COVID topic vol 2

[Riggerjack]

Think it is more like the scrapegoats are going to be those who stripped other people of their rights and forced them into poverty while themselves living their lives how they choose.

Really. How often do you see that happen?

The worst I see is maybe different election results. Maybe. Probably not. Those most offended seem to be choosing different electoral units. The worst offenders from your perspective could conceivably increase their approval rating from voter's self selecting new venues.

Sorry, but the rich and powerful rarely face being scapegoated. That's a movie trope, not real life.

ETA: The south seas bubble proves my point. In the end, a few elections may have changed, a few rich men returned part of their money, but were still rich, the aspirational middle class took it in the nuts, and the world kept on turning.

[Campitor]

@Campitor - Smokers are, however, no longer as free to subject third-parties to passive smoking as they once were. The US is surprisingly restrictive when it comes to passive smoking compared to other countries.

In that case, the freedom to swing one's fist stops well short of hitting someone else's face.

But yeah, rationally speaking, human acceptance of risk vectors are indeed rather arbitrary.

"Not as free" is the operative modifier. In a world of "not as free" even smokers have rights. The CDC states that 41,000 people die every year from 2nd hand smoke which is 12.5% of the COVID death rate and more than the yearly vehicle deaths (approximately 33,654 per year). And we still don't ban smoking.

Citizens under COVID restrictions also have rights, codified by law, which makes being "free from" Covid exposure a less than 100% certainty. My point is that we can only control behavior to the degree which is legal and plausible and that includes behavior that can spread COVID. An essential employee can spread covid just as easily as someone who is supposed to be quarantining.

[A Life of FI]

Really. How often do you see that happen?

The worst I see is maybe different election results. Maybe. Probably not. Those most offended seem to be choosing different electoral units. The worst offenders from your perspective could conceivably increase their approval rating from voter's self selecting new venues.

Sorry, but the rich and powerful rarely face being scapegoated. That's a movie trope, not real life.

I was just saying that it appears more likely than prosecuting people for transmissiting the virus. The CDC guidlines are just guidelines not a legally enforcable standard and they reccommend things that even the people in-charge don't follow - like the fact that older people like Biden and Fauci should isolate. Also after a relatively short period of time the traces of the virus disappear from a person's body, you can't tell whether they had it or not, let alone where they got it from. I agree though the rich and powerful are rarely scapegoated - but sometimes they are.

[Campitor]

As mentioned by previous poster. Freedom from being infected by a pathogen is a thing. I find the argument similar to the “shouting fire in a theater” argument.

Yes but that freedom from pathogen infection is limited by laws. There are certain rights (freedom of assembly, equal protection under the law, etc.) that will limit your ability to be free from infection. And the restrictions that are legal will not stop people from disobeying them anymore than it will stop anyone from yelling fire in a crowded theater should they decide to do so - there's no invisible omnipotent hand waiting to stifle an illegal shout.

Yours is a flawed argument I believe, or at least not the best one. Here’s one inconsistency: COVID deaths are additive. So referencing and comparing numbers of deaths from other things is basically arguing at nothing. Again, strawman, I did not make any argument for or against heart disease and the freedom to die from it. Surely there’s an argument there, but not my point.

Not sure what you mean by additive. All deaths are additive. I wasn't making a strawman argument but rather pointing out that we legally allow certain behaviors despite their health risks. There are many legally allowed behaviors with externalities we permit despite the overwhelming evidence of the current and future harm. My point is that we balance these externalities against the other harm it may cause. COVID containment should fall into this category and shouldn't be a reason for tossing out all other considerations that can negatively impact the public.

My point is that additional deaths from a new pathogen (AIDS, MERS, SARS, Ebola, West Nile, Covid) can and should be avoided. China, Taiwan, these states have shown that it is possible to have a strong, EFFECTIVE, lockdown and eliminate a pathogen. You do that as a globe,
and it’s gone. I know that sounds impossible for today’s cave-people society, but I imagine a highly educated, technologically advanced world of problem solvers could probably handle that.

Yes but we are not China or Taiwan. We're a republic with a constitution that enumerates our rights and codifies the separation of powers as well as the rights enjoyed by the states versus the rights of the central government. These laws protect us in a manner that isn't a consideration in China and Taiwan. So pointing to governments that have a centralized command that can override any provincial decisions is comparing apples to oranges. And I have an issue with trusting any information coming out of China - they aren't exactly paragons of truth.

To clarify, your point is that countries shouldn’t lockdown, let it spread rampant, because no one will do anything? I know I took that to the extreme, but I’m checking a) what’s your point? And b) if this is your point, the implications again aren’t really palatable, certainly not from a moral stance of human life should be preserved.

