How the hell do we actually/pragmatically solve this thing? Is a widely accessible vaccine the only option? How long will that take?
But something being technically feasible doesn't mean it's politically realistic. https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/10/trump-admins-pandemi...
Physical exercise and proper nutrition prevent most diseases, but no one talks about it. Why? Cause big pharma would rather you be sick and pop pills for the rest of your life.
Make sure you take multi vitamins, eat healthy, are not vitamin d deficient, load up on vitamin C in the winter, exercise, meditate, breathe clean air and 90% of diseases wont touch you.
Keep proper distance, practice good hygiene, eat a balanced healthy diet, exercise.
Hey look! Those alone prevent obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol. WTF? But what about the pills?
If you also include things like washing your hands and using PPE, then lifestyle can have a tremendous impact on prevention. Take condoms and HIV for example. The efficacy of this theory of lifestyle and infectious disease prevention will vary from example to example, but should not be categorically discounted as BS.
A healthy diet, exercise, fresh air, and less stress eliminate the need for 99% of pharmaceutical products.
New Age BS... god forbid you tell people to eat healthy and exercise, they rather just sit at home and rot into their couch poppin big pharma pills and vaping til their bodies give up, hoping for a transplant.
What we have to do is continue to mitigate risks and evolve medical treatments. We are making great strides in this regard. Many companies are working over time and we have proven treatment methods that help minimize and reduce negative outcomes. Now we need to scale these treatments. What we need most is Time and that's arguably the one thing none of us have excess off.
Wearing masks in public are fine, washing hands diligently are fine. These are good things. Long term though secondary effects of the disease are proving to be just as damaging to the world. Lockdowns aren't the fix and are arguably not likely to be legal.
Both the left and the right have to stop poo pooing advances and yelling at each other with blame. Yes, people aren't wearing masks as they should, thing is that was and will always be the case. We account for that by majority working with the system. There will always be a minority that fights against it and accounting for that is more important.
The #1 thing I think that will help with managing covid, is Civility. The more we respect each other, the easier it is to find common ground and social agreement on best steps to take.
We will get through this as we do everything else. We have to stop over dramatizing things for the sake of political points. No one disputes the harm of this virus, or the deaths it's caused. One death is too much, but we also have to recognize that we have people dying in large amounts because of a lot of issues.
Notably, the second thing that will improve our success in beating this long term, is emphasis on healthy life styles. The fact that I hear almost 0 about health and minimizing comorbidity issues is astounding. Yes, I realize people can't all of a sudden not have co-morbidities, but we can instill these behaviors now with evidence that may help prevent issues the next time something like this transpires.
TLDR: Being more civil with each other and addressing personal health issues will be the biggest impact to collectively reducing risk and improving survivability.
This is befuddling given that many that have died from Covid-19 have had co-morbidness and have suffered from life style diseases.
One positive side effect of the pandemic is that a lot of people have stopped smoking. Because early on, a lot of people believed that smoking made you more susceptible to the virus. Apparently, that wasn't true but it is a damn shame that it wasn't more drummed up in media. Imagine the positive health effects a disinformation campaign could have had! Some pictures in The New York Times of lifelong smokers' lungs, next to pictures of Covid-19 patients lungs, and some suggestive text. Wouldn't have to be any outright lies, just enough to enable people to make the association. It could have saved millions of lives.
The same will happen with this new corona. A vaccine could make your first exposure to the virus much safer. Social distancing is meant to flatten hospital capacity curves and buy time for vulnerable people to get a vaccine before their first exposure.
Does any government have a goal of permanently ending corona virus? I'm not aware of any. It is with us for the next 5000+ years.
The best option is just to carry on so we don't have bigger problems due to collapsing economies. Although that might be a bit late for some countries.
Nothing to fix anymore.
In the US, even if a vaccine comes it will take several years to roll out such that we cannot immediately go back to “normal”. Given its current performance, I do not believe the current administration and its party to be capable of effectively distributing a vaccine. I also suspect a modest portion of the population supporting this party will not consent to such a vaccine under any circumstances.
