I don’t think the ten year statistic negates the idea that for the majority of people, COVID-19 isn’t terribly dangerous. Diabetics and the obese may have a lower life-expectancy than their peers, but they are still expected to live a more or less normal life span. Yet, a 50 year old diabetic or obese person is at significant risk from COVID.
So, the loss of life years is significant, but as we have ways of predicting who is most at risk from COVID-19, sweeping, restrictive lockdowns - and encouraging panic in people who, statistically speaking, are very, very safe–may not be the best or only answer.
That being said, I do find some of these posts quite callous. We can disagree about solutions while not underplaying the extent of the loss. And, in practical terms, a disease that is mostly fatal to people over a certain age and with certain fairly common conditions is going to have economic ramifications even if the vast majority of deaths are from those past their working years. Seniors shop, and travel – and almost everyone has someone in their life who they care about in a risk group. That doesn’t mean shut down everything forever, but it does mean this is a lot, lot worse than the flu regardless of the age of its victims.
Back to what I am seeing locally. Went to the nail salon as I have issues that needed to be addressed that I could not seem to take care of myself. (its not just about pretty nails). All the nail stations had plexiglass shields. Masks were worn by everyone. Gloves were changed between clients. the owner said that the first week he was busy, but afterwards business has been slow.
I then went into Kroger and found wipes!!! One per customer. Arm and Hammer is now in the wipes business, BTW.
I don’t think we should neglect sequelae. If everyone under 50 who gets covid and doesn’t die (which would be virtually everyone under 50 who gets covid) ends up recovering fully, then we can say covid-19 isn’t terribly dangerous for people under 50. But if a case of covid might leave a young healthy person with permanent lung, heart, or kidney damage, that’s a different story. So far, we don’t know how well people recover when they’ve had bad, non-fatal covid cases.
We’d like to know how people do six months later if they’ve had covid, but for most recovered patients it hasn’t been six months yet. Suppose covid leaves 1% of infected people under 50 with permanent heart, lung or kidney damage. That’s a dangerous disease.
Well…i had the first busy day I’ve had in a long time due to today’s re-openings.
I got my hair cut this morning. I was the first one there and only one other customer came to a different stylist while I was there (and it was a guy whose time was roughly 10 minutes). Plenty of space as the salon has 6 stations and only two hairdressers were there. Door locked and they had chairs outside if you wanted to wait outside and not in your car. No one used them while I was there. Station completely wiped down after a person was done (I saw that with the guy who left). Contact less payment. I left a check, but you could use Apple Pay or Venmo.
Afternoon I want to the periodontist. First day they were open too. They got all new “stuff”. The swishing bowl was replaced with a suction thing with a disposable cup that fit into it. No water tools were used at all. Everything used with me was covered in plastic…to be tossed. Plus the tool also got disinfected. hygienist was well garbed in disposable PPE. They were only using every other station…so things would be more spread out. I didn’t see another patient while I was there at all.
Every single person in both places had masks which were properly worn.
That’s true. I’m not quite ready for tightly packed, maybe 30%, wearing masks, trying to distance when possible?
As for marches, etc. I see a lot of people moving the same direction enmass while shouting, chanting and such. I myself don’t think we’ll see a big uptick and am hopeful that might spur the calls to allow more things to open at least partially.
I think many of us will be watching this with heightened interest. The wishful thinking side of me hopes that we won’t see any surges related to these events, but the pessimistic side of me won’t really let me hope too much.
I would LOVE for my pessimistic side to be proven wrong.
As far as how many would have died had we done less. I’m not going to speculate about doing nothing.
I think we can get an idea from the numbers in Sweden. I understand their numbers are higher now but what about in the long run? I say long run because I’m of the mind that we have just delayed the deaths that are going to happen. No one is going to hide from this forever, well maybe a few. We “flattened the curve” but that didn’t mean less overall cases/deaths, it just meant they were spread out so as not to overwhelm our medical system.
I think we are far from done with this. I think it’s going to continue to churn away at a reduced level and may even take a little break and then come back. I don’t think it will go away until we reach herd immunity either through enough getting it to stop it’s spread or an effective vaccine that may never come.
