Today in is social distancing worth it, lets check in on Sweden.
I think its important to have an educated discussion about social distancing and its value, I tried to do that yesterday and think it was somewhat successful and I'm going to keep trying. I should note, if you watched plandemic and think it made some good points just don't bother posting, you are stupid and your views are worthless. Now that we've gotten that out of the way lets check in the natural experiment Sweden has provided to see if the partial re-openings many states are moving towards right now have a strong evidence of support.
For comparison purposes throughout I will compare Sweden to Norway, Denmark, and Finland since those countries most closely resemble Sweden in terms of culture, density, average health of citizens, and economy which provides a good baseline of comparison. Trying to make Sweden look bad by comparing it to South Korea doesn't make much sense from a natural experiment, neither does trying to make it look good by comparing it to Italy.
First lets check on the economic impact. Obviously one of the arguments about re-opening is it is necessary to save the economy. Recognizing that we live in a global economy every economy was going to shrink, including Sweden's regardless of what they did. However, with more domestic activity the hope would be that Sweden's economy shrank by less and showed lower unemployment than its neighbors. That is could things being open with social distancing provide enough economic value to those places to really matter. Lets check the numbers.
Sweden: GDP expected to shrink by 7%
Norway: GDP expected to shrink by 5%
Finland:GDP expected to shrink by 6%
Denmark: GDP expected to shrink by 6.5%
So not a great start but I haven't done all the research and maybe Sweden had a uniquely export based economy even relative to its neighbors. However, at the very least Sweden's economy is not doing significantly better than its neighbors as the result of staying partially open.
So lets move on to the public health impact. Since total positives is really a testing driven number, the most accurate way to track the virus's impact is through deaths and deaths per million.
Sweden: 3,175 deaths and 314 deaths per million
Norway: 217 deaths and 40 deaths per million
Finland: 260 deaths and 47 deaths per million
Denmark: 522 deaths and 90 deaths per million
So these are pretty ugly numbers. Sweden has 3x the number of deaths as Norway, Finland, and Denmark combined. It is pretty clear from these numbers that aggressive social distancing has an impact on the total number of deaths in a country. Whether that trade-off in deaths is worth it for what society is giving up can be debated, whether or not it saves lives can't really be.
There is going to be a lot of retrospective looks at things once this is all over and much of the story has yet to be written including the potential of a second wave, but for now the natural experiment that Sweden and its nordic neighbors provide has given us these numbers. In my opinion its pretty clear that in a globalized economy, staying partially open isn't enough to have a meaningful impact on the economy and it does cost lives. In contrast to Sweden, Norway announced today a plan to essentially re-open the entire economy by June 15th, meanwhile Sweden had more deaths yesterday than Germany.
I know there's nuance to balancing health with when to re-open the economy and I know it's a developing situation where stuff we think is accurate today may change later, but I'm still going to trust the medical community over people I know getting pissed off and peddling psuedoscience on facebook
One would think that this is the right way to go about things. But I for one have had the medical community screw me over well before this pandemonium ensued. I have watched the medical community continue to cause a global pandemic themselves...opioid addiction...and have taken no responsibility while lining their pockets. Whether you want to admit it or not, the medical community is tied pretty closely with the political community, and that in itself is a crime. And before you react and try and change subjects...I'm not talking about the pediatrician, the registered nurse, or the janitor that handle so much more than a human should have to, and do it with grace. I'm talking the people that own the golf course you play on every Saturday, the people that immerse themselves in political bullshit for monetary gain. The medical community is necessary, we all depend on it, but it has somehow been fleecing Americans without them realizing it for decades.
Wait, what? What prediction has been right made by these doctors, specialists, what have you? Zero, none, zip. I would have been just as well off reading my horoscope as listening to any of these guys.
They don't know any better than ak47, who at least is using a consistent methodology.
I don't agree with his conclusions, because he misses the whole point (getting the pain over now, so there are no second waves or 6 month long current wave), but at least he's consistent.
