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Sorry to nitpick but the social isolation and massive unemployment are being caused by our response to the pandemic, not by the pandemic itself. Lockdowns are a

Sorry to nitpick but the social isolation and massive unemployment are being caused by our response to the pandemic, not by the pandemic itself. Lockdowns are a choice, with tradeoffs.

wonderwonder 6y ago
Exactly and by not locking down properly we have managed to extend the pandemic in the US and its associated quasi lock down leading to our current situation. I agree with your response.
- umanwizard 6y ago
  Have we? It doesn't seem possible to permanently stop outbreaks without having either reached 20-25% of the population infected, or locking down until a cure or vaccine is discovered. Plenty of places that locked down much more stringently than the US are having new outbreaks now - Europe, New Zealand, Australia and even parts of China. Anyway, I seem to remember that extending the pandemic was the whole point of the lockdowns. The messaging at the beginning was that we would spread out cases over time, in order to keep under emergency healthcare capacity. Not prevent cases entirely. By that metric, hasn't the US been wildly successful? Or has the goal changed - and if so, why?
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Other places have managed to become entirely COVID-free due to properly following lockdown policies. The US is still gaining thousands of cases a day–the only reason this isn’t more is that most people are staying inside. The places you mentioned with “new outbreaks” have a handful of new cases, and yet are taking it significantly more seriously than the United States.
    - umanwizard 6y ago
      Europe is having a handful of new cases? No, that isn’t true. Spain is reporting more than 10,000 new cases a day.
      - saagarjha 6y ago
        I did not specifically mention Spain, I was thinking of the other things on your list that are actually countries–as far as I am aware, cases in Australia are still going down, in China they are a negligible number, in New Zealand they had a couple dozen that they immediately locked down over and will likely stop the spread of. But since you brought it up, let's look at Spain–why does it have so many new cases every day? Because they aren't following the policies!
        umanwizard 6y ago
        Yes, that is exactly my point. > It doesn't seem possible to permanently stop outbreaks without having either reached 20-25% of the population infected, or locking down until a cure or vaccine is discovered. You can't magically make yourself immune to future outbreaks by locking down - the only way to avoid outbreaks in the absence of widespread immunity is to maintain the lockdown indefinitely, until a cure or vaccine is discovered and widely distributed. So, it's not true that we could have eliminated the virus and been happily back to normal in the US if we had just locked down harder/better/longer. We would either still be locked down with no end in sight, or have opened back up and now be experiencing another outbreak. Not sure about China, but FWIW Australia and NZ are still quite locked down.
- dunce2020 6y ago
  I agree with your response- the BLM protests need to be more aggressively dispelled.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Perhaps we should fix the thing that they’re protesting about?
    - bacondude3 6y ago
      Absolutely. I'm all for getting rid of the Democrat policies that have been keeping POC, particularly inner city black people, down for decades. Let's have police enforce our laws, give people school choice, and encourage everybody to have a job, become religious, and raise a family.
srtjstjsj 6y ago
Death or lifelong respiratory syndrome isn't a great way to live either.
- jermaustin1 6y ago
  Especially death. Death is a HORRIBLE way to live. /s
- umanwizard 6y ago
  That's true. Without the lockdowns, everyone would have had some very small increased chance of death or lifelong respiratory issues. It's the role of science to tell us what that increased chance is, and the role of politics to decide whether that warrants the long-term decreased quality of life for a much higher fraction of people that the lockdowns/shutdowns will cause. At any rate, none of this was forced, certainly not by science (which can't make normative prescriptions).
  - andi999 6y ago
    There would also be the increase of all kind of death and disablement due to the breakdown of the medical system. So prob 1 month of all emergency cases wouldnt been treated. (Pulling this number out of thin air, maybe somebody has a good source)
    - umanwizard 6y ago
      That didn't happen anywhere in the world, regardless of the severity of lockdowns.
      - andi999 6y ago
        Good remark. Seems Japan was a bit in trouble: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/24/japa-a24.html https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/24/japa-a24.html I only remember that northern italy might have had a similiar problem, and I guess Wuhan and wouldnt be surprised about Brasil. According to media here France choose the 'culling' strategy (or more nobly called age triage) and offered palliative services to people who had covid and were considered too low survival chance.
colinmhayes 6y ago
Isolation, sure. But unemployment is unavoidable when hundreds of thousands of people die.
- HPsquared 6y ago
  During the Black Death, wages rose dramatically due to a shortage of workers. Economically speaking, depopulation is quite good for the survivors.
- thehappypm 6y ago
  How does that make sense? In a dumb sense, if a factory worker drops dead, a job just opened up.
  - colinmhayes 6y ago
    The factory worker didn't die, people stopped buying the factory's product so they were laid off.
- umanwizard 6y ago
  How so? Almost 3 million people die every year in the US.
scarmig 6y ago
This is not true. Sweden experienced a spike in unemployment, despite not having a lockdown. "People are too afraid about getting sick and dying to go outside" is pretty much directly attributable to the pandemic.
- pgwhalen 6y ago
  > People are too afraid about getting sick and dying to go outside This is still a response to the pandemic, just a non-governmental one. I'm not saying such a response isn't justified, but it is not directly attributable to the disease.
  - scarmig 6y ago
    If a hurricane came and destroyed a bunch of people's homes and businesses and people stopped working, it would be more reasonable to say that "the hurricane caused mass unemployment" than it would be to say "the hurricane didn't cause unemployment, it was just people's individual decisions to not work out of a pile of flooded rubble that's causing the unemployment."
    - pgwhalen 6y ago
      This doesn't seem like a fair analogy for a number of reasons. But mostly just that COVID itself is not destroying businesses, whereas a hurricane literally is.
      - scarmig 6y ago
        A hurricane isn't directly destroying anything except the building the business operates from; the business still exists. In principle employees could still walk to the rubble to work and customers could walk to the rubble to exchange money for services, but the material conditions make both of those untenable, in the same way the material conditions of COVID make working and buying things untenable.
        6y ago

