Why do you consider me selfish?

amother

Tue, May 12 2020, 12:59 am

amother [ Orchid ] wrote:

And what exactly has time gotten us so far? We're more than two months into this. The Chinese experts are more than 4 months into this. People on ima love saying "well if we just have more time". All time has gotten us thus far is a bunch of experts with a thousand different opinions and no actual consensus on anything that works or doesn't work.

First it was we need a ventilator for every person, now its maybe ventilators are actually hurting people and we should just put them in a prone position.
First it was masks do more harm than good, now it's you should pretty much always wear a mask.
First it was well the virus doesn't harm children, now maybe it does, but maybe only children when series underlying conditions.
First Hydroxycloroquine was a miracle, then it was more harmful then helpful, now maybe if you give it early enough it can help. Maybe.
We have a treatment that is at best marginally effective at not even decreasing the death rate, but decreasing the time to recovery. I wouldn't exactly call that a slam dunk.
And you can find a so-called "expert" who agrees or disagrees presently with every single thing above.
Science is great when it works. The problem with science is that it takes years to prove even a simple hypothesis or map out a single virus. You don't have years when you're dealing with the destruction of the entire world economy, plunging hundreds of millions of people into starvation and poverty, creating a mental health crisis on top of your public health crises, and generally just destroying the lives and futures of the 7 billion people on this planet who aren't going to die.

E.x.a.c.t.l.y.
Even though I questioned this whole thing from the beginning, I went with the flow and did what I had to.

But now that the predictions keep changing, and they still keep on postponing normal life, adding regulations, posting headlines every day with new speculations, not keeping to their original plan...

I'm kinda fed up. Add to that half of society that's not following anyway. It makes you think how much the govt controls you. If they really cared about us, they would shut down EVERYTHING and send free masks, gloves, & sanitizers to every home...
But instead they kept places running..and gave us no peace with this drama.

I know I'm not the only one. The local UPS guy was coming every day for the past month wearing a mask . This week, he had enough..Its off...And he has no issues walking between us.

ora_43

Tue, May 12 2020, 2:01 am

amother [ Orchid ] wrote:

How are all of these things not examples of time helping? Everything here is an example of how understanding of the virus has improved.

"No actual consensus" - it takes time and testing and research to figure out what's going on. Even for experts. But I don't agree that there's no consensus. Eg on hydroxycloroquine - it was Trump who suggested it was a miracle, not experts, who only ever said that more testing was needed. There were also very few people saying masks do more harm than good at any stage; several countries were wearing masks from the beginning.

Not that waiting for more research is the main benefit of time. The author of that article was saying that the main benefit of time is preparedness.

DrMom

Tue, May 12 2020, 2:04 am

amother [ Purple ] wrote:

This is from the article hammer and dance https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo.....92b56

Presented like these, the two options of Mitigation and Suppression, side by side, don’t look very appealing. Either a lot of people die soon and we don’t hurt the economy today, or we hurt the economy today, just to postpone the deaths.
This ignores the value of time.

If you examine the credits at the bottom of this graph, you will note that this is from Neil Ferguson's paper. Neil Ferguson recently stepped down from his position as the UK's top epidemiologist, presumably because he violated SD rules himself, but probably also because his seminal paper on Covid-19 predictions -- I assume this is what you quoted -- used ridiculously high death rates as inputs and sparked world panic. In the past, he also published overblown projections re: the impact of SARS, swine flu, bird flu, mad cow disease, MERS, etc.

The graphs don't even make sense. We have closed universities, schools, implemented SD, etc. His graphs indicate that there has been no hospital bed pressure yet, and won't be until winter. That's clearly not accurate. Also, there is no curve-flattening here (green curve); just curve translation to a few months later. That doesn't seem realistic either. Am I misreading this graph?

Lastly, these models which say that "flattening the curve" results in an identical number of infections and an identical number of deaths, merely smeared out in time, do not account for the possibility of finding therapeutics which can shorten hospital visits and increase recovery rates.

amother

Orchid

Tue, May 12 2020, 2:07 am

ora_43 wrote:

All of those things are examples because no one agrees. Maybe on masks there's a more general consensus but you still don't see populations or governors requiring masking en masse.

