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Reacher

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A Tx atty who manages healthcare facilities had this to say (You may have to go to his twitter and click on the individual-links to see better)

Basically, he says 1/2 the visits to the ER are people sent by employers to get a test, most positive cases are very mild, low fatalities and hospital beds are being filled by the people who put off care for the last couple months. 

He calls it a "positive story". Maybe there is something positive happening in TX? The few comments I read seem to back up his claim. 

Interestingly, the tweeter is an author and I think I have read a book or two of his. 

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So we have had several positive tests in the last couple of weeks at our two plants! One today came in without any symptoms, and without a temperature, but because they had been in proximity of a positive they were tested! Completely asymptomatic they tested positive!
Still in spite of the wild fluctuations of the cases curve the deaths curve continues a steady trend down!! 
I’m beginning to think only God knows!

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6 minutes ago, Drroogh said:

So we have had several positive tests in the last couple of weeks at our two plants! One today came in without any symptoms, and without a temperature, but because they had been in proximity of a positive they were tested! Completely asymptomatic they tested positive!
Still in spite of the wild fluctuations of the cases curve the deaths curve continues a steady trend down!! 
I’m beginning to think only God knows!

I mentioned this a couple pages back but the death curve is about 15 days behind the cases curve.People don’t die the day they are diagnosed. At this time late next week if it stays down then I’ll consider that good news. Unfortunately I have a feeling it will be increasing. 

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5 hours ago, Reacher said:

A Tx atty who manages healthcare facilities had this to say (You may have to go to his twitter and click on the individual-links to see better)

Basically, he says 1/2 the visits to the ER are people sent by employers to get a test, most positive cases are very mild, low fatalities and hospital beds are being filled by the people who put off care for the last couple months. 

He calls it a "positive story". Maybe there is something positive happening in TX? The few comments I read seem to back up his claim. 

Interestingly, the tweeter is an author and I think I have read a book or two of his. 

I really don’t understand the effort to find tweets and stuff like this from some attorney etc to try to spin things positively. You’d have to be living under a rock right now not to have heard how bad it got here quickly after Memorial Day, which is why the major counties and cities have gone to mandatory masks etc while Texas and the Houston area have hit record level hospitalizations now. Seriously this kind of tweet is absurdly misleading it’s just annoyingly stupid. I live here. I see the reports and statistics daily. I see colleagues who now have Covid deaths and illnesses in their families. I see the hospital capacity levels. This kind of misleading crap is just crap 

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4 hours ago, Hoosierhoopster said:

I really don’t understand the effort to find tweets and stuff like this from some attorney etc to try to spin things positively. You’d have to be living under a rock right now not to have heard how bad it got here quickly after Memorial Day, which is why the major counties and cities have gone to mandatory masks etc while Texas and the Houston area have hit record level hospitalizations now. Seriously this kind of tweet is absurdly misleading it’s just annoyingly stupid. I live here. I see the reports and statistics daily. I see colleagues who now have Covid deaths and illnesses in their families. I see the hospital capacity levels. This kind of misleading crap is just crap 

Apparently this got glossed over..

From the Texas Medical Center 

 

k-Overview-Of-TMC-Bed-Status-6-30-2020-768x432.png

Edited by mrflynn03
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12 hours ago, Hoosierhoopster said:

I really don’t understand the effort to find tweets and stuff like this from some attorney etc to try to spin things positively. You’d have to be living under a rock right now not to have heard how bad it got here quickly after Memorial Day, which is why the major counties and cities have gone to mandatory masks etc while Texas and the Houston area have hit record level hospitalizations now. Seriously this kind of tweet is absurdly misleading it’s just annoyingly stupid. I live here. I see the reports and statistics daily. I see colleagues who now have Covid deaths and illnesses in their families. I see the hospital capacity levels. This kind of misleading crap is just crap 

Did you even read the letter? The guy seems to have pretty good credentials. That you don't want to believe him is on you. @mrflynn03happened to post the hospital levels as I was typing my post. There are all sorts of charts showing fatalities continuing to decrease despite the rise in cases. From the outside, it looks like TX is doing a good job testing more people, uncovering milder cases, which will help in ultimately slowing the spread. Just my opinion, take it FWIW. 

