It seems some people view COVID as guaranteed death and any questioning of lock downs ending means that you are or are about to be a mass murderer.
New Zealand has been able to pretty much eradicate the virus through lockdowns and contact tracing, but they only had 1000 cases.
There is no precedent for doing that in a country with millions of cases, like the U.S. It may be too late for that.
So is the purpose of continued lockdowns in the U.S. to eradicate the virus? That is what I am skeptical about, I don't see the evidence that such a thing is possible.
It is an elementary fact that life rides on the derivative. Stop work and no wealth gets created. No meat, no veggies, no crops, no gas, no electricity, no metal, no lumber, no stone, no plastic, no industrials, no dentists, no medical services, no schools, no nothing. Modern people cannot live subsistence lives off the chickens in their backyard and a plot of land within walking distance. Our stockpiles will last for a while, but not forever.
At a second degree, the social connections that enable the amazing collaboration underpinning modern society break down. The longer we are locked down, the harder will be to come back and figure out our place in the grand social puzzle.
It is a terrible situation. Most people are going to get infected, and a non-negligible fraction of them [1%] are going to die. Everywhere where the virus got endemic. Perhaps a handful of East Asian countries will manage 100% border shutdowns and 100% contact tracing for years on end. More power to them, the rest of the world lacks the social cohesion to pull off something like that.
Worse, the impact is going to be unequal. Some social strata will have more options to stay isolated for longer. It will appear, for a while, that they are somehow performing better than everybody else. Rest assured, there will be very few that can avoid the disease for long enough (~18 months) to be on the upside of a hypothetical vaccine. All we can hope is that, eventually, this disease goes the way of the common cold.
Toughen up. This is not Man's making. Nature send a Russian Roulette our way, we have no choice but to play.
In the meantime, try to avoid media that does it's best to paint this disease as the second coming of the Black Death. One of the technique is to cherry pick. Say 'one of my co-workers died', implying that they are next. Instead of '1 out of 73,348 of my colleagues' died. It is unavoidable tragedy that there may be anywhere between 73 and 733 of their colleagues that are going to die before we see the end of this.
Covid will be with us forever now, and in just a few months we already understand a lot more about it than we did at the start.
The longer we can delay mass infection, the more effective our treatment of the disease will be, and the more likely we will have vaccines.
Lets delay for a while, figure out the best treatment methods, and then let it through.
I've struggled with the same questions. I noticed that no matter which date I picked, 'let's delay longer' was always the preferred choice. We've got to wean ourselves from the lockdown.
OTOH we have been incredibly lucky with both our leadership and our island status.
the US is a huge state, with porous borders so the right choice might be different, but the more controlled the spread is, the fewer lives will be lost and the more likely time will help us understand the best treatment.
You can stay in your house until the treatments get better, which is also a smart thing for vulnerable people to do.
Why not let other people off lockdown if they wish as long as the hospitals are not overflowed? A lot of people face a negligable risk from this.
What difference would it be to you? And look at the cost to them, tens of millions of people's livelihoods thrown up in the air.
Having said the above, I do see the value of lockdowns that prevented hospitals from being overwhelmed. That is different. But it looks to me like we can look at moving past that threat. What do we do next?
The benefit comes when the community as a whole does it, there is literally no point to anyone doing it alone, unless they are vulnerable.
"What do we do next?"
Figure out the best way to treat covid, and talk about the best time to end the lockdown.
Im in NZ btw, NZ locked down hard and early. Its been six weeks and so far we have 20 deaths from covid.
"What next?" is exactly the question, and I dont think anyone knows the best answer yet.
We are likely to be mostly ending our lockdown on this wednesday. We are entering "level 2" which I believe is all businesses open and running, just some rules around congregation.
I simply do not understand the chorus of calls to end lockdown (or simply never start it) in countries where absolutely nothing is under control.
It will cause incredibly loss of life, and people are doing in a rush.
Im really struggling, on a personal level, to understand the rush in some countries to sacrifice people and not economies.
Surely the economy is there to serve us?
That is quite a different scenario than in the U.S., where there were hundreds of thousands of infections (millions?), not enough tests to go after eradication at this point, etc.
Were you thinking that the U.S. would be able to maintain a lockdown until eradication, perhaps with contact tracing? Is there evidence that such a plan could work?
I understand your struggle to see my point of view. Ditto! I read a book that posited that people are born with personality differences, and value some things more than others. For example, I feel very strongly about individualism and anti-authority, while others may be more communitarian and authoritarian. The world ultimately benefits from both.
