COVID-19 Megathread 5: The Trumps catch COVID-19

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Are we ever going to get over this?

It’s only been 5-6 months but it’s really wearing on my mental stability. It’s hard to see any light at the end of this covid tunnel.

I wish people would wear freakin masks. We would be over this a lot sooner.

I don't see how you can look at this graph and not see light at the end of the tunnel.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Are we ever going to get over this?

It’s only been 5-6 months but it’s really wearing on my mental stability. It’s hard to see any light at the end of this covid tunnel.

I wish people would wear freakin masks. We would be over this a lot sooner.

I don't see how you can look at this graph and not see light at the end of the tunnel.

Deaths lag by 2-4 weeks. I remember back when this started people were making the same claim that its not that bad, it wont get that bad, look at the number of cases vs deaths etc and then the number of people dying caught up.

A month ago, when cases started rising and deaths were falling, people said that deaths lag by two weeks.
Then two weeks later, when cases were still rising and deaths were still falling, people started saying that deaths lag by four weeks.
Now that deaths are still falling after more than a month of rising cases, I’m hearing people say that deaths lag by eight weeks.

None of these people have done the analysis.  Check the modelling I did in this thread, especially replies 3880, 3967, 3968, and 3996.

To the extent that deaths lag cases, it is by 7-14 days.  There is no evidence of lag greater than 14 days.  And even this lag is countered by an overall downward time trend completely independent of cases.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

It’s almost as if....deaths lag.

Right, they tend to lag 7-14 days, but not 4 weeks.  So it would make sense that deaths are increasing this week in AZ/FL/TX given that we saw a big spike in cases the previous week.  By contrast, we haven't seen an increase in deaths in CA or NC where cases have been increasing steadily but more slowly for two or three months.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Article

Banning religious singing while blessing marxist riots. It is my opinion that I hope Californians violently oppose this and the evil governor. Thus is beyond tyrannical.

Rioting (violence, destroying private property, looting) is illegal and always has been.
Peaceful protest is protected by the 1st Amendment and when people wear masks, hasn’t been shown to cause a public health risk. It’s a combination of being outside and people wearing masks that makes it safe.
Singing indoors with groups has been the source of multiple superspreader events leading to illness and deaths. This is a smart and sensible public health measure which will save lives. If you’re “pro-life”, you’ll stand with the government.

Im not "pro-life" im "pro-freedom". Religious worship is more important to me than "peaceful" protests. Especially when enforcement is extremely discriminatory. The media literally called it terrorism to protest the lockdowns then immediately flipflopped if you were protesting for communist garbage. There is nothing sensible about this. This is a fricking authoritarian coup via the big corporations who control the media.

The people in the anti-lockdown protests weren't wearing masks.  They were also literally bringing guns inside of state capitols, so I don't see how they can be called peaceful.

If people in churches are wearing masks, I don't think the sort of speech they engage in should be regulated, and that includes singing (though it would probably sound strange).

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

The media continues to report on covid deaths with either no awareness or willful disregard for the weekend and holiday effects (along with typical daily fluctuations) that have been obvious for three months.

On one hand, you have this story in the Washington Post last night:

Virginia reports no daily coronavirus deaths as region sees smallest case increase since April

No covid deaths in Virginia!  Woo hoo, looks like the pandemic is over here!
 
But of course, my state immediately reported 28 deaths today, and the average deaths are still rising compared to a few weeks back.  One day with zero deaths is much more evidence of recording problems than any true progress against the virus.

One the other hand, you have this tweet that was posted in this thread earlier today.

https://twitter.com/thehowie/status/1280524580801708032

BREAKING NEWS! New record of 113 (actually 117) in AZ!  LOTS OF CAPS!

This ignores the fact that Arizona reported a total of 22 deaths across the previous 3 days, for an average of 35 deaths/day during holiday period of July 4-7 (including today's 117).  The average of the previous 7 days (ending July 3) was 37 deaths.

