Facebook says it has removed promotion of anti-quarantine events
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The mortality rate in this place or that; the experience on a cruise ship, or in Sweden, or in North Dakota vs. that in New York or Italy; the percentage of people who are positive and asymptomatic vs. presymptomatic vs. symptomatic; whether this or that drug seems to have a good effect on outcomes; they absolutely don't know how all of this fits together yet. All of them, doctors, nurses, researchers, are going in every day, treating patients, participating in daily conference calls to share information on outcomes, trying different therapies. They're figuring this out and all they have asked us for is some time. All these studies and hypotheses and numbers from various places don't always reflect what's actually happening on the ground.
Someone mentioned quarantining the "vulnerable" people and letting everyone else get back to work and develop our "herd immunity." Are researchers certain we gain long term immunity? Can they precisely define "vulnerable?" My wife is clinical care coordinator on a covid unit in northern New Jersey (that's the personal part). Her first patient was 51. I bet that's younger than most of you are thinking when you think "vulnerable." It looks like he's going to make it and drop into that large "didn't die" bucket I see referred to here over and over, but to get there he spent _five weeks_ in an ICU bed on a ventilator. My wife has treated lots of elderly people. She's also treated people in their 30's and 40's. People in those age groups have died. Children have died, too. How many of each type of person will be affected by this or that containment policy? We don't know.
When this thing started my wife's hospital was running about 2:1 patients to nurses. They're now flirting with 4-6:1. They don't have proper PPE. At another hospital near us a nurse was suspended for bringing her own to work. The general opinion is that the system can't handle much additional strain, and I don't think any of us are in a position to argue the point with them. It's been a month. We can absolutely make it through a few months if we have to, while they do their work. I personally think that would be easier with strong and consistent federal leadership, but that's a separate discussion. At the very least we should be willing to heed the people we expect to save our lives if we get sick.
You and I can. Many of my friends have missed a rent or car payment, and may soon miss another. Most people cannot work from home.
So how does that work? Instead of right now, they'll get evicted and become homeless as soon as things open up, because they've been piling up rent with no income in the meantime? Would you find that comforting?
Honestly, because its unlikely that most people will be able to share the burden of theses costs and we need only look at 2008 to see how a financial crisis reduced people to forced evictions (of people who even owned their homes, no less) because of delinquency.
Personally, I want to believe we could do more as individuals, as relying on the Government for solutions isn't going to work.
I'd prefer to enact a local/community based approach for this pandemic but I have serious doubts as to how it will take place or who would actually honor them when its clear so many businesses (even large corporations) are insolvent in the US. not to mention the level of wide-spread ignorance as seen with these quarantine protests taking place.
I'm starting to really wonder, especially as this can easily lead to a global depression if hasn't already, if we will have to have a debt jubilee given the severity of COVID.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/21/debt-jubi...
This seems like a “prisoner’s dilemma” situation. It’s rational for an individual landlord to evict a delinquent tenant and seek a new one. However, if everyone does this the entire market collapses. It’s better for everyone if the landlord takes a short term haircut to preserve the market.
Since cooperation is expected to break down between individuals, the government must step in to prevent collapse.
Capital owners are not a special class of citizen. If you have assets and need cash, there is a way to convert one to the other. It's called a "market". You may have heard of it.
It seems that during recessions, asset-rich/cash-poor people, nominally Capitalists, turn into overnight socialists because making cuts to the ol' lifestyle is for the little people, not them.
Most Americans are broke, it's just not really talked about.
Sure, and I'm very aware of my privilege in that sense. If people have the choice of getting the disease or missing rent payments that is a social failing we should all be ashamed of. I also don't mean to ignore the global perspective. The U.S. is materially wealthy enough that we could take care of people who need help as we get through this. Other nations don't necessarily have the resources.
This is the statistical morality question that we're very bad at dealing with. Here, move this trolley switch lever. There's a 1/100 chance that doing so kills somebody. No, you can't tell whether it will, or even whether it did afterwards. Here's your cheque.
This makes me wonder if there might be some kind of eminent domain case to be made: If the government orders a business closed due to no fault of the owner/management, is that sufficiently similar to seizing the property that they owe some kind of remuneration for the action?
In my opinion the two (shutdown and relief) go hand in hand.
The idea you can simply shut down the economy at will and balance it with relief doesn't make economic sense.
Funny you say that because it seems to be no problem when it comes to bailing out corporate investors. Of course, near-zero federal interest rates didn’t make “economic sense” either, but yet here we are.
The term "bail out" is usually understood to mean replacing funds after the owner of them lost them through bad decision making. What's happening here isn't a conventional bailout. Governments have destroyed the businesses of private investors deliberately and explicitly - reductions in the damage aren't bail outs.
Bay area issued the first national stay at home order on March 13. By then demand had already dropped precipitously. If your restaurant is seeing 60% fewer bookings, are you going to keep as many wait staff? Are you going to order as much food? How is that going to impact your supplier? And their supplier?
On the flip side we have places like Smithfield food that stayed open and their workforce became infected. Smithfield alone has as many infected as the entire country of Sweden reported newly infected yesterday. These are problems of different orders of magnitutde. How does a factory stay open with 500 people infected at once?
And yet Sweden still disproves your point. Businesses have stayed open, including restaurants and other such businesses, and yet Swedish companies are not evaporating due to their workforces being too sick to work. That's not even close to happening, is it?
``` A record 36,800 people were handed their notice in March, more than 10 times the number from the same month last year.
The government has offered loans and guarantees and expects to increase expenditure by around 84 billion Swedish crowns ($8.35 billion) this year.
At the same time, the central bank has poured money into the financial system, offering 500 billion Swedish crowns in loans to companies via banks and boosting its purchases of securities by 300 billion crowns.
Banking group Swedbank said recently it expected the economy to contract 4% this year. ``` https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-sweden...
The U.K. government is also backing loans for businesses to limp on with, interest free for the first 6 months or year (I forget the specifics).
Of course it doesn't. Governments all over the world aren't making decisions for the benefit of the economy right now, they're doing it to save the lives of their citizens.
I.e. the US and UK have gone ahead wonderfully; the Philippines, China, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, South Africa.. not so much
Yes, government isn't some omnipotent god but neither is it some helpless pathetic entity that can't sort things out at a time of extraordinary crisis.
My assumption is that governments are taking on some sort of debt here.
(Even if you hardly needed to before just by sheer size.)
What they have done is: - allowed companies who's income has dropped by 30% to claim $600/employee/week of salary support - negotiated with all the banks to allow mortgage holidays
Think of it as trickle up stimulus and trickle down rent subsidies to keep people connected to companies and as many companies as possible still viable
We're getting close to having Covid beat(only 5 new cases today, all from known sources), next week we slowly start dropping out of lockdown
Anecdotal cases don't tell anything. Those people and kids could have other undiagnosed diseases or preconditions, they could lie about age, they could even have been miscategorized. All statistics shows that people at risks are 60+ , and people with another comorbidity. Just one example of study :
https://www.jwatch.org/na51296/2020/04/03/how-comorbidities-...
There are other studies if you look for "comorbidity covid19"
All that said 'the hospitals are being overwhelmed' isn't a good reason to shut down most of the economy. If people are going to park up in their houses for months anyway there isn't much difference whether they are sick or not. I know a bunch of work-hungry lunatics who would much rather catch the disease, risk whatever may happen and get back to work and the data I've seen says it is debatable on whether that is the wrong approach for someone in their 30s or 40s. And on the flip side I don't think there has ever been an experiment like shutting everything down to see what happens. We have no idea if we are playing with fire or or a fluffy pillow for some of these decisions around shutting down industries. There is a correlation with bad economies and war breaking out. Does that happen when the economic wounds are self inflected in a crisis? We really don't know. Probably not. But things are happening very quickly and a lot of serious turbulence is hitting the system.
It is a fair observation and somewhat compelling but there needs to be a better reason than 'ICU nurses are overwhelmed with work' to strip people of their right to make their own mistakes. It is good evidence but it is not the end of the conversation.
Also looking at the NHS as a whole doesn’t tell the correct story as the virus right now is concentrated in a few hotspots.
What happens when the kits are faulty or non-experts interpret the data? Lots of folks will think they're safe and go home to visit at-risk elders.
> All that said 'the hospitals are being overwhelmed' isn't a good reason to shut down most of the economy.
The hospitals are overwhelmed, so there will be no help for you when you need it. Any care that would have addressed accidents, infections, major medical emergencies will be under duress. People will die from preventable reasons.
> There is a correlation with bad economies and war breaking out.
This is outrageous to suggest.
> there needs to be a better reason than 'ICU nurses are overwhelmed with work' to strip people of their right to make their own mistakes.
Unfortunately when you get covid-19, you can spread it along and become part of an infection chain that leads to the deaths of others.
Do people have the right to drive under the influence?
That is basically what the CDC did. Having one organisation in a position where a totally ordinary and probably routine failure will kill tens of thousands of people, or worse, is stupid. It isn't like government officials are the only people in the world who care about stopping a blossoming pandemic; the law shouldn't pretend otherwise.
Better to ban tests if there is something wrong with them than preemptivly screw up the response.
In our area, nurses have been furloughed because there is not enough going on at the hospitals and clinics to bill and thus pay for the staff.
It just did. Something rather important.
1) Your anecdote is not consistent with the national concern - it's local to your area.
My father is currently in a hospital for an unrelated reason and it's almost empty -> they are 'prepared for war' and there isn't a single COVID patient in the entire area, let alone hospital. They are all empty.
The vast majority of hospitals in the US are not warzones they are quiet.
"The general opinion is that the system can't handle much additional strain, and I don't think any of us are in a position to argue the point with them. "
Yes - we are! Your local hospital is not 'the system'. We have to take this into consideration.
2) It's disingenuous to somehow imply that 'because some hospitals are busy' that this means 'all doctors think we must be locked-down, everywhere' and more importantly, that people should not be able to protest the lockdown, or that major media outlets should be suppressing this.
3) In the fact of a lot of different variables, people absolutely have the right to come to their own conclusions, and protest, and certainly to drum up support for said protests.
Edit: to be clear, I agree with the lock-downs, but we really should not be suppressing people's will to express themselves. I see a lot of doctors talking about policies without a real instinct as to how existentially destructive they are. Folks we are printing money as never before seen in history, there was a 'fire in the engines' and so we shut them off, but we are now headed straight down to the earth, very quickly. We have to be conscious of that and look very hard at other things (Korea, Sweden etc.) and be real smart about it.
Which is just as anecdotal. The virus doesn't spread everywhere at once, and there are a lot of places in the country/world that aren't NYC/North Jersey yet. If they have similar population density and do a similar job of social isolation then what magic do you suggest will make the outcomes different there?
" social isolation then what magic do you suggest will make the outcomes different there?"
If you'd bother to consider outside the narrow confines of the USA you might want to consider what 'magic' the Singaporean, Hong Kong and S. Korean systems are using because they are considerably more dense and doing really well. Sweden is also dong 'kind of ok' without any lock-down.
The real issue however is the suppression of people's right to communicate and gather, even if online.
We have a situation in which the nation is forcibly locked into their homes, and large conglomerates are suppressing further their ability to communicate. This is existentially disturbing.
The most important right we have is to effectively gather and confer with one another, because the first thing authoritarian regimes want to do is stop people form 'meeting to figure out how to get rid of the regime'.
I wish the protestors would practice better social distancing, and I do think we should remain locked-down, but I absolutely support their right to voice their concerns.
In fact the government should be doing much more to mollify concerns over freedom of movement and expression etc, legislating limits to such rules, requiring oversight etc..
Recall that the outbreak started in central Europe weeks before the USA locked down. Even in the harder hit countries, there are quiet hospitals almost everywhere. Look at Switzerland - it shares a huge land border with northern Italy and has large numbers of people who move across the borders, it volunteered to take Italian patients in. Swiss hospitals are receiving financial bailouts because they're so quiet, it's on the downcurve for a long time now yet it has never implemented house arrest (just closing shops and other gathering places). Even the Italians didn't need to send Ticino patients in the end.
There's a lot of experience with this right now. There are a few cities or local hotspots where for unclear reasons the disease hits harder than the vast majority of places. But even in those harder hit places field hospitals are hardly used.
