COVID-19

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COVID-19

Postby cmsellers » Thu Mar 26, 2020 4:37 am

Given that COVID-19, and especially the reaction to it, is going to dominate our lives for the next few months, I thought it's probably time to start a thread. And my apologies for the long post, but as you will soon see, my thoughts are both ambivalent and outside the mainstream, and therefore I feel the need to go into a fair amount of detail.

What prompted it is this post from the Texas Nationalist Movement.

Now, there's been a lot of crazy right-wing conspiracy theories circulating around COVID-19, and when I got the email, I kind of assumed it was more of the same. So, I was about to post it as "hey, look at what the Texas Nationalists have gotten up to now," and figured I owed them the courtesy of reading it first. And, I actually think it's pretty reasonable, or at least three of the major points it makes are:

1. The projections which have led to a global panic come from a single Imperial College study, and more recent models contradict it. As I've made clear elsewhere, I think that when the medical community feels an urgent need to make recommendations for individual action and especially government policy, they tend to have a strong action bias and made decisions on the basis of questionable evidence. So it does not surprise me at all that in a case where the medical community felt that we need to act literally right now, they'd make decisions based on models from one paper.

2. Given that China tried to keep this under wraps for months, it is entirely possible that a first wave has already spread, mostly asymptotically and with those affected diagnosed with something else I already believed that a lot more people were asymptomatic than were being diagnosed, based on the fact that among the rich and powerful, who are getting tested just because, we're seeing asymptomatic cases from Prince Charles to Rand Paul to Sophie Trudeau.

3. This is definitely imposing a cost on both the economy and our personal liberties which may not be worth it. This last point in particular I need to elaborate on. Because my position here has consistently been to the "right" of the mainstream, though I've rejected both the far-right conspiracy theories and the "let's all get together as a fuck you to the coronavirus."

My position currently is that voluntary social distancing is probably a good idea, and that companies should be allowing people to work from home wherever feasible, and should be granting paid sick leave at least for the duration of this outbreak. I am therefore not terribly upset by governments forcing businesses to do these things (though, Congress managed to write a sick leave bill which manages to not apply to most of the US workforce) though I think that forcing all "non-essential" businesses to shut down is likely an overreaction, and saying people shouldn't go out except for groceries under penalty of law is needlessly extreme. I've also been extremely put off by the preachy articles complaining about how selfish American individualism is dooming all our old people.

I have also been saying consistently that I feel the reaction to COVID-19 has been disproportionate, because it is a disease that is most likely to affect the well-traveled and well-connected, and most likely to kill the old. In short, it's a disease that is disproportionately likely to affect the kinds of people making decisions about closures, while the economic impact of such closures leave them largely untouched.

When I started saying this, I was explicitly challenging the "you can't put a price on human life" mentality, but rather amazingly to me, almost nobody is actually making that argument. Instead, the arguments for the draconian economic policies seem to stem from three concerns.

1. We're at risk of overwhelming our hospital's capacities, especially WRT to such things as ventilators, which may lead to a lot of needless deaths.
2. Lots of deaths are bad for our economy. (Though, callous as this may sound, I'm skeptical that that's true when said deaths are mostly old people; generally economists agree that the higher your ratio of working-age people to everyone else, the faster the economic growth.)
3. We don't know about the long-term effects of COVID-19, but there's some evidence that it can produce severe disability.

We're in it right now, and obviously the imagery from Italy has been disturbing, though I'll note that Spain, which is doing nearly as badly per-capita, does not seem to be producing nearly the same horror stories. At this point, I can't say for sure why things seem so dire in Italy, whether those images are isolated cases, and whether there might be other factors explaining why, for example, Italy is running behind on burials. But I can say that I do not like the idea of letting visceral images from Italy guide our policy, nor do I like the idea of taking extremely draconian precautions based on one study.

It becomes clear to me that COVID-19 reveals two views of the precautionary principle. Government officials—who tend to favor government action no matter what the issues is, that's why they're in government—have tended to see taking all possible action to limit the spread as of overriding importance. In this, they've been backed by the medical community and the mainstream media.

Whereas I, being generally skeptical of government action, have favored individual precautions where feasible and limited government action. If it were up to me, I'd require businesses to allow any employee who can feasibly work from home to do so, shutter non-essential government operations, close government-owned facilities like beaches, and and require paid sick leave. This makes me more cautious than many of the most vocal right-wing skeptics have been, but I've still tended towards the "government shouldn't be reacting so swiftly and strongly when it comes to private businesses and organizations."

