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0 pointsEnginerrrd6y ago0 comments

There's also the goal of slowing down and stalling in hopes of getting a vaccine, better treatments, production to catch up with supply shortages for healthcare facilities, and allowing healthcare facilities to increase capacity, etc.

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7 comments · 2 top-level

treis6y ago· 4 in thread

Barring a miracle, mass production of a vaccine is at least 9 months away. Likely more like a year+

There's no better treatments coming. We've been fighting viral pneumonia since the dawn of medicine and the tool kit is pretty sparse. Finding anything nearing a cure or even a 20% improvement is wishful thinking.

Our health care capacity is adequate. NYC got to ~30% infected and while I'm sure none of the medical workers want to repeat the experience the level of care remained good. Any capacity increase is going to come with only marginally improved outcomes.

There's no purpose in extending the lockdown. Either we can get back to something resembling normal life and control the spread or we can't and everyone gets infected. Extending the lockdown is just delaying that day of reckoning.

dwaltrip6y ago

> There's no purpose in extending the lockdown.

The comment you are replying to should have also mentioned greatly increased testing capacity as well as contact-tracing. Extending the lockdown allows us to build up this infrastructure so that restrictions can be reduced while still preventing exponential spread.

swader9996y ago

Antibody therapies and perhaps decent antiviral treatments could come before a vaccine.

lazyasciiart6y ago

We can't control the spread until we can test people for the disease. As multiple leaders have stated, the lockdowns need to continue until we build up testing capabilities. For instance in WA, the governor said they are waiting for "widely-available testing, quick isolation for those who may have the virus, identifying people who came into contact with a positive case and getting them into quarantine."

makomk6y ago

The only country where this seems to have even vaguely worked is South Korea, and the US is already testing much more people for coronavirus than South Korea even in per-capita terms. Has been for a while. Now, the New York Times editorial board has been pushing the idea that you're behind South Korea because more of your tests are coming back positive - but the way they dropped that number is by using stricter social distancing measures to drop transmission rates, not increasing the number of tests. That doesn't seem to be happening in the US even with a full lockdown, and we don't really know why.

Basically, all of the US media reporting around testing has been terrible, misleading, partisan nonsense designed to create an imaginary testing gap that can be blamed on the current president to try and kick him out of office in November. Publications like the Times are quite open about why they're doing it. The UK isn't much better though.

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elliekelly6y ago· 1 in thread

Has there been any research on survival rates over time? If given the choice of getting COVID-19 today or two months from now I would much prefer the later infection because that’s two more months of doctors learning how best to treat the disease. Even delaying infection by a week seems like it would offer a better fighting chance. The medical community is learning as much as they can as quickly as they can and that benefits everyone who will eventually get sick.

rtkwe6y ago

It’s complicated a bit because of limited hospital capacity and related treatment supplies. If where ever you are is still below saturation later is better than now probably but once your local system is in the band where they’re running out of supplies things can get pretty dire.

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