There is so much we donot know about the long-term effects. It shocks me to Silicon Valley icons like Elon Musk, Paul Graham, and Justin Kan pushing to reopen and spreading conspiracy theories over building tools to understand the long term effects.
Elon Musk, on the other hand, has been wrong on this from the get-go - he took a denialist stance in January and has repeatedly predicted things that have been proven false and keeps shifting the goalposts to try to support his original stance of ignoring the virus.
First example that comes to mind is Mar 19:
"Based on current trends, probably close to zero new cases in US too by end of April"
I have noticed, however, a tendency to vilify those that even suggest an alternative to the current lockdown and a distortion of their positions (such as suggesting that those people care more about money than people, or that they are minimizing the severity of this pandemic).
This virus is terrible and is taking a terrible toll on a lot of people as well as national healthcare systems and economies, but there are also people that purposely want to magnify the risks beyond what the data shows. That's not helping anyone either.
We know the infection fatality rate is well below 1%.
We know that people under 65 are at far lower risk of suffering severe symptoms and death.
And we know it's a virus, so will spread and evolve according to the same evolutionary principles as other viruses.
There are of course unknowns, but everything in the world has unknowns. We have to make educated guesses, and decide on a strategy based on them.
No, we don't. It seems to be at ~1%.
If it were well below 1%, it would be a nothing-burger, and would not have spiked NYC's weekly death rate by a factor of 6.
No, it wouldn't. The other important value is the reproduction rate of the virus. If that value is high, then our healthcare system is going to be overwhelmed just through the sheer number of people that will be infected.
So yes, it is looking like the infection fatality rate is well below 1% (as suggested by preliminary studies from NYC, Cali, Germany, and the Netherlands), but because the reproduction rate is so high, and the fact we have no herd immunity, still means thousands (or hundreds of thousands of people) will end up in the ICU. This seems like what happened in NYC and Italy. There was a massive spike in untracked infections in Feb/March. The vast majority of those people cleared the infection, but the tiny percentage of people who had complications, still overwhelmed the availability of ICU beds.
In fairness, they might be pushing to reopen to make the governments do better than rely on lockdown indefinitely. After all, necessity necessitates invention. One way to reopen and still be on top of the epidemic is accurate, fast, and cheap testing [0] at scale, so that, not only could people be tested repeatedly to curb the spread but also get a good overall data on the spread itself. Contact tracing, social distancing, and quarantine remains essential till a vaccine, or a prophylactic / therapeutic treatment is discovered.
[0] Grant Sanderson, Simulating an Epidemic, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/gxAaO2rsdIs
No, it merely prompts it.
If you toss an 8-year-old into the deep end of a pool, does it force him to swim? No. Drowning is an option.
This is more or less how how most animals learn to swim or how birds learn to fly.
yeah, and they have the losses to show for it.
some birds have losses of up to 41% due to falls and premature flight/parental following.[0]
[0]: https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/5389/SCtZ-0...
It seems to me that is the problem that people should focus on, instead of arguing for lifting measures aimed at protecting people.
More forced sacrifice and pain does not equal better policy.
Worth adding that keeping asymptomatic people at home, which an indiscriminate blanket house containment does, prevents the virus from mutating to become less deadly, which is the typical evolution of viruses.
The opposite, of sick soldiers being transferred to hospitals where they spread their viral infection, and asymptomatic soldiers remaining in trenches where they couldn't spread their less deadly strain, led to the second wave of the Spanish flu being far more deadly than the first.
South Korea imposes far more intrusive and arguably totalitarian measures such as tracking each and everyone's every movement and impose compulsive tests on anyone suspected of contacting suspected cases.
If you were genuinely concerned about restrictions on individual freedom then you would never even dare mention those cases as examples of desirae practices.
Even then, looking at the practicality of your cherry picked examples, those approaches are only possible if you already have all the people tracking infrastructure and testing services in place. Well, you really don't, do you? So what other options are on the table? Only social distancing, isn't it?
So please stop abusing cherry-picked half truths to spread your disinformation. Results are due to processes, and you're complaining about the lesser of all evils while at the same time desiring a specific outcome while disingenuously omitting what was trampled to be able to get to them.
South Korea's measures are far less draconian than imprisoning everyone at home.
Banning people from engaging in communal economic and social activity without complying with surveillance and safety measures, and having mandatory testing != less authoritarian than banning people from engaging in communal economic and social under all circumstances, or even leaving their homes.
Granted that under house imprisonment, you get more location privacy, with no phone tracking, but everything else is more restricted, and on par with house arrest, and the tracking privacy is irrelevant, since the authorities know you're home anyway.
>>Even then, looking at the practicality of your cherry picked examples, those approaches are only possible if you already have all the people tracking infrastructure and testing services in place.
You wrote above:
>>It seems to me that is the problem that people should focus on, instead of arguing for lifting measures aimed at protecting people.
This was in reference to not having a massive social welfare safety net that costs hundreds of billions of dollars a year, necessitates income tax rates of over 50%, and requires an extensive bureaucracy to administer, that typically decades to set up.
It seems to me overcoming the challenges of imposing South Korea or Hong Kong's hygiene rules for being outside the home, mandatory testing and phone tracking, is the problem that people should focus on, instead of arguing for creating vast forcible income redistribution schemes or keeping millions imprisoned at home in the name of protecting them.
>>So please stop abusing cherry-picked half truths to spread your disinformation
>>those approaches are only possible if you already have all the people tracking infrastructure and testing services in place.
Please stop some promoting mass-house-imprisonment, which means giving the state the power to imprison innocent people for months in the name of the public good, and your social welfare agenda, which includes imposing 50% income rates indefinitely, under the guise of fighting the virus.
People in some places, including where I am now, have been under house arrest for over two months now. And there are people like you advocating that it continue, while brushing aside alternative ways to stop viral transmission with hardly any critical analysis.
Meanwhile, you characterize my comments as 'disinformation', merely because they disagree with your house imprisonment policy.
You're disingenuously implying that it's less challenging to setup a $500 billion / year welfare bureaucracy, than an infrastructure for phone location tracking, and that phone tracking and mandatory testing are more restrictive than forcing everyone to shut everything down and stay imprisoned in their house.
That’s why I’d rather see us be cautious about re-opening, but we seem to have decided that rather than find a different way forward to protect everyone, we’re going to just go back to the old economy and hope the sky doesn’t come crashing down on us.
Any decision has to be made considering uncertainties. You either accept the risk or you don't.
BTW, this is what we know for sure can happen when you risk normalcy:
One value in doing this is to highlight the importance of problems.