I think that almost everybody agrees that we need to strike a balance between reasonable precautions and destroying the economy, but I've been inclined to err on the side of not destroying the economy. I'm leaning even more in this direction in light of this email from the leader of a right-wing fringe movement. It feels weird that, on this issue, the people whose position seems closest to mine have mostly been Trump supporters. (Though I still feel that Trump himself has handled this crisis with his characteristic inconsistency, bluster, and ineptitude.)

I also feel like, regardless of where you stand, the high-handed and dismissive response to far-right conspiracy theorists, "under-reactors" (the people who are refusing to change their habits at all), and really anyone who brings up the economy or individual freedom ("We're all in this together you selfish prick! Flatten the curve, dummy!"), has been less than helpful.
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Re: COVID-19

Postby Askias » Thu Mar 26, 2020 12:49 pm

Hello from quarantine. Nothing to worry about I just got the sniffles, but with the current situation I’m obligated to stay indoors at all times. On the matter, I think a lot of deaths are just bad, full stop.

Counterview: I think this event, crisis, what you want to call it, has been marked by indecision and lethargy. If China hadn’t handwaved it away for as long as they did it, and pushed their eventual measures through two or three weeks earlier, it probably wouldn’t have gotten around. If Italy had locked the place down a week earlier they wouldn’t be stacking coffins, and if Spain had issued a lockdown when Italy worsened they wouldn’t be using ice rinks as impromptu corpse storage right now.

Instead, what could have been three-week measures will likely have to be held in place for months for similar effects, and at this point it’s doubtful we’re not delaying the now inevitable. Slowing spread doesn’t make people immune, early on we may have killed it entirely and we still might, but if we drop it before the spread is controlled rather than stymied it’ll just flare up in the still-not-immune populace.

If governments, China first and foremost, had dropped the hammer earlier, we would be in a much better position to kill COVID-19 off. China (according to themselves, at least) has it under control now. That only took the largest quarantine in human history executed by a government with a reputation as one you really don’t want to get on the bad side of. South Korea locked their capital down within a week after first signing and got ahead of it. Hit hard, hit fast, and you can beat it relatively quickly. It really seems to me that if we’d gone to overkill right away, we’d have saved money and lives.

Instead, we’re here. My country will probably be banning public events until June, and extending the general social distance orders until at least the end of April. And don’t think that can’t be enforced, the emergency stops are out and cops have issued fines to people they spotted sitting too close to each other through the windows. Time will tell whether that does anything.

If it gets out of control, that’s obviously not the end of the world. It’s worse than the seasonal flu but doesn’t compare to the Spanish flu, so we’d probably be looking at a death toll of a few million. I would like to not have that. So I’ll stay inside, I’m working from home and it’s not that bad.
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Re: COVID-19

Postby Crimson847 » Sat Mar 28, 2020 6:16 am

It's not so much that "lots of deaths are bad for the economy" as that mass illness and fear of catching COVID is bad for the economy. The stock market cratered and job losses in the service industry started before the shutdowns, as consumers and businesses responded to what they were seeing and hearing on the news. There is no "business as usual" until the virus is contained--better an 8-week lockdown that gets things under control than 18 months of overflowing hospitals and self-isolating or sick customers and workers.

Also, while I'd agree "you can't put a price on human life" doesn't always work out well in policy terms, there's still a lot of uncertainty about how this epidemic is going to pan out. A 1% death rate is a commonly cited figure, for instance, and that sounds like a low number at the moment. If 2 billion people get this virus by the end of the year, though, 1% equates to 20 million people dead. Hundreds of millions more would need hospitalization to live, with a disease that often takes several weeks to recover from. There aren't enough ICU beds or ventilators for them, so a large proportion of those people would die as well. 60-70 million dead worldwide is not an implausible worst-case scenario if we let COVID surge out of control and overwhelm our healthcare systems.

I'm not willing to spend infinity dollars to save even one life, but I *am* willing to deal with temporary business closures to keep COVID from rivaling the death toll of World War 2.
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Re: COVID-19

Postby cmsellers » Thu Apr 02, 2020 5:31 am

@Askias, that is a fair point.

