Samantha Bee explains the steps that need to be taken before we can start relaxing the distancing rules and why that cannot be done quickly.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
[Sorry for the glitch! I have corrected it. -MS]
We have heard about some church preachers demanding that their churches be allowed to have in-person services and violate the social distancing guidelines. Some may be doing it because of their belief that the god demands the actual physical presence of people close together while others may be doing it for ideological reasons such as that no government can tell them when and where they should go. They use the spurious argument that their god will protect the truly faithful.
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I wrote before about how the coronavirus pandemic is creating the conditions for many natural experiments to be conducted. One is the question of how effective the various countermeasures being taken are. We have seen that in Trumpland, those parts of the country where his followers are dominant, the social distancing guidelines are being ignored or relaxed early, despite warnings by public health experts that this could lead to a resurgence in the number of infected cases. These people, especially in rural areas, seem to think that they are relatively immune from the pandemic because the absolute numbers in their areas so far have been relatively few, though on a per capita basis that may not be the case.
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In the US, different states have had different levels of success with limiting the growth of Covid-19 cases. California, the state I live in, has been better than most in the number of cases per capita and this is being credited to early and vigorous action by the governor in issuing social distancing rules and shutting down parks and beaches, since even a couple of days delay can make a big difference in outcomes
After a resident of California died of coronavirus on 4 March, Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency. It was the first Covid-19 related death in the US outside of Washington state.
More than 24,424 people have tested positive for coronavirus in California and 821 people have died. Yet the losses, while tragic, are a fraction of what experts predicted the state’s 40 million people would face.
The virus is spreading fast in southern California and the state’s Central Valley – so it’s not out of trouble yet.
But considering the dire prediction made by Governor Gavin Newsom in March that up to 25 million Californians could be infected with coronavirus, the situation in California has been surprisingly well controlled.
…California was the first place in the United States to issue shelter in place orders. Gov Newsom ordered California to shelter in place on 19 March – three days before New York.
…But can a day or two really make that much difference? “Oh yes,” said Dr Neha Nanda, the medical director of infection prevention and antimicrobial stewardship at Keck Medicine, University of Southern California.
“Even being one day ahead can have a huge impact,” she told the BBC. “The morbidity we will be able to avert, the mortality we will be able to avert – it’s huge.”
Because so little is known about the virus or how it can be treated, it makes prevention “more important than anything else,” she said. “The most potent tool that you have in tool kit is social distancing.”
The current Covid-19 pandemic has drawn many references to the great flu pandemic of 1918. One of the natural experiments that emerged from that event is how different measures adopted by different cities led to significantly different outcomes, with those taking action more quickly effectively flattening the curve and having better outcomes than those that delayed doing so. While multiple non-pharmaceutical interventions such as reducing contacts among people were effective in reducing transmission of the virus, relaxation of those restrictions also resulted in renewing the spread of the virus.
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The title of this post is a commonly used paraphrase of what F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his 1926 short story Rich Boy.
“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.”
Earlier people were told that ordinary facemasks were only effective at preventing those who were infected from spreading it, but did not do anything for those who were not already infected from getting infected. For that one needed the more sophisticated N95 masks. We were also told that we should reserve the existing supply of facemasks for those in the medical profession and other essential service personnel. That sounded reasonable and so I did not try to get any masks for myself
That advice seems to be changing. Now all people in certain areas are being urged to wear facemasks when they go outside. But how does one get hold of one now? I have not been inside a pharmacy or any other store for a month. Do they now have masks on the shelves?
For those who want one and can’t get one, there are various do-it-yourself options. This one (via Carla Sinclair) seems pretty straightforward to make though I have not tried it. I will do so if it becomes absolutely necessary.
When I last checked the Covid-19 trend line, it showed an encouraging flattening in the rate of growth of new cases in the US. China and South Korea had brought things under control much earlier and it looks like Hong Kong and Australia are also doing well. France, Italy, and Germany are definitely showing signs that they have passed the peak and slowing down the rate of growth.
But one of the concerns with the US data is that due to the massive incompetence of the Trump administration in rolling out testing and collecting data, testing is nowhere near a widespread as it should be.
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