Psych, yesterday you responded to one of my posts that asked the question,
"Do Lockdowns Work?", with this:
Psych wrote:Sure they work. They also destroy mental health and there will be no economy to come back to. Seems like there's gotta be a reasonable middle ground somewhere..
And since then, you've continued to argue against a lockdown for a number of valid reasons with which most of us likely agree. Not to mention that we're also probably unanimous in preferring not to have to "lockdown" in any shape or form, just like you.
Unfortunately, although it's early and everything is tentative and there's much that isn't known, it appears that humans have little to no natural immunity to SARS-CoV-19. And, unfortunately, as pointed out below in Trad's excellent link, it looks like the majority of people who are infected have few to no symptoms, despite their ability to transmit the virus being at its peak.
We've had the luxury of watching China, S. Korea, Spain and Italy, et al., in real time, to help us prepare for what's likely coming. It is not in our cultural quiver to do what China did, and it's too late to pull off what S. Korea did, even if we could get Americans to do it. (Spoiler Alert: They wouldn't.).
Consider that Italy didn't do a nationwide "lockdown" until after 800 people had died less than 2 weeks ago, and now more than 6,800 have died; Spain locked down three weeks ago after 200 deaths which has now grown to > 3,400. The US is at 787 deaths, essentially where Italy was when it locked down. Italy locked down and now they're approaching 7,000 deaths in less than 2 weeks. There doesn't appear to be any
"reasonable middle ground", anymore. Not when you have something that's so potentially lethal and is so easily transmitted by infected people who are totally/nearly asymptomatic.
My heart goes out to you and everyone else whose future is made uncertain and put at risk by this. And while it's different for everyone, fortunately, to a very large extent, we're all in the same boat, and we need to all start rowing in the same direction. Or else...
We're not being asked to leave our families for 2 or 3 years and storm the beaches at Normandy to possibly die. We're not being ordered to deploy to Afghanistan or Iraq for the 2nd, or 3rd, or...th, time. We absolutely have be willing to do what we can to put an end to this as soon as possible. We should hope and pray that a "lockdown" is even enough. And while it might already be somewhat late, with pandemics, the goal is always to overshoot, because the penalty for failure to do so is likely too extreme not to.
From Trad's link:
You could be spreading the coronavirus without realising you’ve got it
...Research published last week by Jeffrey Shaman of Columbia University in New York and his colleagues analysed the course of the epidemic in 375 Chinese cities between 10 January, when the epidemic took off, and 23 January, when containment measures such as travel restrictions were imposed.
The study concluded that 86 per cent of cases were “undocumented” – that is, asymptomatic or had only very mild symptoms (Science, doi.org/ggn6c2). The researchers also analysed case data from foreign nationals who were evacuated from the city of Wuhan, where the first cases were seen, and found a similar proportion of asymptomatic or very mild cases.
Such undocumented cases are still contagious and the study found them to be the source of most of the virus’s spread in China before the restrictions came in. Even though these people were only 55 per cent as contagious as people with symptoms, the study found that they were the source of 79 per cent of further infections, due to there being more of them, and the higher likelihood that they were out and about.
“If somebody’s experiencing mild symptoms, and I think most of us can relate to this, we’re still going to go about our day,” says Shaman. “These people are the major driver of it and they’re the ones who facilitated the spread.”
A project in Italy has also found many symptomless cases. When everybody was tested in a town called Vò, one of the hardest-hit in the country, 60 per cent of people who tested positive were found to have no symptoms.
That is lower than the number found in China but is in the same ballpark, says Shaman. “It might be one in 10 in some societies versus one in five in others, but generally you’re looking at about an order of magnitude more cases than have been confirmed,” he says.
...Even people who develop symptoms are at risk of unwittingly spreading the virus. A study in China suggests that infectiousness starts about 2.5 days before the onset of symptoms, and peaks 15 hours before (medRxiv, doi.org/dqbr).
...What all this makes clear is that advising only people with a cough or fever and their families to self-isolate won’t prevent the coronavirus from spreading, thanks to its fiendish ability to cause very mild symptoms in people, and to peak in infectiousness before people even realise they are sick.