Remember when the scientists told us that we shouldn't be wearing masks unless we're infected? Supposedly it was worse because you have extra moisture around your mouth...
So did scientists not understand the effectivity of masks (scary)? Since they're now saying everyone should be wearing one in public. Or did they lie to us so masks would be saved for healthcare workers?
edit: funny people down-vote but have no counterpoint. Here is an article and even says at the beginning of April the CDC changed their point of view.
Editor's Note: On April 3, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began recommending that people wear face coverings in public. You can read that coverage here. The below article was written before this recommendation was issued.
https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-do-face-masks-work.html
The CDC was wrong, is currently wrong, or was lying to us. One of those has to be true.
Good question. I'm not sure which is worse if they lied or if they were too stupid to understand that masks were likely to have at least some benefit. My guess is most were twisting the truth in hopes of minimizing the strain on supply chain demand so hospitals would have enough ppe.
So instead of leveling with people, they lied their asses off in order to achieve the goal of preserving PPE.
Gee, how did this credibility problem ever develop?
Can't believe you are being negged for this comment. When did common sense become so uncommon? I guess people just like to be spoonfed from the mainstream media and take everything they see as gospel. They forget what they were being told on that same media platform a month ago, two months ago. If it's not mainstream media it's now a conspiracy apparently.
We didn't know people could carry the disease and spread it while asymptomatic.
Now we know that so it makes sense to ask everyone to wear masks because anyone could have it and not know. It isn't a conspiracy.
Doctors and scientists didn't know that people can be a carrier for a virus and show no symptoms? That has only been happening since...checks notes....cavemen.
No. What happened was that people started complaining, and the CDC went from a scientific stance to an emotional one.
That was well known before April
No yo-yo, that’s not it. Asymptomatic or not, the data was there to know that masks added protection. Especially the ones they need for Frontline workers.
I assume that you are referring to the 60 Minutes video (you can find it on YouTube) where Dr. Fauci says that there is no need for the general public to be wearing mask during a pandemic surge.
They were wrong about the prevalence and the number of aysmptomatic cases. The idea that they have to bat 100% about a brand new virus to be taken seriously is asinine. Masks don't protect you from getting sick, they prevent you from spreading it if you have it. When you think prevalence is low and there aren't many asympomatic cases telling everyone to wear masks would have just hurt the ability of hospitals to get them.
Once it turned out way more people could be walking around the with the disease with no knowledge the guidance changed. This isn't that complicated nor does it discredit any public health agency.
medical personnel have been wearing masks for centuries. me thinks its primary purpose is to protect themselves.
See, you're 0 for 2.
Masks have not been in use for centuries. Heck, Pasteur's germ theory itself is less than 200 years old. Unless you think that doctors were wearing masks to keep out bad humors?
And, surgical masks are not, and have never been, intended to protect the wearer. They're essentially worthless for that. They are intended to protect immunocompromised patients from the natural germs carried by the doctor.
Respirators specifically designed for use in virology, sure. Surgical masks, no.
The politicians lied about the masks not the scientists. With the slightest research it was pretty easy to validate that masks were going to be protective. I was pretty disappointed when they lied about the masks. I assumed it was because they needed them for healthcare workers but lying was the wrong way to do it. But that’s who we have in charge.
Actually, the CDC and the WHO were never "wrong" about masks. They were wrong about the asymptomatic transmission of the virus.
From the beginning, both organizations maintained that masks would not prevent the wearer from getting sick. Both organizations maintained that masks should only be used by people who are sick themselves as a means to protect other people. Unfortunately for the WHO and CDC, at the time this directive was made in early March, information re: asymptomatic carriers was sparse. Neither organization knew just how prevalent the virus could be in people who weren't already showing any outward signs of infection.
Both organizations changed their directives on masks not because the original point changed--masks still won't prevent the wearer from getting sick--but because we are now realizing that many more people than originally thought are sick themselves without showing it. Masks are still and have always been for sick people to contain their own sickness. Directing everyone wear them is the CDC's way of saying "look a lot of you are currently sick and don't know it."
