Shanghai Disneyland will close in effort to contain coronavirus

CreditWh0re said:

Andy, I hate to be blunt but look at the political leanings of those areas that aren't shelter in place.

I'm swallowing back some vomit to say this: In SC, I have to give credit to Gov. McMaster. So far, he's listened to people around him. While he hasn't done a full stay-at-home, he's at least shut down schools (SKOOOS) through May 1st and strongly urged people to stay home.

I think the closing of schools is the first sign of "something ain't right here." He did it early enough that, in my belief, it kept the spread from entering the schools. We're on day 11 since the announcement, and I haven't heard of any students contracting the virus.

RCMAC said:

I hate to generalize, but.... Texas.

Yeah, I live on the Fort Worth side of the Dallas-FW area and it's a tale of 2 cities. Because there are so many smaller cities in between, most of the behavioral orders have centered on the county government. Dallas has been a day or 2 ahead of Fort Worth (Tarrant County) on accelerating the severity of the orders. It all came to a head with Dallas announcing on Sunday that shelter-in-place would start late Monday night. Tarrant's commissioners met that evening and refused to take that step. The county Republican chairman called in a comment to the meeting and said something along the lines of "we shouldn't do this just because Dallas did and if you want to shelter in place, you should just move to Dallas." Fast forward 24 hours and the Fort Worth mayor announced a joint press conference for Tuesday morning with the county officials and the mayor of Arlington (the other large city in Tarrant) with a snazzy, cowboy looking graphic that said, "Stay at home, Y'ALL!" So, rather than unifying the region with concurrent orders for shelter-in-place, they pushed everything back 24 hours and punctuated it with a glitzy marketing campaign that made sure to distance Fort Worth from those dirty liberals in Dallas. One thing is for sure, we'll have plenty of public official to launch into the sun for entertainment when this crisis passes.

Holding a good thought for Travis. Sounds like a terrible situation for him.

Florida has been a patchwork mess. Our moron governor said he couldn't "order someone not to be able to earn a paycheck," which had nothing to do with closing beaches. County and municipal government is stepping in, but uneven. Orange did its stay-put order, but Osceola took a few more days. We've got a fighting chance at it being effective though, and I can't say the same for Miami.

Lord Gonchar said:

Here you go, nerds.

As a gigantic nerd, thank you. I have said this a million times through every avenue I can and I will say it again. These are the only charts that matter. Case number, new cases per day, red circles on maps....they don't mean anything. The only question that matters is what your transmission rate (and hence, doubling time) is. Even if you don't understand log-scale graphs, you can see that we're headed for some serious trouble if we don't get our "stuff" together.

On the plus side, we did a pretty good job limiting deaths initially, so we had a little breathing room initially, but now we're back on doubling every 3 days in mortality as well, so I guess "breathing room exhausted."

bigboy said:

made sure to distance Fort Worth from those dirty liberals in Dallas.

Fort Worth was such a strange place to live. It's a city, for sure, but it's one of the most conservative cities with a giant side helping of chip-on-it-shoulder that I've ever been privy too. And so many people still clearly thought of it like a small town in their driving, in their patterns, and in the way they talked about it. Even Boston, the (don't hit me!) clear little brother to New York didn't spend as much of its time worry about what New York was doing. (We just beat them in sports and moved on with our lives. Also 'f' the Yankees.).

ApolloAndy said:
Even if you don't understand log-scale graphs...

Ok, I just gotta say something and your post is the one I chose to quote. So it isn't an Andy-specific reply.

A bunch of you keep saying things along these lines. Like people must not understand or they deny science or they're stupid or lack critical thinking skills or are right leaning or whatever.

I really don't think that's the case at all.

I think people have different dispositions, differing tolerances for risk, different priorities, differing goals.

We can all look at those same numbers, charts, observe the science - whatever - and still come to a different conclusion as to how to react.

The science, the numbers, and the charts all say is that there is great potential for a lot of people to die. Observable outcomes show a lot of people dying.

Ok, we all understand that. Everyone. I don't think anyone doesn't understand that. Citing more numbers and charts isn't going to change anything.

We're not divided on the facts, I don't think. We're divided on how to react to a situation given those facts.

ApolloAndy said:

Fort Worth was such a strange place to live. It's a city, for sure, but it's one of the most conservative cities with a giant side helping of chip-on-it-shoulder that I've ever been privy too.

