i just want to weigh in, because i've checked in on this thread many, many times over the past few months, and almost always closed it quickly in frustration.
the biggest misstep that has been done stateside is how early and quickly it got politicized. i will lay all my cards out on the table for you and let you know i am a self-described progressive and did not/will not vote for the current president. i'm also a new yorker, so i live in the hardest-hit area in the country and have a different perspective than most.
i worry that the discourse in this country is so divided that one side wants to make covid a fairytale, while the other side wants to treat it like it's the black plague. the truth is obviously in the middle. where on the spectrum it is is something that settled science probably won't indicate for years.
so yeah, the positivity rate looks bleak in the south and southeast. but also, the median patient age and the average severity of illness are big factors, as are a host of others. whether i give you a five dollar bill or a hundred dollar bill, i've given you cash, but we can agree that there's a pretty big difference in what i've given you, right? i would also argue that we don't have the testing capability to find every case, based on 35-to-50% being asymptomatic. that does not mean we should scale down testing, but if you were asymptomatic in march (i very well could have been), how am i ever going to know? and no, antibody tests do not always instruct an answer (i personally know of several long island railroad workers that tested positive on a PCR test, waited three weeks, then tested negative for antibodies).
we've assumed a lot of group think operating under the guise of settled science, but truthfully, the science on this is very much unsettled. sure, i'm proud that new york has "flattened the curve," but there's also a very real chance that...we didn't, and the virus ran its course through our area affecting everyone it was going to infect, leaving the vulnerable with the worse outcomes. citing the diamond princess data, a 2013 nobel laureate, michael levitt, contends that the virus does not grow exponentially, instead, he says it infects 15-20% of a population before it burns out. the most accurate model, covid19-projections.com -- a machine-learning model that has been far better than the abysmal IHME and others -- predicts my county of residence at 17.2% infection, the county over from me at 21.8%, and NYC at 22.8%. that assumes infections at ~5-times higher than documented cases. in the last few weeks, we've had protests, outdoor dining for three weeks and indoor dining for one on long island (one week of outdoor dining in the city), and still a new positivity rate of ~1% for almost a month. so have we snuffed it out? or does the burnout theory have credence? we don't know yet, but we can't lump all voices that dissent into the honey-crusted nut bar category, because little we've heard from those that have influenced policy makers have borne out to be right.
that doesn't mean we should take life with covid lightly. we can probably agree that we need to agree how we can take common sense mitigation techniques while operating in society. to me, masks aren't a big deal, nor is keeping your distance from someone when possible and limiting (but not eliminating) your social circle. i also think that there are certain things we absolutely need to get back to. in my opinion, in-person school is at the top of that list.
apologies if this seems like a stream of consciousness, but i just feel like we can all do better to try to understand this thing at a deeper level, think critically, and try to leave red-team/blue-team at the door. there's nothing to say that i'm a progressive, so i am required to think i have to stay inside for three years. nor is there anything stopping my trump-supporting grandfather from wearing a mask when he goes out in public.
anyway, hoping for the best in all this. be cool to each other.
