Flying: It’s Worse Than You Think
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
It will take a long time to recover from that. We will still be suffering for it long after the virus is tamed.
How did we get here? What drove the worldwide populist uprising? It's not like this event was unique to the USA, it happened all around the world, near simultaneously.
Did people get left behind by globalism and a few influential people in the limelight (Wall Street, Hollywood in America)? Politics started speaking towards a narrower and narrower sect of the populations, confusing the loudest for the most. Or was it hate weaponized by a different elite, who themselves felt they were being left behind? Sort of a chicken and the egg.
Speaking as one who never was in any danger of voting for Trump, what would be my alternative? The warhawk spouse of a womanizing politician I tired of 20 years ago? IOW, same shit, different decade? And then we're all shocked that the populist candidate actually pulled it off this time? Maybe the world collectively asked, "what's the worst that could happen?" Well, now we know.
Yes, between the "warhawk" with eight years of ancillary experience in the White House, who served in the Senate and as Secretary of State, and the reality tv show host whose only political experience was failing at a previous presidential run, the former was still the most viable candidate for the job, even though her husband got a blowjob that one time.
Although I don't consider that to be legitimate participation in the political process, so much as an act of sabotage.
There's a difference between burning your own neighborhood down, and burning Wall Street / Washington / Hollywood / Silicon Valley down.
Lighting a fire doesn't affect everyone equally, it burns up who has the most wood. It's an attack proportional to inequality, not a uniform one.
Sen Clinton set the middle east on fire as Secretary of State. And then ran away before it blew up in her face leaving Sen John Kerry to clean up the mess.
Seriously there is something really shabby about the current political parties in the US. People forget Trump didn't just narrowly beat Clinton. He utterly trounced Jeb Bush.
Starting a mansion on fire, knowing your tent hundreds of miles away is safe, and even if its not, a new tent is relatively cheap.
The tea party, occupy wall street, and the latest worldwide populist wave are different coin sides all rooted in the same feeling of victimization. It's a purposeful intent to crumble and erode institutions that have amassed wealth. The feedback loops of tax loopholes and lobbying, siphoning off and storing value, pretending their holdings dont cause others problems, are culpable.
In America, it's easy to see why, if you're actually willing to pay attention to the complaints of the white working class. They are tired of being exploited for tax money while not receiving anywhere near the entitlements of other groups, tired of not being officially in the civil rights legislation, tired of their communities being flooded with foreigners that don't share their values, and tired of being replaced. Opiate crisis, brain-drain taking all the youth away from small towns, Walmart destroying Main Street, and other phenomena have combined to make much of America a desolate shadow of its former glory.
A lot of this is the direct outcome of policy decisions nobody agreed to. Nobody would have agreed to the 1965 Hart-Cellar act if they had known that the result would be the end of American culture as they knew it.
Such an uprising was inevitable and it will continue to get more strident as long as the actual concerns of these people are brushed off or claimed to be offensive concepts. It's not a matter of being "left behind", it's a matter of being replaced.
The purpose of all these isolation and social distancing measures is to slow down the process in order not to overwhelm hospitals. But the news reports I've been reading about hospitals is that in general, in developed countries, the hospitals aren't overwhelmed.
If 70% or so haven't developed immunity, then the pandemic will just re-emerge as soon as the restrictions are lifted. It seems to me that eventually 70% are going to get it. Shouldn't we just let it loose and go through our destined suffering faster?
So why are we making ourselves go through all this? ELI5?
Also if the government risks hospital overcapacity by not imposing restrictions, and high deaths per capita resulted, then that would look very bad politically.
We didn’t know what we were up against. We arguably still don’t. We understand the disease 10% more than we did previously, and are using this information to establish guidelines like masks and social distancing, maybe eventually contact tracing.
The ultimate intent is to suppress r0 long enough that we can develop a series of treatments and protocols (and eventually a vaccine) to minimize the negative effects of this virus.
