South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real' | Hacker News Reader

South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real'

thehill.com

237 pointsbelltaco456 comments

My wife and I just moved from Orange County, CA to Detroit, MI this last August.

We decided to drive the northern route. Heading through Vegas, Utah, Yellowstone and Montana. Then onward through the plains of North Dakota and Minnesota. Turning north we entered Wisconsin and finally the UP (Upper Peninsula) of Michigan. After a few days exploring we turned south to Detroit.

In Vegas the concern for masks started to wane. By Utah, no fucks were given and pretty much not a single fuck was given until we crossed the Mackinac Bridge into the lower peninsula of Michigan.

When I say no fucks were given - I mean that pretty much no one around me cared about wearing a mask, social distancing, etc. Hotels would participate out of corporate necessity. We drove hundreds and hundreds of miles sometimes and were the only people in stores with masks on. Sometimes I felt like an outsider alien, being stared at by the people around me. I was surprised yet not surprised at the same time.

So the surge and issues the comminuties up there are facing don't surprise me in the least.

It's actually the state governments that's at fault here. Not the specifically the people. Let me tell you I was in back-country Oregon recently, some of the MOST republican places within Oregon, not going to name drop the county. Anyway, the Oregon state government is very much democratic (cause you know Portland). But because of that, even the republican counties are under a mask order. And the extremely red counties, people are actually wearing masks all over the place. Grocery stores even are employing someone to just stand there and either hand a cheapy surg. mask or tell them to put one on.

So what I'm saying is that regardless of what people WANT to do, the state has the power and push to get people to do it. And this is why we need Biden in office yesterday.

Grocery stores even are employing someone to just stand there and either hand a cheapy surg. mask or tell them to put one on.

In the more advanced countries, such as Thailand, this is automated.[1] The store entrance gate won't open until the automated face scan has seen a mask. Hikvision has a mask and temperature detection system integrated with their face recognition systems.[2] If you already have a face recognition system, adding mask detection is a software update. And yes, face recognition now works on people with masks.

[1] https://twitter.com/i/status/1312668730791403520

[2] https://www.hikvision.com/uk/solutions/solutions-by-applicat...

> In the more advanced countries, such as Thailand, this is automated.

Having facial recognition everywhere isn't necessarily considered "advanced" in all circles. Technically, perhaps. Ethically? Not so much.

Facial recognition could be put everywhere in the US. Its primarily the political, legal, and social culture that prevents it, not the access to sufficient technology.

calling this facial recognition is a bit of stretch when its more akin to "is a mask present?", not trying to match to people in a database. No different then self driving cars detecting a pedestrian. very far from unethical (although i would hope they would make an effort to accommodate all skin colors to not unintentionally discriminate against anyone.)

> not trying to match to people in a database

Are you sure it’s not building one?

What is it going to record? "Dude with a mask" ?

“Dude who ignored a mask mandate from the government”

Facial recognition with masks is already working [1]. So storing facial images of all customers entering store with or without mask is essentially the same.

[1] https://apex.aero/articles/facial-recognition-tech-works-mas...

Facial recognition everywhere is a horrifying thought.

Some might see a million dead people as a worse thought.

I don't really like the idea of facial recognition, but the political class lives in a public facing world where every move they make is scrutinized. So they see the world maybe differently than when they're private citizens.

I guess it depends where each person falls on the “freedom vs safety” spectrum. I’m strongly on the “freedom” side. But I feel it’s a perspective based in some objectivity, as it’s generally a lot easier for one to protect themselves than to free themselves.

perhaps it will incentivizes mask wearing to get around the facial recognize and tracking and help with covid as a side effect

Software, or a person, could do this without knowing whose face is presented and without keeping records.

That's not enough. Someone standing in front of such a system cannot tell whether records are kept, or shared.

1. One risk is that the government will slowly erode any limitations. In Germany, one of the most privacy oriented countries, restaurants were required to collect contact information. This was announced as being strictly for covid contract tracing purposes. Less than a month later, the police in multiple states were found to have demanded and received access to those lists for reasons entirely unrelated to covid. So any default level of trust has already been betrayed.

2. Another risk is that the vendors themselves might prefer "alternative definitions" of record keeping and data sharing for various reasons (e.g. processing in the cloud and/or by third-party companies with even less restrictions, data collection for ML training purposes, selling the same dataset for profit, "flagged as hidden" vs "never actually stored", "stored to persistent media then deleted" vs "never persistently stored", preventing access by contractual/legal vs technical means...). The people making such promises are never ever the engineers that actually understand their system. And similar to the previous paragraph, companies have every incentive to slowly erode any guarantees they might've actually met at some point.

3. The people buying the products (shop owners) as a general rule have neither the expertise, time, motivation nor source code level access to call the vendors out.

`In the more advanced countries, such as Thailand, this is automated.` That seems very dystopian.

It's both. You can still wear masks in areas where they aren't explicitly necessary. In liberal cities in many "red" states, most people wear masks. It's 100% a "culture war" thing at this point. When I was moving from CA back East a few months ago, I saw practically nobody wearing masks even in rural CA.

That's not even mentioning that it's the people who are electing governments which don't require these basic public health requirements.

> Let me tell you I was in back-country Oregon recently, some of the MOST republican places within Oregon, not going to name drop the county.

Not sure the name drop matters given the other information you shared ;) I won't name drop it either but for future curious readers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Oregon

Are we talking about Malheur county?

You know who else has the power to lead people and states? The federal government. Almost like they were empowered specifically for this kind of scenario.

no, the federal government exists to defend the interests of the states, and resolve disputes between them. it's not meant to be a higher level of authority.

> no, the federal government exists to defend the interests of the states, and resolve disputes between them.

Clearly, yes.

> it's not meant to be a higher level of authority.

The Supremacy Clause fairly explicitly disagrees.

yes, but the supremacy clause applies only to laws written within its (federal) jurisdiction, as enumerated in the constitution (and amendments). the battle there, of course, is how much jurisdiction can be finagled under the interstate commerce clause and the like.

In your opinion, has COVID-19 had any effect on interstate commerce? Or is interstate commerce the same as it was this time last year?

all commerce, including the interstate kind, has slowed down due to the pandemic response, but that certainly doesn't mean that the interstate commerce clause should be invoked for covid (or in many other cases that it has been employed by the federal gov't). that power should be reserved for things like collusive, coercive, and anti-competitive behavior, its intended purpose.

for epidemiological concerns, the public health services act is the relevant federal legal framework, as @dragonwriter mentioned elsewhere.

however, a national mask mandate is a political ploy unlikely to lower infection rates materially vs. less visible and harder-to-enforce mitigations. it's polarized pangeantry, being pushed to put some points on the political board and coalesce power. anyone who cares about getting past the pandemic should punish such ineffective partisan behavior in favor of real meaningful, targeted, and effective measures--start with focusing on private social gatherings, the primary vector of spread (and completely unrelated to interstate commerce), not meaningless public displays of compliance.

> all commerce, including the interstate kind, has slowed down due to the pandemic response, but that certainly doesn't mean that the interstate commerce clause should be invoked for covid (or in many other cases that it has been employed by the federal gov't). that power should be reserved for things like collusive, coercive, and anti-competitive behavior, its intended purpose.

> for epidemiological concerns, the public health services act is the relevant federal legal framework, as @dragonwriter mentioned elsewhere.

The Public Health Services Act is almost entirely an exercise of Congressional power under the Commerce Clause. (Some bits of it may be grounded elsewhere, but that is the main source of authority for the Act.)

You can't really say it's the right statutory authority and say that the Commerce Clause should not be invoked in this context.

> "The Public Health Services Act is almost entirely an exercise of Congressional power under the Commerce Clause."

some quick research reveals that the federal quarantine powers of the PHSA are largely restricted to state and national borders. so that's indeed based (partly) in the commerce clause, protecting trade across borders from destabilizing forces. but the 5th & 14th amendments (due process and equal protection) also contribute, as does the necessary and proper clause (allowing the fed to use unenumerated powers to carry out its charter, and only its charter, when necessary and proper).

but a true national quarantine, where people are confined to homes or communities, and other proposed national measures (like a mask mandate) would require broader powers that go beyond the commerce clause, and that was the (unstated) common understanding from which i was arguing from before.

i still find this use of the commerce clause troubling, as it's just another stepping stone in the consolidation of power away from states to a future autocrat. the commerce clause is meant to curtail human-induced distortions on interborder trade, not pandemics.

I started thinking about this when thinking of the United Nations. If the UN had become what it could have, we would have some sort of federal world system that could tackle things like climate change, etc. This same thing occurs at different levels. The US federal government is in the best position to enforce regulations that require collective state action, like pandemic response. If they’re not solving the problems they’re uniquely in a position to solve, then what’s the point of federal taxes?

The states aren't run by stupid people. They're not gonna send in some state cops start shooting people over masks or to escalate in that direction. They don't have the manpower to enforce mask mandates without the consent of the governed. Their options for projecting power into areas where people have relatively homogeneously chosen to not comply are limited.

There are plenty of examples of unpopular rules successfully enforced, from school integration to the War On Drugs. The lack of mask/distancing enforcement is purely government cowardice and indifference. They could do it if they wanted to.

Publicly fire a few county bumpkin Sheriffs who refuse to enforce the mandates and you'd see an attitude change.

So when people protest, are you going to break up the protests?

That's the thing, in rural Oregon they protested the election, but they're definitely walking into grocery stores wearing the masks.

AFAIK most (all?) sheriffs can't be fired. They're elected county officials, so maybe they could be impeached but I really don't think they can be just outright fired like that.