Your mask isn't about you, it's about your fellow humans.
If there is any herd immunity from this disease spreading, you can't compare number like this while it's still ongoing...
To go to an extreme, if everyone is now exposed in Sweden, they may have 0 more deaths expected. Finland and Norwary may still be fighting this through next winter and wind up with the same # of deaths overall.
Like I said, still a long ways to go, nothing about this is definitive. A lot of who turns out to be right will depend on whether we get a vaccine or effective treatment. If we don't, Sweden will be right, if we get one in 12 months they might have let a lot of people die for no reason. Do antibodies provide long term immunity that would help in a fall wave? If they don't Sweden won't be any further ahead.
As of a week ago Sweden had said they think as much as 20% of stockholm had come into contact with the virus, that is still a long ways from herd immunity which happens at 60-70% but is obviously much closer than Norway. I just think its clear social distancing does save lives while buying time, whether that is the right plan will have to do with how well places move from mitigation to containment. Do they contain successfully like South Korea and Hong Kong? Or do they just have rolling shut downs because they never actually get a handle on things?
South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan have factors that cannot be replicated in Europe or North America. They're all relatively tiny geographically -- South Korea is about the size of Indiana; Taiwan is about the size of Maryland; Hong Kong is smaller than Rhode Island. And they're all either actual (Taiwan) or virtual (ROK, HK) islands.
There's very little domestic air travel in any of those places -- no fixed wing travel at all in HK, and only one major route in Taiwan (Taipei - Kaohsiung), and two in Korea (Seoul - Busan, Seoul - Jeju).
Even if you were able to get Americans to accept the loss of privacy required for track-and-trace, it won't matter as long as you have over 3,100 distinct governmental units responsible for doing it. (There are about 3100 counties / county equivalents in the US, plus the 50 state governments and the feds -- and that doesn't even count city governments). And with the mobility of the US, you're going to find that a significant number of your traced population have flown off to a different jurisdiction. It's wholly impractical to the point where I have to assume it's not a serious suggestion.
The only way you're going to get that sort of containment in the US is the way it appears to have been done in China -- if you believe their government -- and that's to have people with guns prevent all travel.
The thing is we have about fifty different South Korea's right here in the United States. They're called States and it's almost like each state can respond FAR more nimbly to the conditions on the ground in its jurisdiction than the federal government can and so this fragmented approach everyone is so mad about may actually be the best/only solution available.
I'm NOT saying the federal government has done any sort of acceptable job. There is a lot of coordinating functions it could have taken on if we had someone in charge of the executive branch who could focus on something for longer than it takes to fire off a stupid fucking tweet, but localized solutions to localized conditions, like in, say, counties where the # of cases is effectively zero are probably the best way out of this. Especially as everyone gets obsessed with comparing the U.S to other countries and forgetting the sheer scale involved.
Sweden's entire strategy is built on the premise that quarantine just spreads the infections and deaths over time. They've been very clear on this, and if you wanted to give an unbiased, rational, and scientific view of this, you would certainly include that in your OP. "There's a long way to go" doesn't cover it. You should say "here's the data as of now, and there's a long way to go, and Swedish scientists - who have actual degrees in epidemiology unlike me - have concluded based on their understanding of viruses after decades of study, that the total number of deaths per million will be the same, and what we see right now in the data is something they completely expect."
So no, you can't say "I'm just looking at what i see right now." The GDP estimates are also laughably variable. No one knows how that is going to shake out.
Also, Sweden has a greater life expectancy than both its Nordic neighbors. Sweden is at 82.7, Denmark is at 80.8, Norway is at 82.3. The distribution of population per age group will be different, but assuming that's held constant (as your post holds a massive number of variables constant), we should absolutely expect more deaths in Sweden vs. its neighbors given the effect of the virus is most deadly to the elderly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy
Sweden also has a much higher % of males to females over age 65 than Denmark, at 87.1 vs 85.6. The data also says the disease is much worse for men than women.
http://statisticstimes.com/demographics/countries-by-sex-ratio.php
I’m not sure you are using the life expectancy the right way. Generally a higher life expectancy implies a healthier population. That argues against the point you are trying to make, Median age would make more sense. Sweden, 41.2, Denmark, 42.2 and Norway 39.2. While Denmark has an advantage in less males, they have significantly higher density, lower life expectancy and higher median age.
