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

[Pericles]

Among many interesting questions on the virus response in a new AJC/UGA poll:

To what extent do you approve or disapprove of Gov. Brian Kemp’s plans to reopen Georgia businesses in the next few days?

Strongly disapprove — 43%

Somewhat disapprove — 19%

Neutral — 14%

Somewhat approve — 14%

Strongly approve — 10%

I’m not sure what your point is? You install leaders to make the difficult decisions - and the difficult decisions are mostly the unpopular ones.

You do need public support to successfully reopen the economy. Otherwise, if people don't think it's safe yet, most will stay at home and so the reopening won't work. However, the reopening will still be less safe than the lockdown and some people would not or cannot stay at home so there would be more cases and deaths. That would then of course mean you need to go back into lockdown. This causes more uncertainty and economic chaos, and means it is even longer before actual safe normal life where people are comfortable going out and engaging in economic activity can occur. So reopening too early is not a workable solution, it isn't even a tradeoff between the economy and saving lives, the economy is still bad and perhaps even worse, while there is a much higher loss of life (that loss of life also is a permanent subtraction of economic activity).

So the only solution is to wait until it is safe-that means flattening the curve until new cases are at much lower and manageable levels-, and having a South Korean style testing and contact tracing system so new cases can be contained rather than rapidly escalating into a second wave. The US is nowhere close to that, with President Trump's failed leadership having to take a big chunk of blame. Therefore, the US is most likely either going to see an unsafe reopening of the economy that causes a second wave and worsens the economic hit, or a really long and economically damaging lockdown (which won't be great socially either).

[Pericles]

https://mobile.twitter.com/CBSLA/status/1255699561399619584

Here come the fun police.

I don't think it would be much fun for those people at the beaches, their family members or other random people they pass the virus onto to be hooked up on ventilators.

[Pericles]

If the task force is disbanded, I don't think we'll ever be free of this pandemic. Not until we have a vaccine, which might never happen; we've never created a vaccine for a coronavirus.

We would have to learn to live with it, although I think it's impractical to expect social distancing, masks, and all the rest to continue indefinitely. Our society eventually acclimatized itself to HIV/AIDS, to give an example of what the path forward might look like if there is no vaccine.

HIV/AIDS is much easier to prevent transmission of. If this coronavirus is truly with us forever, we're looking at an eventual herd immunity scenario as the only realistic ending. Of course that probably means 1-2 million deaths.

We are only looking at 1-2 million deaths if we achieve herd immunity through a random spread throughout the population.  If we had targeted infections among the young and healthy, we could achieve herd immunity much more quickly with likely under 100,000 deaths.

Those are still huge numbers, that's insanity.

[Pericles]

If the task force is disbanded, I don't think we'll ever be free of this pandemic. Not until we have a vaccine, which might never happen; we've never created a vaccine for a coronavirus.

We would have to learn to live with it, although I think it's impractical to expect social distancing, masks, and all the rest to continue indefinitely. Our society eventually acclimatized itself to HIV/AIDS, to give an example of what the path forward might look like if there is no vaccine.

HIV/AIDS is much easier to prevent transmission of. If this coronavirus is truly with us forever, we're looking at an eventual herd immunity scenario as the only realistic ending. Of course that probably means 1-2 million deaths.

We are only looking at 1-2 million deaths if we achieve herd immunity through a random spread throughout the population.  If we had targeted infections among the young and healthy, we could achieve herd immunity much more quickly with likely under 100,000 deaths.

Those are still huge numbers, that's insanity.

We're going to hit 100,000 deaths with the current scattershot approach by the end of June at the latest anyway.

Yeah but that doesn't mean it's not a completely unacceptable outcome.

[Pericles]

Not directly related to US, but a huge deal if true: Now there are reports the first Covid19 case in France could be dating back to November 2019. For reference, the PRC informed WHO on December 31. Haven't seen US media picking this up yet, but if confirmed, we may be talking about a much earlier spread in the US and elsewhere.

I've been saying this for a while, I don't know if it was like this where you guys live but here, EVERYONE was sick like constantly between November and mid-late January. Like, it seemed like everyone I knew (including my wife and myself) got sick with weird respiratory sh**t back during the winter, and everyone I know who went to the doctor for it said they tested for the flu but it wasn't the flu, just "unknown upper respiratory infection" was the diagnosis.

I really think this has been going around longer than people realize, and everyone was fine.

