Now in hindsight, I pause to wonder if it isn't more draconian to keep enforcing these half-assed rules for months on end - and being clearly ineffectively, if reports of ICU capacity are any indication...
Furthermore, many countries have laws that prohibit house arrest, which is essentially what you are suggesting here.
Finally, unless the entire world did the same, we would not be "covid-free". As soon as one person with covid entered the country post-lockdown, cases would grow. If Australia had actually beaten covid, then they could welcome people back. But they didn't beat it! That isolated themselves from the world and continue to do so. That isn't beating it at all.
You may be right that almost everything is open again, but there are also leaving thousands of their citizens stranded abroad. This is an absurd payoff for a virus that, at worst, kills .5% of people who contract it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/australia-...
Similarly, we have no constitution or bill of rights, so a house arrest law is easy and quick to pass.
The issue with the .5% figure is that 5% of covid patients would die if they didn't receive care. So the death rate is only 0.5% until your last hospital bed / ventilators / nurse is busy. Then it's 5%.
We've fucked about letting more and more people get it. Which is fine because 0.5% and because we're following the "herd immunity" strategy. Unlike Aus that went for eradication. But now, so many people are sick the hospitals are full.
London expects to run out of beds within 2 weeks. Rest of the UK in 3 weeks. Given the 5-6 day incubation period, that means we need to reduce the R number below 1 by Monday in London (where people are densely packed and rely on public transport). You have 7 more days for the rest of the place.
Or we accept the 5% marginal death rate. 5% is pretty fucking high.
Look around your office, your sports team, your family and fields. Pick 1 in 20 to die. And that's 5% across the board. It's higher for your grandparents, your sick cousin etc. Plus you have people permanently disabled and "Long Covid" to factor in.
So having encouraged people to go out, having let people test the rules and find them unenforced, and having done all the easy cheap shit (office worked wfh), the government finds it has to get very strict, convince people it means it this time, and get them to stay home, all in the next few days.
Oh, and the current government was elected by the people most likely to die of this. And the current leader is dumb and lazy. And he's spent the last year promising his party no more lockdowns...
But lets take your numbers as they are. It wouldn't be 5% of all infections, or 5% of all severe infections. It would be 5% of all infections _above hospital capacity_. Health systems wouldn't disappear, they would just not take in more folks, or triage more aggressively. I know you address this in your comment, but it is important to note. Because it greatly changes the emotional appeal for your emotional argument to spell it out.
Don't bring long-covid in to this discussion, there is no real hard evidence that it even exists AND is an artifact of covid.
I'm going off:
Positive tests in the UK yesterday: 52,618
Patients admitted yesterday: 3867
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare
That's 7.3%. It's gone up since I last looked, about 1month ago. But I wouldn't call it a true rate as there are plenty of people not getting tested. If half the people are asymptomatic or don't get tested for whatever reason, that gets you 3.6%. There aren't many beds left so I don't think they're admitting many people who don't need it.
I'd be happier discussing a range of anything from 2 to 10% because who the fuck knows. Fair?
To address the marginal vs absolute point, again you are quite right.
I'd actually go a bit further: good triaging would be a bit brutal but it would also mean the majority of deaths were old or otherwise ill. There is a concept in UK medicine called quality adjusted life years (QALY). This tries to mathematically account for "obviously you save a young healthy person with kids over an old, otherwise ill person". Death rates don't incorporate that at all. I'd like to see what the QALY figures are like for covid. I don't think they're public though.
A 1.2 R number (the figure being used for London, again a wild estimate...) gives you a 3% daily growth rate. That means number of infected doubles every 23 days. So assuming we stick with just current measures (reopen schools), your death rate will tend to the hospitalisation rate on a 23 day half-life. Assuming 5% hospitalisation rate (again, try it with your own numbers, I'm not wedded to 5%), the death rate will be 2.75% around Feb 7th. Then 3.5% around March 3rd. Then 3.88% around March 26th etc.
I don't know what will actually happen. And I'd add that trying to extrapolate anything exponential is a fools game. So who knows? I'm merely pointing out there are very possible, very severe outcomes.
This was literally the most opposed aspect of Trump's presidency.
I suspect one element that hasn't been touched by Democrats is admitting that absolute control of the border is something they want but would look like complete hypocrites admitting.
Nancy Pelosi was encouraging everyone to go to Chinatown when the virus was beginning to spread. In retrospect it's obvious how pretentious and unhelpful that was.
I'm just pointing out that politically the issue is tough given the stances people staked their identities on.
Trump did launch a Muslim ban back in early 2017. Scotus struck it down. People called it racist.
Trump later, separately, banned flights from China (with a bunch of exceptions, after most airlines already suspended them).
I don't think anyone mainstream called him racist for that did they? Nancy Pelosi criticised it for being too little and too late (since the virus was already spreading fast in the US). But did she call it racist?
Can you point me to who called Trump racist for the China travel ban?
> Biden added, repeating a line from his USA Today oped: “Diseases have no borders, they have no borders.”
