I'm absolutely tired of having this conversation because it's been 6 months of this throwing around bullshit numbers (only .1% die! no only 1% die! no only 2% die! oh look it's back to 1.5%!) and people arguing from what is basically a completely selfish point of view where nothing changes, nothing impacts their lives. When in reality every time we have this conversation the absolute numbers have another zero on them.
Even back when it was only 50,000 cases worldwide, experts were warning of potentially millions of worldwide deaths. And idiots were arguing not to shut things down and not to wear masks because it was overblown. Goddamn. God damn. Now there are literally one thousand times as many cases. Now 1 million people are dead. And the conversation is still the same. We'll have this argument again and again and forever and the millions of dead will keep ticking by because so many people are completely unserious about dealing with this. It is absolutely disgraceful so many people putting their own money and entertainment above the lives of others and don't even have the decency to wear goddamn masks. Sickening.
Sorry, I don't mean to unload on you personally because your comment wasn't the above, but goddamn I am so tired of this throwing around numbers game. Can we just fucking fight this virus already?
Because the numbers actually matter. We could save lives by quarantining the entire population during every flu season. We don't, because the social and economic costs would far outweigh the benefits. It may well be the case that COVID is so dangerous that it justifies destroying millions of jobs, disrupting children's education, and forbidding physical proximity with friends and family. But if you're going to argue for that you need to use numbers rather than righteous indignation.
Yearly lockdowns may be a step too far, but would it be so terrible if everyone wore cloth masks during flu seasons, if remote work was more standard for white collar jobs, if everyone else were able to take time off when sick, and if we had a plan for sick kids besides sending them to school with a pocket full of kleenex?
Adopting the Asian custom of wearing bog-standard blue medical masks when we have the sniffles is a fine idea, overdue really.
Everyone wearing cloth masks during every flu season is an absurd overreaction.
If numbers actually mattered for then then they wouldn't be both neglecting official statistics, specially growth rates, and also fabricating their own data out of thin air.
These people don't care about numbers or facts. These people are too embroiled in their petty world view or conspiracy theories to care about the harm they are doing to everyone around them. These idiots complain about jobs and classes as if having a million people dying on them and many more being debilitated is something that harms no one or their economy.
This shit could have been contained if these idiots acted responsible and stayed put and took basic sanitary precautions. But no.
I lived in Spain during the start of the year, and witnessed the spanish army trucks carting healthcare workers around and carrying loudspeakers asking people to stay indoors in a time where, according to verified tests, nearly a thousand people were dying per day due to covid. The death rate was so high that the spanish government had to commandeer an ice ring to serve as a makeshift morgue. Social distancing and lockdown and basic sanitary care drove those numbers to single digits in about a month.
Wearing masks in close contact settings may be fine for a few months but it's obviously not sustainable indefinitely. Most likely this pandemic will play out much like the HCoV-OC43 pandemic did in 1889.
Disagree strongly. I am currently in Australia, which shut down early and has been serious about fighting this from the beginning, despite repeated outbreaks from international travel, most recently in Victoria, which prompted a hard and long shutdown...that worked.
27,000 total cases over the course of the entire pandemic. Less than 1,000 deaths. And all of the worst of that has been lapses in vigilance and mistakes.
Those 50,000 worldwide cases were the seeds of the 34 million that have been confirmed. Every one of those hotspots could have been and should have been isolated and quarantined. We'd be through this if we had responded simultaneously, fast and hard. But no one was really prepared for what that shutdown meant or looked like.
But now we are stuck with a persistent infection that just keeps getting worse.
> At this point shutting things down causes more harm than good.
And people then were saying that a shutdown would do more harm than good. I think a 3-4 week hard simultaneous worldwide lockdown would have stopped this in its tracks, but the logistics and necessity of that were absolutely not clear. Instead we were constantly one step behind, enacting half measures and wishful thinking based on past pandemics. Incredible that people said almost exactly the same thing 6 months ago and look how screwed we are.
Now we are three steps behind and there is no putting this thing back in the bottle. We're boned. Millions more deaths are coming and the only hope of even remotely normal life now is a vaccine.
If the vaccine doesn't work, you'd seriously never consider going back to normal ever, in your entire lifetime? That's absurd.
It's rather concerning that people like you are pinning all your hopes on a vaccine. I don't know about you, but at some point living a life with such restrictions and a complete halt or threat to halt many of the things that make life interesting becomes a trade-off that's not worth making. If a vaccine does not work to protect the elderly particularly well, would you seriously be willing to close international borders for the next 5-10 years, for example? Even worse, since there's zero endpoint to anything if you are unwilling to tolerate life as normal without a vaccine, why not just extend all restrictions indefinitely?
Except that it didn't work. You did it once, and it came back. So now you're doing it again.
And you'll keep doing it again and again, unless you plan on keeping Australia isolated from the world until a vaccine has been administered to some huge percentage of the world population. Even if you do keep Australia isolated, it's clearly not a cure, either: the current outbreak happened in spite of your country's travel ban.
Reasonable people can certainly disagree about the trade-offs involved here, but you have to start from facts.
Look, I know the comments section of hackernews is not going to contain a long, nuanced conversation about what did and did not work, and I probably overstated it "working", but let's be clear; the lockdown in Victoria absolutely brought the outbreak under control, from over 500 per day to now nearly zero. If you want to see graphs, please browse: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-17/coronavirus-cases-dat...
