We need an immediate five-week national lockdown to defeat coronavirus in America

1. The Seasonal flu has a vaccine, corona virus does not. Coronavirus based on results in Washington state...
The fact you have to cherry-pick this stat says all that need be said.

When planning for a disaster, you go with the worst case scenario's or possibilities. You have to because lives are at stake. Only an idiot would decide to underestimate what to do in a pandemic.
 
And, as an added bonus, the Democrats,, the media, and their useful idiots can - and most assuredly will - gleefully blame Trump for the millions of new jobless claims every week, the millions of job losses each month, the collapse of the stock market and the double -digit contraction of the economy over two quarters.

Win at every cost, see - who cares if a hundred million Americans have to suffer?

Trump dismissed this crises throughout January and February. Now the shit has it the fan. Were playing catch on the work Trump should have done in January and February. Its thanks to Trump that we have 53,000 cases now while a country near China like Japan only has 1,193.
 
So the answer to the problem is,
When the Gov says stay home, stay home
When the Gov says hands up, hands up
When the Gov says walk to Oklahoma, walk
When the Gov says get in the internment camp, get
When the Gov says get in the boxcar, get

It's for the common good


I shall not comply
 
So the answer to the problem is,
When the Gov says stay home, stay home
When the Gov says hands up, hands up
When the Gov says walk to Oklahoma, walk
When the Gov says get in the internment camp, get
When the Gov says get in the boxcar, get

It's for the common good


I shall not comply


What did the United States do during World War II and do you approve of that?
 
World
We need an immediate five-week national lockdown to defeat coronavirus in America
Yaneer Bar-Yam, Opinion contributor
USA TODAY OpinionMarch 21, 2020, 11:30 AM EDT

I am an MIT-trained physicist and complexity scientist who studies pandemics. I have warned about global pandemics due to increasing travel for 15 years. I recommended community based monitoring of symptoms to stop Ebola in West Africa in 2014, and it worked. The fastest and even the only way to contain COVID-19 in the United States is a five-week national lockdown.
Closing schools, bars and movie theaters are good measures, but not enough. Our relaxed approach to social distancing is insufficient to stop the exponential growth of COVID-19. Until Americans consistently adopt strong social distancing recommendations — a lockdown — the disease will continue to spread exponentially.
During a five-week national lockdown, federal, state and local authorities would ensure that all Americans stay home except to obtain food and other essentials, access medical care, or do work essential to the functioning of society. Travel would cease: We would close our borders and airports and prohibit all unnecessary travel across state and county (or town) lines within the United States. The U.S. government would have to provide aid to citizens separated from their sources of income and ensure care for vulnerable members of society.
Lockdown would sharply reduce cases
During the first two weeks of a lockdown, infected individuals will either recover from mild cases of COVID-19 at home or seek medical attention for the 14% of cases that are severe. During the third, fourth and fifth weeks, any newly infected family or cohabitants of infected individuals will recover or seek medical attention and their isolation will prevent further spreading. By the end of the lockdown, the number of infections will be a small fraction of what they are now.

The lockdown will give us time to dramatically scale up our supply of COVID-19 test kits and capacity to process them. If we reduce the number of infections using the lockdown and start a massive testing regime in the United States, we can control COVID-19 after five weeks without such extreme social distancing measures. Isolating sick individuals and their immediate contacts will be enough.

The human and economic costs of delaying this lockdown will be staggering. The COVID-19 outbreak has many more cases now than are visible (tip of the iceberg) and they are growing rapidly. Absent sufficiently effective intervention, new cases will increase 1.3 to 1.5 times each day. We had almost 20,000 cases in the United States on Friday, over 5,800 more cases than the previous day. Without a lockdown, in one week there will be about 200,000. In two weeks: 2,000,000. One in seven cases require hospitalization and 5% require ICU care with ventilators to survive. There aren’t nearly enough ventilators available.

The effectiveness of a five-week lockdown will be dramatic — and also entirely predictable.

We know a U.S. lockdown can work because it worked in China. At the height of its COVID-19 crisis in mid-February, China had locked down an estimated 760 milllion people, approximately half of its population. This policy was so successful that Wuhan is now much safer from coronavirus than New York City or Washington, D.C. The few new COVID-19 cases in China now stem from foreign travelers rather than local transmission, and all are safely quarantined.

We know what we have to do. President Donald Trump and our states' governors and local leaders must act now to save millions of lives.

Yaneer Bar-Yam is the founding president of the New England Complex Systems Institute, where he is an expert on pandemics and other complex systems. He is spearheading the effort of over 3,000 volunteers working to stop the outbreak at endcoronavirus.org. Follow him on Twitter: @yaneerbaryam


United States Infections and deaths from Coronavirus as of February 29, 2020
Infections: 68
Deaths: 1

United States Infections and deaths from Coronavirus as of March 22, 2020
Infections: 35,000
Deaths: 458


The exponential rise in infections and deaths in just 3 weeks is incredible. Where will the United States be on April 23, 2020 without the lockdown proposed above?

It would be nice to think we could shutdown our economy for 5 weeks and survive as a country, but it is not reality. A 5 week lockdown is a case of the cure being worse than the disease

There is no other option. This is a disaster situation. The priority is survival, not making money. The entire economy will have to be refocused to fighting this war, just like it was during World War II.
Bullshit. We’ve endured worse pandemics before, and we didn’t shut down the whole nation.
Forcing businesses to shut down is wrong. Cracking down on people going to parks is wrong. Let people make up their own damned minds. But authoritarian asswipes can never let that happen.

Go to the park. Get infected from someone you come into contact with. You get sick with a mild case. Go to visit grandma and she dies.

I am not coming into contact with anyone at the park or the biking trails which my stupid city closed.

Neither am I. I have to mask up and stay as far away from everyone as possible. Some asshole goes to Florida on spring break, catches the virus, gives it to their brother, sister, Mom or Dad and they give it to my wife who then gives it to me. I am as good as dead.
that's been that way since forever. flu kills 20,000 and that didn't bother you before did it?

Coronavirus is 44 times more deadly than season flu. Seasonal flu has a vaccine you can take, coronavirus does NOT. When will you start to understand these basic facts?
H1N1 while not being as transmitable.....was a deadly Flu.....killing a hell of a lot more than this one has...........

It killed the young.......4000 Americans died in the 1st 6 months.......it killed by some estimates nearly 600,000 in the world..........A VACCINE was started within a FEW MONTHS.......

Now we have several VACCINES in the works within a few months again.........time will tell their success and how to manufacture so much of it is another problem.

WE CANNOT STAY SHUT DOWN FOR A VERY LONG TIME......IT WILL ECONOMICALLY DESTROY US AND THE WORLD.................Even with all of the people staying home...........we ONLY MINIMIZE THE SPREAD.......it's gonna keep coming back until medicine BEATS IT......or it runs it's course........

I do think once it gets MUGGY AND HOT down south....the spread will lessen.....I've shown SARS studies from the past already saying so.........Even though now they say it's NEW......LOL

SARs. .....isn't NEW.......NEITHER IS CORONA...........BOTH HAVE BEEN STUDIED........

This particular strain of corona is new. The alternative to a lockdown is mass death and the destruction of the health care system everyone depends when they become ill for other things. Defeating the pandemic and human survival are FAR MORE IMPORTANT than normal economic activity.

Its only the old economy that is shut down. A new economy is emerging to fight coronavirus just as a new economy emerged in the 1940s to fight World War II! Amazon.com is hiring 100,000 new workers. Shipping of essential services will continue.

"Mass death"

This is exactly what I mean. There actually WAS "mass death" from H1N1...the kind that you would undoubtedly be abjectly panicked about it it were COVID...to the tune of 60K in one season. We didn't shut one thing down.

As I have explained before, 60,000 is not mass death. 3 million people dead within a year is mass death.

1. H1N1 had a vaccine, Coronavirus does not.
2. Coronavirus is 44 times more deadly that seasonal flue
3. Coronavirus is a more dangerous pathogen than H1N1.

1. H1N1 had a vaccine AFTER the pandemic hit. Stop lying. Its stupid to have so many US deaths (12,500) if a vaccine was available. Stop lying.

2. COVID-19 is NOT 44x more lethal, than seasonal flu.
It may be up to 10x worse depending upon how many unreported cases there actually are.
"So the difference between a 0.1 percent and a 1.0 percent fatality rate could be 360,000 dead Americans. " (not 2,000,000)

I'm not lying! I got the vaccine myself in 2009 and so did the rest of my family. There are an average of 40,000 deaths from seasonal flu every year with the vaccine available. Unfortunately, 50% of people don't get their flu shot each year. A lot of people who died from H1N1 did not get their vaccine shot either.

In Italy, the death rate from coronavirus is nearly 10%. There are over 60,000 cases and over 6,000 deaths. I used the global figures to come up with the 4.4% death rate which is 44 times the death rate of seasonal flu.

If 60% of the U.S. population becomes infected with coronavirus, its estimated there will be 2,400,000 deaths from Coronavirus.

The best thing for the United States, from both a HEALTH and ECONOMIC perspective, is to defeat the PATHOGEN FIRST! Then you can focus on the economy. There are no half measures in defeating a PATHOGEN. Biology is a HARD SCIENCE unlike Economics. Trump should pay attention to the Doctors and Scientist on Epidemiology, not the idiots he appointed to run the economy.

1. I'm not saying you lied about the H1N1 vaccine, but when you "imply" that H1N1 didn't happen before the vaccine was available. H1N1 killed 12,500 Americans, then the vaccine came out. H1N1 hit from April thru September, then the vaccine came out in October. 2009 H1N1 Flu Pandemic Timeline

2. Why use global figures for COVID-19 instead of US CDC figures? Your numbers are way off.
The CDC says that the current mortality rate for COVID-19 is about 0.7% which might be lowered if/when therapies are approved such as Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine: what to know about the potential coronavirus drugs

3. Your 60% infection rate was explained at yesterday's presser by Dr. Birx. She said that the 60% would be over 3-years not one year. We should have a vaccine well before the 3rd year, and therapies well before next year. So your 2,400,000 US deaths is just wrong. If 3% of the US population gets COVID-19 that's about 10m infected, and if 0.007 of them die, that's about 70,000 not 2,400,000. So the death rate would be about the same as a bad regular flu, which is still a bad year.

