If Current DCI Model Gets Cut Back...

[IllianaLancerContra]

2 hours ago, N.E. Brigand said:

Interesting. Did you ever learn the reason?

Supposedly to keep from getting sick during winter.  Seemed to be done more by older individuals when out in public, & esp on public transportation.

[JimF-LowBari]

16 minutes ago, Jeff Ream said:

the fear of looting to get TP i guess is real

Well it is Central PA.... then they are ready for next blizzard to protect the TP, bread and milk.....

[MikeD]

3 hours ago, Cappybara said:

I thought Canadians were supposed to be nice? 

That's good though, I wish people were the same here in the States. I have half a mind to go to the grocery store in a dinosaur suit with a long tail to slap people with if they get too close to me

Around me here in NJ on the whole people are doing a decent job. The Manahawkin Costco, since you mentioned Costco, has people line up outside with six foot intervals taped off, and they only let in a small number at a time. Inside the store it ends up being very sparse, so distancing is easy, and is happening. Ditto checkout. People line up with taped intervals, and an employee directs people to the lane as it frees up. Very well done, in our opinion. 

[Terri Schehr]

3 hours ago, IllianaLancerContra said:

I was stationed in Japan in the early 1990s (10 yrs pre-SARS) & face masks worn by the locals was common then

Jim was in Japan in the 80’s in the Marine Corps and he said taxi drivers and bank tellers always wore white gloves.  And he saw a lot of masks.  He said if someone had a cold, they’d wear a mask.   He said they are extremely polite people.  He loves Japan. 

[Jeff Ream]

46 minutes ago, JimF-LowBari said:

Well it is Central PA.... then they are ready for next blizzard to protect the TP, bread and milk.....

and paper towels and Middleswarth chips

[cixelsyd]

2 hours ago, N.E. Brigand said:

I've already noted above that garfield's prediction might well have been correct about the national peak being in April.

But right now, as I type this at 1:45 p.m. (EDT) on Apr. 15, the page you're citing says this at the top: "Last updated April 13, 2020". That was two days ago. The day with the most U.S. COVID19 deaths so far was yesterday, Apr. 14. In other words, we just don't know yet.

And we really don't know whether the country will be in a position a month from now that would have allowed DCI to have a season.

Also, let me say once more that garfield wasn't trying to mislead anyone! Nor was anyone else who presented a relatively cheery view of how this outbreak would play out.

For example, here's a post someone else made on March 14. I have changed two words to make sure it's not political:

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"Conspiracy theories are based on speculation. The idea that the MSM has an agenda and will stop at nothing to further that agenda and achieve their goal is a widely accepted fact. Heck, they don't even try to hide or dispute it. It is right their on display in plain sight every day and night.

H1N1 Swine flu, 10 years ago, 12,000 deaths, 300,000 hospitalized, 60 million infected. Nothing cancelled, no one cared, [authorities were] praised for the way this was handled. 

COVID 19, 41 deaths, 1500 infected with minimal hospitalizations, 125K infected. All sporting and entertainment events cancelled, schools closed.  Widespread hysteria, panic and paranoia. Stores shelves are empty,"

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

I've omitted the person's name (as you know, it's not you) to spare them the embarrassment of their words being confronted by reality. They just didn't know what was coming, even if the epidemiologists whose guidance led to the shut-down orders being mocked did know. This person made an honest mistake.

But a potentially dangerous mistake too, if anyone here believed what that person (and others making similar arguments) wrote and didn't take steps in their lives to minimize contact with others. (I am reminded of an ironic story I read the other day. There was a judge in one state who last month mocked a lawyer who asked the judge to take steps to protect people in the courtroom from COVID19. That judge has since contracted and died of the disease. I do not wish that fate on this DCP contributor or anyone!)

And the danger was compounded by not only claiming that was there nothing to worry about in comparison to the 2009-10 H1N1 Swine Flu, which killed 12,000 but didn't shut down the economy, but making the further claim that there was a campaign to deliberately lie to us to make COVID19 seem worse that it was. The message was: Those people advising you to protect yourself? Don't trust them!

Here we are just 30 days later, with more than twice as many Americans dead just in the time since that post was made as died in the entire first year of the H1N1 Swine Flu outbreak, and my message is this: Those people who were advising you not to worry? They meant well, but don't trust them!

The problem with that meme-graph is that the burgundy line is disingenuously false. 

No society with enough scientific consciousness to draw these curves would EVER just proceed up the exponential course of "business as usual".  Some degree of prevention and precautions were inevitable, and they began voluntarily.  Social distancing, masks, reduction of non-essential travel, work-at-home, stay-at-home, scaring everyone with misguided estimates... all these efforts were started by individuals and businesses on their own initiative, in reaction to conditions in their communities.

The more such fallacious graphs we see, the more we question the wisdom behind them.

[N.E. Brigand]

5 hours ago, cixelsyd said:

The problem with that meme-graph is that the burgundy line is disingenuously false. 

