[controversy]

The disease will not be wiped out by masks and hand washing. Germany and other countries are finding their rates of infection increasing as people leave their bunkers. The model used by most of Europe is not sustainable. People can’t bunker down in their homes forever.

Sweden’s model shows that you can keep your economy open and reasonably manage the disease. People who are going to die are the elderly by enlarge. That is sad. However they would die soon enough due to their age and pre existing issues. Why sacrifice the economy for the elderly’s two years while harming the next generation by poor remote education and harming the current adults due to destroyed economic activity?

[jrochkind1]

So, it's pretty inaccurate to describe Germany's response as "masks and hand-washing".

Germany still has spikes they need to deal with, but is also doing really well, when in fact people in Germany are not bunkering down in their homes forever. Germany is currently way more open than the U.S. is and is doing way better at control of the disease.

Precisely becuase their response is not limited to "masks and hand-washing". "Masks and hand-washing" and "bunkering down" in fact describes the USA response better than it describes the German response. And Germany is doing a lot better than the USA.

The USA is being hobbled by a strange belief that the only options are "masks, hand-washing and bunkering down must be done forever and are sufficient", or "ignore it and just let as many people get infected as will under business as usual." With one of those seen as a "left" position and the other as a "right" position. Neither is actually an effective response; neither actually characterizes the response of countries like Germany who have been very effective in controlling the pandemic.

It is insanity, and we've been stuck in it for six months, I keep wondering when Americans will realize those aren't the only choices; apparently never? Maybe because some people still think there is going to be some magic bullet "when the vaccine" and we can just wait it out until then; that's not how it's going to work, we're going to be dealing with this for years, and need to be finding sustainable solutions, not arguing about whether we should do something insufficient and unsustainable OR do nothing at all.

What Germany's response has involved is massive testing, a quality healthcare system with universal access, supporting people in quarantine, supporting people financially so nobody has to go to work sick or in non-safe situations in order to stay secure financially, and it goes on from there. All of this is somehow unimaginable in the USA, where people can only conceive of "masks, hand-washing, and staying home", or "pretty much ignore it".

[toip34]

Up to 90% of the positive cases in the US would not be positive in Germany due to how PCR tests are performed in each country, and what countries code as coronavirus deaths also differs. Making comparisons between countries is hard. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testin...

[arrrg]

That’s a weird retort. At least deaths should be reasonably robust and there is really no comparison there between Germany and the US.

Germany is doing fantastically better than the US. All the while measures have been relaxed way more here than in the US. “Lockdowns” were also never really harsh in Germany and only lasted a very short time.

Three factors are suspected to be at play there:

* very early testing that detected community spread with unknown origins very early on (using the influenza sentinel system for detection)

* luckily being late in importing the virus, which lead to …

* … politicians being able to “look into the future” by looking at Italy (a place that unluckily imported the virus quite a bit earlier)

As a result Germany relatively quickly (though Germany could have acted a bit faster and have been even more effective) implemented quite mild measures for a relatively short amount of time. Some of those measures are still in place, most were, however, lifted in the meantime.

This lead to a still enduring drop to very low numbers, extremely low numbers if you look at deaths. Even though measures at this point often are much milder than in the US.

Your defensive “numbers aren’t comparable” retort is bullshit. Mostly because, sure, the numbers aren’t comparable. Sure, that’s true. But we aren’t talking about orders of magnitude here.

Germany is doing fantastically better than the US. No matter what you measure, whether it’s infections, deaths, excess deaths, economic impact. You name it.

[jrochkind1]

The excess mortality is harder to fake or mis-measure though. There are no perfect numbers here (a lesson about measurement in general), but there is no reasonable argument that the US is doing anything but much much worse than Germany.

And yet Germany is not currently "locked down". The argument that Germany is among the best of all countries at handling this is not an argument for "if everyone just wears a mask and doesn't leave their home forever" -- that is not what happened in Germany. At all.

