I was 34 years old when I learned some states don't have a fucking income tax and that's a large part of why they need to reopen so quickly because the entire government is based on sales tax?
Income taxes will still be taking a large hit as people arent working. Even if that tends to be lower income people.
Additionally in states without income taxes (like Washington) there is usually property taxes which would not fall*
*i mean...they will fall because people will be unable to pay them. But assessments will not update fast enough to have an apreciable effect and, having gotten some experience with the city/county’s methods of assesment i doubt there would be a significant decrease even if it was warranted there
+4
Options
ShivahnUnaware of her barrel shifter privilegeWestern coastal temptressRegistered User, Moderatormod
I consider myself someone that keeps abreast of the news. It can be troublesome in the attempt but I feel like it pays out in that I can pierce the veil of bullshit most days.
But this past week? It's gone from news to something like incompetence porn. Which is like disaster porn but is more of the lead up to the disaster we're all living through. Don't get me wrong, we should totally be aware of how people like the President* has fucked up. But the sheer size of the fuckups, the complete lack of empathy and sympathy from the man has finally eclipsed my ability to deal with it. Last night, I found a bootleg of Charlie Brooker's Anti-Virus Wipe on youtube. Started watching it but had to stop about a quarter of the way in because all it was becoming was a montage of malicious incompetence. Very little commentary was needed from him. The images and the people in them spoke for themselves. And it just began to hurt to watch. Worse than any horror movie I've ever seen. The monstrosity of the right-wing is painful. Which is the point, I know.
One does not like to get repetitive with the "OMG, this is a shitshow and it's going to get really bad". But the news coming out of the US is like watching the opening act of a horror movie. "Why would you go into the spooky abandoned house and then split up? Who would do that?" is the kind of question that just doesn't seem as damning as it used to.
This is gonna get bad and it seems like there's no way to stop it.
I'm not totally sure what the point of shutting down was, anymore. "To flatten the curve," yes, but.. it needs to be flattened until a vaccine is made or more than half of people are immune. If I recall correctly, something like 5% of Wuhan is probably immune/resistant from exposure, and a vaccine is nowhere near ready. You need to reopen at some point, you need some level of economic activity, but as far as I can tell, most jurisdictions are opening up when they have not flattened the curve or modeled sufficiently to be sure that opening up won't cause the exponential increase. I have mostly only been paying attention to BC, admittedly, but it also seems like BC is the only place I've seen where some opening up makes sense - the curve has been flattened hard, and modeling suggests that even doubling our present social contact still maintains a <1 R0. So it seems like we can probably fine-tune ourselves to the point of having some amount of sociability and economy while still being protected enough to prevent a severe outbreak. But BC's case numbers are very different from most other places I've seen.
Am I wrong? Is it not as bad elsewhere as I've been assuming? Or are most states' actions making the lockdowns retroactively pointless? Most people aren't immune, nothing has been gained, only a month or two of economic suffering and delaying a month or two of refrigerator death trucks errywhere.
Depends which state you're talking about. The first benefit of flattening is to prevent the hospitals from being flooded and overwhelmed. I think even a lot of the states fucking up might have managed that.The second part is to keep the infection rate down (ideally under 1 but ahaha not likely without more support). But yes most states are fucking up hard. The stupid thing is if they just followed the model from the states not fucking up they wouldn't be restricted that much longer and their economies would benefit. But nope, gotta ignore the overwhelming majority opinion and fuck it up.
Right, I guess I'm saying that I don't think the capacity of hospitals has increased a lot, and that the coronavirus infection curve wants very much to be exponential, so unless people are building up immunity, letting it get to the point of uncontrolled increase is pretty much identical to not bothering to try and stop it in the first place.
Really the states needed the fed to cover their budgets
Why should I pay for your state's mismanagement of the virus out my personal bank account, the US Treasury?! If you had all just taken hydrocloroxaqueenofhearts like I had said everything would be fine!!1!
