Quiet morning in the Ferry Building. Normally it'd be bustling by now.
https://i.imgur.com/Rn9QRhDh.jpg https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisc...erry_building/ |
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This is it: |
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https://youtu.be/IuqcG5nl2dU |
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I went for a drink yesterday in one of my favourite bars nearby and I felt pretty safe. I want things to go back to normal quickly. |
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And up in the mountains, they are none too happy about it: Quote:
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Says you as an epidemiologist? I don't think you understand how pandemics work - I'm no expert either, but pretty sure you can't just eradicate a virus in a couple months. Literally no place in the history of global pandemics has done that. Even remote, isolated New Zealand is seeing a resurgence in cases after momentarily eliminating the virus. Fact is, we currently have under 900 active cases and are averaging <1 death per day in a jurisdiction of 15 million people. Those are very good numbers. |
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Pretty sure he was being sarcastic. Or being intentionally daft to bait people into saying how great Toronto is doing?
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People forget that the goal at the start was "flatten the curve", not "completely eliminate a brand new virus in 4 months". the curve has been successfully flattened, and despite some friction regarding schools starting back up, it's been a pretty cohesive response from everyone in power. |
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See which NYC neighborhoods have the highest rates of COVID antibodies
https://imgs.6sqft.com/wp-content/up...7851267908.png Quote:
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1. Courtesy of NYC Health Department 2. 6sqft |
Here is the interactive map data: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/...a-testing.page
1. Antibody Testing by ZIP Code of Residence 2. Antibody Testing Rates 3. Antibody Tests 4. Virus (Diagnostic) Tests (People tested / Percent of people with positive results |
https://www.syracuse.com/coronavirus...o-kidding.html
Cuomo’s coronavirus rules: No dancing, no cornhole, no karaoke, no kidding syracuse ^ | 08/20/2020 | Michelle Breidenbach There is no dancing allowed in New York’s bars and restaurants, even at a wedding reception, according to the New York State Liquor Authority. To control the spread of the coronavirus, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s liquor authority has also specifically banned darts, pool, cornhole, karaoke and exotic dancing. … “I have to say: Who’s asking the why?” Palladino said. “Where are these regulations coming from? We know that our cases are declining, yet we continue to come out with more and more regulations, putting a tourniquet on businesses.” ... |
Is it not obvious that if you want your businesses to stay open long-term, that you don't make them a hotbed of transmission like Texas and Arizona did with a complete free-for-all opening? Would people/business owners prefer a few weeks or a month of business as usual and then complete shutdown again?
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IDK when this was filmed, looks like April or maybe March prior to the pandemic really going in full swing, but kinda makes one miss the hustle and bustle.
Make full screen, make 4k or 8k, and use mouse to move around. |
^ Nice find!
We will be back to that some day, and even better :tup: |
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We have lots of people pulling their hair out about irresponsible "kids" (i.e. 20 and 30 somethings) partying and ruining it for everyone. We are nowhere near 100% hospital utilization. Nobody really knows the personal details of the party crowd, and the identified cases get isolated, but many people assume social interaction -> covid cases -> deaths (except BLM protests). There's a lot of moralizing, this being Canada. 80% of our deaths were in care homes but the dominant narrative seems to be that the risk is even across the population (push this and people will tell you that deaths in younger people are lower but we just don't know what else might happen to them in the long run). We're still not doing randomized testing from what I can tell so the numbers are just based on who shows up to be tested and contact tracing. PCR seems somewhat available and antibody or T-cell screening less so. The dominant attitude seems to be that we should be in semi-lockdown indefinitely. School reopenings are borderline and controversial. Few people seem to talk about the cost of lockdown policies or the endgame, which I guess is assumed to be that a vaccine will allow us to reopen. Policy seems to have gradually shifted from keeping hospital utilization under 100% to getting cases down as low as possible. It feels like we did pretty well here around March-April, maybe partly by accident (with us being farther from NYC and Europe), but it seems like May-August has been mostly a holding pattern. |
