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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On April 27 2020 18:23 Elroi wrote:
About the situation in Sweden: From the start, as I understand it, the idea behind not locking the country down was to save that "nuclear" option for when it was absolutely necessary and would do the most good (i.e. when the hospitals threatened to be over-burdened). That hasn't happened and the country has stayed open. The ongoing strategy is to protect the high risk groups as much as possible while keeping the society working on a basic level.
The rationale behind this (again, as I understand it) is the assumption that the disease can't be beaten with a lock down anyway and that however long time you extend the lock down you are still going to face the same problems once it is lifted (unless there is a vaccine, but no country can stay in lock down for that long).
The scenario where this strategy is good is if the country would have to stay in partial lock down for a very long time. In that scenario, a strict lock down would be counter productive since it only pushes the problem further in the future while threatening such an economic collapse that it would be forced to open up at a relatively quicker pace and thus creating even more problems and deaths because of the virus.
The scenario where the strategy is obviously bad is if there is some cure that is found quickly which reduces the impact of coming out of the lock down. And, if the relatively light measures are too late and not efficient enough, you run the risk of getting an overwhelmed health care system which is what has happened in places like Italy and New York.
It's hard to know if it's effective at all when the only indicators Sweden has will be lagging ones, like ICU capacity and death rate. By the time those show that something is wrong, it will have been too late to actually do anything about it. It won't go from 80% to 90% capacity in a week; it'll go from 80% to 180% and quickly reach Italy levels of disaster. Is it going to do that, is it going to just fizzle out? Dunno, it's hard to tell when the Swedish government doesn't collect data because "the strategy" says you shouldn't do that. The data that is available suggests that Sweden is currently in a significantly worse state than any of its analogous neighbors by population, geography, and culture, but maybe those factors alone put Sweden on more solid footing than countries like Italy.
Hard to say what the future will hold, but the unqualified praise of "the strategy" and a dismissive approach to its criticism largely seems like magical thinking to me. It's the kind of thing that countries with actual data abandoned as soon as they were able to see that they were well on their way to an exponential growth disaster.
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United States42738 Posts
I assumed they just drew lots and Sweden got to be the control group for "no action taken" in their study of government actions to limit Coronavirus.
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On April 27 2020 18:55 mahrgell wrote:Show nested quote +On April 27 2020 18:49 maybenexttime wrote:
Yeah, I don't understand what the worry is with Sweden. From what I've read, they are far from reaching their ICU bed capacity etc. The virus has a certain lethality to it. Deaths are unavoidable. Flattening the curve beyond what is needed to not overburden the healthcare system doesn't seem to have any benefits. If you assumed, that at some point everyone will be infected and the lethality remains constant, yes. But so far most countries still bank on researchers getting a better understanding of the virus to either improve the treatment (-> lower the lethality) or long term vaccines (to reduce the total number of potentially infected). And then suddenly that assumption falls flat.
You're right. Saying there are no benefits is an exaggeration. But there are going to be deaths from the economic fallout, so you need to account for that when deciding what measures to take. All I wanted to say is that lockdowns have their downsides and it could be argued the situation is not dire enough to implement one. With that said, I think the UK made the right call in that regard.
Simberto's solution would also probably be optimal, but I'm not sure how achievable that is, given how quickly European countries stopped tracking individual people and people they might've infected.
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On April 27 2020 22:41 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On April 27 2020 18:23 Elroi wrote:
About the situation in Sweden: From the start, as I understand it, the idea behind not locking the country down was to save that "nuclear" option for when it was absolutely necessary and would do the most good (i.e. when the hospitals threatened to be over-burdened). That hasn't happened and the country has stayed open. The ongoing strategy is to protect the high risk groups as much as possible while keeping the society working on a basic level.
The rationale behind this (again, as I understand it) is the assumption that the disease can't be beaten with a lock down anyway and that however long time you extend the lock down you are still going to face the same problems once it is lifted (unless there is a vaccine, but no country can stay in lock down for that long).
