I've seen you say similar things in a few other threads, and myself and others have said, every time: the risk to everyone is that the hospitals become overwhelmed. They are not right now because of stay-at-home orders. What you think of as failure - hospitals currently low utilization - is in fact success.
1. This doesn't appear to be a falsifiable position with respect to being overly conservative. Any action that results in the hospitals not being overwhelmed will be taken as somehow likely causing the hospitals not to be overwhelmed. It's not clear by this logic how hospital capacities are ever chosen given various uncertainties in the environment.
2. It commits a status quo bias. Only the risks of deviating from shelter in place are considered. On the one hand we have a virus with a CFR of around 0.5% with fairly well understood vulnerabilities to various parts of the population. On the other we have a completely unprecedented shutdown triggering a 2T spending package and causing record unemployment, with an unknown end goal. Is the risk of continuing down this path somehow less than the risks to the hospitals based on our knowledge of disease?
> with fairly well understood vulnerabilities to various parts of the population.
I don't think the virus is as well understood as you believe, which is why opening back up now may be premature.
Regardless, the riskiest pre-existing conditions appear to be obesity and hypertension. 57-75% of Americans are obese according to the dedicated Wikipedia page. Also bear in mind there is considerable variance among obesity rates per locale. What's the CFR in obese patients?
Edit: if you can't tell me the CFR in obese patients, you shouldn't be rushing to open everything back up. I don't know why people are silently downvoting but there is nothing incorrect or inconsistent about my comment and I'm just making a suggestion based on what little evidence exists.
Point is there will be more than enough cases to overwhelm hospitals if the virus spreads in earnest. In this respect our population is potentially more vulnerable than, say, much of Europe or parts of Asia.
I don't know why my comment is even being downvoted. There is literally nothing factually incorrect or logically inconsistent about it yet every time I post anything regarding COVID19 I get immediate downvotes.
The pandemic isn't going to stop anytime soon. Miracle cures are highly unlikely, and a safe vaccine is probably more than a year away. So I hope that anyone with obesity is taking this opportunity to lose weight at a safe and sustainable rate.
1. A lot of people are gaining weight at a prodigious rate.
2. Newly minted alcoholics are being created before our very eyes.
3. There are already a bunch of seriously bad haircuts.
And this is just among people that I know who have the luxury of sitting around the house working from home. I imagine the real life consequences for the less fortunate are significantly more serious.
> What you think of as failure - hospitals currently low utilization - is in fact success.
What bothers me is the contention that my rights are contingent upon reported capacity of already existing hospitals. If this is truly a concern, and our rights our primary, then we should be building more hospitals so that we no longer have to make this Faustian bargain.
It seems impractical and short-sighted to continue these measured based upon this single metric, especially when there are so many other ways to have a lasting impact on the problem.
Aside from that, I don't personally believe it's the purpose of the government to save lives at any cost. Even the Police won't give you that guarantee.
The last rounds of major public (or notionally public) buildouts of infrastructure where profits be damned were funded by the feds, because the states and localities do not have the financial resources to add this along to whatever else they are currently funding, and even if they did you'd see a patchwork that mostly fails the truly underserved.
This is extremely unlikely due to the current administration.
> What bothers me is the contention that my rights are contingent upon reported capacity of already existing hospitals
This is pretty selfish. What about all of the old and immunocompromised people that could _die_? What about the families of those people? These people deserve rights too and I’d say their right to _stay alive_ trumps your “right” to get a hair cut or whatever
Let the old and immuno-compromised shelter in place then while the rest of us build herd immunity. We don't shut down the tobacco or alcohol industry even though second hand smoke and DUIs kill orders of magnitude more innocents than covid-19 ever will. Millions of people die every year. That's never going to change - such is life. You gotta draw a line somewhere and I think the "save lives at all costs, even the cost of the nation's economy" attitude of covid-19 is too far. You'll pay for a ruined economy later in suicides and increased crime (not to mention suicides snuff out way more man-years of life than old people dying of sickness who were already nearing the end of their rope).
You don’t think that covid-19 growing largely unchecked, infecting millions of Americans and overwhelming our healthcare system won’t crash the economy and kill young people?
