Coronavirus/COVID-19, Thread 2

[theman]

Cape Cod Field Hospital Closes Without Seeing Any Coronavirus Patients

https://boston.cbslocal.com/2020/05/08/coronavirus-covid-19-joint-base-cape-cod-field-hospital-closed/

[SuperDeluxe]

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It doesn't take a brain surgeon to infer that opening the economy will have a predictable effect in terms of contagion.

Nor does it take a noble winning economist to know that keeping the economy shut down will have terrible effects on unemployment. It is a balancing act. And before you say lives are more important than money, let me point out that 20% of suicides are related to unemployment.

Politicians are in an impossible position right now -- any decision that they make will unswervingly send people to the abattoir. I don't envy any of them, though I have more respect for those who don't sacrifice anybody for the economy by assuring them that it's safe to go back to work/school when it is not. But that's just me.

[Parliament10]

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[Bad-Thoma]

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It doesn't take a brain surgeon to infer that opening the economy will have a predictable effect in terms of contagion.

Nor does it take a noble winning economist to know that keeping the economy shut down will have terrible effects on unemployment. It is a balancing act. And before you say lives are more important than money, let me point out that 20% of suicides are related to unemployment.

Ok, so in the United States in 2018 (a higher than average year) there were around 48k suicides, so 20% (I'm not fact checking that number) of that for a year would be for 9.6k. For simplicity lets call it 10k. Coronavirus in April alone killed almost 60k US citizens, and that was in it's first real explosion month and amidst widespread social distancing. Suicide is horrible, I've lost more than one loved one to it, but as a talking point in the argument vs social distancing it's a weak point at best. Even with the inevitability of suicide rates increasing they aren't going to sniff the death toll that unchecked corona virus would cause. Some opening has to happen but people really need to chill the **** out about it, it needs to be done patiently and with a plan to reduce large outbreaks. The way to minimize the death toll rests largely on social distancing and ppe along with providing the people that can't work with a level of support that keeps them from being so desperate taking their own lives seems like an answer.

[Fencer reregistered]

I had something happen a decade ago that happened to few other people -- my parents died, both of natural causes, two days apart.

That kind of thing has suddenly become a lot more common.

[Parliament10]

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[Slax]

It doesn't take a brain surgeon to infer that opening the economy will have a predictable effect in terms of contagion.

Nor does it take a noble winning economist to know that keeping the economy shut down will have terrible effects on unemployment. It is a balancing act. And before you say lives are more important than money, let me point out that 20% of suicides are related to unemployment.

Politicians are in an impossible position right now -- any decision that they make will unswervingly send people to the abattoir. I don't envy any of them, though I have more respect for those who don't sacrifice anybody for the economy by assuring them that it's safe to go back to work/school when it is not. But that's just me.

There are other countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Germany, etc that invested serious resources into high capacity testing, contact tracing, surveillance, and mitigation. Those countries have already started opening large portions of their economies and societies back up, but without deadly consequences, because unlike us they figured out how to get the virus under control. For whatever reason, the US just decided they would not bother with all this stuff, so now we are faced with an unnecessary choice of either a ruinous plague or a ruinous economic collapse. Lovely.

[theman]

It doesn't take a brain surgeon to infer that opening the economy will have a predictable effect in terms of contagion.

Nor does it take a noble winning economist to know that keeping the economy shut down will have terrible effects on unemployment. It is a balancing act. And before you say lives are more important than money, let me point out that 20% of suicides are related to unemployment.

Ok, so in the United States in 2018 (a higher than average year) there were around 48k suicides, so 20% (I'm not fact checking that number) of that for a year would be for 9.6k. For simplicity lets call it 10k. Coronavirus in April alone killed almost 60k US citizens, and that was in it's first real explosion month and amidst widespread social distancing. Suicide is horrible, I've lost more than one loved one to it, but as a talking point in the argument vs social distancing it's a weak point at best. Even with the inevitability of suicide rates increasing they aren't going to sniff the death toll that unchecked corona virus would cause. Some opening has to happen but people really need to chill the **** out about it, it needs to be done patiently and with a plan to reduce large outbreaks. The way to minimize the death toll rests largely on social distancing and ppe along with providing the people that can't work with a level of support that keeps them from being so desperate taking their own lives seems like an answer.

Fair enough but I in no way implied that the number of suicides would equal the number of corona deaths. Only that unemployment is not only an economic issue.

If we triple the unemployment rate can we expect a tripling in the suicide rate?

