Shanghai Disneyland will close in effort to contain coronavirus

Andy, I don’t know - but I would guess occasional flare-ups are more likely in a superconnected world, at least in the short term?

eightdotthree, that’s a really good point that makes Covid a lot tougher. My friend who recovered called it a really “smart” virus - it lets you think you’re ok and spread it around before it hammers you. (“Smart” is metaphorical of course, unless you subscribe to conspiracy theories.)

And yeah, all roads out of this suck, but I’m mostly hoping we can find one that doesn’t involve 80% of the country being infected.

Jeff said:

Economically, both approaches suck, but I can't see any way that the US approach isn't economically much worse, as it likely creates a cycle of infection spikes that are only mitigated by repeating the cycle we're now prematurely ending.

Repeating the cycle? Good luck getting everyone to do this a second time.

Well, if the alternative is dying...

It didn't stop people this time. What makes you think they'll cooperate a second time? Especially when our President has specifically said he will not do this again under any circumstance of a second wave.

Its always easier if you can wait to see what worked and then say we should have done that. And if there are differences in circumstances (that have been decades in the making and that can't be wished away or changed overnight) that likely produce different results, you can just reject them. Amazingly simple.

If we are playing that game though I go with Japan. No restrictions on citizen movements. Businesses from hairdressers to restaurants stayed open. No center for disease control. No wide scale testing. Lets do that.

https://time.com/5842139/japan-beat-coronavirus-testing-lockdowns/

Covid-19 may go away. We don't know enough about it yet and what we do know has only been learned in the last 6 months. Not sure if the expectation was that MERS and SARS would go away until they actually did. Far less spread though for each around the world than Covid-19. Assuming the exit is a vaccine (not clear we will be able to find one that works and is safe or if we can, what the timing will be) there may well be large numbers of people who have no immunity to the virus outside of the vaccine. Vaccines are not necessarily 100% effective. People still die of H1N1 every year even though we have a vaccine for it. From what we know, flu mutates more than Covid-19 does. Not clear what immunity will be from either a vaccine or having the virus itself. A lot of unknowns.

May go away? Hope is not a strategy. MERS and SARS were less contagious and manifested symptoms much faster and consistently. And remember, we're essentially two months in to widespread infection in the US. We know there's "likely" a lasting immune response, but we don't know if last two weeks or two years. People keep talking about herd immunity, which experts generally seem to agree needs at least 70% to be effective. That's 231 million Americans who would need to get infected, and at even a 1% fatality rate, that's 2.3 million deaths. The economic and psychological toll of that would be catastrophic.

What's not unknown is what we can observe from nations getting it right, and we should be watching them carefully to understand their outcomes, so we can learn from them when our experimentation on reopening fails. Whatever differences in culture and approach they have, we can be reasonably certain it doesn't include partying in the Ozarks.

To be clear, Jeff, I think we're very much in agreement. Hope is not a strategy; it's an attitude that points toward there being things we can do besides letting everybody get sick and seeing who lives.

And I realized "on its own" misstates things - by social distancing (even a little, but severely if required), testing, tracing, etc., we can help drive the transmission rate down much faster. But the big point is, herd immunity and vaccines are not the only ways out.

Totally agree, and those options aren't the "fastest" ways either.

Here is the problem, and there is no way of avoiding that this sounds like a political rant. It isn't. This post is about leadership...but those with blinders on will vilify me for a "political" post.

Science was leading the decision making until a couple of weeks ago. Like him or not, the President, via his administration, put out a pretty decent criteria for starting the reopening process...his "Guidelines for Opening Up America Again". Had we all (across the country) simply followed those guidelines, in unison, we'd probably be ok. Not great, either economically or from a health perspective, but ok.

Phase 1, according to the national plan, was to slowly start opening businesses back up...but to then wait 14 days to see if the indicators started moving back in the opposite direction. Increased people testing positive, increases in the sick going to hospitals, etc. However, some leaders around the country...and dare I say in DC...decided that the 14 day waiting period was too burdensome. So, individual decisions were made across the country to, in effect, rush to Phase 2 before the data was in.

So I'm the Mayor of a town in the State of Jeffecticut. I see my neighboring towns starting to open up, even though I acknowledge it is not in following the President's guidelines (because he himself is now sending mixed messages) and my business owners are saying..."hey, what about us?" Now I'm making a political decision to forego the scientific approach in favor of the political one because I don't want to be voted out of office in the next election.

This is entirely about leadership...or the lack thereof. I'm not naive. I understand that politics dominates just about every action in today's America. Hell, even something as simple as wearing a mask has become a symbol of your political leaning...not the basic fact that it is the compassionate thing to do for your fellow man. But a lack of leadership has us all moving in different directions, and that isn't the recipe for success.

