New COVID-19 Poll

[Hellbent]

 

6 hours ago, Jello said:

[snip]

I apologize for saying "This is a bit concerning" in my poll answer. I'd like to change it to "this could lead to disaster and world governments are being idiots about it". That was on March 3rd, I don't think too many people imagined it would turn out to be the utter clusterfuck it is.

 

BTW Jacksonville, FL reopened its beaches. Floridians: always in a State of perpetual wisdom.... >.<

https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2020/04/18/coronavirus-florida-beaches-reopen-big-crowds-during-pandemic/5159264002/

Edited April 21, 2020 by Hellbent : correction

[Bauul]

I don't think having this as a single-select poll is quite right.  Many of these are not mutually exclusive - it could lead to disaster, but it won't because most people are taking this seriously.  So because we're all being good, it's more down to somewhere between "it's a bit concerning" and "it's rather alarming".  I'd also say "it's not that dangerous" but only because of effective social distancing policies mitigating the risks in most countries.  

 

So I'd select answers 2, 3, 4, and 5 please.

[Hellbent]

Okay, updated.

[Dragonsbrethren]

As bad as these death tolls are, I feel like we dodged a bullet. I hope so, anyway. It could've been so much worse. All the serological tests coming out are making the IFR look nothing like the nightmare scenarios that were being presented at the beginning, and will hopefully even make last month's best case scenario look horribly pessimistic. The tests are backing up the reports of there being a large number of mildly symptomatic or totally asymptomatic cases.

 

Anecdotally, I'm in a hotspot and work in a pharmacy. We had something nasty go through here back in January, before the media was really reporting on COVID cases outside of China. Affluent area, lots of travel, large Asian population, so it's possible we got it early. No one thought that at the time. Coworkers came down with an awful cough, fever, severe fatigue that knocked them out for about a week...it certainly fits the bill. I didn't get hit with it myself. My girlfriend picked up some sort of mild respiratory illness at the end of March and quarantined herself. Nasty productive cough but no fever and no real feeling of being unwell. Her doctor wouldn't even humor the idea of it being C19, but didn't test for anything, and the timing is very suspect. There was an outbreak of positive tests in her town a week after she came down with symptoms. She's fully recovered now. I'm hopeful she had it and is now immune, but we're still taking as many precautions as we can.

Edited April 21, 2020 by Dragonsbrethren

[Jello]

Ha. Funny that my comment got a new poll made. I voted correctly this time. Wouldn't it be nice if people could do that in real life?

[elend]

Well, bear in mind that nobody - literally nobody - can look into the future. There is no point in looking back and regretting some decisions, because you could not have known. Sure, there were signs, but there's always this underlying "okay, maybe it won't turn out this way"-feeling, which you could also call hope I guess.

[Murdoch]

New Zealand is fortunately on the home stretch so long as someone infected does not decide to be an idiot or someone is asymptomatic and spreads it anew. 2/3rds of cases are recovered and the number of new and probable cases each day has hit single digits. But I feel really bad for America. The carelessness of your leaders and some of your citizens is going to drag this thing out far longer than it needs to, costing money and lives.

[Maggle]

I picked "it could lead to disaster and world governments are being idiots" because there's no option for "It's already a disaster"

[Teabλg_Johnson]

why can't you just put 2 options instead of a gazillion?

[BBQgiraffe]

2 hours ago, Teabλg_Johnson said:

why can't you just put 2 options instead of a gazillion?

because the original poll had a gazillion

[Graf Zahl]

I think the next few weeks will tell us how bad it will become.

The initial problem clearly was that they couldn't control the flood of incoming new infections. At least here in Germany they seem to have gotten it under control for now. If reopening the public places will not result in a new increase of infected people I'd revise my opinion, but for now I think that far too many politicians are too callous about it - especially those whose only interest seems to be the economy, not the people.

