COVID-19 thread

[zompist]

So what I'm curious is, have any reputable sources/researchers done analyses of how things could've gone differently if the US/Trump had taken it more seriously from the beginning?

I'm not going to find them all, but there have been about a million articles all along explaining what could have been done, what epidemologists recommended, what other countries are doing, what Biden plans to do, etc. There is no lack of information or planning.

The easiest comparison is to other countries that did better, which is all of them. Maybe doing as well as South Korea or Taiwan was impossible in a very large country (though we basically didn't try). But a fair comparison is with Canada: 328,000 total cases, 11,500 deaths. Obviously the per-population figures will be more important: 302 deaths per million, compared to 791 here. At a proportional rate, we'd have under 100,000 deaths.

Of course, we're a very large, very urban country. Another fair comparison would seem to be Germany, which is very urbanized, and in the middle of a huge continent surrounded by countries that didn't do as well. It's deaths per million: 171. At that rate we'd have about 56,000 deaths.

The largest country (126 million) with the lowest per-million death rate (16) is Japan. Obviously being on an island helps (Australia has 35, Taiwan has a frigging 0.3).

It's probably worth noting that some countries that should probably have known better have done about as bad as the US, notably France (746), Sweden (633), and the Netherlands (518). (Italy has done very badly, but mostly because it was hit early— it got the virus under control.)

It's easy to look at these comparisons and start making excuses. I think that temptation should be resisted. Although American exceptionalism is looking pretty tarnished these days, I think it's pretty disturbing if we just throw up our hands and become resigned to never doing as well as other countries.

[alynnidalar]

If I gave the impression that I was making excuses, then I've clearly worded my post quite poorly... in retrospect I realize the way I wrote it did make it sound like I didn't know there were loads of articles theorizing about how things could have been different. I meant more that I hoped folks on this forum might have suggestions for particularly good, comprehensive ones from trustworthy sources; less "here's some numbers" and more "if Trump had done X on Date Y, then the probable outcome would be A B C, and that would lead to D, and then by Date E we'd expect to see F", if that makes sense? Like, digging into all the factors and exploring the actual day-to-day differences, not just a birds-eye view of "well, the death rates would be lower".

But, yes, as far as the death rates alone are concerned, comparing those to other countries does seem to be easiest way to do it.

[Moose-tache]

It is confusing when you start digging around, looking for answers to exactly what went wrong. One of the main reasons the US did so badly, especially early on, was the late appearance of adequate tests. As I've said before, The US and South Korean governments met with health experts in early February to start large scale testing, and in both countries community transmission began in mid-February. But in the US, the tests didn't actually roll out in large numbers until late February, and even then they were too few, by which time the virus had spread and accumulated in reservoirs all over the country. The US had a general plan that was not philosophically that different from the highly successful plan implemented in RoK (except we couldn't do contact tracing as well as them because Americans value privacy too much), it just failed to materialize. When trying to figure out why this happened, I have found one rabbit hole leading into three more rabbit holes over and over, with no clear answer in sight. Some possible explanations would be that the CDC experienced budget cuts, or that they tried to develop their own PCR test rather than copy the WHO's model. But "budget cuts" doesn't explain the mechanism by which a specific process breaks down, especially since the CDC's budget is still huge compared to some countries' health agencies. And the CDC has developed their own tests in the past without issue. Of course they have. They're the God damn CDC. The president's state of emergency automatically triggered some things that made it more difficult for state-level labs to develop their own PCR tests (like requiring FDA approval of any new tests), but that's not something that can be laid at Trump's feet, because any president would had declared a state of emergency. After months of reading, I still don't have that one broken cog I can point to and say "this is where the machine broke." It's easy to point out that other countries did better, and we should have been able to reach the same level of success, or maybe higher. But it's not clear what specific thing we did wrong. "But effectiveness, Bro!" is not a specific thing.

I worry about this because, aside from the obvious problem of people dying, it will be all too easy for us on the left to assume that once "the right people..." actually, I feel comfortable taking the quotes off that: once the right people are in power, everything will be done better. This is akin to how conservatives were more satisfied with the employment rate the day after Trump took office. But if we don't understand the mechanisms, we can easily repeat the same mistakes regardless of how not-insane our leaders are.