Sorry to nitpick but the social isolation and massive unemployment are being caused by our response to the pandemic, not by the pandemic itself. Lockdowns are a choice, with tradeoffs.

wonderwonder 6y ago

Exactly and by not locking down properly we have managed to extend the pandemic in the US and its associated quasi lock down leading to our current situation. I agree with your response.

umanwizard 6y ago
Have we? It doesn't seem possible to permanently stop outbreaks without having either reached 20-25% of the population infected, or locking down until a cure or vaccine is discovered. Plenty of places that locked down much more stringently than the US are having new outbreaks now - Europe, New Zealand, Australia and even parts of China. Anyway, I seem to remember that extending the pandemic was the whole point of the lockdowns. The messaging at the beginning was that we would spread out cases over time, in order to keep under emergency healthcare capacity. Not prevent cases entirely. By that metric, hasn't the US been wildly successful? Or has the goal changed - and if so, why?
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Other places have managed to become entirely COVID-free due to properly following lockdown policies. The US is still gaining thousands of cases a day–the only reason this isn’t more is that most people are staying inside. The places you mentioned with “new outbreaks” have a handful of new cases, and yet are taking it significantly more seriously than the United States.
  - umanwizard 6y ago
    Europe is having a handful of new cases? No, that isn’t true. Spain is reporting more than 10,000 new cases a day.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      I did not specifically mention Spain, I was thinking of the other things on your list that are actually countries–as far as I am aware, cases in Australia are still going down, in China they are a negligible number, in New Zealand they had a couple dozen that they immediately locked down over and will likely stop the spread of. But since you brought it up, let's look at Spain–why does it have so many new cases every day? Because they aren't following the policies!
      - umanwizard 6y ago
        Yes, that is exactly my point. > It doesn't seem possible to permanently stop outbreaks without having either reached 20-25% of the population infected, or locking down until a cure or vaccine is discovered. You can't magically make yourself immune to future outbreaks by locking down - the only way to avoid outbreaks in the absence of widespread immunity is to maintain the lockdown indefinitely, until a cure or vaccine is discovered and widely distributed. So, it's not true that we could have eliminated the virus and been happily back to normal in the US if we had just locked down harder/better/longer. We would either still be locked down with no end in sight, or have opened back up and now be experiencing another outbreak. Not sure about China, but FWIW Australia and NZ are still quite locked down.
dunce2020 6y ago
I agree with your response- the BLM protests need to be more aggressively dispelled.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Perhaps we should fix the thing that they’re protesting about?
  - bacondude3 6y ago
    Absolutely. I'm all for getting rid of the Democrat policies that have been keeping POC, particularly inner city black people, down for decades. Let's have police enforce our laws, give people school choice, and encourage everybody to have a job, become religious, and raise a family.

