Hacker News Reader

Comment by oramit | Hacker News Reader

What we currently have going on right now is a complete collapse in confidence. So many commenters are debating the death rate, case counts, hospitalizations, etc, which is all besides the point.

Heres the thing: even if you believe people are being irrationally afraid, telling people they are stupid and should just suck it up isn't going to get people to cooperate. Do you want to be smugly right, or do you want things to actually get better? People are scared, that's just a fact, and they need to feel confident that action is being taken in their best interest. Telling people that only 1% of them will die so it's all okay is telling people you don't care about them - they notice, they're not dumb.

We all know that this is an exceptional event and that there will be missteps. People will forgive mistakes and setbacks and take on more risk if they are confident that there is a plan - but so far there isn't one. We're almost six months into this and the messaging is still chaos. The lack of a national strategy is what is causing this pandemic to worsen. The rot really does start at the top.

The United States is currently choosing the worst possible combination of options. We locked down - causing enormous financial damage, but we didn't follow through with the lockdown nationally to actually stomp the virus. So we get to have the deaths and have the financial damage as well. Yay us!

View on HN

“What we currently have going on right now is a complete collapse in confidence. So many commenters are debating the death rate, case counts, hospitalizations, etc, which is all besides the point.“

That’s what happens when political parties and now the president and his administration are spreading misinformation as long it helps their short term needs. Nobody believes anything anymore. I am already worried about the election. No matter the result, a significant part of the population will most likely not trust the results. I don’t think a country can survive such distrust without significant damage to its institutions.

They will trust it if Fox News/OAN reports it. And that remains to be seen.

It's not the case. This is clear because lots of countries are having problems with teaching unions refusing to go back to work, but only one country has Trump.

There's a lot of evidence teachers aren't actually afraid, but rather, are in hock to hyper-aggressive unions. They have been paid to not work. They can keep being paid to not work. Why would they work?

To go back to the US context, there's now a teaching union in LA that's refusing to go back post-COVID until their demands are met. Their demands include .... defunding the police. Obviously.

http://www.montereycountyweekly.com/news/state/la-teachers-u...

(The Center Square) – One of the largest teachers unions in the state of California, the United Teachers Los Angeles with 35,000 members, says public schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District should not reopen if certain policies are not implemented on the state and national level, including defunding the police and implementing Medicare for All

This isn't a COVID problem. This is a political problem.

I followed this link which contained the blurb about “defunding the police...” to the next link and read the summary of the actual research paper from the teachers union.

Nowhere in that summary does it mention any demands wrt defunding the police or Medicare for all.

Your comment prompted me to read the actual "research paper", vs the press article.

The article is correct. The paper is filled with hyper-leftist demands. You read the summary, not the actual paper.

Here are some quotes:

[we demand] "Explicit plans to carry out health and safety protocols without resorting to punitive policing and punishment"

"No standardized testing infringing on instructional time"

In the section about federal funding:

"Medicare for All: Coronavirus shows definitively why we need Medicare For All."

"Wealth Tax: A new tax on unrealized capital gains to California billionaires only, 1% a year until capital gains taxes are met. This would generate an estimated $10 billion a year initially"

"Defund Police: Police violence is a leading cause of death and trauma for Black people, and is a serious public health and moral issue.65 We must shift the astronomical amount of money devoted to policing, to education and other essential needs such as housing and public health"

It says:

"Because of the forces of structural racism, Blacks, Latinx, and Pacific Islanders in Los Angeles County are dying of COVID-19 at twice the rate of white residents"

"Meanwhile, U.S. billionaire wealth has surged by more than $584 billion. Over 150 of those billionaires live in California. There is money to safely restart schools, if federal, state, and local governments are willing to finally prioritize pupils over plutocrats."

"No matter the scenario in August, it’s clear that it will not be a “normal” school year. But when “normal” means deep race and class fissures that result in increased infection and death rates in Black, Brown, and high-poverty communities; when “normal” means increasing police budgets even as schools, libraries, and public health face catastrophic cuts; when “normal” means corporations receiving trillions in bailout funds as federal commitments to support special education and high-poverty students remain unfulfilled; when “normal” means working families lining up for miles for food banks while US billionaires increased their wealth by over $584 billion — it is clear that going back to normal is not an option. This crisis presents an opportunity to create a new normal."

Has America swung that far to the right? Those demands sound to me pretty rational... How come are they hyper-leftists? What's your definition of left?

I'm not American. Beyond all the "structural racism" junk, shifting all the police funding to education sounds like a pretty hard left suggestion to me, as does abolition of standardised testing i.e. accountability of teachers.

The naked hatred of wealthy people visible in that document is also very left. Really, just read the whole thing. If it doesn't seem hyper leftist to you, that probably just means you're far to the left ;)

I'm very pleased by the decision from the top in California today about keeping schools remote until things get better. The only complaint I have is how long it took to get there. Tons of people at hundreds/thousands of school districts and private schools throughout the state have spent incredible effort debating and planning and so much effort could have been saved if the decision from the top was made earlier.

I share your pleasure in the decision, but staunchly disagree with you about the method used to reach it.

The correct decision was reached, in time (before the start of the school year) for it to make a difference.

Tons of people and thousands of schools vigorously debating is the democratic process. A decision handed down from "the top" is authoritarianism, and as we've seen repeatedly this year, authoritarian decisions are resisted even when they're the right decision.

For something like masking, you can justify it with the urgency of the situation (even though I'm compelled to add that "the top" got this one wrong during the crucial months of February and March). For starting school in the fall, you can't.

I think you are at least a bit misconstruing direct democracy vs representative democracy and instead calling it democracy vs authoritarianism.

The people handing down the aforementioned decisions were elected specifically to do things like this. That doesn't outright make it authoritarianism. (Yes, most elected US politicians on both sides of the aisle skew fairly authoritarian, but that doesn't mean the process itself is authoritarian)

This is at most a conflation, not a misconstrual.

I prefer to think of these words as points in a spectrum, rather than definitional prisons with tight boundaries.

Allowing school districts to do what they are constituted to do, is more democratic than delegating it to the State governments, which is more authoritarian.

Authoritarian is also not an antonym of democratic. They correlate, but not as strongly as any advocate for democracy would prefer.

> A decision handed down from "the top" is authoritarianism

Actually not so; it is only centralised. The democratic process is pretty clear that the people want education decisions handed down by an authority "at the top".

A decentralised approach to eduction would let parents make on-the-day decisions about where to send their children and probably have some sort of market-based approach to how education was funded (maybe even parent-pays). That approach has been mostly rejected politically.

The vigorous debating resulted in many school districts actually making plans to reopen in a variety of ways. All that effort became moot when Newsom announced his decision today.

I don't share your admiration for "the top".

Why do you believe keeping schools closed is better than reopening? Have you looked into the research? Most of my findings indicate that the benefits of opening safely outweigh the the risks and the adverse effects of school closure (to the children, families and society) outweigh the benefits.

