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The plans to reopen the economy are scary

vox.com

11–20 of 214 posts

Re: The plans to reopen the economy are scary

#11
post #5

Oh my god, the system described by the CAP plan covered in this article cannot be allowed to come into being. Instant dystopian nightmare state. This kind of tool can't be un-made.

Emergency powers to protect us after 9/11 are still in place — two decades later.

Emergency powers to fund world wars are still in place — eight decades later.

It never goes away.

Re: The plans to reopen the economy are scary

#12
post #5

Oh my god, the system described by the CAP plan covered in this article cannot be allowed to come into being. Instant dystopian nightmare state. This kind of tool can't be un-made.

And if it's law that you can uninstall it when you've been vaccinated? It can be unmade.

Re: The plans to reopen the economy are scary

#13
post #3

One of the things the press seems to have had trouble grasping is that there are no good options , and quite possibly never were. (Short of stopping the virus from spreading out of Wuhan in the first place, which might barely have been possible if the world acted fast enough - but that was never going to happen.)

It certainly could have if other countries had closed border with China early. But some news outlets were running unfortunate headlines.

Re: The plans to reopen the economy are scary

#14

The author considers letting the epidemic run its course on the demographics most at risk, to be the most unrealistic outcome. He writes: > I care about my privacy, but not nearly so much as I care about my mother. Most people care about their own mother. But if lockdowns, unemployment and poverty continue, I can definitely imagine people saying, "I don’t care about your mother, so why should I stay unemployed and co…

In the UK they're now making noises about letting the 20-30 year olds who live alone go back to work first. I imagine this is really code for "if we infect all these low-risk people first, we get a large proportion of our workforce immunised, for a fairly low hospitalisation proportion". I don't know enough about the models, but I also guess having a large chunk of your low-risk population already immune reduces R0 f…

> I imagine this is really code for "if we infect all these low-risk people first, we get a large proportion of our workforce immunised".

I think it’s really code for “let’s repeat the mistakes we made early on when we adopted ‘herd immunity’ rather than isolation as an I itial strategy and spread this as rapidly as we can and create another critical peak”, because those people aren't completely isolated from the rest of the population, and spreading it more rapidly in that segment of the population will also spread it more rapidly in the rest of the population.

But I guess it's good to know the the incompetence of the present British government is resilient enough to survive the temporary incapacitation of the PM as a fairly direct result of the incompetence on the very same issue. I'm not even sure the US federal administration would be that committed to it's own (otherwise more complete) incompetence on the issue.

Re: The plans to reopen the economy are scary

#16
post #13
post #3

One of the things the press seems to have had trouble grasping is that there are no good options , and quite possibly never were. (Short of stopping the virus from spreading out of Wuhan in the first place, which might barely have been possible if the world acted fast enough - but that was never going to happen.)

It certainly could have if other countries had closed border with China early. But some news outlets were running unfortunate headlines.

The US never really closed their border with China. Americans returning from China were let back in with minimal checks, and some were probably presymptomatic. Not only would it have had to be earlier, it would have had to strand American citizens abroad until they could be tested, which was never on the cards.

Re: The plans to reopen the economy are scary

#17
post #5

Oh my god, the system described by the CAP plan covered in this article cannot be allowed to come into being. Instant dystopian nightmare state. This kind of tool can't be un-made.

It does not have to be built that way: https://github.com/DP-3T/documents

This is what we'll hopefully be using in Switzerland.

Re: The plans to reopen the economy are scary

#18
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It certainly could have if other countries had closed border with China early. But some news outlets were running unfortunate headlines.

The US never really closed their border with China. Americans returning from China were let back in with minimal checks, and some were probably presymptomatic. Not only would it have had to be earlier, it would have had to strand American citizens abroad until they could be tested, which was never on the cards.

Quarantining all the Americans returning from China might've been sufficient, though that would be politically (and maybe even legally) dicey.

Re: The plans to reopen the economy are scary

#19

I started studying the US news reports of Covid-19 related to ventilators weeks ago when I realized there were no interviews with survivors, and ignored the speculation around partial testing results and R0 calculations because of the lack of hard data, and exponential rate of infection making analysis moot. Essentially, ICU admission for ventilators, and subsequent deaths, are the most complete and factual data we h…

The big problem with this plan is that it would require giving up and letting a large number of Americans die, which is a political and social nonstarter given current expectations around life, death and healthcare. (Well, at least amongst the secular parts of America. Some of the more religious communities seem to still hold the view that it's futile and arrogant to think this is something we can fight, much to the anger and bemusement of secular society.)

Re: The plans to reopen the economy are scary

#20

The author considers letting the epidemic run its course on the demographics most at risk, to be the most unrealistic outcome. He writes: > I care about my privacy, but not nearly so much as I care about my mother. Most people care about their own mother. But if lockdowns, unemployment and poverty continue, I can definitely imagine people saying, "I don’t care about your mother, so why should I stay unemployed and co…

To some degree it could be true, as we see that Covid 19 hasn’t been a racially blind phenomena [1]. In the US, not all communities are in the same boat, even during an international crisis.

If we want more unity then this has to change.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/8/21213974/african-americans...

Texas still allows religious groups to meet in size of 50, declaring it an essential service, while abortion clinics have been closed. We aren't in the same boat.

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