Deaths are indeed rising in Arizona, but there is nothing meaningful about today's total in particular, beyond exposing problems or idiosyncrasies in reporting.  (I believe it will jump the 7-day average to an all-time high in AZ, but only because the previous daily high was exactly six days ago.)

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Deaths have shot way up today. Of course, that is partly due to under-reporting deaths over the 4th of July weekend. However, if some of the deaths reported today were re-allocated to the weekend, that wouldn't make a difference for the current 7-day moving average, and with the deaths reported today it seems that the 7-day moving average has probably stabilized for the time being and may be starting to go up.

As a reminder, this is exactly when we would expect deaths to bottom and start rising if we have a similar trajectory to Iran in its 2nd wave based on the length of the lag between the Iranian case increase and their death increase.

Yeah, there were ~250 fewer deaths on Saturday than the previous week because of the holiday, then ~250 more deaths today than last Tuesday as all the records were catching up.  The same thing happened on Memorial Day weekend.

Right now it’s clear that deaths in a handful of states where infections really surged the last two weeks are going up (FL, TX, AZ), deaths in several states that saw their infections surge months ago are still going down (NY, MA, IL), and deaths in states where infections have gone up more gradually over several months have remained flat (CA, NC).  

Whether this nets out to a positive or a negative at the national level going forward is unclear.  The 7-day average today stands at 556, compared with 559 last Tuesday.  My guess is we will see a slight rise for the next week or two before the death rate starts to fall again at its previous pace.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

It’s worth noting that New Jersey reported 71 deaths today.  They have ten times the overall death rate of Florida, California, or Texas.  And they are still averaging way more deaths per capita than any of those states even just in the past week.    How anyone can use their performance as a model to emulate is beyond me.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Last Wednesday (July 1) there were 676 reported deaths. So far today, we are sitting at 692 deaths, with much of California, almost all of Texas, and the entirety of 8 other states still not having yet reported. This means that the 7-day moving average of deaths will be increasing again. If this up-trend in deaths holds over the coming days/weeks, then we will have started our 2nd death wave with EXACTLY the same # of days lagging behind our 2nd case wave as Iran, literally down to the day. It is remarkable that deaths appear to be up-trending with exactly the expected time lag.

We are also at 45,574 cases so far today, compared to 52,358 last Wednesday, so it is quite clear that cases will also continue to trend up. We have a shot at breaking 60k cases for the first time if California and Texas both manage to post big numbers today. If we don't quite manage it today, we probably will tomorrow.

Do you think there is any difference with how California and Texas have handled the coronavirus pandemic? Has one state been more competent than the other? Or have they both bungled their approaches? Which Governors do you think have done the best in addressing this crisis? I'm asking this because the vast majority of states (36, at last count), are experiencing a rise in cases. This includes Colorado, where coronavirus hospitalizations and cases have increased over the past two weeks.

Basically no governor has done a good job addressing the crisis.  Some have let it spread faster than other, and some were just in better position to hold it off longer.   But no one has done what really needed to be done to truly limit the death toll and efficiently get our society back to normal.  This would have been a hard lockdown accompanied by a program of voluntary deliberate infection and quarantine in order to safely establish immunity without infecting vulnerable people.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Last Wednesday (July 1) there were 676 reported deaths. So far today, we are sitting at 692 deaths, with much of California, almost all of Texas, and the entirety of 8 other states still not having yet reported. This means that the 7-day moving average of deaths will be increasing again. If this up-trend in deaths holds over the coming days/weeks, then we will have started our 2nd death wave with EXACTLY the same # of days lagging behind our 2nd case wave as Iran, literally down to the day. It is remarkable that deaths appear to be up-trending with exactly the expected time lag.

We are also at 45,574 cases so far today, compared to 52,358 last Wednesday, so it is quite clear that cases will also continue to trend up. We have a shot at breaking 60k cases for the first time if California and Texas both manage to post big numbers today. If we don't quite manage it today, we probably will tomorrow.

