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from the lockdowns-were-supposed-to-be-just-one-part-of-defense-at-depth dept.
Economists warn of 'widespread costs' from lockdown:
Blanket restrictions on economic activity should be lifted and replaced with measures targeted specifically at groups most at risk, say economists.
[...] They argue that while the extent to which the lockdown contributed to a subsequent slowing in the rate of new infections and deaths is not easy to estimate precisely, it seems clear that it did contribute to these public health objectives.
However, they say it is "very far from clear" whether keeping such tight restrictions in place for three months until the end of June when they began to be lifted was warranted, given the large costs. They say that the costs of carrying on with such a lockdown are likely to have become significantly greater than its benefits.
Debate over the global dilemma continues.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @11:53PM (9 children)
So double down and make double damned sure we economically buttfuck ourselves is your answer?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 31 2020, @01:57AM (4 children)
I'm sending my kids to school, not because it's good for the country, but because it's good for my kids. If the teachers have a situation where COVID concerns them about their health and/or life, I consider that their problem - stay home, try to collect unemployment or whatever - I'm in no position to change the dipshit policies of a clown show of a national administration and every sub-circus under them, state, county, schoolboard and principals.
On the other hand, I'm keeping my younger son home on weekends, we're not doing 6 yard sales and 2 libraries plus miscellaneous thrift stores, flea markets, etc. every Saturday like we did for hundreds of weekends before COVID because A) half that shit is closed anyway, and B) it's disrespectful to the people at risk to go around like there's nothing to be worried about. These days for Saturday we mask up and hit one used book store for 10 minutes and we're done. I do believe the 150K dead figure, and I don't want to be adding to that number for no good reason.
Yes, those two positions are schizofrenic, but the way I look at it is: if the schools are shown to be a serious problem, we can always keep the kids home at a moment's notice for as long as necessary, but if we sign up for our county's "I plan to remote school my kids this year" program, that's it - boom, we've signed away any chance of the kids having face to face (mask to mask) socialization and learning, probably for the whole next year. Teenage brains only get so much opportunity to learn, and my kids need all of that opportunity they can get.
As for economics, I started working from home fulltime in 2013, got pushed 40% back into the office in 2015, but as of COVID corporate has told the namby pamby "we think it's better to see each other face to face" managers to shove it and we're back 100% home working and more or less as productive as ever. That's my fortunate position, I don't work in a restaurant or bar. I watched that shit reopen as fast and hard as they were allowed to around here and it was obvious this R-bounce was going to happen, but apparently the Governor of Florida doesn't have the stones to tell people to just give up a couple of more paychecks so we don't end up having a restaurant shutdown period 3x as long, so he had to take the gamble and lose instead.
I'm seeing R-stats around here at 0.99 now, hopefully those resemble the truth. Because: when the hospitals are overflowing and there aren't enough people to dispose of bodies in a timely fashion (and it's not a scare-bluff, an R of 1.4 for a couple of months would get us that), things sure as fuck are going to shutdown and hard and that will be worse for the economy overall as compared to doing the smarter thing and kicking COVID-19's butt as fast as possible.
What's really disappointing is that the COVID-19 got let out of the bottle as far as it did. Relatively speaking, we kicked ass on H3N2 in 1968, H1N1 in 2009, and I remember some shit in China in 2003 that was shutting down flights when I was trying to get a job with Black & Decker's home appliance division and the VP was all bent that he couldn't go oversee the factory like normal. I'm pretty convinced that we knew how to handle these things more effectively, we used to do it, and Cheetoface McI'm the biggest Asshole you've ever seen seems to have managed to blow this crisis wide just to watch the world burn and maybe try to jockey for advantage somehow in the chaos.
Make me king, I'll fix the world. Most people will hate me, but 50 years later the ones that are still around would thank me. Scary? Yeah, that's why I'm not running for office.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday July 31 2020, @11:25AM (3 children)
Joe, your kids are statistically in more danger riding to school than they would be if they all had to lick an infected person as they walked in the door every day. There have been pretty much no cases of kids without a compromised immune system dying of the stuff.
As for the rest of us, Tuberculosis has been killing way more people than coronaids every single year and nobody's been wearing masks everywhere or crushing the economy over that. Healthcare workers take it seriously as all hell but most folks don't even have any idea what it is unless they've seen Tombstone.