Edited by Reacher
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I'm not disputing hospitalizations are increasing, just showing that hospitals are capable of handling it.

Hospital ICU's operate at 80%+ capacity regularly.

Slowing the spread is going to prolong this thing. Rolling lockdowns will push this in to next year.  

Edited by mrflynn03
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55 minutes ago, mrflynn03 said:

I'm not disputing hospitalizations are increasing, just showing that hospitals are capable of handling it.

Hospital ICU's operate at 80%+ capacity regularly.

Slowing the spread is going to prolong this thing. Rolling lockdowns will push this in to next year.  

But there’s a way to slow the spread, contact trace and safely open up everything while we wait for a vaccine. And then you avoid tens of thousands deaths...if America can just take this seriously and take the necessary precautions.

Health aside, slowing the spread is good for the economy too. Even if the Government doesn’t shut down everything, during spikes businesses will have to temporarily close on their own because of outbreaks in offices, factories, warehouses, etc. Schools will need to shut down because of outbreaks and parents will be forced to take off work because their children will be home. Even if we let this run rampant we still aren’t going to get out of this until next year and I believe not only will that lead to many unnecessary deaths, it will destroy our economy even more. Remember, we are 4 months in and it still has only infected about 10% of the population. We are still much closer to the beginning than the end. 

I posted a couple of pages back, one person’s irresponsible behavior set off a chain of events at my wife’s company. 8 employees were forced to take off work (a financial hit for them) and the company shut down 2 PT clinics (a financial hit for the company). And the patients who needed Physical Therapy had to postpone their appointments. This is just one tiny example of the economical and health implications of just 1 case. This happening on a Macro scale, across the country is going to devastate the economy. It will happen more if cases continue to increase.

I appreciate you @mrflynn03 and genuinely enjoy chatting with you on a whole host of issues, but i think you are dead wrong on this one. Other countries are deciding it’s the best option to slow the spread. Scientists say it’s best to slow the spread. Many Economists are now saying it’s best to slow the spread. AND we still don’t know how long antibodies last. What happens if it’s only for 3 months? That makes reaching herd immunity a whole lot harder and has fatal consequences. 

Edited by tdhoosier
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In my opinion, the biggest failure for the U.S. in this whole thing is not a lack of testing, not a lack of contact tracing, and not even a lack of social distancing.  All of those things are contributing facts, significant ones.  That said, the biggest failure in the U.S. is the lack of accurate reporting.  From the onset, the numbers have been questioned.  Too high or too low, take your pick.  People dying of alcohol poisoning getting counted as a Covid death versus those claiming somebody reported as dying of the flu in early March should have, in reality, been Covid.

No one, I mean no one, believes any of the numbers that are provided.   On one hand, you have a segment of the population that firmly believes the numbers and the risks are inflated.  On the other, you have a segment of the population that feels the numbers are too low, and that the nation is being reckless.

Compare that to somewhere like Italy.  Nothing I've read indicated there were any questions about Italy's numbers.  They were shocking in the early stages of the epidemic, , but no one believed they were inaccurate.  As a result, the Italian people bought into the actions that needed to be done.  Italy had 142 new cases yesterday.  That's 142, or, put another way, 23 cases fewer than the state of New Mexico, which reported 165.

Fix the reporting.  Give the U.S. population numbers they can believe in, and I think things get significantly better in a shorter amount of time.

    

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2 minutes ago, 5fouls said:

In my opinion, the biggest failure for the U.S. in this whole thing is not a lack of testing, not a lack of contact tracing, and not even a lack of social distancing.  All of those things are contributing facts, significant ones.  That said, the biggest failure in the U.S. is the lack of accurate reporting.  From the onset, the numbers have been questioned.  Too high or too low, take your pick.  People dying of alcohol poisoning getting counted as a Covid death versus those claiming somebody reported as dying of the flu in early March should have, in reality, been Covid.