Do you think there is any difference with how California and Texas have handled the coronavirus pandemic? Has one state been more competent than the other? Or have they both bungled their approaches? Which Governors do you think have done the best in addressing this crisis? I'm asking this because the vast majority of states (36, at last count), are experiencing a rise in cases. This includes Colorado, where coronavirus hospitalizations and cases have increased over the past two weeks.

Basically no governor has done a good job addressing the crisis.  Some have let it spread faster than other, and some were just in better position to hold it off longer.   But no one has done what really needed to be done to truly limit the death toll and efficiently get our society back to normal.  This would have been a hard lockdown accompanied by a program of voluntary deliberate infection and quarantine in order to safely establish immunity without infecting vulnerable people.

But what would a hard lockdown have looked like? A full resort to what China did with Wuhan, or what Italy did in Lombardy? And how could we be sure that a program of "voluntary infection" wouldn't have spiraled out of control? Given how our approaches to this virus have evolved constantly over preceding months, I don't think it would have been a bad idea to go down this path, but would the public have accepted it? This has been a very taxing situation across the board.

It would have at least given people a choice.  If they didn’t want to be locked down, they could get infected, quarantine for two weeks, and then be free to go wherever and do whatever they wanted.  If they didn’t want to risk being infected, they could stay in lockdown as long as they wanted, at least under herd immunity or a vaccine were achieved.

The biggest failure in overall outlook that has led to huge death rates regardless of strategy across countries like Italy, Spain, UK, Sweden, and the US has been the failure differentiate between vulnerable and less vulnerable populations in creating policy.  It is absurd to expect everyone to behave the same when some groups of people literally have 1000 times the chance of dying than other groups.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Or we could just worn masks and mobilized the full resources of the Federal government to get enough masks and PPE for health-workers and then masks for people, including free masks. Also while doing contact tracing and non essential lockdowns.

 A race to herd immunity strategy was modeled to be a disaster by multiple organizations and agencies. You can't pursue a strategy like that when the best mathematicians, scientists, and medical people say it's a stupid way to go. Also the race to her immunity hinging on infected people to stay home for two weeks wouldn't work. What would make them stay home? Who would care for them if they were sick but not requiring hospitalization?

 It seems the countries who have had the most success had a clear government response with no equivocation about how serious this was. Encouraged their citizen or required masks, sometimes provided or subsidized. They also did testing followed by proactive contact tracing to see where the disease was spreading and shape policy accordingly.

As far as I know, no one was modeling a voluntary infection strategy accompanied by a hard lockdown.  All the discussion of herd immmunity was essentially just assuming that everyone would gradually get infected at random.  This is pretty much what happened in Sweden, and why their death toll was so high.  They wanted herd immunity, but they never intentionally directed infections toward the least vulnerable,; they just sort of let the infection spread wherever.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Or we could just worn masks and mobilized the full resources of the Federal government to get enough masks and PPE for health-workers and then masks for people, including free masks. Also while doing contact tracing and non essential lockdowns.

 A race to herd immunity strategy was modeled to be a disaster by multiple organizations and agencies. You can't pursue a strategy like that when the best mathematicians, scientists, and medical people say it's a stupid way to go. Also the race to her immunity hinging on infected people to stay home for two weeks wouldn't work. What would make them stay home? Who would care for them if they were sick but not requiring hospitalization?

 It seems the countries who have had the most success had a clear government response with no equivocation about how serious this was. Encouraged their citizen or required masks, sometimes provided or subsidized. They also did testing followed by proactive contact tracing to see where the disease was spreading and shape policy accordingly.

As far as I know, no one was modeling a voluntary infection strategy accompanied by a hard lockdown.  All the discussion of herd immmunity was essentially just assuming that everyone would gradually get infected at random.  This is pretty much what happened in Sweden, and why their death toll was so high.  They wanted herd immunity, but they never intentionally directed infections toward the least vulnerable,; they just sort of let the infection spread wherever.