The scenario where this strategy is good is if the country would have to stay in partial lock down for a very long time. In that scenario, a strict lock down would be counter productive since it only pushes the problem further in the future while threatening such an economic collapse that it would be forced to open up at a relatively quicker pace and thus creating even more problems and deaths because of the virus.
The scenario where the strategy is obviously bad is if there is some cure that is found quickly which reduces the impact of coming out of the lock down. And, if the relatively light measures are too late and not efficient enough, you run the risk of getting an overwhelmed health care system which is what has happened in places like Italy and New York. It's hard to know if it's effective at all when the only indicators Sweden has will be lagging ones, like ICU capacity and death rate. By the time those show that something is wrong, it will have been too late to actually do anything about it. It won't go from 80% to 90% capacity in a week; it'll go from 80% to 180% and quickly reach Italy levels of disaster. Is it going to do that, is it going to just fizzle out? Dunno, it's hard to tell when the Swedish government doesn't collect data because "the strategy" says you shouldn't do that. The data that is available suggests that Sweden is currently in a significantly worse state than any of its analogous neighbors by population, geography, and culture, but maybe those factors alone put Sweden on more solid footing than countries like Italy. Hard to say what the future will hold, but the unqualified praise of "the strategy" and a dismissive approach to its criticism largely seems like magical thinking to me. It's the kind of thing that countries with actual data abandoned as soon as they were able to see that they were well on their way to an exponential growth disaster.
That is a valid point about the risk of a rapid increase in the numbers, but the situation is not as uncontrolable as you make it sound. The number of tests is not particularly important for this strategy (since we know a lot of people have the disease). It is relevant however to know that the free icu capacity has benen constant for about two weeks.
I'm a litle worried for a potential backlash efter easter though when a lot of people probably got together.
Another question: how do you stop the disease from coming back once it has been stoped in one particular country?
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Another question: how do you stop the disease from coming back once it has been stoped in one particular country?
Short-medium term:
Travel restrictions, testing of travelers and mandatory quarantine.
You need to keep your borders more or less sealed for this to work and you cannot have uncontrolled border crossings.
Massive disease tracing.
You test everyone with any kind of symptom and if they have the virus you quarantine them and test everyone they meet. This is extremely resource intensive but certainly doable. ICU care is also resource intensive so...
It gets easier with things like government surveillance of all movement so you can see who you spent time with and other measures seen in surveillance states.
Indefinite partial lock-down
You can't have to large gatherings. Disease tracking can deal with things like an infected person in a work place or at a small party. But if you have an almost asymptomatic super spreader that sneezes 5 times at a concert with 30.000 people in the audience you will have a bad time.
Long term: Vaccination (it's the only way to be sure).
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On April 27 2020 23:30 KwarK wrote:
I assumed they just drew lots and Sweden got to be the control group for "no action taken" in their study of government actions to limit Coronavirus.
I think this paints a very incorrect picture. I have been working from home for 2 months now on government recommendation. There are also no large gatherings allowed so all sports events, fairs and so on have been cancelled. If you have any cold or flu like symptoms, stay at home.
Sweden did not go for the next step up past that though.
Another thing to consider is that a lot of people perform actions stronger than recommended while some perform weaker. So you have people like me that leave their apartment an average of 1 time a week to people that go to restaurants as normal.
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Lalalaland34491 Posts
That's just Kwark being Kwark.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On April 28 2020 00:47 Elroi wrote:Show nested quote +On April 27 2020 22:41 LegalLord wrote:On April 27 2020 18:23 Elroi wrote:
About the situation in Sweden: From the start, as I understand it, the idea behind not locking the country down was to save that "nuclear" option for when it was absolutely necessary and would do the most good (i.e. when the hospitals threatened to be over-burdened). That hasn't happened and the country has stayed open. The ongoing strategy is to protect the high risk groups as much as possible while keeping the society working on a basic level.