We have a lot to lose and betting it all on for the economy, which would likely be ruined either way, seems foolish to me.
I suppose I just don't believe that would happen. You can still practice social distancing/face masks/hand washing without shelter-in-place. I believe those three things alone would significantly slow down the spread to manageable levels. So I simply don't see a scenario where it "grows unchecked" to millions in the USA. It would hit millions eventually (like swine flu) but it would be manageable (not "unchecked"). Most of the US is geographically separated and not densely populated (except for cities like NYC), and we are only at 3M cases globally and that is with months of growth.
Lastly, even if it grew unchecked, I don't believe overwhelming the healthcare system would crash the economy. It might devastate the healthcare industry, but it wouldn't devastate all industries like prolonged, no-end-in-sight lockdowns are doing. I also don't believe it would "kill [significant amounts of] young people" because I believe the mortality rate is much lower than currently estimated.
Suicide is already killing more young people than covid-19 due to lockdown. 2 USAFA cadets committed suicide because of lockdown orders this month, yet 0 cadets have died from covid-19.
> What bothers me is ... my rights are contingent upon ...
Your rights have been an illusion the whole time. We're one organism. The individual is a useful abstraction, as is further dividing that into the cells, but these abstractions have limits.
> What bothers me is the contention that my rights are contingent upon reported capacity of already existing hospitals.
What rights do you think you have here? Businesses are controlled through licensing and zoning. Outdoor spaces are regulated. Which right are you referring to?
> data suggests the vast majority of the population have taken to voluntary social distancing, which is the crux of Sweden's strategy to slow the spread of the virus.
Does it make any difference if they have "plateaued" if there are more active cases today than yesterday?
Does it make any difference that the US has not "plateaued" if the number of active cases is rising slower than in Sweden, and the death rate is lower?
It's good to have numbers, but given the wide disparity in testing rates and protocols, it's difficult to come to any significant conclusions based primarily on day-to-day case count.
Death count is at least somewhat less subject to such complications, and even there, it'd be much better to compare 7-day averages to smooth over reporting quirks.
Well, this is a truism, but it also smacks of special pleading. When readily available data contradicts a line of propaganda or groupthink, you can rationalize why it has many issues and quite possibly be right, but why are you exerting yourself to rationalize in that direction and not the opposite one? Even weak evidence against something should not enhance your confidence in that thing!
If the numbers were really meaningless, it would probably be evident in their clustering or limited range. I noticed the contrary; I didn't post a complete chart because I figured more data would probably result in diminishing returns when urging people to question their beliefs.
Russia, by the way, in the same data set, has about 7.6% more active cases than yesterday. Brazil, 8.4%. Pakistan, 4.8%. So if you hypothesized that all the increases were in the approximate range of +1% to -1%, you would be quite wrong.
Conversely, Germany's figure is down 4.8% and Switzerland is down 6.2%.
It seems as though people for whatever reason fetishize Sweden, among other nordic countries, and I'm increasingly irritated by it. Partly because it reminds me of the current US president and his judgment of different countries as "shitholes" or not. People pretend that they are clearly seeing facts in an unbiased way while doing the opposite.
No one is advocating going back to usual. Just to stop the irrational hope and actions that seem to target impossible benchmarks - you can't eradicate the disease, not a chance - instead, learn to live with it. And you do that one step at the time, not locking down further.
Exponential growth also means that 10% utilization isn't a ridiculous amount of headroom: it's <4 doublings, each of a few days, from overwhelming the system with new patients.
An R0 of 2 is towards the low end of estimates without social distancing. Zhang et al. estimate it as [2.06, 2.52] from the Diamond Princess data; Sanche et al. reported [3.8, 8.9] from data from Wuhan.
Without social distancing or contact tracing. The Bay Area's r is probably around 0.8 at this point with Santa Clara even lower (EDITED - see notes below). Some restrictions can be relaxed.
Rt of .88 according to https://rt.live I agree some restrictions could be relaxed. Hospitals were a good first step. More of the outdoors could be a good next one.
If it creeps up to 1.1, you still don't need many rounds of infection to completely overwhelm the system. 7 rounds of infection (~a month) would result in 10.4x more total patients.