It is incredibly bad news that Facebook is attempting to interfere with the social processes of figuring out when lockdown should end right now - and yes, that includes protests. There's no evidence lawmakers have any better insight into what's going on than anyone else, and quite a bit of evidence they may have worse insight. Silicon Valley needs to butt out or see its reputation sink the journalism-like lows.
I got some news for you: these protests seem to be indirectly financed by powerful politicians.
https://www.salon.com/2020/04/16/conservative-grouplinked-to...
Really, think about what you're implying here - that Americans somehow care so little about being placed under house arrest that they'd need to be paid to turn up to a protest about it? That's not the America I know.
As for "conservative group with links to conservative politicians", given the vague nature of the term "links" that's going to encompass a vast number of politically active people in the country. There's nothing surprising or sinister about people who distrust centralised state power organising protests against totalitarian actions. It's exactly what you'd expect to see.
Yes, I'm sure dark money funded protestors who blocked ambulances from going to hospitals have better insight than anyone else. What a load of nonsense.
Facebook is a private platform. It can moderate how it pleases.
Absolutely not; it is highly regulated (probably should be more so), subject to constitutional concerns, ongoing legislation and pressures.
Absolutely not an expert and being married to a critical care nurse doesn't make me one. From what she has told me and what I have read ventilators are not about oxygen, they are about the mechanical work to move the diaphragm in and out, something the body gets too tired to do at some point after a long battle with respiratory illness. In fact the arguments against ventilators that I have read is specifically that they put pressure on the lungs without actually increasing the absorption of oxygen. But this is one of those things the actual experts are trying to figure out right now.
I am one of those, who think that way, as a preferred solution. Now there are of course many problems with this approach, because who is "vulnerable"? Who decides on that. Because it also means, that those categorized as not vulnerable, would be expected to go to work etc. and those who do get quarantined should get compensated, otherwise they must go out, out of basic needs (money).
Now for some, this would mean, you can get paid vacation, if you just say, you have been a heavy smoker. Abuse of the system. So medical tests for classification of "vulnerable"? And then who compensates the relatives of the people who were classificated "non-risk" and forced to work, but did get sick and died of it?
So it is not easy. But I still think, that direction would be easier, because "We can absolutely make it through a few months if we have to, while they do their work" is only valid, for people with lots of savings. People who live from paycheck to paycheck cannot. They would need help (from government most likely) or die. And who helps all those, who spend years building up a business and have it all wasted, to protect other people? Is that fair? And there are government programs in place all around the world, but I have serious doubts, that they really compensate in a meaningful way. So the result will be most likely, the big survive and prosper (see Amazon) and the small vanishes. So killing the weak in the name of protecting the weak?
Now yes, it is usually a different thing to die economically and to die literally, but for some the result might be the same. Their live work shattered.
So this is the other side.
There is no easy solution I see, but for context: look at all the poor countries, they really have no other way, than "let it wash over them". You can't really lock people in their home for long(even though they try), if their home is a crowded metal shed in the slums with no AC, power or even running water. They will be cocked, before they starve to death. So what can they do? Live on. But it does not seem to me, that Covid-19 really takes a higher death toll, than all the other diseases are already taking. Some die, but the rest lives on.
This is harsh, but the way it is for them and somewhat working. And in any case, that also means, that the virus cannot really be wiped out globally. So is the solution really to lock the rich world in and the poor world out, until someday maybe a reliable cure or vaccine gets deployed? Well, that seems to be the current plan and it might work, but not if the total lockdown goes on forever. Because then, some parts of the "rich" world will also turn into "poor", with no other choice than working again and take the losses.
Several European nations have already started to ease lockdowns. High risk people still stay home, but a lot of people get to go back to work. If the US gets it's shit together, that can happen here too.
There is a legitimate place for cost-benefit analysis. There isn't for "5G causes coronavirus" or "it's a myth being put about by the new world order". Those kind of memes are also a kind of virality that needs to be quarantined.
(Let's not pretend there's a censorship rubicon; Facebook will remove anything vaguely "adult" or related to copyright infringement very aggressively.)
And regarding Corona: Sweden never introduced a quarantine, and they seem to be in good shape compared to others. Not saying I agree with that policy, because I don't. But the topic isn't as "black and white" as it appears.
Here in Germany, as of today, many of the already few restrictions where lifted as well.
Sweden is currently seeing an increase in both confirmed cases and deaths.
The only reason things aren't worse in Sweden is that they've implemented a mild form of lockdown. There's a lot of debate in Sweden about their approach, and plenty of people think they need to be on tighter lockdowns.
There is still great difference in how deaths are counted between countries. For instance, Italy mostly counted dead at hospitals. In Sweden, if someone dies, it's up to the doctor in charge to call for a post mortem test or not. There has been quite a lot testing in homes for the elderly.
What all of this means, is that it's very difficult to compare between countries. I think it will be much clearer in retrospect, but maybe not even then.
And this mild lockdown is the point - no tracking of citizens with apps, no quarantine orders, no Police and Military (Finland!!) or closed roads. People are changing their behaviour without all of that. The politicians in charge are worried that a hard lockdown will create fatigue - and they want us to be able to keep up mitigations for a long time, because the virus may be with us for a long time.
Germany is one of the few countries that has managed to do test+trace well enough to contain outbreaks. It's definitely a model to be copied .. but you have to get the testing in place first!
And no, we didn't contain the outbreak. But we have 20,000 ICU beds. Unlike France, Italy or Spain, who only have about 5000 each.
While in those countries, people could not be treated for lack of capacity, here in Germany we still have about 50% free ICU beds (as of two days ago, according to the health ministry).
That's why we have low mortality, while still having a pretty large number of infected people.
We don't have the data was markbnj's point. (I'd go even further and say most of the people on HN don't even know what data would be good to have, and wouldn't have the capacity to comprehend the full meaning of those datasets even if we did have them.) He's also correct when he posits the very strong likelihood that the people who do have the data and the capacity for actionable understanding thereof, don't spend their days on trivialities like posting to HN right now.
He's right, they are busy. They're doing the real work of extricating us from this situation and they need a bit of space. Adding more pressure on them right now is not necessarily going to help. In tech terms, it's like working on a giant software release with features that have never before been implemented, (coronavirus), and telling your boss, (the people), you're not sure you can hit the release date 4 weeks from now.
Then your boss decides to help you by only requiring you implement the most difficult features, and moving the release date up to friday.
This is a misleading way to phrase (or perceive) it. Yes, most shops are open again under strict limitations. No restaurants, bars, churches, stadia, theaters, big shopping malls etc., even in the most permissive state (NRW). No gatherings even in private. At the same time, more and more German states are requiring citizens to wear masks for shopping and transportation. Travel within the country is subject to limitations. A few schools will now open to conduct final exams, but most schools and especially kindergartens will remain shut for months. With the R0 still close to 1 anything else would be madness.
Not sure why you felt the need to call it "misleading".
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/new-covid-deaths-per-mill...
They seem to be doing better than average.
Privately-run communication channels have always been arbiters of truth. Fanzines and newsletters chose what to publish. The town supermarket chose what flyers it would allow on its bulletin board. The local book store chose what books and magazines it would sell. Social clubs imposed standards on their membership. And this has always been (at least arguably) both their right and their duty.
The problem is not that Facebook does this. Unless and until they seek some form of common carrier status, they continue to retain the same curatorial rights as pretty much any other private organization that isn't a telecom. The problem is that the town bookstore is gone, the town grocery store no longer has a bulletin board, the Masonic temple and the Elks club have been converted to condos, and we have generally allowed the available media for disseminating information to consolidate into a worldwide oligarchy, with Facebook as its most powerful member. The problem is that my mom gets almost all her information about the outside world, including what's happening in her local community, from Facebook, and I honestly don't know where else she can go.
And that's a problem even if Facebook doesn't try to actively arbitrate truth, because you'd still have all the other problems: The tying of access to information to an abusive monetization policy. The tying of most opportunities for community engagement to an abusive monetization policy. The single, easy target for astroturfing and political manipulation. The way that lies and misinformation generally have to be left to spread like wildfire because you can't do anything about it without people complaining about free speech.
(Does anyone have a definitive "masks will not help" statement from the WHO? Rather than a "masks should not be worn" one)
The internet allows a wealth of information, and you should not trust FB as the arbiter of information anymore than you should absolutely-without-question trust Washington Post, Buzzfeed News or the freaking Daily Stormer.
FB 'censoring' some ridiculously unscientific and dangerous information, like COVID19 disinformation, doesn't completely hide that. You can still find it out there, but you have to look for it.
I would agree it opens up a door. You censor one thing, you think it might be worth censoring another thing and so on. But 'slippery slope' is a logical fallacy for a reason, and this disinformation is an inherently difficult problem, we can't just look to easy answers like "don't allow censorship."
What I hear from those I talk with: at what cost? Businesses are permanently closing. People are losing jobs. One report suggested 30% unemployment as an optimistic stat and that is worse than the Great Depression. Another report was that 50% of people under 45 have lost hours, been furloughed, or been laid off. 80% of Americans don’t have $500 in case of an emergency.
A lot of people are more scared of losing their home than of dying even if mortality rates are over 10%. They hear news that mostly immunodeficient and the elderly are at risk and many feel that those populations should keep under quarantine while the rest get back to business as usual.
I didn't offer anecdotal "evidence" of anything. I told a story from a professional who is on the front lines of this fight to illustrate that the numbers of people who die don't make it clear where the pressures on the medical system come from. They come from people needing care, whether or not they die. In fact whether they eventually die probably has little impact on the overall system load. If your statistical evidence, which is really just the odd bits of studies and reports you probably don't fully understand, disagrees with practitioner experience then it's probably wrong.
In the movie version of "I Robot", since the three laws of robotics prioritize saving life over following humans' wishes, the AI ends up locking down every humans in their own homes for their own safety. Could facebook sensor this movie since it pictures the lockdown as an evil action?
For instance, in France, more than half of private sector employees have already been furloughed. This is unprecedented. So, who could predict what would be the consequences, including in terms of life? The food production in Southern Europe is down. Can we know for sure that their will be no starvation?
Several countries have not decided to do a stay-at-home-lockdown including Sweden, most of Germany, Japan, South Korea, 95% of China. Praising the strategy of these countries should be authorized. Several eastern and northern Europeans countries are opening up as well, even though the disease is still there.
People should be able to take a calculated risk. When people drive to their job, they consider the risk of having an accident, and the benefits of being able to reach their work place, then they take a decision.
The most accurate data about the fatality rate of covid-19 may come from the Diamond Princess cruise boat where everyone has been tested. The 60-to-80 year old infected passengers had a fatality rate of ~2%. There was no fatality among the infected much younger crew.
Now, the government should inform people with data, and let them take a decision. For now, it seems that the overwhelming majority of people in France, Italy, and Spain want the lockdown, so they should be able to get it. But people who want the opposite should be able to express their voice as well. Otherwise, the democracy cannot work.
(Sorry for the bad English, it is not my native language.)
Most people sound more like the latter than the former. If people were saying "We have a need for haircuts etc, this is serious", they'd get a lot more consideration than some appeal to "but our freedoms". Most people sensibly realize that a lock-down in the face of a pandemic is not a regression in our fundamental rights as US citizens, but just a temporary measure to save lives.
If instead you argue that you're legitimately going to see more harm done due to closures, and you back that up sensibly, people will care a lot more. You'll probably be wrong, but people might listen and take that seriously. In fact, they very obviously already are listening to this feedback, and it's a huge part of the communications from govt officials right now - how we are balancing saving lives via lockin vs dealing with the fallout of that exact policy. They're hardly ignoring the issue!
> Could facebook sensor this movie since it pictures the lockdown as a evil action?
Sure they could take it down, it's their platform. Would they? No, probably not, that would be really silly?
> Now, the government should inform people with data, and let them take a decision.
The role of our government is not to provide data but then otherwise let people do whatever.
You say "People should be able to take a calculated risk." - how would they calculate it? Most are not capable of making an informed decision like that, and likening this situation to driving is just ridiculous (and ironic, given that car safety was heavily regulated due to huge numbers of people dying while car manufacturers were left unaccountable. The government stepped in with license requirements, manufacturing requirements, etc.).
