This morning on my walk with Kara (about 3 miles) I saw several Chicago police officers, standing together, not observing social distancing and not wearing facemasks despite the statewide directives. Although I was sorely tempted I did not take their pictures and did not remonstrate them.
If public employees are not going to observe the rules, how can they expect others to do so?
That would be suicidal IMO.
The numbers don’t lie:
700 City Employees, including 400 Police Officers, Sickened by Coronavirus
I think the idea still persists that this is not a big deal. You also have a fair number of people who have the invulnerable syndrome. On top of that this is a major change in behavior.
“If public employees are not going to observe the rules, how can they expects others to do so?”
Incentive? Knowledge? Those who make their decisions based upon public employees are probably different than those who follow suggestions from those who study and treat infectious disease.
Steve
Good question. Typically that sort of behavior flows down from the top. What do you think, Mr Trump?
“I think the idea still persists that this is not a big deal.”
I think the idea still persists that this is not an end of the universe deal, and certainly not one well dealt with by, ahem, “experts.”
There, fixed it for you.
OT : Another anomaly between countries. Turkey.
Among the countries with 100000+ cases, they have the most impressive turnaround (to my eye, better then Germany); according to worldometer, cutting the number of cases by 50% in 3 weeks.
To make it more impressive, Turkey has performed 1/3 the tests per capita of Germany, and imposed a limited semi-curfew; stay-at-home for under 20 / over 65, and closures on weekends; i.e. most people are working.
They credit their success to contact tracing — but the traditional knock on door approach, not the high tech South Korean kind.
It is strong evidence millions of tests per day is not a requirement to doing enough contact tracing to make big difference in transmission rates.
I will not talk about the treatment Turkey is crediting for keeping their fatality rates below Germany’s, because it is unlikely to be a productive discussion.
https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2020/04/turkey-outbreak-peak-gov-ease-restrictions.html
“by, ahem, “experts.—
No one could possibly know anything more than you could they Drew?
Steve
Now that the end of the world is not coming (at least not this month, just wait ’til NEXT month!) it seems we are seeing a lot more of the more typical sniping and snarling at one another on this site (I will admit I’ve done it myself too frequently). I guess one could take that to be a good sign.
I think Dave’s point is the hypocrisy of it. Also how every Tom Dick and Sally government worker is deemed essential whereas ordinary people just to sit at home and pay for their salaries out of their savings and are expected to be happy about it.
I wouldn’t trust Turkey’s numbers much more than I would China’s, consider it’s Erdogan who’s running the place.
It certainly is a big f**king deal for those who got it and ended up in an ICU and/or a ventilator. Drowning in a cytokine storm is not the way I’d want to go, it’s why waterboarding was such a terrifying method of non-bloodletting torture. However years later when the data is reexamined I suspect that the numbers of deaths due to Kung Flu will be adjusted downward significantly, considering how the CDC stopped counting flu deaths almost a month early and the falling off of the table of the reporting of pneumonia and other diseases. Be that it may, it’s good to read reports here from someone actually involved in ground zero instead of breathless reports that we’re all going to die and it’s OMB’s fault or it’s just another cold and stop overreacting.
Here’s a link to a Quillette article about the POC disparity in the UK. A useful perspective although a little too much Bad Oppressive White bashing. I often find the site’s commentary more illuminating than the article.
https://quillette.com/2020/05/01/why-have-britains-ethnic-minorities-been-hit-harder-by-covid-19-its-hardly-a-mystery/
Yes – I did consider Turkey fudging their numbers — but COVID is not something you can hide for more then a few weeks; ie Wuhan, Moscow. When it overwhelms health systems; it goes on social media.
Actually, the death tolls will be revised up. For March / April compared to last year; the excess deaths is double what had been attributed to COVID.
My view are heterodox. I believe lockdowns were essential but quickly decreasing in benefit / cost ratio. I also believe without implementing additional measures (contact tracing; centralized quarantine; mass sanitization) to reduce transmission, reopening will incur horrific causalties.
I think that’s a reasonable enough position but I’m not sure that I agree. I think they were necessary from a tactical political standpoint, i.e. they had to be tried but the actual evidence (other than “tiger repellent”) that they have been effective, at least in the U. S., is unconvincing. The problem we face now is that having imposed them for going on seven weeks political leaders will have a difficult time acknowledging they were useless and so will “double down” until political reality forces them to do otherwise.
One of the issues we face is that are no experts on epidemics in large, modern liberal democratic societies but there are plenty of people willing to generalize their actual expertise far beyond its limits.
