161–170 of 489 posts
This has me a bit confused: I look at the stats on cases and deaths per capita across various U.S. states, including California (which was very locked down, at least in theory) and Florida (which was flippant towards risks of contagion), and many states in between. The per capita cases+deaths are nearly identical across many states with very different approaches. This left me really wondering which measures were and…
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IMHO if you want to understand what an effective response looks like - don't look at North America or Europe. Think Vietnam, Australia, New Zealand, and many parts of Africa, all of which had vastly better outcomes. Of course, I'm not an epidemiologist or public health expert, so while I have some guesses I'm not sure what exactly they did that was more effective - but there's no question that it was more effective.…
I'd wait to draw any serious conclusions until after the pandemic is "over" in both countries you're comparing. It sure seems like this virus doesn't need much of a foothold to take off, and just because an island has been able to deny that so far doesn't mean they'll be able to deny the virus until they are fully vaccinated and out of the woods.
What rubbish. In the UK the figures have been blatantly inflated. The entire UK media has turned into a bought and paid for government propaganda machine; the only journalists left are the independents. The whole thing has been such farce that I now struggle to acknowledge anything more than the presence of a virus. I still, after a year, don't know anyone who knows anyone who's died from this catastrophic, sky is fa…
The earth’s population is 7.9b, so the excess deaths are 0.1% of the population. COVID’s mortality rate is about 0.5%, so roughly 1/5 of the population has has had it (or died of other related things, like starvation in developing countries due to the lockdown stopping food harvests in California). Currently, 1.45b doses of a vaccine have been administered, so about as many people have had the vaccine (partially, at…
Thanks for summing up the relevant numbers, it's helpful in putting all this in context. .1% isn't nothing, but it isn't really a disaster either. The Black Death was 30-50% of the population in Europe. The "Spanish" Flu of 1918 killed about .64% of the US population. Things could still get worse of course. But barring that, and considering the absolute disaster that Covid has revealed our political system and interl…
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I don’t have anything to add except that California is huge and very unevenly applied “lockdown” - there are many towns a where businesses remained open or reopened frequently, but the big cities did have large shelter in place efforts. It would be interesting to compare on the municipal level if the data was that granular.
The community I grew up in in California purposefully threw rallies and went out of their way to rebel against every single restriction. I keep this in mind when people say California's restrictions didn't work. Edit: This was in Orange County CA, not rural. And when I say "rallies" I'm talking thousands of people, not small gatherings.
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I've always thought the main driver of spread was probably not the political football issues like masks in public and businesses being open or closed, but what people are doing behind closed doors with family and friends. Lockdowns don't have much effect on this.
exactly. the measures were always about keeping us simultaneously busy and anxious and not about their actual effectiveness. it’s been so frustrating to see discussion after discussion about the minutiae of masking when they’re so minor to the overall picture. what mattered above all was indoor, familiar social proximity (where we’d be most likely to be exchanging spit for prolonged periods), exactly where our strong…
Masks in public are not all that burdensome, so imo the mandates were reasonable regardless of the actual impact, but I wish they would have re-evaluated closing businesses a lot sooner, since that did a ton of economic damage, and the benefit there seems very questionable. I doubt the CA statistics would have been any different if they had never banned outdoor dining, for instance, or even just kept most businesses running normally but with an indoor mask requirement.
Comparing CA to TX and FL, it's also pretty hard now to argue that closing playgrounds and schools made much difference either, and that has had a severely negative impact on kids. I understand doing it in the first place when everything was unknown, but they should have been quicker to revise in response to new information.
This has me a bit confused: I look at the stats on cases and deaths per capita across various U.S. states, including California (which was very locked down, at least in theory) and Florida (which was flippant towards risks of contagion), and many states in between. The per capita cases+deaths are nearly identical across many states with very different approaches. This left me really wondering which measures were and…
I've always thought the main driver of spread was probably not the political football issues like masks in public and businesses being open or closed, but what people are doing behind closed doors with family and friends. Lockdowns don't have much effect on this.
At least here in the UK, lockdown meant not seeing friends or family (unless you lived with them). Was that not the case in the US? Of course if people flout the rules then they won't have any effect.
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In how many of the countries that did really well did the virus have the same head start that it had in the US and Europe before getting discovered?
It started in China, a country with 1.4 billion people and 20 million pop cities and even if you 100x their official number they did better than the US or Europe. There's few excuses for our mismanagement.
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The community I grew up in in California purposefully threw rallies and went out of their way to rebel against every single restriction. I keep this in mind when people say California's restrictions didn't work. Edit: This was in Orange County CA, not rural. And when I say "rallies" I'm talking thousands of people, not small gatherings.
Still, the vast majority of cases in California have been in the metropolitan areas that have also had the strongest restrictions.
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Thanks for summing up the relevant numbers, it's helpful in putting all this in context. .1% isn't nothing, but it isn't really a disaster either. The Black Death was 30-50% of the population in Europe. The "Spanish" Flu of 1918 killed about .64% of the US population. Things could still get worse of course. But barring that, and considering the absolute disaster that Covid has revealed our political system and interl…
> If this had been a "real" plague, of the kind humanity has faced repeatedly in the past (and has been expected for some time now), we would have been totally and utterly screwed. Not necessarily. Part of the reason there was so much pushback against public health mandates was because covid was so tame. You are being forced, by the government, to wear a mask, isolate from others, and stop going to work for an entire…
Instead, you have this insidious disease that is so easy for people to compare to the flu and common cold, and it preys mostly on the oldest and most frail, so many people went with a "I'll be fine" attitude. And most of those folks did survive. And the virus just continued to spread, steadily doing its thing, killing millions of people worldwide.