It's interesting to hear that take from someone that's not from but spent time here. Fort Worth has weathered economic tough times very well over the last 30 years and spent much of that time letting outside money sprawl the city into nearly 3 surrounding counties with a lot of mediocre quality housing and retail and blue collar jobs. The old local money has grown downtown at a glacial pace with some office space and a decent amount of housing (although most of it in the form of very expensive condo properties). The new money has funded a resurgence of gentrified property on the south side of the city and the old money is okay with that as long as they stay on their side of I-30 and don't even think about proposing street cars or light rail that might make it easier to get around. The old money has created an attitude that Fort Worth has to maintain its "small town" feel. Many people want to see the city become a strong urban center instead of the suburban little brother to the city east of here and that often gets met with tired requests of "Hey, stop trying to Dallas my Fort Worth!" (sometimes they'll replace Dallas with California or New York." All the while, the uptown area of Dallas and suburbs like Plano and Frisco have seen massive development occur, much of it in the way of high-end urban office space with thousands of high paying white collar jobs. There's been some recognition that Fort Worth is largely missing out on that, but the current economy is going to make catching up pretty difficult.

So, I take your point and I think it's somewhat correct.

My specific quote wasn't trying to imply that "red states can't do math." I was responding to the fact that many people from many walks of life including many of my well educated, blue state colleagues (I live in the Bay Area, it's as blue as it gets) wouldn't be able to read a log scale graph and say why a straight line implies a certain doubling time or how, for instance, the fact that US deaths started slow doesn't help us at all, now that we're back on the "doubling every 3 days" slope, even though it looks like we're below that line. But that you don't need to be able to understand those things to see the trends from that specific graph.

I totally agree that different people have different risk tolerances, priorities, and goals. I think we've discussed that a few times here as well.

Lord Gonchar said:

We're not divided on the facts, I don't think. We're divided on how to react to a situation given those facts.

This is where I don't think we're in agreement. I don't particularly care about the red/blue in the data. I mean New York is the most f'd of all the states and it's one of the most blue. It is clear that redder states are approaching things differently than bluer states and maybe that's because of their increased risk tolerance, but I really don't think that's the case here.

We all agree on the number of cases and the number of deaths and those facts about the past and present. What we don't agree on is what those things imply about the future. We don't agree that if we reopen everything on Easter, serious consequences will result and many more people will die. And yet, this is still a fact. That's not a question of risk tolerance, that's a question of science. If I jump out of a plane without a parachute, I will die. This is a fact. If we don't implement shelter-in-place measures, our doubling time will be about 2 days. This is a fact. If we reopen things on Easter, we will have a second spike. This is a fact.

We could probably argue the semantics of the word "fact" and whether me jumping out of a plane without a parachute is actually a calculated risk, but I don't think that's what going on. I genuinely think the difference is a skepticism of the projections and science in general, bordering on defiance. See: climate change, anti-vax, flat earth. I don't think it's a calculated risk. And I do think there's a whole lot of Trumpism (though he's just the manifestation of it, not its impetus) instigating the science defiance. (It rhymes so it must be true).

ApolloAndy said:

This thing is serious enough that it's not going to be some abstract "some old people far away died" kind of thing. It's not the flu where I've personally never met or heard of anyone dying from the flu (and I pastor a church full of 60-80 year olds). If we send people back to work each of your grandma, grandpa, neighbor, crossing guard, postal worker (sorry for the old people stereotypes) etc. has a ~20% chance of dying. There's some trade off being made, but life has value beyond just economic contribution.

I simmered on this thought for awhile, and I think it may sum up a large chunk of the population's though process, at least in this country. People don't seem to care much about something when it has little chance of affecting them. It is written above in black and white, this disease isn't "some old people far away died kind of thing". If this disease was limited to borders overseas, we would continue on our happy lives, and not really put much thought into it. Let's be brutally honest here, I am betting there is a large population of people who are all about saving lives, that truthfully couldn't care less if 100,000 died overseas, they all of a sudden care because it can potentially affect them.

This thought reminds me of something a former boss said when we were discussing global warming. He said that people will refuse to accept it and do something about it until the water is lapping at their front door. It is a problem sure, but the vast majority doesn't put much thought into it. This virus was the exact same thing, we didn't worry about it until it was on our doorstep.

