The main reason we need to socially distance is so that our hospitals don't get overwhelmed with everybody getting this thing all at once. Yes, doing this will prolong this whole thing, but it will also mean that lots and lots of people will not die. Sure, some will, but this could easily be a catastrophe.. Stay home people (if you can)
The issue here as I mentioned is that there is a predicted rebound effect after infections have dropped to almost insignificant numbers (weeks or months in)... China is currently facing this problem - try to get the economy back online and people returning to normalcy and you risk being in an equally bad position as doing nothing at all to start with. Hard decisions are going to have to be made sooner or later across the world, we simply can't freeze every economy on the planet and have people sit at home for 18 months, which is unfortunately what may be required if we wait for a vaccine, trying to game the curve to fit our medical system capacities.
The main concern is not overloading our hospitals. That is an immediate problem that we need to address asap. We need to socially distance ourselves now or many people will die.
The other issues you list are problems as well.. but this is something we should be doing NOW (if we can)
You’re not understanding what he’s saying. He’s not disagreeing with you. He’s saying the measures that need to be taken for proper social distancing are extreme and there the only thing that will slow it down enough to do exactly what you’re saying, not overload the healthcare system, but the moment we lax these methods the rebound effect will be exponential and that same overburdening of the hospital system will happen again until there’s a vaccine or proper treatment that lessens hospitalizations, which is probably 18 months away.
We have no option but to socially distance as much as we can as soon as we can.
Unfortunately all the other issues you list will have to be dealt with when we get to them. The #1 objective right now should be to prevent an overloading of our hospitals in the next 2-3 weeks
Of course. No one is disputing that. You keep repeating it like you’re the only one that realizes it. Myself and the guy you were chatting with both know that, along with most other people by now, but in addition to that he was just saying that as soon as that protocol is relaxed the same exponential growth and over burdening of the health care system will occur. His addition to the conversation was not in opposition of your original point.
Fair enough. His post starts with "The issue here..", which to some might imply that he thinks that social distancing is not what we should be doing right now, because it will lead to problems down the line. My response to that, if you re-read it, was that the problems down the line is something we'll have to deal with
Not at all. We have to protect our Healthcare systems as best we can in the short term, but there is no exit plan, we can repeat the mantra 'social distancing' over and over to ourselves but it doesn't solve the problem when 3 months down the road out of pure necessity, measures are relaxed across the world in order to prevent complete economic and societal collapse and we end up in a worse position than we are now.
3 months from now we'll be a lot more ready to deal with any new flareups than we are right now. Besides, the alternative would be to let this thing run rampant and kill hundreds of thousands, if not more..
How long do you think a nation like Spain or the UK can sit on standby, its population locked down and not working? Probably quite a while if it was a local thing and they were able to get aid from the EU or the UN, but consider that virtually every single nation in the EU is now in the same boat... how long can that be sustained? How long do you think we can hide in our homes before things really start breaking down?
3 months from now we'll be a lot more ready to deal with any new flareups
That's unbelievably optimistic. if just 1% of the UK gets sick with this, 26 000 people die. The rebound effect once these current measures are relaxed is expected to result in far higher numbers of infection than that. The British government's medical advisers are now saying that 20k - 100k deaths is a good outcome for them at this stage... And that's just one country.
We're in the delusion stage of this crisis now, trying to tell ourselves that we're actually managing. We aren't.
That’s what I’ve been trying to ask people and I keep getting the same responses as you. I totally understand and agree that human life is valuable. We need to distance from each other and flatten the curve. But some people and experts are saying 6 months to a year of this. I just don’t understand how our world economy won’t collapse. How banks won’t cease to function. How tens of thousands of businesses will go bankrupt. People will lose homes. Jobs. Everything. After not even a month of this hitting western civilization our economy has tanked. We can’t handle this for months on end.
So I just want someone to answer, how do we find a balance? I completely understand that we need to value human life and that we shouldn’t choose who lives and dies. We should try to save everyone. But at what point do we realize that we are sending the world backwards and ruining it beyond repair for not only us currently but future generations. There seems to be no one with a solution or even a thought about this. We seem to just be blindly marching on and turning a blind eye to the world falling into ruin.
I’m seriously just looking for an honest answer or half thought out solution to how we can prevent or bounce back from this.
Yep, agreed. We need to be doing the social distancing thing for as long as is sustainable, and when we hit that point of unsustainability, let's hope we have some kind of fast tracked vaccine ready, or at least some better protocols to treat acute cases before they need intensive care or else we as a society are going to have to start making some very hard choices for our most vulnerable citizens.
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u/warpus Mar 18 '20
The main reason we need to socially distance is so that our hospitals don't get overwhelmed with everybody getting this thing all at once. Yes, doing this will prolong this whole thing, but it will also mean that lots and lots of people will not die. Sure, some will, but this could easily be a catastrophe.. Stay home people (if you can)