Since it's been decided by the professionals, that the here and now is more important and relevant than the foreseeable future, are we actually saving lives, or just trading them by pushing back and shifting the deaths?

For example, what about the life saving medical research and treatments that are being held back or have been put on hold due to the lock down? What about the people who are known to only have so much time left, who were hoping/expecting those treatments to be ready in time to save their lives? How many of these people are now going to die because the professionals chose to shut things down to save some people in the present? How many will die due to contracting covid 19 itself, which puts them over the edge, when they could've fought it off and lived after being treated? There are many more examples of how people may die in other ways due to this lock down.

Now this may seem stupid to some, because we can't be certain of the future, so why bother worrying about it in this case?

If the near or even distant future isn't worth worrying about, then why for example, should anyone bother saving money? If for all you know, you may be dead tomorrow, why bother having money in the bank? What if every single person was just days away from being flat broke? Would that be a good message for the professionals to put out to the public? Don't bother saving money because the future isn't certain? $250 account limit lock downs going forward because why have more? What about the potential future consequences of a decision like that?

While I don't necessarily think that some are simply virtue signalling when it comes to how much they care about saving lives, I also don't think the overall picture is being taken into account, which makes it seem like some may care less than they actually do. It doesn't appear all that clear which choice is better or worse, if either. Maybe this way ends up saving more lives, maybe it doesn't. We won't really know until later, in the future, so it's pretty hard to say anyone is definitely right or wrong.

I did read it.

"By the end of the war, the European economy had collapsed with some 70% of its industrial infrastructure destroyed."

It's not so much what's right or wrong, it's the going back and forth and half measures that costs more lives in the end.

Quick strict lock down (new Zealand, South Korea), quick to re-open.
No lock down (Brazil maybe), economy fine?, bunch of people dead and some maimed.

Soft lock down, some people die now + recession that only gets worse the softer the lock down.


So if you want to optimize saving lives, there has to be cooperation. Protests don't help, only make things worse.
There's only 2 viable strategies to optimize saving lives, act fast and decisively, or don't act at all. Not something our Western freedom is capable of handling very well.


However I don't think not acting ever was a viable option. It would not save more lives in the long run. It would not spare those waiting for a transplant or depending on long term medical care as not acting would have collapsed the health care system. The disease would still severely disrupt the economy, panic would take hold when the deaths keep piling up and people would stay home out of fear anyway. The best simulated mitigation strategies still ended in disaster.


The hard part now is, how to restart the economy without failing and having to undo the current progress again. People need to keep avoiding non essential traffic and keep observing social distancing rules. The biggest test is yet to come, when flu season starts again.

It's a worldwide problem though, and was almost certainly going to be that, one way or another. So expecting a reasonable amount of cooperation worldwide would actually be an unreasonable assumption. If more was known about the illness, then perhaps, but based on the scenario, cooperation was highly unlikely.

All we know is what we know so far, which doesn't tell the full story. Will we ever get the full truth about everything anyway? How can we be so sure if we don't have extremely reliable numbers coming from open sources?

Both extremes weren't a good option. Not doing anything, or locking things down like they have been in some places, were too much. Somewhere in the middle would likely be best.

Some think the protests are stupid because it's just making the lock down last longer, but who really thinks that's going to stop them? It's not as simple as sit down and shut up and do as we say. Everyone needs to find a reasonable balance, which is easier said than done. The smart thing would be to have as little restrictions as possible, while containing the spread as much as possible. If you've gone so far that the people don't care and will spread it through protests, then you need to adjust to find a new balance point. The world is not static.

This is part of the future problem. The economy won't be going back to normal quickly, and the more time this drags on, the more non Covid 19 related deaths it will lead to eventually. Another flu season, and the possibility of Covid returning with a vengeance, would through more lock downs and further economic decline, lead to more and more non Covid 19 related deaths.

Whether we are doing the right thing overall can't be known for certain, as we can't know the future. I would actually say the lack of cooperation could be looked at as a positive. Odds are if everyone did the same thing, we wouldn't have chosen the optimum strategy. By many nations taking different approaches, we should have a better idea of which strategy works best. Which would hopefully lead to more lives saved in the future because of it, the next time we have to deal with something like this again.

As much as I could potentially provide, it'll never be enough to go against what the professionals have said. You could say they have an 'unfair' advantage. More importantly, even if I could, would it change anyone's mind anyway? The fact some know the answer to that should be alarming.

For example though, in my province, it was mentioned that part of the push for the phase one portion of getting back to normal, was at the top of that list, allowing much needed cancer treatments and surgery to take place again. 

