Yo stop testing so much !!

Its fun to watch the backpedaling. The goals have shifted from flattening to curve to “no new cases at all” without accounting for any metrics or factors.

Well benchmarks have changed

We went from let’s not become Italy war zone and destroyed ... to can we become more like Korea /Japan and get on with relative normalcy

the goals have shifted from flattening the curve to flattening the curve in at least a similar pave of the rest of the industrialized world.

watching countries drop off the curve while we're just flattening is a bit depressing. and anyways the shift itself makes sense, in the early stages no one knew wtf was going on and we're only slightly more informed now.

Why? Herd immunity is more costly that way.

Behind the scenes, most governments in the world seem to have come to the same conclusion: that mitigating the virus as much as possible and betting on getting a vaccine within the next 12-18 months is the more prudent strategy than going for herd immunity. Reaching herd immunity without overburdening the healthcare system would take more than those 12-18 months and lead to more severe economic and public health ramifications.

And the decision makers probably got spooked by reports about long-term damage in covid patients who weren't hospitalized as well as about vanishing antibody levels.

But I agree that this change in strategy/goal was not communicated to the public in adequate fashion, which has lead to unnecessary confusion.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jul 13 2020 06:54pm

kekw

There are some studies suggesting that herd immunity may be impossible because we might not develop long term immunity. A lot of people in Spain/Italy no longer have antibodies so they may end up reinfected. On the other hand, T cells seem to kick in if you're reinfected so symptoms probably aren't as bad. Anyway, the jury is still out on that. At the end of the day, the main goal is to ensure that we don't overload our hospitals. Also, we still don't know the long term effects of COVID yet.

It is pretty sad that America is struggling immensely whereas the rest of the first world countries seem to have figured it out. If we had done the right things earlier on, the economy would be significantly stronger. The American people fucked up and we should all be ashamed of ourselves. I've never been this disappointed with the country in my lifetime. I feel like we live in a third world country.

To be fair, Italy, Spain, France, the UK and Russia (if we want to count them as a first world country) also didnt exactly cover themselves in glory. They did learn from their initial failure though, while the U.S. seems to have doubled down on it..