Lock Yourself Down, Now
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
> The best way to prepare would have been to enter this phase with as few cases as possible.
That is not entirely clear. It is possible that having more infections during the summer might actually be good overall because there was lighter load on medical facilities and immunity does appear to hold for a while after infection.
> In exponential processes like epidemics ...
That is way off. There is no need for exponential spread to trigger an epidemic. Currently the most accurate model for the spread of CoV2-SARS is from Michael Levitt and shows that exponential spread is completely impossible. That does not rule out fast spreading or mean we should relax, but it is important to understand that exponential spread is really bad and we have not seen that.
But we were apparently not able to throughout educate people to minimize infectious potential. To me it seems like common spreaders of respiratory diseases are completely ignorant about infection and don't even consider that by their actions (and presence!) they might infect others.
Global COVID-19 deaths - 1.3M (November 2020), mostly old
From the standpoint of QALY, there’s at least two orders of magnitude difference in the impact of the events.
Include the fact that the world population has basically tripled since 1950, making the impact proportionally less, and we are in three order of magnitude territory.
That’s probably part of it.
I have issues with comparing things this way. We easily could have had higher magnitude of deaths but we chose to use preventive measures to not have that. Hence, it does not yield a conclusive comparison and deriving anything from that is void.
The times of comparison are also not valid, as we are now just at the beginning of the 2nd or 3rd wave and compare that to the sum of all WWII related deaths at the end of WWII.
This is the reason why people are cynical when they say the measures are too excessive because we wouldn't see enough deaths. The only reason we don't see excessive deaths is due to the measures.
Nuclear bombs?
It became too costly to engage in large-scale warfare after they were invented.
We did have a group focused on looking for and responding to epidemics, but it was disbanded by US leaders who find science uncompelling and inconvenient. Japan responded to CoV2-SARS by attempting to identify and focus on clusters and have had far greater success than the US, so your glib reference to "humanity" and "societies" probably needs finer detail to be completely accurate.
To me this seems to be a cultural issue that could have been educated out of people. Just as in Asian countries masks were a everyday sight before the pandemic but in western societies not, as they integrated it into everyday culture and we didn't.
And I am also talking about other cultural issues, such as your mentioned refusal of science. We know from the past that measures regarding personal safety such as e.g. masking (or seat belts!) form loud counter-protest movements, see e.g. the Anti-Mask Leagues [1], which can undermine efforts to stop a pandemic. Yet, we did not work towards dealing with these cultural issues and anticipate or prevent the existence of these movements since the last pandemic.
This leads to further impacts. I am wondering if there are any analyses about how the inability of governments and people to deal with the Spanish Flu impacted the susceptibility of people to fall for totalitarianism which eventually lead to WWII.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Mask_League_of_San_Franci...
Err, what? You’re going to have to back that claim up with more than a Wikipedia link about a 100 year old event. I’ve not heard a single story like the one you appear to be claiming is commonplace...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25083754
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/iruoh4/update_...
I believe this premise is yet to be proven true. We've had no new world war yet.
>they observed with their own eyes (sickness and death) that's maybe not true with Covid-19.
The perceived risk might be just too low in order to reach emergency protocols in many people. Apparently it's not enough to show trains filled with dead people in Italy.
This assumes that people would act differently if the death was visible with their own eyes, e.g. with Ebola. But at this moment 2020 made me so pessimistic that I believe somebody here will post a study how even Ebola didn't bring up the change in people we would like to see.
I don't know yet how to deal with the fact that apparently my whole view on the world and the nature of humans was wrong my whole life.
Nothing convinces them. When a loved one dies of asphyxiation, they shrug it off and say that person died of obesity, old age, or a lack of vitamins. We have nurses telling stories of patients struggling to breath, but who still refuse to believe this virus is real and only cease gasping about the "fake news" when they are intubated.
Complicating this is our HIPAA regulations. The media can't show you what's happening inside our hospitals right now. They can only show the refrigeration trucks for bodies and roads closed for oxygen trucks outside the hospitals. So the conspiracy theorists claim these are for show and that the hospitals are actually empty.
With the complete abdication of leadership at the federal level--where some of our officials are openly urging citizens to fight against policies slowing the spread of the virus, we can do nothing but stay inside and hope to ride this out.
Collateral damage is a shame, but there's a limit to how much you force other people to do what you want. So be it.
