Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition
npr.org
npr.org
I would call the "proper authorities", but since there is a State Police car parked outside every morning, and he is in there working out, just like before the pandemic, I doubt calling anyone would do anything.
Adding to the post, I read it earlier... it is really strange that people feel they have to go work out in groups. Or get together, or go to bars. I find it amazing we can not see short term sacrifice for long term gain.
In addition, there's basic upkeep and maintenance that you're required to perform to keep a building insured, let alone to make it re-openable at some point.
I see the reasoning and don’t think the ethics of our pandemic behaviors have been fully discussed.
the patrons apparently don't believe that their behavior is unethical, and in fact, think that the dictates of their rules are unethical, and potentially illegal too.
It's not like there are alternative tenants who can pay around.
We are now on month 7 of being told to not socialize or see or do anything. I continue to obey the orders, but I totally get why some people are starting to crack.
"Keep your distance, wear a mask, and stick to small groups" is not the same as "do not socialize".
All of the normal places where you see people socialize have bee closed or went out business. Restaurants, bars, night clubs, sporting events, live music (festivals and stadiums) and many, many others.
It would be one thing to conform to what your saying, but its become hard if not impossible to find safe places where people CAN socialize, so they take what they get regardless of the risks to them or others.
If you can't socialize outside a bar, that's on you.
Even in articles about house parties, major media outlets go and grab a beach photo for some reason. It's bad reporting.
Comments like this and the ever popular "it's just a mask!" show a remarkable lack of awareness and understanding. Yes, that's perhaps overly selfish of me. Yes, there are people at serious risk, and many people dying or developing life-long serious complications. But this has been the worst period in my entire life, by far. I was regularly, very seriously, suicidal (have since moved back in with my parents now that they're stateside, starting to get better). All the policies and all the talk are oriented around having a network of close relations to fall back on. That doesn't exist for everyone.
We're going to see pretty significant long term effects to both the economy and children / young people due to a lack of social development.
I couldn't even imagine how shitty being a 20 something in a new city would be now. Dating has to be practically non-existent.
Should say that I'm for and obey covid restrictions in my country (Canada), but I'm amoung the privileged few already working from home, and have a family and kids that keep me busy.
2. Why can't people socialize online? It's even easier nowadays. It might not be the same thing but it can get pretty close.
It is not anywhere near close. Video calls transfer speech, tone of voice, and facial expressions at best. Body language is a vital part of face-to-face communication, and there is no video call equivalent of leaning in towards someone or putting your hand on theirs.
There are ads on pretty much every medium that say "Stay Home", which is not at all what you're describing. To say "nobody is saying do not socialize" is untrue, but to say "We're not allowed to socialize" is also untrue.
Ok, but then we have people doing solo activities, all by themselves, minding their own business -- getting arrested by lunatics[1] because we said no beach allowed during Covid[2]!
How do we reconcile that?
[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-04-03/paddle-b...
You'll find California (and everywhere else) has loosened up substantially on outdoor activities, as we have substantially more information in recent months on outdoor versus indoor transmission. We've learned a lot since April about COVID-19.
It wasn't about safety. Arresting a lone surfer or lone beach jogger isn't about safety. It's about compliance. You must comply.
This whole discussion is absurd. If people actually did comply, then they wouldn't get arrested and we would have had a far more successful outcome nationwide.
We said "No beach during Covid" because a bunch of lunatics flooded the open beaches.
And while the beach may not be a problem, those same lunatics flood the gas stations, Walmarts, etc. and DON'T WEAR MASKS.
In addition, California never really locked down. California has almost continuously had an R0 above 1.0. Mostly due to the lunatics in Southern California.
If you want to open the beaches and arrest anybody not local, fine. The problem with THAT is that you now have to patrol for it--which creates in-person contact.
So, we shut the beaches completely. Sorry you can't surf. Tell your population cohort to wear your masks and stay the hell out of parties and maybe California will get below R0 one day.
Or not. And this crap can continue until we get a vaccine.
Don't allow large gatherings? OK fine, I might object to this, but I can see the other side at least.
Not allowing individuals to do individual activities? That seems misguided at best.
After all, we do allow Ice Cream Parlors to be open, and outdoor seating at restaurants where you sit in close proximity to other people who are not wearing masks... how is that better than jogging on the beach all by yourself?
They aren't better, and none of this is actually about safety nor is it about "Flattening the Curve" anymore. We flattened the curve long, long ago.
No, it's not about safety, it's about compliance. You will comply, regardless of how illogical or contradictory certain County Health Official Edicts are.
Please reread my post. I already told you what the problem was.
A zillion people flooded the open beaches. The problem is that those zillion people then go places other than the beach and spread Covid.
The only real way to prevent that is to simply close the beach. Yes, that sucks for locals. So far, you have not presented an alternative solution. "Reopen the things!" is NOT a solution--it's idiocy.
However, you know what sucks more for locals? Getting Covid 19 from a bunch of out-of-towners because you work at the grocery stores, gas stations, etc. that they all flood after the beach.
Stop being a selfish prat. If you just have to be outdoors, go hike the mountains.
> it's idiocy.
> Stop being a selfish prat
Wow, that's quite an aggressive response, no?
The solution to your problem is to not allow large gatherings on the beach. That's pretty simple, right? We're doing that already everywhere else - lines to get into stores, etc. Or enforce wearing a mask? There's plenty of ways to do this that don't result in a squad of cops running down a solo jogger, or a task force of patrol boats and helicopters for a solo surfer... just because the Mayor or County Health Official said it must be so!
So, what's wrong, for the 3rd time, with a solo jogger on the beach, with nobody around them?
The answer, for a 3rd time, is nothing.
> However, you know what sucks more for locals? Getting Covid 19 from a bunch of out-of-towners
You really think that risk doesn't exist for locals going to grocery stores too? Touching a can of food, then putting it back on the shelf? Handling paper money, grocery bags, etc.
What we have here are not rules for the sake of safety. What we have here are not rules for the sake of "Flattening the Curve".
No, we have rules for the sake of rules. They make some people feel safer, even though there's zero evidence to suggest they are effective at achieving their intended goals. The reason people are disobeying these "orders" is because the government has not done a sufficient job convincing people the rules are based on logic and actual science, not "science" and politics.
It is not inherently more risky to jog on the beach by yourself than to go sit at an outdoor restaurant, no mask, and be around a bunch of other people.
It would be intellectually dishonest to argue otherwise. Yet, here we are.
On the whole, both of us loved the lockdown for the 2-3 months but after that, not being able to see our close friends really started wearing on us. We were some of the first in our group to start expanding our quarantine units. Sometimes I need to remind myself of this, but the right amount of social interaction is a very rewarding and enriching part of the human experience.
What? That's a pretty exaggerated misrepresentation of what's actually being recommended. You can socialize and see or do plenty while still obeying the recommendations. For instance, my elderly neighbors regularly socialize with others -- they just put chairs out on the driveway or patio and maintain two or three times the distance as they would before the pandemic.
And if people had actually sheltered in place back in March, we might be opening back up (or opening with fewer COVID clusters).
As of now, the US has more than 100x deaths per capita from covid than New Zealand because of measures like that.
"Everyone stop moving around for a few days so we can contact trace and test these people without it spreading more" seems like a very good mitigation.
It has worked well for NZ thus far; they've been able to demask, hug, and live life pretty much normally for a while now.
I'd happily take the occasional few days hard lockdown in exchange for that.
The US death toll is over 170.000 now because both people and government alike did not take the measures needed to contain the disease.
But hey, 170.000 is just a number, right? Just like the trillions gained in the stock market. Fuck the people that died, they were weak. Right?
There's a genuine culture difference in America, call it American Exceptionalism if you want, that's caused all sorts of normal preventative measures to be ignored or actively rejected. Many businesses actively rejected the idea of requiring masks, today some businesses still refuse service if you're wearing a mask. That's pretty ridiculous if you ask me.
Moreso in this thread you have hundreds of comments hemming and hawing, nitting and picking at every detail of proposed lockdowns and mask requirements. People hate this stuff and they call it an imposition on their freedom.
In other countries people just put on masks and stayed home. They didn't make nearly as much of a fuss about it all.
Yes. But my point is, I don't see how that could make them any closer to re-opening. The virus still exists. All the factors in play when the lockdowns started are still in play.
Remember, lockdown isn't about 100% prevention, it's about keeping infections at a level that's acceptable (generally defined as keeping enough ICU beds and ventilators available for COVID+normal use).
If people all wear masks, keep distance when possible, and generally "follow the rules", we should be able to return to a more normal lifestyle.
But, as politicians force schools to open, pastors insist on in-person services, and the "mah rights!" crowd refuses to play by the rules at all, we get more COVID clusters than we might otherwise.
That levels in other urban areas generally stayed below thresholds is proof that the lockdowns worked.
Until the pandemic passes (either via mutation, vaccine, or herd immunity), we should be in a state of maintenance where we move in/out of various levels of lockdown/open to keep it that way.
I couldn't find more than one case of this so I'm curious if you have any evidence it's widespread.
The problem I do have is a substantial number of people appear to be ignoring any/all orders to stay home, distance, etc. Everything from the speakeasy gyms mentioned in the article to churches holding indoor services to in-person classes at local schools. All three of which, by most accounts, are likely to result in new COVID clusters.
There is an exit strategy, and we'd be part of it if we could have just followed the directions of doctors and epidemiologists.
What directions did they follow that allows Wuhan to have pool parties? I don't understand how having pool parties can be ok. Does the virus not exist there? How can that be possible?
Well luckily we have this thing called the internet that lets you see images, video, and text from far away places.
> What directions did they follow that allows Wuhan to have pool parties? I don't understand how having pool parties can be ok. Does the virus not exist there? How can that be possible?
Full lockdown, including stipends to help people out economically, heavy maks usage, massive amounts of tests (when they saw six new cases after not having any, they did 6.5M tests in a week in wuhan), and scanning temperatures of pretty much anyone anytime they go into public area.
Which leads to this https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/18/asia/wuhan-water-park-party-i...
Maybe these extroverts aren't extroverts and instead they're regular people suffering from withdrawal because we live in an over-socialized society.
Buy yeah, we are just finishing out month 5 and heading into 6. But the most stringent lock downs were only into May for a lot of places; at least hear in San Antonio.
That said, there are many types of training you can't do without the right equipment, so it's at least a bit more than just wanting to be with others. Strength training/powerlifting/olympic lifting all come to mind. It's often really difficult to keep a rack, barbell and hundreds of kilos of weight at home, and obviously not something people had just lying around in case of an emergency.
There is certainly a social aspect to it as well, I love training with a couple of friends, the atmosphere can't be replicated at home. But like I said, I've abstained, and I would have been hopeful others would have to.
Joined my local gym. It's packed everyday.
This is not a social injustice. I want to lift. Not chat over sweat.
Yeah, this is pretty important. I used to lift and there's simply no way that I would make the investment to have all that equipment in my house. In normal times it's incredibly wasteful for each individual to stockpile their own redundant junk, rather than share a common pool with others. [0]
I switched to a more equipment-light calisthenics routine years ago with a few items I have around the house, so the current pandemic does not impact my own fitness routine - but for people looking to get really strong this is no substitute for lifting heavy.
[0] As an aside: this shouldn't only apply to gym equipment, communal resources should be way more common for economic and sustainability reasons. There's no reason at all every homeowner should have a lawnmower, for example.
This has not been my experience at all. I used to have a membership to my local gym for my wife, myself, and their childcare program (basically watch your kids while you exercise for 1 hour).
I cancelled that membership and instead put that same amount of money into buying equipment at home (where I have enough space for it) and it only took me about 5-6 months to get enough equipment to replicate about 90% of my routine from the gym. Now I also don't have to wait in line or spend the time travelling to/from and I can exercise whenever I want. For me it has been way more effective.
And when I'm done using the equipment it's not going to go in the trash, I'll sell it in the local classifieds.
Personally I can walk to my gym, and I get far greater quality and variety of equipment by not having to pay for, maintain and store it myself. There are no duplicate machines at my gym, yet it spans a whole warehouse, and I've used every machine at some point as my programme evolved.
As a renter, when I move I don't have to lug hundreds of kg of weights and equipment with me.
I don't see a problem with lawnmowers but I think maker spaces should be in every city. I can easily buy high quality tools for myself but I have no space in my apartment and once I'm done with a tool it feels like a waste to let it collect dust in a drawer.
There is one big problem with communal resources. Not everyone is qualified to use a tool and communal resources make it easier for unqualified people to get tools and break them.
That's all I'm trying to point out, for many disciplines there is no substitute for equipment. But so be it, these are unique times.
Calisthenics moves on the other hand require an enormous amount of strength and muscle control, something you can't gain from "just" lifting weights.
Maybe because nobody successfully proved to these people (me included) that this sacrifice is useful.
You can't tell to people, you have no risk of dying (0.5% death rate for population, much much lower for healthy and young people), people who are at risk of dying can protect themselves even around sick people (wearing a mask, staying at home, washing hands, ...) so this is not your fault if they catch it but you need to stop living your life. That can't work.
And above all, what is the long term strategy, we stop everything for the rest of our lives ? (a vaccine doesn't always work, example the flu vaccine, which works approximately).
It is not that people don't want to sacrifice, it is just that scarifying is the worst solution for everyone
The rest of the (developed, and many underdeveloped) world dealt with it and are moving on. I'm watching Champions league finals on TV and Wuhan pool party clips on twitter, thinking wtf went wrong here.
I'm not really sure on that, lets take greece, which was praised for their strategy (I was in greece during the lockdown). They didnt have a strategy, they just locked down before there was an outbreak and blocked flights, so no spread. Now they have an outbreak because they stopped all there restrictions. They were just lucky
Look at New Zealand, their strategy is to prevent anyone to enter the country with covid, well that works as long as not a log of people fly to NZ. Now that flights have restarted, they have like 3 cases so they lockdown the entire city, well, doesnt seem very smart in my opinion.
The only countries which are doing well, are the Asian countries, China (can't really trust their figure), Taiwan, south korea same as NZ, but restricting all freedom of citizens.
The smartest country of all, is Sweden, never locked down, explained to citizen the situation. Managed to get the situation under control without any lockdown, and probably will reach herd immunity before anyone else. Time will tell this is too soon to judge, but they seem well positioned for winning
I keep seeing this narrative but I can never find the data to support it. When you look at the data, Sweden has the worst of both worlds.
1. Among their neighbors, only Germany has more deaths than Sweden. Norway, Denmark and Finland have fewer almost an order of magnitude less cases and deaths.
2. Despite not being government sanctioned, people still chose to self isolate meaning that the still suffered the economic fallout of that decision. Turns out, a global pandemic is bad for business whether or not your government decides to shut everything down.
There is no metric by which Sweden is doing any better than anyone else, and is doing a lot worse than their neighbors.
The number of case is under control [1], almost no death now (and not hiding after a lockdown, really no death) so probably less death in the future compared to those countries
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS...
Geographic comparisons are of limited usefulness; MA had 10x the death rate of near neighbors NH,VT& ME. There are too many other factors to consider. Sweden still did better than UK, France, Spain, Italy and many others.
>> 2. Despite not being government sanctioned, people still chose to self isolate meaning that the still suffered the economic fallout of that decision. Turns out, a global pandemic is bad for business whether or not your government decides to shut everything down.
Mobility data would suggest otherwise; no masks, kids still in school etc. Life has continued with some restrictions. We could have done the same with similar outcomes. Economy definitely took a hit, but less so than other eurorzone countries.
>> There is no metric by which Sweden is doing any better than anyone else, and is doing a lot worse than their neighbors. The fact that the pandemic is effectively done in Sweden is one. We still dont have an exit strategy.
Acting like this is a foregone conclusion is the height of arrogance. Diseases spread in waves. They could just be at the low point between two waves.
We won't know until years from now. Just asserting you're right when there are still this many unknown factors smacks of someone looking for data after coming to a conclusion.
fair point, but do you know that the under 65 excess deaths metrics for Sweden is already almost identical to previous years ie. if you were looking at the charts you would not even know they had a pandemic. I suspect "years from now" looking at the US metrics it will be similar.
You can clearly see excess mortality for Sweden, higher than previous years.
Edit: missed the under 65 bit, would be interested in seeing that data for Sweden, but you can see the collated graphs for all the countries that contribute and you definitely can spot spikes in the lower age ranges.
Deaths per 100k:
Norway: 4.9 Finland: 6
...
France: 46.8 Sweden: 57.6 Italy 58.6 U.K.: 61.1 Spain: 61.7
If you look at Belgium 859 deaths per millions, Sweden (and the US) could go much higher without any preventive action (I believe Sweden is now acting more in line with other countries?).
(Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-covid-deaths-per-mi... )
So the numbers are bigger, on purpose.
Source: I'm from belgium
They did at the outset of the current administration but chose to fire the people trained for 'reasons'. When the pandemic finally pressed on the country, the game plan handed down from the previous admin had been abandoned for years at that point by the current administration.
The logic remains breathtaking, and the irony would be delicious if it weren't so deadly.
The US also has spectator-less sports going on, I'm not sure how that's any different.
That in addition to the federal government not supporting people and businesses while the economy is shut down, leads to this obvious outcome we're experiencing right now.
Originally he erred way on the side of caution, because we did not know enough. We learn more every week, and his current outlook is a lot like what you just wrote.
The big remaining problem is this is not going away anytime soon. There's more politics than science going on, and there have been institutional failures world-wide from top to bottom.
> people who are at risk of dying can protect themselves even around sick people (wearing a mask, staying at home, washing hands, ...)
This makes it clear "nobody successfully proved" really means "I didn't bother to listen". The messaging on masks has long been "they reduce transmission by infected people", not "they prevent you from getting it".
Of course it is clear that if someone has covid and wear a mask, the probability to transmit covid will decrease (I was actually encourage people to wear a mask 6 months ago), but will it stop ? no. people can still transmit it by touching you. So yeah this is decreasing the risk, but is it decreasing the risk high enough that it will prevent the virus to spread ? Nobody has answered the question yet.
In France the mask is mandatory almost everywhere and still the number of cases keep increasing
> "If we were to run into the same disease, knowing exactly what we know about it today, I think we would end up doing something in between what Sweden did and what the rest of the world has done."
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...
He's on record saying mask requirements will be needed if cases started going back up:
https://www.thelocal.se/20200804/tegnell-if-we-see-problems-...
and Sweden wound up with de-facto lockdowns anyways, as many people did it on their own without government instruction. The end result: Same economic damage as the other Nordic countries, but substantially higher deaths.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/business/sweden-economy-c...
> no. people can still transmit it by touching you.
That's an argument for "don't touch people", not "don't wear masks".
So if cases started going back up, which is not the case for now, so this is not an argument
> The end result: Same economic damage as the other Nordic countries, but substantially higher deaths.
You compare the economic impact of one country which was hit by the virus (Sweden) and one which was not (Germany,Finland, ...). What is going to happen if the virus restart in Germany and Finland and not in Sweden ?
If you're going to make the "Sweden did things right" case, "Sweden got it bad and Germany didn't" is an odd position to support the argument with.
Of course, a lot of the US has lost patience with the difficulty of safety, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's worse now. But that's not because of lockdown not being effective. In fact, it's the opposite.
And let's not forget, in the US H1N1 infected 60M people and only killed 12K of them.
The second category are masks such as N95, P95, N99, P100, etc. Things like disposable painter masks or reusable masks with replaceable filters. These are meant to filter out particulate in the air and they do reduce the likelihood of you getting the disease. To call your mask P95 it must be certified by NIOSH and tested to meet the given rating, ie P95 must filter out 95 percent of particulate and be resistant to oil.
In the beginning the US and CDC were not recommending using masks. I believe the main reason for this was, not that they didn't believe it was effective, but that they were worried about a shortage for health care professionals.
Yeah, but instead of saying that they lied and said masks don't work.
I wonder how much of the current anti-mask sentiments arise from these lies.
I think he was right. If your glasses are fogging, RainX isn't your answer. Make the damn mask fit better.
"I don't regret anything I said then because in the context of the time in which I said it, it was correct. We were told in our task force meetings that we have a serious problem with the lack of PPEs and masks for the health providers who are putting themselves in harm's way every day to take care of sick people," Fauci told O'Donnell.
"When it became clear that we could get the infection could be spread by asymptomatic carriers who don't know they're infected, that made it very clear that we had to strongly recommend masks," he said.
"And also, it soon became clear that we had enough protective equipment and that cloth masks and homemade masks were as good as masks that you would buy from surgical supply stores," Fauci added. "So in the context of when we were not strongly recommending it, it was the correct thing."
And that's what Fauci was indicating at the beginning.
But all the good quality evidence we have so far struggles to find a benefit to masks. This is especially true for DIY cloth masks that are being mandated for the public, but it's also true of high quality N95 masks. We only see a benefit when we drop the quality of evidence down, but this means we have less confidence in the result.
https://www.publish.csiro.au/hc/pdf/HC15950
> RCT evidence was limited and showed no effect but accumulated evidence from retrospective case controls and cohorts all showed these strategies decreased transmission. N95 respirator mask OR 0.17 (CI 0.07–0.43), Gloves OR 0.32 (CI 0.23–0.45), Gowns OR 0.33(CI 0.24–0.45), All OR 0.09 (CI 0.02–0.35)
Note that this is for an N95 mask, not worse masks like surgical loop masks or cloth face coverings.
There's some research looking at post-operative wound infection rates. It can't find a benefit to surgeons wearing masks in clean surgery.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7138271/
> Main results
> We included three trials, involving a total of 2106 participants. There was no statistically significant difference in infection rates between the masked and unmasked group in any of the trials. We identified no new trials for this latest update.
> Authors' conclusions
> From the limited results it is unclear whether the wearing of surgical face masks by members of the surgical team has any impact on surgical wound infection rates for patients undergoing clean surgery.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20524498/
> Conclusion: From the limited randomized trials it is still not clear that whether wearing surgical face masks harms or benefit the patients undergoing elective surgery.
Here's the most recent, very high quality, paper about masks and covid-19. This wasn't available when Public Health organisations were making their recommendations.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
> Although direct evidence is limited, the optimum use of face masks, in particular N95 or similar respirators in health-care settings and 12–16-layer cotton or surgical masks in the community, could depend on contextual factors; action is needed at all levels to address the paucity of better evidence. Eye protection might provide additional benefits. Globally collaborative and well conducted studies, including randomised trials, of different personal protective strategies are needed regardless of the challenges, but this systematic appraisal of currently best available evidence could be considered to inform interim guidance.
This para is saying we just don't have the evidence yet. It's saying people should wear facemasks because masks may help, but we don't know, and maybe masks cause harm.
> Interpretation
> The findings of this systematic review and meta-analysis support physical distancing of 1 m or more and provide quantitative estimates for models and contact tracing to inform policy. Optimum use of face masks, respirators, and eye protection in public and health-care settings should be informed by these findings and contextual factors. Robust randomised trials are needed to better inform the evidence for these interventions, but this systematic appraisal of currently best available evidence might inform interim guidance.
Look at the difference in the description of distancing (supported) and masks (optimum use may help).
> Face mask use could result in a large reduction in risk of infection (n=2647; aOR 0·15, 95% CI 0·07 to 0·34, RD −14·3%, −15·9 to −10·7; low certainty), with stronger associations with N95 or similar respirators compared with disposable surgical masks or similar (eg, reusable 12–16-layer cotton masks; pinteraction=0·090; posterior probability >95%, low certainty).
Tucked away in this para is "low certainty". This comes from GRADE. Low certainty means that masks may be much more effective, or much less effective, than they estimate.
https://bestpractice.bmj.com/info/toolkit/learn-ebm/what-is-...
> Low The true effect might be markedly different from the estimated effect
So if you think masks _can_ help (now or in the future, with training, used correctly, when we have enough of them in the future, etc etc) then DO NOT say they do not help and then come back to that because you have "new information".
If the problem was sourcing PPEs for health professionals why didn't the government use emergency powers to seize shipments and ban selling of such critical products to the general population? At least temporarily while building stocks for health professionals (which I'm surprised we didn't already have stocks of, you know, that seems like normal preparation procedure for a national health emergency?)
I also don't see how you can blame the health authorities for this when half the political leadership in this country continually questioned (and in some cases still questions) the efficacy of masks and successfully politicized the issue.
Scott Alexander covers your point under this blog post https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/23/face-masks-much-more-t.... I believe at one point he felt similarly to you.
>“What the World Health Organization [WHO] and the CDC [The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] have reaffirmed in the last few days is that they do not recommend the general public wear masks.”
A quick googling also produced this, from a site I've never heard of, but it naches my memory of the time: https://techstartups.com/2020/06/17/dr-fauci-admits-health-e...
It's possible they were wrong w.r.t. the harms outweighing the benefits but that's easier to say in hindsight.
"They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus" reads to me exactly as "you shouldn't wear a mask because they won't work".
That's not a lie, it's fact.
It's really easy for you to prove it's a lie: post a link to your best quality evidence that shows masks work.
This happened anyway. Telling noble lies to the population just increases populism and makes people distrust the government even more. Which is paying off wonderfully right about now.
Are you saying there have been studies showing approximately 0% reduced risk of infection from wearing a paper or cloth mask?
I'd have assumed that these masks are much less effective than an N95, but I haven't seen any data showing they have no effect.
Related: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/31/ssc-journal-club-macin...
In EVERY other country you can buy masks, and they were strongly encouraged, that prevented YOU from getting sick.
South Koreas KF94 masks come to mind, very good coverage and fit (3 parts including one under chin). And despite the lies basically posted by you and plenty of others including health authorities (don't wear masks if you are "healthy", masks can't protect you from covid) masks CAN be used to protect you from infection, and that is a MUCH more powerful motivator for folks to wear them, and can also be targeted to those who are at higher risk.
