shoshin

Boston was not closed for a week or 10 days after NYC. Keep an eye on what happens there.

I agree with this. If you look at population density by city, there is nothing at all like NYC in terms of density and sheer number of people. Plus they do not have a driving culture. NYC and the North Jersey extension thereof are entirely different from the rest of the country. I could not paste an entire image of this but this is sorted by cities with the most density. The top 8 are NYC metro, and 12 of the top 20 are as well. And at #8, you have 8M people. By comparison, Philadelphia is #95. SF there at 21 is dense but has had limited problems and that is

There was discussion early on about how Italy was counting people with comorbidities as covid deaths and Germany was not. Italy and Spain were both so overwhelmed that who knows. Italy is undercounting in some areas too, where people die in their homes and aren't tested, so the counting is not great either way. Deaths is still the best metric. Cases is a bad one. Here it lags as much as 10 days from test to result and as we all know, not everyone is getting tested (if your spouse gets sick and then tested, and then everyone in the house gets it but does not get tested, only the spouse counts against the total...same with all the other people who call for tests and are just told to only come in if their symptoms get much worse).

In this wave until June, probably ~40-50,000. I assume we will level at 1500-2000/day for a couple of weeks, then see a rapid drop off where cities outside of NYC drive the numbers for a bit. Right now 50% of the deaths and cases are NYC and North Jersey. Currently the numbers showing that other cities are not replicating NYC and North Jersey, a trend I hope we continue to see. If other major metros follow NYC, the number could be 100,000 but I don't see that trend in the numbers. The cities to watch right now are LA, Boston, Atlanta, and Detroit. Philadelphia and Chicago shut down early and haven't seen large increases in deaths (yet). The bigger question on deaths is whether our current small population exposure is the only wave or if we have more. The Imperial College London model predicts multiple waves absent incredibly disciplined rigor in quashing outbreaks. An ability to treat early would help a lot. We all watch those studies with great hope. I already said it, but of course the cases will surge again much worse than before and we will either have an overwhelmed healthcare system or we will have another shutdown, both of which are untenable for the economy. What we are experiencing now is a caseload based on very few people having the disease. The re-opening has to be done smartly so we get the swoosh curve recovery discussed in the other thread so clearly.

The underlined was and easy reaction to predict. We social distance and the spread and deaths maybe level in a few weeks and after that, go down...and people then say, "See, it wasn't as bad as people said it would be." What do you think will happen when we lift the quarantine and the vast majority of the population gets exposed to this instead of the small numbers that we are seeing now?

You do realize that shutting down till June and reopening with "trusted" distancing and no tracking just puts us right back where we are now in August right? Meaning what we are doing now would make little difference economically and wrt bombing hospitals and deaths? I've not vetted these authors but they make a point that saves me from pasting in links to all the studies. All the models show a surge following a shutdown now. Deaths in the millions, cases in the hundreds of millions. The choices are multiple "small" shutdowns like this one, a shutdown and huge surge, or follow the Korea model of test and trace while you're open for business. https://medium.com/@wpegden/a-call-to-honesty-in-pandemic-modeling-5c156686a64b I guess a final option is find a cure in 2 months but that's a magical thought. There were options we didn't follow including to just surge and not shutdown. The UK tried that a bit and that's not working so well now that they are shutdown. If you want this to be the only massive shutdown to avoid the only case surge, tracking has to be part of the plan. The admin knows it and I'm sure Fauci has been told to zip it until they can tease it out because people like you will say they are forming a fascist state. But that plan is coming. Trump is not stupid enough to want to go through this in waves of shutdowns. I If you can present a scenario that has worked and that gets us back to economic health starting in June and avoids a massive case surge, without massive testing and tracking to shut down outbreaks, I'm all ears.

Why name-call now? I would love to be back to a 6% unemployment in July with 30K dead and Trump to be chest-thumping about how he did everything right to an 80% approval rating. To want anything else is near traitorous, really. I don't like him but rooting against him at the moment is really bad form. Questioning his decisions and actions in the moment is fine but I won't resort to calling him names or wanting him to fail. I hope everything I question about his actions is DEAD WRONG and he kicks my ass all the way back to a blazing economy.

Trump's attitude towards this was decidedly unhelpful in getting people to socially distance sooner. Even DeSantis said as much in closing Florida today. But in fairness to Trump, I don't think another politician in America would have done much better. He responded at about the same rate as everyone in America. The "lost month" people talk about is real, but it is a mistake most of America was making. If you showed me how hundreds of politicians were calling for dramatic action on Feb. 1, you could make a point that Trump had a huge failure of leadership but very few people in America were beating that drum. And if you want to blame some humans for our current predicament, the CCP seems like a good place to start. They didn't share the danger, the contagiousness, and didn't shut this down for travel outside China sooner. F-them. When the dust settles on this, a lot of eyes are turning to China. Right now, we actually need them to keep producing things for us.

