Will this end up being the pandemic that cried wolf?

[Colleen27]

Exactly my point. People are protesting the governor’s “order” based on false/inaccurate information. The PP whom I quoted specifically was referring to the order banning items which are not in fact banned.

But that is in itself a failure of leadership. Business owners and city attorneys reached out to Lansing for clarification and got no answer, or conflicting answers, or confirmation that the banned-but-not-really items were meant to be banned. There was terrible communication in the roll out.

I think these protests happening against the lockdown show how pathetic we are. In the U.K. they clap and cheer their healthcare workers. Here we give them unnecessary crap with these protests.

It isn't one or the other. A couple of the guys I know who participated in the Lansing protests were also organizers of local efforts to celebrate and support our local health care workers. The protests weren't about the front line workers, any more than an anti-war protest is about the enlisted men and women.

Thanks - I don't think that was intentional, but agree that it should have been planned to avoid it.

That hospital is down the street from the state capitol. Access ends up blocked by almost any demonstration of any size.

what was the deal with buying seed? Was it banned or was garden stores not essential. Here they were allowed to be essential.

In Michigan stores like Target and Wal-Mart were ordered to prevent people from buying “non-essential” items. Enforcement happened by stores blocking off areas and putting up signs on products to explain they were not sellable. This led to a lot of confusion about what was deemed “essential,” in at least one instance a big box store was preventing people from buying car seats.

Garden stores, if all they sell is gardening stuff (not hardware or lumber or groceries) were deemed non-essential in the governor's first order. So they were already closed. The second order ordered the closure of non-essential departments within stores that had an exception to continue operating as essential - places like Lowes, Meijer and Walmart - and specified garden centers as one of the departments that had to be closed. Some stores interpreted that as only the outdoor center, where live plants and soil and such are sold, while others taped off their seed racks and gardening gloves and pots inside the store as well.

The same issues arose with paint - some places only closed their paint-tinting departments, but were still allowing the sale of pre-mixed paints, spray paint, brushes & trays, etc. while others roped off the whole section. And with furniture - some places interpreted that to mean baby furniture, including car seats and high chairs and cribs, or stopped the sale of play rugs in the toy department, while others took it more narrowly and only closed their household furniture section. And as I mentioned up in my first reply in this post, getting guidance from the state on which of these interpretations was correct was a difficult thing to do, especially in the first week or so of the order.

5-Month-Old Daughter of New York City Firefighter Dies from Coronavirus: She 'Was the Boss'

Did we over react? Ask the parents of this 5-month-old.

Good public policy can't be based on appeals to emotion, no matter how tearjerking. I mentioned on another thread that I have a couple of nurse friends who think we need to outlaw backyard pools and "swim at your own risk" beaches because they've seen a couple of real horror stories of kids coming in brain dead but breathing after being revived at the scene of the drowning. We could undoubtedly save hundreds of lives a year if we did that. But would it be good policy? I'll bet if you asked the parents of one of those dead kids, they'd say yes. Does that make yes the right answer automatically? Or do we weigh something more than a family's grief in setting policy for an entire state or country?

 

[Colleen27]

You may have misunderstood what I wrote then. We know that opening up while the pandemic is surging (10-30k new cases a day) will result in unnecessary deaths.
So my statements was that anyone who pushes to reopen to reopen while we're still experiencing 10s of thousands of new cases is willing to trade the lives of others for financial gain. That's a fact.

What are you basing that number on? "Surging" generally means trending upward, but you're saying that if we cut our cases by 2/3s we'd still be "surging" and need to continue distancing.

The "barely anyone" in a hot and humid climate has it confuses the crap out of me. Singapore, which is one of THE MOST hot and humid places on the planet (seriously hot, seriously humid) added 869 cases yesterday ALONE. Singapore is really more a "city/country" as it is quite small geographically and has a total population about equal to the state of Minnesota. Minnesota added 2 cases yesterday. The difference between Minnesota (this time of year) and Singapore on the "hot and humid" scale is monstrous. Yet, Singapore is having quite the explosion of cases. People who think summer solves this problem are ignoring the many WORLD data points that tell us quite the opposite.