We need to get a grip of basic facts. Masks help reduce transmission and if reasonably designed (look overseas) infection. Why else do doctors in hospitals wear N95 masks? To avoid getting sick.
I am somewhat higher risk. I wear and N95 under a surgical mask. This reduces my risk of getting covid.
The other issue you miss is that there really has not been good evidence of outdoor transmission, and the claims of covid living on outdoor surfaces for 7 days also are suspect.
So when folks say - no one go to the beach, it's a bit of an eye roll. If covid were THAT infectious (huge open ocean airflow hitting the beach, blasting sun) then we'd all have it already just from going to the grocery store.
I think health professionals lost a megaton of credibility in claiming masks don't help, to not wear masks, or that masks can only help reduce transmission not infection. Other countries went all out on masks - with great results.
They are reaping the rewards of these basic lies. Now I'm told going to beach on a sunny breezy day is high risk. I'm listening, show me the outbreak, show me the data that says this is high risk.
Cloth and non-medical disposable masks are not considered protective (although it's likely they block some inbound particles, and there's evidence they may thus result in a gentler illness on average) but do reduce transmission.
You're right that there are multiple kinds of masks; in the US, it's kinda pointless to talk about N95s. No one's wearing them, in part because they're hard to get, and in part because our anti-maskers threw enough of a fit about fairly comfortable ones.
> The other issue you miss is that there really has not been good evidence of outdoor transmission, and the claims of covid living on outdoor surfaces for 7 days also are suspect.
You'll actually find me elsewhere on this thread noting that outdoors tends to be safe, so I'm not sure what statement of mine you're arguing with here.
> anti-maskers threw enough of a fit about fairly comfortable ones
How's this for a solution? Make masks with inhalation valves. You can find masks for dusty work with exhalation valves. It wouldn't be too big a change to reverse those valves. The lost protection against inbound particles isn't much, and the gain would be near elimination of the inherent discomfort of re-breathing CO2. I'm not an anti-masker, but I notice I'm a lot more comfortable with my mask off.
Why would it not be impacted? You'd be breathing in unfiltered air, and that's the main method of transmission.
> the gain would be near elimination of the inherent discomfort of re-breathing CO2
Which isn't really the comfort problem with N95s; they're just tight and hot.
Why would it not be impacted? You'd be breathing in unfiltered air, and that's the main method of transmission.
It would be impacted. You'd lose 100% of that benefit. But 100% is still not much.
What would even be the point then? That'd just be reduced to obstinate anti-maskers wearing lace 'masks.'
The mask still protects other people from transmission by you.
Anti-maskers wearing lace 'masks' does not protect other people.
They are completely different, and that is the main point of mask wearing for the general public - to protect each other by reducing the chance of ourselves transmitting it if we have it.
You're pretty much back at ubiquitous and widely available surgical style masks at that point.
If you want to do that you can just wear a surgical mask instead.
An inhalation valve preserves the mask's primary purpose by closing off during exhalation. It gives up a small amount of protection for the wearer, but obviously a lot of people aren't interested in that anyway and refuse to wear masks. With an inhalation valve they could at least protect others.
> Where is this coming from that only a small amount of protection is provided to wearer [...] public health authorities
I clicked the HN link to your comments. I couldn't quickly find studies, just a mention of Korea having success with KN94 masks. I think it's safe to repost them now without being repetitive.
It doesn’t just assume it. It’s the whole point of the masks.
If your aim is just to prevent making people sick, a surgical mask is just fine (exhibit A, normal doctors).
If your aim is to prevent getting sick yourself, a N95 respirator is a better choice (exhibit B, doctors treating COVID patients).
An inhalation valve does less to protect other people, because the expelled air still has to go somewhere, and will just blow out of the sides of the mask. It could theoretically go through the mask material if it was thin enough, but there’s probably too much pressure inside and it’ll burst out the sides.
That in reverse is the whole idea for masks with an exhalation valve. Breathing in creates negative pressure inside the mask, so air gets pulled inside through the mask. When breathing out the valve opens and releases the extra pressure without blowing out the sides (not really a problem per-se, but would compromise your protection).
No, an inhalation valve makes 0.0% difference here. Here's a simple mental exercise to understand better. Imagine two people side by side. They are wearing identical masks, except one has an inhalation valve. They breathe in, pause, breathe out. In your mind, freeze the frame at the pause between breathing in and breathing out. At that moment, what's the difference between the two? Nothing. Now watch them breathe out. What's the difference? Still nothing.
No they are not. This misconception is absurd. I bought 200ct of KN95 in early April from AliExpress and got them in 10 days. They are still plentiful.
NPR article from today on even medical clinics and dentists still struggling to keep up N95 and other PPE supplies: https://www.npr.org/2020/08/19/903612006/yep-masks-and-prote...
N95's are available on eBay as a black market ish item. Sellers come and go. I've bought dozens and given them to friends and family and use them when in an Uber.
KN95s are fragile, have crappy fit (leak air enormously, obvious if you wear glasses since they fog), and aren't very well regulated. But they are better than surgical or those ridiculous cloth masks.
How certain are you they are authentic? Remember a couple years back when everyone bought glasses online for watching the solar eclipse and then it turned out they were all fake and wouldn't protect your eyes?
Especially given the economic incentive present today for anyone willing to sell "N95" masks.
Yes, our government has been incompetent all around. That's a bad thing.
If the country can't gear up production of masks to fight a pandemic, why am I supposed to believe we could do anything of meaning competently? I know I'm a lot less impressed with our military's readiness if we ever get into a real war than I was a year ago. We've shown we're very good at throwing money at fraudsters and very little about actually producing things we need ourselves.
We also seem to care very little about over a million deaths, if we go with something like a 0.5% fatality rate. Puts the reaction to 9/11 and the whole "how dare you disrespect our troops" racist reaction to athletes protesting into perspective...
I don't understand the people who go from "wow, we've handled this badly" to "we might as well never try anything again," though.
That should be the motivation to start paying more attention, from local politics all the way up, not give up.
That is something to ponder. What does this say about us as a people? "Hey, we must retaliate, they attacked us!!" vs "Hell no I will not do one simple thing to protect others when we are all under attack from a virus." Hrm.
Nothing. A large fraction of the population does not feel this way at all.
There's an analogy to US police forces there, too. And to US politicians.
I don't agree. This is not incompetence. It is malice. The government absolutely could be responding far better, and doing much of the same things every other western democracy is doing. A popular political position in this country is to prove that we need less gov't by making sure it appears incompetent. Combined with the similar political need to believe the virus is a hoax means we get zero federal response.
I believe that national politics gets an undue spotlight, and that local government (in particular) does not receive the attention warranted.
Or we are a federalist society where by the states need to ask for assistance and not have the response mandated by the federal government.
We are a Union of States, and the states do and should have their own sovereignty from the federal government even in pandemic response.
What works in NY may not be the the same as what works in SD as an example so a Federal response is just not needed
While I disagree with the strategy and execution it is completely dishonest to say they were sent "to do community-level police work", they were sent to protect Federal Property after the City and State Governments failed to provide any protection for said property in the face of riots.
Again if it were me I would have just abandoned the building, and take with it all federal money letting Portland burn setting up a new Federal Courthouse (and giving the money that comes with it) to a new city in the region that would welcome the economic output of such a venue.
>>And they are certainly more than happy to dictate many other aspects of our lives using whatever levers they have available.
2 wrongs do not make a right... As a libertarian I advocate for the reduction in Federal power all the time at every level. It seems however Democrats only complain about federal power when a Republican is in charge, and Republicans only complain about Federal Power when a Democrat is in charge. Democrats and Republicans alike have transferred HUGE amounts of power from the Legislative to the Executive which enabled both Obama and now Trump to use that federal power in ways many people disagree with
They may wish that the local police were more successful at suppressing the violence, but that doesn't make it their responsibility to deal with the rioters. And why did they feel the need to meet the Portland protesters with violence but not the guys who occupied federal property out in Eastern Oregon? Politics, perhaps?
> 2 wrongs do not make a right
Sure. However, promoting the general welfare of people in the US by supporting pandemic response is a good bit less bad than creating arbitrary new regulations and laws that criminalize behavior which is really a local concern.
People that say government can or should impose/strongly-suggest/mandate mask wearing to protect overall population. Essentially the pro-mask wearing individuals.
Individuals that believe that we need end-to-end encryption, and that we can't have government watching our emails, tracking our movements, doing facial recognition, profiling, etc to stop violence.
In both cases, one could argue, the solutions being pushed-back against can effectively stop their respective problems. E.g. large scale big-brother surveillance of all individuals could effectively reduce crime to near zero. Just as 100% large scale government lockdowns/SIP and mask-orders can stop the spread of an epidemic.
Obviously I'm generalizing to try draw a comparison and point out the hypocrisy. Both of the problems require a suspension of some set of rights for "the greater good", yet we somehow balk at one (surveillance, facial recognition, centralized DBs, etc) whilst applauding and being offended when people question the other (mask wearing, SIP laws, social distancing, etc).
It's probably time that we decide as a society what we want instead of incessantly debating back and forth with contradictory requirements and expectations we impose on our governments.
If you sit long enough you can come up with a potential abuse for any government law or idea. Just as is done with mass-surveillance. What we don't do is sit down and come up with extraordinary ways and means for us to use powerful tools/ideas/solutions such as surveillance in a responsible and safeguarded manner that is not exploitable by bad individuals in government, or bad governments themselves.
So they can fine them? There are already hundreds of offenses that can be used for that purpose and that can actually land you in jail.
> the negative social aspect of creating laws that have neighbors secretly reporting each-other for this?
Is that really happening? There is no special incentive for reporting people for not wearing masks.
> Or the potential for child-traffickers to gag + hide the gag with a mask while they're busy engaging in trafficking?
They could already do that, wearing masks was already legal.
> If you sit long enough you can come up with a potential abuse for any government law or idea. Just as is done with mass-surveillance.
False equivalence, the potential abuses from mass-surveillance are much more dangerous.
By comparison wearing masks to slow down infection rates of viruses/diseases that spread via nose/mouth secretions has centuries of evidence backing it up and the government doesn't really gain anything by enforcing the use of masks in places like supermarkets. Maybe it can artificially increase demand to benefit some mask manufacturers but that's it.
Do you still think it's hypocrisy?
Freedom of speech is another matter.
For some reason it is absolutely CRITICAL for me to not go outside to a beach, but it isn't critical for the folks lecturing me to get their act together and make masks that cost basically 10 cents to $1.50 and would allow myself and others to carry on productive and healthy activities?
This is the issue - YOU are not listening. People see through the pantomime. Google and apple have API's to help with exposure notification - no apps developed at national level and few at state level. Other countries went big on apps.
Sure, they may not work great, but there just is a total lack of effort to actually solve the problem.
Same thing with masks. Countries with fractions of our per capita GDP and income levels crank up huge mask production. Total availability - literally the post office handing them out. No, not N95's always, but KF94s and other very effective masks. We are still talking about mask availability?
Same thing with testing. I'm talking walk up no dr referral needed testing. My health care provider WILL NOT test unless you are basically dying. I had a collegue, a once in a lifetime chance to see family (10 years) came up. I told him, find a private pay / doesn't do insurance / doesn't deal with govt testing facility and get tested before traveling so you don't spread it by accident.
What about contact tracing. You have millions of folks unemployed, are paying out 1+ trillion in checks etc to all sorts of people, and you can't get a contact tracing program going. Your telling me none of these people can go down a call list and call folks up?
All I hear from health professionals is how they can't do anything about anything, nothing helps, except staying alone at home. Masks don't help if you don't wear them perfectly, masks can't be found, the apps won't really work so they aren't going to do that. PLEASE get a grip.
Masks will help - so get production going. Contact tracing - hire folks sitting around. Get the apps going, get testing up, get rears in gear. I think if we saw more credible action by the "proper authorities" lecturing us we'd all be more enthusiastic in doing our part (now we can't even get good masks or apps etc).
No. Beaches are quite safe.
> but it isn't critical for the folks lecturing me to get their act together and make masks that cost basically 10 cents to $1.50 and would allow myself and others to carry on productive and healthy activities?
It is! (It's not happening in the US, though.)
> This is the issue - YOU are not listening. People see through the pantomime. Google and apple have API's to help with exposure notification - no apps developed at national level and few at state level. Other countries went big on apps.
You seem to be ranting as if I'm supporting the current state of things. The current state of things is bad; the Feds are largely AWOL. States are muddling through with various levels of competency, mostly poorly.
Everything you're saying I agree with. The reaction to the pandemic has been absolute shit, and it leaves us in this position now - ongoing lockdowns, supply shortages, and the like. One need only look at Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam, Taiwan, South Korea, etc. to know it didn't have to be this way.
Yes. That's pathetic at this late date. Worse, many of the off-brand ones don't do much. Some tests found masks performing around the 20% level, instead of the 95% level. This problem should have been fixed months ago. Part of the problem is that manufacturers didn't want to invest in the equipment, because the epidemic was supposed to be over by now.
Good N95 masks use a clever technology. The inner layer is a stretched film with holes. That layer can stop particles smaller than the holes - it's an electret, with a permanent static charge. Anything solid small enough to get through the holes gets pulled to the edge of a hole electrostatically and sticks. This has the interesting property that it works better on smaller particles; the static charge pulls them in more easily. So these can filter solids far below the hole size. Masks lacking that technology either don't work or obstruct breathing too much.
3M 8210 masks work that way. You can get them expensively on eBay, and cheaply if you're willing to wait 60 days for delivery. The "8210 Plus" model has a better elastic strap, which mostly matters for long-term use or storage. Aging of the elastic band is the weak point in the base 8210 model.
There's a vast supply of cheap "surgical" masks available. At least get a supply of those. Only ones with a bendable nose clip. Anything that leaks around the nose is worthless.
Machines for making N95 masks are available for sale, although some of them look like prototypes and are far too slow.
All verifiable sources I've seen have them reserved for medical personnel, although I haven't looked too hard.
I think for the most part health professionals answered specific questions about specific types of situations or types of transmission, and the media runs with overly broad statements when are then pushed/rejected by different parties.
There are many inputs that go into something as simple as a recommendation of "should the general public wear masks", including "are there enough masks for health professionals currently", "what's the current infection rates", "how far has it spread", "what type of masks". Additionally the answer might be different at different times in the past depending on whether talking about a locality with an outbreak or the whole nation. Expecting the answer as to whether wearing a mask to help to not change over time is as silly as expecting it to not change pre-COVID-19 start and after it.
The bottom line is that the inputs that influence the recommendation are fluid and change over time, so we should expect the recommendation to change over time, and the only reason people aren't getting that is because it's in the best interest of different groups to position it otherwise so they can use it to score points (and while the obvious groups in question are political, they aren't limited to one side of the spectrum, this is a common tactic used across the board which is particularly troublesome when it attacks the credibility of the people we trust to tell us how to protect ourselves).
The US Surgeon General https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/12337257852839321...
> Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk! http://bit.ly/37Ay6Cm
Highlighting
> They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus,
Consider, the situation is that people think if they get a mask, they are protected, and can go about their lives as they were. Also, there's a shortage of masks. Given the option of "stay away from large groups of people and public events" or "wear a mask and feel protected", saying "stop buying masks" might mean something slightly different then than it does now.
At the same time, I acknowledge that's a particularly egregious example. To that I say that the Surgeon General is a political appointee, and our government and the politicians that make it up (all of them) have failed us to various degrees. That interacts with what and how the health professionals have communicated with the public, but in a much less straightforward way (if there's different messaging coming from government health services and the general health community, and the government sources are counterproductive, who did you trust, and who do you blame?).
You can read Fauci's statements on what he said and why here[1], but the main things to thing about are:
- What did we know about transmission at the time those statements were made?
- Where was the outbreak at those times? Localized to specific areas, or nation-wide?
- Was it responsible to report to the whole nation that they should be wearing masks given those facts? What if we know there's not enough masks, and that means masks go to areas that don't need them?
The bottom line is, should we have expected anyone to act differently given those conditions and that knowledge at that time? You can note someone made a wrong decision in the past, but if they made the correct decision given the information they have, you can't rationally hold them accountable for the outcome (and if we're not speaking rationally, then we're not actually discussing anything, just airing grievances).
1: https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-doesnt-regret-advising...
Yes? This isn't a school classroom. It's okay to cheat on the test. You know who's best at handling this because you know they handled it last time. You ask your boss to ask his boss to get on the line with Chou Jih-Haw and ask for some of his best people. They're an allied nation with close ties who want even closer ties. They will gladly help.
And this isn't news. People were saying this in February, in March, in April. People whose full time job is other things knew this.
The real problem is that American public health institutions have NIH (haha, a pun!) syndrome.
You think that's Fauci's call? That's Trump's call. You're blaming healthcare professional's for doing what was best given the knowledge and resource they had available. I've made it pretty clear that the politicians failed us, and you've just pointed out another way.
> And this isn't news. People were saying this in February, in March, in April. People whose full time job is other things knew this.
All this does presuppose they have any actual help they could provide. It's unlikely they were willing to ship us a few tens (or hundreds!) of millions of N95 masks.
> The real problem is that American public health institutions have NIH (haha, a pun!) syndrome.
The problem is that they are beholden to the politicians, and even more so now, where appointees that speak out using their experience but contradict the party line are replaced.
There's been a lot of talk about how Trump is eroding people's faith in government and institutions, and here we have a prime example of that, where the institutions were clearly dysfunctional for obvious reasons that have to do with the executive branch, and we still have people shooting the messengers.
(Edit: This is from March, just to be clear that he's not saying that now.)
>Fauci: Right now in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks.
>LaPook: You’re sure of it? Because people are listening really closely to this.
>Fauci: …There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/05/outdated-fauci-video-on-fa...
When there was a toilet paper shortage, businesses were still able to get their supplies since they used a different supply chain compared to the end consumer. I'm surprised that this isn't the same case with PPE.
PPE is often literally the same product sold in consumer vs. healthcare markets. Sure, the distributors may be different, but it's the same goods from the same factories, and often the same packaging.
That includes my county health department (I asked if they would arrest me if I put a mask on or didn't take my mask off on a crowded transit vehicle - they said they would STRONGLY encourage me not to wear a mask on crowded transit vehicles if I was "healthy" despite my higher level of risk and that I shouldn't believe "disinformation". A month later they issued a mask mandate!)
Masks are cheap. For 10 cents to $1 you can save a life - perhaps cheapest intervention out there.
Unfortunately, health recommendations regarding this outbreak have been seen as fair game from both sides for political plays (there's no point in debating why or who started it for this discussion), and as such recommendations from the top had a political bent.
If there is a difference between what healthcare professionals and government agencies employing healthcare professionals recommended, we should note that and target our ire to the correct location.
Much less pathogen is needed to get you sick if it is stuck to something covering your breathing pathways on every breath.
Masks are currently not required in public transport across the country, but that changes this Saturday. Up until last week I can count on one hand how many people I have seen wearing masks.
Now that people seem to have forgotten what social distancing means, masks are a useful tool. But if everyone just keeps their distance, they're not a must have.
I always thought they are meant to protect the patient from doctor coughing directly into an open surgery wound.
The relationship between particle size and the ease of filtering them is U-shaped, not linear, with the dip at around 2.5 micrometers being the bottom of the trough.
Your N95 mask reduces your risk of getting covid by about 99.9%.
Why even wear a surgical mask?
Anyway, I think the issue with going to the beach isn’t the part where you play in the open air on the beach. It’s where a bunch of people go to a beach house and drink a bunch of beer in a small room.
To prevent others from getting covid from _you_ [0]
N95 masks are more expensive, take more effort (and training?) to use correctly and have limited reusability IIRC.
As a society, it's more efficient if everyone wears surgical masks, because that means every infected person is also wearing one, even those that don't know (yet) that they are covid positive. So in my opinion, it's a good thing if countries force everyone to wear them.
Good surgical masks are much nicer to breath in then fabric ones.
[0] https://s.hdnux.com/photos/01/11/66/67/19361245/3/850x0.jpg
> I wear and N95 under a surgical mask.
They’re wearing both a N95 and surgical mask at the same time.
What? I’m East Asian from a country known for mask wearing and this is definitely not how mask wearing is treated. It’s definitely to protect other people from you!
(1) Best available evidence indicates pretty clearly that masks will prevent you from getting it sometimes. This is sharply different from early messaging that masks could increase your risk due to them somehow being viral-magnets and thus you risked infecting yourself.
(2) We have done many studies on many viruses and the consensus seems to be that the initial viral dose matters a great deal -- the lower the dose, the lower the severity. It's also fairly clearly established that, at their worst expected performance, masks will lower the dose you receive.
This is a disease in which the severity matters a great deal. We see wildly different ranges of outcomes/levels of severity.
And indeed, many of the worse outcomes are setting where it's reasonable to assume that there was a significant viral dose.
I think it's irresponsible to promote the idea that masks only help protect others from the wearer. While they clearly do that, the balance of probabilities of available data strongly indicates that they sometimes protect the wearer.
We've even had studies as specific as having examined masks with SARS-CoV-1 -- to pretend that none of our medical knowledge indicated that masks are helpful for SARS-CoV-2 is insane.
The "risk compensation" concern which was claimed as one of the reasons to pretend that masks weren't helpful has been thoroughly debunked as a false concern. Additionally, while they were busy talking about "lack of evidence", their "risk compensation" concerns were also completely lacking a foundation in evidence.
The whole situation disgusts me. "Doctor knows best" and "we can't tell people the truth because they might not respond the way we want" attitude has to stop -- it destroys the fabric of society and the credibility of health experts.
Why would people ever trust words of officials when it is obvious to anyone paying attention that their messaging was focused on avoiding blame for contingency planning failures instead of focused on providing true, accurate, not-misleading and helpful information.
Here's an example from the United States Surgeon General:
Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!
They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!
You want people to believe that your plan is to use these ineffective masks to protect healthcare workers? Are the healthcare workers a different species than the general public?
The obvious solution is: If you are at risk, or worried about COVID, don't leave your house. To everyone else: wear a mask, stay away from people, follow the precautions...but go do what you like (mostly).
What we're doing now is the worst of both worlds: not enough to actually eliminate the virus (not gonna happen in the US...it's just not. Welcome to America) and just enough to mess up the economy and put a lot of businesses out of business (and also just generally make life annoying).
So it seems to me pretty clear: let people do what they want as long as they wear a mask, and just pass a bloody law that says you can't fire someone cause they don't want to come into work because they are overweight. Seems a lot cheaper to just support those people staying home with a welfare payout/BI than shutting down the country for no reason.
Tell that to my buddy who almost died. Healthy, early 40s, no pre-existing conditions.
Also... there are plenty of people who do not fall in out-group rhetoric of being “Very sick, very old, or very obese” who are extremely vulnerable. Or, is that you just define “very sick” as anyone who is not like you?
If you're ready to listen, the proof is already there.
It's not a matter of proof, it's a matter of weighing the cost of action vs the possible outcome. Just like insurance, there's a low cost of action (low continuous payments) to hedge against a possible large negative outcome. It's also worth noting that some types of insurance are mandated because people are bad at calculating risk in general, and when they fail, we as a society don't necessarily want that to have too extreme an outcome, so we have societal guards in place to help. Mandated insurance shifts the burden from society (taxes) back the the individual. We see this in health insurance, car insurance, home insurance, etc. Sometimes it depends on region (some localities requires fire/earthquake/flood, etc insurance).
> people who are at risk of dying can protect themselves even around sick people (wearing a mask, staying at home, washing hands, ...)
To clarify, wearing a mask, as recommended by most officials currently, is not about protecting oneself, but about protecting those around you in the case you are unknowingly contagious. It greatly reduces the spread of your contagion, it does not greatly reduce your chance of being infected unless you are using a high-grade mask very securely fastened such that all airflow is through the mask and not around it.
> so this is not your fault if they catch it
It very well may be your fault if someone catches it if you're contagious but ignoring recommendations about avoiding gatherings of people, or not wearing a mask, etc. They could literally catch it directly from you with little ability to block it. A sneeze can travel very far, yelling expels particles with more force, and direct contact with people or surfaces they touch shortly after and then may touch themselves or something else they touch after washing their hands is not something easily protected against.
> but you need to stop living your life.
This, right here is the crux of the issue. What is being asked for from people ranges from not working to curtailing social group gatherings and activities. The work portion is horrible, and life altering, and actual affects people living their lives. The group activities being classified as "living your life" is both a) relatively recent for the vast majority of the world, which did not have the free time or money to do such things on a regular basis decades ago, and b) shows a complete mismatch by people of what the need and what they like and want.
A vanishingly small number of people actually need to go to the gym (those in physical therapy that need certain equipment), and the others can get basic exercise at home or outside without anyone around. Nobody needs to go to a bar. That we classify these niceties as "living our life" is really just a shift of priorities of modern people in first world countries away from actually having to worry about survival. But this is a matter of survival, and those thought patterns are doing us real harm as a society during this crisis.
> It is not that people don't want to sacrifice, it is just that scarifying is the worst solution for everyone
No, it's that people are unwilling to separate simple and (relatively) easy sacrifices from hard sacrifices, and acting like they're all the same. Get food from restaurants, but limit or eliminate the in-restaurant eating/time (you don't have to order door-dash, just pick it up). You don't have to stop drinking, or talking to friends, but you shouldn't do those in person when avoidable.
Collectively, people stopping the non-essential gatherings such as gyms and bars will not only reduce the spread and save lives, if everyone did it we might get back to the point where the increase in cases was so low more optional services could reopen again, lessening the economic impact.
It's not about scarifying, it's about making people actually understand how this works, and how their actions actually play into this when carried out by massive amounts of people. And when it comes to bars and gyms and people being unwilling to change their habit, it is also a bit about people not wanting to sacrifice. In the grand scheme of things, those are fairly small changes to ask for, and if people can't even bother to do that, what hope is there that they'll follow through with other things?