That's new cases though, isn't it? I was summing over the entire "tree" to get the total instead.
If R0=2 (each person infects two more), you have 1 case at time zero, two after the first time step, and four after the next, but the total number of cases is 1+2+4=7, not 2^2.
It's true that people are discharged from the hospital eventually (one way or another), so there's a little extra room from that, but not much.
California is somewhere near steady-state (R=1) right now, but that's not a "stable" point, in the dynamical systems sense. A small decrease below R=1 would lead to falling rates, but a small increase above R=1 can make them skyrocket.
I'm not sure if there's good data on the length of hospital stays, but an early preprint from China reported a median stay of 19 days. That's not much help here: On day 20, the intake is 60% larger than the initial cohort--and only half of them (b/c median) will be discharged.
People with more data and expertise!) have worked up full SIR and utilization models, but the general point is that exponential growth is manageable, even boring, until suddenly it suddenly isn't.
Note that is CA as a whole. LA is skewing it upward.
e.g. CA was around 1250 new cases 2nd week of April and maybe 1200 now (4% lower). With test capacity increasing, rt.live is giving 0.88, which on a 4 day serial interval implies a 33% actual reduction
Bay Area went from about 200 to about 140 now (30% lower). Factoring the reduction from testing (if same for all of CA), we're actually at a 53% reduction. That's an R of 0.81.
Santa Clara (which I admittedly originally mis-used for all Bay Area) went from 62 to 25. That's an crude R of 0.77 -- 0.7 factoring the test increases.
Various data points. This is an upper bound, more calculated for Santa Clara county.
International comparisons to lockdown level and case count changes.
Assuming serial interval of 4 and > 10x non-detection rate on March 31 and 3x now gives you this.
Knowing people were dying if the disease in early February implies very high lack of detection when SIP was in place. (Likely over 800 infections a day when Santa Clara activated SIP)
What is your evidence that hospitals in America in general, and in California, are anywhere near being overwhelmed? I've cited evidence which shows the opposite--they are very far from being overwhelmed.
I live in a county of little over 100K residents, one death occurred over the outbreak, a 91 year old person died of COVID19. Over the weeks we had a total about 65 known cases, all sent to recuperate at home, with a single patient in the hospital.
The hospital has an entire wing dedicated to COVID patients that did not actually materialize. No care is provided to other patients that might need it (unless it is an emergency). Every appointment was rescheduled months into the future.
Everyone must stay home on the account of better erring on the side of caution.
I just went to the ER last night for what turned out to be a kidney stone. The place was empty. The doctor had just learned that day that the owners had laid off 50% of the staff.
On 3/16 San Francisco and some other cities issued the shelter-in-place order, and CA had 472 patients. Two weeks later, on 3/30, CA had 6,932 patients. That's 21% average daily increase, with an existing shelter-in-place order.
With 21% daily increase, it takes 12 days to go from 10% to 100% hospital utilization. And change of policy usually takes a week or more to affect the curve. Which means, we are ~5 days away from an invisible deadline, after which hospitals will be overrun no matter what.
First, it's not clear or obvious that the 21% daily increase rate would increase indefinitely. Infection rate slows more people get infected, and new potential victims decrease.
Second, all regions saw giant, double digit growth rates at first, and then lower growth rates. Sweden is taking a more laissez faire approach, and their growth rate has dropped from over +20% d/d to +1% d/d [1]
There isn't data to support the idea that we'd have 100% utilization in the Bay Area without shelter in place.
They’re not near being overwhelmed. That’s the point of we are currently living in success. But what we know from Italy and NYC is that the margin between situation-normal and patients-are-dying-in-hallways is less than a month.
The one-size-fit-all lockdown was a reasonable first knee-jerk reaction given the situation. It isn't a tool to fight pandemic, it is just a breather to prepare the long-term sustainable tools and system - like production of tests, certified masks, etc., identifying/quarantining vulnerable population, putting contact tracing in place, adjusting various social distancing rules to be tighter/looser where it possible and makes sense, etc. - to actually fight pandemic. Yet it seems that the lockdown time has so far been almost wasted in that regard and the lockdown itself seems to be taken as the main tool to fight the pandemic (probably also coupled with the naive idea that this virus can be made to go away completely). That doesn't look good. We may get temporarily lucky - the hot and dry weather will slow down the spread until of course October/November when with such an approach we would be back to square 1.5 at best, and that if the virus doesn't mutate to become more virulent and/or deadly (the 2nd wave of the Spanish flu for example was more deadly than the first)
For example - the construction was stopped at near by site. It is a huge 3 acre site where you can easily set social distance of say 10-20ft and have the clad in PPE crew working without any risk of virus spreading.
