6 ms·

What are they supposed to do? Sometimes dealing with reality involves some pretty uncomfortable choices to make, even when that essentially makes you the bad gu

by crx07 6y ago

What are they supposed to do? Sometimes dealing with reality involves some pretty uncomfortable choices to make, even when that essentially makes you the bad guy. The real issue here is that the economy was prematurely reopened before it was safe -- we have far more than enough money as a nation to have prevented this scenario from happening and chose a path of destruction out of sheer avarice instead.

trhway 6y ago
>we have far more than enough money as a nation to for example open more beds in preparation for the second wave (which was obvious to come). Instead hospitals were laying off people in the summer.
- flunhat 6y ago
  I suspect the limiting factor is personnel, not beds (i.e. trained staff to manage covid patients), which can't be increased on short notice. But still -- we have incompetent state & federal leadership that basically knew what would happen yet still didn't do enough to prepare. > Instead hospitals were laying off people in the summer. Yup. One of the dark ironies of this whole mess has been that hospitals have been letting go of staff because they had to suspend (very profitable) elective surgeries to treat (not so profitable) covid patients. Think hip surgeries being postponed and bleeding hospitals dry as a result.
  - trhway 6y ago
    >can't be increased on short notice. i think the 3-6 months that we had would have been enough to train any MD to care for a covid patient, at least for majority of cases and under supervision of existing high specialist. My understanding is that non-covid personnel had their workload significantly decreased, so they could have been trained for covid for the second wave.
    - flunhat 6y ago
      You might be right -- at this point, with everything that's gone wrong at the govt level, I'm pretty willing to accept rank incompetence as an explanation.
- crx07 6y ago
  There are multiple points of failure. Pretending everything was A-OK is the largest one, failing to identify the virus's presence in the country for months was another, denying and downplaying the usefulness of masks was another, underfunding hospitals was another, failing to secure PPE was another, making it painfully difficult to get tested was another. There's a lot of blame to go around on this one. But reopening the economy was the biggest mistake.
danhak 6y ago
There are many factors at play, but in L.A. I don't believe premature reopening is one of them. Bars, indoor dining and gyms have been shut down for pretty much the whole pandemic. Outdoor dining was banned (again) about a month ago. My take is that L.A.'s issues have more to do with housing density, high number of people living with roommates and high number of multigenerational households. Also perhaps some some challenges communicating with an extremely large and diverse immigrant population.
- crx07 6y ago
  LA is one of the most connected cities in the world. It's not LA's fault necessarily, but the country as a whole should've been on complete lockdown from April until whenever the situation was under control. Our national wealth and GDP have plenty of room for a complete quarantine, even if that means paying everyone's paychecks for a year or longer. We deliberately chose to allow 350,000+ peoples lives to end instead.
- jchonphoenix 6y ago
  I'll point you to Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, and Tokyo as counterexamples. All of those cities are 3-7x denser than LA, more populous, and culturally multigenerational. I think it's quite clear to anyone who's been paying attention at this point that behavior has more to do with containment than anything else. The US and perhaps LA in particular for some reason or another is unwilling or unable to implement the same behavioral safety measures of other countries and cultures. Mask wearing is the obvious one. If you go to any of those 4 cities I mentioned, 100% of individuals in public are masked, whether indoors or outdoors. 6ft social distance is very strictly followed with public shaming for those that take off their masks or do not follow social distancing guidelines in public.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    Indeed. LA is not that densely populated by any global standard.
  - danaliv 6y ago
    At some point, “this is a free country” became “I don’t have to apply impulse control under any circumstances.”
cameldrv 6y ago
The real issue IMO was that the lockdown wasn't strict enough, or enforced. Many, many stores were open, many workplaces were deemed essential, masks were not generally worn in the first phase of the lockdowns, and while indoor dining at restaurants was closed, indoor dining at your friend's house was wide open. The three places that I know of that have gotten cases to zero are China, New Zealand, and Australia, and they all used lockdowns that were far stricter than in the U.S. The problem is that a soft lockdown doesn't bring R low enough to eradicate the virus quickly, and people won't stomach it dragging on for months. I also don't believe that it can be done on the honor system. There must be police writing tickets or worse for violations, or there is a segment of the population that will ignore whatever measures that are enacted. Unfortunately sometimes these are even identifiable groups of people that all socialize together in violation of health orders, so the virus will spread within these communities regardless of whatever the governor puts on a piece of paper and makes a speech about.
- tsjq 6y ago
  Interesting points indeed. On the other hand, India had a hard lockdown for 6-8 weeks, and yet the numbers zoomed up weeks after that. And now, the numbers are magically going down despite absolute carelessness widespread. Inexplicable
  - crx07 6y ago
    The numbers start going down quickly once infections have been so prolific that crowd immunity is present. I live in Texas, but I'm sure I personally infected no fewer than 10,000-20,000 people last March, including the sorority that purportedly brought it back from Mexico during spring break. No doctor wanted to listen and no hospitals would test me even after I begged some of the best providers in the region. It wasn't until almost 9 months later that the mistake was acknowledged, and it's highly likely that community spread existed even in the US in November 2019 or even October 2019 just based on retrospective serology studies. Places with poor hygiene controls like India have likely had far, far more infections than anyone even can imagine. That might be one of the first places to be immune.

