Maybe it is how I consume my media, but there seems to be a much greater sentiment of " they can't take away my freedom to do what I want!!" than "we need to lift restrictions because people need to work."

Remember when we were tired of all the emails from businesses telling us about how their new and improved cleaning procedures before we ended up going into lockdown? I am already tired of this story line.

16 friends all test positive for coronavirus after night out at Florida bar

Now I understand this is a blind spot on my part. I am sure it should be seen as them trying to get people to learn from their experience. I just can't make that leap.

Fair enough.

And I think that Arles has done a great job in this threat of laying out the pro-business reasons we need to focus on re-opening. And I think most people agree with that.

But the reopening we are seeing isn't targeted toward keeping the economy afloat while keeping a focus on safety.

It's people refusing to wear masks (even though that increases safety while allowing more activity). It's people going to bars and restaurants without even pretending to socially distance. It's politicians who celebrated adding a trillion dollars to the debt with their tax cut suddenly remembering that they are deficit hawks when there's a chance that the money might go to people with less than $500,000 in assets. Its a federal government who decided that test and trace would be hard, so they just announced they weren't going to do it.

There was a smart way to deal with this. But it was going to require sacrifice and hard choices and trade-offs. And we just threw up our hands. We got tired of it. We threw away months of sacrifice because wearing a mask is uncomfortable.

What do you mean by "blocked off cell"?

So I just went to the local butcher to pick up an order that costs more than my entire grocery order but want to support local business.

There is a small tavern next door. They were setting up tables outside using a tape measure to ensure everything was 6 feet apart. I was initially impressed until I realize of the 4 people doing in none were wearing a mask.

I'm with you on 90% of this. We definitely did reach a point where we decided just to not care enough anymore.

One of the news stations showed each desk being segmented by clear plastic from the next home. My hope is that was just an "idea" they were banding about and not part of the real plan.

As to the mask issue, I have a solution:

We should call a new type of mask a “freedom shield”. Next, say how the media doesn’t think people should wear these new freedom shields and prefers we wear the old masks. Problem solved!

Great idea! And while I don’t agree with the ideology at all, making MAGA face masks would work too

Did we stop caring or stop being scared?
AT this point I think everyone knows someone who has had the disease...and maybe now that more in known the risks are measured and weighed and ..."Meh I'll risk that" is the decision...

I mean driving is dangerous, but we still do it. We know what COULD happen.

I would say we stopped taking reasonable precautions. A month ago I was in favor of starting to re-open certain areas - but that was still with the population wearing masks and distancing where possible. Arizona's issue was we went from lock-down to salons opening to bars/casinos opening without any mask requirements in 2 weeks. That's not a measured plan.

It just seems that in places that were not hammered to begin with (Texas, AZ, Florida, Cali, Georgia), people just stopped taking precautions and the leadership opened everything up. Had we been hit harder to begin with, maybe people would have been more careful - but that didn't happen and now we have these new hot spots. The hope is people dial it back a bit, start wearing masks and go back to their behaviors back in early May again.

Also, it bears repeating, I think, that the response of public health officials to the protests really hurt.

They should have said "Close contact is dangerous. Anything that increases close contact will increase the risk of spread."

Instead, they (not all of them I am sure, but some of them) tied themselves in knots trying to argue that the protests were fine as a public health matter.

It was stupid, and I think that it caused a lot of people to decide that they were never operating in good faith in the first place.

Were there a lot of experts who said that, or were they the minority but got more coverage? I don't remember which it was, but I do remember hearing people talk about taking precautions, including those involved with the protests.

What seems to fall by the wayside when talking about the economy is that lots of infections will also have an effect on the economy. If nothing else, tourism is affected big time (both domestic and international, where the US has 2.5-3 times more earnings than any other country). Also the big corporations with lots of international exchange of employees. Universities and scientific institutes suffer from that, too.

Other countries will not be much more 'closed' than the US over the summer, but they can do it safer because they a) lowered the level more strictly and b) have used the time better developing a strategy and investing in 'preventive infrastructure' (and again having less cases helps with stuff like contact tracing). Heck, they can even take a punt and allow Kids back into schools and ease off restrictions for the most vulnerable.

And even when you can kinda skate by on the backs of those not caring for now, never sufficiently lowering the level of infections does spell big trouble for November and onward (a widely available vaccine this year is a pipe dream imo)* and then worse outbreaks will lead to people being more wary.

*And there is some indication that even the lowered death rate right now is a byproduct of summer as the transmissions that still happen usually will involve less initial viral transfer (even when they happen indoors, air indoors in Summer is different than artificially heated air in winter) and that is likely a factor for how sick you get.