Wearing a mask is mostly about keeping the respiratory droplets of the ill, including the 40-50% which don't have obvious symptoms from spreading around. If only the vulnerable wear masks they wont be safe.
Power rack: $300-500
Weights: $200-800
Bench: $100
Bar: $75-100
Plywood and rubber: $40-100 max
I rent a room in downtown of a big city and I simply don't have space for equipment (my room is mostly just bed with small kitchen and bathroom). Don't assume everybody is rich and owns a house with spare room / garage where you can put equipment.
I am 30+ years old and never lived in a place where I would have spare space for gym equipment. You must be very privileged if you have that (top 1% at least).
Thanks for downvote though.
It is possible to get good workouts with minimal equipment.
If you're in a city there has to a playground nearby providing all sorts of options.
I think people just get too tied to a gym, when there are countless options to get really good workouts if the gym is unavailable for a period of time.
Sure, you can be selfish, but you're also negatively impacting society and saying that you don't care. You do you, but I don't get it.
Sorry if I was a bit harsh - had someone yell "America" at me while running with a mask the other day but I shouldn't project that frustration onto others.
If you're going to attack others for their alleged ignorance maybe you should get basic numbers right? Covid hasn't killed 'millions', it hasn't even killed one million people. You're off by at least an order of magnitude.
The problem is that you are effectively deciding how others live their lives through your careless actions. Everyone should have a say on how they want to live their lives, not just you.
This is nothing more than a tantrum. Nobody can "prove" it. Humanity is still learning about COVID-19. No model is going to predict the outcome of closing the economy. It has not been done in modern times at this scale.
>0.5% death rate for population
Google is showing the death rate at ~3% worldwide. 6 times higher than your nonsense 0.5% water-level figure.
You're commenting later down the chain that you wish to frolic at the beach. The fact is, you're sick of inconvenience and will stomp your feet until someone hears how sick of it you are. Go cry elsewhere.
Confirmed Cases: 21,991,954
Deaths: 777,018
World Pop.: ~7,800,000,000
Case Fatality Rate = Deaths/Confirmed Cases = ~3.5%
Death Rate = Deaths/World Pop. = ~0.01%
That's similar to claiming that, because only 93% of all humans ever born have died so far, your risk of dying is 93%. It may be mathematically sound, but completely ignores the context of the problem: That for the living/not-yet-infected the result is still outstanding.
It is also very strongly correlated with pre-existing conditions and age.
The "masks only protect others from you" narrative (which may turn out to be false) certainly increased that.
The officer's immediate superior may be inclined to cut the officer some slack, but the buck stops with the person charged with ensuring that the pandemic is effectively managed.
The buck stops with all of us. We either beat this thing together or it keeps killing our relatives. Those are the only options. Pick one.
That seems to be a very widespread societal issue. Feedback and gratification are very effective conditioning loops and it applies to basically everything directly socially linked. Advertising, education, law enforcement. Everything which shapes anothe life whether done knowing or unknowingly and can come to bite the conditioner one way or another. Like the "tiger mom nightmare" case of forcing a son through med school only for him to show it to his mom say "There I am done it, happy now?" and working in a convenience store because of the sheer weight of negative conditioned meant that poverty was preferrable to six figure income and working days calling back decades of resentment.
Defying it successfully is a way to make or save money and everyone hates it essentially is rare and doing so is an outright resentment magnet. The majority will dislike anyone who points it out as a potential component to a solution. It gets one outright dehumanized even for optimizations innocous as meal prepping the same balanced and cheap meal daily to save up for something.
Play interests off each other.
Papers please!
> I find it amazing we can not see short term sacrifice for long term gain.
These are two related issues, but not the same.
Before we started (half) using the office again - I'd not see anyone outside of buying groceries. For approximately 3 months straight. It's not healthy, and I absolutely can see others having even more trouble with that than I did.
It is natural even introverts need to socialize.
That said, I'm surprised there seem to be less focus on organizing in smaller, regular groups. It's likely better for preventing spread if people met up in the same group of 5 to 10 people, rather than gathering indoors - especially as it now seems quite likely covid-19 is airborne.
So yes, some personal sacrifice should be expected - but I would be careful dismissing the need for people to see other people, in person.
We are social animals.
Not justifying it, I'm just jealous because my bedroom has turned into a gym and it sucks.
The difference between "overwhelmed" and "not overwhelmed" is pretty subtle. You can measure this in ICU beds and hospital capacity, but that's not sustainable. You have to start asking "How many hours are health care workers working?". You also have to ask, if we did have any setbacks/outbreaks, what buffer do we have in terms of people and PPE availability?
You can't run the system at the red line, it's not sustainable. And any distance between our current capactity and that red line is somewhat open to interpretation, but I bet that distance feels a lot smaller for our EMTs and Doctors than it does for the average person on HN.
In April doctors were pondering why there was 40% to 60% heart attack patients. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/well/live/coronavirus-doc...
It's a collective action problem. If everyone keeps to mask mandate and social distancing for a month, there is no need to close gyms and schools after. Germany and Italy are fine now with maybe ten deaths a day.
If 20% of the population keeps ignoring the recommendations because they don't give a flying fuck about the society they live in, R0 will stay above 1 forever and half of your neighbourhood will see their grandparents die in the next year.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-protests-coronavirus/a-5445665...
Pandemic control measures can temporarily suppress R0, but as soon as those measures are lifted the contagion picks up again.
The average age of grandparents in the US is about 65. The actual infection fatality rate for that age group is 1.3%. That's bad, but nowhere near half the neighborhood.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160895v...
What would you tell the authorities? That there are people in a gym and that they need to be arrested? What outcome would you hope to achieve by tattling on them?
People with houses and garages shouldn't be as critical, given their comparative privilege here.
Swimming is my thing. I don't know why but it makes me feel normal like no other exercise can. but the pools have been closed for months now here in Melbourne (excluding a couple of weeks in the middle there).
Now I'm just depressed, stuck in isolation, borders are closed and can't visit my friends or family. Everyone saying this shit is easy for introverts have no idea. They seem to think introverts don't do anything or never used to leave their house?
Talking to a therapist maybe helps but as other people have said, not knowing if there is any end in sight is what sucks. Not sure why I'm venting to you.
It's a time of adaptation, and it sucks for sure but it's simply Necessary. If I told you what I'm doing instead of olympic weightlifting you would laugh. However it really helps reduce that exact angst you're describing (which I'm very familiar with as well). I consider physical exercise to be as critical to me as everything else, and absolutely essential for my mental health. I happen to be an introvert as well and feel similarly, btw.
We're not all satiated simply by popping pills and plugging into the cloud or whatever it is you do with your free time.
Most humans have a strong need for social interaction.
What is the point of preserving life if nobody is allowed to live theirs?
The reason for why I take the risk and keep go is pretty simple: Mental health.
When we had a lockdown, gyms closed and I was confined to my apartment 24/7 I felt horrible. Days just blurred into each other, I gained weight, my motivation to do anything dropped. My life was just work and I hated it. Of course I bought a set of dumbbells (which were also ridiculously expensive because everyone had the same idea) and tried running but that only gets you so far. I can't get more equipment at home because my apartment is like 35sqm
When the gyms reopned I started going again and kept my guard up: Disinfect everything, don't be near other people, be careful when I take my mask off, wash my hands before I touch anything after I finish. Since then I started feeling much better. Even if I don't do anything else like meeting friends, going out for drinks, or if my workday happened to be shitty, I have something that makes me think more about myself and my health. Sports has incredible benefits on mood, sleep and mental health, hence why I take the risk.
For all we know, this pandemic can continue for a very long time. I'm not saying we should all forget the virus and do what we did before, but we should still try to find a somewhat healthy day-cycle that doesn't knock us in lockdown depression. Going to a small, empty gym while keeping my guard up is my calculated risk of "with corona".
When problems are on this massive of a scale it is easy for individuals to think "cannot be me". Reality is that it is all of us.
You must be a really nice person.
like "15 days to slow the spread"?
There was someone on WGN-TV a few weeks ago lamenting that it was insulting for all of the hairdressers and manicurists and yoga instructors to be called "non-essential."
I thought it was more insulting for that person to value the work of hairdressers and manicurists and yoga instructors on an equal basis with firefighters, doctors, paramedics, and actual real "essential" workers.
Nobody calls a holistic lifestyle consultant to run into a burning building to save a baby.
Because that's what the word "essential" means: Things you can't do without. Not "things I really really really like."
How are you measuring value?
People who save lives > people who don't save lives.
The information was out there..
Not where I live. All restaurants were shut down, even for take-out. They were only allowed to offer take-out food when restrictions started being lifted.
It just seems to me shutting down takeout makes it harder to enforce a lockdown. It assumes everyone is able to cook, which doesn't seem like a reasonable assumption.
It's no wonder we're still muddling along with this problem, months into it.
So what? What does that have to do with anything?
you could say that... even sex-workers are more essential than doctors and fire-fighters.
You can say that, but you'd be wrong. That's the great thing about the internet. Anyone can say anything no matter how false it is, and they get to be on an equal footing with people who know what they are talking about.
It's a pretty twisted definition of "essential" to include only the things that are definitely going to kill you if you go without and not to include the things that just might kill you.
Again, doctors and firefighters might look “essential” for a secular and technological society like ours (one where we’re afraid of death and where we value physical stuff that could burn) but that hasn’t always been the case. It still isn’t in many parts of the world.
Unless things change over time, as such requiring new facilities. We didn't have nuclear power station inspectors (or regulations) thousands of years ago, so are they also non-essential?
> It still isn’t in many parts of the world
There are "many" places in the world were death is not feared and people are happy to see their stuff burn? Barring nomadic jungle tribes with no persistent possessions or home locations in the first place, which societies are you describing?
The fact that our ancestors commonly died of tuberculosis doesn't mean they where happy to do so.
In my parts of the world (Eastern Europe) often times the barber was also the doctor and the dentist (was called "felcer).
Then there is the twisting of "essential" -- the home center needs to say open because if a pipe busts in your house you need to get replacement parts to fix it. But most people go to the home center to pick up materials for home projects that they can now do because they suddenly have a large amount of at-home time on their hands.
This gets tricky. Of course we know that when there's a fire, a firefighter is often imminently essential. But it's trickier to imagine a society where all "non-essential" jobs are banned indefinitely. You wouldn't die in a matter of minutes like in the fire example, but you'd also probably find such a society unrecognizable to the extent that you might reconsider what types of jobs are and aren't "essential." There'd be a lot of poverty, a lot of hunger, and yes, it would cause a lot of people to die.
Part of fairness is in treating equal things equally, and unequal things unequally.
Even talking about non-first responders, the folks in supermarkets are more essential on this spectrum than beauticians of various niches IMHO.
Income is trivially addressed, given political will.
An emergency is an emergent situation, which must be new, evolving, and carry the risk of serious harm. Emergency orders are based upon the idea that executive authority must be wielded to quickly mitigate an emergency situation. But a key attribute of an emergency (by definition) is “new” - if emergency powers are extended month after month then they are based on a situation that is no longer an emergency.
Now before you get angry, consider that we can agree that COVID-19 is a serious threat that requires government action _without_ it necessarily being an emergency or emergent situation. The threat has long since emerged.
Now we have a lot of governors issuing decrees based on emergency authorities that they’ve been using for six months. This is quite simply a conflict with our basic notion of democracy. We do not have rulers, yet our governors are issuing rules purportedly carrying the weight of law with no oversight from legislature.
Whether or not you agree with the orders, I think it’s intuitively likely that you can see how this is essentially a disruption in the relationship between people and their government, and as such it’s at least understandable how many people would feel these orders carry no moral weight (even if they’re not thinking from a legal perspective). And so the existence of gray market gyms and parties is at least understandable, even if we don’t condone such behavior.
That was my biggest issue with the whole situation in the USA. All of these emergency measures were done without any mention of timelines, all the while a vocal part of the population was saying "fuck your freedoms", and "millions of people will die if they lift the lockdown". It's like everyone forgot about the Patriot Act overnight, and doesn't realize that the government doesn't like giving up control after whatever "emergency" situation happens. Something needed to be done, but this whole situation made me lose a lot of faith in the government and my fellow Americans.
Now if we expected our government to set conditions of the lock down ending, that would be better. Something based around the pandemic itself, such as new infections per day and test positivity would probably be best. But time? That’s not how this works.
I'm sure the legislature will have no problem forgoing a game of golf with lobbyists in order to vote to extend a bill that gives government more power. They have no problem doing that every time the Patriot Act comes back up.
There's no good reason emergency measures can't have sunset clauses.
Well, in a lot of states the legislature can do that today if they want. It's completely within state legislature's capacity to force action from municipalities, either directly or through the purse strings.
Most don't want to because they're publicly supportive of shutdowns. Or because they're publicly courting anti-maskers but privately know shutdowns are necessary and therefore don't want to take responsibility.
No one is arguing whether the virus is on our clock. The argument is whether we’ve granted our governments the right to indefinitely extend their emergency authorizations.
“After X days responsibility should transfer from the executive branch to the legislative” is completely different from “the governments ability to take X measures to stop a pandemic should be limited to Y days”. I am only responding to the latter.
My fear about the former is the implicit assumption that the legislature won’t also close gyms, bars, and other businesses that a vocal minority want re opened immediately.
That's the risk and price of democracy and freedom, the people (or their representatives) aren't supposed to do what's best, they're supposed to do what the public wants
First of all, we’re a representative democracy. We do not elect people to implement our exact will, we elect people who we expect to use their best judgement to use the powers vested in them. If the expectation was that elected members do exactly what their constituents wanted, we would be a direct democracy instead.
Second, I find the notion that “the price of freedom is the risk of just not bothering to solve a pandemic” to be a serious insult to democracy. I question the legitimacy of any democratic system that would just ... not bother to protect citizens.
And finally, calls to return to normal represent a narrow minority of the population. In fact a majority of Americans are worried about the virus, a majority wants schools to remain closed, and a majority think we opened back up too soon. If we’re talking about “popular will”, then we would be talking about extending shut downs, not ending them.
Do you have a source for those numbers?
Its interesting because Gallup has shown remarkable consistency in people self isolating. The percentage of the population visiting restaurants, bars, and their friends homes remains down in the mid 20s. Only 34% of Americans have returned to the office, only 5-6% of Americans are going to their place of worship. 5% of Americans have returned to a gym.
People are by and large self enforcing the lock down. According to Gallup the percentage of Americans who would return to normal “right now” is 28%. The vast majority of Americans want at least to see case numbers fall first, with sizable groups expecting no new cases in their state (28%) or a vaccine (23%) before returning to normal. 67% of Americans say they will enforce social distancing “for as long as necessary” before their mental health begins to suffer, up 13% since April.
The groups shouting about ending the lock down and returning to normal are about 28-30% of the population, according to Gallup.
And the legal justification by which those measures apply to a situation that is going on half a year is dubious at best. The legality of those measures themselves is also generally dubious from a constitutional law perspective. Most of them have never been meaningfully challenged because they've mostly been used for short term emergencies at this point. The legislatures need to nut up and to their damn jobs. They've had nearly 6mo at this point.
That's a key phrase and begs some questions:
- Do the "extraordinary measures" have to be proven effective?
- Do the "extraordinary measures" have to be proven effective than doing nothing?
- Has anyone announced what metrics we're even tracking to determine "effective"?
- How long does something have to persist until it's no longer an "extraordinary situation"?
- Are the "extraordinary measures" persistent or limited by time, risk, etc?
Asking for the War on Poverty, Drugs, Terror, etc, etc.
> - Do the "extraordinary measures" have to be proven effective?
That's how it's been handled here. We went through a phase of virtually absolute lockdown this spring, loosened restrictions this summer, and locked a few things back down again (bars were especially bad). The governor also ramped up mask mandates as we learned more about their effectiveness.
> Do the "extraordinary measures" have to be proven effective than doing nothing?
Not sure exactly what you mean here, but the regions that have done nothing have seen worse results.
> Has anyone announced what metrics we're even tracking to determine "effective"?
Number of confirmed cases, number of tests administered, percentage of tests being positive, number of deaths. The last metric is the one we really care about the most, but we can mitigate it by tracking leading indicators. Nothing more than statistical theory at play here.
> How long does something have to persist until it's no longer an "extraordinary situation"? > Are the "extraordinary measures" persistent or limited by time, risk, etc?
Michigan has a phased approach based on various metrics and indicators: https://www.michigan.gov/documents/whitmer/MI_SAFE_START_PLA...
I would love to see this sort of prudence for other crises.
And if such a bill can't be passed - i.e. the person holding emergency powers is using them to do things our elected representatives aren't willing to sign off on - surely that proves how important it is that the powers be limited.
(Of course, if you believe our elected representatives would risk killing people to make the other side look bad, or would stuff unrelated pork into the must-pass bill, you might not follow this line of reasoning)
I genuinely don't understand this fear re: COVID.
Why would governors want keep gyms and restaurants closed post-COVID? What do mayors gain by forcing people to wear masks post-COVID? It's in the government's interest, as an institution, to open things up ASAP. They're hemorrhaging money.
The things I'd actually worry about -- using COVID to justify suppressing protests and speech, for example -- aren't happening even now.
The only way this theory makes even the remotest bit of sense is if elected officials are malevolent villains hell-bent on literally any arbitrary form of control even in cases where it undermines their own self-interest and happiness. Believe it or not, governors and mayors enjoy eating out, some go to the gym, and no one enjoys wearing masks.
I do believe there's a very real danger of emergency powers being extended indefinitely in general. But not in the case of health orders related to COVID. Because the powers being exercised aren't the sort of things even the most power-hungry person would want to enforce indefinitely. There's just no motivation to do so. And, for anyone not experiencing a literal and extreme psychotic break, lots of even completely self-interested incentives to get things back to normal.
Why would they have to? It certainly wouldn't be in their electoral self-interest.
Disease transmission is a communications and network problem -- there are the unobserved opportunities for infection, the known observed cases, the transmission rates, incubation and course-of-illness periods, acquired immunity, mortality, morbidity.
In periods of outbreak you need hightened disease surveillance, increased blocking of transmission, and reduced opportunities for infection. Barriers, reduced crowds, improved sterilisation and surface cleaning, fewer shared-touch interfaces (from touchscreens to bannisters), and the like.
These will likely be instituted through building and health codes, not so much activity restrictions. Some high-contact activities (bars, nightclubs, theatres, amusement parks) may well be subject to temporary closures. But expect these to be contingent on infection levels.
Do expect to see massive changes in office/work, retail, and transport designs, hoever. Possibly travel and quarantine restrictions.
Do you live in the US? The situation is exactly the opposite here.
Downplaying the significance of COVID is practically part of the GOP platform at this point. It's gotten to the point in the last 2 months where even extremely mild and all-volunteer public health measures are political suicide in the majority of US states.
But also, even in the small number of very left-leaning areas like mid-sized/large cities, mayors and governors are under intense pressure to get things back to normal.
Hell. Even universities, which take tons of heat for being hotbeds of leftism even relative to left-leaning cities, are pushing forward with campus openings despite contrary advice from public health experts.
As far as I can tell, being too prudent for too long would be an enormous political liability in literally every US jurisdiction. In fact, being prudent at all is a political liability in >25 states even with new cases hitting highs. Here in rural PA I get harassed for wearing a mask into the grocery store.
The "permanent COVID emergency" concern is ridiculously disconnected from political reality in the USA. So much so that it's more of an unhinged conspiracy theory than a legitimate concern.
The refusal of the GOP (Senate, mostly, though the White House seems to be on the same page and perhaps the main motivator) to provide state/local aid, given that there are legal, practical, and other restrictions limiting state borrowing for emergency costs, especially non-capital costs, and structurally they have since not long after the founding relies on the federal government to backstop them for that is a big part of this.
I do. I live in the Bay Area. Your local situation may be different.
I stand by what I said. I’m surprised to hear some think there will be a permanent COVID emergency. I’m not really doing the whole partisan thing, so I don’t know the state of that debate.
We are in a pandemic; of course there will be pressure on our leaders. My conjecture is that career concerns may be leading some to ignore principles of good governance to minimize the risk that things will turn out poorly for them. I think it is not uncommon for political leaders who call all the shots to back themselves into such a situation. We need a way out.
Talking about hypothetical pressures that a theoretical government might face is a lot less interesting when we can look outside and see that the exact opposite of your hypothetical is actually taking place. Empirically, the pressure to not bankrupt the government and have to lay off police, firefighters, and teachers, to let people go back to their lives, and to not be seen as job-hating nanny-state bureaucrats is the dominant force in state and local decision-making, only barely being held in check by a sense of civic duty and concern for long-term consequences. And in places where civic duty and long-term planning aren't in vogue, we see that the former has won out entirely. Mayor Breed and Governor Newsom are doing what they do despite the political consequences of shelter-in-place, not because of them.
I am active in our local community and contributing my own interpretation.
Edit: and if you are implying that Newsom and Breed and others are holding the line because they know in their hearts to do the right thing, well, this pandemic proves nearly every politician on the planet must have a really big heart.
I don't agree though that it's out of a sense of charity or morality. I think it's a matter of self preservation, just acting on a longer timescale than others. Politicians don't want to live in a blasted hellscape any more than the rest of us. And I think a fair number have realized that taking unpopular actions now is the only way to avoid that.
A completely corrupt mayor could use this newfound power to solicit some political donations. There are plenty other possibilities, like the need to be seen responding to the crisis or "tough on the virus".
...dear god, from who? The Big Mask Cabal? Sorry, this makes no god damn sense.
The possibility of bribes to reopen sooner make me even less worried about dx87's concerns.
Theories by which it is in a government's interest to delay reopening longer than optimal:
1. The Governor's political interests lie in "doing something," to contrast with "do nothing" political approaches. Ceasing to "do something" erases this advantage.
2. Masks and closure become a political symbol to certain classes -- almost a political advertisement -- and those classes tend to see the burdens as insignificant and a "community responsibility." Efforts to reopen, then, are seen as opposed to the good of the community.
3. Industries and activities that support the Governor will increase COVID cases, so the Governor decides other industries and activities are "nonessential," shifting costs from supporters to non-supporters.
4. The Governor is politically or legally risk averse, and defers to the most conservative health authorities to avoid responsibility for outcomes.
5. The Governor underweights economic impacts, because it believes the Federal Government should use tax policy or welfare to socialize the economic costs of the "required" costs.
Granted, these aren't fears the government will remain irrational forever, just that it will stay irrational longer than people can stay liquid.
I do think some people will swap roles after the US election, and they will rediscover a patriotic duty to muddle through, as our elected officials do the best they can.
I think your lack of understanding is because you frame the question as nuanced to keeping two types of establishments closed. Instead ask questions like: Why would governors want to keep overriding city-level authority? Why would governors want to maintain control over federal funds and subsidies related to health crises? Why would governors want to be able to selectively close certain types of businesses (e.g. close bars, allow restaurants, differentiate between the two based on arbitrary number, disallow one to become the other)? Why would governors want to disallow certain medical procedures (e.g. abortion)?
I can go on and on. The general question is whether executive power at any government level begets more executive power, and the answer is almost always "yes".
I don't really buy the power grab angle here. Most of the flack the federal government got was for explicitly _not_ doing any country-wide coordination or restriction. "Leave it to the governors". And it's hard not to find the "assault on freedom" angle disingenuous when it comes primarily from the socially conservative parts of the country that have historically worked to constrain individual rights.
I think perhaps a better attribute for what you are going for is temporary, and temporary is relative. The changes due to the emergency of COVID-19 are temporary, but longer lasting that some other emergencies, like a fire for example. Although I've now gotten used to fire emergencies lasting weeks, which is entirely new as of the last few years.
It may last for a longer term than most emergencies; but still operates on a smaller timeline than legislatures are used to operating. The only analogous situation I can think of is wars, and those are already given special treatment (and have seen a steady growth in executive authority over the past decades).
Additionally, I am not aware of any executive (within the US) that has suspended or directly contradicted the legislative branch. If your issue is that the situation has gone on for too long to be dealt with using emergency authority, then your complaint is with the legislatures that have failed to either issue the rules themselves, or override the executive orders.
I could see an arguement for updating the various authorizations for executive orders to allow them to be repealed by a simple majority vote not subject to veto; or even by a minority vote. However, as far as I am aware, there has not been a major conflict at the state level where these powers would be relevant.
Right now it's unclear if COVID-19 will behave like the 1918-19 Spanish flu and disappear after Winter 2021 because most everyone subceptible will have gotten it, or of it will be more like Picardy Fever, which hung around for two centuries.
Michigan has a procedure that may let the legislature do exactly this without even worrying about a veto:
much of what you say is reasonable, but those two examples are actually quite different, and it's important to be careful with generalized pronouncements because of those important differences.
folks going to a gym can still distance properly, and so can still reasonably curtail transmission. the primary purpose of the gym is a personal workout, not sharing indoor airspace with others for prolonged amounts of time with abandon.
most (large) parties on the other hand are willfully defiant and reckless, with no intention of containing transmission.
gyms are fine, small get-togethers are likely fine, all-night ragers are overwhelmingly unlikely to be fine.
There is also the sense of an ongoing crises, in the sense of a threat in which there is a very real likelihood of either a very bad, or very positive outcome. The Covid situation strongly resembles this.
Too there is the situation that even after the immediate onset of some emergency has passed, dealing with consequential effects carries great significance. To call on one of my preferred nonmedical disaster scenarios, in the 1975 Banqiao Dam failure (China), 170,000 people ultimately lost their lives. "Only" 25,000 or so drowned in the initial deluge. Over 150,000 perished due to an inadequate, ineffective, or incompetent rescue, recovery, and relief operation, due to starvation and disease.
Historical epidemics, even within the past century and certainly prior to it, have lasted years to decades. Come to think of it, the HIV/AIDS, TB (including TDR variants), MRSA, and hepatitis outbreaks also match this description.
