The original risk associated with Covid19 was lack of hospital resources. With most hospitals having plenty of capacity, the risk of getting Covid19 and not getting access to hospital resources is much lower than expected, so it was true.
Not quite true, NYC was over stressed and there is at least one mass grave and are still corpses in refrigerator trucks.
Luckily, social distancing worked better than expected: peak daily US death was reduced to approximately 2,700 rather than approximately 3,000. And the curve was flatten more than expected with the death rate remaining at peak longer.
One can't extrapolate from the success of social distancing to imply that _not_ doing social distance would be less harmful.
>The results of our original experiment turned out to be different than our expectations
To the contrary, the proposed solution worked as expected. The social distancing combined with state-level quick action reduced the severity of the predicted disaster. In addition, people who would normally go to the ER "just in case" did not for fear of contagion. Or because they lost medical insurance. Or because visiting a GP became difficult and so there were fewer referrals. All reducing strain on hospital resources.
Certainly, The predictions of what would happen without out social distancing still stand as the data behind it is unchanged. And if that isn't enough, there is the 10x fatality rate of Sweden vs its neighbors.
Since Sweden dropped from the narrative when it showed serious differences from its neighbors, it hints that criticism of social distancing is either (justifiably) emotional or (unjustifiably) politically. If it were from an honest appraisal by epidemiologists or economist, there would concrete counter projections and remedies rather than imprecise claims about it's success and ambiguous calls as to what a new policy should be.
It is horrible that the US death total exceeds the Vietnam war and that there is serious economic hardship. That is the terrible truth for natural disasters when no plans are in place (let alone actual preparation) and the response is slow. I hope the lesson from this disaster is that we are prepared next time rather than convincing ourselves nothing serious happened.
The Vietnam war had such an impact because the US military went on such an insane spree of war crimes and civilian massacres that America permanently lost its standing as a moral authority gained in WW2. Two million Vietnamese civilians paid the ultimate price for America's geopolitical theorizing, and the disaster was prolonged for an entire decade because the country was too proud to admit it was in over its head. McNamara and then Nixon knew the war was unwinnable, but the US could not appear defeated. And so the atrocities continued. Many in the US realized all of this and became permanently disillusioned with their country.
Apologies for the off-topic rant but this comparison has been making its way through a lot of circles that really should know better. If you find yourself wishing you knew more about this topic, I recommend the Ken Burns documentary The Vietnam War or the book Kill Everything that Moves.
It was a civil war, initiated by the North, in which mostly Vietnamese killed other Vietnamese. The Americans intervening was absolutely a shit-show (and of course colonial history), but for the central point of your rant to stand, you’d need to show fewer Vietnamese would have died without American intervention, and that’s not a simple given.
You should spend some time talking to American Vietnamese with families who were persecuted in the immediate aftermath of the war, or who were lucky enough to escape.
The Vietnamese were largely supportive of Ho Chi Minh and there was supposed to have been a democratic reunification vote, which didn't happen. That's how the civil war started, and North Vietnam would have easily steamrolled the South (since they managed to steamroll both the South and the USA). Most civilian casualties came from horribly targeted anti-insurgency or massive American bombing raids. It's a pretty easy argument there would have been many, many fewer civilian casualties without US involvement.
> It's a pretty easy argument there would have been many, many fewer civilian casualties without US involvement.
The history of Communism in Asia would like a word with you.
Given that communism actually won in Vietnam, we don't even have to work with hypotheticals. There were certainly deaths but nothing to the level of the death toll American military power exacted on the populace.
Regarding the word intervene what I meant is that I believe it is not a good descriptor of what the US did. Makes it sound like some kind of spontaneous humanitarian mission rather than them undemocratically propping up a failing state.
Have you ever heard of the Khmer rouge in Cambodja, and how north Vietnam played a fundamental role establishing it?
IIRC Cambodia is the most bombed country in history.
...in response to the Khmer Rouge's attacks on Vietnam.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian%E2%80%93Vietnamese...
> which was supported by China and the US.
Vietnam was concerned Cambodja's regime was too China-friendly, but the millions being killed under the banner of advancing socialism did not featured as a pressing concern by neither China nor Vietnam.
There were, of course, geopolitical calculations on all sides, which is why the United States and China supported the Khmer Rouge. I don't think moral revulsion alone often leads any government to declare war on another.
No. It was initiated by the South, when it refused (with US support) to participate in a national UN-monitored election, which Ho Chi Minh would likely have won.
Edit: Statement of Eisenhower, from Wikipedia:[0]
> I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly eighty percent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Chief of State Bảo Đại. Indeed, the lack of leadership and drive on the part of Bảo Đại was a factor in the feeling prevalent among Vietnamese that they had nothing to fight for.
Hostilities were initiated by the North in the form of a guerrilla war.