  Come on bro be serious. You really believe you came up with some brilliant strategy that all of the world's experts on pandemics somehow couldn't conceive of and model?

I’m sure many people have thought of this before, but probably didn’t spend a lot of effort trying to model it because they believed it was politically unrealistic and would not be taken seriously.  If you know of a model for this, please post a link, I’d love to see it.

Edit: I also think a lot of people when the outbreak first started really underestimated the seriousness of the situation, and how impossible it was going to be to control using more moderate strategy.  In particular I think people underestimated the contagiousness of the virus and what asymptomatic spread really implied, and believed that temporary lockdowns by themselves would be effective.  So an extreme-sounding proposal like this may have sounded unnecessary to even consider at that point.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Or we could just worn masks and mobilized the full resources of the Federal government to get enough masks and PPE for health-workers and then masks for people, including free masks. Also while doing contact tracing and non essential lockdowns.

 A race to herd immunity strategy was modeled to be a disaster by multiple organizations and agencies. You can't pursue a strategy like that when the best mathematicians, scientists, and medical people say it's a stupid way to go. Also the race to her immunity hinging on infected people to stay home for two weeks wouldn't work. What would make them stay home? Who would care for them if they were sick but not requiring hospitalization?

 It seems the countries who have had the most success had a clear government response with no equivocation about how serious this was. Encouraged their citizen or required masks, sometimes provided or subsidized. They also did testing followed by proactive contact tracing to see where the disease was spreading and shape policy accordingly.

As far as I know, no one was modeling a voluntary infection strategy accompanied by a hard lockdown.  All the discussion of herd immmunity was essentially just assuming that everyone would gradually get infected at random.  This is pretty much what happened in Sweden, and why their death toll was so high.  They wanted herd immunity, but they never intentionally directed infections toward the least vulnerable,; they just sort of let the infection spread wherever.

  Come on bro be serious. You really believe you came up with some brilliant strategy that all of the world's experts on pandemics somehow couldn't conceive of and model?

I’m sure many people have thought of this before, but probably didn’t spend a lot of effort trying to model it because they believed it was politically unrealistic and would not be taken seriously.  If you know of a model for this, please post a link, I’d love to see it.

Edit: I also think a lot of people when the outbreak first started really underestimated the seriousness of the situation, and how impossible it was going to be to control using more moderate strategy.  In particular I think people underestimated the contagiousness of the virus and what asymptomatic spread really implied, and believed that temporary lockdowns by themselves would be effective.  So an extreme-sounding proposal like this may have sounded unnecessary to even consider at that point.

  Early Herd Immunity against COVID-19: A Dangerous Misconception

The article explicitly assumes the “current” (for when it was written) death rate of 2000 deaths/day would continue under a herd immunity strategy.  It makes no attempt to model a death rate among the young and healthy.  The whole purpose of deliberate infection and quarantine is to dramatically reduce the death rate by only infecting those least likely to die, rather than just infecting people unknowlingly and randomly.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

https://twitter.com/propublica/status/1280947020572786689

The same thing happened in NYC months ago.

According to this graph, this also happened in Houston months ago.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

It looks like Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan, and Colorado all had their most new confirmed infections in over a month today. 

It really feels to me like the virus is unstoppable until we reach a certain immunity threshold, which perhaps only NYC right now has achieved.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

It looks like Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan, and Colorado all had their most new confirmed infections in over a month today.  

It really feels to me like the virus is unstoppable until we reach a certain immunity threshold, which perhaps only NYC right now has achieved.

Correction, it's only unstoppable for countries with failing administrations, like the United States and Brazil. Most of the rest of the world has gotten it under control (EU) or has completely eradicated it (Taiwan, NZ).

