ORIGINAL: Sammy5IsAlive
I think we are now moving into the next phase of this. Tracking day-to-day cases/deaths will now start to give us increasingly good news - something to be celebrated
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So I think the question is now - where next?
It seems to me that in Europe and the US we have got on top of the epidemic through 'brute force'. But that strategy is not sustainable economically. It seems to be generally accepted that a vaccine is likely still a year away. What happens in the meantime?
Where do people think the 'holding pattern' is? The balance between economic recovery and avoiding a return to day 1 of an epidemic curve.
South Korea seems to have done a good job of keeping on top of things. But some of the strategies they have used would seem to be anathema to the European/American public. To what extent do we feel comfortable with that kind of heavy monitoring and involvement from 'big government'?
In more general terms (setting aside the public health specifics) how are we going to deal with what looks likely to be a global recession, if not an equivalent of the Great Depression of the 1930s? Do we carry on as normal in the belief that the free market will right itself naturally? Or will we need to make a paradigm shift in our beliefs about the economy and society?
An exellent exposé.
Me again, advocatus diavoli.
The burning question: Why should the casualities ever drop in near future?
Because we are all hiding in caves?
No, this will burn and burn through society like WP, maybe on a lower level - you can't put a modern society into a complete lockdown.
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What is right and what wrong, how should we handle this? Canoerebel, you used the metaphor of Noah's arch (ca. 50 pages ago), the sanctuary for those who needed to be protected — but who is this?
The young, especially the children who will miss an important experience in socializing? All hardworking businessman and employees, whose life work is being destroyed right now? The 90-95 % of our society for whom this will be only a nasty flu indeed. Edit: wrong number, based on a crappy paper: it's more 80%
Or the weak minority, the much fragile and elder, who's future is laying behind them? Should we really destroy our hole economy for some guys with Alzheimer and Bronchitis and Cardiovascular-whatever who would die anyway next year or two?
No easy answer.
If it only would be a nasty, ruined summer - ok, we could hide. Other generations had fight for surviving, we should only stay at home and watch tv.
And wait for x-mas, when our 1 ooo ooo ooo ooo... N95 masks are finally delivered by China.
It's a luxus, a property problem: Never before in human history this question has really arrived — 150 years ago a lot of people at risk would have been long gone: Died A.D. in peace by natural causes we read. But would farmers stopped the harvest then? Would neolithic hunter and gatherers kept the children out of the cave? This exact problem appears only in our time.
Modern medicine has given them, the vulnerable, extra time already and life is neither infinite nor fair. And Adipositas for example, while millions of kids will starving? In a statistic 0.5 % is more or less meaningless.
life is not a simple number, true.
But it's 30 lifes against one. (I thought it was > 200 :1 when I wrote zhis)
And what is with the survivors, the healthy and then immunizised younger generation? Should, could and want we to forbit them all the fun in life we had? And with which force?
At the moment everyone is still under shock. But this will change - keep in mind that for every poor soul in heaven there are at least 200 live-hungry survivors, in a city like New York probably more than only an egocentric minority. When they - the immunized - decide to party again - who has the right to stop them?
Over centuries larger settlements were detremential for population growing - more people died from diseases then newborns survived.
Oh oh, interesting times. Never thought before I would ever be like Nietzsche.
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Edit: so far the Germans are astonishing reasonable - we have NO real lockdown yet and numbers falling. But complience is fading away and easter is coming - no one took this serious any longer cause nothin' is happening and Italy is far away.
--- sry for spelling, grammar stuff etc. - used to go fishing instead of learning as a teen.
; Julia Child
