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It’s fascinating to me that a scientist would look at the Diamond Princess and it’s 14 deaths of almost entirely 80+ year olds (no one under 65 died) and see ev

It’s fascinating to me that a scientist would look at the Diamond Princess and it’s 14 deaths of almost entirely 80+ year olds (no one under 65 died) and see evidence to justify mask mandates and school closures and firing half of the people of color from their jobs. Why not, say, quarantine for senior citizens or any sort of coordinated response to protect and provide for the elderly? When people talk about a covid hoax, it’s not denying the virus exists. It’s denying that the popular mitigation strategies don’t do anything but drive value for Amazon share holders.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago
We unfortunately had (and in many places are still having) both an emotional and fear-driven reaction to the spread of the virus. A lot of people understand the risk is much lower than the measures used to contain it, such as full school closures and closing parks and playgrounds. In retrospect I hope we can admit at least those preventative measures were a mistake. My fear is that if another more serious virus lands on the scene, there will be no credibility to do it again.
- amluto 6y ago
  The park closures made very little sense. The playground closures made sense when people were worried about fomites, and the early lab studies (that largely measured the wrong thing) suggested that fomites were an issue. A school is neither a park nor a playground. Schools are mostly indoors, mostly in inexpensive buildings with correspondingly poor ventilation and/or air filtering, and have a lot of people talking and breathing the same air. This is a totally different situation.
- vaidhy 6y ago
  Is this science driven or emotion driven from the other side? If virus is airborne and can spread without symptoms, are you saying younger age group does not get the virus or does not show the symptoms? If they do get the virus, then they can spread it. The closures were to prevent the virus from spreading and I do not understand why the measures used to contain it are a mistake. From the OP, it seems clear that virus is airborne, spreads in clusters and people spread it before showing any symptoms. I am open to suggestions on what are the alternative ways of stopping the spread?
  - galaxyLogic 6y ago
    You are right. I think we are being gas-lighted. It's not about whether the current restrictions are the best or not. It's about whether anything should be done at all as evidenced by critics' lack of concrete proposals of what they would do instead. Presumably nothing.
    - mardifoufs 6y ago
      So doing something so disruptive is better than doing nothing even if we end up with the same result anyways because... At least we did something? Even if that's true, I keep hearing that argument and I think I'll keep hearing it a lot in the future which makes sense as we try to justify what happened. But it's not based on reality considering that the anti lockdown side had a pretty clear plan: quarantine those most vulnerable, spend any fraction of the enormous resources we spent on locking down everything on making sure to provide for those people. That way we could've also focused the testing capacity & PPE on a lot less people, making it that much easier to isolate them from the virus. Instead of allocating thr same amount of resources regardless of how at risk someone was. You can disagree with the position but I'm not sure how you could argue that it's "doing nothing".
amluto 6y ago
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that you are right to the extreme: Covid kills a non-negligible fraction of people 65 and up and has zero mortality or long term consequences for people under 65. [0] Even if this were true, doing nothing to control the spread among under-65-year-olds would result in absolutely enormous numbers of cases over a fairly short period of time. Do you really expect that the large majority of people over 65 could be protected effectively when the considerable majority of under-65 people to whom they are exposed (caregivers, food providers, relatives, etc) get covid? I do not believe that most of the world has responded in a particularly useful way to covid, but I do believe that masks are quite effective (especially N95 or comparable masks) at reducing the spread of covid in indoor spaces. So yes, mask mandates, at least indoors, make quite a lot of sense. The school closure issue is harder. There seems to be surprisingly little data on the degree to which covid spreads among children compared to adults and the degree to which covid spreads from children to adults. But most schools consist of students indoors, in a poorly ventilated space, often crowded, talking, for hours a day. Read the article: this is prime covid-spreading conditions. Perhaps schools could have been allowed to remain open to the extent that they could move outdoors or drastically improve ventilation, but doing nothing seems likely to have been a very bad idea. [0] This is not actually the case, obviously.
- moron4hire 6y ago
  To me, in the absence of data, we should default to using best-guess models and not just throw up our hands and say "whatever, nobody knows for sure, just keep on keepin' on". Anyone who has children knows that pretty much any disease rips through schools. If COVID-19 were to eventually be proven to not transmit between children in meaningful numbers, it'd be a huge irregularity. But so many people treat this "no proof of transmission" situation as "proof of no transmission".
  - henrikschroder 6y ago
    > Anyone who has children knows that pretty much any disease rips through schools. If COVID-19 were to eventually be proven to not transmit between children in meaningful numbers If? We already know that it doesn't. Yes, other viruses rip through schools rapidly, but this virus simply doesn't. Your gut feeling is wrong. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/transmission_k_12_schools.html#covid-19-children-adolescents https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br... "Younger children (<10 years of age) may be less likely to be infected than adolescents. This possibility is supported by contact tracing studies; test positivity data from children, adolescents, and adults; and population screening studies using seroprevalence data. Susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 infection and the proportion among those infected experiencing symptoms both generally increase with age."
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

ed25519FUUU 6y ago

We unfortunately had (and in many places are still having) both an emotional and fear-driven reaction to the spread of the virus. A lot of people understand the risk is much lower than the measures used to contain it, such as full school closures and closing parks and playgrounds. In retrospect I hope we can admit at least those preventative measures were a mistake. My fear is that if another more serious virus lands on the scene, there will be no credibility to do it again.

