Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
At this situation, the conventional concept of “freedom” is challenged by the COVID19. Before covid19, every one pursue freedom: freedom of shopping, freedom of speech, freedom of play..., now freedom means death, more freedom, more death, less freedom, less death.
Except people will *still* die AND they won't have their freedoms. They will just die from different things. A 17 year old girl in England killed herself last week because of the psychological devastation of quarantine.
Have you considered going back to MA? My guess is that a lot of grocery shoppers in north Dallas would be all for it.
But you would know someone who worked in Dallas County and lived in Collin County and didn't wear a mask, or someone who lived right on the line and shopped in both.
Basically unless we do a complete quarantine where nobody goes anywhere at all, or this half quarantine, the entire thing is sort of a measure to make people feel safe.
If people are that paranoid about everything, then why shouldn't they stay home. Why should someone who has little to no fear of going out be ridiculed. The numbers are on my side. If you are under 70 and/or healthy the death rate is very low, and will continue to go lower. For the elderly or people with weak immune systems, yes, they need to be very careful. But the fact we are treating healthy people like they are trying to kill people is ridiculous.
So yes, I simply believe what the CDC says that most will get this virus, so most will need to fight and deal with it and built immunity for it. What we are essentially doing now is giving people the impression that they won't get it and if they do they will probably die. And so people just listen to any order without any actual merit or common sense at all.
Yeah, all of those pesky medical experts and their fancy "studies" and fake knowledge about virus transmission are really just out to prank Americans and make them jump for no good reason. Mavericks like you and me, we don't jump for anyone, regardless of how many fancy degrees they have. I've got Google and an extra fifteen minutes, so I don't need no epidemiologists.
So you are still living in the "we can contain this" phase. That left a long time ago. This virus was easily here in in January, I think we will find out even earlier. It will be here for awhile, let's stop thinking you won't get it when most will. Let's protect the elderly and others with health issues that will struggle and let the healthy people who aren't having many issues develop some immunity to it.
So sort of 2nd phase, the government went to the point where we can't overwhelm the hospitals, which that part I did agree with for a few weeks. Then, it was flatten the curve, but of course we just started testing (not testing for people that may have had it or did have it), so cases are low and not accurate. You can't tell me way more people haven't had this and beat it when we had it here earlier with no social restrictions at all. That was for at least two months. I know of many people sick I was around and others were around and most ended up fine.
Now its, oh we can't open anything up. Not that it matters cause most won't even go out anyway.
Can we just admit the government has no idea what they are doing other than scaring people to the point other problems are going to to come because of this.
I was dead set against opening. I have since changed my mind. I think we need to do it slowly and carefully. Social distance needs to still be practiced and people should be required to wear face masks. Those who are high risk should stay quarantined.
The previous high of 34k was artificially low. Quest Diagnostics had some reporting issues. There were unreported positive cases going back 11 days to April 13 for multiple states. Massachusetts reported 5k positives today, due to the reporting error.
I wish the article would have mentioned how many of the 5k positives were left-over results. Yesterday, MA had 2,400 positives, so even if we say that half of those 5k positives were left-overs, we still had about 36,000 positives nationally two days ago....still a record.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DPatel304
I'm curious as to when people here think would be a good time to start re-opening.
Realistically, we can't shut the world down until there is a vaccine, so we will have to start taking some risks at some point, right?
It's not so much about the timeline as it is our capacity to do a few things that will allow us to open responsibly. First, our testing capacity has to be much higher. The asymptomatic carriers are likely a big cause of spread, and that can't be managed if only the very sick are being tested. Second, PPE has to be available for regular workers to wear. If we don't have access to masks, and we cannot know if we have it, it will spread like wildfire. Third, we have to have better info regarding the existing state of the virus in the US. This means serology testing needs to be much more widespread. Fourth, we need to have a significant decrease in both new cases and active cases. We hit a record (!) number of new cases yesterday. In what world is that a good time to open things up?
I agree that we can't wait until a vaccine. But we do have to have some of this other stuff in place. IMO, we would have been better off doing a real 30 day lockdown on a national scale.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sunbather
It's like when a client comes to me and says 'i need this work done and i need it done in a week'. When I review the scope, I put a scheduled together that demonstrates I need 160 hours. The fact that they want it in a week arbitrarily doesn't negate the fact that I need 160 hours to do the work,
This is a great analogy. It seems as though a lot of the push to open up is entirely divorced from the actual state and progression of the virus in the US. "Packed churches on Easter" was the obvious example, but this sort of thinking seems to be relatively common right now.
Quote:
Originally Posted by calgirlinnc
Except people will *still* die AND they won't have their freedoms. They will just die from different things. A 17 year old girl in England killed herself last week because of the psychological devastation of quarantine.
Of course people will die either way, but the question is which scenario saves the most lives. "People will die, so it's the same either way" is like "Bill Gates and I both own dollars, so we're equally rich." We are seeing 2,000+ deaths on a daily basis right now, even with historic shut downs in place. We would literally see a million or more deaths from this virus if we returned to normal life right now.
The US had over 35,000 new cases and 2,000 deaths yesterday. That is the second-worst day ever for new cases (so much for a peak on April 4). Texas had 40 deaths, which was its second-worst day for deaths yet. Perhaps more importantly, Texas had over 1,000 new cases yesterday.
