NSR: Coronavirus: A global Pandemic.

Probably the same guy that coined "Whoever drives slower than me is an idiot. Whoever drives faster is a maniac".

 

Ezra is a bright guy, he is usually spot on. I would simplify his options from three to two.

1) Let this thing wash, as Trump would say, with the resultant deaths.

2) Or become China, South Korea, Singapore, and so forth, with the public understanding that privacy will temporarily be no more.

 

That’s why I said “how”. As you noted, just flinging the door open gets us back to where we were back in Feb and will likely result in the numbers to fly off the chart, just with, perhaps, 15% of the population immune after already having it.

I’m also not convinced 2 and 3 are options for the US. Americans won’t accept even the amount of monitoring SKorea does. If 2 is implemented, it will likely be a lesser version where after they find someone that has been infected, they try to track down and contain the people they have contact with and it will likely rely upon the infected person to remember their actions over the last few weeks. That’s basically a variant of 3, but even then, people will slip through the cracks.

 

Think the privacy boat has sailed years ago. We're tracked by every website, cops can follow you around every big city and everyone has a Ring doorbell now

 

Once that door opens there’s no undoing it. There were a few Governors that shut down their own states after procrastinating as long as they could....

 

Food for thought.

I fear, if we open up too early, and we have not sufficiently made that health recovery and cracked the back of this virus, that we could be pouring gasoline on the fire, even inadvertently.”
— New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D), quoted by Politico.

 

Neither has given a reason to be trustworthy.

 

Unless he doesn't have internet, not quite convinced this qualifies. Hell, I know somebody who lives alone and is having Zoom dance parties with her fellow extroverted friends.

 

How come you have a photo of my granddaughter?

 

Let the states take care of it. The states have been doing a far better job so far than the feds, at least in the Northeast.

That may mean limiting interstate travel for a while until neighboring states meet a defined criteria.

New York State borders 5 states and 2 Canadian provinces.

 

The UK reckons 1.5 million residents are at risk and has tried to warn them individually. As usual in the post-Brexit world its made a complete hash of it.

Anyway that's the equivalent of 7.5 million Americans.

The estimates I've seen for the US reckon between 11 and 90 million people are at risk.

Hopefully the British model is closer despite the mess in the details.

 

My honest answer is that I have the same trust in both, which is zero. Truth is an abstract concept to Trump.

But I do trust American journalism and the American bureaucracy more.

 

That sounds like straight good news to me, not just sorta.

 

It's straight good news if you believe that one day's numbers are reflective of a trend.

 

There are other options. The one proposed by the Imperial College folks amounts to a tamped down version of #1: reopen, and shut back down again as soon as ICU admissions cross a pre-determined threshold. Since ICU admissions aee necessarily a lagging indicator, the threshold can't be too high. The problem with that scenario is that it's hard to see re-opening helping economic activity: who's going to risk investment when it could all be shut back down again in a month?

 

I can think of one person who doesn't have a Ring doorbell, since I don't know what a Ring doorbell is.

 

Nah, fewer people going into the hospital is good news. Even if it's not part of a trend. Fewer hospitalizations today is fewer hospitalizations today.

 

You trust American journalism as long as it is published in your preferred publication. (Not aimed at you Dave)

Which is really the problem. I was talking to my mom today, a devout FOX/Trump fan, and she said she was starting to think this was way overblown. I told her I would send her a video from Twitter of the ER nurse breaking down after a particularly bad shift where she lost numerous patients.

Her retort was that isn't happening here in Columbus. I told her it's because of the social distancing.

She got quiet, not because she believed me but because her pundits were telling her differently.

 

I think way more than 15% are immune otherwise we would have seen a lot more hospitalizations. Remember you can have carried the virus with zero or minor symptoms.

New Jersey's governor has asked companies to cut public transit capacity by 50%. That's a good move.

I think you could start by opening stores for a limited time period with a limited capacity.

For instance Home Depot is already limiting the number of customers to 100 and asking waiting customers to line up 6 feet apart.

In the running store I work in you we would ask customers not to bring in non- essential family members.

We have a big enough problem with kids running wild while their parents are fitted anyway and our owner would LOVE any excuse to ban kids.

Here are some ideas.

• Stores, libraries to open a set number of hours a day.
• Stores limit the number of customers.
• Customers are asked not to bring family members unless absolutely necessary (parents allowed, limits on partners and kids).
• Railway and subway stations to limit the number of waiting passengers.
• Offices to open but employees that have been working from home should continue to do so.
• Schools remain closed.
• Colleges and universities continue to teach courses online.
• Tourist attractions continue to remain closed.
• Interstate transport to be limited to essential traffic.

 

Hold on. Isn't NJ Transit always running at 50% capacity?

- A luckily formerly dissatisfied NJ Transit bus customer

 

I’m going off if what the scientists are saying.. your just speculating. Seriously, it’s like people have no concept of the impact that social distancing has had... yes, we are still getting infections, but it is at a significantly slower rate and there is literally no way that it has hit the 60%-70% required for herd immunity. From what I’ve seen, the drop has been pretty significant from around R3 (meaning for every infected person, they infect 3 people, which ramps up to infecting 50k people in short order) to around R1-1.5 (which ramps up to only a few hundred and is on the order of the common flu).

 

You remind me of a guy on another forum who is horseshoe theory personified but even worse. You have gone full Greenwald, is the another way I can put it.

There has been limited testing and undercounting of deaths. We know this based on the reported increase of NYC residents dying at home this year compared to last year. And finally Dr. Fauci said if your doing it right it will look like an overreaction. I mean by your logic we should lose enough seat belt laws and DWI laws because more people die in cars then by guns as opposed to the fact that all these laws are what allows us to even keep the number of car deaths close to the number of gun deaths and maybe we should do the same with guns.