[jeromegv]

What you link to is not mentioning Germany (or Europe) so I’m not sure how what you say is backed up by the URL you linked to.

[bijant]

That is Wrong and the linked article does not support your Assertion. German Labs are running the same high (35+) number of cycles that US Labs are. The Discussion to define a cutoff Value is ongoing.

[hervature]

I recently got in a silly argument where the crux of my argument was that the reason the US is mishandling the situation is because the pandemic was politicized since day 1. The response I was met with was: "no, it's all Trump's fault".

[triceratops]

> the pandemic was politicized

What does that mean? How did it lead to a bad outcome?

[hervature]

As the parent to my comment posted:

> The USA is being hobbled by a strange belief that the only options are "masks, hand-washing and bunkering down must be done forever and are sufficient", or "ignore it and just let as many people get infected as will under business as usual." With one of those seen as a "left" position and the other as a "right" position.

In practice, what does this look like? You have Fox reporting on Nancy Pelosi's haircut everyday on the week. You have 1 op-ed from CNN. Both sides think the each other are bad actors. Funding that needs to go out to the people are held up for election purposes.

Your political affiliation should have no bearing on your thoughts on how to handle a pandemic. It leads to people, who might otherwise be rational people, doubling down to support their side. Whether or not they agree with it. Because both sides are polar opposites, there is no compromise for a middle ground solution.

[triceratops]

You're going to call this more "politicization" but the reality is the US government ignored and downplayed the pandemic until it was too late. This isn't really a debatable or left/right viewpoint. After that, criticism of the response was inevitable, leading to the claim that the pandemic was "politicized".

The only way it would have been not "politicized" was if the initial response had been even halfway competent.

[hervature]

No I'm not going to call your comment "politicization". Here is the government trying to act [1].

Both sides include poison pills that they know that the other side won't pass. Why is a new $2B FBI headquarter or SALT reform even in a COVID bill? They both agree to at least $300B directly to the people, just pass that. Now is the time to have unanimous agreement on things that will help, not include provisions to help your constituents.

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/30/upshot/corona...

[dragonwriter]

> Your political affiliation should have no bearing on your thoughts on how to handle a pandemic.

On the flip side, one would think one’s opinion on how government handles things would have a rather large impact on one’s political affiliation, and the more significant those things are the stronger a factor it would be.

[ChuckNorris89]

Nobody in Europe is bunkered in their homes since March-April. The numbers have increased exactly because people are free to go anywhere on their summer vacation and party as they wish, causing new fires to erupt.

[cygx]

Your cost-benefit analysis is incomplete: Covid-19 can cause long-term lung damage even in the young.

[wsinks]

Not trying to antagonize, but I'm looking for more research / validation on long term effects. Can you provide a source for me? Thank you!

[SahAssar]

We probably can't get long term results to study until there has been a long term.

[controversy]

We don’t know that. The body could heal. Also there was little thought to comorbidities in most papers.

[cygx]

You're right to point out that I should have thrown in some further qualification (it's too early to make definitive statements about long-term consequences).

Apparently, there was some significant recovery of lung damage in the aftermath of the 2002 SARS-CoV-1 outbreak (Pulmonary interstitial damage and functional decline caused by SARS mostly recovered, with a greater extent of recovery within 2 years after rehabilitation. [1])

This doesn't change the fact that this has to be accounted for if you want to play the numbers game.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41413-020-0084-5

[listenallyall]

So can smoking. What is your point?

[Smoosh]

> sacrifice the economy for the elderly’s two years

No. It isn't just 2 years off some elderly people who were going to die soon anyway (not that that isn't an extremely callous position to hold):

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/study-finds-that-people-w...

[controversy]

You should follow through on some of those links to the actual papers. They have structural problems. The first assumed that there was a 50% chance of the individuals living to 100. That is not realistic. But the business insider article does allow for people to sensationalize and feel smug in their knowledge that the long term economic and existential damage from bunkering and collapsing the economy was all worth it.