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We need shut-down metrics next time, not just open up metrics
I get that when the current situation was getting underway we had little information to go on, so most people in government panicked at the thought of hospitals getting overwhelmed. We had to “flatten the curve” so they shut down just about everything, everywhere. Now they’re slowly opening things back up in stages based on metrics such as declining hospitalizations for 14 straight days.
But now we know more, and it turns out that running out of hospital beds didn’t happen. It was a concern only in the New York City area and maybe a couple of other places, for a little while. If anything, hospitals are empty because of stopping most other treatments. Maybe all the shutdowns helped, but we don’t actually know that. Some places didn’t shut down and did ok.
If something like this happens again, I suggest we don’t shut down everything everywhere all at once. We use metrics such as a steady decrease in available hospital beds so that running out might actually happen. We do this at the county level, not even the state level, because of how localized the hotspots were. It’s the shutdowns that need to be justified in stages, not the re-openings.
I suspect many people would voluntarily go back to masks and distancing and working from home if they could. We don’t need the blunt instrument of government disrupting our lives because of something someone said might happen.
Published in Domestic Policy
I agree totally. The governors started essentially with a blank slate, and quickly went overboard using the “better safe than sorry” mentality . . .
“Better safe than sorry” has to be considered in the larger context. “Safe” should have to be justified – and the side effects considered.
If staying home is safe, why is staying home and in your room, away from all other family members not “safer”? Why not cowering under your bed? It’s arguably safer.
For all the unquestioning, obedient ones out there, I ask is there a limit to your unquestioning obedience? If the government announced that it had been discovered that dogs and cats might be carriers, and therefore the authorities would be around to euthanize your pets, would you finally ask for some proof? Or would it just be so long, Fido? Is there a point where you bestir yourself and begin to fight back?
Next time? God forbid.
I still want shut down metrics this time. Almost everyone is still talking as though being shut down is the norm, and those who want to return to being free citizens bear the burden of proof. I want those who want to remain shut down to bear the burden of proof. The burden should always be on those who seek to deny free citizens their inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Even if an initial reason has been established, any continuation of that denial must be justified. The burden of proof should never be on those who seek to exercise their inalienable rights. We can demand that now. We don’t have to wait for the next pandemic or whatever other excuse they come up with.
The pandemic was successful in doing what it was designed to do. Which is to destroy the US economy and the Trump Administration Presidency. What a bunch of fools our political masters are. Only surpassed by the citizenry.
I hope we have all learned the lesson that experts are only slightly more knowledgeable than the populace, that politicians are craven fools that care more about their careers than the citizens general welfare. Sadly I suspect we will follow these idiots once again over the cliff if they so direct. The situation is hopeless and I suspect the worse is yet to come.
What is interesting is that all of the Incident Command training for senior emergency officials stresses that the command staff for a big incident should be thinking about and planning demobilization from the beginning. All the state, county and city emergency management officials take this training – the feds hold money hostage unless you are sufficiently trained up. The hard part of any big incident is getting the right resources in place because inevitably as a big incident expands you are usually trying to catch up, but at some point stuff has to go back to where it came from. COVID is just like any other big incident, but I’d say most political entities have failed badly. My personal opinion is that too many higher authorities were terrified of making a mistake and decided to lower the risk to themselves by making extreme calls. Look at how Andrew Cuomo refuses to take responsibility for his nursing home orders.
Yes. Why is a mask required in stores and outside, but not in your home? Does the mask repel the virus or not? Why are you not practicing social distancing in your home if it is what we need to to do to stop the spread? When Cuomo speaks on TV why isn’t he wearing a mask?
This is the key lesson learned. (Find a map showing all of the counties that had either 0 or 1 pandemic death. What price shutdown?)
The real question is, “How safe is safe enough?”
We could lower the highway speed limit to 25 MPH, but the increase in safety would not be considered worth it by most drivers, and especially not by cross-country truckers. We could require joggers to wear helmets, elbow and knee pads, and knee braces in case they fell, but the running experience would be ruined and more cumbersome.
No one is balancing these theoretical lives saved with the actual lives and livelihoods lost because of these overextended lockdowns.
Has anybody heard this before? https://townhall.com/columnists/larryoconnor/2020/05/20/misguided-shutdown-policy-began-as-high-school-science-project-n2569154 That the shut down policy was based on a high school science project? I find it hard to believe, but then again, I find the prolonged shutdown hard to believe as well.