It sure feels like the quarantine efforts are over in Pennsylvania. Governor Wolf and Dr. Levine are doing all they can, I think, and people have been pissing and moaning and protesting and threatening their lives and now everyone is talking about Memorial Day picnics and vacations
A week after Memorial Day is going to be a wake-up call for a lot of people; even without picnics and various whatnot social events, there are going to be a lot of retail outlets having blowout sales to recoup some of the losses of the last couple of months.
Yeah, I live in the Philadelphia suburb area, and it seams like the dam is slowly starting to break. Since this area (and a lot of eastern Pennsylvania) is a relative short drive to the coast, I'm expecting a lot of people to head to the beach for Memorial day weekend. Gov. Wolf, for his part, is maintaining his very-much-out-of-fucks attitude about telling people to stay home and not go to the beach, but he can't really do more than voice his displeasure about what the Govs. of Jersey and Maryland are allowing.
I'm expecting my area to have another big surge of cases in the next few weeks. *sigh*
As a resident of Delaware, this is what has and continues to terrify. We have a LOT of summer temporary (Weekly, Monthly, and full season) residents from other states. A large percentage are from Pennsylvania. I feel our outlook has a fair amount of relation to the surrounding states' outlooks...
I consider myself someone that keeps abreast of the news. It can be troublesome in the attempt but I feel like it pays out in that I can pierce the veil of bullshit most days.
But this past week? It's gone from news to something like incompetence porn. Which is like disaster porn but is more of the lead up to the disaster we're all living through. Don't get me wrong, we should totally be aware of how people like the President* has fucked up. But the sheer size of the fuckups, the complete lack of empathy and sympathy from the man has finally eclipsed my ability to deal with it. Last night, I found a bootleg of Charlie Brooker's Anti-Virus Wipe on youtube. Started watching it but had to stop about a quarter of the way in because all it was becoming was a montage of malicious incompetence. Very little commentary was needed from him. The images and the people in them spoke for themselves. And it just began to hurt to watch. Worse than any horror movie I've ever seen. The monstrosity of the right-wing is painful. Which is the point, I know.
One does not like to get repetitive with the "OMG, this is a shitshow and it's going to get really bad". But the news coming out of the US is like watching the opening act of a horror movie. "Why would you go into the spooky abandoned house and then split up? Who would do that?" is the kind of question that just doesn't seem as damning as it used to.
This is gonna get bad and it seems like there's no way to stop it.
I'm not totally sure what the point of shutting down was, anymore. "To flatten the curve," yes, but.. it needs to be flattened until a vaccine is made or more than half of people are immune. If I recall correctly, something like 5% of Wuhan is probably immune/resistant from exposure, and a vaccine is nowhere near ready. You need to reopen at some point, you need some level of economic activity, but as far as I can tell, most jurisdictions are opening up when they have not flattened the curve or modeled sufficiently to be sure that opening up won't cause the exponential increase. I have mostly only been paying attention to BC, admittedly, but it also seems like BC is the only place I've seen where some opening up makes sense - the curve has been flattened hard, and modeling suggests that even doubling our present social contact still maintains a <1 R0. So it seems like we can probably fine-tune ourselves to the point of having some amount of sociability and economy while still being protected enough to prevent a severe outbreak. But BC's case numbers are very different from most other places I've seen.
Am I wrong? Is it not as bad elsewhere as I've been assuming? Or are most states' actions making the lockdowns retroactively pointless? Most people aren't immune, nothing has been gained, only a month or two of economic suffering and delaying a month or two of refrigerator death trucks errywhere.
Depends which state you're talking about. The first benefit of flattening is to prevent the hospitals from being flooded and overwhelmed. I think even a lot of the states fucking up might have managed that.The second part is to keep the infection rate down (ideally under 1 but ahaha not likely without more support). But yes most states are fucking up hard. The stupid thing is if they just followed the model from the states not fucking up they wouldn't be restricted that much longer and their economies would benefit. But nope, gotta ignore the overwhelming majority opinion and fuck it up.
Right, I guess I'm saying that I don't think the capacity of hospitals has increased a lot, and that the coronavirus infection curve wants very much to be exponential, so unless people are building up immunity, letting it get to the point of uncontrolled increase is pretty much identical to not bothering to try and stop it in the first place.
