COVID-19 - On the Ground

[Deleted User 89]

Ok. Gotcha. Ya we agree. They should have stuck them in a hotel for 2 weeks and quarantined for sure.

The plan sucked as far as the "ban" goes. We are in total agreement there.

Personally i thought all airline travel should have been shut down (even between states) and borders closed for many months. Maybe the entire year. Otherwise you're just playing whack a mole it seemed like.

yes

but it wouldn’t have taken months. 3-4 weeks would have been sufficient to make an enormous difference, so long as common sense mitigation measures were followed locally

I disagree there knowing what we know now. Eradication of the virus entirely was going to take extreme and prolonged shutdowns.

We shutdown for months and made nice progress....but the moment we opened up the spike began again. The virus was in circulation far too widely to think this was just a few week fix.

Sure in theory if we had a total global shutdown of 3-4 weeks where NOBODY left their house for ANYTHING then that timeline works. But anything short of extreme and total lockdown allows for too much transmission to continue to occur.

shut downs only delayed the inevitable, and caused much economic and social heartache. shutdowns were understandable though, before we really knew what the behavior of the virus was...as was obsessively disinfecting every surface we could find (we know better now)

what worked better, and continues to work, are behavioral modifications...distancing, hand washing and masks

all we had to do was get through to the development of vaccines (and then do the logical thing, get vaccinated)

[ousdahl]

But again - who gets to decide what is racist?

I’m not sure how to best answer that either

I’d suggest that the person being accused of racism prob isn’t in the best position to declare whether it’s racist after all, but I don’t want illy accusing me of picking teams again.

And if we can bring this back to covid - who gets to decide what the best policies and practices are for fighting a pandemic?

[Deleted User 89]

And if we can bring this back to covid - who gets to decide what the best policies and practices are for fighting a pandemic?

internet deviants and malcontents

[Deleted User 863]

But again - who gets to decide what is racist?

I’m not sure how to best answer that either

I’d suggest that the person being accused of racism prob isn’t in the best position to declare whether it’s racist after all

There is racism. There is being prejudice. I agree though, it's a hard thing to really classify in some instances.

Nobody ever said the racist person gets to determine what is racism. I don't know why you think those comments are productive to the convo we are having? It's pretty obvious i am not racist. Let's have a productive conversation without the strawman nonsense.

[shindig]

Some Geek Logic on this Delta strain.
Original strain, r0=3, infection phase = 6 days:
day 0 = 1
day 6 = 1x3+1 = 4
day 12 = 3x3+4 = 13
day 18 = 9x3+13 = 40
day 24 = 27x3+40 = 121
Delta variant, r0=6, infection phase = 4 days:
day 0 = 1
day 4 = 1x6+1 = 7
day 8 = 6x6+7 = 43
day 12 = 36x6+43 = 259
day 16 = 216x6+259 = 1,555
day 20 = 1296x6+1555 = 9,331
day 24 = 7776x6+9331 = 55,987

What this means is that with the original COVID strains, 1 infected person might result in 121 COVID infections in 24 days. With this Delta variant, 1 infected person results in over 55,000 new infections in 24 days. If you are not vaccinated, you need to be because you will get COVID, this Delta variant is just that contagious. Virtually everyone that has been hospitalized with COVID and/or died from COVID is unvaccinated. The COVID vaccines in use are some of the safest, most effective vaccines for any disease ever developed and they could very well save your life or prevent you from having lifelong heart or lung damage resulting from a serious COVID infection. It's a free vaccine versus an average cost of $73,000 for a COVID hospitalization. Pretty simple choice if you think about it.

[Deleted User 863]

One of my best friends works in a hospital. In his network of hospitals currently 90% of the people in ICU with covid are unvaccinated.

Early in the pandemic the demographic most in his ICUs were age 70+....now the largest demographic is age 40-60. Anecdotal evidence since only 3 or 4 total hospitals/healthcare facilities. But evidence nontheless.

[ousdahl]

…and if you had to guess, which “team” is more likely to ignore that evidence?

[PhDhawk]

yes

but it wouldn’t have taken months. 3-4 weeks would have been sufficient to make an enormous difference, so long as common sense mitigation measures were followed locally

I disagree there knowing what we know now. Eradication of the virus entirely was going to take extreme and prolonged shutdowns.