Also, I would imagine many of the sheriffs that refuse to enforce mandates probably have considerable support from their constituents. Surely that would make their impeachment a significantly more difficult ordeal for whatever agency is responsible for the impeachment proceedings.

Do you think mask mandates are working in the other states due to enforcement? They aren't. People are just wearing them because they accept the seriousness and have a sense of the risk and their responsibility.

Some do it out of shame, others necessity (e.g. shop not letting you in without a mask) but nobody is afraid of being arrested for failing to wear a mask.

With mask noncompliance so widespread, what exactly is Biden going to do? Throw all the anti-maskers in jail? Post law enforcement outside their houses to force them to quarantine? In fact, while the state technically has legal authority to get people to comply with mask mandates, they don't literally have the ability to do so. So, I would argue that the state doesn't have the "power" to do anything here at all, or, at least that it hasn't been demonstrated to date.

Yeah, but uhhh shouldn't you change your view while dying?? I mean... That's just plain insane.

I'm reminded of monthy python: those lost arms?!? Just a scratch!

Oregon’s cases are skyrocketing:

https://covid-19.direct/state/OR

Much of this is in Portland:

https://covid-19.direct/county/OR/Multnomah

Cases are skyrocketing everywhere. While your statement is true, it's extremely misleading.

Oregon is 47th place in terms of population adjusted total cases. In terms of number of absolute new cases, Oregon is 40th. Every state with fewer absolute new cases than Oregon is smaller with the exception of Lousiana. Oregon has done a fantastic job of handling Covid.

(1) https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ .

It isn’t misleading in any way: the parent was talking about mask rules in Oregon, asserting that they make all the difference. Yet cases are going up, all over Oregon, and especially in the places with the most compliance.

The fact that cases are going up all over the northern hemisphere - in places both with mask rules and without - should tell you something very important about the effectiveness of those rules.

I'm not sure why you're being purposely ignorant. Rules in Oregon have been relatively more strict so Oregon has had relatively fewer cases. Oregon lifted restrictions, opening up dining & gyms for example leading to an increase in cases. As a response, Oregon has reentered a lockdown.

What's so complicated?

How civil.

Oregon’s restrictions were no more or less strict than, say, New York City. In New York, gyms are open, dining is open.

New York is currently at 20 per 100k cases per day. Portland is at 100 per 100k. I suppose this means that New York is masking harder?

What’s so complicated?

Oregon still seems to be doing relatively better.

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_casesper100k...

Much of it is due to private gatherings without masks, gyms, and maybe bars and restaurants.

From what I can tell (I'm just staying home), people maybe did backyard gatherings when it was nice enough out, but moved indoors and that's gotten a lot of people sick.

> Much of it is due to private gatherings without masks, gyms, and maybe bars and restaurants.

Prove it.

When cases go down, it’s because of masks. When they go up in the same place, it’s because people suddenly stopped wearing them, but no proof is provided for either assertion.

I think we can all agree (and I don't have to prove) that if nobody would ever meet anyone outside their home there would be 0 infections. So that would be the ideal. We could have states just mandate very strict shelter in place. Would you like that?

Probably not, in which case we have to allow people to get outside their homes. When we do that we come up with rules to try to minimize infection rates, distance and mask wearing is supposed to help with that. Is your argument that mask wearing has 0 impact on COVID19 spreading rate?

This article seems to go over a number of studies showing correlation between mask wearing and lower death rates: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02801-8

But if mask wearing isn't helping at all with infectious diseases like COVID19, why are health experts always wearing them? It's a lot more comfortable to not be wearing any mask so they could do that instead. They'd have the data and the skills to determine if it helps or not, much better than we would.

> I think we can all agree (and I don't have to prove) that if nobody would ever meet anyone outside their home there would be 0 infections. So that would be the ideal. We could have states just mandate very strict shelter in place. Would you like that?

Absolutely. If we were really serious about beating the virus, that's exactly what we would do: Real and strictly enforced stay-at home, and mask wearing for exceptional cases when you had to go out. Coordinated nationally so we didn't have this healthy state - sick state problem. Then stick with it until it succeeded. It would be temporarily economically painful, and people would complain about their freedom to get their nails done and eat at Olive Garden, but we'd get the public health benefit and come out the other side not-dead.

Instead, we managed to do an even worse thing: Announce half-assed "business closures" and stay-at-home orders (more like suggestions), uncoordinated with other states, and unenforced, which gave us the negative economic effects and did not provide the health benefit. To top it off, we opened up way too early, causing this yo-yo effect where cases predictably spike after re-opening, causing re-closing, then a rush to re-open because economy, then another spike, then an inevitable re-close, and on and on.

Unless the vaccines pan out, we're going to be in this exact situation a year from now. Constantly re-opening, faking surprise at the cases spiking, and then re-closing.

It is a lot more comfortable to not be wearing any mask, that's why health experts like Dr. Fauci wear them only in front of the cameras but take them off when they think the cameras are off.

This is what https://www.oregon.gov/oha/Pages/index.aspx and our county health program here in Deschutes county are saying. They seem pretty reliable and objective.

I think we can pretty safely conclude that any data saying blue cities have it worse than bumfuck nowhere towns must be misleading or manipulated. It just doesn't line up with what we know about education levels and compliance levels.

There are more total cases in Portland because of the population numbers. From what I recall, the per capita numbers bounce around, with rural counties going through outbreaks occasionally taking the lead. There was a church in La Grande that had a big one in late spring. Sure put the lie to the notion that it was "density" and a "city problem".

San Francisco is the second densest city in America. San Francisco has the lowest COVID transmission rates of any city, with recently a positive test rate under 1%. Masks matter.

San Francisco has imposed unrelenting, draconian business closures for most of 2020, and only barely allowed re-opening of a few classes of business in late summer before closing them again in the fall. The city has seen a mass exodus amongst the worst in the nation.

And yet, despite all of this, and despite some of the strictest mask rules in the world, and the highest rates of compliance...cases have almost quadrupled since mid-October:

https://covid-19.direct/county/CA/San%20Francisco

But sure, none of that matters: if cases go down, it’s because masks. If they go up, it’s because someone didn’t wear their mask right. There can be no other explanation.

I wonder if cities having a high proportion of knowledge workers that are all able to work from home has a big impact too. The less people gather in groups, the better.

The graphs I linked use the Covid Tracking Project API. The data is not manipulated in any way.

Blue cities are denser than outlying red areas. Density means more opportunities for transmission. All else being equal, they would see higher transmission and per-capita infection rates.

The fact that we see the opposite is unfortunate and unnecessary.

You understand that state governments are made up of people from the state right?

I spent a weekend in Oklahoma last month (October 10-11), and was unable to enjoy myself because so few people were wearing masks, observing anything like distancing, etc.

I saw a Carls Jr. employee wearing a corporate-supplied t-shirt that used "maskhole" to describe anyone not wearing a mask... and he was not wearing a mask, just like all the other employees.

The hotel itself was the only place that seemed to be taking the pandemic seriously, so we retreated there, ate takeout, and left early.

The current spike in Oklahoma[0] does not surprise me at all.

0. https://mackuba.eu/corona/#oklahoma_united_states.daily?tren...

I'm very pro-mask but cases are skyrocketing everywhere, even in countries like France and Italy where masking is the norm. I don't presume to know how to fix the issue, but virologist knew this was going to happen -- it is called seasonal forcing[1]. It's disturbing to me that there are people in the US that dont believe COVID-19 is real (I think you can blame the administration for that), but I'm not sure the spikes are surprising.

[1]https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339321846_Impact_of...

Washington State and Maine also experience seasonal forcing. They started requiring masks in June & July.

From FT.com [1], here are the number of new confirmed Covid-19 cases, per million residents, averaged over the last 7 days:

- Maine: 130

- Washington State: 230

- Idaho: 740

- Montana: 1000

- South Dakota: 1600

From this data, I conclude that mask use is effective at reducing the spread of covid-19.

[1] https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=eur&areas=usa&are...

Fixing the issue is easy, even if brutal. Close everything that can be closed.

As the weather turned colder people started staying indoors and the conditions for transmitting the disease turned more favorable. (Eg restaurants, etc.)

Plus after a critical mass regular (intuitive) precautions are not enough. Eg in France restaurants allowed people to dine if they looked okay, and had a mask on while waiting for a table, and while not actually eating.

Clearly this was too lax. (aug 31 https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/Masks-in-Paris-r... )

A few weeks ago we drove from Hendersonville, NC (by Asheville) down through South Carolina and Georgia. We were the only folks in gas stations wearing masks, and received a few chuckles when people saw us wearing them. Your comment of feeling like an outsider alien really resonates.

I don't think using a gas station as your benchmark is fair. I live in what is literally the bluest state if the per county election maps are to be believed. Nobody wears masks at the gas stations unless you're going inside. Mask compliance is practically 100% inside.

That's funny because I'm from SC and Hendersonville was the first place I felt that was too lax in social distancing this summer. In 2 different restaurants (Pop's Diner and Flat Rock Wood Room) parties were sat at tables adjacent to ours. I actually had to check to see if NC had any sort of restrictions in place. Anecdotally, I would say that mask adoption in SC where I live is ~65-70% but even in places where I was in the minority for wearing a mask I've never seen a smirk or a chuckle and definitely haven't felt alienated.

No matter where you are there will be some fraction of people who are children about it. I'm in Boston and friends have had people yell in their faces about how they're stupid for worrying about it (home depot) and I've personally had people drive by and feel the need to bother shouting out their window about how my mask is gay.

To be fair, my mask has lovely periwinkle patterns and I am gay, but that's a lot of effort they're putting into getting attention and obviously comes from deep seated issues with their own masculinity that aren't my problem.

