I don't understand why we don't implement the isolation procedures of countries that have gotten this under control, following these procedures for both foreign citizens AND US citizens:
- When you arrive in the US, you either spend two weeks at a government approved hotel, at your expense, which is monitored by federal agents to make sure you don't leave your room. You pay for room service for two weeks to get food. This is what Singapore does.
- If you don't want to stay at the government hotel, you agree to let the government track your cell phone for two weeks to make sure you stay in your home, and randomly call you twice a day to make sure you didn't ditch your phone. This is what Taiwan does.
As a plus, all the hotels near airports would be so thankful for all the forced business to make up for the loss of travel business.
They should have been doing this for the last nine months.
Edit: And obviously combine these rules with a relief bill that helps the industries that are hurt by these rules, or you know, everyone.
We do that in Australia too and its worked great. (Well, except for a notable quarantine breach 6 months ago due to mismanagement.)
The problem is all this is closing the fence after the horse has already bolted. The average person arriving into the united states is less likely to have covid than a resident. Currently 2.7% of the US population is infected with covid19, compared to 2.4% of people in the UK, 0.9% in Italy, 0.2% in Canada, and ~0% in Australia, NZ, Singapore, India, China, etc.
Almost all new infections in the US come from domestic transmission.
Where did you get those numbers? I read this comment earlier today, quoted 2.7% to a friend later, then realized I didn’t know what the source was and dug up your comment again.
Google took me here[1], which says India is down to 210k active covid cases at the moment. For a country with a population of 1.366 billion, thats only 0.016% of the population currently infected.
Its possible India's covid testing isn't telling the whole story - but they've apparently done 178 million tests to date.
Yes; India is probably missing the occasional case here and there. But given their daily case numbers have been dropping quickly, they're probably finding most people who have covid.
If India's real number of active covid cases was 100x the official reported numbers, they still wouldn't have as many active cases per capita as the UK and USA.
With all Australia's hard border closures and mandatory hotel quarantine, we've still had the UK Covid strain get out into the community. A cleaner at a quarantine hotel caught it from a returned citizen in quarantine (they're still not sure how), and spent 5 days in the community while infected. So far, it looks like we got very lucky, and the only person they've found that she infected is her partner.
From my point of view, the US (and UK and India and many other countries) have a categorically different problem to Australia (and New Zealand and Singapore and Taiwan and a few other countries).
We've _largely_ got things under control in Australia. Most of our cases in the last ~3 months have been hotel quarantine, with worrying incidences of outbreaks where it's escaped from quarantine but been tracked back and identified. Sydney currently has 3 clusters, with about 200 locally acquired cases between them in the last 4 weeks. I'm pretty sure every single one of them has been contact traced back to it's source of infection - and that contact tracing has also proactively got forward to get a very significant percentage of close contacts of infected people contacted and tested, and the places they visited while infectious identified, contact traced where possible (lots of venues are required to have covid checkin so people can be contacted an informed if they've potentially been exposed) - and any venues where they are not confident the covid checkins are comprehensive they publicise fairly widely and strongly encourage testing for anyone who visited during similar times.
This _only_ works because the numbers are so low. It all went to shit in Melbourne when a quarantine hotel breach happened and it got up over 700 cases a day, the contact tracing ability totally fell apart, and Melbourne went into a hard lockdown for several months to get it back under control.
In the US? Our approach just won't work. The virus is out and prevalent in your community. You have no hope of comprehensively contact tracing all of your positive cases, or identifying and mitigating all the venues they were in while infectious and contacting all the people who are at risk of exposure. The scale of your problem is totally insurmountable using the tools that work for us. If vaccination and/or herd immunity doesn't work out soon? You people might be totally fucked. ~1% of you will probably die from the virus, and quite likely a lot more will die from your medical system breaking under the load.
Sadly, I suspect it's like gun control. (I know, I know. Touchy subject, but hear me out - and please accept that I'm not trying to attack gun owners here.)
In Australia, there are few enough guns that reasonably strict licensing for owning/keeping/selling guns _mostly_ works. We managed to restrict "assault style" weapons early enough to have been able to do it before the prevalence of semi automatic weapons made it impossible. Gun violence here is several orders of magnitude lower that in the US by any reasonable measure. Not zero, but rare enough that "gunshots heard" is still newsworthy here.
If the US decided to try and get to that - it'd be a multi generation process to change attitudes and perceptions, and then to remove all the weapons currently in circulation. I don't believe there's the political or social will to even consider starting that. Your solutions to gun violence are fundamentally going to be different to Australia's.
