I read this article long back and it really resonated with me https://threader.app/thread/1218724150312751104 . It explains why people solving problems proactively before they become huge issues get much less credit than people doing it reactively when the problem has become much worse and putting heroic efforts.
It's pretty much the same thing as the classic hero problem solver and it's in computer programming too. The person who does a good design, tests, finds bugs ... doesn't get as much credit as the person who puts in Herculean efforts at the last moment to save the day.
Yeah, I'd argue the issue is largely one of awareness. There simply aren't good established mechanisms for even competent managers to notice the people preventing a problem. The manager only has so much mental bandwidth, and part of being a good subordinate is not consuming too much of that. There's an ideal of "the team runs itself" with the manager only providing overall direction/resources/big picture stuff.
While this can be great for team execution, by definition it insulates managers from the nitty-gritty of design/development, which is where most of the preventative measures happen. However if you try to remedy this and bring the manager into the fold, you invite micromanaging and harm execution, as well as preventing the manager from doing more managerial things.
It's when things go wrong and heroes emerge that people get raises and promotions, if simply because the manager can point to those highly visible efforts as rationale for why this person gets more. Also in large orgs a manager might not know all their direct reports personally so those incidents make the person stick out, like how a professor knows the kids who sit at the front of the class the best.
I suppose the ideal would be a technically experienced manager who understands how to promote good design practices and lets his team do so, but on sheer educated faith with no metrics. Given that metrics are the lifeblood of large-org management careers, the incentive structure isn't there to produce such people en-masse.
I'm not sure if micromanagement is that bad for the final product, as long as the manager has deep technical expertise and respects the people who he micromanages.
Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are famous/notorius micromanagers (though they have some problems with the ,,respect'' part). At the same time as they understand the problems with the product development deeper, they are able to plan more iterations ahead.
One example is the autopilot hardware. About 10-12 years ago I was working at Google, sitting in a self driving car in Mountain View when it was a secret project. I was already at that time amazed that the car could do some offroading tricks that I wasn't capable of, and I was quite certain that within 5 years it would be self driving without safety driver.
Now it's 2020, and it seems to me that in no more than 10 years Tesla will win the autonomous race, as Elon understood that the computer needs lots of deep learning instructions (more than what NVIDIA could provide) and HD maps and lidars are not just unnecesary, but they are the wrong direction, as the visual sensing problem needs to be solved for safe self driving.
In Google there are so many product managers at this point, that they themselves are actively hindering the product development itself, as they don't want to get into the details of the real problems.
Maybe heroes are needed just as much as people that do good designs. Maybe it's more akin to a dichotomy of people that build good houses that hardly catch fire and firefighters who put out fires; even in the extreme case that you build nothing but houses that hardly catch fire, it won't mean that you don't need firefighters; in the nominal case of an economically feasible amount (I doubt many MVPs could take on the cost to make them near fireproof) of almost fireproof houses, it might approximate to needing both equally as much.
Frankly, I've been on both sides of the aisle when it comes to projects that allowed for great design and projects that resulted in doing an endless marathon for 3 weeks straight to put out a fire because of poor design; I can tell you without a doubt that doing great design doesn't take anywhere near as much of a toll on your body and mind as doing an endless marathon; I've severely damaged interpersonal relationships (that I can't undamage) through these marathons.
The balance is that there are orders of magnitude more problems that might happen than problems that do happen.
So the devil is in the statistical details... Which is greater? The average effort required to prepare for all the possible problems, or the average damage caused by the subset of those issues that will actually develop into problems.
One need only look at the dismantelling of our strategic stockpiles of respirators following 2002/2003 SARS to find a relevant example today. Stupid choices are inevitable in a political climate that looks at any spending on human life as a costly line item to be eliminated.
The social engineering aspect of pandemic control is fascinating and something I had never considered before. It's not enough to put the right policies in place. You have to get people to actually follow them (voluntarily). It's like writing a user story on a grand scale.
There are basically three groups of people now: those who are taking this seriously and social distancing, those who think this is some kind of hoax and are gleefully ignoring any advice or orders from the government, and those that are "essential" and have no choice in the matter.
The hoaxers are a clear and present threat to the essential workers. The number of MBTA staff infected with COVID-19 has more than doubled in the past week; they can't avoid people, and they're being infected by those who won't.
Vast simplification that undermines working-class people. Tens of millions of people have lost their job and income, while bills continue to accumulate. It's fair to acknowledge the potential risks of contracting COVID-19, and still decide, I'd prefer to work, observing sanitization & social distancing measures, than to have my entire financial life ruined.
We just had the NFL draft this week. Plenty of these players will have their bodies seriously harmed in the next few years, while others will get multiple concussions and potentially set themselves up for CTE or other brain damage. Not once did anyone raise any alarms about, maybe these young people shouldn't go into this line of work...
The 99% of us who are losing our jobs and eating through our savings shouldn't be forced into a moral dilemma of working to remain solvent vs. quarantine/distancing to protect others. This is entirely a failure of government to quickly and effectively manage the pandemic with country-wide health measures as well as adequate economic support, especially for the most vulnerable. A check for $1200 is an insult.
Your premise is moot. The economic support isn't there, whether or not people "should" face this decision, they are.
'thomasmcgalvin' stated that all non-essential workers are either taking COVID-19 seriously, or are hoaxers. He dismisses what is probably the majority of people -- normal working people who understand there is a risk, but who still want to work in order to avoid a personal economic disaster.
> Not once did anyone raise any alarms about, maybe these young people shouldn't go into this line of work...
Maybe you're just going for rhetorical force but you are factually wrong. Plenty of people have "raised alarms" about e.g. concussions caused by playing football.
First, you missed the main point of the comment, contrasting the way society reacts to different risks. Second, the consequences of concussions and CTE are well-known, that's why they make for a good example. Despite being aware that playing football increases one's risk, including the settlement you link to, there have not been any serious efforts to shut down the NFL -- or to ban college, high school or junior football (more dangerous due to the younger age of participants and exponentially higher number of players). The draft was televised for 3 days on 3 channels last week, the largest sports event in weeks, yet we heard no demands to shut down the NFL from Fauci, Birx, Cuomo, any mainstream media, politicians, WHO, doctors, etc.
For better or worse people play sports voluntarily because they enjoy it. That's very different than succumbing to a contagious viral infection, eh? I don't see what the two have to do with each other.
I feel for the people who have lost their jobs, I have family who have lost their jobs and are trying right now to figure out how to pay their May rent and bills and buy food. It's scary. My mom has lived in the same place so long that her rent is about 1/3 of what her neighbors pay. If she misses some payments I doubt they'll try to evict her, at least not for a few months anyway, but they will likely try to break her lease and charge her 3x her rent. She can't afford that and would be forced to move, probably to a different state. That alone could kill her from stress even before factoring in the additional exposure to possible infection. What I'm saying is, even though I'm a healthy computer nerd, this is still very personal for me.
FWIW I think the simplest thing would be for the government to just give people money. But what do I know?
I agree generally that at some point we will cross the line where the economic and financial harm will outweigh the harm from Covid-19. (The trick is know when that line is reached. Apparently the EPA values a human life at about $7m. Other calculation come to about $130k/year.)
Couple of point (all my opinions):
1. Without the "hoaxers" and deniers we would be able to trust the people to "observ[e][...] sanitization & social distancing measures". To some extend the strict measures are necessary due to those groups.
2. Concussions are not contagious, so the NFL players are making decisions about their own health only. With Covid-19 you take responsibility for _other_ people.
3. The fact that one can be financially ruined this way points to deeper problems in society that should be fixed. Rather than forcing sick people back to work and putting the ethical dilemma of working vs. the safety of others on them, we should support those in need.
High-school and junior-league football involves far more participants, at much greater risk, due to their still-developing bodies and brains, with much less ability to make wise decisions about their long-term health. Yet despite research clearly demonstrating risks, virtually all attempts to reduce or ban it have failed. Gov Cuomo certainly isn't having daily press conferences about it.