Urban/rural looks to matter a lot more than climate. Which is, I suppose, pretty consistent with the new information suggesting the virus is extremely vulnerable to UV radiation from sunlight, as well as with the thinking that the primary transmission is person-to-person, indoors, and less likely outdoors or via surfaces.

No, we are not fine with it. We knew when we started down this road that there would be two separate crises to manage. We are doing so. Let's see where this takes us if we open back up gradually, when a state or area has reached safe new infection levels vs. doing what Georgia is doing. Doing what GA is doing might work - I am hopeful that it will. But science suggests that it won't, and that they are going to be locked down again in a few weeks while the rest of the country is opening back up.

Are we, though? I've got a son who applied for unemployment a month ago and hasn't gotten a check yet. My state was the first approved for the SNAP rollout to replace free/reduced lunches, and they're hoping to start getting that benefit to families in early May. Millions still haven't gotten their stimulus checks. And the Senate has announced that they're done with bailouts for individuals or state/local governments, so there's not likely to be more help forthcoming from any level.

As individuals - hard to say. But as states - we can see very clearly which states have been most drastically impacted, and they are almost all red states.

Like Michigan and New York?

 

[Mrs. Ciz]

I mean a full schedule of classes. Earlier this month, Virginia Tech, Texas A+M, and Liberty U were still open; possibly some others as well.

Virginia Tech did close their campus and go to all online classes at the same time most other big schools did. They made the announcement on March 12th while the students were on Spring Break. At first they said all classes would be online but the campus would stay open. This was done for students who could not leave. When too many students who could leave decided not to leave, they closed the campus. Many parents were frustrated with the school’s lack of firmness in their initial announcements, but VT got it right in the end.

 

[Colleen27]

I know this isn't the most popular thought out there but as well as being concerned about covid I am concerned about the collateral damage the shutdown has had. I heard a heart breaking story of a mother sitting on the steps of a local post office begging people for food to feed her kids. I am sure she is not the only one. I also read that alot of food banks are close to running out of food and are concerned that they won't be able to help the people who so desperately need it.

Virtually all of the food pantries in my area have closed up shop simply because the volunteers running them are all high risk - elderly and/or disabled, because those are the people who have time to give - so there's no one to keep them going. I know people who have driven the 30+ miles into suburbia for food distributions, because there just aren't local resources left in our rural area. And, sadly, at least one came back empty handed because she arrived after they'd cut-off the line, which was hundreds of cars long and wrapping around blocks.

Sorry, I mixed it up with Iowa. Georgia is June 19th. And that's the White House model and reported on CNN

View attachment 490437

This model basically requires zero cases for a state to qualify for reopening. Their actual standard is no more than 1 new daily case per 1 million residents. I think the fact that they project us getting there at all is quite remarkable, much less getting there by May or June. It is such a weird combination of optimism (about the pace of decline of new cases) and pessimism (about how controlled we need the virus to be to start reopening) that I don't even know what to think of it at this point, other than that it probably won't be any more accurate than the previous generations of this model's predictions.

Yeah, I know what herd immunity is. I meant in terms of Covid and so far they don’t know what it will look like - if there is any, how long it lasts, etc. Until they have more of those answers, it is naive to bank on that being the solution.

It isn't naive. It is hopeful. Because if herd immunity isn't the solution, there isn't a solution. We generally have two ways of dealing with viruses - natural herd immunity or vaccine-based herd immunity. Where the former isn't possible, the latter generally fails as well. So not banking on herd immunity being the solution is really nothing short of contemplating a "doomsday" scenario - the virus remains with us, people don't develop lasting immunity, and we simply have to accept that it exacts a continuous death toll until/unless it disappears naturally. Imagine if the common cold killed 1% of sufferers - that's what we're talking about if herd immunity isn't a viable solution.

Add child abuse to the list also, or unreported child abuse cases. The Metro area I work for has seen a very, very sharp increase in domestic violence cases and child abuse reports have plummeted because the kids are out of school. The schools are the main reporters of abuse. These numbers were compared to the same 30 day period in 2019.

