Boulder prohibits gatherings of any size for 18-22 year olds
247sports.com
247sports.com
My friends, colleagues, and community are being directly endangered by CU's obfuscation of case data, refusal to provide comprehensive testing, and foot-dragging on promised safety measures. It's ridiculous that the city/county are being forced to mitigate the downstream effects of this doomed-from-the-beginning plan, but the "run it like a business" university administration is a lost cause.
[1] https://www.bouldercounty.org/families/disease/covid-19/covi...
People seem to forget that the expected total death count from day 1 was, and still is, expected to be the same no matter what actions taken....And the entire point of lockdowns was to not overwhelm the hospitals all at once.
It's so frustrating watching Democrat leaders (Jill Hunsaker Ryan in this case) put plans into place that aren't backed by ACTUAL evidence, blame others when their plans end up not working, refuse to pivot upon receiving new information, refuse to acknowledge when previous data is found to be inaccurate....all while trampling on the constitutional rights of American citizens.
This is so wrong. One has to really wonder what motivates you. Mask wearing alone, a simple action, dramatically lowers predicted infection rates
A Danish clinical trial enrolling 3000 people will probably give some more concrete answers.
OTOH, hand washing and distance are definitely useful to reduce spread.
P.S. Feel free to state your disagreement explicitly instead of downvoting.
[1] https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/08/28/margaret-mccartney-we-n...
Of course,I agree that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But, as the BMJ post I quoted earlier says, instead of just saying "wear a mask", the best idea would also promote trials to verify their effectiveness (like the Danish trial). It's done all the time for drugs, why not masks?
[1] https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/masking-lack-of-evidence-with-...
[2] https://pubpeer.com/publications/6AF113CE946CABB0FBB811697E5...
"missing the compounding effect" - What about the compounding effect of numerous people putting a plague vector directly on their respiratory system?
"Mistaking Absence of Evidence for Evidence of Absence" - The argument isn't that because there's no evidence it's guaranteed to not work. The argument is that without solid evidence constitutional rights should not be infringed.
And on and on.
It will do something, in a very complicated way, but compared to things that really matter that we haven't been able to push like mask wearing(you disagree) and social distancing and being outside, hand washing has been a huge distraction, which is the same as saying it's helped increase the spread.
Could you provide some sort of source for this? This seems completely illogical as our goal has never been heard immunity.
Doing the first saved a lot of people because treatment was available. Secondary saves were non covid patients who could get service because capacity remained more available.
Had we had better safety compliance, we would have reduced even more than we did and may have normalized things such that the wave upon us now would be much less.
Death rates are dead/recovered and that is driven by infections.
Lower infections means fewer entering the death equation. More health care available means more recovered and all of that means far fewer dead people.
A few places did, but that's because they over-reacted and quarantined lots of their medical staff. That's the reaction not the virus.
Deterring people to go to the hospitals, that are destined to save lifes, so they die at home instead, is not brilliant advice. They can (and will) sell it as a success, but Swedden still had much more people killed than their twin country Norway. The fact that those hospital rooms where not occupied despite having some elders in need of specialized care, is a failure, not a success.
> was never any risk of hospital overload
I think that many physicians in the planet would tell a very different history.
Sweden had deaths on par with the average of all of European countries less than Italy, Spain, the UK, etc.
If we can't compare Swedden With Norway, maybe you would prefer Denmark?
645 danish killed versus 5875 Sweddish. Even if we correct the difference in population, is still much lower (around 1290 versus 5875). They are not much different populations genetically. Do you have any hypothesis that would explain the difference?
Also, you're cherry picking again to suit your narrative. Sweden is part of Europe and should be compared as such.
It's disingenuous to keep promoting this demon-ization of Sweden narrative with unsubstantiated, and cherry picked comments.
Sweden did the right thing. Other countries did not. It's that simple.
Mean age of youngsters leaving parental home to live in their own home. Data from 2019:
- Italy: 30.1 Years old.
- European Union: 26.2 Years old
- Swedden: 17.8 Years old.
