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Wisconsin Supreme Court strikes down stay-at-home order that closed businesses

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Re: Wisconsin Supreme Court strikes down stay-at-home order that closed businesses

#301

Post by akhilcacharya »

dgzl wrote: post #268
jptoor wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can tell you're a smart guy, but it reads like you're buying into the politicization of an apolitical problem. The end condition is a therapeutic/vaccine, and since that is not available yet, the next option is a national testing and contract tracing plan. Every successful country has a good one, every country that's seeing mass casualties doesn't have one. There is no political aspect to this. The science is prett…

I generally lose respect for people who think caps-lock is an acceptable way to type messages to others. You should try looking for more descriptive words to get your point across.

At some point we have to decide which is more important - all caps discourse on the internet or 85,000 lives lost in a tragedy exacerbated by incompetence.

Re: Wisconsin Supreme Court strikes down stay-at-home order that closed businesses

#302

Post by 101404 »

ginko wrote: post #258
dgzl wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar in what ways? Aus is an island country whose societal composition and Constitutional rights are nothing like ours. I wouldn't say they're very similar at all.

English speaking, lots of space, common law..

Ah yes, because language is the most important reason to get an infectious disease...

Am I here on HN or in r/worldnews?

Re: Wisconsin Supreme Court strikes down stay-at-home order that closed businesses

#303

Post by simonh »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #284
simonh wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brit here. By and large we have the rights we want. Some rights we have voluntarily abrogated in order to meet what we believe to be more important responsibilities. These are legitimate decisions for a democratic nation to make.

> By and large we have the rights we want. If you have only "the rights we want" then your rights are subject to the whims of the majority. In America our tradition of civil liberties protected the Illinois Nazis' freedom of speech as they marched through Skokie, celebrating the enemies of America who, within living memory, had waged war and killed millions of our citizens. The exercise meant as an affront to our nat…

I agree the Dankula issue was a mistake. I’m not saying our system is perfect, is yours? But by and large there is actually a pretty strong consensus, even across political lines, on our system of civil liberties and protections and I don’t see anything like the same level of consensus in the US.

Re: Wisconsin Supreme Court strikes down stay-at-home order that closed businesses

#304

Post by adtechperson »

Gene_Parmesan wrote: post #217
AbrahamParangi wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lockdowns-are-destroying-America echo chamber and a republicans-are-killing-people echo chamber. These are probably both mostly wrong, but on the plus side things must be getting better because we're back to tribalism.

Here is what I don't understand. (I seriously don't, and would honestly appreciate some explanations or ideas. And keep in mind I am 100% on board with following any and all recommendations of the CDC.) When we were all sent to sit at home back in March, the word was "flatten the curve." The idea was that containment was no longer an option, as declared by the CDC/WHO. Epidemiologists were predicting that somewhere b…

I agree that the goals seem to have changed. We have never contained a widespread respiratory virus without a vaccine and the fastest vaccine ever developed was Mumps and that took 4 years. I guess the best hope now is that by slowing it down, we have more time to develop better treatment options. Or maybe with how much effort is spent on vaccine development, we can develop one in a year? The optimistic estimates for vaccine development seem to put the timeframe at around a year at the earliest? Are we expecting to contain this for a year via social distancing?

Re: Wisconsin Supreme Court strikes down stay-at-home order that closed businesses

#305

Post by tfehring »

jb775 wrote: post #178
tfehring wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The baseline mortality rate for an 80 year old is about 0.5% per month. The mortality rate for an 80 year old with coronavirus is about 15%, with nearly all deaths occurring within a month. So treating all deaths in coronavirus patients as being caused by coronavirus would only overstate the true case fatality rate by 3% or so. The ratio is similar for younger ages. Not sure why Joe Rogan or Elon Musk’s opinion would…

The glaring omission here is that this 80 year old with coronavirus could have had stage IV cancer, and pneumonia, and the Bubonic plague, but the official cause of death is being considered "Covid". And considering the 80 year old is probably broke at this point of their medical journey, the hospitals have the option to either get paid nothing, or can claim yet another Covid death so they get the $13k-$39k per-patie…

Pre-existing conditions are not omitted from the 0.5%/month mortality rate. They just aren’t as impactful because most 80 year olds don’t have immediately life threatening medical conditions. For every 80 year old who will die this month from cancer (or Bubonic plague, sure, why not) there are 199 others who won’t. But if those 200 people all have COVID-19, it will kill another 30 of them. Attributing 30 vs. 31 deaths to COVID-19 just doesn’t matter that much.

80 year olds have better coverage than younger Americans on average because of Medicare, despite Medicare’s generally lower reimbursement rates compared to private insurance, simply because so many younger Americans don’t have insurance at all. And I think you’re dramatically overestimating the strength of the incentives at play if you think medical professionals are defrauding the federal government en masse to line their employers’ pockets.