>> Bills seeking to ban tackle football for kids under 12 or 14 have been proposed — and failed — in five states to date
FWIW, I agree with you. I don't watch football, and I strongly believe that these kids should be protected.
At the same time you cannot _possibly_ be serious about equating the NFL drafts with the Corona virus safety measures in terms of their impact on other people and harm that can be caused!
That's like saying "Well, I might have engaged in risky behavior, but I won't practice safe sex now because these people I met last week didn't wear their seatbelts."
> Tens of millions of people have lost their job and income, while bills continue to accumulate.
The fact that the harm is this severe is a separate failure. Job losses hitting such a huge portion of the population don’t have to happen. Other countries have found ways to manage this with far less suffering.
> I'd prefer to work, observing sanitization & social distancing measures, than to have my entire financial life ruined.
It’s not just your health/life you are risking. The contacts you can’t avoid making (home, shops, medical appointments etc) are all directly impacted too.
> It's fair to acknowledge the potential risks of contracting COVID-19, and still decide, I'd prefer to work, observing sanitization & social distancing measures, than to have my entire financial life ruined.
In the places I've worked, it would be impossible to observe social distancing. Open office plans mean you're usually within six feet of someone else.
Sure, totally impossible ::eyeroll:: Open-office type jobs are overwhelmingly computer-facing and easy to do from home. Even if not, a bit of creativity goes a long way -- work in shifts, alternate which days people come in, spread out desks and utilize conference rooms for more space, wear masks.
Two decades ago I was discouraged from even hobby level soccer due to concussion concerns. In retrospect, the lack of exercise should probably have been a bigger health concern...
There is no evidence that we are headed toward food shortages. We actually have surpluses. The issue now and in the future is one of alignment and market forces.
Yeah, this is just like the WHO announcing "no evidence" antibodies provide some immunity. It just means no one has done a scientific study of how to collapse the food supply on a massive scale. These sorts of "everything is peachy neat keeno" claims are like Fauci saying the "risk to the US is low" back in February. There is a nontrivial risk we are headed toward food shortages. We should get back in a safer, more well understood configuration for food production and distribution.
So you believe the ability to produce food, which we've historically produced too much of and let go to waste, is just going to poof into thin air because a select portion of the population doesn't have money flow.
So technically correct is the best kind of correct? The feasibility of succeeding makes the point moot, and frankly makes it sound like puerile moralizing. You might as well say, in the wake of a murder, "well your society could stop murder altogether if they decided not to kill each other".
Especially considering that we've already passed the largest economic bailout/safety net measures in world history in a matter of 3 weeks, and it looks like more is on the way. It would seem that "society" is doing its best over here given the realities of the situation, theoretical Kumbaya ideals aside.
Nothing about technically correct, just pointing out that I thought they had misread and failed to address the comment they replied to.
For a gun analogy, I go with it's like if someone said "We could choose to make it much more difficult to own a handgun" and then someone fired back with a rejoinder about that not helping the people getting shot right now. The rejoinder doesn't address the statement.
A minor but salient point: in common usage, a hoaxer would be a person perpetrating a hoax, not a person who believes (incorrectly) that someone else is perpetrating a hoax. The people who you are referring to hear are better labelled "denialists" than "hoaxers".
The irony is that misinformation campaigns are the actual hoax here... calling them "hoaxers" is more accurate than you suggest.
The real lesson I got from the article is that politicians are the worst face of a pandemic response: it risks that half of the populace will do the opposite of the advice given.
Once the issue is politicized, that snowballs -- propaganda has infected modern discourse to a disturbing degree, and it's hard to see well-organized denialism being amplified by far-right media as anything but a cold-hearted hoax.
That simply begs the question. Whether you label it "hoax" or "misinformation" doesn't matter. What matters is whether or not something someone says corresponds to actual truth. The beauty of science is that you don't have to take anyone's word for anything, you can actually go and do the experiment for yourself. So by all means, if you think Donald Trump is on to something and the press and the scientists are all conspiring against him to make him look bad for political reasons, then do the experiment: go inject yourself with bleach. I won't stand in your way. But I will give you long odds that it won't end well for you.
Yes, but the difference is that "hoaxer" is already an English word with an established meaning, namely, one who perpetrates a hoax. "Truther" did not already have an established meaning before it was coined to mean what it does.
I think by reversing the meaning of the word hoaxer he can maintain the same rhetoric from his 2016 election to secure his next presidency while making 180 degree turn on what he is actually selling. The democrats will all fall over each other commenting how Trump bends the truth. This will waist so much attention time of the people that could have been used to actual sell on important issues. Donald steered the conversation once again captures momentum and wins.
We're not stopping the spread of covid, with or without "hoaxers", this is going to run its course.
We're just slowing it to a manageable rate with fairly extreme measures like lock-downs (which will likely be loosening soon anyways), and I don't see small pockets of uncooperative people making a sizable difference in the general outcome, not at this stage.
I think it is disingenuous to imply that the only people on public transit right now are those working there and those ignorant people treating it all as a hoax and taking the transit anyway.
You would be surprised to find out how many of essential workers rely on public transport to get to their jobs.
I was only using the MBTA as an example of essential workers. There is a large segment of the public that is fucked right now because we need them to work, and have no way to protect them. The fact that there is a large segment of the population that is happy to spread this virus only exacerbates the issue.
Yep. Thank both the greed of the ruling class and the cowardice of the serf class to assent to even more dire poverty. A few UBI crumbs "that will last 10 weeks" could be the "let them eat cake"-moment, but it is extremely unlikely because the vasty majority of people are cowards and will take any injustice over a barrel because they believe they have no power (learned helplessness).
He didn't say "they need to work" (although they might). He said "we need them to work".
No matter how greedy the ruling class might be, we still need medical people to staff hospitals, police to police, firemen, etc. These people are not serfs or cowards because they're going to their jobs.
I’m seeing a lot of in between in my own friend/friend of friends networks. Particularly in SF it seems a lot of people don’t quite think this is a hoax, but just aren’t very concerned and are stretching the boundaries of the stay at home order as much as they can. Big groups are meeting up in parks where they don’t all live walking distance away, just hanging out having picnics. Lots of people are eating together in the street outside of takeout places. And lots of politicians are even encouraging this kind of thing.
So aside from the shit show of the Trump administration, I’m not seeing even the areas that are being praised as being the “best” in America really take this seriously.
At this point, it looks like we’re way off the trajectory of squashing the outbreak. The curve has plateaued, but we aren’t on track to get the numbers low enough to safely open businesses again and go back to containment and contact tracing. We’re failing at the “hammer” stage of the hammer and the dance, and it seems to me like the probable outcome at this point is a whack a mole of continuous, half hearted hammering for the next year or more where we won’t be able to lift this lockdown much at all.
Maybe you’ve stopped seeing friends but still have sex your non-cohabitating partner. Maybe you went for a walk with a friend and tried to keep 6 feet away but slipped up. Maybe there was an emotional moment and you touched them before you could think. Maybe you had one person over for a special occasion.
Lots of people have at least some intention to take it seriously, but not the steely heart for the hardcore isolation that’s required.
I can imagine more groups. For example people might need to get out of the city/house for psychological reasons. Taking a small chance to get/spread the virus might be better than hurting oneself/others.
I agree. I think the issue with mask recommendations was ultimately that politicians/public health officials were worried people would put on a mask and then feel invincible, therefore leading to more spread.
I think that is the case with lots of calls to re-open now. There are so many businesses that could return safely now if people followed safety protocol, but realistically not only will there be unintentional safety errors but loosening of some government restrictions will lead to the loosening of people's personal safetly restrictions they have been doing since the start.
The world isn't software engineering; if anything, it's philosophy.
I look at it this way, and it sounds harsh but it's big-time decision-making life:
1. You could compel people to listen to something to ensure their safety by force, and then have a riot.
OR
2. You could urge sensible people do something for their own safety while letting the idiots commit suicide and clean-up the gene pool in the process.