No one, I mean no one, believes any of the numbers that are provided.   On one hand, you have a segment of the population that firmly believes the numbers and the risks are inflated.  On the other, you have a segment of the population that feels the numbers are too low, and that the nation is being reckless.

Compare that to somewhere like Italy.  Nothing I've read indicated there were any questions about Italy's numbers.  They were shocking in the early stages of the epidemic, , but no one believed they were inaccurate.  As a result, the Italian people bought into the actions that needed to be done.  Italy had 142 new cases yesterday.  That's 142, or, put another way, 23 cases fewer than the state of New Mexico, which reported 165.

Fix the reporting.  Give the U.S. population numbers they can believe in, and I think things get significantly better in a shorter amount of time.

    

Agree completely.  From the get go of this thread, I reported anomalies in the death count.  Then later... the Army nurse who reported people with medical issues unrelated to Covid... being reported as Covid deaths, because the hospital got money that way.  She had two patients that did not have Covid... but their deaths were reported as Covid deaths.

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8 minutes ago, 5fouls said:

In my opinion, the biggest failure for the U.S. in this whole thing is not a lack of testing, not a lack of contact tracing, and not even a lack of social distancing.  All of those things are contributing facts, significant ones.  That said, the biggest failure in the U.S. is the lack of accurate reporting.  From the onset, the numbers have been questioned.  Too high or too low, take your pick.  People dying of alcohol poisoning getting counted as a Covid death versus those claiming somebody reported as dying of the flu in early March should have, in reality, been Covid.

No one, I mean no one, believes any of the numbers that are provided.   On one hand, you have a segment of the population that firmly believes the numbers and the risks are inflated.  On the other, you have a segment of the population that feels the numbers are too low, and that the nation is being reckless.

Compare that to somewhere like Italy.  Nothing I've read indicated there were any questions about Italy's numbers.  They were shocking in the early stages of the epidemic, , but no one believed they were inaccurate.  As a result, the Italian people bought into the actions that needed to be done.  Italy had 142 new cases yesterday.  That's 142, or, put another way, 23 cases fewer than the state of New Mexico, which reported 165.

Fix the reporting.  Give the U.S. population numbers they can believe in, and I think things get significantly better in a shorter amount of time.

    

Part money, part something-we're-not-allowed-to-discuss-on-this-forum...

Edited by IUFLA
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9 minutes ago, 5fouls said:

In my opinion, the biggest failure for the U.S. in this whole thing is not a lack of testing, not a lack of contact tracing, and not even a lack of social distancing.  All of those things are contributing facts, significant ones.  That said, the biggest failure in the U.S. is the lack of accurate reporting.  From the onset, the numbers have been questioned.  Too high or too low, take your pick.  People dying of alcohol poisoning getting counted as a Covid death versus those claiming somebody reported as dying of the flu in early March should have, in reality, been Covid.

No one, I mean no one, believes any of the numbers that are provided.   On one hand, you have a segment of the population that firmly believes the numbers and the risks are inflated.  On the other, you have a segment of the population that feels the numbers are too low, and that the nation is being reckless.

Compare that to somewhere like Italy.  Nothing I've read indicated there were any questions about Italy's numbers.  They were shocking in the early stages of the epidemic, , but no one believed they were inaccurate.  As a result, the Italian people bought into the actions that needed to be done.  Italy had 142 new cases yesterday.  That's 142, or, put another way, 23 cases fewer than the state of New Mexico, which reported 165.

Fix the reporting.  Give the U.S. population numbers they can believe in, and I think things get significantly better in a shorter amount of time.

    

Sounds like something (fixing the reporting) that one would expect our federal government might handle.  But they seem to want the states to be in charge.  Oh well.