The notion that six months is an excessively long response window fails any experiential comparison. It does howevee reflect failures of education, communication, leadership, and comprehension.
That said, it's perfectly reasonable for a government to keep exceptional procedures for an year. That's the minimum planning granularity they use. The GP's 6 months limit does not seem reasonable.
What happens where a long-term crisis endures requiring rapid decisionmaking, faster than legislative deliberative practice allows?
The point is that that's impossible. If the crisis is ongoing for months then there is ipso facto enough time for the normal legislative process to apply. Applying some emergency decisionmaking process that bypasses the normal checks and balance is only justifiable for novel events.
In a pandemic, lockdown, or quarantine, really is the only effective tool of control without immunity-bosting therapy (vaccination), or possibly, effective treatment (antiviral therapy). Not having people get sick in the first place is your best option, and, due to exponential growth, the faster you respond to outbreaks or rising Rt, the better.
Add to this delays in disease surveillance --- by the time you start seeing cases and they are reported, you're already 1-2 weeks behing the curve, and for COVID-19 that means two orders of magnitude more spread than you've detected, there simply is not time to convene a legislature, undergo debate, deflect disinformation, misinformation, and faulty models, to legislatively reimpose tighter movement controls.
We're seeing this in China, Taiwan, New Zealand, Australia, South Korea, Italy, Germany, Spain, and in numerous other countries and US states as the pandemic is brought under control, controls loosened, rates start rising, and controls are reimposed immediately as the resurgence is apparent. And by doing so, several of these countries (Taiwan, NZ, AU, South Korea) have avoided mass outbreaks, others have limited those to specific locations (China) or brought generalised outbreaks under control (Italy, Spain, Germany). Ongoing vigilance and vigorous response remain necessary, shown by experience.
By direct analogy, an ongoing siege remains an emergency though it continues for months or years. Ask the citizens of Leningrad. And this virus is a siege, it remains outside the gates.
An executive acts, a legislation deliberates.
Both are parts of the government. Systems vary, but in most democratic states, both are ether directly (presidential model) or indirectly (prime minister) the peoples' representatives. The power is not absolute, and legislators act as a check on the executive, increasing or decreasing powers, perhaps removing from office if fully incompetent or abusive.
Again:
- Previous pandemics have lasted years, decades, and centuries. Your imposed timeframe is utterly divorced from reality.
- The principle mechanism for pandemic control is vector and transmission reduction. Reduce numbers and rates of contacts, likelihood of exposure, amount of contagious agent shared, viability of that agent: Stay home, wash your hands, wear masks. It's not high-tech or sexy. It is effective.
- Rapid and effective executive decisionmaking is required for response, there is no time for parliamentary delay.
- In democratic states the executive remains a representative of the people.
- Powers granted are neither absolute nor without check.
- Such governance and response is proved effective in numerous regions.
- Emergence refers not merely to the initial appearance of the threat but to the situation as a whole. If it has rapidly-emergent characteristics and properties, it is an emergency. "A condition of urgent need for action or assistance: a state of emergency." (https://www.thefreedictionary.com/emergency) But the case that all issues must be resolved in a single prime-time commercial broadcast segment, or a few scant months, is parlous poor made here.
And for the record, I've made similar arguments since the beginning of this crisis:
Six months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22273830
Five months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22528060
The executive has emergency powers to respond to novel developments - and that would include unexpected outbreaks or anything that demanded a radical change in our thinking. But at this point the existence of a pandemic is not an emergency. We know it's there, there's enough time to consult experts and debate appropriate responses.
We managed to have legislative oversight when conducting wars. The president is allowed to unilaterally authorise military action for 90 days, but past that point Congress has to approve it. Surely we can manage the same thing for a disease.
If not now, then when? Seriously, this could go on for years; at what point is this just the "new normal"? Before the pandemic people were talking (with good reason) about a "climate emergency"; should that give the executive grounds to make arbitrary decrees for an unbounded time?
I don't doubt that these governors have the right intentions and are doing what they think is best. But our processes and safeguards are there for good reason, and it's not just about protecting us from moustache-twirling villains. When the stakes are high it becomes even more important to have debate, oversight, and review.
"We believe in science" is a fine mantra, though it doesn't directly lead to "liquor stores are essential". Our political elites were unable to resist politicizing every decision, gloating over others' misery and/or misrepresenting outcomes for political gain.
So, yeah, basically now it seems like many people are deciding for themselves.
Some of the people who work in grocery stores commute via bike/car. Their bikes/cars will probably keep working for a while, but after a few months to a year they might need to visit a shop. The need for bike/car repair eventually becomes urgent.
Though, I'm not sure where hair salons fit into this framework. Most people have the means to cut their own hair, they just won't like how it looks.
It also explains why workers in "essential" jobs are still low wage. An apparently baffling situation even though we were all taught the answer in highschool econ 101.
Dumbbells are going for > $2-3/lb on various websites right now, which is insane. Adjustable dumbbells are going for > $10/lb, which is over twice their usual sticker price.
Gyms could lease out their equipment right now and make a killing.
Many have done just that here in Toronto. The equipment went very fast, though.
(And thankfully my gym is now open. Until we get a second wave and it shuts down again.)
I have some resistance bands and used to use my buildings gym but they made the process very convoluted since reopening. And with max time limits of 30 minutes each and only 10 visits a month.
That said I was very sick recently and lost a lot of muscle mass and weight so I’m barely getting back to exercising now anyway.
While the hair salons were closed, my wife's hairdresser was texting her every three days to get her into her underground makeshift totally illegal hair place.
And slightly realated, quarantines don't work when people aren't actually quarantined. There was an article in the newspaper last week or the week before about all the people from California driving into Nevada to get their hair done.
Just what the world needs: People who make poor health decision driving around the country.
I'm confused, if the participants wear a mask, will the virus be transmitted or not?
I'm trans male, so I've gotten both female and male haircuts. Female haircuts generally took much less time. Put the hair in a ponytail, one snip, tidy up a little. Even a buzz cut takes a little bit longer. It's also much easier to cut long hair yourself than short hair, and people with long hair can go much longer between hair cuts. It took me a while to realize that men's haircut needs to be cut every 2-3 months instead of the once or maybe twice a year I was used to.
Hair dying definitely takes longer, but it seems that can be done at home easily as well.
Well, if it's an illegal place what are the odds they follow CDC protocol?
Just open things up with strict masks / disinfectant / distancing rules and heavy fines for violators.
For some, it's not about whether the virus is transmitted or not, it's about the moral implications of deliberately violating the law.
But considering these underground places aren't licensed, regulated, or inspected, I expect they're more risky than a regular place. There's very good health and sanitation reasons that hair cutting places are regulated in the first place.
> but I hope it's not controversial that driving drunk is still extremely dangerous.
Which _implies_ that you perceive "haircut with a mask on" to be similarly dangerous.
If my understanding is wrong, please correct me!
Which is an excellent point, which may make some wonder if it was realistic to try in the first place. It's like imagine if the US govt forced everyone to lose weight and then was shocked that people were hoarding ding dongs in the underground market. "How dare those illegal ding dong hoarders break the law!"
If we're going to make laws that are fundamentally against human nature (see also drug prohibition laws, which is also has parallels to TFA), we shouldn't be surprised that some people don't follow these rules.
Last I checked a 3rd of Americans aren't paying rent now? It's going to explode dude.
Still, those on top are still raking in profit - arguably the crisis isn't that we suddenly are running out of energy, food or housing - just that we're distributing it so badly that we've created poor living conditions for a lot of people.
This appears across multiple states in the US and in multiple countries.
Restaurant, cinema, theatre, and travel bookings most especially.
If you look at winners and losers in the stock market, followed the Q2 earnings season and saw what companies were facing, it seems clear to me that our economy faced a transition rather than a crash. There are huge winners in this market. Home Depot, Target, and other major retailers all announced record breaking income this past quarter. People are still shopping. Tech has lead the charge due to WFH and the shift to online. There are many more factors in this economic shift than could be explained by the Fed's money printing.
How is that not "buying the stock market"?
Fed did not purchase a single share of HTZ.
They hold two ETFs that include Hertz corporate bonds. Not stocks. Bonds. And not new issues.
There has actually been interesting speculation that the Fed will eventually buy stocks similar to the Bank of Japan over the past few decades [1] but the Fed hasn’t done it yet.
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevincoldiron/2020/07/18/the-fe...
(Edit: Maybe GP was thinking that bankruptcy could lead to debt converting into equity? But even then the Fed’s holding would be indirect and the bond ETF probably wouldn’t hold onto the equity.)
The fact remains that they've spent over a trillion dollars on junk bonds and they are almost singlehandedly financing the entire economy right now.
Whether they directly bought stocks is irrelevant because money's fungible. They injected trillions of dollars into the economy[1]. If that drove institutional investors to stocks from treasuries/bonds (in search of higher returns), the effect is identical to them buying stocks directly.
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren...
(and the article doesn't say anything about asymptomatic transmission, only that 8% of secondary infected people were asymptomatic)
6.3% of transmissions being asymptomatic doesn't sound rare to me.
Also, the 89.9% of people with mild or moderate cases may still not realize they have covid, and spread it.
Should I be surprised how many people on HN have resorted to conspiracy theories, accusations of malice, and discreditation over changing and mixed information? We live in a world of changing requirements but somehow changing recommendations based on new and changing information is all the evidence we need to indulge ourselves in confirmation bias?
Something tells me that won't really fly
Here's a brief definition, from a government site about equal employment:
In the UK the warning was BMI of over 35 needs to be careful, >40 needs to isolate. That would be a hell of a lot of americans. Plus the diabetics, heart issues, elderly etc.
And you don't need that many people to isolate for the house of cards to crumble. Plenty shops need to close because 30% fewer customers isn't enough to sustain them
That people don't want to believe it, without evidence to the contrary, just makes them solidly into the wishful thinking category - and likely spreaders that will inevitably get someone killed.
Is this just a way of saying that people who don't agree with you aren't reasonable? What do we do with those people's opinions if they are the majority?
Smallpox is the only disease in history that has been eradicated
More info available at the WHO website: https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/estimating...
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
The estimated IFR is quite different and can’t be just swapped.
Had its tone been more educational and pleading instead of arrogant, shaming and outright threatening they could have avoided polarizing the conversation and creating a contrarian counter-movement that resists even sensible compromise.
If it was truly that urgent I would hope the "stay home" crowd could act pragmatically by taking a more receptive tone. That's belied by a truly frightening undertone of violence that I see simmering underneath the messaging, e.g. "Can't we just throw all the anti-maskers in prison?"
If you can't calmly and dispassionately discuss "lives at stake" situations you have no business in any conversation of importance.
Also, i find this rebuttal interesting. Why do humans have to be dispassionate? We are humans. Getting rid of the passion really seems dehumanising.
No, it's not; it's arrogant.
All of the epidemiologists and experts seem to think otherwise. What do you know that they don't?
So far 172,000 people have died in the US due to Coronavirus, directly[1]. The actual number of people who have died, if you factor in the effect of the virus on infrastructure and missed diagnoses is about double that[2].
We're approaching the total death toll of World War II[3].
Your claim that it's comparable to lightning, which kills about 50 people per year in the USA, is completely inaccurate and displays a grandiose arrogance. An arrogance that, nationwide, has resulted in a staggering number of tragedies this year.
[1] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#Total_...
assuming you mean the US death toll also bear in mind the median age of WW II casualties was something like 26; while the median age for covid victims is 75+. Not to diminish the latter but they are very different.
You mean 48.
" After exclusions, data for 1,320,488 (94%) cases were analyzed.Median age was 48 years"
Is it possible there are other issues you're not aware of, and that the people who spend their lives studying and preparing for these situations are?
Do you have any articles about people being turned away from hospitals due to lack of capacity?
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...
So it’s fair to attribute those deaths to covid then.
-sarcasmApparently coronavirus pays well for hospitals, also some people want the death due to cornoviruis to be as high as possible.
Edit: I meant this as a joke, albeit in poor taste, I see it was not received well.
That being said, I do think that relativizing deaths in terms of "opportunity cost" does lead to some somewhat unpalatable moral conundra.
Hard to argue with it. But it does lead to some places mainstream american morality would consider unpleasant.
This isn't a perspective exclusive to young people either. Last year my grandfather died and my cousin had a miscarriage. My grandmother was far more distraught over the latter because she understood that her husband, who she'd loved for nearly 60 years, had already lived a full happy life. She said as much explicitly.
Anyway, I'd say my grandfather and cousin deaths (non-covid related) had about the same impact on me. Dying is the tragedy of being alive, I suppose.
Best case in term of covid related death is to keep everyone at home, no freedom and get food delivery directly at the door
Worst case, is to do as nothing happened
There are a spectrum of possible responses. But we have to accept that some people are going to die if we want other to live.
Each group can put the cursor where it wants, but you can't have, no death and complete freedom. Some people prefer that a few people die if the rest of people is free, then some other prefer everyone to be alive and restrict the freedom of everyone else. You can't put the cursor for other people than you
Who delivers the food if we keep everyone home? There is a subtle classist underpinning to the entire "Stay The Fuck Home" message which really shows how little people value others, especially lower-class (food delivery) or blue collar (food supply) workers. Everyone needs to stay home, except for the deplorables that will grow, process, and serve food directly to my door.
People do need to eat. They don't necessarily require takeaway, but on a balance of risks this isn't unreasonable.
Additionally, it is worth noting that the risk-based analysis you use is 1) an exercise in line drawing (giving everyone their own office while at work is certainly equal or less exposure than food delivery as long as people don't socialize at work) and 2) an after the fact justification for a policy that is undeniably inequitable across class, race, and sex lines.
I was addressing the comparative risks of delivery vs (presumably the same worker cohort) offering sit-down service. Delivery is a net reduced risk exposure.
That still leaves the net cohort differential, pre-Covid to Covid, of (shared-workspace, public-facing) essential service workers, and work-from-home office and profesional workers. That's a real concern.
I'd identify concerns as both those of fairness and net commonweal. I'm willing to sacrifice choice in consideration both interests, at least during exigent circumstances.
Commonweal demands reducing net risk. This means both maintaining work-from-home policies for those capable of doing so, and providing delivery and bulk-service preparation (foodservice, manufacture, delivery, etc.).
Keep in mind that whilst the pandemic is worldwide, it is not felt equally in all locations. This makes geographic arbitrage onnthe basis of risk possible: manufacturing and services which can be exported from quarantine zones should be. The resulting downtime can be mitigated via social benefits.
Safety measures can and should be implemented in workplaces. I'm well aware that this is often not the case.
Differential unavoidable essential risks borne by one cohort can be compensated by others, through raised wages, tax hikes or credits, or other financial means.
The possibility of "immunity passports" has been suggested from early in the outbreak. It's still not clear that this is realistically an option, but there are 15 millions worldwide and 3 millions in the US who've recovered from Covid at this writing. That is a sizable potential high-exposure workforce.
And finally, there is the option of mandating rotations in high-exposure roles. This most directly addresses equity, and might build community through common bond, shared experience, and sense of collective risk and responsibility. Sort of a Covid Draft or Covid Lottery.
Would any of these address your concerns, or do you have additional suggestions?
I really don't know what the answer here is, but risk mitigation has to be part of the debate. It feels like the culture wars of class, personal freedom, social risk, public shame, etc have supplanted questions of "how do we keep all of the people who keep the engine of society running safe and how do we compensate them fairly for their work?" and "how do we ensure that everyone else does not engage in risky activity simply because they must do so to live."
This is all starting to get away from the core point of the article, which is that people will always find a way to engage in any activity that is illegal, but perhaps if we could address the issues above, the question of speakeasy gyms wouldn't seem so critical because we'd be safe in other areas of our life.
I'm not sure where that opinion fits in a rigidly logical argument that prohibits sound judgment due to its ambiguity.
Raven in Snow Crash had a sensor in his body. The warhead was in the passenger compartment of his motorcycle.
These are super-emotional topics, something on par with politics. My view is that even if it would be just out of respect of older generations who made the world we live today, raised us, protected us, guided us, we should be considerate.
Now we might end up in economical tragedy vastly worse then just letting them die, but that's a threshold we didn't yet cross according to most people here/out there. Hence all the reactions like closures and restrictions and vast majority complying with them.
Another aspect is utterly incompetent leaders, who's countries they mismanage seem to be, purely from rational point of view, currently holding premium places in covid charts. US, UK, Brazil, Russia etc. Seems like some pattern about how far lying and plain stupid ignorance can get you when confronted with something as little caring as virus.
Is it beside the point? It's false. Lightning kills about 50 people a year in the US [1]. It's frankly fairly rare to get struck by lightning [2]. More people under 34 have died from COVID-19 per month since April than die from lightning in a year [3] (quick note that the breakdown is 25-34). That's to say nothing of long term health impacts from the disease. If you are going to argue that it's a rational choice, you need to be working from correct assumptions.
And more importantly than that, getting struck by lightning does not mean you will make other people get struck by lightning. Making a choice that makes sense for you does not mean it makes sense for society. That's why we have laws.
[1]: https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-victims
[2]: https://www.cdc.gov/disasters/lightning/victimdata.html
[3]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
OP said "hit by," not "killed by." I wasn't able to find a number for people being struck by lightning in a cursory search other than "hundreds more" than are killed by lightning.
Cherington, J. et al. 1999: Closing the Gap on the Actual Numbers of Lightning Casualties and Deaths. Preprints, 11th Conf. on Applied Climatology, 379-80
Assuming you believe these numbers to not be somewhat inflated despite widespread reporting of such incidents, the odds of dying from COVID as a 25-34 year old in the US are 1 in ~33,000. This is ~15x times the odds of being struck by lightning. However, I would imagine those odds go down significantly further among 25-34 year olds with no risk factors, and it is largely the people with no risk factors that are going to speakeasy gyms.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/disasters/lightning/victimdata.html
[2] https://data.cdc.gov/widgets/9bhg-hcku
[3] https://www.infoplease.com/us/census/demographic-statistics
Re:the relevance of the comparison, I was just responding to the conversation.
Moral theories that do not demand intellectual character are broken. Sincerely believing in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion does not excuse anti-semitism. Sincerely believing whatever nonsense is coming out of a youtube recommendation k-hole does not excuse ignoring the advice of public health experts.
Moral character does not exist without intellectual character.
> They also never claimed that covid is comparable to lightning
Yes they did.
> just that if you’re under 30 you’re more likely to be struck by lightning than die of covid.
That is a comparison.
> (I cant speak to the statistical truth of this, but that’s beside the point).
~50 deaths due to lightening strikes across all age groups. We were already close to 1000 confirmed COVID deaths for folks under 34 in mid-June.
We're really not though. World War II killed somewhere in the ballpark of 75 million people. COVID-19 has a bit under 800,000 known deaths. Even if we say that for every person who is known to have died of covid, 5 additional people died and were recorded as deaths from other causes (and it's not that high, you can check the excess mortality stats to confirm for yourself that it couldn't possibly be that high), the number of covid deaths _still_ wouldn't even be 10% of the total number of WWII deaths.
Unless by "approaching" you mean "getting closer to because it's currently below that number and increasing" in which case the number of people killed by vending machines is also "approaching" the number of people killed by WWII.
Hyperbolic statements like this just serve to undermine trust, and trust is already in pretty short supply, especially around the pandemic. Messaging around the pandemic has had a pattern of people making whatever statements they think is most likely to get people to comply with public health guidance, even if those statements are false or misleading.
For example, there's a great deal of news lately about how COVID-19 can cause Multisystem Inflammation Syndrome (MIS-C) in children, and that 80% of children who develop MIS-C require intensive care, and that the existence of MIS-C as a possible complication of covid means you should worry more about kids getting covid. What these articles neglect to mention is that only about 300 cases of MIS-C have been observed in children, out of what is probably low-millions of children infected with covid.
When you make misleading statements in order to induce compliance through panic, it'll work the first few times, but eventually people will start noticing, and stop trusting anything you or anyone who sounds like you says, even if it's true. This is the moral of the "Boy Who Cried Wolf" story, and it's been seen again and again in real-life contexts as well (see for example how DARE actually _increases_ drug use).
Making false-but-alarming statements about public health sucks the air out of the room for true-and-alarming statements about public health, and is the moral equivalent of crying wolf except with millions of lives on the line instead of just one village.
Please stop crying wolf.
Even if you don't count or differently count indirect deaths, I'd still say going from 0 to 170K in 6 months with no end in sight definitely constitutes "approaching". We'll get there before this is all over, for sure.
By contrast, the US _is_ one of the countries hit hardest by covid -- the US has about 5x the number of deaths per capita as the world average.
It's a little less egregious if the original poster meant "US casualties in WWII vs US deaths from covid" but it's still a misleading comparison.
Past that, at some point it's hard for me to take this sort of thing too seriously. OP probably doesn't have a copy editor for the online comments he's writing from the shitter/waiting for the coffee brewer.
It's a reasonable comparison because, sans COVID context, literally every American would answer "yes" to the question "did lots of Americans die in WWII?"
Not disputing your overall point, but this is with preventative measures, such as lockdown, quarantine, use of masks, social distancing, etc.
I have seen various estimates with factors such as 35x the number of cases without preventative measures. Right now, there are 5.5 million cases and 172,000 deaths in the USA.
With a more conservative factor, like 15x, a quick ballpark at current ratios of cases/deaths puts that at 82.5 million cases and 2.4 million deaths without preventative measures in the USA, and more considering worldwide cases. Not as bad as WWII, but it is in the range of the Korean War (est 1.5 to 4.5 million deaths) or the Vietnam War (est 2.4 to 4.3 million deaths).
For the 35x number to be true, all of the following have to be true. Those assumptions are, with maximum generosity
1: With no preventative measures, at least 60% of the US population would be infected with COVID-19 (assumes no further infections after today and that 100% of people infected, including asymptomatic people, have tested positive for COVID-19).
2: At least 60% of the people in the US who will be infected with COVID-19 have already been infected with COVID-19 (assumes 100% of the population would be infected without preventative measures, and that 100% of people infected, including asymptomatic people, have tested positive for COVID-19).
3: At least 60% of the people in the US who have been infected with COVID-19, including asymptomatic people, have tested positive (assumes no further infections after today and 100% of the population would be infected without preventative measures).
Note that while "all of the following are true" is _necessary_ for the 35x number to be true, they're not _sufficient_ -- evenly distributing the burden, change all of the "60%"s to "84%"s to get an example of what a world where the 35x number is accurate.
Going in order on my objections to those assumptions, and what I think more realistic numbers look like:
> 1: With no preventative measures, at least 60% of the US population would be infected with COVID-19:
The R0 of COVID-19 is probably between 2.79 and 3.28[1]. We'll go with the higher of these two numbers (3.28) for our upper bound. That means each infected person, in a population with no infected people, will spread the disease to 3.28 other people. In a world of uncontrolled spread, the spread stops when the average infected person comes in contact with less than one person who is susceptible to the disease, so once 1 - 1/3.28 (~70%) of the population has been infected, the spread stops. This gives us an upper bound of 70% for what fraction of the population gets infected.
In real life, that R0 is made up of some people who will spread the disease to an average of 50 people, and others who will spread it to an average of 0.1 people. People who are likely to spread COVID widely are more likely to be the people spreading the disease and are also more likely to be the people infected people "try to" spread the disease to -- a cashier who interacts with 1000 customers a day has 1000 chances to catch COVID from one of their customers, and 1000 chances to pass it on, so they're likely to be infected early on. The people most likely to catch COVID will, in the long term, be the most likely to be immune, lowering the effective rate of spread much more rapidly than the naive model would predict. Estimates for the actual herd immunity levels vary, but as a lower bound let's go with the number Gomes et. al. come up with[2] and say 10% is our lower bound.
Being very rigorous and scientific, let's split the difference between our upper and lower bounds and say 35% of the population would get COVID-19 if the spread was uncontrolled.
Moving on:
> 2: At least 60% of the people in the US who will be infected with COVID-19 have already been infected with COVID-19
Assuming no third wave, cases per day will continue to trend down over time. Currently, it looks like cases per day are decreasing by something like 0.5% per day, and there are about 50,000 cases per day currently in the US. If that trend continues, we end up at about 15M total positive tests. If the trend accelerates to about a 1.2% per day decrease in positive tests, we do end up with only about 9.5M positive tests, so "60% of the positive tests that will happen, in total, have already happened" is not _completely_ outside the realm of possibility. On the other hand, if there _is_ a third wave, we're gonna end up with more than 15M positive tests.
I'll use the "no third wave, 0.5% decrease per day" estimate of 15M positive tests when all is said and done.
> 3: At least 60% of the people in the US who have been infected with COVID-19, including asymptomatic people, have tested positive
This one seems extremely implausible to me. Tests are fairly hard to come by, expensive, and discouraged for people who have not been in contact with someone known to have COVID-19, at least in the US. Furthermore, a significant fraction of cases are either asymptomatic or very mild, and those people are unlikely to be tested. It's hard to get an exact estimate of the fraction of total cases that are tested, but several researchers have taken a crack at it (example[3]), and estimate that between 3 on the low end and 24(!) times as many people have been infected as have tested positive.
We'll go with a factor of 5, because that's a nice round number on the low end of the range and really the 24 number sounds pretty implausible. Maybe back in April when tests were in very short supply, but certainly not now.
Putting all these numbers together, we get
5.6M * 5 = 28M people in the US have caught COVID-19 so far. 15M * 5 = 75M people in the US will catch COVID-19 when all is said and done. 328M * 0.35 = 115M people in the US would have caught COVID-19 if the spread was left unchecked.