P.S. Nearly 62,000 new cases in one day. Fauci might be proven right yet again. 100k new cases a day is not that far off at this point.

You can’t call Italy or Spain or France a success when they still have death rates substantially higher than the US.  Look at the top 8 death rates in the world; they are all in Europe.  They’ve controlled the virus just like NYC did; by waiting until enough people had already been infected that an immunity barrier had been established in the places with the worst outbreaks.

And New Zealand is a tiny island nation that is still completely locked down from any foreign travel.  What is going to happen when they actually open back up again?

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

It is perplexing to me that the UK still has almost the number of deaths per capita that the US does, while having about 20x fewer cases per capita, despite doing 50% more per capita tests. 

It’s been like that for several weeks.  They have a CFR of 17%!  How is that possible?

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Or we could just worn masks and mobilized the full resources of the Federal government to get enough masks and PPE for health-workers and then masks for people, including free masks. Also while doing contact tracing and non essential lockdowns.

 A race to herd immunity strategy was modeled to be a disaster by multiple organizations and agencies. You can't pursue a strategy like that when the best mathematicians, scientists, and medical people say it's a stupid way to go. Also the race to her immunity hinging on infected people to stay home for two weeks wouldn't work. What would make them stay home? Who would care for them if they were sick but not requiring hospitalization?

 It seems the countries who have had the most success had a clear government response with no equivocation about how serious this was. Encouraged their citizen or required masks, sometimes provided or subsidized. They also did testing followed by proactive contact tracing to see where the disease was spreading and shape policy accordingly.

As far as I know, no one was modeling a voluntary infection strategy accompanied by a hard lockdown.  All the discussion of herd immmunity was essentially just assuming that everyone would gradually get infected at random.  This is pretty much what happened in Sweden, and why their death toll was so high.  They wanted herd immunity, but they never intentionally directed infections toward the least vulnerable,; they just sort of let the infection spread wherever.

  Come on bro be serious. You really believe you came up with some brilliant strategy that all of the world's experts on pandemics somehow couldn't conceive of and model?

I’m sure many people have thought of this before, but probably didn’t spend a lot of effort trying to model it because they believed it was politically unrealistic and would not be taken seriously.  If you know of a model for this, please post a link, I’d love to see it.

Edit: I also think a lot of people when the outbreak first started really underestimated the seriousness of the situation, and how impossible it was going to be to control using more moderate strategy.  In particular I think people underestimated the contagiousness of the virus and what asymptomatic spread really implied, and believed that temporary lockdowns by themselves would be effective.  So an extreme-sounding proposal like this may have sounded unnecessary to even consider at that point.

  Early Herd Immunity against COVID-19: A Dangerous Misconception

The article explicitly assumes the “current” (for when it was written) death rate of 2000 deaths/day would continue under a herd immunity strategy.  It makes no attempt to model a death rate among the young and healthy.  The whole purpose of deliberate infection and quarantine is to dramatically reduce the death rate by only infecting those least likely to die, rather than just infecting people unknowlingly and randomly.

What on earth are you talking about? You can not assign Covid-19 to only a portion of the population. We don't know the exact mortality rate but it's pretty deadly to older folks and those with health vulnerabilities. People who are perfectly healthy also say that it's a terrible illness and many feel after effects post viral even after being clear. It's completely nonsensical to get Covid-19 if you don't have too, stop speculating nonsense and arguing for impossible proposals when we can't even get people to follow simple stuff.

You -can- “assign” the virus to a portion of the population by voluntary deliberate infection coupled with quartines and a strict lockdown of those in the population who are not yet immune. 

You are right that the virus is extremely deadly to older and vulnerable people.  None of these people should have been made to be exposed to the virus.  Younger and healtheir people are 1000 times less likely to die from the virus than the most vulnerable.