We shutdown for months and made nice progress....but the moment we opened up the spike began again. The virus was in circulation far too widely to think this was just a few week fix.

Sure in theory if we had a total global shutdown of 3-4 weeks where NOBODY left their house for ANYTHING then that timeline works. But anything short of extreme and total lockdown allows for too much transmission to continue to occur.

shut downs only delayed the inevitable, and caused much economic and social heartache. shutdowns were understandable though, before we really knew what the behavior of the virus was...as was obsessively disinfecting every surface we could find (we know better now)

what worked better, and continues to work, are behavioral modifications...distancing, hand washing and masks

all we had to do was get through to the development of vaccines (and then do the logical thing, get vaccinated)

It's also important to remember that a lot of the mitigation was to:

1) give time to develop a vaccine or effective treatment. We had nothing to combat the virus initially.
2) Not to overwhelm hospitals

The Covid's no big deal crowd always bring up the "low" mortality rate of 1-2%. But we saw what happened in Italy early on and what was starting to happen in NYC early on.

If we didn't take efforts to mitigate the spread early on, our healthcare system would have been overrun. And, in that scenario, where there aren't enough hospital beds, ventilators, etc. The death rate would have been a lot higher.

I believe 3-4% of covid cases require ventillators. How much higher would the death rate be if a lot more people had been sick all at once. Which is what would've happened if we had done nothing.

I think the initial rate of infection was 5-7 new infections from every infected person. You get a point of overwhelming the hospitals pretty quick with that rate.

Which is the forgotten factor among the Covid's no big deal crowd. They never mention the infection rate or route of infection, which are major contributors to why it actually IS a big deal.

[PhDhawk]

…and if you had to guess, which “team” is more likely to ignore that evidence?

Yeah, but the members of either team who ignore evidence are equally as stupid.

You don't get points for being an anti-vaxxer but agreeing with Ousdahl on social issues.

[PhDhawk]

Man Shindig and I made similar points, but he included the math.

But...to make my point more clear, the original strain had an R=6 before mitigation and we brought it under 2 for a while before settling at about 3. And that was when NO ONE had immunity.

But with delta being more infectious, they're predicting that we might start seeing 200,000 positive cases/day again. Which I thought was out of the question as long as the vaccine was in play and effective. But the anti-vaxx movement is strong. People willing to die rather than let Biden look good or whatever their motivation is. At this point fear of the vaccine is no longer a legitimate argument. They're clearly safe.

[ousdahl]

…and if you had to guess, which “team” is more likely to ignore that evidence?

Yeah, but the members of either team who ignore evidence are equally as stupid.

You don't get points for being an anti-vaxxer but agreeing with Ousdahl on social issues.

But whether race or pandemic, the “stupid” comes from essentially the same sort of ignorance and unwillingness to seek understanding.

[Deleted User 89]

I disagree there knowing what we know now. Eradication of the virus entirely was going to take extreme and prolonged shutdowns.

We shutdown for months and made nice progress....but the moment we opened up the spike began again. The virus was in circulation far too widely to think this was just a few week fix.

Sure in theory if we had a total global shutdown of 3-4 weeks where NOBODY left their house for ANYTHING then that timeline works. But anything short of extreme and total lockdown allows for too much transmission to continue to occur.

shut downs only delayed the inevitable, and caused much economic and social heartache. shutdowns were understandable though, before we really knew what the behavior of the virus was...as was obsessively disinfecting every surface we could find (we know better now)

what worked better, and continues to work, are behavioral modifications...distancing, hand washing and masks

all we had to do was get through to the development of vaccines (and then do the logical thing, get vaccinated)

It's also important to remember that a lot of the mitigation was to:

1) give time to develop a vaccine or effective treatment. We had nothing to combat the virus initially.
2) Not to overwhelm hospitals

The Covid's no big deal crowd always bring up the "low" mortality rate of 1-2%. But we saw what happened in Italy early on and what was starting to happen in NYC early on.

If we didn't take efforts to mitigate the spread early on, our healthcare system would have been overrun. And, in that scenario, where there aren't enough hospital beds, ventilators, etc. The death rate would have been a lot higher.

I believe 3-4% of covid cases require ventillators. How much higher would the death rate be if a lot more people had been sick all at once. Which is what would've happened if we had done nothing.