Ease up how? I mean, what's the specific proposal? The lockdown isn't "total" anyway -- very large numbers of people are still working at full salary (including, it must be pointed out, probably more than half the readers of this very site). There's little to no low hanging fruit of safe jobs that can be reopened. Just go look at the California list of "essential" jobs and tell us what needs to be added.
Fundamentally this is just a complicated strawman. People are arguing against "lockdown" but not in favor of another option. But we were all here in late march and we know what this disease does without containment.
I'm not an expert. I'd lean towards loosening restrictions on non-essential businesses, imposing strict capacity guidelines, and adjusting the strictness of the guidelines by region at fixed intervals with a fixed lead time. Add some worker protections so people who don't feel comfortable working don't lose their jobs during when they reopen, and don't exempt them from receiving unemployment so reopening doesn't turn them into a burden for the nonessential employer.
I'm lucky right now, to be an 'essential' employee making roughly twice minimum wage, working for an employer with deep pockets. I'm not coming from a place of personal inconvenience, because my job's gotten exponentially easier since people became afraid to go out. Most of our part time staff is gone, and I'm worried that SMBs will soon start dropping like flies.
We've proven that lockdowns work, really well. now we need to find a balance in order to prevent the economy we as a society return to from being a small collection of megacorps wandering through a graveyard of small businesses and unemployment.
Shouldnt step 4 be actually first one as it has lowest risk of making anything spread? Meanwhile, kids in elementary schools are unable to keep distance from each other and opening them requires reorganization like need for more space, need have them in smaller groups etc.
1) Schools are about to be done for the academic year, so they're effectively shut down until August anyway. It wouldn't make sense to re-open schools for less than a month.
2) For better or for worse, we've conditioned people to be wary of contact with other people. A movie theater that's 10% full is still hemorrhaging money, perhaps worse than if it was closed entirely (no payroll costs/etc).
I'm not sure what the breakdown is, so this could certainly be hyperbole, but it's entirely possible that people will just feel uncomfortable doing things with groups of >10 until a vaccine is available. A restaurant with 25% of its normal business will likely still need to shut down, reduce staff, etc.
Sure, we may not have 22MM people filing for unemployment but it might still be 10MM, which is still extremely abnormally large.
All that to say, there's a real possibility that gradual re-openings don't actually accomplish anything because the root fear (i.e. catching covid-19) hasn't been resolved in the minds of many people, especially in dense urban areas.
> 1) Schools are about to be done for the academic year, so they're effectively shut down until August anyway. It wouldn't make sense to re-open schools for less than a month.
Though it could make sense to re-open them a month early, health concerns permitting. They already got a "summer break" and can make up for lost time
My kid is absolutely still participating in school, and quarantine is pretty stressful for a kid. This hasn't been just loafing around, relaxing, and playing.
> Ease up how? I mean, what's the specific proposal?
Not sure how to put this but if you're advocating for the side that wants to confine seven million people to their homes and shut down nearly all commerce you're the one that has to come up with the specific proposal.
The objection is that there doesn't seem to be any kind of numerical metric to determine the success of this shelter in place policy.
It's public policy. So what are the stated goals of that policy, and what are the criteria for determining success?
It is a serious fucking problem that people aren't even really trying to answer that question any more.
That doesn't seem right. I got tacos from down the street last night. I got paid a week ago. I bought some home office related junk from Amazon yesterday. I need to go shopping tonight.
That's the problem with not being specific, you find yourself spouting silly hyperbole instead of argument. No, "almost all commerce" isn't shutdown, that's not remotely true. We're looking, depending on how pessimistic you want to be, at like a 20-30% drop in GDP. And that's big, but it's simply not almost all.
