6 ms·

Good thing high school students never live in multigenerational households, right? Or otherwise have family members at high risk?

• starkd 5y ago
  When a virus is endemic, it means everyone will get it. Which means most of these precautions are ultimately worthless - other than to flatten the curve and relieve the burden on services. But oh, how long have we been "flattening the curve" now?
  • majormajor 5y ago
    Hospitals tend to be most burdened in the winter anyway, which is unfortunate given transmission patterns, but I definitely think we're moving to a world of "only base policy on hospitalizations, not on raw case numbers" - and believe public health officials are largely moving in this direction too. In this world, once this surge is on the downswing, a lot more things look reasonable to relax. One major change there, I think, is that we need to change the messaging on masks to get a mask to protect yourself if you are vulnerable or will be near those who are. Cloth masks have shown themselves to be better at a population level than nothing in some studies, but that's hardly the same thing as a medical-grade mask, which are now much more widely available than they were a year ago.
    • amanaplanacanal 5y ago
      Where I live that has been the policy from the beginning. Keep the hospital system running. That said, because hospitalizations lag case numbers, I assume they are trying to extrapolate from case numbers to future hospitalizations. Of course that changes depending upon the individual variant that is currently spreading.
  • PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > When a virus is endemic, it means everyone will get it. Which means most of these precautions are ultimately worthless - This couldn't be more wrong. Even if everyone eventually gets it, you'd much rather get it as late as possible and outside of an infection spike like this one where rescue medications are depleted and hospitals are overburdened. The medical knowledge and treatment options available today are far, far better than what we had at the beginning of the pandemic. And they continue to improve. Availability of the best treatments is also scarce, but continues to improve. The virus itself also appears to be slowly mutating to less fatal versions. Even if you think it's inevitable, you want to delay it as long as possible.
    • starkd 5y ago
      That was true at the beginning of the pandemic, but we're long past that now. The recent variant is literally popping up all over the place. Despite the masks and the testing. And this latest variant seems to be extremely mild as in a three day cold - just like you said. So why are we making scaring the kids like this? Protect the kids with existing conditions, we know which ones are at the most risk, which are very few in that age group.
  • ceejayoz 5y ago
    > When a virus is endemic, it means everyone will get it. There's a substantial difference between "everyone will get it in a year or two" and "everyone will get it all within a couple of weeks", especially where hospital capacity is concerned. My city has one ICU bed available and hospitals have been diverting ambulances. > But oh, how long have we been "flattening the curve" now? We've done it several times. After each spike flattens and then comes down, restrictions get progressively lifted. I'm in a blue state that took things quite seriously, and this summer still largely felt if the pandemic didn't exist.
    • mbg721 5y ago
      We sort of expected that when you spend a trillion or two of our federal tax dollars, the hospitals might get better at dealing with it. This does not appear to have been the case.
      • ceejayoz 5y ago
        Nursing's a 2-4 year degree. Doctors take substantially more, and training both requires docs/nurses as professors and clinical instructors. I'm quite dubious that chucking money at the problem would've solved the staffing issue effectively.
        • mbg721 5y ago
          It would work better than shooting from the hip and firing all the unvaccinated health professionals.
          • ceejayoz 5y ago
            It really wouldn't have. It'd buy you an extra percent or two; the numbers have been vanishingly small. Mayo Clinic lost about a percent. Factor in the fact they're more likely to get sick and it's even closer to a net zero. I'm not inclined to treat antivax beliefs as "professional", especially in the healthcare field.
  • dragonwriter 5y ago
    > When a virus is endemic, it means everyone will get it No, it means that it tends to be maintained at some (whether very high or very low or other) stable baseline level in a region in the absence of external inputs or interventions. > Which means most of these precautions are ultimately worthless No, it doesn't, and wouldn't even if “endemic” did mean everyone would get it, since the control measures are not intended to prevent people from eventually getting COVID in the absence of a fundamental change in available countermeasures, but to reduce the speed of particular outbreaks and mitigate acute impacts to health systems (which affects ability to treat anyone needing the system) from caseload and to other essential social services from temporary incapacitation of key staff. > But oh, how long have we been "flattening the curve" now Rarely for more than a couple weeks in a row, on a local basis, in response to particular sharp outbreaks, and invariably with much weaker measures than were taken for the same purpose earlier on in the pandemic, despite outbreaks that are much worse by every measure (in part, because the ultimate goal is much more limited and temporary, and in part because the political faction that deliberately avoided fighting the pandemic in the hopes of blaming the effects on political opponents has turned avoiding control measures into a quasi-religious doctrine to avoid accountability for their earlier malfeasance.)
  • astrange 5y ago
    The reason to flatten it now is that we'll have a much more effective treatment (pavloxid) in a month or two.