COVID-19

[Spekkio]

If you think Sweden was bad, check out New York and New Jersey.

Judging NY/NJ/MA as failures is just yellow journalism. I'd expect nothing less from the Post. Ditto for Sweden.

What this suggests for NY/NJ/MA is two fold: first, that actually following mitigations is virtually impossible in densely populated cities. Second, that the disease will continue to spread in densely populated areas until a population fatality rate of about 0.15% is reached. In less populated areas it will settle between 0.07-010%. You can slow the spread but the final outcome is what it is.

In a year from now we'll have several more states and countries with similar deaths per 1M who 'failed'.

 

[Jim123]

It really is time to let Sweden stand as a failed plan. They have 10 times more deaths than their neighbours and twice as many deaths as Europe in general. 20 times more than Asia.

I don't think Sweden is looking very good at all, to date, but I'm waiting longer to say it was a failed plan. I'll wait until next spring or summer once a lot more things have shaken out.

There is still a lot of conflicting information, or not even conflicting but competing information, about immunity, resistance, spread. I think a lot of the stuff that passes for "science" on social media is noise and a nuisance at best but there is well grounded stuff if you carefully look for it (the funny thing is the good stuff is pretty easy to filter because it's well written, it's not alarmist or emotional, the date on it isn't a few months old, and it often involves esoteric details that are frankly a little boring).

I do agree that as far as handling the disease, some of the countries on your list have done very well. They've made tradeoffs in the name of the common good and those tradeoffs will be the subject of discussion for a long time to come.

Comparing the United States to Australia, yes, as a whole we've done pretty badly. But also keep in mind how diverse the United States is (I realize Australia is also very diverse in its own right, more than most countries in the world), a lot of different groups of people, mountains, coasts, green, desert, a few extremes that have snow all year round. Comparisons to the whole of Europe provide a lot of insight into both places.

 

[jackjack]

I think the deciding factor in the future, is going to be wheather a vaccine is successful. Herd immunity is going to be very costly in lost lives.

 

[BigRed389]

I don't think Sweden is looking very good at all, to date, but I'm waiting longer to say it was a failed plan. I'll wait until next spring or summer once a lot more things have shaken out.

There is still a lot of conflicting information, or not even conflicting but competing information, about immunity, resistance, spread. I think a lot of the stuff that passes for "science" on social media is noise and a nuisance at best but there is well grounded stuff if you carefully look for it (the funny thing is the good stuff is pretty easy to filter because it's well written, it's not alarmist or emotional, the date on it isn't a few months old, and it often involves esoteric details that are frankly a little boring).

I do agree that as far as handling the disease, some of the countries on your list have done very well. They've made tradeoffs in the name of the common good and those tradeoffs will be the subject of discussion for a long time to come.

Comparing the United States to Australia, yes, as a whole we've done pretty badly. But also keep in mind how diverse the United States is (I realize Australia is also very diverse in its own right, more than most countries in the world), a lot of different groups of people, mountains, coasts, green, desert, a few extremes that have snow all year round. Comparisons to the whole of Europe provide a lot of insight into both places.

I'd say Australia is actually very similar in many ways to CONUS with the exception of population distribution (no flyover states, population almost entirely distributed in coastal regions).

If they had any kind of transparency, China would be an interesting contrast for their differences in governance, but similarities in the problems of scale.

South Korea and Israel are also pretty interesting. They're effectively nearly island nations with closed/inhospitable land borders, free societies that also operate under a civil defense mindset, and both have very low death rates per population.

 

[Treetop Flyer]

Look, we're in agreement on that point.

The disagreement is when you keep posting pages of graphs using incomplete or immature data to draw a conclusion that the COVID-19 mitigations adopted are ineffective at slowing the spread of disease. It's indisputable that, on the whole, the mitigations had an impact on the reproduction rate and reduced it from 2-2.5 to 0.9-1.2. Whether those mitigations are worth the socio-economic cost based on what we know today is another discussion.

I think the efficacy is unknown. There are way too many variables to apply from state to state .

 

[SlickAg]

Judging NY/NJ/MA as failures is just yellow journalism. I'd expect nothing less from the Post. Ditto for Sweden.

What this suggests for NY/NJ/MA is two fold: first, that actually following mitigations is virtually impossible in densely populated cities. Second, that the disease will continue to spread in densely populated areas until a population fatality rate of about 0.15% is reached. In less populated areas it will settle between 0.07-010%. You can slow the spread but the final outcome is what it is.

In a year from now we'll have several more states and countries with similar deaths per 1M who 'failed'.