Just one quote out of many:

> Weighing the health risks of reopening K-12 schools in fall 2020 against the educational risks of providing no in-person instruction, school districts should prioritize reopening schools full time, especially for grades K-5 and students with special needs, according to a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

https://www.nationalacademies.org/news/2020/07/schools-shoul...

https://www.mathematica.org/commentary/reopening-schools-whi...

https://jamanetwork.com/channels/health-forum/fullarticle/27...

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/07/18/the-risks-of-ke...

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...

https://globalhealth.washington.edu/sites/default/files/COVI...

Edit: I realize this is a contentious topic. I'm definitely not trying to stir up political wars here. I'm submitting my question and research findings here because I trust this place for civil and intellectual discourse.

That's not research. That's opinion pieces from research organizations. There's a question of values, which is a personal question. I don't want the moral weight of risking that my child catch COVID19 and cause someone else to die.

If I were a teacher, I wouldn't want to be in a position where a mistake I make can make people die.

I can run the numbers as well as the next guy, and I know the risks. I don't want my schools to reopen. If you're from a different culture, you can run the same numbers, get the same risk profile, and say "Heck, if n people die to keep m more kids in school, that's worth it," for the exact same values of n and m.

On questions of values and culture, reasonable people can disagree. Every fiber of my being can scream to prioritize life, and every fiber of your being can scream to prioritize schooling. It's entirely a question of values and culture.

As a footnote, my concern is less about death and more about long-term disability. There, we can more-or-less speculate about the risks.

I agree that a large part of it is a personal/cultural decision. I wouldn't frame it as pro reopening school people prioritize schooling over life though. That sounds pretty bad and doesn't seem fair.

Whenever I get into a car and drive, I risk death and injury to myself, my passengers and other people on the road.

I weigh the risks and benefits and make a decision that driving is worth the risk. Does that mean I value the convenience of driving over life? I don't think so.

And for the record. I'm actually undecided on the issue of reopening schools. Like many people, I assumed not reopening was obviously the rational and sane choice. But when I looked into it, I found differing data and opinions from scientific sources so it made me reconsider.

I don't see it that way. I think my language was neutral.

Your statement: "I wouldn't frame it as pro reopening school people prioritize schooling over life though. That sounds pretty bad and doesn't seem fair" takes a very specific cultural frame as well.

Plenty of people choose to risk their lives (or the lives of others) for all sorts of causes. I have as well. This statement sounds bad only if you take the position that staying alive trumps all other considerations. That's a very modern, Western perspective. Which is not to say Americans and Western Europeans act to protect lives at all costs, but to slightly generalize, Americans and Western Europeans morally believe that protecting lives is worth all costs. When that's not done, that's a moral compromise.

People risk lives to volunteer in dangerous countries, to skydive, for ideological causes, for God and country, to be #1 in athletics competitions, or to earn enough to feed their families. All of those reflect different value systems. The exact same statement: "Would you risk you life to protect your honor by ____?" will make you sound like a horrible person if you say "yes" in some cultures and "no" in others.

I don't think saying "I am glad to risk a few lives to make sure kids get an education" sound bad or seems unfair, and I don't think any less of people who say it. It's just a different value system from mine.

Where I do have problems is where people push their value system on others. I understand see the public health perspective, where your actions affect my health and my decisions affect your health.

But when my actions don't effect you (for example, keeping my child home), I should be able to follow my values. That goes broadly too -- if you decide not to teach your kids evolution, that should be your choice too.

It's not really a question of values because depending on what the actual death rate actually is, you can make informed objectionable decisions based off of it that two rational people with different values should agree upon. For example, if you determined that the risk of death from Covid was less than the risk of death from driving in a year, than I would argue that you should accept that risk if you're okay with driving.

Basically, in order to be rational, you should be willing to accept the risk of dying from Covid if it is less than something else you do that is more risky on a daily basis. So the idea that it is a question of morality and differing opinions of N and M isn't really accurate. It's also why we compare death rates from Covid to Influenza and other diseases because we need to understand just how big of a risk to society it actually is to properly weigh our response.

People make different decisions there too. Some drive recklessly, and some are super-conservative, exactly because of values.

But rationally, you wouldn't make determinations like the ones you're making. False->True isn't a helpful argument. COVID19 isn't the flu, and it isn't driving. Unfortunately, COVID is very, very dangerous, both in terms of death and in terms of long-term disability.

America has already lost more than the combat deaths of WWI and Vietnam combined, and that's with the level of shutdowns we've had. Many of the people who live seem to have horrible symptoms for months; it's too early to know long-term outcomes. In New York, 7.5% of the people who we know caught it died. You can apply whatever corrections you like for underreporting, etc. (and conversely, people who haven't died yet) but the death rate doesn't approach that of the flus or of driving.

If 20 million weren't unemployed, we didn't have achievement gaps, and the nation wasn't saddled with crippling fixed costs like debt, leases, and rents, we'd all be staying home. As is, it's a question of values.

> Most of my findings indicate that the benefits of opening safely outweigh the the risks and the adverse effects of school closure (to the children, families and society) outweigh the benefits.

Did you read the original-original comment? This is exactly what they're talking about man

But he's making the decision for all of California. If you look at the actual data, it appears that most of the cases are coming from southern california. Also, the real data to look at is death rate, and hospitalization rate. I don't know about the death rate, but the hospitalization rate is definitely going up. However, nearly all of the patients are in southern california again. In fact, it's LA that's really the epicenter of death and hospitalization for california.

Here's the hospitalization link I'm using, because there might be better data somewhere else.

https://public.tableau.com/views/COVID-19HospitalsDashboard/...

It's easy to be consumed by the fear about this disease, and that the number of cases that are rising. But we have to be careful to make informed decisions, and not compromise student learning in the entire state due to rising cases in one part of the state.

One thing, is it looks a bit like the hospitalizations might be starting to slightly level off, but it's hard to tell since it still could be trending upwards. At the very least, it doesn't look like the cases are on any kind of exponential curve.

I’m not, California should have got its shit together and instituted comprehensive tracking and tracing commensurate with the needs of public education restarting. By failing to build testing and tracing capacity we have wasted the time bought for us through mass unemployment. California is the 5th largest economy in the world, we could have done this alone and ignored the rest of the us, but we didn’t and that is a failure.

> we didn't follow through with the lockdown nationally to actually stomp the virus

This statement implies that there's a way to completely eradicate the virus, eg. if everyone in the world stays locked in their homes for 6 weeks, then the virus will be eradicated. That's not realistic, the level of coordination required to make that happen does not exist.

So eradicating the virus was never on the table, no matter how much we lock down.

But if everyone had stayed locked in for 6 weeks and if that had prevented 50000 deaths, how is that not worth it?

I'm not sure if it's worth it or not, but after you end the lockdown, you have the same situation you did at the start of the lockdown.

I think there's a huge misconception in many media sources that lockdown will somehow eliminate the virus. It can change the onset pattern of the virus, but that's it.

It's amazing to wonder whether any step, any inconvenience is worth saving even lives when the magnitude of that is in the thousands. Countries have literally been bombed over far fewer deaths.

Such a good point. Ppl really do not seem to understand this.

> Countries have literally been bombed over far fewer deaths.