That to me is part of the problem of the discourse. Seems like a disproportional amount of people have trouble doing sth (or NOT doing sth) to protect someone else, especially someone they might not even know. Say one of those 16 young people in that bar infected an aunt that works in a retirement home with no testing strategy and an overworked public health agency is busy chasing 25 year olds.
Masks (the simple variety) for example always suffered from the fact that they protect others more reliably than yourself.

And yes, that is not a covid thing but a people thing obviously. But it matters more with an infectious disease like this.

Personally i am very much aware this is not exactly a high risk for me individually as an active and healthy person in his early 30s. But it's not primarily about me, so i prioritise what i do not purely based on my needs or based on my perceived risk.

Except you wear a mask to protect other people from you, so the risk you are taking is with someone elses life.

It's like saying, "yeah, I have had a few too many but I'll risk driving home"

Personally I dont think this is significantly more harmful than many other communicable diseases.
I think as a people we have gotten so accustomed to our comfort and safety we have lost sight of reality.

But Im going to just shut up because my opinion here is very unpopular..

"How deadly the disease is" is not an opinion question. We can debate just how precise we can be with it at this point as we're still gathering data. But, statistically, it's a lot more deadly than the flu, for instance - how much is what we're arguing around the edges at.

SI

On an average individual level I’m not convinced you’re wrong.

But if you are unlucky enough to need healthcare, the hospitalisation rate, and the average length of time spent in hospital coupled with little/no alleviative drugs and no preventative cure make it a different beast if you catch the virus after the initial surge, through volume rather than voracity

Like I said earlier, I think we big and old/wise/stupid enough here to accept different opinions as long as people accept that we largely have opinions rather than facts, particularly with this virus bring literally novel at this stage

I have to ask, 'Based on what metric?"
Is it a lot more deadly.

Death rate. % of people who get it that die from it. It's several times worse than the flu, for example, on that front. And the hospitalization rate comparison is considerably worse comparatively speaking.

I would say don't not post because your opinion is unpopular, but there have been lot of studies done on it at this point in terms of the above numbers. I haven't seen a one that suggested that it was close to the flu or others in terms of the effects. The flu doesn't do what happened to Italy, Spain, New York, etc. this year.

Probably also worth mentioning the cost of treatment. The average cost of treating a hospitalized flu patient is $3,250 and the cost of treating a hospitalized covid patient is $20,000-$75,000.

There's plenty of metrics. Of course for any individual this might be less dangerous than say the flu (heck, there ARE more people that don't notice this vs the flu), but statistically on a population level it is more dangerous.
Heck, at the national peak for the US in April you even had over 20% more people aged between 25-44 dying than in any other week since 2015. Not higher than an average week, higher than any other week between 2015 and onset of this Pandemic. 8 other weeks were also higher than any other since 2015.
Same picture, but with larger percentages, if you look at other age groups or only take comparable weeks in the calendar (say +- 4 weeks).

The Problem is simply the mix of deadlines and infectiousness. Plenty other communicable diseases are more deadly, but they don't remotely have the potential to spread this rapidly. You simply are less likely to contract it. The deadlier a disease, the less successfull it usually is at spreading. This one is wired differently, because it has a long incubation period (influenza often hits within hours or a day or two, this takes 5-6 days on average) AND is most contagious before symptoms AND has a high number of asymptomatic carriers (roughly twice as many as influenza).
You don't get 50 people or sometimes more catching the flu within a day or three starting from 1 or 2 initial cases. You don't have 16 friends infect each other at a bar, you don't have dozens of people in a retirement home catch it in a few days before the first actually shows symptoms and you notice anything.

Everybody gets a chance to transmit it for a decent amount of days without being aware of being sick.

Roughly 20% of people will get seasonal Influenza over multiple months without any real countermeasures. You have more than 20% in some regions that got this over a much shorter period despite at least a good part of this being in Lockdown AND in April and onwards. This thing happening 2 months earlier would have been even worse than it was.

EDIT: a good basic summary of how it stacks up to the flu, including actually pointing out what the cited numbers for the flu actually represent: Bloomberg - Are you a robot?
(Bit outdated now but still in line with newer results)

The Arizona governor just said that local cities can decide if they want to mandate masks. I'm guessing many will tomorrow.

The number of dead bodies that piled up over a few months while essentially shutting down the country is probably one.

I'm not understanding where people are coming from not wearing masks.

It seems like businesses that I've been to have been fairly successful getting people to wear masks. Super markets are the places I see the most exceptions where people are not wearing masks.

