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> "Cannot"? Why wouldn't it just require a much bigger effort? Corona is basically endemic in the US. You can test nursing homes and airport arrivals, and do f
by redis_mlc 6y ago
> "Cannot"? Why wouldn't it just require a much bigger effort?
Corona is basically endemic in the US. You can test nursing homes and airport arrivals, and do followup testing on a small population. You cannot test 320 million people, and do followup weekly testing on them.
Perhaps you're inspired by the success in NZ or Taiwan. The US has a totally different situation.
You seem to think that "doing something" is better than nothing. Again, that's false hope in this case. Herd immunity is the only logical result in this case.
But hope is not a strategy.
I would compare the US response to corona in 2020 to the English and French appeasement of Germany in the 1930's. Denial of reality resulted in the total destruction of Europe in WW2, not much different to the health and financial results of corona.
- majormajor 6y agoThis isn't "hope" that I'm expressing. This is me saying that *if we never try, we'll never succeed, at ANYTHING, not just at this. You're convinced hard equals impossible. Which is definitely part of why the US is so incompetent when it comes to this (or healthcare in general). People don't care that we suck. I just find that sad and horrifying. Let's say you take NYC, where the cases have been tailing off, and you implement a massive contract tracing effort there. MASSIVE. Maybe it doesn't save the whole country. Maybe it doesn't even prevent inbound infections from spreading very well. But it's also a hell of a lot of practice for the next time we need to accomplish something big.
- Gibbon1 6y agoWalk back. Look at the hapless response to Hurricane Maria. You see any difference between that and the hapless response to Covid19? I don't. Hurricane Katrina? Ditto. Consider the need to replace the year old train tunnels that service New York. Nope can't do it. California needs to build a high speed rail system to deal with increased commuter and air traffic? Watch people get into a rage at the idea. The US healthcare system is completely out of control. Costs twice what other countries systems cost, with worse outcomes and large numbers of unserved people. Lots of countries have systems that work. But reform is impossible. The underlying cause here isn't technical. It's nihilist ideology.
- mixmastamyk 6y agoI and a lot of folks won’t submit to contact tracing. So it is infeasible in more ways than one.
- Intermernet 6y agoSorry if this seems rude, it's not meant to be, I'm genuinely curious. I understand (and support) opposition to contact tracing by badly designed technological solutions, but what is your argument against manual contact tracing? (actually asking people one-on-one who they've been in contact with if they test positive to Covid-19) I'm just after your reasoning. I promise I won't deride your decision in any way (and I hope others refrain from doing so as well). People react differently in extreme situations, and I try to be aware of as many different reactions as possible, and possibly try to understand the reasons for those reactions.
- kmonsen 6y agoA substantial part of the US population will not cooperate.
- Intermernet 6y agoYes, but why? It may be a valid reason, but I don't know what it is.
- redis_mlc 6y agoIn case you didn't see the riots last week, many US people don't trust the police. If somebody knocks on your door, how do you know what their real motive is? Are they there for contact tracing, to serve a warrant, to tip off ICE, or to plant something? After all, the CIA used vaccines as a ruse to hunt Bin Laden.
- m4rtink 6y agoI don't think police does contact tracing - usually it's the civil employees of the "hygiene office".
- kmonsen 6y agoContract testing is no go in the US, herd immunity is not realistic. It’s open up as much as we can and wait for vaccine. Is not going to be good if there is a second wave. I think South Korea, Hong king and Singapore already had second wave.
- gizmo 6y agoSouth Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore haven't even had a real first wave yet. They're at 5 deaths per million, that's nothing. The US, by contrast, has rapidly increasing herd immunity. That's why the trend is going down despite less social distancing. And there has never been a working coronavirus vaccin, so the assumption there will be one for covid19 soon is unfounded optimism.
- kweinber 6y agoTrend is up for new cases and hospital beds in almost every single state that opened early. The only exception is Georgia which has been caught falsifying data more than once.
- gizmo 6y agoYou have to torture the data pretty badly to come to that conclusion. In deaths per million those states have vastly outperformed and after the dust has settled they will still have way fewer deaths per million compared to those states where politicians panicked, issued full lockdowns, and sent covid patients to care homes.
- kweinber 6y agoAs far as spread/death differences, population density was a clear multiplier, as would be expected. Policy effects weren’t seen in early days because there were no policy differences, just population density and global travel ones. The rise differential now is the first good example of measurement of policy effects. These are not political points, just data points.
- redis_mlc 6y ago> You're convinced hard equals impossible. No I'm convinced it's pointless because herd immunity is inevitable and essentially free. Testing somebody in the morning, then them going to the grocery store in the afternoon, is pointless. Testing takes a significant amount of resources per test, which we don't have to do 300 million tests per week. If you walk through the problem at this point, there is no solution for the US. Mother Nature won this time, and people like you are shouting into the wind. Even if there was a vaccine tomorrow, there's enough anti-vaxxers that it won't be 100% applied. And it better be a free vaccine, because half the population is unemployed at this point and they're not paying $100 for non-essentials.
- hcknwscommenter 6y ago"You cannot test 320 million people, and do followup weekly testing on them." I mean, that is factually wrong. We could actually do that. It wouldn't even be that expensive. Of course, such a thing isn't really necessary. If everyone who wanted a test could get one without delay and get results back in hours, that would be sufficient to implement test and trace effectively.
- kmonsen 6y agoOf course testing scales with the size of the country.
- pedrocr 6y agoSo do available resources. This go to argument that things that work in smaller countries don't work in the US is bizarre. It's used in all these discussions of how things that work in the EU couldn't possibly work in the US, even though the EU has a larger population.
- redis_mlc 6y agoNobody is talking about the EU - we're talking about NZ and Taiwan.
- pedrocr 6y agoNew Zeland hasn't tested more per population size than the US or the EU. If the argument is scale the EU is a counter-example. If the argument is management there are literally dozens of countries that have managed things better than the US. NZ and Taiwan are just examples of where things were done particularly well, but there are plenty of others.
- kmonsen 6y agoMostly agree 100% with you, there is one caveat: you can’t restrict travel inside the USA, so it’s harder to keep things local. For scale it clearly should scale, and there should be efficiencies you can find in bigger countries.
- NhanH 6y agoDid you just recently believe that herd immunity is the solution in the past month (or 2), or was it your ideal solution since January?
- redis_mlc 6y ago1) Since SF hospitalizations flatlined 2 months ago: https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/dashboard.aspx#hospital https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/dashboard.aspx#ho... 2) Since it turned out the US can't do testing and tracing