Re: Covfefe-19 Part 9: Shelter In Place is Temporary, but Wu-Tang is Forever
Stole this post from another board I frequent because it's good:
Fox News is encouraging people to go out and get infected so we can hurry up and get herd immunity.
Sure. The numbers only play out that you have a one in five chance of getting hospitalized. Even if things go well and you recover, enjoy your hospital bill and enjoy your hospital stay without the comfort of your family. Then of course, there's the much-higher-than-the-flu chance that you'll die.
Also, we don't know if getting the virus means you will be immune going forward. We assume that's how it will work since that's how it works with other coronaviruses, but we don't know yet.
Also also, this virus has all sorts of tricks up its sleeve. It's causing weird clotting disorders. It's causing weird damage to a number of organs - not just your lungs, but your liver, kidneys, heart and brain (basically anything that has an ACE2 receptor). I saw a young man in the UK interviewed a few weeks ago who recovered from the virus, but mentioned that he walked away with liver damage that was going to take a while to heal, if it did at all. He was in his 20s, no underlying health condition. Now New York is reporting that it suddenly got 15 children in the hospital with weird, multi-organ/system inflammatory disorder. 10 of the 15 kids either tested positive for the virus or had the antibodies, so this could be one more weird thing the virus does - this time to kids, who we previously thought were relatively safe from the virus. We're still learning what this virus can do to us.
Andy Slavitt pointed out yesterday on Twitter that we know what to do to stop this virus, but it's hard and takes discipline so Trump quit, and so his followers want to quit too. All the people screaming "Tyranny!" are really just saying, "I'm tired of doing this. And I'm not longer willing to be a little uncomfortable for the greater good." Trump got halfway up the mountain, then decided it was too hard and quit because he doesn't have the discipline to see this through.
There are ways through this - aggressive testing/tracing. New York has done this, and they are the one place in the country where cases are dropping. Other countries did it with severe lockdowns/distancing, like New Zealand. Yeah, it sucked, but they succeeded and they are starting to open back up. Other countries are achieving this by having everyone wear a mask - again, the data shows that if 80% of the people just wore a cloth mask, the R would dip below 1 and the virus would die out. But we've got Trumpsters out there saying that the masks are to make us look weak - especially men.
If we just picked one of these things and followed through on it, we could re-open safely. But instead of following through on any of these and getting somewhere, we're just throwing our hands up and saying, "Oh, well. I guess a bunch of you will just have to die." Amazing that these are the same people who screamed about "death panels" and Obamacare deciding whether or not your grandma gets treatment or gets to die. Now they are cool with the government deciding it isn't worth it to keep grandma safe and she's a reasonable sacrifice to keep the economy going. All because Trump has the attention span of a goldfish and he got tired of trying to address this thing.
Oh, and the CDC put together a guide on how to reopen safely. The Trump admin has blocked it's release. I'm sure that's fine.
