I work with some of them in Greece. They have monthly contract extensions and are paid by day, no sick leave. Most offices have skeleton crew now. Technically it is not fb, but agency who employs them.
> Technically it is not fb, but agency who employs them.
And that's part of the problem, IMO. It enables Facebook to say "we're giving these protections to all our employees" which is technically correct but leaves out many people who labor for Facebook.
Hospitals are already stretched, it takes hours of waiting to treat normal injuries such as broken legs. Waiting list for some operations is years long.
How many people are going to die from other causes, if we shutdown entire country for 6 months? How many of those will be children and young people?
It may sound harsh, but as a younger person I prefer this plan.
Indeed, you realy want the bulk of those who will not have complications to catch it early and leaving schools open, enables that. Over making every parent stay at home to look after their child!
Coz you need to balance out infections and with that manage them, so you will see periodic lockdowns in some parts to throttle back infection and also those most at risk will see themselves issolating for months and however you do things, you want to be doing that anyhow.
So infect, isolating those who high risk and letting others carry on and manage infection rate with hospital numbers as you will get risk people getting infected anyhow, so focusing on managing infection in those you can and getting it out the way, has logic behind it. yes people will die, they are not flowing that up, but equally, they are planning for those longterm to be lower than falling victim to the seasonal waves ala spanish flu and how that went.
Yes it does seem harsh, but as an older person it is the best plan for the whole and I'm high risk.
you seem to believe that the government can control a function exponential in time but with incomplete and delayed information. what could possibly go wrong? you only have to miss one super spreader event and you're left with a runaway transmission that you only get to know about 5-10 days after it happened.
also, if bojo wants to ask old people to stay home for 4 months in a couple weeks, why not ask them now to stay home for 4 and a half months? not enough dead in the calculation or what?
I believe people are going to die, and looking at the long term counts over a short-term mentality and with that, having less deaths overall is a better plan than not.
But if you have a solution to how an entire country can completely isolate and operate in today's times for any European sized country then I'm all ears to hear it as we are talking a year at least until any sort of vaccine is available.
As for `super spreaders` that's a given, just the same way Europe has easy access to heroin and cocaine that are all imported - you can't stop things spreading even with best intentions and efforts and viruses are much smaller than smuggled drugs. So given that, people who spread this will happen and how would you ever stop that? Sure isolate from the vulnerable and at risk and those groups are already on the case, heck the amount of old people I know and saw 2 weeks ago buying a years worth of toilet roll - well, they are already self isolating and no need to be told by some PM they may or may not respect when they have a lifetime of common sense and experience to draw upon and effectively kick into war-mode mentality lockdown. Though many will learn that over the comming year as this is a world war, only it's the entire world this time fighting a virus. Looking at how the spanish flu went, the real fear is not the hear and now, but the winter to come.
my plan would be pretty much what my country is trying to do (I hope) and what South Korea has successfully done already: tell everyone to sit on their asses while massively scaling up testing capabilities so that everyone can test every few days. follow up on every positive case, quarantine carrier and all contacts. test everyone (literally) crossing the border, quarantine as above. this allows to open the country back up while waiting for a vaccine in 12-18 months... or however long it takes.
South Korea can test about 10,000 patients a day. Their total population is about 50 million. They've primarily been relying on contact tracing to target their testing, I think.
As Mike Tyson once said, "everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth".
These cool (and callous) calculations will be forgotten the second the hospitals get overwhelmed and there is chaos everywhere. When the country is on fire, the government will be pissing on fires.
That is why they are already planning for overload and with that, having extra buffer layers. Hotels, emergency hospital bed spaces from army, etc etc, already being put in place. Then need for ventilators, many companies been contacted to step up and see if they can make more as many will be needed beyond what any country has. So plans are afoot.
Cool calculations involving the facts that people will die, happen more often in many walks of life without being questioned. Kinda how insurance policies work.
If those calculations show less people die overall then how can that be bad - yes it's involving human life but you have to look at the big picture and not just yourself. I'm about 50% likely to die from this given my health and age, if I'm one of those stats that is in the death count, then so be it, I'll die I certainly won't be blaming the current planned approach by the UK and has much going for it, time will tell but hey - worst case We are an Island so you can all set up navigation warning buoys if it all goes pete tong (sorry British Humour included and slang "pete tong" sames as going pear shaped, going wrong...).