That isn't my point - you're putting words in my mouth. I'm not for a rampant spread of COVID or any other deadly pathogen. What I am for is containing covid in a manner that doesn't override other considerations that are as equally important. Mental health is important, suicide rates are important, avoiding slides into poverty is important, and all the aforementioned is being pressured by all these quarantines.

“It’s about choice...” it’s also about consequences. And an a focus on choice and personal freedom, Regardless of affect on others, is not a solid argument really. Even in the US, which is what it sounds like you’re kinda influenced by (individual freedom, choice, can’t possible “control” people), people don’t have unrestrained free will.

Of course no one has unrestrained free will but they do have legally codified rights that make 100% covid containment an impossibility. To deny this is to bury one's head in the sand. You can't make everyone stay home. You can't make everyone wear masks without turning us into a police state - and even police states can't guarantee 100% compliance. So in the end, you can only guarantee your own safety - the state cannot provide an all encompassing bubble of protection.

[Jean]

It was always normal to expect some effort from sick people to avoid spreading their disease. What is different now, is that everyone is presumed sick. This in addition with the total disproportion between the measures and the risk. Even if it would kill 1% of the population, most people don't have 100 year to live, so it makes no sense to sacrifice 1 year of everyones life to try to save those 1%.
And despite that i might look angry at old people, the fact that some old people had to die alone because of those restriction angered me. Those restriction would probably lead us to keep our grandma at home to die in company rather than trying to get her treatment and risk that she might have to die alone. Even dog aren't left to die alone.

But all this discussion is interesting, because it allows us to see that despite us agreeing on the numbers, we have very different opinion. We often think of disagreement coming from the fact the people live in sorts of paralel realities, but it isn't the case here. I wonder what causes thoses differences. It's not MBTI i think.

edit: Maybe it's because some of us take dead as an invariant, and think that how you live and die is more important than how long you live? And other thinks that later death will alway allow you to enjoy and offer more to the world? Just an idea.

[ZAFCorrection]

@Jean

I think the default problem in an unperturbed form is well characterized to the extent possible. I think where people differ is in cost-benefit analysis and problem solving approach, where basically everyone is operating on their gut instinct and dressing it up with bits of morality and non-sequitur-y references to the numbers in the default case. That makes sense to an extent given that estimating the impact of any solution is pretty challenging; though the so-called numerates should know better than to dress the posturing up as a scientific conclusion.

Another issue is if the outcomes of various solutions were enumerated, you would still end up with x + y = c, solve for x and y, type problem. The pro life/pro choice debate is a good example of how that shakes out. But at least if we could nail down some real "fuck up 50 people here to save a thousand people there" numbers, the debate might at least be talking about something real.

[subgard]

Option 1 - No restrictions. This would result in the healthcare system being completely overwhelmed for several months. People would be literally dying in the streets as they waited to get into the hospital. People that only need supplemental oxygen, car accident victims, cancer patients, etc would die.

Option 2 -Short-term real lockdowns followed by effective testing, tracing, and quarantining, with mask mandates and some mild social distancing practices. Society functions fairly well, albeit with some annoyance and a few short-term lockdowns when infections flare up.

Compromise - What we (The West) have now.

[A Life of FI]

Option 1 - No restrictions. This would result in the healthcare system being completely overwhelmed for several months. People would be literally dying in the streets as they waited to get into the hospital. People that only need supplemental oxygen, car accident victims, cancer patients, etc would die.

But where is the evidence this will happen:

- Cuomo says the hospitals in NY were never overrun

- We were told the hospitals in FL would be overrun when they opened up months ago, but they are not.

- Sweden never locked down and never overran their hospitals. They only had a max of 550 in ICU who test positive for covid at any one time – This in a country of 10 million people.

- Many of the big temporary hospitals that were build have been deconstructed unused – even though they continue to have many cases in those places.

- There were no new large temporary hospitals built in advance of outbreaks in cities over the last 6 months, even though we are continually warned there are not enough beds. Wouldn’t resources from the Federal and State Governments, Army, hospitals and private equity all be flooding in to set-up temporary hospitals if that was actually the case?

In 2.5 years during WW2 we when from an isolationist nation with a limited army to an army from 12 million troops with an even more massive increase in equipment to allow them to move and fight all over the world. Which included hospitals, hospital ships and temporary battlefield hospitals that could treat 1,000s of casualties that could rush in a moment’s notice when the other side started an offensive and provided treatment far more varied and much more intense than for a covid patient. So adding capacity to treat covid would only be a small part of what we did in WW2, seems like if necessary we would have done this by now. The fact that little has been done seems to indicate it is not needed – Occam's Razor.

