Just a note that when i repeated Dominic Cummings words upthread it was called a “hate filled spew of conspiracy theory nonsense” by those more interested in supporting Butcher Johnson than questioning what was blatantly obvious to be the wrong policy.
The Tories, Brexiters and Johnson supporters are on socmedia and still arguing against isolation, still pursuing tribalism, still taking a contrarian position. It’s about doing the opposite of the EU and the rest of the world out of sheer bloody mindness, nationalism and jingoism and now they (well, their parents/grandparents) are going to fucking die en masse. When presented with “stay home” theyve instead looked at a side piece of advice about exercise, and used it as an excuse to carry on doing what they want to do. Its the selfishness, disregard for anyone else and putting your own pleasure and entertainment above other peoples lives. Toryism in a nutshell.
What you will do by carelessly getting infected is probably infect someone else who wasn’t part of your willing carelessness. That’s putting people in harm’s way.
So much this. He’s got my vote, and I don’t even live in Lake Worth.
I mean, why isn’t this the answer to everything? Why can’t everyone go to work during ‘off-peak hours’ and ‘wipe down their desk’ when they are done? Because, I imagine, it doesn’t work. Off-peak hours aren’t off-peak anymore if a lot of people choose them. Some people won’t wipe. Others will wipe carelessly. Still others will wipe well but still not produce clean, uncontaminated environment. That advice is insane, the advice of someone who either doesn’t know what they are talking about or is simply unwilling to tell the truth.
Tim_N
6238
But how would that happen? If you distance yourself from all individuals except those who expressly volunteer to get within your orbit, then by your own definition it is the other party’s willing carelessness that causes them to get infected.
Look, I am working from home full time and social distancing as much as I can, I am not hanging out with friends on the weekend or going to the beach, but the ethics of the situation interest me and some perspectives come across as inconsistent to me.
E.g.
- Why are dinner parties bad but kissing your spouse never mentioned as irresponsible?
- Why are three kids hanging out on the corner bad but them going to school ok?
- Isn’t it unethical to go to the grocery store unless you have literally run out of food in your house?
- Isn’t ordering stuff online just shifting the health risk onto the delivery people who have to cart this stuff around?
Where’s the line exactly?
For the record this is the advice from NSW Health (which may change imminently from new restrictions just announced):
Governments have to juggle more than just the total number of covid-19 infections. Shutting down the economy for a year would certainly get rid of the virus globally, but they can’t do it.
(I should note that this advice is for a country where community transmission is rarer than the big cities of the US).
You don’t know the insides of other people’s heads. You get infected, then infect another ‘willing participant’, who goes on to infect an unwilling person later when you’re not around.
Social distancing is a kind of substitute for herd immunity. It only works if everyone does it.
All of those things are bad! Kids shouldn’t be in school. You should actually be practicing social distancing from your immediate family but governments aren’t going to order that and people won’t do it if they do order it. But it’s still bad not to do it. Yes, it’s irresponsible to go to the grocery store or pharmacy if you don’t have to. Yes, relying on deliveries shifts the burden to the deliverer, just as expecting other people to stock shelves so you’ll have food shifts the burden to them.
The difference is that you need food and medicine, everyone does, but you don’t need to go to the gym! Nobody needs to go to the gym. Nobody needs to hang out with their friends. It is a different class of risk than buying necessary food is. It’s an unncessary risk.
This was answered here:
Study after study demonstrates that even if there is only a little bit of connection between groups (i.e. social dinners, playdates/playgrounds, etc.), the epidemic trajectory isn’t much different than if there was no measure in place. The same underlying fundamentals of disease transmission apply, and the result is that the community is left with all of the social and economic disruption but very little public health benefit. You should perceive your entire family to function as a single individual unit; if one person puts themselves at risk, everyone in the unit is at risk. Seemingly small social chains get large and complex with alarming speed. If your son visits his girlfriend, and you later sneak over for coffee with a neighbor, your neighbor is now connected to the infected office worker that your son’s girlfriend’s mother shook hands with. This sounds silly, it’s not. This is not a joke or a hypothetical. We as epidemiologists see it borne out in the data time and time again and no one listens. Conversely, any break in that chain breaks disease transmission along that chain.
In contrast to hand-washing and other personal measures, social distancing measures are not about individuals, they are about societies working in unison. These measures also take a long time to see the results. It is hard (even for me) to conceptualize how ‘one quick little get together’ can undermine the entire framework of a public health intervention, but it does. I promise you it does. I promise. I promise. I promise. You can’t cheat it. People are already itching to cheat on the social distancing precautions just a “little”- a playdate, a haircut, or picking up a needless item at the store, etc. From a transmission dynamics standpoint, this very quickly recreates a highly connected social network that undermines all of the work the community has done so far.
There is a reason why gyms aren’t open anymore in a lot of European countries for people to go at off peak hours and wipe down carefully after they are done.
Tim_N
6241
From your reply, @scottagibson, it sounds like you are philosophically consistent, it’s bad to be close to your spouse, you shouldn’t go to the grocery store unless you absolutely have to, etc… I am not seeing the same consistency from other people I observe commenting on this whole thing (outside Qt3).
About schools, I think it’s a really fascinating problem and I am not sure if the downsides to closing schools are fully appreciated. I understand the benefits for disease transmission in shutting them down, and I would agree with it wholeheartedly with them if the time period was a month or so. But from what I have heard from governments and chief medical officers this whole thing could easily last 6-18 months.