Nonetheless they have been the exception rather than the rule, so it may be good to assume the best unless someone is actually accosting you.

I've noticed there is a strong tendency for people to assume that a stranger's gaze is antagonistic when in reality they barely register you are there.

It is hard to not be extra sensitive to these things when you are a minority, I guess honestly a lot of people are learning what that feels like for the first time.

I had exactly the same experience driving from Baltimore to Seattle this June.

There were a good amount of masks in Pennsylvania, but in Ohio and Indiana it was as if pandemic didn't exist. Hotel employees didn't understand my reluctance to squeeze into a small space to pick up a to-go breakfast, and made snarky comments along the lines of "am I far enough for you sir?"

Madison, WI was much better, but starting from La Crosse all the way through Minnesota and North Dakota plains it was as if you were living in a different reality.

It depends quite a bit on where you are in any particular state. We did a similar move in May and I found that rural gas stations had close to zero mask usage, but in any larger city people were wearing masks. Some tourist hotspots (e.g. Moab) also have good mask compliance, perhaps because local businesses are desperate to avoid a full shutdown.

FWIW, I live in Utah, and in my urban neighborhood I actually see very good mask compliance. Further into the suburbs adherence drops.

It _really_ drops off at the county line between Salt Lake and Utah counties.

Deaths per capita from COVID for the States you referred to, as reported by State health sites mid November 2020:

Nevada: 1 in 1600

Utah: 1 in 4500

Montana: 1 in 2200

North Dakota: 1 in 1300

Minnesota: (outside of the 7 county Twin Cities) 1 in 3700

Michigan: (outside of Detroit area) 1 in 3600

In comparison

Where you moved from (Orange County CA)

1 in 2000

Where you moved to (Michigan/Detroit area Wayne/Detroit City/Oakland/Macomb) 1 in 350, not 1 in 3500, that’s one in three hundred and fifty.

If you moved to someplace six times deadlier (from a COVID standpoint), I’m guessing you have bigger problems to worry about than the COVID public health posture of those States you travelled through...

Implicit in your comment is the assumption that places that have had the highest death rates so far have more to worry about than places that have had the lowest death rates so far.

We got here by whalesalad complaining about people that don't wear masks. What's the point of masks? To slow the spread of the disease. So unless you've got some reason to think that death rates per infection are radically higher in Detroit than anywhere else along the route, then death rates are a somewhat-imperfect-but-still-somewhat-useful proxy for infection rates.

And therefore your comment is pretty pointless. If Detroit is doing worse about preventing infection than all these places that aren't using masks, then being there for the next month is probably going to be worse than passing through all those non-mask-using places for a week or two. (Unless you have reason to think that Detroit not only reached herd immunity, but did so long enough ago that people aren't currently contagious there. But if you think that, I'd like to see your data. More, I'd like to see why you think that about Detroit but not about the non-mask-using-and-therefore-presumably-spreading hinterlands.)

Unrelated, but I can't help it.

I assume "whalesalad" was a bad autocorrect that was meant to be "wholesale". But since most autocorrects learn from your past typing, I'm really curious what opportunity you had in the past to use the term "whalesalad".

I wanted this to be true, but "whalesalad" was the thread's top-post user.

That only means the conspiracy goes deeper.

If you'd like to see an absolutely terrifying map go to:

https://www.covidexitstrategy.org/

and scroll down to the "Can Our Health System Handle the Spread?" and look at the concentric rings of new infections/million radiating out of North and South Dakota.

This lines up very well with the parent comment's observations.

Meanwhile, here I am in the "anarchist jurisdiction" of Seattle and 90%+ of the people I see are wearing masks, socially distancing, and taking the scientific authorities seriously.

I'm in Seattle too. The local health guidelines suggest that it's safe to:

1. Put on a mask before going outside 2. Stroll to your local favorite restaurant 3. Get a table indoors 4. Remove the mask 5. Socialize

Some rural citizens are skipping steps 1 and 4, but Science only confers protection from covid when all the steps are followed.

This sort of pandemic theater is why cases are at an all-time high here. The 90%+ are not being very well served by their scientific authorities.

> 3. Get a table indoors

Keep in mind that restaurants are at significantly reduced capacity and those tables are now more widely spread apart.

These guidelines mean you are much less likely to share airspace with strangers. Yes, it's not as safe as not going to a restaurant at all, but they are trying to balance mitigating risk while allowing some economic activity. It's a hard problem.

The last time I drove through central Washington, I saw crowds of people clustered together at the front of restaurants with no masks on. I don't see that here. People generally stay spread out and wear masks when around strangers.

> This sort of pandemic theater is why cases are at an all-time high here

This kind of black-and-white "if you aren't being 100% safe you're just doing pandemic theater" rhetoric helps absolutely nothing.

> why cases are at an all-time high here.

Still better here than in much of the US, despite being the first outbreak, being on lockdown longer than most of the US (and thus with the most pandemic fatigue).

> if you aren't being 100% safe you're just doing pandemic theater

Pandemic theater is a preference for the symbolic over the substantive. It's giving yourself a pass for risky behavior (bars, indoor dining) while sneering at others for actions that are far less impactful ("haha, dumb hicks don't wear masks at the gas station!").

The hicks aren't sick because they won't wear their masks. They are sick because they're doing the same exact thing as you, just more of it. It hardly matters that your tables are spread out, or that you wore your mask while waiting for your reservation. You don't want to sacrifice hanging out with your friends, fine. But it's offensive to use "Science" to justify such a transparently frivolous choice. And I don't see why you should attack people for not wanting to make sacrifices that you yourself refused to.

Also Seattle had a huge number of people who can WFH, not everyone can.

> It's giving yourself a pass for risky behavior (bars, indoor dining)

Assuming that all indoor dining is created equal is the kind of black-and-white thinking I'm referring to. Look at how detailed the CDC guidance for restaurants is:

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/organiza...

This is not business as usual.

Also, the way restaurants are patronized in Seattle is different from Central Washington, at least that I have witnessed. In Seattle, I never see crowds of people clustered together, but I have elsewhere.

> The hicks aren't sick because they won't wear their masks.

I haven't characterized anyone a hick, but these people are spreading COVID more because they are not following the guidance:

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/17-cases-tw...

> they're doing the same exact thing as you, just more of it.

I don't know why it's necessary to clarify this, but yes, doing a more of a thing that carries non-zero risk is riskier. No one is arguing that Seattlites are at zero risk. Again, black-and-white thinking. The claim is that the way people in Seattle follow the guidelines has a lower total risk than the behavior of people elsewhere.

> It hardly matters that your tables are spread out, or that you wore your mask while waiting for your reservation.

According to the CDC it does.

> And I don't see why you should attack people for not wanting to make sacrifices that you yourself refused to.

I haven't stepped foot inside any building without wearing a mask the entire time since February. I haven't gone to a restaurant or bar (indoors or outdoors) at all. To the best of my recollection, I can count the number of buildings I've been inside on one hand.

The most recent restrictions in Washington don't affect me at all because I never loosened my behavior after the first wave in April. I'm going well above and beyond what's necessary in order to reduce not just my risk but that of the people I come into contact with.

Meanwhile, jackasses are throwing parties and protesting wearing masks and making it worse for everyone.

This is no longer allowed as of yesterday btw. The data caught up

Yeah, the whole eating and drinking in public places inside is definitely not a good idea with respect to Covid.

My experience on a similar trip was that virus diligence bottomed out in the Dakotas. I went to a restaurant, and their mask warning said something to the effect of "please wear a mask, if you don't we'll assume you have a health condition." Of course, the restaurant was filled to capacity without a mask in sight.

You can't wear a mask while eating or drinking. What else did you expect?

> if you don't we'll assume you have a health condition...without a mask in sight.

I suppose it was assumed everyone had a mental-health condition.

Last time I had to hit the road, I noticed that the social distancing/mask wearing travelers were avoiding towns and eating/relaxing at highway rest stops.

Weird, I moved from SF to Philadelphia last week and most stores on route 80 required masks.

How is the move working out for you, btw?

they're posix compliant so I would imagine they can colo anywhere lol

I have lived in Philadelphia for almost 8 years now and it’s making less and less sense to live here.

City taxes are high, housing prices are steadily increasing, making changes to property is an expensive, bureaucratic nightmare, parking is a nightmare, etc. There aren’t (m)any good places to work that pay well enough to justify the taxes and cost of living. The winter is cold and dreary, the summer is humid.

If not for covid it would make a lot more sense to live in Boston or NYC.

I’m interested in moving to South Carolina or Florida.

Please don't use other people's real names in your HN username - it's a distraction and ultimately a subtle form of trolling (even if you don't mean it to be). If you'd like to use this account with a different name, we can change it for you - just email hn@ycombinator.com with the new name.

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

If you want to live in SC or FL, Philly was never the right place for you. The city exemplifies all classic east coast metropolii; it's vertical, industrial, impatient, no-nonsense and in-your-face. Having lived here for 15 years I've seen Philly offer a little bit of everything, from cultured worldliness to provincial naval gazing. And all of it happens at an urban breakneck speed the east coast is rightly famous for.

Philly, Boston, and NYC are kith and kin (esp. politically), and have much more in common with SF than do SC or non-urban FL. There the tempo of life is slower and more formal, like their danse de rigueur, the gavotte.

I live in Chicago, and masks are the norm everywhere. Definitely indoors, and to a lesser degree outdoors. We rented a house in Wisconsin for a weekend in the fall, and culturally there was a big difference. Went to pick up a pizza and the outdoor patio was packed, drinking beer and watching college football. There were some people wearing masks, but it was not the norm. We were definitely in the minority.

