Healthy middle aged person who wears a mask in public but goes about his life with his family as if nothing happened. Haven’t gotten COVID, but if I do, I’ll take sick days and move on. What else would you expect people to do, hide inside forever? Curve was flattened, there’s no appetite to do so further if necessary, life goes on (or it doesn’t).
Can’t fault people for responding to incentives and policy accordingly.
Are the policies and incentives so powerful that it's overriding your knowledge that you and your neighbors would be better off if you continued to self-quarantine as much as possible?
Not the least problem is that it implicitly assumes that others will take steps to reduce the worst effects, so that you don't need to bother. The basic anti-social anti-vax position.
In any case it's so easily dissected that I'm going to invoke Brandolini's Law [1] and decline to waste the time to refute BS.
Many are asymptotic, many have mild symptom, yes there is deaths but low in number. Is it not the same case as in Italy, Spain, NYC ?
>Not the least problem is that it implicitly assumes that others will take steps to reduce the worst effects, so that you don't need to bother
I don't assumes others will take steps to reduce the worst effects. Even in in the worst case situation where everyone eventually will get infected (including me), it didn't bother me.
Like I said, the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands to millions doesn't bother you. That is repugnant, and sociopathic.
This is a once-a-century pandemic of a virus that is not at all the influenza or any other common virus. If left to itself it would kill, most likely, millions in the US alone. That's not millions who were going to die anyway, it is millions of avoidable deaths with 10's of millions of years of life extinguished.
The sociopathic narcissism of individuals who feel like that's fine as long as they personally don't feel at risk, which this exchange typifies, is deplorable.
A vaccine. This may well happen in under a year. How much of a difference this makes will depend on the efficacy of a vaccine and how many people get it.
Improved treatments. Some experts seem optimistic about monoclonal antibodies. Cost, production, and ability to administer early enough in the course of the disease are still unknown.
Living in a country that is actually suppressing the disease. Countries that have competently managed COVID-19 are not on a course that will eventually infect a large fraction of the population. It seems likely that if all countries were this competent, then COVID-19 could be eradicated without a vaccine.
> As of May 1, 23,430 people are estimated to have died out of a total population of 8,398,748 in New York City. This corresponds to a 0.28% crude mortality rate to date, or 279 deaths per 100,000 population, or 1 death every 358 people. Note that the Crude Mortality Rate will continue to increase as more infections and deaths occur (see notes under the paragraph "Herd Immunity" below for details).
From a Google search of “Covid mortality rate”. As a healthy person, I would remain comfortable even if the death rate is substantially higher under the assumption that one can’t self quarantine forever and infection is inevitable.
"Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) = Deaths / Cases = 23,430 / 1,694,781 = 1.4% (1.4% of people infected with SARS-CoV-2 have a fatal outcome, while 98.6% recover)"
So 1.4%, about 4.67 times higher than what you say.
That said I may have misunderstood so corrections welcome.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/well/live/putting-the-ris... (New York Times: Putting the Risk of Covid-19 in Perspective)
She said: "We are seeing that patients are suffering from moderate to severe acute kidney injury in about 20-30% of patients and 30% of patients who are admitted to intensive care for Covid infection are requiring dialysis so the numbers are much bigger than we envisaged based on the data coming out of China." (published May 2nd)
It's not die-or-recover-completely.
I’m unwilling to live in my home as if it’s a moon base until a vaccine is developed, which could be 6-18 months from now, but as I mention elsewhere in this thread I wear a mask whenever I’m in public (to prevent impacting others if I happen to be a carrier but am asymptomatic). If you’re concerned for my health, appreciate it, but we’re all dead eventually.
You mention in another comment that you do wear a mask. Are there other things you would do if they were simple and were likely to, if done by a statistically substantial number of people, save lives?
Getting people to wear masks (not even all the time everywhere, just in public buildings/crowds) and stay home when they are obviously sick will make a huge difference, but we as a country seem to have said "fuck it, that's too hard".
Avoid dense crowds.
Etc.
How about temperature checks after potential exposure?
I also think you are missing my point. I'm not trying to enumerate all the possibilities, I'm pointing to there being quite a lot of options between quarantine and going back to life the way it was. If we talk about things like concerts being choices, more people look at them that way. If we figure out the small mitigations that make the biggest difference and get them widely adopted, everybody wins.
(note that we are on equal footing here, asserting opinions, I just did it more curtly)
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-do-so-many-americans-r...
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/05/masks-coronaviru...
My favorite, from a Costco:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/i-woke-up-in-a-free-countr...
> “I got every f—ing right to not wear a mask,” he said. “This isn’t about wearing a mask, it’s about control. I’m not the f—ing sheep ... I was one of the only people in that store not wearing a mask.”
The mistake you might make is to assume that this feeling is held by a single person. The data indicates there is a broad contingent of citizens who adhere to these views, therefore your suggestion (“If we figure out the small mitigations that make the biggest difference and get them widely adopted, everybody wins.”) would “impose on their freedoms”, making broad scale implementation untenable.
The first step to change is to want it. That some people in 10 and 20 years will still look back wistfully at the Trump years is disappointing, but it's no reason to give up on changing things that need changing.
And one thing that is worth considering is to work on the change so that it has happened, in whatever amount it has happened, if/when a more difficult pandemic comes along, one where analyzing your own fate doesn't leave you feeling comfortable.
I've been scheduled for an implant for ~4 months now, and waiting for things to calm down before getting it done - but it's not exactly "elective" - there are serious health consequences of not getting the work done - it will be more painful and more expensive the longer I wait. So I get to balance increased pain with increased risk of infectious disease. Compared to most things, it's absolutely a legitimate barometer of how safe I feel doing the riskiest activities _that I have to do_.
So, yes, it's a risk but it seems a reasonable calculated one. Others may of course disagree.
That's what "elective" means. Planned in advance, non-emergency.
“I’m obsessed with dentists because, if the only thing we’re doing is putting the economy on pause, and then going back to normal, all of them should be coming back,” Ms. Stevenson said. “We’re not really recovered until all the dentists are back to work.”
For these groups, Coronavirus might be a death sentence.