The problem is that it may not be temporary due to legal creep. See: U.S. Patriot Act.
edit: When I say 'this' I mean enforced lock in, specifically.
I think it would be sort of a waste of time to compare 9/11 to Covid with regards to government overreach. Off the bat, the threat is of a completely different nature, we understand the threat in a completely different way, the threat is taking place within our borders and, of course, globally.
The measures are not broad, relatively. They are explicitly intended to be short term. They are being discussed out in the open.
I don't know, I could probably spend the whole night listing differences but it's so obvious I really don't think I will. Unless you're simple enough to boil both responses to "well it's a thing that a government did", idk, the similarities end super quickly.
Please, forgive my doubt. It's seeded in deep levels of trauma. I even bought into the whole "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" meme, thinking I was clever.
> measures are not broad
I would call trillions of dollars of stimulus injections and virtual lockdowns quite broad. However my point is more that while a panicked, fearful public is distracted with the News of the Day, governmental agencies, lobbyists and others will play. "You never want to let a serious crisis go to waste."
To be fair there are many on the 'net who are die-hard and staunchly rooted in the anti-governmental camp. I'm rational and seeking discourse to expand my knowledge and evolve a complex, multi-faceted worldview; many others are not.
The people who are doing this are mostly well-off enough not to feel the direct consequences of their actions (yet), which is why they do it.
It’s the same moral hazard that leads politicians into war: gauzy moral sentiments can be very compelling when you’re paying with someone else’s lives.
How was it different? One of the main points of flattening the curve was to minimise the risk of overwhelming (particularly) health services by ensuring that pressure was spread out over time. Overwhelmed health services = people dying, and not just because of the virus.
Now you may think that argument is wrong, but if so it would be better to understand the reasoning (or if you understand it then at least respond to it, rather than misrepresenting it) before dismissing people who argue it as "panicky".
You are illustrating the problem perfectly: the goal of this is not (and was never) to prevent ”people dying”. It was only to prevent “collapse of the healthcare system”. To the extent that we have accomplished this goal, it is a moral imperative to move on to less drastic interventions, even if continuing might save additional lives.
Any scenario where you think that shutting down for longer “saves more lives” creates a moral hazard, and shifts the goalposts from the original intent of this drastic approach.
Country dependent obviously, but it is very preliminary to think we have anywhere near accomplished it.
it is a moral imperative to move on to less drastic interventions, even if continuing might save additional lives.
I'd agree that the next steps will be phased but am not as optimistic as you on time-frame; also I'm still not clear how you adopt such an assured understanding of the situation to consider the loss of additional lives to be worth relaxing the constraints and to be dismissing the opinions of others, the point of my original response?
That feels very much like an erosion of civil liberties to me.
I don't know how to filter the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, when it comes to the online fire-hose of (what seems to be) an increasingly loud amount of ignorance, vitriol, panic-porn, condescension and misinformation.
I sincerely ask "who do we trust, and why," because I'm simply exhausted. Maybe HN has a solution that's not overly taxing on my mental energy? Do we vet every single argument, by every news outlet or institutional press release? Do we all become epidemiologists? Am I missing a fundamental life-skill?
Maybe another commentor can help placate my (certainly over-inflated) discomfort of existing in the modern info-sphere.
Trying to choose between one size fits all top down solutions is the path to madness. State shutdown orders are really just a crude response to an economic treadmill meant to push everyone into working. They're imperfect, as all one size fits all solutions are.
If you do need to continue to come into contact with others to take care of yourself and family, consciously accept the risk and do the prep work to minimize it rather than going full cognitive dissonance and backfitting justifications as to why it's perfectly safe. We've seen enough twitboast->obituary pairings.
If you're exhausted, take a break. Recognize that information for information's sake isn't just unhelpful, but actively harmful to your own psyche right now. Don't drink from the firehose unless you have a very good reason. Intellectual curiosity isn't a good enough reason.
Some amount of unease aso comes from the fact that we don't know much about COVID-19, and in this day and age, that's hard to live with. The amount of scientifically-prove, peer-reviewed information about Covid-19 is vanishingly small so personally until there are peer-reviewed papers upon which to act, I'm learning to be comfortable with not knowing things. Trying to divine a fatality rate when there's a dearth of rigorous studies, globally is recipe for a descent into madness. (I stop reading threads when there's yet another re-hashing of how the Diamond Princess does/doesn't apply.)
Don't blindly trust a "who", but trust that the truth will emerge. It may take some time, however.
But that's not what we're talking about here. Facebook isn't going to an event and shutting it down, they're preventing people from discussing having an event.
There is also a bit of a different trouble with the government shutting down the event itself:
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances
Going to a public event right now is dumb. But some of the things people have a right to do are dumb and they still have a right to do them.
And this is unusually problematic when the purpose of the event is to discuss the lockdown. It's like saying you can't have a public debate on something because the thing you're debating has already been decided against you before you get a chance to make your case. How are you supposed to organize the movement against that decision then?
Maybe they have a point and the only reason we don't agree is that they haven't been able to organize into a group that can effectively convey their message.
> The role of our government is not to provide data but then otherwise let people do whatever.
They should try it sometime. Most of the evils they aim to prevent come from people not having the right information to make a good decision. Just having a strong record of making good recommendations that people can trust would cause nearly everyone to follow them, since people would learn that following them is easier and leads to better outcomes than not. Whereas if they have a record of making bad decisions then how is it better for those bad decisions to have the force of law?
> The government stepped in with license requirements, manufacturing requirements, etc.
There is some evidence that this has caused the rate of improvement of vehicle safety to slow because they basically hard-coded a lot of 1970s-era technology which is now required even if incompatible with something better, and license plates have turned out to be a mass location privacy violation as a result of ALPR.
Now compare this to the alternative where they don't mandate anything but still publish vehicle safety ratings so that customers know which vehicles do the best in crashes and making a safe car is thereby something manufacturers have to compete on to win customers.
This way many of the rights in the Constitution and Amendments were slowly eroded (reduced), permanently. Technically, it is a slippery slope even if it is driven by good intentions. One day there will be nothing left, because this is how lives were saved, think of the children, etc. The only thing that I can think of in this context is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
How is this any different than "think of our freedoms!" which has been used endlessly to oppress other nations and peoples, and, ironically, our own.
The reason freedoms are often infringed upon in times of crisis are because it is often pragmatic to do so. Also, most of these protestors have little to any idea how the US government works, let alone how its founding father's intended it to. Many would probably be upset at what they read.
As for the patriot act, from justice department:
> the Patriot Act has played a key part - and often the leading role - in a number of successful operations to protect innocent Americans from the deadly plans of terrorists dedicated to destroying America and our way of life.
7 people got infected in Wisconsin due to voting: https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/local/milwaukee/2020/04/.... I am glad your experiences in CA/WA were positive, but I would suggest looking into the history of "voting is a state issue."
In this case, the health of the society as a whole is at stake. Therefore, people need to collectively follow rules, and understand that minor inconveniences such as not being able to get a haircut will only affect them for a few weeks or months.
You are endangering others‘ lives each time you drive. And yet you’re not inline at the DMV surrendering your license, why?
Seasonal sickness also isn’t new. My coworker gave me the flu and I gave it to my grandmother. Who’s at fault there?
Here is the latest out of California,
https://pressroom.usc.edu/preliminary-results-of-usc-la-coun...
Making the effective death rate like 0.1% - 0.3%, if confirmed.
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/19/fatal-flaw...
Or, yeah, maybe it is just like the flu, except (1) covid-19 is more contagious, (2) Covid-19 is much more likely to kill you if you get infected, and (3) much of the population has immunity so seasonal flu, while almost nobody has immunity to Covid-19,so it would run roughshod over a population if people didn't social distance (unless testing/contact tracing infrastructure was in place to keep it in check).
Take a good read through this article and tell me why you want to continue comparing Covid-19 to the flu:
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/not-like-the-flu...
The point I was trying to make was, restrictions on personal freedom are reasonable in this case to keep the broader society healthy.
The license you are required to have to drive.
COVID-19 could end up sickening tons of individuals at once and contributing much more death.
You are endangering other drivers' lives with their consent; any time they get behind the wheel, they acknowledge the risk to themselves from other drivers as well as themselves. You're also required to carry insurance to help cover the cost of screwing up and hurting or killing other people.
Please tell me how other people are consenting to your risking of their lives because you want to go get a haircut. Also please let me know which insurance company will pay out in the case that you directly and recklessly infect someone and they die.
> Seasonal sickness also isn’t new. My coworker gave me the flu and I gave it to my grandmother. Who’s at fault there?
Not sure what this has do to with anything. I'm trying to assume a charitable interpretation of what you're asking, but this just sounds like trolling.
[0] https://www.ft.com/content/16764a22-69ca-11ea-a3c9-1fe6fedcc...
Of course it’s about taking calculated risks everywhere.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast...
An interesting other aspect is the change to the status quo. To stick to the better example: Humans accepted that some traffic deaths will happen. But lets imagine that for unknown reason all around the country, car tyres start to just suddenly burst, steering cars into incoming traffic. I'd not be surprised if driving would be restricted until we got to the bottom of such a phenomenon. Even if the average chance of dying on a given day for the average citizen didn't increase manyfold.
Now that I've written that... kind of reminds me of a certain Boeing plane.
Strange times.
I personally think it's okay/normal for there to be idiots in society and trying to fix stupid by stopping them from protesting via opaque big tech companies moderation policies is a terrible way to go about it (or courts via government interference on public property, for that matter, but the constitution covers that already). I'd much rather have some stupid people protesting than have FB/outrage mobs driving what is okay to protest about.
That has little to do with being left/right leaning.
Weeding out astroturfing campaigns is also distinct from this, you can narrowly remove stuff that is atroturfed without being political about it. But just because some stuff is astroturfed shouldn't mean anything to do with it should then be shut down.
Note how dramatically you understate one side and overstate the other by your choice of wording.
I don't care if the first group does it out of ignorance, or simple disregard for human life. They are free to play Russian roulette with their own lives. They have no moral right to do so with the lives of their neighbours.
I merely used stupid here to make a point, to generalize or pander even, it's hardly just 'stupid' that people try to control. That misses the point entirely.
Regardless the other commenter already noted the very important distinction. I’m not trying to control the mob or define who or what is stupid using some top down hierarchy of wrongthink (trying is the key word here, I could rant about the costs of control and false positives vs the efficacy of FB events, ignoring the large existing willing audiences they always tapped into, and Russia spending a few hundred K in a multibillion dollar election, but I’ve fought that war enough times - the philosophy of how to deal with society in general is what we’re discussing).
Just to point out that quote is a textbook example of historical revisionism. Benjamin Franklin wrote this to the Penn family who governed the state of the same name on behalf of the general assembly.
The Penn family wanted to make a one time payment to be excluded from any future tax obligations, and Franklin's quote here is very literal, that is to say, making a one time payment to absolve oneself from duty to the state (in this case taxes were to be used to finance the Indian and French war efforts), is immoral.
So in contrast to what you're trying to imply, Franklin made the case that long term social obligations and the ability of the assembly to govern were more important than dodging one's obligation.
Ironically enough I think this may even be transferable to the covid-19 situation. A little temporary economic boost is probably not as important as following rules to safeguard public health.
Franklin was telling the government that if they "give up essential Liberty to levee taxes for temporary safety (immediate funding)", they deserve none.
Anyway, Franklin wasn't God. He was a brilliant person and a clever rhetorician who new how to manipulate with words.
It's a rhetorical device, not a history book. A lot of other people have said the same thing over the years, but if you attribute it to them instead, the words are still the same and so is the meaning intended to be conveyed by the people using the quote now.
On top of that, the quote still can't be used for what you're using it for, because giving up the power to tax (note also that at the time the taxes had to be apportioned) is not at all the same thing as usurping the power to infringe rights held by the people.
By putting the quote into the context of the founding fathers the precise meaning is to imbue it with the idea that a sort of anti-governmental stance is Ur-American, no explanation or examination necessary, slogans will suffice.