I would compare this situation to ERE, the prevailing idea out there 10 years ago was that it was a laughable idea that someone could retire before 40 years old and the early coverage of ERE in the media followed this line. However as more people have researched it and found it possible and some FI bloggers found a following, some more sympathetic articles have appeared - but they are often still often skeptical and many of the comments in reply to them mocking. And the average person on the street still would not think ERE even remotely possible to achieve – in part because they are continually told that it is very difficult for any American to retire even at the normal retirement age -although many people that research ERE believe it fully achievable and increasing more and more people do achieve it.

So the question becomes are we in the position of the people believe that ERE is impossible, when the evidence indicates otherwise, when we believe the hospitals will be overrun without lockdowns.

At the beginning of this in relation to hospital capacity we could have been in the comparative position of the overspending American needing make a lot of changes and do a lot of work to reach ERE. However now it appears we are actually the in the position of the disciplined not extravagantly spending person with $3 million asking Susie Orman if they could retire and being told you need at least $5 million to even think about it and even then that might not be enough – better to just keep working until your mind or body are too broken to do it any longer. That is the popular thinking is thatit is just always safer to believe the hospitals will be overrun than to critically assess whether they actually will be and figure out how to expand capacity so they won’t.

Or on a more basic level the message is don't ever think of leaving the cave (ours homes in this case) and continue to react to the signs that we show you on the wall (ours TVs in this case) how we trained you to react to them.

Consider if the Allegory of Plato’s Cave shows up in something as big as how we spend the majority of our waking hours (working vs. FI) could it not be at work here also.

[7Wannabe5]

I was in a hospital that was near overrun. The lobby was filled with patients in chairs and wheelchairs placed 6 ft apart. Some people had been there for more than 8 hours. In the emergency room area, elderly people were lined up in cots along the wall. The medical staff seemed quite frazzled. At one point during my 3 day stay in a tiny isolation room, I was given a shot of blood thinner in my abdomen, along with most of the other presumed Covid patients, because “ they couldn’t walk us around.” This was the situation just prior to the worst of the second peak in my region with masking and other measures in place. It seemed obvious that without these measures the hospital would have been absolutely overrun. I would suggest that if you haven’t been in a hospital yourself during or near a peak of local Covid, then maybe you are the one with active poorly informed imagination.

[jacob]

Sounds like this?

https://www.latimes.com/california/stor ... verwhelmed

[jacob]

Or on a more basic level the message is don't ever think of leaving the cave (ours homes in this case) and continue to react to the signs that we show you on the wall (ours TVs in this case) how we trained you to react to them.

Two important self-checks...

1) Insisting on "lived experience" as the ultimate arbiter carries a risk of becoming one of those "I wish I had taken it seriously" mea culpas. Also see, "I didn't think it could happen to me", "I only thought it was something that happened to other people", and similar variants.

2) Avoid the following chain of reasoning: 1) "I haven't seen any information about X"; 2) "I'm a well-informed person"; Therefore 3) "X does not exist. Also see, "I can't figure this out"/"I'm a smart person"/"Therefore nobody can figure it out". While the logic is mostly sound, one of the premises is usually not. This is especially prevalent in filter bubbles. Also see, "If this was really important, I would have heard about it."

PS: Sweden ended their no-restriction policy a couple of weeks ago as their case numbers blew up.
PPS: Google "hospital overrun" or "covid tent". Of course, your google results might be different than mine.

[slsdly]

I've gotten the flu + pneumonia twice in my life (at least). It brought me to my knees, although not hospitalized, so officially it was a "mild" case. I was otherwise a healthy young person with no pre-existing conditions, good dietary habits, exercise habits and such. I don't feel the need to try COVID on for size. I find it hard to believe anyone who has actually gotten pneumonia and its ilk would be cavalier about respiratory diseases. I'm certainly grateful for now having a "social license" to wear masks on planes/trains/buses in the post-pandemic future.

I find it strange to think of the last year as "lost" time. I don't know about you, but I've gotten into all sorts of new hobbies because of the pandemic. My opportunities changed for certain, but I don't feel cheated out of a year of my life. That would be madness. Life is rarely what I have expected it to be, but on the whole, every year has been as good or better than the last, 2020 being no exception. I think an important part of that has been learning how to adjust my expectations, desires and how I react to roadblocks -- it hasn't simply been a case of everything coming up Milhouse.