4. We don't stop the economy for the regular flu, we need to get back to work, but in a smart way, with social distancing and hygiene, after the peak occurs.

1. I never said that we had a vaccine before the first cases of H1N1. I said we got a vaccine quick enough to respond to major spread issues and prevent a major problem. I had family members in older age groups and with underlying health conditions working in the K through 12 school system. They were never advised to stop working, although the emphasized it was important for them to get the vaccine. A vaccine was available before it became a major problem for people over age 60 and with underlying health conditions. The H1N1 situation is not comparable to coronavirus situation!

2. The United States does not have accurate figures thanks to Donald Trump because were way behind on testing. So its not accurate to use just the U.S. figures. Should we use Italian figures, or some other countries figures? No. So that is why for now I use the global figures. I don't trust any one country's particular figures. Again, it is far better to assume a worse death rate and be wrong than to underestimate a dangerous pathogen involved in a global pandemic.

3. I have seen estimates that show 2 million Americans could die before the end of 2020 without the lockdowns in place. You plan for worst case scenarios in a crises like this. Your sugar coating of the problem is the type of thing that gets people killed. As Anthony Fauci has said, its better to overestimate and overreact to a pandemic than to underestimate and under act to a pandemic. Its a global crises, and Trump cares more about the stock market than saving people's lives. Just more reason this idiot should never have been President.

4. This is not regular flu. Anyone who studies pandemics or the SCIENCE on this will tell you that. Your unscientific sugarcoating of this, risk getting millions of people killed. Look at what happened in Hong Kong would they lifted some of the restrictions. They got another wave of the coronavirus.

5. The Economy is not completely stopped. Essential services and production have continued. In addition, there has been huge expansion in certain sectors of the economy as the country refocuses on fighting this pandemic. Idiot Trump is risking killing more Americans by loosening restrictions against the advise of ALL HIS EXPERTS ON PANDEMICS!

6. Finally, lets be clear: Seasonal Flu is not a pandemic. THE CORONAVIRUS IS A PANDEMIC! There is no comparison between the two. The only people who claim there is, are people who are NOT professionals in studying pandemics and how to defeat them!
1. OK. My point is that the H1N1 casualties, 12,500 dead was before the vaccine was available. Hoping that COVID-19 deaths will be much lower.
2, Do the math, more testing means more cases, means that the denominator gets bigger and the death rate gets smaller. The 0.7% CDC currently states supersedes the 4.4% global death rate. So use the 0.7% not the 4.4%
3. Please post a link supporting the 2m US deaths in 2020. If you can't find a credible link stop posting nonsense. Your posts are generally unsupported bullshit, please try to debate using real facts, real links, not unsupported nonsense. Here is Dr. Fauci's early estimate, not 4.4%:
A Doctor’s Assessment of the COVID-19 Outbreak | National Review
"Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, wrote that because of the high number of unreported cases, “the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1% . . . ultimately more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%).”
(This is from Fauci, Lane, and Redfield, “Covid-19 — Navigating the Uncharted,” NEJM (2020 February 28): 1–2.)
4. All pandemics end, we can't hide in our safe rooms too long. The CDC doctors will tell us when its safe to come out.
5. Agree we do not want to play with fire. But we can't delay going back to work too long either.
When Trump haters like Paul Krugman support Trump's re-open when ready plan, you know the economy needs to re-start soon.
6. Was H1N1 a pandemic? What did we do back then? I don't recall shutting the counrty down for a month or two.
Let the doctors do their data analysis, and then when reasonably ready, start getting back to work.

1. H1N1 is not comparable to the coronavirus problem. The coronavirus is more deadly and more transmissible. That's why most countries in the world have instituted restriction that they didn't for H1N1. The listing of the total dead in a certain time frame is not an accurate way to compare coronavirus with H1N1. H1N1 ended almost 10 years ago. This Pandemic is new, far more deadly in terms of the chances of survival for those infected, and much more transmissible.

2. We don't know the exact death rate and won't no it until the crisis is over. There for you have to assume the worst case situation. Information from Washington state suggest a 5% death rate. The global figures suggest a 4.4% death rate. Yes, it may be lower than that, BUT AS A MATTER OF POLICY YOU NEVER ASSUME THAT, YOU ASSUME THE WORST BECAUSE PEOPLE'S LIVES ARE AT STAKE!

3. You don't post any links proving the economy some how needs to be re-opened again to non-essential services at all. I don't have the link but do remember reading the study that showed a worst case situation of 60% infection and 2.4 million dead over a year or two. I'm not going to have a handy link for every thing I post, and you've shown you certainly don't as well.

4. Have a link for that? Trump does is not paying attention to the medical professionals, he is paying attention to economist now. There is no acceptable reason that a non-essential goods or service should be re-opened while fighting a pandemic. That non-essential business is not more important than American lives. This is a war and you defeat the Pathogen before you re-open non-essential business.

5. Again, no link for this assumption. People in Essential services are still working. Other Business's are being converted to the production of medical supplies. In World War II, the economy switched from producing consumer goods to producing Tanks, armored vehicles, planes, Artillery, guns, bullets. That is what should be happening now with MEDICAL SUPPLIES until the PATHOGEN is defeated. If you're a patriot in this war and are not in an essential business, you suck it up and stay home! If non-essential services have to remain shut down until a vaccine is created to make it safe, then so be it. You take the hit and deal with the fallout later while in the meantime you save and protect lives and protect the healthcare system which everyone depends on.

6. H1N1 is not comparable to coronavirus. The Health and Science departments of nearly every country in the world would tell you that, which is why the current measures are in place around the world. Coronavirus is far more deadly and transmissible based on much of the data that has been available. You act on worst case situations in order to protect the people and the country as a whole. There is no reason to restart non-essential goods and services at this time. Defeat the Pathogen first. Then you can go back to business as usual.

7. As I write this, the United State is at 53,013 cases. Japan is at 1,193. The scale of Trump's failure in the early days of this crises grows by the day. Donald Trump now wants to compound the crises and get more people killed by re-opening non-essential business, just so you can see better numbers for himself. He is think about the rich and his re-election prospects, and not on protecting the American people. But Trump has a history of doing that. The Ukraine affair and his dealings with Russia showed that. Its about him, not America. That's why he has been impeached and if the Republican Senators had any sense of morality or standing up for America, or at least Reagan Republicans, they would have removed him from office earlier this year.
1. You state that the COVID-19 is much more deadly than H1N1, yet H1N1 had 12,500 US deaths and COVID-19 has 689. So your diagnosis is not valid. Don't cherry-pick data, WA does have a 5% death rate, but the disease hit old folks homes, not a wide cross-section of ages, so that 5% is very skewed.

2. As a matter of policy the doctors analyze the data, they do not "assume the worst". The data shows that the COVID-19 death rate in the US as a whole is about 0.7% currently, but that may be lower after more testing. About 80% of COVID-19 cases are very mild, in general the older you are the worse it is.

3. Here is a good link that argues to reopen the cities.

4. Trump needs to balance the "wants" of the doctors with the "needs" of the US economy. The doctors fight for every life, and the economy wants to run. I appreciate your points of concern, but as the link in #3 shows, there are smart ways to get back to work. Old people stay home, no crowds, and lots of PPE and medication until vaccines are developed. The virus will be back with a vengeance in the fall like any flu. We can't go thru another shutdown. Buckle-up buttercup, and stay safe.

5. We agree, except that our definitions of "non-essential services" will differ. My list is pretty short:
NO: sports venues, schools/colleges (all online), no concerts/plays, no cruises, etc.
Opening stores would require strict limits on shopper density with a greeter to take temps

6. See #1

7. Finally an honest rationale' to your thread.....its always been about trying to get Trump. No matter what you whine about it won't matter. I'm not sure if you're a democrat or a Never-Trump RINO, but if this COVID-19 pandemic didn't prove to you how right Trump has been about China and Wall Street's outsourcing of US factories you just don't get it. 95% of all US antibiotics are made in China, the other 5% are made in India. We don't manufacture critical components anymore. Many of Trump's supporters are labeled "populists" we call you folks "globalists" because you like manufacturing overseas. 2020 will be another round of populists vs globalists, please vote for US jobs.
 
World
We need an immediate five-week national lockdown to defeat coronavirus in America
Yaneer Bar-Yam, Opinion contributor
USA TODAY OpinionMarch 21, 2020, 11:30 AM EDT

I am an MIT-trained physicist and complexity scientist who studies pandemics. I have warned about global pandemics due to increasing travel for 15 years. I recommended community based monitoring of symptoms to stop Ebola in West Africa in 2014, and it worked. The fastest and even the only way to contain COVID-19 in the United States is a five-week national lockdown.
Closing schools, bars and movie theaters are good measures, but not enough. Our relaxed approach to social distancing is insufficient to stop the exponential growth of COVID-19. Until Americans consistently adopt strong social distancing recommendations — a lockdown — the disease will continue to spread exponentially.
During a five-week national lockdown, federal, state and local authorities would ensure that all Americans stay home except to obtain food and other essentials, access medical care, or do work essential to the functioning of society. Travel would cease: We would close our borders and airports and prohibit all unnecessary travel across state and county (or town) lines within the United States. The U.S. government would have to provide aid to citizens separated from their sources of income and ensure care for vulnerable members of society.
Lockdown would sharply reduce cases
During the first two weeks of a lockdown, infected individuals will either recover from mild cases of COVID-19 at home or seek medical attention for the 14% of cases that are severe. During the third, fourth and fifth weeks, any newly infected family or cohabitants of infected individuals will recover or seek medical attention and their isolation will prevent further spreading. By the end of the lockdown, the number of infections will be a small fraction of what they are now.

The lockdown will give us time to dramatically scale up our supply of COVID-19 test kits and capacity to process them. If we reduce the number of infections using the lockdown and start a massive testing regime in the United States, we can control COVID-19 after five weeks without such extreme social distancing measures. Isolating sick individuals and their immediate contacts will be enough.

