The plans to reopen the economy are scary

I have seen a few click-bait headlines stating that the "oversight was fired" but it is not exactly true. There is some politics going on about who is chair of the PRAC but the other ~20 members of the committee have not changed.

You're not wrong, but the first part is largely what I'm talking about. When people say something is "light-years beyond the kind of political leadership and public-private coordination we’ve seen thus far", I don't think they're doing a principled analysis of what political leadership or coordination has been able to accomplish in the past.

> It's clearly a case of more right leaning areas taking less cautious measures in favor of money.

While I see where you’re coming from with this statement, I’m not sure I agree. From where I stand - a town of 13k people surrounded by a large rural area - it makes sense that we’re taking less aggressive action because the virus is not yet endemic here. Given the growth of confirmed cases in my area (northern Arkansas), it seems those steps are working adequately to keep it from becoming endemic as well.

I propose that areas with lower population density are taking less aggressive action, and those areas are also predominately right-leaning.

> I imagine this is really code for "if we infect all these low-risk people first, we get a large proportion of our workforce immunised".

I think it’s really code for “let’s repeat the mistakes we made early on when we adopted ‘herd immunity’ rather than isolation as an I itial strategy and spread this as rapidly as we can and create another critical peak”, because those people aren't completely isolated from the rest of the population, and spreading it more rapidly in that segment of the population will also spread it more rapidly in the rest of the population.

But I guess it's good to know the the incompetence of the present British government is resilient enough to survive the temporary incapacitation of the PM as a fairly direct result of the incompetence on the very same issue. I'm not even sure the US federal administration would be that committed to it's own (otherwise more complete) incompetence on the issue.

Current plan for Norway is to start gradually opening up after Easter:

* Opening up kindergartens, physiotherapy, hair salons and allowing cottage holidays from 20th April

* Opening schools for 4 youngest classes, After School and some higher education in final years from 27th April

So you go after lowest-hanging fruits gradually, but it's a learning phase and could need rollback if people don't follow restrictions enough to contain contagion. This advice is a mix of political and expert analysis, after observing decline of new cases and deaths, after timely though not early, lockdown.

Norway is a small and nimble country, so could more easily be leading the response in the West. Though a new normal will have to include pandemic response in nearly all aspects of social life. The clustering and stochastic nature of the spread may become somewhat managable, with enough tracking, testing and preparations.

The US never really closed their border with China. Americans returning from China were let back in with minimal checks, and some were probably presymptomatic. Not only would it have had to be earlier, it would have had to strand American citizens abroad until they could be tested, which was never on the cards.

Still much less than the elders and I am not sure what your comment means.

Again, what I am saying is that the lockdown punish purple differently, the most punished are the least affected by the virus itself

Yes! I think many people don't realize that COVID by itself is not the problem so much as the additional burden it places on the healthcare system, which could be used to help people with other problems. We are already seeing cases of people with cancers having surgeries delayed because hospitals are trying to conserve PPE.

I was unlucky enough to fracture my ankle right before California instituted shelter-in-place and to fracture it in a way that needed corrective surgery. I was lucky that CA managed to avoid the worst of it, so that my surgery was able to proceed on schedule. Otherwise I was looking at potential long term complications in addition to being off my feet for 5-6 months instead of the 2 months they expect now.

Still at much lower rate than the elders.

And what I am saying is that the lockdown punish different class of people very differently. And the most punished are the least affected by the virus itself.

> it does tend to put them in the hospital,

Well no. It does sometimes, but it tends to not.

I believe we both agree that locking down 20/30 years old people who still have to study, to meet people, to make experience, to find lovers and to find themselves is very different that lock down 70/80 years old people right?

Then there is no doubts that the virus hit hardest the elders.

Again, what I am saying is that younger people are hit by the lockdown much more than the elders while being the less concerned about the virus itself.

And we should talk also about this.

I've seen a coronavirus study that estimates 90% of the economic benefit of the lockdown accrues to those over 50. (Standard quality-adjusted-life-year rates.)

I've also seen pre-coronavirus studies noting the stark disparity in wealth between baby boomers and millennials at the same point in life. Fun times indeed!

I can afford this myself, but sparks will be flying.