> The same day, Biden Tweeted similarly, “A wall will not stop the coronavirus. Banning all travel from Europe — or any other part of the world — will not stop it…”
https://www.cerescourier.com/opinion/editorial/biden-flips-c...
All Biden's statements are suffused with reminders of the idiotic things Trump is associated with even when it serves no purpose in context of a pandemic. "Diseases have no borders"?
He was looking for opportunities to bring up campaign lines.
At the end of the day, the narrative switched completely where before established health knowledge recognized NPIs outside of social distancing as largely ineffective.
I'm disappointed in Biden, all he needed to say was "too little too late" but instead of being in front of things leading, he was still behind the curve scoring points. And he's the guy leading the US for the next 4 years.
Again, sorry I didn't believe you. I'll be more open next time!
I don't know the last time I ever saw a conservative do this. This is one of the fundamental differences right here.
And I apologize because, I bet your words were sincere, and that probably means you do not actually approve of me using them for point scoring.
But you are you and of course would not praise yourself, and I, being a 3rd party, am free to say "See that? That's how it's done."
Canada adopted a policy of mandatory 2 weeks quarantine for every inbound traveler, and if the numbers are any indication, it worked quite well (but then they went lax on some other aspects in H2 and now are seeing numbers go up again...)
Santa Clara, CA is about as democrat as they come and they've recently announced quarantine policies based on travel distance as well, so in my mind, it seems possible to de-politicize.
Where Trump was continuously treated as a dictator but then his opposition is openly admiring China for their authoritarianism in combating coronavirus.
Likewise his border wall efforts were always stymied cause they were "racist."
That could very well be true but with such sweeping generalizations the political support for border control re: coronavirus isn't really there since everyone's staked their position based on opposing their own enemies.
The UK does not have the capability to close its borders, even if we had the political will to do so. Odd for an island but it’s a fact. Too much coastline and too few people to patrol it.
If you truly believe that that trade-off is worth it, then I completely understand now how authoritarian governments convince otherwise logical people to submit. Create an enemy, make everyone afraid of it, and then claim you are the only one who can protect them.
I am sure you are a smart, logical person. But your approval of what would be martial law for a .5% IFR is astounding.
It's killed a LOT of people. Like 360,000 people in the US according to the CDC.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_casesper100k...
If you believe the numbers are cooked or something, then consider excess all-cause mortality there are clearly a LOT more dead people this year.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
I mean, you can just eyeball the weekly deaths graph between 2018 and now, and go 'oh, this isn't good.' There's no end in sight. LA ICUs are now nightmarish.
"At Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, the breaking point came Sunday night.
There was not one available bed for at least 30 patients who needed intensive or intermediate levels of care, and the hospital had to shut its doors to all ambulance traffic for 12 hours. Some patients, including the very sick who required intensive oxygen, experienced wait times as long as 18 hours to get into the intensive care unit.
The front entrance of Community Hospital of Huntington Park was closed to the public Monday; the back of the building saw a steady stream of ambulances over the weekend, with one security guard saying the vehicles arrived as frequently as every half hour.
And Memorial Hospital of Gardena on Monday was running at 140% capacity, forcing officials to ask for a four-hour suspension of new ambulance calls so it could move patients. The hospital is struggling to keep enough oxygen and supplies on hand amid the crunch of COVID-19 patients who need it."
...
"The crisis at Los Angeles County hospitals hit new levels as patients continued to stream in during the holiday weekend, and the medical system is bracing for a new wave of coronavirus spread arising from Christmas travel and gatherings. L.A. County’s cumulative COVID-19 death toll is expected to climb past 10,000 this week."
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-12-29/l-a-coun...
That's with the biggest state in the country (CA) jumping on the grenade and staying in lockdown. Imagine if CA behaved like North Dakota.
Meanwhile, China is back to normal, with only minimal contact tracing required for the occasional outbreak here and there. They couldn't even run clinical trials for their vaccines in-country because not enough people have the virus anymore. There's a certain freedom in that. Hard to be free if you're dead.
We have had 399,857 deaths over the average expectation, and 328k over the upper bound. Are you saying that every single one of those excess deaths are from COVID infections? How many of those are from deaths of despair, lack of preventative healthcare due to closures, abuse, murders, aggravation of Alzheimer's etc.
The simple fact, that I would love to hear a reasonable refutation of, is that a majority of the people who have died from COVID would have died this year from another cause. However, those who have died from the impact of our response would NOT have died this year.
All in all, we reduced the number of life years due to our response. That is the problem.
Edit: Lets look at state data.
Florida has been widely criticized for their lax restrictions, while California has been widely celebrated for their lockdown. So which performed better?
Florida has 18,000 excess deaths and a population of 21.48 million.
California has had 37,000 excess deaths and a population of 39 millions.
So about the fucking same. Notice also that a lot of the excess deaths in California came throughout the Summer, where there wasn't as big a spike as there is now.
That's the simplest I can put it. You're arguing against reality.
You don't know what you're talking about.
Do you have any sort of a source that ICUs and ERs are on divert more often than not?
And we don't have that.
We have a year of guesswork, and learning, and trying to stop thousands and thousands of loved ones and neighbors from dying.