The human and economic costs of delaying this lockdown will be staggering. The COVID-19 outbreak has many more cases now than are visible (tip of the iceberg) and they are growing rapidly. Absent sufficiently effective intervention, new cases will increase 1.3 to 1.5 times each day. We had almost 20,000 cases in the United States on Friday, over 5,800 more cases than the previous day. Without a lockdown, in one week there will be about 200,000. In two weeks: 2,000,000. One in seven cases require hospitalization and 5% require ICU care with ventilators to survive. There aren’t nearly enough ventilators available.

The effectiveness of a five-week lockdown will be dramatic — and also entirely predictable.

We know a U.S. lockdown can work because it worked in China. At the height of its COVID-19 crisis in mid-February, China had locked down an estimated 760 milllion people, approximately half of its population. This policy was so successful that Wuhan is now much safer from coronavirus than New York City or Washington, D.C. The few new COVID-19 cases in China now stem from foreign travelers rather than local transmission, and all are safely quarantined.

We know what we have to do. President Donald Trump and our states' governors and local leaders must act now to save millions of lives.

Yaneer Bar-Yam is the founding president of the New England Complex Systems Institute, where he is an expert on pandemics and other complex systems. He is spearheading the effort of over 3,000 volunteers working to stop the outbreak at endcoronavirus.org. Follow him on Twitter: @yaneerbaryam


United States Infections and deaths from Coronavirus as of February 29, 2020
Infections: 68
Deaths: 1

United States Infections and deaths from Coronavirus as of March 22, 2020
Infections: 35,000
Deaths: 458


The exponential rise in infections and deaths in just 3 weeks is incredible. Where will the United States be on April 23, 2020 without the lockdown proposed above?

It would be nice to think we could shutdown our economy for 5 weeks and survive as a country, but it is not reality. A 5 week lockdown is a case of the cure being worse than the disease

There is no other option. This is a disaster situation. The priority is survival, not making money. The entire economy will have to be refocused to fighting this war, just like it was during World War II.
Bullshit. We’ve endured worse pandemics before, and we didn’t shut down the whole nation.
Forcing businesses to shut down is wrong. Cracking down on people going to parks is wrong. Let people make up their own damned minds. But authoritarian asswipes can never let that happen.

Go to the park. Get infected from someone you come into contact with. You get sick with a mild case. Go to visit grandma and she dies.

I am not coming into contact with anyone at the park or the biking trails which my stupid city closed.

Neither am I. I have to mask up and stay as far away from everyone as possible. Some asshole goes to Florida on spring break, catches the virus, gives it to their brother, sister, Mom or Dad and they give it to my wife who then gives it to me. I am as good as dead.
that's been that way since forever. flu kills 20,000 and that didn't bother you before did it?

Coronavirus is 44 times more deadly than season flu. Seasonal flu has a vaccine you can take, coronavirus does NOT. When will you start to understand these basic facts?
H1N1 while not being as transmitable.....was a deadly Flu.....killing a hell of a lot more than this one has...........

It killed the young.......4000 Americans died in the 1st 6 months.......it killed by some estimates nearly 600,000 in the world..........A VACCINE was started within a FEW MONTHS.......

Now we have several VACCINES in the works within a few months again.........time will tell their success and how to manufacture so much of it is another problem.

WE CANNOT STAY SHUT DOWN FOR A VERY LONG TIME......IT WILL ECONOMICALLY DESTROY US AND THE WORLD.................Even with all of the people staying home...........we ONLY MINIMIZE THE SPREAD.......it's gonna keep coming back until medicine BEATS IT......or it runs it's course........

I do think once it gets MUGGY AND HOT down south....the spread will lessen.....I've shown SARS studies from the past already saying so.........Even though now they say it's NEW......LOL

SARs. .....isn't NEW.......NEITHER IS CORONA...........BOTH HAVE BEEN STUDIED........

This particular strain of corona is new. The alternative to a lockdown is mass death and the destruction of the health care system everyone depends when they become ill for other things. Defeating the pandemic and human survival are FAR MORE IMPORTANT than normal economic activity.

Its only the old economy that is shut down. A new economy is emerging to fight coronavirus just as a new economy emerged in the 1940s to fight World War II! Amazon.com is hiring 100,000 new workers. Shipping of essential services will continue.

"Mass death"

This is exactly what I mean. There actually WAS "mass death" from H1N1...the kind that you would undoubtedly be abjectly panicked about it it were COVID...to the tune of 60K in one season. We didn't shut one thing down.

As I have explained before, 60,000 is not mass death. 3 million people dead within a year is mass death.

1. H1N1 had a vaccine, Coronavirus does not.
2. Coronavirus is 44 times more deadly that seasonal flue
3. Coronavirus is a more dangerous pathogen than H1N1.

1. H1N1 had a vaccine AFTER the pandemic hit. Stop lying. Its stupid to have so many US deaths (12,500) if a vaccine was available. Stop lying.

2. COVID-19 is NOT 44x more lethal, than seasonal flu.
It may be up to 10x worse depending upon how many unreported cases there actually are.
"So the difference between a 0.1 percent and a 1.0 percent fatality rate could be 360,000 dead Americans. " (not 2,000,000)

I'm not lying! I got the vaccine myself in 2009 and so did the rest of my family. There are an average of 40,000 deaths from seasonal flu every year with the vaccine available. Unfortunately, 50% of people don't get their flu shot each year. A lot of people who died from H1N1 did not get their vaccine shot either.

In Italy, the death rate from coronavirus is nearly 10%. There are over 60,000 cases and over 6,000 deaths. I used the global figures to come up with the 4.4% death rate which is 44 times the death rate of seasonal flu.

If 60% of the U.S. population becomes infected with coronavirus, its estimated there will be 2,400,000 deaths from Coronavirus.

The best thing for the United States, from both a HEALTH and ECONOMIC perspective, is to defeat the PATHOGEN FIRST! Then you can focus on the economy. There are no half measures in defeating a PATHOGEN. Biology is a HARD SCIENCE unlike Economics. Trump should pay attention to the Doctors and Scientist on Epidemiology, not the idiots he appointed to run the economy.

1. I'm not saying you lied about the H1N1 vaccine, but when you "imply" that H1N1 didn't happen before the vaccine was available. H1N1 killed 12,500 Americans, then the vaccine came out. H1N1 hit from April thru September, then the vaccine came out in October. 2009 H1N1 Flu Pandemic Timeline

2. Why use global figures for COVID-19 instead of US CDC figures? Your numbers are way off.
The CDC says that the current mortality rate for COVID-19 is about 0.7% which might be lowered if/when therapies are approved such as Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine: what to know about the potential coronavirus drugs

3. Your 60% infection rate was explained at yesterday's presser by Dr. Birx. She said that the 60% would be over 3-years not one year. We should have a vaccine well before the 3rd year, and therapies well before next year. So your 2,400,000 US deaths is just wrong. If 3% of the US population gets COVID-19 that's about 10m infected, and if 0.007 of them die, that's about 70,000 not 2,400,000. So the death rate would be about the same as a bad regular flu, which is still a bad year.

4. We don't stop the economy for the regular flu, we need to get back to work, but in a smart way, with social distancing and hygiene, after the peak occurs.

1. I never said that we had a vaccine before the first cases of H1N1. I said we got a vaccine quick enough to respond to major spread issues and prevent a major problem. I had family members in older age groups and with underlying health conditions working in the K through 12 school system. They were never advised to stop working, although the emphasized it was important for them to get the vaccine. A vaccine was available before it became a major problem for people over age 60 and with underlying health conditions. The H1N1 situation is not comparable to coronavirus situation!

2. The United States does not have accurate figures thanks to Donald Trump because were way behind on testing. So its not accurate to use just the U.S. figures. Should we use Italian figures, or some other countries figures? No. So that is why for now I use the global figures. I don't trust any one country's particular figures. Again, it is far better to assume a worse death rate and be wrong than to underestimate a dangerous pathogen involved in a global pandemic.

3. I have seen estimates that show 2 million Americans could die before the end of 2020 without the lockdowns in place. You plan for worst case scenarios in a crises like this. Your sugar coating of the problem is the type of thing that gets people killed. As Anthony Fauci has said, its better to overestimate and overreact to a pandemic than to underestimate and under act to a pandemic. Its a global crises, and Trump cares more about the stock market than saving people's lives. Just more reason this idiot should never have been President.

4. This is not regular flu. Anyone who studies pandemics or the SCIENCE on this will tell you that. Your unscientific sugarcoating of this, risk getting millions of people killed. Look at what happened in Hong Kong would they lifted some of the restrictions. They got another wave of the coronavirus.

5. The Economy is not completely stopped. Essential services and production have continued. In addition, there has been huge expansion in certain sectors of the economy as the country refocuses on fighting this pandemic. Idiot Trump is risking killing more Americans by loosening restrictions against the advise of ALL HIS EXPERTS ON PANDEMICS!

6. Finally, lets be clear: Seasonal Flu is not a pandemic. THE CORONAVIRUS IS A PANDEMIC! There is no comparison between the two. The only people who claim there is, are people who are NOT professionals in studying pandemics and how to defeat them!
1. OK. My point is that the H1N1 casualties, 12,500 dead was before the vaccine was available. Hoping that COVID-19 deaths will be much lower.
2, Do the math, more testing means more cases, means that the denominator gets bigger and the death rate gets smaller. The 0.7% CDC currently states supersedes the 4.4% global death rate. So use the 0.7% not the 4.4%
3. Please post a link supporting the 2m US deaths in 2020. If you can't find a credible link stop posting nonsense. Your posts are generally unsupported bullshit, please try to debate using real facts, real links, not unsupported nonsense. Here is Dr. Fauci's early estimate, not 4.4%:
A Doctor’s Assessment of the COVID-19 Outbreak | National Review
"Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, wrote that because of the high number of unreported cases, “the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1% . . . ultimately more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%).”
(This is from Fauci, Lane, and Redfield, “Covid-19 — Navigating the Uncharted,” NEJM (2020 February 28): 1–2.)
4. All pandemics end, we can't hide in our safe rooms too long. The CDC doctors will tell us when its safe to come out.
5. Agree we do not want to play with fire. But we can't delay going back to work too long either.
When Trump haters like Paul Krugman support Trump's re-open when ready plan, you know the economy needs to re-start soon.
6. Was H1N1 a pandemic? What did we do back then? I don't recall shutting the counrty down for a month or two.
Let the doctors do their data analysis, and then when reasonably ready, start getting back to work.