I say take option #2 all-day, everyday because it's easier, cheaper, and better for others who do listen to have one less fewer, stupid liability in the world who would otherwise put others in danger.
The idiots in question are endangering not only themselves, but everyone they come in contact with. This includes essential workers in transport, medicine, and retail. They also exacerbate the strain on critical health infrastructure. Preventing the collapse of critical medical infrastructure is the primary objective of social distancing.
Attending an anti-lockdown protest without taking proper social distancing measures is more akin to driving drunk on the freeway than it is to shooting heroin into one's veins. The latter can in many circumstances be understood to have negligible impact on the rights of others, the former cannot.
The question of "at what point do social distancing measures overstep the legitimate exercise of government power" is a nuanced one. It requires weighing individuals rights against one another in a situation where cause and effect are at best thinly statistical, emergent from collective behavior, and regionally variable (NYC != rural Kentucky).
No government is going to get their response to COVID-19 100% right, but I'm pretty sure focusing exclusively on individual self-harm would be an abysmal heuristic.
Option 2 doesn't really work with an exponential process. There are people who have to work for society to continue functioning who have no choice but to be exposed to the "idiots", and even people able to self-isolated generally cannot completely remove encounters that could cause infection, but instead just greatly reduce them.
Correct. Other people's idiotic choices have deadly implications for everyone else. That's why we can't just let people ignore this problem. They don't just hurt themselves.
At the same time, we can't just let zeal/fear drive us into making the short-term safest choices that may not be safest in the long run. I do think we're overshooting the other way.
- Infection fatality rate -- this looks to be 1/5th or lower than what we thought getting into this.
- Infection hospitalization rate -- similar.
- Probability of getting a vaccine in a moderately quick timeframe -- I'd call this one 50/50. Hard to bet on.
- How long it takes case counts to decay to a point where a contact tracing regime works -- This really depends. It looks like to me that in the US jurisdictions with the best controls, Rt =~ 0.6. This will take a -long- time to decay to the 1 case per million threshold where contact tracing, etc works; 6 months or more. Some models put the decay much quicker, at like a month from now, but I cannot understand why.
- Efficacy of a herd immunity strategy / serology information from various jurisdictions -- looking hopeful, but imperfect information. Sweden is getting there...
- Critical care utilization. In the SF Bay Area, we're below seasonal norms and COVID-19 cases in ICU have been (very slowly) decaying for the past 3 weeks.
- Seasonal effects. We don't really know, but it looks like there is probably a small seasonal swing to Rt. Seasonal effects justify more dramatic action either direction (containment or relaxation). Containment efforts will be made more effective during summer, but it's also an ideal time to experiment with loosening controls while seasonal factors are on our side.
Did you watch "Avenue 5"? It's dumb, but it's got Hugh Laurie, so I did.
The thing is, it's really dark. I have a pretty dark streak in my sense of humor, but were are a lot of moments when I thought to myself, "Did these guys forget that this show bills itself as a comedy?"
SPOILER ALERT
I think the most horrible scene was when some of the passengers get the idea that they aren't really trapped in space, that it's all a simulation and they're really on Earth after all. And so they decide they want to leave. Through the airlock...
And Captain Laurie and the engineer who won't shut up about being underappreciated by the morons around her (Why would you care about their opinions? They're morons) are in between them and the airlock.
Now maybe this means I'm a bad person, but my first gut reaction was, "Hey, let them go outside. It's evolution in action. A problem that solves itself, yeah?"
But then my real self kicks in and points out that, unless I try my very hardest to prevent these fucking morons from sucking vacuum, letting them spacewalk sans spacesuit is tantamount to murder. And I'm not a murderer.
Even though they are useless fucking morons who seemingly only exist to cause problems, standing by and letting them kill themselves is wrong. You'll hate yourself if you do.
That's the downside of self-awareness and intelligence. If you are the only person on the spaceship who knows the score guess where the buck stops?
Yes, the moment you mention was among the most affecting of the first season. The scene is constructed diabolically to ratchet up the mob mentality — where people are just acting in the moment, purely emotionally.
I read the season as an allegory for where we are now politically. The captain is a figurehead, the passengers are readily manipulated, the far-off owners don’t care, yet everyone aboard is hurtling through space in a very complex machine that they don’t really understand.
Hugh Laurie is doing a great job in the show. Another draw is the creator, Armando Iannucci, who did Veep.
> The world isn't software engineering; if anything, it's philosophy.
Always follow the first link on a Wikipedia page (excluding parentheticals with etymology and pronunciation), rinse and repeat: you eventually end up at philosophy.
The revisionist history attempts by the "scientists" in Seattle are staggering.
On Feb 26th, every single level of the Seattle "scientific" community laughed at Ms. Reid, the Superintendent of the Northshore School District when she closed Bothell High School over a potent positive case of a staff member that travelled overseas. She wanted to make sure her students were safe and the building was disinfected.
The "scientific" King County Deptartment of Health went as far as to specifcally send out a document stating that closure was unwarranted - they did not just sit there and let her do her job - they went out of their way to ensure the public was informed they thought she was nuts.
You do not get to do that and then claim to be the greatest organization of all time 2 days later.
I have a different understanding. Before there was evidence, the health depts were not pushing things. The article goes over that. As soon as they got evidence (that's what those pesky scientists like, darn them), then they started doing what this article says.
One of the earliest public things I'm aware of this posting from a scientist in Seattle on Feb 29th, by researcher Trevor Bedford, part of the Seattle Flu Study about covid-19 tracing genetically. They were testing flu samples for covid-19 (the govt refused permission for them to do that but eventually they just did it, because it was so important). https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1233970271318503426
3rd paragraph is the grovelling the school district needed to do to deal with the interference of the King County Health Department.
There is also the "red dawn" emails which clearly show that King County was not doing a single thing in the face of knowing it was a problem - Dr. Duchin (King County Health) on March 1st - not 4 days after this public rebuke of the school idstrict.
"We are having a very serious challenge related to hospital exposures and impact on the healthcare system. Would be great to have a call to discuss. Will be meeting with your team here this morning and then maybe we can chat after that"
So it goes from laughing to all hell breaking loose to doing nothing for almost 2 more weeks? That's the Health Department leading the way?
I'd love to agree with this article, but I don't think it holds much water.
* Washington schools closed very late. My friends' schools in Indianapolis had already been closed a week.
* Barely any of the volunteer WFH was taken, at least among my group at Microsoft. Maybe 10% participation.
* Volunteer child removal from school was spotty, maybe 25%, not enough to make a huge difference.
While I like most of how our governor has managed it, and I like science, I have a hard time saying that it's more than marginally responsible for the NYC - SEA disparity. In fact as the article alludes, many of the decisions were driven by factors beyond the need to minimize covid deaths, like providing school lunches for families who couldn't afford them. So coming to the conclusion that these decisions are responsible for the disparity is disingenuous.
All the other points in the article, including luck, carry a lot more weight. NYC is the city that never sleeps. SEA is the city where if one person is Sleepless then they make a bestselling movie about it....
The other things really that might make a difference, that few have mentioned is that
* The first hit of the virus was ripping through a life care center. That put people naturally on edge.
* Knicks and Nets both had long homestands during the beginning of the outbreak, whereas let's just say the Sonics have been on a rather long road trip.
Seattle public schools closed before the whole state, which is what you would expect.
I think if the experts of evaluating these policies are saying that putting them in place without delay saved lives, it's probably unwise for all us armchair epidemiologists to sit around coming up with other things we think might explain it.
> Which also makes me question about the effectiveness of lockdowns.
Lockdowns are definitively, absolutely effective in curbing spread. It is backed by solid evidence of reduction is spread in places where lockdown was implemented, AND we have logical scientific reasoning to explain why. The only debatable aspect is whether they are the best solution, given all the trade-offs. And that is a difficult choice. But given no other solutions, if you can afford a lockdown, it is the right first step while you figure out other options.
