US has passed a half-million dead from COVID, a grim, sad, and ugly benchmark I didn't think we'd go this high in no small part b/c I was looking at China's numbers & saying "Well, if those are accurate, the 'millions dead' seems pretty unrealistic"
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A big reason I didn't think we'd have this many dead is because I really did think this thing was stoppable It seemed insane to me that we could lose hundreds of thousands of people without implementing effective interventions
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I'm now convinced that my big error was in believing that interventions would be effective They have not been There are two interventions that seem effective: 1) extremely strict border control 2) a population willing to self isolate for very long periods of time
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I thought (along with many others including the CDC) that we could control this through policy interventions That would mean that this many dead would be the result of policy failures. I couldn't believe that we would see a crisis this big without an effective response policy
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I did not even begin to entertain the idea that we could implement massive long-running state sanctioned restrictions on social and business gatherings that *wouldn't* be massively effective Here we are and they simply haven't been
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I think it's instructive that, based on COVID deaths, the best state is Hawaii, an island state with strict border control and massive penalties for disregarding restrictions. And their death rate would still put us at over 100K dead nationwide
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I am, to this day, uncertain where "blame" lies for the death toll in this crisis Very few of the people who call COVID a massive policy failure have any real concrete vision for how we could have stopped this It always ends up boiling down to "We should be New Zealand"
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We are obviously not New Zealand, so what's the next step in this? I honestly don't hear any ideas that can be measured against reality as plausible solutions
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Replying to @politicalmath
it’s arguable the numbers could have been exponentially better had there been more rapid response in testing and mask wearing as well as a much wider travel ban early until testing could be ramped up. because of the very rapid growth in cases without a response small changes impt
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Replying to @DanielleFong @politicalmath
The failure of the CDC with the initial test was a disaster - it might have been possible to contain the spread early on. Masking was never in the cards - Fauci specifically said *not* to mask in the period of time where it might've helped, and there'd have been zero compliance
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it wasn’t just this, they also constrained testing so it all had to be done through them
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