This virus, itself, isn't anti-American or "terrorist" enough for the U.S. to wage war against, yet it's far deadlier.

Even if the US is in the same situation now as we were at the start of the SIP orders in March, given that many other advanced countries have the virus under control, we should have an easier time getting materials and equipment to deal with the virus now.

Plus we have more evidence to base our decisions on. We can look at specific other countries and see what works, assuming people don't turn it into politics like they did with masks. It's really sad that some people believe wearing a cloth mask decreases your blood oxygen saturation, regardless of their education or previous interactions with doctors/dentists/etc that already wore masks on a regular basis pre-pandemic.

One of the main points of the lockdowns were to get the infection rate down to a level where testing and tracing is tractable, not to outright eliminate the virus necessarily. It seems like most states in the US were not prepared for that when they decided to open back up, and now places like FL are in this impossible situation — how do you trace 10k+ infections a day?

Especially if it takes a week to get a test result.

The way that tracing was presented bred a lot of mistrust at least in the midwest.

How could that possibly have happened? Food needs to be planted, harvested(in many situations primarily by migratory workers from other countries) and delivered, power needs to be kept up, necessary medical supplies needs manufactoring, water needs to be cleaned and delivered. There's no scenario where the world gets to collectively take a break

Right, but the world could have refrained from partying on the beaches [1]

[1] - https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2020/07/16/vacati...

Did beaches make a difference? They did that in Florida during spring break in March, but Florida has low cases until just recently.

Weren't the spring breakers mostly from out of state?

They could have also refrained from protesting and rioting over a demonstrably false narrative of death-by-police.

And beer must be drank "Bar lives matters", as Austin Texas bar owner said.

It depends on the denominator. There is no free lunch. If there is an estimate for death prevention, what is the estimated cost in lives?

Given that death is a certainty for all, how many lost person-days do the 50k deaths represent? Since the lock down means no normal activities such as routine doctor visits, how many person-days would be lost due to undetected illness or delayed treatment?

Staying locked in is a strategy for preventing excess deaths from overwhelming a health system. It isn't a long term strategy for eliminating all virus related death.

Here's the other side - How many deaths are acceptable? If death is a certainty for all, should we just get rid of the health care systems? Should we stop research into some of the diseases? Which ones? How many person-days/productivity has been lost because of preventable deaths?

We are talking about a 4/6/8 week lockdown, that's not long term, that's immediate term.

No, no, please don’t waste time constructing persons of straw. One insinuating that my position is “get rid of healthcare” is especially odious since the counterfactual I raised was one considering impacts of preventative care missed due to lockdowns. You made a rhetorical claim: “locked in for 6 weeks and if that had prevented 50000 deaths, how is that not worth it?”

How do you know if it is worth it or not if you don’t know the cost of being locked in for 6 weeks? Ignoring the other track doesn’t seem a path to a well considered decision.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

So you make an exception for essential services, and count health care as an essential service. Tune the lock down so that it makes sense.

If you're talking about US, that's 275,688 person days in lockdown per death prevented, although that seems so extreme I'm afraid my math is off.

Is this a serious question?

But if everyone had of x for y weeks and that prevented z deaths, how is that not worth it?

x=stopped driving y=52 z=34,000

x=not gone skiing y=4 months z=41

I'm not sure where the line is, but there are a number of things we could ban to lower the death rate. That doesn't mean I disagree with your assessment, but I'm just not sure I have any logical cut off point for what I would support and what I wouldn't other than just the way it feels looking at the numbers and how much it inconveniences me personally. (And I happen to like lockdown...)

Complete eradication is not what Europe nor China are doing and have better results.

This. And maybe we shouldn't trust China's reported data, but Europe is almost doing miraculously well if you compare to the USA. Not going for eradication, but containment.

With containment, everything else is possible (healthcare system not overloaded, economy can be opened up, schools can reopen, etc.).

The US has capitulated completely, and even containment isn't really on the table nationally; on a state-by-state basis, some states may achieve a level of containment, but others are simply not even trying (or like Georgia, actively banning containment measures like local mask enforcement orders).

Where in the US is the health care system overwhelmed?

Right now, I'm aware of problems in Texas. Don't know how widespread or if other states are, though.

Texas https://www.texastribune.org/2020/07/14/texas-hospitals-coro...

Arizona https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-health/20...

Florida https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/10/florida-coro...

Georgia https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...

> but Europe is almost doing miraculously well if you compare to the USA.

This is totally at odds with the data. The UK, France, Spain, and Italy, among others, have higher deaths per capita than the US.

Older populations?

That helps, but at least for Spain and Italy, the hypothesis seems to be that the virus was already widely spread by the time lock-down started, so a lot of transmission still happened during lock-down until it got under control. I think it's the same for UK and France. but I'm less familiar.

Other EU countries like Germany, Austria or Poland fared much better than Spain, France, UK and Italy.

Maybe different cultures (e.g. how people relate, how compliant they are, how many people willingly ignore measures, etc.) also play a role.

Providing a source to confirm your statement: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...

IMO, the US will almost certainly make up a lot of ground on the deaths per capita metric (or leapfrog entirely), given the explosion of new cases starting in June and the lagging growth in deaths that comes after cases. Scroll down to the "Deaths" section with the weekly per capita "heat spectrum" of sorts, and the US recently has reached red hot over the past few weeks, while European counterparts have been much cooler: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/world/coronavirus-m...

The main thing Europe is doing, is border lockdowns. Some borders are open, but in general only those to countries with low Covid cases. Other travelers get quarantine, policed to various degrees.

All of this is completely unworkable in the US.

It's not really clear they are having better results. I don't know what the numbers are out of China, but certainly in Europe they had really big outbreaks in Italy, France, the UK, Spain, and other places as well. Their outcomes are pretty similar, in terms of deaths per capita, to the United States.

I think most media outlets are over-emphasizing the impact of government interventions, and under-emphasizing the impact of other factors that affect the severity of the virus. These could be factors like the health of the population--do they have a lot of smokers? obesity?, the age of the population, or other factors like the use of public transit.

It's appealing to assume that the most important factor in deciding outcomes is government policy. This is reassuring because we (society) can control government policy. But I haven't seen any good data to suggest that government policy is the most impactful factor compared to other hypotheses.

No place in the world is handling this as poorly as we have. Well.. maybe Brazil?

What about Iran?

The US has higher case and death counts than Iran, both in absolute terms as well as per-capita. The US also looks to be on a worse trajectory.

Yeah, based on the self reported numbers out of Iran, which you can trust about as much as you can their state news agency on any number of topics. Let’s not forget they were simultaneously denying the virus’ prevalence while their political leaders were dropping like flies and they were digging mass graves that could be seen from space.

With the White House issuing orders for hospitals to report directly to them instead of the CDC, I'm not sure how long we'll be able to trust the US numbers.

Iran managed to get over a first wave, but they had to re-open prematurely because their economy is in the toilet partially due to economic sanctions.

The same thing is experienced in Turkey without economic sanctions...

> Their outcomes are pretty similar, in terms of deaths per capita, to the United States.

