
The coronavirus pandemic isn’t ending – it’s surging - deegles
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/06/11/coronavirus-pandemic-isnt-ending-its-surging/
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ashtonkem
It’s interesting to see the slowly growing disconnect between what public
officials are saying and how individual citizens are feeling.

I live in Los Angeles. Officially, we are open for business. Personally our
response was “haha, fuck off”. My office is still closed with no timetable to
re-open, and a significant number of my colleagues and personal friends are
utterly bewildered at the idea of returning to normal operations.

The general consensus among my group was “I’m not quite sure what it’ll take
to make me comfortable returning to bars, but it’s not this”

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Trasmatta
I imagine this is very regional. People here in Utah seem to have largely gone
back to life as normal. Anecdotally, I've seen mask usage go way down in the
last couple weeks. Meanwhile, our cases have started sharply increasing.

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ashtonkem
It might even be more specific than regional, I’m sure there are different
clusters of people with different views. There is one colleague of mine, who
I’m sure has a whole social circle that agrees with him, that has long
maintained that America should take the Sweden model. I’m sure he does not
feel the public/personal gap that I do.

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sneeze-slayer
I've heard a lot of conservative voices calling for this too. The only problem
is that the US is far from Sweden--no universal health care, no guaranteed
sick leave, and no real safety net for workers. It would seem that if the US
wanted to take the "hands-off" model, it would need to first implement these
things.

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Trasmatta
A lot of places in the US are basically implementing the Sweden model already,
but accidentally rather than intentionally. Which I think is a big mistake.

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ashtonkem
This is one of those scenarios where splitting the difference between two
different systems is markedly worse than having picked one and gone with it.
In our case, we've managed to both melt down the economy _and_ fail to contain
the virus, which isn't good at all.

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Spartan-S63
The patchwork shutdowns should have been used to buy time to scale up testing,
improve contact tracing, acquire as much PPE as possible, and equip hospitals
as best as possible to handle excess demand. The reality is that the shutdowns
were used to enforce social distancing (because apparently Americans can't
understand how critical it is to prevent the spread) and display the
appearance of testing and contact tracing.

What we ended up with was the illusion of a "win" when really we're just
waiting to lose a second time and in a more dire way. I'm not sure the country
will stomach another shutdown with a second wave, so I'm thinking that we'll
just let the virus burn through and incur the high human cost it comes with.

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ashtonkem
I’ve said this before; any permanent social change caused by the virus alone
(protests over police brutality did _not_ enter my predictions) will come into
existence due to any second waves that might occur. I think the snap back from
“we’re reopening America” to mass casualties will be strong and sudden.

Now I can’t even begin to predict what that snap back will look like. A
permanent growth of remote work seems plausible, but I’m sure there will be
unexpected secondary and tertiary outcomes.

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noobaccount
Has a snap back happened anywhere else in the world? While the unknown is
scary, in this case it seems like we can look to our neighbors at home and
abroad for comfort.

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ashtonkem
I don’t know, but I’m not heavily connected to any other culture to speak to
that. It could be happening right now and I would miss it.

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_bxg1
I'd be curious to know how and whether the death rate has changed over time.
We've learned a whole lot since the "first wave", including the fact that it
doesn't seem to _really_ be a respiratory illness at all, but some kind of
autoimmune/blood illness. Have the resulting changes to treatment had a
measurable impact on survivability yet?

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jsf01
It’s difficult to calculate an exact death rate. For one, there’s limited
testing. Without being able to test the entire population, a whole range of
biases can skew the rate dramatically. The large number of asymptomatic cases
that never go reported may be an indication that the reported mortality rate
is too high. On the other hand, it’s likely many deaths due to COVID-19 have
gone unreported. See, for example, the spike in overall deaths in Lombardy in
Q1 2020 compared to prior years and how it exceeded the official COVID-19
death tally for that region by something like 4x. Then there’s the question of
what deaths to attribute to the disease. If a drug overdose patient died
because they couldn’t get access to a ventilator, would you include that in
your death rate? You couldn’t if you were tracking the mortality rate of the
disease to the people it infected, yet there are significant such cases of
deaths that would not have occurred had this pandemic never begun. Those
numbers won’t be captured in a naive calculation either.

That being said, I’ve found a good summary of some statistics on this page,
which you may find helpful.

[https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-
death-...](https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-rate/)

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_bxg1
I'm aware of all the complications with getting a precise number, I'm more
just wondering if there's been a rough - or even anecdotal - improvement in
outcomes for people who do end up in the hospital

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jsf01
Yes. From that linked website, among cases that had an outcome
(recovered/died), deaths in April were around 20%. Today, around 10%.

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xhkkffbf
The case count, though, doesn't tell us much because the cases come from
testing. More testing mean more positives. The most important thing is whether
the ICUs are being overwhelmed .

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Buttons840
How do you know the test count increased? In Utah the rate of new cases has
increased but the testing rate has slightly decreased.

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xhkkffbf
[https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson/status/1271135876379299848](https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson/status/1271135876379299848)

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Buttons840
I see nothing in that Twitter thread to support the idea that increased case
counts are due to increased testing. Again, my state has both reduced testing
and increased counts.

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xhkkffbf
Very tightly worded denial. Berenson offers a detailed explanation of what's
going on.

But if that's not to your taste, here's another factoid. Now which state are
you from? And which window are you using to say that testing has been reduced
but counts have risen?

"Tests have increased by about 37% in Florida in two weeks, but confirmed
cases have risen 28%."

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-second-wave-covid-
scare-115...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-second-wave-covid-
scare-11591919250)

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DeonPenny
I feel like this is a result of lying in government. People made a contract to
bend the curve and quickly it turned into tyranny.

That contract then turned into eliminating the disease all together. Also we
know more now about who getting sick and whose dying so of course the same
decisions wouldn't be made.

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thehappypm
If you read the article, you’ll see that basically the virus is now surging
outside of the developed world and into South Asia and South America. The West
is still stuck with it, some areas definitely surging, but it’s hardly surging
on the whole.

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KCUOJJQJ
I think the public must get the message that there was no terror virus. This
will let the idea terror virus disappear. People who are having the idea will
have to realize that have been taken in by charlatans. This won't feel nice.