People have been making this argument since before the lock down. But on the contrary to your prediction, the argument has seemed sillier and sillier the more we see the effects of the virus. Things are really freakin bad, and that's with a lockdown. I suspect that all but a very small minority will be able to see the sense in spending serious effort on mitigation for the foreseeable future.

Even if people somehow manage to forget the horror and deaths of the past couple of weeks, a loosened lockdown and the inevitable spread of disease that will follow would quickly remind them.

There's also a 12 years old girl dead in Belgium.

https://nypost.com/2020/03/31/12-year-old-belgian-girl-becom...

The article also contains accounts of two more youngsters dead, at 14 and 16.

This thing can kill anyone.

And people will die from suicide due to economic destitution. The ones pretending are those that think public policy should be discussed in morally squeaky clean terms. Crisis policy is a dirty conversation about who sinks and who swims.

We are talking about trading people for people, and we’re saying in some trades the numbers work out better.

Sorry I wasn't clear.

Personally I am myself in the stricter form of quarantine I can do.

However, the argument I brought forward will start to raise stronger and stronger. And if we don't discuss about it, and if we don't do it fast, it will be problematic for everybody.

I personally don't even mind that much the lockdown, but I am not the only youngest around...

I just don't agree with the analysis. If I had a choice between a 2% chance of dying and isolation for the rest of my life, I'd roll the dice.

Certainly nobody is making the following fictional argument: "I'm not going to die anyway, and it's better for you to be dead than for me to be socially isolated."

Nobody is saying that.

Test the young caregivers for antibodies. Only permit those with antibodies and no viral load to get anywhere near the elderly. Pay extra if necessary, it would be much better than breaking society.

I agree with what you're saying, but it's not a misunderstanding - the original article really is saying that the stay at home policies are designed to contain the virus and won't end until a containment plan is in place.

The DP-3T system explicitly calls out the fact that it dismantles itself after the epidemic as a feature.

The government will like being able to track every citizen too much for that to happen.

Unfortunately, the PEPP-PT approach will not protect privacy in many European countries. This is because an individual is linked to a phone number. Since you cannot purchase a SIM card in many countries without showing ID (and a copy of your ID is made and sent to the state authorities), the state is easily able to match phone numbers with people’s real identities. Consequently, the authorities will easily be able to track the user’s movements, or at least track what other people that person interacted with over a period of time, which is essentially the same thing.

If you read the PEPP-PT documentation closely, the “privacy protections” are mainly keeping you anonymous to other ordinary people. But people should reasonably want to remain anonymous from the state as well.

The linked article describes a tracking system that would be mandatory for every single American in order to e.g. board public transportation. (Such a system has already been rolled out in China where people get an automatic red–yellow–green health code and have to show it in public places.) While one can reasonably assume that the NSA is already capable of tracking a huge amount of phone location data from Google or Apple devices, people are still free to not have such a phone and they are still able to move around in public.

The WHO is good at some important things, but not deploying apps to billions of citizens.

Where in Ohio is this? I'm not doubting, just like to read local news on it as I'm in Ohio too.

I applaud DeWine for acting quickly, but I'm concerned that maybe for rural and small city locations the shut down was too much. I wonder if we are creating a cry wolf effect for non-metro areas. All the mass effects in my area are purely from the response. Of course, one may say, what if we hadn't a shut down; but, I think that argument is going to be harder to make to the small businesses in a small city or rural area next time around.

When I see that small businesses get shut down, but Walmart gets to keep selling everything because they have a grocery section, I get a little disgruntled too. New Mexico just shut down standalone liquor stores... but Walmart will be allowed continue selling liquor. If I owned a store, I'd be pretty upset that the governor appears to be enriching the very biggest "everything" stores while driving me out of business.

Honestly, how long are people going to be able to not pay rent for. I've already seen several businesses in my town permanently shut down at the beginning of April. This is people's livelihoods. People's source of food and shelter. Once people start losing that, authority means nothing any more.

If the government loses authority, what entity would fill the power vacuum?

I meant nobody alive today. I guess now we could argue about smallpox, measles, and the like, but I am working from the general definition of the last pandemic being the Spanish Flu.

I have added the two missing words to my original post for clarification. Thank you.