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2 minutes ago, 5fouls said:

In my opinion, the biggest failure for the U.S. in this whole thing is not a lack of testing, not a lack of contact tracing, and not even a lack of social distancing.  All of those things are contributing facts, significant ones.  That said, the biggest failure in the U.S. is the lack of accurate reporting.  From the onset, the numbers have been questioned.  Too high or too low, take your pick.  People dying of alcohol poisoning getting counted as a Covid death versus those claiming somebody reported as dying of the flu in early March should have, in reality, been Covid.

No one, I mean no one, believes any of the numbers that are provided.   On one hand, you have a segment of the population that firmly believes the numbers and the risks are inflated.  On the other, you have a segment of the population that feels the numbers are too low, and that the nation is being reckless.

Compare that to somewhere like Italy.  Nothing I've read indicated there were any questions about Italy's numbers.  They were shocking in the early stages of the epidemic, , but no one believed they were inaccurate.  As a result, the Italian people bought into the actions that needed to be done.  Italy had 142 new cases yesterday.  That's 142, or, put another way, 23 cases fewer than the state of New Mexico, which reported 165.

Fix the reporting.  Give the U.S. population numbers they can believe in, and I think things get significantly better in a shorter amount of time.

    

How far off do you think the reporting is? You post informative stats almost daily from worldometer. I look at the NY Times daily report. The NY Times numbers are a few thousand lower, but they generally are the same. 

I think the fight over reporting is fighting over peanuts. Whether off a little in either direction shouldn't change how we generally view the pandemic. I honestly think the debate over this stuff is trivial, keeps us rolling around in the mud, and hinders us from seeing the big picture.

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10 minutes ago, jv1972iu said:

Sounds like something (fixing the reporting) that one would expect our federal government might handle.  But they seem to want the states to be in charge.  Oh well.

The only thing that makes sense in the counting and reporting is local counting, collected and summerized by the state, then collected and summerized by the feds...

The feds have neither the resources nor the money to count at a local level...

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@tdhoosier enjoy the chatting too.  

I very well could be wrong. Just to clarify why I have my position.  The measures we are taking today, mask wearing, lockdowns, are similar to what was done during the 1918 spanish flu and we can see how that went.

However, during the Asian flu and Hong Kong flu pandemics there we no lockdowns and merely suggested precautions and they ran their course and followed the normal distribution. Farrs law.

The Hong Kong flu still circulates as part of the regular flu season. 

My concern is this will be prolonged much longer than needed and cost more lives, virus and non-virus related, as a result. 

But ultimately, it's just venting on a message board. Just frustrating times we are living in. I would say let's skip 2020 but 2021 could be no better for all we know. 

Edited by mrflynn03
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10 minutes ago, IUFLA said:

The only thing that makes sense in the counting and reporting is local counting, collected and summerized by the state, then collected and summerized by the feds...

The feds have neither the resources nor the money to count at a local level...

👍

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27 minutes ago, mrflynn03 said:

@tdhoosier

I very well could be wrong. Just to clarify why I have my position.  The measures we are taking today, mask wearing, lockdowns, are similar to what was done during the 1918 spanish flu and we can see how that went.

However, during the Asian flu and Hong Kong flu pandemics there we no lockdowns and merely suggested precautions and they ran their course and followed the normal distribution. Farrs law.

The Hong Kong flu still circulates as part of the regular flu season. 

My concern is this will be prolonged much longer than needed and cost more lives, virus and non-virus related, as a result. 

But ultimately, it's just venting on a message board. Just frustrating times we are living in. I would say let's skip 2020 but 2021 could be no better for all we know. 

Yes and no. First, all of these are all different viruses that have reproductive rates and different death rates. So you'll agree that these are all 'apples to oranges' comparisons. The Spanish Flu is most likely worse than Corona. The Asian and Hong Kong Flu are most likely not as worse as Corona....they killed 1 million each and Corona has a death toll of 500k and we're just in the beginning stages. 