And suicide. A reporter I know who covers crime/courts recently talked about the appalling number of suicide calls that he's hearing over the scanner. And let me tell you, it takes a lot to horrify a reporter who has made a career listening to police scanners in Detroit.

 

[Mackenzie Click-Mickelson]

Their actual standard is no more than 1 new daily case per 1 million residents. I think the fact that they project us getting there at all is quite remarkable, much less getting there by May or June.

Yeah that's what I was thinking when a poster posted on another thread the metrics you were talking about. My state was something like mid-late June..we have just under 3million people in the state so that would be less than 3 people per day..but why do we need to get that low to do anything? I mean yay for the curve flattening so well I guess? *sarcasm there.

My state is starting to do more which is targeted testing.

Targeting is being done at these levels:

~random testing of general pop and front line workers/essential workers (so far 3 weeks worth of that)
~focus on latino community
~focus on long-term care/physical rehab facilities
~focus on meat processing facilities
~focus on rural counties especially in the southwestern part of my state--one county there has about 33,600 people in 1,099square miles (compare that to my county which is nearly 600,000 in 480square miles) and is taking their rural testing allocation and doing an aggressive contact tracing. While they have 350 cases up against my county's 417 it's because they are able to so much more feasibly take any case and trace it back. Other areas of the state may have to rely on targeting testing in conjunction with testing due to symptoms (of which that has just been loosened to just 2 symptoms rather than a fever and 2 symptoms) instead of being able to hit it so aggressively.

 

[cobright]

What are you basing that number on? "Surging" generally means trending upward, but you're saying that if we cut our cases by 2/3s we'd still be "surging" and need to continue distancing.

I was using the term to mean that period of time when new case numbers are being driven forward without effective control. In other countries, where they do a better job of managing the pandemic, the progress of the disease tracks something between a normal distribution and an f-distribution. Simply put, I would not call the pandemic 'under control' within the 'middle 80%'
Like...
Setting a condition like 2 weeks of declining cases is meaningless because we have let this go so long already that our current case count is enormous. We currently have as many active cases as the next highest 14 countries, combined. I wouldn't want to see the paltry restrictions we have now removed until we can get our active cases number down under 250k. At that point we can say it is under control and other protocols like regular universal testing are able to limit the spread of the virus.

The obvious argument is that the density of cases is not universal. What's needed in NY isn't needed in Alaska. And for Alaska I would probably agree. But unless we are going to shut down interstate commerce, lock down the state borders down and pay to police them, the virus will continue to follow the flow of people.

 

[cobright]

Not sure what that’s supposed to mean...it’s invalid because I didn’t list his name?

And because I can't find what you are quoting ... anywhere.

I don’t know the person but his bio says he worked at Texas tech and Clemson as a marketing professor and economist

Does the bio not also give his name?

 

[jlwhitney]

I was using the term to mean that period of time when new case numbers are being driven forward without effective control. In other countries, where they do a better job of managing the pandemic, the progress of the disease tracks something between a normal distribution and an f-distribution. Simply put, I would not call the pandemic 'under control' within the 'middle 80%'
Like... View attachment 490547
Setting a condition like 2 weeks of declining cases is meaningless because we have let this go so long already that our current case count is enormous. We currently have as many active cases as the next highest 14 countries, combined. I wouldn't want to see the paltry restrictions we have now removed until we can get our active cases number down under 250k. At that point we can say it is under control and other protocols like regular universal testing are able to limit the spread of the virus.

The obvious argument is that the density of cases is not universal. What's needed in NY isn't needed in Alaska. And for Alaska I would probably agree. But unless we are going to shut down interstate commerce, lock down the state borders down and pay to police them, the virus will continue to follow the flow of people.

our population is huge which is why so many more cases.
But many states aren’t reporting recovered which is critical to know active cases .

 

[RamblingMad]

our population is huge which is why so many more cases.
But many states aren’t reporting recovered which is critical to know active cases .

