7 ms·

This isn’t about people making decisions for themselves. It’s about preventing the spread of infectious disease. You might be fine, but if you are asymptomatic

This isn’t about people making decisions for themselves. It’s about preventing the spread of infectious disease. You might be fine, but if you are asymptomatic, you can directly harm or kill others and not even know it. That being said, I’m not sure what the best policy is. It doesn’t seem feasible to have a complete lockdown that extends for many months. So we have to be clever, keep learning, and find good solutions. We can minimize the risks and prioritize health while allowing society to function in an altered fashion.

just-juan-post 6y ago
> This isn’t about people making decisions for themselves Making decisions for ones self is exactly the principal that the USA was founded on. > You might be fine, but if you are asymptomatic, you can directly harm or kill others and not even know it. See also: Drinking, condom-less sex, smoking, and junk food. All of these things directly or indirectly harm others and if this is about public safety then it's time yourself and others start movements to ban them. The "you may be hurting people indirectly" argument never worked and it's getting more brittle with time. Have a good laugh with me this Sunday night: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXWhbUUE4ko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXWhbUUE4ko
- dwaltrip 6y ago
  Have you thought about how many people need to die for you to change your mind on this one? Just curious where you draw the line.
  - just-juan-post 6y ago
    I'm fine with 1 million. One million is 99.7% of the USA. Multiple studies have shown that the fatality rate is about .3%.
  - scottlocklin 6y ago
    Have you considered that your favored interventions are, in addition to being extremely harmful to society in every measurable way, probably also completely ineffective in altering the outcomes? Sweden didn't do a thing and is basically done with this nonsense, presumably for all time from the looks of the plots; Massachusetts is still mostly locked down and has 4x the death rate. Lockdown fetishists should be greeted with "citations needed."
    - bmn__ 6y ago
      > Sweden […] is basically done False, confirmed cases have grown 4.4% since the start of September. > Massachusetts is still mostly locked down and has 4x the death rate [of Sweden] False, us/ma has 1.42‰ and se has 0.58‰. That's a ratio of only 2.45. > "citations needed." https://covid.observer/se/ https://covid.observer/se/ https://covid.observer/us/ma/ https://covid.observer/us/ma/
      - jeffreyrogers 6y ago
        > False, confirmed cases have grown 4.4% since the start of September. And yet they've more or less had zero deaths per day since the start of August. So yeah, they basically are done.
        bmn__ 6y ago
        The correct numbers are 5743 (2020-08-01) → 5865 (2020-09-21), i.e. 122 or a growth of only about 2%, which is indeed very good. Only Ireland, Italy, China, Belgium are better (and 18 outlier countries adding zero to one deaths only because they each have less than 83 deaths absolute). So, following that definition of "done", I agree Sweden meets it. But at what cost? Its deaths per capita quotient is horrendous! The thirteen worst countries are: |deaths 2020-09-21|pop in million|deaths/1000 capita San Marino 42 0.0339 1.24 Peru 31369 32.5105 0.96 Belgium 9950 11.5393 0.86 Andorra 53 0.0771 0.69 Bolivia 7654 11.5131 0.66 Spain 30663 46.7368 0.66 Chile 12379 18.952 0.65 Brazil 137285 211.0495 0.65 Ecuador 11095 17.3737 0.64 United Kingdom 41877 67.5302 0.62 US 199862 329.0649 0.61 Italy 35724 60.5501 0.59 Sweden 5865 10.0364 0.58 The average for that column is 0.12 and the median is 0.04. It's a really bad trade-off for Sweden to let five to sixteen times more people die than usual just to achieve a small growth rate a couple of months into the pandemic; this does not make any sense. For comparison, Germany's growth in deaths in that time frame was also quite small, namely 2.5%, but they have an under average death quotient of only 0.11.
- ehnto 6y ago
  The point of a lockdown is to stop people who think like you from hurting others. If we could trust people to act responsibly we wouldn't need to lockdown so strictly, but in example after example someone who thinks like you will ruin it for everyone. Regardless, the US has largely already decided to be on your side and let you make your own decision about how to act during a pandemic, and the results speak for themselves. A wholesale failure. Good job, you win, 200,000 people are dead, is that enough patriotism for you?
  - just-juan-post 6y ago
    > The point of a lockdown is to stop people who think like you from hurting others. So is the point of banning alcohol, unprotected sex, smoking, and junk food. Drunk people can fight me and kill me while drunk driving. Unprotected sex may be more pleasurable but if we want to stop hurting others then condoms must be mandatory. Smoking is an easy one, I can smell that from like 30 feet away. It's clearly getting into my lungs. Ban it completely. It's been repeatedly shown that obesity is a social disease. What foods would be banned in your area of the country? I'm having a good Sunday, enjoy this with me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXWhbUUE4ko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXWhbUUE4ko Note that I'm a leftie and I love the video so I hope you and others can get over them poking fun at Elizabeth This is about choice. Stop the restrictions and let the people choose.
    - ehnto 6y ago
      Drink driving is banned, smoking is banned in many situations and only thanks to tobacco lobbies and tax income is it not entirely banned. Having sex doesn't affect passers by, just the active participants. Junk food you choose to eat yourself, you don't hurt others with it. It can cost taxpayer dollars in medical funding though, if you want to take that angle. There are hundreds of laws to stop people from making choices that hurt others, so even if your examples weren't so flimsy they would still be moot. This is a once in a lifetime pandemic, it will pass, take it on the chin and accept that you might have to do something to help others. You will get your choice back soon enough. The choice to be a carrier during a pandemic affects everyone. Why is it individual liberty to choose to spread disease but public will when people die from it?