I just don't want to see the same people who are complaining about opening the economy complaining about high unemployment numbers. Because if you do not let people work you can not have a strong economy.

[theman]

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Does Marty know that the Gay Pride Parade takes place in June?

[Bad-Thoma]

Nor does it take a noble winning economist to know that keeping the economy shut down will have terrible effects on unemployment. It is a balancing act. And before you say lives are more important than money, let me point out that 20% of suicides are related to unemployment.

Ok, so in the United States in 2018 (a higher than average year) there were around 48k suicides, so 20% (I'm not fact checking that number) of that for a year would be for 9.6k. For simplicity lets call it 10k. Coronavirus in April alone killed almost 60k US citizens, and that was in it's first real explosion month and amidst widespread social distancing. Suicide is horrible, I've lost more than one loved one to it, but as a talking point in the argument vs social distancing it's a weak point at best. Even with the inevitability of suicide rates increasing they aren't going to sniff the death toll that unchecked corona virus would cause. Some opening has to happen but people really need to chill the **** out about it, it needs to be done patiently and with a plan to reduce large outbreaks. The way to minimize the death toll rests largely on social distancing and ppe along with providing the people that can't work with a level of support that keeps them from being so desperate taking their own lives seems like an answer.

Fair enough but I in no way implied that the number of suicides would equal the number of corona deaths. Only that unemployment is not only an economic issue.

If we triple the unemployment rate can we expect a tripling in the suicide rate?

I just don't want to see the same people who are complaining about opening the economy complaining about high unemployment numbers. Because if you do not let people work you can not have a strong economy.

If you tripled the unemployment rate and the suicide rate went hand in hand then you'd be looking at 30k deaths vs 720k from covid in a year IF the covid deaths per month stayed the same, and they obviously won't if the economy is opened too quickly and without careful contingency plans to close it back up when the inevitable outbreaks happen. All of these numbers are oversimplified takes on a complex problem but the suicide impact argument really doesn't hold water. It's a tragedy in it's own right but could be better addressed by supporting people that are most vulnerable than by sending them back to non-essential jobs. As for a strong economy, that's just out of the question until a vaccine is readily available. There is no winning in this situation, just damage control until it's over then picking up the pieces and possibly learning so the next time around we are better prepared.

[Bad-Thoma]

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Does Marty know that the Gay Pride Parade takes place in June?

What's that have to do with anything?

[Parliament10]

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Does Marty know that the Gay Pride Parade takes place in June?

You have a History of Prejudicial Posts.
Best to Stop Now.

~ Parl

[Slax]

Nor does it take a noble winning economist to know that keeping the economy shut down will have terrible effects on unemployment. It is a balancing act. And before you say lives are more important than money, let me point out that 20% of suicides are related to unemployment.

Ok, so in the United States in 2018 (a higher than average year) there were around 48k suicides, so 20% (I'm not fact checking that number) of that for a year would be for 9.6k. For simplicity lets call it 10k. Coronavirus in April alone killed almost 60k US citizens, and that was in it's first real explosion month and amidst widespread social distancing. Suicide is horrible, I've lost more than one loved one to it, but as a talking point in the argument vs social distancing it's a weak point at best. Even with the inevitability of suicide rates increasing they aren't going to sniff the death toll that unchecked corona virus would cause. Some opening has to happen but people really need to chill the **** out about it, it needs to be done patiently and with a plan to reduce large outbreaks. The way to minimize the death toll rests largely on social distancing and ppe along with providing the people that can't work with a level of support that keeps them from being so desperate taking their own lives seems like an answer.

Fair enough but I in no way implied that the number of suicides would equal the number of corona deaths. Only that unemployment is not only an economic issue.

If we triple the unemployment rate can we expect a tripling in the suicide rate?

I just don't want to see the same people who are complaining about opening the economy complaining about high unemployment numbers. Because if you do not let people work you can not have a strong economy.