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In BC we actually had a problem of low hospital utilization. Many were bumped from hospitals and then the covid patients did not show up in sufficient number to bring up utilization. So we simply lost out on hospital use (surgeries rescheduled and so on). That will have a cost in health and lives. The key observation is that until there is a vaccine it doesn't matter much what we do to curb infections. Our options are some mix of being locked down and getting covid. I don't think the costs of the lockdown are being fully accounted for nor do I think there is much appreciation for the effect the lockdown and government and media messaging has on behaviour (e.g. some people say behaviour would be the same no matter what). I think we will have a vaccine in 2021, not 2024, but I am not sure a ~12 month slow burn or mix of lockdowns would have been worth it instead of just living normally while the high-risk demographic alone does a lockdown. I don't think it's quite true that the point of the lockdown was to save 5 lives. It saved lives equivalent to the difference between the deaths we saw and what the deaths would have been without a lockdown. Potentially thousands of deaths. It's worth pointing out however that early modeling predicted vastly more deaths than manifested even in places with less severe lockdowns yet authorities seem to be very conservative in moving to more relaxed policies, and people are not changing their behaviour much. If people can go from talking about 3-7% fatality rates to 0.3% without much changing behaviour or policy-wise are we rationally balancing costs and benefits? Personally I haven't been out to a restaurant in 6 months or so now. Not sure that is rational. I am in my 30's with no health conditions. Yet it does not seem like a good proposition if I have to wear a mask to go out, register my name, then maybe get asked to isolate for 14 days if there was simply another infected person somewhere in the restaurant, etc. That is the current protocol. Right now in Canada it doesn't seem like testing cuts down on the 14-day window. In Nova Scotia they are saying returning out-of-province students need to isolate for 14 days AND test. There's no mention of shortening the isolation period after negative results. I suspect part of what's happening is lots of people are scared of liability or blame now and that's driving decisions more than anything else. |
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People will point out that Sweden had a relatively large number of deaths but their absolute number of deaths was low and the people who died mostly had a low life expectancy. The direct covid deaths have had almost no impact on life expectancy there (I worked it out based on life expectancy by age and it's on the order of days of life expectancy lost). Sweden has a population of 10 million and as of August 18, 27 people under age 40 have died there. This is remarkable yet it's hard to get most Canadians to admit that this has implications for how covid should be handled (i.e. maybe society-wide one-size-fits-all policies are not the way to go). I think a lot of the enjoyable stuff that has been cut out during the pandemic like events and dates and visits with family is what makes life worth living. I don't think it is rational to live in purgatory for 1-2% of your expected lifespan to avoid a 0.2% chance of dying. I understand why authorities here locked down in March when less was known about the virus but I don't think we have pivoted in a useful way as more information has become available, particularly during the May to August period. It feels like we are stuck in May, at least here in BC. |
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The number WITHOUT lockdowns would be dramatically higher. |
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When you look at large populations, there are typically outliers in medical outcomes, unlucky people who suffer dangerous or deadly effects. It does not make sense to craft public health policy around these anecdotes or corner cases. I think if anything around here there's been a media bias toward promoting the idea that kids are at risk of these rare Kawasaki disease like conditions, etc. It's telling that when the media talk about children they tend to switch gears and rely on anecdotes. This is fear-based reporting. Great for ad revenues, bad basis for public policy. We are many months into the pandemic now and we can look at the data from countries that followed different policies. For example Sweden kept daycares and schools open and they had a total of 1 death under age 20 (source). With data like that, it's clear that closing down schools would not have been in the best interests of young children. Yet many schools in North America remain closed. Children will pay the cost for that in terms of delayed education and increased abuse. |
You think closing schools is about protecting kids? This thread is one misconception after another.
