtonkem 7y ago
    The same measures have wildly different levels of impact based on how deep the virus has gotten into the community.
_jal 7y ago
> but that doesn't punch the emotional and neurochemical pathways the way politicians and news peddlers want Every discussion involving advertising or app marketing here inevitably attracts tons of comments adopting a let's-be-real-here, this-is-just-how-it-is tone about the realities of the industry. And yet these same people are also experts on the news industry and know the exact opposite is true there, that "de-politicized" or "balanced" news is somehow a thing that is not only possible but stupidly trivial to produce. I mean, I get it, I utterly despise crabbed, shoddy, stupid journalism, too. But don't pretend there's some trivial fix. It is the way it is because of a combination of economic and ultimately social pressures. It is as much a symptom as a cause.

malandrew 7y ago

That's the rub though. You want these to be used. The original goal we were sold is to flatten the curve, which means to use up all the base load capacity, but not exceed the base load capacity. Riding the line of base load capacity was going to be imperfect and we would see usage of these field hospitals as a signal that we are redlining our capacity and need to pull back. The problem is that the only experts we're listening to are doctors and epidemiologists, when we should also be listening to economists. Both sets of people should be in a room together hashing out policy through an adversarial process that charts a middle ground between two bad outcomes. Flattening the curve to well below capacity at the expense of further suffocating the economy, just means that we're completing ignoring economic externalities that is going to take years or even more than a decade to fully recover from.

evultrole 7y ago
"Economists need to be part of the planning, so we can determine exactly how many deaths is best" is the worst take anyone has ever had and you should be ashamed. You're literally saying that someone deserves to die so that rich people can continue to extract wealth. Name them. Name the people who get to die for your economic prosperity.
- megaman821 7y ago
  I am not sure you put much thought into this. A life's worth is not infinite, so there must be some value associated with it. If the cost of doing something exceeds the values of the lives it is saving it is prudent to stop doing it. This is not unique to COVID-19, choices like this are made every day. We could prevent a lot of deaths by limiting the speed limit to 15 mph, but we don't because we value quicker transport more than those lives lost. Also poverty lowers life expectancy. If we are not careful about how and when we open the economy back up, we can cost the hundreds of millions of people months to years off their lives. This has to be weighed against the amount of lives that are being saved right now.
  - lostlogin 7y ago
    > A life's worth is not infinite, so there must be some value associated with it. If the cost of doing something exceeds the values of the lives it is saving it is prudent to stop doing it. This gets ugly fast. How much do you value your life versus how much an economist who has never met you does? Then run that same test on your young child or elderly grandparent. It might be the best measure we have, but it’s a terrible one.

beerandt 7y ago

They're not mutually exclusive. It could be (is likely) that the problem never was as bad to begin with and that it was lessened by flattening the curve. Even ERs have been seeing only 40-50% of normal patient numbers and have been cutting staff and shifts. You don't see that except for the fact that experts assumed and/or modeled very very wrong. And that the population has been scared to the unhealthy extent such that they think the virus risk is worse than not seeking treatment for heart attacks and strokes. There's much we have yet to learn about this thing. We might not figure it out satisfactorily for years. Remember zika? And it's certainly less severe among those infected than was predicted (at least per capita infections, if not overall). As long as people/ officials/ experts deny that, (or exclusively credit flattening the curve, or fail to admit how wrong they were, where appropriate) don't expect the public to take fear-based guidance from the same sources as credible.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
enraged_camel 7y ago
>> It could be (is likely) that the problem never was as bad to begin with As of today the USA has 75,000+ dead and counting. That is pretty fucking bad.
- beerandt 7y ago
  I agree that it's pretty bad. You're sort of making my point, though. People forcing the issue to be binned into either a "bad" or "not bad". No one's saying it's not bad. At least I'm not. It's just a lot less bad than what we were told 3 months ago. Yet very few seem willing to admit that, because (I'm guessing) they think it might mean losing some amount of fear based leverage or control. Or don't want to give people false confidence to disregard rules. Or whatever the motivation. And the public in general is perceptive of that, especially the ones less inclined to blindly trust government. When the original concern was overcrowding hospitals, and the new risk is ERs closing or laying off staff from under-use, the nature and magnitude of the healthcare infrastructure risk has completely changed. Which means either: 1) we were wrong and it isn't as bad as we thought, or 2) that we've been so successful in flattening the curve (and scaring people from going out, including to the hospital for critical treatment), that we've overshot our goal to the point of doing more damage than good. And that's strictly looking at healthcare, before even taking into account economic considerations beyond the hospitals being able to stay open.

yeetman21 7y ago

the problem was not bad to begin with. it was just overhyped by everyone especially the media. Now we have destroyed the economy and futures of millions of young Americans just so that some at risk people can live for two extra months, harsh but true

mdemare 7y ago
Callous and false
- yeetman21 7y ago
  those poor kids graduating in a recession and those 30 million unemployed Americans would disagree
  - chasd00 7y ago
    my wife is a middle school teacher, a handful of her kids were taken by CPS. Kids who were already on the economic edge are paying a heavy price.
greedo 7y ago
"some at risk people" Let's quantify that. At risk encompasses people who are obese. That's roughly 30% of the population. It includes people with heart disease, and diabetes. Roughly 30% of the population suffers from that. Sure there's some overlap in these groups, so we'll call it an even 30%. That's over 100M Americans. Have some humanity.
- yeetman21 7y ago
  ok fatty. those people (probably you included) have no-one but themselves to blame. btw you will never be at a healthy weight so just keep trying buddy

usaar333 7y ago

I don't entirely blame the media. Some of this is over-pessimism on public health officials. For instance in the Bay Area, the SIP's argument was justified primarily from hospital capacity (https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/order-health-officer-031620.aspx https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/order-health-offi...). It wasn't (as has since become) suppress the transmission rate until a test, trace, isolate system can be restored. [1] Even on April 7, Santa Clara (https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/07/coronavirus-santa-clara-county-could-see-2500-to-12000-cases-by-may-1/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/07/coronavirus-santa-cla...) was still projecting 2500-12000 cases by May 1. The higher end of that was highly unlikely even then (that would require cases growing faster than Seattle had been pre-SIP). In retrospect, even the best case scenario was also too pessimistic - at current rates Santa Clara won't hit 2500 until after May 21 -- double the time the "best case" had estimated. Compare the communication to say Germany or New Zealand, where clear numbers, confidence metrics, range of possibilities, and objectives are outlined. [1] Which actually has already happened. I'm not exactly sure what the goal is at this point - we have metrics but it's a bit unclear what they are based on (esp. the hard to reach testing numbers).

tynpeddler 7y ago

I always emphasize to my family that we shut down the whole country, the outbreak was relatively well contained to a few areas, and it has still almost certainly already killed more than 100,000 people and may well kill over 200,000. Given our extreme response, the high death toll should be more shocking to people.

greedo 7y ago
And we're not even close to the end of this. If the IFR holds up at what we're seeing, we already have another 50K deaths that will happen in the next few weeks. Then the math gets really ugly. If herd immunity requires north of 60% to have been infected, that means 197M Americans. Of those 197M, roughly 5% will require hospitalization, and 1% will die. That equates to 10M hospitalizations and 1.9M deaths. Even being generous and lowering the IFR to .1%, means 190K deaths. Now this make be spread out over the next 7 months, but the butcher's bill will be paid. Hopefully we'll get a vaccine by then, or some therapeutic drugs, but I'm not optimistic.