Not sure when or where I was sarcastic, but let's leave that aside.youthathletics wrote: ↑Wed Aug 26, 2020 9:32 amYou must've overlooked the conversation yesterday when ggait and I where going back and forth you sarcastically replied.MDlaxfan76 wrote: ↑Wed Aug 26, 2020 9:12 amI'm puzzled.youthathletics wrote: ↑Wed Aug 26, 2020 8:13 amThanks for that article Bart. It ties into my questioning yesterday about countries that are believed to "have done better" and what that looks like moving forward. As I suggested, just b/c said country appears to have done it better, does not mean they solved anything. If more people did not have it, then they are ripe for the pickens' and it starts all over....just as Old Salt's links indicate below ...it may be coming back for those that hunkered down, ran and hid.Bart wrote: ↑Wed Aug 26, 2020 7:55 am You read alot so you might have already read this but this article is an interesting primer on what we might see as the type of immunity resulting from this virus: https://www.statnews.com/2020/08/25/fou ... -covid-19/
Seems the more people that get it earlier, the better off everyone becomes. And of the 4 immunity scenarios in that article suggests...our immunity system is the key common thread.
Could you explain the basis for the bolded statement...which countries do you think are "better off"? Are you basing this on total deaths to date as a % of population? Or daily death trends now as a % of population?
Or are you saying that the more people who have gotten Covid (ahh well, some have died) is the measure of how "better off" a country is now?
It is indeed logical that a country which has prevented spread to many of its population so far nevertheless remains vulnerable, at least until a vaccine or therapeutic measures can be introduced into the mix.
But that's the whole point, buying time to get to other ways to build immunity or to find therapeutic measures, before spread kills millions...
I am not claiming any country has done better, quite the opposite....calling out everyone that has said the US has done the worst and if we only acted like Country X.....you fit that demo. And yet, you all praise other countries for opening back up that originally ran and hid....which means they are indeed vulnerable. So I ask, why would they give their citizens, those that barely contracted it, the green like to openly go out all of a sudden? And as Old Salt's article infer, it is coming back. I also wonder if those same countries are performing their testing and statistical reporting differently.
My point, is the one you agree with (bold/red).
I don't think we have done the "worst" of any and all counties, but I'm hard pressed to identify many of our peers (in terms of wealth, strength of health system, etc) which have done worse, indeed it's far easier to identify those which have had lower deaths as a % of their population and which are now experiencing lower deaths per day as % of their population.
Please show me the metric by which you think the US is "better off" than peer countries? Which countries?
Which countries have I praised for "opening back up"? Do you mean that I'm looking at countries like China and South Korea and New Zealand or Germany or...which indeed "closed down" longer and/or harder than we did in the US and have now indeed "opened up" to at least some extent more than we have? And have also had much lower economic damage than we have had here in the US?
Which ones do you think I've been praising? And why?
This is a brutal pandemic, which is far, far from over. I've been quite careful to describe it as a 'long distance race'.
We don't know yet how everything will play out.
But that doesn't mean that we're totally ignorant, that we have learned nothing at all.
The dynamics of how the virus is transmitted have been predominantly understood since March or at least April, and those countries which made the right set of early moves to drive N below 1 have lost far lower % of their population to the virus, with far lower overall infection rates. We understand this now, these many months later.
Meanwhile, the scientists have been hard at work to develop vaccines, and significant improvements have been made therapeutically, lowering the death outcome among hospital admitted patients. Far from enough, but quite significant. and the scientists are working to provide better therapeutic answers.
If they want to maintain these lower transmission rates, they need to keep N below 1. That's not going to be easy, but it's been shown to be possible to do so with test, trace and isolate...IF the overall incidence is low enough that rapid testing, tracing, and isolating can be ubiquitous. Miss that, and the spread can catch fire.
We're seeing this play out in various countries that have "opened up" relative to where they were, relaxing somewhat. They are typically needing to scramble to test, trace and isolate in response to small outbreaks...whether they can do so effectively remains to be seen, and surely there will be those that fail, but it looks like most of these countries will continue to re-squelch transmission rates. But the virus is not going to simply go away altogether. there will be outbreaks, at least until we have an effective, widely distributed vaccine...and that's if the virus doesn't evolve faster than vaccines can choke it off.
Now, if an effective vaccine is NOT successfully developed and distributed, and/or therapies are never highly effective, this challenge will go much, much longer. The public policy question then is whether the 'flattening the curve' necessary to prevent health systems from being over run, food systems collapsing, triggering total social breakdown has been worth it, even if we have to maintain that 'flattening' for a long time.
But some countries took a quite different early approach than the sorts described above. Some denied whether the virus was a serious threat, likened it to just another flu, scoffed at its virulence, put the economic interests of the super rich first and foremost in policy decisions. Think Brazil. For awhile the UK. Russia. And yes, the US. And a few others.
And then there are those countries with little health system capacity, with immense poverty, sometimes rife with war and other overwhelming public health threats. I don't think we need to compare the US to those situations, but indeed some have suffered more than the US. Brazil is a bit of a double whammy, deep poverty plus a kleptocrat nutcase as a political leader...