That’s the false dichotomy that Republicans have been presenting. The economy is being trashed, in the absence of sufficient government support (of the sort we’re seeing in actually developed nations). Re-opening doesn’t reduce that, it makes it worse. (Short-sighted Republican governors have been pushing to reopen their states not to help businesses, but to make sure when those workers don’t want to return to work, when those businesses fail, the state won’t be responsible. They’re not looking down the road far enough to see how collapsing their state economies will bite them on the ass.) In states that are opening, people aren’t patronizing most businesses enough to keep them open. Once the next wave of deaths hit, businesses will be hit again, and we’ll have the economic impact of the deaths themselves, which isn’t minor.
Herd immunity requires millions of deaths. That’s a fundamental, unavoidable consequence of adopting the approach of “herd immunity.” Percent of population required for significant “herd immunity” times the virus’s death rate = millions of dead people. That’s assuming a best-case scenario for that approach, which absolutely isn’t happening. If everyone gets sick at once, we’re potentially looking at tens of millions of deaths, because then you get to see the consequences of what happens when hospitals are actually overwhelmed. There are a whole lot of people who don’t need respirators but do need some medical attention to survive, at a level they won’t get if more than a few percent of the population is sick at once.
(I see some people talking about achieving herd immunity by magically making sure that high-risk people are protected and don’t get sick. Even if this were possible, which it isn’t, leaving aside the tens of thousand of healthy young people who would die, the health of Americans is so poor that the percentage of low-risk individuals in the US population is small enough that we couldn’t actually achieve herd immunity if only they got infected.)
Most of the states where the “protests” are most obnoxious are states with governors who have done exactly that.
Pretending that these “protests” would respond to scientific reasoning also pretends that they are grass-roots. They aren’t. They are manufactured in the grist mill of racism and greed.
Well, I mean, you can, but it’s utterly pointless. Each lockdown should, at a minimum, be two full cycles, so four weeks. Ricocheting between open and closed every few days because you’re bored playing with the cat really isn’t going to help. At best it would merely add a facade of health-theatre.
Again, this needs to be tempered by what it is you value.
Also, this …
I agree that we are stuck with two crappy choices: 1) trash the economy or 2) cause more deaths.
… is incorrect. The real choices are
trash the economy, or
cause more death while trashing the economy but giving the appearance of saving it (whatever that means)
The economy as we knew it at the end of last year is rooted either way. That is your starting point.
Hi! I live in North Carolina. Back in April our governor went on camera for a live press conference to announce that reopening would be pushed back to early May. During this presentation he and the state Department of Health and Human Services actually laid out the metrics and the trends required for them to allow the beginning of reopening, as well as provide an idea of what there metrics should look like at the various stages of reopening.
Picked up Chinese food the other day. Heard conversations such as: “It’s not a big deal, this is being blown out of proportion, it’s a deep state conspiracy, just old people are dying who cares?”. PA is really showcasing the stupid.
I stand corrected on North Carolina and the other states that have produced similar reopening schedules. While not all of the ones with protests have done so, and I was thinking of a more stat-based approach, there are indeed some detailed plans being put into motion.
In fact, to help corroborate, there’s a pretty good list of where each state stands on those at CNN:
Just because the economy we’ve been building over the last couple of generations doesn’t work when millions of Americans are temporarily unemployed doesn’t mean that we can’t create one that does.
Part of moving forward means envisioning and accepting a future that looks different from the past.
i really think the same wealthy whites who got trump elected and who have been pushing the gop further and further rightward are doing the math right now.
if we establish a temporary ubi, they’re screwed.
if we extend medicare for all, they’re screwed.
if we suspend rent and mortgage payments, they’re royally screwed.
if we fully fund unemployment and keep the biggest businesses shut down while monetarily supporting the mom and pop sized ones, they’re royally and completely screwed.
their job right now is to extract the most wealth in the shortest amount of time before any new controls are put in place. and, or before the day to day american economy shuts down. whichever comes first.
as it stands, only the biggest best funded companies will survive this bungled and mismanaged response. so they’re going to do everything in their power to get through this. that collective action by the white and wealthy is funneled through this administration. which pushes the response to be even worse. rinse and repeat.
there were two economies before this. there will be two after this. and they will likely be ever so much farther apart than before.
“The idea is to slowly expose people to the virus so that we can develop herd immunity without overwhelming the hospitals.”
you are aware that a not inconsequential percentage of people who recover don’t seem to really have much in the way of immunity, right? and that people who do recover have some rather serious chronic health problems like damaged lungs, hearts and kidneys? maybe, just maybe, we should be a little more cautious about a disease that humanity has 6 months of experience with? we can figure out how to pay people’s bills. we can’t figure out how to resurrect the dead, or to fix damaged organs on a colossal scale.
let’s, for once, worry more about lives than dollars. let’s remember that society and the economy are not the same thing, and that the former matters a whole hell of a lot more than the latter.
The people screaming for a premature reopening aren’t poor workers suffering from “economic anxiety”. They’re financially privileged white people who are pissed that their serfs aren’t available to serve them.
A large theoretical literature shows how to derive R0 for different infections, often implying that the (1 - 1/R_0) threshold be used as a target for immunization coverage and that its achievement can lead to eradication of target infections [3, 12, 14].
The article goes on to explain that this is the minimum-- as this assumes 100% effectiveness, and perfectly random sampling.
Of course, you don’t need to calculate (1 - 1/R_0) to understand that this is a deadly solution. But plugging in “realistic” values and coming up with (f(2.5)=60 %) or f(5.8)=82%) might be a way of engaging an audience’s tendency to believe more precise numbers.
(Note that since the whole point of herd immunity is to relax the quarantine, you can’t really use quarantined supressed values of R_0 in this equation.)
I think that’s absolutely correct. But it’s not just providing survival food and survival shelter to a large portion of the country. It’s a year, or maybe two, of no sit down restaurants, no trips to the beach, no concerts, no baseball games, no birthday parties, no family reunions. Or maybe longer - anyone who says there will be a completely effective vaccine or treatment in X months is pulling a number out of their ass.
We can survive the economic hit. But not so much the lack of human contact and interaction.
That should be sufficient to achieve herd immunity. For example, if the transmission rate without a vaccine is 3.0 and the vaccine works 80% of the time, the transmission rate then would become 0.6 and the epidemic would peter out.
Then we tried to save lives and unfortunately it didn’t work, as opposed to we worried too much about money and maintaining the socioeconomic status quo and a lot of people unnecessarily died. My thinking is that, given that there are infected that are asymptomatic and a considerable number that recover without medical intervention, immune systems can be trained to fight the virus, so a vaccine should be possible.