All states aren't testing the same proportion of the population. The east and west coast both most likely have different strains. And not all of the states have peaked yet. It's hard to say every state should reopen at exactly the same date and time. And data isn't uniform across states either. What's being reported in one state might not be reported in another. It's really one big mess.

 

[luvsJack]

Then Atlanta should be fine reopening.

You do realize that Atlanta isn’t hot and humid all the time? And April has the lowest humidity.

You sound like the reporter asking why they had it in New Orleans if this study was true. Maybe because they started getting it on early March when it wasn’t hot and humid??

 

[CarolAnn856]

Why? Help me understand. I’m genuinely curious.
Almost every person on here has a screen name. Does that mean that all of our opinions are invalid? Because we don’t have any real names behind the ideas or opinions?

Because YOU felt it important enough to mention the writer’s supposed credentials means you were implying that the article should be taken seriously. But, you failed to provide any actual proof that this person has an educated take on the situation. You lost standing by trying to make it seem credible when it may or may not be.

Had you not mentioned the alleged credentials and just said that you thought it was an interesting viewpoint, you actually would havE come off better than you did.

 

[elle21]

I am set. But thanks.
[/QUO

And because I can't find what you are quoting ... anywhere.

Does the bio not also give his name?

There are quotation marks around the entire text that I was quoting.

It does give a name. I don’t know the man. But a friend of mine does and it was shared on his personal Facebook page. I was trying to be respectful of the person’s privacy since he’s not a news reporter and it’s not a published article.
In the same way that I might share the stats on covid-19 that my friend compiles because she’s a biologist and researcher at the NIH, but I’m not putting her name on this board. It feels like a violation of her privacy unless I asked for her permission.
I suppose you can just choose to not believe me when I tell you what that man’s credentials are.

 

[Heather07438]

These are the thoughts and opinions of a professor of economics at a university in Illinois. It’s long but an important read. We must open our country again. Soon. (I also saw a mini documentary from a large dairy farm in MI. The farmer is a friend of a friend and in her words “not an alarmist” He explains that the food supply is already in crisis from this. Our food supply. The people who provide food to your grocery store will be going out of business in a few months. Let that sink in.)
“We are paying $3 trillion per month to maintain social distancing. Now I am all for it if you can answer the following question. How will it save lives?
We obviously cannot afford $3 trillion per month for very long. It is not a matter of wanting to spend the money but a matter of having the money to spend. We don't have the money and we can't borrow the money. Let me put this in perspective. We are spending $100 billion per day to maintain social distancing. Our biggest item in our federal budget is defense. We spend approximately $900 billion per year on defense. That means in the next nine days, we will spend as much staying in place as we spend on our largest budget item for the whole year. How long is that sustainable? Not long.
Unless you can show me how $3 trillion per month is sustainable, I must conclude that social distancing must end in the not-to-distant future. When we do, COVID-19 will be waiting for us. Social distancing cannot eradicate the virus. It can only push it off to some point into the not-to-distant future. All these lives we are supposedly saving now will die then. We haven't saved any lives. We broke the bank with a non-solution.
We need a solution, not a $100 billion per day stalling tactic. Science tells us what that solution is. Herd immunity. That will eradicate the virus. Social distancing won't. What is the cost of obtaining herd immunity? It is the cost of protecting the vulnerable populations while the virus blows through the non-vulnerable populations. I don't know how much that would cost but I am sure it is a fraction of the $3 trillion we are spending on shelter in place. And, since we are protecting the vulnerable during the crisis and then letting them return to their normal lives once this is over, then we are actually saving lives.
Stay at home orders are like a temporary stay of execution. Once it expires (as it must due to it being unsustainable), then people die. We haven't saved lives. Focusing on protecting the vulnerable and letting herd immunity develop is like a pardon. Lives will be saved. People will be temporarily protected when they need to be protected. Then they won't need to be protected because the threat will be eradicated.
So, we can continue spending $3 trillion on a non-solution where the vulnerable are at a huge risk. Or we can spend a lot less doing what nature and science tells us to do to eradicate the threat. I choose doing what science and nature tells us to do. I like the fact that it actually saves lives. And, I like the side benefit that it comes with a price tag we can more likely afford.”