[A Life of FI]

I was in a hospital that was near overrun. The lobby was filled with patients in chairs and wheelchairs placed 6 ft apart. Some people had been there for more than 8 hours. In the emergency room area, elderly people were lined up in cots along the wall. The medical staff seemed quite frazzled.

I was in the hospital several years ago and it was packed, appeared to be somewhat in a state of chaos, and also had to wait for hours - and it wasn't even during flu and virus season when they are typically busier. When I final saw a doctor I heard him instruct the nurse to give me an IV but waited for some more hours and nothing happened. I eventually tracked down a nurse, which I hesitated to do for some time, as they were all running around looking overloaded and asked if they were not meant to give me an IV, they looked surprised, looked at my chart, said yes and said sorry that they forgot about me and afterwards had to track someone down to discharge me.

So I wonder if this way of operating is not unusual for them. They are in the business for a profit and the more people they can treat the more money they make this means less staff to patients and as a result long wait times. And further unlike most business these long wait times will not cause them to lose business as people are very unlikely to leave if they need medical treatment (it’s not a really an optional thing like waiting for a table to eat at a restaurant) so they can make the wait times very long. Any business I have every worked, even professional ones, people would often be overloaded and frazzled and those clients that we thought would wait for us to deliver our work, without losing the client, would made to wait or else we would have not turned a profit - as all of our competitors used this strategy.

But regardless of whether either of our experiences are representative, if we are being told more hospital capacity is needed why is it not being added in large numbers? I only see two possible answers:

1) The people running things are incompetent - And this would be at the Federal, State and private health care levels, or

2) This is the way hospital administrators run hospitals and they don't see a need for a big capacity expansion.

I suspect it’s the later, as I find it harder to believe that the Federal and State Governments and private health companies are all incompetent.

However I am not saying I am sure of this, but I think we need to ask and get the answer to this question.

If someone agreed with their spouse that they would both purse FI but that spouse keep spending all the money and taking on more debt would one not ask why? If we declared war a world in 1941 but our smallish military was the same size 10 months later would people not question it?

On another note I do think that it is somewhat inhumane to make people wait so long for treatment in hospitals.

[Ego]

Last summer people from the Czech Republic created a scolding video lecturing other countries for not following their example.
https://youtu.be/HhNo_IOPOtU

Well.



____

Our numbers will decline in the late spring and people will say "Yeah! The vaccine works. If only those idiots could have controlled themselves for a few months more until the vaccine arrived." Then next fall the dry tinder will reignite once again and we will blame those who refused the vaccination. No one will tell the truth. The vaccine works okay for those who were not vulnerable to the ravages of Covid-19 in the first place and does not work well for those who are vulnerable. Meanwhile the psychological conditions underpinning long-covid - depression, anxiety and OCD disorders - and the drug/alcohol use that feeds those disorders, will continue to explode.

This is an endemic virus. It is highly contagious. It is dangerous for a small percentage. Hospitals will be overwhelmed, even in places where all of the rules were followed. What happened to the excess capacity that was built last spring?

[A Life of FI]

1) Insisting on "lived experience" as the ultimate arbiter carries a risk of becoming one of those "I wish I had taken it seriously" mea culpas. Also see, "I didn't think it could happen to me", "I only thought it was something that happened to other people", and similar variants.

I knew a person who was in a very bad car accident but lived. He repeatedly said "I didn't think this could ever happen to me" does that mean he didn't take the risk of driving seriously - he was a good driver and that accident wasn't at all his fault.

I would say he took a risk that most the population takes every day and 3.2 million people die from in the US during the average person’s life time.

I used to financially restructure large listed companies. In developing markets that often involves the ownership being reduced/taken away from some very rich and powerful people that are in the government or can tell the government more or less what to do (at least in relation to someone like me). Such things can be dangerous and people will sometimes try to surveil you and intimate you through vailed threats on your personal safety to get you to back off or accede to what they want. However I considered 1) that someone needed to do such work for the World economy to operate and 2) giving into any threats would undermine that, so I took the risk of doing it and not giving in.

If no one did such work the financial system would collapse. Everyone here investing in a World stocks/debt/EFTs is actually creating a situation where people like me need to take these risks - because there are always many powerful owners of large companies looking to increase their wealth by reducing the wealth of their creditors and/or other shareholders. This happens even in the US.

This risk for me was likely both more dangerous and avoidable than covid.

If something happened to me while doing this work I would of course I regret it - but does that mean I made the wrong decision in doing it?

Probably like you, as an INJT I don’t really see “lived experience” the ultimate arbiter of anything in the future – just one person’s memories which are random and colored by what was important to them at the time.