It's crucial to keep in mind that it was the North faction that had been fighting for independence from France. And that the South Faction comprised largely the colonial bureaucracy and Catholics.
I agree with this. But, while this is before my time (my parents' generation), my understanding is US attitudes against the war were partly self interested in the short term: many boomer teenagers and 20somethings didn't want to get sent off to participate in such massacres, and much more they didn't want to die for it. Their parents didn't want them killed either. A lot of people knew somebody who had been killed.
If there had been no conscription there would have been less antiwar sentiment.
A similar scenario played out in the 2000s in Iraq, but without conscription.
But the impact of the Vietnam war on the US was primarily due to the number of casualties, wasn't it?
I mean, you wouldn't see many protests if the US government was sending college kids to southeast Asia to chill and soak in the sun, wouldn't you? Their sons arriving dead or maimed had something to do with it.
And, remember disease models did not just predict unmitigated spread. They absolutely incorporated percentages of social distancing into their models. The original imperial college study predicted that a high income county with around 50% social contact reduction would still exceed hospital capacity by 700%.
Cuomo's New York model that predicted 30,000 additional ventilators absolutely incorporated lockdown measures, if they didn't they have some serious explaining to do.
Of course I still agree a lockdown was needed, and agree the lockdown did about as well as it could. But is there any reason to not revisit data and determine if we could do better?
[0] https://www.newsweek.com/new-york-coronavirus-hospitalizatio... [1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2020/04/13/coronavirus-p... [2] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/04/14/dfc_ceo_t...
Not only that, but as a percentage of population, Sweden's fatality rate is far ahead of that of the USA, and still climbing at a faster rate than America:
https://boogheta.github.io/coronavirus-countries/#deceased&r...
Not sure if that's just Portugal having a weaker healthcare system than Sweden's neighbours or if there's something else at play.
You mean Hart Island, which has been used as a mass grave / “potter’s field” for more than a century and already contained over a million deceased?
Certainly New York was hit especially hard, but it’s sensationalist to refer to “mass graves” when it’s in fact a routine thing.
This is inaccurate (at least in implication): this mass grave has been around and in use for 150 years. It's being used more heavily, obviously, but then that's no different than saying "more people than normal are dying in NYC"
-- NYC has maybe peaked but the rest of the country is still rising.
NYTimes: "“If you just look at the total number of cases, you’re going to miss what’s underneath it,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “It’s not a leveling-off. It’s a painful handoff.”"
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/06/opinion/coron...
I don't know how you can say 'lower than expected'. Many interventions were non-medical, depending on social behaviour (e.g. adhering to social distancing), effectiveness of governance and enforcement, as well as economic and political (e.g. supply of test kits, ventilators). And even then, we were dealing with a new virus, there was limited data about all kinds of variables. For example, if people are intubated twice as long in the US due to high levels of obesity compared to China, you need twice as much ventilator capacity.
Point being, we always had to deal with a very wide confidence interval.
Now combine that with the fact we're looking to predict an exponential number, rather than something linear, and you can get wildly different outcomes. In New York the doubling time began around 2 days. That meant the difference between hospitalising 50k or 100k was a matter of starting social distancing two days later. The difference between 50k and say 1.6 million, was just 10 days. Hospital resources can't expand that fast, at best you can add 30% extra beds and shift all bed-use to dealing with corona with emergency interventions, but you can't just scale 3000%.
That's where the field hospitals came in. Not because it was guaranteed or fully expected to need them, but because there was a good chance, and there was too little information to conclude they wouldn't be necessary.
[1] - https://azgovernor.gov/sites/default/files/covidpresentation... [2] - https://www.military.com/daily-news/2020/04/10/armys-seattle...
Deaths lag infections by several weeks. Over 2200 people died yesterday.
Further, we can't just optimize for Covid19 deaths, we have to look at the whole situation, which includes suicides due to shelter-in-place orders, child abuse and other domestic violence, malnutrition due to hunger from unemployment, negative impacts of poverty.
this will certainly be a case study for future generations.
I endure poverty much better than dead parents and loved ones.
This would be the optimal situation, but it requires at least:
* Widespread testing available to any who need it for any reason;
* Careful, centralized monitoring and resource allocation;
* Plenty of PPE, critical care equipment, and disposable goods;
* A cooperative public willing to follow a constantly shifting set of recommendations.
And the country as a whole has basically none of those things. California is better-resourced and managed (for this particular thing) than other states, so they're gonna give it a shot. The rest of the country is just gambling.
This disease does not cooperate with this kind of response because of the lag time from initial infection to critical illness. Reports on this vary from like 3 days to 20-odd days. Coupled with the disease's high rate of infection, this means that a hospital can go from 50% full to 150% full very quickly. If a state government with an impossibly obedient population set a tripwire at 50% hospital capacity and shut everything down the minute they hit that mark, then they're still going to overflow a couple of weeks later as symptoms progress for those that were infected just before the shut-down.
