Absolutely. Definitely. When they chose those jobs they took on the responsibility of living above reproach.
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I donât think you know what my situation is well enough to comment on it.
You keep suggesting that I have a blanket dislike for restrictions, when in fact I donât. What I do think is that the benefits have to outweigh the risks, and that we havenât adequately accounted for the risks of the restrictions- we have been primarily focused only on COVID and not on the collateral damage caused by our attempts to contain it.
We also donât know with any certainty that the restrictions work as intended, though that data is coming in.
If people like me (only way higher up the food chain) donât ask these questions, we will never have the answers. And the next pandemic that rolls around, which may be far more serious than this one, will be a total disaster.
People must have faith in their institutions, and they donât. Why is that? Thatâs what concerns me the most.
In the end, the authorities will need to show us that all of our sacrifices were not in vain. Can they?
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I believe in the âThe hammer and the Danceâ as ideal guidelines to follow in this pandemic. It became popular with this text:
tl,dr. It consists of 2 steps:
- Hammer: do whatever it takes to get daily cases down to manageable levels, while buying time to ramp up testing infrastructure
- Dance: carefully open things up, in order of impact, keeping track of R. Open as many things as possible while R is bellow 1 (sometimes this means backtracking)
This is very close to what I see happening in Germany, and I feel mostly comfortable here. Although I am a bit more paranoid then what regulations allow. Everyone I love is in Brazil. In April a friend of mine lost a sister to corona (in her 30s, 2 kids). After that another friend lost his grandmother, and both father and son leaving across the street from another friend died, and I do not even have that many friends. I know this makes me biased to be more paranoid than the exact right amount. Here in Germany no one I know even knows of anyone who had it.
Figuring out which policies will lead to R < 1 while at the same time reducing negative economic impact is extremely hard. I do not trust the Brazilian government to make the right decisions here. I do mostly trust my local government.
Also, it is very hard to distinguish between the impact of the pandemic itself and the impact of restrictions. There are no travel restrictions in Brazil (except for most other countries not letting us in) and the domestic travel industry is suffering a ton - people donât want to travel if they donât feel safe. And people are more likely to not feel safe after losing someone (or even seeing a bad case first hand). In Germany, where travel restrictions are fairly light - if you are coming back from a high risk zone you get a test (for free) at the airport/train station and have to quarantine for 24 hours while waiting for the test result (of course, if you test positive you have to quarantine longer, but that is true for any positive result) - even then, and even though people mostly donât have any personal trauma, international travel is still way down.
I mostly agree with you. I believe that everything that could be allowed without making R > 1 should be allowed. It requires a competent government in which you can trust. For me the space for personal decisions is for stuff like indoor dining: there is some level of personal risk involved, but (given everything else) allowing it doesnât make R (averaged over the population) > 1 - in that case, allow it. If when fall comes people start eating more inside and that makes the population average higher - that is the time for public policy to change rules. Same thing for travelling and being tested at the border - as long as this doesnât increase domestic transmission rate, it is an individual choice.
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This sounds a lot like what Iâve been thinking for a while. Wouldnât it be great if policymakers had a list of interventions that they could choose from, all with known impacts on transmission? They could pick out the ones that would be the best for their area, with the goal that together the interventions would all add up to an R1 < 1.
The only thing I struggle with is the idea of personal risk. The risk is never just personal with COVID. When we take on the risk, to a certain extent weâre taking it on for everyone we come into contact with, especially family members. So thatâs a hard one.
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While I understand and can track with most of what youâre saying, Iâm not sure this last bit is an expectation that can be met to your satisfaction. Iâm not sure all of the factors that are at play can be segregated out sufficiently to do this. Also, there are some data points that we may never have. For instance, Iâm not sure theyâll ever be able to backtrack into how widespread infections already were in various communities at all the different time points.
I think theyâll eventually have a ballpark IFR and herd immunity %, which will allow us to deduce what fatalities could have been with no mitigation. And weâll know how suicide rates increased, but Iâm not sure theyâll be able to sort how many of those were due to lockdowns only or would have been caused by the overall situation even without lockdowns.
If your confidence in authorities hinges on precise answers to those sorts of things, I think there was no potential for success.
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You know, you have a lot of assumptions about me. While Iâm up for debating anyone, I try not to be personal in my arguments, and do not put words in othersâ mouths. I donât know why I rub you the wrong way, but if you could keep to the topic and not expound on what you think I think, thatâd be great.
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This would be amazing. But I honestly think to get that precise, we would have to do actual human studies that would put people at risk, so that wonât happen. We can kind of guesstimate based on patterns in real world observations, but I donât think it will ever be to this level of granularity.
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I fundamentally believe that everyone here wants the best for the world. 
s all around.
We have some disagreements in how to get the best possible result, standards of proof, trust, and overall priorities when there are hard trade offs.
But s all around, this is all very hard
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They can happen accidentally though, like with the beauty salon in TX. No one would ever run that study, it would be unethical. But because those two stylists did what they did, we know that going to a beauty salon should be a pretty safe bet. I think we can glean information from many cases like that.
Anther way to get granularity is also to run multivariate analyses. I think that could be done using statewide differences in policy, too. That might be an upside of having such patchwork of policies across the country.
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The only way I see is testing a lot, contact tracing every new infection, proceeding with caution, being open to new information, being willing backtrack and having enough infrastructure to keep an almost real time track of R.
If that is not possible, copy policies for places that can do it and hope the local details are not that significant.
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I very much value your opinion and perspective and have learned a ton from your posts.
But Iâll be honest. This type of statement about Sturgis very much rubbed me the wrong way. And you make comments fairly regularly that imply people that support lockdowns donât care about and are ignorant of the negative consequences of lockdowns. So while you may not directly call me out, when you make blanket statements about people that support lockdowns, it feels very personal.
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The problem with exponential functions, combined with this inconveniently slow virus, is that if you are not tracking things very closely, by the time it is clear there is a problem, things are really really bad. 60% of Bergamoâs population caught corona, 0,6% of the overall population died in one month (on average 0,1% of Italyâs population dies in a year).
You have to make some decisions that end up being unneeded in hindsight. If you wait for peer-reviewed studies and precise guidelines, thatâs when refrigerated trucks to store bodies and mass graves come into play.
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A little reminder, that I know you donât need. Please keep things civil. Itâs ok to disagree with an opinion. But no personal attacks.
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Thank you.
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On a lighter note, with the extended closure and then limited crowds, our zoo is having a baby boom. Privacy and stress reduction, apparently. Small silver lining in the whole situation.
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I wonder if a baby boom will be found in other populations???
that activity is free and so many other leisure activities are closed right now.
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Oh, no doubt. We have a lot of âHurricane Harvey babiesâ in Houston! Theyâre actually talking about how the schools are going to need to prepare for the one year bump when they get to school age.
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Well, apparently itâs just the opposite. I think weâre having a baby bust, due to the stress of it all.
Plus, who wants to get snuggly with masks on? Canada's top doctor urges mask wearing during sex, no kissing
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Indeed very hard. I donât think it is feasible for a person to be actually able to make these highly complex decisions taking everything into account. It takes a whole team of trained experts. You have to be able to trust something.
One thing that stresses me out here in Munich is that employees of restaurants/shops are never wearing higher quality PPE (ffp2s + face shields would be my ideal). Whichever exposure they are getting is not a choice freely made, and they will end up suffering the consequences of otherâs decisions without better PPE.
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The official NYC safe pandemic sex guide is extremely specific
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