This sentiment that keeps being repeated in the U.S. that you somehow have to choose between saving lives and saving the economy is completely inaccurate, they are not mutually exclusive. Had America took the correct intelligent/rational/scientific approach earlier on, your economy would not have ever been shutdown, millions and millions of Americans would not have lost their jobs, and you also would not have over 80k + deaths as of now. This notion that this is an unprecedented event and we therefor don't know to handle this is completely inaccurate, you can save Americans from needlessly dying, and keep Americans at work at the exact same time, but unfortunately your country is ran by incompetent morons that have no idea what the hell they are doing, your elected officials are failing you. Everything that has occurred in the past few months was preventable, here is why it occurred.

A) Incompetent/moronic elected officials.

B) Americans have weak social cohesion

C) A populace of low intelligence

D) Lack of common sense

On March 15th, the U.S. and South Korea had the exact same amount of deaths, which was 75 at the time. South Korea currently only has 259 total deaths, the U.S. currently has 83K deaths in total, which is 300x more deaths, yet we at one period of time had the exact same amount of deaths. Not only this, they did this WITHOUT SHUTTING DOWN THEIR ECONOMY. So when your moronic elected officials tell you that nobody knows the correct strategy to handle this, this is somewhat true, your elected officials are morons that should be ran out of office by people that are actually competent and know what the hell they are doing. There is a scientific/rational approach to deal with a virus outbreak like this, it was obvious months ago what that answer/strategy was.

It was actually the government scientists and their expert overseers that screwed it up in the US. The US crushed South Korea's response to this early on, ramping testing and preparations, buying time by excluding Chinese. But their testing ramp got screwed up horribly by the experts/scientists, despite being a simple thing that no one else screwed up. A lot of things were to blame, among them Obama era pandemic procedure which shut out the private market, the incredibly incompetent decisions of Fauci and Birx not to parallelize test development, and the experts/scientists themselves who both screwed up the tests AND failed to catch it for weeks. With no tests it was not possible to mount South Korea's response, or any response really. Without testing data you're blind and the US response was dead in the water. It's that simple. The rest is horrible aftermath.

When I say "preventable", I don't mean zero deaths/zero economical damage. Of course your going to have some deaths and experience damage to your economy. My point is that comparatively speaking, deaths and economical damage could've have been drastically blunted compared to what has currently occurred in the U.S. Let me use a poker analogy, this is not a great analogy, but you guys should get my point. The united States has chased a 4 outer and called a pot size bet on the turn, this is a terrible play. Where as some of these other countries are playing poker more correct/efficiently, maybe not perfect, but they are at least making decent plays. In the most simple terms, the U.S. has historically made -EV plays, where some of these other countries that are having success have made plays that were more +EV, not only in the form of total deaths, but also in the form of economical damage.

I agree. "Herd immunity" seems like a misnomer. Kind of like "flatten the curve" is a misnomer for attempts at eradication through lockdown. What they're talking about is really just less stringent and less mandated social distancing that hopefully flattens the curve to make the outbreak manageable without eradicating it.

But I think the pragmatic calculus is just this:

That lockdowns are not politically sustainable in the US already seems pretty clear. There's also evidence that people started social distancing prior to official stay at home orders (and some, presumably, are continuing afterwards). I think it's clear that if you have the capacity to execute something like a "5 weeks to eradication" plan and succeed then this is obviously a superior plan. I think that we could have been much better prepared and should have followed a path like that much earlier. It's certainly hard to criticize the argument that this is/was the right idea.

But since it's also clear it's not happening here for a variety of reasons (some regulatory, some political, some cultural?) I think the other point of the article is probably true, regretfully or not:

So, mostly what I'm interested in is trying to guess just how bad the outcome of this will be, and to consider the possibility that more voluntary forms of social distancing will allow us to manage without realizing some of the more apocalyptic projections. TS is clearly correct that more people will die because of it in comparison to the perfect counterfactual response. I don't think it's trivial to weight that against the negative effects of a much longer lockdown in most of the US, but it also seems somewhat academic at this point.

It's not about total eradication - that's impossible.
It's about practical eradication. You detect small clusters quickly, quarantine and contact trace - see the recent South Korea outbreak.
To do this, certain physical distancing precautions need to remain in place.

You missed the point. Anyone with half a brain can see what the best strategy is in hindsight, but predicting it before the event is less easy. For example:

I think this forum has the best discussion of covid 19 on the internet. And TS and seedless are a big part of that. So give credit where it is due.

They being said, a couple months ago it seems you guys were arguing countries like the US and UK had no shot of containing coronavirus because they were low intelligence and had low social cohesion. And now it seems the argument it is the experts fault and apparently If they had been more responsible we could have crushed it? What happened to the social cohesion and intelligence part of the pessimistic outlook?

man how long did it take you to find that post

i'm not sure why the outsider opinion of someone who develops apps for a living is relevant

what is relevant is the people in charge of coordinating a response in asian countries unanimously reacted very aggressively and put it to end before it started

had the rest of the world done as taiwan/vietnam/korea did then this would have been a nothingburger and I would likely still be in the "zomg look at how we overreacted" camp

my point is my opinion is immaterial and pointing out that I personally was pretty firmly in the "just the flu" camp in the early days has literally nothing to do with your statement that nobody had that "eradicate it" mentality back in January, which is just not true as basically all of asia did exactly just that in january