Perhaps so many lives were saved due to decreases in traffic accidents, that it totally outweighed the lives lost to murder and suicide? Nobody knows right now.
We're just doing the best we can to leg it out until people can get the vaccine. There has been no cohesive federal anything, so the states are hanging in there as best they can.
Be patient. We've made it a year. We're in the home stretch.
Edit: Compare the size of the largest city in California with the largest city in Florida. It's a whole different ballgame. 900k vs 4 million. Florida's playing little-league compared to CA. They're not working with LA sprawl and urban density.
Also, doesn't the conclusion in your edit (strong vs weak lockdowns are "the fucking same") refute your original claim ("those who have died from the impact of our response would NOT have died this year")?
Also, do you believe that lockdown in general induces severe long-term health complications in survivors on par with the effects of COVID?
Also, do you reject the idea that the effects of COVID scale superlinearly with concurrent infections, due to exhaustion of medical resources (i.e. do you think "flattening the curve" is a myth)?
The second wave has hit hard, but deaths in Slovenia, Belgium, and Italy are at this point all trending back downward. USA's are not. Extend those graphs out and we'll be well ahead in deaths before long. The UK isn't trending down either, but their leadership is suffering from a lot of the same problems as the USA's with not taking this seriously.
Also note that all four of those countries are reporting fewer infections than the USA - their deaths per capita come from higher case fatality rates. This suggests that the death rate has more to do with their hospital systems being worse-positioned to handle the influx of patients than how the spread was managed.
I do not believe flattening the curve is a myth. I believe that without an exit strategy flattening the curve is unsustainable. I believe that keeping ICUs from being full is a very good goal. I also believe we generally locked down out of panic way before ICU capacity was at risk (See SFO in March) and thus consumed the will, resources etc to withstand flattening the curve. Now we have ICU issues but we've lost the will .
And for what it is worth, taking the opposite stance and being lax in the name of freedom or whatever can also be devastating, e.g. read anything about covid ravaging the US mid-west in the past few months.
As for the statistics, I think they are great for a 10,000 miles view, but at the same time, they can really support whatever narrative we want. 0.5% may seem like nothing, but if we instead point out there are 80 million people dead worldwide, it now sounds pretty darn scary. Regardless, there's all sorts of trickle down effects that are easy to gloss over when just looking at numbers: frontline doctors will probably have some very strong opinions about freedom SJWs, and likewise I'm sure jobless people facing imminent eviction will have strong opinions about their governments' response to covid.
???
Whuan/Australia clamped down and then they were relatively COVID free and their economies are expanding. The US is still in upside down mode with business flailing people dying.
.5% death rate is meaningless if 1) it expands rapidly enough to overwhelm the health system 2) even at that rate we're talking millions of dead Americans and therefore must be dealt with.
I'd 100% have rather taken the path of Wuhan, Australia or Taiwan who have effectively dealt with this issue while the rest of us flail in the wind.
The federal republic is an incredible system of government for many things. The balance that it has (in theory) restricts it from doing anything quickly, including responding to a pandemic.
Yes, the pandemic caught us with our pants down, so to speak. But I would not trade for authoritarian control for protection against a once-in-a-century pandemic.
(I know Aus is not an authoritarian country and is quite like the US culturally. But it is an island. The only non-island nations that have curtailed this are strong authoritarian states)
This kind of threat could be exploited by bad actors. But the ultimate goal of keeping people alive and healthy is a legitimate one. I think more of the economy will be devoted to healthcare, fitness, and even "wellbeing". Covid was just a massive acceleration of that.
So, yes! The trade-off in China worked out great for them.
In US and EU they did not. Since its all varying degrees of half-assed approaches. That end up delaying the virus not stop it. That is probably the worse approach, since economy suffers and people are still end up infected.
The one thing you also forget is the serious long term complications including brain damage in around 2% of infected.
2% is enough to make me take it serious, there are account of marathon runners unable to run a mile months after recovering.
The issue we have is we haven't enforced the very important stuff. So now we're fucked. So now we have to enforce the lot, even if this particular event (2 people arriving separately etc) seems small.
As far as I'm concerned, the more people see enforcement, the more lives will be saved. So it's a good thing whether either of these women actually transmitted and actual covid etc...
then I'm thinking this will lower the trust in the police and make people inclined to ignore the rules. Meaning, I think what the police did here, damages the trust in the legal system and covid response, slightly changing things for the worse.
[1] London Christmas Lights Walk 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yz7wJZln6Kw
I completely agree we have a massive issue that the government created themselves: they've encouraged non-compliance in every imaginable way. It's criminally poor.
Now they're stuck: they need to turn it around and do so quickly. So they'll arrest these women having allowed crowds to fill tube trains.
The only problem is they're doing the right thing. We need compliance and we need it now. It's not fair to these women. After this is over Bojo should be arrested. But right now, its necessary.
Salus populi suprema lex esto
(The public safety is the highest law)
> Now they're stuck: they need to turn it around and do so quickly
Situation about the same here where I live (also in Europe).
Thanks for having written a bit more about how you're thinking.