6 ms·

Please stop with this "10x ballpark" stuff. It just leads to absurd conclusions. For example, 10x 34 million is 340 million, leaving 7.4 billion people yet to b

• nradov 6y ago
  By the time there were 50000 cases we had already lost any realistic chance of eradicating the virus. That's unfortunate but we can't change the past and have to deal with reality. At this point shutting things down causes more harm than good. Wearing masks in close contact settings may be fine for a few months but it's obviously not sustainable indefinitely. Most likely this pandemic will play out much like the HCoV-OC43 pandemic did in 1889.
  • titzer 6y ago
    > By the time there were 50000 cases we had already lost any realistic chance of eradicating the virus. Disagree strongly. I am currently in Australia, which shut down early and has been serious about fighting this from the beginning, despite repeated outbreaks from international travel, most recently in Victoria, which prompted a hard and long shutdown...that worked. 27,000 total cases over the course of the entire pandemic. Less than 1,000 deaths. And all of the worst of that has been lapses in vigilance and mistakes. Those 50,000 worldwide cases were the seeds of the 34 million that have been confirmed. Every one of those hotspots could have been and should have been isolated and quarantined. We'd be through this if we had responded simultaneously, fast and hard. But no one was really prepared for what that shutdown meant or looked like. But now we are stuck with a persistent infection that just keeps getting worse. > At this point shutting things down causes more harm than good. And people then were saying that a shutdown would do more harm than good. I think a 3-4 week hard simultaneous worldwide lockdown would have stopped this in its tracks, but the logistics and necessity of that were absolutely not clear. Instead we were constantly one step behind, enacting half measures and wishful thinking based on past pandemics. Incredible that people said almost exactly the same thing 6 months ago and look how screwed we are. Now we are three steps behind and there is no putting this thing back in the bottle. We're boned. Millions more deaths are coming and the only hope of even remotely normal life now is a vaccine.
    • timr 6y ago
      "Disagree strongly. I am currently in Australia, which shut down early and has been serious about fighting this from the beginning, despite repeated outbreaks from international travel, most recently in Victoria, which prompted a hard and long shutdown...that worked." Except that it didn't work. You did it once, and it came back. So now you're doing it again. And you'll keep doing it again and again, unless you plan on keeping Australia isolated from the world until a vaccine has been administered to some huge percentage of the world population. Even if you do keep Australia isolated, it's clearly not a cure, either: the current outbreak happened in spite of your country's travel ban. Reasonable people can certainly disagree about the trade-offs involved here, but you have to start from facts.
• orangecat 6y ago
  but goddamn I am so tired of this throwing around numbers game. Can we just fucking fight this virus already? Because the numbers actually matter. We could save lives by quarantining the entire population during every flu season. We don't, because the social and economic costs would far outweigh the benefits. It may well be the case that COVID is so dangerous that it justifies destroying millions of jobs, disrupting children's education, and forbidding physical proximity with friends and family. But if you're going to argue for that you need to use numbers rather than righteous indignation.
  • saalweachter 6y ago
    At the same time ... I'm not sure we haven't just been complacent as a civilization regarding the seasonal flu. Yearly lockdowns may be a step too far, but would it be so terrible if everyone wore cloth masks during flu seasons, if remote work was more standard for white collar jobs, if everyone else were able to take time off when sick, and if we had a plan for sick kids besides sending them to school with a pocket full of kleenex?
    • samatman 6y ago
      Flu is uncommonly asymptomatic during the infectious period. Adopting the Asian custom of wearing bog-standard blue medical masks when we have the sniffles is a fine idea, overdue really. Everyone wearing cloth masks during every flu season is an absurd overreaction.
  • barumi 6y ago
    > Because the numbers actually matter. If numbers actually mattered for then then they wouldn't be both neglecting official statistics, specially growth rates, and also fabricating their own data out of thin air. These people don't care about numbers or facts. These people are too embroiled in their petty world view or conspiracy theories to care about the harm they are doing to everyone around them. These idiots complain about jobs and classes as if having a million people dying on them and many more being debilitated is something that harms no one or their economy. This shit could have been contained if these idiots acted responsible and stayed put and took basic sanitary precautions. But no. I lived in Spain during the start of the year, and witnessed the spanish army trucks carting healthcare workers around and carrying loudspeakers asking people to stay indoors in a time where, according to verified tests, nearly a thousand people were dying per day due to covid. The death rate was so high that the spanish government had to commandeer an ice ring to serve as a makeshift morgue. Social distancing and lockdown and basic sanitary care drove those numbers to single digits in about a month.