Countries have been able to avoid a lockdown if they have sufficient quarantine facilities, contact tracing and hospital capacity. But in the absence of these, lockdown is the most effective way to navigate this.
Lockdowns were the wrong solution, imo. I think we've underestimated the spread pre-lockdown and the spread during lockdown (grocery stores etc.). We'll know once broad antibody tests are administered. But if the virus has already spread to 30, 40, heck 50 percent of the population, then what the heck are we doing in lockdown...
So, um, no, we are nowhere near the 50 percent, at least according to any data we might have. And, depending which expert do you heed and what is the definition of "herd immunity" they're after, we need 70%, 90% or 95% before this is over.
50-66% is most likely, and perhaps less. Estimates of R0 are mostly in the range of 2.0-2.5.
50% would lower a 2.0 R0 to 1.0. 66% would lower a 2.5 R0 to 1.0. And this ignores that we may have permanently changed behaviors (e.g. handshakes) that facilitate spread, so we may not even need this fraction to curb tramission.
New York City is presently somewhere past 23%, so that's a big chunk of the way to a 1.0 Rt without controls.
This is again missing the point. You cannot assume such things when lives are at risk. From the point of view of a leader, they knew the following:
- There is a deadly virus out there that is spreading very quickly.
- People who are not showing symptoms are spreading it.
- Community transmission has started
Given these data points, if one leader decided to lockdown sooner and another decided to wait it out, I think it is fair to say that the leader who picked lockdown made the right decision. Yes, if you add an additional data point that 50% of population is already infected, sure, you could argue that maybe it is doing more harm than good. But there is no evidence for this, and this almost certainly was not true when the lockdown decision was made in Washington and California.
What we were trying to do was to get the portion of the population that doesn't take this seriously to actually wash their hands, wear a mask (properly) in public to reduce their viral shedding and limit their trips out as well.
The why, as Washington State Governor Jay Inslee said, "The penalties are you might be killing your grandfather if you don't do it."
It's innocent others; our grandparents, those with known compromised health conditions, and those, even young and likely uninsured, with unknown health conditions, that are being saved.
Putting this another way, I don't care if someone is a smoker in isolation. That's their choice. I care when it spreads and affects others, including myself. The balance of freedom must be considered when conflicts exist, with a bias towards preventing tragedy of the commons.
> But if the virus has already spread to 30, 40, heck 50 percent of the population
_If_ is the key part of this sentence. We simply do not know, which is why - as you point out - testing is key!
If we were strict on lock-down and on testing, we can be very effective with this:
After a few (say 6 or 8) weeks if lock-down we can know with high likelihood who is and who is not sick. Now test all the sick people (and their friends), and start testing the general public for anti-bodies. Then start tracing any new infections.
That requires folks following the lock-down and health measures and the mass availability of virus and anti-body tests.
In addition, there's little doubt that the infection has spread far more widely in NYC area than elsewhere. The covid-19 death rate per capita in NYC is 3 to 20 times higher other areas of the U.S. So even if NYC area had 20% who had been infected, that would not mean the rest of the country was anywhere close to that; other areas would not be close to NYC infection rate unless there death rates were similar.
If you read the article you'll see that doesn't matter. By the time Seattle took action the disease was already widespread in the population at large.
Other factors, like size, density, and use of public transport, are discussed in the article.
> The most affected countries are the most visited ones. Which also makes me question about the effectiveness of lockdowns.
The countries we have the best data on are developed countries.
Again, read the discussion on the different tactics and approaches -- lockdown is only one of the issues.
Looking at 2019 passenger statistics for the big 3:
JFK[1] = 62.6 MM
LGA[2] = 31.1 MM
EWR[3] = 46.3 MM
Total = 140.0 MM
> How many does Seattle receive?
Equivalent 2019 metric for SEA[4] puts it at 51.8 MM.
So as a ballpark measure, greater NYC process 3x more than SEA.
The CDC[5] reports ~13k cases in WA, whereas NY alone is at ~267k cases; add another ~102k for nearby NJ.
Extending the benefit of the doubt, that's ~20x positive incident for 3x flight activity. Even if we pretend that WA is under-reporting by a factor of 2, and half of NY cases are false positive, the argument still falls flat on its face...keep in mind, NJ isn't even being accounted for in this thought experiment.
It’s not the sole metric you’d need to regress against. Once those folks get off the plane they are in much closer contact with the rest of the population.
While I don't dispute the overall conclusion that Seattle handled things better, it's important to remember that infection is not a simple linear process. 3x the passengers does not necessarily mean 3x the cases. It means ~3x the chance of superspreader events directly from passengers, plus a higher chance of such events happening indirectly, and those events tend to be multiplicative rather than additive. On the other hand, it increases the chance that some people will be exposed via multiple paths but counted at most once. So 20x the cases seems a bit high, but 3x would be remarkably low.
I agree. de Blasio did terrible and Inslee acted way faster than Cuomo, but there is a reason that Buffalo is much better off than NYC even though they are both under the jurisdiction of New York law. Anyone who has lived in NYC as well as other cities knows just how different it is.
My family is in New England. Massachusetts has 10x more deaths per capita than New Hampshire even though, if anything, Massachusetts has been a bit ahead in terms of closures and interventions.
The thing missed is that the spread from China was based on travel from Wuhan primarily. NYC infections came from Iran and Italy.
Saying that New York's approach wasn't science based is absurd. The most notable screwup was the delay in school closures due to the dependence that many have on getting breakfast and lunch at school. IMO, at the time I don't think awareness that asymptomatic "super spreaders" may exist was known. (Assuming that is true, much of the data known to CDC is now classified so it's difficult to really know!)
Imagine it's February 2020, multiple european countries decided to start softly locking down due to the scary news from Asia, even though they have barely any cases. Fast forward a week.
Your argument would basically be saying at that point "China has much more cases even though they have stricter restrictions, which means restrictions don't work!"
That is not at all my argument. I am saying the posted article paints a picture of Seattle and New York City being equally susceptible to a huge explosion of cases. The differences between the two cities (in terms of density, public transit, tourists, etc) is about as significant as between a city like Boston and a city like Manchester, New Hampshire.
> Anyone who has lived in NYC [...] knows just how different it is.
No one who's been to NYC can miss the fact that it's one of the filthiest places in America, from the perspective of disease possibilities. Many parts simply pile their trash on the curb and there are rats are everywhere. People pack into subway cars like sardines, and there's no way to avoid droplet transmission. During my time there, I saw several people vomit in public and just walk off.
There are plenty of great things about the city, but lacking a real culture of cleanliness (e.g., Tokyo), density breeds disease.
Filthiness, trash and rats have zero to do with coronavirus.
COVID-19 is spread principally by breathing, which is unaffected by cleanliness.
And if you think people are packed into subway cars in New York... have you been to Tokyo?
I'm not saying New York is a paragon of cleanliness, but you will have to show some scientific evidence that curbside trash pickup or the occasional subway rat has anything to do with the prevalence of modern-day diseases. Because they simply do not as common knowledge suggests.
Modern diseases like colds and flus are spread through close contact in schools, office buildings and subways the exact same as they are every other major city on the planet.
> COVID-19 is spread principally by breathing, which is unaffected by cleanliness.
Masks?
> I'm not saying New York is a paragon of cleanliness, but you will have to show some scientific evidence that curbside trash pickup or the occasional subway rat has anything to do with the prevalence of modern-day diseases. Because they simply do not as common knowledge suggests.
"Urban Norway and black rats (Rattus norvegicus and Rattus rattus) are the source of a number of pathogens responsible for significant human morbidity and mortality in cities around the world.": https://doi.org/10.1089/vbz.2012.1195
Key quote: "it is unclear how infectious the rats are to residents".
Yes, we all know rats can carry disease, and that this has been a historical problem (e.g. the Black Death).
But it's not like coming into physical contact with a rat, or even their droppings or anything, is a common occurrence in NYC.
