America's window of opportunity to beat back Covid-19 is closing
statnews.com
statnews.com
Global deaths as of 08/10 according to the John Hopkins' tracker is at 732k. It hasn't been a year yet, but lets say the world will be at 1.4mil by New Years Eve. Double the current at a 9ish month rate to a 12 month rate. Just for worst case scenario giggles.
That puts it roughly even with worldwide road injuries and under diabetes. A bit more than the amount of people dying from diarrhea. I said it in another post, 9+ million people die from heart disease due mostly from really poor diets and lifestyles (the fat, lazy kind more than the malnourished kind). And no one cared about any of those. If you're going to cry about the world is going to end, don't you think those would red flag for that sentiment first?
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/the-top-10-...
https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/topics/causes-of-de...
Modern medicine is fucking awesome. This could have been a death sentence for a hell of a lot more people. More people died in others pandemics and the world kept spinning. Let's keep that in mind. Hell, the sheer fact we have germ theory has fucking saved more lives than we can ever imagine. Yea, things are bad, but they're no where near as bad as they could be. If folks in history could see how we're emotionally reacting to our situation right now, they'd laugh.
Yes, don't be stupid, cough into your elbow, wash your damn hands (it scares me how many people did not wash their hands on a regular basis and admitted to that before all of this) but stop crying and pretending the world is going to end. That mentality doesn't help at all and you're equally the problem if you toot around "The end is near" like a hobo on the side of the road with a cardboard sign.
So again, 3.8B infections, 380M hospitalizations, and 38M fatalities. Even assuming a magnitude of error, we're still looking at 38M hospitalizations and 3.8M deaths.
Michael Osterholm had a really good analogy into COVID. We're wrong to thing of it in waves; it's more like wildfire. Where it finds fuel, it will burn until the fuel is gone.
The best estimate from the CDC indicates an IFR of 0.65% in the US. That's a major difference from 1%.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
A recent sero-prevalance study in Mumbai found that 57% of people in the slums had antibodies, which would put those areas close to the theoretical herd immunity threshold. Despite limited access to advanced healthcare there the IFR was under 0.10%, although it's possible that some deaths weren't accurately recorded.
https://www.cnbctv18.com/healthcare/57-sero-prevalence-in-sl...
I'm extremely skeptical of the link you provided. Small sample size and there's no other supported data to indicate an IFR in line with influenza.
Not to say the other things aren't major issues and in many cades have rather straightforward soputiopns (soda and fast food tax, massively inconvenience/tax smoking and drinking, actual driving lessons, rule enforcement and road improvements in developing countries, clean water and basic medicine for more places, ... But all this doesn't take away the seriousness of the pandemic. The world continued after black death, but with up to 1/3 and in some places 1/2 the population dead. So life will go on no matter how many die, but this doesn't excuse inaction.
That's assuming lockdown was effective...hint: the most vulnerable/elderly mostly died anyway.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/brain-fog-heart-dama...
https://www.heart.org/en/news/2020/07/06/months-after-infect...
So I think for that reason, maybe we should indeed have a "The world is ending" dialogue...
Also, I've seen many posts claiming something like: "Study shows recent protests with 300,000 ppl hanging off each other didn't cause spread of coronavirus". If you believe this (and I actually do btw), why do you think it will spread so easily in public, where basically everyone is wearing a mask and bathing themselves in hand sanitizer?
Not trying to incite an argument, I'm asking real questions that I feel people aren't asking themselves because it intersects with other aspects of their beliefs.
[1] - https://m.dw.com/en/coronavirus-digest-covid-19-shows-no-sea...
And outdoor exposure is largely immaterial. It's exposure indoors where the research is starting to indicate aerosols as a significant vector (compared to droplets).
The Trump administration has already decided to surrender to this pandemic. They're just betting that enough voters in key swing states are on board with their alternative reality that they won't notice or care about their grandparents and elderly neighbours dying.
>They're just betting that enough voters in key swing states are on board with their alternative reality that they won't notice
The propaganda that is digested by Trump supporters solidly claims that: (a) covid isn't that bad, it's just the flu, (b) people who are scared of it are not really Americans, and (c) any noise about it being dangerous is just the liberal left trying to undercut Trump.
This is the world we live in. Put on Fox or any AM right wing station - those are the talking points. It's all so disheartening and just, I don't know, depressing maybe is the word?
Lets hope we'll be able to look back on this period in history, and evolve to be better than this.
No it doesn't. Evolution occurs due to change in allele frequency in a population over time. Relative death rate of certain organisms in a given environment is certainly a mechanism for this change in frequency, but it is not necessary for evolution to occur.
[edit] Rather, not the core drivers but the core direction-setters.
