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In fact, you're a walking advertisement for a basic truth: Advice and guidance isn't enough. |
Texas is slowly actually really quickly opening back up and cars are slowing down. I hate traffic and I wish they would shut the state back down. People are getting too confident. I saw about 40 frat & sorority kids get in a bus together to go tubing sat w/ no masks and it really upset me. I'm over here wearing a mask so both my parents and grandparents don't get sick and these people could care less about anyone else. I'm an essential worker and this is totally disrespectful. These are human lives being put at a higher risk than necessary. The cities are trying to protect their citizens but the state doesn't care. But I guess that's nothing new in Texas. Opening up means higher costs. A lot of people are going to go back to work without health insurance at restaurants, bars, gyms, retail etc just to get sick and loose $15,000 or more on a hospital bill. In the end they will loose more by working than they would if they had just stayed home. It's a total cluster funk. I wish I was wrong and this was over but by the time this is over I think it's entirely possible that we will all see a NYC style pandemic based on our current actions. The first wave was not the deadliest during the 1918 flu pandemic but rather the later 2nd or 3rd wave depending on the city.
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During the 1918-19 "Spanish" Flu pandemic, a few cities opened up early when the number of cases went down. In San Francisco, they had a big "unmasking" celebration in Union Square. A few days later, influenza cases spiked up sharply. "Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it." I fear a spike in cases of covid in some states that are relaxing social distancing and ignoring masks. Making wearing or not wearing masks a political statement is idiocy. On a brighter note, some cities are banning cars from some streets and letting pedestrians and bicycles use them. Restaurants are also allowed to set up tables on the sidewalks and even in the blocked of streets. A more Euro vibe. |
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I set a good example by what I do, but I also can see the frustration of my patients and I see that one of the sources of resentment is the fact that these requirements (and the robbing of livelihoods and school closures) are coming via executive order, often containing policies set at the whim of said elected official. I’m not sure why you aren’t getting that this is one of the primary issues that these people have, and it’s not going to go away by calling them “assholes” or “idiots”. It just makes them want to wear a mask even less, if I were to correctly interpret their state of mind (and I’m pretty sure I am). |
The mood of many right now is well explained today by this non-partisan Chicago Tribune columnist:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/colum...5xm-story.html |
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Some things simply have no value. Quote:
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The whole purpose of the lockdown was to do slow case growth so that we'd have time to build a test-and-trace infrastructure, acquire enough PPE, and build hospital capacity. Some work has been done on all of these, but for the most part the last two months have been squandered. That's not really an anti-lockdown argument, just an argument that the people at the top never had a decent plan for the medium-term, even though acceptable options existed. The fact of the matter is, if you look at nationwide numbers, it's pretty clear the R0 value right now in the U.S. is only slightly under 1, because the number of cases are declining a lot, lot slower than they initially rose. This is a problem, because any lessening of social distancing will probably cause the R0 to rise above 1 again. Maybe we could "mitigate" at something like 1.1-1.3, but if we start going to cases doubling every few days again we're going to be in for a world of hurt. |
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The New York Stock Exchange trading floor reopened today. Notably, they ask people coming to the building to avoid public transit:
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So I assume those reporting to NYSE for now will be the locals? Weird. The transit rule makes no sense, though. How would car service be safer?
Plenty living downtown and in Brownstone Brooklyn, I guess. Guess they can walk or bike in. |
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Am I the only one here who works in healthcare and involved in direct patient care? It seems like the rest of you are just sitting in front of your computers all day and reading online media. For example, the hospital system that employs me went from pretty much zero preparation to having a full scale surge plan, we’ve gotten tons of PPE (we have plenty of wipes, face masks gloves, etc),, and we are now monitoring Covid cases daily like clockwork. Doctors who otherwise haven’t worked in the hospital in years have been granted emergency privileges in the event of a surge (which mostly failed to happen). In the Chicago area overflow hospital facilities have been built by the Army Corps of Engineers (McCormick Place—which sits unused). Hotels have been set up for overflow patients, which once again has never materialized. We are now exceeding 10,000 Covid tests per day in Illinois and we also have antibody testing which is pretty easy to get done. I’m pretty sure that my Illinois example parallels what has happened throughout the country. Ventilator production and PPE production is taking off everywhere. How do you interpret this as a “squandering” of 2 months? You obviously are putting down a lot of people who busted their asses while you were sitting around at home in front of your laptop. Meanwhile, nothing anywhere near to what happened in Italy has happened yet in the US. Nobody who needed a ventilator was denied one because they weren’t available. Hell, we actually have excess reserve of unused ventilators. It’s sad that your desire to see this administration fail is so strong that you are willing to put down thousands of people who responded quite robustly to this pandemic in a short period of time. |
Between the gun nuts, the stupid people who can't figure out how to wear a mask and not walk down the street in a jostling scrum, plus the "freedom coughers" who go around deliberately coughing on others... Jesus, the second wave of this is going to be a real bitch.
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Still not clear how that's safer, though. Manhattan garages are mostly underground and almost never self-park. How is it safer to have some dude drop off/pick up car? The few self-park usually require you to take an (obviously enclosed) elevator or stairs. |
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It's not the frontline healthcare worker's job to understand anything about modeling. Be glad we have experts in the field. Listen to them. |
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1) mandatory mask use (duh) 2) open windows if possible for better ventilation (not sure how much that helps underground...) 3) Recording of what vehicle everyone is in and at what times, for contact tracing. This has privacy implications, but it could be reasonably anonymized if we wanted to and people are being surveilled in the subway anyway. It could be done with smart phones and a modicum of technology (a cheapass wireless microcontroller advertising some id for each train car), but that doesn't cover everyone. UHF RFID probably would work, but would require giving all transit riders an appropriate card (similar to how ez-pass works) and somewhat more expensive instrumentation in each vehicle. |
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The difficulty with reopening indoor place is that it is very difficult to effective track and trace all contacts. For restaurants this is actually pretty easy... we can deny access to anyone remotely symptomatic and require everyone to "register" when they enter and leave, so that any infection from restaurants can be tracked. As long as the number of infected people out and about is low enough that is sustainable. Do we have that in place? I don't know... maybe? Public transit is a bit more difficult since requiring everyone to register going in and out, unless it was done automatically by smartphone app (which would work well for buses, but not as well for trains,). Does this app exist yet? I don't know...maybe? If it hasn't, I guess it's not obvious whose fault it is (the CTA's competence isn't this... should it have been the Illinois Department of Public Health? The Federal Department of Transportation? I don't know... I'm sure they'd all point fingers at each other). |
Testing and tracking is going to be logistics nightmare. 10 bucks says a month or two into it and most agencies are going to scrap that plan and just focus on more obvious sign of infection. Send the coughers home, maybe have employees take their own temperature. Convincing asymptomatic people en masse to get themselves tested is going to be tough. They are starting to bring people back to the office next month so I'll be curious what the protocols are going to be. My hope is people are going to be so paranoid about normal colds and flus that they do stay home. It's those a$$holes who refuse to and end getting the whole office sick.
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