Q1) Slowing down the spread can save lives. Everybody's now aware how flattening helps healthcare. What about improved treatments and therapies that are learned over the next months/seasons? Humanity's ingenuity will improve our odds. But for all the people who get sick now, those treatments will be too late for them. The more we reduce spread the more we postpone patients showing up until we have better and proven standards of care. YES, that will save an incredible amount of lives.

Q2) As an economist maybe he'd like to share his opinion on how many 10s of billions the economy loses regardless. $100b/day isn't going to magically pop back into existence just by re-opening society. It's much more complex than that. The way humans live and interact has changed in response to this virus. Effects to the economy happen in any scenario.
Herd immunity is NOT our only strategic focus because it's yet to even be proven possible. Is this economist even paying attention? Good for him and his opinion but it is not worth a nickel more than any poster on the DIS.

All things considered we have done a good job lessening the potential devastation. There's a long way to go. Our choices on how to proceed and continue reducing the exposure rate play a big role in outcome. The large majority hasn't been exposed yet. The longer that takes, the more we'll have learned how to cope.

 

[elle21]

Because YOU felt it important enough to mention the writer’s supposed credentials means you were implying that the article should be taken seriously. But, you failed to provide any actual proof that this person has an educated take on the situation. You lost standing by trying to make it seem credible when it may or may not be.

Had you not mentioned the alleged credentials and just said that you thought it was an interesting viewpoint, you actually would havE come off better than you did.

Okay. I explained why I didn’t write his name in a post above.

 

[elle21]

Good for him and his opinion but it is not worth a nickel more than any poster on the DIS.

L

I guess in the same way that any opinion on covid-19 isn’t worth a nickel more than anyone else’s right? I mean every opinion out there is just that...an opinion. some opinions come from professional people who have more experience with science or economics, but they are just opinions. So maybe we shouldn’t listen to any of them.
I’m sorry that post seemed to make you so angry.

 

[CarolAnn856]

Okay. I explained why I didn’t write his name in a post above.

I still stand by my post. No reasonable person would think a FB post that some random person on the Dis supposedly saw on her friend’s wall is credible. The difference with discussing other poster’s opinions here is that most of us aren’t claiming to be experts. You’re making a claim you just can’t substantiate.

 

[elle21]

I still stand by my post. No reasonable person would think a FB post that some random person on the Dis supposedly saw on her friend’s wall is credible. The difference with discussing other poster’s opinions here is that most of us aren’t claiming to be experts. You’re making a claim you just can’t substantiate.

That’s fine. You can ignore the information. I’m not sure how many people would have read that with the guys name listed and suddenly said “oh this is legit.” if you’d like to private message me I can give the person’s name and you can look him up.

 

[elle21]

I still stand by my post. No reasonable person would think a FB post that some random person on the Dis supposedly saw on her friend’s wall is credible. The difference with discussing other poster’s opinions here is that most of us aren’t claiming to be experts. You’re making a claim you just can’t substantiate.

I’d also love to share the mini documentary of the farmer (friend of a friend. Not sure if you will believe me or find that credible) and his warning that our food supply will be cut off if something doesn’t change soon. The farmers are about to go out of business.

 

[kandb]

For people who think the US will have a bad second wave of this virus, do you think we will only get a second wave AFTER China and Europe get a second wave first? Is it possible for those countries who experienced the pandemic first to not have a second wave but the US still get one?

 

[Heather07438]

I guess in the same way that any opinion on covid-19 isn’t worth a nickel more than anyone else’s right? I mean every opinion out there is just that...an opinion. some opinions come from professional people who have more experience with science or economics, but they are just opinions. So maybe we shouldn’t listen to any of them.
I’m sorry that post seemed to make you so angry.

The way he offered his opinion bothered me. If he's a professor you'd think he'd be able to theoritically answer some of his own questions better.