I have family in rural Wisconsin and she wanted to buy masks and couldn't even find anywhere local to buy some. I ended up buying her a bunch in California and shipping them to her.

I had the exact same experience on a trip to Tahoe a few months ago. My girlfriend and I needed to get away, so, we booked a hotel and just stayed in for the weekend. We didn't see one single other person wearing a mask who wasn't some sort of restaurant server. We got our food to go.

While the SF Bay Area is much better than most of the country, it's still annoying seeing people here not use masks outside of their homes, or wear them improperly.

With masks we can get back to normal relatively quickly, but people just need to wear them

Interesting to see you say the SF Bay Area is much better than most of the country, while this article says the Bay Area is experiencing significant population decline:

https://www.publiccommentsf.com/post/u-s-postal-service-data...

I was talking specifically about its execution of COVID-19 mitigation. Taxes, and other issues are a completely different subject.

Should've specified that in the original comment, because significant population loss is not doing well.

The whole conversation is about infections from Covid. I don't think that chaostheory needed to explicitly state the context. Everyone in every post in every thread does not need to state the entire context. That's what threads are for.

Masks will not allow us to get back to normal more quickly. The only thing that will allow that is immunity through vaccinations. Countries other than the US have implemented strict mask & border controls still do not have a handle on the virus.

China doesn't seem to have a covid problem. Now, granted it's difficult to trust their official statements on anything because of how easily they lie thinking everyone else is too stupid to see through it. But I'd think if covid were actually a problem there word would get out eventually.

I understand they put some pretty severe restrictions in place initially, though. Probably far too strict for most of us in the west to truly consider. But now they don't need them, and people are more or less living normally.

Studies and data tell us otherwise.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-face-mask-protection-vacc...

https://www.health.com/condition/infectious-diseases/coronav...

People in Asia, from both what I've seen and what my relatives keep telling me, no longer quarantine or social distance. Case in point: Singapore. They have a larger population than New Zealand yet live on an island that's smaller than NYC. They have virtually no local cases. They all wear masks.

btw which country were you referring to that had both mask mandates and strict border controls, and simultaneous are unable to contain it? Doesn't New Zealand has both? They seem to be managing it just fine.

When are we going to stop playing the blame game in regards to COVID? When it's cases in middle America surging, observers are "not surprised". How can this comment be taken as anything but scorn and disdain for rural Americans? It's repugnant.

Where was this same sentiment when places like NYC were getting swamped with Covid? Anyone?

I'm so damn tired of this holier-than-thou approach to COVID, and life in general. It gets nobody anywhere, except for making the person casting aspersions feel better than the ones they're looking down on.

If anything, this pandemic sure has made people show their true colors. Always a good thing, I suppose

The sentiment was everywhere. Rural and suburban areas thinking that NYC deserved it and that it just couldn't happen where they were. And then they refused the fruits of the lessons learned in New York because it just couldn't happen where they were.

People want to complain about the polarization of middle america, but it's mostly BS. What you see online or on the news is not at all indicative of these areas. By that, I mean, these areas are not swarming with people who "refused the fruits of the lessons" of NYC and other places. And I've met VERY few, if any, who thought that NY et. al somehow deserved the pandemic spread.

Where are you getting this information from, if you don't mind me asking?

I'm not sure where you're getting your facts from, but I've been travelling all throughout the MidWest and the South for work this past year. Most people are plenty concerned about Covid, wear masks, etc. It's a highly contagious disease that no country, except for a very select few, have gotten under control in any way.

Once again, I think the country would be a lot better if we just stopped pointing fingers like this.

I'm not American and I don't live in USA. But when a communication center with high density of population is infected at the beginning of a new epidemic it's quite logical this happening. When the pandemic expand to low density areas 6/7 months later when we know a lot of ways to reduce the contaminations, it's not normal this is hapenning.

The entire western world is getting blasted by the 2nd wave of the pandemic. Germany, France, the UK, Spain, Italy. The list goes on & on.

Please explain to me how this is "not normal"

Watching the divergent responses by governors & states who, more generally, trust scientific experts (E.g., Hogan in Maryland, Inslee in WA), vs governors who don't...

I'm glad I live in WA. If I lived in one of those other states, I would look for work, then move when I found it. Family ties, whatever; wouldn't matter. It's a clear breakdown of competent government; time to leave for a better place. For myself and even more, my kid. Not particularly related to urban/suburban/rural divides. Nor per se even Dem vs GOP.

Welcome to Michigan!

Is there any correlation between mask-wearing areas and Biden/Trump voting patterns? I'd be very interested to see someone pull up the data.

Given that we're seeing the same spike in our big, coastal metro areas, perhaps the problem is more complicated than rural attitudes towards Covid.

[0] https://outbreak.info/epidemiology?location=METRO_42660%3BME...

NY: 231 cases per million SD: 1609 cases per million

https://www.covidexitstrategy.org/

> Given that we're seeing the same spike in our big, coastal metro areas

When taking the differences in total population and population density into account, the spikes in sparsely populated states like OK are nothing like the spikes in densely populated states like NY.

rather than moralizing angrily ('fucks'), why not try to hone in on what you're worried about exactly? were you really in danger?

if you'd have focused more on the lack of distancing indoors, that might have been a legitimate concern. but masks are for show in most places, at most times, and your focus on them indicates a retreat to symbolism rather than effect. the primary appeal of masks is for quelling fear and anxiety, not preventing spread.

the one common place they would help, the private social gathering, is where they're donned the very least, because masks have strong connotations of mistrust, which is antithetical to socializing. so masks won't save us, no matter how much force is put behind them. even in countries commonly cited for high mask usage, other more primary mitigative measures are what led to propagation control, not masks. masks are marginal.

walking through a lobby/store or sitting at a table in a restaurant with your family isn't a significant risk, no matter what the other patrons are doing, as long as there's a little distance between (no, the virus is not floating around in significant concentrations to probabalistically infect you from across the room; it falls to the ground and dies quickly). the only other person you should worry about there is your server, who, out of at least "corporate necessity", will likely be wearing a mask, a decent use of masking as someone who interacts closely with lots of strangers (rather than, say, outside, where they're wasted).

this kind of moralizing is not out of a cohesive worry for others, but a divisive fear (anger is a primal reaction to fear). so why are we so fearful and anxious? deconstructing that would be a more fruitful discussion than dwelling so much on the anxiety itself.

> the primary appeal of masks is for quelling fear and anxiety, not preventing spread.

The appeal of masks for me is definitely to lower spread. Yes there is signaling, but also because masks reduce amount of possibly covid-infected droplets expelled from the mouth and nose while breathing and speaking.

It is not possible to have a 6 foot bubble around everybody at all times. It is possible to always wear a mask.

This is not moralizing, this is science.

that's rationalization, not science. feel free to wear a mask everywhere if it makes you feel better and aligns with your mediosocial affiliations, but the breadth of science show that masks are effective in specific, marginal situations, not everywhere, and that its population-level effects are drowned out by other, better mitigations.

Maybe we’ve been reading very different breadths of science. Saying masks only work in a small number of situations sounds more like rationalization for not wearing one when we know aerosols are a major source of spread, and that masks significantly reduce aerosol transmission.

1) I don't think its consensus that aerosols are a MAJOR source of spread.

2) Masks are much less effective for aerosols than for droplet transmission. I think the consensus is they at least somewhat reduce aerosol transmission. Only n95 w/o exhale vents that are properly worn are believed to be good at reducing aerosol transmission.

The fact that your glasses fog up shows that surgical masks certainly are very leaky.

aerosols are not a significant source of spread. otherwise, we'd have been inundated with specific stories and studies proving it. distancing overwhelms the effects of masks in nearly all common interaction cases.

I see this perspective a lot on social media and I think it just adds to the corona response culture shock. No one ever seems to understand each other better when this is brought up.

People seem to always assume/project the other party is controlled by high levels of anxiety around using masks when in reality I see most people know that distancing/masks are a risk mitigation technique (NOT a one-stop-fix, but a risk mitigation) used to bring virus spread rate down and flatten the curve. Instead of being an emotionally charged subject, I think most people see distancing/masks as a tool to reduce the spread of the virus so that we can go out more often as opposed to taking no mitigations and contributing to exponential rates of virus spread.

With this perspective, I think feeling violated by people avoiding masks is a healthy, normal response. It's not about feeling anxious for going outside, but that we have been violated by people spreading the virus to others causing us to have to extend the lockdown and keep our economy dead in order to not over-burden the hospitals.

distancing (indoors), yes. masks everywhere, not so much.

it’s important to dig into these nuances to dispel the anxiety and fear we have against each other (like feeling violated). and lockdowns (in the US at least) are political theater, accruing benefit to a few and wreaking discriminate havoc on the many. the mediopolitical apparatus deserves that blame, not the vilified ‘other’.

The whole “just be 6 feet away and it can’t get to you” is not reality, despite what the CDC or WHO says. Sure, keeping 6 feet apart helps reduce exposure compared to being 2 feet apart, but droplets containing the virus don’t all just magically hit the ground within that radius. Ventilation of fresh air is critical because of the buildup of aerosols that occurs indoors: https://english.elpais.com/society/2020-10-28/a-room-a-bar-a... I’ll be blunt. Restaurants are not a good idea right now; when people are eating and talking they are filling the air with spit, and you can’t wear a mask while eating. And even with masks, prolonged exposure indoors without any fresh air will expose many if one person in the room is contagious.

