D&D and the rising pandemic

[Dannyalcatraz]

I stand by "when".
No plan survives contact with the enemy.

And if what we implemented was a medically-derived plan, it suffered gaping flaws that non-experts saw early on (pat self on back):
Little effort to contact trace unless the patient became Intensive Care serious.
Did not distinguish between sick and healthy.
Did not separate the sick from the healthy, nor put containment lines around areas known to be affected to prevent carriers from spreading it more widely.
No research (or findings ignored) into immunobooster activities that would help civilians fend off exposure.
Lockdowns had not been used against any other epidemic for a century; why was this the proper strategy and not another?
The potential economic and psychological side-effects of universal lockdowns not taken seriously - and led straight to a violation of Hippocrates' maxim "First, do no harm" when they became actual effects.

Hmph, I'm bleeding over from the plan to stubbornly refusing to adapt it as circumstances dictated, I'll stop now.

You can’t say a plan ”failed“ that most of the country did not even approach reasonable implementation of it. And considering it “medically derived” when a good portion of our leadership either downplayed it or considered it a hoax is stretching things a bit.

The actual instructions from healthcare pros DID distinguish between the healthy and the sick, hence things like contact tracing.

Putting aside the time it took to devise tests to diagnose C19 in the first place, separating the sick from the healthy is problematic when @30% of the afflicted are asymptomatic for the bulk or entirety of their infectious period. By the time we could ID the infected with any accuracy, C19 was pretty much endemic. Simply putting up containment lines of barricades and road blocks would have been futile.

Similarly futile would be advocating immune boosting practices beyond what MDs typically advise of their patients. This was a novel pathogen. Even perfectly healthy people‘s immune systems could be overwhelmed because virtually nobody’s immune system had prior exposure to It.*

Lockdowns were used for this pandemic because we had no vaccines or viable treatments for C19 AND no way to diagnose those with C19 until they had been infectious for some time. Also, if you look at the past 100 years of global responses to epidemics, you WILL see the use of lockdowns and mass quarantines for diseases like Ebola.

Epidemiologists DID acknowledge and openly discuss the economic and mental health care aspects of the lockdowns. Some of the more...colorful commentators noted you can’t have a functioning economy if too many people are dead & dying. (C19’s mortality rate hadn’t yet been calculated as a global average.) And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen reminder PSAs to check on friends and family to see how they handling things.

And if you think the Hippocratic Oath’s admonition about doing no harm is all encompassing and absolute, you must have SERIOUS problems with modern medical practice and pharmacology in general.







* Researchers have found that a small percentage of people exposed to some of the cold-causing coronaviruses had a slightly better immune response than those who hadn’t.

 

[Hussar]

And, frankly, the plan DID work. That's what we mean when we talk about places like Japan. The politicians got out of the way as much as they could and let the scientists do their jobs. I remember one of my students commenting after watching American news that he was totally baffled as to why Trump and other politicians were on the news all the time. What's the point of paying all those doctors if you're not going to use them?

 

[Umbran]

And if what we implemented was a medically-derived plan, it suffered gaping flaws that non-experts saw early on (pat self on back):

So, that patting yourself on the back - over 360,000 people are dead. The self-righteous glee in that patting is inappropriate.

From there on - calling what was implemented a "medically derived plan" reads like sophistry to pat yourself on the back, while ignoring the actual events so you can claim intellectual credit. This was a "medically derived plan" in the same way that homeopathic treatments are "derived" from real medicine.

There was a group of folks whose job it was to plan for events like this. They did their jobs, and had plans. The Powers that Be dismissed them, and discarded their plan. From there on, there was no real plan, medically derived or otherwise. There were some holding actions driven by what few people with sense were left could cajole people into taking.

Do not again refer to this as a "plan", like it was set up and faithfully executed. We were not allowed that.

I have no sense of humor regarding people self-aggrandizing on the bodies of the dead.

 

[Deset Gled]

I have no sense of humor regarding people self-aggrandizing on the bodies of the dead.

This is ad hominem.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yeah, calling things a failure of the plan, when the actual recommendations were routinely ignored or modified because they didn't fit someone's political, social or economic agenda is more than a little off.

 

[CleverNickName]

It's still a failure, whether it's a "failure of the plan" or a "failure of the leadership." There's more than one failure mode here, and the virus doesn't really care about the nuances between them.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It's still a failure, whether it's a "failure of the plan" or a "failure of the leadership." There's more than one failure mode here, and the virus doesn't really care about the nuances between them.

Makes a hell of a difference if you're trying to fix it for next time though--and don't doubt for a moment there'll be a next time.

 

[NotAYakk]

So where I live now has 0.5% of the population having their first shot. (Well not my town; but the province. Other parts of the province are harder hit, so got more doses earlier)

Track every COVID-19 vaccine given in Canada. Our tracker outlines every dose delivered on what’s been a long journey

Tracking progress of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout across Canada.

www.thestar.com

I'm still worried that we need to hit 200k/day by summer. But every day the death rate of Covid 19 is gonna drop as the vulnerable are protected.

In other news, the trials are wrapping up, and people who got the placebo are being offered real doses right away.

 

[CleverNickName]

Makes a hell of a difference if you're trying to fix it for next time though--and don't doubt for a moment there'll be a next time.

Not really, though. A failure anywhere in the system is a total failure of the system. People are looking at it like it's a simple matter of finding the weakest link in a chain and strengthening it, but that's a poor analogy. A better one is a balloon being popped by a variety of different-sized pins. It doesn't matter which pin, because any single one of them will pop it just as effectively as any other.

Of course I'm exaggerating...the spread of the virus can be limited, the curve can be flattened, measures can be taken. But they aren't the targets we should be aiming for. Total elimination of failures in any system is impossible, but that isn't a reason to abandon the effort. I'm just saying that we need to give equal weight to all of the failures that we have observed, look for others that we might have missed, and then work to eliminate them equally.

 

[NotAYakk]

Not really, though. A failure anywhere in the system is a total failure of the system. People are looking at it like it's a simple matter of finding the weakest link in a chain and strengthening it, but that's a poor analogy. A better one is a balloon being popped by a variety of different-sized pins. It doesn't matter which pin, because any single one of them will pop it just as effectively as any other.

Sure, but even that is a lesson.

Take that balloon and turn it into a bag of smaller balloons. Now just as many pins, but most of the balloon stays intact, instead of one popping it.

If a central government cannot be relied upon to provide a reasonable response, then form smaller cells to defend against a pandemic. And plan to shut down travel better between cells (strongly) in order to prevent failure of a neighbour from causing you to fail.

This may require prep. And only some places will do it. But it is a take home lesson.

This pandemic was beatable. We saw multiple countries do it. Some had geographic and delay of introduction advantages, others did not. Identify what stopped your area from winning; determine costs of addressing it.