The rationale behind this (again, as I understand it) is the assumption that the disease can't be beaten with a lock down anyway and that however long time you extend the lock down you are still going to face the same problems once it is lifted (unless there is a vaccine, but no country can stay in lock down for that long).
The scenario where this strategy is good is if the country would have to stay in partial lock down for a very long time. In that scenario, a strict lock down would be counter productive since it only pushes the problem further in the future while threatening such an economic collapse that it would be forced to open up at a relatively quicker pace and thus creating even more problems and deaths because of the virus.
The scenario where the strategy is obviously bad is if there is some cure that is found quickly which reduces the impact of coming out of the lock down. And, if the relatively light measures are too late and not efficient enough, you run the risk of getting an overwhelmed health care system which is what has happened in places like Italy and New York. It's hard to know if it's effective at all when the only indicators Sweden has will be lagging ones, like ICU capacity and death rate. By the time those show that something is wrong, it will have been too late to actually do anything about it. It won't go from 80% to 90% capacity in a week; it'll go from 80% to 180% and quickly reach Italy levels of disaster. Is it going to do that, is it going to just fizzle out? Dunno, it's hard to tell when the Swedish government doesn't collect data because "the strategy" says you shouldn't do that. The data that is available suggests that Sweden is currently in a significantly worse state than any of its analogous neighbors by population, geography, and culture, but maybe those factors alone put Sweden on more solid footing than countries like Italy. Hard to say what the future will hold, but the unqualified praise of "the strategy" and a dismissive approach to its criticism largely seems like magical thinking to me. It's the kind of thing that countries with actual data abandoned as soon as they were able to see that they were well on their way to an exponential growth disaster. That is a valid point about the risk of a rapid increase in the numbers, but the situation is not as uncontrolable as you make it sound. The number of tests is not particularly important for this strategy (since we know a lot of people have the disease). It is relevant however to know that the free icu capacity has benen constant for about two weeks. I'm a litle worried for a potential backlash efter easter though when a lot of people probably got together. Another question: how do you stop the disease from coming back once it has been stoped in one particular country?
If ICU capacity does get worse, I expect it to happen very suddenly. It's possible that, as mentioned before, Sweden's population, geography, and culture factors make it less vulnerable overall. But I don't see a difference between what Sweden did, and what other countries that started with lax measured but eventually decided to lock down after testing showed a dangerous exponential growth did, besides the fact that the latter countries had test results.
Border lockdown and contact tracing, as mentioned before, is the long-term strategy. A game of whack-a-mole with preventing localized outbreaks from leading to major national outbreaks is likely, but once you have a strong pandemic infrastructure that's feasible in the long term.
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I think it's wrong to look purely at Deaths per 1M and say that Sweden is doing worse than its neighbors. You could just as easily look at "Antibodies present in blood per 1M" or "% of businesses that have remained open" and say that Sweden is doing far better than its neighbors.
Lockdowns are working in the sense that fewer people are dying right now but they aren't accomplishing anything. We could stay in our homes forever and then we would never die of COVID-19 but that's not a strategy for returning to our normal lives, that's just procrastinating because we don't want to face the stark reality that a lot of people are going to die when the lockdowns are loosened and that's true if they are loosened next month or 3 months from now.
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The governor here in Texas just announced that he's allowing restaurants, retail, malls, theaters, and some public facilities to open up on Friday at a reduced 25% capacity, and counties with less than 5 cases can open up to operate at 50% capacity. Seems like a risky move, but statewide we're not yet as hard hit as the Northeast. I'm worried this might cause a spike in cases in a few weeks, right when they're hoping to consider proceeding to phase 2 of opening up.
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On April 28 2020 06:04 eviltomahawk wrote:
The governor here in Texas just announced that he's allowing restaurants, retail, malls, theaters, and some public facilities to open up on Friday at a reduced 25% capacity, and counties with less than 5 cases can open up to operate at 50% capacity. Seems like a risky move, but statewide we're not yet as hard hit as the Northeast. I'm worried this might cause a spike in cases in a few weeks, right when they're hoping to consider proceeding to phase 2 of opening up.
