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> Could it be the people getting the virus now are less likely to end up in the hospital so that number won't keep going up to the point of causing trouble? It
by newacct583 6y ago
> Could it be the people getting the virus now are less likely to end up in the hospital so that number won't keep going up to the point of causing trouble?
It could. Or it could be simply getting out of control (though specifically California is in much less trouble than Texas, Florida or especially Arizona at the moment). The point is that (1) it's fundamentally impossible to tell the difference until the bodies are counted and (2) the boundary between "well under capacity, we're fine" and "well over capacity, tens of thousands needlessly dead" represents just a week or two of growth.
We don't have time to wait and see, we need an answer now. And we can't get it until the demographics is done postmortem. So what is supposed to happen is that we all behave conservatively until the outbreak shrinks to the point where it can be contained via contact tracing.
And... that almost worked. It worked in Asia and Europe, It almost worked here, at least in the hardest hit areas with the early outbreaks. But... it didn't take. Half the population decided they didn't need to bother with this stuff (largely because of reasoning like yours) and walked back into enclosed indoor spaces.
And now we're right back where we were in March. Effectively no progress. While the rest of the industrialized world is finishing this off and coming back to life, we're having to talk about new lockdowns. It's so deeply frustrating.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoYou have a mistaken perception of what the rest of the industrialized world is doing. South Korea is talking about new lockdowns, China has imposed them, and much of Europe still hasn't really opened up. Only a very few countries believe they're "finishing this off".
- newacct583 6y agoRolling lockdowns are part of control. No one's expecting miracles until a vaccine is available. Still, Europe is clearly winning this battle. Italy and Belgium had BY FAR the worst outbreaks in the world in March. Now they have a lower new case rate than any state in the US. Any of them, including Hawaii. They are sitting at about 10% of the new case rate of Oregon. Arizona has them beat by more than two orders of magnitude. And again, a month and a half ago we were on the same trajectory. And we gave it all up, because MAGA, I guess.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoWe gave it up because Americans didn't want to implement such painful measures. You can call it MAGA, but people on the left were just as happy to start attending and promoting mass gatherings once they had a good reason, and the article's example of California is hardly Trump country.
- newacct583 6y agoSo... the current out of control outbreaks are less painful? You genuinely believe that? And CA, while it does have a growing outbreak, is in some sense the exception that proves the rule. Here are the 10 worst states right now per capita. California is at the bottom of the list, and is the only one you'll see there with a democratic governor. https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-normalized&highlight=California&show=10&y=both&scale=linear&data=cases-daily-7&data-source=jhu&xaxis=right#states-normalized https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states...
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoI don't believe it, but I think it's clear that a lot of people do - otherwise they wouldn't be willing to attend large events or pack into crowded bars. (And I'm biased, since I never really liked mass gatherings in the first place.)