"Despite having obvious signs of illness, the Maplecrest employee went to work that day, and the next."
"The York County Jail employee showed up for an eight-hour shift despite having COVID-19 symptoms. It was the first of five consecutive days of work for the employee..."
I see the main problem not as the wedding, because an infection can frankly happen anywhere, but as a failure to accommodate people who feel they can't miss work even though they are ill (need the money, fear repercussions, policy that limits sick days, etc.). I don't believe the individuals intentionally exposed others, but felt they had no other choice.
There's many symptoms that are hard to spot, and as far as I know, there's asymptomatic spreaders too.
The only person I know that got Covid, his only symptoms was that he was sleepy, he slept for a whole week 14 hours a day. It's quite bad, but I could see many still going with it, sleeping 8 hours and still going to works sleepy. I got plenty of days I felt sleepy in the past and still went to work.
Headache is another symptom, again, never got any yourself? Pop an Advil and go with it? Would you miss work for that reason?... I may miss too many day if I had to consider that one.
I don't know what symptoms he had, but it could be pretty minor... yet we simply can't get a day of for every minor thing. I agree completely with you for major symptoms, but sadly, there's many case where people are asymptomatic or doesn't even know they are symptomatic because of how commons or hard to spot theses symptoms can be.
You know what we can do though easily though, postpone a wedding or have a wedding differently. They were 55 there, were they all required? Why do it inside? Why not refusing people without mask? Why not enforcing more strongly the few basic rules of social distancing?
There are “high-risk” people in care homes who want to visit their relatives for the holidays. To call these people selfish is way off the mark. Human beings are more than a simple statistic to optimize for political benefit. Perhaps it’s the politicians and others who are being selfish by imposing their will and desires.
Viewpoints on liberty and consent aside, there doesn’t seem to be much of a strategy or timeline yet and it’s time we do a cost/benefit analysis that considers all costs and complications beyond covid.
> To call these people selfish is way off the mark
How so?
self·ish
adjective (of a person, action, or motive) lacking consideration for others; concerned chiefly with one's own personal profit or pleasure.
> who want to visit their relatives for the holidays.
Thus, being selfish as they got no regards on the impact of others. In Quebec we got some private care home where 80% died of Covid. It only takes one to bring it.
> Perhaps it’s the politicians and others who are being selfish by imposing their will and desires.
Their will and desires of what? Of saving lifes? Sure caring about someone's else life is purely selfish, much more than wanting to spend time with others.
> it’s time we do a cost/benefit analysis that considers all costs and complications beyond covid.
The US is the one that killed the most to avoid theses "costs and complications". Was it worth it? Go see anyone that lost their grand parents because of this, many of them could have spend time with them today if it wasn't because someone else was selfish.
If you got high risk relative that you want to see, buy them a webcam or keep them permanently in your home please. Keep the risk to yourself. If you care about them, please reduce your risk too, they deserve that "cost and complication".
An example of a false dichotomy if ever there was one.
In reality there is a whole continuum of options, such as reducing the number of relatives you visit, or not visiting them at the height of a wave of infections.
And of course "you die anyway a bit later" isn't true, with a vaccine on the way.
> There are “high-risk” people in care homes who want to visit their relatives for the holidays. To call these people selfish is way off the mark.
Why isn't this selfish? They put not only themselves, but also their families at risk.
Perhaps you'll say they're being "foolish" instead of "selfish" - perhaps they have been mislead to ignore or disbelieve the truth of how potent the virus is, or how miserable a way to die it is. But their own selfishness and their own self-interest can only make it easier for them to believe the lies or misinformation that would cause them to make such an error.
Couldn't agree more. You're asking 330 million Americans to give up some of their freedoms without any real plan or timeline; of course there is going to opposition.
Thanks for expressing this, I think most people are scared into silence by the self-righteous scolds among us.
But clearly - even globally - more than enough people are aware that some people will absolutely destroy any semblance of normal life, and irreparably damage the fabric of society in a frenzy of fear and panic, waving the banner of science, without acknowledging any of the complex decisions around risks, costs, etc.
There's a very real plan, which is to develop a vaccine. And that plan seems to be going pretty well. The timeline will be dictated by the success of the plan, but it seems that most experts are reasonably confident that vaccines will be available next year.
That's not true at all, most states have very specific lockdown guidelines that call for degrees of restrictions based on measurements of infection and medical capacity. And of course the real plan is just to buy time until a vaccine is produced. So yeah, there are uncertainties and it's scary and frustrating, but that's no excuse to give up.
To be fair, it's accurate if they also fall into an actual high-risk category like "immuno-compromised" like my sister, but I really doubt that's what the parent meant ;).
Isn't the long-term care facility link a little implausible? 4 days seems like a bit short for the child to be infected, incubate to the point of being contagious, pass it to the parent, then incubate again to the parent being symptomatic.
Regardless, the wedding and reception behavior was entirely irresponsible. But the link between it and the long-term care cases seems tenuous, at best.
It would depend on how the tracing was done I'd expect. I believe it is often possible to sequence the data from the infections to provide a link between them, that may have been done in this case. (https://twitter.com/nextstrain - is an example)
Doesn’t seem so; the numbers I’ve heard since the beginning of the pandemic are 24-48 hours until you are infectious, and 2-14 days (a lot of variance) for symptoms, if you are going to show them. If somebody has newer numbers please do share.
Well, there's the rub. No one seems to know, even today, how long after exposure you become contagious. That's especially the case for asymptomatic spreaders (as we assume the child was, if the child was the source for the parent).
Everyone seems to say "1-2 days before symptoms start", although some sources say "2-3 days". And yes, as you say, the 2-14 days for becoming symptomatic seems to be much more agreed upon.
That's where it seems to me to be a very rapid spread (below average) from the wedding to the LTCF. But not impossible.
I was also curious about the situation around the LTCF in the days leading up to that outbreak. I was expecting to find that perhaps there were other community cases around there that could have contributed to the LTCF.
However, looking at the MeCDC website for Somerset County (where the LTCF is reported to be located), the county seemed to be pretty "under control" in the days leading up to this event. The most recent confirmed cases had been over 2 weeks prior, on July 24th. It's actually the longest they had gone without a new case in almost 3 months.
Given that, I'm more likely (as the CDC concluded) to suspect the contact tracing from the wedding to the LTCF as being the cause. It's not an absolute link, but it's probably more likely than I originally assumed.
What are HNers planning to do for the holidays? We’re seriously considering not seeing anyone, not even parents, even though my SO has had COVID already (she works at a hospital and contracted it from COVID patients).
Stories like this are the main reason. Even if no one at the party gets very ill, the chance of further spreading it to others seriously scares me.
I lost a family member this week. I did not attend the graveside service even though it was outside, which is anecdotally supposed to be lower risk than something indoors. The issue for me is I'm high risk combined with the fact it's possible someone could show and refuse to wear a mask. Even if everyone socially distanced and wore masks, I believe there's still a non-zero chance of transmission. Couldn't take the risk for myself, much less anyone else I might expose if I were to get infected.
To answer the original question I don't plan to do anything for the holidays either. Our activities will be in-home with my wife and myself only. I don't really see that changing until vaccines are ubiquitous and the local R factor is well below 1. Unless the disease is eradicated which in the face of antivaxxers seems unlikely, I don't thinks things will ever entirely return to normal.
> Unless the disease is eradicated which in the face of antivaxxers seems unlikely, I don't thinks things will ever entirely return to normal.
I think you're way overestimating antivaxxers. They make a lot of noise on the Internet and in some media but they are far from being a majority. I'm confident we will be able to eradicate this virus with vaccines, like we have (mostly) done so in the past with diseases such as polio or tetanus.
>but they are far from being a majority. I'm confident we will be able to eradicate this virus with vaccines, like we have (mostly) done so in the past with diseases such as polio or tetanus.
No of course they're not a majority, but there are enough out there that it reduces herd immunity; I'm not epidemiologist so I can't really make an argument as to how much, but it will be > 0.
Yeah polio is unfortunately a perfect example of how one community for whatever reason choosing not to vaccinate leaves a reservoir for the disease and prevents total eradication. I'd be delighted if I'm proven wrong and we manage to eradicate Covid-19. I'm just personally skeptical compliance will be high enough to do it considering the anecdotal data just watching people wear masks now, which is frankly a much lower bar.
Normally we'd fly out of town for Thanksgiving/Christmas to our respective families, but my wife and I are staying put this year. My parents are coming to us for Thanksgiving, but we are making them get tested the weekend prior, quarantine at home for a few more days, then they are driving to us only stopping for gas (so, wipe down the pump with a Clorox wipe and then use hand sanitizer after touching it).
That process alleviates enough of the fear for us.
Edit: Why the downvote? This answers OP's question, and if I'm being downvoted due to concerns around spreading a virus then by all means, please feel free to start a discussion around why this option might be unsafe. Nobody in my family has traveled yet this holiday season and I'm not trying to be cavalier about this, so any additional input is welcome.
I carry rolls of dog poop cleanup bags. They make great temporary gloves that you can slip over your hand before touching the gas pump, and they slide off into the trash easily without touching the outside with the other hand.
Keep in mind that Clorox wipes still take 30 seconds to kill the virus (according to the manufacturer page). Most people don't tend to wait after disinfecting a surface before touching it, meaning the cleaning agent may become more diluted and less effective.
Better yet, disinfect and wear a baggie-glove while pumping. I don't disinfect the pump when wearing a plastic bag glove myself, but I do use hand sanitizer as soon as I'm done.
Great question! Looking at it strictly from an age perspective you're correct, but there are a lot of other factors that flip that around for us.
My wife has a pre-existing condition and we've been taking sheltering-in-place pretty seriously since the Bay Area shut down in mid-March. We've both been working from home and have only ventured out for walks, to sit in corners of parks away from everyone, or to go to a doctor. Groceries/food get delivered (I haven't even been into a grocery store since March, which feels weird) and we haven't hung out with friends in person or anything like that.
On the flip side, both of my parents are going into work and my mother works at a nursing home (which - so far - has not had a single case of the virus), so they come into contact with far more people during the day than we do. In addition, we have an eight month old which makes us doing a day-long road trip without stopping at a hotel next to impossible.
So since our contact with others remains next to 0, and my parents are totally cool with using the extra PTO to quarantine, get tested, then quarantine a bit more before driving down, we feel comfortable with it. Obviously I'm not going to view it through rose-colored glasses and act as though there's no risk, but there's a much, much smaller risk through this route than if they were to hop on a plane and come straight over sans negative test.
Okay, interesting - good luck! (I guess it would have been reasonable for me to have assumed you two have a particular situation and I could've avoided my snarky question :) )
I've got a turkey ordered, sugar pumpkins roasted (in preparation for pie), gonna get cranberries, potatoes & all the fixins, and stay home and have thanksgiving with my household only, no relatives, no neighbors, no friends.
I want to have a big blowout party next year this time with all my friends and family, but in order to do that, this year has to be different.
This won't be our whole lives, this is temporary. One measly holiday season, that's what we're being asked to compromise. Surely we can manage that?
Think of our grandparents in WWII (or other wars) would have said: "just cancelling get-togethers for one single Christmas? And you're complaining? Ha! How many years we had to ration foods, gasoline, rubber, keep the lights off, curfews, etc?"
I weep for our society if we lack the personal discipline and civic pride to be able to handle this relatively limited set back responsibly.
I was hoping to see my immediate family (total gathering size = 7 people) for one or both of the holidays, but the infection rate skyrocketing in the past few weeks has pretty much nixed those plans.
The big extended family gathering (~40-50 people) at Christmas has already been cancelled.