It's not lost on me that we are doing incredible damage to our society by closing ourselves away in our home for months on end. I want the economy to thrive! And I don't see this as a liberal vs conservative issue. There is nothing liberal about being locked in our homes forever unable to work or socialize, and there is nothing conservative about recklessly ignoring a deadly pandemic and allowing bodies to pile up. Smart experts from across the political spectrum have come up with dozens of plans for what it might look like to open the economy without perpetual mass death. As an example, here's a plan from the right-wing think tank AEI, which was written by Scott Gottlieb, who Trump picked to run the FDA for two years: https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/national-coronavirus-response-a-road-map-to-reopening/. The upsetting thing is that think tanks, academia, and politicians have churned out a couple dozen plans just like these, and there has been zero movement to do pretty much anything on them, even as other countries like Germany and Taiwan have already implemented similar ideas and now reap the rewards of reopening their economies while having less disease and death than we have here in the US. Heck, the White House even put out its own guidance of milestones for moving to reopen, which was kind of just "wait until your case counts start going down, then gradually phase in more activities, shutting back down when case counts go up again" - and you know what, that's an unambitious plan that straddled the line of not doing a great job at either suppressing the disease or reopening our economy because it didn't really provide a path for mass testing or contact tracing or quarantine or anything, but it at least had the merits of providing some structured way of thinking of how reopening might work and could be phased in over time. But at this point, it's clear that nobody is taking that plan seriously in part because the government has decided to abandon it in its messaging.

So what did we do over the last month and a half to prepare to reopen? What the heck are we even planning to do now? The fact is that right now, our national vision for "reopening" is being defined by a bunch of screaming idiots with swastikas and guns swarming state government buildings, instead of by serious people like Scott Gottlieb.

[threrf23]

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I'm reluctant to risk turning this into political debate. But I will say that, of all the things we could be spending other people's money on right now, people making an annual income of $100k do not need an extra $2k per month. Likewise, even those making a $40k salary don't need an extra $2k per month in addition to the $4k-5k some are currently making off of unemployment.

IMO, money should be spent on: free and widespread testing and tracking and/or treating so economies can reopen, making sure those who truly need support, i.e. families on the verge of poverty, don't fall over the edge, and are receive to receive stimulus money regardless of their status as a tax filer, and funding small businesses so that fewer people lose their jobs, and corporate America can't use the pandemic as a means to establish quasi monopolies.

[claycarver]

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51979654

Is the virus bringing forward deaths by a few months?
Every year, about 600,000 people in the UK die. And the frail and elderly are most at risk, just as they are if they have coronavirus.

Nearly 10% of people aged over 80 will die in the next year, Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter at the University of Cambridge points out, and the risk of them dying if infected with coronavirus is almost exactly the same.

That does not mean there will be no extra deaths - but, Sir David says, there will be "a substantial overlap".

"Many people who die of Covid [the disease caused by coronavirus] would have died anyway within a short period," he says.

Knowing exactly how many is impossible to tell at this stage.

Prof Neil Ferguson, the lead modeller at Imperial College London, has suggested it could be up to two-thirds.

I remember reading this back in April, and also saw a good response by a skeptical actuary here: https://www.actuaries.org.uk/news-and-insights/news/what-difference-word-makes

But the life expectancy of these non-athletes is more ‘athletic’ than you’d think. Even assuming no mortality improvements, to stack the game against them more, a 70-year old of diabetic obese male smoker has a life expectancy in the region of 8-9 years; an 80-year old has a life expectancy of 4-5 years. If we take away the diabetes and instead assume COPD, or a heart attack a few years ago, we get roughly the same results.

Yes, you say, but life expectancy is an average and there’s a lot of variation around that average. That’s true, of course, but the odds of our reference group surviving the year are good. Only around 1-in-20 of such 70-year olds, or 1-in-7 of such 80-year olds, would be expected to die within twelve months.

These are examples of people who have a respectable number of years to look forward to; they are not ‘the walking dead’, and if they die with COVID-19 raging in their bodies, we can accurately say that they died of COVID-19, and were probably not going to die this year in any case.

For the record, I don't know which one of these assessments is correct, but I think the fact we're seeing large numbers of excess deaths in places that were hit hard (eg nyc) makes me lean toward the interpretation that most of these people weren't on the verge of dying anyway.

Nursing home residents have an average life expectancy of 5 months from the time they enter the home. There's no other group with a higher concentration of people within the last few months of life. I don't think it's an accident that about half of the deaths are coming from this small slice of the population.

[claycarver]

Nor does it take a noble winning economist to know that keeping the economy shut down will have terrible effects on unemployment. It is a balancing act. And before you say lives are more important than money, let me point out that 20% of suicides are related to unemployment.

Ok, so in the United States in 2018 (a higher than average year) there were around 48k suicides, so 20% (I'm not fact checking that number) of that for a year would be for 9.6k. For simplicity lets call it 10k. Coronavirus in April alone killed almost 60k US citizens, and that was in it's first real explosion month and amidst widespread social distancing. Suicide is horrible, I've lost more than one loved one to it, but as a talking point in the argument vs social distancing it's a weak point at best. Even with the inevitability of suicide rates increasing they aren't going to sniff the death toll that unchecked corona virus would cause. Some opening has to happen but people really need to chill the **** out about it, it needs to be done patiently and with a plan to reduce large outbreaks. The way to minimize the death toll rests largely on social distancing and ppe along with providing the people that can't work with a level of support that keeps them from being so desperate taking their own lives seems like an answer.

