The end of a pandemic: what if this guy is correct?

[MotorCityRadioFreak]

The deniers continue a year later. Absolutely asinine that the right continues to embrace this belief that COVID is man made and developed by China or Bill Gates. Yet at the same time, the virus is fake and Whitmer's shut downs are useless. What an upside down world they live in. Definitely making the case for debt free college as education is sorely needed.

[Turkeytop]

The deniers continue a year later. Absolutely asinine that the right continues to embrace this belief that COVID is man made and developed by China or Bill Gates. Yet at the same time, the virus is fake and Whitmer's shut downs are useless. What an upside down world they live in. Definitely making the case for debt free college as education is sorely needed.

But wait. I thought they said it was a Democrat hoax and it would be forgotten about the day after the election

[bmw]

The deniers continue a year later. Absolutely asinine that the right continues to embrace this belief that COVID is man made...

I never said that.

...and developed by China

or that.

...or Bill Gates.

or that.

...the virus is fake...

or that.

...and Whitmer's shut downs are useless.

Yes, I did say that. Prolonged government lockdowns have done virtually NOTHING to slow the spread of the virus, and I have yet to see evidence to the contrary. The closest thing I saw was a study done last summer (can't find it now) that compared various localities in the US and whether they had government-mandated lockdowns or not, and what the study found was that 21 days after the lockdowns were implemented, the reduction in daily Covid cases amounted to a barely statistically significant 2.1 percent.

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The deniers continue a year later. Absolutely asinine that the right continues to embrace this belief that COVID is man made...

I never said that.

...and developed by China

or that.

...or Bill Gates.

or that.

...the virus is fake...

or that.

...and Whitmer's shut downs are useless.

Yes, I did say that. Prolonged government lockdowns have done virtually NOTHING to slow the spread of the virus, and I have yet to see evidence to the contrary. The closest thing I saw was a study done last summer (can't find it now) that compared various localities in the US and whether they had government-mandated lockdowns or not, and what the study found was that 21 days after the lockdowns were implemented, the reduction in daily Covid cases amounted to a barely statistically significant 2.1 percent.

The government needs to ask itself whether using this particular bullet on this particular situation was worth it... you don’t get to shut down Willy nilly like this and then expect everybody to jump to attention the NEXT time there a worse situation. I have the gut feeling they fired their bullet on the wrong one.

[Robert Faygo]

The government needs to ask itself whether using this particular bullet on this particular situation was worth it... you don’t get to shut down Willy nilly like this and then expect everybody to jump to attention the NEXT time there a worse situation. I have the gut feeling they fired their bullet on the wrong one.

Excellent point!

500,000+ deaths with who knows how many more to come is worthy of a bullet or six, IMO. But only if we truly understand the scope of these deaths and if doing what was done actually did anything.

And this topic is totally insensitive, and I apologize for that -- but I don't know how else to talk about it. I did have to pause before typing this out of respect for those that have died during this and everyone that has felt the pain of losing a loved one / friend.

- I've seen charts, still I really don't have a good grasp on how many more deaths have happened during COVID than what would be considered normal. I have no doubts that COVID has sped up the rate at which people are dying, especially the elderly. When COVID is over, are we going to experience a period of lower than normal deaths while nature "catches up"?

- How many people are going to have long term health (mental and otherwise from things like delayed cancer treatments, etc) consequences because of the bullets that were used?

- How many people are going to lose their livelihoods from the bullets that were used. Will this impact things like infant mortality because folks can't afford / have access to the same health care as before?

There are many other thoughts in my head ... but tldr

It's going to take decades to really understand all this, IMO

[bmw]

In hindsight, I don't have a problem with the initial set of lockdowns last March and April so that we could at least get some idea of what this virus was all about and to give enough time to educate the general public about it. Once most of the mass public was generally educated, which IMO was by early last summer, that is when the government needed to shift its strategy away from mass lockdowns and restriction and instead focus on more targeted measures. Most businesses should have been allowed to re-open in the summer, at at least 50, if not 75 percent capacity, and absolutely should not have been shut down a second time in the fall. K-12 education should have started and continued on as normal the first day of school this past fall. The elderly in nursing homes should have been allowed more freedom to visit friends and family. Ultimately, I think government restrictions, while perhaps justified for the first several months, have now SEVERELY overstayed their welcome and may well create a "Boy Who Cried Wolf" problem when something worse hits.

