Hawkeye wrote: ↑Mon Jul 18, 2022 7:02 pm
Res Ipsa do you wear an N95, a cloth mask, or a surgical mask?
How many lives would you estimate that the lockdowns, quarantining, masks, and other mitigation measures have saved? What would be the ratio of that number of lives to lost earnings? I have to wonder what kind of quality of life we've saved as well. Even if I were immunocompromised I'm not sure it'd be worth it to me to live locked down the rest of my life.
I remember early on when Gunnar claimed that if Trump had just done a better job with getting sufficient testing kits we could be like Vietnam and have zero Covid. Do you still believe that zero Covid in the US was a possibility if we had a different president at the time?
I wear N-95s. I switched from Cloth to KN 95s once they became widely available. I upgraded to N95s once more data became available that compared the effectiveness of different types of masks. When I’m going to an indoor public space other than home, I mask up before I leave the house. It comes off when I get home, after which I thoroughly wash my hands.
As to the rest, I’m not your unpaid researcher. in my opinion, you consistently and belligerently exaggerate the actual mitigation steps that have been taken on the economy, while completely ignoring the economic impacts of serious illness, disability and death. For some reason, you seem to believe that being dead doesn’t reduce a persons washes or that doctor and hospital bills don’t reduce disposable income. Not everyone gets paid while being laid up with COVID.
You’ve never demonstrated any interest in discussing the actual economic burden of disease and death, so I don’t see any sense in wasting my time on that issue.
It’s easy to talk about what you imagine you’d think if you were immunocompromised. But you’re not. And I see no evidence of you having empathy for immunocompromised folks. If you’d rather die than live than do what immunocompromised people have to do today to stay alive, that would be your choice. But it’s you and others like you that put the immunocompromised in their current position. They didn’t choose it.
I don’t recall what Gunnar may have said in the past. The first substantive post I made about COVID was on Facebook and I don’t remember whether I posted it here. My view at the time was that I didn’t think the US had the political Will and unity that would be required to eradicate COVID. Because the US failed to conduct surveillance testing and abandoned the early plans for quarantining everyone who entered the US from elsewhere, our ability to make use of the tried and true public health measures for eliminating disease.
My state had one of two choices - drastically reduce the rate of transmission or suffer the complete breakdown of our health care system. We had hospitals running out of masks and other PPE, with cases still increasing. Has we not reduced the rate of transmission, we were looking at our ERs and hospitals becoming sources of increased transmission rather than as places to help people survive and recover. My early posting was about the need to help keep the system from breaking by using voluntary mitigation measures to avoid overrunning our health care system.
When we went to mandatory restrictions on business capacities and operations, it meant that we’d failed at eradication. I watched the WHO practically beg countries not to resort to lockdowns and to concentrate instead on cutting off the chains of transmission through testing, tracing, isolating and quarantining. I heard Tedros emplore countries not to let political differences get in the way of fighting the disease. Without unity in our actions, the disease wins. And he was absolutely right.
Although I think Trump acted irresponsibly with respect to the pandemic, resulting in significant unnecessary suffering and death, I don’t think a different president would have been able to eradicate the disease in the US. The fundamental problem is the depth of our political division. If it was ever true that Americans dropped their differences in a crisis and helped each other, those days are long gone. The concept of sacrificing anything for the common good is dead in the US — to the extent that we’d prefer to kill off grandma and the medically vulnerable rather than endure the mild inconvenience of wearing a mask. The notion of being a citizen is dead in the US, and we’ve just started paying the consequences of that loss.