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Sweden Update
For those who may not recall, Sweden did not shut down. They kept schools and businesses and restaurants open, encouraging only those at risk to quarantine. So… how are they doing?
It definitely looks like Sweden has stabilized. Which is excellent news for those who want to unwind the lockdowns ASAP.
Published in General
Because we have strong evidence that asymptomatic carriers can effectively transmit the virus to others, and a school classroom is one of the higher order nodes in a real world personal network. And anyone who has kids or works with them knows they are germ ridden disease carriers in the best of circumstances.
Next.
#25 MISTER BITCOIN
Again, at this juncture, all this herd immunity rah-rah is capillary rather than jugular in relevance, as several on this thread are highlighting and as I have been strenuously pointing out on the Rodin COVID Day 84 thread.
We don’t know nearly enough about the Wuhan Virus, on any number of fronts, to be able to make sweeping pronouncements or institute changes in a way that can be likened to clearing the Grand Canyon in a single jump.
Iterative and incremental. For the children, as it were — just not *via* the children.
None of the government employees worry about it; their jobs continue no matter how good or bad a job they do. Did anybody get fired from the CDC when they prevented anybody else from making a test while they rolled out a defective test? As Taleb says, they have no “skin in the game”.
The President and maybe some governors are the only ones that will be judged, by the voters.
That might be a testable theory, if we can find the right data. Have any of those following the numbers @Rodin @JerryGiordano seen case or death breakdowns by US SMSA out there? (Standard metropolitan statistical area). No way to eliminate the reporting inconsistencies, but a large enough sample would probably average them out.
It’s the way there that it should have been all along here: very strongly encourage the vulnerable to quarantine themselves, and also encourage the rest of society to be especially mindful of groups, hand hygiene, and staying home if you are sick at all. Early and frequent testing and contact tracing would have helped a lot in the beginning, but that ship has for the most part sailed, though we’ll have the opportunity to use that tool again the next time this thing flares up, providing of course our CDC doesn’t do everything they can think of to screw up our response again.
You don’t get the virus just by walking past someone who has it, or even sitting near someone in a restaurant who has it. That just isn’t how they are transmitted. With reasonable precautions – the same things we should all be doing every flu season anyway – there’s no reason why everything needs to be closed.
From six feet away. With masks on, right? Right?
@lockeon, the short answer is that I have seen no breakdown by SMSA. But I will take a crack at the totals for the greater New York as the individual counties that comprise it are identified. One then could compare it against the totals for the 4 states that comprise it. My guess is that it would represent quite of bit of the cases/deaths for the four states (although I may have to compares how it looks with and without the Pennsylvania counties included).
For opponents of the lockdowns, what is the basis for believing the numbers would have been the same, or within acceptable ranges, without them? If you believe they were ineffective, how could that be explained? You would have to be arguing that the virus is not spread from person to person, right?
But I have not heard anyone even propose the idea that the virus is spread by any method except person to person contact or proximity. If that is how it is transmitted, then the social distancing must have had an effect on the spread. There is no getting around that logic. If the numbers show a different curve than you expected, it cannot be that the distancing did not have an effect. It must be because the data entered into the calculation is clouded by unknown, unpredictable factors.
I believe the lockdowns were important to limiting not only infections, but potential deaths. The big question is how strict they should be and how long they should last.
The basis for believing that the lockdowns were unnecessary is rooted in the fact that rational humans will generally make choices that serve their self-interest, without being forced to do so. Look at all the things that people are doing now that aren’t required by law (or at least aren’t really enforceable by law) but indicate that people take this seriously. The NCAA and NBA postponed their seasons voluntarily. South by Southwest cancelled itself. Individuals flocked to stores to buy hand sanitizer and masks. There are dozens of other examples. All this long before the governments started closing businesses.
I would not argue that government-imposed lockdowns have had no effect. I think it is very likely that they have. But that doesn’t mean they were necessary.
The virus is spread primarily by touching contaminated surfaces and then your own face. It is not airborne, which means you will not get it just because you are in the same room as someone else who has it, or walk past someone in a store who has it. If someone who has it sneezes or coughs, then saliva containing virus can become aerosolized and land on surfaces (including skin) some distance away.
