Shanghai Disneyland will close in effort to contain coronavirus

Sure. They're also islands, which is probably the biggest difference. I agree that the outcome wouldn't be the same here, but we weren't even in the same ballpark (heck, not even the same sport) of effort attempted.

Lord Gonchar said:
I'm not sure I'd call it "lazy"

Yeah, I inserted personal judgment and maybe it was a cheap shot. But also, (going back to the objective morality thing) I think it is correct to judge people whose priority is "not being told what to do" over "preventing people from dying."

Lots of topics we've already discussed coming together here, so maybe dead horses don't need more beatings?

Lord Gonchar said:

Yay compromise!

Don't take this too seriously (lol), but this from xkcd:

I agree that the current discussion in this thread reminds me of the recent objective morality discussion. Likely will reach the same conclusion. :)

ApolloAndy said:

maybe dead horses don't need more beatings?

Truest statement in entire thread.

Edit: except that it's a question, but point remains.

ApolloAndy said:

I think it is correct to judge people whose priority is "not being told what to do" over "preventing people from dying."

I think it's unfair to just call it that though. There's definitely mental resolve at play.

I think we've all generally agreed that this latest wave is the worst because people gave up, but maybe the more correct way of looking at it is that they broke. There's definitely a mental factor at play and I don't think it's wrong to call that an ability more than a priority.

"Muh freedoms!" is priority.

"I can't sit here any more, I need some normalcy or I'm gonna need medication and kill my entire family." is ability.

I don't know. We love weird anaologies around here. I liken it to running from a bear. It's a life and death situation, but my ability to run doesn't suddenly increase because of that. If you take mental health seriously at all (and I know the room does - probably moreso than myself) then I think it's a valid statement.

A segment of people simply weren't able to stay (locked down/quarantined/distanced/verb of choice). They lacked the (discipline/resolve/mental toughness/whatever we want to call it) to do that.

Me? I could lock the doors, close the blids, pull the plugs and never talk to any of you ever again.

But everybody ain't me. 😁

But do you think there's something fundamentally different about the people in Taiwan or New Zealand which enabled them to do so? Or does their island geography decrease the need to do so? Or does the fact that they weren't "lazy" (I know, I know) at the beginning, before they were at their limits mean they didn't ever have to push themselves beyond the limits of their ability?

I mean, I get what you're saying. There was a point in late June (when our county moved down from purple tier to red tier) when I said, "F' it. I'm going to go play ultimate frisbee in the park, regardless of whether it's permitted in red tier because I need to get out of the house." That's an issue of the limit of ability. But New Zealand has full enrollment ultimate frisbee leagues for months now because they clamped down hard because they had the will to do what it took at the beginning (and also they're smaller and an island).

It feels like our deferred gratification calculation is horribly off (see also: climate change, national debt, etc.). Staring down the barrel of another major wave, if the choices are "lock everyone inside for 6 weeks to buy a couple of low transmission months in the spring" or "keep half-assing it and lose 100,000 more people and continue to have major ebbs and flows for 6 months" it's hard to imagine justifying the second and I have a hard time chalking that up to ability, rather than will.

(Also, of all the people who could argue that it's not a matter of will but of actual limitation, Gonch was not the one I would have anticipated)

Taiwan and Hong Kong are relatively smaller; they were both directly impacted by SARS and have experience, whereas the U.S. is a big country. You have very different cultures depending on whether you’re in New York City or South Dakota," he said. "Even now you can see in some places in the U.S., the response is to go and buy guns and to protest social distancing as an intrusion on their rights.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/taiwanese-authorities-stay-vigil...s-n1188781

File this under something that easier in a country with four airports and 23 million people.

Arriving passengers must also hand over their mobile phones so health authorities can record the details and use the GPS signals provided by telecoms operators to track the phone’s owners — and make sure they stay isolated during 14 days of mandatory quarantine.

Police show up within minutes if the reception is poor or the phone runs out of battery. And a failure to answer the phone can prompt authorities to send text messages such as this: "Please return home immediately. Violations of home isolation/home quarantine regulations will result in fines and mandatory placement. The Central Epidemic Command Center cares about you."

Ok, **** just got real.

COVID-19 Can Cause Erectile Dysfunction in Men

With all the BDE around people suggesting "fear" is the driving motivator for mask-wearing, that is fantastic irony.

I like where Andy is going though, because I think the judgment that he's dancing around is at the core of literally everything that I think we could be do a better job at. We can do hard things if we want, but only if we can acknowledge what we're not good at. Look at healthcare... our outcomes suck given our relative wealth. The environment? No, let's let China make all the gear that will create renewable energy, because we should hang on to oil. And systemic racism? We may not have invented it, but we continue to own it.

Why can't we solve these problems, and worse, why do we accept that we can't? Have we been led by a loser for so long that we just accept losing now?

No. We have been led by losers for such a long time that we accept losing now. Plus those losers are the only game in town. Trump is in the White House now (for a few more weeks anyway) in large part because neither party showed any interest or ability in addressing any of the problems they promised to fix for decades. So people went with an outsider. Still didn't fix many problems (may have created some more). But looking to the same people who have failed time and time again isn't likely to produce success. What is it they say about insanity and doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results?

