
The data is in – stop the panic and end the total isolation - onetimemanytime
https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/494034-the-data-are-in-stop-the-panic-and-end-the-total-isolation
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NotSammyHagar
This is written by a doctor at the conservative hoover institute. Good to keep
in mind, doesn't mean he's wrong. In this case, he's wrong.

He has 5 'facts', I paraphrase them. I will just prejudice this by saying we
need widespread testing and PPE, then we can consider opening up. Why don't we
have these? Because we are acting like idiots here in the us and we can't
organize ourselves.

1\. "The vast majority of people do not have a significant risk of dying from
covid19". It's true but there will be young people dying who have no other
risk factors. The problem is overloading the hospitals with those who are
sick. It's the actual problem.

2\. "We can protect older at risk people and eliminate hospital overcrowding".
Perhaps. But the entire world is failing to do this! Even Sweden, the place
without shelter in place and allows open bars is expected to have over 10,000
deaths; similar sized Switzerland will have around 1,800 deaths according to
IHME [1] (8.5 mil pop Switz., vs 10 mil in Sweden). In a sense, because they
are similar countries with similar medical systems, There are about 8000
people dying in Sweden who probably wouldn't die if they had shut down society
like Switzerland. How many extra deaths are worth opening the economy?

3\. Herd immunity is prevented by isolation - it's potentially right that more
herd immunity could help later on. But we won't know how much immunity without
being able to test for antibodies. Every western country trying this strategy
seems to not be doing great (see Sweden).

4\. "people dying because hospitals stopped doing nonessential procedures".
I'm in seattle. We got to the edge of hospital overload. All the docs were
filling out their wills, they made plans if they died, there were medical
workers married to another medical worker, they were afraid to go home. At
least 3 med workers here in Seattle died. I think people died from being
afraid to go to hospitals, but there were people with all the prep available
(docs!) and they died.

5\. We know who the risk population is and we can protect this. This just
seems so irritatingly wrong. We know we reduced covid-19 cases by staying
home. We are failing to protect people at risk. If we stopped sheltering in
place, we'd get more cases. We already can't protect people with the cases we
have. Adding more cases does what - it kills more people.