[bmw]

As to the question of WHY lockdowns didn't work with this particular pandemic - simple: Covid is HIGHLY contagious. More recent data suggests that it has an R0 value of 5.7 FIVE POINT SEVEN!!!! That is a humongous number. That means that for every person who gets it, they on average give it to 5 or 6 other people. And that number is in spite of masks and lockdowns.

https://www.healthline.com/health/r-nou ... ion-number

Seasonal flu? 1.3.
The 1918 swine flu? Between 1.4 and 2.8.
Asian flu of 1957? 1.53 to 1.70
Hong Kong flu of 1968? 1.06 to 2.06.
The H1N1 flu of 2009? 1.4 to 1.6.

Covid is orders of magnitude more contagious than all the major pandemics in the US in the past 150 years. That is why lockdowns were completely pointless. The government actively tried to fight mother nature's method of herd immunity, and with severe, long-lasting consequences.

[Robert Faygo]

Unfortunately K-12 is far more complicated than a one-size fits all answer.

Have most schools probably erred too much on the side of caution? Yep.

That said, I think it's incredibly damaging that Ann Arbor and Kalamazoo schools announced already that they are not giving kids the opportunity to return to in-person school at all this school year. Giving up seems like a complete cop-out.


That healthline article about the Covid R0 value is from last April and way, way out of date. No one estimates it's 5.7 now - it's between 2 and 3 (still high, but nowhere near 5.7).

https://www.statista.com/topics/5994/th ... -outbreak/

[jadednihilist]

As to the question of WHY lockdowns didn't work with this particular pandemic - simple: Covid is HIGHLY contagious. More recent data suggests that it has an R0 value of 5.7 FIVE POINT SEVEN!!!! That is a humongous number. That means that for every person who gets it, they on average give it to 5 or 6 other people. And that number is in spite of masks and lockdowns.

https://www.healthline.com/health/r-nou ... ion-number

Seasonal flu? 1.3.
The 1918 swine flu? Between 1.4 and 2.8.
Asian flu of 1957? 1.53 to 1.70
Hong Kong flu of 1968? 1.06 to 2.06.
The H1N1 flu of 2009? 1.4 to 1.6.

Covid is orders of magnitude more contagious than all the major pandemics in the US in the past 150 years. That is why lockdowns were completely pointless. The government actively tried to fight mother nature's method of herd immunity, and with severe, long-lasting consequences.

To add to Robert Faygo's point, R0 is turning out to not be a great metric for defining policy and forecasting. You can't really compare the R0 of early pandemics to COVID since the way we sampled total number of infections were quite different. I'm sure people have tried to apply corrections, but those corrections are based on loosely constrained data and subject to error. We're sampling plenty of asymptomatic carriers with COVID that we did not have the luxury to do with previous pandemics.

With COVID, there's a lot of uncertainty regarding R0 since it's highly dependent on geographic factors and human behavior that varies greatly from region to region. One tool that's potentially useful is defining an Re (an R0 benchmark based on policy-imposed restrictions) to identify what kind of spread our healthcare system can maintain. Angela Merkel early on set that value below 1, which is why Germany has had such strict measures put into place. (Source: https://www.the-scientist.com/features/ ... read-67690)

[jadednihilist]

The government needs to ask itself whether using this particular bullet on this particular situation was worth it... you don’t get to shut down Willy nilly like this and then expect everybody to jump to attention the NEXT time there a worse situation. I have the gut feeling they fired their bullet on the wrong one.

Excellent point!

500,000+ deaths with who knows how many more to come is worthy of a bullet or six, IMO. But only if we truly understand the scope of these deaths and if doing what was done actually did anything.

And this topic is totally insensitive, and I apologize for that -- but I don't know how else to talk about it. I did have to pause before typing this out of respect for those that have died during this and everyone that has felt the pain of losing a loved one / friend.

- I've seen charts, still I really don't have a good grasp on how many more deaths have happened during COVID than what would be considered normal. I have no doubts that COVID has sped up the rate at which people are dying, especially the elderly. When COVID is over, are we going to experience a period of lower than normal deaths while nature "catches up"?

- How many people are going to have long term health (mental and otherwise from things like delayed cancer treatments, etc) consequences because of the bullets that were used?