 

[dr_st]

Have you read Tomas Pueyo's articles on the subject? They are usually very informative, and he appears to be basing them on a lot of data and research of many people.

https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-the-dance-be9337092b56

[BBQgiraffe]

just found out my state is reopening, if schools open I might just ditch the rest of the year, I would rather repeat than risk death

 

[Graf Zahl]

42 minutes ago, dr_st said:

Have you read Tomas Pueyo's articles on the subject? They are usually very informative, and he appears to be basing them on a lot of data and research of many people.

https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-the-dance-be9337092b56

 

It's interesting but I don't think it gets all its facts right.

The main problem is that the European outbreak was too decentralized - it first hit a winter vacation region and spread too fast from there to all over the continent, so the measures taken in China couldn't have worked - it was literally everywhere before authorities even noticed.

 

But if numbers of various countries are an indicator, the most severe measures do not really help, they only generate resistance and let people do stupid things. Here in Germany we never had a total lockdown, they implemented social distancing rules and partial lockdown of non-essential commerce - but people were still allowed to leave their home - and it looks like it was enough to contain the thing - the numbers of cases have been on the decline since these measures were implemented - factoring in the two week delay between infection and confirmation, of course. So, with the current state of things they were able to loosen the lockdown this week - we'll have to see how this plays out.

Considering that I think the US are playing with fire. There's no sign of containment right now and yet it's still not being taken seriously by some leaders.
I think one outcome here will be inevitable: Once Europe gets this under control (and it looks like most countries are on their way there) but the US don't, be prepared for many countries to not let you in anymore.

 

[Phobus]

I think I'll stick with my initial take - "it's a bit concerning". There's the potential for a major catastrophe, and for many people personally it's been disastrous, but it doesn't actually take too much effort to reduce the spread once people are sufficiently motivated. The bigger problem is in the long term. The damage Covid-19 isn't doing on it's own will be done instead by the results of locking down on the economy and general well-being. If we can't vaccinate against it or adequately protect against second waves, the issue will be compounded.

[yakfak]

I think it's too early to relieve the lockdown, though. so many people auto-bought into the "it's just the flu :D :D" bit (including me for a few days cos I saw some really good twitter jokes that rewrote my brain centre) that the minute some official idiot goes "maybe we could just open ONE or TWO viral transmission factories" those same people will hear Business as Usual then we'll get a second wave that'll be more depressing than this one. worrying about the economy should be a distinct second place concern compared to worrying about a deadly virus, i don't care how many hours of business class you tolerated

 

heart goes out to people who can't take being silently cooped up at home. i'm the opposite, can't abide busy places or being watched but i know what anxiety and cabin fever feel like!

 

was really impressed to hear about new zealand's actual proportional response to the virus. makes just about everyone else's response look like flippant incompetence huh

[Kronecker–Capelli]

2 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

especially those whose only interest seems to be the economy, not the people.

I see you point, but they trying to minimize long term consequences.
"Damaged" economy of a country, not even speaking about world economy, create much, much worse situation than global pandemic we have now.
I dont know how it was in Germany, but in Russia and surrounding countries dissolution of the USSR completely destroy economics of all countries that was part of it.
For example, it was so hard that you literally can be killed for like 10$ if somebody notice it in your wallet. No joke, peoples were so desperate. Of course, this did not happens constantly, but chances of that was pretty high, comparing to "peaceful" times.
For reference, that hard time was overcome with help of the entire world. And even than its takes around 4-5 years.

And I know that all countries are far from it, and I really doubt that this actually happens in this scenario (since dissolution of the USSR  also completely destroy government system and it was created anew almost from scratch), but chances of something similar are not equal zero.

[Graf Zahl]

37 minutes ago, Kronecker–Capelli said:

I see you point, but they trying to minimize long term consequences.
"Damaged" economy of a country, not even speaking about world economy, create much, much worse situation than global pandemic we have now.

 

The problem of course is that if you do not contain the epidemic, the economical consequences will be a lot more severe. But that's something a few people do not seem to realize. You do not want riots on the streets because the people accuse their leaders of betrayal and such.

