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> If they are otherwise healthy, their immune system should have a good chance of clearing the Covid-19 virus Yet we decimated our economy out of an absolute p

> If they are otherwise healthy, their immune system should have a good chance of clearing the Covid-19 virus Yet we decimated our economy out of an absolute panic and still continue to push for lockdown even when numbers show it’s time to start things again.

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
> decimated our economy out of an absolute panic and still continue to push for lockdown 80,000 Americans died, and thousands more will die before this is over.
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  And that's with the lockdowns. The figures could easily be an order of magnitude or more worse be now without them. We successfully managed to not exceed the capacity of our healthcare system, for the most part.
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    That's not past tense yet...
  - jfnixon 6y ago
    There is still a piper to pay for the lockdowns, and that is the patients who will die due to untreated heart disease, missed cancer treatments and surgeries, mental health problems, und so weiter. Not to mention all the people who will now find their disease at a later date and suffer a worse prognosis for it. The lockdowns could have created more deaths and suffering than were prevented, but we won't know for some time.
    - CydeWeys 6y ago
      Social distancing was always going to happen. Restaurants here in NYC were running at one quarter their normal business in the days leading up to the official lockdown. People aren't stupid, and will choose to stay home when a pandemic is ravaging their community regardless of what official guidance might be. There's no world in which the pandemic is running unchecked through society and people are acting like everything is fine and normal and doing all the usual stuff they're accustomed to. This is a conflation of what the virus itself has down, and the response to it.
      - jfnixon 6y ago
        Not at all. Hospitals shut down elective procedures, not because they were running out of room, but because they were ordered to do so. That freed capacity may have been necessary in NYC, and maybe not, but nowhere else was it necessary.
  - Fjolsvith 6y ago
    At the expense of all other medical procedures that people needed, let us not forget. We did all of this despite a whole bunch of people effectively having already been vaccinated against COVID-19.
    - WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
      > effectively having already been vaccinated against COVID-19 There is no vaccine against COVID-19... unless you consider drinking bleach or dying...
      - Fjolsvith 6y ago
        "Effectively" is the meaning I got from this article.
        WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
        No, they're saying that 40 to 60% of people have antibodies that can make it easier to fight Covid-19... this could be one of the reasons the elderly die more often for example.
        Fjolsvith 6y ago
        The reason the elderly died more often is because they didn't quarantine retirement homes, and instead send infected individuals into them.
        antonvs 6y ago
        The paper doesn't say that at all. It isn't known whether these antibodies are effective at fighting SARS-CoV-2 or how effective they are. The actual deaths we've seen and the overwhelming of hospitals in multiple countries refute the kind of narrative you're fantasizing about.
  - dkdk8283 6y ago
    Many many people will lose their homes, insurance, and die from other illnesses as a result of shutting down
    - purerandomness 6y ago
      Loss of a home or an insurance can be temporary. The loss of a loved one is never temporary.
- perl4ever 6y ago
  It's more like 90K now. However, for perspective, North America (which is mainly the US) has had 1.65M cases and 100K deaths, while Europe has had 1.76M cases and 161K deaths. With all the focus on the US as the single country with by far the most cases, it seems to have not registered with most people that Europe as a whole is of comparable size, has had a comparable number of cases, and has seen a lot more casualties. I wouldn't draw the conclusion that this validates the US health care system, or the decisions of authorities, because of other variables, but it makes me wonder if a narrative about how terrible the US is has been allowed to obscure the facts.
  - helij 6y ago
    Europe as a whole has more than twice the population of US.
    - perl4ever 6y ago
      Which is why I gave numbers for North America. The stats I was looking at appear to be based on a definition of Europe that is about 700 million, while "North America" is about 590 million.
gameswithgo 6y ago
if we had not locked down everywhere would have been like italy or nyc or worse. remember that deaths peaked at 2500 per day in the usa with a lockdown. thats 5x of a bad flu season with no lockdown.
- asah 6y ago
  Yes, and NYC locked down... imagine if NYC hadn't...
  - CydeWeys 6y ago
    I'm in NYC and our biggest problem here is that our dumbass mayor and governor waited at least a week too late to shut everything down. If we'd locked down sooner we'd have had a lot fewer deaths and would be much further along the road of reopening already. One week on the front end is worth many weeks on the back end when you're talking exponential growth.
- jfnixon 6y ago
  NYC and surroundings are very different than FL are very different than California. I agree NYC was a complete disaster, but it doesn't follow that Dallas would have met the same fate.
CydeWeys 6y ago
Classic conflation of the effects of a pandemic itself with the measures taken to fight it. Things would not be going along swimmingly if governments hadn't stepped in with social distancing measures; instead there'd be a lot more dead and everyone wouldn't be leaving their home anyway out of raw fear.
- elmerfud 6y ago