So... Yes, definitely I would say that they are very different societies. This, most probably, saved Swedden several deaths.
> Sweden is part of Europe and should be compared as such.
For your information, Czechia is an European country, same as Denmark
Correlate all of the countries covid death per capita with age youngsters leave the home.
See if that's a valid observation and holds true across countries... or just a single data point that you pulled out of thin air.
Have there been any actual studies to support this hypothesis or are you making this up to support your narrative?
It seems to be just an endless rabbit hole of unsubstantiated correlations and cherry picking.
(Homework for the weekend?... LOL, who do you think I am? your secretary?)
but Swedden still had much more people killed than their twin country Norway.
So what? Zero deaths was not ever a goal of lockdowns, and cannot have been because there's no logical way to get from that policy to that outcome. You've done what lockdown advocates always do when Sweden comes up: not just shift the goalposts but move them entirely out of the field.
At any rate, Norway may simply have not had the disease spread through the population yet, or they may have just got lucky - seasonal flu always hits some countries and not others for unexplained reasons. It doesn't ultimately matter. Sweden disproved epidemiological models, and thus the actions taken on their basis were not justified.
As for physicians, luckily the opinion of a doctor here or there is not sufficient to change actual data or observed reality. Fortunately most doctors are sensible: there are plenty who have been outspoken against lockdown precisely because it emptied the hospitals and clinics leaving them with a huge backlog of patients who they could have saved but now cannot.
Social distancing[edit] On 16 March 2020, the agency recommended that people over 70 should limit close contact with other people, and avoid crowded areas such as stores, public transport and public spaces.[112] At the end of March, 93% of those older than 70 said that they were following the recommendations from the health service to some extent, with the majority having decreased their contacts with friends and family.[113] In May, the agency looked at easening the recommendations for the 'young elderly' of good health, but ultimately decided against it.
The US might be keeping school systems closed, but movie theaters for example are open across most of the country. Mask compliance for example tracks closely with where areas that are currently experiencing outbreaks in the US. That likely says more about overall compliance than the effectiveness of masks.
PS: It’s random mixing between groups that really spreads diseases. Individual classrooms where people see the same people every day may have outbreaks, but that’s all local transmission.
Swedden has not such stellar results as they are trying to sell.
A bit later they point out that flattening the curve increases the chance of getting to a vaccine or viable treatment; which is another way to reduce the total number of infections.
Which more rigorous models have the area under the curve as roughly the same, as you describe it?
I believe any model which has herd immunity, where personal immunity comes after a period of infection, must have the possibility of overshooting the minimum heard immunity density when the infection rate is high enough. As in the SIR model.
Lower the infection rate and there's lower overshoot.
I believe it's the burden of the proof is on you to present a new, more rigorous model if you want to argue that slowing down transmission significantly lowers overall mortality - as the null hypothesis is that they are not associated.
On the last point, I am aware that under the SIR model, there's the possibility of overshoot, i.e. exceeding the minimum herd immunity threshold. My understanding is that this isn't a significant effect unless you have uncontrolled, explosive expansion, so that most people get infected simultaneously before others develop immunity and can therefore act as a barrier for herd immunity. I don't believe this is the situation right now given the numbers we are seeing.
That said, I believe that the more realistic future is that a vaccine or an effective treatment will be developed in the next months, and that will be the thing that will have made temporarily lowering transmissibility worth it. What I don't believe, because I haven't found any evidence for it that holds basic scrutiny, is that if no vaccine or effective treatment can be developed in a reasonable timeframe, then keeping the measures to slow down transmission as long as possible will have any significant effect on lower overall mortality.
EDIT: To make it clear so people do not misunderstand me, what I believe has no evidence is that without a timely vaccine or effective treatment, slowing down transmission beyond what is necessary to keep the health system from overloading is associated with lower overall mortality.
I say it's wrong because months ago I heard arguments that models predicted that lowering the curve could also reduce total mortality. And I linked to that video to give evidence that this was part of the general discussion months ago.