While it currently seems there is a chance you can get COVID-19 again, it is not as bad the 2nd time, and you are not contagious. But even if we had a guarantee that we'd have a vaccine in a year and could save all those lives by all quarantining until then...let's do the math.
Every person in our country will spend about 1.25% of their life in quarantine, let's say getting 50% enjoyment of their normal life.
328 million * 0.0125 * 0.5 ~ 2 million full lives missed out on in the US
If everyone in the US caught it, they're saying they'd expect about a 0.6% death-rate.
328 million * 0.006 ~ 2 million lives. Except the average age of the person who'd die is in their 60s, having < 25% of their expected life left.
Why should I have to spend a year in quarantine, living life at 50% enjoyment, to add an expected value of 3 months of life added to someone in their 90's? That person in their 90's is also getting 50% or less enjoyment out of life not being able to see their family, go to church, etc.
This doesn't even take into effect herd immunity, which means that the high risk population should want everyone else to be out there catching it. For that whole year until a vaccine, the longer COVID hangs around, the more of a chance they have of being exposed by a package, mail, etc. even if they remain quarantined. This doesn't account for the economy, people losing their jobs/businesses and may have to work for XX years more before they can retire.
We should be opening up to a level that will keep the hospitals from being overwhelmed (flattening the curve) while also trying to allow it to spread through the healthy portion of society. Open up bars and restaurants, gyms, etc. Force people to wear masks in places where the high risk population may have to go to limit their exposure (grocery stores).
I don’t see very many people advocating for a year of shelter in place. In MD, where I live, ICU use has plateaued, but has not yet dropped. We are still taking first steps to open up, non-essential medical visits, golf courses, beaches etc. The governor has announced and I expect, further loosening next week. Based on yesterday’s thread, similar things are happening in Michigan and my sense from the news is that is true in most states.
I agree, nobody is arguing for that yet... But there are always going to be people complaining we're opening up too early.
The math is the same per day we remain closed. We lose about 5000 complete lives (using 50% living factor) per day staying closed. We lost about 2000 lives in the US yesterday, averaging those people have 25% of their lives left, that's 500 complete lives.
5000 >> 500
too many people don't know the difference between "existing" and "living".
Hoping for herd immunity without a vaccine available is a dangerous proposition.
What if a vaccine is never available? Also, given a vaccine is, AT LEAST, a year away you may as well be arguing that we need to wait for Unicorn Farts as cure before engaging in any activity.
Precisely. This post is misunderstanding -- intentionally, if I had to bet -- what Sweden is trying to accomplish.
To reiterate, the "flatten the curve" folks stated, from the very beginning, that the goal was not to reduce the number of infections, which they conceded was likely impossible. The goal was to keep the hospitals from being overrun. Sweden just said, "eh, we don't think our hospitals will be overrun."
It's only been in the last couple of weeks when they started to move the goalposts, as people started to wake up to the fact that in most of the country, the hospitals never came anywhere close to being overrun. What happened to the tens of thousands of ventilators that we allegedly needed?
Which country are talking about in terms of ventilators? If you are talking about the US, your post makes no sense. Hospitals in many U.S. locations were absolutely overwhelmed. And it was not just ventilators that were lacking. There were severe PPE shortages in many locations and hosptial staffs were heavily stressed.
And that was all with forced lockdowns in almost every state. Imagine how things would have looked without the lockdowns?
There were vast PPE shortages for hospital staff, absolutely. Hospital staffs were also worked very hard from a worker-hours standpoint.
However, very few hospitals, if any, were overwhelmed from a capacity standpoint.