- How many people are going to lose their livelihoods from the bullets that were used. Will this impact things like infant mortality because folks can't afford / have access to the same health care as before?

There are many other thoughts in my head ... but tldr

It's going to take decades to really understand all this, IMO

These are great questions that I don't think we really have good answers to right now. I'd like the emphasize your serious question to consider are the long-term effects of the complications to COVID. These have been seen in many young healthy people, including those without obvious co-morbidities, that have acute impacts on normal daily functions. We are in the very early phases of understanding these long-term effects and what fraction of those infected end up with these complications.

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The government needs to ask itself whether using this particular bullet on this particular situation was worth it... you don’t get to shut down Willy nilly like this and then expect everybody to jump to attention the NEXT time there a worse situation. I have the gut feeling they fired their bullet on the wrong one.

Excellent point!

500,000+ deaths with who knows how many more to come is worthy of a bullet or six, IMO. But only if we truly understand the scope of these deaths and if doing what was done actually did anything.

And this topic is totally insensitive, and I apologize for that -- but I don't know how else to talk about it. I did have to pause before typing this out of respect for those that have died during this and everyone that has felt the pain of losing a loved one / friend.

- I've seen charts, still I really don't have a good grasp on how many more deaths have happened during COVID than what would be considered normal. I have no doubts that COVID has sped up the rate at which people are dying, especially the elderly. When COVID is over, are we going to experience a period of lower than normal deaths while nature "catches up"?

- How many people are going to have long term health (mental and otherwise from things like delayed cancer treatments, etc) consequences because of the bullets that were used?

- How many people are going to lose their livelihoods from the bullets that were used. Will this impact things like infant mortality because folks can't afford / have access to the same health care as before?

There are many other thoughts in my head ... but tldr

It's going to take decades to really understand all this, IMO

These are great questions that I don't think we really have good answers to right now. I'd like the emphasize your serious question to consider are the long-term effects of the complications to COVID. These have been seen in many young healthy people, including those without obvious co-morbidities, that have acute impacts on normal daily functions. We are in the very early phases of understanding these long-term effects and what fraction of those infected end up with these complications.

This is the one reason I’m so torn on whether or not these shutdowns were good... you see the economic pain but then the effects of the virus go beyond just the deaths... there are no clear easy answers here.

[TC Talks]

So with the insight of a years worth of data on this virus (verse 2 weeks), you are suggesting that the policy our governor made was not perfect?

Where was the federal government? This was and is a national issue, and the old administration went golfing and a witch hunt instead of collaborating with the states.

Last weekend, Biden signed a Major Disaster relief order for Texas, what if he told them the storm as a "State Matter" and left it at that... Look at how Puerto Rico was treated during the last administration.

[jadednihilist]

I'm a bit confused by this post.

No one is above criticism and it's a perfectly healthy and normal exercise to leverage hindsight to learn critical lessons for when something like this happens again in the future. bmw acknowledged how his views evolved with the benefit of hindsight and I applaud that.

The federal government absolutely failed in their response to the virus and totally gave up on governing after the November election. Our governor made mistakes, some of which don't require the benefit of hindsight to acknowledge, and our state legislature remains dysfunctional. It's good to see our federal government help Texans out in their time of need. All of the above can be true without contradiction. It's also perfectly reasonable for anyone to draw different conclusions from the same data.

[ftballfan]

I think the actual number of people infected is much higher than the official infection count as many people that may have been infected in the early stages of the pandemic (March/April/May) were never tested as they never developed symptoms or had mild symptoms not severe enough for a hospital visit. Even during the fall surge, total hospitalizations statewide never hit the spring peak. However, the spring peak was concentrated in the Detroit area while the fall peak was more evenly spread out with many hospitals hitting capacity, but very few if any hitting levels seen in the Detroit area in April.

[km1125]

In the early months, there were a LOT of projections that said the actual infection rate was several multiples of the reported rate due to the reasons ftbalifan noted.

There were quite a few tests around the country that did random antibody tests and in some cases the actual infected were reported to be 50x the reported number. That might have been a bit flawed or too optimistic, but the general consensus was that there were definitely many more that survived the virus than what was being acknowledged.

What ever happened to those antibody studies?? Why haven't we seen more of them since?? Is there something the government/press doesn't want the public to know??