Coronavirus in DFW - News & Discussion (extermination, allergy)

[TurtleCreek80]

Originally Posted by biafra4life

Yeah. My office is one wide open space with cubicles tightly packed in. The whole 6 feet for social distancing just wouldn't work. That's why I wonder about the reopening the economy by May if there are still thousands of deaths a day. I would give anything to have a closed off office.

My last company was SO proud of their open floor plan remodel. The new offices started to open during flu/strep season that year and my friend in HR told me that work attendance was something like 30% lower than the same time the prior year. I got strep 2X in six weeks. It was awful. I think they’ve had continuous issues since then.

[calgirlinnc]

Originally Posted by Wittgenstein's Ghost

No one is arguing that there is no hardship caused by the shut downs. I agree that it is a disaster.

Yes, actually, that is the position that started this whole argument.

Someone claimed that we are being "whiny" and "childish" just because we can't go "shopping."

When the facts were pointed about job losses and people needing assistance to feed their families, that same poster claimed that those people were on the brink "anyway." It was further claimed that those job losses were not that important because they are service industry jobs, and those people don't spend much.

When the travesty of people suffering from mental health issues and the spike of suicides was pointed out, that poster again claimed that those people had issues "anyway."

God help me I if read one more time that this shutdown is easy because all we have to do is sit on the couch and watch Netflix.

All these ignorant people should be grateful that none of their loved ones struggle with clinical depression or anxiety or any other illness like that.

But that doesn't mean it is a cure that is worse than the disease. You are vastly underestimated the risk presented by Covid.

And you greatly underestimate the risk presented by mass unemployment, homelessness, spikes in mental health conditions, and so forth.

I'll take models put forth by experts any day. What's the alternative? Guess? Say that the best epidemiologists in the world don't have knowledge that is any better than that of Joe Everyman?

Geez, not even the expert epidemiologists agree, which again you would know if you watched something outside your own point of view.

[unknown00]

what are pple's thoughts on re-open?
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/gre...rus-guidelines
https://www.fox4news.com/news/gov-ab...xas-businesses

[Wittgenstein's Ghost]

Originally Posted by calgirlinnc

Geez, not even the expert epidemiologists agree, which again you would know if you watched something outside your own point of view.

But pretty much all of them support the shut downs. That's the point.

My issue here is that your position doesn't seem to be sensitive to the evidence. You cite statistics like the 1-in-77 figure or observations like Gates' inconsistency with vaccines as the reasons why you think the risks from Covid are overblown or the experts are unreliable. When these points are shown to be incorrect, your position doesn't change. Can you see why that might make someone believe your views aren't held as a result of evidence? When it is shown that, based on data, letting 18-64 year-olds go about normal life would result in 6 million+ hospitalizations, that doesn't seem to change your mind, either.

I used to believe we'd see 150k deaths. When Fauci revised it down to 60k, I changed my expectations. If you showed me a poll with a good methodology that showed that the majority of respected epidemiologists believed that Covid risks were greatly overestimated, I'd change my view. But when you've been shown on several occasions that the evidence on which your views are based isn't correct, your views don't change.

[calgirlinnc]

Originally Posted by Wittgenstein's Ghost

But pretty much all of them support the shut downs. That's the point.

That may be your point but it isn't the truth. Limited shut downs, yes, but not all agree on full shut downs. You only have to watch about the first 5 minutes of some of these videos to learn that some experts believe, for example, that children should be in school because most children have an inherent resistance to respiratory viruses, and they can build up herd immunity.

Regarding odds, you are quibbling over lifetime odds versus annual odds. So tell me, what are the odds of dying in a car accident versus dying of CV? Annual or lifetime, you choose.

All of this however, is ignoring that we are now facing 20 million unemployed and a loss of GDP of perhaps 40% according to JP Morgan. Headlines are screaming about this being worse than the Great Drpression. THAT is what I am concerned about, and YOU keep ignoring that. When this is all over in 5 years or 50 years or whenever, we can look back and count up the cost of lives destroyed by the virus versus life destroyed by the economy and isolation and so forth.

Until then, I'm done discussing this with you. ETA: you didn't even address the main issues I'm talking about. It just isn't worth it.

[Ralph_Kirk]

Originally Posted by calgirlinnc

That may be your point but it isn't the truth. Limited shut downs, yes, but not all agree on full shut downs.. You only have to watch about the first 5 minutes of some of these videos to learn that some experts believe, for example, that children should be in school because most children have an inherent resistance to respiratory viruses, and they can build up herd immunity.

You don't think there's a danger of them taking it back home to their parents?


Do you have an example of medical experts explicitly advising schools reopen?