(From my perspective, the news that my nieces regularly do "active shooter lockdown training exercises" in schools was inexplicable and horrifying. I kinda understand your historical "right to bear arms" - but I can't bend my mind into understanding how that's ended up at "there's nothing we can do about disgruntled teenagers getting hold of AK47s so we'll just teach our children how to hide under school desks and not make any noise, hoping that 'playing dead' will help them avoid getting shot". Not that I'm claiming too much moral high ground here, the most recent mass shooting in New Zealand was by an Australian. We have our fair share of fuckwits here too. Our main advantage is that most of those fuckwits do not have access to firearms when they fly into a murderous rage.)
I think is a case of a little too late. There's probably a higher risk of a traveller coming to US leaving with it, than arriving with it - currently. If this had happened 9 months ago, there might have been a chance of this working - with better leadership in other areas - as other child comments have pointed out.
> I don't understand why we don't implement the isolation procedures of countries that have gotten this under control
I'd hazard a guess that it's because they don't want to completely kill off tourism, an industry which is hurting pretty bad because of covid (see TSA arrivals screened https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput)
No tourist would be interested in coming over to stay two weeks on their own dime locked in a hotel, only then to be able to do some actual traveling.
I have family and friends in the US. A lot of friends. I've visited on average 2 or 3 times a year over the last 20 years or so. (Almost all "tourist" travel, maybe 10 or so "business trips" for conferences or vendor meetings, all of which had ect4ended time as a tourist visit included).
I have accepted the fact that I'm unlikely to see my family or friends there for probably at least 3 maybe 5 years.
They will very unlikely be allowed to visit here (Australia), and if they are will probably need to spend 14 days in quarantine upon arrival. Right now I am not allowed to leave the country (without a special exemption, which sure as hell does not get granted "to visit my little sister and her family!")
Even if I got that exemption, I'd need to join the huge queue of people attempting to return to Australia with severely limited inbound international travel capacity (we were only allowing 4,000 returning citizens per week, with the current concern overt he UK strain that's been cut to 2,000 per week). There are news reports of people who've been trying and failing to get back to Australia for 6 months or more, with flights being cancelled - and confirmed tickets of flights being cancelled (reportedly for people with higher priced tickets to fly instead...)
I hope the vaccines work out. I fear that they may not - either being less effective that advertised, being less effective against mutated strains, or being thwarted by anti vaxxers.
I spent New Years weekend in Palm Springs going on day trips to Joshua Tree National Park. It was PACKED. The park is absolutely beautiful and everyone should check it out sometime. It's an almost alien landscape.
My hotel was full as well in Palm Springs. The only thin open late and popping was the Indian casino. They did check temps and make sure people had masks, but otherwise it felt like Vegas on a normal busy weekend.
Considering how many immigrants and children of immigrants live in the US, even if the people you saw seemed very diverse they could maybe have been primarily US citizens not foreign tourists?
The anecdotal evidence says that a small number of people have been reinfected, out of millions. Statistically, the average person is likely immune for at least a matter of months, probably a couple years or more.
It's definitely a thing - a couple days ago I've read an article where they did interviews with three people who got reinfected here in Czech Republic. It also mentioned a fourth person who unfortunately died due to being infected for the second time.
So even for a country with just 10 millions of people you can still find enough people who had covid twice to interview - how we fucked up the second and third wave notwithstanding.
> It's still not clear if a previous infection stops you from being an asymptomatic carrier, and we don't want more asymptomatic carriers.
It's as clear as it is for any other viral disease. For example, to my knowledge, nobody has ever done any kind of systematic study of whether or not infection with influenza protects you against asymptomatic reinfection with the same strain.
This is a level of paranoia that is unique to this particular virus.
> level of paranoia that is unique to this particular virus
This particular virus is >5x deadlier than seasonal flu, is significantly more contagious, and nobody has any pre-existing immunity.
Despite strong countermeasures, almost half a million people in the USA have died from the pandemic so far, and by the time we are through that number could potentially double.
It is the worst infectious disease threat since the 1918 flu (thankfully not quite as deadly as that one, given modern medical care).
Regardless, as I said before, demanding that some kind of study be provided to prove that asymptomatic infection is prevented by natural immunity is so far beyond what we know about any other virus that it borders on the hysterical.
This virus is significantly worse than the 1957 or 1968 flu, causing many more hospitalizations and deaths despite much stronger countermeasures. But those two were indeed quite deadly, worse than seasonal flu, and if a similar flu emerges in the future it should be treated extremely seriously. Hopefully we can learn from our severe systematic mistakes in the Covid pandemic to better prepare for and react to future pandemics of flu and other pathogens.