Closing schools is mostly about protecting families, teachers, and societal infection rates overall. Especially since evidence is mounting that kids are extremely efficient Covid spreaders. |
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/17/o...t-disease.html https://www.statnews.com/2020/07/27/...-heart-damage/ https://www.pennmedicine.org/updates...-heart-disease Yeah, I'd like my heart to remain functional and not equivalent to someone 60 years older than I. |
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You are right, the goal or narrative has switched from flattening the curve to make sure hospital beds were available, to minimizing cases as much as possible. Everyone knew back in March and April that cases would go up when the economy got started again, but now people are forgetting that. Like in British Columbia, most new cases in the United States are in younger people, who are supposed to keep the economy afloat while older people continue to shelter in place (whether or not this has been expressly stated). Deaths and hospitalizations have largely remained relatively low, even while positive cases surged. The downside is the possible cardiac residual effects. The upside is the potential antibodies and herd immunity developed. School openings have been controversial. It has largely been teachers versus parents here. The parents want actual schooling, having not really gotten any schooling since mid-March. The teachers want to protect themselves. There's not been much consideration given to the students themselves. As a youth sports coach, most of the children I interact with are actually getting pretty desperate to go back to school. I can't believe I'm hearing it, because when I was a kid, I would've been happy to have a 6-month summer. But these kids can feel that they are not getting smarter (and therefore not maturing), and there are clear long-term mental health effects coming into play. Things were going well here from Easter to Memorial Day (end of May) and into June. From mid-June until now it has been a holding pattern where regulations have neither gotten looser or gotten stricter. I can't remember what I read, because it was a few days ago, but I think Wilmington or Delaware actually has had more overdose deaths than coronavirus deaths. I will have to look for that. Wherever it was, drug overdoses have exceeded coronavirus deaths. I also saw a report indicating that domestic violence has indeed skyrocketed since March. All of this tells me that we have to avoid the two extremes. We can't stay locked down forever and force people into a year of isolation or constraint. The human brain will eventually reject that and ignore policies in place. At the same time, we cannot pretend that nothing ever happened, and that everything should be back to normal. Here in Delaware, with a Democratic governor, I think we have done well in finding the best of both worlds. Early on things were tough here. There was a quarantine in place, and all businesses were closed, and everything like that. But I think an element of reasoning was included in restrictions as the economy opened back up. So, while we are being aggressive in trying to keep our positive cases down, much like New York or Massachusetts and unlike Florida or Arizona, there is no arbitrary law about needing to order food when you're in a bar, as if the coronavirus won't spread because you have food on the table, and the quarantine was lifted on June 1 and there has been no talk of reinstating it. It has provided a good balance of determination and vigilance with freedom and normalcy. That makes it easier for people to follow the rules still in place, because they get the sense that things are getting better. |
Other viral infections impact the heart as well, such as:
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Florida passed 10k deaths yesterday (British Columbia has had 200 to compare to a previous poster). On a per capita basis still less than 1/4 of NJ though.
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The reason myocarditis is somewhat nonspecific in viral illness is the role played by the host immune response and not just the virus itself. However the thing of most concern with COVID is we don't yet, and can't because the disease is so new, know about the long term sequelae in this illness. Will these patients have a higher rate of heart failure and other complications down the road? Do they need long term monitoring? |
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https://uniim1.shutterfly.com/ng/ser...995664/enhance https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...e-tracker.html The leading vaccine candidates in the West come from Oxford/Astrazeneca, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer/BioNTech. Others among the 8 are in Russia and China. All evidence indicates that one and probably more of these vaccines will be approved by the FDA in the US before the end of 2020 (conspiracy theorists are already suggesting it could happen before the November 3 election). It will likely take another several months to manufacture and administer enough doses to vaccinate most of the willing populations in North America even though the US government has already contracted to purchase hundreds of millions of doses of the leading western candidates: US cuts $1.95 billion deal with Pfizer for 100 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine Trump says U.S. has reached deal with Moderna for 100 million doses of coronavirus vaccine U.S. secures 300 million doses of potential AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine That's 500 million doses. The population of the US is less than 400 million so enough to vaccinate all Americans has been purchased and is already being manufactured, assuming all 3 vaccines work. If only one works, we will have the amount of that one at least. One hopes Canada is doing something similar. But the point here is we are already making vaccine at the fastest rate possible. and should know by Christmas which one(s) work and have them ready to provide at least to those most at risk. In the ensuing months, we should be able to vaccinate the rest of the population, say by late Spring. That may be why several large companies such as Facebook and Salesforce.com have told their workers who are working at home they plan to continue that until next June or July. By then, everyone who is willing to be should be vaccinated and life should be returning to normal if largely normal (it's my own opinion that the economic recovery will take a while longer). So the point here is that we need to continue measures to avoid infecting as many people as possible for just 4 or 5 more months. That goes for those at most risk and for others because those others can infect the ones at risk. Just today, a study result was released showing that school aged children and adolescents can carry a viral burden--and spread it--higher even than very sick adults. Taking a fairly conservative estimate of the mortality rate of the disease, if we do not do this we can see the death of 100,000 or several hundreds of thousands who don't need to die because in just a few months they can be vaccinated and survive this disease. |
