The problem with this false thinking is that others action can and do effect the person that doesn’t go outside. For example, last year my son had his appendix almost burst and was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery. Had that happened last month, he might not have been seen as quickly if the hospitals were overwhelmed with COV-19 patients. This is a real possibility this month if we “open up” the economy and we see a spike in cases. We need to think how our actions can and do effect others. It not so simple to say, go outside if you want, stay inside if you want. In addition, what happens if our food supply chain gets impacted by another spike in cases, etc. It’s a global economy and we are all in this together.
One of President Trump’s personal assistants has tested positive for COVID-19.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/07/politics/trump-valet-tests-positive-covid-19/index.html
True, but there are also victims of heart attacks, strokes, cancer etc dying because they are too scared to go into the hospital. If you live in the vast majority of the country, hospital capacity is not now and has never been a problem. I agree we are all in this together, but we do have different local situations and risk tolerances. I am not at all certain that people need to continue to shelter in Biloxi to avoid crowding in Brooklyn hospitals.
One of the reasons for mass spread in places across the Midwest and the East Coast was because the initial announcement was just thrown out there, and it implied that all travel from Europe would be shut down. This caused a panic in which massive numbers of USA citizens were flying home at once out of fear that they would be locked out of the USA.
As a result, the international airport hubs, like O’Hare, were swamped by people, many who were infected, all flying in packed airplanes, all crowding into airport terminals and lobbies, all spreading the disease which the brought from Europe.
Of course, they were required to be screened before entering the USA. However, they were packed together while waiting for the screening. So they may have been screening people who may have been infected, but only after they made sure that those infected people were in close contact with thousands of other people for hours.
The thousands who were infected at the airports spread across the country. Of course, the airport workers helped spread the virus across the NYC and Chicago metro areas.
The scientist, professor, U.K. task force icon and author of the highly utilized, heavily reported on and incredibly wrong imperial college model has been sacked for breaking his very own sah policies. Known as “Professor Lockdown”.
He’s been wrong on every pandemic/mad cow/avian flu model in regard to fatalities for 20 years and his peers call him the master of disaster.
I know he’s a genius and all. He’s also a complete hypocrite.
It doesn’t take away from the truth regarding mitigation but makes me want to ask people to go a little easier on the judgments and condemnation of the little people and shop keepers.
There was minimal/no screening at most airports. My colleague flew in from Europe that Thursday and the huge lines were for security. There was no screening.
One of my children returned to NYC from Paris on Wednesday, March 11, the same day that Trump announced restrictions on non-American citizens traveling to the U.S. from Europe. No screening took place at JFK when she returned.
Have you heard or read anything about Wisconsin being concerned about Illinois vacationers?
Of course, some Illinois peeps have second homes in WI, but places like Door County are very popular for long weekends.
Since Mississippi stats have been cited by a previous poster, I am a Mississippi resident and would like to report actual numbers from the dept of health website. We have 8686 cases, with 396 deaths as of today, for a 4.5% mortality rate. Testing was very difficult to come by for weeks but has finally ramped up to 80,308 tests, for a positive rate of almost 11%.
As for the trend, deaths for Tuesday were 32, with 330 new cases reported. On Wednesday there were 22 deaths, with 262 new cases reported. As for anecdotal info, a very small county with which I am very familiar has a death rate of over 10%, and includes a range of ages and socioeconomic status.
I will leave it to others to decide how successful Mississippi has been, and whether reopening is warranted. As a previous poster stated very well, I suspect it depends upon whether they let evidence form their beliefs, or beliefs form their evidence.
The science behind 6 feet was from studies of disease spread in airplanes. People within two rows of an infected person tended to get sick. Since airplanes are highly segment I take the 6 feet recommendation as bogus for other situations. (I posted the Radio Lab session on the subject in the last thread I think.) I find that when I meet friends on our trails they tend to creep closer, or even worse, feel they have to take off their masks to talk. We have one set of friends who keep trying to invite us to get togethers in their garden. No we will stick to virtual parties for a while longer.
