I encountered a traffic slow down today coming home, it’s been picking up more and more all week. I even experienced a sig alert on Wednesday which took me an hour and a half to get home. Since the shutdown I was making it home in 30 minutes, thankfully I’ve been working at home 50% of the time and next week I’ll be teleworking again, yay.

But some kid died!!! Lock down everything forever. I can’t compute statistics but I know that there’s stories of random healthy people dying from this, so keep everything shut indefinitely.

It sounds like some people can only conceive an either-or scenario.

How about a version of business assistance and wage assistance that takes away most of the financial pain, which some countries are doing better than we are?

With that out of the way, 10023 doesn't need to be ok with killing a million retirees.

You know, if we didn't half-ass our lockdowns, we'd probably have mostly eradicated COVID-19 in the US by now.

We'd certainly have knocked it down to a more manageable level.

The US seems to be too "me first" at the personal level to weather a crisis like this, and too scattered on the policy level.

It wouldn’t be anywhere near that high even if everyone got it. And much lower if you just lock down elderly homes, advise old people to isolate (and discourage visits from family), and other more targeted and reasonable measures.

People who are actually vulnerable are doing risky things anyway. Again, I see old people walking with grandkids every time I go to the park. That is a problem, not restaurants.

They don’t know if it’s “for good” but it has been confirmed that antibodies confer resistance. The question is how long they last, but it’s usually years.

The cases you’ve read about with people testing negative and then positive again were based on false positives, because PCR testing picked up fragments of dead virus still floating around in the body.

And not just business but play as well. You can’t have one without the other or people will go postal, not to mention the fact that all of those things (leisure, hospitality, travel) sustain millions of jobs as well.

I work with healthcare businesses for a living. Those staff would be under isolation orders and subject to testing, just as they are currently, with all of the success and failure of the current situation.

The risk to young people is de minimis, no matter how many times you try to claim otherwise.

Different rules for different people. Your island analogy is the right one, but figuratively. If you are old or vulnerable, stay home. If you work with the old or vulnerable, stay home. If you have old or vulnerable family whom you plan to interact with, stay home. If you are none of these things, go out and catch it so we can be done with this before we waste an entire year (i.e., summer). The Swedish approach is the right one.

Well, the rules of quarantine as they were defined over or around here (Spain, France, Italy) were pretty strict, even comparable to some sort of mad dictatorship in my opinion, and it is not eradicated yet.

We've only succeeded in slowing down the epidemic, which is yet something. That's what caregivers required from us all, so they could manage the crisis in a decent condition.

I don't really know about the Spaniards or the Italians, but I think the French in general took it seriously and tried their best to act as disciplined people. This shows that in spite of extreme individualism widespread over society, we're still able to come together when something serious is at stake (public health in this case), which is obviously a good thing.

However, it has to be lifted now. It's been for 2 months and some of us would go really crazy if it had to last any longer. Quarantine is just not good for one's mental health. Lol.

As most countries managed to beef up their healthcare systems, the curve was flattened in most places, I don't think government officials should restrict retail, bars, restaurants anymore, specially if they face popular opposition.

Those anti-social mobs believe everything will be back to normal, that bars will be full again, companies will throw social events, and economic depression will magically be avoided. When they realise half of population will still at home and those establishments will be in trouble anyway, they won't have anyone to attack.

Governments can't force businesses to open if they don't want to, they can't force people to go out to bars, restaurants, stores, etc. and spend their money. If people don't want to, they simply won't. Many people seem to be taking this seriously and taking steps to follow social distancing, the people screaming "Reopen!" who seem to be expecting everything to immediately snap back to how things were in February are going to be in for a rude awakening.

Yeah, how selfish of us wanting to be able to pay our electric and water bills, buy food, and not go into foreclosure on our homes.

If only we were not such horrible people. Bad Americans!! :superwhip

ok, how do you explain 2-3x higher per capita deaths in Europe (thus far)?

are new yorkers especially selfish, given the huge per capita deaths in NYC?

Population density... We're getting tired of repeating, viruses spread faster where they find many many clustered hosts.

NYC is very densely populated. Manhattan is even way more dense than Central Paris, which is quite a feat.

Almost all other regions in North America (including Canada) are nothing comparable.

See the population density in the UK or in Italy. That is a major factor for the virus to spread more easily. Europe as a whole is far more dense than North America.

You think Northern Italy is a 3rd world? Their healthcare system is both cheaper and more efficient than that of the US based on the corporate system. Same to the UK. They had a very fine healthcare system before it was messed up by excessive financialization as of the 1980s. I know, I saw it in the media from English reporters themselves, and I believe what they say in that matter.

I don't know how the Germans manage to be mostly spared, though. Their country is very dense as well, and their results just humiliate us all.

Policy is based on information 1,000x as good as yours -- fact-based concepts vs. wild guesses, and actual analysis and modeling, particularly as information has improved.

The idea that a "figurative" island can be accomplished is pure fantasy. There are too many points of contact, too much chance of transmission between people and even food supplies. Testing and PPE would only improve the odds, given that testing doesn't work until well after people can infect others, and PPE only reduces transmission. A worker who was infected the previous day but passed the test would likely pass it to others, and kill much of the building's population. Of course even that would need to wait until we had more test kits. With that as a given, we need to keep infections down outside the islands as well.

I know it's tough having rules you don't understand. And 'murica. But sometimes the grownups need to be in charge.

There have also been instances of healthy people aged 30-50 surviving but with serious lung damage that may be permanent.

But I think people on the reopen without a solution side are being extremely fucking naive if they think that everything is going back to normal tomorrow if the government suddenly lifted all stay-at-home orders. We all want to go back to normal, but we are not going back to normal until someone comes up with an effective treatment or vaccine.

Traffic jams are back in Chicago(sort of)!

Anyways, Georgia's deaths and hospitalizations have gone down by a lot. Schools are open or opening up in the next two weeks in Europe.


Time to open up every city, everywhere.

How about the federal government pay wages and support small business more, as some other countries are doing. I said this is another post just above the one you quoted.

But Manhattan has some of the lowest rates in the tri-state metro. And other dense metros have very low rates. Canada has higher weighted density than U.S., but lower rates. California has very low rates, but very high weighted density. And New Orleans and Detroit, two very sprawly metros, have very high rates.

The European strain has higher death rates. This strain is prevalent in the New York region. I thought this was common knowledge.

Despite this, despite outbreaks earlier than most places, and despite some potential disadvantages (I'm guessing that kiss-greetings, cafe culture, and three-generation households have been an issue), southern Europe and New York have cut their death rates dramatically because of smart policy and (especially in Europe, reportedly) people following the rules.

Other places like the UK and Sweden haven't, and they're currently paying.

The US reported death rate is about 6.7x the reported world average. It's probably closer in reality but it's still horrible, and likely some multiple of the average.