Except that they are all now on downward trajectories while being more open (as opposed to the US, which is on an upward trajectory). Travel is allowed in Europe. Schools are open. Bars are open. And they are still on a downward trajectory.

And furthermore, there are locations in the United States that have handled the virus pretty well and are powerless to stop people from coming up there and messing it all up.

“Mike, from Old Town, who did not want to share his last name, ordered a vodka Red Bull before getting back in line with friends at Old Crow Smokehouse’s curbside bar. He had just gotten back from a vacation in Dallas, Texas, with a friend, where he left a day early due to the spike in cases and the state’s rolling back on its openings.

“[It feels] like I’m the problem,” he said with a nervous laugh as he talked about being out and about amid the pandemic. Looking around at the throngs of people drinking and walking around Wrigleyville, he said it is concerning.”

What the hell are we supposed to do about that with zero national plan? All the local shutdowns in the world are useless unless we can put the interstate commerce clause on hold for a bit.

The one national level thing Trump could and should have done, but didn’t, is ban international and interstate travel.

> What the hell are we supposed to do about that with zero national plan?

Looking at California, a state where borders are mostly in remote areas that aren't especially porous (compared to NYC/NJ), there's still be a huge surge, and nothing points to borders being the reason. It's mostly state and county-level policy. States around NYC seem to have stomped it down relatively well, despite there being three states involved.

The US is huge and diverse, so you're not going to get a "national plan." The best you can hope for is guidance.

> as opposed to the US, which is on an upward trajectory

You have the wrong scale in mind. The US is closer to the EU than a single country here - individual states have totally different trajectories. For example, Illinois, where I am, looks like those European countries that were hit hard early and is also opening up.

Except that big outbreaks were used as learning experience by other places who managed to contain issue before it became big and are opening now. While having enough testing capacitiy and experimenting with exact rules that allow them to open up.

It appears to have worked for New Zealand, though notably, not anywhere else, even Australia.

So you can argue that it was infeasible, and I would have to agree with you. But you can't argue it was impossible.

Island.

Yes, exactly.

But Australia is also an island, in the relevant sense for this discussion, and didn't succeed in eradication.

Hawaii also had considerable success, albeit recently undermined. Much to my chagrin, since I live here.

My conclusion is that eradicating this virus is very difficult, even with all the advantages.

But again, not impossible.

Australia's is an interesting case because the recent spike coincides (~2 week lag) with the lifting of most of the restrictions. It's also only really spiking in one state (although NSW may be slipstreaming Victoria).

This is evidence that the lockdown rules were having a significant effect on suppression, and eradication may have been within reach had the easing been delayed another month or two.

Adding an Australian perspective here. Our politicians did not share the same approach as New Zealand (which started with a level 4 lockdown and stayed there for 6-8 weeks). The approach here has certainly been more unified than the US, but states are encouraged to pursue their own approaches, with some states (WA, SA, Queensland) having much more success than others (NSW, Victoria). The plan here was never to pursue eradication, but to flatten the curve and keep infection rates manageable. I wish we'd considered eradication more seriously. As a country we have the resources to support the country through that 6 week period, and the national government would have done a decent enough job in ensuring the population had sufficient support through that period.

Sorry is the implication that the US is in the state it’s in because infected people are continuously walking across the border and infecting more people?

If no, then being an island isn’t really relevant here.

I invite you to spend some time with Hawaii's COVID statistics before coming to the conclusion that being an island, or not, is irrelevant to US outcomes.

https://www.hawaiidata.org/covid19

No, it’s because 100 different people (according to genetic studies) started separate chains of infections in New York City due to international travel, immediately overwhelming any efforts to do contact tracing.

Vietnam. Long border with China, two million people cross every year, population of 95 million, zero covid deaths because they got serious early and everyone more masks.

There is absolutely no chance that they had 0 covid related deaths anywhere in the country of 95 million. None. Not to say that they didn’t act well and where prepared though.

Perhaps not, but Western reporters have confirmed that they're not noticeable problems at all.

Not infeasible no, I agree.

But, if you want to know what draconian policy really is, you can look at NZ. That place is no joke. It's state-managed isolation or a quarantine facility for at least 14 days and until you test negative.

There are a bunch of reports of people breaking out of these facilities after having been there for more than a month. Just zero chance this would work in America.

Thats overstating it a little. or even a lot.

Nobody has been in those places for more than a month, its 2 weeks.

The 'escapees' so far have been an alcoholic (went to the nearest bottle store) and a couple of people with mental issues.

The REASON those people escaped is because the places aren't prisons, or even close. They were hotels, high quality hotels in some places...with no police presence at all...

There was a bunch of fuss made by the public because it was eventually realised that people were being allowed out without testing to attend funerals under a compassionate exemption.

Your description makes it sound like something very different to the reality.

Its toughening up a little now, because everyone in NZ wanted them to toughen up, but for a long while the reality was that all you had to do to leave was decide that you wanted to leave.

Most people didn't, of course, because most people aren't dicks.

I actually chose stomp over eradicate because I wanted to imply that there would still be some left but that it would be a manageable amount. That's interesting that you took it the opposite way; I'm sorry for the confusion.

I agree, eradication was probably impossible in the United States. What I thought we all agreed on at the start of this thing was to lock down so we could "flatten the curve". Remember that? While we were locked down there would be an enormous marshaling of resources so we could equip everyone with PPE/Masks, get testing going, and do contract tracing. But because we didn't lock down the entire nation we snuffed out the hot spots in Washington and New York but let new ones fester and they are now out of control.

We didn't snuff out hot spots. The virus was/is still in NYC and Washington. No matter how long we locked down for it would still be there waiting to emerge after the lock down ended. That was the problem with the lockdown. It was touted as a solution when its just a delaying tactic.

Schools are the same. Keeping them closed is just a delaying tactic. And like the lockdown, unless we delay until a vaccine then it's a pointless delay.

I don't remember lockdowns being touted as a solution. I always understood it as a delaying tactic so things could be brought back under some control. Flatten the curve and all that. NYC didn't eliminate the virus but they've kept their curve flat so it's not getting out of control again.

This delaying tactic is all we have for right now, its likely saved thousands of lives, and that's not nothing. What is your plan for the next stage?

It's not clear what the impact of the lockdowns are. You say that they've saved thousands, but in a lot of places we are back to where we were before the lockdown. Or even doing worse. I suspect that the lockdowns delayed deaths, but in most places will not have substantially reduced them.

The plan for the next stage is all of the public health measures that other countries have used to contain it. Masks, hygiene, social distancing, contact tracing, etc.

At this point we know how to stop it. Compliance is not there and every day that passes it goes down.

You’re right, that was all we could arrive at at the time. We don’t have the plan that says test everyone once a week, support the folks who need to quarantine as a result, and really fence this off for 3 months til it’s down to little pockets. We don’t have a plan that says follow the regions, the counties, the communities, and work hardest on suppressing it where it was and where it was heading.

We did choose a bad option, now people who’ve been locked down are exhausted and ornery while the ones who didn’t are finally getting the idea.

And for some reason “no shirt no shoes no service” is well understood, no blowing secondhand smoke is accepted all over, but the right to infect is held as culturally important.

