Policy and Punditry Need to Adapt to New Virus Data

[Right_in_Virginia]

Policy and Punditry Need to Adapt to New Virus Data
Real Clear Politics, May 3, 2020

When we began our foray into quarantine seven weeks ago, there was a unifying and eminently sensible rationale behind it: “Bend the curve.” The idea was this: If allowed to go unchecked, COVID-19 would overwhelm hospitals, leaving patients without beds.  Short on ventilators, patients would be left to suffocate. In short, by slowing the spread of the virus we would prolong the amount of time it spread through the country, but would reduce the total number of deaths. Moreover, we would buy time for the nation’s testing apparatus to ramp up, to produce more ventilators, and to expand hospital capacity.

[...]

There are many interesting stories within these data, but the main takeaway should be relatively clear: No states are on anything resembling an exponential growth trajectory, almost all states are past a peak, and most states are substantially so. This would suggest that in many states, the question really should be how to reopen while keeping hospitals from being overwhelmed again.

But in the meantime, there seems to have been a subtle shift in the discourse. Some of this has been a refusal to update prior assumptions – some people seem to believe not much has changed since early March – but other analysts have subtly moved from “bend the curve” to what we might call “crush the curve.”  [...]

But the shift has probably been the most pronounced among pundits. Perhaps the strongest statement of the “crush the curve” point of view comes from an article published in The Atlantic, with the (frankly unhinged) headline “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice,” with the subtitle “The state is about to find out how many people need to lose their lives to shore up the economy.” Infections in Georgia appear to be trending downward, and it is beginning to reopen its economy, including gyms and hair salons. The upshot of the title and the article (which avoids the hyperbolic language from the headline) is that people will die as a result of the decision to open early.

It seems likely that this is the case, but the idea behind bending the curve wasn’t that we would bend the curve until there were no more cases. Indeed, it was expressed that we might end up with a similar number of cases, but that by spreading them out we would lower the number of fatalities. This, then, is something different: The idea that we should use the shutdowns to eradicate the virus as best we can, and that weighing lives against the economy reflects a choice tantamount to sacrificing some portion of the population.


More:  https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/05/03/policy_and_punditry_need_to_adapt_to_new_virus_data_143102.html

[Right_in_Virginia]

Cuomo Plays On Fears And Ignorance About Reopening The Economy
Why Are We Still Trying to ‘Flatten the Curve’?
Insights & Issues, May 4, 2020, Editorial Board

Now that roughly half the states in the country are starting to reopen their economies, expect a rash of stories about how they opened “too soon” and that COVID-19 cases are climbing as a result.

A headline on Friday, for example, was about how Georgia reported more than 1,000 new cases of the virus “the same day its governor lifted the stay-at-home order.”

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo warned Saturday about “blindly” lifting lockdowns and reopening the economy. “Use information to determine action – not emotions, not politics, not what people think or feel,” he said.

It’s Cuomo himself who is playing politics, acting on emotions, and ignoring information.

The fact is that the lockdowns weren’t about stopping the spread of the disease. Their justification was to “flatten the curve,” — that is, slow the spread so our health care system wasn’t overwhelmed. Cuomo should know that even in his home state there’s little evidence that the health care system was even close to being engulfed.

<snip>

Even if the lockdowns were effective, keeping them in place for fear of an even worse outbreak ahead makes no sense. First, there’s the fact that millions have already been exposed to the virus and now have antibodies to it, which means a future outbreak isn’t likely to be worse than the current one. Plus, in addition to having plenty of hospital capacity, the country is now far better prepared to handle an increase if one does occur. We have more tests, more ventilators, a greater ability to trace the disease, and more experience in treating victims than we had at the start of the outbreak.

Edward A. Snyder, an economics and management professor at Yale, and L.S. Dugdale, director of the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at Columbia University, summed it up well in a piece for The Hill.

“Although a flatter curve may reduce deaths in particularly overburdened health systems, the net number of lives lost may not substantially differ over the course of the disease. The extent of long-run adverse health consequences, however, will increase with the extent of damage to the economy from prolonged efforts to flatten the curve.”

In other words, the cure will end up being far worse than the disease.


More:  https://issuesinsights.com/2020/05/04/Cuomo-Plays-On-Fears-And-Ignorance-About-Reopening-The-Economy/

This mission creep is going to destroy us.

[catfish1957]

This mission creep is going to destroy us.

Kwomo should have lost all moral authority in this crisis when it was found he intentionally planted COVID-19 patients at nursing homes.  Why there hasn't been universal outrage and reporting of this at  an "11" volume is disgusting.