Re: Wisconsin Supreme Court strikes down stay-at-home order that closed businesses

#306

Post by ginko »

101404 wrote: post #299
dtwest wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sweden has 342 COVID deaths per million. The US has 254 deaths per million. Germany is doing better, but the rest of Western Europe has much higher rates of death than the US. There seems to be a myth going around that Europe is handling this better than the US and the statistics don't really support that claim. If you have to bash Golden Corral to make your claim, you're probably a bit biased against Americans. That…

Yep. But Sweden is run by an ultra leftist government, so if course it is not criticised. But the same lies about "the US is doing worse" are told here in Europe as well. Just need to look to the stats, do the sum, and suddenly the US and EU are about the same. Oh well, modern journalism is about clicks, not facts, unfortunately.

How is Sweden ultra leftist? The ruling party are Social Democrats.

Re: Wisconsin Supreme Court strikes down stay-at-home order that closed businesses

#307

Post by Stranger43 »

makomk wrote: post #270
DanBC wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lockdown can't last forever and so countries or US states need a plan to transition away from lockdown back to a new normality. That plan includes massive testing and tracing. It includes science and data. It includes sensible triggers for further action -- if we start seeing more infections in the community we slow down the transition to normality. I don't know much about the US but it feels like a lot of this is re…

It's literally unprecedented as a method for trying to deal with a respiratory infection, as far as I can tell. Test and trace worked for SARS and MERS, but they were much easier diseases to contain for various reasons and didn't require massive-scale testing and tracing as a result. It is not in any way, shape, or form part of the normal playbook for dealing with a pandemic like this.

The problem is that nobody in the history of medicine have ever solved an pandemic once it left a containable area, but as most epidemics follow an bell curve you get a lot of people thinking some action or another solved the problem.

Add to that the story driven way we get out version of the truth and there is now an irresistible pressure on the politicians in charge to do something and to claim that something was effective the data be damned, and that real science is never 100% sure and tend to take years if not decade to come to any kind of conclusion.

Re: Wisconsin Supreme Court strikes down stay-at-home order that closed businesses

#308

Post by 101404 »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #242
sandworm101 wrote: post #128

This is where culture really matters. Almost every jurisdiction in the western world has faced this issue. Governments are issuing orders that, when push comes to shove, might not be 100% legitimate in the eyes of a court. In most countries that hasn't mattered. People acknowledge the covid problem and are obeying the "orders" despite them, perhaps, not having legal teeth. This requires trust. Like the current politi…

> Like the current politicians or not, most populations respect their governments and are willing to support emergency measures in the short term. This is certainly the facade presented by the international media, but it’s absolutely not true. I have family in some of the more media-celebrated countries, and their citizenry is absolutely not united in the way you’re presenting. Some of them have had their lockdowns l…

Being from one of those "celebrated" countries myself, I can confirm. Though our media too is mostly celebrating our own gov and trashing the US with all sorts of unfounded (and easily verifiable as unfounded) claims. Pretty sad what has become of journalism.

Re: Wisconsin Supreme Court strikes down stay-at-home order that closed businesses

#309

Post by thrower123 »

There seems to be a deep unawareness on the part of some of these officials that stupid draconian restrictions undermine their credibility and activate the latent "fuck you, buddy" attitude that is a core part of the American psyche.

We're already seeing just how much enforcement of any of these decrees ultimately relies on the consent of the people to go along with it. Deploying jackboots over closing beaches or not letting people buy seeds at Walmart chews up legitimacy that will be needed as this thing goes on.

Re: Wisconsin Supreme Court strikes down stay-at-home order that closed businesses

#310

Post by rayiner »

djannzjkzxn wrote: post #224
rayiner wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we’re talking about Wisconsin, not New York. The death rate in Wisconsin is 1 in 14,000. Flu is about 1 in 4,000-5,000 in a typical year. New York is such an outlier in terms of death rates that it should be a totally separate conversation.

It spread much faster in New York so we got to see the devastation it can cause. Same will eventually happen everywhere else if the measures to slow the spread are lifted. I don’t get why you’d want to exclude the data from New York when it’s our best example of what a full-scale outbreak looks like in the US.

Even with restrictions, the virus will eventually spread to most of the population. The question is time scale. In New York—thanks to its density and reliance on public transportation—even a full lock down couldn’t avoid a brush fire that left the hospital system overwhelmed. That hasn’t been true in the rest of the country. In nearly states, the death rate is elevated less than 10% from normal levels. In 14 states, the death rate is lower than normal levels. That means that less restrictive measures could be implemented in those states while keeping the excess death rate to some acceptable level.

South Dakota never fully locked down, and the COVID-19 death rate there 4.5 per 100,000. That’s 1/3 the average for the country minus NYC and 1/30th the rate for NYC. And that’s a 5% increase over what the baseline death rate would have been in the state over that time period.

It’s also worth pointing out that nowhere has really “locked down.” Most people are still going to work and leaving the house. Minnesota has found that the stay at home orders reduced contact only by 55%: https://www.minnpost.com/health/2020/05/minnesota-has-update.... Under various scenarios, Minnesota projected a “do nothing” scenario at 57,000 deaths over the course of the pandemic, versus 26,000 deaths if the stay at home order were extended to September. But lifting the order on May 18 results in only a few thousand extra deaths compared to leaving it in place until September.

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