The fact that you disagree with that model, or argue that I need to give a stronger evidence for the current information we have, has no bearing on my point.
Eg, when you write "I don't believe this is the situation right now" - that statement is based on knowledge you have now, not knowledge that people had on "day 1".
Nowadays it seems both EU & US hasn't pursued heavy suppression (probably too costly, and legally and culturally difficult), but rather just hoping to keep it somewhat under control until a vaccine comes, hopefully.
They don’t want people thinking that if action was taken by the U.S. gov sooner (Feb instead of Apr) we would have dramatically fewer deaths and cases, which is probably a more scientifically accurate view but with all the data being so new this debate is ripe for political distortion.
I don't know if that is a mistake or intentionally misleading - I would hope the former.
Note: I'm from the UK.
Why do you single out "conservatives" when Democratic politicians were telling people during the Chinese Lunar New Year there was nothing to worry about?
This wasn't a partisan blunder.
Stares like Florida and Texas, which has higher infections than NorthEastern states, had far lower death rates because of what we had learnt about the virus in the intervening months (just a few things we learnt, that ventilators were not very handy, there are several drugs that are more effective than ventilators, even if we are facing a shortage of medical grade PPE cloth masks themselves can be extremely useful, outdoors are much safer than indoors, etc).
The idea that we were always expecting the same number of deaths is nonsensical, but even if someone did believe that in the beginning of the pandemic, it’s been proven incorrect by now.
Even simple models like the one described at https://youtu.be/k6nLfCbAzgo?t=920 (I point to the relevant part) shows that reducing the infection rate can also lead to fewer overall deaths.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2020/09/23/commentary/w... https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/shopping-i-can-t-real...
Only if you assume we'll never have vaccine or efficient specific treatment, which is most likely false assumption.
In all other cases expected total death toll can vary by order of magnitude or more depending on how many people get infected before vaccine and/or treatments are widely available.
[For some unknown reason, HN doesn't let me post any more today, so replying as an edit]
Excellent point about having exit criteria. Just to pick a state at random, Pennsylvania [1] explains their criteria pretty well. They're looking for less than 50 new confirmed cases per 100,000 population reported in the previous 14 days. Which seems way too many to me, but what do I know, I'm not an epidemiologist. These criteria need to be open to change if they're wrong, though. If they notice cases increasing after re-opening, they need to 1. close back down, and 2. adjust their criteria downward so not to make the same mistake again.
1: https://www.governor.pa.gov/process-to-reopen-pennsylvania/
There is clearly legal precedent to age discrimination/restrictions in the United States, from age related employment discrimination protections not applying to those under the age of 40, to the legal age of alcohol and recreational marijuana consumption (the latter of which is not somehow "exempted" by the 21st amendments restriction of the federal government).
So the issue here is really that the university of Colorado has a number of students who are flagrantly ignoring masking rules. They also have a administration that opened the campus. Boulder is a very left leaning city, has a department of health that has decided to be extremely expansive with their mandate in boulder county. Churches and public schools are still closed. But there is a tricky issue in that the state constitution keeps bolder from regulating CU. The majority of cases in Colorado are now from CU. That’s why they’ve structured at the way they have, because they cannot regulate CU directly.
So the question becomes is this a violation of the bill of rights? You’d have to be able to argue that the governments actions are designed to be punitive, rather than protective. As much as Boulder has consistently overstepped itself, I think this still meets that criteria.
As a sidenote, for all of the politicking about red state versus blue state, it is definitely millennials and zoomer‘s that I see without masks. Doesn’t bode well for the future.
Also Boulder and CU have had this war going on for quite a while independent of covid. It got to the point where the University even decided to purchase a quarry to get around Boulder restrictions.
Compare the US's curve to China's. If the US hadn't tried to half-ass it's measures (at the personal to the national level), we wouldn't still be arguing about them because the virus would be under control and they wouldn't be necessary anymore.
Are you advocating welding people in buildings?