I understand that no one would volunteer to get the virus all things being equal.  But as a society, we don’t really have a choice.  At least 60% of the population is probably going to be infected eventually.  That’s about 200 million people.  If we just let people get infected randomly, probably about 0.5% die, which is 1 million people.  But if we had only infected the healthiest people, we could have probably reduced that ten or twenty fold. 

Now obviously, we’ve already exceeded that optimistic projection, because of the failure of our political leaders to consider bold proposals.  So maybe it’s too late.

But this is a war of a scale that we haven’t seen since WWII.  And in WWII, millions of Americans consider it their patriotic and moral duty to risk their own lives to protect others, and protect the society under attack.  Here, we could call upon people to do the same thing.  Unlike in a real war, the risk of death to each individual would be less than 1 in 1000.  But literally a million lives could be saved.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

https://twitter.com/revrrlewis/status/1280807299561525253

I really, really wish calling the Republicans a child-sacrificing death cult was hyperbole.

It’s so sad to me that this has become so partisan.  Neither side is actually willing to acknowledge the data and the science when it doesn’t support what they feel like is their party’s position.

Coronavirus is of very, very little risk to young people.  It is significantly less fatal than chicken pox among children, and people have been deliberately infecting their children with chicken pox for generations.  A thousand times more people over 85 have died of covid in the US than children.  Children are much more likely to die in a car accident on their way to school than from covid.

You can argue against reopening schools on the basis of other, more vulnerable people who might be infected as a result.  But no one is deliberately sacrificing children.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Children are much more likely to die in a car accident on their way to school than from covid.

Even if you deliberately infect them?

Eh, this I'm pretty ambivalent about.  I definitely think all deliberate infections should be voluntary.  And so I'm uneasy about giving parents the right to decide this for a child.  In general, I think parents have way too many rights over thing that determine their children's future.

Children are much more likely to die in a car accident on their way to school than from covid.

Even if you deliberately infect them?

 He's making baseless assumptions with data he doesn't even understand.

And just a side note but children are less likely to die in car accidents if they wear seatbelts, or use car-seats, their parents or other parties don't speed, or drive distracted, or drive intoxicated. You know like follow common sense safety and preventative measures.

You're comparing wearing a seat belt with canceling a child's education?

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

32 deaths today in Virginia, which is the highest total in six weeks.

I’ve always thought that the surges in places like Texas, Florida, and California were pretty much inevitable given the lack of infections there earlier on.

But in the past few days, it has become clear that even most states that already saw big surges and death totals have been unable to shake the virus regardless of what they did to combat it.  This is totally disheartening.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

We will all have to get our "coronavirus" shots, just like we get our "flu" shots, on an annual basis.

This part doesn't seem like much concern at all, since I can't see any reason why they couldn't just combine it with the flu shots we already get.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1281253710413402115

Very true; the lockdowns in places like FL and CA were never on their own going to prevent an infection surge upon reopening.  They could have stayed locked down another six months and the same thing would have happened six months later.  They're just a delay tactic while other things develop.

It's a bit of an overstatement to say they didn't accomplish much, because we definitely made progress in a lot of areas just by delaying things for two months. 

The most significant is treatment, where I believe a majority of covid patients who would have died if infected in April will now recovery if given timely quality care.  We've also expanded testing, though not nearly to the point where we should have, and the public is much better informed about the dangers of the virus than they were a few months back. 

Nevertheless, we could have done much, much more to develop a real plan to deal with the virus.  But man people have said this, and very few seem to have a clear idea for what this plan should have been (or at least, if they do, they are not willing to say it).

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Not everyone who is 65 or older is a step away from death. Not everyone who has a chronic illness that makes coronavirus much worse is close to dying. It is not acceptable to claim that the 135k deaths so far in the US would have happened anyway.

Thank you.  I particularly detest the argument about this virus culling only the older population (which is of course false, as well as morally reprehensible).  I'm in my mid-sixties, healthy, fit, productively working at a high-skill job, and I daresay a net positive contribution to society.  According to actuarial tables my life expectancy is close to 20 years, and my family tends to be long-lived so it may be longer.  Anybody who thinks it's not worth some inconvenience on their part to protect all the people like me because "we're going to die soon anyway" can just shove it.