At our church, they strongly recommend masks.. We haven't returned since they've been allowing in person services. We're just viewing the live stream of the services. What I see of the congregation is a helluva lot of people with out masks. I think I'm equally pissed at those not masking up and the church leadership for not simply requiring it.

We're about to start testing the waters. My wife and daughter play in the orchestra and I volunteer to run audio. All of the staff and volunteers are actually required to wear masks, so I'll be relatively isolated with folks that are at least wearing masks or off by my self depending on the venue. That said I don't think you can play a flute and really be effectively socially distanced from other musicians. I can't really even speak to how the choir in the traditional (old fogey) service might be considered feasible.

If I get the impression that they're really trying to manage things safely, and the others participating are responsible, we'll keep it up. Otherwise it will be back to live streaming for us.

Portland is finally going into its first stage of reopening on Friday. Masks are also going to be required at all inside business starting next week, but I dunno how they're going to handle bars & restaurants in that regard.

I am not surprised that people are not taking this virus serious. The moment it became a political issue was the moment the virus was suddenly nothing for some people.

I'm not the smartest guy in the world but I listen to science and data.

This is literally from the White House mailer from yesterday; a copy of an Op-Ed from the WSJ. That's where they are getting the idea from.

There Isn’t a Coronavirus ‘Second Wave’


“In recent days, the media has taken to sounding the alarm bells over a ‘second wave’ of coronavirus infections. Such panic is overblown,” Vice President Mike Pence writes in The Wall Street Journal.

“While talk of an increase in cases dominates cable news coverage, more than half of states are actually seeing cases decline or remain stable . . . The truth is that we’ve made great progress over the past four months, and it’s a testament to the leadership of President Trump.”

Except that a lot of the people who aren't wearing masks wouldn't believe Trump if he told them water is wet, and people were already taking precautions on their own back when Trump was downplaying the virus. There's a lot more to this than that.

Florida up to a 12% positive test rate yesterday.

And their death numbers indicate they are either terrible at getting people diagnosed, had a really weird data backlog (though death certificates should still be logged by day of death), have seniors/homes afraid like hell (to get hospital help), are overworked or the numbers are cooked beyond recognition.
Anyway: CDC excess death data shows about 30% excess deaths (5300 vs an average of 3900 for that week, only a bit over 250 accounted by official covid deaths) in the week ending June 6th, which is likely not even 'complete' as far as data input is concerned.

WTF.

Makes perfect sense in a country where to admit you are wrong is the greatest sin you can commit. The only real path is to double down, no matter the consequences. Goes hand-in-hand with believing the only successful outcome is one in which you avoid showing weakness.

Arizona is up to 14% and I expect masks to be mandatory in Phoenix soon. I also just read that they are shutting down the three big casinos through Gila River for two weeks after they had an outbreak of cases.

It's wild how we went from "managing well" back in early May to "full Trump 'Merica" in about 3-4 weeks.

It's frustrating to me how in all of April, Gov Ducey was talking about this plan:
1. opening salons, waiting a week
2. opening restaurants with smaller capacities, waiting 1-2 weeks
3. Opening gyms and waiting a week
4. Finally looking at casinos, bars, etc

That plan became:
1. Open salons, wait 5 days
2. It's the wild west and everything is open! Yee haw!

Just stupid and the Trump followers/bar owners are the main cause of this. Hopefully taking a step back, mandating masks and shutting down some areas will help get us under control. All I can say is I am glad to be heading up into the mountains in Colorado for two weeks in 8 days. This state is a mess.

I just don't get how a state has a decent plan and just throws it out in 5 days like that? Like wtf is that decision making?


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I think there's a lot of pressure on governors from influential business people and economic-minded people on their staff. And there's inherently more pressure because the states can't spend their way out of problems like the feds can. And they can't really rely on the feds to do anything.

Our state stuck with the staged plan for re-opening, but they did end up tweaking one of the self-imposed requirements so they could get to State IV when they did. Numbers are creeping up but I don't think there's been a ton of human activity outside of downtown Boise, and businesses are imposing social distance restrictions everywhere but the trendy bars downtown. And we don't have stuff like casinos or big vacation destinations where people gather. So hopefully it doesn't get too bad.

Edit: We've been under the excess death threshold every week of the pandemic except 2 weeks, once in late March, and once in early May. And in that May week we were literally 1 death over the excess limit. Most weeks we've been under the average expected number of deaths. That's good, but it could make us vulnerable down the road if we have nobody with antibodies and no real fear of it to alter our behavior. But, we generally do well regular flu seasons too. Maybe it's the fresh air.