What are you suggesting is a delaying tactic? What is the thing being delayed?

The delaying was so that we 'delayed' or avoided overfilling the hospitals and causing a lot of secondary death and damage. Delay people getting sick, reduce the max. Spread the infections out over time.

I don't think that's necessarily what the person I replied to is talking about, given their language, which is why I asked.

Well if you take eradication off the table, then you have to assume the entire susceptible population will eventually get the virus. So I guess, I don't see the benefit of "stomping" the virus down to some small level. It was at a very small level back in February, and then grew. If we get it back down to that small level, it will just grow again. There's no benefit to locking down for 3 months to have it grow in July instead of March.

A controlled burn approach makes a lot more sense, but that is not the same as "stomping" the virus.

If you stomp it down enough then a few relatively light measures (masks, some distancing, some contact tracing) are enough to keep it down. That's what's happening in Europe right now. Sure, eventually everyone would be infected at least once given infinite time. But that doesn't matter, what matters is how many people get infected before a vaccine is developed and widely deployed.

Effective testing and contact tracing is sufficient to dramatically reduce the spread of the virus.

If we're a year away from a vaccine or treatment, then we don't need to burn down society to stop it this month. But if we act in a way that causes millions of infections, we're inflicting unnecessary harm on thousands.

We've also learned more about how to keep people alive and how to slow the spread of the virus since February, so it's useful to postpone that exponential growth as long as possible.

If you keep the infection rate low enough you can keep the hospitals from being over capacity and also delay infections until after a vaccine is developed and administered, thus preventing the infection. Both of these states would have the benefit of reducing the total number of deaths. When the lockdown talk started, I thought that was the point.

Time does wonders. We have much better knowledge of treatment options than we had in March, which makes a real difference in lives lost. And eventually, we might (might!) get vaccines. So the longer the curve is flat, the more time we have to learn and craft better interventions.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus...

Stomping the virus down to a manageable level so it doesn't overwhelm hospitals was the main goal of "Flatten the curve". We actually succeeded in quite a few hot spots to do this - NYC being the biggest example. Covid still exists there and people are still dying but it's not out of control. If you stay on top of it, it doesn't just grow again.

I'm not sure why you say there was no benefit to locking down. It clearly did wonders for NYC. It's likely that thousands of people were saved by this action.

What you're describing may be a controlled burn approach under a different name. After a certain point, the virus infects the entire susceptible population, and then it stops because everyone susceptible has died or obtained immunity.

Suppose 30% of the population is susceptible to covid. If lockdown policy slows the spread of the virus to 1% of the population per month, it would take 30 months before the pandemic passes. That's a very long time to do lockdown, very damaging to the economy and people's livelihoods.

I've read a lot about overwhelmed hospitals. I'm not clear on if it's happened in any widespread fashion. The media coverage tends to emphasize the bad cases and ignore the boring cases. It doesn't seem like people are unable to get medical care. I have checked the Texas online dashboard now and then, and currently about 10,000 people in a state of 29,000,000 are hospitalized with covid.

Texas dashboard: https://txdshs.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#...

The logical policy would be let the virus pass through the population as fast as possible without overwhelming hospitals, given the specifics of any geography.

I'm sorry but you making one incorrect assumption after another.

No, it would not be logical to let the virus go. It would kill some people and causes other health effects. We don't want a few million deaths. Plus now there is clear evidence that some people don't have antibodies after they get it, a few months later, and this is not completely unknown in other diseases. Some people have some protection though. Plus there are people who get it a second time as far as we can tell.

There are not infinite number of hospital beds. In NY they were past the limits for a month, killing med staff and also ptsd for them. This was barely avoided in Seattle. It's happening now in Houston. The people sick with cv19 are blocking others from being treated, and some people stay home. The hospitals financial plans start to fail because all the other medical procedures are stopped because its dangerous to be at the hospital and they are repurposing say dermatologists to work in the cv19 wards.

> There are not infinite number of hospital beds. In NY they were past the limits for a month, killing med staff and also ptsd for them. This was barely avoided in Seattle

To be frank I've stopped caring enough to follow the news in detail anymore (which itself probably says something), so I don't know whether the rest of your comment is accurate or not. However, I can attest firsthand that this part pertaining to Seattle is completely false.

I live in Seattle and have had multiple friends/family members hospitalized with covid19. We were nowhere close to overwhelming hospital capacity. At the beginning of all of this, we had a massive field hospital in Century Link stadium set up and shut down without seeing a single patient, as well as a hospital ship which was supposed to harbor here but ended up being redirected (I believe to Los Angeles) because we didn't need it. Even now with the resurgence that's been happening, our metrics around ICU utilization are where we're performing best:

https://coronavirus.wa.gov/what-you-need-know/covid-19-risk-...

Metrics | Value | Goal | Meeting Goal

Percent of licensed beds occupied by patients | 60.3% | <80% | Yes

Percent of licensed beds occupied by COVID-19 cases | 3.7% | <10% | Yes

Other sources -

Field hospital being set up in Seattle: https://www.king5.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/centur...

That hospital torn down 2 days later with no record of serving a single patient: https://www.king5.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/centur...

U.S. Navy Hospital ship originally meant for Seattle redirected to Los Angeles: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-navy-hospital-ship-depart...

---

I'm assuming good faith and that you're simply worried just like everyone is, but you are spreading misinformation here. Again, I can't really attest with good knowledge to anything other than Seattle, but the fact that you are wrong about that makes me skeptical of the rest of your comment.

I think some of what you are saying is true, but you may be lacking some balance in your sources of information. For example you say:

> It would kill some people and causes other health effects. We don't want a few million deaths.

A few million deaths would be in the 2-3 million range. This doesn’t seem realistic based on the data we have so far. About 140,000 people in the United States have died from the virus after about 5 months. It would require a 20x increase to have 3 million people to die from it. That seems like a really big reach.

> because I wanted to imply that there would still be some left but that it would be a manageable amount.

Go for "decimated" next time, rare to see it used right ;)

Decimate means you kill 1 out of every 10. It's probable that we decimated the virus and more. It's just that doesn't really make a difference.

Decimate means leaving 1 out of 10 alive. A 90% reduction.

> Decimation was a form of Roman military discipline in which every tenth man in a group was executed by members of his cohort. ... The word decimation is derived from Latin meaning "removal of a tenth".

No it doesn’t. Look it up.

As in 10% reduction?

JFK international airport is a 20 minute ride from the heart of Manhattan and we have a "transportation security agency" that can't find physical contraband in a suitcase much less be expected to be gatekeepers of health for the nation.

Suppose we drastically lower transmission. How many times should NYC and the surrounding areas be locked down because someone flew in from a country with loose contagion protocols?

Besides waiting for a vaccine and mass infections of those unwilling or unable to stay at home, I haven't seen a concrete proposal from anyone on what we should have or should be doing next.

Logistically, it's easier to force everyone arriving into mandatory two-week quarantine, than finding a contraband whatever hidden in a sea of suitcases.

What's lacking is political willpower.

Australia does this. The border is somewhat porous, but it's worth mentioning that Australia is worrying about hundreds of cases right now.