Thanks to China concealing the information they had about the initial COVID outbreak, both the U.S. and Europe didn’t even have 2-3 month advance information that could be considered reliable to work with when the first cases started showing up in both areas. So there was a certain amount of flying blind and making up the rules on a day-to-day basis, until more information about the coronavirus was known from localized real-world experiences.
But all that was pretty much in place by mid-April, and that’s when you saw the narrative start to change, especially in Blue states, from flattening the curve to avoid overwhelming local hospitals, to the higher and higher bar of lack of new COVID-19 cases (as opposed to COVID hospitalizations and death rate spikes). Because Democrats love top-down government, and using crises involving issue A to get pet projects B through Z enacted into law, the idea that they were going to start treating the coronavirus like polio or smallpox, where the incapacitation and mortality rates were so high nothing but total eradication was acceptable, was about as easy to predict happening in May as forcasting the sun rising in the east tomorrow morning.
That’s why they and much of the media is really angry at the federalist system right now, because having 50 different options on handling COVID is providing the contrast-and-compare to their draconian shutdowns they don’t want residents in their states to see. If Indiana and Ohio are opening up, it makes it harder for governors Whitmer or Pritzker to keep laying down the hammers, and the anger at the contrasts is why you openly see liberals wanting states like Georgia, Florida and Texas to fail, even if people have to die for their reopenings to fail.
The shutdowns should have been more localized.
However, based on information about the virus at the time, staged shutdowns would have defeated the purpose. By the time the hospitals start to be overwhelmed, you have already allowed enough infections to sustain the overload and probably to cause a cascade as well.
As eager as everyone is for this to be over, necessary though it might be to accept even a million deaths to keep society chugging and to defend against tyranny, we still don’t know what hospital loads will be like a month or six months from now. We don’t know if even 10% of Americans have been infected yet. We don’t know if the virus is seasonal. And we don’t know how many people have been infected since many lockdowns were lifted and the delayed symptoms just haven’t shown yet.
While it is true that there was a science fair project – the idea of a complete shutdown with at home food delivery in the face of a pandemic dates back to 1630 in Florence, Italy.
Florence lost 12% of their population compared with other Italian city states (24%, 36% in a few, more that 40% in others)
That lockdown is the gold standard.
Can’t like this enough
It happens at other levels, too. It also explains the all-out war on Swedish strawmen.
It’s too bad that Amy Curtis’s post, A “Patchwork” Approach to Normalcy (by @amyseeger) hasn’t got more attention here, because it shows that the angry phenomenon you describe has also been taking place within Wisconsin, where the media are criticizing the governor’s approach because it’s too diverse (i.e. it’s a patchwork).
We should be throwing the leftmedia hostility to diversity back at them.
The local CBS station here in the Permian Basin has been running both coronavirus infection/fatality reports and coronavirus recovery stories for the past six weeks. Everyone runs the first story, but the second one, that shows the low ratio of deaths to recoveries, tends to fade into the background, while on the state level even in Texas, you get stories like this from Texas Monthly about Abbott’s reopening plans, where the writer’s hope that the plan fails bubbles up into every keystroke. It’s the kind of story you get when a magazine that supposedly markets to the whole state adopts an Austin-centric mindset, and the conventional wisdom in Austin really wishes the state were more like New York or California.
What we are learning every day is that the experts are not experts on this particular pandemic. From the very beginning we were told that this virus is highly lethal, extremely transmissible, and lasts for extended periods of time on surfaces, making it nearly impossible to avoid. We were also told that our hospitals would be paralyzed by an overwhelming assault of terribly ill people who would need 10’s of thousands of ventilators that we didn’t have.
What we know now, no thanks to our experts, is that this disease is lethal mainly to old and infirmed, which is not much different from most other diseases. Yes it is highly transmissible, but so is the flu. Just yesterday I was shocked to read that it doesn’t seem to stick to surfaces as much as we originally thought:
“Though many have been concerned about infection through items like groceries or mail deliveries, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recently issued updated guidance saying that coronavirus “does not spread easily” from touching surfaces or objects.”
The only hospitals that were overwhelmed were in NYC and some in New Jersey, but the 3000 COVID 19 beds built by the Federal government to alleviate this crisis were never used because the crisis never happened. In the meantime, hospitals all over the country are going broke because they were not allowed to practice standard medical care and elective surgeries for fear of using beds that might be needed for the COVID Crush. We produced so many ventilators that we are now searching throughout the world for countries that might take some off our hands.
