And my point all along is that the response should not end up causing more damage than the disease itself, and that the response should be proportional, targeted to the most vulnerable while not creating a whole host of problems for those that are not vulnerable, thereby making this a much bigger tragedy. And in making that larger point, I also made the point that we have to consider not only the spread of the disease on one side, but the economic and human toll of blanket, mass shutdowns of the economy on the other side, since that's the solution we have been taking.
Now correct me if I'm wrong, but man, does it appear that you objected, and strenuously so, to those points.
In this thread here, you have used very little data in your responses to me, but lots of emotion, mostly underlying fear. I've tried to get you to address some of the various data I have linked to, and you haven't.
- You haven't specifically addressed the 3.3 million new unemployment claims
- you haven't specifically addressed the additional suicides that result from unemployment, outlined in one of the articles I linked to
- you haven't addressed anything about the case of the Diamond princess, which involves an environment which is ideal for the virus to spread, with a statistically significant sample size, albeit one with a selection bias that skews
toward the most vulnerable demographic by age, and, which despite all that, found only a 17% infection rate, with most of those asymptomatic and a majority of those with symptoms having light symptoms.
What science did you base your proposed response on? Let's review some of the events we've seen in the past couple of month.
- Sometime around the 3rd week of January, the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO) flatly stated that COVD-19 was not transmissible from human to human. Oops.
- Not long after that (and apparently ignoring the WHO), the administration here formed the first task force to respond to the new virus.
- On January 31st, the administration cut off all travel from the then-epicenter of the disease, China. That reduced from about 10,000 incoming per day (with overwhelming odds that some of them were carriers of the virus) to zero. Critics of the move said it was an overreaction, while hurling the usual epithets (racist, xenophobe, blah blah blah).
- In early March, after previously stating that COVD-19 couldn't be transmitted from human to human, the Director General of the WHO radically reversed course, stating that this disease had a mortality rate many times higher than the average seasonal flu, and predicted a Spanish-flu like scenario. That's a pretty big shift don't you think? From one extreme to the other. And yet from the data we know, he was wrong - wildly wrong - in both cases.
- Meanwhile, in Britain, a modeler from Imperial College predicted 500,000 deaths from the virus in the UK, and 2.2 million in the US. Within the past two days, he has revised the UK number down to 20,000 for the UK (I haven't seen his revision for the US). Yet, none of the lockdowns started in the UK until mid-March, which means the virus was there and spreading, and yet the numbers they did have with no mitigating actions were orders of magnitude short of his dire predictions. Not surprisingly, Professor Ferguson does not want to release the code for his model.
The last two bullet points are the most important, because those formed the basis for responses around the world, including in this country, are based on the worst case scenarios that they presented. And even before we went down that path, there was enough data out there to strongly suggest that the worst case scenarios would not materialize even if we did nothing. While doing nothing would be imprudent, with the data we did have, we could have taken a much more measured approach that protected the vulnerable while not restraining everybody else outside of that group.
Instead, the response over here, by governors and mayors across the nation, has been based in fear of the worst case scenario, creating an unfounded panic which as driven unemployment significantly higher in a very short amount of time and caused economic damage that will linger long after the virus is gone, while turning the mere act of the acquisition of toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and basic food items into the fucking Hunger Games. Well done, people take a bow (insert golf clap here).
I don't even know why you are making any reference to China at this point after conceding their faulty data and lack of credibility of their government's messaging regarding the virus. Their credibility was shot long ago, and in the last few days they've cut off their country to incoming travelers (XENOPHOBES!!!!) and expelled Western journalists.
An educated guess based on a lot more data - data that is trending strongly in the direction of his educated guess.
Speaking of data, we have a bit more that should now be considered:
View: https://twitter.com/MichaelCoudrey/status/1243734377198018560
This same doctor has done other tests with this drug with results in line with this, and other studies have also shown similar results. While the studied groups are in and of themselves not large enough to be statistically significant, pretty much every study with this drug has yielded results that, at worst, are in the same ballpark, if not nearly identical. This is a drug that has been around since the 1940's and has been used a lot so its side effects are very well known. And it's a drug for which there are 100's of millions of doses floating around the U.S. right now, exceeding the number of confirmed cases of COVD-19 by many orders of magnitude. Therefore, its wide availability and demonstrated effectiveness in fighting COVD-19 should be factored into how we proceed. It's another data point that says we can get the non-vulnerable back to work.
On the flip side of that though, we have governors (read: not medical professionals) in two states completely prohibiting the use of this drug to treat COVD-19. Care to comment on that?
Again ... China. Why even bring them into the debate at this point? They have as much credibility on COVD-19 as the Soviet government had on Chernobyl, i.e. absolute zero. Their reported numbers are meaningless.
This is purely conjecture on your part. If you want to make a point with this, present some actual data. Not anecdotes that come from some heartstring-pulling story from The New Yorker or The Atlantic Monthly, not a few anecdotes here and there, but actual
data. Absent that, this point has no support and thus no validity.
Where did I do that? I'm merely trying to get the concerns of the workers
considered in this discussion, with their needs balanced against those who are getting sick from COVD-19 and with the hopes that a compromise that addresses both sides and doesn't leave long lasting damage that will exceed that of the virus itself.
What the hell does that even mean? The 3.3 million newly unemployed I have mentioned multiple times in this debate are most certainly not the wealthy. I haven't heard anything about millionaires and billionaires losing their jobs en masse while the blue collar workers keep trucking along. As someone who studies economics in their spare time should know, ANY economic downturn affects those at the bottom of the ladder first, and affects them the most. Can you give me an example of an economic downturn that affected only the wealthy while those on an hourly wage just keep going like nothing happened? Either way, that's not the case here, so again, that point is a complete non sequiter.
You were saying?
