America is giving up on the pandemic? • Hacker News Board

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#791

Post by Hnrobert42 » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 5:34 AM UTC

refurb wrote: post #317

war1025 wrote: post #3

A thing I've noticed is that they stopped mentioning the daily numbers on the radio (NPR, more specifically Iowa Public Radio). It's sort of like the media has extracted all the juice they can from the pandemic and now we're just left with the pulpy mess that no one really wants to deal with.

Very astute observation. The media jumped all over Covid because, well, they could write a lot of news about it. Now? They've moved on.

I get a lot of my news from text.npr.org. Only a daily basis, it still seems about 40% articles are about covid

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#792

Post by dehrmann » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 5:34 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #14

San Mateo County health officer: "The third modification of the shelter in place order is being made on 6/1/20. These modifications are being made in attempt to strike a balance. They are an attempt to find a way to increase the immunity of the population (in public health terms, this is called “herd immunity”) slowly and methodically, while minimizing premature death, with equity in mind, while not overloading the h…

Without a vaccine, if people keep social distancing, we'll never have herd immunity. Suppose the US gets 25,000 new cases daily. That's 9.1M per year. OG SARS immunity lasts three years, and other coronaviruses are similar. We need more like 300,000 new cases per day to have a shot at herd immunity. The big caveat is we have 25,000 reported cases per day. How many asymptomatic people are getting tested? There needs to be more antibody testing so we can answer these questions.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#793

Post by Tomte » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 5:36 AM UTC

ikeyany wrote: post #784

Tomte wrote: post #775

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read my comment at all? "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."

They still lied, which was the original point. Even if they lied for what they believed to be good reasons.

No, they didn't. They reasonably believed masks to be useless (at least compared to the burden of having everyone wear masks).

They simplified (and arguably over-simplified) the public communication.

Insisting that they lied is uncharitable at best, and a hallmark of all sorts of conspiracy theories right now.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#794

Post by unishark » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 5:37 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #304

Total deaths in US caused by police. (2019, full year): 1112 [1] Total deaths in US caused by coronavirus (last Friday, one day): 975 [2] [1] https://www.theroot.com/here-s-how-many-people-police-killed... [2] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

They protests are only directed at a subset of those killings.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#795

Post by ashtonkem » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 5:37 AM UTC

JamesBarney wrote: post #622

humaniania wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CDC revised their risk estimates towards the end of last month. "The fifth scenario is the CDC's "current best estimate about viral transmission and disease severity in the United States." In that scenario, the agency described its estimate that 0.4% of people who feel sick with Covid-19 will die. For people age 65 and older, the CDC puts that number at 1.3%. For people 49 and under, the agency estimated that 0.0…

Those CDC numbers are really weird btw. 0.4% of symptomatic cases is like a 0.2-0.3% IFR. 0.3% of the New York City population has already died of corona-virus. So assuming everyone in New York was infected that gives us an IFR of .3%. But if a more realistic 20% of the population was infected then the IFR could be as high as 1.5%. I tried going through all the most recent research and almost all of it came up with a…

An interesting question is this: which 20% got it? A representative sample, or a localized group with unusual risk characteristics, like retirement homes or prisons?

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#796

Post by grey-area » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 5:38 AM UTC

cmdshiftf4 wrote: post #517

grey-area wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is no5 in the world for police homicides, just behind countries like the Philippines, Syria, Brazil. Not a record to be proud of - 1,536 in 2019 according to wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc... Other countries manage to achieve numbers like 2 for Japan, 3 for the UK, 11 for Germany which is nowhere near even adjusted for population. American police kill more people per ca…

Do you think it's intellectually honest to compare countries with very, very low rates of firearms access to a country where firearms are available to anyone who wants one? You're comparing the USA, which has about 100k shootings per year, 36k deaths involving guns of which 33% (~12k) are homicides, to the UK which has 50-60 cases of homicide involving a gun per year. The fact is that the US police are far, far, far…

Yes I do. That easy access to guns on both sides is a big part of the problem. Militarised police and easy access to guns are IMO one of the biggest reasons for this discrepancy. It can be fixed, it just requires gradually tightening gun laws and changing police culture.

There are also cultural issues - policing should be with the consent of the population, if you lose that trust and end up in an adversarial position, violence moves from the last resort to the first resort.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#797

Post by Tomte » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 5:39 AM UTC

mirekrusin wrote: post #772

Tomte wrote: post #754

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When wearing mask in public you're not protecting yourself - that's ineffective - you're protecting others from your own cough/talking droplets - that's effective.

Exactly. Why do you think you disagree with me there?

The point is that when almost all contagious people stay at home, we don't need community masks. We only need them because contagious people are asymptomatic (that's new!), tehrefore don't know about their status and therefore go out in public.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#798

Post by ashtonkem » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 5:39 AM UTC

GiorgioG wrote: post #642

gridspy wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you do not die, you might have a very unpleasant experience with lasting consequences. Perhaps a better way to frame it would be - 2% (?) of patients have serious life-changing consequences. Those under 49 tend to survive them.

The problem for me is we don't have any way at this time of knowing at an individual level what the consequences are likely to be. I might have no symptoms if I get sick but I may transmit it my son (type 1 diabetic) who might die. Or maybe he'd be fine and I might die, etc. There's just no way to gauge what one's reaction might be to getting the coronavirus. A local, healthy 8 year old girl started having symptoms l…

There’s the risk of death and injury, which is an interesting discussion, and then there’s the fear. With cases beginning to rise rapidly in multiple states again, I expect the latter to have a more dominant effect on our behavior

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#799

Post by Hnrobert42 » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 5:39 AM UTC

tenpies wrote: post #500

war1025 wrote: post #3

A thing I've noticed is that they stopped mentioning the daily numbers on the radio (NPR, more specifically Iowa Public Radio). It's sort of like the media has extracted all the juice they can from the pandemic and now we're just left with the pulpy mess that no one really wants to deal with.

Keep in mind it's an election year, and the biggest failure in the US and the world, New York, is extremely Democrat. It is critical to the Democrats to shift the conversation. Clearly blaming Trump for the city's failure isn't going to work, so the pivot was to waiting until there was one particularly bad case of police abuse against a black person and then light the powder keg. If you look back this year there have…

Lately, I started to think we make a mistake when we guess what motivates large, poorly defined groups like “Democrats”. I say “we” because I do it all the time, too. Maybe the way back to a less polarized society is to focus more on what people do/say and less on their perceived motives.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#800

Post by Hnrobert42 » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 5:44 AM UTC

rpiguy wrote: post #312

achenatx wrote: post #294

Just wanted to add that the abolish the police sentiment isnt as inane as it sounds on the surface. Abolish the police is about taking away responsibilities that police have today and giving them to people more suitable. Police - people trained for aggression with weapons to stop violent criminals should not be handling: 1) mental health 2) homeless 3) drug addiction 4) domestic violence 5) traffic stops etc etc They…

Unfortunately, items 1, 3, 4, and 5 are all extremely dangerous. The Not Police would be in grave danger. There is a reason that the Police Police are armed. That guy on drugs could stab you, you could pull a car over and that person could have a gun, you could go to stop domestic violence and get attacked. Police brutality goes up proportionately with violent crime in their area. In other words, the more police deal…

That’s an interesting point about police brutality vs. violent crime. Is that supported by evidence or just a supposition? Not trying to send you on a wild “source?” goose chase. If it’s just supposition, that’s fine.