An article on excess deaths which gives an indication of true deaths by coronavirus vs official nos.

Coronavirus: What is the true death toll of the pandemic? - BBC News

Specifically for the US

And what sucks with that approach is that many rational/overcautious/commie America hating pussies (pick an option based on your world view) like my wife and I are just going to stay in doors longer, where if reopening was actually done sensibly with social distancing and best practices were actually respected, we’d be out there spending money in the economy much sooner. Even if there’s not a massive second wave, it’s still very shortsighted with the potential for absolute economy crushing disaster if the worst case scenario is close to being true.

Well, a bunch of business owners were threatening to re-open anyway and forcing him to arrest or fine a bunch of businesses. Instead of holding firm with the phased plan, he just said "f*ck it" and opened up everything a week later.

Texas, in their infinite wisdom, has outlined their plans for school in the fall:
Texas schools reopening for fall 2020, Greg Abbott says | The Texas Tribune



SI

What the hell is wrong with America? Why is this being framed as a political issue??

Excuse me while I yell aimlessly for the next week.

So, I realize this is a deliberately non-partisan thread, I'll do my best.

I think what has happened is basically that America just decided, sorta quietly, that we/they buy the general argument that this really isn't that big of a deal. While it's not exactly just a bad flu season, the sensation of it... kinda is. Our general inability to handle or process even semi-complicated mathematical ideas has rendered a mortality rate of, say. 0.6% to basically be the same thing as the flu and its, say, 0.1%... as in "I might get sick but it likely won't really be a big deal for someone like me." It's play-the-lottery type thinking.

I think it's true that in the early stages of this, while nobody knew what a true pandemic might look or feel like, we heard Spanish Flu stories with phrases like "not everyone died, but everyone knew people who died." We started to think about it like Ebola... if you catch it, it's a seeming death sentence.

Now that it's come into more focus, it's... well, it's more abstract than most of us had envisioned. In my county, we have had around 200 people die, confirmed. Statewide, it's nearly 3,000. That is a massive impact collectively... but to be fair, (as a white dude in a white suburban neighborhood) I don't personally know anyone who has died from it. I know about 6-8 people who have had it, with varying degrees of effects, but nobody who went to the ICU. I don't know of any interaction that leads me to think I need to get a test.

So... as the boredom and frustration and economic anxiety has built, it's set alongside a gradual sense that this is (even if we don't want to say it quite this way) not as big a deal as we had feared. Or, if we feel like pointing fingers, and we're good at that, we'll argue that dumb or agenda-driven scientists or doctors or models steered us all wrong.

Anyway... so here we are. Much of the re-opening, at least in some places, seems unwarranted by the science, but toothpaste/tube, I reckon. Many places who set out gradual, phased re-openings are casting them aside because... well, we just don't care as much as we did in April. And it's not that we love grandma less, but... well, if she's white and doesn't live in a big city or in a nursing home... maybe the dice are just safer to roll than we had been told at the start.

I've got varying degrees of ambivalence about all this. I'm glad it seems to be toward the lower end of a range of outcomes we had prepared for. It doesn't kill 2 or 5 out of 100 people who get infected. The cases of young and fit people who get seriously affected seem few, as far as the short term visible effects go. We see a headline of a dozen or two players on a sports team confirmed to have it, and rather than thinking about the specter of a bunch of dead athletes, we're thinking about the team doing some testing, separating, and smarter preparation for a still-go season weeks from now. Okay.

Let's hope that the mixed signals of a substantial later resurfacing, a second wave, turn out to be overblown. If we can just get our national death toll to keep trending downward, maybe this becomes manageable in the months ahead. Not sure how many extra deaths I can call "manageable" without feeling like an absolute ghoul, but... well, I guess I'm an asshole who wants a haircut too.

Meanwhile in Germany kids now make up the same % of cases as they make up of the population (10% each of the population is 0-9 and 10-18 yo, 10% each of cases are those ages)

But let us be honest here: considering the dramatic long Term consequences for development and the future, schools and daycare should still be among the first things to open. And again, let's be honest: The reason they aren't is not scientific anymore (initial fear was they get infected and spread it much more than adults, which is not likely anymore), it is because schoola don't generate money directly and closing them is the easy way out.

They should also be the last place to enforce Social Distancing or Masks. It is ass backwards to allow adults to do what they want, then have kids save the bacon by forcing them to submit to the strictest rules to avoid at least that one source of transmission best you can.

You need to have a testing strategy in place, but that costs money and effort.