However, concluding that wearing masks and limiting public gatherings didn't work during the Spanish Flu is not accurate. They did not quarantine well. They lacked the medical equipment and knowledge. And newspapers weren't allowed to report on the flu:

Quote

Spain was neutral during World War I and unlike its European neighbors, it didn’t impose wartime censorship on its press. In France, England and the United States, newspapers weren’t allowed to report on anything that could harm the war effort, including news that a crippling virus was sweeping through troops. Since Spanish journalists were some of the only ones reporting on a widespread flu outbreak in the spring of 1918, the pandemic became known as the “Spanish flu.”

  https://www.history.com/news/spanish-flu-second-wave-resurgence

Edit (I hit 'post' too early): Regardless, while I understand your concern, I'm more concerned with the concerns of the experts who actually study this stuff for a living. Call me too trusting if you want. If you can find me a virologist or epidemiologist that thinks slowing this thing down isn't the best course of action then I'll reconsider my stance. 

 

Edited by tdhoosier
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18 minutes ago, mrflynn03 said:

@tdhoosier enjoy the chatting too.  

I very well could be wrong. Just to clarify why I have my position.  The measures we are taking today, mask wearing, lockdowns, are similar to what was done during the 1918 spanish flu and we can see how that went.

However, during the Asian flu and Hong Kong flu pandemics there we no lockdowns and merely suggested precautions and they ran their course and followed the normal distribution. Farrs law.

The Hong Kong flu still circulates as part of the regular flu season. 

My concern is this will be prolonged much longer than needed and cost more lives, virus and non-virus related, as a result. 

But ultimately, it's just venting on a message board. Just frustrating times we are living in. I would say let's skip 2020 but 2021 could be no better for all we know. 

I agree...Human Nature vs Mother Nature is no contest...We'll lose that one every time...

This thing is going to run its course...I hate to go all "Lion King" on everybody, but much of it is circle of life stuff...A good friend recently lost his mother (87 and a load of health issues...kidney failure, diabetes, EOPD) to what was assigned as a COVID-19 death. In his words, she was either doped up all the time or in pain...so I'm sure it was a relief to her.

I watched my father struggle for a year with ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease). It was agonizing, not only from a physical standpoint for him, but, in his perception, what he was putting his family, especially my mother, through. He was 60 when he passed, and I'm quite sure something coming along and ending his misery would have been a blessing to him...

I'm seriously not trying to be morbid here, but for those reasons, I'm not that worried about it. I abide by the social guidelines (wear a mask in public, social distance) but if that's where my tough luck card gets pulled, so be it...Time to stop the hand-wringing and get back to some semblance of normalcy...

 

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53 minutes ago, tdhoosier said:

How far off do you think the reporting is? You post informative stats almost daily from worldometer. I look at the NY Times daily report. The NY Times numbers are a few thousand lower, but they generally are the same. 

I think the fight over reporting is fighting over peanuts. Whether off a little in either direction shouldn't change how we generally view the pandemic. I honestly think the debate over this stuff is trivial, keeps us rolling around in the mud, and hinders us from seeing the big picture.

Over time, I've come to the belief that the numbers are only meaningful when looking at trends.  7 day average, or a week to week comparison based on a day of the week.  I don't believe the numbers are accurate in and of themselves.  I think total cases are probably undercounted due to so many people being asymptomatic.  Meanwhile, I think deaths are probably overstated due to people dying of a multitude of other reasons who happened to also test positive for the virus.  That said, as long as the reports are CONSISTENT, then trends can still be meaningful.  Things go haywire when inconsistencies start to happen.  For instance, New Jersey added thousands of people to their death toll last week on a single day because they changed the way they reported deaths.  That blew all of their positive trending out of the water even though most of those cases were from April and early May.

Even with trending, number of deaths is infinitely more meaningful to me than number of cases.  Whether the death is 'by' Covid or 'with' Covid is almost irrelevant at this point as long as the target does not move as it did in New Jersey.  The number of cases has skyrocketed in some states.  But, that is not as important to me as deaths for a couple of reasons.  One, is that testing has increased, so how do we know that Texas, Florida, and Arizona didn't have the same number of cases in April as they do now?  