Thank you, this context is important. Swine flu killed between 150,000 to 575,000 globally in 2009, and almost nobody even remembers it. HIV is a recent pandemic that many living people have lived through, from discovery to treatment.

And of course the flu, which is different than SARSCoV2, kills between 250,000 and 500,000 each and every year. If you're 30 years old, between 7 and 15 million people have died from flu in your lifetime.

In practice this seems to be a subset of the first choice. Everyone who has a proposal to control the rate of infection also says we need to lockdown indefinitely until their proposal is fully implemented.

This, precisely. Maybe we find better treatment (especially treatment that reduces the incidence of patients needing hospitalization or ventilators). Maybe we get testing technology widespread enough that we don't have to treat everyone like they're positive unless proven otherwise. Maybe we get antibody tests that allow us to figure out who isn't immunologically naive to the virus. Maybe we learn more about how it spreads. Maybe we learn more about why some people are asymptomatic.

Basically there are countless ways in which quality of life can be improved over time as we continue to maximize efforts to contain spread.

Yeah sure. a month, a year, a decade. How much of my life are you willing to steal?

The fatality rate for octogenarians is 15%. Octogenarians also have a 10% chance of dying every year anyway. At 18 months of lockdown 15% of them are dead anyway and you took a single digit percentage of my life away

This state of affairs is not life. I would kill myself if we have to do this for a year.

The data on the Santa Clara (California) stats site shows that 10% of those tested are infected.

https://www.sccgov.org/sites/phd/DiseaseInformation/novel-co...

What your comment is missing is that the mortality of ventilators is 66% - 90%. So they're not a good solution for most patients. ICU doctors have been recommending using non-intrusive methods like cannulas as long as possible before intubating. However, that causes aerosolization of corona, so quarantine buildings are needed.

Please see my links for more detailed info.

That's a false dichotomy.

We could have locked down the vulnerable (60+ and those with pre-existing conditions), and anyone with a temperature, focused our healthcare efforts on them and let everyone else go about their business with more caution (masks + hand washing).

We would have built societal (cows are a herd, humans are a society) immunity by this point and could slowly return to normal for the at-risk crowd.

As it stands, we haven't built up any social immunity and will have to wait over a year for a vaccine which, by definition, we will not know the long term effects of.

It's not that easy. Social networks, particular urban dense ones have the characteristics of small world networks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_network). The distance between every person in a city is maybe 5-6 individuals. You can imagine how many hundred people you stand next to, how many people they stand next to, and so on.

So if say, the chance of being infected in an interaction is say 5%, then the chance at a distance of two is 0.25%, the chance for someone at a distance of 3 is merely 0.01%, etc..

Do you really think it's a rational use of resources or your attention that if you're one of the countless 'distance 3' people to alert you? Unless you had some mysterious ability to determine with extremely high fidelity that infection has occured from metadata alone, which doesn't exist, it's a tool for mass panic.

Bluetooth will give you a match for up to 10 meters. The official safe distance is 6 feet. You can't even tell from a bluetooth match if people were close enough at all.

We don't. The primary transmission path is droplets through people in close contact (less than two meters, inhaling aerosols etc..). There is no current evidence that people simply walking past each other can somehow infect others at a meaningful rate, and surface tranmission is negligible as well.

See most recent results from the German researchers in Heinsberg.

Cheer! Because with 28%, you are close enough to herd immunity that you can push R0 below 1 with social distancing.

In fact, herd immunity does not require 70% of the population to be immune. It just requires 70% of all potentially transmitting contacts being eliminated. And if those 28% who contracted the virus first are also the ones that have more contacts than average citizen (which should be the case, because that is why they probably got it before the other 72%), we might already be fine. Let's these 28% have 72% of all human contact (because human is -like almost everything - not distributed equally), then we would already be there and have reached herd immunity. There would still be sporadic local outbreaks, but nothing dramatic any more.

A lot of trade goes over those borders, and it only takes a few cases on the wrong side. Sure if on 1 Jan the RoW had shut borders with china things might have gone ok.

No because you cannot close borders off to American citizens. Even travel bans aren't terribly effective because you can pass through other countries or be infected in other countries.

I don't really understand the point of temperature taking as asymptomatic patients are contagious (sars-cvd-2 is far from alone in this respect).

This testing provides a false negative which allows vectors to mix with healthy people -- a false sense of security. You might as well not do it.