Skipping the big family Thanksgiving events. Might do a small thing with my parents and sister, but that gets less appealing as the rates climb.
Flying to Florida for a wedding in December, which I'm very unhappy with. But my wife's a bridesmaid, the bride's her best friend she hasn't seen for years, and the bride cut down on guests. She's doing a webcast for most family and friends. I wish they'd just delay it.
Staying the f away from elderly in-laws with high-risk health conditions (diabetes, COPD). Definitely continuing that through Christmas. They are not fans of that decision though, and guilt-trip us on every FaceTime chat.
It's absolutely insane how indifferent some older people are to the risks of covid-19. Cognitive decline is a real thing but with covid-19, it's like they have lost their minds.
Older people aren't insane, they have different priorities. Some would prefer to see their grandchildren today because they know they might drop dead of a stroke tomorrow. There is more to life than avoiding death.
In a normal year, we'd do lunch with my family and dinner with my wife's family, and be stuffed beyond belief.
And in a normal year, my wife would come down with bronchitis shortly thereafter. Recently we learned that's mostly due to a congenital immune deficiency that had been undiagnosed for years.
Given that, we'll of course be sitting this year out. We may do a drive-by visit to air-hug folks from the car or something, as long as they don't try to get to close to the window unmasked (as some have done in the past).
I would really like to abstain but my family doesn't take covid seriously and would likely ostracize me. I've tried to explain that I work in a school and I'm the most likely in our group to be carrying, but that doesn't go far with them.
Now is the time to stand on your principals & do what you know is right. It may upset your family in the short term, but you'll be able to look back & know you did the right thing. Imagine you gather, you find out you had Covid and gave it to a relative who later dies of it. How will that feel? What if you are "a bit sick" and a relative dies of Covid afterward and you never know if you were the one who gave it to them?
Make the choice that lets you sleep easy at night & be able to say "even though it was hard, I did the right thing." Standing up for what's right isn't always easy.
I will stay home. I will organize a few events virtually, but that's it.
I'm afraid, quite a bit of people around me said that they will still do the same as usual. People that do care about Covid, that do talk about the risk and want to reduce the amount of propagation, but still won't make the concession of missing holidays. I'm from Quebec so it's probably that mentality that made us have more death per capita than the US.
Since incubation period is 2-14 days (with a median of 5 days), we have requested that family members attending for Thanksgiving refrain from other social gatherings for 14 days prior. While this does not eliminate risk, it should reduce it to within a margin we are comfortable with.
Please consider other plans. Next year you can get together with everyone at once, but in order to do that everyone needs to survive this year, and that's not guaranteed. Do your part to reduce infection–don't mingle households for spreader events!
Visiting my parents outside for Thanksgiving if the weather is ok. Everything else is going to be video chats.
Almost none of my family have followed reasonable guidelines and I've seen snapchats, etc of them eating indoor at restaurants. There is zero chance I'm going in any of their houses even with a mask on.
Fortunately my extended family and my immediate family already share a mutual distaste for each other, so I don't anticipate a problem.
Hell, I face a bigger risk coming in to work every single day because my employer insists on all hands on deck despite the pleading of my state's governor.
Fortunately I'm working from home, my parents are teachers who are working remote, and my wife's parents work night shifts cleaning a college that's pretty empty right now. Hopefully we'll be able to get together.
Definitely not traveling for any family (or otherwise) gatherings. It will be the first Christmas I haven't done this, but it's really not a difficult choice at all.
My parents live in the same city as me. I'll probably spend the day before thanksgiving in line to get a rapid swab, then bike to their place and eat some bird.
on further reflection I'm not going to their's; gonna facetime them and have some food with the people in my bubble. Just not the move right now to push the limits.
we just cancelled a trip to Chicago to see my BIL for Thanksgiving. My mom and aunt both have covid ( mild case ) so West Texas is a no go as well. My sister was exposed but her and her husband tested negative. However, I think it will just be me, wife, and kids for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Pretty disappointing, Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday for seeing family.
Everything going forward as usual. We will be having a few of my siblings and their families over. Some of us have already had Covid others haven't. There is a known risk but one we would gladly take to be together.
COVID is not going anywhere. It is here with us and is not a light switch to be turned off. Eventually, everyone will get it. By hiding in your closet and afraid coming out is not the solution. I live in here in Mountain west where there is a lot of skepticism about everything with COVID. Not that it's not real, but how to approach get past it. For example, I believe that flattening the curve means staying open and going on about your normal lives. As we have seen, shutting down and then reopening only seems to cause spikes again.
If you get it, you get it. It sucks. It sucks a lot worse for some than others. But so does heart disease, cancer and any number of things I could get and die from.
To live your life in constant fear is no life at all.
This approach makes sense for something that's random and not easily preventable, like lightning strikes and pancreatic cancer. It makes no sense for COVID, where there are very simple things you can do to greatly reduce the risk of spread: Namely not going to large gatherings, and wearing a little piece of cloth on your face. It's just like wearing a seatbelt. People don't wear seatbelts because they live their lives in constant fear--they wear them because they are simple, low-effort ways to greatly reduce risk of death.
Is there any good reason to think this? The 2009 swine flu epidemic is estimated to have infected around 20% of the world population, and that was a big one (it was also probably less deadly than COVID-19, and was met with much less resistance from lockdowns).
Same thing I'm doing right now, bugger all. We've already written off a large part of 2020, seems silly to throw all this isolation away for some paper party hats and a christmas tree.
I'll wait for the vaccine before I pretend everything's normal again
I'm going to travel to see my family for Christmas. I know I'll probably get hidden, flagged, whatever for saying that. I've known lots of people who have had the virus and I'm of the opinion that these news stories are quite overblown and meant to scare people. There are lots of cases, yes, but bodies aren't piling up in the streets.
Same reasons the news media ever tries to scare people. Propaganda, softening people's opinions of some political party, moving the Overton window, etc.
Reading the article, it sounds like maybe if the people experiencing symptoms had stayed home from work, most especially the care facility and jail workers, the spread and deaths would have been drastically reduced
The facility employees should never go to work with Covid-19 symptoms, including “fever, chills, cough, myalgia, runny nose, and headache”, regardless of the wedding.
But that's not enough. Since a person can be infected without having any symptoms, they can operate as a vector and infect the nursing home residents -- all without violating the policy.
Because risk mitigation is linked to risk profile. Even in non-pandemic times an immunocompromised person or caregiver thereof must behave differently from someone who is not.
If the care facility is housing at-risk patients, they should have strict protocols in place for visitors. Shaming a wedding here seems irresponsible by the media considering these people could have picked up Covid anywhere like Walmart.
It's not irresponsible. Holding these sorts of events without proper protocols increases the risk of secondary infection to society at large. The impact at the nursing home is collateral damage.
Walmart, on the other hand, requires customers to wear masks, and they have and will impose occupancy limits as needed to help minimize exposure.
While we cannot practically reduce the risk of infection to zero, we should also behave wisely. This applies both inside the nursing home and outside it.
Because it's literally their job to protect their patients from infection? It's not like we've just recently found out that the elderly are especially vulnerable to Covid-19.
If a website left their admin portal open, didn't set a password and then got hacked, would you put the blame for that on the script kiddie who did it, or on the website's security team?
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
That's lazy thinking. There are a whole host of things a care facility can do to mitigate risk with various cost/benefits, but the difference is there is an acute risk at the facility while a distributed risk for anyone outside. It obviously makes sense to implement more protections at the vulnerable location than blanket policies across the board.
Not true. The long-term care facility could just have required sick employees to stay home.
From the article:
> A worker at the Maplecrest Rehabilitation and Living Center, a long-term-care facility 100 miles from Millinocket in Madison, Maine, came down with a “fever, chills, cough, myalgia, runny nose, and headache” — all symptoms consistent with COVID-19. This worker’s child had attended the wedding reception, and the two had been in close contact in the days right afterward.
> Despite having obvious signs of illness, the Maplecrest employee went to work that day, and the next.
But that's not enough. Since a person can be infected without having any symptoms, they can operate as a vector and infect the nursing home residents -- all without violating the policy.
"Two-thirds of the facility’s residents were at least 75 years old, and 88% of them had at least one preexisting medical condition that could have made them more vulnerable to the virus.
Six of the residents ultimately died of COVID-19. All of them were at least 60 years old and had at least one preexisting medical condition."
6/7 deaths were from elderly people with pre-existing conditions in a long-term care facility.
Why do people go to work when they're sick? I don't understand for the life of me, how someone thinks it's ok? If you don't feel well, your company (or money) is not worth your life or the lives of others. Stay home ffs.
Some people aren't paid if they aren't working and can't afford not to work. US employees have no federally guaranteed paid sick days and that results in a culture that prioritizes showing up to work no matter what.
Sometimes because they don't get sick pay (or it is reduced putting them in a [more] difficult financial position) or because for some disgusting reason people think they are "strong" and "hard working" for going into work when they are sick.
I've worked with people who were proud of coming into work with a hacking cough and temperature. They would take their temperature at their desk and announce it as if they were doing something amazing.
Even worse is when I've worked for managers who during your review compare you to those people saying things like you should make more effort to reduce your time off sick (even if under the average yearly sick days) or make more effort to come in when you're just feeling a "bit under the weather".
It is a terrible attitude but it is extremely common the world over sadly.
When your boss goes to work sick (as the CEO at my last two companies did), it signals its ok to the rest of the employees. Ignorance plays a large role as well. Commonly (IME), someone with a viral cold gets antibiotics and goes to work the next day thinking they are no longer contagious.
In the startup ecosystem at least the blame lies with leaders who continually value 'hustle'. In other cases it is usually 'I don't get sick pay and I need to feed my kids'.
COVID can make you infectious but without symptoms. Which means that it's very likely that people can infect their workplaces before realising that they are even sick.
Seeing the fallout from Sturgis, I think the holiday seasons back-to-back are going to make things far worse. It doesn't help that we will already be in the middle of flu/common-cold season.
"Coming from both the left and right, and around the world, we have devoted our careers to protecting people. Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health – leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice.
Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed."
I really lament that HackerNews has become just another outlet for political propaganda and manipulation. It didn't used to be this bad, but now there's large scale brigading of the top comment sections just like at reddit. I don't know what the solution is, but the reddit/HackerNews model of discussion definitely has its downsides in the face of malicious actors.
This reads as the equivalent of an ad hominem argument - why not address your concerns with the merits of what was said, rather than just dismiss it as propaganda?
The same link has been posted several times in this thread by several accounts, all in a similar manner. Several days ago there was another COVID19 posting with "FREE MICHIGAN" and similar bizarre, anti-intellectual ramblings. Unfortunately HackerNews/YCombinator is the one controlling the identities on this website, so without access to more information I'm unable to discern much about the authorship of these comments.
That's why the site guidelines specifically ask people not to post accusations of astroturfing or brigading without evidence:
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
Users are overwhelmingly (as in, thousands of times) too quick to assume organized malice as an explanation for material that they don't like appearing on the internet. This is a symptom of how divided society is on divisive topics. People disagree, but they don't believe that the disagreements are legitimate. For a site like HN, accusations like what you posted are much more toxic than the problem you're complaining about. There's tons of past explanation here:
Before anyone comes out with "dang says astroturfing doesn't exist"—no, the point is that there are two problems: real astroturfing, and imaginary internet accusations about it. Anyone assuming only the former is making a huge mistake. So what's the solution? Obviously we have to try to distinguish between the one and the other based on some sort of objective evidence. It's not enough to dislike someone else's view on a difficult topic like Covid and then say "brigading!"
