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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?

#911

Post by tuna-piano »

philwelch wrote: post #818
vore wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is important to keep in mind that this is not about protesting just police brutality: police brutality is just one part of systemic inequality affecting POCs, especially black people, in the US. With that in mind, it is important to put an understanding of public health data in context with systemic racism, and why the data looks like it how it does.

For instance, black Americans are disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic itself. Protesting that “Black Lives Matter” during a pandemic that takes black lives seems self-defeating to me.

It's unjust that black people are more affected by Covid!

What are we going to do!?

Gather in large groups while screaming in close proximity to each other!

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#912

Post by claudeganon »

gizmo wrote: post #881
1bc29b36f623ba8 wrote: post #840

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sweden failed to protect their own elderly, mainly because national authorities simply assumed that local authorities were ready to fight a pandemic, when they were in fact hopelessly underfunded and staffed by underpaid staff with no PPE and who were expected to do stay at home on their own initiative and without payment if they got sick. The same happened in a few places here in Finland, and I am quite certain that…

Sweden did screw up the retirement home situation somewhat, but in terms of excess deaths all Nordic countries look identical. Finland, notably, doesn't even count covid deaths outside hospitals according to the THL, so comparing Swedish and Finnish covid stats is a bit silly. The Swedish catastrophe is always another 2 weeks away, and secondary effects of a lockdown (like delaying non-critical medical procedures and…

I think Sweden’s strategy is on the bad end of the spectrum and Taiwan and South Korea’s on the great end. I don’t anticipate any more catastrophe for them than their relative peers in the bad response group, but they did do quite bad compared to liberal democracies in SE Asia. Taiwan has had 11 deaths and South Korea about 300. Sweden has about 4700.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#913

Post by wegs »

blub wrote: post #821
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s my understanding — which seems to be congruent with the pages you linked? — that facial hair is an impediment to medical-grade respirators that require a tight seal to be effective. With cloth/paper masks that aren’t intended to be PPE for medical workers, though, that’s not actually what we’re going for, though, right? What we’re trying to do is curtail the spread of droplets. Beards and mustaches really won’t…

It's an impediment with any mask which can form some kind of seal. A surgical mask will stick to your face when you breathe in, which indicates that it does form an imperfect seal. If one's beard is creating even more space between the face and mask, it's of course going to make things worse.

Cloth masks aren't trying to form a seal. They have a few roles:

1) They capture a lot of droplets coming out of your mouth. Do you sneeze in your elbow or in someone's face? A face mask does better than an elbow, and for every breath (not just a sneeze). So does a beard for that matter; if your sneeze goes around through a beard, it's catching big droplets too.

2) You know the six-foot-guideline? They effectively increase that distance. A person talking, yelling, sneezing, etc. can carry droplets 15+ feet in a straight line. If we're both wearing masks (or face shields), it's not going in a straight line. Beards disrupt linear airflow too.

3) You can't touch your face.

They don't stop virus aerosol. That's where you need a proper seal.

I'm not actually sure facial hair makes any difference with a cloth mask. Surgical mask would be in between. And an N95 probably becomes a surgical.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#914

Post by dustinmoris »

empath75 wrote: post #556
metrokoi wrote: post #90

Quoted from a letter from 1,000 health professionals on the virus and protests [0] >However, as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States. We can show that support by facilitating safest protesting practices without detracting from…

There’s a lot of risk for these protests but I do feel like protesting for some issue other than ‘end the lockdown’ is more justifiable than just protesting the lockdown itself. Even if it were an anti-abortion protest, for example — something I am ideologically opposed to — I wouldn’t stand in the way of a group that wanted to do that.

The lockdown will be directly responsible for an estimated death of 40 million people globally due to famine, hunger, job losses and lots of other directly related issues. Is 40M people not good enough to protest against the lockdown itself?