I think there’s more to that story, namely the decision to force the elderly in NY back into their nursing homes in order to make room in the hospitals.

New Jersey is in the same boat. Fact: Over 50% of their deaths came from nursing homes. Fact: Governor Murphy compelled nursing homes to take back covid positive patients to make room in hospitals.

I realize that these decisions weren’t made in vacuums, but that doesn’t mean they need to be buried deep down and forgotten. I think the media is very complicit in protecting the leaders who enacted these policies. You call it yellow journalism, I call it reporting the facts and asking for answers.

 

[SlickAg]

I think the efficacy is unknown. There are way too many variables to apply from state to state .

Ultimately I think this will be the issue in trying to analyze all the data. Even within states there can be vastly different outcomes based on population demographics, geographical differences, climate, etc that it’ll be hard to make quality comparisons across the board.

 

[robav8r]

I think the media is very complicit in protecting the leaders who enacted these policies. You call it yellow journalism, I call it reporting the facts and asking for answers.

Yep, all . . . . . day . . . . . long.

 

[HAL Pilot]

 

[Treetop Flyer]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1294266335887646720

More good news. This means that immunity among an exposed population is greater than those with detectable antibodies.

“
Summary
SARS-CoV-2-specific memory T cells will likely prove critical for long-term immune protection against COVID-19. We here systematically mapped the functional and phenotypic landscape of SARS-CoV-2-specific T cell responses in unexposed individuals, exposed family members, and individuals with acute or convalescent COVID-19. Acute phase SARS-CoV-2-specific T cells displayed a highly activated cytotoxic phenotype that correlated with various clinical markers of disease severity, whereas convalescent phase SARS-CoV-2-specific T cells were polyfunctional and displayed a stem-like memory phenotype. Importantly, SARS-CoV-2-specific T cells were detectable in antibody-seronegative exposed family members and convalescent individuals with a history of asymptomatic and mild COVID-19. Our collective dataset shows that SARS-CoV-2 elicits robust, broad and highly functional memory T cell responses, suggesting that natural exposure or infection may prevent recurrent episodes of severe COVID-19.”

 

[Jim123]

One of the theories, related to that, is a young person's immune system has a lot more of those memory T cells that haven't been programmed to any illnesses yet (simply haven't been exposed to as much as an old person), which could partly explain the differences between young people and old people who get sick from COVID.

Put another way... it's complicated.

 

[SlickAg]

“Schools are unsafe!! Kids must learn from home!! Except they can come to school if they need to!! We’ll just take precautions and screen them!!”

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1294404258633261059

 

[HokiePilot]

Please provide the nuance with respect to the difference in covid safety between a 4 year old in preschool/day care and a 7 year old in elementary school. I don't see it.

Some preschools may have larger rooms and higher staff to student rations and other preschools may not. Some schools have those features and others may not.

There is no such thing as perfectly safe. All activities carry some risk. All of the different mitigations have costs and effectiveness. Not all of them are useful in every scenario. People have to decide how much residual risk to accept.

We need to weigh that risk against the benefits of the childrens' education and socialization. Additionally the childcare functions of education are important.

I'm sure that none of this is new information to you. My point is that blanket statements that one thing means another is not useful. Guidelines are useful starting points, but individual solutions are the key.

 

[HokiePilot]

Except all those procedures are State. It isn't a federally run election. No federal mandated procedures. Some state might be able to afford online elections, others not. Offer fed money to help, fine. Some states simply will not be comfortable with it. Feds can't make them go online. And what about fairness and institutional racism. Mandatory ID is said to be unfair because some unknown number of people do not have ID but somehow cash payroll or social security checks. I suspect many more do not have computers or wifi or know how to go online and provide proper multi function authentication at the local library. Or will we just chalk that up to hypocrisy and move on?

Banks have money illegally stolen via online all the time. The feds have lost millions of people's personal info and had huge breaches of Intel agencies. Most vulnerable node will be the PC, voter, and that internet connection. People are more careful with their money and online banking or atm credentials then they will ever be about voting.

Here is my take. If good citizenship requires some investment in time or effort, so be it. Means you are serious about your vote and results in skin in the game. Easy votes are more likely to be thoughtless and unserious.

I was nodding along with you until that last paragraph. I understand the sentiment, but if you go down that route, there be dragons.

Its not any of our right to determine how much effort someone should vote. Everyone who is eligible to vote must be give the ability to vote.

 

[Treetop Flyer]

Everyone who is eligible to vote must be give the ability to vote.

Yes, let’s do that. Ok, done. What next?