  Sweden begs to differ with this statement as the as the misleading headline article from the NY times shows that their numbers aren't meaningfully different than other European countries which did lockdown. UK which has a lockdown policy was quite a bit higher. CDC own numbers on this aren't really supporting the panic level either. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm Pneumonia is still stomping covid19 as far as deaths. Death projections are made from the 2017-2019 data and as of now they're at 101% of their protections. That number moves up and down but has been sticking really close to 100%. With 60+k unexpected covid19 we should be around 105-107% deaths but we're not. Things aren't over yet but all the be data coming out is very much supporting that is has been a massive overreaction. If we're going to overreact for the purpose of saving lives, why don't we don't we do it to solve the 9.1 million deaths from hunger and hunger related issues?
  - CydeWeys 6y ago
    Sweden is a lot more locked down than you seem to think it is, and they are experiencing the same bad economic effects: https://www.ft.com/content/93105160-dcb4-4721-9e58-a7b262cd4b6e https://www.ft.com/content/93105160-dcb4-4721-9e58-a7b262cd4... The main difference is that they have a lot more deaths relative to many other countries that handled social distancing better.
  - mopsi 6y ago
    > UK which has a lockdown policy was quite a bit higher. No, the UK was following in Sweden's footsteps until forecasts became untenable, by which time a lot of damage had been already done: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/03/16/905285/uk-dropping-coronavirus-herd-immunity-strategy-250000-dead/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/03/16/905285/uk-droppi... Compared to its neighbours, Sweden is doing remarkably bad: https://twitter.com/MarkkuPeltonen/status/1261138454236352518 https://twitter.com/MarkkuPeltonen/status/126113845423635251... In terms of economy, Sweden's GDP is expected to fall about as much as rest of the EU (~7%).
hyperbovine 6y ago
> even when numbers show it’s time to start things again. Which numbers would those be? Because I'm looking at https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/new-cases https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/new-cases, and it does not in any way support your claim.
- zests 6y ago
  It seems lazy for that website to not show per-capita numbers or positive test percentage numbers. https://coronavirus.1point3acres.com/en/test https://coronavirus.1point3acres.com/en/test
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Retric 6y ago
    Positive test percentage numbers depend greatly on the rate of testing. People with the most severe symptoms are generally tested first. A declining number of hospital beds used is an extremely good sign, but there is very limited data for this nationwide.
- cdash 6y ago
  Maybe, just maybe you shouldn't look at new cases as your measurement when you are constantly ramping up testing. If you test more people of course you will find more people with the virus. You should be looking at hospitalizations and those numbers are pretty much down across the board.
  - CydeWeys 6y ago
    An alternative way to look at this is that you shouldn't remotely consider reopening if you don't even have enough testing capacity available to identify nearly every case. You can't control outbreaks if you don't have the data needed for contact tracing.
    - koheripbal 6y ago
maxerickson 6y ago
There's plenty of evidence that people not wanting to get sick is a big factor in the economic slowdown, it's not just a top down policy choice.
- JackFr 6y ago
  Well to a large extent that’s policy driven as well. The media have been pounding the message safer at home unrelentingly for weeks. Make no mistake, the virus is real, it is far more deadly than the flu, and while there’s no natural experiment it’s likely the lockdown saved lives. That being said, the messaging hasn’t been calibrated very well. Everyone talks about the post 9/11 “security theater” of the TSA, but because we’re unable to reasonably assess the threat, today we’ve got equivalent public health theater, but the TSA is us.
alkonaut 6y ago
> Yet we decimated our economy out of an absolute panic and still continue to push for lockdown even when numbers show it’s time to start things again. Remember: the correct recation to a situation like this will probably look like an extreme overreaction. There is basically no way of telling the adequate response from a complete overreaction right now. Even if it turns out that in the end the IFR of the disease was just 0.1%, or that 50% had existing immunity... then that will only change after the fact what would have been the correct response. The decision needs to be made without that information.
- user_50123890 6y ago
  Yes, look at Greece, they implemented extreme measures. As a result, they basically had no issues at all with the virus compared to neighbouring Italy and Turkey.
  - tripletao 6y ago
    And look at Japan, where they half-assed their response and turned out better (fewer deaths per capita) than Greece. I think most commentary assigns way too much credit/blame to the government's response, while ignoring yet-unknown environmental, pre-existing cultural/behavioral, genetic, or other factors. I'm saying this not to excuse government incompetence, but to counter the persistent suggestion that everyone could have the same good result as e.g. South Korea if only their government had responded in the same way.
b0sk 6y ago
Oh yeah, the parachute has slowed my free-fall down considerably, it is certainly time to let go of it.
- rement 6y ago
  If your on the ground you can (like many parts of the country). If you are still in the air you shouldn't (like NYC, D.C. area, etc.)
  - ianlevesque 6y ago
    This opinion would be adorable if it wasn't so dangerous. Every major area in the USA outside NYC and Washington is still growing in cases. It hasn't nearly peaked.
    - rement 6y ago
      My point still stands. The major areas still growing in cases shouldn't ease up. Anywhere that has peaked and is declining can start to ease up and continue to monitor the situation. We shouldn't require everyone in the country to wear a coat because it's cold in New York City.
      - ianlevesque 6y ago
        It is cold everywhere https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/us-map https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/us-map
user_50123890 6y ago
What do you think would happen to the economy if we let the virus run free through the population, and eventually everyone would be too scared to leave their house and quit showing up to their job?