So clearly there are ways to check the spread and cut out 99% of deaths. (They are also not wizardry or witchcraft. Mandatory masks in public, temp measurement at schools and public buildings, quarantines at entry and positive diagnosis enforced extremely strictly by law enforcement, and tracing the infection chain. That’s literally it.)
Not particularly, but even if China undercounted by 10x, it's still way ahead of places like Sweden and the US on a per capita basis.
I have relatives there, and their lives are basically back to normal and have been for months. The bungling Western (especially American) response has unfortunately been a huge propaganda win for the Communist party. They're thanking every American asshole who loudly refuses to things as simple as wearing a mask for making them look good.
No, that's a straw man. It's like saying that someone who advocates for an effective police force is also advocating for that force to recklessly kill suspects.
What I am advocating for is mandatory pandemic control measures that are strict enough to work and applied consistently until the job is done, and a population that's willing consistently take efforts to protect the common good rather than complain and resist when things aren't maximally convenient to them personally. That applies not just to first-order responses, but to second and third order responses as well.
Does violation of fundamental civil rights like freedom of assembly not also harm the common good? We can't focus narrowly on one objective and ignore everything else.
Is putting a device on your face that requires constantly interacting your hands near your respiratory tract common sense?
Everything that follows a cult's narrative is common sense, everything that disagrees with a cults narrative is immediately discarded.
Be aware of your biases.
> So the question becomes is this a violation of the bill of rights?
Seems less like an issue of being "left" and more "authoritarian". I wish there was a pithier word than "Auth" available for this. Some left-wingers still defend the 1st Amendment.
I hope the parties this decree impacts sue and bring this to the Supreme Court. The biggest issue with lockdowns now seems to be lawmakers' fear of making a deadly choice. We need a high court opinion to be clear on what government can and cannot do. IANAL but the language seems clear in 1A that there shall be no law restricting peaceable assembly.
Doing some quick Googling about the scientists at the head of US public policy on the subject: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/covid-19-colleges...
The scientists seem to say 1) don't send students home and 2) contain them so they don't cause further outbreaks at universities. So the suggestion of ending youth public gatherings at a university seems in-line with the science.
It seems comically naive to expect that the population that faces virtually zero downside and has the greatest propensity for risky behavior would obey such an order.
(In case anyone isn’t certain, I do not support this line of thinking. But since authoritarianism is fashionable nowadays I fully expect it to happen)
I didn't get that out of the article you referred to. The article said that students mingling should be assumed inevitable:
"They're going to wander. They're going to visit each other. They're going to go into town. They're going to sneak off and have a party. This is what they do."
And that sick students should be grouped together, away from healthy students:
"Some colleges have the capability of a dorm or a couple of floors of a dorm where they could keep people who are infected,"
Sounds reasonable, better than sending them home, given the odds.
It's less questionable when you look at it a different way: this is one of the segments of the population most likely to behave irresponsibly. It's a common observation that people in this age range often unjustifiably act like they're invincible. Those feelings can lead to bad results for others, like in the case of a drunk driver killing someone else in an accident.
#1, I don't think it's relevant that you think that segment of the population is irresponsible. We are talking about adults and taking away their freedom. I personally would rather see objective facts, not opinion.
>people in this age range often unjustifiably act like they're invincible
#2, I think you are wrong about their invincibility in this case. 330 people under 25 died of covid as of August 20 [0] (most with comorbidities), out of a population of 104 million in the U.S. [1], that is 1 out of 346,000 (edit). This is not high on the list of dangers for that age group.
You should attempt to justify your imposition on them without smearing them. Young people are not in danger from this disease are being forced as a group to make significant scholastic, social, and economic sacrifices for those who are too afraid to self-isolate on their own.
EDIT: Maybe the focus needs to be on vulnerable populations, and not young people? What is the goal here? Are Colorado hospitals overwhelmed? There's no proof that lockdowns otherwise make a difference.
[0] https://fox8.com/news/coronavirus/new-cdc-report-shows-94-of... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
And maybe a drunk driver really is invincible because he has a very safe car that will protect him in any accident. Does that mean he should be allowed to drive drunk?
