The problem is people saw China bring the situation under control in under six weeks and thought that containment rather than management was also an achievable goal here. They therefore interpreted the term "flatten the curve" in that context and assumed it would lead to containment. What they didn't see (and what was never really talked about) is just how extreme China's eventual response to COVID was relative to the constraints placed on Americans.
The Chinese were placing everyone under house arrest, mandating mask use, monitoring everyone's movements at checkpoints, temperature checking anyone who left their house when possible, banning people from going outside more than X times per week, forcibly quarantining, arresting non-compliant people, shuttering every non-essential business under the strictest interpretation of "essential", blocking internal travel, physically isolating cities, requiring quarantine when returning from traveling abroad, etc. The US government didn't really do any of that. To anyone aware of the contrast in national responses, it was very obvious that we would not be able to replicate China's success and that COVID would be around until we got a vaccine.
They didn't have to maintain the draconian initial lockdown the whole year though. A few months in they were opening things back up and thoroughly testing everyone that came into the country to keep it from being reintroduced while maintaining the monitoring to catch new cases. To all outward appearances it worked. The failure in the US wasn't inevitable, the US didn't even implement the basic versions of fever monitoring and test and trace, this whole time there have been two places that have temperature checked me; the courthouse and an store for a shared glass blowing studio. We have a lot of the same tools, medical quarantines, food distribution so people don't have to leave their houses, etc, there's just a massive difference in the attitude towards collective action in the US.
Fever monitoring is a pointless waste of effort. Those thermometer guns are generally inaccurate, most infected people don't have a significant fever, and those who do have a fever often knock it down using OTC medication.
For all we know, China just stopped counting and is accepting whatever new cases or deaths come up.
We know they fake other numbers. There's not reason not to think they aren't faking them here.
If the news wasn't telling me about the Virus all the time, I would not know there was a "raging" epidemic. I only know one person who contracted the virus among my entire family and friends group.
Show me the data. All existing data points to the fact that the Chinese largely beat this and have handled it in a way that is orders of magnitude more effective than the Americans. That includes anecdata I have coming from internal sources who have no reason to lie. If there was ANY data suggesting otherwise, you would have heard about it: they couldn't contain news about the original outbreak or any follow on outbreaks.
A few months into this, basically every single American media outlet was tripping over themselves to defend American values when it was abundantly clear that they were impeding our ability to successfully respond to this crisis. There was a huge appetite for bashing China / authoritarianism and pointing out the universal superiority of our system. The fact that we have largely heard nothing about the Chinese response (no criticism, no praise, no critique, not even general acknowledgement that it was much different than ours) from the government or the media suggests that it was a success whereas our efforts were a colossal failure and we don't want to talk about it or admit it: this situation doesn't align with the story we tell ourselves ((freedom and democracy) > authoritarianism, always).
> If the news wasn't telling me about the Virus all the time, I would not know there was a "raging" epidemic. I only know one person who contracted the virus among my entire family and friends group
We are basically a year into this with 500K dead and counting. How many citizens need to die before people stop feeling the need to create throwaway accounts to announce that this whole thing is overblown.
What data am I gonna show you? the only available data says "they defeated it" and it comes from the state government.
>We are basically a year into this with 500K dead and counting. How many citizens need to die before people stop feeling the need to create throwaway accounts to announce that this whole thing is overblown.
Like I said, I literally only know one soul who got this. They recovered in two days. My Aunt & Uncle are emergency room nurses and say that it's overblown _now_ (last April? was definitely bad).
I also don't know anybody who dies from the seasonal flu that claims a lot of people too.
"overblown_now" but April was bad? In April we were seeing roughly 2K deaths per day. The average the last month has been over 3K. Or perhaps you live in Taiwan, or NZ where they actually handled COVID properly. But in the US, it's been a shitstorm.
I literally don't know anybody. I'm not being facetious, though I'm incredibly frustrated watching my city melt away, but I just haven't seen it. I would've expected bodies on the sidewalk given how stringent everything has been.
Was there a reliable test in Feb 2020 at the time of the WHO article?. Who is to say that they are reporting the numbers correctly? For most of Jan 2020, china claimed covid was mild and wasn't spread human to human (and the WHO backed them up for some time as well).