1. H1N1 is not comparable to the coronavirus problem. The coronavirus is more deadly and more transmissible. That's why most countries in the world have instituted restriction that they didn't for H1N1. The listing of the total dead in a certain time frame is not an accurate way to compare coronavirus with H1N1. H1N1 ended almost 10 years ago. This Pandemic is new, far more deadly in terms of the chances of survival for those infected, and much more transmissible.

2. We don't know the exact death rate and won't no it until the crisis is over. There for you have to assume the worst case situation. Information from Washington state suggest a 5% death rate. The global figures suggest a 4.4% death rate. Yes, it may be lower than that, BUT AS A MATTER OF POLICY YOU NEVER ASSUME THAT, YOU ASSUME THE WORST BECAUSE PEOPLE'S LIVES ARE AT STAKE!

3. You don't post any links proving the economy some how needs to be re-opened again to non-essential services at all. I don't have the link but do remember reading the study that showed a worst case situation of 60% infection and 2.4 million dead over a year or two. I'm not going to have a handy link for every thing I post, and you've shown you certainly don't as well.

4. Have a link for that? Trump does is not paying attention to the medical professionals, he is paying attention to economist now. There is no acceptable reason that a non-essential goods or service should be re-opened while fighting a pandemic. That non-essential business is not more important than American lives. This is a war and you defeat the Pathogen before you re-open non-essential business.

5. Again, no link for this assumption. People in Essential services are still working. Other Business's are being converted to the production of medical supplies. In World War II, the economy switched from producing consumer goods to producing Tanks, armored vehicles, planes, Artillery, guns, bullets. That is what should be happening now with MEDICAL SUPPLIES until the PATHOGEN is defeated. If you're a patriot in this war and are not in an essential business, you suck it up and stay home! If non-essential services have to remain shut down until a vaccine is created to make it safe, then so be it. You take the hit and deal with the fallout later while in the meantime you save and protect lives and protect the healthcare system which everyone depends on.

6. H1N1 is not comparable to coronavirus. The Health and Science departments of nearly every country in the world would tell you that, which is why the current measures are in place around the world. Coronavirus is far more deadly and transmissible based on much of the data that has been available. You act on worst case situations in order to protect the people and the country as a whole. There is no reason to restart non-essential goods and services at this time. Defeat the Pathogen first. Then you can go back to business as usual.

7. As I write this, the United State is at 53,013 cases. Japan is at 1,193. The scale of Trump's failure in the early days of this crises grows by the day. Donald Trump now wants to compound the crises and get more people killed by re-opening non-essential business, just so you can see better numbers for himself. He is think about the rich and his re-election prospects, and not on protecting the American people. But Trump has a history of doing that. The Ukraine affair and his dealings with Russia showed that. Its about him, not America. That's why he has been impeached and if the Republican Senators had any sense of morality or standing up for America, or at least Reagan Republicans, they would have removed him from office earlier this year.
1. You state that the COVID-19 is much more deadly than H1N1, yet H1N1 had 12,500 US deaths and COVID-19 has 689. So your diagnosis is not valid. Don't cherry-pick data, WA does have a 5% death rate, but the disease hit old folks homes, not a wide cross-section of ages, so that 5% is very skewed.

2. As a matter of policy the doctors analyze the data, they do not "assume the worst". The data shows that the COVID-19 death rate in the US as a whole is about 0.7% currently, but that may be lower after more testing. About 80% of COVID-19 cases are very mild, in general the older you are the worse it is.

3. Here is a good link that argues to reopen the cities.

4. Trump needs to balance the "wants" of the doctors with the "needs" of the US economy. The doctors fight for every life, and the economy wants to run. I appreciate your points of concern, but as the link in #3 shows, there are smart ways to get back to work. Old people stay home, no crowds, and lots of PPE and medication until vaccines are developed. The virus will be back with a vengeance in the fall like any flu. We can't go thru another shutdown. Buckle-up buttercup, and stay safe.

5. We agree, except that our definitions of "non-essential services" will differ. My list is pretty short:
NO: sports venues, schools/colleges (all online), no concerts/plays, no cruises, etc.
Opening stores would require strict limits on shopper density with a greeter to take temps

6. See #1

7. Finally an honest rationale' to your thread.....its always been about trying to get Trump. No matter what you whine about it won't matter. I'm not sure if you're a democrat or a Never-Trump RINO, but if this COVID-19 pandemic didn't prove to you how right Trump has been about China and Wall Street's outsourcing of US factories you just don't get it. 95% of all US antibiotics are made in China, the other 5% are made in India. We don't manufacture critical components anymore. Many of Trump's supporters are labeled "populists" we call you folks "globalists" because you like manufacturing overseas. 2020 will be another round of populists vs globalists, please vote for US jobs.

1. Again, there is no comparison to H1N1, plus that is not how you calculate a death rate or how deadly a pathogen is. Were at the start of coronavirus, you can be comparing total deaths from coronavirus to any other episode in history. Why? Because it just started. So any comparison you make like that is grossly inaccurate. Think of what the death rate for ebola is! They don't calculate it by the raw total number of deaths. Its number of deaths divided by the number of infections.

As for the death rate with coronavirus, better to go with the worst case projections than something hopeful you cherry picked. In a WAR, you plan for the worse case PERIOD!

2. In a pandemic when much is not known, you do assume the worse case. Take Dr. Fauci on the issue. "Its better to overreact in this circumstance than be wrong and under act.

3. What does Dr. Fauci think about that?

4. Again, there is no evidence that the country can't shut down non-essential services for 6 months or three years. Its a War, you do what you have to do to fight it. That's what happened in World War II! That shows there is no relative problem with shutting these non-essential services down. Its what you do in a WAR!

5. Again, this is a war with the a pandemic. Biology is a hard science. Economics is not. World War II proved that American society can go without non-essential services for years!

7. China is doing so well against Covid that they have nearly defeated the virus. But they have had shut downs for months that have been extreme to get where they are today. The number of active cases in China is now below 5,000. They are thinking about opening movie theaters in China by May. The Chinese only fear now is that their going to get re-infected by the United States because of the Donald Trump's dumb policies in fighting the pathogen.

But I guess according to you, the China should be done as a nation because their country was on lock down for too long! Wrong again! If China's economy can survive such extreme lock down measures, any economy can.
 
By the way, the link is not pushing for re-opening cities NOW, its talking about how cities can re-open AFTER the pathogen has been defeated!
 
World
We need an immediate five-week national lockdown to defeat coronavirus in America
Yaneer Bar-Yam, Opinion contributor
USA TODAY OpinionMarch 21, 2020, 11:30 AM EDT

I am an MIT-trained physicist and complexity scientist who studies pandemics. I have warned about global pandemics due to increasing travel for 15 years. I recommended community based monitoring of symptoms to stop Ebola in West Africa in 2014, and it worked. The fastest and even the only way to contain COVID-19 in the United States is a five-week national lockdown.
Closing schools, bars and movie theaters are good measures, but not enough. Our relaxed approach to social distancing is insufficient to stop the exponential growth of COVID-19. Until Americans consistently adopt strong social distancing recommendations — a lockdown — the disease will continue to spread exponentially.
During a five-week national lockdown, federal, state and local authorities would ensure that all Americans stay home except to obtain food and other essentials, access medical care, or do work essential to the functioning of society. Travel would cease: We would close our borders and airports and prohibit all unnecessary travel across state and county (or town) lines within the United States. The U.S. government would have to provide aid to citizens separated from their sources of income and ensure care for vulnerable members of society.
Lockdown would sharply reduce cases
During the first two weeks of a lockdown, infected individuals will either recover from mild cases of COVID-19 at home or seek medical attention for the 14% of cases that are severe. During the third, fourth and fifth weeks, any newly infected family or cohabitants of infected individuals will recover or seek medical attention and their isolation will prevent further spreading. By the end of the lockdown, the number of infections will be a small fraction of what they are now.

The lockdown will give us time to dramatically scale up our supply of COVID-19 test kits and capacity to process them. If we reduce the number of infections using the lockdown and start a massive testing regime in the United States, we can control COVID-19 after five weeks without such extreme social distancing measures. Isolating sick individuals and their immediate contacts will be enough.

The human and economic costs of delaying this lockdown will be staggering. The COVID-19 outbreak has many more cases now than are visible (tip of the iceberg) and they are growing rapidly. Absent sufficiently effective intervention, new cases will increase 1.3 to 1.5 times each day. We had almost 20,000 cases in the United States on Friday, over 5,800 more cases than the previous day. Without a lockdown, in one week there will be about 200,000. In two weeks: 2,000,000. One in seven cases require hospitalization and 5% require ICU care with ventilators to survive. There aren’t nearly enough ventilators available.

The effectiveness of a five-week lockdown will be dramatic — and also entirely predictable.

We know a U.S. lockdown can work because it worked in China. At the height of its COVID-19 crisis in mid-February, China had locked down an estimated 760 milllion people, approximately half of its population. This policy was so successful that Wuhan is now much safer from coronavirus than New York City or Washington, D.C. The few new COVID-19 cases in China now stem from foreign travelers rather than local transmission, and all are safely quarantined.

We know what we have to do. President Donald Trump and our states' governors and local leaders must act now to save millions of lives.

Yaneer Bar-Yam is the founding president of the New England Complex Systems Institute, where he is an expert on pandemics and other complex systems. He is spearheading the effort of over 3,000 volunteers working to stop the outbreak at endcoronavirus.org. Follow him on Twitter: @yaneerbaryam


United States Infections and deaths from Coronavirus as of February 29, 2020
Infections: 68
Deaths: 1

United States Infections and deaths from Coronavirus as of March 22, 2020
Infections: 35,000
Deaths: 458


The exponential rise in infections and deaths in just 3 weeks is incredible. Where will the United States be on April 23, 2020 without the lockdown proposed above?

