CharonY

It think the basic issue for the lengthy argument that leads nowhere is that the assumption being made (more police interactions automatically lead to more negative interactions) fails to address the second dimension of the quality of interactions. If you reduce the likelihood of a negative outcome per interaction, you can obviously increase the number of interactions without also increasing the number of negative interactions. A simple example is looking at other countries where police shootings are extraordinary rare events. They reduce their issues not by having a smaller police force (in fact in many cases they are on average larger than the US) but by having a different system of policing. I suspect if that is not being acknowledged, we will go another round of identical arguments for a couple more pages.

This is not exclusively matter of number of police, but type of policing. What you describe is typically known community policing. Unfortunately especially large police forces tend to forego it in favour of hard responses (certain narcotics and anti-gang groups are notorious for that). That being said, it is true that effective community policing often requires more manpower. But again, the important bit is to change the approach. In fact, studies have shown that increase in police force has to be balanced with policies. In areas where e.g. things like stop and frisk events increased due to increased police presence, there was no benefit in terms of crime reduction, but there was an increase in complaints and violent incidents. So having more force on the beat and building community connections is indeed a good way to reduce crime as well as complaints, but it has to be part of a larger package. In other words, it would make sense to defund the areas dedicated to the most aggressive measures (say, military equipment, heavily armed plainsclothes units and so on) in favour of hiring folks that get to know the folks that they are policing.

The reporting system is to me a stronger indicator of organized central responses are going to be. There are countries with similar challenges (though being way smaller) which have been more successful than others. In most cases a strong coordinated response was the reason. Case in point, we got a rich, well-educated country high standard of living and much fewer issues with sanitation. But the response was half-hearted, to say the least.

Most likely. In a country of that size implementing effective containment is difficult. However, surprisingly China had a decent success to keep it contained, (even if they do underreport). But I do not understand the Indian system well enough to comment. The little what I heard is that their reporting system is mostly inadequate, which does not bode well.

Here is an interesting paper examining responses to COVId-19. It focuses on Europe but it highlights how important coordinated efforts are:

Just a guess, but maybe you cannot drive to Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam and/or Alaska? The latter being loophole that Canada tries to patch as folks do not want diseased folks from the South. Which, btw., is fricken ironic.

Do you mean in direct competition or overall efficiencies when comparing to a large state? What Canada has also done is trying to create a better supply chain for PPEs but also chemicals for required for testing. While Canada tried to help provincial labs and other test labs to get needed stocks (including asking research labs for unused chemicals at the beginning of the pandemic) in the US each state needed to secure their own supply and outbid each other, as well as the feds, which also outbid several states in the process. So even with California's buying power it meant that prices went up and on top, the fact that it is harder to secure a supply chain, it also meant that they needed to stockpile more, and thereby creating more scarcity.

And it should be added that in Canada feds heavily supported provincial responses, e.g. by negotiating and buying PPE in bulk on their behalf. Meanwhile, in the US the feds made the states outbid each other for PPE access and helped private contractors to enrich themselves in the process.

According to an article (in Vanity Fair of all places), the bumbling response in the US was not only sheer incompetence on the top, but also strategic: So far COVID-19 has killed over 155,000 people. In comparison, flu killed an estimated 24-62k throughout the 19/20 season (in addition, of course). And the deaths are trending upwards. Edit: and on top the WH decided not to have the CDC collect and publish COVID-19 data but rather now want to do it themselves. Certainly nothing shady going on here.

Well, the issue is that the anti gun control lobby has opposed safety regulations that would require guns stored safely. Accordingly, accidental gun deaths relative to population size in the USA are about 5 times as high as in countries such as Canada. There is also the weird mindset (mostly in the USA) that you need your gun locked and loaded as quite a few folks think that they need to defend themselves in a moment's notice. This, of course, increase accident risks.

alfa05 has been banned due to continuous spamming and failure to engage with the community after several warnings.

Very strong "I got a black friend"-vibe.

Ken123456 has been banned for abusive behaviour and continued soapboxing.

This is not really different from the other findings, and despite what I wrote earlier, a reduction in titers does not automatically mean lack of immunity per se and the authors of the actual report did not make comments to this effect. But it does mean that protective titers drop relatively fast and unless there is rapid recruitment from memory cells. In addition, some earlier studies found the presence of T cells in infected patients (but in a very small cohort), which is in principle good news. But as usual, the situation is still fluid and highlights the need for efficacy tests (which are going to be difficult) before one can rely on them.

I should also add that theoretically folks may still have long-term protection if sufficient memory cells are formed, which cannot be easily be tested with simple serological assays (i.e. the rapid tests). What the study calls into question is the usefulness of serological tests to establish how many folks may have been infected without detection as well as the length of immediate protection. Now, lack of immunity against RNA viruses in general is often the result of their high mutation rate. OTOH, coronaviruses have a proof-reading enzyme that reduces the mutations rates (but are still high compared to DNA viruses). Also, there a bunch of viruses that can cause cold symptoms so it cannot actually be traced back solely to the major human coronavirus strains. I have looked a bit into some older pre-SARS papers and found one from 1990 (Callow et al. Eipdemiol. Infect) in which 15 volunteers were infected with coronavirus 229E. Here they showed that some volunteers showed slightly increased antibody titres after one year, though it did not protect from re-infection. However, there was lower shedding, indicating a higher level of neutralization and none developed a cold. So there is some potential there, especially if vaccines result in a stronger response. At the same time, SARS-CoV-2 (and 1 for that matter) obviously elicit quite different responses, including massive inflammatory responses. So there are still a lot of unknowns at play (plus, we do still do not understand all that goes into long-term immunity and the literature is maddening at best).

