I believe the old FDR phrase, "There's nothing to fear but fear itself," is becoming more and more accurate with our situation.
The risk from this virus goes down dramatically the younger you are. Kids are young. That's obvious. Their parents also tend to be young, at least young enough to not be in the high risk groups.
These groups are also accustomed to being sick or dealing with sick people.
If there were no vaccine in the pipeline, our only option would be herd immunity. If we were shooting for herd immunity, the groups exposed by going back to school would be exactly who we'd want to put at risk from a statistical standpoint.
So it's really a question of do we want to continue hiding out in hopes that they truly are able to fast track a vaccine, or do we want to just deal with a couple hard months and get our lives back?
Most of the alarmism at the beginning of all this was centered around it being a repeat of the 1918 flu pandemic. It's not.
Or you know, you could deal with the virus like 99% of the other first world countries and be half way through it instead of still not having hit the peak of the epidemic. It's crystal clear that the US is doing something wrong. "it's not that bad", "europe is reopening schools so we should do it too", &c.
> It's crystal clear that the US is doing something wrong.
And if that's the reality, then we need to figure out how to move forward from there. We can't go back to March and convince everyone to do a better job of shelter in place.
We followed all the rules in my family. It was, in my opinion, a waste of time. I'm not going to hide in a hole for fear of the damn boogey man for the next three years.
> We can't go back to March and convince everyone to do a better job of shelter in place.
Apparently it's impossible to convince Americans to do a better job of anything. So "moving forward from here" is going to be just as incompetent and half-assed as shelter in place was. Apparently no one in power has learned a thing, hence this article.
It's not just those in power. Too few people in the populace learned that they really needed to follow heath guidelines like this was serious. Without that, the people in power can't do too much.
And why do many people not take the guidelines seriously? Partly it's because of the fumbling and incompetent response to Covid, but it's not just that. Government/political leadership has been setting their credibility on fire for a decade or several. (To be clear: It's not just this president, it's not just this administration, and it's not just one party.) They've been too busy trying to win at political trench warfare to actually govern, and the people have noticed. Too often, neither reason nor competence have been on display. So when it actually matters, nobody is willing to listen to the politically-driven clown show, because it's probably just more of the same. (And, to some degree, it was.)
So "moving forward" will require rebuilding trust in government. People need to trust that policy will be competent and (at least in something like this) not set by politics. That's going to take a decade or several to rebuild.
You will see that no single state except LA looks like that, they all look like the Germany graph.
The graph is simply the result of adding several time-shifted graphs together. Basally some US states had a delay before getting hit hard by the virus.
Everyone is like Europe good US bad hurr hurr hurr. But actually the US is simply lagging behind Europe. States they were hit early and done, states that were not are starting their ramp up now.
If you look closely you can actually see the virus spreading from East to West (and South) - notice the Eastern states had their cases and done, and now the Western and Southern states are starting.
Did we look at the same graphs ? There are like 5 states which are post peak, 15+ in very high increase, and the rest is beginning to rise.
> Everyone is like Europe good US bad hurr hurr hurr. But actually the US is simply lagging behind Europe. States they were hit early and done, states that were not are starting their ramp up now.
The first cases were reported more or less at the same time in every state or close enough that it doesn't explain the lags.
I read the article and I don't see how it contradicts my point. Kids are getting sick, as we expected. Soon they will be immune. Then it won't be an issue.
The risk from this virus goes down dramatically the younger you are. Kids are young. That's obvious. Their parents also tend to be young, at least young enough to not be in the high risk groups.
These groups are also accustomed to being sick or dealing with sick people.
If there were no vaccine in the pipeline, our only option would be herd immunity. If we were shooting for herd immunity, the groups exposed by going back to school would be exactly who we'd want to put at risk from a statistical standpoint.
So it's really a question of do we want to continue hiding out in hopes that they truly are able to fast track a vaccine, or do we want to just deal with a couple hard months and get our lives back?
Most of the alarmism at the beginning of all this was centered around it being a repeat of the 1918 flu pandemic. It's not.