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago

> decimated our economy out of an absolute panic and still continue to push for lockdown 80,000 Americans died, and thousands more will die before this is over.

CydeWeys 6y ago
And that's with the lockdowns. The figures could easily be an order of magnitude or more worse be now without them. We successfully managed to not exceed the capacity of our healthcare system, for the most part.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  That's not past tense yet...
- jfnixon 6y ago
  There is still a piper to pay for the lockdowns, and that is the patients who will die due to untreated heart disease, missed cancer treatments and surgeries, mental health problems, und so weiter. Not to mention all the people who will now find their disease at a later date and suffer a worse prognosis for it. The lockdowns could have created more deaths and suffering than were prevented, but we won't know for some time.
  - CydeWeys 6y ago
    Social distancing was always going to happen. Restaurants here in NYC were running at one quarter their normal business in the days leading up to the official lockdown. People aren't stupid, and will choose to stay home when a pandemic is ravaging their community regardless of what official guidance might be. There's no world in which the pandemic is running unchecked through society and people are acting like everything is fine and normal and doing all the usual stuff they're accustomed to. This is a conflation of what the virus itself has down, and the response to it.
    - jfnixon 6y ago
      Not at all. Hospitals shut down elective procedures, not because they were running out of room, but because they were ordered to do so. That freed capacity may have been necessary in NYC, and maybe not, but nowhere else was it necessary.
- Fjolsvith 6y ago
  At the expense of all other medical procedures that people needed, let us not forget. We did all of this despite a whole bunch of people effectively having already been vaccinated against COVID-19.
  - WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
    > effectively having already been vaccinated against COVID-19 There is no vaccine against COVID-19... unless you consider drinking bleach or dying...
    - Fjolsvith 6y ago
      "Effectively" is the meaning I got from this article.
      - WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
        No, they're saying that 40 to 60% of people have antibodies that can make it easier to fight Covid-19... this could be one of the reasons the elderly die more often for example.
        Fjolsvith 6y ago
        The reason the elderly died more often is because they didn't quarantine retirement homes, and instead send infected individuals into them.
      - antonvs 6y ago
        The paper doesn't say that at all. It isn't known whether these antibodies are effective at fighting SARS-CoV-2 or how effective they are. The actual deaths we've seen and the overwhelming of hospitals in multiple countries refute the kind of narrative you're fantasizing about.
- dkdk8283 6y ago
  Many many people will lose their homes, insurance, and die from other illnesses as a result of shutting down
  - purerandomness 6y ago
    Loss of a home or an insurance can be temporary. The loss of a loved one is never temporary.
perl4ever 6y ago
It's more like 90K now. However, for perspective, North America (which is mainly the US) has had 1.65M cases and 100K deaths, while Europe has had 1.76M cases and 161K deaths. With all the focus on the US as the single country with by far the most cases, it seems to have not registered with most people that Europe as a whole is of comparable size, has had a comparable number of cases, and has seen a lot more casualties. I wouldn't draw the conclusion that this validates the US health care system, or the decisions of authorities, because of other variables, but it makes me wonder if a narrative about how terrible the US is has been allowed to obscure the facts.
- helij 6y ago
  Europe as a whole has more than twice the population of US.
  - perl4ever 6y ago
    Which is why I gave numbers for North America. The stats I was looking at appear to be based on a definition of Europe that is about 700 million, while "North America" is about 590 million.

