This seems counterintuitive, but perhaps the “front line” workers benefitted from better access to PPE and testing?
https://twitter.com/luisferre/status/1259147393548894209?s=19
But the estimate is only like 5% of people have gotten the virus, right? If we were to fully reopen tomorrow, that would mean the lockdown was virtually meaningless vis a vis hospital capacity.
Olink makes a good point, though, that shifting the curve alone is still good. It (hopefully) gets us closer to a vaccine, has gotten us a couple better treatments, allowed hospitals time to implement new processes and best practices, etc.
We have almost no idea how many people have been exposed. Given what we’ve learned about how it’s spread I would be gobsmacked to discover that only 5% of the people have had it.
This data makes masks seem REALLY IMPORTANT
In the early days of “flatten the curve” I often saw it accompanied by “raise the bar”, which was supposed to imply an increase in treatment capacity (more equipment, more personnel, better triage systems, etc.). Two months of lockdown could have allowed for some progress on that front, but it seems like we didn’t do enough, especially in the states that are now getting LIBERATED!
I mean, kinda seems like you are hand waving the serology tests that are all showing very low percentages infected, other than in NYC. I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on how good the tests are, and certainly we could use more random testing, but I don’t see any experts suggesting there is a huge % of infected people who are not showing up on the serology tests.
Open for Business is good, but I think a better title for chapter 4 would have been Countdown to Catastrophe
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They’re building ventilators like crazy. GM and Ford are already cranking them out I believe. That’s a big component to raising the bar.
That is chapter 5…
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Like, every day we get new reports as to how crazy infectious this disease is, how it spreads for weeks undetected asymptomatically. And then people want to say that the true number of people infected is low. And yes I am hand-waving the serology tests, we don’t know how many people get this and don’t develop an antibody response. It’s all Calvinball, we don’t test people and then we brag that there aren’t a lot of infected people.
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Unless your state is closing borders, it doesn’t matter. It’s like having a family member sick with the flu stay in their bedroom. But if 10 family members go in and out all day and associate with others, you are all exposed.
5% is still 16.5M people
10% is 33M
Either is way far away from herd immunity
I mean 14.9% positive rate in the country amongst people who have symptoms and contact with infected people indicates it isn’t 10% and 5% isn’t gobsmacked territory
With 15% positive rate we probably aren’t more than 10x cases which would be 13.5M, a little shy of 5%
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Herd immunity is just a polite way of saying most people have been infected and 0.5% of them are dead.
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Yes. No one wants to wake the attack dogs by saying if ever an all or nothing strategy was required, this was it, but it’s probably true.
ShuttIng down and reopening prematurely is markedly worse than not shutting down at all but building enough new hospitals, employing enough medics with enough PPE and equipment from the part of GDP which has been lost under shutdown.
Probably something like, “I feel totally fine, there’s no way I have it.”
I’ve never seen so much collective ignorance/stupidity from society. It’s a spectacle to behold.
More like we bought a 2-year gym membership, prepaid in full for no discount, waited two months to go, loaded up about 500 pounds on the bar, made sure our neck was right under it, and tried to bench it without a spotter.
A few weeks ago it was that we were going to run out of vials. These dumb motherfuckers running the country can’t even cover their bases after fucking up the first time. You’d think when you find out you’re going to be short on vials, you’d go through step by step and make sure you are going to have each little thing necessary. But, nah. Herd immunity, who needs a vaccine? VACCINES ARE FOR LIBERAL WUSSIES!
Got any encouraging reasons we won’t go back to at least doubling every week once we open up? I mean some states are less open than others, so that’s good. But, like, even doubling every 2-3 weeks would be pretty catastrophic here with more than a million active cases.
When this happens we’re drawing live to some really bad shit happening. Bodies will be piling up, unemployment will be high, people will be losing their homes, going hungry, and if McConnell says fuck off no blue state bailout, it’s hard to see it not turning violently ugly. He’ll essentially be committing an act of political violence against millions of people, hard to imagine they all turn the other cheek.
Because we’re going to just go for herd immunity anyway, so what was the point of crippling the economy too? The whole point of flattening the curve is to use the time to expand testing capacity, contact tracing capacity, hospital/icu capacity, and to build up your PPE. We did ~none of that. So we open up, cases skyrocket, and what good did it really do for us?
Like, if we just open up and don’t shut down again, we’re just going to end up with the same ultimate death toll, which is the IFR * ~75% of 330M. Call it .6%, which brings us in at 1.485M. If we’re going to let 1,485,000 Americans die anyway, why cripple the economy too?
Like it goes without saying we’re all for saving lives, shutdowns, testing, tracing, etc. But if the choices are binary: let it rip, or wait two months and tank the economy then let it rip, we should have just let it rip.
It would have made for more of a V shaped recovery. We would have probably hit herd immunity between now and the end of June.
Do you seriously expect the curve to stay flattened when we open everything back up in like 30-40 states?
Probably also better effective use of PPE. Healthcare workers aren’t taking their masks off to scratch their nose, or pulling it down to only cover their mouths.
Although apparently, what we may actually want is just O2 nasal tube things and humidified air being pushed into the lungs more gently. I think it was in Chicago where they were having better results with that than venting?
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New infections on rise in Germany
New coronavirus infections are accelerating again in Germany just days after its leaders loosened social restrictions, raising concerns that the pandemic could once again slip out of control.
The Robert Koch Institute for disease control said in a daily bulletin the number of people each sick person now infects – known as the reproduction rate, or R – had risen to 1.1.
Chancellor Angela Merkel bowed to pressure from leaders of Germany’s 16 federal states to restart social life and revive the economy, announced on Wednesday measures that included more shop openings and a gradual return to school.
At the same time, she launched an “emergency brake” to allow for the reimposition of restrictions if infections pick up again.
Karl Lauterbach, a Social Democrat lawmaker and professor of epidemiology, warned that the new coronavirus could start spreading again quickly after seeing large crowds out and about on Saturday in his home city of Cologne.
“It has to be expected that the R rate will go over 1 and we will return to exponential growth,” Lauterbach said in a tweet. “The loosening measures were far too poorly prepared.”
The Robert Koch Institute said on Sunday the confirmed number of new coronavirus cases had increased by a daily 667 to 169,218, while the daily death toll had risen by 26 to 7,395.
“It is too early to infer whether the number of new infections will continue to decrease as in the past weeks or increase again,” the institute said in a separate daily bulletin issued on Saturday evening.
It cautioned that the R figure was subject to statistical uncertainty, adding: “The increase of the reproduction number R necessitates a close monitoring of the situation.”
Germany has the sixth-largest Covid-19 caseload in Europe but has managed to contain fatalities from the highly infectious respiratory disease thanks to widespread and early testing and a healthcare system that is well-run and well-funded.
Does pointing this out scare McConnell into acting? Maybe not, but does it hurt to try take a shot and predict that bad things might happen?