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I'm not sure sure this is right. First, the "outdoor activities" seem to be a big part of the problem right now. People hanging out at the beach, the playgroun
by D13Fd 6y ago
I'm not sure sure this is right.
First, the "outdoor activities" seem to be a big part of the problem right now. People hanging out at the beach, the playgrounds, the parks, eating in groups in outdoor seating at restaurants, protesting, etc. all accelerate the spread.
It may well turn out that people doing fewer of those things means that we don't have a heavy second wave in the fall. I hope that's the case.
Second, the window isn't "closing," it's pretty much slammed shut. The genie is out of the bottle for the U.S. and likely the planet. We're in the ballpark of 50k diagnosed cases per day, plus between twice and ten times that number of undiagnosed cases, if not more.
Contact tracing 50k cases a day would be a massive undertaking, and we'd still be doing nothing about the 50k+ undiagnosed cases out there, most of which represent people who are still spreading the virus.
The political will for additional lockdowns and preventative measures is all but spent.
I hate to say it, but absent a very effective vaccine, COVID-19 is most likely here to stay.
- arcticbull 6y agoI don't know why people keep talking about this "second wave" in America. Countries that have a second wave have one because they ended the first wave and are on the look out for more. America has not ended the first wave, at all. There can't be a second if the first is still here.
- dtwest 6y agoThere was a big acceleration of cases in March (largely in NYC), and a second, even bigger acceleration (mostly in the Southern and Western regions) in June. Your point is valid, but there were two large increases in new cases that some people are calling waves, what would you prefer they be called?
- mikem170 6y agoI would assume a "second wave" means that it has crested in the same place twice. as opposed to calling Wuhan the first wave, Iran the second, Italy the third, Spain the fourth, NYC the fifth, and so on. If NYC is bad again I'd call that a second wave. Florida is 1500 miles away and is experiencing their first wave, some time after NYC had theirs. The optimist in me has noticed that no locality experiencing a bad first wave has had a second wave yet. Perhaps that is a sign of herd immunity (helped by T-cells, if so). Time will tell...
- nradov 6y agoIt's more like each population center in the country has its own (mostly) independent wave. Those waves then stack up on top of each other to produce a single national wave.
- flavor8 6y agoFrom what I've read (and there's no shortage of opinion and new facts floating around), indoor transmission is the bigger issue. The explosion in cases in the south is linked to reopenings of bars, restaurants, etc, and indoor crowds; whereas the protests (outdoors) caused relatively little movement in case numbers in those states. This is consistent with recent findings of the virus being "airborne" (for various definitions of the word airborne) - indoor, poorly ventilated spaces are much worse than outdoor spaces, which have both UV and circulating air. Otherwise, I agree with you about the window being slammed shut. Turning it around now would require political willpower and coordination that the US simply doesn't have.