I thought this set of graphs in the New York Times was really fascinating. Apparently in the months leading up to the pandemic death rates were below average almost everywhere in the US so in some states fewer people are actually dying than usual, so it’s no wonder some places are itching to open up. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/05/us/coronavirus-death-toll-us.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage (Note that if you want an idea of percentage above normal you have to look at the bottom of the page, not at the graphs.)
A positive test rate of 11% is considered good, it means that most people who get tested ( likely due to symptons,and or exposure) do not actually have COVID.
I am quite certain reasonable people can and are looking at the same evidence and come to different conclusions, so I do resent your inference that it must be those ignoring science who disagree with you, or some type of religious zealot. The entire nation of Sweden is not religious zealots or science deniers.
@Midwest67, I’ve read a few things about Door County. One article was in the New York Times on March 28. Here’s an excerpt:
On a recent morning, Mr. Lowry, 79, the chairman of the town board in the Door County community of Liberty Grove, sat down and wrote a message unlike any other he’s ever delivered to this community that thrives because of its two million visitors each year.
“If you have a seasonal home in Liberty Grove, please stay at your winter homes at this time,” said the advisory that was posted to the town website.
Here’s another excerpt:
Door County officials decided last week to declare a public emergency for the interconnected web of communities that is home to about 27,000 full-time residents scattered across the 80-mile-long peninsula. The county had not yet registered any infections, but the declaration freed up resources in case people started getting sick.
Cars with out-of-state license plates were showing up in the little towns across the county where shops were still boarded up for the winter. Hundreds of vehicles, one county official said.
People started joking about shutting down access to bridges that lead to the northern part of the peninsula. As the days passed, the jokes turned serious with texts and emails sent to officials calling for checkpoints at the county borders to block anyone with out-of-state drivers’ licenses from entering. People were getting scared.
“We are trying to protect our own, if you will,” said David Lienau, chairman of the Door County board of supervisors.
Here’s a link to an article from yesterday’s Door County Daily News, about Mr. Lienau (quoted immediately above): https://doorcountydailynews.com/news/506967
It doesn’t seem like natural immunity to COVID-19 is a common thing. Look at the prisons, meatpacking plants and nursing homes where the virus (if not stopped) spreads uncontrollably . There is a women’s prison in Louisiana where all the prisoners were tested and all were positive. If there’s such a thing as natural immunity, why didn’t any of those women have it?
Between the beginning of January and the end of February millions of people poured into the NYC metro area airports just from Europe. More came from Asia and other parts of the US. COVID has been here aong time. It didn’t magically show up between March 1st and 6th.
It’s not true that driving a car is more dangerous anyway. Roughly 800 folks (max) get killed by car accidents in a week. Covid is killing roughly a couple thousand a day at this point.
"From April 9 to 15, at least 13,613 people died from COVID-19, compared with 9,801 the week before.
For comparison, 12,451 people died on average per week from heart diseases and 11,521 people died per week from cancer in 2018. Fewer than 800 people died from car crashes in any week that year."
And at the time this article was written:
“On Friday, the main model used in the US was predicting 60,415 deaths by August, assuming social-distancing measures are kept in place.”
It’s not August yet and we’re around 75,000 deaths now.
Details, details.
The country will open up because few people care or see ways to make this work (donating enough to help those out of work, etc, figuring out how to be content doing things at home, keeping things safe on hikes, beaches, etc). The economy will end up with a bigger hit to it when (if) more folks start dying and fear takes over. Dead folks can’t buy anything. Scared folks won’t.
Hopefully medical folks will learn enough about treatments to help avoid the “if.” Hopefully Vitamin D and summer help. Those are truly my hopes. I don’t want to see it get worse. I’m ok with all of those claiming social distancing wasn’t necessary because it never got bad in _________. (It’s ok with me if they don’t understand how social distancing likely helped!)
It doesn’t surprise me that many folks who are staying home have gotten it in hot spot places (like NY) where many have it (vs just a few). Many of my neighbors have “stayed at home” in their eyes. In our eyes we see different friends and relatives visiting all the time and they head out to the store often for one or two items they need. (Groceries, tools, etc) What their version of SAH is and what it should have been differ when it comes to how effective it is. All is takes is contact with one infected person. In NY where there are many, they’re seeing the consequences. In non hot spots like mine, it’s risky though they might be fine.