amluto 6y ago
The park closures made very little sense. The playground closures made sense when people were worried about fomites, and the early lab studies (that largely measured the wrong thing) suggested that fomites were an issue. A school is neither a park nor a playground. Schools are mostly indoors, mostly in inexpensive buildings with correspondingly poor ventilation and/or air filtering, and have a lot of people talking and breathing the same air. This is a totally different situation.
vaidhy 6y ago
Is this science driven or emotion driven from the other side? If virus is airborne and can spread without symptoms, are you saying younger age group does not get the virus or does not show the symptoms? If they do get the virus, then they can spread it. The closures were to prevent the virus from spreading and I do not understand why the measures used to contain it are a mistake. From the OP, it seems clear that virus is airborne, spreads in clusters and people spread it before showing any symptoms. I am open to suggestions on what are the alternative ways of stopping the spread?
- galaxyLogic 6y ago
  You are right. I think we are being gas-lighted. It's not about whether the current restrictions are the best or not. It's about whether anything should be done at all as evidenced by critics' lack of concrete proposals of what they would do instead. Presumably nothing.
  - mardifoufs 6y ago
    So doing something so disruptive is better than doing nothing even if we end up with the same result anyways because... At least we did something? Even if that's true, I keep hearing that argument and I think I'll keep hearing it a lot in the future which makes sense as we try to justify what happened. But it's not based on reality considering that the anti lockdown side had a pretty clear plan: quarantine those most vulnerable, spend any fraction of the enormous resources we spent on locking down everything on making sure to provide for those people. That way we could've also focused the testing capacity & PPE on a lot less people, making it that much easier to isolate them from the virus. Instead of allocating thr same amount of resources regardless of how at risk someone was. You can disagree with the position but I'm not sure how you could argue that it's "doing nothing".

amluto 6y ago

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that you are right to the extreme: Covid kills a non-negligible fraction of people 65 and up and has zero mortality or long term consequences for people under 65. [0] Even if this were true, doing nothing to control the spread among under-65-year-olds would result in absolutely enormous numbers of cases over a fairly short period of time. Do you really expect that the large majority of people over 65 could be protected effectively when the considerable majority of under-65 people to whom they are exposed (caregivers, food providers, relatives, etc) get covid? I do not believe that most of the world has responded in a particularly useful way to covid, but I do believe that masks are quite effective (especially N95 or comparable masks) at reducing the spread of covid in indoor spaces. So yes, mask mandates, at least indoors, make quite a lot of sense. The school closure issue is harder. There seems to be surprisingly little data on the degree to which covid spreads among children compared to adults and the degree to which covid spreads from children to adults. But most schools consist of students indoors, in a poorly ventilated space, often crowded, talking, for hours a day. Read the article: this is prime covid-spreading conditions. Perhaps schools could have been allowed to remain open to the extent that they could move outdoors or drastically improve ventilation, but doing nothing seems likely to have been a very bad idea. [0] This is not actually the case, obviously.

moron4hire 6y ago
To me, in the absence of data, we should default to using best-guess models and not just throw up our hands and say "whatever, nobody knows for sure, just keep on keepin' on". Anyone who has children knows that pretty much any disease rips through schools. If COVID-19 were to eventually be proven to not transmit between children in meaningful numbers, it'd be a huge irregularity. But so many people treat this "no proof of transmission" situation as "proof of no transmission".
- henrikschroder 6y ago
  > Anyone who has children knows that pretty much any disease rips through schools. If COVID-19 were to eventually be proven to not transmit between children in meaningful numbers If? We already know that it doesn't. Yes, other viruses rip through schools rapidly, but this virus simply doesn't. Your gut feeling is wrong. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/transmission_k_12_schools.html#covid-19-children-adolescents https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br... "Younger children (<10 years of age) may be less likely to be infected than adolescents. This possibility is supported by contact tracing studies; test positivity data from children, adolescents, and adults; and population screening studies using seroprevalence data. Susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 infection and the proportion among those infected experiencing symptoms both generally increase with age."

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]