So I ask again: who do you want to go back to work before the virus case load drops? Be specific.
> That's the problem with not being specific, you find yourself spouting silly hyperbole instead of argument. No, "almost all commerce" isn't shutdown, that's not remotely true. We're looking, depending on how pessimistic you want to be, at like a 20-30% drop in GDP. And that's big, but it's simply not almost all.
You're kidding right? The drop in GDP between 1929 and 1932 was about 15% or so. You're saying I'm the one being hyperbolic for calling a drop of twice that size in three months a total free fall?
I apologize I forgot about Jeff Bezos and your local taco guy. I'll try to be more optimistic, like you are doing here, by predicting an instant drop of economic activity to twice the severity of the Great Depression.
And sure I'll take your bait on specifics anyways. I think we should pick policies just restrictive enough to keep hospitalizations below system capacity and no more. There really isn't any other reasonable choice, the current policy is just delaying the inevitable for no clear reason and without any specific vision of what success looks like.
You realize that if we have the same number of cases, and deaths, but with 3-4x the economic destruction, that's a spectacular policy failure right?
> The drop in GDP between 1929 and 1932 was about 15% or so.
I could be entirely wrong, but I just wonder whether GDP is a good measure or not for this situation. Think about childcare - it's not that children are not being cared for: in fact, they might be getting more attention from their parents or other family members. Yes, the daycare is shut down and not making money, but the work is still performed. Similar to restaurants vs. food made at home.
I wonder if the loss of non-essential businesses is as detrimental to our economy as the loss of essential businesses. During the Depression, we were losing essential businesses like farms and then on top of that we had a dust bowl. The economy feels very squishy - as in, we're able to layoff and furlough an amazing percentage and people still get the basics like food, water, and shelter, and we still have luxury goods: Apple is still releasing new iPhones even though they're made in China, we still have craft beer flowing, and we can get tacos.
Tied into this, though, is that we do have to keep money flowing not through labor, since that's illegal for a lot of folks, but start figuring out better unemployment insurance and small business aid.
Ease up by returning to normal economic activities, but with mandatory masks and gloves for most workers and consumers, while strongly encouraging social distancing.
My current belief, based on experiences reported in other countries, is that this would be enough. There's not much evidence that total physical lockdown is necessary for everyone regardless of their level of vulnerability.
I'm painfully aware, which is why I asked the question. Who would you like to see back to work, and are you certain they're not already on the list of essential positions?
If many people get very sick simultaneously, they would not only overwhelm hospitals, they would also inflict a disorderly, involuntary shutdown of large swaths of the economy, driven by fear -- instead of the orderly, voluntary shutdown we have at present, driven by government mandate.
We all want to avoid a disorderly shutdown driven by fear.
The current so-called shutdown (at least where I live) seems to be mostly voluntary. People are out and about horsing around all the time. There's no difference in traffic before and after on my street. It's pretty much being ignored by many people, and there's no visible enforcement. It seems more like a stay-at-home suggestion than an order.
Here in BC we don't have such restrictive conditions, and yet we still have very few cases. Vancouver has about 76% of the population of SF, but has half the number of cases. Restricting people to be at home has no benefit, no logic behind it, but has significant repercussions on mental health.
My understanding is that the Vancouver lockdown is largely identical to the California one, no? What is open there that isn't in CA? I know restaurants, theaters, large gatherings, etc... are all closed, which is the economic activity most of the "reopen" people are concerned about.
Edit to note: two responses "disagreeing" with me by pointing out that the BC lockdown is effectively the same thing as the California one from the perspective of economic impact. This is why I asked the question! People are being fooled into arguing with a strawman idea of "lockdown" that isn't what is actually implemented.
First, it's not a Vancouver lockdown (it's a BC thing), nor is it really a lockdown at all. Nobody is legally required to stay at home except for people who are under a specified health order. Here are the restrictions on life that are most commonly noticed:
1. Restaurants are closed except for take-out and delivery.
2. Personal services businesses are closed.
3. Large gatherings of all kinds are banned.
4. Schools are closed.
You can still go to your office if you wish to, so long as social distancing rules can be respected (staying 2m apart). This being said, the vast majority of businesses that can have their employees work remotely are doing so, simply out of a concern for their health and wellbeing. If you have to have employees in your workplace, then there are guidelines for making it as safe as possible.