The result was that we got 50 different responses, not coordinated with each other. And to some degree that was appropriate - New York City needs a very different response than Loving County, Texas. That would be better handled at a state level than a national one.
The problem is that the state responses were too political and not enough medical. That might lead you back to thinking of a national response. But a national response would likely also be political rather than medical (for which Trump does deserve the blame). Even more, it would be perceived as political rather than medical (for which Trump also deserves some blame).
This meant the end result was a devastated economy AND full-on COVID, worse than anywhere on Earth other than Brazil.
You can make a case for a full-on economic shutdown, like the Europeans, Australians, New Zealanders and even to a lesser extent Canadians. It seemed to work out there.
You can make a case for leaving the economy open like Sweden did, knowing they'd potentially have to pay a penalty in lives greater than countries that got a vaccine before everyone caught it -- and they are down to zero deaths now too. Sweden didn't shut down and COVID is done for them now. A total of 6,000 deaths for a population of 10,000,000.
But what you can't make a case for is HALF shutting down the economy -- not enough to let people make money, and not enough to stop the virus, and not really paying people enough to stay home, but somehow more than they were making anyways. That's literally the worst of all worlds. Devastated economy. Many dead people. It's a global embarrassment.
Whoa, I don't think it's safe to say that it's done anywhere. Just look at Melbourne, for an example of an outbreak in a country that supposedly had COVID19 under control.
Otherwise though, yes, the half measures in the US - and the limited compliance with even those half measures in many states/regions, has set up the US for a worst of all worlds scenario.
In Melbourne, they shut down in an attempt to stamp out COVID, keeping people from catching it, leaving a large population still prone to infection.
In Sweden, they did not. Their goal was not to stop people from catching COVID in Sweden, it was to let it happen at a rate they could manage, and treat people who caught it to the best of their abilities. That's why they aren't at risk of a second wave, but countries that shut down are at risk of one until a vaccine can be deployed to a herd-immunity level of the population. Sweden is there already.
Sweden is likely the only place on Earth it is safe to say it's done.
The claim that Sweden has reached herd immunity is far too strong to be taken at face value without any supporting evidence ... evidence that simply doesn't exist at this time.
However, their daily death rate is much higher then their neighbors:
https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-c...
The jury is far from being out on Sweden's approach, and unless they lock down their borders in perpetuity (unlikely for a country so dependent on international trade and commerce), they will still have incoming cases from elsewhere in the world.
Sweden doesn't have to lock down their borders because they didn't lock down their interior. It's all the other countries that need to lock down their borders. If it's not spreading inside the country, that's because it can't, due to herd immunity. Bars and restaurants are open, people are going to work. Life is approximately normal there now. It has been approximately normal there the whole time.
A few key points from your article:
> "There’s a lot to indicate that SARS-CoV-2 is a virus that needs to be controlled and not passively waited out."
And yet.
> "It’s still unknown whether they have short term immunity for about a year like with other coronaviruses, or any immunity at all."
Obviously people develop an immunity, their immune systems are responsible for clearing the virus out. If the immune system wasn't able to clear the virus out, they'd be dead. It's also fair to say that the more serious coronaviridae like SARS convey antibody-based immunity for >3 years [1] and T-cell immunity for 17 years and counting [2] so it's not exactly a shot in the dark.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/sweden?countr...
If Germany decided to adopt Sweden's or the US's lax approach, the virus would have ravaged Germany like it is the US, and would have rapidly spread into small neighboring countries like Sweden. This isn't just the case for Sweden, It applies to all the small Nordic countries that are seeing good outcomes. The policies they enact are ultimately a rounding error compared to the impact of policies enacted in large neighboring countries like Germany and France.
This is basically what happened in the US, where states like Texas and Florida appeared to be doing well early on, but only because lockdowns in New York and other areas with early outbreaks temporarily protected them. Once everything reopened, those states were inundated with the pandemic.
Canada is only doing better perhaps because it still has entry restrictions on visitors from the US. If they open up their borders to US citizens before the pandemic is brought under control in the US, their efforts will be for naught.
The US is a Federal Republic so it's not a fair comparison with our Federal Government. I think the equivalent would be the EU mandating member countries shutdown. (I'm not that familiar with the EU charter but this is my understanding).
"worse than anywhere on Earth other than Brazil."
That seems to be subjective based on the metrics of comparison. If you want to make a claim like this, please be more specific and account for key variables such as population densities, count criteria, and ability to count/likely undercount (which applies to the US as well).
Germany - a EU member - is itself a federal republic. Here, it's not the federal government but the state and local country/city governments who managed the crisis (e.g. the government agencies tasked with ensuring public health as largely organized on the city/council level).