(Warning: political speculation partly driven by election anxiety) “Wait,” you say, “there could be an administration change soon, what if that happens?” Unless the Senate is secured–such that a bill could be passed through reconciliation–the aforementioned party will return to the same diehard obstructionist form as we saw the during the Obama administration (even if many agree with the contents of the bill McConnel would never allow a vote). It will be up to the executive branch to issue executive orders in order to distribute the vaccine. This is not guaranteed to be effective either. Whatever the order is it will immediately be challenged in court only to be struck down as “grossly unconstitutional” thanks in part to the three most junior justices of the Supreme Court, wherein (I suspect) their opinions on executive power apply only to presidents of the party that appointed them.
I would expect similar legal challenges and outcomes even if the senate majority is Democrat. See the Affordable Care Act, wherein the existential legal challenge _National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius_ decided that it is constitutional (by the skin of its teeth 5-4 Roberts in the plurality.) Which, by the way, I would not count on it being constitutional after opinions are issued from the upcoming Supreme Court term so the count of uninsured will skyrocket sometime next year, great time (/s) to deliver a vaccine through a for-profit healthcare system. Elections matter.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/preve... “A person infected with coronavirus — even one with no symptoms — may emit aerosols when they talk or breathe. Aerosols are infectious viral particles that can float or drift around in the air for up to three hours. Another person can breathe in these aerosols and become infected with the coronavirus.”
Granted, every country is different in terms of size, politics, culture, etc.
I don't think you can replicate what Taiwan or South Korea are doing in the USA for example because of. both size and cultural issues. However there are still elements you can take - i.e. wearing masks. Unfortunately even that has become a political/cultural issue.
At least in the US, the fact that both sides have extreme political views on a myriad of things, Covid has ended up becoming an issues vs people stopping and saying ok, how do we meet in the middle, treat each other as humans, and positively convince people to work for the better good. Yelling at someone and calling them a myriad of names because they don't want a mask, isn't going to win them over. Ironically it's the same root problem we have in politics. Both sides also have to accept that they don't have the answer, they have an answer with the truth lying somewhere in the middle.
These days though, i'm losing faith in the ability of people to be calm and collective in discourse. I guarantee just the discussions here will be downvoted when the opinions don't match 100%.
That's the real problem we're going to have to solve.
I think your last two paragraphs allude to a belief I have - democracy is only as "good" (rational, reasonable, logical, etc) as the citizens are. I wish schools taught philosophy of argument classes (logic).
I agree. We see this with pretty much any disease. Even look at Zika virus - the US is concerned about it becoming endemic and focuses resources to combat it when it does pop up, yet we don't do anything preventive like restrict travel nor institute mandatory travel quarantines. This used to be a standard practice for international travel to areas with known diseases. We probably need to bring this back. Basically the option is kill tourism in those areas or deal with extension treatment and containment programs - either one would be very costly. So for now, we do like always - we ignore it.
By prescribing zinc plus low dose hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin EARLY in serious cases:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24930365
Article Date: 26 October 2020
Article title: "COVID-19 outpatients – early risk-stratified treatment with zinc plus low dose hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin: a retrospective case series study"
FTFA:
>"As of June 2020, diagnosis and treatment of COVID-19 have been almost exclusively studied from an inpatient perspective, including intensive care with mechanical ventilation. Only one study has described characteristics and key health outcomes of COVID-19 diagnosed patients in an outpatient setting [3]. This is surprising as primary care physicians often see COVID-19 patients first. They could play a critical role in early diagnosis, treatment, and management of disease progression and virus spread. This assumption is supported by the established principle in medicine that speed of eradication is linked to the outcome of life-threatening infections [4].
The early clinical phase of COVID-19 has not been the focus of much research so far, even though timing of antiviral treatment seems to be critical [5]. The optimal window for therapeutic intervention would seem to be before the infection spreads from upper to lower respiratory tract and before severe inflammatory reaction ensues [6]. Therefore, diagnosis and treatment of COVID-19 outpatients as early as possible, even based on clinical diagnosis only, may have been an underestimated first step to slow down or even stop the pandemic more effectively. Based on clinical application principles of antiviral therapies, as demonstrated in the case of influenza A [7], antiviral treatments should be used early in the course of infection."<
We're not as helpless as you believe.
Also see
"States Bow to Pressure to Reverse Course on HCQ" (Sep. 9 2020) at
https://yated.com/states-bow-to-pressure-to-reverse-course-o...
and
"Is HCQ banned in your state? (probably not)"(Aug 18 2020) at
1. Massive testing. Test the whole country every week. At least cover those who are out around people a lot.
2. Run an artificial selection campaign to find the least lethal stains and spread those as an ad hoc vaccine.