There is also extensive testing. Anyone with symptoms can be tested promptly.
FWIW I'm not familiar with CA specifically, but that sounds like the same kind of lockdown we have here in NY.
Offices are voluntarily closed, as far as I can tell, not by fiat. While you're only supposed to be working at an office if you're an essential worker, the definition is somewhat loose.
No. We are allowed to drive. All workplaces are open except for places like restaurants, personal service businesses, gyms and theatres. Other businesses just have to ensure distancing.
We're allowed to drive in California too - its supposed be for "essential" travel only, but that is pretty broad. I'd estimate in the Bay Area, traffic is only down by 50% or so (though certain commute routes are more dramatically impacted).
"Everyone is required to stay home except to get food, care for a relative or friend, get necessary health care, or go to an essential job... If you need to get into a car or on public transportation to go for a walk or run, you’re going too far."
Correct. Driving somewhere doesnt increase risk, any more than walking near your home. In a large city you are probably better driving outside the city.
The lockdown restrictions are a faith based policy, not evidence based. There is no hard evidence that they will reduce total deaths over the full span of the pandemic.
That (1) driving is a pre-cursor to contact with others and (2) driving requires contact with others (gassing up, toll booths, parking attendants, snacks, LE and so on) and (3) driving could lead to accidents which might in turn lead to you ending up in the ER or requiring ambulance transport.
Walking or driving can be a precursor to contact, but as mentioned in my previous comment, if you live in a large city it is difficult to physically distance yourself when walking outside. You are probably better driving to a more remote location for exercise.
Generally there is sufficient distance from other people when gassing up, so that seems like a very low risk for a short period of time, compared to walking in a city.
You are also at risk of requiring ambulance transport if you do DIY work at home. So best just sit in a dark room because you don't want electricity workers to have to go to work, or Netflix employees to have to go into work, etc.
If you think a pandemic is the time to start major DIY projects then you really don't get it. You're not alone in that, but that doesn't make it smart or right.
If we expect a roughly fixed number of people to eventually need hospitalization, then underutilizing hospital capacity is a waste of very expensive shutdown time.
The shutdown is preventing quite a bit of sickness, disability and death from occurring during the course of the shutdown. If we could indeed maintain a shutdown forever, and if that would reduce the total amount of sickness, death, etc, then maybe it follows that an indefinite shutdown would have value to weigh against the cost. But those are some seriously questionable assumptions. What actually seems to be happening is that we are delaying people getting sick, and the value of that is not self-evident.
I am suspicious that much of the COVID-19 response is based on pretending that it is a severe pandemic flu with a comparable fatality rate. With a flu, shutting the world down until summer or until a new flu vaccine can be mass produced has clear value. But COVID-19 is not the flu.
The problem I see with that statement is that it's difficult, if not impossible to falsify.
Hospitals are nowhere near being overwhelmed, in general, which means that they have some capacity to handle an outbreak if we lift restrictions gradually. I know people who work at hospitals in places like LA, and they've reported that activity is relatively slow. (of course in part because fewer people are going to the ER for other issues)
Lives are being ruined by furthering a draconian lockdown. I know several people who have not only been laid off, but had their businesses destroyed and their dreams crushed. Someone in my neighborhood spent their life savings on starting a gourmet burgers and brews joint next to a movie theater, which would have undoubtedly succeeded in normal conditions. They're getting very few curbside orders because they opened after the pandemic started and nobody is familiar with the brand. They're almost certainly screwed, especially if some semblance of foot traffic doesn't begin coming back in the next month.
I, too, was in the early stage of starting a brick and mortar business before the lockdown. Fortunately, I hadn't opened up anywhere yet. Because my business relied on the existence of gyms, I would have been massively screwed. If there is a god, I'll thank him now for not putting me through the ordeal of owing tens of thousands of dollars to the bank. Now I'm not even going to bother opening up because there may not be any appreciable business in the next year or so, which also means people whom I would have employed have to look elsewhere and may be out of work.
Low hospital utilization seems to have become our only metric for success. I think that's crap, especially now that it's coming out that way more people have had this virus than the numbers suggested.