No society with enough scientific consciousness to draw these curves would EVER just proceed up the exponential course of "business as usual".  Some degree of prevention and precautions were inevitable, and they began voluntarily.  Social distancing, masks, reduction of non-essential travel, work-at-home, stay-at-home, scaring everyone with misguided estimates... all these efforts were started by individuals and businesses on their own initiative, in reaction to conditions in their communities.

The more such fallacious graphs we see, the more we question the wisdom behind them.

But it's not false or disingenuous at all. It's what would happen if business as usual went on. And yes, some people were advising just that. Herd immunity!

I quoted a DCP poster who said that it was ridiculous that all "sporting and entertainment events [were] cancelled, [and] schools [were] closed" in response to COVID19.

That person's reasoning? Swine Flu killed 12,000 Americans *over the course of a year* and we didn't do those things. (Though there were some very limited small-scale closures.)

And that was before stay-at-home orders were issued in most places. That person wasn't responding to those measures but was complaining that even just shutting down events and schools was too much -- apparently even if they were to save as many as 12,000 lives.

Now we've seen COVID19 has killed more than 30,000 Americans in 47 days, and we're on our way to reach twice that number. (The past 24 hours have the most deaths yet. Also, while New York has finally done the right thing and started to record *some* of the large number of people, vastly exceeding the daily average of the past five years, who died at home but were never tested, most jurisdictions still are not doing this, so the real death count still exceeds the official count by a fair bit. And yes, comparisons like that are the way that these things are normally counted. That Swine Flu count was calculated after the fact by comparing to previous years' averages, not by counting each death that had tested positive in real time.) Some hospitals are right at their breaking points. Bodies are piling up in spare rooms. (Seriously. I can provide pictures if necessary.) A fair number of doctors and nurses have fallen ill or died. (Not something that normally happens because of the flu!) They're wearing garbage bags because they ran out of protective equipment. But in the hardest-hit jurisdictions, so far, we seem to have done *just barely enough* to avoid cause health care collapses. One recently discovered fact helped: ventilators are less helpful than had been believed. (They're still needed, just not as much as expected.) People whose blood oxygen levels have dropped so low that all the books and training says they ought to be on ventilators are often better off without, because of the weird way this strange virus acts in the lungs.

But again: we're going to have five times as many deaths from this outbreak, in one-fourth the time, as we did for Swine Flu.

And those are 60,000 souls *on top of* those who died from the flu this year. The one disease didn't replace the other.

And all of that happened even though we imposed extensive social distancing measures. It would be so much worse if we hadn't!

This is just baffling: when some people here claimed that COVID19 was being overhyped ("get back to me in two or three weeks", said someone here in the last week of February) because the swine flu was worse, or the regular flu season (in which 60,000 deaths is a bad year) is worse, even though both of those claims have proved to be false, that wasn't worth disputing. But when other people here warned that it was going to be much worse, and then when they noted that subsequent events bore those predictions out, that's somehow misleading.

That burgundy line on the chart is what would happen had we done nothing. (Which would lead to somewhere between 500,000 and 2 million Americans dead, by the way. Yes, that's a big uncertain spread, because there's lots we just don't know about this virus yet.)

That "efforts start working" point on the chart? If we're lucky, that's where we are right now, in terms of the death toll. Or we may be just a bit to the right, just past that inflection point. What you seem to be proposing is that the efforts taken to this point weren't worthwhile, because once we reached this point, we could now take all the measures that are helping us bend the curve. Or alternatively you seem to believe that people would have taken sufficient steps on their own to match the official policies, and those would have been good enough to get us here.

If that's what you mean, I don't think it's true. Had we taken the social distancing steps we did take just *one week earlier*, we probably could have cut the death toll by half. And that obviously didn't happen, whether officially or not.

What are those 30,000 American lives worth?

We probably ought to decide, because it needs to be a factor in how and when we reopen (and thus ultimately how 2021 plays out for DCI).

Edited April 16, 2020 by N.E. Brigand

[N.E. Brigand]

6 hours ago, Terri Schehr said:

Jim was in Japan in the 80’s in the Marine Corps and he said taxi drivers and bank tellers always wore white gloves.  And he saw a lot of masks.  He said if someone had a cold, they’d wear a mask.   He said they are extremely polite people.  He loves Japan. 

Never been to Japan, but I love me some Japanese movies.

[LabMaster]

6 hours ago, MikeD said:

Around me here in NJ on the whole people are doing a decent job. The Manahawkin Costco, since you mentioned Costco, has people line up outside with six foot intervals taped off, and they only let in a small number at a time. Inside the store it ends up being very sparse, so distancing is easy, and is happening. Ditto checkout. People line up with taped intervals, and an employee directs people to the lane as it frees up. Very well done, in our opinion. 

Supermarkets in my town do that and have made aisles one way.  And cashiers have plexi screens.

[Ghost]

35 minutes ago, N.E. Brigand said:

Never been to Japan, but I love me some Japanese movies.

Is this from the great 7 Samurai movie?