It's a little hugged to death at the moment, but https://covid19risk.biosci.gatech.edu/ is a useful tool to show relatives who are thinking about social gatherings for the holidays.
Lead dev here... Huh, didn't think I'd ever see my work show up on HN. Sadly getting an .edu institution to fork over the money for better scaling is hard... Even when it gets them unlimited free press.
Just a reminder, that tool likely underestimates the risk of covid. Seroprevalence data shows undercounting of up to 24 times (rather than the 5 or 10 this tool shows.)
Also, this tool assumes you are only seeing people from your county.
And humans are terrible at assessing compound risk. If the tool shows a 5% risk from a gathering, people will likely attend multiple events. ("Oh, it's only 5% to go to Thanksgiving. And 5% to go to Friendsgiving. etc.") When you consider multiple events, risk doesn't stay constant.
So while that tool is interesting, don't look at it as a mechanism to say, "Yeah, it's probably ok to have a gathering."
While you're not wrong that we might be under-estimating risk, I'll note that we do take into consideration seroprevalence in our calculations (so called, ascertainment bias). We provide estimates for two cases; 5x and 10x under-counting bias.
And you are right, that risk is additive (to a degree) if you go do multiple parties. And people are terrible at doing this sort of calculation. Our messaging, in our manuscript/press/social media has always been to limit gatherings of any size, and mask and gather outside as much as possible
It's also worth noting that this tool shows the risk of at least one other person in attendance having covid before going, not the risk of contracting covid at the event.
It's clear to most people, in that instance, that an ugly side of human thinking emerges around viral outbreaks and it presents itself in how we consider other human beings.
People so readily stigmatize and it's very clearly on display in this thread.
No human being without ill-intent can be blamed for a virus. Tragedy befalls humanity from time to time, this is certain; instead of pointing fingers, we should be more empathetic, not less.
Tragedy does befall humanity from time to time, but you're arguing for comforting those who make selfish choices that make things worse for everyone. This is not like the AIDS crisis; the medical system was not at risk of collapsing.
What of empathy for those who have and will needlessly die alone in tents and hospital hallways and their grieving families who don't get to say goodbye? What of empathy for the medical staff who are working 12, 24, or 36 hour shifts with no end in sight? What of empathy for those who stock our shelves who are constantly put at risk? What empathy for an entire generation of children who will have worse educational attainment because they're forced to do a year or more of remote school?
But sure, let's empathize with someone who keeps eating out and refuses to wear a mask. It's not like they could have done anything to mitigate the tragedy that's going on, right?
> This is not like the AIDS crisis; the medical system was not at risk of collapsing.
Neither is it now? Even at the peak in NYC, the Javits center was never filled, nor the hospital ships. Likewise in the UK the nightingale hospitals were never used.
Should we be wary at all of our propensity for stigmatizing people with disease(especially a viral one)?
Should we berate anyone who gets HIV when they could have worn a condom?
> The entire state of Iowa is now out of staffed beds, Eli Perencevich, an infectious-disease doctor at the University of Iowa, told me. Worse is coming. Iowa is accumulating more than 3,600 confirmed cases every day; relative to its population, that’s more than twice the rate Arizona experienced during its summer peak, “when their system was near collapse,” Perencevich said. With only lax policies in place, those cases will continue to rise. Hospitalizations lag behind cases by about two weeks; by Thanksgiving, today’s soaring cases will be overwhelming hospitals that already cannot cope. “The wave hasn’t even crashed down on us yet,” Perencevich said. “It keeps rising and rising, and we’re all running on fear. The health-care system in Iowa is going to collapse, no question.”
Most of the US is likely to have their medical systems collapse this winter. That will lead to thousands of preventable deaths.
Stigmatizing people with HIV was bad because it was a proxy for stigmatizing gay men. Stigmatizing people who don't wear masks is stigmatizing anti-social behavior.
> Most of the US is likely to have their medical systems collapse this winter.
“Collapse” is too terse and paints a potentially misleading picture of the problem; “be overwhelmed and forced to ration care on bases other than medical need, such as expected future quantity and quality of life and chance of recovery” and “face significantly reduced total capacity because of COVID-19 impacts on staff” would be more precise.
Fair. A key indicator is the death rate of patients hospitalized with COVID. It's been driven down significantly since the start of the pandemic, but if the fatality rate of those hospitalized starts climbing that's the system starting to fail.
> Even at the peak in NYC, the Javits center was never filled, nor the hospital ships
Yeah, whatever, that was months ago, and, leaving aside the debates about how meaningful that observation was at the time (which was argued quite a bit here on HN), that's not, and not relevant to, the current situation or forward risks. Right now medical systems in a lot of the country are exceeding capacity and turning away patients who would normally be hospitalized or treated due to the impact COVID-19 is happening.
>> Right now medical systems in a lot of the country are exceeding capacity and turning away patients who would normally be hospitalized or treated due to the impact COVID-19 is happening.
Does this account for the dynamic aspect of capacity? e.g if health care providers had layoffs due to lack of cases wouldn't that result in reduced capacity?
Also I followed the Arizona ICU bed utilization and noticed the capacity figure followed the number of cases and the number of beds total varied by roughly 2x low to high. This implies the capacity was not fixed and followed utilization. Which makes sense from a business management perspective. But it invalidates utilization as a harbinger of TEOTWAWKI.
I'm going to guess this plays out like every place around the world so far.
It's extremely tough for a while as a population experiences their wave and then the virus essentially becomes endemic. But every place so far around the world has gotten through their wave.
Everywhere else in the world implemented some increasing level of restrictions as their cases climbed and that's what prevented collapse. We're arguing about a significant subpopulation that refuses to adhere to those sorts of restrictions at present (unlike most of the planet). Combine that with the apparent seasonality of spread and loss of political will due to fatigue and economic damage and we're into uncharted territory here.
I certainly hope you're right as to a rough peak, but I'm perfectly happy enforcing pro-social behaviors during a crisis of this type. It's normal for the US and other democratic states. Go read some newspapers from 1918 shaming "mask slackers".
We operate in the wedding niche and we have seen a drastic decline in not only the number of weddings but also the size of weddings. The impact has been significant.
I just want to say thank you. COVID shutdowns basically trade the well-being of business owners, employees of said businesses, and healthy people with the well-being of the unhealthy and elderly. This is a worthy trade, but I don't think we show enough appreciation for those whose livelihoods are being taken away.
In this thread someone asks "What are HNers planning to do for the holidays?"
This is a fabulous question for online social media: when you go out it can seem like everyone is flouting the rules, no one is being careful, and you're the only one. This is largely because you don't see the people who are being careful because they are staying in so there's a massive bias towards careless, selfish jerks when you go out.
If you want to promote Covid safety, ask this question about holiday plans on Facebook, Twitter, whatsapp, or whatever social network you use. Or a more general question: "How are you/your family staying safe from Covid?"
This question brings everyone who is staying safe out of the shadows and into view, and all the sudden rather than feeling like you're "the only one" being careful, you realize you're in very good company. It's great to show other people as well. So if you want to "do something," start discussions on social media about what people are doing to stay safe!
> And if there is one thing we can definitively state, it’s that this virus is much, much less likely to spread outdoors than in. For example, in a study of 7,324 Chinese case reports, only two — part of the same transmission event — could be linked to outdoor settings. A database of more than 20,000 cases (including the 7,324 Chinese cases) found 461 that were associated with transmission in completely outdoor environments — predominantly crowded events like markets and rallies. Overall, only 6 percent of all the cases in that database were linked to events that were either totally or partially outdoors. The rest were tied to indoor events.
Is anyone in the U.S. using thermal cameras to spot individuals with a fever? I live in a smaller city, not really close to a big metropolitan area, but I haven't seen a thermal camera in use yet. I see they are available on Amazon, so it doesn't seem like it is an issue of availability. Are these being used by businesses in other areas of the U.S.? Seems like it would be a no-brainer to use these to non-invasivly screen patrons.
First off let me make it clear (1) I've mostly stayed entirely isolate since March. (2) I plan to stay isolated. So don't shoot the messenger please.
Anyway, I live in Tokyo. Tokyo Metro area has basically all of California (SF, SD, etc..) squeezed into an area the size of Los Angeles. 34 million people.
Tokyo has been mostly unlocked since June. Theaters and other venues are open (every other seat), clubs are open (WTFBBQ!), restaurants are open and many are full, everyone has masks off while eating and drinking though outside it's 99% masked.
Number shot up in the last 2 days, we'll see where it goes, but though September and October they stayed flat. About 100 to 200 a day (vs California, same population, 10k day or 100x)
Here are some videos from 3 different weekends in October Tokyo Metro Area
No idea why the number are 100x less than California similar population. Especially given Tokyo is far more densely populated than California and trains are still packed during rush hour. Schools are open though they swap half the students each day. Lots of people have ideas, none of them proven.
* Japanese don't wear shoes indoors so don't track it into their houses :P
* Japanese are better at wearing masks? (ok, but walking by restaurants full of unmasked people doesn't seem to fit)
* Japan isn't testing as much. I think that's not true enough to get a 100x difference but even if it was hospitalizations and deaths would be up? They are not AFAIK
* Japan has a different version of the virus? Ok, so when the real one arrives were screwed.
* Japanese are healthier? (like obesity is 3.6% here vs 30% in USA)
* Japanese are not vitamin D deficient?
They have put lots of measures in though I assume that similar elsewhere. Every cashier is surrounded by various forms of transparent partitions. Fast food joints sometimes have partitions between every 2 seats. That said a cafe I used to hang out at as one large 20 person table and 8 or so bar seats near a window. I've walked by since it's near the grocery store I go to and it's full, people eating with masks off, no partitions.
I have plenty of pictures of full restaurants as I walk by.
Anyway, would certainly love to know why the numbers are so low relative to the USA and Europe. Maybe it's just luck? Seems unlikely
A recent serology study of a large number of Japanese subjects found that about 46% had antibodies to SARS-CoV-2. The infection fatality rate in Japan appears to be very low despite a large number of infections.
It looks to me like Japan could be on the cusp of a drastic increase in cases, at least. Whether or not it translates to hospitalizations or deaths is another question (I feel it is less likely based on other health factors).
Since the beginning of November, your test-positive rate has more than doubled, from a relatively good 3% to 6%. 5% is considered "good" coverage for tests.
Test coverage per-capita does not seem to be increasing, and may have even dropped slightly in the same time period.
I'd advise against complacency in any country. We've seen just how quickly this thing can spike in a number of countries that appeared to have things "under control".
The Japanese effort to contain the virus correctly guessed that since the virus spreads quickly the best approach is to identify and contain clusters. This has made it possible to target their testing and tracking in a way that is highly effective.
The not wearing shoes inside really needs to be called out as bunk on two levels. First of all, coronavirus is extremely weak and does not live at all outside of droplets. This means that fomites, that is the spread of infection through residues on surfaces is negligible. You need droplets or aerosol for an infection. Second, as a housecleaner I have found that the no shoes indoors rules leads to less floor cleaning and dirtier floors since the reality is still that gravity takes every crumb and speck down and walking around spreads all that. It is unpopular to say, but in my experience shoes allowed in the house results in cleaner floors because people understand that crud is always accumulating there rather than being in denial.
that doesn't match my experience at all. I've been in few houses/apartments in Japan with disgusting floors. I've been in plenty in the USA. You can see cleaning floors in Japan is part of the culture as it feature heavily in anime about real like since everyone shares in it as a well known cultural activity.
Carpet is also unusual in Japan. Tatami are not uncommon but they are easy to clean where as carpet is not.
My remark was not about floors in Japan. In Japan there are tatami mats and a cultural habit of putting away items not in use which is very different from the US where beds are often left out and unmade.