The 1957 flu had less than half the IFR of Covid. It infected a smaller percentage of the world population than Covid is likely to, despite much less significant public health countermeasures, and a tremendous increase in medical knowledge in the past half century. It was likely significantly less contagious.
Death estimates in the USA are in the 100k range, vs. Covid which has already killed more than 400k (if we count using a similar estimation method) and will likely kill at least 200k more before it is through. (US population has more than doubled in the mean time, but we are talking about at least 5–8x as many deaths.) The difference in hospitalization rate is dramatic.
It is really tragic that the abject failures of the US federal response have made partisans so heavily invest themselves in the claim that Covid is no big deal and we shouldn't worry about it.
> Globally, the 1957 flu caused about 1M excess deaths. Currently, Covid is attributed to ~2M deaths
No, this is a disingenuous apples-to-oranges comparison. One is a post-epidemic estimate by independent epidemiologists, while the other is a confirmed-positive-death count subject to contemporaneous political pressure and institutional inability to confirm every Covid death.
The contemporaneous confirmed death numbers from any seasonal or pandemic flu are always many times lower than the final estimate, and decades ago it was probably at least an order of magnitude lower. The discrepancy won't be quite as dramatic with Covid today, because a tremendous effort has been made around the world to get Covid tests to hospitals. But it will still be a very significant undercount.
After a couple years once experts have had time to gather and crunch the numbers, the number of Covid deaths from a comparable kind of best-guess estimate is going to double or more. Even in the USA, we are probably missing on the order of 150–200k Covid deaths so far from our confirmed death counts. And the situation is broadly comparable in Europe. But many less developed countries have much less capacity for gathering and reporting accurate numbers, and only a tiny fraction of Covid deaths are being reported in many places.
> One is a post-epidemic estimate by independent epidemiologists, while the other is a confirmed-positive-death count subject to contemporaneous political pressure and institutional inability to confirm every Covid death.
...as well as almost certain over-counting due to extremely liberal criteria for "Covid deaths" (e.g. deaths within 30 days of a positive test, which is the standard in many areas.)
Point being: there's uncertainty on the "confirmed-positive death count" in both directions and you're assuming that it's a strict lower bound.
Just today, the WSJ published an excess-death study that put the number at 2.8M, worldwide (or 3.5/10,000):
Higher than the JHU numbers, but still within reasonable statistical error of the 1957 pandemic estimates.
> After a couple years once experts have had time to gather and crunch the numbers, the number of Covid deaths from a comparable kind of best-guess estimate is going to double or more. Even in the USA, we are probably missing on the order of 150–200k Covid deaths so far from our confirmed death counts.
Well, now you're just making things up. Also, again: see the WSJ study above. Even if you count every excess death this year as Covid...it's about the same as the 1957 flu season.
covid-19 is not 5 times deadlier than the flu. It is about twice.
The IFR sits at ca 0.19. Flu is about 0.1.
Covid scare-mongers using inaccurate and outright false data to cause panic, terror and so much confusion that the public is left to choose what to ignore and what to follow, are causing much more damage than covid deniers are.
The fear of going to the hospital among people with other ailments come to mind.
There was an article in Nature the other day on the 300% increase in stillbirths in UK due to lack of in-person pre natal care. Another delightful side effects of the extreme fear propaganda.
No one listened to the idiot deniers anyway. They never were the problem.
0.19% is much lower than even the low bound of consensus scientific estimates; the Ionnidis paper on which he bases these estimates has also received significant direct criticism. In my opinion Ioannidis is a disingenuous hack who has thoroughly discredited himself during this pandemic, and from what I can tell his agenda-driven Covid punditry is popular on Fox News and Breitbart but not taken seriously by professional epidemiologists.
The US CDC's best estimate of IFR as of a planning scenaario document from September was 0.5% for people aged 50–70, and 5.4% for people aged 70+. (This is not the best source available, but miscellaneous journal papers could be criticized as cherry-picked.) Adjusted population IFR varies from place to place, depending on the proportion of seniors, people with pre-existing health problems, access to medical care, etc., but nowhere in the US is it as low as 0.19%.
If you want a credible widely cited meta-analysis, try e.g. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-020-00698-1 from December which calls Covid "far more dangerous than influenza", and estimates the IFR to be at least 5–10x higher.
> The estimated age-specific IFR is very low for children and younger adults (e.g., 0.002% at age 10 and 0.01% at age 25) but increases progressively to 0.4% at age 55, 1.4% at age 65, 4.6% at age 75, and 15% at age 85.