It's not a minor thing to use historical figures and turn their words on their heads, and it's done very deliberately. To pick up OPs point, if an ordinary person were to argue that shops should reopen during a pandemic because they need a haircut they would be dismissed, and they ought to be because that's a terrible argument.
A sort of anti-governmental stance is Ur-American. They didn't fight a revolution because they were satisfied to live under the rule of a far away unaccountable government. The implication being ascribed isn't out of character.
Franklin also said things like this:
> Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government; when this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins. Republics and limited monarchies derive their strength and vigor from a popular examination into the action of the magistrates.
Which isn't as pithy but was treasonously anti-government in that era.
More to the point, he said the one about liberty and temporary safety more than once, so focusing on one instance as if that context is the only one is just as misleading. Here's a different one:
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-21-02-02...
Where we see this:
> As to the other two Acts, The Massachusetts must suffer all the Hazards and Mischiefs of War, rather than admit the Alteration of their Charters and Laws by Parliament. They who can give up essential Liberty to obtain a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
So here's Franklin arguing that they must go to war sooner than give up their liberty to Parliament in peace, i.e. context in accordance with the usage for which it's typically quoted.
Reopening the country has undeniably turned into a political issue, and one thing we know for certain about Facebook and social media in general is that they are rife with political disinformation. I don't think it's accurate to explain this activity as the speech of "ordinary people" when there seems to be just as much evidence, if not more, that most Americans are concerned about COVID-19, and that these campaigns to organize protests are barely-disguised astroturfing. See also Trump's "LIBERATE $STATE" tweets.
I think Facebook is terrible and should be destroyed, but I must admit they have a very challenging problem on their hands in distinguishing malicious, manipulative speech from ignorant speech, and ignorant speech from speech that goes against the majority opinion but is, in fact, correct. And even if they can classify content correctly most of the time, how should they deal with all those categories and all the shades of grey within them? Do you think they should turn a blind eye to political disinformation? Do you think they should enable the spread of manipulative ignorance, theft of elections, and so on?
Given that some people will disagree with everything they do, and that at the scale of billions of users they will invariably fuck up a lot of individual cases, I think banning astroturfed campaigns to get people out in the streets blocking ambulances and harassing medical personnel during a global pandemic is A-OK. The people propping these things up should be fucking ashamed of themselves, but I know they aren't capable of such things. This activity has nothing in common with good-faith speech questioning the value of these lockdowns.
But it's not. Folks breaking shelter-in-place orders impose a non-trivial risk on everyone else. This is a classic externality problem and the classic answer, if a market mechanism cannot be formed, is regulation.
Since viruses don't respect cap-and-trade schemes, we are stuck with what we have and we should absolutely punish those who impose substantial risks (2% is absurdly high, are you kidding?) on the rest of us against our will.
What is shutdown and what is open certainly needs to be refined. (Simple example: there is a private park near me that is closed, in spite of it being a good place to get out of the house while distancing) But it's awfully hard to have nuanced discussion when it's drown out by obtuse ignorant nonsense.
Evolutionary pressure on the virus should be towards a "wimpy virus", not a virus that "has the power to kill a perfectly healthy young man or woman within 24 hours of showing the first signs of infection".
And yes, it is important to balance the economic damage and public health risk. And it is important to take into consideration that there is a public health risk from economic damage.
In practice, the solution is probably pretty simple. The economy should be reopened in a controlled manner, in a few months. Sport events, concerts, conferences should stay closed, until there are either: antivirals, herd immunity or vaccines.
I've heard variations on this argument made 3 of the last 5 days by the President Of the United States. In what sense is this not authorized? The most powerful person in the world is promoting variations on this idea. Also, turn on Fox News and they have been making this argument almost continuously for the last 72 hours. No one is censoring them. Indeed, if you watch that channel, you might think this argument is the mainstream view.
There is nothing wrong with the argument itself, which is why it is getting so much air time. Still, the actual gatherings that are being organized are a different issue. Until there is more transparency about who is funding the anti-quarantine movement, a certain caution would be wise, otherwise we are potentially stumbling into another fiasco like the 2016 election.
The problem with this argument is that there isnt that much data around, and what is available is only understandable to a subset of the population as it's in scientific papers. If you let everyone decide, what would happen is most people would listen to their authority figures which would be their governor, mayor, pastor or news anchor. The problem is those people will each have their own agenda and aren't going to give an unbiased recommendation, and those people don't necessarily have the knowledge themselves to understand the data.
What you are saying is similar to saying people should have a choice of whether to smoke or not. The risks of smoking are pretty well known, and its easy to make that call. This is more like deciding whether to take a new party drug - your friends take it and everything is fine, but you've all heard about the story of that couple that died from taking it. (And that doesn't take into account that you can infect others who are more vulnerable than you)
That is not at all what we're talking about here. People should not be able to take a calculated risk with the lives of others. Let me tell you why it's not like driving: the NHTSA reports 102 car fatalities a day in 2016. NYC just got under 500 COVID deaths a day. One city. 5x the fatalities. Compared to a country of 300 million people.
This is, by far, the most outrageous, insanely reckless thing I have ever read on HN. I beg you to please, stop doing this. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of lives maybe are at stake.
NO. THERE IS NOT. Less than 50% of COVID deaths are over 75 years old. That means that more than 50% are under 75. A full quarter of deaths are below 64. These are not people dying anyway. These are not people in nursing homes. These are people like you.
That means more half of the deaths are of people over 75, and 75% of deaths are over 65.
Tell this to her parents.
The distribution of case fatalities from SARS-CoV-2 is still very much up for debate. But it sure as hell isn't as simple as 'they were about to die anyway'.
Also something that mainstream news coverage mostly ignores is that 1: about 20% of all patients regardless of age require supplementary oxygen to survive the infection and it'll be straight up the worst experience of their life. And 2: those who develop pneumonia (again no corr to age) run a pretty high risk of suffering permanent lung damage.
If you want to inflict this on yourself, go ahead. But you absolutely don't have the right to take actions that put others at risk of these outcomes. You don't even have the right to ask for a hospital bed if you end up being one of those 20% that needs oxygen if you recklessly infected yourself. That hospital bed belongs to an actual victim.
Really? It seems to follow the same pattern everywhere.
>1: about 20% of all patients regardless of age require supplementary oxygen to survive the infection and it'll be straight up the worst experience of their life.
You mean all patients in bad enough state to end up in the hospital? 20% of all patients who have contracted SARS-CoV-2?
>And 2: those who develop pneumonia (again no corr to age) run a pretty high risk of suffering permanent lung damage.
A little googling, and everything seems to corroborate that it is in fact correlated with age and given that smoking seems to be big risk factor, even if age in and of itself wouldn't be, we'd see it a lot more in older people.
Pretending like massive lockdowns aren't having a very negative effect on drug abuse, mental health, domestic violence, and increasingly looking like food production as well, would be disingenuous. Now, maybe all of those negatives are outweighed by whatever would happen if we opened up, but surely it must be okay to at least have the discussion.
This might be a bit provocative, but I'm genuinely curious. Let's assume that suicide hotlines are filled up due to mental health problems from being forced to stay inside. If someone is advocating for a lockdown, should they not have the right to call?
Yeah let's do it. COVID-19 might kill millions of people. Discussion over.
But even better: it warms my heart to know the vast majority of people think it's okay to take an economic hit to save lives, to prevent the collapse of our healthcare systems, to buy time on our way to a vaccine. We're in this together, young and old. We don't want other people to spend the last days of their lives suffocating in their own lung fluids. Not if we can help it. Some people will kill someone for a couple of bucks and there are different limits for everyone, and there comes a point where we're no longer the majority, but right now I'm happy with what I see.
From the perspective of people who see the virus as not in fact that dangerous in the grand scheme of things, it looks like a lot of people couldn't care less about the lives of others: the people who are trapped on their own for months at home under house arrest, the people who spent their lives building a business who tomorrow will have to tell their teammates it's all over, the people who are losing everything, and that's before we get to the risks of knock-on effects like food shortages, critical equipment failures due to the manufacturers of a special widget going bust and so on.
I don't understand people who hear "the economy" and appear to think of going on holidays? Or gambling in a stock market? They don't think of a supply chain that leads to a replacement filter in their local water treatment plant. They don't think of the builders who are trying to grow a family by constructing their house. They don't think of food being harvested in the fields or internet companies linking loved ones by video chat. They think it's all "just a couple of bucks".
It's not just user spiderfarmer above - we've seen actual politicians talk like that, which is terrifying. The economy isn't optional, the economy is life support and everything else that makes life worth living.
In reality, it is how we house, clothe, feed, and provide the most basic humans needs.
Your argument: "the economy is important, we can't do without"
Yes it is, but the economy will rebound like it always does. It will not disappear. We need to flatten the curve, gain more insight in other consequences. We don't need to lockdown forever, but we can't immediately reopen either. Both would be stupid, we need to find a middle ground.
Please do more research and be more responsible. The stakes are very high.
The economy is one giant web. You say it's a strawman argument, but that would mean I was putting words in people's mouths. The problem is that this is the opposite of what's happening: people aren't talking about these kinds of problems because they seem to perceive the economy as this optional nice-to-have thing which governments can neatly and instant partition into "needed" and "frippery which shouldn't matter if anyone is sick". That's just not how economies work.
Finally, please don't engage in childish condescension like your last statement. Describing people concerned about the economy as irresponsible is exactly the kind of behaviour I am condemning. There's nothing naive or irresponsible about the people sounding the alarm right now.
There is, it's whatever your government says it is. They're consulting with experts and people on the ground to make and update those determinations.
> Water plant, etc.
Yeah there are tons of cases like this. All to be handled by your government in consultation with experts and people on the ground. When the water treatment plant needs X, they'll figure out how to get it (after figuring out if it's worth the risk).
> You say it's a strawman argument, but that would mean I was putting words in people's mouths.
No a strawman is mischaracterizing someone's position to make it radical, and thus easy to discredit. Here's what you've said about others:
> I don't understand people who hear "the economy" and appear to think of going on holidays?
> it looks like a lot of people couldn't care less about the lives of others
This is mischaracterizing someone's position to make it callous and naive, and then calling it callous and naive. No one's saying these things. You also did it again when you said "they seem to perceive the economy as this optional nice-to-have thing which governments can neatly and instant partition into "needed" and 'frippery which shouldn't matter if anyone is sick'." No one is trivializing the economic impact, in fact many (including me) are deeply worried about it. But coronavirus is worse, and we have other tools to deal with the economic fallout. The only thing we can do to fight coronavirus is to shelter until we have testing.
> Finally, please don't engage in childish condescension like your last statement.
I wasn't condescending, I was admonishing. When I said "please do more research" I meant "research what your government is doing and the dangers of breaking shelter too early." By "be more responsible" I meant don't engage in strawman after strawman to try and persuade people that breaking shelter is a good idea, because you haven't done adequate research. By "the stakes are very high" I meant lots of people might die and it doesn't seem like you know, because you haven't referenced it. Your posts have been one-sided in favor of breaking shelter.
"It seems a lot of people can't care less about the life of someone they don't know."
and my whole point was that this can be turned around exactly - people who treat shutting down the economy as if it were a trivial, obviously good thing to do don't appear to care about the lives of others who they don't know and who will be seriously negatively affected by that. As exemplified by the comment about how "Some people will kill someone for a couple of bucks".
So that's the opposite of a straw man!
They're consulting with experts and people on the ground to make and update those determinations
Unfortunately they really aren't. The only people with expertise in command economies (which is what our economies have suddenly become) know they always result in ridiculous outcomes. The shutdowns aren't some hyper-precise expert driven brilliance: they're shambolic, chaotic and riven with extremely stupid results.
Here in Switzerland I went to the supermarket the other day. You can buy many things there, but the toy shelves were covered, with a sign saying you're not allowed to buy them. There's no health justification for that because the people are in the supermarket anyway. And for the millions of parents stuck at home with bored kids, toys are rather important. Instead this is a side-effect of the way the law is written - it bans sales of particular goods, not openings of particular types of stores. They could have phrased it differently but then of course every store would start selling vegetables so they could remain open. Regardless of how such a law is written you get nonsensical and frustrating outcomes with no health justification.