The bottom line is that we allowed people who might know a lot of stuff to destroy our way of life because they don’t know the right stuff. The experts are myopic. They only know their tiny little part of the world. I know President Trump got slammed from left field with this virus, but we all got hosed as a result. As much as Trump correctly calls the news “Fake”, I am afraid he allowed them to control the narrative. We all are going to pay.
One thing that should be done next time is for the general public to see all the input the decision-makers use to come up with their orders. If only a reporter had the guts to ask Oberfuhrer – I mean, Governor Whitmer what data or studies prompted her to ban the sale of seeds but allow abortions.
I’ll bet a dollar to a doughnut (whatever the heck that means) the experts said the virus “could be” highly lethal and “could be” extremely transmissible, a “could” last long times on surfaces. Fauci was very careful in his public appearances with Trump, and used several CYA couched terms when answering questions. It’s the MSM and politicians that strip the couching terms and spout these extreme statements as gospel truth . . .
Interesting. So the loosening of controls is called “rolling the dice,” but the installation of them in the first place is not. Well, I suppose that is correct in a sense. Shutting down was more of a sure thing, though not necessarily a good thing. It was sure to be destructive, even if what it did about the coronavirus was not so sure.
Yes. When they say the virus can last 10 days on a bubbly surface, or whatever surface they’re talking about, that doesn’t tell me what we need to know. Such as: What percentage of the virus lasts that long? What is the daily “mortality” rate of the virus on such a surface? How many different types of bubbly surfaces were tested? What is the variance among surface types? And the biggie, what is the likelihood of getting the disease that way? They may not know the answer to that last question but if they tell us the answers to the others, it can help us know how seriously to take the threat by that means in comparison to other modes of transmission.
Here’s another example of the media hostility to diversity. It’s a headline on the front page of the online WSJ:
As if “agreement” on it is a desirable goal.
I suppose “States Don’t Agree…” is a step up from 3-4 weeks ago, when they headlines were more in line with “Governors of Georgia, Florida Condemning Millions to Die With Disgraceful Reopenings“. At least the new headline isn’t claiming to be able to predict the future, even if it’s still putting continued lockdowns on equal footing with the reopnings, despite four weeks of evidence of nothing near the worst-case scenario.
I am glad to see this:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/05/21/donald-trump-we-are-not-closing-the-country-if-hit-by-second-wave-of-coronavirus/
He is a little late on this. It should have been our initial approach.
I totally agree with Trump that we shouldn’t so massive lockdowns again if a second wave of infections should materialize. I’m glad he went on record opposing the idea. But Trump didn’t close things down this time – the governors and local governments did. Can he keep them from doing it again if they choose to do so?
He might have a case of States closing down interferes with interstate commerce. But mainly if the President doesn’t advocate for closing down, the Red States won’t do it. That puts a lot of pressure on the Blue States.
We should not have done a nationwide shutdown in the first place. It should have been determined by conditions on the ground and at the county level. We live in a very big diverse country. New York City, Washington DC rules should not apply to Kentucky or Alaska. I am miffed at my President for being sucked into this liberal Democrat trap. Mainly since it seems designed to get them elected and for them to steal and implement their progressive policies. It may be that Trump has doomed us.
So you think his avenue for keeping states from closing down (or at least trying to keep them from closing down) would be to encourage states to stay open and praise those that do or at the very least not issue guidelines that encourage states to go back into lockdown modes?
The actual shutdowns were done on state or local levels, not on a national one. I think the governor of South Dakota never issued one for her state. As for encouraging or endorsing them, I think Trump was caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place – at least at the beginning when things were so unsure. If he wasn’t seen as being supportive of the governors’ attempts to protect their citizens and the recommendations his experts were suggesting – things that might have proven useful -and things wound up being as bad as some were predicting, he would have been crucified. See how bad things have gotten? If Trump had only listened to what everyone was telling him. I think Trump’s initial instincts were right, but he had no way of knowing whether they were or not when decisions were first being made. I wish he had changed directions a bit earlier than he did, but I don’t fault him for making those initial decisions.
As for your last sentence, I’m hoping and praying that when November rolls around, people will remember exactly who wanted to keep them locked up – and it wasn’t Trump.