Masks are one additional piece—and truly one of the easiest measures—to reduce overall exposure. It’s been well established that even basic masks significantly reduce the amount of aerosols emitted as we talk, so when I’m in a grocery store surrounded by others, I do feel unsafe if people aren’t wearing masks, because it means far more of their airborne spit emitted when they breathe, talk, cough, or sneeze is reaching my eyes and lungs than if they would just wear a simple, cheap surgical mask. Medical personnel don’t wear masks for the hell of it; they wear them because it substantially reduces the amount of transmission, and does provide some small amount of protection to the wearer versus wearing nothing.

I don’t even blame people for coming to the conclusion that masks don’t need to be worn. The science has gotten much clearer over the past year and yet our governmental leaders have not only failed to accurately convey what we’ve learned, but have actually lost the trust they may have had. It’s no wonder people are confused about what works to reduce risk and what doesn’t, and how significant the risks are, when our leaders fist told us masks only protect doctors, then told us we could stop the spread with short, poorly enforced lockdowns that maximized economic harm without sufficiently quarantining the population, and now are telling everyone to wear a mask without properly acknowledging that aerosols are a major mechanism for superspreader events.

note that care workers interact intimately closely with others, and are a good example of the marginal case where masks are a primarily effective mitigation. most common interactions don’t fit this profile.

Studies so far seem to disagree with you that going to a restaurant 'isn't a significant risk'.

“...restaurants were by far the riskiest places” for new infections, “about four times riskier than gyms and coffee shops, followed by hotels,”

https://sf.eater.com/21561143/covid-19-restaurants-indoor-di...

"...case-patients were more likely to have reported dining at a restaurant (aOR = 2.4, 95% CI = 1.5–3.8) in the 2 weeks before illness onset than were control-participants."

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6936a5.htm

what's your take on https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/20/health/airflow-coronaviru...?

as an instance of seeing what we want to see in what is otherwise a random event (like flipping 6 heads in a row is not that uncommon over lots of flips).

the simpler, more likely explanation is that those were three different sets of transmissions that happened to be sitting next to each other in a restaurant at the same time, with a clever narrative tying it together. cleverness restrains our otherwise natural skepticism.

we'd likely have seen dozens of similar stories if this was a significant mode of transmission. and nyt is biased and partisan enough to have featured those stories prominently if they'd have been available.

My friend works in the covid ICU here in Michigan and told me yesterday that she's seeing a dramatic increase in patients who are getting angry at her and still believing that covid is not real. When she asks where they may have caught it, they sometimes say at a wedding with 100 people where no one was wearing masks.

I can't imagine how emotionally taxing it was to be a healthcare worker attending to people with covid in the beginning, but at least then they received a lot of gratitude from their patients. I cannot fathom how these healthcare workers must feel after 8 months of this and then getting yelled at by patients who don't think this is real. I almost don't even want to imagine how much pain they might be feeling.

I don’t know how these healthcare workers do it. Why would I put my physical and mental health in danger to save people who are that selfish? I suspect many of them need the job. But those who do it out of a sense of duty are better people than I am I guess.

Ambition leads people to med school, med school brainwashes people into the sense of duty thing, and then the first ten years of clinical practice unravel that into a jaded spiral of misanthropy (but by that point you're sill paying off interest on that 100k debt, so what else are you going to do?).

I have an aunt who was forced to come into work at her hospital before stay-at-home orders were in effect in Florida. Not complying meant professional consequences.

Healthcare pays very, very well.

Politics seems to be a factor here, but I wonder how much of this has to do with popular culture.

Over the last 20 years we've been bombarded with metric tons of Apocalypse porn, a lot of it focused on killer viruses.

Most of those movies are unrealistic to put it mildly. Zombies. Deserted cities. Rotting corpses on sidewalks. Visible, palpable nauseating death.

This pandemic is nothing like those movies. I know of not a single pop culture depiction that looks anything like what we have now, except maybe the movie Contagion. And that's really a stretch.

So a lot of people have a problem when they see dire predictions and statistics that bear no relationship to what their own five senses are telling them.

There's also the problem of previous pandemics that sounded the alarm, but amounted to little in the US. SARS-CoV-1 and the Swine Flu.

All of this leaves the US with a population primed to expect a very unrealistic kind of pandemic, and already skeptical from previous false alarms. Throw in a president who not only sympathizes with the "hoax" perspective, but actively encourages it, and it should maybe not be surprising that we are where we are.

I don't know stuff has been pretty apocalyptic the past 9 months. In San Jose a normally busy clean commercial street was boarded up on every store front with graffiti on most boards(BLM riots/protests). Trash was everywhere. Everyone was wearing masks. In NYC in April mobile morgue trucks flooded the city as the dead exceeded the capacity of the city's morgues. Drive by some parking lots and see hundreds of cars waiting to get covid tests. During the spring many stores in major metro areas ran out of basic supplies like paper towels/tiolet paper, cleaners, meat. A friend of mine had to wait 3 hours to get toilet paper at a target(3/20). In Italy and Europe busy tourist areas were empty and soldiers were patrolling the plazas with rifles. This stuff is like nothing I have ever seen in my life and my parents and grandparents lives as well.

This probably somewhat explains why people in rural and suburban areas are quick to dismiss it as a hoax. None of what you seen is present outside of coastal American cities.

I vacationed in rural Wisconsin this summer. Felt like every other summer I spent there.

I think it was a mistake to lockdown many states in March that didn't really have a large number of infections. They spent 2-3 months lockdown for a virus that didn't really exist in their world yet. They formed their opinion that it was FRAUDVIRUS at that time. And aren't reevaluating now that they are finally getting their huge wave.

Maybe a mistake in hindsight, but part of the point was the we simply didn't know which parts of the country did and didn't have a large number of infections and couldn't afford to have several more New Yorks.

Agree, its why at the time a national lockdown made little sense(early March/April timeframe). Britain did that and its GDP dropped 20%. Now in the US the virus is running rampant due to increased spread, lower humidity and colder weather so will have to see what Biden does in the coming months but I expect a nationwide mask mandate at the very least and probably 1-2 months of the entire country under a strict lockdown. And this is with a vaccine somewhat widely available.

> This stuff is like nothing I have ever seen in my life and my parents and grandparents lives as well.

My personal experience doesn't match that. I'm German, so my grandparents on both sides were involved in WWII. I grew up with the stories of what they had to go through. My grandmother had to flee after the war when she was ten on a 24h notice, being allowed to carry only one suitcase and give up all other possessions. Hunger was rampant, people foraged in the woods for acorns. Bread with mustard was a delicacy.

I think we should be grateful that for most Western countries, the last 2-3 generations have seen an incredible, unprecedented period of stability and peace.

The power works, water runs, food is delivered, and I stil get bills and spam in the mail

This is not an apocalypse scenario. There were supply shocks, but thats a function of JIT living that naturally makes things extremely fragile.

While maybe there is some truth to what you say, it doesn't justifies being an idiot that cant distinguishing reality from tv. Furthermore denying evidence because it doesnt align with how it happens in the movies

Contagion feels like a stretch because everyone has PPE.

News teams aren't sending camera crews into the overflow hospitals being setup. Hard to show full hospitals ("rooms are full" doesn't look good on TV), nor could TV crews go into Patient rooms and show what it looks like (social media is doing this, but typically for patient's who are surviving as personal accounts).

World News Tonight showed a hospital and a patient in his room last night.

This is what happens when politics becomes religion, then pollutes things where religion should have no place, namely science. I just recovered from Covid, and I can tell you although some symptoms indeed are similar to a normal flu, and although I wasn't heavily hit by the virus, there are others that I never experienced in my life, like squishing a fresh basil leave right under my nose and smell absolutely nothing, or eating potatoes that tasted like cardboard. Only somebody whose critical thinking has been completely annihilated could think there wasn't something serious going on.

This has happened frequently in history. Separation of church and state is a relatively new idea. The fascinating part to me is that this appears to be the first time the religious people are demanding the right to effectively kill themselves as well and not just others. Seems like a self defeating strategy.

Tangent, but, since ~2010,

I believed HN was the smartest publicly available forum. It made sense that the users here would go on to be leaders at innovative companies.

Something changed around 2016 and has accelerated since 2018.

Seeing the "COVID denial" comments in this thread is exactly what I'm talking about.

It's just too bad.

Worse, this entire thread has already been flagged into oblivion, like any other thread that HN apparently "can't handle" anymore,

Sadly, that will ultimately decrease the amount of smarts working on this critical problem.

I'm also shocked at the amount of COVID downplaying, but I guess it's better than the usual "only one right opinion" you see on other controversial topics where the echo chamber is stronger. I guess I'd rather engage and debate a COVID denier than have their posts simply downvoted to -4 and flag-killed.

I'll bite sure.

Covid is not that bad. Statistically unless you are very sick and/or very elderly, you are extremely likely to not die.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-73777-8

Deaths were almost entirely in the 60-80+ years old range. When your that old dying is sad, but inevitable.

I'm extremely glad that we don't have an actually dangerous pandemic that effects a wider span of the population.

Sounds like you're coming at this in good faith so thanks!

OK, so your paper only takes about mortality. It's a good point that a low percentage of people die from this. Great news. However there's growing evidence pointing to long-term health problems for survivors. Elevated risk of stroke even among young people, heart damage, and long lasting respiratory problems. Since the disease is new, we don't really know the long lasting effects yet. Maybe they will go away after years, we'll see. My neighbor had it and still struggles to breathe and has that widely-described "mind haze" many months later. Point is you can't just look at death rate.