In the UK the government is supposed to be buying essential items like PPE. Instead it's flailing around in a swamp of incompetence:
- Politicians are causing diplomatic incidents by claiming orders weren't dispatched but
- Those same orders weren't actually submitted to the sellers days or even weeks after it was claimed they were
- Private companies with PPE in UK warehouses are shipping it to other European countries, because the government didn't bother to actually buy it after import
- When equipment is ordered, it's bought from dodgy suppliers who routinely ship wrong or defective items.
You can find news stories about all these events in the British press.
We're living in a world where governments can't reliably purchase gowns and masks or make an exception so toys can be sold in supermarkets, let alone evaluate the tens of millions of products and firms to decide what's essential and what's not. Even conceptualising the size of such a task is beyond them. The idea the shutdowns are coordinated by experts on the ground is a pleasant dream, but sadly not real.
Are you saying that it’s immoral to at least consider the implications of a prolonged economic shutdown, or to advance a timetable for reopening that isn’t contingent on waiting 6 months for a vaccine?
Save us the sanctimony, you and everybody else is engaged in the exercise of assigning different values to different lives everyday.
I'm not letting you in on this to high road you. I also bought a new phone instead of donating that money to COVID relief, for example.
Rather, my point is that we need to find sustainable ways to improve the world. We're not gonna solve genocide, famine, etc any time soon, and we shouldn't beat ourselves up for enjoying life while we work to improve it. It's the only way it will ever get done.
> Are you saying that it’s immoral to at least consider the implications of a prolonged economic shutdown, or to advance a timetable for reopening that isn’t contingent on waiting 6 months for a vaccine?
I'm confident that isn't what I said. Consider away. Please don't minimize the danger of COVID-19.
If we're gonna have a reasonable policy discussion about this, my understanding is the plan is to not evict/foreclose/repossess for the time being, and print money to bail people out. That seems within our power. Containing the spread of coronavirus without sheltering or a massive testing regime doesn't.
It doesn't solve everything, people's lives are put on hold in more ways than just financially and we need to keep looking for answers. But again I think we can figure that out.
The fact that we need to imagine more options means we only have the one.
Additionally, NYC had 500 deaths because its approaching its peak - soon most people will recover and be immune to this disease, then its gone forever. But the economic costs - the careers and education opportunities lost to regular people will impact their whole lives.
If you can’t find an insurer to indemnify you if you make someone ill, that should tell you something about the level of harm you could cause someone else.
Here is what you should do:
- shelter in place
- if you must go out, wear masks and gloves, stay at least six feet away from others if possible, and wash your hands thoroughly when you return
- lots of places need volunteers, please help them if you can and follow their safety protocols
- donate money to funds for responders and local business/community relief
Here's what you shouldn't do:
- flout shelter in place orders
- minimize the risk in public forums
- engage in armchair epidemiology; this isn't like having an opinion on tabs vs spaces
I'm sympathetic to (indeed terrified by) the economic destruction of this, and I know it's happening right now. Let's stay alive and keep each other alive first. We'll figure the rest out later.
Current estimations are 60-70k deaths from it but the doubling of suicides resulting of lockdowns this year to 100k make us more likely to die from suicide than covid-19.
Older than 85: 650k deaths
65-84: 150k
55-65: 400k
I don't think everyone will be infected, but lets say it's half. That's 600k. Let's say it's 10%. That's 120k. By any measure, the loss of life is... just breathtaking. But either way, parent was taking about letting everyone get it to build herd immunity, so that's where "everyone gets it" is coming from.
https://www.livescience.com/is-coronavirus-deadly.html
> the doubling of suicides resulting of lockdowns this year to 100k make us more likely to die from suicide than covid-19
This had been circling the internet a little, but I would caution against extrapolating an uptick in suicides into doubling by the end of the year. There are no doubt consequences to sheltering in place, domestic abuse is a concern as well for example. But this is the best we've got.
https://www.livescience.com/is-coronavirus-deadly.html
and
https://www.statista.com/statistics/241488/population-of-the...
Feel free to check my math, it's late and I did some pretty sketchy rounding.
There's no evidence that suicides are doubling.
When? As far as I know, no one has provided any quantifiable goal post for when it’s safe to stop lockdown.
I get it's frustrating to not have a timeline and that the stakes are high. But as shitty as it's gonna sound, life's not fair.
But in terms of metric, people are actually talking about what stats to look at, mainly the reproduction rate (Cuomo refers to it as infection rate in his watch the dial slide) vs. hospital capacity. Angela Merkel went on at some length about it. But it'll take time, and to avoid new waves, we need testing, and I haven't heard anything about US plans for that, which honestly scares me.
NYC Hospitals find that 15% of pregnant women have COVID-19: https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2020/04/20/new... That particular article doesn't mention it, but other reports I've heard of said only about 1 in 8 of that 15% were symptomatic.
In Chelsea, MA, 30% of 200 random people tested positive, 1/2 reported no symptoms at all: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/04/17/business/nearly-third...
Here's a general article pointing out that this is very likely to not be as big of a deal as we thought it'd be: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/how-many-people-h...
If the studies are accurate, only 1/600 affected people die... Which means that every single man, woman, and child in NYC has already been infected, and that the death rate will drop to zero tomorrow. I find that rather difficult to believe.
These studies don't add up, and there have been numerous criticisms of them referenced elsewhere in this discussion.
Just in your post, you're suggesting that 1 in 8 of infections are asymptomatic /and/ that 1 in 2 are asymptomatic. Those are very different figures.
Anecdotally, friends and acquaintances of mine who have had the disease are reporting that contact between people is very likely to result in a symptomatic infection.
Take the UK cabinet as a "public anecdote": the UK PM got the disease (and required intensive care), the PM's fiancee had to isolate with symptoms, so did the UK health minister, and the chief medical officer who shared the PM's press conferences, and the PM's chief advisor.
I don't know how many people Boris Johnson was in close contact with, but that outcome feels consistent with the 40-50% asymptomatic cases assumed by e.g. the Imperial study. It could easily be a bit outside that range, but it doesn't feel consistent with the idea that vastly more people are asymptomatic than not.
Of course, we need good data rather than anecdotes, and hopefully we'll get them soon. My money is on less than 50% asymptomatic though.
The key point there is that you do that with their consent. Also you are required to be insured to cover you in the case that you screw up and hurt or kill people. Please show me the insurance company that will cover you if you recklessly spread COVID-19 to someone who then dies.
I don't consent to you risking my life and the lives of people I care about just because you're getting a little cabin fever.
> you take the lives of everyone in your car and those around you in your hands while driving.
Says who? The data we have so far does not support (or refute) that. We just do not know yet.
> But the economic costs - the careers and education opportunities lost to regular people will impact their whole lives.
Yes, that's potentially true. But if you want to be persuasive, you're going to need to quantify that, with error bars and probabilities. We have pretty solid estimates as to how many people are likely to die based on various social distancing, shelter-in-place, full quarantine, etc. scenarios. Those lost lives can't be "fixed" after they're gone.
Economic harm can be lessened and even fixed. No, I do not have confidence that everyone will be made whole after this; unfortunately governments and people in general are far from perfect. But that's not an excuse to take other actions that will directly cause deaths.
You are extrapolating only to spread FUD. Covid19 could kill only a few people, but very fast, which could also explain the data we have for now.
There is no evidence "that millions of lives are at stake" and the available data shows cars and tabacco have killed and will kill more people than the covid19 over 20 years
"We could all die from covid19" hypothesis was valid the first 2 weeks of December. It has been long found that only a segment of the population is at risk, and we should help them, but not stop the entire economy pretending we will all die.
The "tobacco also kills us so we should let COVID kill us faster" argument makes no sense, by the way.
Important to remember what led up to that. High risk people were going about their daily activities, no one was social distancing. It’s disingenuous to imply that anyone who is anti-lockdown is talking about a complete return to pre-pandemic behavior that caused the numbers we are seeing in NYC.
Feel free to point out where I've done that.
When you see photos of the people protesting lockdowns, it's clear that they're not city metro living yuppies. They're suburbanites and rural.
Any argument that cites NYC results for restrictions on non-NYC behaviour is ignorant at best and most likely disingenuous imo.
> Any argument that cites NYC results for restrictions on non-NYC behaviour is ignorant at best and most likely disingenuous imo.
There are outbreaks in several other cities and the recommendation is the same: either get a robust testing system in place, or shelter. Those are your options right now.
[1]: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/04/whos-behind-the-reopen-d...
... with their own lives. You're talking about allowing people to risk other people's lives, and no, that's not ok.
> The most accurate data about the fatality rate of covid-19 may come from the Diamond Princess cruise boat where everyone has been tested. The 60-to-80 year old infected passengers had a fatality rate of ~2%. There was no fatality among the infected much younger crew.
You're contradicting yourself. If the Diamond Princess is perfectly representative of the world population, then no young people should die, anywhere. But that's not the case -- young people have indeed died from this -- so therefore the Diamond Princess does not give us an accurate picture at all.
> Now, the government should inform people with data, and let them take a decision. [...] But people who want the opposite should be able to express their voice as well.
Express their voice, yes, I agree with that. Make their own decision, no, not at all. The average -- even above average -- person does not know how to interpret the fractured data we have right now to the point of being able to make an informed decision. This is one of those frustrating times when we must rely on the people who live and breathe this every day to make those decisions for us. I'm not saying they don't need to explain or show their work, and I'm not saying we need to just blindly trust, but we do need to carefully consider whether we know better than people who are literally trained to know how all this works. (Hint: we don't, and can't, know better.)
So, let's ban driving then?
I should definitely quarantine me and my family after before 6 AM and after 6 PM.
The Swedish approach is based on the idea that people who have any symptoms at all are able to stay home from work. I really doubt that that approach would work in countries like the US where workers' rights are much weaker.
And although Sweden is not in a mandatory stay-at-home lockdown pretty much anyone who is able to work from home is doing so and the streets are much emptier than usual.
The trouble with this assertion is that we don't know if it is statistically valid. Consider the number of crew to the number of passengers on a typical cruise ship. If there were only 20 crewmembers, is that enough to form a valid conclusion of "young people don't die from this disease"?
Furthermore, were emergency services able to help every infected passenger on board? Yes, the fatality rate was 2%, but how many were infected and required treatment?
The big issue in the states is that if enough people (just 1% in some areas) require treatment, the hospital systems will be overwhelmed and people who have a treatable illness will die due to lack of available resources. So the best thing society can do is either self-isolate to prevent the spread of COVID-19, or hospitals can somehow advocate for legislation to refuse patients with COVID-19 symptoms to prevent their resources from being overwhelmed.
I see little reason to doubt that all involved are trying to minimize general death and misery, even if they may disagree radically about how to do that.
It'd be pretty wild if (say) Google decided that Chrome would no longer display pages that were "too far" in their discussion and advocacy of the options.
At the risk of sounding inflammatory, there are pretty clearly some actors who would welcome death and misery upon others if it meant they made some money.
Note well: I am not just talking about one side here.
It's interesting that even with the best case scenario there are entities with enough power to control behavior like that. That fact is scary.
If they have ulterior motives. That fact is scarier.
However when there is a pandemic overwhelming hospital systems around the world, they do have the power to shut things down precisely because most people agree with that decision. Clearly right now there is a vocal minority who disagrees and has chosen to protest. And as far as I can tell they are suffering no consequences besides being ridiculed and called “stupid” by the folks who consent to staying in for the greater good. The us government only has the power to shut things down when most people agree that they should have that power.
Edit: I’ll clarify by saying that (my personal opinion) is that the protests are at best ... misguided. My question is about precedent on free speech / assembly under circumstances where harm might occur or it violates something like a quarantine or shelter-in-place order. The Atlantic article linked below is fascinating because I definitely have always thought of the “fire in a crowded theater example.”
see this article [0] for a longer discussion, but tl;dr: it's from an ancillary opinion (ie, not part of the actual ruling) from a case that was overturned many years ago.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
Medical experts and scientists can provide data that helps inform people. Just because medical experts say something will "save lives" does not mean we should blindly follow that as policy. There is unfortunately a dearth of data that would allow us to make well-informed policy choices.
There are tons of data available. Even at a layman level, it should be pretty obvious that doing no or late lockdown ends up in situations where there are large numbers of deaths.