It would be nice to think we could shutdown our economy for 5 weeks and survive as a country, but it is not reality. A 5 week lockdown is a case of the cure being worse than the disease

There is no other option. This is a disaster situation. The priority is survival, not making money. The entire economy will have to be refocused to fighting this war, just like it was during World War II.
Bullshit. We’ve endured worse pandemics before, and we didn’t shut down the whole nation.
Forcing businesses to shut down is wrong. Cracking down on people going to parks is wrong. Let people make up their own damned minds. But authoritarian asswipes can never let that happen.

Go to the park. Get infected from someone you come into contact with. You get sick with a mild case. Go to visit grandma and she dies.

I am not coming into contact with anyone at the park or the biking trails which my stupid city closed.

Neither am I. I have to mask up and stay as far away from everyone as possible. Some asshole goes to Florida on spring break, catches the virus, gives it to their brother, sister, Mom or Dad and they give it to my wife who then gives it to me. I am as good as dead.
that's been that way since forever. flu kills 20,000 and that didn't bother you before did it?

Coronavirus is 44 times more deadly than season flu. Seasonal flu has a vaccine you can take, coronavirus does NOT. When will you start to understand these basic facts?
H1N1 while not being as transmitable.....was a deadly Flu.....killing a hell of a lot more than this one has...........

It killed the young.......4000 Americans died in the 1st 6 months.......it killed by some estimates nearly 600,000 in the world..........A VACCINE was started within a FEW MONTHS.......

Now we have several VACCINES in the works within a few months again.........time will tell their success and how to manufacture so much of it is another problem.

WE CANNOT STAY SHUT DOWN FOR A VERY LONG TIME......IT WILL ECONOMICALLY DESTROY US AND THE WORLD.................Even with all of the people staying home...........we ONLY MINIMIZE THE SPREAD.......it's gonna keep coming back until medicine BEATS IT......or it runs it's course........

I do think once it gets MUGGY AND HOT down south....the spread will lessen.....I've shown SARS studies from the past already saying so.........Even though now they say it's NEW......LOL

SARs. .....isn't NEW.......NEITHER IS CORONA...........BOTH HAVE BEEN STUDIED........

This particular strain of corona is new. The alternative to a lockdown is mass death and the destruction of the health care system everyone depends when they become ill for other things. Defeating the pandemic and human survival are FAR MORE IMPORTANT than normal economic activity.

Its only the old economy that is shut down. A new economy is emerging to fight coronavirus just as a new economy emerged in the 1940s to fight World War II! Amazon.com is hiring 100,000 new workers. Shipping of essential services will continue.

"Mass death"

This is exactly what I mean. There actually WAS "mass death" from H1N1...the kind that you would undoubtedly be abjectly panicked about it it were COVID...to the tune of 60K in one season. We didn't shut one thing down.

As I have explained before, 60,000 is not mass death. 3 million people dead within a year is mass death.

1. H1N1 had a vaccine, Coronavirus does not.
2. Coronavirus is 44 times more deadly that seasonal flue
3. Coronavirus is a more dangerous pathogen than H1N1.

1. H1N1 had a vaccine AFTER the pandemic hit. Stop lying. Its stupid to have so many US deaths (12,500) if a vaccine was available. Stop lying.

2. COVID-19 is NOT 44x more lethal, than seasonal flu.
It may be up to 10x worse depending upon how many unreported cases there actually are.
"So the difference between a 0.1 percent and a 1.0 percent fatality rate could be 360,000 dead Americans. " (not 2,000,000)

I'm not lying! I got the vaccine myself in 2009 and so did the rest of my family. There are an average of 40,000 deaths from seasonal flu every year with the vaccine available. Unfortunately, 50% of people don't get their flu shot each year. A lot of people who died from H1N1 did not get their vaccine shot either.

In Italy, the death rate from coronavirus is nearly 10%. There are over 60,000 cases and over 6,000 deaths. I used the global figures to come up with the 4.4% death rate which is 44 times the death rate of seasonal flu.

If 60% of the U.S. population becomes infected with coronavirus, its estimated there will be 2,400,000 deaths from Coronavirus.

The best thing for the United States, from both a HEALTH and ECONOMIC perspective, is to defeat the PATHOGEN FIRST! Then you can focus on the economy. There are no half measures in defeating a PATHOGEN. Biology is a HARD SCIENCE unlike Economics. Trump should pay attention to the Doctors and Scientist on Epidemiology, not the idiots he appointed to run the economy.

1. I'm not saying you lied about the H1N1 vaccine, but when you "imply" that H1N1 didn't happen before the vaccine was available. H1N1 killed 12,500 Americans, then the vaccine came out. H1N1 hit from April thru September, then the vaccine came out in October. 2009 H1N1 Flu Pandemic Timeline

2. Why use global figures for COVID-19 instead of US CDC figures? Your numbers are way off.
The CDC says that the current mortality rate for COVID-19 is about 0.7% which might be lowered if/when therapies are approved such as Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine: what to know about the potential coronavirus drugs

3. Your 60% infection rate was explained at yesterday's presser by Dr. Birx. She said that the 60% would be over 3-years not one year. We should have a vaccine well before the 3rd year, and therapies well before next year. So your 2,400,000 US deaths is just wrong. If 3% of the US population gets COVID-19 that's about 10m infected, and if 0.007 of them die, that's about 70,000 not 2,400,000. So the death rate would be about the same as a bad regular flu, which is still a bad year.

4. We don't stop the economy for the regular flu, we need to get back to work, but in a smart way, with social distancing and hygiene, after the peak occurs.

1. I never said that we had a vaccine before the first cases of H1N1. I said we got a vaccine quick enough to respond to major spread issues and prevent a major problem. I had family members in older age groups and with underlying health conditions working in the K through 12 school system. They were never advised to stop working, although the emphasized it was important for them to get the vaccine. A vaccine was available before it became a major problem for people over age 60 and with underlying health conditions. The H1N1 situation is not comparable to coronavirus situation!

2. The United States does not have accurate figures thanks to Donald Trump because were way behind on testing. So its not accurate to use just the U.S. figures. Should we use Italian figures, or some other countries figures? No. So that is why for now I use the global figures. I don't trust any one country's particular figures. Again, it is far better to assume a worse death rate and be wrong than to underestimate a dangerous pathogen involved in a global pandemic.

3. I have seen estimates that show 2 million Americans could die before the end of 2020 without the lockdowns in place. You plan for worst case scenarios in a crises like this. Your sugar coating of the problem is the type of thing that gets people killed. As Anthony Fauci has said, its better to overestimate and overreact to a pandemic than to underestimate and under act to a pandemic. Its a global crises, and Trump cares more about the stock market than saving people's lives. Just more reason this idiot should never have been President.

4. This is not regular flu. Anyone who studies pandemics or the SCIENCE on this will tell you that. Your unscientific sugarcoating of this, risk getting millions of people killed. Look at what happened in Hong Kong would they lifted some of the restrictions. They got another wave of the coronavirus.

5. The Economy is not completely stopped. Essential services and production have continued. In addition, there has been huge expansion in certain sectors of the economy as the country refocuses on fighting this pandemic. Idiot Trump is risking killing more Americans by loosening restrictions against the advise of ALL HIS EXPERTS ON PANDEMICS!

6. Finally, lets be clear: Seasonal Flu is not a pandemic. THE CORONAVIRUS IS A PANDEMIC! There is no comparison between the two. The only people who claim there is, are people who are NOT professionals in studying pandemics and how to defeat them!
1. OK. My point is that the H1N1 casualties, 12,500 dead was before the vaccine was available. Hoping that COVID-19 deaths will be much lower.
2, Do the math, more testing means more cases, means that the denominator gets bigger and the death rate gets smaller. The 0.7% CDC currently states supersedes the 4.4% global death rate. So use the 0.7% not the 4.4%
3. Please post a link supporting the 2m US deaths in 2020. If you can't find a credible link stop posting nonsense. Your posts are generally unsupported bullshit, please try to debate using real facts, real links, not unsupported nonsense. Here is Dr. Fauci's early estimate, not 4.4%:
A Doctor’s Assessment of the COVID-19 Outbreak | National Review
"Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, wrote that because of the high number of unreported cases, “the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1% . . . ultimately more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%).”
(This is from Fauci, Lane, and Redfield, “Covid-19 — Navigating the Uncharted,” NEJM (2020 February 28): 1–2.)
4. All pandemics end, we can't hide in our safe rooms too long. The CDC doctors will tell us when its safe to come out.
5. Agree we do not want to play with fire. But we can't delay going back to work too long either.
When Trump haters like Paul Krugman support Trump's re-open when ready plan, you know the economy needs to re-start soon.
6. Was H1N1 a pandemic? What did we do back then? I don't recall shutting the counrty down for a month or two.
Let the doctors do their data analysis, and then when reasonably ready, start getting back to work.

1. H1N1 is not comparable to the coronavirus problem. The coronavirus is more deadly and more transmissible. That's why most countries in the world have instituted restriction that they didn't for H1N1. The listing of the total dead in a certain time frame is not an accurate way to compare coronavirus with H1N1. H1N1 ended almost 10 years ago. This Pandemic is new, far more deadly in terms of the chances of survival for those infected, and much more transmissible.

2. We don't know the exact death rate and won't no it until the crisis is over. There for you have to assume the worst case situation. Information from Washington state suggest a 5% death rate. The global figures suggest a 4.4% death rate. Yes, it may be lower than that, BUT AS A MATTER OF POLICY YOU NEVER ASSUME THAT, YOU ASSUME THE WORST BECAUSE PEOPLE'S LIVES ARE AT STAKE!

3. You don't post any links proving the economy some how needs to be re-opened again to non-essential services at all. I don't have the link but do remember reading the study that showed a worst case situation of 60% infection and 2.4 million dead over a year or two. I'm not going to have a handy link for every thing I post, and you've shown you certainly don't as well.

4. Have a link for that? Trump does is not paying attention to the medical professionals, he is paying attention to economist now. There is no acceptable reason that a non-essential goods or service should be re-opened while fighting a pandemic. That non-essential business is not more important than American lives. This is a war and you defeat the Pathogen before you re-open non-essential business.