But, for the sake of argument, let's assume you personally are fortunately in the group that won't experience any of these problems. How do you know that everyone you encounter are also in that lucky group? Same for the people they encounter after they encounter you? You don't, and by not following the basic guidance of staying at home and wearing a mask when you have to go out, you're increasing the likelihood that others you meet catch it, and then either die, have long-lasting health problems, or spread it to others.

Now, let's talk about 60-80+ year olds. "They're gonna die anyway so..." So, what, exactly? Increase their chances of dying because we don't want to close Starbucks? I don't think I can really even put myself in the shoes of someone making this argument. Almost everyone has someone in their family or acquaintances in this age range. A mother or grandfather. Maybe a teacher. I don't think you're really saying downplay the virus even if it throws these loved ones under the bus. If this was the year 2060 and you were in this age range (I'm assuming), would you still make this argument?

One thing we can agree on: We're glad it's not more deadly than it is. If COVID were 10x deadlier, or affected people uniformly across age ranges, or if it were 10x more transmissive, we would have been in a world of shit, because people evidently don't have the character to make small uncomfortable sacrifices for the greater good. Even with a 10x worse COVID, we would have just kept insisting on going shopping and partying and accepting more people dying. Which is appalling, really.

Can someone help me understand something?

Back in March, we had ~40k new cases per day, and were seeing ~3k deaths per day.

Today, we have ~140k new cases per day, but our deaths seem to be ~1k per day, and haven't risen much with rise in cases since September.

What explains this? Were we not testing as much in March, and really our cases were ~200k per day? Or were the populations that got sick in March somehow different than today?

A few answers:

- the infected population tends to be younger this time around (the nursing homes already got cleaned out).

- test availability in March was low, so only the severe cases got tested

- better treatment awareness (e.g. proning).

We don't know for sure. But several hypotheses are being thrown around:

- when the virus hit the first time, the age group of those affected was higher, hence the high initial mortality.

- hospitals have better protocols now to deal with the disease. They learned a lot over the past months wrt to treatment. For example not putting people on ventilators that fast.

- through natural selection, a milder strain has managed to be more contagious but less lethal overall.

- some of the mask ordinances were effective in reducing the viral load

Regarding the last point, I'd never thought of a virus like a poison before. Very interesting, thank you.

If I get a higher dose of virus does that mean I will be sicker?

Yes – work on two other coronaviruses: severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers) has shown this.

https://www.sccm.org/getattachment/05471bbb-2f6d-40f4-aa0e-c...

We certainly weren't doing enough testing in the Spring to know the true case numbers.

There's a number of reasons that explain the lower death rate now.[0] The population getting infected now is younger, and less likely to die. We've also gotten much better at treating patients once they're sick enough to wind up in the hospital.

[0] https://www.nj.com/coronavirus/2020/11/fewer-in-nj-are-dying...

A much lower fraction of the new cases today are old folk, who have a much greater likelihood of dying from it. We've also learned not to do stupid things like send infected old folk back to group homes.

We've also learned how to treat severe cases better. We have a few therapies now that we didn't then like remdesivir and antibody serum, and know when & when not to use them. But mostly we know what doesn't work well, like hydroxychloroquine and early aggressive use of ventilators.

Detection and treatment have gotten better.

The populations exposed are also shifting. Schools are back, more elderly and at risk are taking proper precautions.

More testing and the PCR iterations are off the scale (over 40). They're basically picking up tons of false positives. With that type of PCR testing, it's like picking up background radiation with a Geiger counter and saying you've been exposed to deadly radiation.

> but our deaths seem to be ~1k per day

1) Most mild and asympthomatic Covid-19 cases were mostly ignored back in March 2020.

Now more Covid cases are, actually, tested.

That is why "new cases" are significantly higher.

2) Big share of the population already has immunity against Covid-19 (because they were exposed to Covid earlier this year).

That is why deaths from Covid are much lower.

I feel like I've seen versions of this story pop up throughout the year, and it seems that others have too [0]. I guess I remain skeptical as to whether this actually happened until more proof can be provided.

[0] https://twitter.com/annbauerwriter/status/132853834817300480...

Here is a similar story from a news source: https://www.npr.org/2020/11/12/934266487/icu-nurse-on-dealin...

You are right to be skeptical. Wired found tons of issues with it:

https://www.wired.com/story/are-covid-patients-gasping-it-is...

Interesting.

I followed the links, and found one that seemed legit: https://twitter.com/TheBlondeRN/status/1328378945172074499

Did you see the link to the nurse being interviewed?

https://mobile.twitter.com/theblondern/status/13283789451720...

Really?

https://www.mibluesperspectives.com/2020/10/30/teen-diagnose...

These types of interactions happen all the time. A simple youtube search will get you tons of patient accounts.

This was a strategy used by certain hospitals to increase public awareness.

Nowhere in that article does it say that he went to urgent care insisting that covid isn't real. The link that the OP posted says that dying patients are insisting that covid isn't real. Your own link says that the kid thought that it just hit older adults, not that he thought it was fake or a new world order conspiracy or any garbage like that.

While politics are being hotly debated I came here to say that I am again and again fascinated by the ability of the human mind to delude itself.

You might be quick to argue that these patients aren't smart, and there will likely be a correlation, but being smart does not protect you from delusion.

This is evidenced by a number of Nobel prize winners who have gone on to peddle pseudo-science. E.g. Kary Mullins, 1993 Nobel prize in chemistry for the PCR technique, went on to deny the link between HIV and AIDS [1]. This New York Times article has more examples [2].

So there is a non-zero chance that you and I might find ourselves in similar situation of denial, and we shouldn't be too quick to judge.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis#Contrarian_scienti...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/weekinreview/28johnson.ht...

https://mackuba.eu/corona/#south_dakota_united_states.daily?...

To set the perspective for those not familiar, the population of the state is close to 900k, roughly the same as the city of San Francisco. The normal pace of all-cause deaths is about 24 per day, so with COVID-19 killing off 15 people per day it is probably the leading cause of death in that state today.

If I remember correctly, deaths today are linked with the hospitalizations 12 days prior.

From what I've seen, South Dakota is nearly out of ICU beds, as are many other states.

These Covid19 death rates are going to get really, really bad this time around.

Definitely. The die, as they say, is already cast. Remember, too, that the trailing 7-day average of an exponential process is incredibly misleading. If it's 15 deaths per day by that measure, that means it's really 50 today and 100+ soon.

Yeah, that graph added 7-day averaging because the reporting numbers bounce around on weekend boundaries, which was leading to a lot of confusion.

Whether there's 1-day or n-day averaging, exponential growth is the scary beast.

>From what I've seen, South Dakota is nearly out of ICU beds

Do you have a source for this?

According to the South Dakota Department of Health site, they 36.2% of the ICU beds are currently available [1]. According to this article [2], that count includes NICU (infant) beds, which will not be very helpful for COVID-19, which mostly seriously infects adults.

[1]: https://doh.sd.gov/news/Coronavirus.aspx

[2]: https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-sioux-falls-voting...

How many beds are usually available? If there is, for example, only typically 40% of ICU beds available then being at 36% isn't that bad.

I've looked into these states and its really hard to get a good idea how close we are. There are easy solutions to quickly expanding ICU beds:

1) moving patients who don't need to be in ICU back to the regular wards. Hospitals tend to have a "use it or lose it" view of ICU beds.

2) you can turn regulars ward beds into ICU beds fairly quickly.

The limiting factor is essentially the doctors/nurses/staff. They are able to squeeze more space by forcing doctors/nurses/staff to work longer hours. But you can't shift radiology doctors/nurses to ICU since they aren't qualified.

We'll know things are bad when there is a call for doctors from less hard areas to fly to the infected areas.

Long story short, its hard to know as layperson what % is bad, so we should just listen to the experts.

I have wondered that myself, and it's a valid consideration.

Anecdotally, I've seen quite a few people who work in and around ERs and ICUs reporting a sharp increase in 'business', which follows (but trails) Covid19 positive test data.

We obviously don't know with any degree of precision how bad things are at the macro scale, but I think it's undeniable that the current trajectory is pretty scary.

I was looking at this site:

https://public.tableau.com/profile/todd.bellemare#!/vizhome/...

Noting that the adjacent comment also seems to have some good data.

In the US we seem to either focus on the medical crisis or the economic crisis. I wish we would focus on both.

How I understand it, how to resolve this would require medical interventions (shutdowns, testing, tracing, therapies, vaccines, etc) and economic interventions (stimulus, deferrals, forgiveness, etc) and yet we seem to mostly be doing the medical ones and getting pushback on it.

I could be wrong on this, but I think one of few institutions in this country that can provide economic interventions is the US Congress. They provided one stimulus bill that helped to provide the economic safety net while we worked on the medical safety net. It shocks and angers me that they haven't provided another one.

I struggle to see why they don't provide more economic stimulus. HN, can you help me understand why Congress isn't providing more financial help to the country?

More precisely, the majority of the US Senate (republican) opposes another large COVID bill. In contrast, the majority of the US House (democrat) has proposed new bills at between $2-3 trillion.

The GOP is currently under control of the current President. Until he leaves, they will not act independently. After January 20 (and after the Georgia Senator runoffs are over), republicans will fear Trump's wrath less. But will that be enough to shift those politicians' sentiment? Only the impact of enough lives lost to COVID in the next two months will tell.

But why does the Republican majority oppose another large COVID bill? I guess I just haven't heard or understand their arguments for why they think giving more economic stimulus would be a bad thing.

- Is it a moral one? "Giving money makes people lazy, people should work for their money."

- Is it a financial one? "If we give more money, this country will go further into debt."

- Loyalty/obedience to Trump?

- Something else?

I'm just so confused...