In 10 years living in New York City, I've seen a rat maybe 50 times total? Every single one was on the subway tracks (i.e. inaccessible), except exactly once I saw one at the end of the deserted platform, but far away from people.
Now I'm sure there are rats elsewhere, I'm just a single data point.
But nevertheless, to put it simply, getting diseases from rats is not a known public health problem in New York City. You cannot extrapolate a risk here simply from the presence of rats.
If you'd like to see a rat (as in rats), go to one of the city parks on trash day. The cans get emptied 24-48 hours before the trucks pick them up. Go there in the evening and sit maybe 30 meters from the trash heap. Watch carefully. Extra credit: Toss them french fries.
If you're up for a more disturbing experience, go sit on those benches at the south end of Riverside Park--the ones next to the ivy or whatever. Listen for the squeaking. Guess what? Those are rats. Lots and lots of rats, like in Jurassic Park or something.
The connection is that the residents have simply come to accept those conditions and many related ones that probably will turn out to be relevant. It's a culture. (no pun intended)
I haven't been to Tokyo, but I have sat and watched groups of rats feast on curbside trash in Upper Manhattan. Many times. (And the roaches--ugh.)
Here's some stats i dug up the last time when we were comparing LA to NYC...Seattle's differences are probably even more extreme. Sure they could have done better from a policy perspective, but the difference in outcome is not purely driven by policy and the stats between areas with widely divergent levels of transmission opportunity aren't really that comparable.
--
'More subway' doesn't really capture it. NYC has ~70x the daily ridership on metro rapid transit.
NYC also has the lowest car ownership in the nation, so you're basically left with walking or uber/taxi/public transportation just to get to the store/doctor/etc.
"Andrew Cuomo: 13.9% of New Yorkers
Tested Positive for Coronavirus
Antibodies; 21% in NYC"
The 21% is huge.
So, it looks like the virus spread much
faster than symptoms indicated and now
ballpark 1/4th NYC has been "exposed" to
the virus and is either infected without
symptoms or recovered without ever having
significant or any symptoms. Amazing.
So, if want to accept the usual situation
for viruses, then the 1/4 of the
population soon can't get or transmit the
virus.
is, call it an exploitation of
a captive audience,
> When the first cases of the new
coronavirus surfaced in Ohio’s prisons,
the director in charge felt like she was
fighting a ghost.
> “We weren’t always able to pinpoint where
all the cases were coming from,” said
Annette Chambers-Smith, director of the
Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and
Correction. As the virus spread, they
began mass testing.
> They started with the Marion Correctional
Institution, which houses 2,500 prisoners
in north central Ohio, many of them older
with pre-existing health conditions.
After testing 2,300 inmates for the
coronavirus, they were shocked. Of the
2,028 who tested positive, close to 95%
had no symptoms.
> “It was very surprising,” said
Chambers-Smith, who oversees the state’s
28 correctional facilities.
and the article has more such data.
Then if want to accept an estimate that
50% of the population immune means herd
immunity, NYC is ballpark half way to
herd immunity which would be close to
the end of the epidemic. E.g., even
people in NYC so far never exposed to the
virus would not get infected even from
infected new arrivals before they were
recovered or dead.
So, a guess is that the virus SARS-COV-2
is very strange in two respects: (1) It
is astoundingly communicative, that is,
spreads very easily and (2) has some huge
fraction of people with the virus but
without symptoms.
A guess at an explanation: In NYC, the
virus was often getting spread just via
the air, e.g., via building central HVAC
systems?
The good news, if want to believe all such
evidence and related common assumptions,
is that we can get to a fraction of the
population with immunity large enough to
have herd immunity and, thus,
essentially be well on the way to the end
of the epidemic, all surprisingly quickly.
> If so, then they would be well on the way to herd immunity and, thus, essentially at the end new cases and the end of the epidemic.
Only, there's no evidence that folks who recover from COVID are immune. Herd immunity might never come, so lockdowns remain beneficial in reducing hospital crowding.
> Only, there's no evidence that folks who recover from COVID are immune.
Yup. But the usual assumption, experience, history, situation, whatever of viruses is that recovery means immunity at least for some significant time, say, a year or so.
Also, I stated
> So, if want to accept the usual situation for viruses,
I didn't explicitly repeat this qualification just before your quote but went for fewer words.
A lot of people miss that herd immunity is likely the only reasonable path. Some models show decay to low case counts in a few weeks, but I'm not buying it.
Here in the SF Bay Area, I'm seeing a 40% decay weekly in hospital admissions. If you assume infections outnumber hospital admissions by 20x, it's going to be months before we reach the low case counts (1 per million) needed for contact tracing and suppression efforts amid semi-normal activities. And that's assuming we keep the 40% decay rate, and don't encounter subpopulations with higher Rt's that keep the virus circulating much longer or even growing.
>> So, if want to accept the usual situation for viruses...
You're saying that we should assume "normal situation" in the face of evidence that your assumptions do not hold. Anything you say based on this faulty assumption is hardly worth consideration.
Folks don't develop immunity to this virus. They can get re-infected immediately after recovering. Herd immunity is a phenomenon observed elsewhere, but not here.
> Folks don't develop immunity to this virus. They can get re-infected immediately after recovering.
This is an extraordinary claim without evidence.
There's a few case reports of "reinfection", but they are rare. In all cases A) symptoms were mild, and B) researchers were unable to culture SARS-CoV-2 from them. Many viral illnesses have people shed virus again a few times after "recovering", and this seems no different.
A bigger concern is, humans seem to lose antibodies to coronaviruses with time-- this is how we get the common cold again and again. But infections after the first time seem to be less severe, thanks to longer-lived immunity from memory t-cells, etc. And at least for SARS-COV-1, immunity lasted quite a bit longer than typical for other human coronaviruses, with decent antibody titers at 3 years (no followup past then).
> You're saying that we should assume "normal situation" in the face of evidence that your assumptions do not hold.
Not really! As you say, this virus is new. Soooooo, we are short on info. So, we should entertain several possibilities.
I didn't say "should" and, to entertain more than one possibility, only said "If"! Biggie difference.
Yup, we don't know. If we do a lot of very well designed and executed statistical trials, controlled, double blind, randomized, simple random sample, stratified sample, etc., then maybe in five years we will know enough to be sure on all the major points, across seasons, ages, other medical conditions, reinfection, spreading via HVAC systems, therapeutics with dosages, side effects, and contraindications, vaccines with number of shots, contraindications, etc. Ah, just wait five years!!!!
Well, nope, to paraphrase, we go to war with the info we have and not the info we want.
So, for the info we have, from the history of viruses, once recovered, then likely immune for a long time; for now we have to take that seriously and maybe are in effect forced to act as if we believe it.
Yup, there are reports of "reinfection" from maybe China or South Korea -- I didn't pay much attention to those reports due to concerns about, call it, data quality. But, net, yup, maybe in some cases, maybe even in all cases, recovery does not mean immunity.
At high cost, we will be finding out with some relatively good data, and in less than five years! Did I mention high cost?
> The current state of both cities has nothing to do with what they did or didn't.
I disagree.
Specifically, Deblasio took forever to close the schools. I don’t live in NYC, and I remember when before they closed the schools wondering why they hadn’t done it yet.
There is some evidence schools, and young children, are not spreading the disease. In SG, which did extensive contact tracing early on, there were no clusters associated with schools (apart from one where the cluster was in staff who had minimal contact with students). The early super spreader event from an SG conference resulted in a Covid-19 positive child, and not one case was attributed to this person. Anecdotal, not rigorous, but still evidence.
There's emerging data in the UK of a syndrome that's connected to covid-19 in children (but it may not be covid). Whatever it is it's not common, but a small percentage across a large population is a large number.
Nobody can back up any of these claims right now, it’s all belief and speculation. If someone says they have analyzed the outbreaks in Seattle and NYC and can control for all the differences between them, they’re delusional.