5. Again, no link for this assumption. People in Essential services are still working. Other Business's are being converted to the production of medical supplies. In World War II, the economy switched from producing consumer goods to producing Tanks, armored vehicles, planes, Artillery, guns, bullets. That is what should be happening now with MEDICAL SUPPLIES until the PATHOGEN is defeated. If you're a patriot in this war and are not in an essential business, you suck it up and stay home! If non-essential services have to remain shut down until a vaccine is created to make it safe, then so be it. You take the hit and deal with the fallout later while in the meantime you save and protect lives and protect the healthcare system which everyone depends on.

6. H1N1 is not comparable to coronavirus. The Health and Science departments of nearly every country in the world would tell you that, which is why the current measures are in place around the world. Coronavirus is far more deadly and transmissible based on much of the data that has been available. You act on worst case situations in order to protect the people and the country as a whole. There is no reason to restart non-essential goods and services at this time. Defeat the Pathogen first. Then you can go back to business as usual.

7. As I write this, the United State is at 53,013 cases. Japan is at 1,193. The scale of Trump's failure in the early days of this crises grows by the day. Donald Trump now wants to compound the crises and get more people killed by re-opening non-essential business, just so you can see better numbers for himself. He is think about the rich and his re-election prospects, and not on protecting the American people. But Trump has a history of doing that. The Ukraine affair and his dealings with Russia showed that. Its about him, not America. That's why he has been impeached and if the Republican Senators had any sense of morality or standing up for America, or at least Reagan Republicans, they would have removed him from office earlier this year.
1. You state that the COVID-19 is much more deadly than H1N1, yet H1N1 had 12,500 US deaths and COVID-19 has 689. So your diagnosis is not valid. Don't cherry-pick data, WA does have a 5% death rate, but the disease hit old folks homes, not a wide cross-section of ages, so that 5% is very skewed.

2. As a matter of policy the doctors analyze the data, they do not "assume the worst". The data shows that the COVID-19 death rate in the US as a whole is about 0.7% currently, but that may be lower after more testing. About 80% of COVID-19 cases are very mild, in general the older you are the worse it is.

3. Here is a good link that argues to reopen the cities.

4. Trump needs to balance the "wants" of the doctors with the "needs" of the US economy. The doctors fight for every life, and the economy wants to run. I appreciate your points of concern, but as the link in #3 shows, there are smart ways to get back to work. Old people stay home, no crowds, and lots of PPE and medication until vaccines are developed. The virus will be back with a vengeance in the fall like any flu. We can't go thru another shutdown. Buckle-up buttercup, and stay safe.

5. We agree, except that our definitions of "non-essential services" will differ. My list is pretty short:
NO: sports venues, schools/colleges (all online), no concerts/plays, no cruises, etc.
Opening stores would require strict limits on shopper density with a greeter to take temps

6. See #1

7. Finally an honest rationale' to your thread.....its always been about trying to get Trump. No matter what you whine about it won't matter. I'm not sure if you're a democrat or a Never-Trump RINO, but if this COVID-19 pandemic didn't prove to you how right Trump has been about China and Wall Street's outsourcing of US factories you just don't get it. 95% of all US antibiotics are made in China, the other 5% are made in India. We don't manufacture critical components anymore. Many of Trump's supporters are labeled "populists" we call you folks "globalists" because you like manufacturing overseas. 2020 will be another round of populists vs globalists, please vote for US jobs.

1. Again, there is no comparison to H1N1, plus that is not how you calculate a death rate or how deadly a pathogen is. Were at the start of coronavirus, you can be comparing total deaths from coronavirus to any other episode in history. Why? Because it just started. So any comparison you make like that is grossly inaccurate. Think of what the death rate for ebola is! They don't calculate it by the raw total number of deaths. Its number of deaths divided by the number of infections.

As for the death rate with coronavirus, better to go with the worst case projections than something hopeful you cherry picked. In a WAR, you plan for the worse case PERIOD!

2. In a pandemic when much is not known, you do assume the worse case. Take Dr. Fauci on the issue. "Its better to overreact in this circumstance than be wrong and under act.

3. What does Dr. Fauci think about that?

4. Again, there is no evidence that the country can't shut down non-essential services for 6 months or three years. Its a War, you do what you have to do to fight it. That's what happened in World War II! That shows there is no relative problem with shutting these non-essential services down. Its what you do in a WAR!

5. Again, this is a war with the a pandemic. Biology is a hard science. Economics is not. World War II proved that American society can go without non-essential services for years!

7. China is doing so well against Covid that they have nearly defeated the virus. But they have had shut downs for months that have been extreme to get where they are today. The number of active cases in China is now below 5,000. They are thinking about opening movie theaters in China by May. The Chinese only fear now is that their going to get re-infected by the United States because of the Donald Trump's dumb policies in fighting the pathogen.

But I guess according to you, the China should be done as a nation because their country was on lock down for too long! Wrong again! If China's economy can survive such extreme lock down measures, any economy can.
1. Yes I can compare H1N1 to COVID-19 its easy, H1N1 killed 12,500 and COVID-19 killed 689 so far, even though H1N1 is a "flu" and COVID-19 is a "viral pneumonia".

2. The CDC and Dr. Fauci are working hard to defeat COVID-19. There is no "official US death rate" yet but according to Dr. Fauci, it should end up less than 1%. (Not 4.4%)

3. Dr. Fauci is looking at the data. He and his team will make a recommendation, Trump will consider their recommendation and then make the decision. That's what a president is elected to do, make the tough decisions.

4. Its a multi-front war. The virus and the economy. Either one can cause many casualties if not given enough attention. There are economic realities that say that the US needs to go back to work and pay its bills. There are no free rides.

5. See #4

7. China still has to deal with the virus until they get the vaccine, I wouldn't do a touchdown dance just yet. However, I would celebrate their reopening their economy except for movies and large groups until May.
 
And, as an added bonus, the Democrats,, the media, and their useful idiots can - and most assuredly will - gleefully blame Trump for the millions of new jobless claims every week, the millions of job losses each month, the collapse of the stock market and the double -digit contraction of the economy over two quarters.

Win at every cost, see - who cares if a hundred million Americans have to suffer?

Trump dismissed this crises throughout January and February. Now the shit has it the fan. Were playing catch on the work Trump should have done in January and February. Its thanks to Trump that we have 53,000 cases now while a country near China like Japan only has 1,193.
Thank you for proving my point.
 
I bet it will be something more than 5 weeks. I live in Spain and it is almost a month we have been locked. They suppose the thing will start easing up only mid May.
 
World
We need an immediate five-week national lockdown to defeat coronavirus in America
Yaneer Bar-Yam, Opinion contributor
USA TODAY OpinionMarch 21, 2020, 11:30 AM EDT

I am an MIT-trained physicist and complexity scientist who studies pandemics. I have warned about global pandemics due to increasing travel for 15 years. I recommended community based monitoring of symptoms to stop Ebola in West Africa in 2014, and it worked. The fastest and even the only way to contain COVID-19 in the United States is a five-week national lockdown.
Closing schools, bars and movie theaters are good measures, but not enough. Our relaxed approach to social distancing is insufficient to stop the exponential growth of COVID-19. Until Americans consistently adopt strong social distancing recommendations — a lockdown — the disease will continue to spread exponentially.
During a five-week national lockdown, federal, state and local authorities would ensure that all Americans stay home except to obtain food and other essentials, access medical care, or do work essential to the functioning of society. Travel would cease: We would close our borders and airports and prohibit all unnecessary travel across state and county (or town) lines within the United States. The U.S. government would have to provide aid to citizens separated from their sources of income and ensure care for vulnerable members of society.
Lockdown would sharply reduce cases
During the first two weeks of a lockdown, infected individuals will either recover from mild cases of COVID-19 at home or seek medical attention for the 14% of cases that are severe. During the third, fourth and fifth weeks, any newly infected family or cohabitants of infected individuals will recover or seek medical attention and their isolation will prevent further spreading. By the end of the lockdown, the number of infections will be a small fraction of what they are now.

The lockdown will give us time to dramatically scale up our supply of COVID-19 test kits and capacity to process them. If we reduce the number of infections using the lockdown and start a massive testing regime in the United States, we can control COVID-19 after five weeks without such extreme social distancing measures. Isolating sick individuals and their immediate contacts will be enough.

The human and economic costs of delaying this lockdown will be staggering. The COVID-19 outbreak has many more cases now than are visible (tip of the iceberg) and they are growing rapidly. Absent sufficiently effective intervention, new cases will increase 1.3 to 1.5 times each day. We had almost 20,000 cases in the United States on Friday, over 5,800 more cases than the previous day. Without a lockdown, in one week there will be about 200,000. In two weeks: 2,000,000. One in seven cases require hospitalization and 5% require ICU care with ventilators to survive. There aren’t nearly enough ventilators available.

The effectiveness of a five-week lockdown will be dramatic — and also entirely predictable.

We know a U.S. lockdown can work because it worked in China. At the height of its COVID-19 crisis in mid-February, China had locked down an estimated 760 milllion people, approximately half of its population. This policy was so successful that Wuhan is now much safer from coronavirus than New York City or Washington, D.C. The few new COVID-19 cases in China now stem from foreign travelers rather than local transmission, and all are safely quarantined.

We know what we have to do. President Donald Trump and our states' governors and local leaders must act now to save millions of lives.

Yaneer Bar-Yam is the founding president of the New England Complex Systems Institute, where he is an expert on pandemics and other complex systems. He is spearheading the effort of over 3,000 volunteers working to stop the outbreak at endcoronavirus.org. Follow him on Twitter: @yaneerbaryam


United States Infections and deaths from Coronavirus as of February 29, 2020
Infections: 68
Deaths: 1

United States Infections and deaths from Coronavirus as of March 22, 2020
Infections: 35,000
Deaths: 458


The exponential rise in infections and deaths in just 3 weeks is incredible. Where will the United States be on April 23, 2020 without the lockdown proposed above?

It would be nice to think we could shutdown our economy for 5 weeks and survive as a country, but it is not reality. A 5 week lockdown is a case of the cure being worse than the disease

There is no other option. This is a disaster situation. The priority is survival, not making money. The entire economy will have to be refocused to fighting this war, just like it was during World War II.
Bullshit. We’ve endured worse pandemics before, and we didn’t shut down the whole nation.
Forcing businesses to shut down is wrong. Cracking down on people going to parks is wrong. Let people make up their own damned minds. But authoritarian asswipes can never let that happen.