I don't disagree that the experts were giving bad advice Tooth, I agree, let me use a theoretical scenario for you though. Imagine your a world renowned virologist, and let's say in this scenario your like a Fauci and your job is to educate the general public on how to deal with this virus so they can take an intelligent/rational approach of dealing with this virus, but here is what happens. You tooth want to tell the general public to wear masks back in February, but unfortunately, because of incompetency at the higher levels of government, masks were not stockpiled, what do you do? What ends up happening is you now have "experts" telling the GP that masks are not effective and that they should not be buying them up, but why are experts saying this? They are saying this because they think it is more important for doctors/nurses to have masks over the general public having masks, the "experts" were forced into a scenario where they had to lie to the public because of incompetency that may have not been there actual fault. Had masks been stockpiled, "experts" would have told the GP to probably wear masks, so in this scenario you have experts receiving the bad end of the stick for something that may have not been there fault.

Now don't get me wrong, I am not defending Fauci, Fauci and someone else at the CDC said community spread was unlikely occurring back in late February. There was no excuse for them to make this claim, it was highly likely exponential growth was occurring and was inevitable regardless. Also, I agree with you on the testing, not refuting that, they obviously screwed that up. This impacted our ability to contact trace and isolate, but we could have still been implementing viral avoidance behavior like you have brought up in earlier posts, of course avoidance behavior includes masks though.

I've heard (herd?) this said numerous times but I don't think it makes logical sense. If getting infected and recovering provides immunity, how would enough people getting infected not lead to herd immunity, just as enough people getting the vaccine would?

Two mins. I searched oldest first and I think it's your first post itt.

Really? Check the numbers. I think you'll find more Asian countries that didn't test, track, trace in January than did. This is also probably true today.

That was pre-shutdown - a discussion of how it's possible to control it without destroying the economy I believe and locking everyone at home. It's played out exactly like expected - the lower IQ and social responsibility demographics are massively over-represented in both infected and deaths. In some areas they're 75% of infections despite being 20-30% of the population.

It makes the job a lot harder but I outlined how it's achievable even without shutting everything down (but possibly not in the low iq/social responsibility populations). Once the US showed it was willing to do and maintain harsh lockdowns, eradication became easy.

IF getting infected and recovering provides immunity and IF there are no new strains that bypass it, it's theoretically possible at an enormous societal and economic cost.
But that kind of herd immunity would still be constantly challenged by newcomers (births and from abroad).

dude you're just nitpicking semantics at this point

my point is that all of asia from the ladyboys to the nerds took this very seriously from the start and very successfully made it a nothing burger

sweden has a smaller population than just the city of wuhan china and will surpass all of china in deaths before the end of the month and will likely be far more

to argue that this is unforseen or that the disease running through society was inevitable is ridiculous and based off seeing the complete and utter incompetence in our own countries and neighbors and assuming that to be the norm because USA#1 so obviously we're doing it best

the entire continent of asia was freaking out, shutting down airports, ramping up testing capabilities and mask production and meanwhile we lol'd and watched our stock markets reach the all time high

Anyone been following these developments?

Getting a lot more coverage in local NYC news lately. Certainly a disturbing development, as children being essentially untouched by COVID was one of the only bright spots.

Still rare considering the number of kids who have likely been exposed to the virus, but it's odd that these cases are popping up now, when infections in NY are declining. Could it be an entirely new disease, or a delayed reaction to the virus?

Good job I have never.argued anything even remotely resembling this position then.

My "weirdo ideas" being what, exactly? That so-called "experts" do not price in massive crises in their planning? This has been widely known for years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory

In the case of CV one only had to look at Spanish flu in 1918 in the set of possible outcomes, that is a global pandemic of massive scale is certainly not beyond reason. But of course 100 years ago is ancient history in the context of scientific achievements, correct?

If Spanish flu happened at similar scale 20 years ago do you really think the "experts" would have reacted the same to CV as they did 4 months ago?

Taiwan, Hong Kong, and other neighboring countries had experience dealing with China and their outbreaks/misinformation. Taiwan in particular reacted the quickest and most aggresively, shutting down its border with China and immediately leveraging technology in managing quarantines.
All this while being completely isolated from WHO. Tells you a little bit about the value of that organization when it really matters.

It all tells us the value of having had to deal with it recently. If we have another similar incident in a few years time then the west will be massively better prepared and the population wont think it's not going to be a big deal.

The expertise will be much the same (hopefully the science will be slightly more advanced). The situation and outcome will be very different.

Still in Screw Sweden mode apparently. Why don't you talk about countries that did not lock down yet have uber low death rates?

If you want to bash Sweden for not shutting down its borders early on, fine.

Yes, this was one of my points a few posts above.

If you comparing a small European country to the whole USA its kind of a silly comparison. Thats like one of our random small states doing quite fine here. EU as whole would compare better to USA

I posted that in a direct reply to a link about Sweden.

If anyone is in screw Sweden mode its you, given you have a raging hard on for it.

Why dont you post about countries that did not lock down that have uber low death rates. That is your argument not mine, this post your own arguments and evidence for said argument thing seems to confuse you greatly.

If by experts, you mean politicians, especially now, then sure.
Also, this wasn't a black swan. Pandemics are part of human existence.