In the US carpet is not only common but is often required for noise reduction. In this environment not wearing shoes is not enough to keep floors clean and it is common for people who do not wear shoes in the house to have filthy floors that take extra effort to clean.
I have cleaned around ten thousand homes during my career as a cleaner. How many homes have you attended?
Another theory I've heard is that Japanese people don't talk as loudly as Americans, so exhaled droplets don't travel as far.
Honestly, though, it's probably the masks. Adherence isn't very good in the US. And maybe a third of the people I see with a mask are wearing them below their noses.
Knowing what I know about Japan, I expect both cases and deaths to be underreported.
Other factors I can think of is that the Japanese are particularly obedient. Tell them to wear a mask and they wear a mask, they don't organize protests instead. They also take hygiene seriously in their day to day life.
Another thing is that despite the population density, the Japanese naturally keep their distances. Not much handshakes, hugging, and touching each other unless it can't be helped.
As for a "different virus", it is very unlikely, but a different population, that's possible. As I understand it, the Japanese population is relatively homogeneous, and they may have a genetic advantage.
It also demonstrates why the "personal choice" stuff is BS here. I see a lot of folks going "why are you worried if you're following the rules yourself?", and yet...
> None of the victims who lost their lives had attended the party.
You can tighten the circle even tighter than that. Since (non-N95) masks are mostly useful for limiting how far your own droplets spread, and don't do much to protect against incoming germs, it's really not about whether or not you personally are following the rules. It's about whether or not everyone else is.
It's sort of like the pool at my kids' swim school. If other toddlers were being allowed to go in the pool without a swim diaper, then it really wouldn't matter if my own kid is wearing one or not. They'd still be swimming in water that's repeatedly being fouled by uncontained feces.
The "non-N95 masks don't protect yourself" was what we thought in March; it's no longer what we think after the Starbucks contact tracing and other studies.
Regular masks absolutely provide substantial - admittedly, not perfect, but substantial - personal protection.
"Regular masks absolutely provide substantial - admittedly, not perfect, but substantial - personal protection."
There is no evidence for this, and if you read the CDC guidance document that suggested it this week, you'll see that every citation in the newly added section refers to studies about filtration efficiency, which is a very different question:
The high-quality evidence for masks has not changed substantially since March. The few lines of direct evidence suggest that it's possible they help a tiny amount, but we haven't been able to detect much evidence of this, either way. Only by combining multiple (poor) studies together, pooling the data and statistically re-weighting the pooled results was the WHO meta-analysis able to find any signal at all, and the signal wasn't strong:
In 2020, we've had a number of studies that attempt to use statistical analysis of infection data from late spring (when cases were declining in the northern hemisphere) to draw conclusions about masks, and a handful of anecdotes that are repeated frequently by the media -- the Missouri hairdresser, the Korean Starbucks -- that were neither controlled, nor subjected to statistical analysis of any sort.
The only randomized controlled trial conducted on masks for personal protection against Covid -- the highest quality form of evidence for a health intervention -- has been completed since June, and rejected by three major publications:
Moreover, as we have now seen, most of the places around the world with mask mandates and high rates of self-reported compliance are experiencing spikes in infection. At the very least, these call into question the publications that attempted to make claims based on data from the spring. We're starting to see retractions related to this:
I hope some enterprising lawyer starts filing wrongful death civil suits for people who do not follow mask and gathering rules. With sequencing of the virus, plus some contact tracing it should be possible to make a preponderance of evidence case for a subset of deaths. That should hopefully provide a stick to get a large number of defectors (in game theory terms) to stop defecting. A political solution would clearly be better, but I'll take what I can get.
The extreme level of litigiousness and authoritarianism you're advocating is perhaps the worst, inhumane impulse that surfaces during a crisis like this.
Imagine, for instance, that we started tracing HIV strains and jailing gay people.
And then arguing that having sex isn't really necessary and abstinence is the only way to prevent transmission.
The implications of what you're saying is appalling.
I hardly think making people face the consequences of their actions is authoritarian, nor is it worse than the callous disregard for other people's lives that many are demonstrating through their actions. People who refuse to take basic precautions are externalizing the costs of their decisions onto the rest of society. Litigation is one way society deals with that problem.
If someone went around having unprotected sex without telling their partners, then I don't see a problem with a civil suit from anyone they infected to make them pay for the damages they inflicted.
If I were to distort your view like you did mine, I'd say that you're arguing for the ability to go around punching anyone else in the face because to prevent you from doing so would be starting down a slippery slope that would lead to authoritarianism.
I do too. Reading the comments here there are plenty who don't care about others enough to take basic precautions, and happily spread lies about the effects of covid-19 or who is vulnerable.
I expect there will also be social penalties. The world isn't going to forget the people who chose not to take basic steps to protect each other. It's a violation of the social contract, and that comes with consequences.
I don't think this is evidence for or against that, though.
The wedding attendees used their "personal choice" to attend the wedding and get sick. But we don't know how they transmitted it to people once they left. Were the people they infected taking precautions? Or were they also using "personal choice" not to?
Precautions are not perfect. Just because your personal choice is to wear a mask does not mean you are 100% immune from the flocks of people that choose not to. As the numbers of infected grows so too will your chances of being infected, even if you take precautions.
I've been super self isolated. I live lone. I've seen 6 people since march 15th and those were just 2hr walks outdoors with masks on. That's it.
But, it's reasonable question to ask, what's the acceptable number of casualties. The answer is not zero. We have plenty of other diseases that kill lots of people. COVID is more but we still have to pick a number.
Is 1 in 100 ok? 1 in 500? 1 in 1000? 1 in 5k? (the car rate), 1 in 10k? (the flu rate).
I heard about this thinking on the Sam Harris podcast. He mentioned some people claiming if we lifted all restrictions by their estimates deaths would be 1 in 300. He and his interviewee dismissed out of hand without giving it any thought which was very disappointing. Whether or not it actually would be 1 in 300 we still have to pick a number below which we'd accept the losses. Is there a reasonable way to decide that number? Flu is around 1 in 10k (or at least my 30 seconds of searching seem to put it in the same order of magnitude) so apparently that's an acceptable number and we don't apparently get upset as a society that people go around spreading the flu. (though I get super upset personally)
How can we live good if there exists a significant amount of people rejecting seatbelts?
We need to face the reality that on average people make bad choices which leads to substantial negative outcomes for any group. In particular, the COVID-19 pandemic again confirms empirically that humans on average don’t have self-responsibility.
How can philosophical ideas that are founded on principles such as “humans have self-responsibility” then still deem credibility for any larger group of people?
Why do we need laws that mandate seatbelts? Won’t people wear them by themselves? And if not, what does that mean to the whole house of cards of Liberalism?
> We need to face the reality that on average people make bad choices which leads to substantial negative outcomes for any group. In particular, the COVID-19 pandemic again confirms empirically that humans on average don’t have self-responsibility.
None of this has to be accepted or conceded to, somehow East Asian countries are able to do to this right, even New Zealand just so we don't start hovering on West vs East, this is absolutely not "humans on average don't have self-responsibility", this is a specific culture that has promoted entitlement, selfishness, materialist hedonism, and ruthless, hackneyed individualism since the late 60s and now the bill has come due
But I bet they had their mask on when they tried. I could look outside my window in my urban American city and see people walking around without a mask, especially when the weather is nice. Last night my downstairs neighbors had a big loud party and another tenant yelled at them to turn the volume down. In the summer, not one pre-teen or teenager was wearing a mask in my neighborhood. Are we really gonna compare the limited instances of people being weld into their apartment to sheer collective wantonness going on stateside? And I live in a blue city.
I still remember the day I went in to my heart surgery rotation to find that all heart and vascular surgeries for the day were cancelled, because someone in a serious car wreck had used up all the blood.
It doesn't only hurt yourself. Mandating seatbelts reduces the population's overall risk of injury. When you have a society that has a public fallback for health insurance, reducing the amount of serious injuries has a beneficial impact on lowering the cost of providing healthcare to society.
If this is the rationale, why do countries with public health insurance fallback not also have mandatory BMI or tobacco/alcohol limits, given the much much higher fatality rates of cardiovascular disease and cancer versus automobile accidents?
There may not be hard limits on tobacco or alcohol use but they do tend to have very high "sin" taxes on those items. Those who use the most pay the most. It is imperfect but probably the best we can do without going full surveillance state in people's homes.
Of course not. I’m saying that complex situations yield inconsistent results, and that way we solve one problem may not be exactly the same way we solve a different problem, even though they may look superficially similar.
This is a common and dangerous misconception. Wearing a seatbelt causes you to be a projectile that bounces around the car, into other people. YouTube "not wearing a seatbelt" and you'll never not wear one again when others are in the car.
Those videos are the equivalent of the DARE junk of the 90s but for cars. You should wear a seat-belt because it improves your own survivability not because some scare tactic told you to.
Similar in some ways, but also very different. HIV/AIDS had a much higher mortality.
Covid-19 is interesting in that it's on the margin for death rates, and its long-term health effects are more varied and subtle than those for, say, polio.
Strictly speaking seat belts improve the ability of drivers to stay seated and in control during emergency maneuvers. This factor can have an impact on other drivers.
If a significant amount of people already makes a bad choice at this point where it affects themselves we cannot expect these people to make good choices to protect others.
Are you paying extra for all the people who need to clean up your body in the accident you get into? And to bring the coroner out just to verify your time of death. And all the lost time of the other people on the road delayed because you died or were seriously injured when you didn't have to be. We all pay these costs with higher insurance and higher taxes. These costs are a drag on society. Just like smokers, people who don't wear seatbelts should pay more for insurance. Likewise, they should pay more in taxes because they cost more.
Can you please elaborate what is so difficult to understand about the concept that when you drive fast and crash you get thrown out the windshield and possibly die? What does it mean to you that this understanding already fails?
It's a constant minor annoyance weighed against a fairly rare, hypothetical risk.
People ride motorcycles despite vastly higher death and injury rates than cars, cause it's fun. (I did for awhile and might start doing so again one day.)
I'm not disagreeing with you I don't think? I agree that it's a really stupid thing to not wear a seatbelt. I just think it's important to consider how to solve these problems without throwing up our hands and saying "people are irredeemably stupid" because that doesn't really do much good for anyone.
>Because the average person has a very bad understanding of risk and consequences?
When it comes to things that are defined by social consensus (like whether or not one should wear a seat-belt, or smoke indoors, etc) like the hypothetical "average person" is always correct by definition.
> How can we live good if there exists a significant amount of people rejecting seatbelts?
Is there really? One thing that has always struck me since the beginning of this pandemic is precisely why people would be more willing to attach their seatbelts than to wear a mask. Perhaps not the best comparison to make, though.
From personal experience and the experience of many friends I can confirm (anecdotally, but still) that in Eastern Europe there exist many societies where putting on a seatbelt is socially stigmatized.
It's fascinating to watch, for example, people commenting on Facebook about vehicles driving too fast in winter conditions, endangering other road users. But those same Facebook commenters will say that nobody can order them to wear a mask...
If governments enforced COVID restrictions as well as they enforce speeding and DUIs, we wouldn't have to rely on people being smart and considerate. All these stay at home "orders" and mask "mandates" and they didn't mean squat and had little effect because almost nobody was fined or went to jail for violating them.
It's the easiest thing to enforce, too. In my city alone, a single police officer with two functioning eyes could probably issue hundreds of mask violations a day. It's not like you have to search someone or go out of your way to see they aren't wearing a mask.
