This coordinated messaging combined with the kind of people who are showing up with guns to “protest” in Michigan makes me think there may be a tipping point coming sooner rather than later.
What happens when the Ingraham/Hannity/Jones/Doocy’s of the world convince a few hundred thousand people to openly defy the stay at home orders?
How about “our health system is not going to collapse in the next month”?
IANAD - but from what I’ve read, the reason why vaccines for colds and flu are so difficult is because of the rapid mutations these particular viruses undergo. Cold virus mutates extremely fast and seasonal flu on a rather predictable schedule - although they sometimes get it wrong and pick the wrong strain to vaccinate against which is why some seasons are harder hit than others.
All RNA-based viruses mutate and evidence so far suggests that SARS-COV2 has a relatively low mutation rate. So far they’ve identified only 11 significant base pair mutations among 8 different strains. This should make finding an effective vaccine relatively easy and more importantly, stable.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/07/health/coronavirus-mutations-analysis/index.html
Just stop that.
How else will we know that we’re overreacting to the pandemic… /s
The best way to determine that is to look at the trends in ICU bed usage by covid patients. I’m not sure that those numbers are readily available to the public.
We may of course see some hospitals close for good because they aren’t allowed to admit anyone but covid patients or life threatening emergencies. And we may see a lot of patients die or suffer serious reverses because they are not in either of those two categories. Those count toward the collapse of the health system too.
Every time we decide (for example) where to place fire stations, we are placing a dollar value on human life.
New York and California are both states with large urban populations. They both have extensive travel networks which brought many people in from China and Europe. They both have activist governors who got out in front of Trump on this issue.
As of April 16:
New York - 11,530 cases and 821 deaths per million
California - 706 cases and 24 deaths per million
Now, if you want to believe that this is just a matter of chance, and that it easily could have gone the other way, go for it. I do not believe that.
Nice deflection. I notice you didn’t answer the question though…
Here’s the wikipedia answer, didn’t have time to weigh the different values on other sites.
The actuarial value of a human life comes in at about $10 million from this article.
The problem with your question (How much is your wife or your childrens lives worth to you?) is that it’s designed to prompt an answer of “infinity”. Now, I would spend every penny I have to save my child’s life, but I don’t have a claim on an infinite amount of society’s resources to save her.
Personally, my wife and I are both in the high risk group for covid. But I don’t demand that my kids and grandkids give up everything they have to increase my odds by a few percentage points.
I am sure this is not the right metric, and matter of factly, those numbers don’t really exist anyway. Germany is actually working on it, but this isn’t an implemented policy.
ETA to clarify: to include number of used ICUs in the statistics sent to the RKI is not implemented policy.
The metric makes not much sense anyway, since you would have a two-weeks time lag with possibly exponentially growing case numbers to include!
Also the number is very much dependant on the age groups etc. infected. Modeling this statistically is hard.
What Germany has, and the US has not, is an idea of the actual case numbers. An IDEA. Not the true number.
It’s true that we don’t know how many more asymptomatic or recovered cases are out there. Could be in the millions. But I think it’s plausible that most patients who need ICU level care are there or have been there, and that number is not growing exponentially. Those are the patients who could crash the health system, and outside of a few hard hit areas that just has not happened.
Again, the idea of shutting down large categories of businesses was to shallow out the curve and prevent such an ICU crash. It’s not possible to maintain that shutdown until the number of cases reaches 0.00.
I don’t believe that and did not indicate otherwise.
But rural America isn’t nearly as isolated from the urban centers as people like to believe, though. We also have tested so little that we actually have no idea who is actually sick and where they are. That’s why it would be incredibly irresponsible to “open” the economy until we have wide spread testing. 
Are we really doing that? Why should we make ourselves into fucking commodities?
She (and my child, and everyone’s child) are not wigets. They are people. We are a wealthy enough country that could have weathered this economically, if our president had not denied it was a problem and if he’d kept in place measures that previous administrations had built to deal with pandemics. What we can’t afford to keep doing as a nation is keep putting the onus on individuals to pay for the exorbitant price of health care. No other developed nation does so to such an extent that millions of people are in medical debt on a regular basis. THAT does not make economic sense, since are economy has such strong dependence on consumers.
Are you kidding?
No one here is advocating for that, but we don’t have testing, we don’t know who has it, and who don’t know how is going to get it. UNTIL we have more testing and a means tracing cases and tracking cases, we can not open the economy. Unless you’re a fan of mass graves and overwhelmed hospitals.
The difference between ‘plausible’ & actually PROBABLE in this case is like freakin’ light years…
Listen, I’ve been patient until now, but if you insist that someone is claiming we need an R0 = 0 you are driving trollies. I certainly didn’t claim that.
Also, stop throwing around numbers. Until we haven’t enough ELISA testing this is just FUD. We can discuss it, but it cannot inform our decisions.
We need to flatten the curve. Worldwide. If your wife is working in healthcare, she will understand why.
This will be hard.
But there should be.
It’s hard to break down quite all of the ways in which this is wrong. So I’ll just leave these two tidbits in here about 1. what happens when you eliminate restrictions too soon; and 2. The extent of the underestimate of the number of low symptomatic/asymptomatic infections there are out there.
OK, point taken. Since you are throwing around terms like “R0=0”, I’ll grant that you’ve studied this stuff. What are the levels of infection at which it would be reasonable to reopen things like
(a) gardening departments in big box stores
(b) nail salons
(c) hockey games
Do you have metrics in mind, or is everything “until further notice”?
Does that mean every country in the world has to lock down until the country in the very worst shape has solved the problem?
Minnesota is a lot farther from New York than Germany is from Italy.
So far, it’s been pretty doggone easy on those who generate income by sitting on their butts in front of a computer, or for those who get paid for each word they type and upload to a news site, or those who read those words while sitting facing a camera.
It is hard for lots of others, though.
I am not interested to play number games. Especially if you bring up cosmetics and sports. It shows you are not taking this seriously.
This is not a game. It is real. As you know. You are affected, as you told upthread. No games. Don’t try to play me.
I’ll break it down to you in the shortest form, and please note that this means it is absolutely oversimplified.
We do not need a full lockdown all of the times. But we are at the beginning, not the end, and not the middle, of a pandemic. And we do not know enough about the virus itself, the illness caused by it, how to help people who are ill, etc., to have a perfect plan.
The currently best chance our societies have is slow down the infection rate and use the time wisely.
You already know how to do the first part.
An effective medicine would also help a lot. I think remdesivir is the best we’ve got so far, but it’s still pretty experimental.
When we have more ICUs and other required equipment to deal with any surge? How’s that for a metric. Right now, the US isn’t even able to do testing beyond less than one percent of the population. I guess until then Chetwick in Finance is gonna have to take a hair cut on his ‘investments.’
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