How many people are you willing to sacrifice to get back to normal and let Covid19 run its course?

Its a tricky question—I have never caught it though I am in several stores a day. I worked among the sick and hurricane victims early on in this pandemic in Nashville. Just took basic precautions. My friend Jane is very sick with it now, and she never left her house except to drive to a grocery store where foods were loaded in her trunk.

We’re all getting by just the way we can. I do expect a vaccine to be available soon, Maybe four months from now,

There is no getting back to normal. This is a highly infectious disease with a significant hospitalisation rate.

The dichotomy of choosing “the economy” over people’s lives is also a false one, and attempting to prioritise the former over the latter is also a false economy.

Had countries locked down properly and for long enough in an attempt to eliminate the virus, you would now have a better economy as well as fewer deaths or any perceived need to sacrifice people—just as New Zealand had.

Instead you have politicians wilfully ignoring scientific advise because they’re so ideologically wedded to neoliberalism and “the economy”, which is talked of as some mathematical abstraction measured only in GDP (basically aggregate spending).

They’re also incapable of conceiving people having an income and spending without actually working—which is well within the realm of possibility given advancements in automation, roboticisation, and the fact many actual jobs are already meaningless and serve only to provide an income in order to spend (and raise GDP).

We could have avoided much of the stress and all the anti-lockdown and anti-masks protests had our idiots in power simply assured that no one was going to go hungry or homeless during the pandemic. Instead there’s uncertaintly, chaotic communication, and constant rule and guideline changes that try to control the virus rather than get rid of it.

My country has this strategy of breaking down quarantine time. Basically everyone go into quarantine when there are too many cases, then get back to work again when the number of cases are somewhat under control. Then we would try to keep pushing back the virus until there is another outbreak, then people go back to quarantine again. That way we could ensure the country’s economy doesn’t suffer without scarifying anyone.

This requires clear step-by-step plans, almost military-like, and only works with strict laws and people’s willingness to obey the law, which I don’t see in some countries sadly.

Scarifying people won’t work because this virus has been shown to mutate over time. Just as people think they get used to the virus, it mutates and causes even more havoc. Even my country got in hard time because the virus here just mutated and became many times stronger. I remember seeing on TV a governor of a European country don’t remember which right now, but could be The Netherlands saying that he wouldn’t put the country on quarantine because he wanted everyone to develop immunity against the virus through repeated exposure. Said country is now closing its border for quarantine because the plan failed miserably.

@Mimishu1995,
> ”That way we could ensure the country’s economy doesn’t suffer without scarifying anyone.”

Could you please say this another way? I don’t know what you mean by “scarifying” in this context and in your last paragraph.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/scarify?s=t

Thanks.

7.5 billion.

So everyone has to go??^^^ that might be a touch harsh.

Not everybody. There are experts, supposedly, that claim there should be no more than 500 million humans on the planet. 7.5 billion is how many humans there were in 2007. The population of the Earth grows by 95 million a year. And it’s been 13 years, so that should be enough…

@kritiper: Would this “experts” name be Thanos by any chance?

Do I get to choose which people?

None.

@caravan Any are a tragedy. Its beyond sad losing so many of our elders, dying alone with no touch. Heartbreaking. Today we lost someone over 100 years old, earlier a 36 year old woman. :(

Local hospitals say that remsodivar (however its spelled) is helping. Here anyway.

What do you think of the exposure now? As far as intentional exposure. Any new developments on that front?

@Jeruba oh, I was trying to say “sacrificing”. I was trying to bypass my spellchecker. Didn’t know I was using the wrong word :P

@cookieman It doesn’t matter who said it. (If I could remember who said it, I would have noted it in my post. There is a stone monument near Atlanta, Georgia, where it is etched in stone. And, no, it wasn’t “Thanos.”)

Be the COVID-19 pandemic the fault of China or another country, it’s moot at this immediate time, at least for us dealing with it on a daily level. Let the experts work it out as it will take time.

For now, it’s just a matter of the rest of us adhering to the advice being offered by experts, adapting, and counting ourselves lucky to live in this time rather than the last time there was a pandemic.

@KNOWITALL Remdesivir is next to useless. It may decrease hospitalizations a few days for those who are mild to moderately ill, but it is crap against those who are severely ill.

I am extremely worried about the winter. Anybody who intentionally exposes themselves is an absolute fool.

Run it’s course? It will take years for it to move through the population enough that it slows way down. There are vaccines and treatments being tested now as everyone knows, we just have to curb our behavior.

If everyone would just wear a mask we could have more normalcy.

I would go out much more and travel and shop if everyone was wearing a mask.

Maybe I would get to see my parents.

I don’t want anyone sacrificed.

@Mimishu1995, I should have guessed! A simple transposition. But I was thrown off because one use of the word “scarify” refers to vaccination. Anyway, now it makes sense. Thank you.

Is it an option to sacrifice everyone in Canada?

“Masks according to the experts don’t work.” That’s simply isn’t correct. Where everybody wears one the transmission rates plummet.

The problem with a “runs its course” / “herd immunity” approach, without masks and distancing, is many thousands more deaths than would otherwise occur (in the US).
Fortunately death rates are lower now than they were initially. (Hospitalized patients had a death rate around 25% initially and that has fallen to less than 8% now.) This is mostly due to useful therapeutic drugs, especially Remdesivir that actually prevents the cell destruction that the virus usually causes. If someone gets diagnosed early enough (TESTING!!) and gets remdesivir they can dodge a lot of the permanent damage suffered by early COVID patients. Also there is the grim fact that a lot of the people most vulnerable to COVID have already died, the death rate among the rest of us is lower.
So, while original herd immunity estimates (without masks and distancing and therapies) were as high as four million (US only) they are now down under two million. Yay, from today’s nearly 250 thousand dead, only another million or so to go!

Polio was here for hundreds of years and still infects people. Measles is still on the planet. Herd immunity doesn’t work in the way people think. They keep floating 50%, 60%, which will hamper transmission, but it needs to be much higher to make covid basically disappear.

Small Pox was a world effort that included massive vaccination efforts, and the vaccine was very effective, they are hoping the covid vaccine is 75% effective.

Excellent answer @dabbler and true, but our fright wings have given a lot of links saying masks don’t work,and no one argued saying they did,but with masks to keep projected droplet distance down and with social distancing down seems to be the best bet for everyone yet.