As I've said before, I strongly suspect that when this is all over, there will be a heck of a lot of deviation in results that don't neatly align with a "stupid government" vs. "enlightened government" dichotomy. Although people will certainly try.
The Northeast US is, at least in parts, some of the worst in the world that is known about and, other than being pretty dense, it really doesn't map to especially poor government response by reasonable definitions. Perfect hindsight doesn't count.
King County has had ~400 confirmed COVID deaths while NYC has had ~12,000. Number of flights, population, all that stuff doesn't explain a x30 increase in deaths.
If you read the article, they largely discuss NYC's inability to arrive a decision promptly, which allowed things to spread. Also, resistance to the idea of social distancing looks like it made things much worse.
It's like everyone who is commenting here didn't even read the article and is just spouting opinions.
Arguing against the short term effectiveness of lockdowns is like arguing against physics. If on average the number of people a person come in contact with decreases, it will definitely decrease the infection rate.
The long term effect is arguable since we don't know if we can prevent the majority of people from getting infected.
> The long term effect is arguable since we don't know if we can prevent the majority of people from getting infected.
That's why the phrase "slow the spread" makes sense. Even if we can't prevent people from getting infected eventually, we can slow the spread enough that hospitals can handle incoming patients. If everyone gets infected at the same time, there won't be enough ventilators to treat everyone.
If you don't think lockdowns have dramatically reduced the number of infections, you are incorrect.
More visitors may kick off more chains of infection (so higher numbers) but that's just linear growth. Stopping exponential spread is what prevented something far worse than what we have seen.
We don't even know the order of magnitude of the infection count, and you are making claims about how the lockdown is reducing them? That's not reason, that's faith.
It's actually suspected that the whole epidemic in Europe originated from the first confirmed infection in Germany.
A woman from Shanghai who had a business trip with her car manufacturer. That same manufacturer happens to have a factory in northern Italy.
Some Italian scientists did an RNA analysis on samples from infected people from Italy, and confirmed they descended from the first German case.
Basically, if this hypothesis is true then German quarantine and/or exposure tracking failed. Had they played it safe and properly quarantined the entire staff of the office building , Europe's coronavirus pandemic might have gone entirely differently.
> It's actually suspected that the whole epidemic in Europe originated from the first confirmed infection in Germany.
According to virologist Dr. Drosten, this idea has been mostly disproven. Some scientists believed it initially but after more debate, the consensus has emerged that both Italy and Germany got their virus directly from Wuhan or Shanghai.
The Milan area hosts more than 100000 Chinese foreign workers. Madrid nearly 200000. How many came back from vacation in December and January taking the virus with them? I think this was seeded earlier than we think.
Nextstrain has a nice graphical overview of virus pathways.
It might well be that containment failed, and that a single person caused hundreds or thousands of the deaths in Italy, much like patient 31 in South Korea.
On the other hand, without those extra deaths, authorities would simply have waited a bit longer with a lockdown, people would have acted as usual for longer, and the end result might just have been very similar with a delay of a few weeks.
This just makes it worse. NYC is denser, more interconnected, more unqeual, more public transit oriented, and all these other things that make it high risk. Being a higher outbreak risk, they should have taken more precautions earlier, rather than fewer precautions later. The difference in number of cases in each region isn't the story. It couldn't be, precisely because these places are so different. The story is the differences how each region approached precautions. You'd hope NY, as a higher outbreak risk, would have been more cautious and more willing to listen to experts than Seattle.
More specifically, NYC/NJ had lots of flights from the European epicenter. The west coast has more flights from Asia, which had a comparatively small number of cases.
I think that this breaks down when you look at the case progression. Likely west coast cities and NYC/NJ had similar case counts at the beginning of this, but made different interventions and had drastically different outcomes.
As I see it, lockdowns are not effective and were a massive mistake. You may find this epidemiologist's perspective to be interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfN2JWifLCY
From looking at the current infection graphs Sweden is about to have a very bad time. When 99% of epidemiologists are saying one thing and you have to seek out a contrarion ask yourself if you're really being helpful or just trying to confirm your existing beliefs.
People have been saying that about Sweden for about 2 months now yet we still don't see any catastrophe happening there. Their hospitals are doing just fine, they aren't overwhelmed and there is no uncontrollable mortality. Why would Sweden suddenly do much worst now? It's curve has flattened and they are even closing emergency ICUs they setup but never had to use.
Sweden has a pop of about 10 mil, Switzerland has a pop of about 8.5 mil. Sweden is projected to have about 10,000 deaths, Switzerland under 2,000; accounting for their population differences, Sweden could have avoided 8,000 deaths if they had locked down. 8000! source is IHME, https://covid19.healthdata.org/sweden, https://covid19.healthdata.org/switzerland. This also applies to the nordic countries like Denmark, Finland, Norway as compared to Sweden too.
Sweden did start much more slowly that switzerland but they clearly are vastly underperforming in saving their citizens.
The death rate in Sweden is comparatively high but it is too simple to just blame it on their avoidance of a lockdown.
You took Switzerland as an example, but if you would have taken Belgium, Sweden would do actually very well. Still, Belgium took quite strict lockdown measures and in a pretty early stage.
What really seems to have had a significant result on keeping the death rate down, is testing: countries like Germany and Switzerland are testing often and early and have done so already in an early stage of the outbreak. This way they were able to treat patients early and to protect vulnerable patients against others in their surrounding that were infected.
That is an important question to ask, but I think in this case the answer is that it's helpful.
That other 99% really don't seem to know for sure lockdowns are effective; the only arguments I've ever seen them present are "my model says they're effective" or "it would be strange in principle if they weren't". (Some laypeople draw dishonest comparisons to control measures for the Spanish Flu, but epidemiologists know that these measures didn't include orders to stay at home or close all businesses.)
Sweden has about 10 times more deaths than their neighbours. Oh and this is with 80% of the population in VOLUNTARY lockdown, their bars and restaurants are open sure but they're empty.
The US would probably be at over a million deaths by now if life had continued normally without lockdowns.
Norway doesn't count its deaths in the same way Sweden does and in any case Sweden's hospitals are not getting close to being overrun. Remember, curve flattening isn't about avoiding infections it's about spreading our rhe infection rates to allow the healthcare system to better cope. Also, Sweden is doing better than a lot of locked down countries so in any cade it's weird to only compare them to their immediate neighbors. Québec is similar to Sweden in a lot of ways but still has a higher mortality rate even if the province got hit a lot later than Sweden did
In a few years, not now, we'll be able to look back and say with some confidence which actions saved lives (and didn't have an equivalently large negative effect on the economy). It does seem likely that, in areas with dense populations like cities, rapid early isolation made a significant difference in the overall impact on the care system. It is still entirely unclear what the longer term outcomes will be, since we can't all isolate indefinitely, so presumably, everybody will get infected eventually.
We won't have the economic counterfactuals really.
At some point, people would have got the idea about reducing contacts for themselves, but say that didn't happen in New York until 2 or 3 or 4 times as many people were infected. Not a ridiculous scenario, and who knows what the economic situation would be.
With some luck, if we isolate long enough, we either get a vaccine or a somewhat effective treatment before everyone gets infected. At least we will know what doesn’t work, so you won’t get chloroquine etc unnecessarily
As a New Yorker it's been eye opening to see the extent of the Cuomo worship nation (world?!) wide during the COVID outbreak. The view of Cuomo from many in the city was quite negative before, and I've been waiting to see how long it'll be before perceptions snap back to reality. Stories like this feel like the start of that, and there will be much more to come.
The problem is people praise a ship captain who wrestles the ship control 1 inch away from the iceberg, not the captain who proactively avoids icebergs from a mile away.
People usually bring up the population density and travel point to say why NY and NYC in particular is doing so bad but it is a lot to do with attitude of the leaders. This[1] is a tweet from March 2 from the city's mayor. I know it hadn't gotten bad anywhere except China and Iran at this point. But Italy's case growth curve had a sharp uptick by this point with total cases reaching about 2k. Lockdown was unnecessary but encouraging people to go out in crowded places was just silly.