This discussion might be a bit semantic, dependent on your working definition of "overwhelmed". In my use of the term, an overwhelmed hospital is one that can't possibly flex enough to take in and treat every patient that comes to them, or refer patients that come to them to other, nearby hospitals that can treat them. Basically, how many hospital systems were so overrun by intake that patients who needed hospital care could not get it anywhere, and died as a result? The answer to that is very few, if any.
That's what I mean when I say that hospitals were not overwhelmed, at least.
Where? New York and possibly Detroit. Elsewhere, hospitals are not being overrun, and I haven't seen a single note about ventilator supply since Andrew Cuomo said, paraphrasing, "oh, yeah, we have more than we need, so we're going to send some back." We had those giant temporary hospitals set up for all of the patients we expect, and then, crickets.
Yes, there were PPE shortages -- mostly caused by people who thought it was vitally important that they wear an N95 mask to drive around in their car or go grocery shopping. My understanding is that there are still some, although it seems that quite a bit of that is due to logistics and red tape.
And, yes, hospital staffs have been heavily stressed. I feel for them. This disease is extremely painful. That's why I want to get past this as quickly as possible.
Telling people to say home in Iron County, Michigan because hospitals are near their capacity in New York City makes no sense.
there was a PPE shortage because demand was up to 20 times higher than normal. the CEO of a PPE maker said that. nobody on the planet predicted that. you can't snap your fingers and magically come up with an additional 19 3M companies overnite. that is why stockpiles are important and NY failed miserably there as did the Obama and Trump administration.
Prince Georges County MD
“Prince George’s County is the epicenter of the state,” said Joseph Wright, interim chief executive of University of Maryland Capital Region Health, which oversees the hospital in Cheverly. “We have had to activate a very aggressive surge plan.” The Cheverly facility began sending patients to other hospitals in the University of Maryland Medical System after seeing a “dramatic spike” in patients who needed critical care over the weekend, Wright said.
Northern NJ
“Every single 12-hour shift I work is like nothing I’ve ever endured,” said Lynn, a nurse at Pascack Valley Medical Center in Westwood, northern New Jersey. She has worked in the field for more than three decades, and describes the current state of the ICU as “a war zone”. The patients are “sicker than I’ve ever seen”, she says. They can crash in the blink of an eye, then slip into multiple organ failure.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/10/new-jersey-coronavirus-hospital-overwhelmed
NewOrleans
"The hospitalist service has not wanted to admit 'stable' patients with [both COVID-19 and comorbidities like] diabetes," said Michael. "Normally, I'd be screaming that they should be admitted. But the people I admitted [with COVID-19] were sicker.”
“The patients we have intubated in the intensive care unit are not able to wean off the vents,” said Jennifer, a registered nurse in an emergency department. “Two hospitals in the region are already out of ventilators. There are no more rooms available. The patients in the emergency department who need to be admitted are just sitting there.”
Albany, Georgia
Late Monday night, the medical staff at Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital faced a fresh dilemma in the crisis that has tested the institution like no other in its 110-year history. Several patients were rapidly deteriorating in one of the hospital’s coronavirus wings, yet they couldn’t be transferred into intensive care because the unit was nearly full.
Shortly before midnight the hospital’s chief medical officer, Steven Kitchen, was called in. Quick decisions had to be made on which intensive care patients had recovered enough to be moved out.
“We marshaled all of our resources,” Dr. Kitchen said. “We were able to free up some beds, move a couple patients out of the ICU, and were able to meet the patient care needs at that point.”
Yes, all of these areas have managed to survive, largely in part to: 1) Herculean efforts by medical staff that are not sustainable, 2) using additional regional resources, which works as long as neighboring areas don’t get overwhelmed.
I definitely agree that more targeted strategies could be applied, but doing it in the beginning would have required a few key things. First, better up-front planning and second, more good information/testing. Unfortunately we did not have enough of either of those things.