[zompist]

There's no one point of failure because there were many points of failure. Just off the top of my head:

* The president throwing out Obama's pandemic plan
* The president firing the pandemic response agency
* The president and the major TV network telling people there was no problem, that the virus was a hoax, that people should "rise up" against restrictions
* No use of the federal power to create tests, masks, ventilators, etc.
* The president literally hijacking shipments of equipment, keeping them away from the hardest-hit areas
* The president preventing foreigners coming here... in such a way that thousands of Americans arrived at once and crowded the airports
* The president encouraging super-spreader events and in general serving as a reverse role model
* No national coordination on lockdowns, masks, etc.
* Premature re-opening, focusing on high-risk activities like indoor restaurants
* The president fighting with his own CDC staff
* The president fighting with WHO
* The president just not fucking caring, and infecting his own damn family and party
* Employers like Elon Musk allowed to create super-spreader facilities
* Few states addressing nursing homes, prisons, and the homeless population as insiders-- Vermont is an exception; they fed and housed the homeless

I guess I don't get what's difficult to understand here. All these decisions were bad, all are paralleled by better decisions made elsewhere, and-- gosh who could possibly have guessed-- we have the worst performance in the world.

Again, a few countries were blindsided and were hit hard when people didn't exactly know what to do yet: notably Italy. But Italy managed to implement restrictions and climb out of the hole. Maybe we can't aspire to an actually humanistic, competent government like South Korea; they obviously have elves in charge and we need never bother to learn from them because AMURRICA NUMMER ONE. But jeez, we can't have as effective a government as Italy?

Really, I get tired of the "America can't possibly do anything competently" trope. Last time we had a national crisis, we got Americans to routinely take off their shoes in airports. We care too much about privacy? BS; Facebook has all our data anyway. Half-seriously: why not get Facebook to do the contact tracing? Hell, let liberals get it done with Twitter and conservatives can use Parler. Americans love having their privacy violated, they just want plutocrats to do it.

Oh, and now the crisis is intensifying, and McDonnell/Trump won't do a thing, and the Treasury is preparing to end stimulus, because it's more important to spite Joe Biden than save hundreds of thousands of lives. So yes, Biden will inherit a huge mess, and Democratic presidents rarely get much credit for cleaning up Republican messes. But hey, Biden wanted the job.

BTW, the Vermont article is a partial response to alynnidalar as well. I wasn't trying to be unhelpful, but I've been following all this stuff all year and there are literally several articles a week about who's doing better, what epidemiologists think, etc. That one was merely the last one I saw, so I remembered where it was. Vox has been particularly good at reporting on this, check their archives.

[zompist]

BTW, here's an interesting chart:



The US never really got things under control. Europe did, by July. And then several countries got out of control again: the UK, France, Spain. I haven't really read anything on what went wrong in France; perhaps someone can help out!

[Ares Land]

Nothing went wrong, or rather a lot of things went wrong, but not really more so than in other European countries. Using the number of COVID deaths as a metric, the increase is about the same in Western Europe. (Though Germany started out much lower.)

Most of those cases are mild to asymptomatic: we did a lot of testing starting this summer, so the number of cases reflects information that was below the radar. And for some reason, the epidemic mostly spread among young people this summer and this fall.
So basically, it's a policy choice not to go into lockdown while the cases were mild. That's debatable, of course, but the consequences of a lockdown are fairly severe, so IMO that was justified.

Our screw-ups (and there are many) don't show up on this graph. Mostly, our hospital system is underfunded and managed with an eye to cost-cutting. This led to a disproportionate number of deaths. (We did just as bad as the US, and worse than Sweden -- and Sweden didn't go into lockdown at all.) Also, we weren't prepared for a pandemic, because preparing for a pandemic requires public spending, and we have that notion that public spending is evil.

I regret that the government didn't make work for home mandatory, though. It would have cost practically nothing and would have helped greatly. I don't think the kind of masks the general public uses are designed for people crammed into overcrowed buses and trains.

[MacAnDàil]

To specify, I would say it's primarily the political elite that has the tendency in France of supposing public spending is evil. Especially considering the fifth Republic presidents have been majoritarily right-wing and overly powerful.

[Ares Land]

Yeah, it's mostly the political class that is at fault here -- and left-wing governments haven't really been any better.
But the general view of public servants as a privileged class of criminally lazy parasites doesn't help, either.