If you put people in stadium seats separated by six feet, there’s no way you can put in 30% of a full crowd. For six feet, you have to block out every other row, then put put people in every third seat in the other rows. That’s 17%.
I work in an “essential” industry. Today my company activated our emergency notification app to instruct us in proper protocols if we find ourselves being approached by rioters.
Actually you could because I guess you’re assuming no one can be closer but they can. People could certainly go to a game with family, that’s what I do. Anyone living in the same household can sit together. You could have groups of 2, 3, 4, 5 or more.
And if rioting proves to be a non-issue with regards to covid then you could out more in as they aren’t social distancing.
For us instead of having painful ten minute conversations with our kid in California we can play a game with him for an hour or two and have a much more natural conversation. At the same time he can play with his brother in Maryland and his cousin in Boston and his aunt in DC. We have always played lots of games together.
Regarding the ease of getting used to Tabletop, I think I am the worst at manipulating the controls for the Tabletop, it did help to go find a mouse for my laptop. Mostly I don’t like having to constantly zoom in and out to go from seeing things on the board versus things in my own hand. I don’t find flipping cards or rolling dice difficult. We have had some issues with lagging, or underpowered laptops (I can’t run Discord, Zoom or Hangouts at the same time, but DH can.) It definitely is helpful if at least one person in the group is a gamer. I also think super complicated games with lots of cards to read and pieces to manipulate can be more painful. OTOH, the rule book is usually right there and everyone can look at it at once. Zooming in on individual cards is easy using alt. I think it’s a pretty well thought out system.
@suteiki77 I know you can feel sad about all the things your child is missing. But I think today’s kids have learned different lessons in these last few months, ones that in retrospect may have been every bit as valuable as the school play, or marching down an aisle in a really ugly robe and hat, or learning calculus.
So my S and a small group of his friends and their families gathered over the weekend to take grad pics at his school and the cathedral from which they would’ve graduated. One of the moms purchased and handed out “Class of 2020” masks matching their grad gowns, which was sweet. We socially distanced as much as possible with the exception of a few quick group photos. Nobody was very close to one another, and it was for literally 30 seconds and then they dispersed. In the cathedral each graduate took photos with their family. At one point the organist came in to practice and when we had just about wrapped up taking photos, the organist surprised us by playing Pomp and Circumstance. The grads proceeded to walk out of the cathedral to the music. I don’t think there was a dry eye among us parents. A bittersweet moment.
Because so many of the protesters are young and may be asymptomatic it could take a long time to show a spike…until they pass it on to others who are more likely to be ill.
With respect to having bought time by shutting down, I suspect we’ll see fewer deaths in the future due to better knowledge of what to do by the doctors involved. They’ve been learning as they go along. I think that will continue to happen. I suppose we’ll find out (in a way) if Norway ends up matching Sweden - or not.
This is good because I’m not sure we’ll ever get rid of the virus (only if it mutates to become safer) and sooner or later we’ll all be in a higher risk category. It’s a cruddy way to die.
So far, we haven’t had rioting or looting in our area - home or business, but if it does start in the industrial areas where our business is I hope for the looters’ sake they come at night when all our employees are gone. Over 50% regularly compete in USPSA and/or Three Gun and one of the teams even uses a back room to load ammo.
Probably not an issue - the looters are focusing on soft targets where they’re unlikely to encounter any resistance, which is good for everyone because nobody should be hurt trying to steal or prevent people from stealing, but as the unrest continues, it’s only a matter of time before stupid things start happening.
I wonder how gun control - or lack thereof - influences the decisions of where and to what extent people feel comfortable or emboldened. My son goes to college in Chicago and he jokes that he’s pretty sure that the students and professors at the college are the only people in the area that aren’t armed.
June is here and we are about 10 days past Memorial Day weekend – does anyone know if there have been any spikes from all those areas that had big crowds? I haven’t heard much reporting on that. I did read that 1 person tested positive from that Ozark gathering, but didn’t hear about an outbreak. I am hoping for some positive news on that front.