 

You do not want a disease with a death toll as high as this one to tear through the population. But that seems to be the route some of the economy-centered people in he US are willing to take.

[seed]

I chose "rather alarming" this time. Granted, we're almost at the peak and while a few hundreds of people did die, I think we've overall done a good gob by following simple common sense rules (social distancing and staying in our own home). I was also pleasantly surprised that despite the initial wave of morons who equated lockdown and quarantine with "party at home or somewhere else with friends in group", most people here did their best to not make it worse for everyone else or themselves.

 

I don't we're ready yet to loosen the restrictions though, but we're slowly getting there. And thankfully there's no more panic and hysteria, the first weeks were pretty crazy with all the different reactions coming from people. And the economy will be rebooted when it's time to reboot it.

[Murdoch]

32 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

 

The problem of course is that if you do not contain the epidemic, the economical consequences will be a lot more severe. But that's something a few people do not seem to realize. You do not want riots on the streets because the people accuse their leaders of betrayal and such.

 

You do not want a disease with a death toll as high as this one to tear through the population. But that seems to be the route some of the economy-centered people in he US are willing to take.

 

Plus even if it really goes through everyone due to people being careless, it's still going to mean many of those people won't be well enough to work anyway for two weeks at least.

[Kronecker–Capelli]

40 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

But that seems to be the route some of the economy-centered people in he US are willing to take. 

Thats a consequences of voting for "very correct and successful" government officials which, consequences, was accumulated over several years, if not several decades.
So not only the official is to blame, but also those who voted for them.
Also, no matter how cruel it sounds, but "every nation gets the government that it deserves", local proverb.

[Master O]

So what do people suggest Americans do, wait years for a vaccine and just stay bunkered down in their own homes?  Americans are not a patient people and will not accept their lives being disrupted for that long. 

 

I'm merely curious.

[Phobus]

Die in droves, then. It seems to be the current plan.

[Fonze]

Tfw people assume "slowing the spread of corona" means stopping it and want the lack of a quarantine to be over; smh we all gonna die.

[FractalBeast]

COVID-19 is already spreading among the anti-lockdown protest groups. I guess there's some cosmic justice on this plane of existence after all.

[Cacodemon345]

At least this pandemic is exposing how deaf, dumb and ignorant humanity can be in modern times, ffs.

[dr_st]

3 hours ago, Master O said:

So what do people suggest Americans do, wait years for a vaccine and just stay bunkered down in their own homes?  Americans are not a patient people and will not accept their lives being disrupted for that long.

You mean, some societies will accept their lives being disrupted for that long?

 

Read "The Hammer and the Dance" article I linked to above. It explains what to do and that it does not have to be a months-long total lockdown. Restrictions, yes. Change of what's normal, yes. Total shutdown, no.

[insertwackynamehere]

@Graf Zahl I think you're exhibiting a lot of bias against the US. I'm in New York, our lockdown sounds similar to Germany's from your description. It's not severe, it's just that we encourage people to only go outside if necessary, not gather in large groups, and we shut down places for socializing (bars, restaurants, cafes, etc). And it's worked. We already peaked. The result was far from the worst case predictions (even though things were still very bad).

 

To say the US isn't working to contain this is just wrong, it has been contained in the hotspot areas like New York and this can be seen both in numbers and in the policies implemented.

 

Also, the US doesn't want this to tear through the population. Flattening the curve worked, and the idea was always to reduce load on the healthcare system. Re-opening the country (cautiously and sanely) is the next step. I don't think we should open the floodgates tomorrow so I'm not defending the tea party Trump nonsense going on right now, but every country is looking towards how to open back up following the worst of this wave and the US is no exception. It's not fair to act like the US doing this is just out of greed but any other country isn't.

 

---

 

On another note, one thing I've been toying with at home is modeling this stuff as a game. I have no expertise in this field and this has nothing to do with medical advice risk, but more collective social psychology risk. So take literally everything with a grain of salt and even if my little game is maybe "accurate" with the parameters given, it has nothing to do with the medical advice side of things.

