"The government" (in any country) can't "keep everybody safe" and have a functioning society. They are mutually exclusive goals. The best they can do without a vaccine is "flatten the curve" to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed with acceptable restrictions.
Everybody staying at home for a few months is not acceptable to the vast majority of people. As a human being, just existing isn't living.
This is a false assertion. There are all manor of things that can be done that are less than "everyone stays home" but still more than is currently being done to provide benefit. At a policy level from the top, we've chosen to ignore most of those things.
Considering that you state it is happening in all 50 states, how do you then blame it on putting "your faith in the wrong political leader?" The governors are in control of everything and the President doesn't actually have any power over them. You may say that he has influence over the Republican governors but certainly not over the Democrat governors. Yet every state is having issues to some degree.
As I've said before, there are things only the federal government can do, primarily funding. Plan direction and funding set at the federal level and then specifics implemented at the local level. Without a federal leadership direction and funding, it's 50 independent states all slightly different, all without funding, all competing for the same stuff driving the cost up.
It is a virus. Viruses spread and infect new hosts. That's what they exist to do. The only way to for human intervention to truly stop them or even significantly slow them while maintaining some semblance of civilization is with a vaccine that prevents them from infecting a new host.
It isn't a political policy issue like funding Medicare. It is a disease.
This is the same false assertion that a vaccine is the only solution. It's definitely a policy issue.
Stopping infectious spread is as simple as stopping an infected person from interacting with an infectible person. A vaccine makes this easy by significantly reducing the number of infectible people. Masks, plexiglass, air circulation, filters all try to reduce the chance that an interaction leads to infection. Lockdowns and distancing try to eliminate all interactions irrespective of which person it is, they're broad based. As such, they'll target just as many or more interactions where neither person is infected. We're not doing enough to target infected people. If we devoted more resources on identifying and isolating infected people along with providing support for people who think they're infected to isolate instead of interact, then we would could reduce interactions of of infected people with targeted actions.
We've chosen as federal policy to focus on vaccine and treatment and not other stuff.
This is as simple as watching the percent positivity. Larger numbers means there's a higher chance of an infected infectible interaction. Small numbers mean we understand where more infection is and can then take targeted action.
I realize the number is very large, but even if every single person in the US was infected (which isn't possible because herd immunity would happen at some point), somewhere around 0.2% of the population would die from it and maybe another 0.2% would die because they wouldn't be able to get needed medical care in the short term while this happened which would be over the course of 2-3 months. While 0.4% of 330+ million people is a lot, even doing absolutely nothing, well over 99% of the population would be "protected."
1.3 Million is the number, it's definitely large.
It's probably wrong and to small too. I'm not sure where the 0.2% comes from. Johns Hopkins says the US has 10,642,218 infections and 243,044 deaths right now. 2.284% of infections dead. We can certainly debate that 10,642,218 is under counting. It would need to be 11 times larger for the dead to only be 0.2%. If actual infected is double and we're headed for 60% population before we stop, the larger number is 2.2 Million dead. We can hope the infected really is 11 times higher, if that continues another 8 million infections reported with another 250,000 dead and we'll be at a presumed 60% of the population infected and begin to slow down after 500,000 dead. But, it's going to go up fast from there if it's not that order of magnitude of underreported infected. Might be nice if we were doing more work to identify and isolate infected people.
You contradict yourself when you say that all COVID deaths are preventable but that you aren't talking about total lockdowns. If you don't have total lockdowns, there will still be plenty of deaths and therefore not nearly all of them are preventable.
Again, there's lots of room between what we're doing an total lockdowns. Not being able to prevent everything doesn't mean we should do nothing.
Comparing doing anything as not the same as total lockdown and saying a total lockdown is the only solution that does it all completely misses the goal at best and is a bad faith diversion at worst.
Yep, for kicks I went back into the March/April part of this thread. We said at the time that all models are wrong, but some are useful. I'm not sure how true that ended up being. The most conservative models at he time showed cases going to near zero by August, mroe aggressive ones showed by May.
I've always assumed those models included concentrated effort to identify and isolate infected people. That they assume actions will be taken to get community spread under control and isolated. Since we didn't do that, they're all super useless. Hopefully the current models eliminated this assumption are are based on what's actually been done over the last few months.
I am going to Utah in January. I do not live with anyone elderly, in fact I live alone. I do not visit or interact with my grandparents, parents, and pretty much no one in my family except my younger brother and his wife, rarely. I am, and all of us are getting tested when I get back. I am not dining indoors while I am there. In fact the only indoors I’ll be is with our small group of friends (5) when we sleep at night in our rental home, and the grocery store, which i do at home anyway, so we can eat at the house.
Not judging here, but as a practical matter what this really means is that size of your POD is increasing by the size of all the PODS of those 5 people. Tested or not, as false negatives with rapid tests in early days seems to be common, when you see people in your POD (brother) after you return, it's increased the size of your brother's POD through no direct action on his part. His POD of exposure now includes those in the PODS of your 5 friends. If one of them is in a POD with someone who does risky things, that person relatively far removed from your brother is effectively in your bother's POD.
Testing helps to mitigate some, since if you're positive you'll contain it. But, if you're negative it probably doesn't mean you are in the clear. If you get a better test (that takes longer and isolate while waiting), that probably helps more. Or, get a bunch of rapid tests isolating until the last one after some number of days. Or, just isolate as if a test was positive. Similar, if the 5 of you all isolate before the trip too you could reduce the effective size of the PODs you're bringing together combining with the others.
All of those different things do different amounts to reduce the effect. None of them are prefect. We each do whatever is enough to make us comfortable. Hence, not judging, just the practicalities of it. It's also a good example of why it's so hard to isolate only the high risk. If we imagine that your brother interacts frequently with someone (in your POD even if you don't know it) who has high risk contacts. And, if you were to do no extra measures that person would be exposed (through a longer chain) to the imaginary reckless contact of your friend. Imaginary reckless-->friend-->you in the rental-->brother-->frequent contact-->vulnerable person.
Even in my immediate household, we have this type of issue. Some do better at preventative steps than others. Which exposes even the more careful because we don't really isolate from each other.
All of this is another good reason to focus on getting community spread under control. With low spread (more than none, not gone), that long chain of imaginary people means each interaction isn't likely to carry an infection. Conversely, at rampant community spread, there's a much higher chance of an infection passing through the chain.
I wish it wasn’t so, but with cases doing what they are doing it’s a no brainer. Sad to see that people couldn’t help themselves and now we are paying the price.
. We have our problems, but the USA is the greatest country on the face of the earth and yes the USA spends billions and billions helping other countries.