The best measures are frequent cleaning of your hands and surfaces that you touch, and anyone with a cough (or otherwise sick) should stay home. If we had all done that, and the sick and elderly had self-quarantined, we would have been fine.
#35 AlphaBravo
Re restaurants: Define “near”… While we’re at it, define the dimensions of these restaurants you’re talking about where seating proximity doesn’t translate to transmission.
Meanwhile, does anyone have video footage from that communal banquet in Wuhan early in January? (Hint, hint…)
If this disease is gonna come back again, then it is once again shown to be like malaria in certain ways. So that should add fuel to the hot idea of getting plenty of hydroxychloroquine in production, and doing it now. if that strategy is good enough for Switzerland, Germany, France and Belgium as well as Bahrain, it should be good enough for us. This anti malarial should be produced here in the USA, not in CHina or some third world nation.
We should also pay attention to what is happening in India, with Bill Gates being criminally charged for his horrendous experiemnt on the people including children of India. (With over 400,000 lives ruined due to his need to test people there with his vaccines.) Very important to note that when he releases his vax in a few weeks or months, we Americans will be the test subjects.
I agree completely that people will do a lot of the social distancing on their own, without the gov. orders. I have made that argument myself.
When I say “lockdowns,” I mean the broader practice of social distancing, whether mandated or not. I am arguing against the notion, which seems to be prevalent, that the social distancing, and resulting economic harm, was unnecessary because the numbers turned out lower than some of the worst projections. I don’t think that is correct. I think the social distancing (mandated and/or voluntary) had a significant effect. I think the orders probably were necessary in most places in the US because many here were not taking it seriously, and were convinced that the disease was no worse than the flu.
If you aren’t touching a dirty table or doorknob and then rubbing your face, and if no one sitting at the able next to you is coughing or sneezing, you are unlikely to be exposed to the virus.
If you are exposed to the, then yes, you may get sick. If you do get sick, there is a small chance that you’ll become very sick, and an even smaller chance that you’ll die. The chances of these things happening are likely on the order of the chances that you’d be seriously injured or killed in a car accident on your way to or from the restaurant.
If you are old or have pre-existing health problems, then your chance of getting sick and possibly dying is much greater though the odds are still very much in your favor. In that case, just to be safe, you should just stay home.
#40 AlphaBravo
Notwithstanding their laudable hand sanitizer purchase objective, people flocking to stores would have been a great way to further pump the virus into circulation — and depending on the locale, it probably was.
In various neighborhoods and venues in Tokyo (where I was living until I fled in late February), TP and mask panic-buying rushes on stores during the past several weeks have probably at least partially contributed to the exponential contagiousness starting to finally turn up in heretofore suppressed statistics releases.
Please do not take this as strong pushback, because I admit my knowledge in this area has “gaps.” But this is a different take from much of what I’ve absorbed. Sure, you may not get the virus in an airborne manner, but is it not commonly accepted that much of the transmission is through the air? Is the wearing of facial protective equipment (e.g., masks) a total overreaction? How does it spread in nursing homes?
Stores where I live are just as crowded as normal. Perhaps more so, curiously, and we have a much lower rate of infection here than places with stricter social distancing requirements. So I’m not sure your hypothesis holds up.
It seems like you just want to think what you want to think, and that’s cool. Lots of people do.
#43 D.A. Venters
Heartily agree.
Where I am nowadays — back to my hometown in the Boston area, after fleeing my Tokyo abode — there’s a reason so many Bay State denizens get the sobriquet “M[REDACTED]”: We’re not exactly chock-a-block with considerate, empathetic, societally responsible types. In all social strata and milieux.
Here is the data: On 4/13/20 the greater NY SMSA represented 88.4% of the cases for the four states of NY, NJ, CT and PA. If you eliminate the 5 counties of PA that are in the far west of the SMSA, the remainder of the SMSA is 94.8% of the three remaining states in the SMSA.
Many, if not most, nursing home patients have to be handled by staff multiple times daily, whether it’s changing clothes, physical rehab, providing medicine, feeding by hand, cleaning up you-know-what, etc. Despite masks, gloves and cleaning, if a staff member has it, it’s almost sure to get to someone who has immunity issues that make it dangerous.
Agreed, but are we excluding the possibility that airborne transmission is a factor? Given the rampant spread in some homes, I have my doubts that physical contact, while a culprit, is the sole cause.