Go to the park. Get infected from someone you come into contact with. You get sick with a mild case. Go to visit grandma and she dies.

I am not coming into contact with anyone at the park or the biking trails which my stupid city closed.

Neither am I. I have to mask up and stay as far away from everyone as possible. Some asshole goes to Florida on spring break, catches the virus, gives it to their brother, sister, Mom or Dad and they give it to my wife who then gives it to me. I am as good as dead.
that's been that way since forever. flu kills 20,000 and that didn't bother you before did it?

Coronavirus is 44 times more deadly than season flu. Seasonal flu has a vaccine you can take, coronavirus does NOT. When will you start to understand these basic facts?
H1N1 while not being as transmitable.....was a deadly Flu.....killing a hell of a lot more than this one has...........

It killed the young.......4000 Americans died in the 1st 6 months.......it killed by some estimates nearly 600,000 in the world..........A VACCINE was started within a FEW MONTHS.......

Now we have several VACCINES in the works within a few months again.........time will tell their success and how to manufacture so much of it is another problem.

WE CANNOT STAY SHUT DOWN FOR A VERY LONG TIME......IT WILL ECONOMICALLY DESTROY US AND THE WORLD.................Even with all of the people staying home...........we ONLY MINIMIZE THE SPREAD.......it's gonna keep coming back until medicine BEATS IT......or it runs it's course........

I do think once it gets MUGGY AND HOT down south....the spread will lessen.....I've shown SARS studies from the past already saying so.........Even though now they say it's NEW......LOL

SARs. .....isn't NEW.......NEITHER IS CORONA...........BOTH HAVE BEEN STUDIED........

This particular strain of corona is new. The alternative to a lockdown is mass death and the destruction of the health care system everyone depends when they become ill for other things. Defeating the pandemic and human survival are FAR MORE IMPORTANT than normal economic activity.

Its only the old economy that is shut down. A new economy is emerging to fight coronavirus just as a new economy emerged in the 1940s to fight World War II! Amazon.com is hiring 100,000 new workers. Shipping of essential services will continue.

"Mass death"

This is exactly what I mean. There actually WAS "mass death" from H1N1...the kind that you would undoubtedly be abjectly panicked about it it were COVID...to the tune of 60K in one season. We didn't shut one thing down.

As I have explained before, 60,000 is not mass death. 3 million people dead within a year is mass death.

1. H1N1 had a vaccine, Coronavirus does not.
2. Coronavirus is 44 times more deadly that seasonal flue
3. Coronavirus is a more dangerous pathogen than H1N1.

1. H1N1 had a vaccine AFTER the pandemic hit. Stop lying. Its stupid to have so many US deaths (12,500) if a vaccine was available. Stop lying.

2. COVID-19 is NOT 44x more lethal, than seasonal flu.
It may be up to 10x worse depending upon how many unreported cases there actually are.
"So the difference between a 0.1 percent and a 1.0 percent fatality rate could be 360,000 dead Americans. " (not 2,000,000)

I'm not lying! I got the vaccine myself in 2009 and so did the rest of my family. There are an average of 40,000 deaths from seasonal flu every year with the vaccine available. Unfortunately, 50% of people don't get their flu shot each year. A lot of people who died from H1N1 did not get their vaccine shot either.

In Italy, the death rate from coronavirus is nearly 10%. There are over 60,000 cases and over 6,000 deaths. I used the global figures to come up with the 4.4% death rate which is 44 times the death rate of seasonal flu.

If 60% of the U.S. population becomes infected with coronavirus, its estimated there will be 2,400,000 deaths from Coronavirus.

The best thing for the United States, from both a HEALTH and ECONOMIC perspective, is to defeat the PATHOGEN FIRST! Then you can focus on the economy. There are no half measures in defeating a PATHOGEN. Biology is a HARD SCIENCE unlike Economics. Trump should pay attention to the Doctors and Scientist on Epidemiology, not the idiots he appointed to run the economy.

1. I'm not saying you lied about the H1N1 vaccine, but when you "imply" that H1N1 didn't happen before the vaccine was available. H1N1 killed 12,500 Americans, then the vaccine came out. H1N1 hit from April thru September, then the vaccine came out in October. 2009 H1N1 Flu Pandemic Timeline

2. Why use global figures for COVID-19 instead of US CDC figures? Your numbers are way off.
The CDC says that the current mortality rate for COVID-19 is about 0.7% which might be lowered if/when therapies are approved such as Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine: what to know about the potential coronavirus drugs

3. Your 60% infection rate was explained at yesterday's presser by Dr. Birx. She said that the 60% would be over 3-years not one year. We should have a vaccine well before the 3rd year, and therapies well before next year. So your 2,400,000 US deaths is just wrong. If 3% of the US population gets COVID-19 that's about 10m infected, and if 0.007 of them die, that's about 70,000 not 2,400,000. So the death rate would be about the same as a bad regular flu, which is still a bad year.

4. We don't stop the economy for the regular flu, we need to get back to work, but in a smart way, with social distancing and hygiene, after the peak occurs.

1. I never said that we had a vaccine before the first cases of H1N1. I said we got a vaccine quick enough to respond to major spread issues and prevent a major problem. I had family members in older age groups and with underlying health conditions working in the K through 12 school system. They were never advised to stop working, although the emphasized it was important for them to get the vaccine. A vaccine was available before it became a major problem for people over age 60 and with underlying health conditions. The H1N1 situation is not comparable to coronavirus situation!

2. The United States does not have accurate figures thanks to Donald Trump because were way behind on testing. So its not accurate to use just the U.S. figures. Should we use Italian figures, or some other countries figures? No. So that is why for now I use the global figures. I don't trust any one country's particular figures. Again, it is far better to assume a worse death rate and be wrong than to underestimate a dangerous pathogen involved in a global pandemic.

3. I have seen estimates that show 2 million Americans could die before the end of 2020 without the lockdowns in place. You plan for worst case scenarios in a crises like this. Your sugar coating of the problem is the type of thing that gets people killed. As Anthony Fauci has said, its better to overestimate and overreact to a pandemic than to underestimate and under act to a pandemic. Its a global crises, and Trump cares more about the stock market than saving people's lives. Just more reason this idiot should never have been President.

4. This is not regular flu. Anyone who studies pandemics or the SCIENCE on this will tell you that. Your unscientific sugarcoating of this, risk getting millions of people killed. Look at what happened in Hong Kong would they lifted some of the restrictions. They got another wave of the coronavirus.

5. The Economy is not completely stopped. Essential services and production have continued. In addition, there has been huge expansion in certain sectors of the economy as the country refocuses on fighting this pandemic. Idiot Trump is risking killing more Americans by loosening restrictions against the advise of ALL HIS EXPERTS ON PANDEMICS!

6. Finally, lets be clear: Seasonal Flu is not a pandemic. THE CORONAVIRUS IS A PANDEMIC! There is no comparison between the two. The only people who claim there is, are people who are NOT professionals in studying pandemics and how to defeat them!
1. OK. My point is that the H1N1 casualties, 12,500 dead was before the vaccine was available. Hoping that COVID-19 deaths will be much lower.
2, Do the math, more testing means more cases, means that the denominator gets bigger and the death rate gets smaller. The 0.7% CDC currently states supersedes the 4.4% global death rate. So use the 0.7% not the 4.4%
3. Please post a link supporting the 2m US deaths in 2020. If you can't find a credible link stop posting nonsense. Your posts are generally unsupported bullshit, please try to debate using real facts, real links, not unsupported nonsense. Here is Dr. Fauci's early estimate, not 4.4%:
A Doctor’s Assessment of the COVID-19 Outbreak | National Review
"Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, wrote that because of the high number of unreported cases, “the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1% . . . ultimately more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%).”
(This is from Fauci, Lane, and Redfield, “Covid-19 — Navigating the Uncharted,” NEJM (2020 February 28): 1–2.)
4. All pandemics end, we can't hide in our safe rooms too long. The CDC doctors will tell us when its safe to come out.
5. Agree we do not want to play with fire. But we can't delay going back to work too long either.
When Trump haters like Paul Krugman support Trump's re-open when ready plan, you know the economy needs to re-start soon.
6. Was H1N1 a pandemic? What did we do back then? I don't recall shutting the counrty down for a month or two.
Let the doctors do their data analysis, and then when reasonably ready, start getting back to work.

1. H1N1 is not comparable to the coronavirus problem. The coronavirus is more deadly and more transmissible. That's why most countries in the world have instituted restriction that they didn't for H1N1. The listing of the total dead in a certain time frame is not an accurate way to compare coronavirus with H1N1. H1N1 ended almost 10 years ago. This Pandemic is new, far more deadly in terms of the chances of survival for those infected, and much more transmissible.

2. We don't know the exact death rate and won't no it until the crisis is over. There for you have to assume the worst case situation. Information from Washington state suggest a 5% death rate. The global figures suggest a 4.4% death rate. Yes, it may be lower than that, BUT AS A MATTER OF POLICY YOU NEVER ASSUME THAT, YOU ASSUME THE WORST BECAUSE PEOPLE'S LIVES ARE AT STAKE!

3. You don't post any links proving the economy some how needs to be re-opened again to non-essential services at all. I don't have the link but do remember reading the study that showed a worst case situation of 60% infection and 2.4 million dead over a year or two. I'm not going to have a handy link for every thing I post, and you've shown you certainly don't as well.

4. Have a link for that? Trump does is not paying attention to the medical professionals, he is paying attention to economist now. There is no acceptable reason that a non-essential goods or service should be re-opened while fighting a pandemic. That non-essential business is not more important than American lives. This is a war and you defeat the Pathogen before you re-open non-essential business.

5. Again, no link for this assumption. People in Essential services are still working. Other Business's are being converted to the production of medical supplies. In World War II, the economy switched from producing consumer goods to producing Tanks, armored vehicles, planes, Artillery, guns, bullets. That is what should be happening now with MEDICAL SUPPLIES until the PATHOGEN is defeated. If you're a patriot in this war and are not in an essential business, you suck it up and stay home! If non-essential services have to remain shut down until a vaccine is created to make it safe, then so be it. You take the hit and deal with the fallout later while in the meantime you save and protect lives and protect the healthcare system which everyone depends on.

