[departure]

Then don't go to a restaurant or bar. Down here in Texas we opened in May and left it up to the individual to make the health choice. I'm active and going to the gym daily and bars during the weekend, but I have friends who won't go outside and haven't dined in a restaurant since March.

[macintux]

Given the disaster that has been south Texas healthcare for the last week or two, that hardly seems like a ringing endorsement.

It’s not all about personal choice. Everyone is impacted by the decisions we make.

How many healthcare personnel have to die so people can go to the bar?

[Covzire]

Great, now apply that logic to automobiles in general.

I think more people understand the situation with COVID than some realize, that it's a trainwreck from top to bottom and a lot of the decisions being made are far more political than they should be, as evidenced by the sheer amount of hypocrisy surrounding the supposed safety of protesting for left wing causes vs anything else. Even if you're totally right, the optics of this hypocrisy have created a permanent and un-mendable fracture where a large chunk of the country is never going to believe anything Coumo or De Belasio say about COVID.

[BoiledCabbage]

> Great, now apply that logic to automobiles in general.

Do automobile accidents experience exponential growth? If so, I guarantee they'd get the exact same treatment.

Or guess what else with your auto example. Drinking and driving. You don't get free reign to do so because society shouldn't have to pay your costs for you.

[Covzire]

> experience exponential growth?

Exponential growth of the spread isn't the same thing as exponential growth of mortality rates. By now we know that virtually no children are affected by it at all. The most vulnerable are 60+ with preexisting health conditions. The very same kind of people Governor Coumo and a few other governors in the country put at risk by forcing COVID19 positive patients into nursing homes.

They've pushed the disease on the most vulnerable while making the least vulnerable afraid of their own shadow, literally, so they stay home and afraid and unable to work in many cases.

[BoiledCabbage]

I think you may be missing something fairly fundamental about the math.

If you're seeing exponential spread, and a fixed portion of people die from it (whatever portion you'd prefer to define), that means you also have exponential growth of mortality from it .

Maybe that's the issue here.

[raisedbyninjas]

There seems like a difference in utility between automobiles and getting drunk in pubs. I can't quite put my finger on it though.

[munificent]

A lot of psychological literature shows that one of the most important factors in a long, healthy, happy life is being part of close-knit social fabric, so it may be that "getting drunk in pubs" has the greater utility.

[dehrmann]

> the sheer amount of hypocrisy surrounding the supposed safety of protesting for left wing causes vs anything else

Even if these protests have been have been relatively safe, I worry about a publication bias with those findings (publishing that the protests spread covid would be politically risky) and, more importantly, the lack of criticism essentially gave people permission to go have their own gatherings.

[wenc]

Not agreeing or disagreeing with Cuomo or De Blasio -- merely addressing the philosophical issue around the framing:

The issue with that framing is that it's really not a personal choice issue because one's choices in this instance are not sufficiently isolated from the rest of the system. Many choices are, but this is not. If one exercises one's personal choice incorrectly, the entire system suffers.

One might say, everything in life is a risk and everything we do affects someone else. Well yes, but not everything in life is has huge downside risk and exponential spread. This is a different class of risk.

(that said, I think there are ways to lower the probability of spread at a bar (spaced outdoor seating) and at a gym (masks + distancing). Excessive alcohol consumption is a risk for noncompliant behavior though.)

[makomk]

New York City is probably way past the point where this kind of exponential spread risk is something to be worrying about, and imposing these kind of measures now seems like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted and run halfway across the country. The antibody testing figures I've seen give an infection rate higher than Stockholm, infection epicenter of no-lockdown open-resturants land. I've heard it said that NYC was already past their peak before lockdown, and given what happened in Sweden I can quite believe it.

[dragonwriter]

> I've heard it said that NYC was already past their peak before lockdown

They weren't passed their actual hospitalization peak, death peak, or (unless something caused a longer delay between infection and either of those outcomes than seen elsewhere) the infection peak when they started locking down.

[robertoandred]

You know infections occur outside of gyms and restaurants and bars, right? Places like grocery stores, homes, doctors offices, places people HAVE to go. You get infected at a gym, infect someone at the grocery store, and they infect their parent at home, and that parent dies. Good job! You made a great health choice for them.

[king_magic]

Oh yeah, sure, Texas opened in May. How's that working out? Spoiler alert: Texas is now an absolute disaster zone. Sometimes leaving health choices that affect other people up to individuals is a really terrible idea, as evidenced by the disgraceful state that your state is currently in.

[txsoftwaredev]

I've been living my life pretty much as before Covid here in Texas and have not experienced this disaster zone you are referencing. The state of TX has experienced around 6,878 deaths out of 28.9 million Texans. I'll take my chances with those odds.

[king_magic]

That's a pretty disingenuous way to frame things. The state of TX has experienced 7,341 deaths out of 454,364 confirmed cases - so far.

Besides a 1.61% death rate being nothing to sneeze at (and it's probably actually higher than that), you have absolutely no idea how many of those 28.9 million Texans will ultimately contract COVID - nor will you always personally know if you're an asymptomatic carrier, responsible for infecting more of your fellow citizens.

To each their own, but I would not want to take my chances with the actual odds you face in TX today. And I wouldn't take those chances with other people's lives. It's not just about you.

[jdminhbg]

> Besides a 1.61% death rate being nothing to sneeze at (and it's probably actually higher than that)

No, it's way lower than that. Deaths are probably undercounted, but nowhere near as much as infections are.

[coldcode]

Go to a hospital and see for yourself. You don't know when you will need access to a hospital bed; if there are none available for whatever you need it for, will you be happy with the odds then? Also the deaths are likely highly undercounted. Also most of the people who will die in the next month are just getting sick. 145,000 people in the US were alive April 1 who are dead now from Covid; I wonder how many of them thought the odds were fine on April 1.

In 1918 August most of the people who died in 1918 from the Spanish Flu were still alive.

[misiti3780]

The numbers coming out of texas and other places in the south do not look good, but if you look at the raw data it is true that on a per-population basis, NY/NJ deaths per X are much worse (as of today)

[iancmceachern]

Yeah, how is that working out for you (Texas), not well....

[departure]

220 deaths in my 2million+ county is nothing. Society would of carried on perfectly fine.

The economic depression screwed us over way more.

[king_magic]

The problem with your line of thinking is you're failing to consider what would have happened if society did not shut down.

Even with a conservative 1.6% death rate, if only a million people in your county contracted COVID, you could still expect 16,000 people to die.

That kind of death rate would tank the economy far worse than a temporary shutdown.

[briHass]

1.6% death rate is not conservative or based in reality. The CDC's best estimate for the IFR, currently, is 0.65% (almost 3x less.) As a population average, even 0.65% doesn't paint an accurate picture. We know deaths are disproportionally in the elderly and those with serious pre-existing conditions.

A better plan would be to do what was possible to protect at-risk populations, but not make the Faustian bargain we did to destroy the economy.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

[logicchains]

>That kind of death rate would tank the economy far worse than a temporary shutdown.

That's completely false. Most of those deaths would be people who aren't working anyway (retirees). The 1918 flu killed way more people, but the economic impact was far less, because there were no lockdowns. Sweden had almost 6000 deaths, but its economy is still doing way better than most countries in Europe (France, Italy, England..).

[king_magic]

No, it's absolutely not false at all. You seriously don't think that retirees contribute to the economy? Beyond that, a large portion of those deaths would be retirees, but a significant portion would be younger people (20s-60s). As more people get sick, more people stop going to work. Stop going out. The downwind effect is massive.

[rorykoehler]

This is heartbreaking.