ApolloAndy said:

RideMan said:

Of course now the question is, what would have happened if we hadn’t shut down? In hindsight it sure looks like we might have cut six months off the pandemic.

You've said something to this effect a couple of times, but I don't think I'm catching your argument from the rest of your post(s). Why do you think this is the case?

You see what the infection curve, where we got a bunch of cases in March, then it tapered off until mid June, stayed somewhat flat through the summer, then exploded in September? Hindsight suggests that if we hadn't shut down, logically all the cases we had March-August would have probably hit betwen March and June. Now, I don't know what happened in September that caused the explosion in cases, especially in October. The only thing that really changed at that point was that some schools re-opened. So if that was the cause, and given that schools were in session in March, we probably would have seen some of the same acceleration at the beginning, perhaps followed by a drop-off through the summer. But every pandemic has an expiration date, including this one. That happens when the virus runs out of hosts...whether that's because enough people got sick and gained antibodies, because a vaccine was administered, or because it killed everybody. Obviously the second possibility was the preferred choice, though not an available one, and everyone was scared of the third "option". But one way or another, realistically through a combination of all three methods, we're going to reach that end point where virus replication becomes difficult. Had we not employed the mitigations we did, we might reach that point six months earlier simply because more people would have been exposed faster. Of course that probably would also have resulted in more dead, and reduced even the possibility of a vaccinated finish. But assuming that the timeline depends on the number of available hosts for the virus to infect, we would probably be six months further down the timeline than we are.

As to whether that would be a desirable thing or not, we really don't know what that first three months otherwise would have looked like. We also don't know whether that would have avoided pushing people to the limits of what they could tolerate long before it really became necessary to push those limits: what if when we got to October a widespread shutdown were still a viable option? Would it be as effective six months in as it was at the beginning? Would it be more useful? Would people be more willing to cooperate with it?

Sorry, I don't have answers for those questions, but as a thought experiment they're questions that might be worth asking.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Lord Gonchar said:

Ok, **** just got real.

COVID-19 Can Cause Erectile Dysfunction in Men

I bet if that knowledge was around in March, COVID would've been wiped off the planet by April.

Sometimes, to get results you have to hit where it hurts...

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Jeff said:

Why can't we solve these problems, and worse, why do we accept that we can't? Have we been led by a loser for so long that we just accept losing now?

To be fair, he did warn us we'd get tired of winning.

RideMan said:
You see what the infection curve, where we got a bunch of cases in March, then it tapered off until mid June, stayed somewhat flat through the summer, then exploded in September? Hindsight suggests that if we hadn't shut down, logically all the cases we had March-August would have probably hit betwen March and June.

That isn't a logical conclusion at all. You're using retail shutdowns as the only only input and knocking off a month. Furthermore, it varied a ton by region and state. The national curve looks flat-ish in the summer against the current spike. But look at states like Florida and Texas, the curve from summer to now is a perfect U shape.

Now, I don't know what happened in September that caused the explosion in cases, especially in October.

You mean other than the fact that most of the nation experiences colder weather and people couldn't party outside? The experts were warning about this in the spring.

Except that the dive I have been doing is specifically on Ohio data, recognizing that Ohio has been a bit of an outlier an many ways from the beginning. And that's somewhat important because here, October and November were, for the most part, unusually warm and gorgeous. September wasn't half bad either My gut feeling is that the thing that changed was that schools (at all levels) started back up again..that's really the only major change that happened right at the inflection point in early September.

I don't have any way of testing any of the scenarios I've described, and given my background in data modeling (i.e. "none at all"), I fully expect that I'm totally wrong. But the question was asked, and I think it only fair to try and explain my thinking at least a little.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

And yet, Fauci supports keeping schools open, which I did not expect...

"If you look at the data, the spread among children and from children is not really very big at all, not like one would have suspected," Fauci added."

https://www.businessinsider.com/anthony-fauci-close-bars-school-ins...th-2020-11

He's supporting it because it's where the data is leading him. Isn't that what we want? The only problem that I see with schools is that they have vastly different protocols for testing and keeping people home. I'd be way more comfortable in my district if they were testing kids themselves two or three times a week, which of course they can't because they aren't getting any funding for that.

Pure unadulterated 100% pure Gonch-informed speculation follows regarding school not being a significant source of spread.

Is it just because we're not catching it as opposed to it not actually happening. If children are largely unaffected and/or asymptomatic, we likely aren't testing them. And if we aren't testing them, we aren't aware of potential spread and certainly not actual spread.

They take it home to mom and dad, who then have family/friends over in one of these forbidden small gatherings and suddenly you have symptoms and testing among the adults and it gets connected in that way instead of connecting it to little snot-nosed Billy, licking some other kid's mask and coming home and kissing mommy.

Just a theory.

The data does indeed say what it says. We just might not be collecting the right data.

Think I read somewhere (sorry, don't remember the source) that the fastest growing infection rate is in those under 18 years old. That may be in Florida but not nation wide. (Actually, I think I read that in the data from Rebekah Jones who's home was raided by FDLE the other day).