Fair enough but I in no way implied that the number of suicides would equal the number of corona deaths. Only that unemployment is not only an economic issue.

If we triple the unemployment rate can we expect a tripling in the suicide rate?

I just don't want to see the same people who are complaining about opening the economy complaining about high unemployment numbers. Because if you do not let people work you can not have a strong economy.

It's not just that.

The United State generates a ton of resources around the world for economic development and health initiatives. Cut off that spigot and you're looking at a multiplier effect of deaths in third world countries.

The health of people strapped to their house is absolutely declining. It's a meme now about how fat people are getting. Personally, I had gotten up to 3 miles a day in the pool and I was in the best shape of my life. That's slipping away. The health effects on the broader population is a health issue.

This shutdown is bad for a lot of people. The money vs lives line is false.

[theman]

Ok, so in the United States in 2018 (a higher than average year) there were around 48k suicides, so 20% (I'm not fact checking that number) of that for a year would be for 9.6k. For simplicity lets call it 10k. Coronavirus in April alone killed almost 60k US citizens, and that was in it's first real explosion month and amidst widespread social distancing. Suicide is horrible, I've lost more than one loved one to it, but as a talking point in the argument vs social distancing it's a weak point at best. Even with the inevitability of suicide rates increasing they aren't going to sniff the death toll that unchecked corona virus would cause. Some opening has to happen but people really need to chill the **** out about it, it needs to be done patiently and with a plan to reduce large outbreaks. The way to minimize the death toll rests largely on social distancing and ppe along with providing the people that can't work with a level of support that keeps them from being so desperate taking their own lives seems like an answer.

Fair enough but I in no way implied that the number of suicides would equal the number of corona deaths. Only that unemployment is not only an economic issue.

If we triple the unemployment rate can we expect a tripling in the suicide rate?

I just don't want to see the same people who are complaining about opening the economy complaining about high unemployment numbers. Because if you do not let people work you can not have a strong economy.

It's not just that.

The United State generates a ton of resources around the world for economic development and health initiatives. Cut off that spigot and you're looking at a multiplier effect of deaths in third world countries.

The health of people strapped to their house is absolutely declining. It's a meme now about how fat people are getting. Personally, I had gotten up to 3 miles a day in the pool and I was in the best shape of my life. That's slipping away. The health effects on the broader population is a health issue.

This shutdown is bad for a lot of people. The money vs lives line is false.

Good news from the internet of flab: Data from connected scales suggests Americans aren’t piling on lots of pounds while in coronavirus isolation.

Withings, the maker of popular internet-connected scales and other body-measurement devices, studied what happened to the weight of some 450,000 of its American users between March 22 – when New York ordered people home – and April 18. Despite concerns about gaining a “quarantine 15,” the average user gained 0.21 pounds during that month. Some 37% of people gained more than a pound.

https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2020/may/06/digital-scale-maker-finds-its-customers-are-mainta/

[Slax]

Ok, so in the United States in 2018 (a higher than average year) there were around 48k suicides, so 20% (I'm not fact checking that number) of that for a year would be for 9.6k. For simplicity lets call it 10k. Coronavirus in April alone killed almost 60k US citizens, and that was in it's first real explosion month and amidst widespread social distancing. Suicide is horrible, I've lost more than one loved one to it, but as a talking point in the argument vs social distancing it's a weak point at best. Even with the inevitability of suicide rates increasing they aren't going to sniff the death toll that unchecked corona virus would cause. Some opening has to happen but people really need to chill the **** out about it, it needs to be done patiently and with a plan to reduce large outbreaks. The way to minimize the death toll rests largely on social distancing and ppe along with providing the people that can't work with a level of support that keeps them from being so desperate taking their own lives seems like an answer.

Fair enough but I in no way implied that the number of suicides would equal the number of corona deaths. Only that unemployment is not only an economic issue.

If we triple the unemployment rate can we expect a tripling in the suicide rate?

I just don't want to see the same people who are complaining about opening the economy complaining about high unemployment numbers. Because if you do not let people work you can not have a strong economy.

It's not just that.