- sellyme 6y ago
  I'm all in for banning smoking, but unfortunately drug addicts tend to become violent if they're cut off. It's much less damaging to society to do that one slowly over time.
- TomSwirly 6y ago
  > The "you may be hurting people indirectly" argument never worked and it's getting more brittle with time. The United States has 25% of the world's COVID deaths and 5% of the population. In fact, wilful ignorance DOES hurt people.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    To be fair, the US is in kindof a weird position with respect to Covid 19. It's a perfect storm of 1) good testing (at least better than the developing world) and 2) inconsistent and ineffective responses to Covid. I don't dispute that the US has performed poorly here, but the 25%/5% stat needs to be contextualised by the fact that other countries who have done really poorly (e.g. Brazil), have much less testing than the US has.
    - Terretta 6y ago
      Deaths have nothing to do with testing. "We can observe trends from the number of deaths reported each year, on a weekly basis. When we see large deviations in the numbers for a time period, we call that excess deaths. Looking at 2020 since March, the raw number of excess deaths is 200,000 more people than a normal year. When we try to understand that, COVID-19 is the most rational and likely explanation. If you don't believe it's COVID-19, try to pinpoint why this year has been so different than any other. Why would a new disease that kills people not be the cause?" https://hub.jhu.edu/2020/09/01/comorbidities-and-coronavirus-deaths-cdc/ https://hub.jhu.edu/2020/09/01/comorbidities-and-coronavirus... Graphs: https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
      - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
        Excess mortality has nothing to do with testing, you are entirely correct there. However, most Covid deaths are counted as deaths post a positive test. Therefore, the tests provide the denominator for potential deaths. The US has lots of testing (though probably not enough) and an overall poor response to the pandemic, causing the 25%/5% statistic, and hence my point.
- loco5niner 6y ago
  >> This isn’t about people making decisions for themselves > Making decisions for ones self is exactly the principal that the USA was founded on. You mis-understood that statement. It's saying its about making decisions for others, since you could be infecting them without knowing it.
logicchains 6y ago
There is a lot of things that can indirectly harm others. Unless you can show that opening up is much more dangerous to others than those other things, it makes no sense to selectively ban opening up. Given bars and restaurants are already open in other states (and other countries) without any significant increase in deaths compared to California and New York, where's the data showing opening up bars and restaurants is dangerous?
Yetanfou 6y ago
Once SARS2 is history it will be interesting to compare the approach in places like NYC to those in e.g. Florida. I suspect the latter will come out on top when it comes to efficacy of the approach while the former will end up both bankrupt as well as looking for a new mayor and governor. Especially given the number of retirees living in Florida these results are remarkable, when the epidemic (as in 'local version of the pandemic') began I suspected FL would end up topping the mortality lists. A number of bad decisions were made in the beginning - e.g. allowing infected elderly people to be sent into care homes where they infected others - which have been haunting state and local government ever since and probably gave rise to the continued lockdown measures - a classical example of someone closing the barn doors after the horses escaped. I live in Sweden where similar mistakes were made in the beginning, in this case mostly caused by personnel in care facilities not following the mandated personal protection measures which caused them to spread the infection between infected and 'clean' departments, facilities and people. In contrast to NYC this has not led to more draconic lockdown measures, probably because the problems in those care facilities were recognised. Unfortunately they were not dealt with in time which has led to a large number of vulnerable people getting infected. Apart from these (grave) mistakes it now looks like the Swedish approach might start to show its merits given the low infection rates here compared to surrounding countries. Things can still change but currently the number of new infections in Sweden is lower than that in surrounding countries.
thu2111 6y ago
You might be fine, but if you are asymptomatic, you can directly harm or kill others and not even know it. No, this is a rumour that was long since debunked. Asymptomatic transmission does not exist. Basically no cases have been traced back to that and the WHO no longer supports the concept. WHO officials months ago pointed out this was "very rare" (read: doesn't happen, considering how noisy testing and contact tracing are). This story summarises: https://bgr.com/2020/08/31/coronavirus-asymptomatic-spread-risk-study-china/ https://bgr.com/2020/08/31/coronavirus-asymptomatic-spread-r... They (the WHO) distinguish this from "pre-symptomatic transmission" which means you will develop symptoms in a day or two, but are infectious a bit before that happens. This happens with many viruses. It's entirely normal. In the UK right now flu is twice as deadly as COVID, same is true of many other places. So you have a choice. You can never go out again in case you are about to come down with flu and un-knowingly, via a long and complex chain of events, kill a disabled child. Or you can accept that there's nothing unusual currently happening beyond media and government hysteria, and go to a restaurant before they're all gone.