The other scary viruses they tried to get us to panic over? No masks, no economic shutdown, and most people don't even know which one is which. This shit ain't the black plague back in the day that killed a third of Europe, 99.9% of us are going to survive it if absolutely nothing is done and add a few more nines to that for kids.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 31 2020, @12:33PM (2 children)
Clearly, we're not worried about our kids' safety from COVID, they've eaten enough dirt they're fine. We're 1% concerned for ourselves, not dying of COVID-19 (mid 50s) but maybe spending the rest of our lives with some nasty after-effect of it. 1% is not enough to keep the kids home from school over.
See, I don't think they tried for panic, I think they actually controlled it - and fast. 2003 did literally shutdown flights to China - that would have been somewhere around March to June, and I think the restrictions lifted toward the end of the year, but there were a lot of Asian faces wearing masks in the news starting then. 2009 also got it under control, but I was distracted enough I forget the details. Both of those used the liberty flaunting methods of contact tracing and isolation of cases that did reach the U.S. - kept R 1.0, and the flat-earth inclined can remember them as a big hoax because nothing actually impacted them personally. This go around, my opinion (opinion because the facts are too spun out by the reporting chain) is that we had less objective, scientifically driven, monitoring in Wuhan at the source of the initial flareup, which allowed it to spread wide enough that contact tracing and isolation was overwhelmed and therefore ineffective in places like New York, Miami, California...
Anything big like this comes around, there are sharks out there that live for the chaos - think they're gonna be able to leverage the situation to jump a couple of levels up - gamblers who figure this is their chance to play the long odds and maybe be big a winner for once. The initial spin on this one seemed really slanted to help COVID spread.
Oh, and if you want to take a shot at AIDS as a "scare tactic" that only threatens gays and needle sharers... get to know some first responders: EMTs, Firefighters... AIDS is real for everyone, especially them.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday August 04 2020, @04:04AM (1 child)
Right now estimates are there are ~13 million people just in the US with a latent tuberculosis infection that could wake up and eat their lungs any old time it feels like it. Ten million diagnosed in 2018 worldwide, up three million from the year before. A million and a half died. But that's ordinary and expected, so nobody who doesn't wear scrubs for a living bats an eye. Let that sink in and then tell me why coronaids warrants shutting down the whole country but tuberculosis and the flu skipping around like they own the joint every single year doesn't even warrant water cooler conversation.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday August 04 2020, @01:15PM
Because TB and the flu are known, and the status quo has a known rate of spread, infection, death, side effects, etc. We, as a society, are set up to deal with the sickness and death of TB and the annual flu - we've been doing it forever. We've presumably "done our best" for those and all the other extant diseases. Everybody dies eventually, and statistically TB and the flu occupy their little niches supplying the grim reaper.
The severity of COVID-19 was completely unknown in January, it had the crematoriums in Wuhan working 24-7 - that alone should warrant some kind of response. As I said before, we've proven that modern society is capable of corking these kinds of Djinnis back into their bottles multiple times in the past decades - how we respond matters. COVID-19 could have been another H3N2 or any of the other "insignificant" flus that got contained, but instead it's blown across half the planet like we're back in 1918 - I guess this is how you MAGA, by regressing 100 years. What's worse is that half the planet has contained it, so we're going to be in a corona standoff with them for a long long time. Looks like Trump is getting those border walls erected and paid for, not by Mexico, but by every country that managed to contain COVID-19 and doesn't want to just let it run and see what the uncontrolled death and serious injury rate is, it's already proven to be higher than TB and seasonal flu combined, and we're in summer when corona isn't supposed to be as virulent or deadly.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2020, @04:16AM (3 children)
Ah, one of the idiots who thinks that the fictional human creation "the ecomony" (insult in there you un-cultured swine) is more important than human life!
The economy needs us WAAAY more than we need it. It will bounce back better with more people alive, and it will crash and burn when the people destroy shit over the easily prevented mass deaths. You're lucky Florida is full of MAGA idiots. Well sorta, I'm not sure what is worse, some buildings with broken windows and graffiti or tens of thousands of dead people.
Hmmmm, head scratcher!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday July 31 2020, @11:26AM (2 children)
The economy is us, moron.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 01 2020, @01:11AM (1 child)
So then you should be on board with lockdown so we preserve human lives and can re-start the economy which "is us" you blight stricken moron?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday August 04 2020, @04:05AM
You can't restart an economy with bankrupt employers. Those jobs aren't on hold, they're gone for good.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.