This sometimes results in diverging rules, but at the height of the crisis, everyone (even across party lines) sat together under the moderation of the federal government and came up with common rules to minimize irritation by differing rules.
To summon up, I don't think its fundamentally a problem of the political organization but of the political climate. The US seems to be far beyond the point where anyone would expect the people in power to actually come to a consensus across party lines.
There also appear to be profound misunderstandings of how the world works among large swaths of people, from the idea that people will voluntarily do as they are told en masse (downright hilarious to anyone who has any understanding of compliance in healthcare at least in this country); to the notion that falling case rates ~= we have beaten the virus and can resume normal behavior (this all started from a handful of cases); to the notion that messaging doesn't matter (why parrot "masks protect other people from you" when you can truthfully say "masks protect you and others", and why say "young people should be concerned about putting old people at risk" when you can truthfully say "everyone is at risk of life altering complications"?); to the notion that it's acceptable to flip flop on facts for political expendiency without losing credibility; to the idea that concealing data about risk makes people more risk tolerant (it's the opposite); to the idea that John Doe consumer is somehow responsible for global supply chain management instead of governments, manufacturers, vendors, militaries, et al (how is it my responsibility to not buy masks through consumer channels instead of politicians' responsibility to order masks redirected to hospitals?); etc
I'm sure you'll come back with more "stats" that you misinterpret or perform bad maths on. Normally I don't engage in ad-hominem, but your entire comment history on COVID has been one of denial/dismissal/diminishment that one can't help to assume you're commenting in bad faith.
1. I don’t believe CFR is at all a useful metric. It’s not comparable across countries or across time. What is it capturing? If Sweden isn’t testing anyone who isn’t deathly ill of course it has a 10% CFR. If Singapore tests everyone of course it has a 0.05% CFR (both numbers from your link). Same disease, equally fatal in both places, yet you’re looking at a metric with a range of 3 orders of magnitude. If at this point those numbers haven’t started converging worldwide it’s a bad metric.
2. Of course how the disease affects families matters. The conversation isn’t about that, though. Public health decisions impact people one way or the other. People die one way or the other. The goal is to minimize deaths and suffering. This is the kind of thinking that prevents prison reform: “but what if we let someone out and they hurt someone else! Let’s just lock them up forever instead, problem solved.”
3. 1-2 deaths per day in a country of 10,000,000 is not a lot. By any measure. It will never be zero. 1-2 deaths per day is similar to their road fatalities (200-400 per year). It’s in line with their flu fatalities (500 per year).
If 1-2 daily flu and 1-2 daily road fatalities don’t represent a catastrophe, why does this?
4. 200 cases per day in a country of 10,000,000 is not a lot when they’re not trying to contain it. Like CFR though it’s not a useful metric for comparison across countries because it doesn’t factor in testing methodology. I cite this metric at all because of it’s pronounced exponential downtrend.
Factual inaccuracies in my posts preceding are my having looked at a graph wrong, or a poor graph, not bad faith.
Yes, I think it's a serious disease. Yes, I wear a mask whenever I'm outside. Yes, I think masking should be mandatory. Yes, I'll take the vaccine when it's available. I do also think there's been an awful lot of sensationalism at play.
First, the "outdoor activities" seem to be a big part of the problem right now. People hanging out at the beach, the playgrounds, the parks, eating in groups in outdoor seating at restaurants, protesting, etc. all accelerate the spread.
It may well turn out that people doing fewer of those things means that we don't have a heavy second wave in the fall. I hope that's the case.
Second, the window isn't "closing," it's pretty much slammed shut. The genie is out of the bottle for the U.S. and likely the planet. We're in the ballpark of 50k diagnosed cases per day, plus between twice and ten times that number of undiagnosed cases, if not more.
Contact tracing 50k cases a day would be a massive undertaking, and we'd still be doing nothing about the 50k+ undiagnosed cases out there, most of which represent people who are still spreading the virus.
The political will for additional lockdowns and preventative measures is all but spent.
I hate to say it, but absent a very effective vaccine, COVID-19 is most likely here to stay.
If NYC is bad again I'd call that a second wave. Florida is 1500 miles away and is experiencing their first wave, some time after NYC had theirs.
The optimist in me has noticed that no locality experiencing a bad first wave has had a second wave yet. Perhaps that is a sign of herd immunity (helped by T-cells, if so). Time will tell...
This is consistent with recent findings of the virus being "airborne" (for various definitions of the word airborne) - indoor, poorly ventilated spaces are much worse than outdoor spaces, which have both UV and circulating air.
Otherwise, I agree with you about the window being slammed shut. Turning it around now would require political willpower and coordination that the US simply doesn't have.