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The responses make me think far few people have looked at the y-axis of the flattening graphs. We’re not talking turning 2x into 0.95x capacity. We’re talking something like 10x to 3x or so. The overwhelming of hospitals cannot be avoided. At best fewer people die waiting.
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If the time is not used for cranking out both ventilators and people trained to use them, and developing treatments (not vaccines), we’re just moving spikes around. Ventilators alone is closer to WW1 attrition/trench warfare. We’re pinned down. WW2 maneuver warfare needs drugs.
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I don’t think the 6-10 weeks people are thinking about is enough time. But distancing past that will cripple the economy to the point that the ventilator manufactuting and and drug dev fronts will collapse too. Need smart distancing of some sort.
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I don’t think any of the best-case endgames people are hoping for is actually likely under current global leadership. I think we’re looking at 10-20m dead globally in the next 2 years.
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I’m not sure I get why people are pinning their hopes on test-and-trace. Not only does it take the kind of authoritarian lockdown that is unlikely to be politically enforceable in the west, it doesn’t do much unless you’re making rapid progress towards a drug or vaccine.
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Humanists are eager to point out that the economy doesn’t recover if the healthcare war isn’t won. Converse coupling also holds: the healthcare war isn’t winnable in a borked economy. You want to keep mitigation going >12 weeks, create remote-work jobs for 30m people.
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tldr: we are in wishful thinking mode. The best thing we could probably do now is work on smarter mitigation. This thing might need to go on far longer than the current mitigation can be sustained for. The virus might remain irrational longer than distancing can remain solvent.
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I think people are letting trump derangement syndrome blind them to criticality of getting economy running again. Every modern industrial war since the US civil war has been won by a better economic machine overwhelming a worse one. The fighting bought the economy time to win.
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Trump wants the right thing for the wrong reasons. He measures his “winning” in stock market and employment figures terms. But the health war is not winnable with a crashed economy. The economy needs to be reoriented towards the war effort in much bigger ways.
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Bigger ways than distillers making hand sanitizers and GM making ventilators. 10m people have filed for unemployment in 2 weeks. Their jobs might not be back for months or years or ever. They needs jobs in the war economy. I hate the war metaphor but it’s the only one we have.
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I have a very mixed feeling about this. People want to live, so govs have to react. Is it better to struggle in dying economy or not to struggle at all? Actually, dying economy and social unrest are extremely dangerous to the rich, too (see French & Russian revolutions).
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Or they understand precisely how much more unequally a prolonged economic catastrophe will be felt by those most disenfranchised, relative to a virus that kills far more indiscriminately.
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You're missing it because you're Othering the people who don't understand the class implications, giving you a reason to stop at first order consequences
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The real problem is you can't make people go to work in the face of 10-20 million dead over the next year. Most of the speculation about vents isn't helpful, once you're on one of those, there's still only a 50% survival rate, and your lungs are damaged for life
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It’s worth considering non-pharma, non-mainstream views eg: 1. This is a war against what? Coronovidae, or overreacting cytokines in immune compromised ppl due to medical establishment ignorance of nutrition & lifestyle 2. Have the SARS-CoV 2 tests... 1/2
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