There likely aren’t non-American sources for American data either, or non-European sources for European data. The only people with access to a given country’s data are the authorities of that country. Health statistics are not like election monitoring.
I think the error here is perceiving errors from medical authorities as having emotional or manipulative motivations.
First masks were unnecessary and hand washing was crucial. Now it’s essentially the reverse. It helps to wash hands of course but we realize it’s less of a vector.
Then various governments said it’ll be over by summer. Then various governments said it’ll be a year.
No one was attempting to gaslight; this was the culmination of millions of professionals doing their best to make sense of the situation, and occasionally, uncertain terms being communicated incorrectly. This is normal. The decision to perceive non-optimal performance in an incredibly complex situation as an attack on a population is yours, and you’re welcome to it. I simply don’t see the point.
> I think the error here is perceiving errors from medical authorities as having emotional or manipulative motivations.
I think you might be forgetting medical authorities approving certain protests as being more important than containing covid. Dont want to start was flamewar here but just pointing out a flaw in your response. That was factually a 'emotional or manipulative motivation', right or wrong.
> I think you might be forgetting medical authorities approving certain protests as being more important than containing covid.
Can you provide some examples? I googled around and found this [1] which seems like a reasonable summary of the Covid-related consequences of the George Floyd protests. The "reasons it seems like it was OK" doesn't seem too divergent from what many medical professionals are saying (don't gather indoors, wear masks, wash hands).
I'd also like to point out that institutional racism and police brutality are public health crises with uncountable effects on the health of Black Americans. Further, when you consider that Covid-19 has had far worse effects on communities of color, and that many essential workers are people of color, the protests don't seem that unrelated.
> “Protesting against systemic injustice that is contributing directly to this pandemic is essential,” Dhillon said. “The right to live, the right to breathe, the right to walk down the street without police coming at you for no reason . . . that’s different than me wanting to go to my place of worship on the weekend, me wanting to take my kid on a roller coaster, me wanting to go to brunch with my friends.”
> "Staying indoors all the time in a pandemic is equivalent to an abstinence-only policy,"
> For her part, Patel says the core tenants of harm reduction fit into public health doctors’ broader obligation to protect human rights while also helping people stay safe. "You’re describing a broader human rights-based approach to policy and medicine," Patel said. "These are the tenants of human rights."
> "There’s broad recognition that racism is one of the top public health issues of our time," Beletsky said.
> "Racism is a public health problem," the health department tweeted Monday. "In New York City, Black and Brown communities face the disproportionate impact, grief and loss from the COVID-19 pandemic on top of the trauma of state-sanctioned violence."
> “If people were to understand that racism, and all of the social and political and economic inequalities that racism creates, ultimately harms people’s health,” Boyd says, they would see that “protest is a profound public health intervention, because it allows us to finally address and end forms of inequality.”
> "We created the letter in response to emerging narratives that seemed to malign demonstrations as risky for the public health because of Covid-19," according to the letter writers, many of whom are part of the University of Washington's Division of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. "Instead, we wanted to present a narrative that prioritizes opposition to racism as vital to the public health, including the epidemic response. We believe that the way forward is not to suppress protests in the name of public health but to respond to protesters demands in the name of public health, thereby addressing multiple public health crises."
The point isn't really about institutional racism or police brutality, per se. The virus doesn't know or care about your cause or ideology, it spreads through a crowd regardless.
The point is that there might be reasons why violating social distancing and lockdown mandates might be worth it. Protesting police brutality is one reason. Avoiding unemployment and accompanying mental health issues is another. One of these protests got the public approval of health care professionals and the other didn't. There was an entire movement called White Coats for Black Lives who endorsed the protests. Again, worth it. However, there's an entire class of folks who don't have options for remote pajama jobs. The protests against lockdowns was about avoiding the devastating effects to their lives.
Not sure why the response was surprising: one group was protesting police brutality, and the other was protesting the exact pandemic rules that the CDC (etc.) was pushing. It would be a bit weird for the CDC to say "hey, we need to keep businesses shut down and people should stay inside, but it's cool if you want to go out and protest that requirement, in direct violation of the requirement itself".
And sure, there's a political/optics component. Disapproving of protests against police brutality would have been an incredibly bad look, much worse than disapproving of protests against pandemic safety measures. That shouldn't require any kind of explanation or evoke any surprise.