I was including northern NJ with NYC (admittedly, that drives many Jersey folk nuts). Prince George's County, sounds like that worked according to plan. I should have included Albany, GA -- that's a fair point because it doesn't share much demographically with NYC, so it's likely a more relevant example for the rest of the country. And as for New Orleans -- I had missed that part of the story. I knew they'd been hit, but didn't know it was that bad. Thank you for the information.
I definitely agree that more targeted strategies could be applied, but doing it in the beginning would have required a few key things. First, better up-front planning and second, more good information/testing. Unfortunately we did not have enough of either of those things.
I know that there are people working to try to figure out why some communities get hit so hard and others don't. If we can figure out what ties those places together, we may be able to identify the areas that need stricter measures and those that don't.
While we’re never going to agree on masks, I think if we sat down and had an actual discussion about this over a beer, we’d actually agree on more than our differing opinions on MGoblog suggest. I think a significantly more nuanced strategy focusing on more aggressive social distancing in more urban areas and some, but less aggressive social distancing in more rural areas coupled with some form of monitoring/testing (which could be surrogates like calls to Drs, google searches or actual testing) would have been more economically effective with little change in health outcomes. We probably would debate alot about the last point, but I suspect are not that far off on the urban/rural divide.
I actually think Sweden could have benefited from that approach to. Looking at their population density, focusing a bit more aggressively in Stockholm (less than 10% of the country) might have been much more beneficial.
The debate isn't whether the lockdowns were the right policy, I think they were. The debate is whether and how to keep them running now. For every person convinced its a mistake to go out there's another convinced its time to open up. And Frankly, if you're not ready to go outside yet, don't, it's not like there are roaming gangs of people breaking into your homes to force you outside.
The PPE thing was a result of a demand spike several orders of magnitude above what the system was built to service and with the way Just in Time has developed it has always been vulnerable to a shock like this. Even the emergency supplies hospitals are required to keep on hand were blown through very quickly(and THAT assumes those PPE supplies were actually stored somewhere where they would stay in useful condition AND that it wasn't just something trotted out to pass a JCAHO inspection). So this whole PPE thing people are yelling about was always going to be a problem and there are several logistical issues behind it, but sure just yell enough and you can magic supplies into existence.
There are a lot of things that are going to have to come out in the wash at the end of this and having some kind of PPE stockpile or quick manufacturing capacity is going to be a big one, as is making adjustments to the food supply chain so it can shift more quickly when demand shifts as aggressively as it just did.
This is exactly right. The goal of lockdowns is to save hospitals from the initial tidal wave. There's a decent question as to whether we even needed a lockdown to keep our hospitals from being overrun - with surge flexibility, we have really massive hospital capacity in this country. Either way, we enacted lockdown measures, the vast majority of hospitals (virtually all outside NYC) were never close to being overrun, and we avoided that initial tidal wave. That was fine policy and successful.
The lockdowns are now over-extended per their legitimate purpose. We should enact policy that takes aggressive protective measures towards long-term care facilities like nursing homes, but the rest of the country should be opened back up. Everyone should wear masks in public for the foreseeable future - until their is a major breakthrough treatment and/or widely available vaccine - and there should be immense peer pressure and shaming as it relates to individual public health behaviors. However, the lockdowns are no longer serving their original, legitimate purpose and should be stopped.
Now, I think you're being somewhat misleading. A number of hospitals came very close to being overrun/were temporarily overrun, having to turn away patients. Also, most of these models assumed a normal in-flow of people going to hospitals generally, for situations such as routine surgeries, emergencies, etc. But as part of hospitals shutting down elective surgeries and people generally being reticent to visit hospitals (out of fear of contracting COVID-19 or otherwise being put at risk), the overall throughput never quite reached the maximum capacity. Yet, people are still getting sick and dying, they just aren't going to the hospital to do so. And that doesn't just apply to COVID-19-related deaths; people are still having heart attacks, strokes, etc. They just might not be going to the hospital in time (or at all).