What is meaningful to me is how many people are dying.  Are the same number of people dying each day?  Isn't 1,000 deaths compared against 50,000 cases better than 1,000 deaths compared against 12,000 cases?  The math says it is.  Now, if deaths actually go down while cases increase, that's even better.  Maybe the virus is losing a little steam as it mutates.  Or, maybe, while it can be deadly, it's deadly in a rate that is more in proportion to what we see with other diseases.  

The big caveat to all of this is we likely will not know whether the spike in cases results in more deaths for a few more weeks.  So, for the time being, we need to be concerned about the spike.  If it turns out deaths do not go up despite the massive spike in positive cases, then we learn something and can use that to make educated decisions on how to proceed going forward.

 

 

    

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40 minutes ago, 5fouls said:

Over time, I've come to the belief that the numbers are only meaningful when looking at trends.  7 day average, or a week to week comparison based on a day of the week.  I don't believe the numbers are accurate in and of themselves.  I think total cases are probably undercounted due to so many people being asymptomatic.  Meanwhile, I think deaths are probably overstated due to people dying of a multitude of other reasons who happened to also test positive for the virus.  That said, as long as the reports are CONSISTENT, then trends can still be meaningful.  Things go haywire when inconsistencies start to happen.  For instance, New Jersey added thousands of people to their death toll last week on a single day because they changed the way they reported deaths.  That blew all of their positive trending out of the water even though most of those cases were from April and early May.

Even with trending, number of deaths is infinitely more meaningful to me than number of cases.  Whether the death is 'by' Covid or 'with' Covid is almost irrelevant at this point as long as the target does not move as it did in New Jersey.  The number of cases has skyrocketed in some states.  But, that is not as important to me as deaths for a couple of reasons.  One, is that testing has increased, so how do we know that Texas, Florida, and Arizona didn't have the same number of cases in April as they do now?  

What is meaningful to me is how many people are dying.  Are the same number of people dying each day?  Isn't 1,000 deaths compared against 50,000 cases better than 1,000 deaths compared against 12,000 cases?  The math says it is.  Now, if deaths actually go down while cases increase, that's even better.  Maybe the virus is losing a little steam as it mutates.  Or, maybe, while it can be deadly, it's deadly in a rate that is more in proportion to what we see with other diseases.  

The big caveat to all of this is we likely will not know whether the spike in cases results in more deaths for a few more weeks.  So, for the time being, we need to be concerned about the spike.  If it turns out deaths do not go up despite the massive spike in positive cases, then we learn something and can use that to make educated decisions on how to proceed going forward.

 

 

    

Well said!

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1 hour ago, tdhoosier said:

Yes and no. First, all of these are all different viruses that have reproductive rates and different death rates. So you'll agree that these are all 'apples to oranges' comparisons. The Spanish Flu is most likely worse than Corona. The Asian and Hong Kong Flu are most likely not as worse as Corona....they killed 1 million each and Corona has a death toll of 500k and we're just in the beginning stages. 

However, concluding that wearing masks and limiting public gatherings didn't work during the Spanish Flu is not accurate. They did not quarantine well. They lacked the medical equipment and knowledge. And newspapers weren't allowed to report on the flu:

  https://www.history.com/news/spanish-flu-second-wave-resurgence

Edit (I hit 'post' too early): Regardless, while I understand your concern, I'm more concerned with the concerns of the experts who actually study this stuff for a living. Call me too trusting if you want. If you can find me a virologist or epidemiologist that thinks slowing this thing down isn't the best course of action then I'll reconsider my stance. 

 

Been following Dr. John Ioannidis of Stanford University.

Here is a recent interview from him article

I'm not trying to change anybody's mind, just provide and alternate viewpoint.  But I think extreme approaches like lockdowns or doing nothing are more harmful than good.  There has to be a reasonable response somewhere in the middle. 

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