We can put on masks, wash our hands, and all that, but this idea that "the new normal" is to have little to no proximity with other human beings is demoralizing and wrong. Life isn't just about staying alive.
EDIT: To bring up anecdotes is not a fallacy, and I won't apologize for it.
Some ignorant boob happened to bring up NYC, and their comment to mine got flagged, but I still want to reply to that point.
You can't focus in on a particular city and then claim that, without draconian intervention, that NYC will be coming to a neighborhood near you. It's more complicated than that, and the more data we are getting, the more it's looking like we could begin to take measures to ease the restrictions in a reasonable way in parts of the world where it makes sense. But people like to point at the raw numbers rather than looking at the science or the per-capita numbers.
By using the logic of "but look at NYC!", we should keep the entire world closed until every city on the planet has no more cases, which is highly improbable and destructive.
+ CO2-increased houses make people much less clever,
+ Demotivation/decrease of testosterone makes people durably less productive, further hampering our ability maintain the little flow of goods that’s left.
We are setting up ourselves for a much more deadly future.
Exercise hasn't been banned, so unless you absolutely can not exercise without a full gym, there shouldn't be any reason to think people will be gaining weight, or having decreased testosterone. Even if you don't want to leave the house, you can still do things like Yoga, lift weights, or any number of other physical activities that need little or no equipment.
I'm not sure what the concern about CO2 is - at least in the Bay Area, we're in prime keep-the-windows-open-all-day weather. And the status quo would be working in offices or other buildings that tend to not even have openable windows, so even if the weather wasn't nice, indoor CO2 shouldn't be a concern.
That may be true, but that isn't going to change human behavior. Encouraging people to continuing to work out at home is a good thing, but most people are demoralized. Fewer people are going to exercise because there's nothing to do, nobody to see, and not much to look forward to for the next year. I know my fitness has decreased due to demoralization. Sure, I can exercise, but it's hard to find reasons to exercise beyond mere health. Most people also want to be fit because they want to look good, but during the pandemic, looking good for whom? Toss unemployment income and "survival" junk food into the mix, and you've got a population that is probably overall less healthy.
I'm on board with keeping up the exercise, by the way. It's just that the reality is that people aren't going to come out of this more healthy because their motivation has been crushed.
>The problem I see with that statement is that it's difficult, if not impossible to falsify.
All you have to do is take a look at hospitals in NYC to know how wrong you are and right the person you responded to is.
>Someone in my neighborhood spent their life savings on starting a gourmet burgers and brews joint
Holy shit won't someone please think of the gastropubs. This is why I'll never believe this is a good faith concern for the people that really need our concern right now: no one ever says "I know a delivery driver" or "I know a busboy" or "I know a janitor" that needs help. It's always some lifestyle business owner that we should be weeping for in these outcries.
of course i would. would you like to setup a call so i can tell you to your face in real life how absolutely morally repugnant and completely facile your ideas are?
i don't care i'm not a politician. people like you get away with spouting nonsense because no one ever shames them for it (they've always gotten the benefit of the doubt about their intelligence). i'm a firm believer in shaming people for their stupidity when it affects others. you have zero stake in this mr webdev and you should at least be forced to ante up your ego. so i don't care if you're persuaded, only that next time you'll think twice about opening your mouth because you expect everyone will just politely disagree with you.
We were on an exponential growth path before. Now we’re not. It’s impossible to prove that an intervention made things not happen, but this is the predicted outcome.
I don't know about San Francsico, but, in much of the less population dense US West, the deaths from denial of so-called "non-critical" procedures are getting out of control, and hospitals and medical facilities are losing way too many employees.
People should remember that the mortality rate for COVID-19 is under 3% _with_ medical care. If it isn’t available the mortality rate goes way up to around 20%.
Wuhan hit about 17% in the early days when their hospitals were overloaded. I though that was common knowledge? I also thought it was common knowledge that about 1 in 5 symptomatic cases require medical care.
The cdc has revised their estimates down in wuhan from 17% to 12%, and hospitalization rates have also gone down as testing has improved over the last few weeks. On the flip side there is mounting evidence that many COVID-19 deaths are not being counted.