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- One study was 39 autopsies of people who died from covid and 100 who recovered. - They noticed heart involvement in many recovered patients but there's no discussion of the true health impact and there's no control or context given. Does this damage persist? Is it different from what happens with other infections that we know people are at risk of and recover from, and that we don't implement lockdowns for? - The authors call for more study and data, i.e. this is not information that by itself can usefully guide public policy decisions or individual decisions. Unfortunately we will have to take risks in life and make decisions with incomplete data. We cannot react in a reliable way that improves our standard of living based on fears about poorly understood potential future effects. |
NEWS FLASH
In Sweden, where they did and continue not to social distance, where they did not wear masks, where they let the pandemic play out, where schools are open, the same amount of people have died, per capita, as in the US. Cases in Sweden are miniscule, per capita at the same levels as states that were hard-hit early on like NY and CT. |
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Let's suppose the best-case scenario is true and everybody in the United States who wants to be vaccinated can get vaccinated in October before the election and the vaccine works perfectly, instantly reducing covid risk to 0. People will have spent March-October in partial lockdown, about 8 months. The US life expectancy is about 78.5 years. So the average American will have spent 0.8% of their lifespan during this period. Note that some older people will have spent 20% or 40% of their remaining life expectancy in lockdown; the ones at highest risk of death are giving up the largest percentage of their remaining life in the strictest isolation. The fatality rate for under 40's is something like 0.2%, with the rate being lower for people without health problems and for those under 20. Actually the difference in mortality is even lower because some people are still getting covid despite the measures happening right now. Is it rational for households made up of people age 40 and under to lock themselves up for 0.8% of their life to avoid a 0.2% or maybe 0.1% risk of death plus the risks of other health impacts (which are probably not multiple times costlier than the risk of death)? Can authorities answer this question? No, because it depends on how much people care about the covid measures they take. The price of not going to the theatre or to a restaurant depends on the value to the individual. But I'd say it's far from being a clear win. |
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One of the red flags is you haven't talked about probabilities at all, or attempted to characterize the health impact (e.g. in terms of QALY) of these aftereffects. To make a rational decision you need to quantify the costs and benefits. If your lockdown argument would be the same if the risk were 10x higher or 10x lower it's unlikely to be rational; that would swing the cost-benefit ratio by 10-100x. |
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To argue as you seem to be is to argue as long as "I'm alright, Jack", 100,000 extra deaths among other groups is insufficient to keep me from going to the gym or a football game or concert (that's what 10023 regularly argues). I had a very pleasant OUTDOOR lunch at a restaurant yesterday. I didn't feel I had missed anything when I went to bed last night. |
^^By the way, I'm an opera fan. I miss real live opera. But Rome just proved even that is possible (thanks to their ancestors of 2000 years ago):
Rigoletto at the Circus Maximus https://www.wantedinrome.com/i/previ...-the-stars.jpg https://www.wantedinrome.com/news/fr...s-maximus.html |
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It's odd to accept that distancing measures make a big difference but also a young healthy person getting covid implies other more vulnerable people will get it too. I have a feeling a lot of businesses and cultural institutions are not going to survive covid. The profit margins for concerts and restaurants are probably pretty thin. I would argue that a lot of these activities are what make life worth living, and so going without them significantly worsens quality of life. |
You guys are coming up with really weak arguments given that you're supporting the most unusual mandatory change to life in North America that has been seen since WWII.
I don't necessarily have a strong opinion one way or the other about the policies that should be implemented but it's food for thought. I think for the most part we should try to open up over time and let actual deaths and hospitalizations determine the public health response, while being careful to tease out exactly who is affected. I don't think this process should be governed by fear of the unknown. |
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It simply isn't possible to totally remove the young people from your life. You can only take reasonable precautions. But if you are a 40-something diabetic or maybe a little fat with kids in school, you are entirely subject to what the kids may bring home. |
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Care homes were a disaster. That's where 80% of Canada's deaths were. But they are supposed to use PPE, limit visits or moving workers between facilities, etc. That shit show is not the fault of 30 year olds who have never even been in a care home. |
[QUOTE=someone123;9018403]Why do you need to have significant exposure to these people? If you stay 2 m away from them your odds of getting covid are minimal.
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