Experts warn parts of U.S. on verge of being overwhelmed by Covid-19 resurgence
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You wouldn't know it looking at the media.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/04/09/830664814/fauci-says-u-s-coro...
In fact, I'd take this as evidence that quarantine might have been a mistake.
Have a look at this - https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus...
Suppose that we quarantine people for longer while a vaccine is found, and suppose this vaccine is fairly effective. Presently there are 120,000 deaths. Who knows what this number will rise to. This number is already with some quarantine measurements in place.
If a vaccine is not found, you're bound to have a catastrophe on your hands. So let's hope that one is found so that we can resume things in some "normal" way again.
Whether or not you quarantined, the economy would collapse because you would have a massive death toll and paranoia throughout the country. People would stop going out, they would stop spending money and they would hunker down regardless. Economic turmoil is a positive feedback loop. The coronavirus or the quarantine are just the triggers for it to begin. This cannot be overstated.
At least with a vaccine, you can get out of this by the skin of your teeth and reduce the over all deaths. So no, I don't think that quarantining to save lives is the "cure is worse than the disease" scenario. The economy would have collapsed regardless.
Citation needed. Plenty of economies have dealt with mass death and gotten along fine. This particular threat is also largely centered on the elderly who are, in coldly economic viewpoints, drains on the economy rather than contributors.
I don't particularly think the quarantine was a mistake, but you have to acknowledge that it is a gamble. Betting policy on a miracle vaccine is a bad idea. They might not work, or they might be short lived. Turning the economy on and off with lifted and then reinstated lockdowns is a bad idea.
There are several promising vaccines that are already fairly far along in development. One of them (the Sinovac vaccine candidate) is going into Phase III trials as we speak.
Throwing away hundreds of thousands of lives when a vaccine might be available within months is just a terribly cold-hearted thing to do. Add to that the fact that many countries have now suppressed the epidemic and have partially reopened, and the US response to the pandemic makes even less sense.
>> Whether or not you quarantined, the economy would collapse because you would have a massive death toll and paranoia throughout the country.
Lol, what? 1/3rd of the covid deaths have been nursing-home patients. Covid basically doubles your odds of dying in a given year. So it'd be like 2 years worth of people died in 1 year (and importantly, mostly retired people), so no, not a societal collapse.
And you should be ashamed of your self-righteous and dishonest argument style.
These things are NOT the entire economy, and large parts of the economy will continue with people avoiding these types of enviornments.
The cost is due to officials using a crisis to benefit themselves. Only people should be bailed out. Let the free market take care of companies that have leveraged themselves off the cliff.
Tyranny is where you restrict the movement of healthy ones.
Except they didn't really restrict those kinds of people completely, right? All those exceptions to the rules of people who didn't have to quarantine, irregardless of whether they may be a carrier.
The origin of the word is quarantena, Venetian for "40 days", the period of time a ship suspected of carrying disease had to wait outside the harbor.
Only about half of a percent of them.
It was a stupid thing to do on both sides, but now it's political and there's no going back.
And also realise that what you're saying is that you advocate for a modeled 2 million deaths.
So far as I know, there's no evidence that now that quarantine is over the same number of people aren't going to get it anyways and the deaths will be equal.
Quarantine may be over in some places but strong restrictions are still exist in many. Which is more evidence for why pandemic response should have a top down coordination team.
Deaths may equal out to worst case predictions, in which case all of America failed.
Early lifting of the lockdown combined with things like people unwilling to wear masks and social distance themselves is going to render the benefits of the lockdown useless. America wasted the quarantine. The last few months have been rendered meaningless. That's not the case in other first world countries.
Which is why we build models.
Do you take into consideration how our reaction to the disease might affect us on a more global scale? Because I wonder if people who had the same thought about banning all travel to/from China will have the same consistent viewpoint when it becomes banning all travelers from the US.
The US literally can't do testing and tracing to save their own lives. Yet people still pretend otherwise, like the tulip or bitcoin manias.
2) What is your alternative? The US lost to mother nature.
Not all diseases provide immunity forever.
This is not true, nor a generally good guideline to think about things. Coronaviruses generally confer short immunity periods.
> 2) What is your alternative? The US lost to mother nature.
In the very least, being aware that long term herd immunity is not a viable goal.
would the common cold be a good example? the common cold is caused by a few different coronaviruses, and it's not uncommon for people to get a cold at least once a year or even multiple times a year.
I'm being sardonic here because you have a severe misunderstanding of how immunity and our immune system actually works. Some diseases (like the chicken pox) we never truly beat, it just becomes latent. Other diseases we only become briefly immune.
Each flu season, a new strain appears.
Get your facts straight.
I, for one, am hopeful that we can get through this without that many deaths.
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/studies-report-ra...
HN readers: there is no conclusive science behind anything reported about COVID-19.
Also, lockdown just kicks the can down the road in the US. Even welding doors shut like in Wuhan just means the epidemic continues after the lockdown ends. Ad nauseum until herd immunity.
> HN readers: there is no conclusive science behind anything reported about COVID-19.
America's lack of testing is like Bitcoin? What an amusing and irrelevant example.
Even if there was a vaccine tomorrow, there's a lot of anti-vaxers in this country.
Instead, we have the opposite: everyone goes into lockdown, the nursing homes are ravaged, and there is no additional support for high risk people. The many high-risk people I know personally (diabetics, older people, people with lung conditions, heart conditions) will get asked to go back to work in the next couple of weeks, and none had any help isolating or buying groceries, and were barely able to isolate at all during the last few months.
I could lose a lot of friends and family over the next year because they have almost zero support, but thank goodness all the healthy people couldn't go to restaurants for 2-3 months.
Unpopular opinion, so downvote away. Nevermind that 96% of hospitalizations in new york were with patients with preexisting conditions that put them at higher risk, it goes against the trending opinion
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/health/coronavirus-patien...
Having healthy people isolated is not about protecting the healthy people. It's about stopping the healthy people from spreading the disease to the high-risk people.