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America is giving up on the pandemic?

theatlantic.com

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Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#751

Post by asawfofor »

schoen wrote: post #680
rayiner wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oxford Textbook of Public Health: https://m.oxfordmedicine.com/mobile/view/10.1093/med/9780199... . Do you see any sections on police brutality? Not to mention, I have family in the field, I grew up with probably a dozen public health experts attending Thanksgiving dinner, and did my first internship at a public health company. At no point in hearing decades of shop talk did I ever hear police brutality being mention…

I've seen some indications that many people in the public health field feel that everything that affects morbidity and mortality is potentially within scope for them, including, for example, intentional actions like assault or murder. A difficulty with this view, at least potentially, is that it seems to allow everything in the world (certainly almost every area of public policy) to be in scope for public health, bec…

Courts struck down a law in Florida in 2017 preventing Pediatricians from talking to parents about gun safety.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#752

Post by [deleted] »

deanCommie wrote: post #688
rayiner wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t forget public health officials outright lied and said masks don’t help reduce the spread of the disease, putatively to help conserve masks for medical personnel: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-... > When news of a mysterious viral pneumonia linked to a market in Wuhan, China, reached the outside world in early January, one of my first reactions was to order a modest supply of masks.…

[flagged]

[deleted]

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#753

Post by deanCommie »

hindsightbias wrote: post #720
deanCommie wrote: post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

We indeed live in an era where all things are binary. But what is a thinking person supposed to think when the Surgeon General is saying don’t wear masks in a pandemic caused by airborne viri? In urban (educated) zones likely to be hotbeds for outbreaks, could the state not do a little nuance and say “hospitals need the N95s and you need a bandana” Everybody has got a bandana, but if I were to start walking into stor…

> could the state not do a little nuance and say “hospitals need the N95s and you need a bandana”

No. Not in 2020. Not with the vast majority of the population. Nuance is dead.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#754

Post by Tomte »

rayiner wrote: post #498
smsm42 wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission That's a shining example of weasel speak. They don't explicitly say it's not risky - because that would be plain lying, it is obviously risky - but they are saying they are not condemning it as risky. Which most people would take as implying it's not actually risky - even though they are not saying that. They…

Don’t forget public health officials outright lied and said masks don’t help reduce the spread of the disease, putatively to help conserve masks for medical personnel: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-... > When news of a mysterious viral pneumonia linked to a market in Wuhan, China, reached the outside world in early January, one of my first reactions was to order a modest supply of masks.…

That is simply not true and an awful accusation.

The last Sars or Coronavirus illnesses differed from this one, as in those cases asymptomatic people were not spreading the virus very much.

So the (reasonable) assumption was that people mostly know when they are contagious and stay at home.

In that scenario "community masks" (everything below FPP-2) don't matter much.

When researchers found that Covid-19 is different (and that has to do with the massively higher virus load in the throat, where former similar diseases built most of the virus load in the lungs), the stance changed.

That is a good thing! Learn new information, adapt your response.

What's fueling conspiracy theories now is that the messaging back then centered on "we need to preserve masks for the medical community", which was a smaller component of the motivation, sure, but got mostly conflated with the real argument. I think that is because it was much easier to explain to the public and to journalists.

In hindsight that was a mistake. But the conspiracy theories that health officials just flip-flopped for no reason is wrong, and it's damaging the fabric of society even more.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#755

Post by SllX »

deanCommie wrote: post #688
rayiner wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t forget public health officials outright lied and said masks don’t help reduce the spread of the disease, putatively to help conserve masks for medical personnel: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-... > When news of a mysterious viral pneumonia linked to a market in Wuhan, China, reached the outside world in early January, one of my first reactions was to order a modest supply of masks.…

[flagged]

The problem with falsehoods is that by making and perpetuating them, you are undermining your own credibility. Yes, there are some who will think that maybe it was better to be lied to, but most will remember the fact that they were lied to. And some of those will believe that they were lied to because their life was discounted.

The problem with lying is that your intent doesn’t matter, you still lied, and in a society that is built on gradations of trust, you’re trading against your own credibility every time you lie. You don’t get a discount on the price of your lie simply because you were acting in a paternalistic manner, in fact, Officers and employees of the government taking a paternalistic position makes their lie worse and increases the cost to their own credibility in the long run.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#756

Post by [deleted] »

baddox wrote: post #614
fennecfoxen wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Unemployment is generally regarded as a public health risk, beyond the immediate insurance consequences. There will moreover be people who suffer long-term impacts that these short-term payments can only partially mitigate.