I think the initial rate of infection was 5-7 new infections from every infected person. You get a point of overwhelming the hospitals pretty quick with that rate.

Which is the forgotten factor among the Covid's no big deal crowd. They never mention the infection rate or route of infection, which are major contributors to why it actually IS a big deal.

and why it’s still a big deal now, with even more infectious strains popping up with regularity

edit: shoutout to shindig

[shindig]

Ha, I was bored after I finished a project for my Director, so did a little research and put that together. Send it to all your Missoura, Arkansas, Kentucky friends (well the whole fvcking south US).

[PhDhawk]

…and if you had to guess, which “team” is more likely to ignore that evidence?

Yeah, but the members of either team who ignore evidence are equally as stupid.

You don't get points for being an anti-vaxxer but agreeing with Ousdahl on social issues.

But whether race or pandemic, the “stupid” comes from essentially the same sort of ignorance and unwillingness to seek understanding.

I think there's more to it than that. There's an anti-intellectualism, that I think is mostly right-wing. But there's also a thought that "I'm smarter than everyone, in spite of having no training, and only I am aware of this nugget of information" that causes people to seek out alternative explanations for things, and fall for conspiracies, I don't think that's something that falls down political lines. The whole, I have a secret that no one else knows, that people like lobster has aren't separated out by politics, he happens to be right wing, but I think it exists along the spectrum.

There may also be a reverse causal relationship to some of this. You might not question something that's obviously true because you're a republican. But you might be a republican because you question everything. So the party who's more skeptical of authority appeals to you for the same reason that not believing data appeals to you.

[ousdahl]

Umm doesn’t the whole “I have a secret” conspiracy type stuff tend to fall overwhelmingly on one end of the spectrum?

Or perhaps I should ask, how do you differentiate between the “I’m smarter than everyone in spite of having no training” that you identify as existing across the spectrum, and the anti-intellectualism that you identify as mostly right wing?

[PhDhawk]

1. No
2. One is just a distrust of authority, whether it's the gov't, higher ed, an expert in the given field, etc.

The other is more like, the Gotcha mentality, or like that feeling of when someone hasn't seen the Wire and you have that NEED to incredulously say "You haven't seen the wire!!!!!" where you want to hold something over on someone. It's like, "This guy thinks X...probably isn't aware Z" Where X is something factual and Z is usually something untrue or involves a misrepresentation of reality. And I don't think either party has ownership over that kind of dumb.

[Deleted User 863]

Yeah, but the members of either team who ignore evidence are equally as stupid.

You don't get points for being an anti-vaxxer but agreeing with Ousdahl on social issues.

But whether race or pandemic, the “stupid” comes from essentially the same sort of ignorance and unwillingness to seek understanding.

I think there's more to it than that. There's an anti-intellectualism, that I think is mostly right-wing. But there's also a thought that "I'm smarter than everyone, in spite of having no training, and only I am aware of this nugget of information" that causes people to seek out alternative explanations for things, and fall for conspiracies, I don't think that's something that falls down political lines. The whole, I have a secret that no one else knows, that people like lobster has aren't separated out by politics, he happens to be right wing, but I think it exists along the spectrum.

There may also be a reverse causal relationship to some of this. You might not question something that's obviously true because you're a republican. But you might be a republican because you question everything. So the party who's more skeptical of authority appeals to you for the same reason that not believing data appeals to you.

You put thoughts into words very well. Couldn’t agree more with a lot of that.

[Deleted User 89]

phd is just a know-it-all

i read it here, so it must be true

[PhDhawk]

I mean, let me flip it on you, Oussie.

Any rational person who's intellectually honest recognizes that vaccines are safe.

So, what kind of dumb are the hippy type anti-vaxxers. Or, they're not dumb cause they're on team ousdahl?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr is one of the most influential anti-vaxxers there is and he's a staunch democrat.

[Deleted User 89]

I mean, let me flip it on you, Oussie.

Any rational person who's intellectually honest recognizes that vaccines are safe.

So, what kind of dumb are the hippy type anti-vaxxers. Or, they're not dumb cause they're on team ousdahl?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr is one of the most influential anti-vaxxers there is and he's a staunch democrat.

the anti-vaxxers are an odd conglomerate, and anything but monolithic