The United State generates a ton of resources around the world for economic development and health initiatives. Cut off that spigot and you're looking at a multiplier effect of deaths in third world countries.

The health of people strapped to their house is absolutely declining. It's a meme now about how fat people are getting. Personally, I had gotten up to 3 miles a day in the pool and I was in the best shape of my life. That's slipping away. The health effects on the broader population is a health issue.

This shutdown is bad for a lot of people. The money vs lives line is false.

I agree. Money vs lives is false. The economy is going to reopen eventually, no way around it. The choice is do we open with a plan in place to protect people's lives, or do we just do nothing and let people die?

We are the wealthiest, most technologically advanced, most innovative country in the world. We are capable of putting in the hard work and smarts and resources to accomplish what Germany, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, and other countries did over the last couple months to allow them to start opening up their economies without risking lives: wait for a reduced case count, ramp up mass testing, do contact tracing, quarantine the infected. We are also capable of just going back to the way things were two months ago, seeding a dozen New Yorks across this country, and letting millions die, probably forcing us to go back into shutdown when hospitals become overloaded. I think it's pretty sad that anyone thinks the latter is the more acceptable option. In reality, we will probably do something in between the two: fail to ramp up testing and contact tracing enough to safely get the economy going, but also not decide to commit collective societal suicide by going full tilt, thus having a weak economy and muddling through a bunch of deaths for the next year and a half until we can scale vaccine manufacturing. It's about as sad and disappointed as I've ever felt about my country, knowing that this is the choice we are making.

[claycarver]

I agree. Money vs lives is false. The economy is going to reopen eventually, no way around it. The choice is do we open with a plan in place to protect people's lives, or do we just do nothing and let people die?

We are the wealthiest, most technologically advanced, most innovative country in the world. We are capable of putting in the hard work and smarts and resources to accomplish what Germany, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, and other countries did over the last couple months to allow them to start opening up their economies without risking lives: wait for a reduced case count, ramp up mass testing, do contact tracing, quarantine the infected. We are also capable of just going back to the way things were two months ago, seeding a dozen New Yorks across this country, and letting millions die, probably forcing us to go back into shutdown when hospitals become overloaded. I think it's pretty sad that anyone thinks the latter is the more acceptable option. In reality, we will probably do something in between the two: fail to ramp up testing and contact tracing enough to safely get the economy going, but also not decide to commit collective societal suicide by going full tilt, thus having a weak economy and muddling through a bunch of deaths for the next year and a half until we can scale vaccine manufacturing. It's about as sad and disappointed as I've ever felt about my country, knowing that this is the choice we are making.

Germany just produced a study that concluded there are likely 10 times the number of infected people in their country than they realized. And this makes sense...they've only tested 2.7 million of their 83 million residents. This is a higher percentage than the 4 million tests preformed in the US, but it is not a magical percentage that gives them awareness of who is safe and who isn't.

This means they, like us, are woefully unaware of which people are actually infected by the virus. They do not have a handle on who is infected now so it is impossible for the infected to be quarantined.

We'll all be muddling through. But I think you're underestimating people. Most of the US isn't forced into each other's personal space like they are in NYC. Nursing homes will remain quarantined, cutting the risk of increased deaths in half. People will stand further apart. Most people will not return to random hand shakes. They will use up an ungodly amount of hand sanitizer. High risk individuals will take more drastic precautions. Children, who are usually engines of infection transmission, will not change their behaviors as much but they seem to be terrible vehicles for spread of this virus.

Without shutting down our lives, most people will adjust in ways that avoid the outcome you fear.

[GregB]

It doesn't take a brain surgeon to infer that opening the economy will have a predictable effect in terms of contagion.

Nor does it take a noble winning economist to know that keeping the economy shut down will have terrible effects on unemployment. It is a balancing act. And before you say lives are more important than money, let me point out that 20% of suicides are related to unemployment.

Politicians are in an impossible position right now -- any decision that they make will unswervingly send people to the abattoir. I don't envy any of them, though I have more respect for those who don't sacrifice anybody for the economy by assuring them that it's safe to go back to work/school when it is not. But that's just me.

Politicians wouldn’t be in an impossible situation if they just did the right thing by their people like other countries. Mortgage and Rent should have been waived covered for 2-3 months. Instead we guarantee trillions of dollars to corporations who stock buy backs put them in the position to be at Risk. Because they know when it comes down to the American people’s taxes will bail them out for their corporate greed.

No one should have to worry about losing their home and going belly up during this time or have to work to survive at the expense of risking their life.