Our county locked down way back a year and a half ago, but has been back to normal for quite a while. Almost no one wears masks, restaurants are open for in-room dining, businesses are back open. I gather that's typical for rural America. I keep mentioning that we haven't had a death since February, but I got to thinking maybe that's just good luck. Maybe deaths are higher in other rural counties; surely they are in the cities.
Now if you go to the CDC website to look at county-level data, here's what they'll show you first: 'community spread.'
Looks terrifying, right? But you have the option to select for 'deaths,' and in rural America deaths are at zero in much of America; in some places there are still single digit or low-double digit deaths.
So rural America is less prone to death; that makes sense because of less crowding and so on. It's almost the same for the metro counties, though, with a handful of exceptions.
It seems as if there's plenty of room here for a Sweden-style solution to most of America, at least.
Of course, you could take the position that 'even one death is too many,' and lock down like New Zealand at the first confirmed case. But they're a remote island nation where keeping cases to zero is an imaginable goal, even if it's probably impossible in the long run. That's not true of the United States, where international commerce is centered. Even if we had control of our southern border, we'd still have a lot of people coming and going at ports and airports across the country.
We can't actually take the position that even one death is too many. There are no disease-countering strategies that bring the death of any particular disease to zero without substituting deaths of other sorts.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, the elder brother (late 60s) of a local acquaintance just died of COVID, unvaccinated, and I'd bet big bucks he didn't even know enough to seek antibody treatment. A wealthy family with access to anything it needed, but you can't make people pay attention if they don't want to.
You're right, though, that although meaningless "case counts" are higher, they're not showing up in deaths at anything like the alarming rates we saw last December and January. Hospitals are stressed, but perhaps hospitalizations have peaked, we'll see. This Bloomberg page continues to show charts of both "cases" and "deaths," nationwide and state-by-state; toggling between them tells a story the press would rather avoid. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-united-states-coronavirus-outbreak/
As I have noted before, Sweden voluntarily masks, closes, and distances at a high rate without government insistence. I doubt that would work here, particularly in the urban areas where it would be most necessary. As with gun control, the laws on the books are not always an indication of behavior. Most legal gun owners police themselves and don't do dumb or aggressive stuff. there is probably worthy social pressure from other gun owners to do the right thing. No one is used to this closing, masking, and distancing so we don't have a culture that has learned to do this voluntarily. Swedes do what social pressure tells them to, Americans not so much.
ReplyDeleteYou can paint maps to look as calming or terrifying as you want. It's basic How To Lie With Statistics stuff. But Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi have more cases than at any time in the entire pandemic with no sign of abating. Texas and Louisiana both had over a hundred deaths yesterday alone, so references to "one death" in New Zealand, ridiculous as that was, are not really an accurate comparison. It is now clear to me we will reach one million deaths.
People don't feel like there is much danger because disease is invisible and this is new territory for all of us. None of us have gone through a serious epidemic before. We see that our cars still run, the mountains are still in place, we don't see bodies in the streets, so we think it can't be so bad. We see people who have lost jobs and businesses that have closed, so those loom larger to us. Both of those are appearances, however much they are based on real information. The negative side is invisible to us, but that doesn't mean it's not there.
My buddy in Mobile (who is much closer to your opinion than mine on the subject) notes that they had 65 deaths in the last two weeks. Hospitalization there is up 165%. I ran him through the same numbers I posted here, and he said this:
ReplyDelete"I'm thinking plenty of space that limits indoor human interaction and you're good, plenty of vaccinated people and you're good, plenty of people being cautious and you're good. None of the above? Not good."
I'm interested in the idea that a low-restriction approach like Sweden's can work, though, as I watch especially NZ and New Zealand (and Scotland, whose parliament said yesterday that they'd like to make their COVID powers permanent features of government authority). These kinds of things have big effects on society, which surely ought to be connected to big benefits if they are to be considered at all (and perhaps they shouldn't be, in many cases where basic rights are concerned).
What Sweden shows is that you can get there without these approaches. Maybe it's not true that we can get there; but then again, much of America is already there -- and many of the parts with the fewest active restrictions. Those ugly spots are Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Austin, etc. (I'd feel better about this conclusion if Florida wasn't apparently refusing to provide any data, so we could compare Miami and Tampa to New Orleans, Mobile, Atlanta, and the cities in NC and SC).
The two nationwide or state-by-state charts or maps I'd really like to see side by side are deaths/hospitalizations for (1) the unvaccinated, never-tested-positive-before, and (2) the vaccinated-or-previously-infected. It could be that the former would look like the scary graphs from Oct. 2020-February 2021, while the latter would look like "meh." Average them together and you get a current spike in hospitalizations/deaths that's much higher than ideal but much lower than last winter.
ReplyDeleteI'm not convinced that either would have a darn thing to do with masks, but until there's less cherry-picked research on the subject, that's going to have to remain either unknowable or at least hotly contested. My preference in the context of unknowable or hotly contested prophylactic measures is to defer to individual choice.
Sweden and france have beaten america. The world is beginning to end. And that is a good thing. God s world is not the corrupt human world.
ReplyDeleteLet it burn. Many must atone for their past atrocities in vietnam. The nation included. All of this are merely divine lessons and tests.
Only the true god of liberty will not abandon the children. The falze idols america and constitution, fake apostles, fake pastors, bible and talmid have
The waxxine is the bio weapon disease. As i foresaw in feb 28 2020, the wuhan engineered the disease. Mrna wax distributes more of the spike protein dna used by the so called virus and makes people sick.
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