just-juan-post 6y ago

> This isn’t about people making decisions for themselves Making decisions for ones self is exactly the principal that the USA was founded on. > You might be fine, but if you are asymptomatic, you can directly harm or kill others and not even know it. See also: Drinking, condom-less sex, smoking, and junk food. All of these things directly or indirectly harm others and if this is about public safety then it's time yourself and others start movements to ban them. The "you may be hurting people indirectly" argument never worked and it's getting more brittle with time. Have a good laugh with me this Sunday night: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXWhbUUE4ko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXWhbUUE4ko

dwaltrip 6y ago
Have you thought about how many people need to die for you to change your mind on this one? Just curious where you draw the line.
- just-juan-post 6y ago
  I'm fine with 1 million. One million is 99.7% of the USA. Multiple studies have shown that the fatality rate is about .3%.
- scottlocklin 6y ago
  Have you considered that your favored interventions are, in addition to being extremely harmful to society in every measurable way, probably also completely ineffective in altering the outcomes? Sweden didn't do a thing and is basically done with this nonsense, presumably for all time from the looks of the plots; Massachusetts is still mostly locked down and has 4x the death rate. Lockdown fetishists should be greeted with "citations needed."
  - bmn__ 6y ago
    > Sweden […] is basically done False, confirmed cases have grown 4.4% since the start of September. > Massachusetts is still mostly locked down and has 4x the death rate [of Sweden] False, us/ma has 1.42‰ and se has 0.58‰. That's a ratio of only 2.45. > "citations needed." https://covid.observer/se/ https://covid.observer/se/ https://covid.observer/us/ma/ https://covid.observer/us/ma/
    - jeffreyrogers 6y ago
      > False, confirmed cases have grown 4.4% since the start of September. And yet they've more or less had zero deaths per day since the start of August. So yeah, they basically are done.
      - bmn__ 6y ago
        The correct numbers are 5743 (2020-08-01) → 5865 (2020-09-21), i.e. 122 or a growth of only about 2%, which is indeed very good. Only Ireland, Italy, China, Belgium are better (and 18 outlier countries adding zero to one deaths only because they each have less than 83 deaths absolute). So, following that definition of "done", I agree Sweden meets it. But at what cost? Its deaths per capita quotient is horrendous! The thirteen worst countries are: |deaths 2020-09-21|pop in million|deaths/1000 capita San Marino 42 0.0339 1.24 Peru 31369 32.5105 0.96 Belgium 9950 11.5393 0.86 Andorra 53 0.0771 0.69 Bolivia 7654 11.5131 0.66 Spain 30663 46.7368 0.66 Chile 12379 18.952 0.65 Brazil 137285 211.0495 0.65 Ecuador 11095 17.3737 0.64 United Kingdom 41877 67.5302 0.62 US 199862 329.0649 0.61 Italy 35724 60.5501 0.59 Sweden 5865 10.0364 0.58 The average for that column is 0.12 and the median is 0.04. It's a really bad trade-off for Sweden to let five to sixteen times more people die than usual just to achieve a small growth rate a couple of months into the pandemic; this does not make any sense. For comparison, Germany's growth in deaths in that time frame was also quite small, namely 2.5%, but they have an under average death quotient of only 0.11.
ehnto 6y ago
The point of a lockdown is to stop people who think like you from hurting others. If we could trust people to act responsibly we wouldn't need to lockdown so strictly, but in example after example someone who thinks like you will ruin it for everyone. Regardless, the US has largely already decided to be on your side and let you make your own decision about how to act during a pandemic, and the results speak for themselves. A wholesale failure. Good job, you win, 200,000 people are dead, is that enough patriotism for you?
- just-juan-post 6y ago