Close the border, it's as simple as that. All countries that were able to lower infections did this.

In Europe this was done even between neighboring countries both part of Shengen.

Here in Canada it was even done between provinces. My region has a bubble of four small provinces with few cases. But even so to travel across a provincial border in the bubble you will need proof of residency.

Other countries have done far better than the US. We could have done the same.

> we didn't follow through with the lockdown nationally to actually stomp the virus

Do you think an enforced national lockdown is feasible in the US?

Given the size of the country, the culture of independence, the relatively loose union of 50 states and other factors, my answer is no.

It’s bizarre to me that given the conclusion that this is the only solution people’s immediate instinct is to just say it’s not possible. Nothing’s possible if you don’t even attempt it.

Also, in case you haven’t noticed, we are not even remotely “locked down”. If you go downtown where I live (and in countless other cities in the USA) you will find people out horsing around, ignoring stay-at-home, eating at their restaurants, shopping for their khakis, and basically pretending the virus doesn’t exist. Traffic has not changed. People aren’t wearing masks (despite a statewide order). And where is enforcement? Nonexistent. I’m not convinced we can do a national lockdown because no state has even managed to implement a statewide or even citywide lockdown.

We have powerless leadership, proclaiming half-assed and unenforced orders, more worried about saying the right things than doing the right things.

If we were actually serious about beating the virus, downtown would be totally empty and I wouldn’t hear constant traffic and human activity from my backyard.

An old CS professor: Efficiency with computers, effectiveness with people.

>Telling people that only 1% of them will die so it's all okay is telling people you don't care about them - they notice, they're not dumb.

No no no no no. It's high time we stop treating everything as black and white in this country. It's not just callously disregarding the dead - it's about determining whether the literal and figurative loss of life caused by a lockdown is worth the loss of life caused by the virus. And the signal/noise ratio right now is absolutely tiny, especially considering how much damage the media has done by unambiguously turning this into an opportunity to bash Trump. Regardless of how you feel about the presidency, if you compare per capital rates ours were actually on par with most other first world nations until the recent protests (both left and right) began; and while I do believe it is shameful that we were caught with our pants down, scrambling to gather supplies nearly 3 months late, I'll remind you that so was everyone else.

Let's also not forget that a number of other countries like Sweden didn't lock down at all and are doing fine. We also shouldn't be applying the same policies to urban and rural areas.

You know what would really answer this question to me? What percent of nurses and doctors in COVID wards have gotten sick? And what is their CFR? That's pretty much worst case exposure and seeing as I haven't heard of doctors dying in droves, I'm inclined to start believing that people do have and/or develop immunity and the fatality/complication rate really is extremely low, for whatever reason. But I need data to be sure.

Lives are only lost in a lockdown scenario because of god awful policy. Pay people to stay home. Feed the poor.

That only works when we have food to feed everyone ... which requires a surprising amount of people to stay at work. Besides the obvious people working in the fields/farms, there's a lot of support businesses that need to stay open. The people who repairs the tractors, the people who make parts for the feeders in the barns, etc, which need support for their own manufacturing equipment.

We can't just "shut it all down" worldwide and not run out of food.

No one is saying to shut down essential workers. Just to push pause on the silly luxuries we've come to expect.

How do you think food gets made and distributed?

See way it is now, by essential workers wearing masks. Not by packing halls with protesters holding coughing parties.

> it's about determining whether the literal and figurative loss of life caused by a lockdown is worth the loss of life caused by the virus.

oramit said:

"The United States is currently choosing the worst possible combination of options. We locked down - causing enormous financial damage, but we didn't follow through with the lockdown nationally to actually stomp the virus. So we get to have the deaths and have the financial damage as well. Yay us!"

> Let's also not forget that a number of other countries like Sweden didn't lock down at all and are doing fine.

Sweden did a voluntary lock down, which was in practice pretty comprehensive. Even then they still had a death rate per capita many times higher than its neighbours, and it was economically hit just as hard.

Perhaps it was worth a try, but it didn't pan out. Their government even formed a commission to figure out why it went so bad.

This is the critical aspect of the Sweden example: the people of Sweden are rational and everything isn't hyper politicized. Even though they tried a different approach, many still took reasonable precautions. There still were significant restrictions on operations like bars and restaurants.

Sweden was never like the "COVID denier" communities in the United States.

And still its results are relatively terrible compared to its neighbours and peers.

It also wasn't completely voluntary, they closed high schools, they banned gatherings with more than 50 people, they limited how many people could visit bars and restaurants and made them sit at a table. The government didn't sit back and do nothing like many people seem to think.

These restrictions with some give or take are what the world will have to adopt until it's either eliminated or we get a vaccine.

> countries like Sweden didn't lock down at all and are doing fine.

Interesting, Sweden suffered more deaths than their neighbors and does not appear to be any better off economically.

Sweden Has Become the World's Cautionary Tale - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/business/sweden-economy-c...

Sweden had no lockdown but its economy is expected to suffer just as badly as its European neighbors - https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/30/coronavirus-sweden-economy-t...

Sweden's economy likely won't benefit from its decision to avoid a lockdown, according to analysts - https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-economy-likely-wont-b...

Sweden's controversial anti-lockdown strategy resulted in high death toll and no real economic gain, data shows - https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-coronavirus-strategy-...

Sweden Has Avoided a Coronavirus Lockdown. Its Economy Is Hurting Anyway. - https://www.wsj.com/articles/sweden-has-avoided-a-coronaviru...

Now either this strategy isn't as good as you claim it to be or NYT, CNBC, Business Insider, and the WSJ and all the analysts and experts they cite are working together to cook up a conspiracy.

Except for your NYT article, these are all pieces from more than 2 months ago. And the NYT has been exceptionally poor at reporting on covid with an even hand. What it fails to mention is that though Sweden's economy will contract by the same amount as it's Scandanavian neighbors, about -8%, it's a huge win compared to UK/Italy/France which will contract by 22-30%.

src: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-16/one-econo...

It's irresponsible to believe that journalists and editorial organizations are able to cut through their own emotions and biases during what is one of the most tense times in recent history. Everyone has an opinion. The only thing without an opinion are the data.

For Sweden that data is pretty great: - 15 deaths in the past 7 days - ~1200 cases

src: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/

If you only want to compare Sweden to its neighbors you're cherry-picking what you want your argument to say. Sweden's strategy divorced them from their neighbors and put them in the boat with us. We are apples to apples. Sweden to Norway, when they took up the strategy, became apples to oranges. Since we are both of the same strategy it's entirely reasonable to point to Sweden and say "hey, it's about as bad there as it is here and they didn't go hard lockdown and kids are still in school".

It's not like we can go back in time and follow New Zealand. That ship sailed five months ago.

To get a real look at the data I strongly recommend people get on Twitter and follow any of these accounts to get a good grasp on the overall situation as told by the numbers and as a bonus you'll get: - how deaths are reported and what that means for the narrative - cases and their level of significance - hospital census, dwell, and coding

@ethicalskeptic @aginnt @boriquagato @natesilver538 (we don't agree on how to handle this, but he's been fair in reporting data as it should be understood) @MLevitt_NP2013 (Nobel laureate) @AlexBerenson

> Sweden to Norway, when they took up the strategy, became apples to oranges.