gameswithgo 6y ago

if we had not locked down everywhere would have been like italy or nyc or worse. remember that deaths peaked at 2500 per day in the usa with a lockdown. thats 5x of a bad flu season with no lockdown.

asah 6y ago
Yes, and NYC locked down... imagine if NYC hadn't...
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  I'm in NYC and our biggest problem here is that our dumbass mayor and governor waited at least a week too late to shut everything down. If we'd locked down sooner we'd have had a lot fewer deaths and would be much further along the road of reopening already. One week on the front end is worth many weeks on the back end when you're talking exponential growth.
jfnixon 6y ago
NYC and surroundings are very different than FL are very different than California. I agree NYC was a complete disaster, but it doesn't follow that Dallas would have met the same fate.

CydeWeys 6y ago

Classic conflation of the effects of a pandemic itself with the measures taken to fight it. Things would not be going along swimmingly if governments hadn't stepped in with social distancing measures; instead there'd be a lot more dead and everyone wouldn't be leaving their home anyway out of raw fear.

elmerfud 6y ago
Sweden begs to differ with this statement as the as the misleading headline article from the NY times shows that their numbers aren't meaningfully different than other European countries which did lockdown. UK which has a lockdown policy was quite a bit higher. CDC own numbers on this aren't really supporting the panic level either. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm Pneumonia is still stomping covid19 as far as deaths. Death projections are made from the 2017-2019 data and as of now they're at 101% of their protections. That number moves up and down but has been sticking really close to 100%. With 60+k unexpected covid19 we should be around 105-107% deaths but we're not. Things aren't over yet but all the be data coming out is very much supporting that is has been a massive overreaction. If we're going to overreact for the purpose of saving lives, why don't we don't we do it to solve the 9.1 million deaths from hunger and hunger related issues?
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  Sweden is a lot more locked down than you seem to think it is, and they are experiencing the same bad economic effects: https://www.ft.com/content/93105160-dcb4-4721-9e58-a7b262cd4b6e https://www.ft.com/content/93105160-dcb4-4721-9e58-a7b262cd4... The main difference is that they have a lot more deaths relative to many other countries that handled social distancing better.
- mopsi 6y ago
  > UK which has a lockdown policy was quite a bit higher. No, the UK was following in Sweden's footsteps until forecasts became untenable, by which time a lot of damage had been already done: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/03/16/905285/uk-dropping-coronavirus-herd-immunity-strategy-250000-dead/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/03/16/905285/uk-droppi... Compared to its neighbours, Sweden is doing remarkably bad: https://twitter.com/MarkkuPeltonen/status/1261138454236352518 https://twitter.com/MarkkuPeltonen/status/126113845423635251... In terms of economy, Sweden's GDP is expected to fall about as much as rest of the EU (~7%).