The mayor (and other elected officials) definitely has some blood on his hands. Not saying he willfully was trying to harm anyone but his mistakes cost lives.
I find it particularly odd given that the reason Cuomo is in the spotlight is because his state has done so so poorly, even compared to areas with similar density.
They could have started pushing social distancing measures earlier. Also, they might not be able to close airports on their own but if I am not mistaken screening and quarantining is something they could have started enforcing(or more strictly if they were already doing it).
San Francisco is around 60% of the density of NYC. Outside of the US, cities like Taipei, Hong Kong, and Seoul are all similarly densely populated and have largely avoided the problems that have befallen New York due to quick responses and smart planning.
Yeah, but the truth is in what you don't say. The top 8 density areas were all NYC metro area, all of them small small population cities (<70k) except for NYC at #6 with over 8,000,000 population!
I think for various reasons that population density metric does a bad job of capturing density as a metric relevant to infectious diseases. The percent of the population that uses public transportation is a probably a more relevant metric, and in NYC that might be over 100%, since so many non-residents use it.
OK, correcting you since you're wrong: It's not just New York City that's done badly, but smaller cities and areas of upstate New York that are quite similar to large parts of the rest of the country (that have done comparatively better).
> OK, correcting you since you're wrong: It's not just New York City that's done badly, but smaller cities and areas of upstate New York that are quite similar to large parts of the rest of the country (that have done comparatively better).
If by upstate NYC you mean Westchester County, that's still largely affected by the spread of the virus in NYC given how interlinked the two communities are.
Yes, NYC had factors that made it particularly susceptible in a global pandemic of Covid-19: (1) high density (as you say), (2) lots of international travel to and from NYC, (3) heavily used public transit (covid virus lifespan on metal surfaces -- like poles people hang on to in subway trains -- is long).
What is more eye opening is the extent that a narrative can culminate for someone's future political ambitions, from their own party and from the media. Anyone that doesn't think Cuomo has his eyes set on a 2024 run is insane.
I escaped New York a couple of years ago, and never particularly cared for Cuomo. Right now I think he's benefiting from the "wartime bump" Trump was hoping for, and basking in the comparison between him and the POTUS.
Trump has been such a complete failure, and demonstrated such complete ignorance, that any kind of competency shines in contrast.
We're at the point in American politics where "believing science" and "accurately quoting statistics" is a heroic stand, and people are jumping on the Cuomo train because he's a comparative light in the darkness.
I hope this means that people are motivated to vote in November and take their government back, and I hope that the US is prepared to vote in a safe and secure manner. Unfortunately, McConnell and the GOP are blocking any such efforts.
NYC, to put it bluntly is a country of its own. It requires a completely different calibre of management in the City Hall. Definitely not what they have right now
I think this kind of retrospective look at these two datapoints is probably not focused on the right thing at this point.
This article picks on DeBlasio / Cuomo and indirectly DeBlasio’s health commissioner heavily for encouraging continued going out to restaurants and events and riding the subway in late Feb and into mid-March. But remember in late Feb the President was still saying it was going to just magically go away. Bay Area politicians including the speaker of the house Pelosi were encouraging lots of people to come to Chinatown parades. Florida even left their beaches open all the way through mid March for spring breakers to come. While those events have almost certainly led to additional cases and deaths, other areas of the country seem to have largely gotten away with a less proactive and later response than Seattle.
I think we are probably going to see that the real challenge on NY is that we just don’t have another city in the US with New York’s density, air travel volume, and high utilization of public transit. Comparing NY to Seattle just because they are both in the US is probably not as relevant. Given what we know now about the propensity of high volume super spreader events to drive the bulk of the R0, NY can probably only really fairly be compared to London and Paris in the Western world, at least.
No, I'm sorry, you're missing the point of the article. One of those places had politicians using more economic and political considerations leading to their choices. Seattle has those forces but generally acceded to the guidance of scientists.
Of course you are correct, but the article is also a “so far” assessment. We’re right now in the middle of the response. Every assessment, right now, is at a point in time. And so, to a degree, premature. We can only look at the information we have currently.
I see some states saying that they want to reopen by a certain day. I appreciate my governor’s proclamation that she’s not going to give a date but the lock down will continue until she says so. That seems a lot more logical than setting a arbitrary date in the future and either disappointing people when it turns out to not be realistic or going for it anyway and creating a massive health crisis.
I think that many large corporations announced March 6th, that their workforce stay home until at least end of month helped raise awareness throughout the Seattle area, and made people become a lot more conscious.
The government did not act as fast on the West Coast either.
This is a rosy take to fit the narrative, although the article is correct that New York made some big mistakes. Seattle leaders have also taken missteps. For example they closed all the parks on Easter weekend, an unnecessarily drastic step that probably just resulted in people grouping elsewhere in smaller, more crowded spaces. The parking lots at most parks remain closed, making it much harder for people needing a mental break to deal with all this. More broadly, Washington state also has restrictions other states don’t - for instance fishing is banned, which makes no sense given that it is a pastime that naturally requires distancing. Same with golfing. Private construction is banned but public construction is not. State parks and national forest lands are closed, despite most being desolate and full of space. Cycling and jogging on Seattle’s popular citywide trails however, are not banned, despite it being a much more likely vector for spreading via aerosol particles (note, some other areas like France have banned cycling for this reason).
There is an inconsistency and inequality in how these restrictions were selected. The arbitrary nature makes me think it is simply was what was politically expedient, rather some principled design. As for an example of political expediency, right now the city’s socialist council is trying to pass an “Amazon tax” under the auspices of the mayor’s emergency proclamation, which due to a technicality would make it immune to subsequent referendum even after the emergency expires (https://sccinsight.com/2020/04/08/the-amazon-tax-bill-is-des...).
If Seattle or Washington were truly responsible, they should’ve shut port traffic (at airports) early and aggressively. Even if that wouldn’t have stopped the coronavirus from arriving ultimately, it would have at least delayed it and provided more time to prepare. I think they should also have taken steps to make their shelter orders more nuanced, rather than the blunt weapon one size fits all approach.
It's hard to figure out what a safe and credible plan is for closing down the world or even a city. The city and state have been adjusting it as we go. The whole point of the problem of closing the parks and then people still going to them is that they are spreading coronavirus. because we in Seattle were mostly successful keeping people from doing stupid things like hanging out together in parks, we had a lot less spread of coronavirus. New York City waited way too late and that's why there are more cv 19 deaths in just New York City than any other country in the world.
What's your plan to settle what should be open and what should not be?
The city and state have made barely any adjustment throughout the entire period, so I’m not sure what you’re referring to when you say that they’ve been adjusting. Fishing remains banned, in only this state and no other. People have written to the governor, protested, and yet nothing. Does that seem rational to you or does it seem like ignoring the voices of constituents (particularly those in central and East WA, who are not politically aligned with the governor).
Parks, golfing, fishing are all open in CA. Private construction should have been permitted this entire time since it is trivial to do it responsibly - but everything from new home construction on an open air site to remodels done by one person are not permitted. Numerous European countries have already taken their first incremental steps to reopening things but we don’t even have a date for those first steps in WA. And yet jogging and cycling are fine even though many studies show they’re more dangerous than most other outdoor activities.
As for parks - the city prevented people from gathering in open areas and likely caused them to gather in closed areas or in smaller parks. The big parks have tons of room and can easily be used responsibly, and the city and state need to strike that nuanced balance, instead of just using the most risk averse approach possible.
I live near Green Lake in Seattle and in my experience on nice days Green Lake is so crowded that people are certainly not 6ft apart consistently.
I also do a lot of hiking and on nice days the popular (and most accessible) trails are utterly packed with people. There would be no way you would be able to consistently stay 6ft apart.
Green Lake would be less crowded if those near living there could go to other parks that normally are far less crowded than Green Lake. However those other parks had their parking lots closed by the city, which means locals near you have no choice but to crowd into the running trails around Green Lake.
