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unless the world plans to stay isolated until there is a cure this may be the alternative that doesnt also bankrupt a lot of businesses and put people out of work.
I’m going to try and lay out the case in as neutral terms as I can, although to be clear I think they are probably right. They’re going to take an awful lot of stick for it though, and indeed already are. They believe that there are basically two mitigation strategies. One is to have a very drastic early lockdown that shuts down the virus before it spreads widely. The problem with that is, once you lift the lockdown…
I'm pretty confident they'll start copying everyone else in 10-14 days. They are ignoring any sensible model of this and they won't be able to deal with the uproar once the numbers reach a psychological threshold. Happened last Sunday in Spain BTW.
Doing what someone else does, but a week later doesn't necesarily mean you made a mistake, or that you are a week late in making a decision.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doing what someone else does, but a week later doesn't necesarily mean you made a mistake, or that you are a week late in making a decision.
I think it does, you don't wait a week to put out a fire, it gets worse. China has essentially contained it already. Maybe alternating lockdowns and releases we might be able to keep it manageable until there's a vaccine. This is not hard to model once there are a few cases in a population, again IMO.
Flattening out the infection curve too much means increasing the economic harm by a much larger degree.
Calling a lockdown a week too early, means continuing it a week extra on the other end or you risk a sudden, unmanageable peak.
I don't envy any politician the decision, but pandering to panic and locking down too soon will cause a lot of harm too.
unless the world plans to stay isolated until there is a cure this may be the alternative that doesnt also bankrupt a lot of businesses and put people out of work.
There will be pockets that will see this carry on for years globally. Currently it is mostly prevalent in climates in their winter phase months, and UK just entered spring. Then there is this virus mutating, could it mutate into something less harmful, or something more harmful. Past pandemic the spanish flu saw the initial infection decline in the summer and in the winter saw a higher wave of infections and deaths -…
Evolutionary pressure works that way -- as a less-deadly version will spread faster and outcompete a more-deadly version (because it won't kill as many hosts -- dead hosts cease spreading -- and because less-ill hosts are less likely to stay in bed until better, thus encountering more people and thus more spread)
This is why, broadly, endemic diseases like influenza become less lethal over time
It's why severe influenzas are usually those that just mutated to cross over to humans from some other animal -- like swine flu from last decade, which was not that deadly to swine, but remarkably so to humans those first seasons, or avian flus which also have appeared occasionally.
The Spanish Flu was one of those -- an Avian flu that had newly mutated to infect humans.
I’m going to try and lay out the case in as neutral terms as I can, although to be clear I think they are probably right. They’re going to take an awful lot of stick for it though, and indeed already are. They believe that there are basically two mitigation strategies. One is to have a very drastic early lockdown that shuts down the virus before it spreads widely. The problem with that is, once you lift the lockdown…
Do you have sources for these claims?
I wonder how much of it is just playing the odds. Shutting everything down will very likely have a large, but fixed consequence on the economy, which has huge cost, including in lives and health. Whereas biding your time increases the relatively small risk of catastrophic consequences from coronavirus, but avoids the economic consequences. So it comes down to a choice between accepting a known downside, or taking a g…
> through very little fault of his own https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/ Get out of here with this. We had expert teams and processes in place to combat the possibility of this exact thing and his administration fired them without any replacement. The virus existing is not his fault, but nearly all of the national consequences rest directly at his feet.
Ah yes, yet another person who looked at the Snopes piece's headline and nothing else. One would think reading only that, or the Twitter thread (!) the piece is based on, that to save money (or because the Trump administration hates science, or something) the entire "US Pandemic Response Team" agency was eliminated and everyone in a large DC office building was fired.
Actually reading the contemporary NBC News https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/tom-bossert-t... and Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/0... articles the Snopes piece cites in the body, they seem to have been a handful of people in one team in the National Security Council hierarchy, that the new National Security Advisor reassigned to related agencies, as part of a desire to have his own hierarchical structure. Ziemer resigned because he wanted to keep his team the way it was.
COVID19 was not a surprise; that is, it was known to exist in China some time before the first cases appeared in the US. It is not unreasonable for a government to assemble a team to respond to something like a pandemic as needed, as opposed to having people dedicated solely to the purpose and nothing else. And that's exactly what the US did, implementing the ban on non-American travelers who'd been to China in late January, among other things.
You may or may not agree with this. But please don't claim that this is somehow prima facie proof of the Trump administration's malfeasance/evilness.
PS - No, Trump did not "cut the CDC budget" either. https://apnews.com/d36d6c4de29f4d04beda3db00cb46104
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think herd immunity is an integral part of the strategy. If a population never gets herd immunity, it will keep on getting infection breakouts and keep on having to impose lockdowns. The only way to stop doing lockdowns is either to prevent the ingress of the virus, ever, or eventually reach herd immunity. The virus is everywhere now, it’s part of the landscape, so preventing breakouts is just flat out not possible…
> However we do not have a vaccine yet and have no idea if or when we might ever get one. https://www.jpost.com/HEALTH-SCIENCE/Israeli-scientists-In-t...
It feels like we're the big version of one of those corona-virus cruise ships