So by a back-of-the-envelope calculation, we should expect the precautions have decreased the spread by a factor of 115M / 75M ~= 1.5, with a fairly wide margin of uncertainty (but I'd say almost certainly not higher than ~3 or lower than ~1). Certainly not a factor of 35 or even a factor of 12.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7073717/ [2] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/medrxiv/early/2020/05/21/202... [3] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
What about how many people other infectious diseases kill? What about how many people other sources of preventable deaths kill? Why haven't we thrown away our civil liberties in the past, or destroyed our economy, to tackle those problems?
If we had not taken steps to stop it, the projection was millions dead. That is why.
Close to 500,000 military personnel (read: military-aged) died in WW2. Sorry to be crude, but what the f*ck are you smoking?
1. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
Edit: Keeping the vulgarity for posterity, but on reflection it was quite unnecessary. Apologies.
Discounting externalized costs to zero is rational, true; that's the source of the tragedy of commons (in the economics/game theory sense, not necessarily the somewhat disputed original example for which the effect is named.)
But that's a manner in which individual rationality is insufficient to address issues whose effects aren't limited to the individuals engaging in transactions.
I understand the pandemic is an emergency, but it was predictable. If we got caught with our pants down, we got caught with our pants down. Personally I think it’s time to put the hysteria aside and start discussing the longer-term view.
If I as an Australian have covid and go to a gym and infect a bunch of people, I've given covid to people who otherwise wouldn't have caught it. If an American does the same, they've given covid to people who would have just caught it next week or next month. They've also given it to less people because a lot more people in that gym have already had it than in my Australian one.
It's very much a selfish prioritization of the individual above everyone else to think you're under 30 so no precautions need to be taken even though someone under 30 is perfectly capable of passing it on to a whole bunch more people who might be older & vulnerable.
COVID-19 has pretty severe morbidity that make it absolutely nothing like the flu. Some afflicted with severe cases will require months of rehabilitation (never mind working as usual) and probably suffer lifelong complications.
Moreover, it’s the hubris and ignorance of people like the speakeasy gym goers that will prolong the pandemic and arguably case more economic harm than any original lockdowns.
This sounds like Y2K all over again. No one is disputing the mortality rate. But it's starting to look like all the people who are pulling out that strawman are ignoring the "infectious" part of that equation.[1]
Do we have enough healthcare capacity to support the people who get sick enough to need care until herd immunity is achieved?
And the same people like to bring up Sweden, all the while conveniently forgetting the social mores and jokes. The headline image from this[0] story makes it very clear that what worked in Sweden would not work anywhere else in the world.
[0] https://europost.eu/en/a/view/sweden-goes-it-alone-28030
[1] https://www.healthline.com/health/r-nought-reproduction-numb...
According to a review article published in BMC Medicine, the R0 value of the 1918 pandemic was estimated to be between 1.4 and 2.8.
But when the swine flu, or H1N1 virus, came back in 2009, its R0 value was between 1.4 and 1.6, report researchers in the journal Science.
The R0 for COVID-19 is a median of 5.7, according to a study published online in Emerging Infectious Diseases. That’s about double an earlier R0 estimate of 2.2 to 2.7
...
The researchers estimated a doubling time of 2 to 3 days, which is much faster than earlier estimates of 6 to 7 days. The doubling time is how long it takes for the number of coronavirus cases, hospitalizations, and deaths to double.
With an R0 of 5.7, at least 82 percent of the population needs to be immune to COVID-19 to stop its transmission through vaccination and herd immunity.
By this logic COVID19 is nothing compared to SARS or EBOLA because those have higher mortality rates, but obviously COVID spreads much faster and farther so it has had a huge international impact.
> The fact is if your under 30 you have a better chance of being hit by lightning then dying of Covid
Yes, but what about the other members of the community who aren't below 30 who you might infect? Thinking "I'm under 30, so I'll be fine" and not worrying about the fact that you could still spread the disease to others is pretty much a textbook example of "prioritizing individual choices over the collective health of the community".
honestly I think the phased reopenings are partly to blame, once you say "this is important enough, that isn't" everyone wants to do their things and disparage other people's things. if they closed the gyms here again, I'd find an illegal one. if they closed the restaurants, or the churches, or the schools, I wouldn't care. but for the people who derive existential fulfillment from their religion, or can't tolerate taking care of their children 24/7, or [insert reason why people care about restaurants, I honestly don't understand the upside anymore], my desire to go to my gym is selfish and wrong but their need for their thing is inherently good and right
not to mention the fact that most of the country isn't locked down, and there's no internal borders, and most people didn't take lockdowns seriously after the first month or two of kumbaya we're all in this together stuff anyway. so your individual actions wouldn't even move the needle. there's a continuum between the hypervigilent closed societies where one person gets it and they shut down the city, and the endemic countries where it's already everywhere anyway so the best you can do is mitigate risk to a tolerable level and go on with your life. new zealand, south korea, taiwan vs. mexico, india, brazil. we're with india and brazil
and I don't think it could have gone any other way. americans are suspicious and callous toward their countrymen and deathly allergic to being told what to do. for better or worse, it's just in our blood. gotta make the best of it
How figurative is the blood you're referring to here?
I'm a naturalized US citizen from a country that dealt well with the pandemic. I wasn't born in my heritage country, and so have always identified first as an American. But, recent events demonstrating the "uglier" side of America's sociocultural norms has left me wondering if >~40% of the country I recognize as home don't consider me a worthwhile part of it.
As always, a dose of perspective is necessary.
Is that the case with the fitness centers in your state?
Childcare is one of those basic and ancient jobs that's accrued a lot of compex laws over the years. In PA, anyone caring for four or more children not related to them is required to get some sort of certification, even if they're doing it out of their house for friends for free. Home daycares aren't uncommon here.
I'm not sure about the laws in your area, but my money's on that business having to apply for certification and pass inspections. They'll probably hire a certified childcare worker.
> Please consider reporting the details to the appropriate authorities
No, on the contrary I'm encouraging people to go out and resume their normal activities.
Is there a way to work out safely? Complete air replacement and surface disinfection. That can realistically only be done outdoors.
As a club kid who refuses to grow up, I bring my professional club lights and a mobile DJ speaker to the park to dance with a friend. She has a much harder time coping with isolation and it helps her. It is a system for events of 50-100 people, so it is loud enough to mimic the experience. I would actually be OK with us both wearing Bluetooth headphones like my JBL BT Reflect Mini, which are robust enough to wear while dancing and doing crazy head moves, but a club speaker sounds different because of the reverb from the surrounding environment.
We still wear masks despite not touching and being completely outdoors. We do not need to according to laws of physics, but not doing so would contribute to the attitude that masks are optional. They are not optional. As much as I trust my friend and she trusts me, there is no way to know with certainty we can not infect each other after a day of interaction with other people.
One way to setup a safe workout would be to use the gym's parking lot and set it up with gym flooring and 10x10' canopies. Portable patio heaters would keep the person warm when warm weather ends. They are expensive, but one way to solve that would be to setup a solar array and use electric heaters.
Another friend who is a Zumba instructor is hosting classes in a park's parking lot. That works for her and her students and it is safe.
I bike 25km every day wearing a full P100 respirator, the kind with replaceable cartridges that catch organic vapors, like for spraying paint.
It’s fine, and not a significant burden. People complaining about masks are just that: complaining. Respirators are built for doing hard, strenuous labor in hazardous conditions. If demo crews can manage it, so can anyone else.
Masks simply aren’t that big of an imposition.
We had a high school swim coach that really bought into this. He would make the kids train on cardio equipment in the gym for a couple hours, only you would be wearing a snorkel with a piece of tape over the hole, with only a pin prick through the tape to breathe through. We've owned our division in state swim meets for about 2 decades now. Work your lungs.
For me I’ve canceled the gym membership and taking up biking. It has been working out great. Discovered a lot more biking trials around the area. Got plenty of sua shine and vitamin D along the way.
So I've been looking for private commercial space. I already have a personal wall need to move it indoors.
My question is what others think of the ethics of expanding from just myself to trying to get 5-10 people onboard with a 501c7 social group to lower costs and build more walls in a private space. Only allow one person in at a time - mask-less (or closed loop groups for instance me and my climbing partner are in a 2 person closed loop).
I'm currently trying to look at the last order to see if that's legal.
but now with this thread I'm questioning the ethics and curious what others think. Besides the obvious unequal privilege that I can afford this luxury.
The uniquely American issue, is with bars and clubs being closed. In the land of big houses, everyone knows someone with a bar in their backyard or basement. Keeping bars closed now, when everyone is fed up with the social isolation (sorry, Zoom doesn't cut it) just means actual underground speakeasies serving alcohol aka house parties. Where dedicated gym rats aren't drinking alcohol at the same time they're at the gym (it hurts gainz), and are can be more responsible for their actions, people on alcohol can't. I'm not saying that to excuse drunk people's behaviors, what I'm saying is that trying to get drunk people to stay 6-ft apart and wear a mask is an exercise in futility.
Since people are gonna be drinking anyway, especially during a pandemic, and a recession, and in the face of great uncertainty, and on the cusp of a presidential election, what's needed is to open the bars, but require patrons scan-in via phone app using the bluetooth-based contact tracing (PEPP-PT), or else face suspension of liquor license. By making it required at bars, you get around some of the privacy issues since those that don't want to, can just not go to bars. Using bluetooth-based tracing gets around issues of using GPS-based tracking, and also helps amplify the effectiveness of an under-funded contact tracing corps by providing a technology based solution.
This is imperfect, but perfect is the enemy of the good, and even done imperfectly, contact tracing can very successfully drive Re (the local effective value calculated from a diseases' R0) down below 1, at which point the disease doesn't continue to spread and the pandemic can be controlled. For a disease like COVID-19 with an R0 of 2.5, it doesn't take too much to drive it down.
In the big scheme of things it's just not a good example of anything relating to effectiveness of government imposed restrictions.
I wonder how the paranoiacs who think deadlifters are going to cause mass death mentally deal with the facts on the ground in Sweden. They seem to be doing fine; all they did was prevent large gatherings; no masks, no shut down, yet 4x better covid death rate than, say, Massachusetts, which is still locked down as if we're in the black death. Nobody ever talks about Sweden, I guess because they appear to have gotten it right, making fools of most of the rest of the West.
This from last week, cites studies. Short version: Sweden was wrong.
With all this more focused time during lockdown, I was tempted to buy my own equipment and toyed with the idea of letting some friends come use it, it got me thinking about the legalities and liabilities of that kind of thing.
If we go back into lockdown, I'll definitely be buying my own equipment. I do powerlifting, so bodyweight and a few dumbells don't really cut it.
https://yoga-horizons.com/pdfs/Fatmans-Guide-to-Cable-Traini...
Fun fact: all Greek troops were named after the type of shield they used.
Source: https://acoup.blog/2020/03/17/new-acquisitions-hoplite-style...
This turns up in many places in technology --- bugs, design flaws, architectural errors, implicit assumptions, security issues, unintended consequences, UI affordances, algorithmic biases, data corruption, ...
A typoogy of various forms of such cognitive biases would be interesting. Too small, far, distant in time, transparent, big, diffuse, etc., etc.
See also Robert K. Merton's Manifest and Latent Functions.
Seriously doubt anybody described as a 'swole bro' is coming from Planet Fitness. They're pretty heavy on the anti-bro advertising [0] and their business model is more about finding tons of people sign up that rarely actually work out in their gym.
What do you think you're accomplishing by posting easily debunked misinformation?
The data on Sweden is clear, they are down to near zero covid deaths per day in a country of over 10 million people. Can't see how that can be debunked.
And how are they significantly worse? They are living normal lives.
Also, if something is 'easily debunked' then just do it.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
Sort by deaths/million - Sweden is even higher than the USA.
I'm not going to reply to you any more, don't think you've won just because you gish gallop on to another falsehood in your reply.
Sweden had no lockdown and did about as bad as worst performers many of which had a heavy lockdown. This is absolutely a significant piece of information. If we had a no lockdown country getting the absolute worst result perhaps we could settle the debate. Would UK or some of the other bad performers be worse off without a lockdown? We don't know. There is no example to point to.
If UK could have had no lockdown and replicated Sweden's result then the lockdown was a huge waste.
I'm not saying that you cannot compare it to Norway, nor am I necessarily saying that Sweden couldn't get a better result with a lockdown. But even if that were to be true it doesn't mean Sweden isn't an interesting data point casting doubt on the effectiveness of lockdowns in some countries.
Why are people ignoring all of these risks, what kind of threat model do they have?
The exact same one - "it won't happen to me". I mean, is it really that surprising? I see this all the time everywhere.
Are you implying that the people going to these speakeasy gyms are then self-quarantining and not interacting with people who did not go to the gym? Because if not, then this is a non sequitur of a response.
> Surely your indignation would be better directed at employers, schools and others who are requiring in-person attendance.
Except OP is not about employers, schools and others.
it's not about the individual, what he wants or do. It's about this individual spreading the virus to the community later on.
But I also acknowledge this is a western culture issue more than one of intelligence alone.
Discouraging nonetheless. We’ve really messed up.
I feel the same about religion, so AFAIK this has always been so - move along, nothing to see here.
Except religion has been around long enough to excuse itself from the obvious, or a least to bare its fangs at anyone thinking of commenting on the emperor's new clothes..
Except that these people go there and then go home and spread it to their family and other friends. They go to grocery stores and other locations and touch things or cough/sneeze it in to the air. It's never about one person's individual choice.
> Surely your indignation would be better directed at employers, schools and others who are requiring in-person attendance.
Yes this deserves it as well but that does not negate the concerns
Further, there are major benefits to psychological state, social/emotional state, mental acuity, health, and maintenance/progression of physical capacity.
I'd love to see you try and add all that up in micromorts of personal risk and show me that it's actually a bad rational decision. I suspect it would be very marginal for your argument at best, and most likely neutral or positive.
That's all to say it's probably rational decision making, though certainly selfish thinking.
On an individual level, I have no doubt you're right. The health benefits from exercise would definitely outweigh the risk of COVID-19 (assuming the individual's not over 65 or has a majorly risky health condition).
But this is a pandemic, so decisions are made on the community level. The disease spreads. Healthy people don't live in separate cities from those at risk. Even if everyone is careful, mistakes happen: an unexpected sneeze, unconsciously rubbing your eyes, getting caught in a crowd. We're trying to minimize the number of mistakes (especially the more likely ones).
That's not too say whatever policy is current in your area is right. But if you think things can be done safely, consider reaching out to your representatives with a plan backed up by medical research. I know my state desperately wants to reopen businesses; the government doesn't benefit from closures.
This isn't new in any way; just look at how we've treated at-risk populations previously (e.g., homeless folks, the foster system, etc). The difference with the pandemic is that there was a rapid increase in who's considered "at risk".
Empathy =/= agreement.
It's extremely dangerous to give people the impression that the disease is only serious for those over 65 or with pre-existing conditions. That sort of impression is why people are engaging in risky behavior such as going to gyms.
Isn't that the whole reason public health is necessary? Because a large group of individuals making rational health decisions alone can, collectively, make poor health decisions for the group? It's kind of like polluting or littering. Yes it's perfectly rational for me to throw my trash on the ground because it's cheap and convenient but when everyone acts "rationally" then everyone is worse off compared to when we coordinate.
If people gave a damn about other people, they would be following best practices voluntarily, which would make policy limitations a moot point. But they do not, so here we are.
Why do randos think they understand the threat model better than the CDC and state medical authorities?
This is HN. We get a post on at least a weekly basis to the effect of: medications shouldn’t require prescriptions, anyone with an internet connection and a couple brain cells can manage their own care.
HN: home of “no one in management can possibly understand the technical complexity of software” and “who needs doctors, obviously I can easily understand that other enormous technical field.”
One, OP's question was about the threat model of underground-gym-goers not the CDC and state/local medical authorities.
Two, public health authorities don't do "exactly that calculation" because they are looking at interventions on the population level. Their job is to mandate things that would be individually irrational for the collective good. They have their own calculus about what the acceptable trade-offs are, that I'd suspect ultimately relates to the same monetary value of a human life that FEMA uses, but I'm not sure. I generally trust them to do their job correctly though.
Here’s my threat model:
- we’re all young, healthy, and in good shape
- we all wear masks during normal life, some of us even while training
- we all social distance and follow the right protocols outside of boxing
- it’s always the same group of people
- 2x/week seems like low enough frequency that exposure won’t add up
- we stay home or even cancel class when someone feels off
- we’re outside so it’s nice and windy
- we keep distance when not punching each other and groups of 2 are kept far apart
So far so good. It feels like an acceptable level of risk to me.
Going to the farmer’s market (with masks) every week is probably way more risky than the boxing class.
But is it an acceptable level to all the people you counteract with say within a week?
Is the cashier at your supermarket, that lives with their 6+ family members, ok with you doing this?
Is your elderly neighbour that also uses your elevator OK with this?
This is the moral and societal conundrum we are in.
If memory serves, the probability of transmission is under 1% with those measures.
Could you link the study that backs the 1%? How is that statement better than just coming up with a number?
CDC says the numbers “show the right idea” but we don’t yet have studies that yield a specific percentage.
https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/verify...
If anyone in your group gets infected, there's a good chance you'll all catch it (you seem to acknowledge this). In that case, in one day of infectiousness, there's a 0.995^10 = 95.111% chance nobody else gets infected. So a 4.889% chance of infecting. That's low.
But if you all remain infectious for 14 days, there's now only a (0.995^10)^14 = 49.571% chance nobody new is infected. So the odds are your group spread it to at least one other person. And this process will probably repeat through those new infections.
Obviously, these numbers are arbitrary. It's a terrible model for an infectious disease. My point is to show how probability is very hard to reason about. It's unrealistic to expect average citizens to do this.
I have no supermarket cashier to request consent of; amazon fresh contactless delivery.
I live a pretty wealthy lifestyle away from the coasts, no shared elevators here.
If the screenings work, why are we closed?
If the screenings dont work, why bother doing it?
Odds of dying this year: 0.002138 [1]. Odds of dying this year if they get Covid: 0.00271 (~n*1.3) [2]
Odds of contracting Covid over 160 days if going to gym: 60% Odds of contracting Covid if not going to Gym: 43% (assuming 10 people at the gym each time, 1 hour workout durations, odds of someone at Gym having it in any one session at .025%, and odds of catching it 20% at gym).
Now what about the negative second order affects of spreading it to others? I did not model those, but I think at this point there could be a compelling case that not catching it now might be net harmful to the folks at high risk, since they would need to remain in lockdown if there remains a large number of people around who are not immune.
[1] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html [2] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160895v...
Looking at the stats I'm more likely to spread the disease if I go to the gym, but much less likely to personally die of the disease if I stay healthy by going to the gym.
Complicating the situation is due to work and food delivery situation, I can't actually spread the disease to anyone at risk because they just aren't in my life.
In the US, roughly 150 per 1m people catch covid per day. Infection fatality for 20-29 is about 7/100,000. For 365 days, that is about a 1/million chance of dying of covid (for a 20 something year old) .
For context[1]: For similar ages, the suicide rate is 200/ million. Deaths from unintentional injury is 600/ million Deaths from heart disease is roughly 100/ million
When I put this into a threat model, I should put about 1000X more effort into these areas. A 10% reduction in risk of heart disease is an equal trade-off with +900% chance of contracting covid.
The UN estimated [0][1] that between 83 million and 132 million people will go hungry around the world because of anti-COVID measures. Some of these people will die from starvation or malnutrition. Some of them will die from other preventable health problems later in life.
According to the Stop TB Partnership, a three-month lockdown followed by a gradual return to normal over 10 months could result in an additional 6.3 million cases of tuberculosis and 1.4 million deaths between 2020 and 2025. [2][3]
It's also plausible that lockdowns could lead to hundreds of thousands of additional deaths from each of HIV/AIDS [4], malaria [5], and several other diseases, though I'm not as confident about these numbers.
I am sure someone will be tempted to respond with some variant on "we could have avoided these deaths by tuning the stay-at-home restrictions more competently." Of course, that's true; but the point is that we didn't. We never do. Historically, every society that has tried to eliminate "non-essential" jobs through central planning has eventually found that even when the planners operate with the very best of intentions, they still make mistakes. Dealing with one problem causes a cascade of other subtle changes with real, harmful consequences, which are harder to mitigate when people aren't allowed to freely choose how to spend their own resources. Meanwhile, problems that are judged to be less important are forgotten, because planners can only focus on a limited number of tasks at one time. Human societies are incredibly complex. Trying to manage them from the top is like developing software using the waterfall model: it would work perfectly with perfect planning, but we all know how that works out in real life.
On a personal level: a relative passed away from cancer recently. Cancer isn't a good way to die at the best of times; and I'll be honest, she almost certainly would not have survived even with better medical treatment. But if hospitals hadn't shut down "elective" and "non-essential" care, she could have gone through a lot less pain and suffering. I am not trying to use this as a bludgeon – I understand there are also a lot of people who have suffered greatly from COVID, and of course, we should make policy based on what's best for everyone rather than a small number of anecdotes. But when I read comments saying things like "I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about other people"... let's just say that I don't know how to respond to that without severely violating HN guidelines.
[0]: https://data.unicef.org/resources/sofi-2020/
[1]: https://africa.cgtn.com/2020/07/17/who-urges-world-not-to-fo...
[2]: http://www.stoptb.org/assets/documents/news/Modeling%20Repor...
[3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/03/health/coronavirus-tuberc...
[4]: https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/11-05-2020-the-cost-of-...
[1] https://www.worldobesity.org/news/obesity-and-covid-19-polic...
Your source doesn't support that. Viewing each of the separate country-specific statistics as being generally applicable you could conclude:
* A majority were obese, but a significant minority were not.
* Virtually all had some preexisting condition that COVID aggravated, and some (but not all) of those were preexisting conditions for which obesity is a risk factor.
> If the military forced everyone to exercise (and diet, but that's harder to mandate than exercising) it would have been much more effective than forcing everyone to wear masks.
That's not at all supported by any evidence which you've presented. For one thing you seem to have not considered in dreaming this up, people (especially, but not exclusively, of advanced age) with the kind of preexisting conditions involved often can't just pick up an exercise routine even if doing so before developing the conditions could have prevented them.
> Most of us are going to get covid even if we stay inside all day (I got it twice)
While there is some concern about whether getting it gives you long-term immunity, AFAICT there is no confirmed reinfection and most indicated potential reinfections are more likely to involve at least one testing error rather than an actual reinfection.
It also says that 99% of deaths in Italy were from patients with pre-existing conditions, which would included weight related and non-weight related ones.
Regardless of COVID, maintaining a healthy weight is probably one of more important lifestyle changes one can make to reduce risk of overall mortality.
> Patients with BMIs greater than 40 kg/m2 had higher death rates overall, and those with BMIs greater than 45 kg/m2 had a risk ratio of 4.18. Most strikingly, however, those younger than 60 years had increased risk ratios of 12 to 17 versus 1 to 3 if they were older; high BMI increased risk in men more than in women.
(That said I'm not against masks. We should have been wearing them for cold and flu seasons this whole time.)
It's causation, not just correlation. If you want an explanation, here's what physicians say:
> Then, there is Newton's second law: force = mass × acceleration. It requires more muscle force to displace the diaphragm downward when a substantial fat mass lies below it. Abdominal obesity also makes it more difficult to breathe in a prone position that is favored to improve ventilation in patients with COVID-19. Among more specific mechanisms is expression of angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 protein in adipose tissue. This is the docking protein for SARS-CoV-2 to enter a cell, and fat has higher levels than the lungs and so may serve as a viral refuge and replication site, prolonging virus shedding.
This is true, but mostly because virtually all people are overweight or obese. At least, the link you provided cited that 74% of critically ill Covid patients in the UK were obese, while it turns out that 64% of the UK is already in the overweight/obese category anyway.
Masks are still probably a more effective way to prevent critical illness from covid than exercise.
- give up a few luxuries especially if they involve heavy breathing or eating in close quarters.
- Work from home if you can
- Socially distance
- Wear a mask when you can't socially distance
- Go to work if you need to. Don't go to other people's work if you don't need to
- Support temporary benefits to your fellow citizens as you helpfully avoid going to their place of work.
People only looking at fatality rates and so on are taking unknown risks. Many people who have healed from COVID including younger people cannot even climb a flight of stairs. People suffer from fatigue and brain fog months later. Many need lung and kidney transplants. This is not a flu. It causes heavy clotting of the blood and organ damage all over the body which the flu doesn’t.
I urge people to do more research before taking such risks.
How about -- what's the max viral load one can sustain for it not to pass the 1st layer immune system? Is there really a 1st and 2nd layer? Can I resist it without getting antibodies? How much more effective is a KN95 / N95 mask in terms of viral load vs the others?
And why don't we have more high powered venting fans and permanent outside events and require building to open their windows or remove their walls in climates where that'd work?
You can do one thing to reduce your viral load. Wear a mask. N95 will do better than a surgical mask. But even mask wearing seems controversial. These things are really hard to study so you need to err on the side of caution.
If the price of soybean, or wheat, or pork goes up 15% internationally as a result of US supply disruptions, that doesn't starve any Americans, but it absolutely causes deaths in Yemen, which is already in the middle of a famine.
I think your concern is real and well placed. When the economy is frozen for a pandemic, you have a demand shock and a supply shock, what happens to prices? I think this was genuinely unclear early in the pandemic. Interesting additional details here [4,5]
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSOYBUSDQ
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PPORKUSDM
[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PWHEAMTUSDQ
[4] https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/articles/2020-05-27/pa...
[5] https://mobile.twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/12416894220909...
Are you referring to this study[0] and possibly this article[1]?
(In my experience, telling people to “do research” instead of giving them links to primary sources isn’t great if you want to educate people or have a high quality discussion.)
[0] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/...
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/08/long-haul...
highly recommend /r/COVID19 (stay away from /r/coronavirus) for well moderated discussions that aren't politicized/sensationalist and are based on research/science/numbers.