That's a straw man: no one is proposing banning all gatherings forever. Drunk people are banned from driving when they're drunk, not when they're sober. People like these students will have to suffer some analogous restrictions during this pandemic, especially in hot spots like Boulder, but those restrictions will stop when the virus is under control.
But they're not just banning gatherings of sick people when they are sick, they are banning healthy people from gathering too. So maybe we don't ban driving every night, just New Years Eve and St Paddy's day, when there's a higher number of drunk drivers out?
Your analogy is just bad. Closer would be banning all drivers between a certain age rubric because possibly, maybe, some of them will get drunk and drive.
If anybody proposed that, it would be rightly derided, but here with politically motivated COVID panic based on still poorly understood evidence is somehow making this absurd restriction seem okay to an awful lot of people right here on HN.
You know we already ban all drivers "between a certain age rubric"? Try to get your driver's license from age 0-15.
Here's the text of the order: https://www.bouldercounty.org/families/disease/covid-19/publ...
The text says in part: ""Gathering: more than one individual coming together or being physically near each other for any shared and common purpose, including socializing or participating in any activity together including but not limited to shopping, dining, or exercising. A gathering does not include employees of any business while performing work for that business or any classroom learning activity explicitly permitted by the University of Colorado. Members of the same household while in their shared household space (e.g. a dorm room) together are not considered a gathering.""
They've excluded people at work, so I suppose this allows people in this age range to provide childcare for essential workers, work in health care or at grocery stores, etc.
How kind of our benevolent overlords. We can still partake in the economic machinery! Just none of that pesky “living your life” stuff.
I’m surprised they haven’t banned laughter yet. It spreads SARS-CoV-2-laden respiratory droplets like nothing else.
You want to find the authoritarians among us? Find the people who are unable to laugh and make it known that no one else should.
(Many of my closest friends see through the narrative, partially because I wouldn’t shut up about it once I started reading the research and really realized how big of a mistake we’d made as a society)
It’s kind of like how everyone thinks that they would have opposed the Nazis because they grew up being taught that Nazis were bad. The truth is, this experiment in mass collective delusion has made it very clear which among us would have spoken out.
The ones reporting their neighbors for having a gathering or not wearing a mask while watering their lawn would have happily helped participate in genocide. Don’t doubt it.
What's clear to me after the pandemic: most people wouldn't think twice about completely destroying the fabric of normal society (perhaps irrevocably, while also violating fundamental rights) if they believe they're acting morally.
In any case, I take solace in the fact that pretty much all of my comments in this thread are more or less equally downvoted :P
I’ve had to stop browsing HN as much during covid because people here tend to be very rabid about this issue. I am shocked how normalized the idea of forcible business closures and total bans on population movement for years (“until the vaccine”) has become. All to avoid a virus that spreads so well that even literal islands (NZ) have been unable to contain it, which has per the CDC a .65% IFR (I personally think the real figure is .3%), and which unlike Influenza does not kill children.
But I digress.
Really shows you how far the overton window shifted.
Also doubly ironic that I got called paranoid for talking about what is literally happening right now, not what I fear might happen.
>"But this doesn’t mean we should go back to the ‘old normal’."
https://www.who.int/westernpacific/emergencies/covid-19/info...
>"There's nothing new about the 'new normal'. Here's why"
>"Normal' has not worked for a majority of the world's population, so why would it start working now? We should use our discomfort to forge a new paradigm instead."
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/theres-nothing-new-ab...
> It’s kind of like how everyone thinks that they would have opposed the Nazis because they grew up being taught that Nazis were bad. The truth is, this experiment in mass collective delusion has made it very clear which among us would have spoken out.
> The ones reporting their neighbors for having a gathering or not wearing a mask while watering their lawn would have happily helped participate in genocide. Don’t doubt it.
So yes, you're acting paranoid and not contributing meaningfully to the conversation.
