What could possibly go wrong?
Bolsonaro fires health minister, calls to reopen economy
41–50 of 127 posts
Re: Bolsonaro fires health minister, calls to reopen economy
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sweden isn't performing a lot of tests for one: https://www.thelocal.se/20200414/understanding-swedens-figur...
Why do they need to perform a lot of tests if their strategy isn't dependent on testing?
If you're not testing a sizeable enough sample of the population, then whatever number of cases you give has to be taken with a rather large helping of salt.
For example, my country's CDC has the official number of confirmed cases in the low hundreds with a dozen deaths, but anyone wise enough knows that between the ridiculously low number of samples tested (less than ten thousand in a population of a couple hundred million), the poor public health infrastructure, the anaemic government response and general public health illiteracy, the real number of cases is easily an order of magnitude or two higher.
Re: Bolsonaro fires health minister, calls to reopen economy
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, if you just google "covid death tolls" you'll see 34,386 deaths in USA alone that we know of. Considering a lot of COVID patients don't even get diagnosed the real number is likely higher. Isn't that enough?
How many of these would have died anyway, I am asking about the difference in numbers, not a feeling.
I think this Economist visualization tracking excess mortality should give you the answers you're looking for: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/04/16/tracking...
Re: Bolsonaro fires health minister, calls to reopen economy
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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The actual public health authorities agree that the coronavirus will spread no matter what we do, and that lockdowns will end in the near future.
You’ve managed to completely ignore why we had a lock down; it’s not about preventing total infections, although that would be nice, it’s about preventing a spike of infections that overwhelms the medical system.
Re: Bolsonaro fires health minister, calls to reopen economy
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do they need to perform a lot of tests if their strategy isn't dependent on testing?
Because if there’s a giant spike of currently asymptomatic carriers, you’d want to know.
I definitely want to know. But it seems like Swedish public policy is that the current measures are the strictest sustainable ones, so they're going to maintain them until strict measures are no longer needed. It's not clear that early visibility of a spike would change that.
Re: Bolsonaro fires health minister, calls to reopen economy
#46Bolsonaro has no negotiation skills, and is (frankly) bad at mostly everything, but he's got a good finance minister who's saying that the country just can't stop creating value, but what is the right balance? Mandetta, the previous health minister, had no flexibility in his views, he wanted to follow the WHO blindly, without weighing anything else. Maybe the new guy has the flexibility and the brains to find a bette…
It’s not the job of the health minister to consider the economy. If they’re thinking about that, they’re being an awful health minister.
It’s the job of the executive to balance between the different paths recommended by different advisors, and chart a path that has the correct balance of trade offs.
Re: Bolsonaro fires health minister, calls to reopen economy
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
The actual public health authorities agree that the coronavirus will spread no matter what we do, and that lockdowns will end in the near future.
You’ve managed to completely ignore why we had a lock down; it’s not about preventing total infections, although that would be nice, it’s about preventing a spike of infections that overwhelms the medical system.
I don't follow. I'm not ignoring that. We locked down to prevent a spike, and in many places the spike has been successfully prevented, so those places are now figuring out how to open up. Some people say that this is irresponsible - that nobody should open up until the coronavirus can be eradicated - but this isn't realistic and isn't what public health officials think should happen.
Re: Bolsonaro fires health minister, calls to reopen economy
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because if there’s a giant spike of currently asymptomatic carriers, you’d want to know.
I definitely want to know. But it seems like Swedish public policy is that the current measures are the strictest sustainable ones, so they're going to maintain them until strict measures are no longer needed. It's not clear that early visibility of a spike would change that.
Given that mortality rate is closely tied to the availability of ventilators, it would be catastrophically short sighted to not react to a spike with strong, short term measures.
Re: Bolsonaro fires health minister, calls to reopen economy
#49I know we're talking about people's lives, but maybe the world needs to see a country get it devastatingly wrong.
Does it make any difference one way or the other? If the response is vital, then some country will get it "devastatingly wrong", and then won't that produce a new wave after a bit everywhere else?
Won't that just be a sequel to the first cycle, where things seemed under control, it was downplayed, and then it got going outside of China. Why should anyone expect other than a fractal replay?
Re: Bolsonaro fires health minister, calls to reopen economy
#50The Brazilian supreme court already decided that state governors and city mayors can impose regional lockdowns. Most cities are already with restrictive measures and this event is not going to change that.