That said I do think it’s possible for gyms to adapt to be covid-safe by moving equipment outside, restricting the max number of people allowed in the exercise area, mandating masks and social distancing, and wiping down every piece of equipment after it’s used. I have seen some gyms doing that in San Jose. But I guess most gyms don’t want to do that even though gyms outside of dense urban area typically have pretty big parking lots they might be able to use with some open-air huts
local gyms (as opposed to chain/bigbox) tend to be extremely tight-knit communities, which means people want to keep each other safe and will go out of their way to do it, within reason. most people don't care about everyone in their city in abstract, but they do care about members of groups they derive camaraderie from. hell of a lot safer than reopening restaurants, imo
https://www.amhf.org.au/social_isolation_increases_male_suic...
If I told you to leave your house because it was on fire, would you accuse me of trivializing your daily routine?
You should see that as a problem.
Of course, if you just arse around in the house and don't get out of the goddamn way of the firefighters, it's gonna be a hell of a lot harder to put out the fire and I imagine there's gonna be a lot more damage before all's said and done.
"there's a wildfire and firefighters asked you to limit water use to only drinking water, but some people decided to keep taking long showers, washing dishes, etc"
I don't remember giving my elected officials the authority to pursue such extreme policies, especially based on incomplete science. Scientists didn't realize the virus mutated until months after the mutated version was the predominantly spreading version. They waffled on masks and even know there's evidence to suggest that masks can cause more harm because people do not use them properly (they are not washed enough/at all, they are constantly fiddled with (i.e., people touch their face), etc.). Now the latest excuse to extend the lock downs indefinitely is maybe, just maybe a C-19 infection may have long-term negative health externalities.
Mind you, this is all being pushed by the privileged few who have home offices with webcams and fast Internet, food and groceries delivered on a whim, and a Peleton in their home gym. The whole situation is preposterous; it's like we're living in a Monty Python skit.
Some sources:
https://www.azfamily.com/news/continuing_coverage/coronaviru...
https://www.newsweek.com/arizona-hits-record-high-hospital-c...
So no, the lockdown isn't some moving goalpost made by politicians gone wild. It is an unfortunate necessity given the abject failure of the federal administration and many states in managing a very serious public health crisis.
https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson/status/1291552713004777476
^ Those charts so ICU rates dropping in TX which was supposed to be "Overwhelmed" just like AZ.
Just look through the data here for AZ:
https://azdhs.gov/preparedness/epidemiology-disease-control/...
Similarly for Texas:
https://www.tmc.edu/coronavirus-updates/total-tmc-covid-19-p...
And pretty much any way you slice it, opening up prematurely resulted in a huge ballooning of cases, deaths and hospital/ICU bed utilization by late June, early July. Perhaps you should look to getting your news from more reliable sources than some dude on twitter with a clear agenda...
It also doesn't help when the Governor of TX was actively hiding data related to hospital bed availability, etc to mask the complete failure of his head-in-the-sand approach to leadership in the time of a major public health emergency [1]
1 - https://www.texastribune.org/2020/07/02/texas-hospital-capac...
Personally, I think the federal administration has done a fine job--most, if not all, of dealing with this situation should be up to the states, not the feds.
I mean those states are nowhere near the front lines of where COVID would first strike or spread, but the complete apathy to the threat of COVID is going to have consequences. The numbers are already beginning to show that.
1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/national/corona...
Why do you think politicians want to shut things down?
What worldview do you ascribe to people where the view is "wow, this is a great chance to kill off people going to bars and bankrupt our city/state, I've always wanted to do that!"???
One of the most common arguments for schools staying closed is "so you are ok with kids dying".
We have reached a point where as the OP implied, we have become hysterical about any deaths and dems will use that to crucify trump.
The fatality rate of a car crash is also about 0.5% [1], but that doesn't prevent us from driving. That means there's a piece of the puzzle missing here, right?
Note that I'm not concluding this means we should go to gyms (or whatever). I'm just pointing out your analysis is missing an important factor, making it faulty/unconvincing.
Edit: Changed the statistic source, because it wasn't measuring what I thought it was measuring. (Which incidentally also gets at the same distinction I was trying to make in my comment.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
That seems a weird statistic to seek out, because your conclusion would then be "...and we don't try to avoid getting in car crashes to avoid that 0.5% risk of death". Which is wrong, we do and we should try to avoid crashes.
I don't think that statistic is even close to right. I know exactly zero people who have died in a car crash. Many of them are quite old.
The Australian statistics suggest that the odds of anyone in Australia dying of a car crash are 0.0000478 per person per year. This is considerably smaller than your statistic and so I am going to dispute it, at the risk of you thinking I am stupid.
Your anecdote is not more valid than mine.
>>The Australian statistics
it seems Australian drive about 30% fewer miles per year on average;
in the US the risk of death in Auto Accident is 1 in 106, or .95% which I think is close enough to 1% to give the Grand Parent a little slack
They were projecting 3 million may have died if we did nothing over a matter of months; 100 years worth of auto fatalities..
They were. The COVID deaths in the USA are about double what has been reported. Not a conspiracy, just a reality of how the deaths are coded due to testing constraints.
What are the current projections on how many deaths would have occurred if we did nothing?
If we don't develop an effective vaccine then given immunity seems to be temporary (as with other coronaviruses) most of us will catch this every year so a really high proportion of us will die of covid eventually (where eventually is in many years).
By "near 100% chance" here do you mean the fraction of the population getting the disease, or the likelihood of getting the disease even if you take the appropriate precautions? Or to put it another way: imagine 1% of the population taking all the ideal precautions for the next year (and only going outside fro obvious necessities, like food/groceries/etc.). Will they also have a near 100% chance of getting it in your model? Or does 100% merely refer to # of infections / population?
London is a perfect example of how quickly this thing can spread in a modern city and how many people get sick at once. The only reason the death rate wasn't way higher is that many many people self isolated for their own protection in early March.
I know less about New York but it sounds similar.
Then they looked at a new model and realised that if they achieved herd immunity, the predicted number of people who would die, this summer, was going to be massive.
They also realised that some of those deaths would be due to the healthcare system being unable to treat a lot of people, making the number who would die even larger, and avoidably so. Presumably hospitals turning critical patients away would also be socially & politically disastrous. This started the "flatten the curve" strategy.
So they rapidly did a U-turn towards progressively increasing lockdowns, and now decreasing restrictions.
Now with a bit more thinking behind us, we also realise herd immunity might not even work as predicted, because it's not clear what are the long term effects of the virus, including immunity and ability to be infectious to others after new exposure despite having had the virus before.
Like in the USA, people aren't complying with much consistency, and it looks obvious that many people, mostly younger, don't care to protect others. The emerging anecdotes and data about long term damage when surviving do not seem to bother them either.
Nonetheless, it looks like the strategy has made a large difference to the outcome compared with what early models predicted if there were no restrictions.
And now with the emerging data about long term harm (including evidence suggesting asymptomatic carriers who don't know they had it but may have sustained organ damage affecting them in future), we can be confident the strategy, by reducing the numbers of people who get it, will have made a difference to more people than previously thought.
This doesn't stop a few people from saying that the lockdown was unnecessary because there were only X deaths and the temporary new hospitals were not much used, when X is because of lockdown (and is larger than the models predicted). There are people with no brain apparently.
I'll bite ... what is your point? Approximately 30000 people die a year in car accidents a year in the US, COVID has killed 170K in six months. What's the missing piece you are trying to bring to the table?
I do wonder how the critical injury vs. lasting COVID complications will workout.
All of which is to say: there's a good case to be made, and I'm not even against it, but (a) on the one hand, it's not nearly as open-and-shut as just comparing the (mismatched) statistics in the original comment, and (b) conversely, when there are more compelling arguments, it's so much better to make those arguments instead of comparing apples and oranges.
Whats the exit strategy? What has to happen for this to end?
For what I've read there's a good chance this virus will stay with us for the long term, just like the flu. Waiting for the vaccine is kind of like hoping for a miracle, as it might not even work. So when will all this madness end?
Assuming a vaccine doesn't appear, then we're left with herd immunity through community infection. There are problems with that though, because it's not yet clear whether infection with the COVID-19 virus even makes a person immune to future infection.
Amidst all the uncertianty a vaccine is our best hope. Personally I'm assuming this will be with us in some shape or form for many years.
If you don't become immune after getting the virus, how would you become so after vaccination? My understanding is that vaccines have a weaker version or a portion of the virus inside them, and your body needs to make antibodies. But if that doesn't happen?
The exit strategy should be to enough of a lock-down to get rates very low. This would likely have to be combined with quick-turnaround testing and contact tracing. The US largely failed with this. Other countries show what an exit strategy could have looked like. I'm not sure if it's still viable, but maybe.
This is what I wanted a lock-down to bring us, and what maybe still could:
* Access to testing: This has improved a lot. In March and April, I knew people with symptoms who couldn't get tested. Last month, my partner found it easy to get tested.
* Quick-turn-around with testing: This still sucks. My partner's test in July was easy to get, but the earliest appointment was five days out and it was another five to get the results. This isn't good enough.
* Contact tracing: We still don't have this, at least in most places. I would love to install a contact tracing app on my phone, but there isn't one. Seems they're regional, and Texas/Austin hasn't bothered?
* A reduction in growth-rates due to social distancing: We got this! Daily growth rate dropped from 1.3+ in mid-March to 1.06-1.08 in mid-April. (I haven't looked recently, but I don't think this has lasted. Still, we were on track to hit 100k deaths by mid-April without this effect.)
* New information about how to prevent it: We got some important new information! Turns out surfaces aren't a big deal, and masks are. This is the opposite of what we were told early on, and knowing to wear masks (and more recently, not to use gaiters as masks) is a Big Deal.
* Improved treatments: Only thing I've seen is the "proning helps" thing a few months back.
* Vaccines: We've made a lot of progress. More than I think experts expected by now.
So, yeah, we currently seem to have no real exit strategy other than waiting for a vaccine, or for herd immunity. That doesn't mean it's rational to just exit without a strategy.
For now, I'm just going to stay mostly locked down until the vaccine happens or our government decides to step it up and do enough of the things listed above to get the spread under control. Not everyone can do this -- as another commenter mentioned, things that aren't urgent the first week will become so after a month, or six months, and these things are different for different people.
But as much as I liked going to the gym, I'm going to continue to forgo that.
But if you get the infection rates very low, and reopen, the infection rates will go up, unless something fundamental has changed.
Different countries have done different things, but my understanding is that South Korea avoided a lock down for the most part by implementing this before cases were widespread. They occasionally add some temporary restrictions, but I think "sometimes we have to add some restrictions until there's a vaccine" is a livable long-term situation. What we're seeing in the US is that for a lot of people, our current situation isn't.
This is wrong and misleading. You're quoting the average fatality rate for "healthy" people, but the distribution doesn't look like that at all. Then, you cherrypick 10% out of nowhere for "parents and school teachers". 10% is the rate for people in their 80s.
Real data: "[t]he estimated IFR is close to zero for younger adults but rises exponentially with age, reaching about 0.3% for ages 50-59, 1.3% for ages 60-69, 4% for ages 70-79, 10% for ages 80-89."[1]
[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160895v...
Have you ever seriously contemplated death? If you have, those numbers don’t seem very good, not at all.
Not to mention these are stats for DEATH. Meaning these are the worst case scenario. Dead. The chances of getting seriously ill, like major suffering, are much higher. Would you want to experience that? Would you wish that on others in your community?
Suck it up and do some pushups for gods sake.
Here are the chances of dying in a year, for a given age, from actuarial tables:
25 year olds: 0.16% chance of dying
35 year olds: 0.2% chance of dying
45 year olds: 0.3% chance of dying
55 year olds: 0.7% chance of dying
65 year olds: 2% chance of dying
75 year olds: 3.5%
85 year olds: 10%
95 year olds: 26%
How about, if you’re worried, stay home, stay in. If you’re not worried, go out. Let’s not impinge on freedoms of any groups. Not just little freedoms. Pretty basic ones like, freedoms of assembly.
But there's a few big problems here:
a) As we've seen, some of the most vulnerable people are in situations where "staying in" without letting the virus in is very difficult. This will be worse the more widespread in the wider community?
b) Even if the vulnerable can perfectly protect themselves, this assumes a very selfish calculus of unconcern for everyone else. If your hospitals fall past the tipping point in a "get it over with ASAP" yolo policy, people not only die faster than in a world where there's never a vaccine or effictive treatment, more of them die too due to reduced ability to treat.
c) Who's gonna pay for all the non-wealthy vulnerable people to stay home? Especially in cases where they need to be more isolated, such as those with healthy roommates who will be acting normally, so they need to relocate too? I haven't seen anyone proposing answers to this in the states like TX or GA.
I know this is a morbid topic, but it gets to a fundamental truth. How valuable is a human life? Is it worth significantly damaging the future of the young through economic depression and increased social isolation and mental illness to extend the life old old people by a year, 5 years?
There is no easy solution. We can hibernate as much of the non-essential economy with lock-downs and mandate the wearing of masks. But this, will extend the economic hardship we are under, which will put further economic strain on young people, who now have had to contend with the great recession and now likely a depression. We can do like sweeden and try and isolate and protect the vulnerable, and keep the economy open, or we can do nothing. Each of these choices has trade-offs in terms of economic hardship and lives. Not just the lives of people who get COVID, but those who commit suicide due to social isolation, economic hardship, and other factors related to COVID.
American's can't have this discussion in a mature manner because it has been poisoned by politics.
Looking at current number of deaths as the outcome for the decision to open stuff up only makes sense if you think we would have seen the same infection rate.
If the infection rate is high enough and fast enough, we surpass the healthcare system's capacity to help with hospitalization, and then we see a large increase in the mortality rate for those infected, as some of those with bad, but not fatal infections that recovered in the hospital don't recover out of the hospital. The faster the spread, the worse (higher) that number is.
> The economic impact would be roughly that of everybody taking a really long vacation.
People come back from vacations. The economic impact would be more like those people all quit at the same time.
> it does not seem like that is the calculus going into our policy decisions here in August.
It is. They're looking at worst case scenarios for COVID-19, and how likely they are, compared to worst case scenarios for the economy, and how likely they are.
Worst case for the economy is a depression, which may take years or decades to recover from, but the workers are still there, still trained, and we can hopefully get them back to work with stimulus, even if it takes a long time.
Worst case for COVID-19 is that instead of hundreds of thousands of dead, we see millions of dead. What's the economic impact of one of every 50 or 100 families loses a parent, and how that affects they flexibility and ability to recover from financial bumps? What's the impact to Apple or Google if a high level exec that's spears a division dies (what's happened at Apple since Job died, and he had plenty of time to groom a successor)? What about the 20 employees of small business that was struggling but surviving when the owner dies? The economic impact of people actually disappearing forever is sometimes equivalent of the cost and time to train a replacement (which is generally multiple months of salary for any non-trivial position), and that's when it can actually be replaced adequately.
Even if you want to completely ignore the humanitarian aspect of it, there's good economic reason to not want people to die, and why locking things down, while economically disastrous, maybe still be less economically disastrous than NOT doing so.
That's fine. People are going to do what they're going to do. I'm not quite willing to let them do it behind nonsense arguments and justifications though.
If someone's unwilling to give up going to the gym, so be it. When they couch it (as some have here) as them actually doing it for the benefit of everyone else by helping the economy, I'm going to loudly and vehemently call bullshit.
If they say they just aren't willing to change and don't care about any of the data, well as long as they actually know the data, then I'll have nothing more to discuss with them.
That said, I don't think this is how people are. I think people are living in a deep cognitive dissonance and refusing to see the facts, not acknowledging them and saying they don't care.
That's not a policy problem, that a problem of educating people that do not want to be educated. Should the rest of the populace just shift our views away from reality so people that don't want to face it can get a better deal out of some policy? That won't lead to an acceptable outcome either, when the policy in question is about public safety.
I’ve been comparing flu stats for Australia. 2019 a BAD flu season was over 400 deaths. A NORMAL season is roughly 150 deaths. I think 146 in 2018. 2020 has 36 deaths.
Melbourne deaths peaked at 25 for a single day. The current outbreak in VIC totally blows past the flu death rate for the entire country.
Total COVID deaths in Australia (450) already matches a bad flu season in a “locked down” environment and we still have 5 months to go for 2020.
Thankfully in Australia it’s possible to make mask wearing mandatory.
The flu certainly makes for a better comparison for discussion's sake than something like smallpox or the bubonic plague. Let's not forget the Spanish flu was also a flu.
When you look at overall mortality it's not similar to the flu. It's worse. Covid is a bigger killer, with a major reason being the lack of population resistance, vaccination, treatment protocols etc.
I think most discussion misses this point, it is similar in some ways and not in others.
In my view a rational and evidence-based approach would have focused on protecting vulnerable populations from day one. Such policies received little emphasis. Instead, we panicked and implemented measures that destroyed the jobs of healthy people who were living paycheck to paycheck. It's hard to imagine a worse response than one that fails to focus on the core problem and injures millions in the process.
Saying its just a flu, also discounts the potential life long impacts of a COVID infection, which appears to damage the hearts and lungs of some people who survived.
The broader point is, that there is no one right answer, all answers cause pain and suffering for different groups. To dumb it down to a black and white response does a massive disservice.
Can't really make a comparison with a long standing disease when covid19 is still doing its first rounds.
https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject...
When I was trying to google data I don’t think I ever came across the ABS site in the results. 2016 was also 400ish deaths.
Preventable deaths.
> American's can't have this discussion in a mature manner because it has been poisoned by politics.
I would say it's deeper than that. American society has been poisoned by individuality to the point where no one wants to do anything to help one another if it doesn't benefit them. It feels there's no concept of civic sense or societal good. Everyone just wants to do whatever they want, regardless of the consequences.
Ask me to inconvenience myself for someone else? Fuck you buddy I got mine /s
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/12/us/covid-deat...
How many more quarter millions of souls is a sufficient amount to sacrifice on behalf of gym fetishists?
(I was planning a return to the gym following an involuntary multi-year lapse this past January. On advising my doctor I was delaying plans, their first response was to dismiss my concerns as germophobic. They've since apologised.)
However, I do want to address the young and increased social isolation and mental illness. Took my toddler for an annual checkup recently and asked about all this as he's been out of daycare since March and had concerns about development.
The pediatrician's answer, which I found compelling was: this is a big deal, and it's going to have an impact, and therefore we should be a little lax to help create some comfort around the house. That said, all the psychologists in the world are looking at this and starting to work on the impact and how we get kids back to "normal" or ease the harm this has on them. There is going to be expertise and guidance on this.
Of course, that likely doesn't apply to the anti-science crowd.
I am remarkably lucky. I am fairly resilient and being stuck working from home hasn't negatively impacted my mental health. I've been promoted during the crisis. I am financially secure.
Not everyone is like me. Many people have suffered horribly due to the crisis, becoming unemployed, unable to see friends, they don't have their usual coping mechanisms. My point was, how we choose to deal with this is a choice, each choice has consequences. Currently we are saving older lives, at the expense of damaging the futures of younger generations. Is this the right balance? I don't know. I don't claim to know. But as a society, this is what we need to answer, how valuable is each human life.
Should we choose harsh lockdowns to extend the lives of older people by x years on average? What is the cost in economic and mental health harm to younger generations? How do we balance these needs?
These are the discussions we should be having, instead of decrying anyone who disagrees with the harshest of measures as a witch.
Where is proof of causality between coronavirus and these afflictions?
https://www.smh.com.au/national/seizures-and-battered-heart-...
[1]https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/irv.12470
So... not like the flu in scale or scope.
a realistic calculation of risk should be looking at your risk of dying, your risk of serious illness, your risk of permanent illness and/or long-term effects, _and_ your risk of medical bankruptcy. one dude got a bill for a million dollars when he finally was able to leave the ICU.
COVID-19 is going to have a long tail...
[1] Outcomes of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Patients Recently Recovered From Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), Puntmann et al, JAMA Cardiology, 2020
Yet we know that while heart attack risk is elevated for a few weeks after a bout of flu, it reverts to baseline for virtually all otherwise healthy patients.
The myth of long-term COVID heart damage is, as of the evidence yet, media scaremongering. We have no reason to believe that COVID behaves any different than any other common respiratory infection in this regard.
[1] https://academic.oup.com/cardiovascres/advance-article/doi/1...
Economic-cost-wise, why is this cost the one that gets people so riled up?
Is it because it also comes with personal inconvenience, and so much of the other ways we spend money fighting death - or trying to extract revenge for death like after 9/11 - doesn't?
Driving, for instance - the government makes us spend a lot more to have safer cars, but other than styles and types of car available as a result, we don't really get impacted by it. It just makes the cars more expensive, and few people care.
Or maybe we're just bad at dealing with adversity without having someone to blame? So we go reaching for "bad guys"?
The ability of politicians to control transmission by making decrees, even dramatic ones, is limited, yes.
The ability of ordinary people to control transmission by taking obvious common sense precautions is not. And those obvious common sense precautions should include, yes, not engaging in activities that have a high risk of transmission.
I’m not arguing for total lockdown. I’m arguing for avoiding the more risky activities that involve heavy breathing in close quarters so total lockdown can be avoided. Local governments mostly know this, and have set policies accordingly. In general they should do a better job of compensating businesses in the short term since it’s not the gym owner’s fault (for example) that his business happens to have been risky right now.
I don’t think it’s good behavior to go out of your way to circumvent a public health policy based on a personal risk tolerance.
The "more trivial things" like normal social interaction, employment, and healthy exercise?
I've never seen a more pointed example of most people's abject inability to perform utilitarian reasoning than this pandemic. If you think causing at least tens of thousands of suicides since the start of the lockdowns, impoverishing millions of people for years to come, and drastically reducing almost everyone's quality of life is a reasonable tradeoff for buying (on expectation) an extra few months of life for geriatrics, you are not rational.
Yep, me neither. If more people could, we wouldn't have this problem, because people who could would stay home. And going to the gym is indeed one of the "more trivial things".
I suppose the problem is that it's hard to impress on people the seriousness of the situation. If instead of a virus, you had a madman or enemy soldiers going through the street and shooting every two hundredth person at random (even with a heavy bias towards the elderly), everyone would stay home and keep crying the government needs to do more.
If a single-basis-point-scale increase in annual death rates is enough to make you “stay home”, you should never go outside in the first place.
On expectation, my marginal increase in risk of death from depression from becoming a shut-in is higher than the marginal increase in risk of death from contracting covid.
The primary problem with this disease is the asymptomatic spread.
I've included everyone I come into contact with. The risk to them is insufficient to justify me becoming a hermit. If they have a vastly different risk profile from me, they'll become a hermit of their own accord and I don't have to worry about them catching it from me.
> The primary problem with this disease is the asymptomatic spread.
If that's the "primary problem", then it's probably not something to worry about, don't you think?
Obviously there is not going to be a total lockdown in the the US no matter what happens. Regardless of the potential benefits, that option isn't even remotely politically feasible. People simply won't comply, and there aren't enough police to enforce it.
There are some obvious ones, like: no new cases in the city/county reported in 14 days.
For some reason, it seems people thought this would take a month or two, and then everything will be back to normal. But it wouldn't. Two months is a ramp-up period, a default if you do nothing. "Flattening the curve" measures were always going to extend the partial lockdowns until late this year. We knew that in March.
Obviously the political situation and what’s feasible is different, but I hope restrictions on group sizes and a small number of activities is not infeasible. They are not “lockdown”, they are the way to avoid lockdown.
Again there is no political possibility of a future strict lockdown in the US. So for better or worse it has already been avoided.
One problem with age-based stats like this is that it gives the impression that the way to think about risk is along the lines of russian roulette: when someone gets infected, the great actuary in the sky rolls a D100, consults the tables, and if their roll is good, they don't die.
But what if the die was already rolled for some individuals? What if, say, one in 100 people carry a genetic risk factor that means that if they get COVID, they have a much higher risk of dying - regardless of their age? That hypothesis is also compatible with the statistical data we are looking at.
You could also consider, what if some people have particular predisposition to become a superspreader and infect many more people?
If the population contains individuals for whom their individual outcome risk, or their potential impact on other people, is significantly above the average, then by reducing the spread of the disease we reduce the number of such people who ever get infected. You can prevent the D100 having to be rolled for as many people, including people who need to roll much higher to survive.
Why does the timing of the roll matter?
The point is more to get people to think about the difference between aggregate average mortality, vs the individual prognosis of one unlucky COVID patient.
This winds up being a trolley-problem kind of reframing of a moral argument. Philosophically, should you change your behavior between the following two scenarios:
- a group of 100 people all have a 1 in 100 chance of dying of a disease
- a group of 100 people contain one person who will definitely die if they get the disease
?
Does your answer change if you are the one person?
I think in US everything is polarized and politicized. To the point that wearing masks is somehow considered against freedom. I believe health officials have some blames to share. They still have not come clean for their initial mask guidelines that was blatantly wrong. I think health authorities will have long time to regain trusts in US.
I also feel we don’t quite understand the transmission mechanism fully yet. It’s airborne, at least we know that part but the clusters in nursing homes and indoor parties also indicate there is some mechanisms in play when indoor.
When people get careless, it flares up, but can (thanks to decent testing meanwhile) typically be suppressed again with regional lockdowns before it gets really bad.
Where?
Poland took some early actions but there are no covid free areas. Infections rates have plateaued but remain on a more or less constant levels. And people are getting upset. It will be really hard to keep them homes during the second wave... Same seems to be true for Czech Ostrava region.
I'm not sure I follow here - what is missing on that front? They have explained why the mask recommendation changed and how they got to their initial recommendation. Not sure how much more they could do there.
Yet despite this, United States has 4 TIMES the cases per day.
Europe can relax because they worked hard in the beginning to get everything under control. The US never did that, most states (like my home state of Texas) did a half-assed closing for 3 weeks, so the numbers never really got under control.