On the trails - I think we could easily force them to operate at half density by closing half the lot at popular trailheads. People would spread out to other locations as a result.
Even so, you don’t have to be 6 feet apart all the time. The WHO’s guidance is only 3 feet, for one. But you also get a benefit from just MOSTLY reducing contact, and even on crowded trails people aren’t on top of each other except at the destination. With mask requirements the risk is likely low.
There's clear evidence this is not health theater. The evidence is places that waited to shut down had much larger outbreaks than they would have had otherwise. See for example New Orleans and Mardi gras.
The popular conception of "waited to shut down" is based almost entirely on the strength of the outbreak in a location rather than how long they actually waited. New Orleans was one of the first places to issue a stay-at-home order, and New York was relatively early.
Sure but what about Sweden, who’ve been doing fine despite having no strict shelter requirements. And how do you explain the fact that recent studies show similar infection rates between Germany and New York State? My take is that the lack of consistent federal messaging caused unnecessary gatherings like Mardi Gras to continue. But we could’ve had better results even without resorting to authoritarian orders.
Sweden is a country of only 10 million people, relatively homogeneous, and not a society where people have a distrust of experts and/or science. They are voluntarily limiting social interaction because they understand how important it is; don't need government to force them:
https://reason.com/2020/04/17/in-sweden-will-voluntary-self-...
Sweden isn't doing that well. Sweden is expected to have about 10,000 deaths and they should have about 2,000 deaths if their health system works about as well as Switzerland. See Seattle's ihme projections: https://covid19.healthdata.org/sweden. For reference Sweden has about 10 mil pop, Switzerland has 8.5 mil. Sweden is expected to kill about 8,000 people unnecessarily.
Sweden also has various challenges that Switzerland doesn’t. They have a large population of Somalian refugees that live in multigenerational homes. Sweden also counts nursing home deaths in their public figures and not all locales do this. If you compare Sweden to the surrounding Scandinavian countries, they’re similar in terms of mortality once you adjust for population. These points are mentioned in https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52395866. CNN also reported that more than half of Sweden’s deaths are from nursing homes for the elderly (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/22/no-lockdown-in-sweden-but-st...) and I don’t think stricter orders would’ve helped there.
Sweden is past their peaks like many other areas, all while retaining their liberties and economic vigor, and domestically their approach has been very popular (see https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8257353/Swedens-vir...). There’s a value to retaining some degree of normalcy and individual liberties, and it is not reasonable to claim that saving lives is automatically more valuable. As far as trade offs go, I think they’re doing a fine job, although I realize that’s a personal assessment. But leaving Sweden aside, others like Denmark are also taking a nuanced and thoughtful approach, rather than simply banning everything - see https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52226763.
[...] For three days, dozens of that man’s family members had sat at his bedside in the hospital [...] The next day, the man with all the family visitors died. [...]
So I am not easily impressed, but this freaked me out for a second. Just to be clear - one man had died on that day, not dozens of people. Sheesh.
I suppose there's some valuable comma somewhere in that sentence, or absence thereof, that should have kept me on the even keel? Or did they just did that on purpose?
I would have written it off as just another error, but I am having hard time accepting that The New Yorker would let that slip through by accident.
Asking as a non-native speaker, how would you write this sentence instead? I tried but cannot produce any syntactically correct alternative better than this.
I think it’s a good thing that the states have taken different approaches at solving the problem. This is how we experiment and improve on the system. You can’t make innovation without experimentation.
If the federal government rolled in with a heavy hand, we’re all stuck with whatever they think is best. The governors should be the ones that decide for their state, and the federal government should support that in whatever way possible.
The same is said for countries. When the dust settles we can examine the data and see what really worked and what made things worse. This is how we become stronger.
> Tom Frieden, the former C.D.C. director, has estimated that, if New York had started implementing stay-at-home orders ten days earlier than it did, it might have reduced COVID-19 deaths by fifty to eighty per cent.
Obviously that's one person's view, but if it's true that means somewhere between 5,550 and 8,800 people have died needlessly. Innovation is good, but not at any cost.
Your conclusion does not follow from the premise. Perfect timing is always producing better result, but do we have a way to establish perfect timing in the moment, lacking the benefit of hindsight? It's very easy to overfit the answer.
If you do it too late then more people will die than could have, if you do it too early you will end up overreacting and sending economy into a tailspin every other year without a good reason. You will also lose trust of the people, killing your chances at effective containment in the future.
Also, sorry about the downvotes you're getting. I think you're raising a good point and in a good manner.
You're assuming that if all states had taken the same approach, they would have all taken the best approach. You're correct that one hypothetical outcome is that 5500-8800 more people died. However, another outcome is that the entire nation could have responded in a way similar to New York in which case there would have been many more deaths.
> You're assuming that if all states had taken the same approach, they would have all taken the best approach.
I'm really not. It makes sense that different states should try different things, and I imagine that if all politicians listened to the scientists there would have been different answers proposed for different states.
This isn't just playing around with abstract new things that we have no experience with in public health. The same situation is happening in Sweden's "experiment" as compared to other countries with similar health systems in Europe. Sweden is expected to have about 10,000 deaths and they should have about 2,000 deaths if their health system works about as well as Switzerland. See https://covid19.healthdata.org/sweden. For reference Sweden has about 10 mil pop, Switzerland has 8.5 mil. Sweden is expected to kill about 8,000 people unnecessarily. We know this can happen because of experience with many previous epidemics.
Another question, though, is whether any lives would have been saved in the long run.
A vaccine showing up before we have to relax controls is not a given. If we have to rely on population immunity, a certain number of people need to get sick for us to attain it. Of course, we want the least vulnerable people to do that, and for it to happen at a rate that doesn't cause healthcare overload and excess mortality (which NYC came perilously close to).
>A vaccine showing up before we have to relax controls is not a given.
The opposite is probably a given. In the US, opening won't be initially full throttle but I think it's probably a given that significant re-opening will happen over the next 30-45 days.
I don't think that's actually true. On the 17th de Blasio announced that it might happen and he'd release the decision within 48 hours. Cuomo smacked that down but then issued a shelter in place order on the 20th. So there's up to three days variance there. Realistically it's one day. But the point in the article is that both politicians should have been considering shelter in place ten days before.
I didn't mean to imply that DeBlasio might have locked down NY City 10 days earlier; just that he probably would have done so a couple days earlier. And even a couple of days might have helped.
I think he would have because DeBlasio implemented quite a few restrictions earlier. On the 13th, he cancelled large gatherings and limited smaller venues to 50% capacity.
Even San Francisco didn't issue a lockdown order until the 16th, and Washington state was even later than NY. I don't remember anyone considering a lockdown on the 10th.
>If the federal government rolled in with a heavy hand, we’re all stuck with whatever they think is best.
Yeah, like saving people's lives instead of entertaining some muppet's idea of what it means to be scientific.
Hint: If you're not listening to trained, professional scientists while attempting to sound scientific and curious, you're probably just performing an intellectual jerk off.
Under normal conditions, people should follow the scientists without requiring orders from politicians out of their own common sense and could differ between quackery and actual science - instead we have 100 people calling the Maryland covid19 hotline about injecting disinfectant and 30 ppl in NYC actually consuming disinfectant.
What happened instead is the result of decades of underfunding in the educational system colliding with years of trust in media being undermined (most obviously with the current Presidency, but mis-information was a thing before his campaign), trust in politicians generally being eroded for decades (gridlocked Congress, Iraq WMD lie) and decades of underfunding of social security nets - of course it is a hard decision to close schools when literally tens of thousands of kids rely on them for basic needs such as food and clothes washing!
The crisis is entirely on the last decades of inaction and underfunding. And not only in the USA (where it is the worst) but also in other parts of the world. I hope that the world at least learns from all the needless death...
This just seems like an ahistorical summary. Lots of people were following the science without requiring orders. Until mid-March, most American politicians were trying to get people to stop being cautious, because their caution was bad for business.