> As shown in Fig. 6, population IFR (computed across all ages) ranges from about 0.5% in Salt Lake City and Geneva to 1.5% in Australia and England and 2.7% in Italy.
> Supplementary Appendix O: [We estimate that during winter 2018–19] the population IFR for seasonal influenza was in the range of 0.04% to 0.08% – an order of magnitude smaller than the population IFR for COVID-19.
* * *
> increase in stillbirths in UK
The UK has royally screwed up most aspects of pandemic response. Just like Brexit and everything else the Tories have had their hands on in the past few years. You don't see the same problems in other wealthy island nations like New Zealand or Taiwan.
(With the notable exception that the UK has done a decent job sequencing a large collection of viral samples.)
> Across 51 locations, the median COVID-19 infection fatality rate was 0.27% (corrected 0.23%): the rate was 0.09% in locations with COVID-19 population mortality rates less than the global average (< 118 deaths/million), 0.20% in locations with 118–500 COVID-19 deaths/million people and 0.57% in locations with > 500 COVID-19 deaths/million people. In people < 70 years, infection fatality rates ranged from 0.00% to 0.31% with crude and corrected medians of 0.05%.
But this is a meaningless debate. Your own preferred source makes it clear that the "average IFR" is heavily dependent on population demographics (i.e. in the very next sentence after the one you quoted:
> our results indicate that about 90% of the variation in population IFR across geographical locations reflects differences in the age composition of the population and the extent to which relatively vulnerable age groups were exposed to the virus
You're also completely misinterpreting Figure 6 from that paper. It is showing that their model of age-specific IFR correlates well with observed differences in reported IFRs. It is not claiming that those reported values are meaningful in the absolute -- in fact, all of the "reported" values seem to be higher than the model by a factor of ~2-4, and they're substantially higher than the numbers cited by the WHO bulletin.
(and yes, I know you don't like Ioannidis, but this is a metareview, not original research. Also, not liking someone doesn't make them wrong.)
Still doubt that that many people will travel long distance because of the hassle, the risk of getting stranded or having to deal with the local overwhelmed health system. Anecdotally I know a couple of people in Europe that travelled quite a bit during summer because it was an unique chance to see some historical places e.g. in Italy without the mass of tourists they are usually overrun by. But that was a tiny fraction of the usually very travel happy social circles of mine.
But for the US I think the main attractions are the big cities and the national parks. The former are not really tempting to go to atm and the latter you usually want to go in groups and they seem so vast that I don’t think it is that big of an opportunity to go there when there are few tourists. The only people I know that traveled in between continents in the last months did so for family reasons and it was a huge pain for everyone with multiple flight cancellations, chaos with ever changing immigration requirements that not even the officials can keep up with, self-isolation, etc.
Speaking as an Australian, I'm not allowed to travel to the US at all right now, unless I'm moving there permanently. Keeping everything open (and thus keeping covid rates high) isn't doing your international tourism sector any favours.
> No tourist would be interested in coming over to stay two weeks on their own dime locked in a hotel, only then to be able to do some actual traveling.
Depending on where they're coming from they'll have to do that on the way home, so they're not interested in coming anyway.
Before you get on the plane you need a negative test, but even then there is a mandatory 14 day quarantine. When you arrive you are required to have a SIM card. During quaratine, they track your device and call randomly one or twice a day to be sure your phone is on you. Breaking quarantine is a big fine (up to $33k USD) and there is a carrot if you complete quarantine without any incidents ($500 or something?). Individuals are provided quarantine housing if they can't pay but employers are expected to pay (e.g, workers from Indonesia).
I assume this is combined with some kind of mandatory GPS tracking. The GPS tracking knows the phones location and the call confirms the user is next to their phone.
They were not asleep, they were deliberately letting the car drive off a cliff because they thought admitting there was a cliff there would make them look weak.
Probably also contributed by the fact that the opposition pointed out that they should avoid the cliff so the only option left is to intentionally drive off it.
Also (to extend this metaphor to all three modes of transport), they were sure that - should any cliff present itself - the greatest nation on Earth will not fall down it, but will boost off and fly towards the sunset.
Would you agree with the court when it determined that the rights of black people were different between northern and southern states, or that internment of the Japanese was legal during WWII? The supreme court has been wrong on many issues for decades on end throughout US history. They haven't all of a sudden become infallible in the last 20 years.
If you're hinting that what is legal is not necessarily right, it seems odd to fall back to this position when the original comment about the 1st and 5th amendment are legal, not moral.
Instead of just mentioning the 1st and 5th amendment, it may have been better just to say that the US has a culture of privacy and personal freedom.