Much of the country never issued stay at home orders and almost no place has stay at home orders now, so they would have been right to call you inaccurate if perhaps paranoid isn't the right word, as we largely didn't do that, and where we did we didn't keep it for six months.
I am genuinely perplexed here.
No, I'm saying that the claim specifically made in the grandparents comment about general stay at home orders maintained for 6+ months was false (not paranoid), because much of the country never had a stay-at-home order, and almost all actual stay-at-home orders that were issued were lifted. Had we actually had a hard lockdown nationwide for even a fairly short period of time, we might still be seeing the kind second wave some places are seeing, but we wouldn’t still be in an epic disaster of a first wave, and we probably wouldn’t be seeing the kind of extreme-but-isolated orders you are complaining about now.
I think from this we could infer that they will take responsibility when they think it becomes clearer that students will not sufficiently comply with the public safety directives.
Young kids is completely different we aren't doing enough and there aren't a ton of other options but to open schools. But in person college for adults? not a necessity
I mean, they aren't going to expel the students from their university, but they are going to drop the pretense of in-person classes.
18-22 year old's in college are self-contained for the most part. They're around people their own age, not known for intermingling with senior citizens etc.
The people in your scenario that are most at risk are roaming the same area freely, so the solution is to ban the least at risk people?
The same people who are the least likely to follow the prohibition?
If you want to protect the most at-risk people and the only way to do it is to divide the high-risk & low-risk the far more logical route would to ban the high-risk people.
I know this because I have family in those facilities that I have not been able to see since this all started. We (low risk) have been banned from these facilities (high risk) for months now.
We are lucky in that we are still somewhat healthy in regards to my family near CU. Many other families in these facilities are not and have lost loved ones due to the pandemic. The bans are not working as well as hoped, especially since the start of the school year.
The decisions of the CU community in relation to the larger Boulder community are contentious at the moment. Many parts of the larger Boulder community do not appreciate CU's 'cavalier' policies.
Do waste management districts handle epidemiology issues in Utah?
To me this "adult" here reads like "old enough to be thrown under the bus"
Is it still ethical? Legal? Effective?
Try cutting the social security COLA by 1%? Get a riot.
Destroy the economic livelihoods of a generation of new entrants to the economy? No problemo, my stocks and real estate portfolio is doing great!
Can’t expect a generation to go through two economic catastrophes (GFC, Covid) without support and expect positive results. Things will just go from bad to worse.
(Compare South Dakota, right-leaning and NEVER locked down, to my home state of California, which is so democrat-leaning that we’re a de facto single party state)
I happen to think mask mandates are ridiculous too but that's besides the point.
So vote and get active in a political party, then?
Why are 16 year old 'too immature' to vote by 90 year olds eligible? You can vote even if you are mentally ill.
Do schoolchildren have no interests at all that deserve at least some representation? Imagine we had a few representatives in parloament talking about their issues, that would probably improve discourse.
> Is it still ethical?
No, it wouldn't be. All young people, regardless of race, deserve equal protection from their own stupidity.
> Legal?
No, it wouldn't be.
> Effective?
For those lucky young people, it would be. But that screws all the young people of other races/religions.
Laws aren't targeted at people who do no wrong, but those people still get protection from those laws.
> Where would I be in your book?
You're safer because the idiots around you who would be doing stupid things have a lower chance of infecting you and your grandma.
Most wouldn't say the concept of a retirement age is discriminatory, nor the concept of age of consent or minimum age to purchase alcohol, or pricing insurance rates differently based on age.
Somehow this application of age discrimination seems to cross the line for many people, though. I'm genuinely curious as to why.
Age limits make sense in some contexts but we need some consistency.
My point is that this does fall under that reasoning.
> No State shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws
It's clearly not legal.
Whether it's ethical or effective is in doubt, given herd immunity arguments, Sweden, the Constitution, etc.
Ethical? That's a judgment call. I say yes, personally.
I assume that there are a number of factors here, most notably that the assembling, while peaceful, poses a considerable danger to the public. Certainly it would be nice to see some sort of carve out for explicit protesting but there you go.
