Reverse the spread for what reason? I believe we accomplished that in the beginning to prevent an overload of the healthcare system which has been reported a success. But what about herd immunity if we continue to reverse the spread? This is one topic that has the concern of a number of medical professions as well.
Mis-spelling.
Reducing the spread rather than reversing. Its an epidemic of a respiratory virus. Until we learn something different (and I hope we dont), there is no 'chronic Covid infection'. You get infected with the virus, there are only two outcomes:
A. The virus replicates in your body, you become sick (or you remain asymptomatic) and you recover after 2-3 weeks.
B. The virus replicates in your body and it kills you.
We dont have:
- a known animal reservoir that is widespread through the community like we have for example with Lyme disease.
- patients who are chronic carriers who continuously shed like a 'typhoid mary'
An epidemic with those characteristics can be managed (and a few countries have shown us how to do that). You reduce the reproductive rate to below 1.0 population wide. Eventually, more people recover from the virus than are newly infected by it and the total number of 'actively infected' goes down and trends towards zero. If we consistently do so, eventually the epidemic will run its course and one day the last patient with covid will either recover or die with it. This is the plot from Austria which illustrates that relationship pretty well:
Orange is 'everyone who ever had the virus', red is 'currently infected', green is 'recovered' and white is 'dead'. You notice that delay between the red and the green curve, as time passes, people move from the 'red' to either the 'green' or 'white' pile. If you push down R
0, eventually the number of people who recover exceeds the number of people who acquire the disease and your number of 'currently infected' starts to go down. It's like effing magic!
The reason we want to stop the covid epidemic: Because in addition to killing people, it puts large numbers of people in the hospital, requires expensive resources to take care of them and has a potential to leave them with long term disability. So if we can keep this at lets say 5% of the population overall, we are better off than letting this run its native course until it infects 60+% and it only stops due to herd immunity. If you want to see 'herd immunity', take Queens or Brooklyn at the height of the epidemic and multiply it by 3.
What is so special about stopping COVID that the "government" basically destroyed our way of life when 4x the COVID number of people died from tobacco use last year? Or 300,000 from obesity related causes? Why didn't the medical field/government drastically change our way of life in past years/decades as we did for COVID to protect the millions that have died from similar preventable deaths?
Covid has done this damage in the span of 2 months while affecting only a minority of states. If this was allowed to spread through all the states at the same rate it spread in the tristate area, it would dwarf those numbers for the other diseases you mentioned by multiples before the year is over. Both smoking and obesity kill 'willing participants', Covid kills without regard to participation status.
Add to the discussion that COVID related "protections" have possibly created a new preventable disease category in that the numbers of previously preventable cases (cancer, etc.) are/will spike due to COVID related shutdowns. This was brought up by my friends son last month as he was seeing a shift in causes of death along with his fellow coroners. And just yesterday(?) a group of 500 doctors sent a letter to the WH on the same non-COVID deaths.
I am just coming off a medical staff meeting for one of the hospitals I cover. I just dont see that happening. We never stopped seeing emergency patients, patients with acute cancer issues, cardiac patients etc. We stopped temporarily doing routine mammograms, most imaging for things like sports injuries joint pain etc. The majority of cancers we pick up with screening are early stage and there is no data to support that diagnosing a cancerous polyp in the colon or a focus of early cancer in the breast two months later affects anyones outcome. Anyone with chest pain still got worked up and taken to the cath-lab, anyone with a breast mass they could feel got plugged in for workup and treatment. Limiting access to primary care
was an issue, there are patients whose blood pressure or diabetic control is now out of whack because they were unable to see their doc or nurse practicioner. But then, most primary care docs adapted, moved to video visits and called in changes of prescriptions, so for those patients who either know how to operate a smartphone or have a nephew with a laptop, there was never a complete disruption of the continuum of care.
Now in NY/NJ, the overwhelming crush of covid patients DID paralyse the medical system otherwise, and I would fully expect that there will be patients who were harmed by the non-availability of medical services. But that's the diseases doing, not 'the government'.
Perhaps I'm confused then as that is not what your posts 448, 453, and 461 implied to me at least on face value. I took it as you wanted everyone to mask regardless of circumstance to protect any potential vulnerable individual.
No, I dont, and I am opposed to any politician driven rule that would require such a waste of resources. If you are indoors away from your residence and in a situation where you cannot maintain 6ft (or 2m) distancing from the next human, I want you to wear a mask regardless of whether you think that any of those people are vulnerable. That's all that the science we have at this point requires.
Oh, and wash your hands*. Before you put on a mask (and touch your face) and after you take off your mask (before touching anything else).
Look, I strenuously disagree with how much of this has been managed and there would have been much better ways to manage the counter-measures using data and science. But that would have required leadership at the federal level and full cooperation at the state and local level, and that we did not have. There was never a logical reason to go to full-scale mitigation measures in communities that had yet to reach the state of 'community transmission'. Early on in this, I said
'if a hurricane hits louisiana, we dont tell people in NY to climb on their roof' yet that is pretty much what we did with Covid. But they didn't make me king or even assistant associate deputy state health commissioner, so nobody in the government asked me for my opinion.
*
or perform hand hygiene using sanitizer if you are not in an environment where you can wash your hands with soap and water