I will be completely honest, and this is exactly what Gonch said a few moments ago. People have different perspectives, my outlook is that everyone owes their life, at some point this debt will be called. I would much rather find the middle ground rather than put all effort into saving the maximum amount of lives. Diseases happen, so do many other disasters and incidents, there are always lives lost. We do our best in most situations to minimize the lives lost, and can do a very good job at that because those events are either small scale, or localized. This event is worldwide, there will be death, I am all in favor of finding the tradeoff point, and I believe that everyone simply staying inside is not the answer. Eventually people will venture back out, and when that happens reinfection will occur. Has anyone taken a moment to think about what happens once the infection cycle resumes when we resume our lives? It seems like we are just hiding in our homes and hoping it will eventually disappear.

We cannot simply sit inside until a vaccine is developed, especially if that is a year or more. Sure, lives will be saved, but there will be no economy left, and then we will turn to looting, rioting, and roaming the streets in packs to ensure survival of our smaller units. I am not saying that is the outcome, but if we stay inside long enough it will be.

I was reading an article today that estimates at our current pace that 40 million of us in this country will be jobless when this is over. This will cause a ripple effect in many other areas. Talk about loss of life, what will these 40 million do? Is my life worth living if I am living it on the streets because I lost my livelihood and my home? There have already been a huge uptick in calls to suicide prevention lines.

I agree with the vast majority of what you said, but I disagree with this:

TheMillenniumRider said:
I would much rather find the middle ground rather than put all effort into saving the maximum amount of lives. Diseases happen, so do many other disasters and incidents, there are always lives lost. We do our best in most situations to minimize the lives lost, and can do a very good job at that because those events are either small scale, or localized. This event is worldwide, there will be death, I am all in favor of finding the tradeoff point, and I believe that everyone simply staying inside is not the answer.

According to projections and math, there is no middle ground. That's the point that I, Jeff, and others have been trying to make over and over. When it comes to exponential growth there is no middle ground. If we choose to relax the shelter-in-place / social distancing guidelines, it will result in millions of deaths, just in our country. There is no "we'll trade 20,000 deaths for 20 million jobs." You're basically trying to balance a billiard ball on top of basketball and on one side is "tens of millions of people die" and the other side is "we lose forty million jobs." There is no middle ground. That is the nature of exponential growth. Have I mentioned that there's no middle ground?

ApolloAndy said:

When it comes to exponential growth there is no middle ground. If we choose to relax the shelter-in-place / social distancing guidelines, it will result in millions of deaths, just in our country. There is no "we'll trade 20,000 deaths for 20 million jobs." You're basically trying to balance a billiard ball on top of basketball and on one side is "tens of millions of people die" and the other side is "we lose forty million jobs." There is no middle ground. That is the nature of exponential growth. Have I mentioned that there's no middle ground?

But there are degrees. Obviously, there has to be. If we locked everyone in their house for 28 days, this would be done. If we didn't change a thing about day-to-day life, a whole bunch of us would be dead. Instead we have varying degrees of "stay-in-place" and "essential workers and businesses" and such. We're already in the middle ground, we're reducing, but not eliminating, death from COVID-19.

Hell, isn't the very definition of flattening the curve, the idea that with certain actions we can mitigate (not eliminate) the death (or risk of death) resulting from this?

This is not an either/or situation. The economic disaster will happen if we continue with shutting things down to gain better control of the disease or if we let the disease run its course. I think that's the point Andy is making, albeit much more eloquently. What's happened in other countries doesn't make me think that gambling that it's not as bad as we think is worth the risk.

ApolloAndy said:

Have I mentioned that there's no middle ground?

How would you explain S. Korea. They kept the case count down, while not locking down the country.

There is not a middle ground, which I've been saying for the better part of two weeks. Mathematically, it just doesn't work that way. Either we limit the spread or we don't, and the latter has dire consequences. There are no degrees. South Korea most certainly did keep everyone from moving around while spinning up an extremely robust testing regime. If you know who is infected, it's a lot easier to make informed choices about who can be out. But that door closes once it's already out there.

As someone else mentioned, it's easy to dismiss when it isn't near you, but it's wholly naive to think that it won't be near you. By then, it's too late to be proactive.