It seems like this would really depend on what “the argument” was exactly.  The fact that some easily identifiable segments of the population are overwhelmingly more likely to be significantly impacted by the virus is certainly not a good argument in favor of ignoring or downplaying the virus.  But it does seem like a very good argument in favor of crafting a public policy response that emphasizes protecting those who are most vulnerable.

I think a good analogy would be breast cancer.  Both men and women can get breast cancer.  And a random person has a 1-2% lifetime risk of dying of breast cancer.  This would be a pretty good reason to devote significant resources toward preventing and curing breast cancer, and recommending individual behaviors that might help detect or prevent it.

Of course, a quick glance at the statistics will reveal that women are 100 times more likely to get breast cancer than men. If men were to argue that this is a good reason not to invest in breast cancer research, that would obviously be horrible and indefensible. 

However, it is totally reasonable to use this data to devote many more resources to research and treatment of female breast cancer than male breast cancer.  And more relevant to this analogy, it is also reasonable to recommend different behaviors among men and women: medical guidelines recommend that all women over 40 get a routine mammogram every year, but men are never recommended to get a routine mammogram unless they have very specific high risk factors.

Certainly the analogy is not perfect, most importantly because breast cancer is not contagious.  But that doesn’t mean that the extreme differences in vulnerability across subgroups should be ignored. 

With respect to vulnerable populations, we should be enforcing social distancing policies much more vigorously, but also providing much greater assistance to allow people to live their daily lives without risking contact with infected people.   

And with respect to young and healthy people, we should acknowledge that they have the right to engage in behaviors that will risk getting themselves infected, but not a right to put others at risk of getting infected.  Mask requirements (which I certainly support) are a “soft” example of this, but a voluntary infection and quarantine program would be much more effective.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Here's a good article published in Vox today about the relative risks of school reopening:

I’m an epidemiologist and a dad. Here’s why I think schools should reopen.

Just quoting from the section about infection risk to children:

Are our kids going to be safe?

If any of us is ever going to send our kids to school again, we need a clear answer. Fortunately, I think we have one, at least for the children. Children are less likely than adults to be infected with Covid-19. There are multiple ways to study this question, and all the approaches arrive at this same conclusion.

First, when we look at public health reporting, children under the age of 18 make up only 2 percent of cases in the US, even though they represent 22 percent of the total population. Similar studies in Chicago and Massachusetts found that children make up fewer Covid-19 cases than expected, as have studies in Italy, South Korea, and Iceland. For me, that is a lot of similar results for this to be a fluke. When one study in one location produces a finding, it is notable. When five studies from five different settings find the same thing, it is compelling.
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Finally, even in the worst-case scenario, in which a child does contract Covid-19, the outcomes of the disease are less severe in younger people than among older adults. In one analysis of more than 550 confirmed cases among children under age 18 in China, Italy, and Spain, only nine people (1.6 percent) had severe or critical disease. In another study, approximately 5 percent (one out of 20) developed symptoms that required hospitalization, but only 0.6 percent required intensive care. In comparison, a recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report indicates that among those ages 60 to 69 who have the coronavirus, 22 percent require hospitalization and 4 percent require intensive care.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Anyways, at this rate, we should just have a strict national lockdown. Three weeks, no exceptions, and no interstate travel when possible.
Masks should also be mandatory and result in fines at the very least if not worn.
We are in the same situation we were in March, can we please not screw up this time like I warned about?
This is the only way to save our economy at this point.

If you have a national lockdown, infections will just rise again a month later.  Maybe this will reduce deaths because we’ll have better treatment in a month.  And it might be beneficial to implement lockdowns in some specific hot spots where the health care system is in danger of collapse.  But this strategy is not going to reduce total infections in the long run.