It would have been impossible to a) gather enough data in time and b) drive change in behavior in the mass population without a SIP ‘reset’ taking place.
1) If we just "let it loose" then we will quickly overwhelm hospitals and see greater loss of life than is necessary
2) We may be able to delay widespread infection until there are more effective treatments. And, given how much we don't know, it is almost certainly the case that a delay of a few months until widespread infection means that we will have a better understanding of how effective our current treatments are, allowing better treatment and better allocation of hospital resources
3) Slowly reopening allows high-risk groups to keep themselves safer, while people who are eager to get haircuts and play sports and aren't worried about the risk can volunteer themselves to be part of our herd immunity group.
Also, many projections appear to predict spread uniformly. Should spread be modeled more by frequency of travel and interaction, moreso assuming that people with frequent interactions are likely to be infected first?
There has to be a way to model, predict, and account for the ebb and flow of which demographics are getting hit, and how to shape the spread with regard to capacity and risk. Hospitals are empty, open the gates a bit. Opening up restrictions on the lowest risk populations first, and tightening them back up as cases rise too fast. This would likely be predicated on a stronger welfare state, more equipped to serve people they are asking to stay locked down. "Stay inside, but we got your back" coupled with "your risk is low, go build herd immunity, stay away from the vulnerable."
Maybe something like a pollen or wildfire indicator, or defcon, county by county. "Free to do anything. Slightly elevated risk. High risk quarantine. Quarantine for all" with week by week or day by day updates. I understand that such a volatile type of lockdown would be hard for businesses to adapt to.
These folks are generally either retired or employed in a job that pays them to work from home in their pajamas. Or they work for a tech company that makes even more money because the government is banning their F2F competitors.
The reason hospitals aren't overwhelmed is because social distancing is working. All these "facts" are evidence of quarantine doing what it was intended to do.
The quarantine we have is already extremely relaxed. I don't think there's any reason to relax it further without killing more people.
I work for a startup, full-remote - I wish we all agreed upon the amount of people who could die from the epidemic and relaxed the rules.
There’s just too many people I know who are not going to get their jobs back after all of this is over (this will affect their lives for way longer after it all ends).
Dying is a natural part of living. Many people would prefer to die rather than continue living in isolation.
The quarantine is doing it’s work, but isolation is not an answer because that’s not living.
The quarantine is going to last only a few months likely, or a year at most. It's not indefinite, and I'd suggest anyone who'd rather die than accept reality should seek professional help.
That's how living in a modern society rather than a vacuum is supposed to play out, anyway.
In reality, the economic concerns (note: this is different from "I'd rather die than live in isolation [for a few months]!") will probably win out soon enough.
There’s quite a few occurrences of politicians going to their second home/visiting extended family and I cannot believe other people don’t do that.
So in reality people are not doing what you think they are doing, and that’s even worse.
On top of this all I don’t remember people actually voting on this matter. This all had been forced on us by the governments.
Nevertheless, I am very much pro-isolation. But I don’t really care about it - my life hasn’t had any drastic changes and I can still do most of the things I was doing from home.
Most of the people can’t afford that.
If we dropped all mitigation efforts, you should expect this to infect something like 95+% of people before effectively dying out. The amount of overshoot is going to depend on how widespread the infection is.
Second, you can develop immunity without the bad effects of actually getting the disease (ya know, like a fucking vaccine). Saying that we need xx% of people to develop immunity doesn't mean that we need xx% of people to get this deadly disease.
At this rate, life will not fully return to normal until a substantial share of the population has been vaccinated.
Just like 9/11 changed air travel forever, this pandemic will have long lasting effects on how we live as a society.
Too many Americans are far too selfish and inconsiderate not to return to the "way things were". We're already seeing the 1%'ers of that class coming out of their caves demanding a return to normalcy regardless of the costs in lives.
When, is answered by either when there is a vaccine or the virus has touch pretty much everyone. Given the political distaste for doing things like other countries or upon the advice of people who know about pandemics, my money is on the latter.