> The Supreme Court has already ruled that neither of those apply at the border. Nor does the 4th.
reply
This is an extremely overbroad generalization.
The supreme court may or may not rule that forcing someone to be surveilled by federal agents in order to travel by plane is unconstitutional, or it may not. And it may be right or wrong. My qualm is legal and moral.
>I don't understand why we don't implement the isolation procedures of countries that have gotten this under control, following these procedures for both foreign citizens AND US citizens:
I know its probably crazy to ask, but tell me where in the US Constitution does the federal government have the power to force me into a hotel at my expense
I know in "times of emergency" people seem to think the constitution is suspended and the government as "unlimited power" but last I checked Emperor Palatine was a fictional character, and saying "Singapore does" well Singapore is an Authoritarian nightmare IMO, one i do not really want to replicate here in the US. I pass taking public policy lessons from Singapore
It's part of protecting the borders. The Supreme Court has already determined that anything within 100 miles of the border is the "border zone" and gives the government broad authority to enforce border protection within that zone.
Also, it could reasonably argued that it is part of their "protect life" job.
That is a stretch of the reading of those provisions, the court has generally (and wrongly IMO) allowed Federal Law enforcement to stop people with in the border zones to establish if they crossed the border illegally, once Citizenship is established then normal protections snap back into place
Even at border crossing the government has been allowed to seize Devices and other things but they generally can not prevent a US Citizen from entering, they can stop you from bringing your stuff, but they cant stop you (outside the limited questioning detainment certainly not 14 days) unless they have an arrest warrant or some other cause of action to arrest you
Pandemic+unknown disease status is proof of danger.
You can argue that isn't a high enough standard, but it's a pretty clear one, and given the exponential spread, it's a real actual danger that can be controlled at the point of entry.
Given that Virus and Biology have no obligation to be compatible with various national and international laws, it is upon human society and governments to work around the virus.
Thus, for e.g., people in South East and Far East Asia learned from the earlier pandemics and voluntarily wear face masks to protect themselves and those around them even when one has "just a cold or a cough".
People also agreed to socially and physically distance when asked. The messages from scientists and doctors have been enough proof of the dangers that the virus poses.
That is fine, my problem is recently we have just be ignoring the constitution when it is deemed to be a problem
The fact remains the federal government has no constitutional authority nor do most state government.
If we need "pandemic response" authority then we need to amend the constition to add the power to the government not just simply declare it so because "The Experts™" have declared that is what is best for us.
if that is the measure of our rights, we have no rights at all. If rights can be stripped with a simple declaration of emergency, on which there is no power to challenge that declaration then we have no rights at all
To believe the government will not use this unprecedented event for which they have usurped a wide range of never used before power in ever increasing ways is naive and ignores all of human history.
It will not be long before the seasonal flu or cold will be enough to warrant draconian measure and limited on personal freedoms, or be used for privacy invading policies like contact tracing all the time (which will then be used for Law Enforcement like in Singapore)
it amazes me out people can not see what is next, or maybe than can but simply believe the promise (false promise) of safety is more important than liberty
Personal attacks are not cool here, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. We ban accounts that do that. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site to heart, we'd be grateful.
Edit: looks like we've had to ask you this more than once before. Please don't do it again!
This was not a personal attack. This was an attack of their position.
A: "We should be doing [stupid thing] X"
B: "Good thing you're not the one deciding."
B is not a personal attack. The entire premise of the point is that it's because of what they said/think, not something personal about that particular individual.
> That is a stretch of the reading of those provisions
Any, you know, the government and law enforcement have _never_ been known to do that...
"It's not 'collection' if we permanently record every phonemail/textmessage/email ever sent. It only counts as 'collection' if a human reads/listens to it!"
Borders (and airports) are already a constitutional twilight zone. Just to get into (or sometimes out of) one I have to go through an X-ray scanner or manual groping that on its face would violate the Fourth Amendment. But at the same time, nobody is forcing me to go there.
- When you arrive in the US, you either spend two weeks at a government approved hotel, at your expense, which is monitored by federal agents to make sure you don't leave your room. You pay for room service for two weeks to get food. This is what Singapore does.
- If you don't want to stay at the government hotel, you agree to let the government track your cell phone for two weeks to make sure you stay in your home, and randomly call you twice a day to make sure you didn't ditch your phone. This is what Taiwan does.
As a plus, all the hotels near airports would be so thankful for all the forced business to make up for the loss of travel business.
They should have been doing this for the last nine months.
Edit: And obviously combine these rules with a relief bill that helps the industries that are hurt by these rules, or you know, everyone.