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6255

If this is true, then I wonder if it’s not worth just abandoning it in order to preserve the economy. If we’re going to fuck over our economy with devastating consequences that will affect us all for decades to come, then we need it to be for something. It’s entirely possible that, even as bad as the disease could be, the cure could be worse.

6256

I’m kinda of the same mindset. Maybe 2-3 months of social distancing to flatten things out of critical piles of bodies, but some deaths are acceptable to preserve the future. I’d take a 1-2% death risk to get back to semi-normal.

I think the economic damage/deaths of a year of social distancing would be greater than the cost of the disease itself.

6257

Or people could take it fucking seriously for a month and get the numbers down while the government deploys massive testing to detect and isolate the infected. Then people can mostly get back to work.

It’s an alternative to letting 5% of your population die.

6258

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The West’s insistence that no one should wear masks is such an enormous error IMO. Friends in Asia are aghast at what advice is being put out on not wearing masks.

Yes, I’m aware most masks aren’t protective to the wearer. And that N95 are in short supply.

But what is done in these Asian countries is mass wearing of disposal surgical masks, or washable fabric masks. This works on the principal that while such masks don’t protect the wearer, they limit spread of droplets to all others. You assume everyone is asymptomatic and contagious. And very few people have to stay home.

Laws if I were king:

  1. During the pandemic (or, cases in local ICU > x) everyone must wear a surgical type mask in public
  2. Only essential services are allowed to buy and wear N95 masks.
6259

So… South Korea? And where is China on that chart? Looks like cherry picking to me.

6260

Is it 1-2% once your healthcare system gets overwhelmed and everyone is just spreading it all over?

6261

Is that the plan? No one is saying that’s the plan. In fact, there’s plenty upthread that suggests this social distancing thing will continue for the next year. There’s a big difference between doing it for a month and doing it for a year.

6262

Yep, if this is continuing into October- I’d vote for whichever politician would end it, no matter what.

6263

Will you still vote for it come October if your hospitals are swamped and stuff that now’s just a nuisance is a death sentence? And hey, nobody needs to live past 50…

In any case, if no hail Mary comes, it’s still doable, we just won’t like it very much. Just add IR sensors everywhere, have people / AI monitoring, and if you check out as not okay, you disappear from society, for a few hours, a few weeks or forever, depending on how things go. You know, like China.

6264

South Korea added masks after the curve was clearly flattening.

6265

If you get it, you’re probably going to live. Eventually everyone would get it and get immunity.

It’s better to take that risk of death then to live in such a way. If we had to live in such a way, I’d probably welcome death.

Again , I’m ok with a 2-3 month attempt to flatten the curve, but going beyond that is counterproductive (unless I see proof otherwise)

6266

I understand that advice from the government in Singapore was only to wear a mask if you were sick so I’m not sure if that is entirely correct. That said, they made a number of masks (4) available to every household.

Of course, many Singaporeans I know ignored this and wore masks anyway when they went out. The government has however done an outstanding job.

6267

You’re probably going to live, but like 20% will need hospital. No hospital, no bueno. Like russian roulette but with worse odds.

Immunity, maybe? We don’t know that people get immune for very long, it’s just too new, so, again, it’s a roll of the dice.

But I think it’s perfectly “doable”, we’re not going to be socially distancing like now forever more, but if this becomes like the flu, we won’t go back to living like before, just like when we realized you can’t just throw your shit outside the window, or that washing your hands prevents diseases.

It’s just going to suck for the transition. Like all transitions.

6268

Yeah. But the West simply doesn’t have the quantities of masks in the system to allow this - there’s no cultrue of wearing masks while ill in the first place. And the demand for masks has skyrocketed in the places where most of them are made.

So there simply aren’t masks to wear.

6269

It’s the only viable plan. It’s the plan China has successfully carried out. The thing is, the lockdown needs to be super strict and the testing and surveillance needs to be ubiquitous. Wuhan had like 20,000 people their only job was contact tracing. Not counting all the other people involved.

China isolated sick people to make the lockdown more effective. You absolutely need to get the numbers down.

The thing is the US at this point needs a larger effort since it is already so widespread.

Edit: the less effective the lockdown is, the longer it has to last. If you don’t get R0 below 1, then you get the 18 month scenario.

6270

I do think we’ll have treatments within a year. I’m not saying completely give up now but I do think there’s going to be a time when I think the economic death toll is going to surpass the disease death toll.

I don’t think the US would accept the Chinese plan under any circumstance, nor would it be capable of pulling it off due to how spread out things are here.

6272

If there were enough masks available that everyone could wear one, I’d be totally fine with everyone wearing masks. They would reduce the spread by asymptomatic individuals.

But the facts currently are that we don’t have enough masks for frontline healthcare workers, so they should be the people wearing them. If you want to argue that a bandana around your face has some positive effect, have at it. But until we secure enough protective gear for healthcare workers, other people shouldn’t be getting them - those healthcare workers are more precious than the rest of us.

6273

I agree with the sentiment. I suspect once the medical capacity + new processes are put in to keep the curve below a certain point the lockdowns will ease up simply because people (and countries) can’t afford to stop the economy that long.

6274

This isn’t going to be like the flu. Let me quote a virologist:

This was relayed from my PI in a conversation last night verbatim. But if you listen to the “This week in virology” podcast, they have said some of the same things in the episodes I’ve listened to. (In fact, the TWiV folk think the corona==flu stuff going around on social media is outright lies, perhaps with malicious intentions.)

nCov-2 seems like a very slot mutating virus. The theory that the S and L strains are functionally divergent is not well supported. The virus doesn’t mutate fast enough to stay ahead of vaccines, the way the cold and flu viruses do.

The flu analogy (“That’s why you get a flu shot every year”) is wrong because the flu recombination happens in the poultry / swine co-culture agriculture of China. There’s no reason to believe this will happen with SARS-CoV 2.

We already know that coronaviruses in general confer post-infection immunity. (There are 4 earlier common corona viruses that have far milder symptoms than SARS, MERS, and SARX-nCov-2. In fact, we’re probably had some of them.)