The Aus PM has essentially made the argument that he wants to keep schools open (for the next six month, not just till pressure mounts and he closes them in a couple of days) because he doesn’t want kids to miss a whole year of education. Is it fair to ask kids to miss a year of education for a disease that won’t even affect them? He also expressly said that it’s naive to think you can have a complete shutdown in a month or two and then the virus will be gone, it would just come back after the shutdown and you’d be no better off. I imagine he is listening to experts about that. Lastly, he made the argument that closing schools for long periods will really screw the economy further because many of the adults of these children won’t be able to work.
I know, I know, the economy, it’s unfashionable to care about it the last couple of months. A global recession, in the grand scheme of things, is nothing and the world will recover. A global depression that lasts several years, well that’s another matter entirely. You can’t shut the economy down for six months. It’s great to say ‘noone needs to go the gym’ or to a restaurant, but the livelihoods of many people are relying on such transactions and they won’t be able to afford any food without it. Stimulus packages will work in the short term, but the government can’t just create incomes for a sizable proportion of the population for 18 months.
Not to mention the famine, misery, and epidemics of disease that will ravage kids in poor countries if a global depression were to take place. Maybe I am completely wrong on how long it will take to contain the virus, I am just writing from the impressions I got listening to chief medical officers and epidemic modellers.
It isn’t that I don’t care about the economy. It’s that I think failure to at least constrain the growth of the contagion, failure to keep the number of seriously ill to a manageable number, will be just as bad or worse economically, plus we will have unnecessarily killed millions. Better a bad economy without so many deaths.
And why can’t governments give people an income for 6 or 12 or 18 months? What makes that impossible?
No surprises at all, there. As multiple people (including British) have been saying all along, the about-face was never about data (because the data has been pretty much stable since January).
The worst is still to come though. And the government needs to act now.
Please.
But, but…they listened to the experts! /s
Aceris
6245
Except they aren’t his words, because it’s not a direct quote. You’re lying again.
but no, you are instead going to argue Murdochs paper invented bad things about the Tories. Congrats on siding with the worst fucking scum in politics. You stand with them, I’ll oppose you.
Aceris
6247
I am surprised by these photos I see of hordes of Brits on the beach or in parks. More than a fortnight ago (before the government did anything), things were already getting quiet here. Now everyone in my circles is thoroughly bought into the social distancing. Seeing those pictures really does reinforce to me how fragmented our society has become in terms of worldview and outlook.
The situation in Ecuador as of today:
Sorry it’s an image, but it’s the only easily accessible data I have found so far.
Edit: for context, Ecuador has ~18 million people.
Why? Or rather - the question you need to ask yourself is, how many deaths do you think would make it worthwhile to close schools down for 6-18 months? Because that’s what we’re talking.
You commented earlier on the mortality rate if China had a million infected, and yes - it’s right that 0,3% mortality doesn’t seem so bad compared to influenza (the Danish estimate currently goes from 0,3 - 1,0%, so basically this is what they think happened).
But keep in mind that when we’re talking a 12+ month horizon for this, we’re assuming a scenario were the spread infects very large numbers of the population. A 60% infection rate in the US with that fatality rate is 600K -.2M people dead. And that’s under ideal circumstances. If the health services get overwhelmed, as will happen in many localized cases even under the best of circumstances, the fatality rate will triple or worse.
Personally, I think all countries are going to experience long-running lockdowns - it’s just a question of whether you are proactive and keep the number of casualties low, or you are reactive and are forced to do it later and suffer many more dead. Cf. the graph above which suggests that the UK will be in the same situation as Italy in 2 weeks - as a best case scenario.
Governments can do a lot more than people think, if they want to.
Matt_W
6250
Someone has to produce the things they buy. Someone has to deliver them and/or stock shelves. I would normally scoff at the idea of moral hazard, but it is real here. Some people really do have to work or we’re all going to starve on a long-term lockdown. They’re putting themselves and their families at risk. And yet everyone who stays home is getting a paycheck? I mean I know that’s what should happen, but we are depending on the people who get the lowest wages in our society to stay working and put themselves at risk, while the rest of us stay home and collect government paychecks. That is not going to last for any length of time.
To be clear, it’s also impossible. You can’t live in the same house as other people and maintain social distance. If that’s what we’re relying on, we’re fucked and we need a different solution. If social distancing requires draconian measures, then governments need to say that: “if children normally live in 2 household because of, e.g. divorce, they need to pick one and stay there for the duration. They can visit their other parent virtually for the next 12 months.” or “If your partner does not live with you, say goodbye to them. You can blow them kisses over Zoom for the next 12 months.”
China insists this was necessary, via fever clinics and centers (no confirmed cases can stay at home), to avoid continuous spread within families. Some other Asian countries didn’t need this, but used contact tracing technology that Westerners scoff at. Again, I think we’re far from knowing a) the public health impact of the virus in a society that refuses to follow others effective practices, and b) how much a western society will compromise it’s values like privacy and personal freedom of movement once the medical system is in collapse.
Matt_W
6252
This is different then “every single person needs to isolate themselves for 12 months.” One is theoretically possible and lasts through the 14 day course of the disease, the other is not possible and lasts for an indeterminate length of time that might be many months.
Yes, completely agree that the China and Asia approach does not imply a longer hiatus from work - actually a shorter one. But at a sacrifice of some values like privacy and the government ability to detain positive cases until they test negative.
Edit: I was mostly commenting on your rebuttal to the idea of families isolating from a positive case. China found these families had to be separated.