You realize your hospitals are going to be swamped by coronavirus cases and people are going to start dying from other treatable conditions - the exact thing you're worried about. Your logic appears to be backwards.
Yes, but we also have the benefit of modern materials science.
You can make a backpack with a lot more parts/materials and still have it lighter than a backpack made 20 or 30 years ago.
Of course the downside is that you can't repair them when they break. You can't weld, glue, or sew broken parts any more, and good luck getting replacement parts or modifying your pack in any way.
Some of us like our creature comforts too. I could go ultra-lightweight, but I don't want to be eating nothing but beef jerky and snickers bars, and sleeping under a couple of square feet of tarp. I want to eat real food and sleep in a tent (actually I've always been a hut man).
The tradeoffs are substantial. I've come across a lot of through hikers over the years. The featherweight packers are usually the ones who are mentally broken, as if enduring solitary confinement in a cell that has a serious water leak and freezing temperatures. The heavyweight packers are physically broken but still bear a resemblance of a civilized human being.
This is the real problem. Both the CDC and the FDA stopped everyone else from making progress on testing and we only started getting more tests when labs decided to disobey them.
Cockups like this really should lay to rest the idea some people have that the federal government is a panacea for everything.
This is very similar to one of Warren Buffett's quote about investing in companies: “I try to invest in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will.”
The truth is that federal government is far from being able to be wonderful when run by idiots. The best thing to do is try things out at the state level and if it proves to be so wonderful, only then do you try to scale it to two states, then three until it is so wonderful that it can be done at the federal level.
> Cockups like this really should lay to rest the idea some people have that the federal government is a panacea for everything.
IMHO, a major reason South Korea improved so much in recent decades is, when we had idiotic/evil leaders, we didn't say "What did you expect from the government? The government can and will be run by idiots, so you should not depend on it."
Instead, we said "How come our government is run by these murders and idiots? This is unacceptable! We demand a government we can depend on!"
You keep saying the government is run by idiots, you get your government run by idiots. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The problem I have with this attitude, as it plays out in the United States, is that people accept this idea as true, and so then they de-fund things until they operate poorly, they vote with apathy so you end up with idiots in control, and basically the prophecy fulfills itself.
All these things about idiots being in charge is, as Buffet said, true of companies as well. Nothing is a panacea.
You can have many companies to choose from in the market and can choose to avoid the one run by idiots. You only have one government, so if it is full of idiots, you're pretty much screwed.
I'm not every talking about government funding. I'm talking about government having too much power and control. That said, just throwing more money at the government gives zero guarantee that it will run any better. It usually will run just as poorly, but wasting more money than before.
There is nothing secret about RNA testing. Any decent lab can synthetise its own markers from a file downloaded from internet. It is like genetic research is illegal in US or what.
Offering a diagnostic test without FDA approval is illegal, for good reason (there would be companies far worse than Theranos) but clearly in an emergency regulators need to adapt.
In Arizona, Mayo Clinic, Sonora Quest Laboratories, and the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Flagstaff are rolling out their own tests. Official test kits from the CDC are in woefully short supply, under 200 right now, and only being used for people showing significant symptoms. According to a news article the new tests will use a technique similar to the CDC test known as reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction, otherwise shortened to RT-PCR
2) The reagents needed for the testing are also in extremely short supply, and labs are having a hard time getting more. So, you can develop a test, but your testing capacity will remain limited.
It's sarcasm. If Boeing's "High Quality" software kills people and they get dragged before congress, why isn't Tesla getting the same treatment when their software has also killed?
Because comparisons without baselines are silly. Boeing's 737 Max is compared to the industry average, which is amazingly good.
Tesla is compared to the industry average that is so bad that it kills a 737 load of passengers every hour. Tesla is better than average in that industry.
It is fair to debate why and whether or not Tesla could be even more above average, but that is the baseline.
Tesla has thousands of employees, sells thousands of cars and sometimes even makes money. I can't believe they still get away with "Sorry, we messed up, but we're a startup after all"
Honestly there are people who just do not care. Article has interesting content. But political stuff is just like ads, you ignore it, or go away if it becomes too annoying.
I am not even from US, we have universal healthcare, but it is even more broken than yours.
But genociding your engineers is probably not best idea.