[MacAnDàil]

That's mainly because Hollande badly chose his prime minister and economy minister, who were closet right-wingers. Mittérand was better, especially his first mandate.

[Vardelm]

My wife just had a co-worker test positive.

[Risla]

My boss and two coworkers are positive. The company is trying to cover it up so they don't have to shut down one of their top three performing locations. I'm trying to blow the whistle but nobody is listening. It's a fucking mess.

[doctor shark]

No positives have been publicly declared where I'm working (at least in the department), though there have been a number of scares here and there. We have, however, exited a "tightening" of the partial lockdown here in the Netherlands, so we're back to the previous restrictions at least until early December (which is just around the corner). Numbers are stabilizing/declining at least in Gelderland, so the situation's... well, it could be better (as it could almost everywhere), but it's not looking like further locking down will be needed.

With three/four vaccine candidates that appear to have made it preliminarily through Phase III trials, maybe by mid-next year we'll be able to get closer to semi-normal (once we get to 60-70% immunity). Not sure where I'll fit in with the vaccination priority schedule: I work at a university, though not directly in biomedical research (and not yet for teaching, though this could happen).

On a more personal note, a return to the US for Christmas is a poor life decision at this point, so that's not happening. May try to have a small, emotionally-distant Christmas celebration with some coworkers, but a more notable thing is that, due to being unable to travel/the situation not being clear for travel and avoiding quarantines, I haven't spent any of my vacation days so far this year (and they require us to take two consecutive weeks of vacation each year, which really makes no sense!), so I'll just blow through the ones about to expire and spend them at home.

Also, I see a stark contrast between my mother and father: my mother is very happy to stay at home and away from people, but my father is obviously not and seems to be spewing conspiracy theories here and there, as is his wife. (If anyone, I'd be more worried about my father considering his heart problems, but that's me.)

[zompist]

Another story about better handling of Covid-- in this case Victoria, Australia, which has had 0 cases in the four weeks.

https://www.vox.com/2020/12/4/22151242/ ... s-lockdown

[Raphael]

I really hope that this isn't the start of the next pandemic:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ ... ra-pradesh

[Raphael]

After weeks of constantly rising case- and death numbers, Germany is going back into lockdown on Wednesday. It's meant to last until January 10th. The pandemic doesn't seem to have reached the people behind my computer's spellcheck yet, though - I still get "lockdown" marked as an error.

[Raphael]

The specific details of the new German lockdown rules on some points seem to come down to some version of "We will do A, but we will also do B, and we will make sure that C isn't forgotten, either", when in some cases A, B, and C directly contradict each other (i. e. schools are supposed to be closed in principle but will stay open in practise).

[Ares Land]

If it's any consolation, it's about the same here.

To be fair, there's some kind of balance to be found between containing the virus, not damaging the economy too much. Besides the fact that we can handle everyone being half-crazed from cabin fever, but not utterly stark raving mad.

On a very annoyed note, why haven't we started vaccinating people? I'm not sure we even have a precise date for when we'll start doing it?
And how does it reflect, exactly, on our government to be doing worse than the US and the UK, two countries run by incompetent clowns?

[doctor shark]

On a very annoyed note, why haven't we started vaccinating people? I'm not sure we even have a precise date for when we'll start doing it?
And how does it reflect, exactly, on our government to be doing worse than the US and the UK, two countries run by incompetent clowns?

The big difference: the vaccine hasn't been approved in the EU through the Medical Authority, but it has been approved through "Emergency Use Authorization" in the US and a similar process in the UK. That said, there is a possibility for emergency authorization in individual EU countries, which Hungary was reportedly seeking for Sputnik V, but I don't think the vaccine's been submitted for emergency authorization in any member states.

[alynnidalar]

Fun fact: the US Pfizer vaccine is being produced partially in my state, and the first shipment of it flew out of my local airport.

[Ares Land]

The big difference: the vaccine hasn't been approved in the EU through the Medical Authority, but it has been approved through "Emergency Use Authorization" in the US and a similar process in the UK. That said, there is a possibility for emergency authorization in individual EU countries, which Hungary was reportedly seeking for Sputnik V, but I don't think the vaccine's been submitted for emergency authorization in any member states.

I really do wonder why it wasn't. If the current crisis is not an emergency, what is?