Coronavirus pandemic

[SEWIGuy]

My irony meter has been broken several times during this whole thing. This is one example.

Kentucky's hospitals are mostly empty, to the point where they are furloughing or laying off staff members. Meanwhile, two field hospitals were built. One at the fairgrounds in Louisville, and one at the UK football practice facility in Lexington. Odds are pretty good that neither will ever host one patient. The whole idea of "flattening the curve" was to avoid overwhelming the health care system, but there's no likelihood of that happening, even if we get a spike in cases requiring hospitalization, because there are so many beds empty at existing permanent facilities.

Nice!  It means that Kentucky's stay at home order was the right thing to do and Kentuckians are abiding by it!  Good job!

[vdeane]

I don't think the United States is coming back after this. Other countries might have a fighting chance. But I think America is broken forever.

American isn't broken yet.  But it's gonna be a while before it fully comes back. If anything, this just moved up an inevitable recession by a few years.

I think this is much bigger than a recession.  Many businesses are going under.  Not just Mom and Pop stores, either.  The Dunkin Donuts I'd pass by on my way to work is now gone - not just closed, but gone, with their logo taken down from the building.  Many restaurants are struggling with the loss of dine-in customers.

It's hard to envision movie theaters reopening, for example - people are going to be leery about congregating until there's a vaccine or treatment, and movie theaters are going to have to significantly reduce capacity to maintain social distancing.  That's very bad for them - movie theaters are a low-margin business, and they weren't in the greatest financial shape even before the pandemic, so even a 30% drop in attendance will send them to bankruptcy.  Add in the fact that concession sales are 50% of their revenue and mask wearing will make it hard to much on popcorn, and things do not look good for them.

The more businesses go under, the more people are unemployed or have a reduced income, the less spending there is, further straining businesses due to lost sales, and the cycle goes on and on.  The economy was not designed for large parts of it to be clobbered by a pandemic.  We're in for an extended period of economic pain even in the best case scenarios at this point.

[GaryV]

Even hospitals in metro Detroit are laying off workers.  This is not because there are no COVID patients.  It's because other patient counts are down due to elective procedures being cancelled.  If you're not doing a knee or hip replacement, you don't need the employees who work in those operating rooms and recovery.  You don't need food service employees to feed patients who aren't there.  You don't need someone in billing or accounts to take care of payments for services that aren't happening.

Not every hospital employee can be a direct caregiver for someone with COVID.

[kalvado]

Expect 1500 by next week, 15k by 04/01, million by end of May. Favorable conditions overall as peak goes into summer when it may be easier to handle.

Those are certainly testable predictions!  Italy, with about one-sixth the population, is already well past the 7,000 mark.

I am hoping conditions won't be quite that bad in the US, in part because a million confirmed cases translates to about 100,000 severe enough to require hospitalization and 30,000 deaths.  I don't think any US jurisdiction is likely to end up digging mass graves to dispose of the bodies of COVID-19 victims like Philadelphia had to do when the 1918 flu hit, but the US as a whole has only 95,000 ICU beds.  In Britain there is already talk of establishing field hospitals for COVID-19 patients.

It is only end of april, and US just hit one million diagnosed cases - despite pretty drastic response.... I thought I was pessimistic back then....

[SSOWorld]

USA == Europe as far as population is concerned - Europe "wins". 

[J N Winkler]

Expect 1500 by next week, 15k by 04/01, million by end of May. Favorable conditions overall as peak goes into summer when it may be easier to handle.

Those are certainly testable predictions!  Italy, with about one-sixth the population, is already well past the 7,000 mark.

I am hoping conditions won't be quite that bad in the US, in part because a million confirmed cases translates to about 100,000 severe enough to require hospitalization and 30,000 deaths.  I don't think any US jurisdiction is likely to end up digging mass graves to dispose of the bodies of COVID-19 victims like Philadelphia had to do when the 1918 flu hit, but the US as a whole has only 95,000 ICU beds.  In Britain there is already talk of establishing field hospitals for COVID-19 patients.

It is only end of April, and US just hit one million diagnosed cases - despite pretty drastic response.... I thought I was pessimistic back then....

Not to mention we now have about 50,000 COVID-19 deaths (depending on source you check--Wikipedia's stats page shows just 49,113 as of yesterday) and coronavirus victims buried in a mass grave on Hart Island (in 2 x 3 x 25 "pods" of pine coffins).

[Scott5114]

I don't think the United States is coming back after this. Other countries might have a fighting chance. But I think America is broken forever.

It was broken forever before, you just didn't notice yet.