[calgirlinnc]

Originally Posted by Ralph_Kirk

You don't think there's a danger of them taking it back home to their parents?


Do you have an example of medical experts explicitly advising schools reopen?

One example is in the first video in post #808 on this thread. His argument is that schools should never have been closed.

[Wittgenstein's Ghost]

Originally Posted by calgirlinnc

One example is in the first video in post #808 on this thread. His argument is that schools should never have been closed.

You realize it's an appeal to authority fallacy to cherry-pick experts that represent a minority view, right? The vast majority (as I said in my last post, "pretty much all") of experts do support some sort of strong shut down. Finding one or two who don't is logically fallacious.

Arguments against these shut downs usually take one of two forms:

1. The effects of the virus aren't as bad as they are made out to be. This is akin to your comparisons to car crashes and other large-scale dangerous things, like heart disease. This usually fails on its face because, without these shut downs, Covid would kill far, far more people than these other things. It will kill more people than car crashes even with the shut downs, and without shut downs, it would likely be the single largest killer in America.

2. The effects of the shut downs are worse than the effects of the virus. This isn't necessarily false on its face. I agree that there is some hypothetical point at which this would be true. If we knew we would face a fifty year depression that was worse than the Great Depression, that might hold greater weight than the lives of a million or so mostly old people. So, it's at least not false on its face. But I think most proponents of this view have arbitrarily arrived at this position. We really are talking about millions of potential deaths here, and the economic effects are likely to be temporary. I don't know if it will end up being worse than 2008 or not, but I do think it's unlikely to be so bad that we should be willing to sacrifice a million plus lives. That is a massive figure, and I really think most people espousing this view have a serious case of scope insensitivity going on.

You can think the economic effects are really terrible and have major sympathy for the 16 million people who have lost their jobs and think that this has all been worth it.

[Peter5457]

The experts do not agree.

https://theconversation.com/coronavi...disease-135825

Denmark is opening back schools next week. Maybe hoping they can try to reach the herd immunity so they won't get clobbered next season.

And their infectious diseases agency SSI has estimated that the true number of people who have had coronavirus is between 30 and 80 times larger than the roughly 5,000 who have so far tested positive. Based on their study of blood samples from 1000 donations.

https://www.thelocal.dk/20200408/dan...-been-infected

[Wittgenstein's Ghost]

Originally Posted by Peter5457

The experts do not agree.

https://theconversation.com/coronavi...disease-135825

Denmark is opening back schools next week. Maybe hoping they can try to reach the herd immunity so they won't get clobbered next season.

And their infectious diseases agency SSI has estimated that the true number of people who have had coronavirus is between 30 and 80 times larger than the roughly 5,000 who have so far tested positive. Based on their study of blood samples from 1000 donations.

https://www.thelocal.dk/20200408/dan...-been-infected

1. You previously posted a video of Dr. Knut Wittkowski (post #808, as mentioned above). Did you actually watch the video? There were a few key points in it that are quite unbelievable:

• Wittkowski claimed that, if no measures were taken, there would be 25,000 new cases and 500 deaths per day. In actuality, even with the measures taken, we have had 2,000 deaths per day and 30,000 new cases.
• Wittkowski claimed that there was no shortage of PPE equipment because, somewhere in the world, there is PPE equipment. Okay. So I guess there's no such thing as starvation because, somewhere in the world, there is food.
• Wittkowski claimed that there was no purpose in flattening the curve because the virus would exist in the population longer. The reasons for flattening the curve are well-understood and well-accepted. We have 900,000 hospital beds. Even if Wittkowski were correct and our total cases would be the same if we took the hit up front, our medical system would be overrun. Our death rate would sky rocket. Wittkowski is probably the only person on earth who believes this.

2. You are cherry-picking experts who support your view, but they represent a small minority view among relevant experts. That's an appeal to authority fallacy. If I find a physicist who believes gravity is illusory, it doesn't suddenly mean that experts' views are potato/pot-ahh-to. If there's a strong consensus among experts, and I'm not an expert, I should be inclined to accept that strong consensus. Finding a few dissenters doesn't muddy the waters.


Regarding herd immunity: In order for this to happen, 50% of the population needs to get the virus. That's over 150 million people. If it does turn out that there are 80 times as many people with the virus as we think, we'd be about a third of the way there. But we need good evidence of those figures before acting on them. That figure is a very preliminary figure, even in Denmark, and we then have the further question of what that number would look like in the US. If it's "only" 10x the tested-positive figure, we'd only have 5.5 million positives, or 1.7% of the population. That's nowhere near enough for herd immunity.