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#915

Post by CathedralBorrow »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #787
deanCommie wrote: post #753

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Rumors of its death have been greatly exaggerated. There seems to be a trend to paint people as imbeciles who can't tie their own shoelaces without somebody standing over them, and then on investigation it turns out not to be true. There was a story a while back about a couple who drank fish tank cleaner (containing chloroquine) after Trump touted chloroquine against the coronavirus. Come to find out the couple were…

Wait, you read a NY Post article with rumors about a married couple having marriage difficulties, and you believe you've uncovered the "whole story" that other people are somehow blind to but you can see?

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#916

Post by matwood »

realtalk_sp wrote: post #280
matwood wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's incorrect to only count deaths as the fallout from police attitude towards minorities. An entire group of people is effectively controlled and held back my the police. As we have already seen, the impacts are generational and have gotten us to where we are today. COVID-19 is the thing will most likely be forgotten next year with some sort of vaccine or herd immunity arising. Even if the protests are succ…

I'm so flabbergasted by this argument on behalf of killing innocent people I barely even know where to begin. In my mind, there is almost no cause that warrants the avoidable death of even a single person, let alone tens of thousands. Clearly you have a very different morality.

> In my mind, there is almost no cause that warrants the avoidable death of even a single person, let alone tens of thousands

I agree with you! I don't think I was clear in my original post. The human toll of systemic racism and police brutality is much greater than the 'deaths by cops' number. Look at how COVID-19 is much more dangerous to the Black communities. Why is that? Lack of adequate healthcare, opportunity, and lagging economic outlook linked to systemic racism.

You see the deaths from COVID-19, and they are horrible. I'm thinking about COVID-19, and the next 10 pandemics that will disproportionally impact Black and minority communities. In aggregate the death toll could dwarf COVID-19. How do we avoid those deaths?

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#917

Post by danaris »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #590
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…

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.

Unemployment is not the real problem there—people not having money is.

If the government would continue—and increase—the individual stimulus checks, it would matter much, much less how long the lockdown must continue. People would still be able to support themselves and keep themselves healthy.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#918

Post by CathedralBorrow »

blub wrote: post #829
baddox wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, that seems like fairly precise language. They’re saying they do not believe the risk level is sufficiently high to condemn the gatherings. It doesn’t seem much different than saying grocery store visits are not condemned as risky, while music store visits are condemned as risky. The virus doesn’t care about what you’re shopping for either, it’s just that shopping for food is more important (by their estimation…

"They’re saying they do not believe the risk level is sufficiently high to condemn the gatherings." But that's obviously nonsense, given that not all of the participants wear masks, distance cannot be kept, they stay at the same location for a longer time and some are chanting/yelling.

It it nonsense though? If that's true it sounds like there was no need for anyone to weigh in at all; it was evidently obvious that these protests must be condemned. Do you believe that's the case?

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#919

Post by Stranger43 »

Everyone is giving up on the containment strategy of shutting down all public spaces, some do it slowly to give the illusion of control, where as other simply open up and let people sort it out on their own but i doubt you will find a single state/nation waiting on the magical vaccine(that might not arrive) that fixed the issues with zero side effects to start returning to normal.

Some of that is due to the fact that the number seen in context(https://ourworldindata.org/causes-of-death#what-do-people-di...) are not as extreme as it was feared/hyped, and that the containment measures were to little to actually stop the pandemic and never designed with that goal in mind.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#920

Post by CathedralBorrow »

rayiner wrote: post #510
thisiszilff wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Another excerpt from the article state: > "We created the letter in response to emerging narratives that seemed to malign demonstrations as risky for the public health because of Covid-19," according to the letter wri…

The letter is gobbledegook. Police brutality isn’t a “public health problem.” It’s a bad thing, and it may well be that reasonable people feel like protesting police brutality justifies taking the risk of increased COVID-19 transmission. (I certainly feel that way.) They’re deciding that “protesting police brutality is worth some excess deaths from COVID.” But the authors don’t want to own the fact that they’re makin…

> They’re deciding that “protesting police brutality is worth some excess deaths from COVID.”

Why are you putting your own characterization in quotation marks as if you're quoting someone else? Or did I miss something and this is a quote from the the health professionals in question?

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