“One of the issues we face is that are no experts on epidemics in large, modern liberal democratic societies ”
But we do have people who study infectious disease for living. People who have studied and worked in epidemics, helping to successfully control them. True pandemics are rare, so if you set the standard high enough then you are correct. However, in other epidemics mitigation, isolation and quarantine have worked. There is no other model that has been tried. We have seen, Ebola for example, what happens when we do not successfully carry this out, then see what happens when we do. The same tactics were carried out for MERS and SARS.
So now what we have instead, what you are supporting, is the idea that everyone knows more than the “experts”. That we totally discount any expertise and prior experience, Its just a free for all. Instead we have people suggesting stuff we have never tried and dont have the slightest idea how to accomplish. All while watching other countries follow that advice with good outcomes so far.
The irony is that this is rejected because the “experts” in finance are predicting apocalypse if we don’t reject the expertise of those who study infections disease. And we know a lot about the expertise of th finance “experts” don’t we?
I said at the beginning that I thought there was good enough experience to try what we are doing. Of course what we tried was severely undercut and sabotaged with lack of testing and little effort to increase PPE supplies, among other things. I also acknowledged if things didn’t work we couldn’t do this forever. Eventually we might just treat this like the flu and what happens just happens.
Two final things. I am not suggesting that we blindly follow expertise. We rejected some of the expertise of the CDC as an example because they were clearly wrong, and it turned out we were correct. Expertise is not always correct, but it has a much better chance. The sequins thing is that this is clearly a long term effort to generally reject expertise on anything. The end result being that you can believe anything you want, especially if it conveniently fits your ideology.
Steve
Restaurants and malls were opened here yesterday, we went for a drive. Lots of people out, riding bikes, playing Frisbee, roofers on roofs, looked in vain for anyone wearing a mask. Maybe they can’t get them, maybe they don’t care, I just didn’t see any level of concern. I think this is a virus only other people get.
I think this is a virus only other people get.
That is where the tragedy starts.
Ex-NYC, the number of cases and deaths per day is increasing and reached a new high yesterday. For most of the country; the risk has never been higher.
https://www.zerohedge.com/health/why-sweden-has-already-won-debate-covid-19-lockdown-policy
Frankly, I doubt it and your saying that suggests you don’t understand how modern science and the modern academic world work. Everything is much, much more specialized than that. They aren’t experts in “infectious disease”. There are experts in Ebola in Liberia (if not in one district of Liberia). Very, very narrow specializations. Can their knowledge and intuition be generalized? Maybe, maybe not. We simply don’t know. So much depends on one’s assumptions.
The case mortality rate for Ebola approached 90%. In 1981 the case mortality rate for HIV/AIDS approached 100%. What’s the case mortality rate for COVID-19? It may be as high as 10% but there is a belief that seems to be pretty common among the same experts you’re touting that the case mortality rate for COVID-19 is orders of magnitude lower than that. IMO that influences how close your instincts hew to the situation.
Today you can’t be an expert in “medicine” or “economics” or “public policy” or anything else. Expertise is in extremely narrow niches. I’d bet that just as there are areas of economics about which Paul Krugman knows little more than somebody whose study of economics was limited to Econ 101, there are areas of infectious disease epidemiology that scholars of the Ebola outbreak of 2016 are ignorant.
“Quarantine” and “isolation” mean completely different things in a country where people rarely travel more than 20 miles from their hometowns in their lives than they do in countries (like the U. S.) where people travel more than 20 miles from their homes on a daily basis.
Guarneri: People of other political persuasions would disagree, some vehemently. Even the POTUS said something disparaging about Sweden’s course of action. Me, I’m not certain it was right or wrong. Different nations, different cultures, different demographics and cooperation/noncooperation with laws and guidelines. It’s a question of priorities and cost/ratio benefit, cold as that sounds. Will shutting down the economy save more lives than not? At what cost, both in lives and treasure lost? I wish I knew the answers. All I know is that I’m smart enough to know that I’m not smart enough to run other people’s lives for them.
“Frankly, I doubt it and your saying that suggests you don’t understand how modern science and the modern academic world work. Everything is much, much more specialized than that. They aren’t experts in “infectious diseaseâ€. There are experts in Ebola in Liberia (if not in one district of Liberia). Very, very narrow specializations.”
That is so wrong I don’t know how to address it. There are people who specialize in how diseases spread. There are people whose expertise in virology, just to pick an example, extends beyond one disease in one country. You are in essence saying that someone can only have expertise for very, very small areas, down to the point it might apply to only one pt. Thats absurd. I can only think you are defining expert in some odd, bizarre manner that no one else is using. In essence, no one is an expert in anything. Absent the recognition of some kind of expertise we either have paralysis where no one does anything or everyone does whatever they want ignoring whatever evidence exists. (To be clear, expertise lies not so much in the individuals but in the work they have done and/or the evidence they understand.)
