Update: I have wondered about long-term effects, and even mentioned them occasionally, but I am also guilty of overlooking the other difficulties, even if you don't die. I had forgotten the neurotoxicity as well.
Most of the sites I frequent include a fair number of people who have concluded we have overreacted to C19 and caused unnecessary damage economically. Several of them, both posters and commenters, no longer engage in much discussing, just keep making the same assertions, regardless of what arguments are offered. As a consequence, I no longer read anything they write. I haven't got the time.
They may be right, of course. Right that we overreacted, that is. They are less likely to be right in blaming the economic problems on that.
I think we still lack enough information to make pronouncements and are all still guessing our way through. The knowledge that both Chinese researchers (who would be tempted to lie in the opposite direction), and the South Koreans (who I think are regarded as reliable) have both found that some who have recovered now show few - even "barely detectable" - antibodies is cause for concern. The South Koreans claim they are also seeing re-infection. That may turn out to be a non-issue. We don't know.
There is evidence than many more people have been exposed and would test positive. Is it a good thing if the population is 40% on its way to saturation? I don't know. Does that mean that an enormous percentage of people who get the virus aren't going to be much bothered? Does it mean there are multiple strains? Does it tell us anything about immunity come autumn?
Update: Then there is this out of Hokkaido, Japan. Please understand, I am not saying that this is about to happen here or will happen at all, only that the information we currently have is uncertain, and likely to remain so for some time. It is the people pushing everyone aside to get up on the dais and proclaim what they are certain is the truth who are increasingly becoming the problem, creating a political pressure that is only loosely tied to reasoning and evidence.
Some of them come perilously close to saying "the risk of deaths is worth it in order to have a good economy and not have government officials telling me what to do, because that really pisses me off." If that is what they mean, then they should actually say that. If that is not what they mean, then they should take more care to make that clear.
I will add, as I have noted before, that there is a lot of energy being expended in to criticising the government parts of the shutdown, as if that were the major, if not the only reason people have lost their jobs and the economy has taken such a heavy blow. It is the virus, not the government that has done that. In some cases one could argue that it is the fear of the virus. I have no objection to that reasoning. But that is still not the government, and yelling at your fellow citizens that they are fools, cowards, and sheep who don't love liberty as much as you do isn't going to have any good effect. Most of the economic damage is not due to the government shutdown. Sports leagues did not shut down because the government told them to. One difficult part of the recovery is going to be disengaging from China, which makes an enormous number of component parts - because it was cheaper and we wanted it that way.
As to what has had the biggest effect in slowing the growth of the illness, I will only note that in discussions of distancing and reduced contact, I don't think the closing of the schools has gotten as much notice as it should. When considering the schools, all the energy is going into the difficulty of teaching and the discussions of when to reopen. It is a long-know fact that a community's schools are one of its primary reservoirs for infectious disease. Oh, I work at a school. I catch everything that goes around. Please note I am not claiming that's the key. I am simply stating that it's a big item that isn't mentioned much. Churches may be a big community spreader as well, but in New England, not so much.
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During January and February, there was concern that some local schools were reaching a concerning absentee rate due to flu. My grandchildren stayed at my house when they were running a fever so their parents could continue to work. Thus, whatever viruses were going around then, I was exposed to. I check off all the risk factors for death from covid19 except diabetes. A nice flu probably wouldn't have been all that much different - chances were strong it would have killed me.
And then suddenly in early to mid-March, I'm off-limits. That hasn't changed my life so much, but it's drastically changed the life of my grandchildren. For one thing, the safety/escape valve of spending the night with grandma is gone. I think that's minor compared to the loss of their physical and emotional escape valves -- volleyball, basketball, running (races) and what might have once been seen as fleeting and unimportant interactions with classmates.
My thoughts now are that we are very close to having 'flattened the curve' and it is time to plan on letting up on some of the restrictions. I think it would be disastrous to allow the mission to creep from flattening the curve to preventing death at all costs... the main cost being ultimate herd immunity.