When this is over, I bet the entire planet will have rates similar to Sweden. My theory is lockdowns delay the inevitable. We should protect the most at risk (95% of fatalities in the US are ages 55+), but we also need to realize there is no way to really stop a virus in circulation.
I wrote a while back about how we just need to come to accept our life expectancy is just lower now:
https://battlepenguin.com/politics/this-is-not-a-time-of-hon...
Sure there is, a vaccine.
Pharmaceutical companies have never made a successful vaccines for coronaviruses before. I've heard the argument, "Well we have more people working on it." If you hire nine women, you can't make a baby in a month. There is no way, no matter how much money you throw at it, to safely do 5~10 years worth of testing in less than a year.
Absurd argument. You can't parallelize the birth of a baby but you can do that for testing a vaccine.
So basically dose tens of thousands of people before you even know it's safe?
That was a beautiful strawman, and even one of the replies your comment walked right into it.
There aren't many human coronaviruses circulating to begin with. And they're not dangerous, aside from SARS-CoV-2. Of course there aren't any vaccines for them. Got pretty close on SARS & MERS before they fizzled on their own.
> It takes 5 to 10 years to create a safe and effective vaccine
How long do you think the leading SARS-CoV-2 vaccines have been in development? Years. It's not like they were dreamed up since February.
Not just some, but surveys show something like 40% of Americans say they won't take it
New cases were expected, and planned for. There is active investigation into how the virus got into the community, and efforts to improve the resurgence plan. New cases coming from elimination can't really be compared to "we have community spread, but the cases went down so we are going to open up again".
https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/diseases-and-conditions/...
The reason that the "second wave" (if that's what it truly is) is coming now is because of easing of restrictions more than anything else. This is summer, and Europeans religiously go on vacation during summer.
This second rise in Covid-19 is more related to groups moving between borders, and those borders having had their restrictions lifted, than some "lockdowns don't work" conclusion. If you looked at the data for different EU nations, a few weeks after moderate lockdowns were introduced, the curve did in fact flatten and cases began to plummet. And as countries open up their borders -- and gyms have reopened where I live -- cases go up.
I was in Greece a few weeks ago, and the cases in the entire nation were pretty OK. On the island where I was, it was pretty good. But their borders with their neighbors were open -- Croatia, Albania, etc. -- and the uptick came largely from their neighbors. Now, at least last time I checked, current cases are higher than from the "first" wave.
In total - I'd say it's more a result of the vacation mindset and opening of borders here in Europe that is resulting in this summer uptick than a failure of lockdown measures.
Europe is getting tired right now, and I'm not talking about economies but about people. You can't lock people for months and expect them to to obey indefinitely. It's unsustainable. It's more reasonable to apply some proportional restrictions than to lock everything down. Eg. limit users of a gym and require disinfection. That's how a legal state should work: effective and proportional restrictions, rest is a human right.
I believe it's the decision not to reopen indoor dining and bars, and to mandate masks, that saved NYC the resurgence that the rest of the country has seen. You absolutely can control COVID even during the current period of social unrest; the US largely chose not to. COVID doesn't seem to like to spread that much during largely masked, outdoor protests. It loves to spread in bars and parties.
School is opening soon, so things will probably get worse, but nevertheless: NYC demonstrates that in an American context, COVID can still be controlled pretty well.
(NYC government has a lot to answer for w/r/t the initial response in March, but that's not the same issue)
You can't compare cases
I have seen recently that serology tests in Italy have shown the same outcome for people who were locked down than essential workers who were not locked down (and mortality stats in the UK told a similar story a couple of months ago).
Also the evolution of deaths in Sweden followed the same shape and timing than all the other european countries who locked down, suggesting the peak had more to do with the natural evolution of the infection than as a result of a lockdown.
And as far as I know, the WHO does not support lockdowns.
I suppose things like how well care homes were protected probably mattered a lot more.
WHO is corrupt, and has been politicized. They were also against masks at the beginning, and also said COVID does not transmit from human to human.
Professor Plum works for the WHO. —-
Miss Scarlet : I hardly think it will enhance your reputation at the U.N. Professor Plum, if it's revealed that you have been implicated not only in adultery with one of your patients, but in her death and the deaths of five other people.
Professor Plum : You don't know what kind of people they have at the U.N., I might go up in their estimation.
Can you put that canard to rest? On January 14th (when virtually nothing was known about this yet), the WHO tweeted (my highlights):
> Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus
So, note:
a) this was very early days, and the understanding was in flux.
b) the WHO didn't itself claim anything about the virus and its transmission, but it reported on a study. The WHO doesn't conduct their own studies. The WHO reports and aggregates information from the member states. Here, these were investigation reports from the Chinese authorities, and that's what they said at the time.
c) these were preliminary studies, not a final conclusion.
d) the claim wasn't that there is no transmission, but that at the time no clear evidence for it had been found.
The tweet was maybe ill-advised, and it didn't age well, but it is by no means indicative of corruption.
That is not to say that the WHO doesn't have major problems. But this tweet is not one of them.
No, this is absolutely wrong, every single sentence. Lockdowns definitely help. New York was hit hardest because, despite closing the earliest, they still closed way too late. Cuomo resisted calls from his health experts for almost three weeks. By the time he gave the order, there were 5,000 daily cases reported and the virus was practically out of control.
New York doesn't have herd immunity - not even close. Majority of New Yorkers were not infected. https://patch.com/new-york/new-york-city/nyc-hasnt-built-her...
Wasn't there a study showing 40% of people have generic coronavirus anti-bodies from prior colds and it is believed that these help? Though the extent might not be known.
Thank you ! I am all for the lockdown. I am all for wearing masks. Contact tracing is great and d=should be done more rigorously. I am all for proven methods working well for a disease that is both more and less well-understood than we think.
However, amidst genuinely useful health policy, we also have a seriously large amount of security theater. As of this moment, any stance outside "covid is the next coming of the black death" is met with a lot of pushback.
The disease primarily kills and affects older people. We still haven't seen any age specific policy come out of any govt. Close down old age homes. Ensure social distancing at all costs. Let other things come back to normal slowly. It is near impossible for it to spread via surfaces.
WHO has claimed that truly asymptomatic patients (not pre-symptomatic, not making that distinction initially caused push back) patients rarely transmit, and another study found that about 80% of patients in the 10-30 range are asymptomatic.
From my POV, America failed with Covid due to the South, Republicans and many refusing to take basic covid precautions. Shouting at those who are already doing their bit, for not going above and beyond is not going make this any better. People need to stop with purity tests, and directing their misguided anger towards those who are already doing more than enough. This is knowing what we know from countries that have beaten covid.
Probably because anything less and everyone thinks they're special enough that special health measures don't apply to them.
Not that I'm ordinarily in favor of dramatizing things, but I'm at a loss about how to handle the lot of regular people that I know personally, who aren't capable of nuance and instead will use any excuse to justify ignoring lockdown & social distancing measures. The pictures coming from Italy in March scared the shit out of everyone, but now that we don't see trucks full of bodies in the news on a regular basis, this significant fraction of the population is back to ignoring all safety measures and whining about "covid craze".
The difference between the 'black death hysteria' and the 'invisibility' of the disease on the ground has only emboldened conspiracy theorists, republicans and idiots.
While Trump certainly made it worse, the medical community is to blame as well.
The death estimates (with or without lockdown) from the highly influential ICL study turned out to be completely bogus. The mixed messaging on masks, ventilators and spread via surfaces were all major missteps. The right wing support of Hydroxychloriquine, the disgraced study opposing it printed by respected medical and journalistic outlets and then its eventual disappearance into obscurity was another major blow to the establishment's credibility.
Breeding resentment among those abiding is never a good idea. Adding even more rules for those who aren't is even worse. The moral and practical choices are almost never the same. If the US had found a middle ground lockdown, that everyone was willing to follow, maybe it would have worked out better.
To be clear, if I was a dictator, the lockdown would have been far more severe. But, the US is the country of freedom, where neither the central or the state govts. have much power to enforce anything. They have to negotiate with the citizens,
Covid cases in the US far exceed those of nations where the lockdown requirements (at least those imposed by NE states) are far less stringent. Clearly, the severity of lockdowns was not the problem. It was the complete inability of the experts to get a vast section of the country onboard.
(It is also possible we are arguing the same thing from different points. In Boston, where I stay, I haven't seen a single person without a mask for weeks, everyone socially distances, we have readily available free testing and I getting a bit annoyed at gyms being closed in all capacities despite the per-capita rate being about as low and everyone doing their due diligence.)
https://mobile.twitter.com/yinonw/status/1295152579941249024
> Population 746,419,440
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe
> Population 328,239,523
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24216964
and EUROPE population is 746 million, as I already said:
So what is your point? Just throwing out random facts? And even if you just talk about EU, its still embarassing. EU still has 35% higher population than the US, while the US has 4 times the daily cases.
European Union ≠ Europe
What’s the accuracy of the tests?
Where do you see that COVID19 is over?
> under control
A very steep second wave of infection is, to me, the opposite of "under control". Do you actually check data?
https://covid19.who.int/region/euro/country/fr
Also, just routinely mentioning:
"No country knows the total number of people infected with COVID-19. All we know is the infection status of those who have been tested."
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-testing
Also, the US tests about twice more (per thousand people) vs the rates of testing in Europe, so you should expect at least 2x more cases discovered in the US just by this mere fact.
Most of Europe also has only a "symptoms-based" testing policy, while the US also has an "asymptomic" testing policy.
It will be interesting to see the death rate once this is all over. It might be much lower and the initial numbers were skewed by cases in the elderly.
But a major factor is that deaths have consistently been a lagging indicator for this disease, both because the progression is quite long and because the most active spreaders tend to be younger and healthier. It's likely that they'll see a matching resurgence in deaths over the next few weeks, as other areas of the world with case surges have consistently seen.
We are getting better at treating COVID19. We are not as clueless as 6 months ago.
I don't think they were. There is a 2013 study that shows cloth masks would be ineffective at preventing spread of respiratory illnesses, and posts by UIC Health early on that said they weren't necessary (which they've added a notice to). I wrote about this here:
https://battlepenguin.com/politics/secondary-effects/#masks-...
Fauci originally said masks were not very useful (quite convincingly I might add) and then turned around and said they were. When pressed, he said he was afraid of health professionals running out of PPE. He admitted he made a noble lie. So if he was lying then ... how do we know he's not lying now? How do we know he's not pushing masks because it's causing political strife and fear? After all, his wife has a major role at the NIH for approving emergency drugs and vaccines, and Fauci has vested interested in big pharma. You cannot trust a liar and he admitted to lying directly to us!
In Canada, a man was pepper sprayed at a Tim Horton by a cop for not wearing a mask. Another man refused to wear one, went home, and the cops came to his house. The resulting altercation lead to the cops fatally shooting him. A woman with a medical notice in Melbourne was choked by cops and arrested (granted she did flip them off instead of handing them her note like she should have).
Masks have really torn everyone apart, and have been used as a big source of shame. By mandating them, you break the social contract, and you're asking people to accept certain beliefs, for which there are 10+ scientific papers published on both sides of the fence. They make it harder for us to "see" one another. The hurt our trust because we evolved to depend on facial expressions. And if they don't do very much as far as preventing spread of infection, than they might even cause more harm than good. Am I the only one who sees the normalization of the mask as contributing to those who are rioting?
There are plenty of nations and States within the US without mask mandates and we see similar infection rates based on population density. In the end, I think they'll end up being a political statement. Nothing more, and everything less.
Please, just no.
Anonymity lets people express their extremes, for both good and bad.
Everybody is a liar.
You don't have to take Fauci's word for it so whether he is or isn't lying, you do or don't trust him, is not a good argument for or against masks.
However, the study you referenced states the opposite: "Both masks significantly reduced the number of microorganisms expelled by volunteers, although the surgical mask was 3 times more effective in blocking transmission than the homemade mask." AND "Conclusion: Our findings suggest that a homemade mask should only be considered as a last resort to prevent droplet transmission from infected individuals, but it would be better than no protection."
"However, these masks would provide the wearers little protection from microorganisms from others persons who are infected with respiratory diseases. As a result, we would not recommend the use of homemade face masks as a method of reducing transmission of infection from aerosols."
No. No, no no. Masks have torn nobody apart. They could have brought us together. One segment of the population embraced politics and decided that masks was the last straw among all of the rules they otherwise accept in their lives, and decided to turn it into a public statement. These people are the ones that have torn everyone apart and ripped up the social contract.
The rest of us are just quietly sucking it up and doing what little we can to improve outcomes for all of society.
Let's not pretend that there isn't a "wear masks because of politics" segment in the US, too. It's been turned into signalling on both sides, to the detriment of us all.
Everyone?
In nearly all countries, people simply wear masks when appropriate. The common fight against the virus brings people together, if anything.
To watch the self-destruction of the USA about the "great mask debate" is somewhat baffling.
> There are plenty of nations and States within the US without mask mandates
You need to look at mask wearing, not mask mandates (believe it or not, there are people who wear masks voluntarily); and correct for a whole lot of factors, such as density (compare Hong Kong and Alaska). Then, from what I gather, evidence supports masks.
In my "bubble" the experts have been proven right, time and again. Again, the mask thing is about the only piece of bad information I can remember being spread.
And yet, all over the internet, 6+ months into this, we have a bunch of people who deliberately misinformed themselves for months, complaining that "the experts have been wrong over and over again".
One know mechanic is the virus's half life when airborne. We know that the airborne virus can be killed/filtered when there is enough UV light and/or a fine enough particulate air filter in place. In other words, indoor safety can be improved with better filters. Without the proper filtration, HVAC circulation can help circulate the virus, which could be the problem in nursing homes and at parties.
Meanwhile, outdoor air is relatively safe when there is enough distancing as sunlight will take the virus's half life down to 90 seconds at 20% humidity and 70-75 degrees [1]. 20% humidity is pretty low, but the good news is that half life gets even shorter as humidity goes up. Sunlight doesn't even contain the best frequency of UV light to kill the virus, but it's intense enough that it still works fairly well.
1) https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-04-sunlight-coronavirus-...
No, the clusters in nursing homes and indoor parties indicate that airborne transmission is a lot easier when you have high risk people who can't avoid close contact with others, or a lot of people in close contact in a small space, in a closed environment where air is recirculated.
> Support temporary benefits to your fellow citizens.
What benefits? Support how? Prayers?
Support that small business in your community with your wallet.
> Also congratulations for not caring about a 1 in 200 chance of death.
Where's the data to back up any close to an assertion like this?
You betray an inane non-appreciation of what is actually happening to people economically.
Go out and spend your money, support local businesses.
Edit: To address the claim about the 1/200 rate directly, that number is based on bogus 0.5 - 1% global IFR estimates that haven't been controlled for any demographic group. The IFR for people under 70 is less than 0.1, and likely much, much lower for under 40. And that's not even controlling for anything except age.[1]
1. https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/53c0dc391b...
>> Where's the data to back up any close to an assertion like this?
Latest IFR estimates are between 0.5% and 1.0% (1 in 200 to 1 in 100).
https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/estimating...
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160895v...
Your reference is very good. It is still a pre-print, but the breakdown is very informative. It estimates the IFR (Table 4) for ages between 0-34 as 0.01% (1 in 10,000), increasing exponentially from there. The estimated IFR for the next age group, people between 34-54, is between 0.04% and 0.2% (1 in 2,500 to 1 in 500), one to two orders of magnitude greater. For people over 85, the IFR is 36.8% (~1 in 3).
Note that the population over 34 is about 50% of the total in the US.
I rarely see mentions too that just because the mortality rate is lower for younger/healthy people - why does that exclude them potentially transmitting it to older folk?
It's possible that we mostly exist in different filter bubbles though.
It's good to know it's being brought up when people mention IFR of age groups as if that "proves" we shouldn't worry about it.
I don't understand how this number can be reasonably used to say anything about basically anything.
From the document you site:
> Many such serological surveys are currently being
> undertaken worldwide [10], and some have thus far
> suggested substantial under-ascertainment of cases, with estimates of IFR converging at approximately 0.5 - 1% [10-12].
> Results:
> Age 0–69 Population %: 88.3, IFR: 0.09%
> Age 70+, Population %: 11.7, IFR: 4.29%
People, come on.
1. https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/53c0dc391b...
The data you cite has a large age group as well (0-69), which has the same problem you describe. See the comment by user kmm below for a reference with a better breakdown of estimated IFR by age groups. The reference also shows how the IFR increases exponentially by age.
If you want to see what number applies to you in particular, then you need an specific breakdown. But if you need to see what is the risk for the population in general, then the estimated total IFR, sampled from that same population, is valuable. Think of individual risk vs systemic risk.
However another aspect that is still very nebulious at this point is post-infection sequelae.
Some of the patients who survived SARS-1 infection (in the SARS 2002-2004 outbreak) had lung scaring, loss of VO2 max, and other pulmonary related disfunction, more than 10 years after infection. [0]
We have seen a lot of pre-print articles discussing SARS-COV2 lung damage, heart and blood vessel damage, peripheral nerve damage, etc.
So if we want to be factual and give people a chance of making an informed decision, then we should also take this aspect in consideration.
At this point, we simply don't know enough about who will be affected and how severely but if take what we learned from SARS-COV1, than it is iresponsible not to disclose that life long injury or damage with _varying_ degrees of intensity across potentially multiple systems is very likely for _some_ of the survivors of SARS-COV2.
My point is an informed decision of not following health authority guidelines (which, at this point of social isolation, I do not judge), should not be reduced to something binomial like survival/death, it's just not that simple (as with most things in life).
How about instead of focusing solely on the IFR of young people - bring into the conversation how those same young people may not 100% recover.
What about discussing how those same infected young(er) people may not die but they may pass it to other people that aren't so lucky?
You realize the impact in the US is dramatically greater amongst the black and brown population?
Possibly due to: the higher likelihood of being in essential jobs in areas with greater population density than Sweden.
Or, you need ethnicity controls because, eugenics?
I am empathetic to the situation but that's a limited view on "skin". Those who are or have loved ones (colleagues, friends, etc) in the high risk categories also have skin in the game. The 783,000 COVID-19 deaths have permanently affected tens of millions of lives.
Only in America would people legitimately make the argument that it's ok to expose people to risk because people someone is losing money.
Who are you to put a value on my loved ones lives? 1/100 chance, 1/1000 chance, why does any of that matter? Fuck your business, it won't bring my parents back. It won't replace scarred lung tissue in COVID survivors or heal neurological damage.
Preventable death and disability, especially using easy measures like mask wearing and lockdown, should always be preferred over monetary issues.
Modern American values are morally corrupt and disgusting.
Everything in the world fits along some scale of costs and benefits, and your emotional reaction shouldn't get to ignore that. Your loved ones lives literally do have to balance against the possible consequences to the lives of other people and their own loved ones due to one set of policies vs. another.
By your basic logic of who is anyone to put a value on people's lives due to varying risks of X negative thing happening, we could ban a whole pile of things that people need because somewhere, somehow, these things will indeed cause some people to die. I'm not comparing it to the current severity of COVID, but the flue alone kills tens to hundreds of thousands per year. Does this mean that the whole world should be annually locked down against relatively marginal risks?
The economic debate around the costs of quarantine isn't just about modern american values being "corrupt and disgusting", it's a global consideration that I promise you, billions of people are deeply worrying about in many other countries.. I live moving between two different countries that aren't the United States and which both make many cultural efforts to separate their values from those of Americans, and in both of them, the domestic economic question is causing the same enormous worry and resistance to prolonged quarantines that millions of Americans are also worried about..
I mean, what modern specifically american values? Being able to stay economically solvent? No dude, that's worldwide, and especially among vast parts of the population that don't live under a strong social safety net or with the privilege of enough money or work-from-home opportunities to comfortably sit out the pandemic while criticizing others as greedy.
Filing for bankruptcy will never, ever be equivalent to someone dying from willful negligence because you wanted to keep you business open.
Full stop. There's no argument you could make, it's never going to be equivalent and there's nothing you can say that will balance that out.
I say again, fuck your business. Any size of business. Small family business, large corporation, hot dog stand. If you can't it open, safely, without getting people killed, then you're toast.
Any argument you make is just muddying the waters. This is very clear and unambiguous.
This logic does not work. You must make a choice to balance risks, because EVERYTHING has risks. Aggregate economic ruin kills people.
By your logic, you shouldn't be able to sell cars, food, practice medicine, go for a walk, run, play sports, do ANYTHING AT ALL because all of these things could injure or kill you or others.
It even works against itself, like so, to rephrase your own words: "If you can't shut down the economy and force all normal social activity to cease without getting people killed, then you're toast"
Since you obviously can't claim that your extreme insistence doesn't cause such a level of harm (and it would, directly or indirectly), somebody else could argue just as forcefully against your own idea because it will destroy their lives or lead to the death of some loved one. This is why I mentioned the very important question of balancing harms and outcomes. How can that be so hard to understand on a rational level?
As the other reply said, virtually any activity can be deadly in some context and it's impossible to promise it can't possibly be. This was the case before COVID and it's the case now too. I assume you participated in normal social and economic activity before the pandemic, thus you could also call yourself a hypocrite in cherry picking your starting point for moral outrage.
Ahh the old "essential business" justification.
Every business is essential to the owners, employees and even customers that depend on those businesses. I do not believe it is the proper role of government to tell people what is and is not "essential" to them.
This is with out getting it into the corrupt policies many local government employed where by some businesses where allowed to operate due to political reasons, but other similar businesses were forced to close again for political reasons.
Then there was completely illogical enforcement where small retail businesses where forced to close even when they were doing Online Only sales and the only person in the store was the owner.[2]
Mike Rowe is correct: all workers are essential.[1]
[1] https://fee.org/articles/mike-rowe-is-right-there-s-no-such-...
[2] http://newjersey.news12.com/story/42155935/police-interrupt-...
Reality Check: It's not different. People should stop from thinking they have a higher moral ground. Nobody does. On the other hand, on a free society, you should not be able to strip people from their freedom, regardless. People should be able to decide if they want to die from Coronavirus or live a semi-paralyzed life in fear. If you are that concerned, then you can confine yourself at home until everything is over.
Also humanity and evolution has a coping mechanism called natural selection. Helping people through medicine is a good idea but I think we are stretching it too much. In a few hundreds year, everyone will be walking on earth on a space suit.
So the phrase "Survival of the Fittest" refers in the abstract to the idea that, given fitness function F, members of a species who pass fitness function F will out-survive members who fail function F and then reproduce in higher numbers. But natural selection itself does not define any fitness functions, and makes no mention of a "universal fitness quality" that can be used to judge the fitness of an individual.
The fitness functions that nature comes up with are pretty arbitrary, and don't necessarily align with cultural ideas about merit, fitness or attractiveness. A disease that weakens bones could kill more tall people than short people, a disorder that exploits muscle tissue might affect people who work out more, and a respiratory disease that spreads through the air could take down more sociable people while allowing introverts who stay inside to survive.
The point of modern medicine is that we recognize these many of these fitness functions have no meaning beyond the immediate danger they present. And we can use technology to say "that fitness function is dumb" and remove it from the equation. In doing so, we aren't "unlearning a lesson nature wanted us to learn", we're protecting ourselves from the meaningless and arbitrary rocks that nature occasionally throws at us, and as a result we are increasing human lifespan and quality of life. (And yes, you can quibble about stretching out the suffering of people with terminal cancer, but the millions of children who don't pointlessly die of infant diarrhea each year would probably push back a bit)
nature's fitness is not arbitrary. it's about survival. culturally accepted fitness is arbitrary or linked to a particular evolution era. nature is constantly evolving, so what's fit in this era is not fit in the next.
> the millions of children who don't pointlessly die of infant diarrhea each year would probably push back a bit
I didn't say I don't like medicine. I do and do visit doctors. My main point was about freedom restrictions and how people should have free will to decide.
The amount of nuance that you refuse to integrate with your worldview is staggering. I'm shocked to see people write comments like this on Hacker News of all places.
I know this point has been beaten to death already (which contributes to my surprise that you'd even make a claim like this), but have you entirely forgotten about people who rely on younger, more able bodied people AND probably wouldn't survive a full blown coronavirus infection? How do these people "decide if they want to die from Coronavirus"?
HN asks you to assume a favorable interpretation of the comments. For me it is very clear that the parent meant the whole spectrum, including all nuances by stating the two extremes.
The total probability of hospitalization per contact is
prevalence * transmission rate * hospitalization rate
so it is probably something like 1% * .7% * 3% per contact. So your probability of getting hospitalized is quite low per contact.
I personally have a bike trainer and a power cage at home. The one thing I absolutely miss is brazilian jiu jitsu. I see posts from the various gyms that are basically operating in full.
Where do you get these numbers from?
Get outta here, you phony.
calling a protest a riot doesn't put it indoors. gyms, shopping, etc are much more dangerous than being outside at a protest.
My fear is solely that I pass it to someone at higher risk, and to that end I’m working from home, masking up, and there isn’t a single person in my life over the age of 40. But I’m also not holding back on seeing friends my age, and yes even throwing parties. We’re all in the same boat, and if they’re also out and about then they’ve made the decision that they’re comfortable with that level of risk themselves. I don’t think it’s a crazy one, and so I’m not going to make it for them.
My chance of death is vastly less than that - probably on the order of 1-10% that.
I also estimate the risks of COVID to be 10-20x of flu (and I had a relative who died from flu complications - maths is still maths), so I take 20x the precautions compared to what I do for flu in a year when I forget to get the shot... 20x of almost nothing is just a little more than nothing.
But that has been discussed above, with much better words and numbers.
I only have one unique contribution. A little bonus that made me happy to go outside to closed outdoor areas during stay-home orders, visit (willing) friends at the height of the lockdown, and hit the gyms and restaurants as soon as they opened with work-to-rule mask wearing and distancing, is that it makes unjustifiably sanctimonious people angry.