Sweden just reported out 114 deaths equal to 3762 in the US, and at death total of 1033 equal to 34,089.
From the WHO: Airborne transmission is different from droplet transmission as it refers to the presence of microbes within droplet nuclei, which are generally considered to be particles <5μm in diameter, can remain in the air for long periods of time and be transmitted to others over distances greater than 1 m.
Some diseases (TB and measles are the classic examples) are airborne, meaning you have a good chance of being exposed to the pathogen simply by breathing the air in the same room as someone who has the disease. In medicine, we term the precautions that need to be taken when caring for these patients “airborne precautions”, the cornerstone of which is use of an N95 mask. Early on, there was concern that coronavirus is airborne. Studies have not borne that fear out.
All the evidence points to the fact that coronavirus is transmitted the same way that most viruses (influenza and the common cold for example) are: primarily through droplets of respiratory secretions or saliva. It is strongly suspected that most transmission of viruses is done by touching contaminated surfaces and then a thin membrane such as that inside your mouth, nasal passage, or the conjunctiva of your eye. Droplets can be aerosolized during coughing or sneezing and there is some risk that particles could be inhaled that way, but that risk is considered low. The biggest problem with coughing or sneezing is that it spreads the particles to surfaces nearby, which other people then touch.
Masks probably provide a small amount of protection and are a good idea as long as they are worn properly and are clean. A dirty mask may cause more risk than no mask, and an improperly worn mask will likely not work at all. The most value for masks in public is probably in having sick people wear them to contain their respiratory secretions.
I understand that, but these graphs don’t show a pattern of decrease or even plateau. They show increase. Each mountain is higher than the previous mountain and the valleys are higher than the previous valleys.
A mountain and valley are one iteration of a cyclical pattern. I can expect another high at the end of the current valley. The question that has yet to be determined is if the next cycle’s high is lower or higher than the previous cycle’s high. If it is lower, I’d be more confident in saying it peaked. But this graph ends in a valley, so I have no idea what the next mountain will look like and neither does anyone else. By simple pattern recognition, I’d say the next mountain would be higher than the last. By typical illness patterns, it could be lower next cycle. But that’s not guaranteed and is not assured by the graphs presented.
This is always the problem with analyzing strong government intervention. It’s very hard to prove that something wasn’t necessary, yet very easy to look back and say “it would have been much worse if he hadn’t done what we did”.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.
Government always has every incentive to act boldly, and the healthcare system was caught with their pants down preparedness-wise, which means they had to try to get the public to do everything in their power to not need their services.
Again, I don’t think anyone would argue that social distancing didn’t flatten the curve. In fact, I think it worked much better than was expected. But how necessary was it to put millions of people out of work and destroy thousands of businesses and add trillions to our already horrifying national debt? How many lives did we really save? And what about the unintended consequences? How many people will be badly hurt because of the economic blowback of all this?
And keep in mind that “flattening the curve” did just that…..it flattened the curve, it didn’t reduce the area under the curve. Just as many people are going to get very sick and die than if we had done nothing, potentially even more over a longer period of time. Also keep in mind that a significant majority of the people using most of the healthcare resources and eventually dying are statistically likely to have died from other causes within a year or two anyway…..I know healthcare rationing is a taboo topic, but most people spend a large majority of all the healthcare dollars they spend in their entire life in the last year of their life, and considering the dismal state of healthcare economics in our country right now, that’s probably not something we can afford to keep ignoring.
Yes, we are excluding airborne transmission as a factor in nursing home outbreaks. OldPhil explained how it works perfectly.
I think there is a degree of “technical” terminology/semantics at work here. To me (a layperson), “droplets” (possibly microscopic?) are “airborne,” although the use of the term in that context may not be correct.
From CDC:
This indicates to me that, being in close proximity (6 ft.) to someone in a restaurant, market, bank, etc. raises the possibility of transmission without the need for “touching” a contaminated surface.
I explained it the best I could. “Raises the possibility”? Sure. To what degree? A small one, likely.
And yes. Masks (outside of the hospital environment) are an overreaction and a placebo and, to some extent, virtue signalling. Kind of like reusable bags.
And I’m good with your explanation. It’s a complex topic, and arguably beyond me, but I think we differ on the degree to which touching a contaminated surface is the first order of transmission.