@Crimson, based everything I'm seeing, I think 1% is high if the hospitals are not overwhelmed, but also understand that if the hospitals are overwhelmed that will change this. Unfortunately, the Imperial College study everyone is basing projections on anticipates that hospitals will still be swamped even if we take the most extreme precautions for three months and then let up. My reading of the Imperial College study is that the majority of preventable deaths attributable to hospital overcrowding will not be prevented even if we extend the measures we have no for three months. It will be 12-18 months before we have a vaccine, and several months more to ramp up production and get everyone innoculated. So the question is: just how long can we keep all this up, and what are we doing to prepare for the inevitable lifting of restrictions?

A YouTuber I follow (who has a PhD in biology but is not an epidemiologist) noted that there's an option which no government seems to be seriously considering, though the UK government reportedly toyed with it earlier: lock down the old and immunocompromised, and let the young and health develop herd immunity. I can see why this option isn't exactly a popular solution: since this option still overwhelms the hospitals just by sheer numbers, you're trading a smaller number of preventable deaths of young, healthy people in to preserve the lives of a greater number of sick and old and the economy. In the US, moreover, you have the issue of young and healthy people being less likely to have insurance, much less low-deductible insurance. But, where we are now, *that* feels to me like the least-bad option.

On a different note: the Cuomo-cultism that seems to be springing up is annoying the fuck out of me. "Handles COVID-19 better than Trump" is a bar so low you'd need a backhoe to get under it. Nonetheless, he has apparently decided that the COVID-19 crisis is a great opportunity to repeal New York's bail-reform bill, a move which is not only callous and counterproductive but also rises to Trumpian levels of "what the fuck are you thinking!?" It also reinforces my sincerely-held belief that no man named "Andrew" should ever again be allowed to become president.
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Re: COVID-19

Postby Askias » Thu Apr 02, 2020 4:27 pm

Removed, edit gone wrong.
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Last edited by Askias on Thu Apr 02, 2020 4:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: COVID-19

Postby Askias » Thu Apr 02, 2020 4:29 pm

cmsellers wrote:A YouTuber I follow (who has a PhD in biology but is not an epidemiologist) noted that there's an option which no government seems to be seriously considering, though the UK government reportedly toyed with it earlier: lock down the old and immunocompromised, and let the young and health develop herd immunity. I can see why this option isn't exactly a popular solution: since this option still overwhelms the hospitals just by sheer numbers, you're trading a smaller number of preventable deaths of young, healthy people in to preserve the lives of a greater number of sick and old and the economy. In the US, moreover, you have the issue of young and healthy people being less likely to have insurance, much less low-deductible insurance. But, where we are now, *that* feels to me like the least-bad option.

A strategy that would see a quarter-million dead by August according to those projections. Upscaling to the U.S. that would be in the ballpark of a million and a half, with well over 10,000 deaths per day at the peak. You don’t get reliable herd immunity until a significant portion of the population has been infected, with something this contagious at least a 50% ballpark, possibly 75%+, of citizens infected.

Let's file that under ‘strategies no politician is *ever* going to announce until things have already gotten well past control, much less in an election year’.
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Re: COVID-19

Postby cmsellers » Thu Apr 02, 2020 7:28 pm

The question is: what's the better alternative? I don't think anyone thinks we can lock the world down for eighteen months while we develop and distribute a vaccine. But, unless I'm missing something, it seems like the plan of most Western governments is to lock things down until the public gets restive and then .. what? If they just lift those restrictions, you'll end up with far more preventable deaths than prevented deaths, and far more preventable deaths than with the "let the young and healthy develop herd immunity" option. And so far, it doesn't seem like any Western leader really has a plan for what to do when the kind of lockdown we're seeing now becomes politically untenable.
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Re: COVID-19

Postby Pedgerow » Thu Apr 02, 2020 8:50 pm

The UK plan, insofar as we have a plan, which we don't, is to lock everything down for a few weeks so a bunch of people get coronavirus and fill the hospitals, but no more than that. Once those people are recovered, remove the restrictions and let everyone go out and get coronavirus. The economy can breathe in, and the hospitals will fill up again, and then we'll lock everywhere down again. I was predicting within about three days of the lockdown that there will be orgies in the street when it ends, so I'm sure bars and shops and hairdressers will do a roaring trade when the government says, "You can all do whatever you want again, but only for three weeks and then it's back undercover."