One group was violating the lockdowns out of a need to be heard concerning police brutality, the other group was violating lockdowns to preserve their livelihood because they can't work remotely. It wasn't just "hey we think this is dumb and we wanna go to Disneyland". This shouldn't evoke surprise either.
Sure and I don't want to minimize the suffering of people affected by COVID-19, either directly or economically. But there really is no comparison with the systemic violence and racism that Americans of color have experienced for 400 years.
Ok, fair but it's not really a comparison. It's more a question of what is a threshold for acceptable violation of lockdown orders. It doesn't really matter if Reason X is N% worse than Reason Y. The scale of each protest fully explains the scale of the problem.
Totally, and I think it's wholly unreasonable to tell someone who's lost their income for months to just chill and stay inside. I think that's the correct advice, but I also think it's not gonna work. I fault our idiotic government for failing to help us when we needed it most. People were right to be infuriated, and I think this shows that when government fails--either to address systemic racism or to provide assistance in a pandemic--everything gets worse.
We shouldn't be faulting protestors or doctors here, we should be faulting our leaders.
'"Prepare for an increased number of infections in the days following a protest," the letter says. '
> “The right to live, the right to breathe, the right to walk down the street without police coming at you for no reason . . . that’s different than me wanting to go to my place of worship on the weekend, me wanting to take my kid on a roller coaster, me wanting to go to brunch with my friends.”
This is obviously an emotional response. She didn't do A/B testing of various activity outcomes on public health and base her conclusions on that. Can't somone simply say going to church is good for metal health of the population, she didn't obviously measure the outcomes of that activity.
Sure, my point is that the medical professionals responding to the protests were acknowledging that racism is a public health crisis and that the protests are both deeply relevant to the COVID-19 pandemic, and even more important than containing COVID-19. They also compared those protests to other gatherings like religious services, social events, and anti-mask/lockdown protests and said those gatherings were not as important as containing COVID-19.
From where I sit, I think they pretty well explained why they think the BLM marches in the wake of George Floyd's murder were justified. I certainly wouldn't say they had "emotional or manipulative motivations", a characterization which seems completely off base.
anything that's not based on scietific hypothesis is obviously an 'emotional response', how is this even a controversial statement.
Can you point me to the study for public health outcome differences from protests vs going to church. And what what their scietific criteria for where to draw the line was.
Overdose deaths definitely spiked in the early months of the pandemic. I haven't been able to find anything after 5/2020, but I think it's a reasonable assumption that no one's in the pink of mental health right now, and that means the vulnerable among of us are much more at risk.
But I don't think doctors are making decisions about advice based on emotions. COVID-19 is the most likely cause of death for people 25-44 [1] (supplanting unintentional opioid overdose deaths). COVID-19 has a hugely disproportionate effect on communities of color [2]. Systemic racism also causes deaths; look at asthma for example [3].
Finally, even the CDC is kind of at a loss as to what to do about overdose deaths [4]. Essentially they're like "get more naloxone and get more treatment."
> Who are they to decide which population is expendable.
I get where you're coming from here but, I don't think it's as simple as "lockdowns kill people" because:
- Not imposing a lockdown also kills people
- Even in the absence of a lockdown order, people are hesitant to get together
- There are lots of ways to socialize and get outside that are very low risk (pods, outdoor activities)
- COVID-19 deaths are far, far outstripping opioid overdose deaths due to lockdowns (the numbers I've found show that COVID-19 deaths exceed all opioid overdose deaths, not just the total YoY increase).
But if I could summarize what I think your points have been, I think your argument is broadly that doctors treated George Floyd's murder and the subsequent protests differently than hardships in other communities, and that at least indicates some level of emotional reaction if not outright bias. But I think they themselves have explained why they reacted differently, and I think the data (gathered by medical researchers and social scientists) back them up.
I don't understand how protests had any effect on asthma outcomes among POC.
Are you saying that they calculated
deaths caused by covid protests < deaths prevented from potests effecting health outcomes of POC.
Hence Protests OK.
deaths from depression caused from isolation < deaths from covid
Isolation OK.