Even this is debatable.
I have no skin in this game and no strong opinion, but let's be honest -- lots of people were expecting total disaster in Sweden since they decided not to implement lockdown, but so far their daily cases chart looks not that different from other nordic countries.
That's because many people in Sweden live alone.
I add: when the data is clear cut. At worst, when data is noisy or little is known, you get (at least what I've seen in Italy) declarations from experts in the news that can be easily contradictory. Worse when some of the experts, because they're human, are a little more attached to their ideas.
In a way, this pandemic brought the scientific debate to light in public, in the sense that ideas are often challenged and adjusted based on discussion, and even harsh contrast. But this is a problem when communicating outside, because lay people usually regard experts as holders of truth, or at least part of it.
See the current debate on serological tests' sensitivity and specificity and the consequences on the results. I can likely understand the issues and the criticisms, but I can't expect lay people (not because any fault of them, of course) to understand them.
The same experts (like WHO) told everyone 3 month ago that masks don't work, that no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission was found, etc. If they made such obvious mistakes and we still have to obey their orders now, what's the point of having government at all? Let's just accept the rule by the experts and get rid of elections and stuff.
That a human made an error doesn't mean the public is smarter than them.
So there is nothing malicious with the same public that funds the WHO to now start questioning them and their recommendations.
By analogy, if you thought Covid-19 danger's were overblown, you are free to say so.
https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha...
Yes correct, freedom of speech is not absolute, there are a lot of limitations in the U.S.: “libel, slander, obscenity, pornography, sedition, incitement, fighting words, classified information, copyright violation, trade secrets, food labeling, non-disclosure agreements, the right to privacy, dignity, the right to be forgotten, public security, and perjury.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech#Limitations
The problem in this case is it can be reasonably argued that quarantine is damaging to some people, and not quarantining is damaging to other people. Even if it really is a bad idea to protest, it might be really difficult to establish clearly and legally that protesting is causing unnecessary harm, and greater harm than not protesting.
I’ve read the Wikipedia page on Freedom of Speech before, but I just noticed for the first time the interesting criteria called “Imminent lawless action”. I’m not a lawyer, but it seems possible this could apply even if harm can’t be demonstrated.
“Under the imminent lawless action test, speech is not protected by the First Amendment if the speaker intends to incite a violation of the law that is both imminent and likely.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action
Half of this doesn’t apply to the US.
In the same Wikipedia article:
> The opinion in Brandenburg discarded the previous test of "clear and present danger" and made the right to freedom of (political) speech's protections in the United States almost absolute.
Ah, yeah that is a good point, since these protests are political speech. Does it matter that the protests are assembling? I could imagine the protected ability to say anything you want about politics, while reserving some rights about the ability to do anything.
Personally, I don’t think it should be illegal to protest this. It doesn’t seem like a particularly bright idea though.
This situation doesn’t have a lot of legal precedent, and it might cause some to occur right now. But since communicable disease is a threat to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the law and constitution weren’t exactly written with global pandemic in mind, do you think the ability to assemble should be absolute?
> Half of this doesn’t apply to the US.
Here’s the US specific list... it’s still long
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
* Actually, would you mind listing the specific exceptions above that you believe do not apply to the US? I could be wrong, but I scrubbed through all of them and can’t find a single one that doesn’t seem to apply at least partially.
In the US, fighting words, obscenity and pornography are there explicitly; false statements of fact covers things like libel, slander, dignity and perjury; the imminent lawless action exception covers sedition and incitement; commercial speech and speech owned by others covers classified information, copyright violation, trade secrets, food labeling, and non-disclosure agreements; right to privacy is implicitly granted by several amendments in the constitution, and the right to be forgotten has legal precedent. I think that’s all of them. What did I miss?
But then I guess you have to contend with the question of whether or not making gatherings illegal in the first place is constitutional, even for the purposes of curbing a public health crisis. I personally hope it is constitutional, but I'm no legal scholar.
administrative directives need to convince a (super-)majority of the populace with evidence to gain trust and compliance. antagonistic pressure needs to remain so that the implied force behind those directives are removed as soon as possible (no sooner, no later).
Thus how to protest responsibly?
Holding a "Its just a Flu" poster while wearing a face mask might not be that ridiculous after all.
with that said, yes, it's prudent to wear a mask around random strangers in close proximity while shouting (spitting) a lot, to keep from infecting each other. note that the flu is deadly too (30-60K/yr in the US), we just don't shut down the economy for it.
I'm interested in learning more about an alternative strategy to the lockdown.
It's relatively close to what's being done in Sweden, so I guess we'll at least end up with something of a test-case in retrospect.
I'm guessing you would need to wait for immunization to be developed for restrictions on high risk people are loosened?
You can't quarantine vulnerable people completely. If everyone gets it, every bag of groceries is going to be covered in COVID and an enormous number of quarantined people will die.
You can't tell who's going to die from it.
You can't have everyone getting sick at once. The death rate will go up tremendously if nobody can get treatment when they have treatable symptoms. This is what "flattening the curve" means.
We don't have enough protective equipment, medical supplies, hospital beds, healthcare workers, or even morgue space. The only tool left is staying inside, and so that's what we're doing now.
"Herd immunity" uses the word "herd" because we don't normally use it to describe actions taken toward human beings.
Sweden absolutely bungled their response and have 10x the number of deaths from this as compared to their neighbors who shut shit down.
Yes you absolutely can. The workers interacting with the quarantined subset of the population could use PPE to avoid transmitting it to them. Packaging on groceries, as well as the grocery bag, can easily be disinfected before being transferred to the quarantined individual.
2. We're not going to train minimum wage workers and quarantined vulnerable individuals to follow sanitary procedures to any adequate degree.
3. We don't even have enough trained medical workers to treat dying people, so no they aren't going to make the deliveries. This problem will only get worse if you go all "herd immunity" because a shitload of people will be in the hospital being triaged because they were classified as "non-vulnerable"
The only option the US has is quarantine, because it is a failed state.
Of course quarantining part of the population is hard, but I fail to see how it is harder than quarantining the whole population
Even if we did have tests, at some point nearly everyone is going to have the virus- especially delivery workers. There will literally not be enough people to make clean deliveries.
Quarantining the population is easier for us because the majority of us have dwellings already. We do not have tests or ppe.
There are also other ways to sanitize these distributions channels, e.g. we know the virus can only last so long on cardboard etc.
I disagree strongly that securing a fraction of our population against a disease is less feasible or practical than what we currently are doing
>especially delivery workers. There will literally not be enough people to make clean deliveries.
Will have had
I don't see why training delivery workers to follow sanitary procedures would be infeasible either.
Whatever costs/challenges in ensuring no disease transmission from the majority to the quarantined minority pales in comparison to the challenges posed by completely collapsing the economy by requiring everyone to be quarantined.
>>a shitload of people will be in the hospital being triaged because they were classified as "non-vulnerable"
The chances of a person infected with the coronavirus ending up in critical condition or dead from COVID19 are vastly smaller if they're under 45.
Couple weeks? Sure.
3 months? Barely, it seems.
1 year? No. It just won't work.
(I don't think we'll get to that point, but I think that the point stands: quarantine is a short term fix.)
Some experts in Italy have called for quarantines up to 24 months until there is a vaccine. The net effect this has done is just to scare the population, at this point.
I hope we don't have to go that route.
Just as a random factoid, somewhere I was just reading that someone was doing testing of surfaces in a hospital, and on average they found maybe 80% contaminated with the virus, but the floor of the pharmacy was 100% even though no patients had been in there...
Other objects were not as high as I recalled, but computer mice in the ICU were 75%.
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0885_article
Also see table: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0885-t1
I'd argue that no, you should not be. Because if you get it, you will most likely require care and overload hospitals, which is what the whole point of that (partial) quarantine is. Either that or you forfeit your right to healthcare, which has loads of moral issues
I was also comparing lockdown vs partial lockdown, which I feel still does more damage to more people to be total
On a particular topic. This hardly qualifies as suicide attempt. Just increased risk. Maybe the same as selling alcohol to people knowing that many of them will end up driving drunk or many other similar things.
Sweden is criticized heavily, but if their strategy works, they could have very little SARS-CoV-2 in the next few months while the rest of the world constantly re-surges because the lockdown didn't really stop anything, just delayed it.
We have no idea which one will be true. Predicting the future with math has never worked for the stock market. Why did we think it would work here?
If that's the case, then the question is not "did we really need to reduce activity that much" but "could other countries have achieved the same low social contact rates without enforcing it?"
Current deaths per million population: Sweden 156 deaths/mil, Norway 63 d/m, Finland 33d/m, Switzerland 165 d/mil; overall populations Sweden 10 mil, Finland 5.5 mil, Norway 5.x mil, Switz. 8.5 mil.
Sweden not doing well compared to Norway & Finland but it's doing better than Spain, Italy, France (446 deaths/mil, 399 d/m, 310 d/m). If you look at Sweden's daily numbers it varies a lot in a kind of repeatable way. That's apparently attributable to private labs are closed on the weekends and there's a delay in reporting (similar things in other countries); some countries report 1 day late to add up everything too.
Doubling per day time [2], [4], [5]. This is more complicated but Sweden is growing faster than comparisons. I don't have exact current numbers.
Predictions of total deaths [3]: Sweden 5,890 and Switzerland 1,584 (recall pop is 10 mil vs 8.5 mil). Notice Sweden has many more deaths per capita. Norway 280 expected deaths (5+ mil pop). Sweden will have disproportionately more deaths than Switzerland (pop adjusted Switzerland 1584-> expected 1863 per capita (1585*10/8.5). But expected deaths is 5,890, 4000 more!
1. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden (etc)
2. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-confirmed-deaths-si...
3. https://covid19.healthdata.org/sweden
4. http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19/
5. https://www.economist.com/news/2020/03/11/the-economists-cov...
I hope this was useful, hopefully not too many typos!
Daily numbers made me react as well, they say it's a post-weekend thing. Perplexing to me but then that's what rolling averages and trends are for, I suppose.
Only two of Filmstaden's cinemas are open and they are by far the biggest cinema chain in the country. So to say that movie theatres are open is pretty disingenuous.
There was never a law that forced them to close though, they took that initiative themselves after the government started recommending that large crowds should be avoided. The same goes for all the ski resorts which are now closed.
Sweden's approach is also heavily based on the idea that people who have any symptoms are able to stay home from work. In countries where the workers' rights aren't as strong, that is much more difficult to achieve without stricter regulations.
Some states are restricting fishing and hunting... That's not a team sport and if I use a lure (edit: as in I don't even have to go to the store for bait) I'm not going to affect anyone else.
Some protesters want to get haircuts.... GET OVER IT.
I feel like both sides have some valid and various levels of invalid points. In the expedience of not needing to sort the chaff, i'd side with the stay at home crowd, but there really is some shit they closed down that seems.... a little too far.
I'd like to point out that some people equate "invest in public health infrastructure" with free healthcare.
The two aren't the same. To deal with a pandemic you need a pandemic response plan for the spike to the system. This can be done in even in the US under our current system. It'd just magnify the pros/cons of our any system in place.
I'm for state run healthcare, but the argument about pandemic readiness isn't about that (imo).
Healthcare is never free. Some cultures invest in it. Some don't.
People feed themselves and provide their family's healthcare by providing haircuts.
Everything is essential to someone. I wouldn't be so dismissive.
No, we've built our economy on non-essential work. That's good 99% of the time but it's definitely not essential. The government shutting down these small businesses means, it should (imo) maintain the business owners it shut down. But to call that service essential is not correct.
I'm speaking to the vanity of wanting to get your hair dyed during a pandemic, not the businesses that were shutdown. We should accept as a society that we incurred a great debt by shutting the economy down for the duration we have. And that we owe it to the businesses we shutdown, to keep them afloat.
Maybe they just want to get the same haircut that the mayor of Chicago got the other week, long after the state lockdown...
Beyond that, though, presumably a lot of my friends would be interested in what I have to say. FB getting in the middle of that seems pretty heavy-handed.
(Personally, we're way past the point where I'd care to have a Facebook, Twitter, etc. account, partly for reasons like this, and I've deleted mine years ago.)