Prepare for what? If ventilators are harming more than helping, we certainly don't need more ventilators. Testing and tracing is the theory, but the number of testers and tracers needed before the fall to make a dent is basically unattainable for a country the size of the United States no matter how you spin it. People love to scream ramp up testing but you actually have to physically be able to do that and it doesn't seem remotely plausible we'll get to 20 million tests a day. Plus testing and tracing doesn't actually prevent infections, it just prevents a certain place from getting too overwhelmed all at one time. PPE I'll grant you could use more time, but honestly if we're going to have a second spike it would make more sense to have it in the summer or now when there are relatively few other viruses going around and people are more willing to comply rather then the fall when we also have the flu and people will be absolutely done with lockdown orders and will probably just ignore them.

amother

Purple

Tue, May 12 2020, 10:02 pm

Here's a partial list of the things I would like the powers that be to have more time to do before reopening:
- ramp up production of PPE
- ramp up production of drugs like remdesivir
- discovery of new treatments
- vaccine testing and production
- research on how the virus spreads
- better information on how to manage symptoms

But the main thing is this - if we can keep this up for longer and get the R to be below 1 then when we reopen MANY fewer, like tens of thousands fewer, people will get sick and die, even though the virus will not be stamped out.

amother

Orchid

Tue, May 12 2020, 10:15 pm

amother [ Purple ] wrote:

Yes those things would be nice but we also have to be realistic. We are not going to discover a new drug and produce it en masse in the next few weeks. I haven't heard about PPE issues recently, but I could be wrong. Vaccine testing and production is under way, but again, will not happen in the next few weeks, may not happen in the next few years, very possibly could never happen. We pretty much know how the virus spreads.
The R-knot in NY, the most affected place in the country, is below 1 and has been for at least 2 weeks. The R-knot in the rest of the country is likely lower, considering nowhere else in the country had spread like NY did.
So realistically, what is going to change between now and July?
Likely nothing, except the economy continues to go into a death spiral, billions will be pushed back into poverty, middle class Americans will foreclose on their mortgages, 1 in 5 children will continue to go hungry, untold numbers of people will commit suicide and develop lifelong mental health issues, and children will continue to fall behind academically and socially. Sounds like an extremely heavy toll to pay for little in return.

amother

Purple

Wed, May 13 2020, 11:31 am

amother [ Orchid ] wrote:

PPE shortage is real, ask anyone who works in a NY hospital.

What is your source for R0 <1 in ny let alone elsewhere in the country where they are on the up swing of the curve? Fewer than half of the most populous states are on a downturn, the rest are flat or rising.

In the past week alone two studies have come out with potential treatments, a month in virus terms is a lifetime.

amother

Orchid

Wed, May 13 2020, 11:39 am

amother [ Purple ] wrote:

Obviously you haven't been watching Cuomo's briefings.

On April 18, almost a month ago, Cuomo announced the R0 had dropped to .9. He has since announced further drops.

https://www.businessinsider.co.....020-4

ora_43

Wed, May 13 2020, 4:34 pm

amother [ Orchid ] wrote:

All of those things are examples because no one agrees.

Opinions changing over time isn't the same as disagreement. Neither is a lack of information.

Masks was just one example, the same is equally true about ventilators. It's not like there was a point where most doctors were confident that ventilators would fix the problem. It was a hope. And then it was shown to not help as much as hoped. At every point along the line there was widespread agreement, from cautious hope to concern to tentative agreement re: limiting use of ventilators to extreme cases.

(which doesn't make ventilators unimportant - the people going on ventilators now are the ones who would die without them, so even if 80% die anyway, that's still 20% of lives being saved)

I'm sure you can find the occasional outlier opinion here and there, but in general there's a consensus on everything you mentioned (even if the consensus is "it's too early to say").

Quote:

Testing and tracing is the theory, but the number of testers and tracers needed before the fall to make a dent is basically unattainable for a country the size of the United States no matter how you spin it.

The US has a larger population to test, but also a larger population of testers.

China's testing and tracing, as are parts of India. It can be done.

**

None of this is to say that it's worth continuing lockdown just for these things to happen. At some point leaders have to say that yes, more time would help to reduce the number of ill even further and allow for even more preparation, but it's just not worth the damage.

But there are real benefits to lockdown. They don't outweigh every single possible drawback, but they're real.

amother

Purple

Wed, May 13 2020, 10:01 pm

ora_43 wrote:

But there are real benefits to lockdown. They don't outweigh every single possible drawback, but they're real.

I think we can all agree that there are costs and benefits to lockdown. It is a judgement call on when the costs outweigh the benefits.

I don't think the politicians have our best interests in mind nor do they share our values and I don't trust them to make the decision. I'm hoping our rabbonim do, and until I'm given evidence to the contrary, I will trust their psak.

OP - if your rabbonim tell you to visit your grandparents, go for it. Where I am they are telling us all to stay put.