So might it come down to the fact that people of the same personality type may approach a probem through similar mental processes but have different levels of risk tolerance in evaluating the output from that process?

This is a possible answer to the question that Jean was asking and one I had also been thinking about.

[A Life of FI]

2) Avoid the following chain of reasoning: 1) "I haven't seen any information about X"; 2) "I'm a well-informed person"; Therefore 3) "X does not exist. Also see, "I can't figure this out"/"I'm a smart person"/"Therefore nobody can figure it out". While the logic is mostly sound, one of the premises is usually not. This is especially prevalent in filter bubbles. Also see, "If this was really important, I would have heard about it."

PS: Sweden ended their no-restriction policy a couple of weeks ago as their case numbers blew up.

I have monitored Sweden’s cases, deaths and ICU capacity almost every single day since the beginning of April.

They have many more cases now but ICUs and deaths are both 40% less than they were in March in absolute numbers (percentage wise the reductions would be much greater). This is akin to the situation in NY where they also now have more cases but less deaths. This might be due to more testing now than in the Spring or the vulnerable population being significantly reduced by the Spring wave or other factors.

And even the higher deaths in Sweden in the Spring have not caused them to exceed mortality rates in recent prior years. Here are their total population adjusted deaths by year, from the beginning of each year until the December 6th of each year (which is the date of the last up to date numbers for 2020):

2020 87k
2019 80k
2018 85k
2017 85k
2016 85k
2015 88k

Note that 2015 is greater than 2020 and also that 2019 was a lite flu and virus season and total deaths were 5k to 6k below the average for the previous years, which might mean when a normal flu and virus season goes through deaths may increase.

Do the things you mentioned above come into the above analysis?

Do we disagree on the basic facts themselves or on how we each view the risk related to them?

[Peanut]

But all this discussion is interesting, because it allows us to see that despite us agreeing on the numbers, we have very different opinion. We often think of disagreement coming from the fact the people live in sorts of paralel realities, but it isn't the case here. I wonder what causes thoses differences. It's not MBTI i think.

edit: Maybe it's because some of us take dead as an invariant, and think that how you live and die is more important than how long you live? And other thinks that later death will alway allow you to enjoy and offer more to the world? Just an idea.

Early on, Sayers, a journalist, summed up these differences as "a complex combination of your politics, your own life experience, your attitude to risk and mortality and your relationship to authority." I agree with his assessment. Any number of things, like the value you place on the comfort of one group relative to another (i.e., children vs seniors, even as they are often intertwined), or your own perceived (in)vulnerability to disease, may be huge as well. There is a lot that goes into one's willingness or refusal to accept one set of trade-offs over another set.

[Peanut]

At the risk of being annoying for repeating a post I made elsewhere, I want to put it here for @Life of FI. I can't remember where it was but somewhere I thought you were alluding to societal projections like these, so here again:

Couple articles about the harms of U.S. schools remaining closed on everything from dropout rate to GDP growth to years of life lost:

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/pub ... fetime?utm

-"We estimate that an additional 2 to 9 percent of high-school students could drop out as a result of the coronavirus and associated school closures—232,000 ninth-to-11th graders (in the mildest scenario) to 1.1 million (in the worst one)."

Among other things, HS dropouts tend to live shorter lives than they would otherwise.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamane ... le/2772834

-"The decision to close US public primary schools in the early months of 2020 may be associated with a decrease in life expectancy for US children." Their estimate is 5.53 million YLL, and they specifically note they did not include the McKinsey HS numbers in their analysis.

[Peanut]

Since I'm here, this also recently got my hackles up:

https://unherd.com/thepost/genomics-exp ... o-control/

"Engelthaler is also one of the few epidemiologists to have publicly spoken out against school closures, for which there is 'no scientific evidence.' 'Privately, behind closed doors, there’s definitely been a lot of discussion from the very beginning that there’s no scientific evidence that shutting down schools actually helps to stop a pandemic…Epidemiologists knew that from the beginning, but that was not a popular opinion to take publicly and seems to have been kind of left to the side.'"

The interview is mostly focused on the contagiousness of the new mutation, which he compares to the common cold, i.e., unstoppable. Agree we saw at least two large societies achieve the impossible, but also agree their methods are not really replicable globally with a disease of this profile.

[Viktor K]

https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/26/asia/jap ... index.html

https://www.woodtv.com/health/coronavir ... s-variant/

What's the US response?

Beginning Monday, for instance, the US will require all travelers from the UK to receive a negative Covid-19 test within 72 hours of boarding a flight to the US. Passengers will also be required to provide documentation of their laboratory results.