A lot of localities evidently hide behind ‘CDC guidelines’ that they published as to when it’s ‘safe’ to do this or that. Those guidelines include a metric for daily positivity (testing) rate. Does that metric account for the false-positive rate inherent to the test?
If not, we will have set up a system where we have decided we ‘can’t’ open this and that until a number with an inherent noise-rate averaging X goes below X/2. A ‘benchmark’ that can, and will, never be reached.
If that’s the case (and I sincerely don’t know) then I can only say I am Opposed To More Testing. In fact, I would want as little testing as possible. Not because I don’t see the value of testing for pandemic control, but because (in that case) people have setup retarded metrics.
This is one of the pitfalls of the McKinseyization of this whole thing (metrics! dashboards! phases! table of guidelines! multi pronged decision trees!). Everything becomes gamified in a way that’s just completely distant from actual outcomes. If that’s the game, let’s play
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Bloomberg promotes this opinion piece (which I can't read, paywall, and don't wanna bother using real Bloomberg to find it) with phrases like 'Ending Covid-19 by Letting Everybody Catch It Is a Terrible Idea'.
This is the kind of straw man idiocy that characterizes Team Lockdown
This whole 'debate' is like two sides shouting at cartoons instead of, at least, shouting at each other
How exactly is the Barrington approach about 'letting everybody catch it'?
How exactly does Lockdown (or whatever Team Fight The Virus wants) 'not letting' people catch it?
Under the approach of 'Not Letting' people catch it, millions of people have caught it.
Team Lockdown (I'm just gonna call them that) pretends their strategy has a perfection which it doesn't, then faults other strategies for falling short of that perfection.
As usual, herd immunity and targeted measures that acknowledge tradeoffs are deemed to fall short of a utopian and perfect approach that exists only in peoples’ heads, failing to clear hurdles that for some reason Lockdown 4ever is never required to.
Why this constant motte-and-bailey switcheroo between some Platonic notion of ‘do masks help?’ pursued as an intellectual exercise purely for the love of knowledge, and the *actual experience* of Dumbass Mask Mandates, as they affect actual people
Hooray, yet another snide remark from a Smart Person who ‘doesn’t understand’ anti-mask POV, concedes in-passing (as if this is minor!) that some mask policies are Actually Dumb, as my elementary school age kid is forced to wear a ‘mask’ while running around a soccer field
Every Smart Person nods their head at ‘get the virus under control first’. Especially financebros. They’ve thought about it deeply and all of them know that everything else depends on ‘getting’ the virus under control. True! QED. So just decide to do that, and then do it.
Is ‘getting the virus under control’ an action, that you can say, with words?
Yes.
Therefore, the government Can Do It.
How could there be an action relatable using words that The Government couldn’t simply decide to do and then do? That’s like saying the government isn’t God