One thing I wonder about is can a city like Dallas or Atlanta even turn into NYC? That is one reason I never see additional lockdowns happening. Most large US cities are commuter cities and the rate of possible spread in a city like Dallas will never be what it was in NYC. I see a somewhat slow and prolonged burn of this across the country as a result. And by slow I still mean faster by quite a bit than during lockdown, I just don’t see another US city going full nuclear meltdown mode like NYC. As you said though we are all just guessing.
It also seems that people get used to large numbers quick. Two months ago we weren’t in lockdown anywhere and had 500 total cases. Now we have 25-30k new cases a day and are averaging nearly 2000 deaths a day and most people don’t seem to care. .
Your point about the election being what is driving the choices I think is right. The dumb thing about that is that a competent response would have been so so popular and probably led to a Trump landslide. Of course we all know that Trump is fully incapable of that which is why we are where we are.
Yup I agree with most of that… The thing is, even at a slower rate of exponential growth it’s still exponential growth. Unless they mitigate it down to an Rt of <= 1 at some point and/or increase hospital capacity, it’s not just going to stay a slow and prolonged burn, it’s going to ramp up and overtake healthcare capacity at some point.
To put it another way if the Rt in NYC with no mitigation led to a doubling every 3 days, and the Rt in the Atlanta metro area with no mitigation leads to a doubling every 3+X days, it’ll take longer but it’s still repeatedly doubling and it’s still going to get there.
They’re probably all-in on the summer slowdown theory/hope. They probably think they can reopen now, it’ll shoot up but not enough to lose control before like June, and then mother nature will warm things up and flatten it and decrease it until like September/October, at which point they just have to ride it out til early November to secure re-election.
That’s the gambit, isn’t it?
It’s a hell of a gamble, but it might be their best political play… and they’re a bunch of massive assholes who only care about their own personal political future, so, away we go.
Plan is obviously for Trump to point at CDC recomendation to only reopen after 14 days of declining cases and then blame the governors for opening early. He will push for everything to stay open but have things like this to give him plausible deniability and enable blame shifting.
Friend sent me a video from the bar below her friend’s apartment in Tampa last night (this is a screen shot, it wouldn’t let me post the video because the format is wrong?):
If we follow this line then all the smug idiots of just a flu and just old people better be ready for Cv 3.0. (Let’s say these are 1.0 and 2.0).
It won’t necessarily happen like 1918 2.0 but it could and the more active cases we allow the more likely that is.
One could argue that excellent social distancing will choke off its warm body supply.
One could also argue that half-assed social distancing gives a selective pressure for a variant that is MORE contagious (better survivability in air, better spike protein, etc)
And of course since morbidity isn’t even really a major factor in spread (accepting that those with no and low sickness are the primary spreaders), then who knows if it will get “nastier”. There is definitely reason to believe that infection efficiency and host damage tend to trend together. There is certainly not much pressure to become less symptom causing.
And that’s not even factoring all these apparent longer term effects like strokes in young adults and Kawasaki like illness in children.
Those are cases. Now stack up the bodies like cord wood.
As you know, we are going for herd immunity in the most painful fashion. Fast enough to be always at risk of overwhelming local healthcare, which necessitates lockdown and economic damage butbslow enough that people SHRUG at 2,000 deaths per day as long as NIMBY.
Let’s say there are 12 million active or recovered (10x positives) and it takes 300,000,000 for herd. Only 25x more. 25 x 70,000 = holy fuck 1.75M.
Yes they were bigots. I think there was an aunt or older cousin Dad was close with growing up that completely cut off all contact.
You’d think that my catholic mothers family who helped found Montreal and is nothing but French names in Quebec for 250! Years would have had the harder time.
I’m grateful that my Dads parents didnt hassle my mom on that basis. They could be perfectionists and judgemental about every day stuff but they did that to everybody regardless.
Gives me hope going forward as one of my biggest concern is that there is a generation being raised by Trumpers in the era of Trump and they will be entering politics before I die If I make it to 90.
Can confirm wife and I were driving around (as we do to avoid the cabin fever) and there were a lot of places open with a lot of people inside them in the North Austin area. This thing is going to blow the fuck up. Every white person in Austin felt that Cinco de Mayo was a great reason to go to a Mexican restaurant from what we could see.
Growing up with the internet seems to do really significant damage to religiosity and conservatism. I expect the number of theists to absolutely flatline over the next couple of decades. Ditto for anyone whose views are about returning to the past. That whole line of thinking is really hard to maintain in the face of unlimited information access.
I was accused of trolling for saying it, but a 0.2% chance or whatever of death just isn’t that scary for a youngish, relatively healthy average person. It’s not scary to me and I’m a little less dumb than average. It’s not that they don’t believe the stats, they may or may not, they just don’t care regardless.
Might take 10-15 years off your life even if they don’t die? So what, how hard was it to get people to just cut back on smoking?
If you want to really burst the bubble of some of the “It’s just like the flu” and “antibody tests are going to show mass prevalence(and therefore it is less deadly)” crowd just show them this:
Yes that’s right .161% of the entire population of NYC has ALREADY died. So there is a 0% chance barring some kind of future mutation to become less deadly that this is just like the flu or anything close.
I think your perception of risk is common. Two issues
Your short term odds of just about any other cause are way lower. Odds you die of heart disease over a lifetime is higher. Odds of dying of heart disease in the next six months is basically 0 (assuming you are young and healthy).
You are the spreader. Your willingness to accept the risk is like driving like a maniac on the freeway. You get the perceived gain of getting their faster but some fraction of the time you take out a minivan full of a family.
I’m not trying to be critical of you personally. Just a generalized statement of how personal risk is perceived and how collective risk is virtually ignored by vast numbers of people.