> If governments enforced COVID restrictions as well as they enforce speeding and DUIs, we wouldn't have to rely on people being smart and considerate.
odd comparison to make. I find that in the midatlantic US, speeding and DUI are not enforced very consistently. with speeding, there seem to be only a couple days of the month (usually the last few days) where a bunch of cops are out with radar/lidar pulling people over. with DUI, you are quite likely to get away with it if you aren't intoxicated to the point where your driving is noticeably erratic. the exception would be the few times each year where they actually have checkpoints on certain roads.
> It's the easiest thing to enforce, too. In my city alone, a single police officer with two functioning eyes could probably issue hundreds of mask violations a day. It's not like you have to search someone or go out of your way to see they aren't wearing a mask.
this seems like it could be counterproductive. for one thing, issuing a ticket is necessarily a close physical interaction. for another, what if the interaction goes south and the cop has to grapple with the offender, arrest them, and take them to jail? does this really serve the goal of preventing covid transmission?
>> It's fascinating to watch, for example, people commenting on Facebook about vehicles driving too fast in winter conditions, endangering other road users. But those same Facebook commenters will say that nobody can order them to wear a mask...
It's very clearly not murder; that'd set really bad precedents. You might be able to pull off something like involuntary manslaughter, but I tend to doubt it.
And if such persecution flies (which I doubt and really hope it does not), do not forget sweeping in as suspects for involuntary manslaugter those folks who, in the years past, came to work sick. Flu complications are deadly and kill many people, too.
I wonder if a civil prosecution might be easier. Have people pay for others' loss of wages, medical expenses, the support of dependents of people they caused to kill, etc, when they can be shown to have caused the spread and been irresponsible, to a civil burden of proof.
Two possible problems:
1) It might hurt tracing efforts if people are worried about being prosecuted (ie. people "clam up"). For example, this particular story might not be known at all. Hurting tracing harms public health, so this might be a good enough reason not to go after irresponsible people on the basis of tracing infections at all.
2) I'm not aware of the law ever holding anyone responsible for non-deliberate infection. New legal ground would have to be broken in this area.
(2) is a direct consequence of (1). Remember, until this year public health experts were always pointing out how shaming people in a public health context is highly counterproductive. People won't engage with the health system if they fear being punished for doing so. And with communicable disease that means there will be more spread.
With the extreme indifference to human life, and the knowledge that they could be causing "bodily harm" even if they think the odds of death are remote, we could try for second-degree murder.
It would fall under behavior matching something like likely to cause serious injury or death with reckless disregard or depraved indifference to the safety of others, which in most states would be straight manslaughter or low-degree murder.
Probably not a good idea. But there is maybe very loosely a kind of precedent in cases of spreading HIV [1].
Unfortunately a lot of these people really don’t believe it is harmful. The ones who have mislead them on this by intentionally spreading misinformation are probably better targets for any kind of culpability.
Freedom is not absolute. As Hobbes said, without government to help organize us, life is "nasty, brutish, and short." Obviously there is such a thing as too much control, but there is also such a thing as too little.
Situations such as this are extraordinary. We have a virulent and serious disease we're trying to control the best way we can. The best leaders are making difficult decisions using the best science we have to guide them.
Protecting the innocent and the vulnerable -- and valuing life in general -- is a tenet that our society has chosen to adopt. How do we do that? By balancing freedom with measured restrictions that are consistent with that tenet.
We can argue about whether the measures taken are effective, or whether they restrict too much freedom. But to just say "Fuck it all, absolute freedom for everyone! Everyone toss out their masks and get together indoors!" during this crisis goes much too far in my view.
I said nothing about masks. This thread has people advocating murder charges for going to a wedding and spreading to someone who dies afterwards. WHO said lockdowns should not be primary method of stopping the spread. Lockdowns harm as much as help, loss of jobs at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum, cancer screenings delayed, mental health issues related to isolation, and we don't know the huge cost of what has already occurred. Quite a few want to look at one thing and not the entirety of a situation. The stats show that this virus is no worse than the Hong Kong flu (1-4 million people died in 1968 / 1969). We went to the freaking moon and held Woodstock during that time. You don't value life by not living it.
Slight difference is that this disease is fifty times more deadly than the HK flu. Just about everyone in the US got that one and about 50,000
people died. We are at 5 times that level already and only 10% of the population has been exposed. (Also the value placed on old people’s lives has increased drastically... you might not like it but it is social consensus to spend millions to extend the lives of 75-year-olds by a few more years. )
Where do you see it as being fifty times more deadly? Wikipedia lists Hong Kong flu deaths in US as upwards of 100,000 with 100m less people in the country. Even at fifty times more deadly it is not greatest cause of death this year. Heart disease and cancer have killed far more (over a million collectively). The response is way out of proportion to what we have seen. I believe the initial response was appropriate given the projections (which turned out to be a complete fabrication) of millions dead in US alone. We've seen what this virus is, it's not millions dead. We can't cancel life for a couple of years waiting for this to go away, everyone needs to get on with their lives, getting married, seeing people over the holidays. This continued fearful response is preposterous.
Your choices and decisions are what threatens your life. If you don't want to be exposed to Covid, don't leave your home. I don't see why others shouldn't walk around / party, if they're themselves willing to take on the risk of infection.
Those killed in the story didn’t go to the party.
As well as those who died, some number will have long term disability and illness. Many of them won’t have been guests at the wedding.
They still made choices to get in close contact with people who did go to the party, without having vetted them sufficiently. I'm not saying it's easy to avoid such choices, but even things like going out to buy food - how many layers of mask are you wearing? What hours do you go shopping? How many months of food do you have stored at your home (inb4 "survivalists are just paranoid")?
Indeed, in those case the duty of care was explicitly (legally?) delegated to someone else. Someone in the chain of transmission had a duty of care, and failed in that duty.
> Despite having obvious signs of illness, the Maplecrest employee went to work that day, and the next.
It wasn't a partygoer. I'm fine with holding specific people responsible (even legally) if they failed their explicit duty of care, but assigning blame to the whole population just because they don't comply with your narrow moral senses is intellectually dishonest. If we stopped doing that, maybe we could also focus on actually being effective (e.g. specifically protecting the old / vulnerable & their caretakers with specific, targeted and (most importantly) effective measures), not just requiring that everybody abide by arbitrary rules.
That's a bit like saying you should personally vet every automobile driver before they drive close to you to see if they're intoxicated, and if you get injured by a drunk driver, that was your fault for not having vetted them sufficiently.
> They still made choices to get in close contact with people who did go to the party
Some (all?) of the fatalities were rest home patients and many who caught it were prison inmates. They didn’t get to make any choices about who they saw or who cared for them.
I waited too long to post my rant and the comment got killed, so you've become my rant-patsy, and I'm pasting it below. Also, yeah, things like choosing to eat, just choose not to go get food and you're good, right?
Jeez, what a short-sighted, selfish, impatient, and entitled point of view. I'm guessing you haven't spent much time living anywhere that's actually dangerous?
A large percentage of people in the world have live their lives cautiously, because where they live is really dangerous. There are places that have to deal with ebola still, there are places where not being deferential to the right person means that you and your family are hunted and killed. Most of these places are what we call third-world countries, and being in danger, having your family in danger, is a staple of living in them. If they've been dangerous for a long time, then ALL of the people living there live cautiously, defensively, because everyone who wasn't genetically predisposed to this behavior was killed by their environment long ago.
In most first world countries, and the USA in particular, a vast majority of the population has no clue what it's like to live under these types of conditions, where you actually have to try to take steps to protect yourself. Until this year, the most danger the average American was in was during our morning commutes, where being actively defensive means "Try not to look at your phone too much while driving". Now we're just experiencing a taste of how it is to live in many of the third world countries.
What is absolutely insane though, is not that we are too stupid to figure out how to live cautiously and defensively (we're not used to having this burden, so it's somewhat understandable that we don't know how to handle it), it's that even when we're told common sense procedures to act defensively, we actively fight against them. Taking precautions that are stupid simple, that are common sense, that are EASY, and that will preserve our lives, the lives of our family and friends, and the lives in our communities, we reject those because we can't get past the delusional narcissism that we should never have to sacrifice anything.
And that's why we've had 240 thousand deaths due to covid since March. Cause we, as a nation, responded as entitled yuppy assholes, instead of taking some basic, easy, mature steps to protect ourselves.
I'm not sure if you meant to write this sarcastically, but it kind-of sounds like you're comparing COVID with third-world countries full of Ebola and tribal killings? You do realize you're the comparison is a bit ridiculous?
Ultimately, it's a question of value. How much do you value not getting an illness with 99.9% survival rate, vs. living your life. And then imposing your own value system onto others (or not).
At no point did I compare COVID to a country, so no. Also, you use an awful lot of nasty little rhetorical manipulations in your posts, did you realize that? Actually, that last sentence is an example of one of these tricks you use! Go back and read my post if you're interested in learning something, but do not use faulty summarization to misrepresent what I wrote.
But aside from your creepy and manipulative way of writing, let's get down to the heart of the matter. You wrote: "How much do you value not getting an illness with 99.9% survival rate, vs. living your life." This is a stupid and fallacious argument. It presupposes that you cannot take cautious, responsible, defensive measures against being infected without sacrificing "living your life". I'm currently living in a first world country, living happy, content, and healthy, and also only going out in public places when I really need to, and always masking when I do. It's not the SAME as pre-Covid, but it's also not painful, difficult, or boring. So taking some simple, possibly inconvenient precautions means you can still "live your life", it just means that there are some boundaries dictated by your circumstances.
Secondly, let's say for the sake of really destroying your argument that you can't both take these common sense precautions and still "live your life". Fine, COVID 19 is destroying your mojo during 2020. All you have to do is take a year off. It's ridiculously fucking easy. We'll have good enough therapies early next year to make COVID not a huge problem anymore, so when you say "live your life", what you're actually taking about not being able to do is "living your life for a year and maybe a couple months", which is really not a big deal when you consider all the harm you can do to the people around you by being a selfish twat.
The “personal choice” stuff was always BS even on the face of it. You can probably find some “libertarians” who will argue for removing all restaurant food safety regulations, for example, but I’m pretty sure even they are okay with banning drunk driving on shared roads.
I don't think I'm confused. I'm well aware that the word "libertarian" is used to describe a vasty range of beliefs, but I gave a realistic description of mainstream libertarianism in the United States. The Libertarian Party opposes food and drug safety regulations and workplace safety regulations, for instance.
Yes, I'm aware. I'm talking of course about government regulations. Clearly we're not talking about the non-existent regulations imposed by this hotel or wedding planner.
actually I think you'd find that a lot of libertarians oppose DUI and similar things being criminal offenses. driving drunk exposes other people to unnecessary risk, but each instance of drunk driving does not necessarily harm someone. often libertarians prefer for such things to be handled via liability and private insurance.
I think you're conflating a fringe libertarian stereotype with reality. No reasonable person wants to chance food poisoning every time they eat, which is why we have meat thermometers.
Libertarians that I've read and met, in general, want to remove government policies that force entanglement or reliance on the government. A good example is DUIs; reasonably, we know that driving while impaired is dangerous, but what we don't want is for someone to make the mistake of doing that being beholden to the governments whims for their entire lives, which is currently how it works.
Food and health regulations are explicitly opposed by the Libertarian Party of the United States. The word "libertarian" covers a vast range of beliefs, but my description is very reasonable.
Going to an event with dozens of other people during covid, especially in the current situation, is like driving on a highway full of walking people. It's not a "it might be dangerous" situation, it's a "it's definitely going to end bad" situation
> And yet, comparison of catching a virus to homicide by gun is not.
That was not intended as a comparison, but as an obvious example of where "my body, my choice" clearly does not apply to making a slight movement of your index finger.
