russ_watters said:
No, I'm pretty sure I never suggested waiting as a general strategy before taking action of any kind -- perhaps case-by-case basis action, though, which could be earlier or later. Thinking-through your options isn't "waiting", especially if you should have already done it.
Thinking without action isn't better than just waiting. You can keep thinking forever, but if that doesn't translate to actions it's all for nothing. Actions that need to come before "thinking is done" - you'll never be done with that anyway. The pandemic doesn't wait.
If you strongly disagreed with the paper discussed
around here, suggesting no quick action if the full consequences of an action are not clear, then I missed that.
But at least it's clear now why
the base case was not chosen. I was curious even back then why you discussed it at all.
Yes, I don't find any post where you said "the policy should be X", but no matter how hard I try, I can't read your earlier messages as favoring quick and strong government efforts (of any kind).
How many more deaths and trillions of dollars does it have to cost before we even ask if we're on the right path?
But... that is asked all the time.
I've certainly never suggested any such thing. I can't fathom where you got that from except to speculate that you have "social distancing" blinders on and aren't considering the other options. If true, don't feel bad: that's where the West's head is at right now in general. And that's basically my entire complaint that we're discussing here.
Why do you keep discussing "social distancing" in particular?
You keep bringing this up over and over again.
Anyway: If you pool everything that reduces the risk of infection under "social distancing" then there isn't much else you can do.
Of course. Again, I'm not suggesting we actually do this, I'm suggesting it as a logic exercise to predict the upper bound of additional deaths from hospital overcrowding. If you've got a better method or better yet a source that's actually attempted to model it, I'm all ears.
The better method is to call your "upper estimate" a lower estimate. If someone needs a ventilator and doesn't get one they'll die with ~100% chance, otherwise they didn't need a ventilator. Without hospital care deaths will go up by at least 25% based on your earlier estimate. Or 50% using the data from UK, or ~80% if we take China's earlier data. The best upper limit we can set so far is "everyone admitted to a hospital". In Italy that is
16% of the current cases - although that is biased as more severe cases take longer to resolve. But still: If these people wouldn't have somewhat problematic cases they wouldn't be in a hospital.
As you showed, you made this claim at least as early as March 1, without attempting to quantify it. How can you claim it is important to not overwhelm the healthcare system if you can't or won't put a number on the death toll that will result?
I don't find the post now but somewhere in this thread I compared deaths to hospitalizations and ICU admissions, a bit similar to what we do now, and the result was the same. It will increase the death toll a lot, potentially by several hundred percent. Is this a gamble you want to take? Do you want to keep studying this for months, possibly to end up with the result that yes, doing more would have saved two million people?
But I'm confused why this is now being discussed again. You want the government to take actions to limit the spread, right? So why do we discuss the
do-nothing, just collect dead bodies from the streets scenario again?
It doesn't depend much on when the actions were originally taken, because we're "resetting" when we re-open. It just impacts the duration of the shutdown until re-opening is possible. In general the goal is to get the case rate down to where contact-tracing will successfully hold down the number of new cases. In my area, that criteria is 50 cases per day per 100,000 people, and the effect is that different places will open at different times versus the start, which happened in the entire state pretty much at once.
Clearly a shorter shutdown is preferable. The initial rise in cases was roughly twice as fast as the subsequent drop, so every day of earlier action means the restrictions can be shorter by two days (ending three days earlier) if everything else stays the same. You end up with fewer overall deaths, too. Ramping up the testing capability won't be sped up from that, okay.
Don't tell China or Korea that. But seriously, there's nothing special about a land border in most of the world. They are controlled and can be closed.
Even the Korean border, probably the most well-watched land border in the world, isn't 100% without contact. But that's clearly not a typical border.
Borders in the Schengen area are largely like borders between US states: On major roads there is a sign that you are now in a different country, and probably another sign informing you about speed limits in that country. That's it. On smaller roads there isn't even a sign. Tens of thousands cross each of these borders every day because they live on one side and work on the other, or simply because the nearest supermarket is across the border. Can you imagine closing the border between New Jersey and New York? For a year? Me neither. Sure, Schengen borders are the other extreme here, but they are clearly of interest in Europe. Most borders will be somewhere between these.
Islands have it much easier. Very few international commuters, generally fewer people crossing the border normally, and people enter the country in a very limited set of places.
russ_watters said:
any, even temporary, loss of privacy?
When was the last time a government stopped recording private data it got access to?
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Australia's new cases per day went up a bit the last days. From ~5-20 in late April to ~25 the last three days. Do we see an effect of loosened restrictions, or something else?
New Zealand's new cases are quickly approaching zero. 2, 3, 6, 2, 0, -1, 2 cases the last seven days. -1 was a false positive I guess. Iceland is at one case every few days, every case could be the last one now.