Wait, are you talking about the people who want to send everyone back to work now, even though we don't even have masks for doctors yet? Are you saying they are trying to minimize death and misery? Or are we talking about completely different people here?
I'm not in that situation, but I wouldn't be caught dead silencing their voices.
With those people taken care of, the protests are reduced to landowners demanding blood for their haircuts and Fuddruckers.
And I seriously doubt any of the protesters are landowners, aside, perhaps from "owning" their houses. ("owning" == mortgages, in most cases)
This is an argument made in a bad faith. You can't send "everyone to work now", if you are not running a gulag. People who are financially secure can stay at home till 2021, nobody can force them to go to work, this is obvious.
It's a question of being able to make a personal decision between staying at home or going to work.
>It's a question of being able to make a personal decision between staying at home or going to work.
Double speak. You mean rich people can decide to quarantine until 2021, and poor people can decide between work followed by exposure and possible death, or homelessness followed by exposure and possible death.
To make this decision for him looks unethical to me. And why exactly poor? It might be solidly middle class person.
EDIT: I'm pushing forties, can sustain myself for 1.5 years without working maintaining the same lifestyle, and I would go to work if I could. I'm damn tired working from home.
Interesting. I work from home 20 years already and have no desire to sit in a cubicle or waste my time in downtown traffic. I have my own company and products but also develop products for other companies on order and my first ever requirement is that unless there is some super duper meeting I only work at my own premises.
Do not feel lonely either as I have enough friends with whom I can socialize to my heart's content whenever we feel like.
Unless the anti-quarantine events are organized by a hostile power.
And this seems likely since they are insanely harmfully, arose suddenly and with widespread and great organization and have a lot of precedent. [1][2][3]
And especially since it's already been explicitly shown for at least some of the domains connected to the protests.[4]
[1]https://money.cnn.com/2018/01/26/media/russia-trolls-faceboo...
[2]https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-backed-facebook-account...
[3]https://thehill.com/policy/technology/358025-thousands-atten...
[4]https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/04/whos-behind-the-reopen-d...
It doesn't have to be one or the other, of course. It would be far from the first time that a true grassroots movement was taken over by some non-grassroots group for their own purposes.
I will point out that one of the reasons this may seem to be exploding suddenly though is that everybody is being exposed to the same conditions at the same time. Under those circumstances it should actually be expected that large social changes occur in relative lockstep at a pace that wouldn't have been possible during "normal" times. Mere speed of motion is not really a reason to be suspicious that the entire thing is being manufactured.
And note I am specifically speaking about that argument and no other. There is plenty of evidence that the sites in question are too organized to be a simultaneous grass-roots effort springing up in multiple states at once at this speed with this similarity. That is also so unsurprising as to be something you should expect in advance. I'm just suggesting that it's not a good idea to therefore conclude there isn't a significant group of people who really do feel this way; marginalizing that group of real people will if any tend to empower these fake organizations by making them the only place those people feel like they can get any respect.
Think about the implications of a foreign power being able to spread disease and death with disinformation. Is it 'war' if a million people end up dead, even if no bullets were fired? Who are the combatants, and how, as Americans could we win that war?
There is a strong case for reopening ASAP and the pressure is becoming more real by the day. Its perfectly reasonable to be skeptical about the overreach of Government power, and even to take action against it. That said, in this time, with the scale of the infection in the US, opening too soon is an unnecessary danger to millions of people.
It's really interesting to see that view phrased that way, because I see it oppositely: the "damage" as you put it, is "human lives lost" in one case, and financial and economic losses in the other. The latter can certainly cause the loss of human life, but I haven't seen anything but hand-wavy attempts to quantify it. While the potential death toll due to relaxing shelter-in-place and social distancing measures isn't absolutely known either, I find the estimated ranges to be both persuasive and unacceptable.
We can make people whole financially (though I admit I have little confidence that this will be accomplished all that well) after the fact, but we can't bring people back from the dead.
GiveWell calculates lives/dollars for its charities and I think the most efficient one is like $3k/life.
Not some used up, only 2 years left neither of them good life either. That of a child.
There's a few reasons for that. One is that people are very reluctant to hear than there is a finite limit to the amount of money that other people should spend to save their lives. Another is that it is highly situation-dependent, so there really isn't one solid number.
Nevertheless, yes, at scale your mental conception of "economic damage" is probably incorrect. You are probably, if you mentally examine your conceptions, basically taking all the economic damage as coming out of "discretionary income"; who cares if we all lock ourselves up for a while and as a result, people can't buy the 65" new flatscreen TV they wanted and have to stick with what they have? Were that the truth, yes, economic damage would be something we could basically wave away.
It is not the truth. The economic impact does not entirely come out of discretionary income. Connect some other pieces in, such as the HN favorite "Most households can't handle an unexpected expense of a $1000." Connect in the fact that poverty isn't just not buying flatscreens, but food insecurity, childhood stress that we've had links to studies showing the long-term negative impact of, and the general badness of poverty. Economic damage is true damage, and will in the long term kill people. Moreover, we are choosing economic damage now that will persist for months or years, still hurting people, after the coronavirus would have been gone. It also hurts the poor more than the rich; frankly the coronavirus up to this point has hardly affected me personally at all, but that doesn't mean I should underestimate how it is affecting others. At the moment I can't name anyone who has been totally, utterly "fired" to the point that they are guaranteed they have no job to come back to, I can name many names of people currently not being paid, who may or may not all be made up by government checks.
Also note I'm not making a new argument, I'm still just defending my original claim that the range of possible outcomes is so wide that there are non-trivial options where coronavirus would have hurt less than a full lockdown. (Especially if you include other options, like, "tell everyone to wear masks, even impromptu ones made of T-Shirts over your face, wash your hands, limit social gatherings and cut schools (huge germ transmitters), but otherwise let the economy go. There's a lot of reason to believe that would have worked fairly well, beyond the scope I can go into right now.) But economic damage really will hurt people.
(On the other, other hand, it has been observed that the total death rate in the US is down right now, which also factors in somehow.)
Basically, I'm saying there's plenty of other contexts where we have no problem saying that economic hardship is really, really bad. It should be the same in this context, too. Otherwise, the next time someone is talking about how bad poverty is for someone, intellectual honesty would compel you to dismiss that argument the same way you are dismissing the idea right now that economy hardship is bad. If you are unwilling to agree with the proposition that "economic hardship isn't really a big deal in the long run" in that context, you shouldn't be agreeing with it in this one either.
That said, I doubt these protests have much effect. It's kind of like people standing on corners waving signs, or the pro-antifa vs anti-antifa stick-fests. Amusing or mildly appalling and worth a click-bait article, but does anyone really care?
If there's any real effect, I suspect it'll be just to mark that there are people suffering, people who have lost their livelihoods, can't make their rent, and just want to go back to their okay-but-not-great jobs so they can live their lives.
The problem is that the "followers" in the "Reopen All The Things(tm)" camp is ASSUMING that you get immunity once you get Covid-19.
We do not have information about this. We also do not have information about how long immunity lasts if you do get some. We also do not have data as to whether a person who has an asymptomatic case of Covid-19 can later get a case which puts him into the hospital.
Herd immunity has significant limitations if immunity burns out every 6 months.
Pure speculation, of course.
But, we've never succeeded at a vaccination for a corona virus, and it's far from clear that we'll have one soon for this one. It could be that this will play out no matter what we do.
But we keep partial immunity to coronaviruses for a long time. Right now it looks like our best estimate of infection fatality rate is 0.3%, and it may very well be a lot less if the disease re-emerges in a few years because past encounters will be protective.
That is, would 229E be pretty damn bad in an immunologically naive population? I think it might.
Google also removes pages from their index at the request of law enforcement or by court order. There’s nothing wild about that.
A 30% unemployment rate will kill substantially more people than the coronavirus.
In fact, you could argue the protesters are advocating for behavior that would prevent people from dying (people who get laid off and are now in poverty).
As you should know, poverty carries a much higher mortality rate.
But it needn't. They could be advocating for social safety nets, but instead they want the right to put others at risk.
In fact, the Fed is predicting 32%. [2]
[1] https://www.mailman.columbia.edu/public-health-now/news/how-...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/30/coronavirus-job-losses-could...
Of course poverty has bad health outcomes, and I've just cited sources in another reply.
This is the part that isn't "blindingly obvious" and requires a bit more of a substantive argument to backup the statement that "the deaths from coronavirus will be nothing compared to the deaths caused by economic destruction".
59% of Americans could not afford $1,000 in an emergency. [1]
So you're talking about an optimistic runway of $1,000 + a $1,200 one-time benefit payment. The average person will be in poverty within 60 days.
I think you're dramatically overestimating the wealth of the average American.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/21/41-percent-of-americans-woul...
The onus is still on you to make a meaningful argument to support that statement.
You're asking me to prove something that hasn't occurred yet.
My point is, poverty is deadly, the coronavirus response causes massive unemployment, unemployment causes poverty and so it's pretty obvious that the economic implications have a death rate associated with them that won't shake out for years. In my opinion, it'll be significantly worse.
I don't like it when people hand wave away the blight of those in poverty for personal safety. These people have awful outcomes, and they're treated as collateral damage.
The media talks about death from poverty all the time, except for now. Why? You cannot pause the economy without dramatic upheavals in industry and community.
For example, one particular study found that from the 2008 economic crisis there were nearly 5,000 excess suicides in a single year. Well, this crisis is substantially worse and will last substantially longer.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...
Ah, so it's an opinion unsupported by facts or evidence. Got it.
What proof do you want? I figured everything I said was common sense. 30% unemployment isn't outside the bounds of possibility and poverty has been repeatedly proven to have a much higher mortality rate.
> The protestors are advocating for behavior that will literally kill people, including medical personnel.
No they are not. No more than those advocating for the repeal of prohibition advocated for drunk driving.
> The protesters are no different than those who call for deadly riots or civil war.
They are very different. You're mindset is akin to blaming those who protested for civil rights for "deadly riots or civil war". It's amazing how your arguments are so similar to those who wanted to shut down civil rights' protests.
> They deserve to be shut down for jeopardizing public health and safety.
This type of thinking is why constitutional rights are under so much threat. Just an extreme rehash of "Won't you think of the children" fearmongering to take away rights.
Creating a group of people standing closely together and/or blocking the streets is a safety issue at the moment.
If the only way you can protest is to do it in public, you lack imagination.
Also, your rights aren't affected. This is Facebook telling stupid people to shut up and stop spreading fud that could actually hurt people, not the government breaking up peaceful and legal assemblies.
Even if it survives legal review, this harms the spirit of the Bill of Rights, which is incorporated against the States.
Voters should reply in November with their ballots as appropriate.
It takes a lot to get me to defend Facebook, but the arguments popping up in this thread are proving to be more than sufficient.
Are you OK with similar rights being stripped from your hometown newspaper on the grounds that they are a "corporation", despite the explicit specification of the press as a protected entity in the First Amendment?
Citizens United v. FEC
But the government is breaking up peaceful and legal assemblies. While I don't have the article handy, there have been arrests over the past few days for refusing to leave.
As for "legal" - the First Amendment is very clear on this matter. The federal government (and through the incorporation doctrine, the governments of the several states) is specifically denied the power to prohibit this.
Also:
> In addition to serving as medical functions, isolation and quarantine also are “police power” functions, derived from the right of the state to take action affecting individuals for the benefit of society.
https://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/specificlawsregulations.html
https://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/aboutlawsregulationsquarantin...
First let's assume for the sake of argument that you're right: it still doesn't matter, Facebook is not the government. Facebook can tell stupid people to shut up and stop putting innocent people at risk and that is not breaking up "peaceful and legal assemblies" as you put it.
Now, going back to the government breaking up "peaceful and legal assemblies" (which these are not), it still doesn't matter: you are not guaranteed every right in the constitution at all times equally. A good example of this is time, place and manner restrictions: the government can't tell you that you're not allowed to advocate for a candidate for office, that would violate the first amendment. However, they are allowed to tell you that you can't advocate for a candidate for office at 1AM with a loudspeaker in a residential neighborhood. That's effectively what these people are doing: there is a pandemic, their actions could hurt a lot of people, so their stupid assembly is not legal. (Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and nothing I say constitutes legal advice)
Unemployment is deadly. The mortality rate while in poverty is over 2.5x.
