General > General Technical Chat
Working From Home - Impacts of Coronavirus
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SiliconWizard:

--- Quote from: james_s on March 21, 2020, 04:38:24 pm ---They could try, but it could cause a massive panic or an armed uprising in some areas. You can't just force someone out of their livelihood, people gotta eat and pay the bills. All kinds of people take jobs that are risky to life limb and health in order to make a living. Imprisoning people in their homes for extended periods doesn't work either,  it has a huge impact on mental health and people get antsy. There are not resources to enforce it either.

--- End quote ---

I don't disagree with you there, but this is basically what they did in many countries worldwide. People can still get out but just to run some errands, go to work but only if the job can absolutely not be done from home, etc. People are also allowed to get out for some exercising, as long as you don't go too far away from your home. If you're controlled in another city than your home city for instance, you're likely to get fined unless you can justify it very clearly, and not just for a walk...

And yes it absolutely looks like home detention as I said earlier... except that we didn't do anything wrong.

I understand this could be much more difficult to enforce in the whole US as it's a very large country, a different mentality and you probably don't have the resources to enforce it either indeed, especially since the country is so spread out geographically.
SilverSolder:

--- Quote from: james_s on March 21, 2020, 06:39:16 am ---I still don't see what they're going to do, the current situation is unsustainable, I happened to read an article today suggesting that the lockdowns and social distancing may need to go on for a year or more but I don't see that working out, sooner or later more and more people will decide they'd rather risk death than be imprisoned in their own home and there's no way we can sustain having millions of people forced out of their livelihood for that long. Even after a couple of weeks of this people are going to start to get very restless. I suspect that under the best of conditions we'll slow down the spread slightly while committing economic suicide, beyond that it's just going to come down to nature doing what it does, a bunch of people will die, most will not, that's just life. Unless we achieve either herd immunity through the natural process or come up with an effective vaccine likely to take a year or more, I don't think the virus is just going to go away, I would guess it will start spreading again as soon as controls are relaxed. Guess we'll see.

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Maybe some of what we are seeing is the inevitable government "must be seen to have done all they could",  then people breaking the quarantine can be blamed for the inevitable deaths.
james_s:
Who knows. I just view it with the attitude that it is mostly futile, those of us who can work from home should, those who can't should take extra precautions not to spread germs, those who are at greater risk should be able to take temporary leave while collecting unemployment. It is pointless and counterproductive to try to shut everything down though, viruses are microscopic, they reproduce in huge numbers, they are easily spread and it is impossible to completely isolate everyone from everyone else, it takes *one* slip up somewhere to bypass all of the draconian containment efforts. The vast majority of us are going to catch this bug sooner or later no matter what. The best we can hope to do is slow down the spread enough that hopefully the medical system doesn't get overwhelmed but loads of people have lost their jobs already which in most cases (in the US) means they have lost their medical coverage and the ability to pay doctor bills, we are going to see a lot of people die of all sorts of different things because they chose to chance staying home vs ending up with a huge hospital bill. Much of these will be difficult to link directly to Covid because they'll be caused by unrelated conditions that could have been caught by preventative care or non-emergency doctor visits. Then when you have people panicking and doing things like hoarding supplies and even stealing masks and stuff from hospitals that all just makes a bad problem so much worse.

One thing it does highlight is the utter lack of preparedness, even having some sort of plan in place to mitigate the damage would have gone a long way. We should have at least a few domestic factories that can manufacture medical supplies and equipment, even if they have to be government subsidized to compete with imported products during normal times, they can be idled when not needed but we NEED the ability to ramp up capacity quickly. I'm skeptical of the usefulness of surgical masks in these cases but none the less there is no good reason we shouldn't be able to produce billions of them, a modern automated production line could pump out hundreds of thousands or millions a day. We need to have the ability to quickly set up temporary hospitals like they do in warzones, we need to have a large pool of people who have had some sort of medical training so they can volunteer at these facilities in emergencies doing tasks that don't really need a fully trained and licensed doctor or nurse. This is all stuff we need to do 10 years ago, not today. I shudder to think what we will do if there is ever another world war, in WWII our factories quickly shifted over to produce vast amounts of equipment for the war effort but today we have virtually no factories to shift over.

In the nearer term, stores should have immediately implemented progressive pricing policies at the first signs of hoarding, buy one at the regular price, pay progressively more for each additional of the same item, that would go a long way toward stemming the hoarding. Then if only our media and politicians would focus on distributing the information without the sensationalism and hype, keeping people calm, reminding them not to panic, how to prepare, not to hoard, etc along with efforts to control the spread rumors and false information on social media. Instead it has been a complete shitshow with the media stirring panic and hype, creating a polarization of people in a panicked frenzy who think the world is coming to and end on one side and people who think the whole thing is a bunch of BS and refusing to take any action on the other. I think we'd be far better off if most people were sensible and composed and just stayed calm and took a few sensible precautions. Panicked and complacent people are both part of the problem and get in the way of those working on solutions. 
rsjsouza:
With the level of scrutiny the governments have been facing (and some that distort on purpose to gain political points), I think they have no choice but act as if they are doing something - see the enormous backlash that Mexican government is taking from its apparent lack of initiative.

At any rate, my cynical side is piqued strongly when some sort of worldwide consensus is reached: "is the trigger reaction designed to give someone an advantage or is the situation indeed serious?" I honestly don't know and hope the suspicion is misplaced.
james_s:
We should also be drilling into people's heads what to do when they get sick, most people by now either know what to do to reduce their chances of spreading it or they are never going to get that message. It's virtually guaranteed that huge numbers of people will get sick and now we need them to know when to seek medical attention and more importantly when NOT to. A vast majority of those infected are likely to recover on their own at home the way we do when we get any other respiratory virus, some remedies will be more helpful than others and some of the rumors that go around are likely to do more harm than good. Everyone who goes to the doctor or ER when they don't need to is one less resource available for someone who really does need it.
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