American Politics Discussion Thread

[darrelljs]

Was invited to the Dolphins game Sunday and one of the guys in the suite was an ER doctor at the largest hospital in Broward. He said it was basically over, and that the ER had emptied of covid patients. His explanation/belief that the thing mutated into a less virulent strain, since there were still people testing positive but all asymptomatic. My mom tested positive (thrice) and she is afflicted with old age, diabetes, high blood pressure and a predilection for pneumonia. No symptoms 9 days in.

Darrell

[darrelljs]

I usually don't condone the pervasive problem-solving approach through semantics, but I'll eat my hat and say that the proponents of the "herd immunity" approach should use the proper term, which is herd culling.

Huh?  The models I've seen show survivors no longer being transmitters to the point R0 eventually goes below 1 (even with no social distancing).  The word cull means to limit the population of a group by selectively killing a subset.  Was your statement hyperbole or did you mean it literally?

OK, if proponents of lockdowns use the proper term of authoritarian government tyranny.

There's a broad expanse between anarchy and tyranny, and enforcing social distancing during a global pandemic fits comfortably therein.   I like the precept "your rights end where another's begin".  Its nice to think people would wear a mask voluntarily and as a courtesy to others, but turns out that's not the case.  So unfortunately it needs to be enforced by law.  I also favor requiring a measles vaccine to attend public school, and the right for private schools to require the same.

Darrell

[The Black Sword]

Most information I have seen for Europe suggests that we will not be close to herd immunity by the time they project for vaccines next year. 

I don't know what the situation is where you are Darrell, but we(Ireland) had a near emptying of the hospitals after our initial lockdown. After being relatively open for a while now they are starting to fill up to more worrying levels again.

[T-hawk]

Unless of course you think it'd be only fair for you to foot the medical bills of any person you infect, and to face manslaughter charges should they die. It'd be a coherent position then.

This is exactly it. This is how we handle the threats caused by driving a car, for example. Let me purchase Covid liability insurance to cover my share of the externalized costs. Those that refuse that can keep themselves locked at home, those that agree can engage in the liberty that should be normal.

The problem with granting government power in the event of a "crisis" is that everything becomes a crisis. Remember when the War On Terrorism emergency ended? Oh wait, it never did and never will.

[darrelljs]

Most information I have seen for Europe suggests that we will not be close to herd immunity by the time they project for vaccines next year. 

I don't know what the situation is where you are Darrell, but we(Ireland) had a near emptying of the hospitals after our initial lockdown. After being relatively open for a while now they are starting to fill up to more worrying levels again.

We had by one model a 12-18 month projection for herd immunity back in August.

South Florida was the highest per capita infection rate with over a 25% test positivity rate for over a week about a month ago.  The governor closed bars and made masks mandatory, and I think people also self modified behavior and now we are at what feels like fairly reasonable levels.  It's impossible for me to say what prompted the downturn.

Broward County from this map if you are curious:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020...html#cases

Darrell

[The Black Sword]

This is exactly it. This is how we handle the threats caused by driving a car, for example. Let me purchase Covid liability insurance to cover my share of the externalized costs. Those that refuse that can keep themselves locked at home, those that agree can engage in the liberty that should be normal.

You can't buy insurance that lets you drive on the wrong side of the road. If you break the law and cause damage your insurance pays for the damage, but you'll still be penalised for breaking the law and endangering others.  Your last sentence can also come dangerously close to starting with 'those that are poor'.

The problem with granting government power in the event of a "crisis" is that everything becomes a crisis. 

There's obviously a problem with not granting government powers in a crisis - you can't deal with said crisis. So you need to weigh up the pros and cons on a case by case basis. And this can hardly be argued as governments making a mountain out of a molehill to extend their powers. If Covid doesn't count as a genuine crisis then I don't know what does.

[The Black Sword]

South Florida was the highest per capita infection rate with over a 25% test positivity rate for over a week about a month ago.  The governor closed bars and made masks mandatory, and I think people also self modified behavior and now we are at what feels like fairly reasonable levels.  It's impossible for me to say what prompted the downturn.

Broward County from this map if you are curious:

https://covid19ireland-geohive.hub.arcgi...u--testing

That's our data, we had 2 fairly quiet months and now things are looking dicey again. I guess I'm just saying that clear hospitals doesn't necessarily mean you're out the other side. But maybe it does if you had it worse before. Either way, you probably just keep opening things up slowly and see if anything changes.

[T-hawk]

If Covid doesn't count as a genuine crisis then I don't know what does.

It doesn't. We thought it did at first, reasonably so given the information at the time, before we saw what the infection curves and actual death stats look like over time.

Do you understand how many people die in the normal course of affairs? It's 3 million per year in the US. Do you understand how little of it is actually Covid? 200k in six months, which is only 13% above the normal figure of 1.5 million. And that will continue dropping as treatments become established. And that's ignoring that the vast majority of Covid deaths had other comorbidities. And that's before you start considering anything like quality-of-life-years where half of Covid's numbers were already at death's door anyway. (The average stay in a nursing home before dying is 14 months. Half of Covid's nursing-home deaths would have died in this time span anyway, because that's what old people do anyway.)

Any serious look at the numbers reveals that it is not worth destroying the liberties and livelihoods of 330,000,000 Americans for the sake of a tiny percentage.

[DaveV]

But there are a disturbingly large number of post-infection health problems: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6930e1.htm

35% of symptomatic patients would be a much larger number than your "mere" 200,000 deaths.

[GeneralKilCavalry]

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6932e2.htm

Or this.