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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

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.
- Consultant32452 7y ago
  You mentioned feeling like the country is reopening too fast. Can you talk about how many deaths you expect from the virus vs deaths caused by economic distress related issues if we stay closed? I feel like talking about one without the other is missing half the story. The media has framed everything to only talk about virus related death but it's not the only cause of death.
  - javagram 7y ago
    IMO, that’s a false choice. Economic distress could be solved by improvements to the rescue package (The USA is currently able to borrow money at about 1% interest rate over 20-year terms, which is a negative interest rate when accounting for future inflation). Individual workers are already eligible for $600/week of unemployment bonus through July 25 as long as their business doesn’t re-open, for many of them their economic situation is actually better if we waited two months to reopen as they get paid more than they would working their job. Unfortunately some businesses like restaurants are being poorly served by the PPP and treasury department regulations that don’t allow them to pay enough out of PPP to pay rent in higher-rent locations. That could be changed, but the Federal government is counting and planning on economic pain to force states to reopen too fast instead, without tests or other measures in place that could reasonably be expected to cap or reduce new virus cases. It’s a very short-sighted plan.

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.

Consultant32452 7y ago
You mentioned feeling like the country is reopening too fast. Can you talk about how many deaths you expect from the virus vs deaths caused by economic distress related issues if we stay closed? I feel like talking about one without the other is missing half the story. The media has framed everything to only talk about virus related death but it's not the only cause of death.
- javagram 7y ago
  IMO, that’s a false choice. Economic distress could be solved by improvements to the rescue package (The USA is currently able to borrow money at about 1% interest rate over 20-year terms, which is a negative interest rate when accounting for future inflation). Individual workers are already eligible for $600/week of unemployment bonus through July 25 as long as their business doesn’t re-open, for many of them their economic situation is actually better if we waited two months to reopen as they get paid more than they would working their job. Unfortunately some businesses like restaurants are being poorly served by the PPP and treasury department regulations that don’t allow them to pay enough out of PPP to pay rent in higher-rent locations. That could be changed, but the Federal government is counting and planning on economic pain to force states to reopen too fast instead, without tests or other measures in place that could reasonably be expected to cap or reduce new virus cases. It’s a very short-sighted plan.