You're arguing that this situation should be an exception to the usual rules of personal liberty that we all take for granted -- I should be able to require you to wear a mask and not meet with family members, because $disease is deadly and transmissable.
OP pointed out that this is contradictory to the usual rhetoric on abortion.
Your response was that we make just such an exception for guns and drunk driving. The implication, therefore, is that this is of such an equivalent moral imperative, that the same reactions are justified here.
You may not want to be drawing the analogy, but if you aren't, there's no point in raising the subject at all.
> OP pointed out that this is contradictory to the usual rhetoric on abortion.
I'm pointing out that it's not, just like drunk driving and moving your finger when it happens to be connected to a gun aren't "pro-choice" moments.
"My body, my choice" doesn't apply in the same fashion when other people's rights are also involved. (And, to head-off the "nuh-uh", pro-choicers tend to fall down on the "no" side of fetal personhood.)
"I'm pointing out that it's not, just like drunk driving and moving your finger when it happens to be connected to a gun aren't "pro-choice" moments."
It's nothing like either of those, let alone "just like" them.
Catching a virus is not, in any way, like pulling the trigger on gun or choosing to drink and drive. The former happens to you. The latter two require personal agency.
Firstly, that's not the same commenter. Secondly, the drunk driving and gun examples were clearly provided merely as examples where "my body, my choice" doesn't apply.
If you're going to argue that gun homicide and drunk driving are examples that should also be followed here, you are making the analogy between catching a virus and those examples.
This is a misapplication of an ideological statement about abortion. Disregarding the guidance of health professionals such as wearing a mask and socially distancing means endangering other people's lives.
"Disregarding the guidance of health professionals such as wearing a mask and socially distancing means endangering other people's lives."
...which isn't different than any other year.
Every year, the flu kills tens of thousands (in the US -- higher worldwide). Disproportionately children.
Every year, driving kills hundreds of thousands, even when you exclude the effects of alcohol.
Every year, people have sex without condoms, and pass on harmful -- possibly fatal -- viruses.
Every year, millions of people die from communicable disease of every sort, ranging from pneumonia to HIV.
This is the first time in my life that we've tried to apply transitive risk logic to justify curtailing of individual freedoms. Masks are one thing, but telling people that they can't have family gatherings because it might hurt you?
This seems wrong to me. You can use this logic to justify literally any curtailment of personal freedom.
>This is the first time in my life that we've tried to apply transitive risk logic to justify curtailing of individual freedoms.
Seems wrong to me, too. There exists no society (that I'm aware of) where the decisions of an individual don't have second or third order effects on other members of the society. We manage and deal with this risk every day of our lives. Sometimes it flat out sucks. However, you can't control for it without raising a lot of very, very uncomfortable questions about what personal choices get to be made, by whom, and under which conditions.
This boils down to how you see the world, I guess. Much like any of the usual contentious political topics, both 'camps' view the other side as morally reprehensible.
I'm not "free" to ignore stop signs, stop lights, and speed limits. They impact my freedom to drive as I'd wish -- because otherwise I might hurt you.
I'm not "free" to start cooking commercially out of my home kitchen without inspections and licensing. This impacts my ability to earn an income -- because otherwise I might make you sick.
It's public health risk mitigation. We do it all the time.
"It's public health risk mitigation. We do it all the time."
Not responsive to the argument. You might hurt me in any other year, too. We don't tell people to avoid their families at thanksgiving, stop going into the office, etc. "all the time". It's unique. This year.
The flu is about as dangerous to me as SARS-CoV2, for example. How many years of your life, so far, have you avoided seeing your family at holidays in order to protect me?
Cars are also more dangerous to me than SARS-CoV2. How many years of your life have you avoided automobiles, because you might kill me in an accident?
The logic is the same. You may feel as though there is a justification for telling people not to see their families at Thanksgiving, but that's your opinion. Other people have different opinions, and they're equally valid.
It's the same argument, and shifting the objective to "healthcare resources" doesn't make it any more responsive than before.
I (like many people) am at ~zero risk of serious disease, so we're back to the same transitive logic: apparently my catching a virus is morally equivalent to overloading the healthcare system, because I might give it to someone who is at risk. Well, likewise: you risk putting someone else in the hospital by catching the flu. Has it stopped you from living before?
And of course, there is a matter of degree: getting a seasonal shot is one thing; demanding that people avoid seeing their families is entirely another.
Finally, consider that every young, healthy person who gets this virus is afterward immune, and contributes to overall population immunity. Therefore, getting the virus and recovering from it is a positive outcome for society. This is offset by some small risk of transmission, of course, but that's a manageable risk. After all, masks and social distancing work, right?
Of course it's allowed. But you should come armed with epidemiological data that contradicts the evidence and studies already out there. That's the language that epidemiologists speak. And extraordinary claims that contradict both the data and common sense require extraordinary evidence.
Merely questioning it without a plausible explanation that is consistent with the existing data is a distraction. Why should anyone listen to you if that's all you've got?
"Of course it's allowed. But you should come armed with epidemiological data that contradicts the evidence and studies already out there. That's the language that epidemiologists speak."
Interesting that you should say that. The Danish RCT for masks as PPE was just published this week, and showed no statistical effect of masks on protection against SARS-CoV2:
Despite this study being high quality, the only randomized controlled trial of masks and SARS-CoV2, and of pressing public interest, it was rejected by no fewer than three major scientific journals before publication. That's...unusual, to say the least:
As a scientist, it has been dismaying to me how willing the scientific community has been to engage in censorship of unpopular opinions in 2020. Even the highest quality evidence is being actively suppressed, if it doesn't fit the "consensus viewpoint".
"And extraordinary claims that contradict both the data and common sense require extraordinary evidence."
In the case of medical interventions, the historical convention is that you do nothing if you cannot prove effectiveness. Said differently: claiming that an intervention works is an extraordinary claim. Assuming that it does not work is, quite literally, the null hypothesis.
> How did masks ever get conflated with “freedom” anyway.
The Republican Party, Trump, and Fox News did that deliberately because Trump early on chose to downplay the virus and response to it. Backtracking on that would have made Trump lose face and harmed the Republican brand in an election year, so instead they chose to politicize it and double-down on not wearing masks.
Weren’t all of our politicians downplaying it initially? I remember “come on down to Chinatown for the Chinese New Year celebration” and that definitely wasn’t Trump, who at that moment was attempting a travel ban on China.
The mask mandate is part of a larger discussion on what can be required of you because of covid 19. Many places right now are testing the waters to decide who you may and may not be with during Thanksgiving as a simple example. These discussions happen together with masks, not separately.
ULTIMATELY the options come down to either we accept citizen's personal choice will guiding individual action, or we accept that said action will be compelled through government use of lethal force.
Ad absurdum “the options come down to either we accept citizens personal choice will guide whether they wear clothes or ride naked on the subway, or we accept that wearing clothes on the subway will be compelled through lethal force.”
This has nothing to do with personal choice and everything to do with culture war nonsense being spread at the expense of just about everyone, purely for the political gain of a tiny fraction of a percent.
If everyone actually wore a mask during all those things and kept distance then more drastic measures such as total shutdowns wouldn’t be necessary as the virus would not be spreading so fast. But people can’t be bothered to even wear a mask (some are proud of their mask avoidance) so here we are.
No, it demonstrates overwhelming information asymmetry from what the general population is learning from mainstream media vs what the actual stats are. If you look at the actual CDC [1] COVID death count numbers, it is not much more than the annual flu death count. I don't fault the general public for this, it's the media trying to instill unnecessary fear among people.
The CDC publishes a number called excess deaths. It’s a number of how many people died versus the average. You can see the graph of excess deaths spike in March and continue to trend higher than the baseline. If this is just a “flu”, by your own words, can you please explain to me how did all these people die then?
Removing personal choice should sound alarm bells for anyone who has read Brave New World, 1984 or the Gulag Archipelago.
If you permit me to stereotype the HN demographic here- you are probably reading this comment from the comfort of a warm apartment with running water and you're probably not hungry. Removing personal choice is an extremely dangerous idea where those reliable things that you take for granted start to disappear. All you have to do is look to N. Korean, Turkey, Hungary, Venezuela right now, this day to see how disastrous it is. You may call me hyperbolic but this is exactly how it starts. If we have to lose some elderly people to a virus (with an IFR of .1%, median age of death of 84 and 92% with comorbidity), i'm sorry to say that we have to lose them. The alternative is authoritative oppression, starvation and misery for hundreds of millions of others. Make no mistake, this is exactly what is at risk when you talk about removing personal freedoms.
Stopping people from spreading a deadly disease doesn't make us North Korea. Not every slope is slippery. We can move further along a spectrum without being guaranteed to fall off a cliff.
I don't have the personal freedom to get drunk and drive my car down the highway because that puts the lives of everyone on the road in jeopardy. Spreading disease is the same thing. Your personal freedoms end when they start invading my personal freedom to continue living.
>Not every slope is slippery. We can move further along a spectrum without being guaranteed to fall off a cliff.
Let me ask you something; Has there been any setting in the past 50 years other than changing sexual mores in which people have gained any personal freedom? And have any of the instances in which people lost bits of their freedoms in that same timeframe ever been reversed (again aside from changing sexual mores)?
I don't see how the overall trend is relevant to this specific issue. I also don't understand why you are ignoring "sexual mores" or even what that specifically means. Does that include every increase in personal freedom related to gender and sexuality? It would be weird to ignore those because they are obviously the biggest increases in freedom over the last 50 years since many of the biggest changes of the civil rights movement occurred just outside that window.
If you do want to ignore all those issue, I will point out that freedom of speech is more prominent today than it was 50 years ago. After repeal of the fairness doctrine, the loosening of obscenity laws, and various court cases including Citizens United most recently, free speech rights might be at an all time high in the US.
Also there are examples of freedom being lost and regained in gun ownership. The assault weapons ban in the US that lasted 10 years is one that comes to mind.
Thank you, I had forgotten about the assault weapons ban and the fairness doctrine.
The reason I said that about sexual mores is because from my perspective almost all of the increases in personal freedom since the civil rights era have been related to that, and other freedoms have mostly been on a steady decline since that time. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good for people to not be forced into some religion’s definition of a ‘good relationship’, but if that’s the only thing heading in the right direction and everything else from an individual rights perspective is heading in the wrong direction it’s a distinction very much worth considering.
This is such a simplistic take on the virus. There’s not just the death rate, there’s also the lingering health effects many people are experiencing after getting over COVID. There’s the fact that it’s not just affecting elderly people, setting aside the suggestion that the elderly are expendable. There’s also the fact that in many places in the US it’s pushing the medical system to its very limits. In North Dakota the governor asked nurses who are COVID positive to go back to work because they are so short staffed [0].
What about their personal freedom? What about the people who don’t want to work in an environment that might put them or one of their loved ones at risk? You talk about living in a bubble but you don’t seem to consider the teachers, first responders, medical workers, who have to make the choice between working during a pandemic or losing their livelihood.
None countries you mentioned didn’t descend into authoritarianism by enforcing restrictions during a once-in-a-century pandemic.
First of all, your extra-low IFR is trying to draw a false equivalency between COVID-19 and less-fatal diseases like the flu. It is more like 0.5%-1% (if not more), and the IFR once you hit 65+ is 1.5% and rises quickly.
So when a pandemic is hitting us and our collective personal responsibility is failing, our only choice is to roll over and get sick?
There are plenty of options to feed those who are going hungry due to COVID, but you should look at who is throwing up roadblocks to assistance.