Your logic is simply wrong here. If you want to assess the effect of the lockdown, you compare effects between similar countries that did and didn't have a lockdown. Apple trees with fertilizer vs apple trees without fertilizer. You don't learn about the effect of fertilizer by comparing apple trees with fertilizer vs orange trees with fertilizer.

I don't think anyone is arguing that Sweden's outcome is better than Norway's. I'm certainly not.

What I'm saying is that you can go without a lockdown and avoid the doomsday scenario that was so proffered about. Everyone was pointing to Sweden as though they were a cautionary tale of a state that was about to wipe out 10% of its population.

Yet here we are and that didn't play out. So the narrative switched to "but against its neighbors!". Yeah Sweden did worse, but they also showed you didn't need to go into hiding to get the same result the rest of the quasi-lockdown camp got.

What you're implying is that if the United States went full no-lockdown strategy our outcome would be different than Sweden. Whereas logically a virus does not care whether the host is Swedish, Ugandan, or American. A human is a human.

UK/Italy/France which will contract by 22-30%

Not sure where they got those numbers, France is projected to see a 10% decline, not 30%.

https://publications.banque-france.fr/en/macroeconomic-proje...

> if you compare per capital rates ours were actually on par with most other first world nations

Not true, we're squarely between several 2nd and 3rd world countries: https://www.statista.com/chart/21176/covid-19-infection-dens...

> until the recent protests (both left and right) began

Not true, current research does not link any outbreaks to protests (BLM protests at least), mostly due to the fact that protesters were wearing masks and were outside: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2020/07/01/research-d...

> Let's also not forget that a number of other countries like Sweden didn't lock down at all and are doing fine.

Not true, Sweden is sitting about 150 deaths / million higher than the US right now: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data?country=USA~SWE#...

> What percent of nurses and doctors in COVID wards have gotten sick? And what is their CFR?

Largely irrelevant, because nurses and doctors should be wearing PPE, are trained to work in infectious environments, work in buildings designed to prevent disease vectors, and places that are sanitized regularly. You should see significantly less cases in healthcare than you would elsewhere.

And just in general, the economic impact of letting the virus run rampant would be astronomical. Even outside of deaths, those with severe cases are ending up with likely permanent damage to their hearts, lungs, or kidneys, which will require increased medical costs and likely people who can no longer work.

1. All sorts of problems with that Statista chart. Just for starters it doesn't take into account number of tests being performed per 1m/pp.

2. Would it be astronomical? Total speculation. That's just a hysterical statement that doesn't point to a problem or a solution.

There is some anecdotal evidence that a small fraction of those that develop symptoms but do not become fatal can have lasting effects from the virus. There is no evidence that this is widespread. However, it's a favorite place for people to point to when they want to move the goal posts when deaths aren't going up.

1) Chile, Kuwait, and Singapore have similar rates of testing to the US [1]

2) Current studies show roughly somewhere between 10-20% of hospitalized patients ending up with heart damage, increasing their future risks of heart attacks and strokes.[2][3] Up to 36% of hospitalized patients are displaying neurological symptoms, with possible damage.[4] Up to 60% are ending up with ARDS which may be permanent.[5]

Extracting that with current numbers, assuming we had a 50% infection rate, 15% hospitalization rate [6][7], and a 1% death rate, we'd have ~1.5 million dead, ~22.5 million hospitalized, ~3.375 million with heart damage, ~8 million with neurological issues, ~13.5 million with ARDS.

Obviously many of these would overlap, but it sounds pretty devastating to me.

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-testing#the-scale-of-...

[2]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/...

[3]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

[4]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2...

[5]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...

[6]: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidvi...

[7]: https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...

The sheer number of people likely to come out of this with disabilities or serious-but-not-disabled level chronic problems is really depressing. Just the lung issues (didn't know the term ARDS, thanks for that) will be terrible.

Tests per 1mm/pop: US - 140k Chile - 71k Kuwait - 106k Singapore - 172k (most definitely not a 2nd or 3rd world country. HDI 7th in the world and GDP/pc 8th in the world. Both higher than the U.S.)

src: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

You're stacking your numbers and assuming a worst and numerically impossible scenario. When you take into account asymptomatic cases that are extrapolated via serology samples and not just the positive PCR tests you get a fatality rate of 0.24% (and falling) with a huge age gradient down to less than 0.008% for those under 40.

At most it's 1%. That is the highest of any estimate I've seen. Here are a few dozen https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01738-2

Knowing that the vast majority of cases are asymptomatic dramatically lowers the scary numbers you just threw out. And you must know by now the prevalence of asymptomatic cases.

Also [5] has a sample size of 36 from May, can't tell if it's peer reviewed.

[6] is a mish-mash of CDC numbers so not sure what you're pointing to.

[2] Though worth noting, I don't think 19.7% is indicative of anything out of the range of ordinary when you consider the at-risk group for covid. You would need to control this by age and all-cause mortality. Same for [4] and [5]

The question of "with" vs "from" covid is very real. Now, I'm not saying that covid is benign. It can do damage. What I'm saying that it is significantly less dangerous than people that want to remain in lock down would lead you to believe.

You've been downvoted quite a bit but I think your post is a good example of the problem at hand.

Yes, we have to make choices about costs and we can't save everyone. Yes, the data is super noisy and its hard to tell what is happening. Yes, the media loves bashing Trump.

But none of that is important because then you go right into downplaying things and saying that "if you compare per capital rates ours were actually on par with most other first world nations until the recent protests". The tone-deafness of this sentence is astounding to me. People are scared, telling them that actually we only failed as badly as other countries, is, wow.

Yes. This is largely the problem. Unfortunately, I don't think it would have mattered whether it was a left or right president. The side not in office would have done the opposite. Everything is a political proxy war right now.

There are two camps causing trouble preventing COVID-19 mitigation: the Radical Right where they are in office (Trump, Arizona, Florida,...), and the Radical Right where the Left or moderate Right are in office (Michigan).

This is what I'm talking about. I want to preface this with: I've voted blue ticket my entire life...

The numbers just do not back this claim up. NY/NJ/CT all have the absolute worst outcomes so far. NY and Gov Cuomo couldn't be more adored by the media. Meanwhile the red south and others that never locked down are sitting at about 10% the deaths of the blue northeast.

You can say wait two weeks, but we've been waiting two weeks on AZ, FL, and GA, for about 6 weeks now. Cases have gone up but deaths have not. Current trends suggest they will tick up, but they will not go vertical.

So I'm not sure what the real problem is that you point to.

>NY/NJ/CT all have the absolute worst outcomes so far.

They were also hit early in this ongoing pandemic and had to fight hard to get it under control. That red states are now ticking up is a sad commentary on their governance, which is a mix of hubris, denialism, and willful ignorance.

> Cases have gone up but deaths have not.

The average age of the infected is lowering, and they tend to survive.

> The average age of the infected is lowering, and they tend to survive.