hyperbovine 6y ago

> even when numbers show it’s time to start things again. Which numbers would those be? Because I'm looking at https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/new-cases https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/new-cases, and it does not in any way support your claim.

zests 6y ago
It seems lazy for that website to not show per-capita numbers or positive test percentage numbers. https://coronavirus.1point3acres.com/en/test https://coronavirus.1point3acres.com/en/test
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Retric 6y ago
  Positive test percentage numbers depend greatly on the rate of testing. People with the most severe symptoms are generally tested first. A declining number of hospital beds used is an extremely good sign, but there is very limited data for this nationwide.
cdash 6y ago
Maybe, just maybe you shouldn't look at new cases as your measurement when you are constantly ramping up testing. If you test more people of course you will find more people with the virus. You should be looking at hospitalizations and those numbers are pretty much down across the board.
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  An alternative way to look at this is that you shouldn't remotely consider reopening if you don't even have enough testing capacity available to identify nearly every case. You can't control outbreaks if you don't have the data needed for contact tracing.
  - koheripbal 6y ago

maxerickson 6y ago

There's plenty of evidence that people not wanting to get sick is a big factor in the economic slowdown, it's not just a top down policy choice.

JackFr 6y ago
Well to a large extent that’s policy driven as well. The media have been pounding the message safer at home unrelentingly for weeks. Make no mistake, the virus is real, it is far more deadly than the flu, and while there’s no natural experiment it’s likely the lockdown saved lives. That being said, the messaging hasn’t been calibrated very well. Everyone talks about the post 9/11 “security theater” of the TSA, but because we’re unable to reasonably assess the threat, today we’ve got equivalent public health theater, but the TSA is us.

alkonaut 6y ago

> Yet we decimated our economy out of an absolute panic and still continue to push for lockdown even when numbers show it’s time to start things again. Remember: the correct recation to a situation like this will probably look like an extreme overreaction. There is basically no way of telling the adequate response from a complete overreaction right now. Even if it turns out that in the end the IFR of the disease was just 0.1%, or that 50% had existing immunity... then that will only change after the fact what would have been the correct response. The decision needs to be made without that information.

user_50123890 6y ago
Yes, look at Greece, they implemented extreme measures. As a result, they basically had no issues at all with the virus compared to neighbouring Italy and Turkey.
- tripletao 6y ago
  And look at Japan, where they half-assed their response and turned out better (fewer deaths per capita) than Greece. I think most commentary assigns way too much credit/blame to the government's response, while ignoring yet-unknown environmental, pre-existing cultural/behavioral, genetic, or other factors. I'm saying this not to excuse government incompetence, but to counter the persistent suggestion that everyone could have the same good result as e.g. South Korea if only their government had responded in the same way.

b0sk 6y ago

Oh yeah, the parachute has slowed my free-fall down considerably, it is certainly time to let go of it.

rement 6y ago
If your on the ground you can (like many parts of the country). If you are still in the air you shouldn't (like NYC, D.C. area, etc.)
- ianlevesque 6y ago
  This opinion would be adorable if it wasn't so dangerous. Every major area in the USA outside NYC and Washington is still growing in cases. It hasn't nearly peaked.
  - rement 6y ago
    My point still stands. The major areas still growing in cases shouldn't ease up. Anywhere that has peaked and is declining can start to ease up and continue to monitor the situation. We shouldn't require everyone in the country to wear a coat because it's cold in New York City.
    - ianlevesque 6y ago
      It is cold everywhere https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/us-map https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/us-map

user_50123890 6y ago

What do you think would happen to the economy if we let the virus run free through the population, and eventually everyone would be too scared to leave their house and quit showing up to their job?