It's been a long, hard slog. It sucks. Lockdowns aren't binary, and I hope I didn't represent them as so. Unfortunately they are only effective to the extent that they don't let infections slip through the cracks. To be effective, the actual numbers need to be low enough, and kept low enough, that contact tracing and quarantining work, so that the economy can function at all. That ship has sailed for America. It is sad.
Victoria is an example of what happens when the thing gets out and starts spreading. Here in the ACT where I am, and the seat of government is, things are in much better shape, with only a few hundred cases overall through the pandemic, and a handful of deaths. A phased reopening has meant life here has gone back to nearer to normal, and even mask wearing isn't required. Canberra has been very lucky and I can actually live my life like the virus doesn't exist, because right now, right here, it pretty much doesn't. But I can't stay here forever, I'll be out in the wild with the rest of ya soon enough. Thanks for letting the virus run rampant over my homeland. Cheers!
We've eliminated one human virus in all of history, and it took two hundred years and a vaccine. The final push took a really effective vaccine, and decades of intensive effort to weed out the last cases. You're not going to eliminate this one by locking people in their homes for a few months.
Lockdowns are not a permanent solution, duh. Yeah, of course they postpone things for a while, if the virus is still spreading and the population is just as susceptible. I thought that part was clear to people from the outset, but apparently not. Lockdowns buy time, slow or hopefully even stop the spread, identify and isolate cases in order to focus efforts, and then quarantine those people so it does not get out of hand. If you don't isolate the virus during the lockdown then it was pointless as it will just escape again. Unfortunately the logistics of doing that are pretty involved and it takes a serious effort and little to no defection from people escaping quarantines. It helps a lot when political leaders understand and explain the basic strategy instead of being more concerned about their political fortunes and the fragility of the economy and calling it a hoax. Mixed messages confuse people. The US government completely fumbled that one.
You want to protect people's jobs? Then do it. Provide unemployment benefits, provide wage subsidies, provide support to businesses so they don't go under. Impose a rent moratorium so people aren't evicted. Banks will not go under because of a rent moratorium. The financial system doesn't crash because of a rent moratorium. The financial system will crash if millions default, though. But instead America's political leaders chose poorly and did none of those things, or did them poorly. They bailed out absolutely the wrong people. Instead everyone's been in a rush to open everything back up, because fuck it, or something.
And the defections, the arguing, the denial. Unfortunately along with "you can't lock us in here forever"--a semi-reasonable argument which I will generously spot you--there are lots of irresponsible people out there who can't even do the bare minimum to slow or stop the spread, or who just plain don't care, who rationalize away hundreds of thousands of people dying, because fuck it, or something. So we are in a situation where these people spread the virus everywhere. And every step of the way there were so many voices of dissent like this that sound subtly different on the surface but all pretty much amount to "fuck it, that sounds hard". And yeah, now it is exponentially harder to fix this problem. And yes it's still a global pandemic killing thousands and millions of people, despite how tired we are all of the whole mess, despite how our news cycle ADD attention span. And it will absolutely keep getting worse.
> You're not going to eliminate this one by locking people in their homes for a few months.
Like I said, that alone wouldn't have been sufficient. But anyway, not now. It's far too late for America. It would have worked in February to get this under control, get effective testing and tracing programs in place, and keep numbers from spiking. But now the massive number of tests being done just finds this blasted thing is everywhere; a total failure of containment.
Are they? China still has cases. So do ~all of the southeast Asian nations, Korea, Taiwan and Japan. The virus is endemic, and while these countries may have controlled it temporarily, they have not eliminated it. Save for perhaps Korea (and maybe China, but it's not clear), most of these countries aren't testing at high rates, so they don't really know what is happening.
Unless you believe the virus is hiding out in cats, the only other logical conclusion is that it's spreading asymptomatically, and they're simply not detecting it until it pops up in a symptomatic way.
Vietnam had had 35 deaths in total.
Singapore, an international transit hub, 27 deaths.
Thailand, 59.
Read about how Vietnam handled coronavirus. Heavy lock downs at the very beginning quarantine for everyone entering the country, and then localized lockdowns in areas that had breakouts combined with extreme levels of contact tracing.
People in other countries are back to school, back to work, back to living normally.
All of them have stopped international travel and closed their borders. Vietnam has a mandatory quarantine -- in government-run centers -- for most people who do enter the country. Singapore is similar. Thailand has a two-week quarantine, and their economy is devastated, as essentially all tourism has stopped.
All of those countries have extensive restrictions in place, and have only recently begun to re-open their own businesses. For example, Vietnam just started re-opening businesses in mid-September:
https://www.vietnam-briefing.com/news/vietnam-business-opera...
Singapore, while much better than before, still has widespread community transmission:
https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/economics/article/3103353/sin...
It still has restrictions on group gatherings, people can't to to restaurants in groups larger than 5, and alcohol can't be sold after 10:30. I guess this counts as "mostly normal", right?
So basically, all of those countries are still locked down, or have just barely re-opened, and even then, there's no suppression, just a lower level of community transmission than before. It's far too early to be declaring victory.
You can control the virus for a time when you trap your society inside, deprive them of their livelihood and otherwise accumulate huge social and economic costs. Then you stop, and the virus comes back.
Confirmed cases will never be equal to total cases unless the virus affected everyone the same and had 100% mortality with distinctive causes i.e hemorrhaging.
The asymptomatic or mild case rate is so high that treating confirmed cases as anything other than a speculative baseline is hard for me to accept.