I think something has gotten lost in all this discussion of social distancing and other preventative measures. Wasn't the whole point of flattening the curve to prevent our medical services from getting overwhelmed by too many COVID-19 cases? Maybe I'm mistaken, but it was my understanding that the total number of cases was essentially fixed. It wasn't a matter of how many get sick as much of a matter of how quickly that number gets sick. So, doesn't the question of whether or not we can reopen everything hinge on whether our medical services will be overwhelmed?
That's what I feel like is being lost in these discussions. The goalposts moved, likely unintentionally, and no one really noticed. Now I get the impression (and it could just be my impression) that people think the goal is to prevent anyone from getting the virus at all. That's doesn't strike me as a feasible option unless we all want to stay sequestered until we have a vaccine.
We're getting more ventilators and other supplies everyday, so will we get to a point that we can say, "Sure, open everything back up. A lot of people will get sick, but they were bound to get sick no matter what. Less will die because we can handle it."?
Leaving serious commentary aside, I find I like some aspects of social distancing. For example, I was happy that I could tell the creepy guy who nudged me while I was checking out at the store last night to back off. Six feet dude! A few months ago, all that would have been socially acceptable was a dirty look.
Handling this epidemic seems to be like chasing ghosts. So many unrelated yet substantiated bits of data that don't appear to tie together around a common illness theme. And it would appear that the key elements are still missing pieces. Often an emerging scientific discovery gets off to a slow start and then the pace of learning and problem solving starts to accelerate as resources and minds are brought to bear. But in this case it looks like the learning curve for this virus is a flat line with an unchanging, steep slope - a hard slog all the way through it to reach a reasonable degree of understanding that will allow medical science to finally get its arms around the problem.
At least it appears not to be particularly virulent and the mortality rates are coming in much lower than modeled. That is a huge saving grace.
Deevs, you are correct. All this social distancing and shutting down of non-essential businesses isn't expected to prevent anyone from being exposed to the virus, it is just spreading out the time period over which it occurs.
I think both are true. Many people told us at first that we could largely prevent or at least minimise this. Then "flattening the curve" was the whole point. As the latter seems to have worked very well, many have gone back to trying to achieve the former. Is that mission creep? I think it is mostly is, because flattening was the big push and the main justification for the stricter measures. Still, it's not entirely pulling the rug. The difficulty with looking back at what we thought was being said and what the point was is that a lot of people said a lot of things, got to the main stage at different times, and have changed their minds at least somewhat since then. Secondly, our memories of such things deceive us greatly. I encountered a very liberal coworker in late March who insisted he knew C19 was a big deal in mid-January. I bit my tongue, but that was a flat lie, a motivated self-deception. (To be fair, a conservative acquaintance thinks it's all a coverup for 5G damage.) Yet that is only the worst example. We are all likely to retrospectively think that we knew much earlier than we really did. One son went to visit another in early March, and I was queasy and almost said something but didn't. Had I been more certain I would have sounded the alarm. But I didn't so I must not have been.
We owe Senator Tom Cotton a great deal.
I read somewhere today that Japan was requiring all confirmed cases to be hospitalized, not just the serious ones. If that reporter wasn't completely confused, then it seems Japan has a fairly simply tool for relieving the pressure on hospitals from the current uptick.
New article in the Lancet finds that the virus is showing up in the vascular system. https://twitter.com/search?q=-from%3Aquotedreplies%20url%3A1251178521940066306&f=live
"Here we demonstrate endothelial cell involvement across vascular beds of different organs in a series of patients with COVID-19."
hubs.ly/H0pCwhx0
Making real research progress now.
...there is a lot of energy being expended in to criticising the government parts of the shutdown, as if that were the major, if not the only reason people have lost their jobs and the economy has taken such a heavy blow. It is the virus, not the government that has done that. In some cases one could argue that it is the fear of the virus.
I would argue that much of the economic damage is due to uncertainty about the virus and its knock-on effects. For example, who expected oil prices to crash? It may be a while before markets stop gyrating in response to news and stabilize at new levels.
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