Having said that, I wonder what practical benefits a person who chooses to self-isolate in any of a number of countries where this is endemic gains by forcing other to lockdown against their will when the hospitals are not overflowing. Why should the many young and healthy who face a negligible risk to continue in what is sometimes very difficult circumstances? What is really gained at this point?
Anyways, that was all meant to be a peek into my thinking.
", where there were hundreds of thousands of infections"
well, EVENTUALLY, there were hundreds of thousands of infections. at one point there were, famously, 15...
"Were you thinking that the U.S. would be able to maintain a lockdown until eradication, perhaps with contact tracing? Is there evidence that such a plan could work?"
No, I dont think that would be a long term solution for the US, I dont have any source for my beliefs, but I suspect with the size of the US, the nature of its people and the incredibly porous border it has that a lockdown until eradication would be doomed to failure.
" I feel very strongly about individualism and anti-authority, while others may be more communitarian and authoritarian"
yess....the world does need both. Im not sure where that comes into the decision to lockdown or not, and for how long. I feel like there needs to be a more sciency approach taken there rather than some vague handwavy stuff about personalities.
"Why should the many young and healthy who face a negligible risk to continue in what is sometimes very difficult circumstances?"
I dont know. I dont have much use for the word 'should'.
I think that two things are true, first the young and healthy are at risk from this disease themselves - the stats prove that, and second its almost certainly true that the young and healthy have loved ones who are young and unhealthy, or old and healthy, or old and unhealthy, and....maybe....the young and healthy dont want to catch covid and then infect the people they love.
All I was saying with my comment above, is I dont understand the rush to sacrifice those people who are vulnerable to this disease.
Even here in NZ where we have been very lucky so far it is obvious that eventually we will have to reopen the borders and let the rest of the world in, and at that point infections will start again, but by then we have the best possible chance of understanding how to treat the disease most effectively.
I dont believe "lockdown for eradication" in the US is a viable choice, but I do think "lockdown to slowdown" is a sensible option for a while yet, to give every one of your citizens the best possible chance of survival.
The economy will recover, it always does. It reflects the nature of people, and for that reason is endlessly resilient.
Maybe there were 15 case last October! :-) I'm thinking we could have had thousands of cases in the U.S. before we started testing. But that's water under the bridge at this point. I wasn't arguing that lockdowns were useless, or that they weren't justified a month ago. But given the additional data I wonder about them now.
>I think that two things are true, first the young and healthy are at risk from this disease themselves - the stats prove that
I end up looking at NYC stats a lot... Last week they were seeing 20-25% of sample population with antibodies. I found found April 14 NYC numbers showing 4.5% of covid deaths there were people under 45, and a bit over 14k deaths in NYC as of yesterday. Extrapolating from these numbers I calculate 2500 people under 45 will die before reaching 80% herd immunity. That's 2500 in a city of 8 million. 2016 numbers showed 4.9 million people under age 45. Which works out to just under 1 in 2000 young people dying.
It's interesting for me to think about that number. Is it significant? I looked at some actuarial tables and see that a 45 year old has a 1 in 300 chance of dying in any given year. 1 in 1000 for 20 year old.
I'm betting a lot of unemployed young people want to get on with their lives and wouldn't be worries about taking their chance with a 1 in 2000 risk.
>and second its almost certainly true that the young and healthy have loved ones who are young and unhealthy, or old and healthy, or old and unhealthy, and....maybe....the young and healthy dont want to catch covid and then infect the people they love.
I'm not saying that everyone has to go out and mingle. Everyone is free to self-isolate.
I grant that some people could be put in a difficult position, feeling like they have to go to work when they don't want to, living with someone who won't self-isolate, etc.
Maybe there's away to ease the lockdown and provide assistance to those left in a bind. These would be good problems to talk about, and will probably come up no matter when we ease the lockdown.
Again, I dont understand the rush to throw so many lives under the bus with so little care, its bewildering.
Those people, our vulnerable, can be sacrificed at anytime, but they can only be sacrificed once.
Lets try something else for a few months first, and see how it works.
If nothing else works out, we can always fall back to the "let everyone in society who has an underlying condition of some kind die" plan afterwards.
Which side do of that argument do you believe holds authority at the moment?
Soft Authoritarianism: Do what I say or else I convince everyone else you should be treaded like a pariah. See exile, excommunication, cancel culture.
Liberalism: This is the right thing to do, I pray you join me in doing it.