[bing101]

One of the leading protesters in NC tested positive. Wouldn't you know who won the pony?

https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/article242317346.html

https://www.10news.com/news/local-news/organizer-of-downtown-san-diego-covid-19-protest-faces-arrest-possible-charges

One of the leaders of the San Diego COVID-19 protest is under investigation for sending people to Downtown San Diego to violate California shelter in Place orders. Not shocking if the same is happening  at State Capital Cities though.  Also in the Allegations the leader of the California protests has filed a lawsuit against the Governor over COVID-19 prevention orders. Umm why do you think some counties in California are being pressured to extend shelter in place and mask orders?

[Roadgeekteen]

One of the leaders of Reopen NC got coronavirus  .

[bing101]

One of the leaders of Reopen NC got coronavirus  .

https://www.newsweek.com/states-around-north-carolina-begin-reopening-governor-cooper-extends-stay-home-order-may-1500067


Update North Carolina has extended their Stay at Home Orders until May 8th.

[bing101]

https://www.wsoctv.com/news/local/coronavirus-local-updates-sc-governor-expected-extend-work-or-stay-home-order/G53SSTHJUFBJFPFGIVHRSCTXOQ/


South Carolina has extended their State of Emergency orders.

[bing101]

https://abc7news.com/society/live-mayor-breed-announces-details-on-covid-19-shelter-in-place-extension-in-sf--/6133024/


San Francisco has announced that they will extend their shelter in Place orders until May 31st.

[kphoger]

I just don't get why it's assumed businesses (and churches and others) aren't able to make good decisions on their own.  Some grocery stores around here started implementing good ideas that weren't dictated by government, and that's a great thing.  I personally think some of them should remain after the crisis is over–specifically one-way aisles.  I think businesses (and churches and others) are quite capable of making good decisions like that while remaining open, especially now that were a couple of months in and a lot of good ideas have been percolating.

Churches are a thing that I'm not addressing in this comment, since I don't know enough about how they operate, and there's a good degree of emotional attachment involved that complicates matters. And it's against forum policy, too.

But the reason that it's assumed businesses aren't able to make good decisions on their own is because any business always has an inherent conflict of interest. The purpose of any business is to make money. Fine, this is a capitalist society. But the problem is that so many businesses have proven that the profit motive is their only motive, and they will pursue making a profit over and above all other interests, such as employee safety, the overall benefit of society, etc.

The only thing that stops this is when business leadership is cognizant enough of the conflict and chooses to act in the public good, which is, strictly speaking, against the business's own self-interest. However, if the business is a publicly-held corporation, such leadership is accountable to a faceless group of shareholders, who will remove leadership which does not maximize the shareholders' return on investment. This means the only way to make such a corporation behave in the public interest is to make doing so compulsory.

I disagree.  Businesses making decisions that benefit society–especially in this specific context–are likely to attract more customers.  If Store A implements social distancing measures and Store B does not, then any potential customers who are concerned about the virus will be more likely to shop at Store A.  You say the measures would not be in that stores financial interest, but I say it gets them more customers in the door.

I don't want to violate forum policy by discussing religion too much, but there are certain ritual aspects for several denominations that make it more difficult than just "remain six feet apart," especially Eastern denominations (Orthodox, Eastern Catholic) where Communion is distributed under both kinds via a spoon.

This is very true.  Not everything church-related can be done online or even six feet separated.  That could be spun either way, depending on your position.  Either it means banning in-person religious services is a good thing because people would definitely be too close together, or else it means banning in-person religious services is bad because that's the only way some religious activities can be done.

The venn diagram of those churches that want to (or are) defying these orders, and those churches who are made up of science denying creationist types, are pretty well overlapped.

Perhaps in this country, but that's not the case universally.  In eastern Europe and Russia, it is the Catholic and Orthodox churches that have taken the most defiant stands against restrictions.  I suspect that has something to do with the comment/reply immediately above this one.

American isn't broken yet.  But it's gonna be a while before it fully comes back. If anything, this just moved up an inevitable recession by a few years.

Isn't it about time for one of tradephoric's spiffy line graphs?

My irony meter has been broken several times during this whole thing. This is one example.

Kentucky's hospitals are mostly empty, to the point where they are furloughing or laying off staff members. Meanwhile, two field hospitals were built. One at the fairgrounds in Louisville, and one at the UK football practice facility in Lexington. Odds are pretty good that neither will ever host one patient. The whole idea of "flattening the curve" was to avoid overwhelming the health care system, but there's no likelihood of that happening, even if we get a spike in cases requiring hospitalization, because there are so many beds empty at existing permanent facilities.

That means it's working. If we continued life as usual, the system would be overwhelmed.

Nice!  It means that Kentucky's stay at home order was the right thing to do and Kentuckians are abiding by it!  Good job!

Logically, that is not the only conclusion to be drawn.  It's entirely possible that hbelkins is correct in that the building of the hospitals was going overboard and that they were never really needed to begin with.  I, for one, doubt that the number of patients kept out of treatment by the government orders amounts to that many empty hospital beds.  If they had built seventy hospitals, your argument would fall flat on its face.  Admit that maybe only one hospital was needed, or maybe there was already enough capacity to begin with.

never say never. I expect worst is still to come.