 

Basically, I was doing math on expected value of a lockdown versus the risk of returning to normal (rooted purely in self-interested terms, without caring about how behavior affects others). Then, I also calculated prospect-utility from prospect theory on how a human would treat the odds from a risk averse perspective. The goal is to see how different "rational"  timelines of lockdown are versus risk-averse timelines. Then, the next thing I wanted to see was what are the worst case timelines across the population.

 

Imagine you have a game where a population all have varying risk of dying of an illness. These people all have two concerns, they have self-interest in mind and they have empathy for their neighbor as well. A lockdown is enacted on this population, the idea being that if at a certain a point a vaccine is found, everyone's risk of death goes to zero. Every individual has both their own period of time they'd lock down out of self interest, and all the time they'd lock down following that is altruistic. This means the length of the lockdown is bounded by the individual with longest period of self-interested lockdown. Because once this is hit, there is no one left to be altruistic for, everyone has crossed their personal threshold of risk and therefore everyone would collectively agree that it's in everyone's best interest to lift the lockdown and see what happens; no one in this model is spoken for as a sacrifice.

 

Obviously this is very over-simplified. But if everyone was a rational actor, then just under six months of lockdowns would be hit before every non-retiree agreed it was no longer worth sitting around waiting for a solution. If you include everyone, it would be a little over nine months of lockdowns before collective agreement to end lockdowns.

 

People aren't rational actors, however, so when modeled with prospect theory, it would take 63 weeks for the holdout non-retirees to finally decide it was no longer worth waiting. It would take 72 weeks overall (including retirees). This is grimmer, it means some people (in this extremely oversimplified model) will be uncomfortable for over a year with opening things back up. However, if you set the maximum age of the population to 60, it would only take 38 weeks before the fear is assuaged. A maximum age of 50, it would only take 19 weeks. A maximum age of 40, it would only take 15 weeks. A maximum age of 30, it would only take 9 weeks. And a maximum age of 20, it would only take 4 weeks.

 

So what does this tell us? It shows that first of all, there is a huge gap between true rational expected value and risk averse value which is understandable. It also demonstrates how there will be an "altruism gap" which is the timeline between one's self-interested participation in a lockdown and the time until every member of the population is comfortable with ending the lockdowns. It's pretty obvious in general given the numbers without doing all this math, but younger people will have a larger "altruism gap" and as more people enter the altruism gap or use up all the altruism they have left over (if they have no jobs or no social life this will likely deplete rapidly) this will balloon as pushback against lockdowns. But even with a population that has infinite altruism and pure intentions for the sake of their neighbor, this model falls just short of 18 months before the lockdown is no longer seen as tenable across all populations even with risk aversion.

 

Obviously there's about 50 million things oversimplified with this construction I have but the point is to sort of show what I'm working at in my head recently when people casually say we will have years of lockdowns. Like, it just doesn't make sense. And here, without even accounting for how years of lockdowns would compound to be non-linear in disastrousness, it attempts to show how people's rational and risk-averse tolerances for the "insurance" of a lockdown don't even add up to making it feasible.

 

These numbers will also be adjusted in a very optimistic way if antibody tests end up pointing to much lower mortality rates across the board.

 

Final note, I really need to clarify I'm dusting off math here that's I'm far from an expert in. I'm doing this purely for my own amusement. It's also not meant to prescribe advice on when someone should stop caring about a lockdown or consider breaking it a worthwhile risk, it's supposed to model the psychology of people coming to those conclusions. I made it because I find this problem interesting and wanted to brush up on stuff, not because I'm claiming I got my math right nor to provide any sort of instruction or guide on when its good for "you" to no longer worry.

Edited April 21, 2020 by insertwackynamehere

[Lizardcommando]

I'm tired of this situation. I'm so fucking tired of this pandemic. I wish it would fucking end.

[taufan99]

Chose "The Walking Dead but not as cool", because that's the closest to my current view of the outbreak.
At least it affects some other organisms in a rather positive way, instead of in a zombifying way.