Good luck... if I were in a state with a comparably low case-count, and the state was slowly reopening, I would still minimize going out in public for the next 2-3 weeks, just to see whether or not the case-count spiked up as a result of this.
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On April 28 2020 06:04 eviltomahawk wrote:
The governor here in Texas just announced that he's allowing restaurants, retail, malls, theaters, and some public facilities to open up on Friday at a reduced 25% capacity, and counties with less than 5 cases can open up to operate at 50% capacity. Seems like a risky move, but statewide we're not yet as hard hit as the Northeast. I'm worried this might cause a spike in cases in a few weeks, right when they're hoping to consider proceeding to phase 2 of opening up. Opening up counties with less then 5 cases seems like a good idea tbh. You can't keep a lockdown going indefinitely and with that few cases the risk is minimal.
The main risk is opening up metropolitan area's to soon.
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On April 28 2020 06:04 eviltomahawk wrote:
The governor here in Texas just announced that he's allowing restaurants, retail, malls, theaters, and some public facilities to open up on Friday at a reduced 25% capacity, and counties with less than 5 cases can open up to operate at 50% capacity. Seems like a risky move, but statewide we're not yet as hard hit as the Northeast. I'm worried this might cause a spike in cases in a few weeks, right when they're hoping to consider proceeding to phase 2 of opening up.
The problem is going to be enforcement. First one I think will be the worst are restaurants that serve alcohol/have bars. Some of them are definitely not going to observe lowered capacity guidelines and there will be no effective accountability mechanism. I've been seeing this at various places in WA where gun shops didn't observe the shutdown and many businesses didn't start even encouraging social distancing or capacity reduction (to varying degrees) until the last week or so.
I'm not going to be surprised if the worst is still ahead of us in the US.
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On April 28 2020 06:04 eviltomahawk wrote:
The governor here in Texas just announced that he's allowing restaurants, retail, malls, theaters, and some public facilities to open up on Friday at a reduced 25% capacity, and counties with less than 5 cases can open up to operate at 50% capacity. Seems like a risky move, but statewide we're not yet as hard hit as the Northeast. I'm worried this might cause a spike in cases in a few weeks, right when they're hoping to consider proceeding to phase 2 of opening up.
Moronic. There are a hundred ways that a virus would spread among people in the same building it's already a risk as it is just to go shopping for essential items.
What are they going to do? Expect everyone to eat at the restaurant with masks on? How does anyone protect themselves in that environment? What about public restrooms? Are they going to thoroughly sanitize every table after a group of people leave?
There's no way to enforce that every restaurant obeys the types of procedures they'd need to to keep workers and customers safe.
Are people going to actually go out to eat with all of that in mind? Of course they will. /sigh
This might be ok in the areas that aren't hit hard, but this is gonna cause a spike in cases in the cities. If the mayors are smart they'll keep the restaurants closed regardless of what the governor says.
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There are probably like five sit-down restaurants in all of the US that can operate at 25% capacity to a profit lol, what a stupid idea.
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On April 28 2020 07:30 farvacola wrote:
There are probably like five sit-down restaurants in all of the US that can operate at 25% capacity to a profit lol, what a stupid idea.
I know!
How does anyone expect a restaurant to operate under those restrictions even without the fear of the virus scaring customers away? This governor clearly has never spent a fucking DAY working in service industry.
I swear, every American needs to work a mandatory minimum of 6 months of service industry in retail or food/beverage so they can be a tiny bit educated on what those workers deal with on a daily basis and how hard it is to actually run one of these businesses.
It would make people a little more courteous in public that's for sure.
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On April 28 2020 07:30 farvacola wrote:
There are probably like five sit-down restaurants in all of the US that can operate at 25% capacity to a profit lol, what a stupid idea.