Lord Gonchar said:

But there are degrees. Obviously, there has to be. If we locked everyone in their house for 28 days, this would be done. If we didn't change a thing about day-to-day life, a whole bunch of us would be dead. Instead we have varying degrees of "stay-in-place" and "essential workers and businesses" and such. We're already in the middle ground, we're reducing, but not eliminating, death from COVID-19.

Hell, isn't the very definition of flattening the curve, the idea that with certain actions we can mitigate (not eliminate) the death (or risk of death) resulting from this?

I wouldn't call that middle ground, though. There's a tiny bit of wiggle room on one side of the scale where maybe we can trade a few thousand deaths for a few hundred thousand jobs or whatever. But when you're talking about letting people go to church or go to work or play pickup basketball, you're going past a certain point on the scale where you're trading one job for ten deaths or a hundred deaths or a thousand deaths. And if you get to that place, you can't go back. There may be some small scale tradeoffs to be made about what is essential and whether two people can go to the grocery store together, but that's not what Millennium Rider was suggesting. Everything I've read leads me to believe that if you remove shelter-in-place restrictions the exchange rate from jobs to deaths gets really, really bad.

TheMillenniumRider said:

How would you explain S. Korea. They kept the case count down, while not locking down the country.

They were able to contain because they acted quickly, did things we'd never do (privacy concerns), and were prepared with tests. We are long past the point where containment is an option for us.

Jeff said:

As someone else mentioned, it's easy to dismiss when it isn't near you, but it's wholly naive to think that it won't be near you. By then, it's too late to be proactive.

https://xkcd.com/2278/

The title text, which serves as sort of a captions reads: "I actually came in in the middle so I don't know which topic we're briefing on; the same slides work for like half of them."

Jeff said:

There is not a middle ground, which I've been saying for the better part of two weeks. Mathematically, it just doesn't work that way. Either we limit the spread or we don't, and the latter has dire consequences.

So anything short of doing everything is like doing nothing?

Hmmm.

ApolloAndy said:
Everything I've read leads me to believe that if you remove shelter-in-place restrictions the exchange rate from jobs to deaths gets really, really bad.

But if we had hardcore, enforced, mandatory quarantines for 28 days, we'd be done.

So these two ideas together demonstrate exactly what I'm trying to get at. We're currently doing less than everything and more than nothing and expecting a certain result with tradeoffs.

That's the definition of a degree of action.

Sure. There's obviously some tradeoff to be made. I have never disagreed with that. But, (for simplicity) imagine if the choices were this:
10 jobs for 1 death
20 jobs for 10 deaths
30 jobs for 100 deaths
40 jobs for 1,000 deaths
50 jobs for 10,000 deaths
60 jobs for 100,000 deaths

You might be able to have some meaningful discussion about the first two choices and you might be able to talk about tradeoffs and middle ground and such, within that very narrow band of choices. But whether you call that "middle ground" or whatever, it's not the middle ground MillenniumRider was talking about. He was talking about trying to move past the second line of the scale, and speaking of some middle ground lower on the chart. I wouldn't call that middle ground anymore and I don't think anyone's risk tolerance would support that kind of move. (This is all completely aside from the fact that if a bunch of people get sick or die, the economy crashes anyway).

bigboy said:

Fort Worth

That's interesting. I lived there from 2005 to 2016 and I could definitely feel the tension between the older natives (including the old money) and the developers. Our church (which is right on the river off Henderson, where the Panther Island Pavilion is) went through a very long and contentious discussion about whether to sell the property and move north to Keller or something. So many of our lifetime members were saying that they never wanted to move and they didn't want Fort Worth to become developed and lose its soul. I certainly can't blame them for that position, but I kind of felt like it was inevitable. (For the record, we decided not sell and just sell parking for all the Panther Island Pavilion events at $20/pop. I think they're raising over $10K/year that way now).

Lord Gonchar said:

So anything short of doing everything is like doing nothing?

Hmmm.

In a sense, yes, because we are working with exponential growth.

In a Gonch spectrum, with 1 being everyone stays locked in their house for 28 days, and 10 being everyone goes back to work and we deal with it... options 1.1 through 10 all produce the same level of carnage (death, health, economic) because of the growth rates. So this middle ground you really speak of is somewhere between 1 and 1.1.