It should be added that vaccines still might elicit different or stronger responses. But other than actually trying them out there is no way (that I am aware of) to predict the outcome. Theoretically if one could coordinate enough vaccinations worldwide even short term protection may burn the virus out. But looking at those in charge, I have low hopes.

Add the fact that studies suggest that black and Hispanic folks are disproportionately target (e.g. for jaywalking) plus the fact that poor folks get disproportionately punished for minor infractions it does not seem like a great system to begin with (or at least has substantial issues).

It is generally a immunological effect that is not due the disease per se (there are exceptions and certain diseases can effectively wipe out your adaptive memory, but this is not one of those). Roughly speaking it is the reaction of your body to the antigen that determines how long your body remembers it. However, there are a lot of unknowns regarding what precisely makes a response long-lasting. It is not my area of specialization so I cannot really say how far the research in the area has progressed, but from discussions it appears to me that the field is still wide open in that regard.

No, that study was just looking at antibody levels of patients. Especially when they are asymptomatic they vanish (i.e. they become seronegative). But even symptomatic folks had a drastic reduction of antibody levels within two months. It is theoretically possible that vaccine-induced immunization could be more effective, but it certainly is making folks more cautious.

I think one could make a short update here. While most countries stumbled at the beginning, with different outcomes arguably also dependent on how lucky they got with initial infections, we can also start to see consequences if shutdown was not or only partially enacted. The US has re-openened without pushing the levels down sufficiently and we start seeing new cases surpassing the numbers in March. Of course, those numbers were most likely too low as too few tests were available. Nonetheless, in other countries the numbers were pushed way down. Other countries in denial include Brazil as well as other South American countries were reports indicate that numbers are continuing to rise. India is in a similar spot and who knows what is happening in Russia (excess deaths seem to paint a different picture as what is being reported). Considering recent reports that immunity only lasts for a relatively short amount of time, it could mean that vaccinations, once available, would need to be timed in an unprecedented manner, otherwise there will be plenty of pockets where new outbreaks can start and spread. Good times.

Not sure what you mean precisely, but the first step in my mind is to revise policies that result in racially divergent outcomes. I doubt that we can get to a level where everyone is truly raceblind and I see little value in pretending that the society is. One important reason for the push for reforms is that traditionally racial inequalities were equated with qualities of the race itself (there is a shift from the purely racial argument to a cultural one, but it amounts to the same thing with different words). With mounting evidence, there is now more scrutiny on policies, laws and their interaction with day-to-day decisions and how those may create segregation and racial inequality. This may range from how schools are funded to criminal justice, law enforcement and so on. There is, however, also a strong pushback from certain circles which often feels like being borne of a desire to deny systematic inequalities (and thereby putting the burden back on minorities again).

Society at large. This includes researchers to identify the sources of disparities and potentially proposing solutions, lawmakers trying to address them and folks voting those folks in that intend to make the right changes. If we vote in folks that intensify the war on drugs and have racial biases, chances are that segregation will continue further, for example. That is a key element. Now many policies designed in the past may be based on bad and/or racist information. And those need to be reformed.

Of course, but the racial divide is something that sticks out in research again and again. And the reverse is also true, non-racial motives can result in racial disparity. All of them have to be addressed. Only focusing on motives and not looking at outcomes is not helpful to solve the issue.

Even so, we have a bias in the system. White collar crimes are punished less severe than what you cal street crime and the latter are typically also subject to more policing. That is a good starting point, and therefore whenever we see disparity, we need to look into factors causing observed differences. With regard to that specific point, it depends a bit on the data set, as different areas show different outcomes, indicating complex factors are at play. Some studies suggest that local inequality are associated with higher crime rate (e.g. if one part of town drops economically). This does seem to be more frequent in white neighbourhoods, potentially because black areas start off fairly low to begin with.

Then you are wrong in your assumption. Systemic refers to a system as opposed to just parts. Following your definition there is no room for things like systemic racism as you will find hardly any system in which everyone is racist. You also might want to explore the difference in acting racist (consciously or not) vs following an ideology. For example there is a prominent series of experiment just looking at reaction times when folks learn to associate a picture with certain words. Some of these words were for example "gangster" or "thug". And perhaps unsurprisingly folks had better reaction times for associating a picture of a black man with these negative words than a white man. Does it mean that the person is a white supremacist? Not it means that they have been exposed to a system (for example media) that have been priming them. If one does not acknowledge that these mechanism exist (as they are very well researched) then it follows that one will fail to understand important mechanism leading to racial inequalities. Another good example I think is unequal medical treatment based on race and the failed attempts to address that using a race-neutral approach, but I am running out of time here.