Yep. I don't know when I'll have a meal in a restaurant. I can't see it happening any time soon. We're going to a few more stores than we have been, but only one of us goes in and it's usually only a couple of days a week. The rest of the time, we sit home.

The first big test we have is whether to keep our vacation in August to New Hampshire. We've already cancelled/postponed 3 other trips (wife and I were supposed to be flying to Seattle TODAY for an Alaskan cruise, actually). If we go, we'll still probably cook for ourselves or get curbside, which I assume is an option up there (haven't looked yet). Given the way we've been treated by other vacation places, I hope we can go because I'm sick of being told I can either cancel and lose all my money or reschedule 2 years out. Other than our cruise and Delta airlines, most places have been pricks about giving any kind of refund. VRBO bookings, in particular, have been contentious.

I've been mulling over this post quite a bit but there's so much about it that I'm still not comfortable with.


I think this is where I have a big problem. Because we took such extraordinary measures to contain it early on, we're still looking at infection rates of roughly 5% across the country. That's like 1/10th or 1/20th of who will ultimately get infected. That seems like such a small dataset to make those sort of anecdotal "I don't know anyone who went to the ICU/died" sweeping generalizations.

But, c'mon - there were very few people who thought it was like Ebola and even in the pandemic "fog of war", you had to be woefully ill informed to think so. No one had it at Ebola's 50% bad.

The most dramatic signs early on were like what you had below at 2-5%. Really bad. That's upwards of about 15M in the USA alone bad. Or, more popularly, the 1-2M from the Imperial College bad. Heck, if you parse that, it's less than 1%. So if you don't know 100 people well (I'd argue most people don't), you may not even know someone who died. But that's a huge toll. I think that's a sentiment you capture in the above paragraph and it's a cognitive dissonance we have problems with.


I guess this is the hard part - right. This is the "hard conversation" people have talked about where it's "how many lives versus what we have to give for them". And not in the "HOW FAST CAN WE OPEN THINGS UP TO GET BUSINESS GOING, YEE HAW!" sense. I mean, we've been seeing these arguments for more than a month but they were rarely serious. They were cloaked in the "I want to go back so I'm going to throw every whataboutism at the wall and see what sticks". Those were obvious when you have a lot of the disingenuous "but what about suicides" where no one actually brings numbers to bear or "what about poverty" from someone who was just fine kicking every "welfare queen" off the books the month before or those who claim "masks are tyranny" when it's pretty clear that between it and testing are the best ways we currently have to actually try to minimize this disease.

And I just don't have an answer. This is clearly exacerbated here by the fact that our health care system is already a lottery so we're mentally conditioned to make our health decisions that way (for some reason - ok, I know the reason). But, also, as a society, we're clearly not willing to try to make this decision with a clear mind. I'm not sure we ever have - we probably haven't as a lot of stories from 1918 have shown. But when something like mask wearing or minimizing contact during a pandemic is a "controversial" issue, it's clear these decisions are being made emotionally not rationally.

SI

So if we look at a 100 skittles bowl, looks like 1 skittle is definitely deadly. Like a few more skittles may result in hospitalization or serious discomfort. I’m still worried how may skittles may result in some sort of strange ailment/long term damage.

This is a concern to me, as well. It seems to have some sort of significant blood illness component to it that we really don't understand much yet.

SI

A few local updates


1. At 5pm today, The City of Tampa, not Hillsborough county, announced masks are required in all indoor locations outside the home when residents are unable to maintain a six-foot separation from others. St Pete is requiring employees n all businesses to wear a mask when interacting with customers.

2. Pasco County Schools are giving parents three options for at least the first semester.

options:

• Traditional – A return to campus and classroom with the standard school schedule and bell times. This option includes a heavy emphasis on health and safety precautions. Students will practice safe social distancing to the greatest extent possible. Schools will use signage and consistent communication to discourage the gathering of large groups of students. Students will be expected to wear masks or cloth face coverings on the school bus, but masks will not be required in classrooms.

• mySchool Online – Virtual learning with a connection to the student’s enrolled school. This option requires that students follow the standard school schedule and bell times. It features lessons and virtual interaction with teachers during each class period – all conducted online.

• Virtual School – Online learning through Pasco’s nationally recognized Pasco eSchool. This model offers flexible scheduling and is taught by Pasco County teachers. Students work at their own pace can do school work during non-traditional hours.

3. I am taken this one as a bit of tit for tat. Gov. Cuomo is considering quarantines from people visiting New York from Florida.

We're back to a tale of two countries as NY yesterday had a positivity rate of less than 1% while the rest of the country is pushing 7%.