LogFAQs > #945888228

Side note: Ctrl+W is the worst shortcut ever. This post was longer before it all got swallowed by me hitting ctrl instead of shift.

OhhhJa posted...

I find the current approach to be quite destructive honestly

Of course it's destructive. It's a goddamn pandemic. A global outbreak of a deadly disease is always going to be destructive, no matter how people respond to it. That's simply inevitable.

OhhhJa posted...

The current approach has no foreseeable endpoint.

Genuine endpoint, as in everything returns to normal and this whole thing becomes nothing more than a chapter in history books? Yeah, who knows when that's happening. But all of these infection control strategies come with roadmaps for gradually resuming normal life as case numbers reach reasonable levels. Nobody is saying "let's just shut everything down indefinitely." With good compliance rates, it's not actually that hard to get Covid under control, and plenty of countries and regions have basically been able to return to normal aside from wearing masks and ordering takeout more often. Arts and tourism are really the only industries that can't mostly get back to normal (and even the staunchest anti-lockdown folks aren't advocating for a return to normal, unrestricted tourism) until an actual end is in sight, which is obviously not ideal, but it's far from the economic catastrophe you're so afraid of.

Now, will Americans ever comply well enough to progress along those roadmaps? That's another question. Large swaths of the US are being terribly 'Murkin about the whole issue and dragging it out much longer than necessary, and at some point it is going to be necessary to accept that the whiny babies are going to keep the safe approach from working and necessitate something more dangerous. "Do nothing and hope for the best" still isn't going to be a good idea, but the country is not going to be able to keep stimulating the economy indefinitely (especially not if every stimulus bill consists mostly of bonuses for executives and nothing for people that actually need money to get through it), so something more relaxed may be needed.

OhhhJa posted...

We dont even know if a vaccine for this will even be as reliable as a flu vaccine at this point or when we'll even see a safe, effective vaccine

I'd expect six months or so before we have some concrete answers on that, with vaccine deployment reaching herd immunity levels by the end of next year. It's still a ways off, but not so far that it's reasonable to give up on the possibility of a vaccine working and proceed as though it won't. If trials haven't yielded anything in ~6 months, then it's time to start exploring other alternatives, but so far there's no reason to believe a vaccine will never be possible.

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