I’m not surprised at all that the military is holding now on accepting previous positives. Doctors are reporting heart, lung, kidney, and clotting disorders that seem to be bad even from mild cases. They don’t know if those will improve or not. There’s fear they won’t. Makes sense that the military wants to take a “wait and see” approach.
Immunity comes from prior exposure, where the immune system had learned to recognize and defeat the virus. Until this year, no one had been previously exposed to this specific COVID-19 coronavirus. So, the prisoners had never been exposed until recently. Hopefully they are developing immunity right now. (Sorry, I might be misunderstanding your question?)
Keep in mind that if there were no natural immunity to the virus, a vaccine would not be possible. Same principle, exposure builds antibodies.
One concern I have with the new antibody tests is that some (or all) of them might not be testing the correct IgG/IgM. Too much overlap with other viruses, among other things. (Had a nice chat with my child’s immunologist.) There is a lot of work going on in the biologic sector, a monoclonal antibody was supposedly discovered, etc. I have faith that this part will get sorted out, though that takes time. I spend a bit of time reading about T cells, comparing to my kid’s bloodwork lol etc…
It’s not just hospital care that could be problematic, supply chain for say food. Yesterday, in Hanford (CA), a meat packing plant had 138 new cases of COV-19. Hanford is a relatively small town (56K).
Can you imagine if this plays out in other farming and agriculture businesses, distribution, transportation, ultimately restaurants. There is no easy fix to say, open everything up at once and those that want to shelter in place will be fine. Everything we do is connected and there is so much unknown about this illness that it absolutely makes sense to open things up slowly, evaluate, and then open a little more, evaluate, open a little more, etc. Governors have been clear that we could be taking one step forward and two steps back for the foreseeable future. Let’s do this the right way, based on science, not emotions.
I’m returning to Cuomo’s remarks about the New York people being admitted to the hospital being, in the majority, low-income people in hard-hit neighborhoods who themselves were isolating. I’m wondering who these patients were living with. If I’m an old guy carefully staying home, but I live with my grandchildren who, by necessity, are working, they can transmit the disease to me.
How were these patients getting their food? In low income neighborhoods in New York, lots of people are infected and asymptomatic, so the chance that one of these patients encountered an infected person if they went out for any reason, or had someone else in their home for any reason, would be high.
I wish they’d drill down further into these numbers.
Like @emilybee I think people overestimate their success at SIP and “not touching anything”. I also do the grocery routines and so forth, only touch mail in a designated place and then wash hands, etc. When DH and I had to go take care of some legal documents, we brought our own folding table to the parking lot, as well as gloves, masks, pens, and cleaned it off afterward and still washed well at home.
It hit home for me in mid-March when a relative wanted to go to still-open specialty shop in another state, and my BIL, a doctor, said, “you will not do that - doctors will be risking their lives for every new case” and convinced him.
Meanwhile, I see people adjusting their masks with unwashed hands, touching random bannisters/buttons, not thinking about things like who touches their credit card, having a hug because they “really wanted to”. And somehow having magical thinking about all the contact with their pets who touch everything outside and are not cleaned off in any way. It actually calms me that this is happening, because it means that true SIP has better results than we are measuring.
When DS20 got sick in April, we were completely stymied as to how that happened, because viruses aren’t magical curses; they have to have a host and be transferred. It turns out, he had mononucleosis, which can have a very, very long incubation period.
As for super-spreaders, I think we all know those people. Gregarious, shaking hands with everyone, getting in your space/face (well, that’s my introversion speaking), hugging, touching things, taking food from common bowls with not the most self-aware handling techniques. If one of those guys gets a highly-contagious virus, that’s how the big “events” occur.
Perhaps we should study lessons from all those plants and facilities with hundreds or even thousands on site currently that are managing well. NASA’s JSC has over 1000 on site currently. Some Defense plants, too.