As for the ventilators, it's become more clear that using ventilation isn't helpful to everyone and can have huge strains on people's health depending on how long you are on one. But during spikes in NYC and MI (I know people who were nurses in both areas that were hard hit) they wound up rationing who got access to the limited stock they had. Now, there's no "official" way to quantify who got access and who didn't and the outcomes, but there definitely were limits applied unofficially. But yes, as medical professionals learned more about treatment options and how they affected people, the ventilator shortage wound up not being as severe as expected. Why learning from past experience and adjusting your expectations is treated as a bad thing here is another issue.
Also, Sweden is apparently pretty close to being overrun around Stockholm and only maintained capacity because of a makeshift hospital erected in a convention center. So there's some debate over whether or not their bet was correct in terms of their health care capacity.
It's not my intention to mislead. I read the same thing that you're mentioning, but only with reference to the NYC area and possibly Detroit. (Mixed signals there). I haven't seen anyone say that about Seattle, LA, Chicago, or any of the other hard-hit areas.
And, you're right -- people who need help aren't going to the hospital, and that's largely a result of these lockdowns being in place and people making fear-based decisions. (The two are related but I'm not claiming causality).
Why learning from past experience and adjusting your expectations is treated as a bad thing here is another issue.
Hey, that's unfair. I'm specifically saying that we should learn from experience and adjust our expectations. I'm glad that the ventilator supply hasn't been taxed, and I don't really care that we wasted millions of dollars figuring out how to build more -- it was a good investment at the time. My point is, we need to stop just assuming the worst case scenario and yelling about it as though it were preordained.
So there's some debate over whether or not their bet was correct in terms of their health care capacity.
If Sweden was mistaken, it will indeed be a tragedy. I pray that they were correct.
I'm not asking for prescience. I'm not saying that large cities should never have been locked down until we knew what we were dealing with. But, at some point, we have to say that we have enough data to show that the danger of overrun is less extreme than we thought. NYC can stay locked down, if that's what you need (stay safe!). But applying a single standard to the whole country is silly.
I'm simply arguing that the ventilator comment felt like one of those "see, they were wrong about X so we should be skeptical about other things experts claim", which is a dangerous stance to take if you aren't acknowledging the uncertainty of a novel virus. And by the same token,
My point is, we need to stop just assuming the worst case scenario and yelling about it as though it were preordained.
should apply to all of the (in my opinion) overly optimistic talk about re-opening the country by some date and the various treatments proposed with limited to no efficacy testing. The notion of a full season of football in 3-4 months, with fans in the stands, is insane to me, and yet multiple people paid millions of dollars trumpet it as almost an inevitability. So it has to be a balance, but I took your original comment as dragging doctors and governors for believing they needed more ventilators. Sorry if that wasn't the intent. They were correct that most of them needed far more PPE equipment than they had on hand a those supplies were also denied them with the "you're being hyperbolic" argument.
Nobody is applying a single standard to the country; about a dozen states never enforced a stay-at-home order and have had mixed results. But this isn't a city-only problem; it's more acute in cities because that's where more people live. But there are small towns with substantial cases, and a big reason the US is struggling right now is because they failed to learn lessons from China, Italy, and other countries that had to deal with outbreaks earlier. No community is necessarily immune to the virus, and assuming that just because it hasn't hit yet it won't seems foolish. Again, states are empowered to do what they want and they are, but there's no going back if the bet is wrong.
I'm simply arguing that the ventilator comment felt like one of those "see, they were wrong about X so we should be skeptical about other things experts claim", which is a dangerous stance to take if you aren't acknowledging the uncertainty of a novel virus.
That's fair. We should be skeptical about things anybody claims. But we shouldn't be mindlessly dismissive, and you're right that one can lead to the other. (As I've been accused of being about masks :).
should apply to all of the (in my opinion) overly optimistic talk about re-opening the country by some date and the various treatments proposed with limited to no efficacy testing.
Fine, as long as we acknowledge the very real damage that's being done to the economy in service of public health. Maybe that's the right choice to make -- but we need to decide that as a society, not to have it decided for us.