I go to a gym with a lot of bodybuilders, and I often forget how much of the world sees them as mindless thugs. And yet among us are at least two real-estate executives, a famous death-metal singer, a handful of computer nerds, a very famous (regionally) pop singer, a former Ambassador, at least one former Olympian, and a bunch of Hollywood stars when they happened to be in town. Plus, you know, ordinary men, women, boys, and girls who like to be fit, or are trying to get fit. Some are large, some are not. The oldest is 75.
Evelyn should swing by the Bay Club and do a bro count, see how that goes. Might offend a judge or two, especially if they're swole.
wear a mask please.
If so, that really bothers me. Any excess contagion would endanger everyone, not just the gym users. Please consider reporting the details to the appropriate authorities.
EDIT: If someone is inclined to downvote this comment, I'd be very grateful for a clarification why (comment or DM). I'm trying to address some problems in my communication style, and I can't always infer how I could have done better.
Qatar has 44000 cases per 1m pop and 69 deaths per 1m.
That is not much higher than flu.
What does Qatar do to a person who is confirmed infected? Does the same action occur to someone with the flu?
What is Qatar asking it's population to do differently today, compared to this time a year ago? Does that have any meaningful impact on transmission rates?
I illustrated it as a place in which there is so much mass testing that the mortality figures are more fact than fiction.
When the actions to prevent these people from dying, uh "just earlier than they would have," are as simple as wearing a mask and social distancing, it is unethical to not do so.
I'm not gaining muscle mass but I'm having absolutely no trouble whatsoever maintaining it at home with exercise bands and calisthenics. It's a tiny, tiny price to pay for helping keep my community safe.
I would sacrifice the gym for the rest of my life if it meant adding even a year of life to a single person. Sentient existence is immeasurably more valuable.
Why bother treating any sick person if this is your position? The healthcare system would be a hell of a lot cheaper and easier if we just "frontloaded some death" for everyone who gets seriously ill.
Total predicted number of excess deaths since 2/1/2020 across the United States:
All causes: 174,930 - 235,728
All causes except COVID-19 : 29,416 - 78,932
> the Wuhan virus
Propaganda pro-tip: If you want people to trust you, suppress the obvious tells.
It shows:
39,000,000 – 56,000,000 flu illnesses
18,000,000 – 26,000,000 flu medical visits
410,000 – 740,000 flu hospitalizations
24,000 – 62,000 flu deaths
Which is actually kind of on the higher side for the flu season. They attribute that most likely on the increased testing happening this year due to people getting tested for Covid.
Until you provide overwhelming evidence (because that's what you're up against), you're spreading misinformation.
Seems to me like you're speaking from a feelings position, rather than a facts one.
> It's pretty locked down. You have an app that unless it's says healthy you are not allowed into any public place.
The explicit comparison to the flu doesn't really seem to hold, since the conditions applied to the infected aren't equal. If those carrying the flu were subject to the same conditions as those carrying this covid-19, the comparison would hold up a lot better.
> I illustrated it as a place in which there is so much mass testing that the mortality figures are more fact than fiction.
Mortality numbers as a % of tested peoples are hugely variable due to the differences in testing between nations.
Mortality numbers as a % of the population (deaths per 100k/1m) make for good comparisons, and unless the nation is engaging in outright deception, those numbers are reasonable to use as a comparison.
According to https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality the USA has 52.52 deaths per 100k. In line with your previous, Qatar has 6.94 deaths per 100k.
10x more people have died in the USA vs in Qatar. What's going on?
Look - my country no one bothers to observe measures and our system is far from overloaded.
I think that a lot of influential l people threw too much social capital on stay at home and stuff like this and now they just can't handle the situation if covid is less dangerous than thought.
I think we are in the sink cost fallacy.
There are 10x more deaths as a percentage of the population in the USA than in Qatar. The number of tests / positive cases is not relevant to that number.
That makes Covid 5.6 times more deadly than the flu.
But, the Covid numbers here are from a complete lockdown, where people are social distancing, wearing masks, schools are closed, everyone is working from home if possible, etc. And even with those level of precautions, it is at best 5.6 times deadlier.
That's why the estimate from the CDC is that Covid is 10 times deadlier than the flu.
The other thing is, this only measures immediate death. But there are unknown long term risk. Other type of SARS virus are known to cause long term issues to people that recovered from it. Hopefully this doesn't turn out to be the case for Covid but it could, and we don't know yet.
The last problem is mutations are possible. There's already one known mutation that makes it even more contagious. And the more the virus spreads, the more likely it mutates as well. So containment is important for that as well.
Now, that's the risk of it from the data today. You can decide that it is a risk worth taking or not. That's kind of a personal thing. But it is absolutely much higher than the flu.
So our current understanding is that COVID-19 is both more deadly and more infectious.
This does take into account infection rates, it's absolutely relevant and it's the big reason for Covid being deadlier, because it is more contagious.
So from the data, we see that with social distancing, lock down, and all that, it still infects and kills 5.6 times more people than the flu does every year given the measures taken for the flu, which is to have some amount of the population vaccinated. Thus assumed that without any protections, it would be even worse, possibly killing around 620k people per year. That would put it above cancer and up there with hearth disease as the number one cause of death per year.
And that's precisely why we're hoping for a vaccine. So that we can hopefully get the infections down and stop it's crazy contagion rate to manageable numbers that result on much less deaths per year, and doesn't force us to continue with the more challenging measures for limiting the spread of the virus.
Perhaps they are an essential worker, and don't have the option to stay at home?
Perhaps they have medical issues that leave them immunocompromised and may require hospitalization, putting them at a high risk of death from exposure to COVID patients?
Perhaps they are unemployed or at risk of unemployment due to pandemic restrictions, and the irresponsible behavior of people who are too cool to do body weight exercises at home could directly harm them by lengthening the time these restrictions are necessary?
"It's none of your business if other people break the law in a way that harms others."
I'm not entirely sure which part of my comment you're arguing against:
> How is a gymgoer endangering you, if you are staying 6ft from all others, wearing a mask, washing your hands and not touching your face?
Are you saying that as long as the measures you listed are followed, any additional shutdowns required by the local/state government are unreasonable and are okay to ignore?
If instead you're saying that the measures you listed satisfy the local/state requirements for gyms, then I'm confused because I wouldn't expect the gym to be shutdown in the first place.
Yes. How does a government shutdown help me, if I'm already isolated?
If you go to the grocery store or receive deliveries, you're not isolated, and government policy that reduces viral spread benefits you.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/faq.html#Spread
What, without evidence of it ever spreading from one person to another in a grocery store, you believe it isn't possible? Is extrapolating the knowledge of how it spreads to the possibility of encountering that situation in a grocery store not viable here? Shall we wait for evidence of spread in every single possible permutation of leaving the house before we consider such an activity potentially dangerous?
I was challenging isolation. I go grocery shopping - I think it can be done safely. But, I wouldn't do it if I lived in some red state full of pandemic deniers with huge spread rates - it's too dangerous. In my area, everyone wears masks, everyone makes sure to social distance, so it's not as much of a risk. But I acknowledge that I'm not isolated, and that was the claim that was made.
We have extensive contract tracing now in every state in the US, and around the world. I would think it wouldn't be that hard to show. Were you able to find any cases?
You failed to answer my previous question: is it impossible to extrapolate knowledge of how the virus spreads, to judge risk of various scenarios?
Do you require evidence from every permutation of possible activity?
I'm not expecting society to follow that line of reasoning any time soon, though.
To me it is a matter of goals, when posting.
I seek to learn something and/or share something, and think this is best achieved by replying to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.
I find that satisfaction of baiting a stupid post then refuting is short lived.
This post is a good case in point. I don't thinking drawing the analogy helped to educate anyone who read it or establish the appropriate moral obligations of an individual living in a society.
Imo, it is effectively trolling, especially when presented in a one sentence post. Do you think it spawned productive discussion when reading the child discussions?
Once we start comparing and contrasting the two, it becomes a more interesting discussion. I don't think they are strictly equivalent, but am open to a difference of degree and exploring where the line is drawn and why.
Living in a world with other people involves risk, even without covid. Driving anywhere sober, for pleasure or work, puts yourself and others at some level of risk. This is legal and socially accepted, so we know there is some threshold.
Another interesting area of comparison is consent/ acceptance of risk. When I get on the road (or walk down the street) I accept the fact that another vehicle could careen out of control and kill me. In the case of the speakeasy gym, the members presumably are accepting the risk.
This brings up the last area of comparison, second order effects. Even if the two Speakeasy gym members consent to take a risk, what about 3rd parties that could be harmed. what are the chances a 3rd party is harmed, and how do we typically handle comparable 3rd party risks? Airborne particulate is estimated to cause 200k premature US deaths per year. How does the particulate from a road trip, flight, or web browsing compare?
If we were so inclined we could try to throw some numbers to these.
The result is that gyms are an excellent space for spreading COVID-19. And measures that reduce the spread for things like walking around a store are not sufficient to reduce it to a safe level in a gym.
Here is some evidence in the NY Times that counters your argument: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/25/health/coronavirus-gyms-f...
Researchers have been tracking many superspreading events around the globe, and there seem to be recurring locations no matter what the country. In addition to those we have heard most about, like prisons, food processing plants, and elder care facilities, there have also been numerous large superspreading events at bars, churches, offices, gyms, and shopping centers.
(Note gyms are on the list.)
I’m on the fence with something like this. Covid-19 isn’t turning out to be nearly as scary as it looked like it might be in December (at least based on rumors coming out of wuhan). I still feel like there’s information at a high level (security clearance type stuff) that we don’t get to see, and so have to assume the stay stay at home orders are still founded.
That said, people in the US can only maintain this type of social distancing so long. A lot of people are reaching a breaking point. And if some speakeasy gyms help prevent a massive ‘fuck it’ style rave, then it might be a lesser of 2 evils kind of thing.
Furthermore, virus or no virus, the right to peacefully assemble is a human right that cannot legally or morally be abridged.
I don’t want the police to shut down protests. I also don’t want them to shut down gyms, or voting, or churches, or any other peaceful reason (dumb) people wish to assemble.
Assembly in the middle of a pandemic is stupid and irresponsible. I don’t do it.
I also don’t want men with guns stopping those that do. You can’t fix (or stop) stupid with a Glock and a uniform, which is what TFA is illustrating.
No it doesn't.
It could mean code enforcement, or the health department.
It’s not men carrying clipboards. They’re carrying pistols, and they have machine guns in the trunk of the vehicle they drove there.
DO NOT call the state to solve your problems.
If you wouldn’t solve the problem by taking a gun over there, don’t call someone else to do that.
This seems like simply a dodge or dismissal of the legitimate criticism that breaking most of society’s rules should not cause an armed opponent to suddenly appear. It’s unreasonable and uncivilized and frequently results in the small-rule-breaker being physically abused or even murdered, especially if they aren’t white.
Your casual dismissal of these consequences suggests that you are never targeted by these people. For that I am glad. I hope everyone can be as callous about the consequences for minor rule breaking one day.
You are attempting to equate assembly for the purpose of fighting racism or exercising vitally important activities like voting, with "assembly" for the purpose of "sick gainz bruh". This is such a false equivalency that it's laughable, and honestly also a little insulting.
Free speech means freedom to shitpost, not just write literature.
Correspondingly, freedom of assembly is for stupid and pointless things like church, moderately important things like gym, and not just critically important things like insurrection.
The proliferation of “illegal” gyms suggests that many people feel similarly.
Yes it absolutely is. I have no idea why you think otherwise. The right to "free expression" is conditional as well. We prohibit certain "peaceful assembly" and "free expression" every single day and have done so for centuries. The classical example: you do not have the "right to free expression" to go into a crowded place and falsely yell "fire", because that would be a public danger. Similarly, going to a gym during a pandemic causes a public danger. "Right to peaceful assembly" doesn't apply.
"Peaceful assembly to work out" is in no way similar to "peaceful assembly for protesting". It's ridiculous of you to claim otherwise. It's so ridiculous that I can only believe you're trolling or trying to make an argument in bad faith.
Surely if you feel it necessary to omit someones last name you should err on the side of caution and omit their first name too? A fist name narrows a search down significantly.
Also as someone with experience being anonymously quoted by journalist before, it seems to be standard practice for the journalist to defer any decisions on how they would like to be referred to the source. Odds are Evelyn is the one who decided to just go by Evelyn. She probably doesn't care too much about absolute anonymity, but she also wants plausible deniability.
Deal with the 40% obesity rate in the US.
Death rates are extremely low if you're not geriatric or not fat. All the top killers are attributable to being fat and living unhealthy lifestyles. COVID is the scapegoat here.
This comment would be fine without the provocations at the end.
1. Go to the gym during a pandemic
2.a. Your lungs are permanently damaged, with lower lung capacity for life. Your life expectancy is shortened.
2.b. You are dead.
2.c. You did not develop symptoms.
3. You passed on the disease to many people, including your friends and family.
4. Everything you wanted to achieve by going to the gym turned out wrong and everyone now thinks you are/were a selfish jerk.
Some great reading:
https://yoga-horizons.com/pdfs/Fatmans-Guide-to-Cable-Traini...
Sure, I could buy several hundred thousand dollars' worth of free weights, machines and kettle bells, and a treadmill, and install a big tv over it and get satellite cable, and somehow fit all of that and a sauna and a swimming pool into my tiny apartment, and have to worry about moving it all every time I move, and about maintenance and everything else, or I could just walk into any Gold's Gym on the planet and have nothing but the workout be my problem.
If you regularly lift truly heavy weight, you need a squat rack and a rubber floor capable of sustaining equipment drops.
Going from a dedicated machine to another dedicated machine is faster than reconfiguring a universal machine like a Bowflex. Pace matters in a workout. Rests are regulated.
I own variable weight equipment. Someone sold me a set of Turbobells, which scale from 5 to 60 pounds per hand. It is a great system similar to Bowflex Selectech. My workouts require using 3 progressively heavier weights. It is a common body building technique.
So, for my arms I need 10, 12.5, and 15 pounds. Some exercises are 15, 17.5, and 20 pounds. My legs are stronger, so I use 35, 40, and 45 pounds. If I didn't have an adjustable set, this would be a lot of free weights and good luck finding fractional sizes in a store.
Gyms usually have good air flow, at least at the gyms where I am a member. Many have amenities like swimming pool, whirlpool, massage chairs and so on.
Dropping weights at a gym is annoyance. Doing so in an apartment above neighbors is evictable.
People whose goal is to lose weight do not need a gym.
Completing my workout with a set of dedicated weights at 2am when I have the gym to myself is at least 20 minutes faster than with my adjustable weights. So, using a gym also saves time.
Costs to replicate a gym: 1. 8x4 1" gym mat - about $150, weighs over 100lb - just looked into this last week. 6x3' horse stall mats are decent also. 2. Free weights - a few hundred all-in 3. 8' Mirror - not cheap and yes they are necessary 4. Adjustable bench - over $100 5. Gym-like variable height adjustable treadmills are not cheap
All of this takes space to store. If you do not have excess space, that adds to setup and teardown time.
Speak for yourself. I live in a hot and humid place and exercising outside is incredibly unpleasant. It's 10 times worse if you're standing in direct sunlight.
>Calistenics aka exercises with the weight of your body are quite efficient and don’t make one look like an ogre
What if I want to look like an ogre?
Sure, adding a bit of shape to your body is not a bad thing but exaggerating it doesn't lead to good outcomes
i struggle to see this as not shaming. also there's plenty of other middle ground between bodyweight exercise and "ogre".
i don't disagree w safety of outdoors and avoiding illegal infection incubators. i just think your suggestions around Calisthenics and comments on ogres are ignorant. not everyone has your preferences for body shape, access to climate and physical abilities.
>I have 2 friends who bulk up and are actually in a very bad shape mobility wise, their arms are so big that they can't reach arms behind their backs
Bodybuilding is only one type of strength training. Furthermore, the primary goal of bodybuilding is aesthetics, not necessarily strength. That's not to say that they're not strong, but there's a reason why body building competitions will involve flexing in front of the judges while olympic lifting competitions won't.
You don't need to be in a commercial gym to maintain solid functional fitness.
You might need to be in a commercial gym to maintain unnatural levels of muscle mass and body weight for bodybuilding & powerlifting. Even that stuff can still be done in a home gym setting though given an equipment budget.
This is not a health argument, it's not even proven bodybuilding is healthy.. excess mass from body building & powerlifting tends to have negative effects later in life due to the metabolic strain of the extra weight.
Just deal with the idea you can stay super fit but you might not weigh as much.
Gymnasts, rock climbers, etc.. are all ultra elite strength athletes that get by largely with bodyweight exercise & minimal equipment. They just don't have abnormally high body mass.
Outside of these arguments of "I'm too big and strong to get enough home equipment to keep my gains Bro!" it mostly seems to come down to narcissism.. desire to be seen in the gym and to socialize in the gym. If that's such an important part of being in the gym it's no different than not being able to handle avoiding bars.
You can still have a training partner for spotting... just make sure it's the same training partner and you both keep good behavior outside of workouts and it'll be pretty safe.
I get that some of this can be related to body dysmorphia, but that's probably a tiny corner case. Is it the thrill of doing something "illegal"/dangerous? Is it more denial about the impact of COVID? Hustlers trying to capitalize on a crisis?
Edit: based on some of the replies, it looks like it boils down to a sense of entitlement: people wanting to stick to their routines without a care of putting others at risk.
Gym, as in the physical location, is also very much part of the "fitness habit". It doesn't feel the same doing it outside by yourself.
Nothing to do with body dysmorphia or doing something "illegal" but based on the fact that covid is not as severe that warrant stopping recreational activity.
Is simply risk vs benefit.
A thing that is very important about rituals is that there are almost always triggers of when the ritual should be performed. Often that trigger involves being in a specific place.
For exercise, that trigger is going to the gym.
For work, that trigger is going to the office
For religion, that trigger is going to the church / temple / etc.
When you deprive people of the ability to be in the correct place, then their trigger is blocked and their rituals don't happen.
Yes, you could retool your rituals (work from home is the biggest example of this), but for many things, the motivation or desire just isn't there.
The spaces are too important to the ritual itself.
So I can totally see why people would want to go to the gym even if they weren't supposed to.
Ive had a certain degree of success mimicking this by adding smells via essential oil defusers are key points like “starting work” or “preparing for bed”, but I can’t say I’ve found a silver bullet. Still, I think there’s something here.
I finally started biking recently, but I struggle to get motivated and get out of the apartment to do it. That was never a problem when going to the gym.
I imagine that the problem is much worse for bodybuilders and powerlifters.
When you’re feeling depressed or lazy, just showing up at the gym can kick start an upward spiral.
Barbells and dumbbells are appropriately ergonomic (handles, balance, etc.) and won't ruin your back if you use proper technique. Lifting a heavy stone is a recipe for injuring yourself severely.
People need specific indoor gym equipment if they lift, which is a very valid form of exercise. Or, you know, if it's raining or thunderstorming or a humid 100°F outside.
And bodyweight exercises only get you so far, even if you're doing one-handed or one-legged versions.
You can't just dismiss the fitness routines people have spent years choosing and refining and getting better at. The fact that you seriously suggest lifting a heavy stone demonstrates you don't seem to know much about safe fitness at all.
More arrogant than putting other lives at risk because you can't put your routine on hold, or alter it for a bit? No. It isn't.
"Lift a heavy stone"? That's a joke, right?
No, and it's part of strongman competitions. It's not dangerous if you have the right form and don't overdo it. Same as dumbbells & barbells.
He answered your question directly and then you change the goalposts. Clearly you hold the opinion that gyms should remain closed, and that's fine, but why even ask the question?
This is the part I'm confused about. If gyms were open, people who's lives were at risk still wouldn't go to the gym. Only people who didn't care would go. They are consenting to the risk that would inherently come with it. It isn't the type of place that at risk people HAVE to go, so why shouldn't we open it for people that are fine with the consequences? Also, restaurants are all completely open for dine-in in many of the places that gyms have yet to open. How does that make any sense? No one magically stops breathing for the hour+ they're in the restaurant.
I think quarantine should be down to the individual and the rules they'd like to implement on their private property (including their business), but you've probably already gotten that by now.
Too bad most people leave their private property and interact with people in public spaces where their personal rules are moot.
You can usually find a threadbare heavy equipment tire more easily though since most people with stones just let them sit whereas tires need to be disposed of.
On that note, construction workers do severely damaging work every day (not being sarcastic, they mess up their bodies for people who will haggle to the last cent). Show them more respect.
I've been lifting for 15 years, mostly in the gym. The last couple of years though, I've realized how much you can do with bands. You can't beat them on cost and convenience in the realm of home gym equipment. The only thing you can't reasonably do with them are squats. Deadlifts can be substituted with pull-throughs which are a better posterior chain movement anyway. Yea, you might have to do more reps. That's infinitely better than nothing.
Unless you're a competitive strength athlete, or trying to be one, not having access to a gym is frankly an excuse. In my younger days I used to have a very rigid mentality when it came to strength training which eventually led to burnout and extended vacations from the gym. Having mental flexibility instead of striving for some notion of perfection is what's kept me in this game long-term.
EDIT: typo
I am not, It must be very hard, to take away something you love and trained.
Society is asking you to sacrifice a big thing for something that may not benefit society at all. The chances of you catching and then spreading are ~ 1/1000. Assuming a 1% mortality. We are asking 100,000 people to give up something they love to save one loved one.
My own value system is that my enjoyment is not worth 1/100,000 of a person life. I would say in the order of 1/1,000,000. Based upon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALARP is where I get my figure.
I am interested which figure you think is reasonable - 10^5 or 10^6 or between or higher or dismiss the risk entirely ?
^ They definitely aren't asking
Some light reading on the subject:
https://yoga-horizons.com/pdfs/Fatmans-Guide-to-Cable-Traini...
I could probably target my leg muscles more effectively at a nice gym with barbells, but after 5 months, I'm still working through bodyweight based progressions for deadlifts and squats, so I don't feel like I've plateaued yet. I've made big progress too. When I started I could barely do a single pull-up and now I'm up to 3 sets of 6 per workout. Similar story for pushups, I can crank out 20-30 of those now no problem, where I struggled to hit 5 before.
The ease with which you can get fit at home has been one of the pleasant surprises of this pandemic.
But some people have been going to the gym for decades and take it very seriously as a hobby. Losing access to the gym will set them back years.
It can be very hard to keep the same high quality of workouts without going to a specific facility and training with the guidance and motivation from peers. Not to be rude, your suggestions sound like ideas from someone who doesn't really work out much. Pull up on a tree branch? Lift a heavy stone?
Everyone's risk profile is different. I work in statistics and data, so I certainly have a different understand that gives me a more realistic perspective on the dangers.
“Can’t go to the high tech gym? Just strap a fallen tree to your torso and drag it up a mountain!”
A 6x6 area can be hard to find. In my apartment, getting that requires moving two bulky pieces of furniture.
s/need/want/
This article could just as easily have been written about speakeasy bars that have opened during lockdown.
Working out has solved a ton of problems for me. Anxiety, Depression, Mood Swings, Rage. You get into a routine, and you don't want anyone or anything to mess with it. It's what makes you feel good. For me its the difference between a productive day and an unproductive one.
Changing things up, especially with improvisation, can result in injury. Or just not getting a desired result. For example, I squat 400lbs or more. Would I try to squat a 400lbs stone, not only no, but hell no.
For some that go to real gyms, it's not just the workout. It's the comradery that comes with doing hard things with friends. It's socialization.
I think it has very little to do with being a rebel or a denier, and a lot more to do with it being a way of life, for a lot of us.
Further, "Heavy stone" workouts do not easily lend themselves to progressive overload, or varied programming.
You asked why people would want specific equipment. You didn't ask whether the tradeoffs involved are worth it. The replies here mostly answer the question you asked, not the one you're pivoting to.
But after so many months off, I'm reaching the point where the lost gains might not be recoverable. I have to decide sometime soon whether to get back into the gym or give it up permanently.
It's not a total loss since I've been doing handyman work for my boss and 50 incline pushups 2-3 times per week. I'm in generally good health and my face is thinner. Still stinks though.
I bought a used weight bench and plan to use it soon. And I'm still paying my gym membership, only $20/mo for life at a converted Gold's Gym. But we get such a boost in the first 6 weeks of n00b gains after a break that I feel it's better to go all-in rather than dabble.
Oh and to answer your question: pumping iron is a hack. My girlfriend does kickboxing, and it's a tremendously physical exercise revolving around burpies and other crossfit-style functional training. It's really good. But, I feel that weightlifting provides a much higher bang for the buck because it takes advantage of 2 to 5 day overcompensation cycles in the body so that gains continue indefinitely. So my intensity under the bar over an hour and a half period never even reaches the intensity of her warmup. Yet I put on perhaps 2 to 4 times as much muscle as I would cross training, for 1/2 to 1/4 the effort, which works out to about a 4 to 16 times better return on investment (an order of magnitude better result).
I pump iron because I'm lazy, is what I'm saying.
https://yoga-horizons.com/pdfs/Fatmans-Guide-to-Cable-Traini...
Zero tolerance?
One potential infection of a 300million+ population?
One potential death of a 300million+ population?
Since you don't work out, I assume you like food. Imagine if you had to spend months eating nothing but Soylent because of $reasons, then when you complain you get chirping like "I don't get it, it's the same nutritional value, you don't need any real food".
It has since healed, and I am better now. However, there was a point in time where I had to continue going to the gym and keep using those weight machines. It took a few years before I was back to normal and could start working with more generalized equipment. So there's more than just a sports-focused need (like MMA fighting or football) for gym equipment, and that equipment cannot easily be substituted, nor can it be done safely with a bike or a heavy stone.