An illness that lasts two weeks and then goes away is a shitty two weeks.

We're sitting at what, a shitty five months now?

I guarantee there are a lot of people out there who would take a rough couple of weeks over what we've done to their livelihoods this year.

> An illness that lasts two weeks and then goes away

Two big assumptions. This is true for many, but between this and death we also have people sick for months or with possibly permanent health damage. We also have completely asymptomatic cases. It's a spectrum, not few specific outcomes.

> You can say wait two weeks, but we've been waiting two weeks on AZ, FL, and GA, for about 6 weeks now.

> Cases have gone up but deaths have not.

You seem to have a severe misunderstanding of the virus. The reason why people say to wait two weeks is because there's a massive lag time. Not only is there a long incubation period but there's also a massive period of time between exhibiting symptoms and death. People who exhibit symptoms will die around two to eight weeks afterwards.

When you see cases go up, that means we can expect any deaths to follow within the next month or so. That's exactly what we're seeing in Texas right now with a huge spike in cases and many of our hospitals overwhelmed.

NY/NJ/CT have had the worst outcome so far because they got hit the hardest early on. They've already passed over the death hump assuming there isn't a second wave. For us in Texas though? Just wait and see. In fact I'm going to favorite your post and get back to you when it starts getting really bad.

And this is because protesting during a pandemic never leads to a rise in infections, so the thousands of BLM protesters surely had nothing to do with rising case numbers.

This is a classic example of whataboutism.

BLM protests where, on the whole, at least masked. This is a huge contrast from the literal “we will not wear masks” protests that erupted from the radical right.

There’s a whole subreddit dedicated to capturing videos of such people refusing to wear masks or socially distance. Based on the non-negligible amount of (sometimes racist) right-wing talking points they often devolve into, I’d say many would be considered on the right.

In any case, weird attempt to distract against the current sitting president and radical-right legislative bodies of several states acting in direct conflict with scientific advice on how to reduce the rate of infection.

Well just in terms of chance of infection a mass gathering is much worse than individuals refusing to follow orders. We have those her e in Germany as well, including right and left wing conspiracy theorists.

I'm not so certain. There is extreme political polarization, yes, but I don't think we can honestly look at the situation at hand and not see the giant Trump shaped elephant in the room. He hasn't ever governed as a "unity" president. That has worked for him when things were generally humming along but it fails catastrophically in times of crisis. Lots of people (myself included) simply don't believe he can put aside partisanship and his own ambition to do what is in the best interest of the country. I feel like my mistrust has been proven correct.

Remember, at the start of this crisis Trump did start holding regular Covid briefings, there were big actions taken, and his approval numbers went up quite a bit. But then he backed away from all that, and started actively undermining things. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/ I'm honestly baffled by it because he doesn't even have to really succeed to get good approval numbers, he just has to look like he cares, but he can't manage even that.

Contrast this with Andrew Cuomo of New York, who by any objective measure totally screwed things up. It didn't matter though - he was decisive, held daily briefings, and at least looked like he was putting in effort to fix things. Now his popularity is up a ton. https://buffalonews.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/public-...

That's really the core of my entire thesis. The public doesn't expect perfection in the face of something like this - I don't. But I do expect the politician to give a damn, or at least put in the effort of looking like they giving a damn. A crisis like this is exactly the sort of thing you can rally the country around. There was a brief two week period in late March where it actually happened! It was a choice by Trump, which then filtered down into Trump leaning local politicians, to turn it into a proxy war.

Believe me, I'm cynical about politics too, but I think you're engaging in the worse kind of "both-sidesism" with this. Is your contention really that if Hilary was president, Republicans would have all locked down, and Democrats would not? I just don't see it. We only truly know about the timeline we are in right now, shrugging your shoulders and saying things wouldn't be better anyway in another timeline you don't know anything about isn't helpful.

What I'm saying is that if Sec. Clinton were in office the red states would be doing exactly what they're doing now. It wouldn't have made a lick of difference.

I should have been more explicit on that.

> Contrast this with Andrew Cuomo of New York...

Exactly. I think this is part of the problem on the left. The desire to do something, anything, when sometimes doing nothing, or less, is the right thing. And then if it doesn't work out saying "yeah but we did something!".

Frankly, I think the outcome in NY was inevitable regardless of policy. So I don't blame Cuomo but I also don't think he's a hero. He just did his job and showed up. The way the data has shaped up against other jurisdictions around the country/globe I think they would have gotten about the same outcome regardless of the policy.

> It was a choice by Trump, which then filtered down into Trump leaning local politicians, to turn it into a proxy war

That's fair. He did "start it". He's a real problem for sure. Anything he touches or recommend almost can't be touched by the left for fear of keeping him in office.

But same for the right. There's no way the red states would have saddled up with Clinton.

Thanks for the clarification. I thought you meant a complete reversal. If Hillary were president I think red states would have resisted but its hard for me to imagine they would be doing it at the same level. Maybe i'm being too Pollyanna there.

I also agree that simply doing something, anything, isn't always the right approach. I'm an independent who hangs out with the left and there is a tendency to reach for the hammer of government a bit too often. The feds shouldn't have led the charge by any means, but once individual states had started to shut down, a coordinated federal response to get this fully under control would have been the best approach. I think the end game for this will be something like that.

Here’s the thing, you can be as ideological about this as you want but if you look around the world at what has worked, empirically, national level intervention with a large testing and tracing effort at that level is what works. The best approach is what keeps people from overwhelming hospitals, not what meets some platonic ideal of overlapping spheres of influence.

> What I'm saying is that if Sec. Clinton were in office the red states would be doing exactly what they're doing now. It wouldn't have made a lick of difference.

Sure it would. Heck if a Republican that wasn't Trump was in office now, there wouldn't have been the White House bully pulpit being used against basic safety measures and White House emergency powers abused to block states from getting PPE and other emergency supplies. We'd probably have a state aid bill, too, though probably a less generous one than a Democratic Administration and Senate would have been on board for, but probably more than nothing. Which make it financially more viable to do lockdowns (states often can't, Constitutionally, borrow for no capital expenses, and procedurally have a difficult process to approve new debt and have a high cost of borrowing, the Feds have none of those problems). Leadership matters and there's a reason Trump's numbers are falling even among Republicans.

> He hasn't ever governed as a "unity" president.

Obama never governed as a "unity" president either.

Bush immediately after 9/11 was probably the last time there was some semblance of political unity in this country.

The financial damage is completely self inflicted. There is plenty of food, housing, and other necessities of all kinds except some items specific to treating the pandemic itself (which is important, but not the goal of "reopen it the economy").

Closing restaurants and football stadiums doesn't deprive anyone of the necessities of life and health. We can watch TV for entertainment. People doing essential work haven't stopped.

The only economic-related suffering are people being pushed out of their homes by landlords, or refused food (of which there is plenty) by the controllers of the food supply.

Government officals, corporation managers, billionaires and few others are simply unwilling to let go of their obsession with hoarding money, an imaginary social invention (which is of course useful in easier times), for a few months while we fight the commmonest real enemy the world has ever faced.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com