"Using these age-specific estimates, we estimate the overall IFR in a typical low-income country, with a population structure skewed towards younger individuals, to be 0.23% (0.14-0.42 95% prediction interval range). In contrast, in a typical high income country, with a greater concentration of elderly individuals, we estimate the overall IFR to be 1.15% (0.78-1.79 95% prediction interval range)."
There have been dozens of papers in this area, primarily differing (as does your link) in the assumed balance of ages in a society.
The CDC citation is aggregating these studies, and (essentially) picking the middle. Cherry picking a single study from the larger pool is not a rebuttal.
What I don't understand is why people don't make better personal choices?
It's very strange that people won't just wear a mask (with it over their mouth and nose). There might be some tiny fraction of people that have a real issue with it, but not anywhere the number of people that feel the need to loudly object to it.
Is there room for a position of liking wearing a mask, liking other people wearing a mask, but also supporting people's personal choice to not wear one..?
Surely obvious, but there are people who will think that you make bad personal choices and need to make better ones. If those people also wield extraordinary power, well, it becomes less fun to find yourself suddenly having wrongthink.
>> There might be some tiny fraction of people that have a real issue with it, but not anywhere the number of people that feel the need to loudly object to it.
Let's not forget the cadre of objectors who want us to wear a mask to protect their peace of mind, explicitly stating this goal as needful. Or those who vociferously demean anyone who objects for personal reasons (e.g. I tear up and start sneezing if I wear a typical cloth mask or sterile surgical mask for more than a few minutes, and have a sinus headache for several hours subsequent; I'm not the only one in this class).
Can you cite the transmission rate for asymptomatic carriers? The false positives for the various tests? The critical aspects of the efficacy of masking?
Masks reduce droplets and aerosols, by multiple obvious mechanisms. That reduces transmission from infectious people. And even cloth masks seem to have some protective effect.
The easiest way to get infectious people to wear masks is to have everybody do it in high contact situations, there's no need to be fancy about who wears mask during a raging pandemic, so your other two questions don't really need answering.
Does anyone have statistics on mask wearing compliance in public? Seems like someone could use ML to identify people with and without masks. Last time I went out shopping it was 100% compliance (and using a mask correctly) as near as I could tell.
The tragic thing is, it's much easier to measure "coronavirus deaths" and "coronavirus cases" than it is to measure the price we pay to minimize those things. It's your typical case of over-optimizing for a single KPI and losing the bigger picture.
The measures we've taken are deteriorating society in more subtle ways, and there are deaths and suffering indirectly caused by these measures. They are just not easy to sum up. How many people have killed themselves because of the lockdowns and economic problems? I know of at least one. How many people in third world countries are starving as a result of it? I've read millions. How many families are being torn apart due to increased divorces? These kinds of effects pay out their harm over longer periods of time, and in less obvious ways. We aren't tracking those on a widget on TV.
Because the pro-lockdown, pro-authoritarian case is so much easier to back with clear and obvious numbers the government and media are able to easily manipulate the population, most of whom won't consider the trade-offs, into conformity. This is so sad to watch.
This post explains a lot about why many Americans are incapable to taking basic, rational steps to halt the progression of this disease. If we were more capable of reflection and putting others before ourselves, we wouldn’t have to invoke a bunch of irrelevant boogeyman to justify our shortsightedness.
>Over the next 38 days, the virus spread to 176 other people. Seven of them died.
Seven people died. This isn't some hypothetical where people are acting like there's risk where there isn't; it's a story of seven real, living, breathing humans passing away.
I'm becoming more and more callus about the whole thing and beginning to think we just need to adjust our expectations and accept that people die.
I was told recently that my town is in terrible shape and the hospitals are nearly overwhelmed. Listening further, I learned that "nearly overwhelmed" meant we had capacity for two or three people to be really sick with Coronavirus.
If we need to decimate our economy because only two or three people can be really sick at once, then that is the wrong trade-off in my opinion.
Would you believe it if I told you that not fighting the virus has an even bigger toll on the economy? Imagine if we'd aggressively addressed this problem back in March, how much less economic impact would have resulted. But then, as now, we wanted to "protect the economy" and avoid restrictions as long as possible. But this time the strategy will work? I have trouble believing that.
> Europe had about the strictest lockdown you can imagine
Um, no. No, we didn't. The lockdown in Europe (which was different in every single different country in Europe) was sloppy in the extreme. You shouldn't be looking at Europe as an example of a good way to deal with the virus and protect the economy, you should instead look at South Korea, New Zealand, and Australia.
Lockdowns should be early and hard, until there are no unknown cases left in the population (that is, all cases have been tracked down and isolated, and there are no new surprise infections popping up). The earlier and harder the lockdown, the lower the number of deaths, the sooner the virus is eradicated, and the quicker the economy can go back to making money.
I think that Europe is not the correct comparison to draw. From what I understand from friends and family, the lockdown in the EU was not particularly different than the US. It varied from region to region. There was some resistance to wearing masks in some places. People did not stop traveling, holding events or eating out.
I think the best comparison to draw is China and New Zealand. They have the strictest lockdowns you can imagine and the virus has been completely contained in those countries. Whole cities are locked down after just a few cases. China has been limiting and disinfecting frozen food imports as it is one of the few remaining vectors the virus has been reentering the country. As far as I understand, their economies and daily life have been saved, but it comes at a huge cost to individual freedom, a cost that North America or Europe would never accept. There is no point in imagining Chinese disease control measures in America. It's beyond the realm of possibility. We need other solutions.
Why are you conflating "aggressively addressed this problem" with a strict lockdown?
The spring lockdown made sense, in that we didn't really have much information. At this point, we have a bunch of other tools that we aren't using, because people have decided that doing anything is somehow the equivalent of a strict lockdown.
> We did in fact lock the country down for several months.
No we didn't. What state or city could you not travel to? Where were you confined to your house and forbidden from going outdoors?
We closed schools, some businesses & public attractions like beaches in some places (not that there weren't still huge crowds on beaches in many places), but we did not "lock the country down." Everyone was basically free to go outside, socialize, and travel wherever they pleased.
I have not put words in your mouth, I've questioned your interpretation of the comment you replied to. You stick to that interpretation here, because they didn't say anything about 'strictly enough', they said we didn't aggressively address the situation, and we didn't.
The 'lockdown' such as it was, was a significant measure, but it apparently was also in many minds all we needed to do.
> And they have spiking case counts just like the US right now.
What lead to this recent spike, in your opinion?
"peaches and cream" it's a global pandemic, I don't think "peaches and cream" is on the table right now. What we need is to survive to have peaches and cream another day, and that takes discipline and PERSONAL SACRIFICE not everyone whining and moaning about how they can't just pretend nothing is going on and do everything as normal, as some people seem so desperate to do. I weep for how spoiled and entitled our society is, living in the lap of luxury but still complaining.
“I weep for how spoiled and entitled our society is, living in the lap of luxury but still complaining,” they say while working from home and admitting that they have not left their house at all for the past half year, not even to feed themselves because a benevolent underclass of coronavirus immune elves delivers paychecks to their bank account and food directly to their door.
haha my friend, you need to sit back and take a chill pill. The fact that you're digging through my comments and trying to attack me personally is why I say this. But I'll play along for argument's sake:
Yes, I pay extra for grocery delivery or pickup, only order at places that do curbside or occasionally delivery, ordered a lot more than normal on Amazon and avoided public transit because yes, I can afford it. Would you rather I increase the population on the bus, in the grocery store and in restaurants even though I don't need to? Would you rather I keep the delivery fee I'd otherwise pay to my grocer & have them not employ extra people right now?
Yes, anyone who can afford to should be ordering pickup, delivery, etc. because it is less circulation of people and therefor reduces spread of the virus. This is the responsible thing to do. Less people circulating means less virus, and this is good for everyone, rich and poor alike. Not to mention all my extra spending on delivery directly from my butcher, grocer, etc. is injecting more money into my local economy and creating more opportunities for employment in the service sector which is currently being savaged by the pandemic.
I am sympathetic to your frustration, but I don't understand your lashing out at me over it. Do you want to share what frustrates you about this? Or hell, go ahead and give me advice if you want: What do you think I should be doing differently, in your opinion?
Also: wow. So 1.3 million avoidable deaths worldwide (or 250k in the US if you're there) is an acceptable loss to you, but staying home for the holidays is unacceptable?
Your lack of empathy for your fellow humans is staggering. A day may come when tragedy strikes your family, I hope you are shown more empathy than you are choosing to extend to others here.
I think it is good to have compassion for other people's frustration. Everyone has made sacrifices this year. I don't think any person's experience should be dismissed. The best way to inspire compassion in others is with your own compassion.
You are speaking truth, you're right I am getting hot under the collar in this discussion and it's not helpful.
To be pedantic, I would disagree that "everyone has made sacrifices" this year. To make a sacrifice implies giving up something one wants voluntarily. If I rob you that's not a sacrifice, you had no choice.
There are clearly a ton of people who are unwilling to "voluntarily give up" anything, and they've given things up only when forced to, i.e. by restaurant or school closures. There are many more who make vague gestures towards responsible behavior but refuse to do anything that would incur any actual inconvenience.
I wish it were true that everyone has made sacrifices, but I'm afraid we haven't achieved that level of civic responsibility, not by a mile.
OK you must be yanking my chain now, I can't believe you're commenting on this so boldly and are completely unaware of the last huge spike in cases when occurred in July.
A lot of the summer spikes were in hot places with a lot of air conditioning where people tend to stay inside a lot during the summer. When I have looked at infection maps in the EU and USA, they seem very clearly connected to season. I think there is a process where people adjust their lifestyles to the current risk of infection, but then the goalposts get moved and the infection rate goes up due to environmental factors. Then there is a period of behavior adjustment again until the infection rates level off.
Would I believe someone who works at Postmates with over a decade of experience in the software industry bubble when they offer an opinion on the effects of a novel virus pandemic on the overall economy due to high level policy decisions?
Instead of me, why not listen instead to Dr. Michael Osterholm, PhD MPH, "an American epidemiologist, regents professor, and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota."
I think it is a valid concern. A bad economy kills. The so-called diseases of despair[1] kill more than 150k a year in the US. And much suffering is caused by limited opportunities and limited hope. These limited prospects can and have have taken down many governments in the past. And regime change is rarely a bloodless process. There are no perfect solutions when it comes to governance. We must do our best to promote good outcomes and mitigate the bad. I very much want my government to worry about the economy, just as I want it to worry about the virus.
Let's be honest with ourselves. The real reason many are worried about the economy is because of their rich lifestyles and stock portfolios.
If they cared about "diseases of despair" they wouldn't continue to support paltry minimum wages, lack of social safety net, no universal medicine, constant tax breaks at the expense of the budget, etc.
They didn't care about "diseases of despair" in 2008 either. It's simply a bad faith argument.
I am not them. The real reason I am worried about the economy is so that it can provide as good as a life to as many people as possible. I am not arguing in bad faith, and I do not want any of the things you list. I know our society has problems distributing wealth and I will always support distributing it more fairly. We need to have an economy for there to be anything to distribute. I do care and I am not your strawman.
> Why can you accept people dying, but not accept the economy not doing well?
In the grand scheme of "the economy", my portfolio is up something like 8% for the year last time I checked. My job is stable.
In the locality of "the economy", I have heard multiple businesses in my area say that they are barely hanging on by a thread and will be forced to close permanently if the state forces them to shut down again.
People might not be dying from the shutdowns, but it sure is an uneven load we're asking people to carry. Particularly from this high pulpit of HN, where we nearly all have cushy tech jobs where we don't have to interact with anyone to get paid.