That seems like a good argument to expand unemployment benefits during a global pandemic, and I suspect most public health officials would agree.

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Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#757

Post by [deleted] »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #670
tootie wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't be obtuse. Of course all factors were considered. Keeping people out of offices and shops is not a public health risk. People becoming impoverished and losing health insurance is. That's why the federal government spent $2T protecting people's financial health to offset the damage. The bigger question is why health care access is tied to employment, but there's no way the current regime would consider dealing w…

> Of course all factors were considered. That's not entirely accurate. Even Faucci answered, in response to Rand Paul, he was a virologist. Not a economist, etc. There's been little public acknowledgement of increases in suicides, illness from delayed med treatments, economic fall out affecting deaths, etc.

[deleted]

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#758

Post by entee »

javagram wrote: post #664
rayiner wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t forget public health officials outright lied and said masks don’t help reduce the spread of the disease, putatively to help conserve masks for medical personnel: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-... > When news of a mysterious viral pneumonia linked to a market in Wuhan, China, reached the outside world in early January, one of my first reactions was to order a modest supply of masks.…

FWIW, I don’t think the majority of the officials intended to lie about this. It wasn’t anything that started this year or anything - they’ve had the same message about masks since as far back as the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/23/face-masks-much-more-t... > But the CDC has recommended against mask use. I hypothesized that the CDC was intentionally lying to us, trying to trick us into not b…

I think you’re right. I don’t understand the general tendency of assuming malice when a combination of uncertainty about the virus, poor supply chains, and not-very-good underlying data would do just as well.

It’s also unclear what “masks” meant in the initial phases. An N95 respirator? A surgical mask? A homemade cloth mask? Each of these has different uses and effects. I seriously doubt most people knew the difference in early March, I only had a vague notion. The surgeon general likely is thinking of respirators, because all MDs in hospitals get fitted for it. They know how hard it is to put it on and take it off safely, and know how critical it is for it to be a good tight fit. None of those things are going to be true for most people in early March 2020. If that’s your frame of reference, then it makes total sense that you’d recommend people not buy masks.

Everyone going out and buying N95s when they’re not particularly useful to most people unless in a close confined space is a bad thing. It doesn’t actually save many lives, but does make it harder for people who need it (docs/nurses in close confined spaces, particularly with patients on respirators that aerosolize the virus).

People wearing surgical or cloth masks may help some, probably mostly in enclosed spaces and mostly for exhalation rather than preventing you from inhaling a virus from someone else.

Even then, it’s my understanding that the data isn’t awesome here. Many of the papers I’ve seen are under fairly odd scenarios (for example an airplane, lots of the same air, recycled all over, for hours, where the paper showed positive mask benefit). We don’t have much for bandanas, or masks that were washed 3 weeks ago, or masks that are tighter, masks that are looser. I’d wager it helps, a little, especially indoors.

In other words, this shit is complicated, why assume lying when instead we could just say, “it’s complicated, they didn’t get it 100% right.”

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#759

Post by HaloZero »

banads wrote: post #591
HaloZero wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, people like to throw around race war occasionally now but I only hear about it from the far-right. Nobody on the far-left is advocating for the extreme violence. During the 1960s, I believe Malcolm X was ready to have a real war to defend Black Americans. Now, at worse the discord is about justifying some looting that has diminished.

>Nobody on the far-left is advocating for the extreme violence I have seen many people talking about "burning the system to the ground".

I think that's a metaphor like they want to destroy systematic racism or prison industrial complex? But I haven't seen those posts. Anything public you wanna share?

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#760

Post by ribasushi »

dang wrote: post #723
ribasushi wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in this country, black-on-white violence is a much bigger problem than white-on-black violence In the interest of discourse, I am genuinely curious: how did you arrive at the quoted statement? Links to anything that would allow me to understand your view will be very much appreciated.

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. This is one of the commonest and most inflammatory clichés of race war that exists, so your comment reads like concern trolling. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thank you for taking the time for an individual reply. The thread was young and I was genuinely baffled, as I do not get much exposure to this type of... thinking in my daily life. I regretted my engagement the moment the response came back :(
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