Steve
Go back and look at their CVs and that’s not what you’ll find. You can’t advance in the academic world or in the sciences as a generalist.
Yes, the modern academic world is absurd.
Why do you insist on turning to virologists for advice on public policy? They aren’t public policy experts.
You are describing lab researchers. Go look at epidemiologists and public health degrees and the people working in those specialties. . There are always people who work on broader issues. We need those people who know everything there is to know about one tiny area of one disease but without the people who have broader expertise, especially in how disease is transmitted and how to stop it spreading, we never stop any epidemic. We would all be dead right now from Ebola.
Steve
Here’s where I’ll agree with you, Steve. I think that the policies being put in place by our elected officials should be better informed. They should be seeking the views of experts including virologists, epidemiologists, public policy experts, psychologists, and business experts to formulate policies that achieve specific, well-defined objectives and are consistent with the way our society works. That’s not happening. What is happening is that elected officials are brandishing the views of a handful of experts to formulate the policies they dare to and which comport with their basic inclinations. I don’t believe they’re working.
Trump is a prime offender in this but he isn’t the only offender. Illinois’s governor, J. B. Pritzker, is by training a lawyer and has inherited wealth. He’s basically following the party line which is to impose the strictest lockdowns you can without getting pushback, particularly from the public employees’ unions.
For weeks he said we’re “bending the curve” but more recently he’s stopped because you can only say it when it isn’t true for so long without looking absurd.
Stop comparing SARS-CoV-2 with Ebola! It is an invidious comparison. Most of the people who contracted Ebola weren’t asymptomatic. Didn’t you complain about comparing SARS-CoV-2 with the seasonal flu? The two are orders of magnitude more closely related than SARS-CoV-2 and Ebola. You’re trying to have it both ways.
The diseases are different, but in both cases you need people whose expertise is in stopping the spread of infectious diseases. You are making the equivalent of the argument that if someone gets stabbed in the right ventricle we need the “stabbed in the right ventricle experts”. No, we need an experienced heart surgery team. There is no and never will be a stabbing in the right ventricle team.
Steve
In the 19th and much of the 20th centuries there was no such thing as a surgical specialist. The same surgeon who operated on your leg last year might operate on your brain this year. Now there are. Tomorrow there might, indeed, be “stabbed in the right ventricle” specialists. It’s already true that some surgeons have more experience with trauma than others and it might be prudent to seek them out in dealing with difficult situations involving trauma. I think you’re wrong that the experts you believe should be in charge exist but I agree that there are people who are experts in something else willing to offer their expertise by possibly false analogy.
No, there wont be tomorrow or ever such specialists. There wont be enough cases. Plus it just doesnt matter how good the surgeon is without a support team. So you need an OR team, ICU team, ED team, etc that are also specialists. What you will have, what you have now are people able to use their skills and knowledge of physiology to care for such pts, those who live to make it to the OR anyway.
So when we have Covid 31 or Covid 51 we wont have specialists in Covid 51 per se, but we will have lots of people who study disease trasnferranc sin general and a lot of people who will have studied what we did with Covid 19.
Steve
There is a difference between experts with book knowledge and experts with book knowledge and actual experience in dealing with novel respiratory pathogens.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/20/the-months-of-magical-thinking-as-the-coronavirus-swept-over-china-some-experts-were-in-denial-about-what-was-to-come/
The European experts in the article are as qualified and know as much as the South Korean one. But the South Korean expert dealt with MERS — so he got the threat much faster then his European / American colleagues.
I know this is late but in LA county when the lockdown started there were a string of 1 to 2 deaths a day occurring. A week later, 4 deaths a day. The next week 15 deaths a day. The next week the rate of increase started to slow and since mid April the county is averaging 50 deaths a day. The lockdown, social distancing, and mask wearing seems to have had a impact.
Regarding 1229 deaths as May 3, 75% of the deaths are over 65 years old. 45% of the deaths are associated with LTCs, assisted living facilities, and nursing homes. When the county does open, people over 65 will still have to stay at home, when outside wear a mask, and wash there hands a lot.
Governors in this country don’t look at maps. Large swaths of California could be opened up. I don’t understand why they haven’t been.
I don’t know that it’s established what works. Maybe nothing will.
South Korea has done a great job of tracking, quarantine, isolation, and has run the virus to ground.
In their own country.
How long will they need to isolate their country from the infectious world outside? Forever? I suppose they could budget a coronavirus fire department.
My point is the feeble aged over 60 years are the dry tinder. And they’re still around.