As a side observation about coronavirus, I think the governments of the world are doing a fantastic job of managing expectations. I can feel myself getting gradually more pessimistic, but right now I still expect things to be okay again by Christmas, and better than now by June. When it started two months ago, I thought, "This will be mildly inconvenient for a couple of months." A couple of months later, it's the same and we're not really doing any better. But the consensus now is that things will be inconvenient for a couple of months. So that's four months in total, minimum. And eventually, I'm going to need to buy a lightbulb or a bicycle inner tube or something else that's not "essential", and the challenge will really do a number on me. But that hasn't happened yet.

I would also like to take issue with the rules about "key workers" and "essential employees" and so on. I am officially a key worker, and so are the two remaining colleagues who still come in each day. We mainly fix websites, for God's sake. We can do that from home, but we aren't doing, because we might at some point need to also do something that requires a physical presence but which would only ever require one person. And yet all three of us go in every day, and all three of us have had a cough at some point this week. Not every day, but still, I suspect all three of us could well have coronavirus.
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Re: COVID-19

Postby CarrieVS » Thu Apr 02, 2020 9:54 pm

Pedgerow wrote:I would also like to take issue with the rules about "key workers" and "essential employees" and so on. I am officially a key worker, and so are the two remaining colleagues who still come in each day. We mainly fix websites, for God's sake. We can do that from home, but we aren't doing, because we might at some point need to also do something that requires a physical presence but which would only ever require one person. And yet all three of us go in every day, and all three of us have had a cough at some point this week. Not every day, but still, I suspect all three of us could well have coronavirus.


That sucks unbelievably. I also fix websites for a living, and my company's shut the office and sent everyone to work from home. Yes, there are a few things that require an occasional physical presence... so one guy comes in every week to do those.

I'm not even sure we're considered key workers. We probably are because some of the sites we support are key industries. So at a minimum we'd need to be on call to fix those if they broke. But in fact we're working as near to normal as possible from our home offices.
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Re: COVID-19

Postby Pedgerow » Thu Apr 02, 2020 10:22 pm

I work in a datacentre, so officially I'm in the telecommunications industry, which is a key industry. However, I don't do much datacentre stuff and do a lot more stuff with the customers of a web hosting company we bought. I'm basically there in case anyone phones up, because nobody else likes answering phones and talking to customers. But they could always email.
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Re: COVID-19

Postby NathanLoiselle » Fri Apr 03, 2020 12:45 am

Are we sure that this virus didn't raise it's ugly head in a Mexican Corona brewery first?
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Re: COVID-19

Postby RedBearded » Sat Apr 04, 2020 5:26 am

Image

Live Long and Prosper.
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Re: COVID-19

Postby jbobsully11 » Mon Apr 06, 2020 12:15 am

I got a text from one of the head bosses at my job a little while ago. He said everything was disinfected, some people were quarantined, and work will start regular time tomorrow for everyone else. Masks will now be mandatory if we need to be <6 ft apart, and there are some other changes we’ll be hearing more about when we get there.
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Re: COVID-19

Postby iMURDAu » Mon Apr 06, 2020 12:54 am

I work at a decently sized grocery store in Maryland. Idk about other places and countries where people are calm and orderly and can handle being told what to do but I don't think anything is going to stop the flow of traffic to my store short of deploying a fleet of ED-209's from Robocop to keep them out.

I can't take the gawkers and the incredibly stupid people. I overheard multiple customers last week saying that they're only at the store because everywhere else is closed. Some people have the most incredulous reaction when I tell them I can't really give them a concrete day when the birthday cake flavored coffee creamer or other frivolous item is coming in because of everything that's going on. I've resorted to telling people that we can't stock it unless it comes in.

Also people seem to think that if they call and ask when the best time to shop is that there's a magical answer, or even funnier they ask how long the lines are as if that won't change by the time they get there and shop. "They're long. I wouldn't want to stand in them". :D

It's only going to get worse as people get more desperate. Theft has gotten to where we've got full time security on hand. People have had fits claiming we're "keeping everything in the back for the employees". I don't know how so many people learned the phrase "price gouging" without also learning the definition but bahgawd they managed.

So basically long story short I'm just waiting to get the disease because nothing will stop the demand of leisurely grocery trips.
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Re: COVID-19

Postby Krashlia » Fri Apr 10, 2020 7:31 pm

RedBearded wrote:
Spoiler: show
Image


Live Long and Prosper.


I unironically believe this.
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