With an extra $600 per week for four months on top of regular unemployment compensation, what is the incentive to go back to work for people who make around $15/hour?
"Social distancing and shelter in place are designed to drag it out longer." check out the definition of mitigate. it says nothing about dragging it out = the action of reducing the severity , seriousness, or painfulness of something. while I do agree that this mitigating practice does take a little time; thus your comment. But what they are doing (mitigating= social distancing) is NOT designing to drag this out.Not saying you are wrong but there is a lot of media driven speculation that we would have completely overwhelmed our hospitals without these drastic measures. There is no proof of that. We don't know closing down business's and the economy has drastically effected the economy and our lives. I believe it has probably slowed down the spread but to believe taking our lumps now with hopes of it being better quicker is contrary to everything that is being said by the experts. Social distancing and shelter in place are designed to drag it out longer. In the end...…...the same amount of people are going to be exposed. Do you want to do it in 2 months or 6 months. Well we are on the 6 month plan. That might be optimistic.
Pretty discouraging when it is now being said by front line doctors that intubation and ventilators are being overused and causing more harm than the virus in many cases I would like to read the story you found that in. I had not heard thatPretty discouraging when it is now being said by front line doctors that intubation and ventilators are being overused and causing more harm than the virus in many cases. Kind of like the small business payroll bail out.....easier to pay people to stay home than actually open and provide a service.
Not saying it isn't necessary or bad, but when money is available, people will find a way to claim it, even if it isn't necessarily going to lead to the best outcome.
This is the exact conversation my wife and I where having when all this began. Its a rationalization of the situation but its also a fact (if your figures are correct - didn't fact check you on that) but your rationale is solid.Nice post as I have used some of the same analogy to try and grasp some reality of the situation. Put it this way on the driving thing. Almost 300,000,000 people in the United States are exposed to a potential traffic accident or death daily. In a course of a year over 10,0000,000 of those are actually involved in them or should I say catch the disease. Out of that 10,000,0000 approximately 250,000 are seriously hurt enough to need medical treatment and 40,000 die. And yet we don't make people park their cars, close down roads, close Convenience stores and ban the sale of gas just to eleminate the risk.
Put this in perspective. Does 100,000 people dying from the Coronavirus seem steep? On average about .83333 % of Americans die each year. If those 100,000 additional die it would make it .86363 %. Here is another perspective. Out of the reported deaths, most have underlying problems that threatened whether they wouldn't have been part of the death statistics in the next year anyway.
Now am I trying to say this isn't bad? Of course not. Especially if you or your family are the ones that get it. But its bad if you or your family have to deal with any death including that of a vehicle accident. I'm just saying some perspective is needed.
"Social distancing and shelter in place are designed to drag it out longer." check out the definition of mitigate. it says nothing about dragging it out = the action of reducing the severity , seriousness, or painfulness of something. while I do agree that this mitigating practice does take a little time; thus your comment. But what they are doing (mitigating= social distancing) is NOT designing to drag this out.
the same amount of people are going to be exposed This comment is unprovable
Exactly. I’m not a scientist but my understanding is it was supposedly to make the normal tall bell curve into a short stubby bell curve lol Thus LESS deaths overall. The good thing about statistics and mathematics...... its based on recorded facts. The problem with the media (and others) is they collect ”facts” to further their point of view. (whatever that may be ) and leave out other “ facts” that don’t further their point of view.I guess my understanding of the social distancing was to flatten the curve and keep us from having a sharp spike. So that hospitals don't become overwhelmed with cases. In all the statistic classes I took and all the psych classes I took that would mean we are stretching it out over a longer period of time across the x axis. Instead of having a high peak of incidence on the y axis. It has been a long time since I did much graphical analysis but that is a pretty simple graph to read.
Its been a while since my last statistics class, so I may be off base on this. With a normal bell shaped curve, if you flatten the curve aren't the areas under the curve the same in both cases? In the Corona case I'm not sure whether the two curves are meant to have the same area under the curve. Obviously, a flatter curve would help the hospitals by spreading the patients over a longer period of time than, presumable, the same number of patients over a shorter period of time. But, my question is: does flattening the curve actually increase the area under the curve (increase the number of persons) because there is additional time for personal interactions which will result in more cases?
Pretty discouraging when it is now being said by front line doctors that intubation and ventilators are being overused and causing more harm than the virus in many cases I would like to read the story you found that in. I had not heard that
Wow man you do some deep reading .... are you a health professional? THIS is not just casual reading. I certainly appreciate you passing this on And it supports your statement completely. Thank you. Some good info there. It just goes to show you what these health care providers have to deal with on a daily basis. A lot to learn.Doctors fighting coronavirus face a ventilator Catch-22
As critically ill patients struggle to breathe, healthcare workers have deployed invasive ventilators that take on the job for them—and help protect those around them from infection. Critically ill Covid-19 patients usually display symptoms of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS)—they...www.yahoo.com
What you're implying is basically a straw-man argument that there would be anyone out there, anywhere who is advocating for doing nothing at all, carrying on with Mardi Gras parades, Rave parties, etc. Nobody is advocating for that. Obviously there is a correlation between people dying and economic output, but, again, nobody is arguing that there isn't.It’s a fairly commonly accepted concept in the field. You can search and find consensus among economists. Here’s one link to an article summarizing some research done at MIT.
Straw-man argumentIf we think about it logically it makes sense. Can you imagine what would happen if we didn’t take steps to mitigate the spread?
Part Proving a Negative and part Straw-man argument. If we shelter in place, and things turn out great: "See, isn't it great that we took such drastic measures?" Meanwhile, if the totals for the dead and gravely ill are still severe: "See, imagine how bad it would have been if we hadn't taken such drastic measures!" Then compared, again, to doing nothing.The restrictions we’re under now are painful and it frankly it sucks. But it’s nothing compared to what it would look like if we didn’t mitigate.
Do you understand the economic ramifications of what you are saying? If we keep a significant portion of our economy shut down or at least hobbled until 2021, there will not be "a normal" for us to come back to.My hope is that we make the necessary sacrifices now, take our lumps now, and hopefully we’re in position to ease restrictions this summer and have some return to normal activity by August. My fear is that we won’t enter into our ‘new normal’ until an effective vaccine is on the market in 2021.
MIT link
I think you're correct. The NU system decided last week to continue remote instruction of all coursework through the summer sessions. Also, this week they issued the order that all buildings are closed to non-essential personnel. It begins tomorrow and they will reevaluate in 2 weeks. I can't even access the building where my office is located. I'm not complaining, just noting how shut down the university is right now.One thing to add. I think university presidents are going to be really conservative about letting students back on to campus. Few will want to risk the PR nightmare of having students die because they were antsy about starting back up. Universities were early movers on shutting down activity, and my guess is that universities will lag behind businesses in resuming activity.