Lowpe
Posts: 22133
Joined: 2/25/2013 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: obvert quote:
ORIGINAL: RangerJoe quote:
ORIGINAL: witpqs quote:
ORIGINAL: JohnDillworth quote:
I saw the photos taken of the crowded NYC subway yes, you did see a photo or two a month ago. The situation has been addressed and while not perfect is much better. Some were inconvenienced for the good of many. The trolley is barreling down the track towards five grandmothers. You can pull the switch and redirect it so that it kills no one. But you have to wear a mask to buy a toaster oven. What do you do? No, you can't make it kill no one, that's the point. 1) It will kill many no matter what. We try to influence that to minimize the death toll. 2) Any and every action we take to minimize the death toll from COVID-19 also has other consequences, and those include deaths and disease other than COVID-19. A more balanced approach with broader vision is better than a narrow, myopic approach. Consider that NY State nursing home edict. It mandated that patients be taken in (or back in) even if they have COVID-19. Are nursing homes set up to/capable of quarantining patients in an effective manner? None I've ever seen. They don't have the facilities or the resources. But the edict went even farther. It prohibited testing those patients for COVID-19. That point alone is bombastically stupid, the edict in its entirety even more so. The consequences were many deaths, perhaps thousands, among the most vulnerable to the disease. Was that done on purpose? Of course not. So how could something so obviously stupid be done? Because the officials in charge were thinking too narrowly and too short-sighted. They were thinking about keeping the supply of hospital beds from being overwhelmed. They blew it. And that example shows a direct COVID-19 consequence. The consequences outside COVID-19 itself (deaths and disease from other causes brought about by actions to address COVID-19) seem utterly beyond the thinking of many officials right now. Not to mention many in the media. I hope that the order was not done on purpose. But with some people you never know. Describe the Nazi concentration camps to them and some people will joke about them but they will not deny that is what they actually want. I think both RangerJoe and witqs cold do to use some examples of how leaving it all to the States has helped, rather than a Federally mandated mitigation program implemented early. You're both just shooting digs at NY and not actually talking about the issue, which is a bit of a problem around here. There are many tragedies in this several month period, and a lot of them could have been lessened by an earlier Federal mandate to enforce mitigation measures and set up consistent guidelines for ALL of the States. It's likely the lockdown could have been shorter, the cases less, deaths less and economy less affected overall if these things were tackled by the Federal Government earlier. Fauci confirmed he advised a shutdown in late February. He also confirmed in an interview that there was " a lot of pushback" about shutting down at that point. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-52264860 I mean, obviously, if we had, right from the very beginning, shut everything down, it may have been a little bit different. But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then. All of this sent Trump to Twitter in a fluster to talk about firing Fauci. "Fauci was telling people on February 29th that there was nothing to worry about and it posed no threat to the US public at large," it said. "Time to #FireFauci..." This goes through figures using IHME to show how Federally mandated mitigation could have reduced deaths in the US if the government had imposed measures earlier. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/opinion/covid-social-distancing.html On March 16, the White House issued initial social distancing guidelines, including closing schools and avoiding groups of more than 10. But an estimated 90 percent of the cumulative deaths in the United States from Covid-19, at least from the first wave of the epidemic, might have been prevented by putting social distancing policies into effect two weeks earlier, on March 2, when there were only 11 deaths in the entire country. The effect would have been substantial had the policies been imposed even one week earlier, on March 9, resulting in approximately a 60 percent reduction in deaths. To determine the impact of early interventions, we used growth rates in cumulative deaths calculated by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington from the date that social distancing measures were introduced until the predicted end of the epidemic, and applied them to case numbers from earlier points when such measures could hypothetically have been put into effect. Ok. Open for insults, derogatory comments, refutations based on pure emotion and other usual non-objective tactics. I, for one, would be leery of giving that kind of power to any President of the US. In the US, there were 8 states that didn't issue mandatory stay at home orders. None of those States were in risk of their hospitals being overrun which was the primary, original goal of the lockdown. There always exist more than one way to skin a cat. There were many other states that had lockdowns of differing severity. In each individual state you see a wide disparity among local counties and their state govts. Some counties are actually in open rebellion. Most state Govnr's don't have the legal authority. The argument that the lockdown doesn't carry it's own deathtoll has somehow been excluded. The decision to have a centralized mandate, would carry with it an important factor. Down the road, the economic costs of decision making during the time of the Pandemic would be distributed equally. For example, say my company has production in China that I now desire to bring back to the States. Would I pick New York, with it high tax, high cost, likely future shutdown environment, or someplace like South Dakota or Arkansas. I would only pick New York if the logistics savings or customer engagement was very concentrated there or the state plied me with tons of tax dollars/offsets or the Govt guaranteed I was immune from any future lockdown. But if Arkansas was forced to shutdown, well then, that removes a very big decision making input. Cap said earlier that he fears a 4 year or so economic turnaround. I think we are more like at 10 years right now, based on the 2008 economic downturn or even longer. Just to give an idea of the hideous changes that are upon us, Gov Cuomo of New York is openly questioning having brick and mortar schools. Colleges are going to be especially hard hit. Not only are we living in the greatest medical experiment of all time, we are going to see a huge economic migration across the world. It took almost 3 generations for economic interdependencies to return to their pre WW1 pre Spanish flu levels. May you live in interesting times.
< Message edited by Lowpe -- 5/9/2020 6:40:05 PM >
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