6. H1N1 is not comparable to coronavirus. The Health and Science departments of nearly every country in the world would tell you that, which is why the current measures are in place around the world. Coronavirus is far more deadly and transmissible based on much of the data that has been available. You act on worst case situations in order to protect the people and the country as a whole. There is no reason to restart non-essential goods and services at this time. Defeat the Pathogen first. Then you can go back to business as usual.

7. As I write this, the United State is at 53,013 cases. Japan is at 1,193. The scale of Trump's failure in the early days of this crises grows by the day. Donald Trump now wants to compound the crises and get more people killed by re-opening non-essential business, just so you can see better numbers for himself. He is think about the rich and his re-election prospects, and not on protecting the American people. But Trump has a history of doing that. The Ukraine affair and his dealings with Russia showed that. Its about him, not America. That's why he has been impeached and if the Republican Senators had any sense of morality or standing up for America, or at least Reagan Republicans, they would have removed him from office earlier this year.
1. You state that the COVID-19 is much more deadly than H1N1, yet H1N1 had 12,500 US deaths and COVID-19 has 689. So your diagnosis is not valid. Don't cherry-pick data, WA does have a 5% death rate, but the disease hit old folks homes, not a wide cross-section of ages, so that 5% is very skewed.

2. As a matter of policy the doctors analyze the data, they do not "assume the worst". The data shows that the COVID-19 death rate in the US as a whole is about 0.7% currently, but that may be lower after more testing. About 80% of COVID-19 cases are very mild, in general the older you are the worse it is.

3. Here is a good link that argues to reopen the cities.

4. Trump needs to balance the "wants" of the doctors with the "needs" of the US economy. The doctors fight for every life, and the economy wants to run. I appreciate your points of concern, but as the link in #3 shows, there are smart ways to get back to work. Old people stay home, no crowds, and lots of PPE and medication until vaccines are developed. The virus will be back with a vengeance in the fall like any flu. We can't go thru another shutdown. Buckle-up buttercup, and stay safe.

5. We agree, except that our definitions of "non-essential services" will differ. My list is pretty short:
NO: sports venues, schools/colleges (all online), no concerts/plays, no cruises, etc.
Opening stores would require strict limits on shopper density with a greeter to take temps

6. See #1

7. Finally an honest rationale' to your thread.....its always been about trying to get Trump. No matter what you whine about it won't matter. I'm not sure if you're a democrat or a Never-Trump RINO, but if this COVID-19 pandemic didn't prove to you how right Trump has been about China and Wall Street's outsourcing of US factories you just don't get it. 95% of all US antibiotics are made in China, the other 5% are made in India. We don't manufacture critical components anymore. Many of Trump's supporters are labeled "populists" we call you folks "globalists" because you like manufacturing overseas. 2020 will be another round of populists vs globalists, please vote for US jobs.

1. Again, there is no comparison to H1N1, plus that is not how you calculate a death rate or how deadly a pathogen is. Were at the start of coronavirus, you can be comparing total deaths from coronavirus to any other episode in history. Why? Because it just started. So any comparison you make like that is grossly inaccurate. Think of what the death rate for ebola is! They don't calculate it by the raw total number of deaths. Its number of deaths divided by the number of infections.

As for the death rate with coronavirus, better to go with the worst case projections than something hopeful you cherry picked. In a WAR, you plan for the worse case PERIOD!

2. In a pandemic when much is not known, you do assume the worse case. Take Dr. Fauci on the issue. "Its better to overreact in this circumstance than be wrong and under act.

3. What does Dr. Fauci think about that?

4. Again, there is no evidence that the country can't shut down non-essential services for 6 months or three years. Its a War, you do what you have to do to fight it. That's what happened in World War II! That shows there is no relative problem with shutting these non-essential services down. Its what you do in a WAR!

5. Again, this is a war with the a pandemic. Biology is a hard science. Economics is not. World War II proved that American society can go without non-essential services for years!

7. China is doing so well against Covid that they have nearly defeated the virus. But they have had shut downs for months that have been extreme to get where they are today. The number of active cases in China is now below 5,000. They are thinking about opening movie theaters in China by May. The Chinese only fear now is that their going to get re-infected by the United States because of the Donald Trump's dumb policies in fighting the pathogen.

But I guess according to you, the China should be done as a nation because their country was on lock down for too long! Wrong again! If China's economy can survive such extreme lock down measures, any economy can.
Its been three weeks since I responded to this prior post. Lets see how your post looks now:
1. You're correct. Initially COVID looked very deadly, your 4.4% death rate and millions of dead Americans based on the global death rate. Now they keep revising US deaths downward, currently projected to be about 60,000 by the end of August, 2020. More like the regular flu.
2. "Overreacting", by shutting down the US economy seems to be working. Now we are talking about restarting the US economy in stages, probably starting in May
3. Dr. Fauci may or may not agree with the restart, but its not his call.
4. Restaurants can't survive being shutdown much longer. Other countries are restarting their economies, Germany, Austria, et.al.
5. We want to save the best economy in the world, not throw it away. New test protocols and new therapies are being developed. COVID is rapidly approaching the regular flu in predicted deaths.
 
World
We need an immediate five-week national lockdown to defeat coronavirus in America
Yaneer Bar-Yam, Opinion contributor
USA TODAY OpinionMarch 21, 2020, 11:30 AM EDT

I am an MIT-trained physicist and complexity scientist who studies pandemics. I have warned about global pandemics due to increasing travel for 15 years. I recommended community based monitoring of symptoms to stop Ebola in West Africa in 2014, and it worked. The fastest and even the only way to contain COVID-19 in the United States is a five-week national lockdown.
Closing schools, bars and movie theaters are good measures, but not enough. Our relaxed approach to social distancing is insufficient to stop the exponential growth of COVID-19. Until Americans consistently adopt strong social distancing recommendations — a lockdown — the disease will continue to spread exponentially.
During a five-week national lockdown, federal, state and local authorities would ensure that all Americans stay home except to obtain food and other essentials, access medical care, or do work essential to the functioning of society. Travel would cease: We would close our borders and airports and prohibit all unnecessary travel across state and county (or town) lines within the United States. The U.S. government would have to provide aid to citizens separated from their sources of income and ensure care for vulnerable members of society.
Lockdown would sharply reduce cases
During the first two weeks of a lockdown, infected individuals will either recover from mild cases of COVID-19 at home or seek medical attention for the 14% of cases that are severe. During the third, fourth and fifth weeks, any newly infected family or cohabitants of infected individuals will recover or seek medical attention and their isolation will prevent further spreading. By the end of the lockdown, the number of infections will be a small fraction of what they are now.

The lockdown will give us time to dramatically scale up our supply of COVID-19 test kits and capacity to process them. If we reduce the number of infections using the lockdown and start a massive testing regime in the United States, we can control COVID-19 after five weeks without such extreme social distancing measures. Isolating sick individuals and their immediate contacts will be enough.

The human and economic costs of delaying this lockdown will be staggering. The COVID-19 outbreak has many more cases now than are visible (tip of the iceberg) and they are growing rapidly. Absent sufficiently effective intervention, new cases will increase 1.3 to 1.5 times each day. We had almost 20,000 cases in the United States on Friday, over 5,800 more cases than the previous day. Without a lockdown, in one week there will be about 200,000. In two weeks: 2,000,000. One in seven cases require hospitalization and 5% require ICU care with ventilators to survive. There aren’t nearly enough ventilators available.

The effectiveness of a five-week lockdown will be dramatic — and also entirely predictable.

We know a U.S. lockdown can work because it worked in China. At the height of its COVID-19 crisis in mid-February, China had locked down an estimated 760 milllion people, approximately half of its population. This policy was so successful that Wuhan is now much safer from coronavirus than New York City or Washington, D.C. The few new COVID-19 cases in China now stem from foreign travelers rather than local transmission, and all are safely quarantined.

We know what we have to do. President Donald Trump and our states' governors and local leaders must act now to save millions of lives.




United States Infections and deaths from Coronavirus as of February 29, 2020
Infections: 68
Deaths: 1

United States Infections and deaths from Coronavirus as of March 22, 2020
Infections: 35,000
Deaths: 458


The exponential rise in infections and deaths in just 3 weeks is incredible. Where will the United States be on April 23, 2020 without the lockdown proposed above?
How’d that work out after 20 months?
Oh yeah. You get a jab of some substance and you still live in morbid fear.
 
It would be nice to think we could shutdown our economy for 5 weeks and survive as a country, but it is not reality. A 5 week lockdown is a case of the cure being worse than the disease
I agree. Covid lockdowns have failed in Europe (Ireland being the latest example).
So why afflict the US with a lockdown now?
A lockdown would be far worse that the virus itself, which is on the wane in most states.
 
I agree. Covid lockdowns have failed in Europe (Ireland being the latest example).
So why afflict the US with a lockdown now?
A lockdown would be far worse that the virus itself, which is on the wane in most states.

Damn, why are you quoting a post from Mar of 2020 now?

Is anyone talking about a total lockdown now in Nov of 2021?

That was the week we got sent home to work, we had a pool going on when it would end. I said June of 2020! And yet I am still working from home and they are talking about making it permanent.

It is remarkable how much our world/country has changed since that post.
 
I agree. Covid lockdowns have failed in Europe (Ireland being the latest example).
So why afflict the US with a lockdown now?
A lockdown would be far worse that the virus itself, which is on the wane in most states.
Let’s go Brandon
 
Damn, why are you quoting a post from Mar of 2020 now?

Is anyone talking about a total lockdown now in Nov of 2021?

That was the week we got sent home to work, we had a pool going on when it would end. I said June of 2020! And yet I am still working from home and they are talking about making it permanent.

It is remarkable how much our world/country has changed since that post.
I only now saw the post of yours in reply to U2Edge and didn't think to check the post date
because all the replies were contemporaneous, except for mine, it seems.


 
I only now saw the post of yours in reply to U2Edge and didn't think to check the post date
because all the replies were contemporaneous, except for mine, it seems.

It is all good, kind of interesting to read the post from back then and see what we were all thinking.
 

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