We can test people who care for the elderly, so that people in that age group can be protected.

We can tests a classroom weekly with one test. If it's positive, come back in three weeks, if not hear the parents cheer.

We can let companies be responsible for having people tested, if they want people in the office.

Once scaled up, we can have restaurants, bars even festivals be full of people, that the owner/organizers tested.

"When you have symptoms? Too late."

The goal has never been to bring the transmission rate down to zero. If we could quickly test everyone at the onset of symptoms, then trace and test anyone likely to have been exposed to the virus by that symptomatic individual, we could bring the transmission rate down considerably. It's been done in other countries. Add in some other precautions, like automatic temperate checks, and the transmission rate can be lowered even further. Low enough? Dunno, but lockdowns can't last forever and our healthcare capacity is getting better by the day.

How much money would it take to make testing everyone a realistic possibility? How much money are we losing by just shutting everything down? Which one costs more?

For herd immunity, the number discussed is 80% of the population getting Covid-19. Since there are cases world-wide, I don't see containment at this point working.

To even consider containment succeeding, we would need a way to test 300 million people a couple times a week. Since we can't do even 1 million tests a day, the math doesn't add up.

"Giving up" is a strange way to look at it. We have various flus annually. There will be a time limit to lockdown of several weeks, not 18 months.

So it's important to look at the data and make an informed public healthcare policy decision.

People die every year from flu in the tens of thousands, or car accidents, or myriad other causes.

Rather than an emotional response, we need healthcare policy experts to look at the data as of today.

What has changed in the past month is that we know ventilators don't work 66% - 90% of the time, so they should be taken out of the "flattening the curve" equation.

Please see my post with several links to learn more.

I just added my source links (search this page for "Source Links"). Please review them and let me know of any questions or comments.

I'd really appreciate the feedback to decide what my next step is after my initial 2-3 weeks of research and thought.

EEE then. That's a virus transmitted by mosquitoes. Malaria was a bad example.

I don't disagree, absent a well stocked National Stockpile, the Great States should build their own emergency reserve for Natural Disaster and Pandemic. Each state building its own stockpiles of some things that don't hit all areas equally could be wasteful. Keep close relationships with manufacturing firms who are prepared to be ready on short notice.

This is as much a failure of planlessness as it is policy.

Having some states do the right things and others not doing so is kind of like having a pool with a peeing section.

What I see happening. People are indoors and pursing something that they are really interested in. Maybe knitting, trumpet playing, etc. They are connected with new people online who share the same interests as them. In a few months people will be connecting in person with these people. Modernity will do what modernity always does...connect people who have distinct, unique, interests together. As a society I think that we've outgrown the idea of just going to a movie theater and hanging out with friends. I think that the older model society will re-emerge...fraternities, social clubs, members only places, hackerspaces. Let's say you get passionate about a hobby right now, lets say playing an instrument. You'll want to find a safe space to meet. Maybe a few people will pitch in some cash and just rent a space to turn into a private hangout club. With the coming recession space will become cheaper.

>Moving the majority of activities indoors forever will have a negative impact on the psyche of the most people.

So does industrialization as a whole, but I'm not for rolling that back either. Ride the ennui all the way to posthuman psyches. c:

> You don't need to pay people to take biology courses. You need to pay people UBI so that they could choose to take biology courses. Then you only need a (relatively) modest amount of money to design the course, pay the graders, and deliver the content.

I agree with your sentiment, forcing people into Biology is entirely the wrong approach--I was and I detested my HS level classes, and even most of my lower division classes in University as it was mainly just rote learning--but because I met a Community of students and professionals online when I was still in HS I got to learn what research they were focusing on and it intrigued me enough to go to the BS level, all while attending upper division University lectures in various subjects during my Junior/Senior years of HS.

While I'm a proponent of UBI, I still think a concerted effort is needed to make the Life Sciences appealing to the masses; I personally subscribe to the Biohacker and Community Science approach, and having (wet) lab extensions built into local community libraries would go so much further.

I've been out of the Industry for 8 years now, but I'd gladly volunteer and teach Plant Science and some Molecular biology labs for free if we had UBI and I could offset some living expenses. I know of 3 or so recent biology grads who wish they could do the same.