  > The point of a lockdown is to stop people who think like you from hurting others. So is the point of banning alcohol, unprotected sex, smoking, and junk food. Drunk people can fight me and kill me while drunk driving. Unprotected sex may be more pleasurable but if we want to stop hurting others then condoms must be mandatory. Smoking is an easy one, I can smell that from like 30 feet away. It's clearly getting into my lungs. Ban it completely. It's been repeatedly shown that obesity is a social disease. What foods would be banned in your area of the country? I'm having a good Sunday, enjoy this with me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXWhbUUE4ko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXWhbUUE4ko Note that I'm a leftie and I love the video so I hope you and others can get over them poking fun at Elizabeth This is about choice. Stop the restrictions and let the people choose.
  - ehnto 6y ago
    Drink driving is banned, smoking is banned in many situations and only thanks to tobacco lobbies and tax income is it not entirely banned. Having sex doesn't affect passers by, just the active participants. Junk food you choose to eat yourself, you don't hurt others with it. It can cost taxpayer dollars in medical funding though, if you want to take that angle. There are hundreds of laws to stop people from making choices that hurt others, so even if your examples weren't so flimsy they would still be moot. This is a once in a lifetime pandemic, it will pass, take it on the chin and accept that you might have to do something to help others. You will get your choice back soon enough. The choice to be a carrier during a pandemic affects everyone. Why is it individual liberty to choose to spread disease but public will when people die from it?
sellyme 6y ago
I'm all in for banning smoking, but unfortunately drug addicts tend to become violent if they're cut off. It's much less damaging to society to do that one slowly over time.
TomSwirly 6y ago
> The "you may be hurting people indirectly" argument never worked and it's getting more brittle with time. The United States has 25% of the world's COVID deaths and 5% of the population. In fact, wilful ignorance DOES hurt people.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  To be fair, the US is in kindof a weird position with respect to Covid 19. It's a perfect storm of 1) good testing (at least better than the developing world) and 2) inconsistent and ineffective responses to Covid. I don't dispute that the US has performed poorly here, but the 25%/5% stat needs to be contextualised by the fact that other countries who have done really poorly (e.g. Brazil), have much less testing than the US has.
  - Terretta 6y ago
    Deaths have nothing to do with testing. "We can observe trends from the number of deaths reported each year, on a weekly basis. When we see large deviations in the numbers for a time period, we call that excess deaths. Looking at 2020 since March, the raw number of excess deaths is 200,000 more people than a normal year. When we try to understand that, COVID-19 is the most rational and likely explanation. If you don't believe it's COVID-19, try to pinpoint why this year has been so different than any other. Why would a new disease that kills people not be the cause?" https://hub.jhu.edu/2020/09/01/comorbidities-and-coronavirus-deaths-cdc/ https://hub.jhu.edu/2020/09/01/comorbidities-and-coronavirus... Graphs: https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      Excess mortality has nothing to do with testing, you are entirely correct there. However, most Covid deaths are counted as deaths post a positive test. Therefore, the tests provide the denominator for potential deaths. The US has lots of testing (though probably not enough) and an overall poor response to the pandemic, causing the 25%/5% statistic, and hence my point.
loco5niner 6y ago
>> This isn’t about people making decisions for themselves > Making decisions for ones self is exactly the principal that the USA was founded on. You mis-understood that statement. It's saying its about making decisions for others, since you could be infecting them without knowing it.