They say that "it's a bunch of radical left-wing priorities disguised as a pandemic bill".

What they mean is that they really don't want to give money to states and local governments, because they believe it will be poorly spent. This is problematic because these governments can't borrow, so will need to cut services in the midst of a pandemic.

Additionally, the Republicans are pushing strongly for a liability shield for employers from Covid deaths/cases, which the Democrats don't like.

Additionally, a bunch of Republican senators have found debt-reduction Jesus again, in the midst of the pandemic (even the IMF, those bondholder-buring, water-privitising backstards have said that now is not the time to worry about debt).

Covid is turning out to be a disease of culture. The same virus hit the East and the West. The East got through it, the West is on its knees.

I’d call it a disease of experience, first and foremost.

The US missed the worst of SARS-Cov1 and MERS, which were catastrophic in some parts of the world. East-Asian Democratic countries had public debates about what are and are not reasonable public health measures. They passed enabling laws, built public health infrastructure, and established cutting edge novel virus surveillance programs.

The US did not. We were creating homeland security departments and starting stupid trillion dollar wars.

How do you explain certain states and cities doing so much better, even within the US? And other western countries, such as NZ, Canada, and Germany really beating the US in every metric possible? Experience is not the key here. Quality of leadership is

Is Germany really beating anything now? They sure did before but things have changed over here, the whole Europe is affected though.

Do you see anything happening in the US public sphere to make you particularly hopeful about how we’ll handle the next one? These people are literally dying on the hill of “covid is a hoax”. Half of the country claims they won’t take a vaccine, and the leadership of half of the country has learned they can gain power by downplaying covid.

I expect this will go like Watergate—-it’ll be unclear and confusing for the people who lived through it, but clearer to subsequent generations with the aid of historical perspective.

I’m not hopeful at all about the US (RE: SARS-Cov2 or otherwise). I think we should have pulled the plug on this version of the Republic when we gave up on reconstruction after Civil War I.

The East already had a few diseases like this in the past. I wonder whether their reaction for the first time was much better.

I saw some people say there were two different strains. One that went East and one that went West. I don't know how accurate that is, but it may not be identical.

I have three small children who have not been sick ONCE since the lockdowns started. They barely have seen another child, let alone played with them in close proximity. Do you think this is good news? No, it actually puts them at much higher risk of childhood leukemia and that scares me much more than them getting covid 19[1].

Articles like this strike me as propaganda. You can believe that covid 19 is real and covid 19 is deadly but still be against lock downs, despite what the propaganda would have you believe. Our actions have consequences. There's no free lunch here.

1. https://www.nhs.uk/news/cancer/child-leukaemia-linked-reduce...

> Articles like this strike me as propaganda. You can believe that covid 19 is real and covid 19 is deadly but still be against lock downs, despite what the propaganda would have you believe.

How is this article propaganda? The nurse said, "many of her patients don't believe they are dying of COVID-19".

The patients weren't arguing against the lock down, they were arguing that the virus isn't real.

If it helps, this is from the same article (here again: [0]) and sounds like you do not have to worry too much about this. All the best to you and your family!

"Can I reduce my child's risk of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia?

The evidence isn't well enough established to suggest definitive recommendations that will reduce risk of child leukaemia.

[...]

Obviously, parents make their decisions about childcare based on a number of factors. They should not worry that they are endangering their child by not sending them to a nursery or day care.

And while most childhood infections are benign, some less common ones bring their own set of serious risks. So this review certainly shouldn't be taken as an encouragement to ditch important methods of infection prevention, such as frequent handwashing and making sure your child's vaccinations are up to date."

[0] https://www.nhs.uk/news/cancer/child-leukaemia-linked-reduce...

Yeah this all seems like propaganda

At this point my sentiments can be summed up thusly[0][1]. Although I'm the fortunate few who could work remotely -- and I've been doing so since the beginning of the year -- my job[2] still bounds me to CONUS. I'm beginning to entertain the thought of quitting so I could move to one of the few Asian countries that takes COVID-19 seriously.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXK03FHVsHk&t=26

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW9WGibEF04&t=266

[2] My company's COVID-19 response so far is excellent, but it doesn't help when (seemly) no one else gives a crap.

The absurdity of the irrationality at play here is just surprising. It's like the bystander effect, except it's all about being right and also involves risking yours and other people's lives. Unbelievable.

Obviously, it isn't right to be rude to nurses but it probably also isn't right to sneer at people on their deathbed who don't want to accept that they're dying or really understand why, and blame them for their disease even though we have no idea how they got it.

I think some people dying in hospitals from COVID have a right to be mad at the medical system. Did these patients get any of the 5+ antiviral or immunomodulatory drugs with published successful RCTs? Did they get prophylactic antithrombotics? Did they get good advice on a healthy diet and medical care throughout their life? Probably not, and I don't think a judgmental tone towards them helps anything.

A quote from the article: "It just makes you sad and mad and frustrated..." That's not sneering. That's being in a shitty situation and reacting as a human.

>5+ antiviral or immunomodulatory drugs with published successful RCTs

I don't think that number is at all accurate. Dexamethasone is really the only thing that fits your description. People think of remdesivir, but the data on that are still quite ambiguous.

> but wow do we sure know that they're dumb hicks who deserve to die

I didn't see that sentiment expressed in the article, or by the majority of comments here.

I have toned this down, thank you.

People in the healthcare system are doing the best they can, putting their lives at risk to help people, with insufficient resources.

Every should be very, very angry. It should be directed at politicians and corporations, not middle or working-class individuals trying their best.

Einsteins quote springs to mind:"Only two things are unlimited - the Universe and human stupidity. I'm not so sure about the first one."

Covid may not be real, but cognitive dissonance sure is.

tis but a flesh wound

Lol, perfect!

Though, sadly, some people here that are going to see that, combined with seeing "news" in the domain, and will start preaching it as fact to their children: "Dont worry, news says it's just like a flesh wound."

It's a shame that even pandemic diseases have to be politicized.

Go Darwin, Go

Yes, the pandemic fatigue is real. Yes, it would be wonderful to hang out with my friends in person, or to drive 100 miles crossing the border to go visit my children.

But the reason this is lasting so long, and things are shutting back down is because people are ignoring the truth. You can talk about the economy all day long, but the fact of the matter is that if we all would’ve taken this seriously and shut everything down, we would be through the worst of it already.

Comparatively, New Zealand and Canada have done a dramatically better job than America. People there appear to be willing to set aside their selfishness in favor of the common good.

And the people who don’t believe that it’s real? All I can say is that it’s extremely clear that we are living in a second Cold War. But instead of fighting with nukes, we’re fighting with misinformation, and Russia is winning.

Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. That's the last thing we need here. Well, tied for last anyway.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

the fact of the matter is that if we all would’ve taken this seriously and shut everything down, we would be through the worst of it already

This isn't supported by the available evidence. Spain was forbidding people from leaving their homes except for essentials, and now they're worse off than the US in terms of hospitalizations and deaths. Many other countries also had stronger lockdowns that have not spared them from winter surges.

You can say that they didn't do "real" lockdowns, and that if people would just sit quietly in their homes for six months then it would have gone away. Which is about as useful as saying that if everyone ate less and exercised more then obesity would be eliminated, or if everyone stopped having sex outside of marriage then STDs and teenage pregnancies would no longer be problems. Humans do not have infinite willpower, and if your plan is to assert that they should and then shame them for their horrible selfishness of wanting to occasionally visit their families, it is going to fail.

> Spain was forbidding people from leaving their homes except for essentials, and now they're worse off than the US in terms of hospitalizations and deaths.

That second wave has started months after Spain lifted all those restrictions.

Yes, that is exactly the point. Lockdowns don’t make all of this go away sooner, because as soon as you lift them, the outbreak resumes.

It was only ever supposed to buy us time (to develop treatments, vaccines, reorganize workplaces) and avoid overwhelming the capacity of services like hospitals.

I don't think anyone credible has said that lockdowns were going to put the genie back in the bottle. It is only one component of a complete response.

They _have_ argued that a complete response might permit more economic normalcy somewhat sooner, and that appears to be bearing out.

Spain did do real lockdowns and it worked. And then they stopped doing real lockdowns. So it is in fact supported by the evidence.

It didn’t solve the problem, meaning, unless you are willing to lock down indefinitely, the virus will come back. So in the pedantic sense you are right, lockdowns work, but clearly are not a solution.

I was there and remember the sequence of events clearly. The lockdown worked and cases across Spain were very low right after the quarantine. Then tourism opened back up, because the economy, and tons of people from countries that did not quarantine all flocked to Spain. Spain’s numbers started going up immediately.

Lockdown works; Spain would have been fine by now if they were more careful with opening (not allowing the British in for instance). But alas it is worse than ever and there is no stomach for another lockdown so people wear masks but restaurants are crowded every day and there are few travel restrictions so...

Clearly it is a solution. The problem is that places like Spain stopped their lockdowns. What we really need is a flexible and informed approach, where the stringency of lockdowns is implemented on a sliding scale determined by actual real-time case numbers. Masks and other basic measures should be everywhere and always required and more stringent steps applied proactively as hot spots emerge. This coupled with rapid testing and contact tracing works. It has been proven multiple times in multipel places.

The actual problem with Spain is that they have a decentralised system of contact tracing (which is normally good), but which didn't really get implemented quickly enough.

Madrid in particular did pretty poorly at this.

Additionally, their economy is so dependent on tourism that they felt they needed to open back up to avoid ruination.

This lead to loads more cases, coupled with pandemic fatigue and here we are.