The notion of a full season of football in 3-4 months, with fans in the stands, is insane to me, and yet multiple people paid millions of dollars trumpet it as almost an inevitability.
I don't think anyone is trumpeting it as an inevitability. But think about what you're saying. How many college towns' economies depend upon football? Who is going to make AAG&O or Pioneer High School whole for the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of dollars they make during the season on parking alone?
And it's not just football, which I will certainly admit is not life or death (and could presumably be played without fans anyway -- just look at minor bowl games. Or Spartan Stadium). It's the fact that if it's not OK to have football, it's also not OK to do X, Y, or Z involving large groups of people. Now you're devastating the conference industry, travel, hotels, dining, etc. And that ripples out through the rest of the economy.
They were correct that most of them needed far more PPE equipment than they had on hand a those supplies were also denied them with the "you're being hyperbolic" argument.
Agreed. We did a poor job, locally and federally, of making sure that we were prepared. We didn't learn from SARS/MERS.
No community is necessarily immune to the virus, and assuming that just because it hasn't hit yet it won't seems foolish.
Right, I agree with that also. My position has been, and remains, that we cannot stop this virus. I think that's the sticking point for a lot of people -- it's sad! I don't want to be right -- I would love to be on this blog next year getting called an idiot because I thought that eventually the virus would have to take its toll, but we found a way to get it under control and tens or hundreds of thousands of lives were saved.
But if I'm right, then what we're doing now may just be adding to the misery that was already inevitable.
I really don't want to be right. :(
It’s way too early to know for certain. This is going to be a marathon, not a sprint, and we are only in the first few miles. I generally fall into the Sweden’s getting this wrong camp, but only time will tell.
The only measure I trust is deaths over expected deaths. Basically anything that’s being reported by government entities, including our dear leaders cult, has to be discounted. I also don’t trust GDP numbers until they are published and revised. Finally, short term impact to GDP vs long term impact are very different. Disruptions to supply chains, shocks to systems, etc. can have a short term equal impact to neighboring countries. Longer term, those countries’ resilience will factor into ability to cope.
anyway, appreciate the post, but I think it’s simply too soon to know for sure.
Too early to say anything definitive for sure, so far all this shows is social distancing does save lives. That doesn't mean Sweden got it wrong and Norway got it right, we won't know that for a while.
No, unfortunately all it shows is that social distancing saves lives over the short term.
Short of an actual working vaccine in global quantities of doses, people will get sick, lest you think you can hide forever from a threat. Is it possible a vaccine is coming by end of the year? Sure, and by all means, it may hand social distancing a win. ** I HOPE IT DOES **
But until a vaccine actually shows up, people will eventually have to interact, and every interaction bears with it a certain threat percentage, and people will get sick. Just as Michigan had an earlier outbreak than some other states, but now the #s are coming down so we're falling back to more where we "should" given our relative population and density to other US states - there's a very real probability that Sweden's current outlier status may eventually get caught and passed as distancing over the long term proves harder.
Again - I hope social quarantine proves a win, and many lives are saved. This examination shows that it works over a 3 month period, NOT over the whole course of a given disease.
actually, you may be able to hide from a virus your whole life. i'm not sure i've ever had the flu, at least a bad one or any number of the horrible viruses out there that still have no vaccine.
good hygiene does work.
Or....too late
^^^This ^^^
we lack hindsight here. It’s possible in 24-36 months Sweden looks like shit for their approach if they end up with far more dead than similar countries and non-significant economic upside. It’s also possible these other countries start to open up in 3-6 months and deaths rise and it’s a wash. It’s possible these others countries see a far worse longer term impact to the economy.
we don’t know. So we can choose to play it safe with health and risk tremendous damage to the economy. Or we can choose to play it safe with the economy and risk tremendous damage to our citizens health. Either way we have a lot of dead people and a fucked up economy - just a question of which is a little worse and a little better and let’s be clear BOTH are tremendously dangerous for humanity.