> People might not be dying from the shutdowns, but it sure is an uneven load we're asking people to carry. Particularly from this high pulpit of HN, where we nearly all have cushy tech jobs where we don't have to interact with anyone to get paid.
Seems like a perfect opportunity for the government to continue supporting people. Perhaps some taxes on your high pulpit would do some good.
But heaven forbid we do that - because the real answer isn't "oh people die in a bad economy." It's "I'm unwilling to support my fellow americans in a proper way, I'd rather them risk their lives instead of providing some support during difficult times."
e.g. "my taxes!". It's a bad faith argument. The economy has been bad before and we never cared about the poor then.
It's a lot more than two or three people. And the decimation would be a lot less bad if stimulus relief was passed. How large is your town, that the hospital only has a couple ventilators?
I am going to jump to your aid, because I suspect the downvotes are coming. I think it is ok to question if we are doing the right thing. There are intellectually honest ways to do that and intellectually dishonest ways. I do think we should do everything we can to avoid becoming callous. Some amount of of emotional fatigue is to be expected though. We are talking about nearly 250k deaths so far. That is a completely overwhelming number. And the lockdowns and general fear has created an immeasurable impact on the the future world economy, political stability and mental health.
The science is clear that the risk of COVID morbidity and mortality is not evenly distributed. There could be more than one good way to manage this risk and keep our healthcare system functioning. As we start distributing the vaccine, we are going to have a great opportunity to mitigate a large portion of the risk for some people, while accepting a lower risk for others as the price to pay for getting back to normal as soon as possible. We make these kinds of population risk decisions all the time and no one bats an eye. Simply getting in your car every day and trusting your life to its imperfect safety systems is one example.
Soon we will need to draw that line of what risk we, as a society will accept, and then get on with it.
We've banned this account for breaking HN's guidelines. Can you please not create accounts to do that with? It will eventually get your main account banned as well.
You have to be in a high risk group for what? To die? As far as I know, while some health conditions or age raise risk of covid death or morbidity, there is no group that is without risk of death, i.e. anyone might die from Covid19. Is that your understanding as well, or do you know of some demographic group that has experienced 0 deaths?
To play the devil's advocate, the line of reasoning you used in your comment isn't very useful. Just because more than zero 5- to 14-year-olds have died from covid does not negate the fact that their risk is minuscule compared to other age groups. With a large enough sample size, there are always going to be outliers.
Fair enough. But this "I don't have to worry because I'm young and healthy!" besides being incredibly selfish (implied "who cares if I kill people around me by spreading the virus") it's also bullshit: it is not true that you don't have to worry, that there's no risk of mortality or morbidity.
I am happy to grant that the risk is much smaller, but just like the "kids can't get or spread covid" MYTH that people have been grasping to for dear life in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, this "only old people die of it" myth needs to be squashed.
it is not true that you don't have to worry, that there's no risk of mortality or morbidity
For young healthy people, it's true in the same sense that you don't have to worry about getting struck by lightning or attacked by a shark. These things happen, but they're so rare that it's silly to go through your life in constant fear.
besides being incredibly selfish
It is not selfish to consider whether it's possible to protect vulnerable people without demanding that everyone give up their social lives, children's education, and jobs for a year.
just like the "kids can't get or spread covid" MYTH that people have been grasping to for dear life in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary
What evidence? Schools haven't been significant drivers of infection or deaths anywhere in the world. Yes, the risk is not literally zero, but if that's your criterion then you'd never leave your bedroom.
this "only old people die of it" myth needs to be squashed
If everyone had the risk factor of a healthy 30 year old (say, 1 in 10,000 chance of death and 1 in 2500 chance of serious complications), would you still support shutting everything down?
You do not have to be in a high risk group. I've seen people not in high risk groups die. Your odds may be lower, but no one is immune. (I guess except those who survived it or got the vaccine)
If one event is cancelled because they saw this posting, then lives were potentially saved. If this is a good reminder for us to talk to our loved ones to cancel their events, then it almost certainly saved lives.
It's a low cost way to remind people that we definitely shouldn't be having Thanksgiving, Christmas, or other holiday gatherings.
I don't know anything more about this than the two links you just posted, but the article in the Independent and the Politifact Fact Check certainly do not come to the conclusion that this "declaration" is fake.
The Independent piece is talking about some of the 150,000+ names signed by the public. Of course people on the Internet are going to add fake names to the list. That doesn't make the declaration fake.
The Politifact piece explicitly notes that the official signatories are real. It then goes into an explanation of why their heterodox opinion is wrong, which maybe it is. But that doesn't make it fake.
Are you trying to say the authors don’t exist because some troll entered a fake name on their website?
Dr. Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard University, a biostatistician, and epidemiologist with expertise in detecting and monitoring infectious disease outbreaks and vaccine safety evaluations.
Dr. Sunetra Gupta, professor at Oxford University, an epidemiologist with expertise in immunology, vaccine development, and mathematical modeling of infectious diseases.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor at Stanford University Medical School, a physician, epidemiologist, health economist, and public health policy expert focusing on infectious diseases and vulnerable populations.
These are all people who wrote in favour of tobacco not causing cancer in individuals for the tobacco lobby. There were many other equally credentialed individuals who also said so. If you put enough money in front of an unscrupulous individual, no matter their background, they'll tell you whatever you want to hear.
The great barrington declaration is undoubtedly not fake, in that the core people who put their names to it have not said they didn't.
The volume of support is of course dubious as the only requirement for saying that a "medical professional" was signing it, was a check box on a web form.
the challenge I see with the declaration's approach is that (AFAIK) it skips over the hard part of how "Focused Protection." is actually implemented.
It's super easy to write a web page saying that we should use "focused protection" to avoid heavy loss of life to Covid, and much much harder to design and implement a workable strategy.
This article actually demonstrates that problem. A worker at a care facility spread it to a set of vulnerable people. How would "focused protection" have stopped that? There may be an answer, but I don't see that information from the Great Barrington declaration.
it skips over the hard part of how "Focused Protection." is actually implemented
That's a reasonable criticism, but I would point out that the "responsible" strategy of trying to force entire populations into quarantine has not survived contact with reality either.
A worker at a care facility spread it to a set of vulnerable people
The worker should have been living on site, or if that's not possible seeing literally nobody outside of their job. And we should be paying them huge amounts of money to compensate for that disruption.
> An open letter that made headlines calling for a herd immunity approach to Covid-19 lists a number of apparently fake names among its expert signatories, including “Dr Johnny Bananas” and “Professor Cominic Dummings”.
> Others listed include a resident at the “university of your mum” and another supposed specialist whose name was the first verse of the Macarena.
> Sky News discovered 18 self-declared homeopaths in the list of expert names and more than 100 therapists whose expertise included massage, hypnotherapy and Mongolian khoomii singing.
The pandemic makes ongoing science/technology news, and has substantial impact upon the work culture, sector demand, and societal role of the tech sphere.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans have perished from this disease and it didn't have to be this way. There is a major thrust of anti-intellectualism in the US, Brazil, and other countries. As "hackers," we try to understand what the intellectuals believe. Then, we figure out what's happening in the real world, and finally, we break the intellectuals' rules in pragmatic (but not expedient) ways.
The guy who just won the US presidential election claimed that we are entering a "dark winter," and it's a pretty relevant topic to HN in my view. COVID-19 sits at the unlikely confluence of medical science, tethics (shout out to Gavin Belson), statistics, system dynamics, and public policy.
your comment is fair, but the LA times article is about super-spreaders.. remember super-predators? the fearmongering pumped out of mainstream media, which well predates covid, isnt why any of us read hn. if a covid topic is to remain on hn until the pandemic is resolved, there could be better sources.
im familiar with the pareto principle. the point im trying to make is just that its usage by the la times is intended to trigger fear. super-man doesn't trigger fear -- thats the difference in analogies. it would be equally valid to say, "virus spreads via supertypical method around a supertypical gathering", imo
I think you're ascribing too much malice to the phrase "super-spreader." It just means "someone who spreads beyond what is typical." The pejorative connotation from "super-predator" comes from the "-predator" part.
If you're afraid of the word "spreader," then I suggest that you stay away from the lawn care section of your local home improvement retailer.
People are afraid of disease. That doesn't mean we should stop using the word "disease."
EDIT: I can't speak for the LA Times, and I'm not trying to defend them. Maybe they have an axe to grind. My comments are restricted to the terminology itself.
I am getting more and more frustrated with the FDA. The vaccine has been around since February. The severity pandemic can be boiled down to a function of drug testing. If we had a pandemic drug testing protocol we could have had a vaccine months ago. The FDA is just sitting on their hands right now waiting for people in the stage 3 trials to get sick to see if the vaccines are effective. If we would have used challenge trials where people are deliberately infected we would know this answer months sooner and save possibly 100,000's of lives.
I wonder if we could implement some sort of cap and trade system to make everyone happy?
Everyone could be rationed a certain number of gatherings per month and then each person would be free to choose how to use them. They could use one to see family during the holidays, they could go to a protest, go to a wedding, celebrate in the street, go to a movie, etc.
We could even track them as discrete tokens, or "social credits" using blockchain technology. This would allow contact tracing software to be able to determine the "cost" of an event based on how many people were exposed and then withdraw the appropriate number of credits from the participants.
In a system like this, people who don't go anywhere or see anyone would be able to redeem their excess social credits for things XBoxes or VR headsets.
It's true that minimizing all gatherings is the best choice. But we also have to recognize that social distancing fatigue happens. And when it does, people might stop socially distancing. Giving them a "social budget" could help them recognize risks and keep it up for longer. Of course, don't give them enough budget for an indoor wedding.
By sheer coincidence I’ve been reading World War Z and it’s amazing how in the real world we’re making the same mistakes that countries in the book made against the zombies. Of course the situation is entirely different, but it’s interesting.
Why doesn’t the government actually just enforce rules? So many lockdowns, mandates and laws but so little enforcement, or the penalty is not commensurate with the risk. What’s the point?
> Why doesn’t the government actually just enforce rules?
Because there is no government to enforce the rules. Only a loose aggregation of individuals, each with their own personal interests. Those interests often include things like, "I don't want to do anything that might anger people and lose me the next election," or, "If I cite someone for this, I am going to have even more paperwork to do when I get back to the station."
This way of thinking about how civic institutions behave becomes particularly important in a country like the USA whose cultural values tend to place individual freedom above many other things, including civic duty.
and other incentives too - enforcement is going to be hard on the scale of "everyone on the planet", but I wonder why people who got the cough went back to work. Would it have hurt their employment prospects to take the time off? Did they have responsibilities that were not able to be covered by coworkers? Understanding why people don't follow the rules by themselves is important - tweaking the incentives in the system could help to lower the R rate, where I think having the police monitor the social lives of everyone on the planet is not a viable solution.
The US president (or other authorities) can't just make new laws out of thin air, that whole democracy thing gets in the way. Short of rolling tanks down the streets of cities and towns everywhere you're not going to be able to enforce much. Even then, with tanks on the streets you have a very very bad situation on your hands. People in the US don't like having liberties taken away without due process and representation. And by "don't like" i mean will fight to the death over it.
Edit: also the federal government can't just "demand" things of the states. That whole republic thing gets in the way there.
I’m not talking about the federal government. Most major cities and states have already passed temporary mandates and orders that are not being enforced.
"The York County Jail employee showed up for an eight-hour shift despite having COVID-19 symptoms. It was the first of five consecutive days of work for the employee..."
I see the main problem not as the wedding, because an infection can frankly happen anywhere, but as a failure to accommodate people who feel they can't miss work even though they are ill (need the money, fear repercussions, policy that limits sick days, etc.). I don't believe the individuals intentionally exposed others, but felt they had no other choice.