I don't know what comes next. Nobody does. But in the history of America it is hard to point to a moment in time when we didn't follow the science, and that decision didn't bite us in the ass. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this will magically go away. But, that doesn't seem to be the case in other parts of the world. Brazil is on the verge of catastrophe because of their arrogant, ignorant leader. The US relies heavily on Latin and South America in many industries, and in tourism particularly. What hurts them hurts us. We are all in this together yet nobody is acting like it.

Sorry, feeling a little pissed off today.

SeaWorld Orlando opening June 11 - Walt Disney World waiting until mid-July

Hambone and Jeff are talking about a 3rd option for an endgame (besides vaccine or herd immunity), but I don't think I understand what that is. Is it "total and complete lockdown leading to eventual eradication"? Is it social distancing, masks, testing, and tracing leading to ultra slow reduction in cases until eradication? Or is that in perpetuity and not really an "end game"?

wahoo skipper said:

Sorry, feeling a little pissed off today.

I don't think you'd have to be pissed off to present the well reasoned and coherent argument that you did. The total inconsistency (remember when Trump released the 4 phase guidelines and them immediately tweeted "liberate ______" undermining the guidelines he tweeted two days before?) only compounds the willful ignorance. It's like Trump knows what's right (or at least has advisors telling him what's right) and also knows what will give him the biggest applause from his base and he wants both.

It's not an end game, per se, it's an interim version of normal until there are successful treatments and/or vaccines. The extreme version is what they're doing in Wuhan, where a few new cases spring up, and they test 9 million people in less than two weeks to figure out who to keep quarantined. The less extreme version is the NZ/AU model, which involves several weeks of serious commitment to quarantine, then immediately react to new cases with rapid testing and tracing, potentially quarantining small numbers of people.

With a patchwork of enforcement and advice that isn't consistent, we can't do that in the US. We can't do hard things because 'Merica or something.

I don't think science was ever leading the decision making process. Nor do I think it ever should. Policy makers determine policy. In the US those policy makers are politicians. Those are the people we elect. Not scientists. Scientists can tell you if you do X, Y will happen and if you do A, B will happen. But they won't be able to tell you whether you should do X or A unless you give them parameters/goals But they won't pick the parameters/goals.

Scientists can (and do) tell us there are large numbers of deaths in the US each year which could be prevented if we did X or Y or restricted A or B. But they do not make the policy decisions as to striking balances. And those balances are struck every day. That reality seems to make many people uncomfortable when confronted with it directly as we are with Covid which I find interesting.

Policy makers do consult experts. Policy decisions are often based in large part on experts. Often there are competing interests. The experts typically do not resolve those differences. Policy makers do.

In terms of things being political, I have noticed over the years that if people agree with the decision, it aligns with their world view or is made by someone on their team, there is a tendency to view the decision as just, equitable, rational, well thought out or right rather than political. If that is not true, the tendency is to view the decision as being politically motivated, pandering to a base, trying to get re-elected, etc. Maybe I am jaded and cynical but I think all politicians always make political decisions. There is too much money and power involved in getting elected and staying in office for that not to be the case.

I think you're dipping toward the moral equivalence argument, which I completely disagree with. Not everyone treats politics like a sports rivalry. I can disagree with policy positions, but none of us should accept dishonesty, cruelty or incompetence from leaders of any party.

Masks now appear to be the savior.

How do we go from masks are of no use to this?

We now have really clear evidence that wearing masks works -- it's probably a 50% protection against transmission," Dr. Chris Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, or IHME, at the University of Washington

Who said they were of no use?

If I believed that Trump carefully weighed the competing priorities, respected his advisors and their expertise as more than "yes" men, took their advice into account, crafted a plan, communicated the plan, promoted the plan to the American public, and we still ended up where we are...then so be it. Blaming Trump would be a partisan knee jerk reaction. (And as much as I disagree with nearly everything Trump does, I do sometimes get fed up by the "if Trump did it, it must be the worst thing ever" crowd.)

Instead we got scapegoating (democratic hoax, liberate _______, blame China), diversionary tactics (Obama gate, investigate Wuhan lab), credit hoarding (put my name on the checks, I don't have the power to close things, but I want to be the one to reopen them), unsubstantiated claims (hydroxychorloquine), cronyism in the face of real scientific expertise (Mike Pence leading the pandemic task force, firing Rick Bright), threats (attempting to withhold federal funds), and simple failure to have a plan or at least to communicate it effectively (4 phase plan that nobody is actually following).

Regardless of how true any of these things are or are not, they are the exact opposite of the leadership necessary to bring about a unified effort against a common threat. That is a failure of leadership. I honestly still cannot figure out what our plan as a country is. Can anyone tell me what it is?

Science should not define policy, but policy should not ignore science.

Somewhat related article that I stumbled over earlier this week:
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/05/23/861577367/mess...-outbreaks

Shades said:

Masks now appear to be the savior.

How do we go from masks are of no use to this?

Because that's how science works? At first we thought it was primarily transmitted by surface contact and now we have better evidence that it's transmitted by particles in the air. We created a new understanding through hypothesis, experiment, observation, and analysis which may later be refined.