Should we congratulate the uninsured who weather the storm?
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/arizona-coronavi...
I think there's no question that COVID-19 has been a disaster here, but it's going to be heavily debated whether the lockdown saved us or just made things worse on net.
Without regard to the actual effectiveness, the fact that the field hospitals went mostly empty will fuel acrimonious debate about said effectiveness.
Our choices since then have been "economic hardship and misery" or "economic hardship and misery with a spicy side dish of death and suffering". Covid19 has been the leading cause of death in America for a month now [1]. Some time tomorrow, it will have killed a confirmed 80,000 Americans [2] and America has consistently had 1/3rd of the world's critically-ill cases for weeks [ibid]. There is no way we are going to get out of this with less than 100,000 dead.
Amazingly, the same country that had endless investigations into the deaths of two people in Benghazi and went to war over the deaths of 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001 -- subsequently spending $6.4 trillion in war operations [3] -- is finding 100,000 dead to be "pretty good", and the economic cost of mitigating further death to be just a little bit too expensive.
As usual, some of this is explained by political misinformation campaigns that too many people are falling for [4][5][6][7], but still, the same talking points get repeated into forums like this one, even though most Americans would prefer economic pain over a higher death toll for now [8][9][10].
I'm just gobsmacked that the disinformation is taking root so easily, because arguing that can really trivially be reduced to, "I don't think enough people are dying to justify the measures meant to prevent people from dying."
Hopefully states like California that are following more conservative, evidence-based approaches to relaxing restrictions, will relieve some of the tension.
[1]: https://thehill.com/homenews/news/492053-coronavirus-now-lea...
[2]: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
[3]: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/20/us-spent-6point4-trillion-on...
[4]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-the-conservat...
[5]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/04/19/pro-gun...
[6]: https://www.vox.com/2020/4/19/21225195/stay-at-home-protests...
[7]: https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/2020/0...
[8]: https://www.newsweek.com/americans-coronavirus-restrictions-...
[9]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/us/politics/coronavirus-r...
[10]: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/most-americans-think-it...
> California recognizes that economic restrictions are causing severe harm and began rolling them back today
But the OP wrote,
> Hopefully states like California that are following more conservative, evidence-based approaches to relaxing restrictions, will relieve some of the tension.
You are both correct: California is rolling back economic restrictions, but they are following a conservative, evidence-based approach to relaxing them. The OP's basic premise, however, is not at all false, and I sincerely hope you don't have the impression that the state is just throwing a switch and going back to "normal." It's not.
Or I should say, we're not. I don't know where you're located, but I'm in California -- the Bay Area, specifically. We don't even have official guidance on how restaurants are going to re-open yet, an the California Restaurant Association -- the business group that represents restaurants, and clearly has an economic motivation to get back to business -- has actively lobbied for the re-opening of their member businesses to happen slowly and very carefully.
I would like nothing more than to be able to start going back to my favorite restaurants and bars. But the reality is that for the last month, the daily number of new Covid-19 cases and of deaths hasn't been materially dropping in the US in the way it has in countries like the UK, Italy, and Germany, which strongly suggests that our collective behavior throughout April remained too relaxed in most states. The paradox of this pandemic is that the looser the restrictions we place on ourselves are, the more economic damage we're likely to face over the long term, not less, because we'll start cycling through repeated outbreaks, being forced to close businesses, districts, and even regions ad hoc, and running a much greater risk of overwhelming hospitals with bursts of new cases virtually all at once in stricken locales.
What I don’t quite understand is how people expect the economy to “just go back to normal”... like, even if you “reopen” everything, ease all restrictions, it’s not like people are goingback to living as usual.. they’re still going to keep by themselves, because that’s an individually sensible decision... are you going to attend a conference, a wedding, a dinner party / restaurant where you’ll be near 100+ people? Of course not, you’ll be making sure you stay healthy! The economic damage will happen and persist, and governments can’t just legislate against that!
Yes, yes, and yes.
As will you.
I remember hearing a story of a solder that sent a single bullet into a pole mounted transformer. The oil leaked out, it over heated and exploded. Power went out to the block, maybe taking connected devices with it.
Also California is reopening since all their predictions turned out to be way off the mark.
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/california/story/2...
I expect we have a few weeks until we have nearly 0 restrictions in place.
> https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/california/story/2....
says nothing like that.
If anything the US government failed to act to attenuate the expected economic impact that emergency anti-epidemic policies would naturally have on the most vulnerable elements of society.
It's also very ironic, if not hipocritical, to abuse the most vulnerable and victimized elements of society, who have been systematically ignored and sacrificed , to argue against undoing policies aimed at defending society's best interests.
What will happen as we try to return to normal yet another situation.