All allowed activities are government approved activities.
None of the rights in the bill of rights are absolute. For better or for worse, the courts have decided that pretty much every right you have can be limited in the name of public safety.
If I'm in jail, the warden has no obligation to let me out if I want to go to my best friend's birthday party. If I try to stage an unpermitted protest in the middle of the street, I will eventually be removed
If you want people to follow rules, you have to be consistent in how those rules are applied.
Yes, we should.
> increase mortality by requiring proportionally more at-risk people to get sick to reach herd immunity.
This assumes that herd immunity is reached without a vaccine; the whole idea of controlling the spread is to reduce the degree to which herd immunity depends on people getting infected.
https://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/aboutlawsregulationsquarantin...
However as I commented as a sibling comment to yours, SCOTUS precedent would hold that this is almost certainly allowed, despite my utter disgust for these backwards policies.
If you can forcibly sterilize someone, why not prevent them from gathering? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson_v._Massachusetts (forced vaccination despite history of adverse reaction)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell (forced sterilization)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korematsu_v._United_States (forced detention based off of race)
I did a quick search of her background and she was almost indicted for falsifying Covid death data to inflate the total number of deaths[1]. Once she was forced to accurately report the numbers, the number of deaths magically dropped significantly. Won't hear about this in the news!
[1] - https://www.9news.com/article/news/local/next/gop-rep-allege...
https://koanewsradio.iheart.com/content/2020-05-15-gov-polis...
> Won't hear about this in the news!
Huh? I found lots of news articles about it.
We need to strip all emergency powers now. These were meant for times like earthquakes, where legislatures don't have time to act. It's been 7 months now, that is no longer an excuse. I think a 30 day cap is generous enough.
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/09/21/fac...
Plus, the article says it was only 8 people which won't have any actual impact.
I can't imagine any rational person thinking this would be effective. "Oh, I'm digging a grave for someone who has lived 3x more than me." If that were successful nobody would smoke, drink, eat bad food.
https://www.dailycamera.com/2020/09/24/boulder-county-issues...
You might may something to the affect "desperate times call for desperate measures," but have no doubt, the next 'emergency' is right around the corner. Once you give government power, it's quite difficult to take it back. People will be toeing the lines for years on what an emergency is, until it simply becomes the norm.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Boulder,+CO/@39.949631,-10...
Age Number of Individuals in Boulder County *
0-9 66
10-19 1,261
20-29 1,364
30-39 340
40-49 335
50-59 318
60-69 189
70-79 144
80+ 111
Source:
https://www.bouldercounty.org/families/disease/covid-19/covi...
why does the number of infections matter?
a focus on the number of infections rather than suffering, illness or death implies a goal of slowing or preventing herd immunity and, by extension, prolonging Covid regulations.
The lowest elected position in the CDC chain of command is the President of the United States.
Conflating this as a human rights issue as some commenters have tried to on this thread is a dangerous trend.
In other cities, like La crosse, WI for instance college campuses tended to be the hotspots.
The same was true of senior housing a few months back.
So I am leaning towards the public health officials targeting this based on data for hotspots and demographics and not just to ground some group of people.
The virus needs to be quashed and NY is the evidence.
They are undertaking this measure because of a spike in COVID “cases” (read: positive PCR test results). A spike in cases without a corresponding increase in deaths or hospitalizations should be a good thing, but we treat it the same as having an equivalent number of centenarians get sick. Completely absurd and it goes against everything we knew about public health before this mass global hysteria took root.
The reality is that compared to March New York city in September has quashed the virus, per data.
Ironically, the hysteria is partially why New York’s IFR is the highest in the world; fears of hospital overrun scenarios that never materialized (and in retrospect never could have, but we didn’t have good data at the time) led to Cuomo sending infected into nursijg homes. And a doctrine of early invasive ventilation led to iatrogenic harm and therefore death. And deprivation of sunlight/exercise/sleep all serve to destroy the body’s natural immunoregulatory mechanisms.