The rest of my post was supposed to be nonsensical. That was the point. Not taking future deaths into account and not treating them as important as the deaths that could occur now, that will happen due to locking down because of Covid 19, is to a degree, nonsensical. Yet we're doing it anyway.

Does this mean that some level of nonsense is a sensible thing?

Ignoring the future would not be a smart thing to do, at least some would say.

If it's important enough for the media to cover and point out how much of a problem it is towards extending the lock downs, then I'd say yes. Obviously they aren't covering that for other useless reasons, right? Some people aren't using that as a reference as to why people should just stay put, right?

Why is Canada's soft lock down better than New Zealand's strict measures?

Not that we had much of a choice being so intertwined with the US or did we? And of course New Zealand has the benefit of being an island with 1/8th of the population. However Ontario and Quebec could have done a lot better.


No need to look far away, the difference between BC and Ontario / Quebec is huge. Until March 22nd BC was in the lead for daily reported cases before getting overtaken by Quebec and Ontario.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-ontario-quebec-covid-19-1.5524056

It's undoubtedly true that B.C. was able to learn from having a few isolated cases in January and February. It's also true the province has been lucky not to have a viral "super-spreader," as has been the case in other places.

However, there's a little bit more to it than that.

Dr. David Fisman, an epidemiology professor at the University of Toronto, said British Columbia's institutions for disease control have long been a model for the rest of the country.

"You've got a functioning public health system, with integration of lab and epidemiology and service in British Columbia," he said. "Here in Ontario, we have had difficulties with public health leadership culture for a long time."

Fisman says B.C. was able to, as Henry put it, "take a lot of measures early" because it had the lines of communication to quickly scale up a unified response relatively early.

One of the key points was part luck, part stupidity

On March 12, B.C. recommended against all non-essential travel outside of Canada, while Ford told families to "go away" and "have fun" during the week-long holiday. 

"You could see this coming," said Fisman. "There was talk in the epidemiology field that we really can't have a million people return to Ontario from places with unfettered COVID transmission. It's gonna be a very bad thing for us, but we didn't use that opportunity."

At the same time, British Columbia was fortunate that the scheduled spring break for students was later than in other jurisdictions — allowing health officials to adapt. 

"We learned from Quebec," said Henry. 

"Their March break was two weeks earlier than ours, and people were coming back … from places like France, and coming home from March break and getting sick." 

Fisman also credited B.C. for putting in an early measure to stop health-care workers from working at multiple care homes, which was a big factor in preventing community transmission.

But ultimately he believes a big part of B.C.'s fortune comes from the person who speaks to British Columbians at every news conference.

"Bonnie Henry stays at press conferences and answers the questions … and doesn't shade the truth. She's frank and honest and emotional with people," he said.

"And given that part of this response depends on being altruistic and doing the right thing to help other people who we will never meet, having a leader who can articulate how we're all in this together and make a convincing case for why you need to do your part … is very important."

Henry's direct experience in overseeing Toronto's SARS and Canada's H1N1 outbreaks is the type of background that's impossible to quantify in a situation like this. Henry herself doesn't mention it at news conferences.

"Part of [curve-flattening] was the system we had in place to detect cases … and part of it was luck, and part of it was timing," she said.

But Fisman believes Henry's experience has been crucial.

"We all play the hand we're dealt. [British Columbia] has played the hand they've been dealt very, very well. And you can see it in the numbers," he said.

"Ontario has played the hand that it's dealt in a way that is not the United States … but I think Ontario is lagging."

Good communication and leadership is key at this time. The faster we get it under control, the sooner life can start to go back to some form of normal. It's not going to go away, but it's possible to get it down enough to safely re-open most of society. I wonder how that fast test cube is doing...

https://www.bioworld.com/articles/434614-dna-based-spartan-cube-to-test-for-covid-19-in-canada

Looks like its coming along.

That’s what they call a lack of argument. But let’s discard everything that was said and fake an outrage over something that isn’t there. Typical.

The Netherlands doing well today is because they released numbers from yesterday which was Kings day, long weekend.

Normally it looks like this


Yesterday

Like many others, you seem to be happy to draw the lines between being a decent human being and an asshole, and it wasn’t hard to guess that the line starts where you good deeds stop.

Here, let me a draw a line: Good for you being a charitable person, but that’s not really an accomplishment when we live in the first world. Think long and hard about the life that you’re living and how much money, time, effort you waste while people literally die of hunger. You are really not doing enough to make this world a better place and prevent famine, welcome to the club.