srtjstjsj 6y ago

Death or lifelong respiratory syndrome isn't a great way to live either.

jermaustin1 6y ago
Especially death. Death is a HORRIBLE way to live. /s
umanwizard 6y ago
That's true. Without the lockdowns, everyone would have had some very small increased chance of death or lifelong respiratory issues. It's the role of science to tell us what that increased chance is, and the role of politics to decide whether that warrants the long-term decreased quality of life for a much higher fraction of people that the lockdowns/shutdowns will cause. At any rate, none of this was forced, certainly not by science (which can't make normative prescriptions).
- andi999 6y ago
  There would also be the increase of all kind of death and disablement due to the breakdown of the medical system. So prob 1 month of all emergency cases wouldnt been treated. (Pulling this number out of thin air, maybe somebody has a good source)
  - umanwizard 6y ago
    That didn't happen anywhere in the world, regardless of the severity of lockdowns.
    - andi999 6y ago
      Good remark. Seems Japan was a bit in trouble: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/24/japa-a24.html https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/24/japa-a24.html I only remember that northern italy might have had a similiar problem, and I guess Wuhan and wouldnt be surprised about Brasil. According to media here France choose the 'culling' strategy (or more nobly called age triage) and offered palliative services to people who had covid and were considered too low survival chance.

colinmhayes 6y ago

Isolation, sure. But unemployment is unavoidable when hundreds of thousands of people die.

HPsquared 6y ago
During the Black Death, wages rose dramatically due to a shortage of workers. Economically speaking, depopulation is quite good for the survivors.
thehappypm 6y ago
How does that make sense? In a dumb sense, if a factory worker drops dead, a job just opened up.
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  The factory worker didn't die, people stopped buying the factory's product so they were laid off.
umanwizard 6y ago
How so? Almost 3 million people die every year in the US.

scarmig 6y ago

This is not true. Sweden experienced a spike in unemployment, despite not having a lockdown. "People are too afraid about getting sick and dying to go outside" is pretty much directly attributable to the pandemic.

pgwhalen 6y ago
> People are too afraid about getting sick and dying to go outside This is still a response to the pandemic, just a non-governmental one. I'm not saying such a response isn't justified, but it is not directly attributable to the disease.
- scarmig 6y ago
  If a hurricane came and destroyed a bunch of people's homes and businesses and people stopped working, it would be more reasonable to say that "the hurricane caused mass unemployment" than it would be to say "the hurricane didn't cause unemployment, it was just people's individual decisions to not work out of a pile of flooded rubble that's causing the unemployment."
  - pgwhalen 6y ago
    This doesn't seem like a fair analogy for a number of reasons. But mostly just that COVID itself is not destroying businesses, whereas a hurricane literally is.
    - scarmig 6y ago
      A hurricane isn't directly destroying anything except the building the business operates from; the business still exists. In principle employees could still walk to the rubble to work and customers could walk to the rubble to exchange money for services, but the material conditions make both of those untenable, in the same way the material conditions of COVID make working and buying things untenable.
      - 6y ago