by crx07 6y ago

trhway 6y ago

>we have far more than enough money as a nation to for example open more beds in preparation for the second wave (which was obvious to come). Instead hospitals were laying off people in the summer.

flunhat 6y ago
I suspect the limiting factor is personnel, not beds (i.e. trained staff to manage covid patients), which can't be increased on short notice. But still -- we have incompetent state & federal leadership that basically knew what would happen yet still didn't do enough to prepare. > Instead hospitals were laying off people in the summer. Yup. One of the dark ironies of this whole mess has been that hospitals have been letting go of staff because they had to suspend (very profitable) elective surgeries to treat (not so profitable) covid patients. Think hip surgeries being postponed and bleeding hospitals dry as a result.
- trhway 6y ago
  >can't be increased on short notice. i think the 3-6 months that we had would have been enough to train any MD to care for a covid patient, at least for majority of cases and under supervision of existing high specialist. My understanding is that non-covid personnel had their workload significantly decreased, so they could have been trained for covid for the second wave.
  - flunhat 6y ago
    You might be right -- at this point, with everything that's gone wrong at the govt level, I'm pretty willing to accept rank incompetence as an explanation.
crx07 6y ago
There are multiple points of failure. Pretending everything was A-OK is the largest one, failing to identify the virus's presence in the country for months was another, denying and downplaying the usefulness of masks was another, underfunding hospitals was another, failing to secure PPE was another, making it painfully difficult to get tested was another. There's a lot of blame to go around on this one. But reopening the economy was the biggest mistake.

danhak 6y ago

There are many factors at play, but in L.A. I don't believe premature reopening is one of them. Bars, indoor dining and gyms have been shut down for pretty much the whole pandemic. Outdoor dining was banned (again) about a month ago. My take is that L.A.'s issues have more to do with housing density, high number of people living with roommates and high number of multigenerational households. Also perhaps some some challenges communicating with an extremely large and diverse immigrant population.

crx07 6y ago
LA is one of the most connected cities in the world. It's not LA's fault necessarily, but the country as a whole should've been on complete lockdown from April until whenever the situation was under control. Our national wealth and GDP have plenty of room for a complete quarantine, even if that means paying everyone's paychecks for a year or longer. We deliberately chose to allow 350,000+ peoples lives to end instead.
jchonphoenix 6y ago
I'll point you to Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, and Tokyo as counterexamples. All of those cities are 3-7x denser than LA, more populous, and culturally multigenerational. I think it's quite clear to anyone who's been paying attention at this point that behavior has more to do with containment than anything else. The US and perhaps LA in particular for some reason or another is unwilling or unable to implement the same behavioral safety measures of other countries and cultures. Mask wearing is the obvious one. If you go to any of those 4 cities I mentioned, 100% of individuals in public are masked, whether indoors or outdoors. 6ft social distance is very strictly followed with public shaming for those that take off their masks or do not follow social distancing guidelines in public.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Indeed. LA is not that densely populated by any global standard.
- danaliv 6y ago
  At some point, “this is a free country” became “I don’t have to apply impulse control under any circumstances.”

cameldrv 6y ago

The real issue IMO was that the lockdown wasn't strict enough, or enforced. Many, many stores were open, many workplaces were deemed essential, masks were not generally worn in the first phase of the lockdowns, and while indoor dining at restaurants was closed, indoor dining at your friend's house was wide open. The three places that I know of that have gotten cases to zero are China, New Zealand, and Australia, and they all used lockdowns that were far stricter than in the U.S. The problem is that a soft lockdown doesn't bring R low enough to eradicate the virus quickly, and people won't stomach it dragging on for months. I also don't believe that it can be done on the honor system. There must be police writing tickets or worse for violations, or there is a segment of the population that will ignore whatever measures that are enacted. Unfortunately sometimes these are even identifiable groups of people that all socialize together in violation of health orders, so the virus will spread within these communities regardless of whatever the governor puts on a piece of paper and makes a speech about.

tsjq 6y ago
Interesting points indeed. On the other hand, India had a hard lockdown for 6-8 weeks, and yet the numbers zoomed up weeks after that. And now, the numbers are magically going down despite absolute carelessness widespread. Inexplicable
- crx07 6y ago
  The numbers start going down quickly once infections have been so prolific that crowd immunity is present. I live in Texas, but I'm sure I personally infected no fewer than 10,000-20,000 people last March, including the sorority that purportedly brought it back from Mexico during spring break. No doctor wanted to listen and no hospitals would test me even after I begged some of the best providers in the region. It wasn't until almost 9 months later that the mistake was acknowledged, and it's highly likely that community spread existed even in the US in November 2019 or even October 2019 just based on retrospective serology studies. Places with poor hygiene controls like India have likely had far, far more infections than anyone even can imagine. That might be one of the first places to be immune.