We had several early surges to learn from, Italy, NYC, aircraft carrier, cruise ships, meat packing plants. The virus raced through the NYC subways and picked off its immuno suppressed victims. So we knew early on that (1) highly contagious, much more than influenza, (2) demographic impact was the aged and immune suppressed. This meant that contact tracing would be impossible and impractical, PRACTICALLY ZERO YOUNG ADULTS AND CHILDREN WERE DYING.
You make arguments about March with the benefit of hindsight, things looked much differently then. We botched trying to get test and trace implemented, it's over now and we have to deal with what we have in a different way. But contact tracing HAS been successfully implemented elsewhere, following a period of lockdown which sent cases to very low amounts. Again South Korea and New Zealand are probably the best examples so it's certainly not impossible (and nothing is practical in the current climate). Lockdowns were a mistake in the aspect that we failed to use them to make any strategical progress.
I digress, I never thought they would work since 1) we didn't take COVID seriously enough early enough (compared to Sweden who beefed up ICU capacity in February and 2) we as Americans are fiercely independent to a fault when it comes to health issues, we think we know better. Again I'm not advocating for blanket lockdowns, lower population density places like Montana or South Dakota and other areas would likely come out okay from a hospital standpoint regardless of what they do.
Yet our Governor was strutting around like he was saving the world from the plague, blocking all critical media from his daily news conferences.
Two important moments: the aircraft carrier and the Minnesota pork plant. Both had one death. Sad to be sure, but stop the world for 1 death out of 5000? Turns out the pork plant worker was a 67 year old heart patient, we weren't told about the sailor's underlying conditions.
If you don't want people to use NYC as a representative of the entire U.S., why would you use two isolated incidents to represent what would happen country wide? People whose job it is to study this are saying it's somewhere around 1/100-1/350 people will die if they get it. I'm not going to argue what the threshold of deaths is that we take it seriously, people just move their goalposts. But I would say my personal opinion is the level is not high enough to levy blanket lockdowns, but not low enough that we should live without any precautions.
The hospitals were empty because this thing was being treated like the BLACK DEATH.
The hospitals were empty because that's where sick and vulnerable people go. You don't schedule bunion correction surgery on a 60 year old diabetic smoker when there is a 10% chance they'll die if they get covid, high risk low reward... Again, we've learned a lot since then too.
What people don't know is that influenza leaves permanent damage in people, and we don't stop the world for it.
We should have soldiered ahead, when local areas reached overloaded hospital capacity, we should have imposed local responses, not state-wide ones. We should never have contemplated closing down sports.
You should google exponential growth and infections, if you wait until an area gets overloaded to impose restrictions, simply put, you're fucked, deaths triple. But again, I am all for more pointed, well thought out responses that target specific regions vs blanket shutdowns, now you're talking!
Right now Sweden has achieved herd immunity and hopefully, Florida, Texas, Georgia, Arizona are not far behind. The hit maximum hospital capacity but did not exceed it.
While I hope this is true, there is currently nothing to actually support that. Even Anders Tegnall thinks Sweden will see a second wave yet... Remember two months ago when you kept claiming the virus is dying out, we've already reached herd immunity? Then oops, here comes Arizona, Texas, Florida, Georgia. Now I have read some very interesting papers that posit the infection induced herd immunity level would be a much lower threshold than a vaccine based one. And through infection we may actually get to herd immunity faster because those superspreader type individuals become immune quickly and thus lower the infection rate as time goes on. BUT, as of now we can't confirm that, I would say NYC or some of the other early hard hit areas not seeing any type of resurgence would lend support to this hypothesis.
Also, you can't say those southern states did nothing. They closed bars and limited many other things again over a month ago now. Cases have just started falling and I would bet it's due more to those restrictions and people taking it more seriously (ie more masks/distancing) that have led to the case reductions vs. herd immunity.
The way it looks like now, COVID is actually less lethal than the 1957 Hong Kong flu outbreak which killed 100,000 in a much smaller population of aged and ill people.
Ask old people, they can barely remember it.
That's where we are, Go Gophers.
Again, I'm not going to debate what is or isn't an acceptable death level, I made my personal stance clear before. But you also have to remember we've done a lot to curb this virus, probably <15% of the population has been infected and we're at the current death levels, you can't really compare the two.
Again I have to ask the question you left unanswered: Why do you think we (and many other countries) have experienced multiple surges while Sweden has largely escaped that fate? What about places like Brazil? Why do we and other countries have twice the confirmed cases per capita of Sweden and our infection rates are still raging?
funny because we all expect the worst, most excruciating outcome as MN sports fans.