If so, can you show me how they calculated,
'deaths prevented from potests effecting health outcomes of POC'
> > I think the data (gathered by medical researchers and social scientists) back them up.
what data is this ? There is no way they gathered any data within 1 week of when the protests started. Thats just too crazy of a timeline. If they are saying that collected some secret data to prove that protests will save more lives than lockdowns in less than week, then that proves how brazen they are in in their lying.
Some ruling parties in Europe were aware early last autumn that restrictions would last all the way to the spring at least (and regardless of case numbers and hospitalization), but they never stated that overtly. They preferred to claim that measures were just a short-term, temporary thing, and then when those measures were set to expire, they were just renewed again on ostensibly a short-term basis. This was done because those ruling parties knew that there was massive opposition to long-term lockdowns, and being open and honest with the public could lead to their defeat in the next elections.
1. Lots of outright lies, for example Chinese people saying the truth getting arrested, WHO toeing the CCP line (for example claiming there was no human-human transmission) when it was obviously a lie already, etc...
2. Lots of governments around the world using the lies for their own gains at expense of population, for example in Brazil the media was quick to paint the president as evil, to allow a inconstitutional power grab by governors and mayors (mind you, I am not saying quarantine is bad, I am saying it was done in a extremely illegal manner, and often for corrupt reasons, now a ton of the people involved are going to jail after quickly stuffing all money they could on their own pockets).
3. Lots of politicians lying and trying to pin the blame on scientists, see Cuomo lying about deaths on nursing homes to avoid Trump criticizing him.
4. Tons of corruption in procuring vaccines, masks, remote working tools, catering, etc... some examples are various politicians from multiple countries getting caught getting bribes from chinese manufacturer, politicians forcing lockdowns but maintaining their own business open, that crazy case in hollywood where open air restaurants were shut down but there was even a catering company serving movie production crew in a makeshift open air restaurant right in front of a local restaurant that was forced to shut down...
5. Lockdowns used for supression (see Iran executing the guy that asked why he had to lockdown but religious people didn't...)
Maybe health officials were more misleading where you are, but from everything i saw the "2 weeks" messaging wasn't intended to say that everything would be solved in two weeks of lockdown, it was that after two weeks we would begin to see if a lockdown was effective or not. and it never was effective because our lockdowns are more of a polite suggestion to please not lick strangers than an actual lockdown.
What the parent comment is trying to say is that we did accomplish the goal of those two weeks. The curve was flattened. Your perspective is a result of not living in the universe were it was a lot worse. This isn't the best time line, but it is one of the better ones.
The curve was flattened, but the goalpost changed. We went from flattening the curve to eliminating the virus. With flattening the curve, the question should be "how full are the hospitals"?. Instead, the metric was infection rates.
Unless you live in New Zealand you probably haven't ever written down your contact information when entering a store, and probably don't even know what that is.
Flattening the curve was really about overloading hospitals. The end game is to make covid-19 extinct in the wild, or domesticated in the sense that only relatively harmless variants remain.
Without serious testing and contact tracing that may take a very long time. We completely fumbled the early 2020 chance to contain the virus. The vaccines should decrease the numbers enough that there will be a second chance to contain it, this time with real efforts at contact tracing if we actually want to make the virus extinct.
> Unless you live in New Zealand you probably haven't ever written down your contact information when entering a store
We did that for bars and restaurants in the UK, but it doesn't seem to have done as much good as it was probably just lost or ignored by our abysmal track and trace services...
We also had a QR code system to tag yourself in places, but it fell down because it was firstly optional, and secondly there was no way to tag out so the records weren't that accurate.
We check in with a govt app and QR codes in NSW and all of Australia does this and venues confirm before letting you in. It's integrated into the Service NSW app so I don't need a separate one. Same app where my digital drivers licence is. No paper. In fact I don't carry a wallet here anymore because public transport is with NFC - Apple pay.
We did (still do?) that in San Francisco, but it's incredibly inconsistent. Some restaurants would make a reservation in their reservation system on the spot for you to keep a record of you being there. Others didn't keep track at all.
Meanwhile, we spent last month in Honolulu, and every single restaurant took down our contact info.
Nothing for regular stores in either place, though.
also on a unrelated note, "you will see in two weeks" crowd seems to have completely disappeared.