That guy's Tweets are showing that the flattening is working, yes? I would love for the model to be ***** but those curves were predicting the risks of inaction, which is why the administration sounded the warning sirens.

You're fooling yourself if you want an economy running in 2 months AND no contact tracing. The first is only possible with the second unless there's a magic pill discovered (and available) by June. The only way we get back to normal economic functioning is by stamping out outbreaks as they occur in real time when a positive test happens, not reacting to them through treatment. I understand the privacy concern but Trump has said he's on a war footing and I agree with that. We need to beat this AND get the hell back to work.

If 50% of the country refuses to be tested and tracked on something this contagious, expected prolonged health issues and market uncertainty. When we finish this 2-month run, only a very minor % of the US population will have been infected. One way to guarantee more is to just let everyone back into the wild and not track infections except at some macro level.

In fact, not what I said. It's sensible vs insensible. The people who comply with tracking will help everyone. The people who won't comply with tracking will not, whether they are just being CV-party-hard ***** or whether they are being right to privacy flag-bearers. Both groups will not help if we need to track down recent contacts after a positive test in a central database. You're catching up! It's out there, critical to rapid testing, and not the "magical" test you thought it was.

Set up the system, come up with the plan, (neither are that hard) and hopefully most sensible people will abide by it. Of course many won't because they want to party on the beach or plant their right to privacy flag on mass graves, but if enough do, we can control it.

You keep saying this like we have a binary choice between distancing/hygiene vs testing to prevent the spread. It's not binary. We need both, and more steps, to prevent more deaths.

Where are you getting this dystopian dreamland from? The same place as thinking that an antibody test was magical 3 posts ago? In June, we all can hopefully attempt to get back to work, except for certain obvious jobs. People who can still work from home and maybe older or at risk people don't, but the rest of us who can, return. The rapid antibody testing, if very widespread, identifies outbreaks EARLY so we can isolate those people who are positive early and isolate their contacts perhaps before they are contagious and get tested themselves. This is how you prevent more outbreaks and yet another way that testing saves lives. That's vaccine and that's still pretty damn optimistic at 18 months. Fingers crossed that some of the treatments show promise to shorten the length and severity of symptoms. The most easy to produce would be the anti-malarial combinations.

It's OK to Big Brother the concern on tracking but here's the tradeoff. If you want one shutdown where we get this under control and coming out of it, we get back to work, we better have some tracking in place until the vaccine arrives. Not if there's testing and tracking. Without testing and tracking in June, we will have an outbreak just like now by the end of summer. That would be terrible and only happen as the result of bad decisions right now. Don't be ignorant. It's not magic. The tests are already being rolled out, though it's early.

This is really good data and thinking. The way we start getting back to work in June is with widespread rapid testing, medical facilities with adequate supplies of everything, and tracking of cases/contacts. This is the Korea model and if we achieve all 3 of those goals, we would attain relative predictability and could recover faster. There will be outbreaks after June but if they can be contained, it's OK. What we can't have happen is the Imperial College model of multiple waves like this one.

This is absolutely true. A rapid and accurate antibody test is the Holy Grail of the testing and outbreak prevention plan that we need to get back to work. I'll take it. If we are recovered to present levels in two years, that would be fantastic. Some industries (travel and hospitality, restaurants) are going to be gutted though for a long time. That's why the infrastructure spending that wouldn't even start until 3Q at the earliest could help those folks at least find some jobs.

It's lonely dying on the hill.

The idea of waiting the 6-8 weeks in quarantine is the one that the country is following, I think. No one is making that plan clear but with testing in place and a medical system geared up and ready, Pence's June 1 prediction is probably right for re-opening a lot of the country. But you're right. The economy is not going to be the Trump "V" that he predicted. At best it will be a backwards J. We will get some rise this year but double digit unemployment will linger for a long time.

Speaking for my own posts, I am not criticizing Trump on testing. I am criticizing the idea that testing would not help prevent spread. That's just ignorant. The testing ramp up has been impressive.

Your ignorance on this is shocking. I'll drop this and stick with Team Fauci and the CDC over Team "GG" and the Bills board posters on extensive testing being one of the keys to getting through this with fewer deaths.

I really hope I can do this for my employees. And I'm fine taking it as a loan that I pay back, but right now cash flow is $0. I can personally weather the storm for some time but my business cannot if I have to lay people off. And if I kill my business off, it can't lay golden eggs for my employees. My story is one shared by millions of small businesses.

Our economy is so different today. I'm not sure if those lessons are applicable city to city, but I do agree that a hard shutdown, clearing this crap out, then being ready to test/track is the way to get back up in 3-5 years and not 10-15.

We don't need testing because data doesn't matter or something something.