This is another possibility.  It's too soon to say whether they'll be used.  It might turn out that they'll start filling up in five weeks.  Who knows?  It might even turn out they should have built three.

The economy was not designed for large parts of it to be clobbered by a pandemic being forcibly shut down by government.  We're in for an extended period of economic pain even in the best case scenarios at this point.

FTFY.  The economy would have endured the pandemic.

[kphoger]

If the quarantine makes you feel like life is not worth living, that means you are not making use of the time properly.

Realize that to a lot of people, hearing this sort of thing is unhelpful and just comes across as condescending/judgmental.

Given how Maslow's hierarchy of needs works, people will generally need to feel that their more basic needs for safety and security are met before they can focus on fulfilling any higher level self-actualization related needs. This is normal, and it is not a personal failing if anyone isn't productive during this time.

If you've successfully disengaged yourself from the situation enough that you are still able to focus on accomplishing other things, well... more power to you. But not everyone is going to be capable of doing this, and being told they should isn't going to change that.

The bigger error is that he assumed I suddenly have a bunch of extra time that needs making use of.  Not everyone got laid off or furloughed.

[ftballfan]

I think there will be a few states (or parts of states) that will still have stay home orders on July 4th. The current farthest-out order is Virginia, and theirs currently expires on June 10.

Also, I could see a few states open regions of their state at different times, especially states that are dominated by one major metro area (IL, MI, and NY come to mind). In my home state of Michigan, there are a few counties (all in the UP) that have reported no cases. Michigan has a high caseload (currently 7th in # of cases, but was 3rd for a couple weeks behind NY and NJ), but 75-80% of the cases are in three counties (Macomb, Oakland, Wayne).

I'm not Catholic, but the local diocese won't have any in-person services until May 24 at the earliest. Once Sunday services resume, they'll likely be busy with the backlog of funerals and memorial services (if people choose to have them; even before COVID, there were people in my area that died during the winter but didn't have funerals or memorial services until the summer due to the number of older people that winter out of state).

[J N Winkler]

The economy was not designed for large parts of it to be clobbered by a pandemic being forcibly shut down by government.  We're in for an extended period of economic pain even in the best case scenarios at this point.

FTFY.  The economy would have endured the pandemic.

That claim is debatable.  It is hard to do comparisons with the 1918 flu because much of the econometric data that is collected now was not gathered back then, but with no social distancing, ICUs become overloaded and mortality soars, so the coronavirus now becomes pretty comparable to the 1918 flu in lethality (no antibiotics and no modern mechanical ventilation).  Anecdotal evidence from 1918 suggests there are economic impacts no matter what.  If you impose social distancing and stay-at-home orders (our current situation), the volume of business drops as many commercial transactions simply don't happen.  On the other hand, in 1918, many businesses (with some exceptions such as pharmacies, doctors' offices, etc.) experienced large drops of revenue and large losses as a result of workers and customers getting sick, perishable products having to be discarded for lack of buyers, etc.

So, even if we were prepared to ignore the ethical implications of allowing ICUs to overload so that treatable cases of COVID-19 end in death, it is not at all clear that the economy does well in the counterfactual case where social distancing and stay-at-home orders are not applied.

[Max Rockatansky]

If the quarantine makes you feel like life is not worth living, that means you are not making use of the time properly.

Realize that to a lot of people, hearing this sort of thing is unhelpful and just comes across as condescending/judgmental.

Given how Maslow's hierarchy of needs works, people will generally need to feel that their more basic needs for safety and security are met before they can focus on fulfilling any higher level self-actualization related needs. This is normal, and it is not a personal failing if anyone isn't productive during this time.

If you've successfully disengaged yourself from the situation enough that you are still able to focus on accomplishing other things, well... more power to you. But not everyone is going to be capable of doing this, and being told they should isn't going to change that.

The bigger error is that he assumed I suddenly have a bunch of extra time that needs making use of.  Not everyone got laid off or furloughed.

In that vein, how many of us actually haven't missed a day of work or worked from home during all of this?  I still go into my office five days a week and I don't even think working from home has even been discussed.

[jakeroot]

Not sure this was posted or not...makes me worry about places like Georgia that are starting to peel back restrictions, despite cases continuing to rise (at a rate much higher than the point when Hokkaido started to relax):

This Japanese Island [Hokkaido] Lifted Its Coronavirus Lockdown Too Soon and Became a Warning to the World (TIME)

Hokkaido's story is a sobering reality check for leaders across the world as they consider easing coronavirus lockdowns: Experts say restrictions were lifted too quickly and too soon because of pressure from local businesses, coupled with a false sense of security in its declining infection rate.