Plus, it'd be super annoying to enforce for customers. Some stores (e.g., the Trader Joe's near me) have been doing a reasonably good job of enforcing a maximum number of customers inside the store, by having people wait outside in a line (six feet spacing, etc.) until a customer leaves, so that the maximum number of occupants inside the store never increases past the recommended capacity. But that's doable when customers are food shopping in a small store and probably won't take longer than 15 minutes to get in and get out. The rotation moves at a reasonable pace. On the other hand, sitting down to a full-fledged meal that could take over an hour would be absurd. (I would hope that everyone would call ahead to check the restaurant's availability, but it would be incredibly frustrating on both the restaurant's end and the customer's end.)
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On April 28 2020 07:54 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:Show nested quote +On April 28 2020 07:30 farvacola wrote:
There are probably like five sit-down restaurants in all of the US that can operate at 25% capacity to a profit lol, what a stupid idea. Plus, it'd be super annoying to enforce for customers. Some stores (e.g., the Trader Joe's near me) have been doing a reasonably good job of enforcing a maximum number of customers inside the store, by having people wait outside in a line (six feet spacing, etc.) until a customer leaves, so that the maximum number of occupants inside the store never increases past the recommended capacity. But that's doable when customers are food shopping in a small store and probably won't take longer than 15 minutes to get in and get out. The rotation moves at a reasonable pace. On the other hand, sitting down to a full-fledged meal that could take over an hour would be absurd. (I would hope that everyone would call ahead to check the restaurant's availability, but it would be incredibly frustrating on both the restaurant's end and the customer's end.)
Absolutely, it's hard to conceive of how dine-in food service will work once we make it through this all of this in 18-24 months, so much so that it seems relatively likely that restaurants will never be like they once were. Just imagining 24-50 people sitting in close quarters all letting out a constant cloud of vapor tinged breath (with some number of people waiting at the door or just outside) will be enough to dissuade large numbers of people from ever going to a place like that again. And for good reason given what we know about how the 'rona spreads.
On April 28 2020 07:35 Vindicare605 wrote:Show nested quote +On April 28 2020 07:30 farvacola wrote:
There are probably like five sit-down restaurants in all of the US that can operate at 25% capacity to a profit lol, what a stupid idea. I know! How does anyone expect a restaurant to operate under those restrictions even without the fear of the virus scaring customers away? This governor clearly has never spent a fucking DAY working in service industry. I swear, every American needs to work a mandatory minimum of 6 months of service industry in retail or food/beverage so they can be a tiny bit educated on what those workers deal with on a daily basis and how hard it is to actually run one of these businesses. It would make people a little more courteous in public that's for sure.
Totally agree, food service and ground floor customer facing work is such a huge component of daily life, the more the average person knows about it, the better. Some kind of civil service program far more robust than Americorps should incorporate it as an option for sure.
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On April 28 2020 07:54 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:Show nested quote +On April 28 2020 07:30 farvacola wrote:
There are probably like five sit-down restaurants in all of the US that can operate at 25% capacity to a profit lol, what a stupid idea. Plus, it'd be super annoying to enforce for customers. Some stores (e.g., the Trader Joe's near me) have been doing a reasonably good job of enforcing a maximum number of customers inside the store, by having people wait outside in a line (six feet spacing, etc.) until a customer leaves, so that the maximum number of occupants inside the store never increases past the recommended capacity. But that's doable when customers are food shopping in a small store and probably won't take longer than 15 minutes to get in and get out. The rotation moves at a reasonable pace. On the other hand, sitting down to a full-fledged meal that could take over an hour would be absurd. (I would hope that everyone would call ahead to check the restaurant's availability, but it would be incredibly frustrating on both the restaurant's end and the customer's end.)
I don't get what the issue is. If people are too annoyed to wait in line then there would be no line. People can determine what their time is worth and how long they are willing to wait. I went to Trader Joe's 2 days ago and there was a line of about 5 people and I decided to go to Whole Foods instead because I don't feel like waiting in any line to go into a grocery store no matter how long it is. I wouldn't wait in a line for a restaurant either. Some people might. I don't really care about their frustrations since they still have the option to go home and cook their own dinner.
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