Depends on what problem you are trying to solve. If you are trying to make COVID19 go extinct then yes, lockdowns aren't sufficient. If you are trying to avoid overwhelming health care resources (so they are available to dying patients of all kinds) then it can help as it reduces the hospitalization rate.

The lockdown brings the numbers down. Contact tracing, quarantines and testing keeps it down. If you do not follow up the lockdown with these measures, you are bound to fail.

It's not an unsolvable human nature problem. Look at just about any country in East Asia.

Lo, the flaws inherent in taking assertions way too literally.

Spain has a different economy than other countries. There's depends unusually heavily on tourism compared to other countries in the Western world.

What do you think happened in the last year that would prevent tourists from coming to Spain?

Seriously, HN, we are better than this inanity.

The country dealing better than any other with Covid has been Taiwan. No lockdown and > 200 days without new Covid case [1] see e.g. [2] for how they did it. It probably helped having had an epidemiologist as vice-president [3].

   Russia is winning.

Why did you have to end an otherwise insightful post with a many-times debunked conspiracy theory? May I recommend removing the last paragraph?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/29/taiwan-domesti...

[2] C. Y. Wang, C. Y. Ng, R. H. Brook, Response to COVID-19 in Taiwan: Big Data Analytics, New Technology, and Proactive Testing, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762689

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Chien-jen

It's not just Taiwan, it's all of East Asia. At this point it's beyond irresponsible for people to keep comparing the US's handling to other Western nations – EA showed how it's done (in both democratic and autocratic societies), but we have some weird cultural blind spot that makes us not want to see.

The problem is, there is no “how it’s done” to point to. All of the east asian countries did radically different things.

Taiwan slammed it’s borders shut before cases got into the country, and hasn’t done much else. Korea adopted large-scale contact tracing and isolation interventions. China uses authoritarian rule to lock people up when they have it. Japan hasn’t tested much at all, kept offices and restaurants open, and never even came close to “stopping“ the virus. And yet, even there, the fatality level isn’t nearly what we’re seeing in the west.

It isn’t unreasonable to hypothesize that something else is going on.

Your description of Taiwan's response is wrong.

As outlined in [2] I linked to above, Taiwan permitted the docking of the Diamond Princess [1] and allowed passengers to disembark in Keelung (near Taipei), on 31 January, before the ship left for Japan. The ship was subsequently found to have numerous confirmed infections onboard. In reaction, Taiwan's government published the 50 locations where the cruise ship travelers may have visited and asked around 600k citizens who may have been in contact with the tour group to conduct symptom monitoring and self-quarantine if necessary. So at least in the beginning of the pandemic, Taiwan was not closing the doors. Today, Taiwan has essentially the same 14-days entry quarantine as most countries. Another important difference is that Taiwan takes quarantine very seriously and monitored those sent into quarantine via mobile phone location tracking. That too is outlined in [2]. Police will talk to you if mobile phone movements indicate that 14 day quarantine is violated. In contrast, quarantine is de facto voluntary in many European countries.

There is no good reason as far as I can see, why other countries don't adopt similar policies.

I must admit, I am not pleased that I am loosing 1 year of my life because the countries that I live in are not adopting best practises. Indeed, are mostly not even aware of them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_Princess_(ship)

[2] C. Y. Wang, C. Y. Ng, R. H. Brook, Response to COVID-19 in Taiwan: Big Data Analytics, New Technology, and Proactive Testing, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762689

It seems to me that the one difference that is just stark, between the US and all of those cultures, is that they already had a system wherein it was acceptable (or even encouraged) to wear a face mask.

Is it that? Is it that simple? Those are honest questions.

Face masks have been normalcy on public transport in winter in south east Asia for a while, I think, but am not sure, since SARS Cov-1, in 2003.

The quarantines are only one tool in China’s response. They were also quick to adopt masks and contact tracing.

Characterizing quarantines as “locking people up” seems to me the root cause of the mass deaths in the West. The iconography of individualism has trumped the idea that walking around expelling a cloud of deadly material makes you a threat against the life and liberty of others.

>Why did you have to end an otherwise insightful post with a many-timed debunked conspiracy theory?

I believe they're making the extraordinary claim that Russia is solely responsible for Americans not believing in mask wearing, as if Russia is in total control of the most wealthy & strong country in the history of the planet. Americans love a bogeyman to distract from the reality of a completely politically split country who create their own misinformation and spreads it under their own power through domestic social media.

_Solely_ responsible? No, of course not.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=russian+covid+disinformatio...

I oppose lockdown/shut down, doesn't mean I don't believe that covid is real, nor I believe there is 0 risk from covid but simply I'm comparing the cost/risk of lockdown vs cost/risk of covid.

I acknowledge though that this cost/risk can be very subjective.

So what do you think of intensive care bed running out and people dying at the hospital entrances like in Italy? Also, what is the cost you speak about? How many minutes of Bezos income? How many F35? How many days of US budget deficit?

I mean avoiding lockdown is possible at a certain time. After a certain threshold of infection it becomes unavoidable. But lockdown or no lockdown, this must be done right. A few places have not done it right, for example Spain letting people party in the summer or France with packed cafes.

A friend of mine explained it well. When treated, COVID has a mortality of .5%. We are doing better than in March because for example elderly care person wear masks and isolate properly the risk population. If they wouldn’t, the mortality would be in the low percents, which would already be a lot. But when you are running out of ICU capacity, then you land in the 10% deaths. That’s what everyone is trying to avoid at the moment.

>So what do you think of intensive care bed running out and people dying at the hospital entrances like in Italy?

It is bad, I didn't say nothing should be done about it. Some that can be done: Increasing intensive care capacity, redistribute capacity to other hospital, do not admit patient with mild symptom, increasing effort for better treatment/vaccine, etc.

I'm still open to lockdown but certainly not for this virus. Doesn't make sense if the cure is worse than the disease.

Keep in mind vast majority cases is asymptomatic or only have mild symptomp.

cdc estimate of the ifr : https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

0-19 years: 0.00003

20-49 years: 0.0002

50-69 years: 0.005

70+ years: 0.054

Its very low.

>Also, what is the cost you speak about?

Lockdown cost: unemployment, bankruptcy, mental health issue, kids receiving poor education because they can't go to school, delayed treatment for other diseases, suicides, domestic violence, etc

> Comparatively, New Zealand and Canada have done a dramatically better job than America. People there appear to be willing to set aside their selfishness in favor of the common good.

Or even temporary constraints in favor of better things. In New Zealand you wear a mask but at least you can hang out with your friends. It's not even selfishness at that point, just denial and stupidity!

> But the reason this is lasting so long...

Masks and social distancing and banning birthday parties are not about speeding up or ending the pandemic but slowing it down (to minimize deaths) until a vaccine is ready. This is what 'flattening the curve' is all about.

It's also weird to see Canada among your success stories. Their 'worst of it' is right now.

We're fighting with misinformation alright.

> Masks and social distancing and banning birthday parties are not about speeding up or ending the pandemic but slowing it down (to minimize deaths) until a vaccine is ready. This is what 'flattening the curve' is all about.

Not quite. NZ took the route of hard lock down early, 30 days (2 infection cycles). They basically managed to get covid to burn itself out, so they're just dealing with imported cases, and contact tracing the heck out of out them to bust any potential clusters.

Canada's lockdown isn't nearly as long, and people didn't take it nearly as seriously. PHAC dragged their heels on mask use; and now on rating COVID as potential aerosol risk. We did it all half-assed, the province didn't use the time to really amp up contact tracing, learning techniques from jurisdictions that had success, such as South Korea, or Taiwan; nor did we really make testing work during the summer lull. The Feds didn't / can't squeeze some kind of national standard in dealing with things, in part because of the minority government, and in other parts of not knowing when doing the right thing matter more than dealing with idealists bitching about divisions of power.

We get cold faster and longer, and people tend to stay inside, so there can be more clusters. I'd expect things to get worse.

In this situation, NZ has unique geographical advantages. Others that have tried similar measures without those advantages haven't found the same success. I think most European and North American nations recognized very early on that NZ-style elimination was not a viable choice for them.

I agree with everything you say about Canada, which is another reason why I wouldn't put it in the same category as NZ.

> But the reason this is lasting so long, and things are shutting back down is because people are ignoring the truth. You can talk about the economy all day long, but the fact of the matter is that if we all would’ve taken this seriously and shut everything down, we would be through the worst of it already.

This is untrue to the point where it hurts. The reason it's lasting so long is because covid-19 is a highly infection virus that's already out in the wild, and it's going to spread despite our best efforts to contain it until a vaccine is invented and deployed or until we reach herd immunity.

We are not gods. We can't wave our hand at biology and make the virus disappear. We must take all necessary and sane precautions, and accept the consequences of our life.

So it turns out this post is likely complete disinformation and made up. This nurse likely hasn't treated very many dying patients. Wired did a followup:

https://www.wired.com/story/are-covid-patients-gasping-it-is...

'Not real' is a strawman fallacy argument. The real argument against wearking masks is that Covid-19 is similar to Influenza: a dangerous desease, but still not dangerous enough to spend too much time on wearing masks/social distancing -- and keep living in fear.

The reasoning against wearing masks -- is that wearing masks and social distancing - hurts more than it helps.

Idaho is currently sending it's overflow COVID patients to Washington state.

Idaho's state health authorities are blaming it on a mysterious epidemic that is definitely not COVID, and that social distancing, reduced capacity, and mask use is unnecessary.

> "Something's making these people sick, and I'm pretty sure that it's not coronavirus, so the question that you should be asking is, 'What's making them sick?'" he told the medical professionals who testified.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-idaho-kootenai-coun...

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