By mid-March, the health crisis was stabilizing–new cases were in the low single digits and even zero on some days–but complaints from businesses were increasing.

The announcement lifting restrictions came just before a three-day weekend; Hokkaido residents spilled onto streets and lingered in cafes, celebrating the conclusion of their weeks-long confinement. That likely kicked off the second wave of infections, says Nagase.

[hotdogPi]

Not sure this was posted or not...makes me worry about places like Georgia that are starting to peel back restrictions, despite cases continuing to rise (at a rate much higher than the point when Hokkaido started to relax):

South Carolina was initially doing the same as Georgia, but the governor reversed course; SC is now extending the stay-at-home order.

[Hot Rod Hootenanny]

I don't think the United States is coming back after this. Other countries might have a fighting chance. But I think America is broken forever.

In that case, make sure you send your roadmeet plans to either Dan Garnell, or Steve Alpert before Memorial Day.

[oscar]

South Carolina was initially doing the same as Georgia, but the governor reversed course; SC is now extending the stay-at-home order.

Only for another 15 days or less (the previous emergency declaration expired today, apparently all state emergency declarations in SC expire after 15 days). The governor indicated that the "home or work" order, automatically extended by the new emergency declaration, might be canceled before the 15 days are up. The emergency extension also appears not to reverse the governor's previous order loosening some restrictions on local businesses, only to make sure the remaining restrictions continue in force.

https://www.wistv.com/2020/04/27/gov-mcmaster-renews-covid-state-emergency-more-days-extending-home-or-work-order/

Text of new emergency declaration:

https://www.scribd.com/document/458659376/042720-Executive-Order-Mcmaster#from_embed 

[US71]

I don't think the United States is coming back after this. Other countries might have a fighting chance. But I think America is broken forever.

I disagree. Things will change. some for the better some for the worse, but things will change.

"While there's life, there's hope"

[Plutonic Panda]

I don't think the United States is coming back after this. Other countries might have a fighting chance. But I think America is broken forever.

On the contrary, I think the USA will come back stronger so as long as we don't normalize this near unprecedented slap in the face to our rights and freedoms.

I'll also add, maybe this is just wishful thinking on my part, but if any country to collapse I think it will be China. I've been reading multiple articles about this or that company moving it's operations out of China. I think the world will change because of this and hopefully many other countries that are deserving will see economic boosts.

[Scott5114]

I just don't get why it's assumed businesses (and churches and others) aren't able to make good decisions on their own.  Some grocery stores around here started implementing good ideas that weren't dictated by government, and that's a great thing.  I personally think some of them should remain after the crisis is over–specifically one-way aisles.  I think businesses (and churches and others) are quite capable of making good decisions like that while remaining open, especially now that were a couple of months in and a lot of good ideas have been percolating.

Churches are a thing that I'm not addressing in this comment, since I don't know enough about how they operate, and there's a good degree of emotional attachment involved that complicates matters. And it's against forum policy, too.

But the reason that it's assumed businesses aren't able to make good decisions on their own is because any business always has an inherent conflict of interest. The purpose of any business is to make money. Fine, this is a capitalist society. But the problem is that so many businesses have proven that the profit motive is their only motive, and they will pursue making a profit over and above all other interests, such as employee safety, the overall benefit of society, etc.

The only thing that stops this is when business leadership is cognizant enough of the conflict and chooses to act in the public good, which is, strictly speaking, against the business's own self-interest. However, if the business is a publicly-held corporation, such leadership is accountable to a faceless group of shareholders, who will remove leadership which does not maximize the shareholders' return on investment. This means the only way to make such a corporation behave in the public interest is to make doing so compulsory.

I disagree.  Businesses making decisions that benefit society–especially in this specific context–are likely to attract more customers.  If Store A implements social distancing measures and Store B does not, then any potential customers who are concerned about the virus will be more likely to shop at Store A.  You say the measures would not be in that stores financial interest, but I say it gets them more customers in the door.

You say theories that aren't borne out in reality. Efficacy of social distancing measures are not going to be the primary concern that shoppers have when they choose a place to do business with. Price, convenience, product selection, and brand loyalty are, just as they always are.

Check out this poll that someone did on the OKCTalk forums:


You can argue these people have the freedom to endanger themselves by choosing to patronize a store that refuses to implement social distancing. But that means more possible infections, more potential asymptomatic spreaders, and more people to potentially take up a hospital bed that you might need later on.

[bing101]

https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/coronavirus/article_8c3f87c8-88b0-11ea-a367-2faccc4d6e0c.html


Louisiana will extend their stay at home orders until May 15th.


https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-new-york/new-york-governor-cuomo-to-extend-stay-at-home-order-in-some-parts-of-state-idUSKCN2292B3




New York State to consider extending stay at home orders.