It might seem so, but I'd say it's accurate, for exmaple:
“Their last dying words are, ‘This can’t be happening. It’s not real,’” Doering said, adding that some patients prefer to believe that they have pneumonia or other diseases rather than covid-19, despite seeing their positive test results.[1]
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/11/16/south-dakot...
Keep in mind the general urge to call them morons has the opposite effect. Not saying anyone in the thread specifically has done that, but melodrama/hand-wringing is in the neighborhood.
For me, I'm just not going anywhere or doing anything. It turns out that I can have everything delivered, and my risk is essentially 0. I'm going to wait it out until there's a vaccine. If the numbers dip very low in my area, I might try to squeeze in a doctor and dentist visit. I'm not immunocompromised, but it's not that hard to live as if I was. I'm considering this whole thing a bit of an experiment to see how self-sufficient I can be.
Conversely, I have coworkers that are traveling all over the country (wearing masks), and staying at cheap airbnb's. Some are relocating because of the changing housing market. If you don't mind taking on a minimal amount of risk, you can get a lot of good deals on flights/hotels/airbnbs/apartments/etc right now. Personally, even a little risk isn't worth it when I know there's 95% effective vaccine being manufactured.
At this point, it's obvious that we'll never get rid of COVID-19 entirely as a disease. Hopefully it'll become a disease only for the people that believe in "fake news" and "anti-vax".
Especially in the case of COVID, where NY, NJ, MA and CT have per capita death rates two to three times worse than the National average. In early May, over half of all US deaths were in the Boston to DC corridors.
The sort of folks who don’t care much about COVID aren’t posting on HN. Typically. So you will get a sampling bias towards the (over?) aware, or those who have an agenda for or against a particular position on COVID response.
There’s still a huge number of people in complete denial that this is real.
Beginning of August the deaths per capita in the 7 county Twin Cities area were four times the rate of the rest of the State. It has reduced to only 2.5 times now.
Basically for the first seven months, the COVID fatality rate in the rest of the State was comparable to the 17-18 flu season, perhaps a little better. Folks would reasonably ask why worry...
Given the Twin Cities have had over twice the COVID fatalities per capita is spite of an arguably superior health care system, the city folks themselves aren’t in much of a position to preach what works...
As to the rest of your point, yes, in a large urban area the virus will spread faster and sooner than out-state. However, I've been watching the weekly change per-capita per-county map in the Star Tribune and Hennepin county has been lagging everywhere else for quite some time now, so I think we are in fact in a position to preach about what works.
Similarly one can know it's real but have a different perception of risk.
For instance, a recently published controlled trial doesn't show a statistically significant difference between mask wearers and non.
I don't think you're taking away the complete story of the paper you mention. There are two fundamentally different ways in which masks could help: protecting the wearer from others, or protecting others from the wearer.
They state:
"These findings do offer evidence about the degree of protection mask wearers can anticipate in a setting where others are not wearing masks and where other public health measures, including social distancing, are in effect. The findings, however, should not be used to conclude that a recommendation for everyone to wear masks in the community would not be effective in reducing SARS-CoV-2 infections, because the trial did not test the role of masks in source control of SARS-CoV-2 infection. During the study period, authorities did not recommend face mask use outside hospital settings and mask use was rare in community settings (22). This means that study participants' exposure was overwhelmingly to persons not wearing masks."
By suggesting that this paper concludes that masks don't help much, it totally ignores the community benefit of widespread mask-wearing.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/dont-wear...
I think it is harmful to say that masks protect the wearer (unless they are N95 or better). This is a big and easily attacked surface that only serves to obscure and discredit the real point of wearing masks.
Instead the messaging should focus solely on the fact that they protect others from the infection carried (likely without knowledge) by the wearer, and that people without symptoms can be contagious.
This point needs to be drilled into people's heads until everyone gets it. People also need to be taught to wear masks properly. Wearing one with nose sticking out is darn near useless.
Given the prevailing attitude towards personal freedom and personal responsibility in the US, I wonder what sort of an effect would such explicit messaging would have on the level of mask wearing.
Umm...doesn't show a statistically significant difference between recommending mask wearing or not.
Ironically, when that study was posted here (yesterday?) people were saying in the comments the 'anti-maskers' would jump on it to 'prove' mask wearing wasn't effective.