logicchains 6y ago

There is a lot of things that can indirectly harm others. Unless you can show that opening up is much more dangerous to others than those other things, it makes no sense to selectively ban opening up. Given bars and restaurants are already open in other states (and other countries) without any significant increase in deaths compared to California and New York, where's the data showing opening up bars and restaurants is dangerous?

Yetanfou 6y ago

Once SARS2 is history it will be interesting to compare the approach in places like NYC to those in e.g. Florida. I suspect the latter will come out on top when it comes to efficacy of the approach while the former will end up both bankrupt as well as looking for a new mayor and governor. Especially given the number of retirees living in Florida these results are remarkable, when the epidemic (as in 'local version of the pandemic') began I suspected FL would end up topping the mortality lists. A number of bad decisions were made in the beginning - e.g. allowing infected elderly people to be sent into care homes where they infected others - which have been haunting state and local government ever since and probably gave rise to the continued lockdown measures - a classical example of someone closing the barn doors after the horses escaped. I live in Sweden where similar mistakes were made in the beginning, in this case mostly caused by personnel in care facilities not following the mandated personal protection measures which caused them to spread the infection between infected and 'clean' departments, facilities and people. In contrast to NYC this has not led to more draconic lockdown measures, probably because the problems in those care facilities were recognised. Unfortunately they were not dealt with in time which has led to a large number of vulnerable people getting infected. Apart from these (grave) mistakes it now looks like the Swedish approach might start to show its merits given the low infection rates here compared to surrounding countries. Things can still change but currently the number of new infections in Sweden is lower than that in surrounding countries.

thu2111 6y ago

You might be fine, but if you are asymptomatic, you can directly harm or kill others and not even know it. No, this is a rumour that was long since debunked. Asymptomatic transmission does not exist. Basically no cases have been traced back to that and the WHO no longer supports the concept. WHO officials months ago pointed out this was "very rare" (read: doesn't happen, considering how noisy testing and contact tracing are). This story summarises: https://bgr.com/2020/08/31/coronavirus-asymptomatic-spread-risk-study-china/ https://bgr.com/2020/08/31/coronavirus-asymptomatic-spread-r... They (the WHO) distinguish this from "pre-symptomatic transmission" which means you will develop symptoms in a day or two, but are infectious a bit before that happens. This happens with many viruses. It's entirely normal. In the UK right now flu is twice as deadly as COVID, same is true of many other places. So you have a choice. You can never go out again in case you are about to come down with flu and un-knowingly, via a long and complex chain of events, kill a disabled child. Or you can accept that there's nothing unusual currently happening beyond media and government hysteria, and go to a restaurant before they're all gone.