A very large number of industries, companies and communities will be permanently wiped out from this.
There are also industries growing, and industries that will be created. And some of the industries that may be permanently eliminated may be a net positive -- cruise lines are a complete blight.
I don't know what the net-net will look like, but it's important to push back on the assumption that economic downfall will be all negative in terms of lives lost.
http://news.mit.edu/2016/study-rich-poor-huge-mortality-gap-...
https://www.mailman.columbia.edu/public-health-now/news/how-...
You can't really look at a past study of unemployment effects and expect it to be anything like what we're about to experience; we literally have no idea.
The economy cannot be paused without massive stimulus to keep it afloat (and no, the current stimulus isn't keeping it afloat). Some companies are entering bankruptcy as we speak. They aren't coming back.
Good system, eh?
It’s not generally people sitting around maliciously wanting to oppress other people.
It’s more often someone who thinks they are doing good, and that “right” is just in the way.
always - really? Corporations lobbying government to curtail people's rights are driven by the desire for the greater good? Why am I in big doubt.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/04/whos-behind-the-reopen-d...
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/salvadorhernandez/coron...
Also take a look at this Reddit comment
https://www.reddit.com/r/maryland/comments/g3niq3/comment/fn...
If you don't trust BuzzFeed you can go look at the domain registration information for open[enter state name].com domains.
"Astroturfing" would be when paid shills or robots spam FCC comment boards. It's not astroturfing when thousands of genuine supporters of a cause show up at a protest, whether or not there is coordination (surprise, all protests need coordination).
Trying to turn this into a sinister conspiracy -- and not genuine discontent -- is a cheap mental shortcut which lets you discount that a lot of people feel differently than you.
I don't see how that's astroturfing though, unless they're being paid to show up? Seems unlikely?
I have seen wapo video of Michigan protest. People there were angry because they want to get their hair done or buy paint and fertilizer. They want others to go to work to they can stay home.
0-9: 1 0%
10-19: 6 0.1%
20-29: 56 0.4%
30-39: 227 1.6%
40-49: 535 3.7%
50-59: 1410 9.8%
60-69: 2863 20.0%
70-79: 3811 26.6%
80-89: 1753 25.4%
90+: 12.2%
Most working age people will be just fine. Except they are jobless. Terrible times.
[0] https://covid19tracker.health.ny.gov/views/NYS-COVID19-Track...
Look at Sweden. They decided to let the people at risk stay home while others go out and about their business. Didn't work out too well for them.
In US people are willing to sacrifice human life for economic activity
How many additional COVID19 deaths would you accept to avoid a crippling economic depression? If the answer is zero, you are not being serious. If the answer is more than zero, then as Churchill noted, we've established what kind of person you are and are now haggling over price.
To be fair that is not the actual choice on offer. Its more like being jobless, vs accepting a certain (in some cases low) probability of dying.
Read literally, this says everyone who returns to work will die. For the future, I recommend more nuance in your writing.
Losing your livelihood does carry a substantial risk of increased death.
I'm thankful right now that I live in Canada where every week—sometimes multiple times a week—measures are added or adjusted in order to prevent anyone from falling through the cracks. Some businesses have faltered or are closing permanently, but many others are receiving substantial support.
We're currently beating the projections in Ontario, and while this is not an easy time, every action necessary is being taken to at least try and prevent as many deaths by this thing as possible.
I think things would look different if the United States had taken different measures to support people during this crisis.
The barber in this narrative should receive enough aid to get by, and enough support for their business for it to persist until it can reopen—and the people who just want their hair done should just have to wait.
Of course, such measures can only work for a while until things start breaking down. We can do without barbers for quite a while, but the more professions are offline, the worse the accumulated effect is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace,_order,_and_good_governm...
Is that actually the choice being made here?
That is not the choice. The choice is between some uncertain chance of death plus a chance to spread the infection and a certain lack of income.
Part of astroturfing is getting the grass roots to participate.
I wonder how astroturfed this was: SF Anti-mask League 1918. https://mobile.twitter.com/timkmak/status/125193624283456307...
This is a deeply disingenuous statement and essentially false.
a) The protestors at the rallies clearly believe in their cause. You can't delegitimize their opinion.
b) CNN just published a study showing 2/3 worried about opening to early 1/3 worried about not opening soon enough.
That's 100M Americans, out of them it only takes a few to be very concerned.
The snippets from a recent protest of individuals describing how they are going out of business, will lose their livelihoods, homes and going destitute cannot be dismissed.
S. Korea has no lock-down with tracing. Sweden has no lock-down and is going 'kind of ok'.
It's deeply disturbing to see major companies suppress individuals' right to reasonable expression and it's not helpful to diminish their views just because a few idiots in Russia may like it.
The protests are fine, except for all the guns, which is a little spooky.
Facebook is not a public entity; they are a private company and the Constitution does not constrain it. You can argue that Facebook is depriving you of your Constitutional rights until you're blue in the face, but it'll probably get you nowhere in court.
But on the other hand, if you allow people that spread extreme ideologies like fascism/nazism, communism, hatred between religious or ethnic groups, that is where you should draw the line.
In here, supporting freedom of speech and therefore the ability for deniers to have a platform sets a dangerous precedent for the whole population. Just like anti-vaccine groups, they are creating a massive hazzard for people that disagree with them, so just like the law says, your right ends where mine begins.
The constitution applies to the government, not Facebook.
i'm the least fan of corporations, but you know what also can't stand for long? a president executing authoritarian power and promoting domestic terrorism that then "true americans" lap up and execute.
You are ironically and hypocritically violating their free speech rights by demanding that the government force them to host speech against their will. It's equivalent to the government forcing you to put up a yard sign for a candidate you don't support.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01095-0
Most places (outside of super dense metros) actually don't need quarantine at all. Maybe for people working in eldercare.
With these new statistics the risk of death for those <65 is about the same as the normal risk of random death through other circumstances over the course of 2 months.
They recruited people over Facebook at a time that California's COVID tests were backlogged (with ads not presented in the paper, with links to signup that could, anecdotally, be shared out); in that situation, avoiding selection bias towards people that were sick with something previously and want to know about potential immunity would be rather tough. (Per WTO protocol, they asked about symptoms in their sample but poof for some reason that data isn't in the paper).
They got a 1.5% positive rate in their sample with 50 individuals testing positive. They then immediately applied demographic weighing to move that raw number to around 3%. Only then did they contemplate the false positive rate, taking the data of the manufacturer and 30 samples as a point estimate to figure out a 95% CI of positives around that 3%.
That's a no-no for correctly propagating uncertainty. The statistically legitimate way to do that would've been to generate the 95% confidence interval for belief about the test's false positive rate and carry that forward in the demographic reweighing. That basic math would've avoided the frankly laughable result that a randomly selected person in Santa Clara county could have a 5% chance of having had COVID-19 while in the same county people seeing a doctor and getting tests through their doctor are only around 10% positive for COVID-19 [2].
Another critique: [3]
[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463v... [2] https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/dashboard.aspx#te... [3] https://medium.com/@balajis/peer-review-of-covid-19-antibody...
I still maintain the gist of my point though -- we don't have sufficient evidence for widespread quarantine. New York and Italy are outliers, and should be understood as such. Even if the results are 5x or 10x instead of 50x -- it still means decisions were made on grossly inflated worst case data.
https://toronto.citynews.ca/2020/04/20/new-modelling-shows-p...
Ontario is largely a rural province.
> New modelling predictions show that the wave of new, community spread cases of coronavirus in Ontario appears to have peaked, but the spread in long-term care homes and other group settings is still growing.
> Earlier models predicted the peak would be hit in May, however according to data released by the province’s Ministry of Health, public health measures and social distancing have brought it forward.
In spite of this we are not yet moving to reopen, rather deciding not to cut the parachute just because it started to slow our fall.
>In this sample 11% has antibodies and the test detects 70-80% of people with antibodies. So, that leaves us with 14.6% immune. With a population of 2,377,081, that means 347053 people would be immune in Stockholm now, for an IFR of 0.27%.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/g4znbg/at_least_11...
Moving back to the current situation...
I only want to belong to a social network that values science and public health. Why shouldn't I be allowed to be a user of a website that has those same values? You're going to tell me that the kind of website that I want to belong to should be outlawed and not allowed to exist? Or, let's not even go that far... that it's BAD that it exists?
Keep in mind, you can have any view you want. This is whether or not Facebook wants to use their social network to help spread events that would endanger the general public. A "keep things closed" event would be treated the same way.
(I agree FB is too big and should be cut into multiple pieces. And they shouldn't have been allowed to buy Instagram. But for very different reasons. Mostly I worry about their impact, as well as Google's, on publisher ad revenue.)
I think it's a problem of expectations.
Some expect Facebook to just be a social network. Others, like you, expect it to be a safe space where unapproved opinions aren't allowed. Neither kind is bad per se, but I don't think most people expected Facebook to be of the latter kind.
We should both agree that the real problem is monopoly. That if Facebook (and Google btw) weren't so powerful, people would be perfectly cool with the idea that maybe different people can have different values from one another and that maybe different companies could accommodate those different values.
Stopped reading right there as that is a big enough indicator that you're sitting on a high horse.
I view the term the same way I view "pro-choice" and "pro-life." Both terms frame the sides in favorable light, are how people self-identify, and so I use both of them (even the one that's in a category I don't fall into).
I'm a civil engineer. When we decide to buy, for example, protection side fences for a road, we calculate how many people will pass the road, how many will die with and without and how much cost the fence. If the price per life is bigger than target, lets say, we spend 5M$ to save 1 life, we Don't put the fence.
What you should do is to put a price to lifes, and then put a price to goods, and then make simulation to see how much goods are produced and lifes are taken in 2years range scenarios. Take in to account soft and harder measures, risk of second waves, asymmetrical lockdown by regions and ages and genders, inmunology ID, Testing, night work options to reduce contact... Anything!
Let the doctors do, let the engineers simulate, and let the best option execute as planned
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22928292
This story is going to dig up the usual FB hatred, battles over "freedom of speech" vs "corporate platform", and tired discussion topics that have been re and rehashed again here.
It was already selectively flagging certain news articles as true or not, countering certain misinformation while conveniently missing others. It's a questionable practice to become the gatekeepers of fact when the fourth estate itself is held to no such legal standard.
The centralized web needs to stop this subtle censorship. We can't rely on the opinions of a few to censor the many in any fair or equitable way, look at Twitter/Reddit/YouTube...
I personally would side with Facebook on this one.
I think it is strange to criticise this move as suppressing free speech. If you value free speech you wouldn’t be using facebook, a for-profit venture controlled by a few people with their own agenda.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
That said, allowing Zuckerberg to simply silence protest movements on a whim is insane and will bite all of us incredibly hard in the future. He should not have this kind of power.
I just think it be an interesting metric, if I decide to go get a hair cut, did I also just decide for 2 person to die?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
This action will "prove" to some people that the tech industry has a liberal bias. I don't know that there's a good counter action to these protests, though.
*Propaganda is not meant to be used as a derogatory term in this context; it is a tool, like a gun that can shoot deer for food or humans for conquest.
If you actually read the 'lockdown' scriptures it does state the 'lockdown' will end, it also talks about how the devil of herd immunity will eventually live amongst us.
The exact time of rapture of ending the 'lockdown' is not stated in the scriptures but it's not totally unreasonable to think it's now.
The incubation is ~14 days. So if _everyone_ can act together, stay at home for 2-3 weeks, then it'll all be over and we can get on with our lives, right?
For those who don't want to follow (the deviants): force them to sign agreement, "If COVID-19 happens to me, that's solely my problem." and let them do whatever freedom they want, as long as they're not near non-deviants.
This is similar with smokers. In many countries, smoking is still allowed in designated areas: closed room where all smokers smoke. You think smoking is okay? Fine, do it with the rest of you, but don't inflict damage to non-smokers.
Sorry for the rant, but I'm perplexed by the selfishness. You want it your way? Go ahead, but don't risk others.
Plus, the problem with "deviants" as you put it, is that if they don't "conform", they can infect a lot of other non-deviants.
The problem is a complex one, for sure.