At this point, we have no clue if the US has peaked in terms of new daily cases. It certainly didn't happen in early April. Right now, our two highest new case days were yesterday and the day before.
For those who are interested in the modeling, the White House, including the medical team, have primarily been using the IMHE model mentioned a couple pages ago in this thread. An interesting article came out a couple days ago regarding this model (https://www.politico.com/news/2020/0...s-model-207582). In a nutshell, it did a good job of reflecting the lower peak due to social distancing, but it is probably the most optimistic model out there, and its creators have realized that it is too optimistic. They will be raising its projected death totals in the coming days.
A few key quotes from the article:
Quote:
“The IHME model is an odd duck in the pool of mathematical models,” said Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Medicine. “I fear the White House is looking for data that tells them a story they want to hear, and so they look to the model with the lowest projection of death.”
Quote:
He added that IHME’s model is far more optimistic than others in large part because it heavily accounted for the impact of social distancing — a decision Murray credited for helping pinpoint the pandemic’s national peak even as others warned of continued massive growth in cases.
“We’re orders of magnitude more optimistic. On the other hand we also called the peak correctly,” he said. “We believe in fitting models to data, and not making an assumption and then saying how my assumption would play out in a hypothetical world.”
Quote:
Compounding those concerns is what he called a “disturbing” trend of slower drop-offs in new cases in some countries like Italy, a signal that the crisis could persist for longer than expected.
The IHME, he said, will update its estimates next week to reflect a gloomier future amid indications that states like Georgia will begin to reopen — and boost the odds of a prolonged pandemic.
“We had presumed, perhaps naively, that given the magnitude of the epidemic, most states would stick to their social distancing until the end of May,” Murray said. “That is not happening.”
There seems to be an interesting self-defeating cycle at play where models like IMHE can make projections based on optimism about how seriously people take the virus, and then people take the virus less-seriously because of optimistic models. The article also mentions that much of the IMHE model is based on the trajectory in Italy and China, but if you look at their trajectories versus our own, it's clear that we are not seeing nearly the drop off in cases that either of them did.
To be clear, I think modeling this sort of thing is extremely difficult, and a model that calls for 60k deaths at the very beginning likely did an excellent job if we end up with 100k deaths. The general public would call that a failure, but given the difficulties of predicting the actions of 300 million people and 50 state governments with a virus that is novel, any projection that ends up within 50% of the final outcome did an astonishingly good job, IMO.
Also, for those who are more graphically-oriented, I'll leave this here:
I think we can safely reopen if people are willing to proceed cautiously, work while keeping a distance and wear masks when working/talking.
In Taiwan they never shelter in place even now and they are doing just fine with a population that has been cautious and responsible.
Texas is anything but cautious and responsible compared with Taiwan. Those things won't happen here so I'm worried it won't be under control for a while. I am glad to more people wearing face masks though.
It's not so much about the timeline as it is our capacity to do a few things that will allow us to open responsibly. First, our testing capacity has to be much higher. The asymptomatic carriers are likely a big cause of spread, and that can't be managed if only the very sick are being tested. Second, PPE has to be available for regular workers to wear. If we don't have access to masks, and we cannot know if we have it, it will spread like wildfire. Third, we have to have better info regarding the existing state of the virus in the US. This means serology testing needs to be much more widespread. Fourth, we need to have a significant decrease in both new cases and active cases. We hit a record (!) number of new cases yesterday. In what world is that a good time to open things up?
The thing that most bothers me about "opening up" right now is that as far as I can tell, the nation hasn't made effective use of this time to deal with those issues you have stated.
For instance, nobody in leadership--that is, the White House and Congress--has made a national priority of making effective PPE available to workers. The government has not done the kind of coordination it did in WWII to contract all kinds of fabricators across the country to convert their manufacturing to making masks (like the WWII clockmakers that switched to making Norden bombsights).
Some manufacturers have done it voluntarily, such as GM using former auto floor space for masks, but the fact that some have done it voluntarily only proves that with proper coordination and incentive, a lot more could have made those conversions, and should be cranking out millions more masks by now.
All kinds of paper companies like Scott could switch to masks. Not all would be 3M-patented N95 masks, and not all need be. Many more paper and filter companies can make N95-equivalent filter inserts to insert into fabric masks made by clothing fabricators. Or for that matter, a nationwide cottage industry of cloth mask-making to complement factor-made filter inserts.
There are still hundreds of fabricators who could be turning out other equipment needed by hospitals such as beds.
But that takes federal level coordination, it takes the federal-level offer of contracts. We've had three months to have gotten that underway, but that time has been squandered.
Except people will *still* die AND they won't have their freedoms. They will just die from different things. A 17 year old girl in England killed herself last week because of the psychological devastation of quarantine.
With that logic, suicides also occur regardless of pandemics, so why be concerned with the ones that do?
Let's be a little more compassionate to the 200,000+ people (and counting) who have died over the past 4 months that were just living their lives prior to all this. Those numbers would be outrageously higher without any regulations in place. Things are not getting better in the US...yet
With that logic, suicides also occur regardless of pandemics, so why be concerned with the ones that do?
This young girl was one of those 200,000 people just "living her life". Her mental condition deteriorated because of the pandemic/quarantine.
Who are you to say that some people deserve compassion but others don't?
I've read lots of horrible comments on this forum, but this is a new level of cold heartedness. I'm not the one who needs some compassion.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