Maybe....or it could have been one of thousands of viruses which cause upper respiratory infections.
Considering the sudden spikes in mortality in known Covid hotspots, I don’t think this is as likely as people say. There certainly may have been some transmission earlier than we thought, but I doubt most Americans have had Covid.
Of course, as usual I hope you are right.

Yeah, I've heard that there may have been cases in Italy in like October 2019, but I don't believe it. Otherwise the pandemic would have escalated a lot earlier. Sometimes the simple and boring theory-that the pandemic did actually start in late December 2019 in China-is accurate.

[Pericles]

Instead of blaming externals, why can’t Democrat’s do any introspection?

 It’s not Covid that is hurting the Dems, it’s that you have a blundering old fool as the presumptive nominee. Until the party can reckon with itself, it’s going to expose itself to further embarrassing defeats like 2016 and this coming 2020 election. God bless.

The projection is high in this post lmao.

[Pericles]

All of this is the greatest self sabotage of all time - after 9/11, forever wars, and the Great Recession we were on target for immense peace and prosperity. And then society decided to lose its sh**t and react irrationally and irresponsibly. It’s important to remember, all of the response (reaction) was a choice.

Warning of the Fermi Paradox, as well....

That would probably be electing Donald Trump. As he is incapable of competent leadership, America was probably always doomed with him as President sadly.

[Pericles]

Isn't 12-18 months the minimum time before a vaccine can be released, if everything goes perfectly? Thinking this can be solved by the end of the year is foolishness, and is just getting people's hopes up for nothing.

[Pericles]

People saying "I'll be fine" has some dark connotations to me, due to them ignoring the risk of infecting others and generally worsening the situation for the entire community by continuing the chain of transmission. Either people are too dumb to take that risk into account (which I consider the best-case) or the spirit of selfishness has so infected American society that a large share of the population just don't care about the risk of infecting others and the well-being of their community.

[Pericles]

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?

The UK seems to have ramped up their testing late into their pandemic. The UK also had a high toll in care homes, in part due to the government sending people from hospitals to care homes without testing them first (I think only New York did that in the US). A recent Guardian report says 5.3% of UK care home residents have died of Covid. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/28/covid-19-risk-of-death-in-uk-care-homes-13-times-higher-than-in-germany

[Pericles]

Everything is fine.

https://twitter.com/javimorgado/status/1283531072530153472

Oh no...    If DeSantis and the federal government don't take immediate and stern action, this is going to get disastrously ugly very quickly.

It might already be too late, given the lag between infections and it getting to the stage that they need ICU care.

[Pericles]

Trump is bored and done with COVID-19:

https://twitter.com/jaketapper/status/1284289432863100928?s=20

It's incredibly selfish of him to not resign then and let someone who is actually willing and able to at least try and do the job people expect them to. Of course, it's completely unsurprising behavior from Trump.

[Pericles]

Remaining locked down is not feasible in ANY community where there are enough ICU beds, and this has become obvious to 95%+ of all people. 

No, the point of lockdowns is to bring it down to a low enough level where a mitigation strategy of social distancing, and testing and tracing new cases can work. However, states like Florida stopped the lockdown too early so it didn't actually get to bring case numbers down to a manageable level and did not put in the work of building the infrastructure so that testing and tracing can contain flare-ups. So of course, there is a second spike, and of course then preventable deaths occur.

[Pericles]

I think the case numbers in the U.S. will slowly improve, but a lot of people just don't think about it much anymore. I've been to family events all over the Cincinnati area in recent weeks. I've noticed family members' neighbors have just been gathering like normal. The only thing different out there is that people will often put on a mask when they go to a store, but even that doesn't have full compliance.

A family member told me this virus will be pretty much gone by spring - either because of a vaccine or some level of herd immunity.

There's still people who are afraid to go out, but a lot of people still go on like normal, and the virus still hasn't been spreading that much around here. I don't think a second lockdown would be viewed very favorably.

Disruption only disrupts for so long; people are resilient and move on.  In the absence of any plan other than "lockdown indefinitely", the trend will be towards resuming normality.

There could have been a plan, but Trump and Republicans were too incompetent to use the time provided by lockdown to put one in place.

[Pericles]

Florida is such a nightmare right now, and it's obviously about to get much worse. When will it be enough? Is there any point at which DeSantis develops a conscience and do another lockdown (it is so clearly needed)?