Unfortunately, Jacobson v Massachusetts has given legal precedent for forced sterilization and forced detention based off of race, so I’m sure Jacobson can be used to justify these mortality-inducing lockdowns from a legal standpoint. That neither makes it ethical nor good for public health.
What arrogance to think that New York is not experiencing cases because of the interventions taken. Is it just a coincidence that Sweden, which never locked down nor mandates masks, is also done with COVID? No, it’s all just seroprevalence. Which so many of us have been trying to tell you guys for half a year now. Meanwhile the third world is about to experience an unprecedented mass starvation that will eclipse the COVID mortality by far.
You sure about that? I had friends who are doctors there tell me back during the peak (~April) they had run out of anesthesia and had to intubate patients without it.
Intubating without anaesthesia sounds very not-fun though.
BTW New York followed a doctrine of early invasive ventilation which almost certainly caused iatrogenic harm. So perhaps an over-reliance on intubation contributed to your friends' hospital(s) running out (that's besides the point but just interesting to note)
Lots of people that don't get hospitalized are reporting significant lingering symptoms. An effective vaccine appears to be ~months away. Do either of those things matter at all?
With SARS-1, there can be lingering fatigue and minor cognitive deficits for a few months post infection, but radiological abnormalities of the lungs, etc clear away within months and are certainly gone at the 1 year mark.
The evidence in SARS-2 is incredibly weak and especially for those who are asymptomatic or paucisymptomatic the chance of lasting harm is essentially zero. Remember that the real damage occurs from the immune response, so if you have no symptoms you cannot have damage. The notion being promulgated of having totally asymptomatic COVID-19 and then randomly showing organ damage (heart, lungs etc) is absurd.
Finally for mathematical purposes we need to consider long-term damage - which again just doesn’t really happen - as not as bad as a death. So we can still work it into the math just fine, whether you want to call it a tenth of a death or half or whatever.
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Oh finally, quick point that vaccines are not without risk either. Go read the data on the Moderna trials. Or the history of rushed-out vaccines that caused paralysis (it was either for swine flu or avian flu, I forget which)
We don't have that information about a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine yet, but you are just hand-waving here, it's likely enough that one of the many vaccine candidates will be less harmful than a course of infection (In general, vaccines are safe enough that we use lots of them…).
You also aren't working long term damage "into the math", you are doing just what I was getting at, dismissing it.
Your position also implicitly relies on the notion that SARS-2 isn't spreading right now, but it is, so by the time we get a vaccine we will have a lot of exposure. Data from NY and Sweden implies somewhere around 20% seroprevalence is when we hit herd immunity.
Since you haven't given me much to work on, and I don't feel like digging into the vaccine side, let me give you some research on long-term damage:
["Follow-up Chest CT findings from discharged patients with severe COVID-19: an 83-day observational study"](https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-27359/v1) - First Submitted May 4, Published online May 12
> Radiological abnormalities in patients of severe COVID-19 could be completely absorbed with no residual lung injury in more than two months’ follow-up.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1440-1843... (SARS-1 pathology)
> Preliminary evidence suggests that these lung function abnormalities will improve over time
and here's just one effect of lockdown: loneliness.
https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/110/15/5797.full.pdf
> mortality was higher among more socially isolated and more lonely participants. However, after adjusting statistically for demographic factors and baseline health, social isolation remained significantly associated with mortality (hazard ratio 1.26, 95% confidence interval, 1.08–1.48 for the top quintile of isolation), but loneliness did not (haz-ard ratio 0.92, 95% confidence interval, 0.78–1.09). The association of social isolation with mortality was unchanged when loneliness was included in the model.
For the first link, only 40% of the patients had (in the sense of the Chest CT study) recovered after 2 months. But that's a single measure, it would be good to have additional assessments of the health of those folks, rather than just the single factor.
It's also a very dangerous trend to ignore human rights because it is convenient for your current goals.
College campuses are the best possible location for herd immunity to take place.