Oh, yeah. What's the point of first doing a half-assed spotty lockdown for about 2 months during which you do nothing whatsoever to prepare and in fact fire a shitload of medical personnel, then abandoning it because you got bored and waiting for the exponential growth to ramp up again?
You get like 2-ish months of slightly less horror, followed by the exact same thing happening in June that happened in March.
Trump attacked the authors of a Columbia U study finding there would've been many fewer deaths with earlier distancing, calling it a "political hit job" and saying Columbia is "very liberal." This is his now-familiar approach to findings he doesn't like.
Trump notes that hydroxychloroquine has not killed him even though he's almost done his regimen: "I think it's another day. And I'm still here. I'm still here."
"It did not kill me" is not the endorsement Trump thinks it is.
Trump is really proving why he is impossible to educate on anything. Anything that suggests he should have done anything different or should do something he doesn't want to do is bad and evil.
I consider myself someone that keeps abreast of the news. It can be troublesome in the attempt but I feel like it pays out in that I can pierce the veil of bullshit most days.
But this past week? It's gone from news to something like incompetence porn. Which is like disaster porn but is more of the lead up to the disaster we're all living through. Don't get me wrong, we should totally be aware of how people like the President* has fucked up. But the sheer size of the fuckups, the complete lack of empathy and sympathy from the man has finally eclipsed my ability to deal with it. Last night, I found a bootleg of Charlie Brooker's Anti-Virus Wipe on youtube. Started watching it but had to stop about a quarter of the way in because all it was becoming was a montage of malicious incompetence. Very little commentary was needed from him. The images and the people in them spoke for themselves. And it just began to hurt to watch. Worse than any horror movie I've ever seen. The monstrosity of the right-wing is painful. Which is the point, I know.
One does not like to get repetitive with the "OMG, this is a shitshow and it's going to get really bad". But the news coming out of the US is like watching the opening act of a horror movie. "Why would you go into the spooky abandoned house and then split up? Who would do that?" is the kind of question that just doesn't seem as damning as it used to.
This is gonna get bad and it seems like there's no way to stop it.
I'm not totally sure what the point of shutting down was, anymore. "To flatten the curve," yes, but.. it needs to be flattened until a vaccine is made or more than half of people are immune. If I recall correctly, something like 5% of Wuhan is probably immune/resistant from exposure, and a vaccine is nowhere near ready. You need to reopen at some point, you need some level of economic activity, but as far as I can tell, most jurisdictions are opening up when they have not flattened the curve or modeled sufficiently to be sure that opening up won't cause the exponential increase. I have mostly only been paying attention to BC, admittedly, but it also seems like BC is the only place I've seen where some opening up makes sense - the curve has been flattened hard, and modeling suggests that even doubling our present social contact still maintains a <1 R0. So it seems like we can probably fine-tune ourselves to the point of having some amount of sociability and economy while still being protected enough to prevent a severe outbreak. But BC's case numbers are very different from most other places I've seen.
Am I wrong? Is it not as bad elsewhere as I've been assuming? Or are most states' actions making the lockdowns retroactively pointless? Most people aren't immune, nothing has been gained, only a month or two of economic suffering and delaying a month or two of refrigerator death trucks errywhere.
Depends which state you're talking about. The first benefit of flattening is to prevent the hospitals from being flooded and overwhelmed. I think even a lot of the states fucking up might have managed that.The second part is to keep the infection rate down (ideally under 1 but ahaha not likely without more support). But yes most states are fucking up hard. The stupid thing is if they just followed the model from the states not fucking up they wouldn't be restricted that much longer and their economies would benefit. But nope, gotta ignore the overwhelming majority opinion and fuck it up.
Right, I guess I'm saying that I don't think the capacity of hospitals has increased a lot, and that the coronavirus infection curve wants very much to be exponential, so unless people are building up immunity, letting it get to the point of uncontrolled increase is pretty much identical to not bothering to try and stop it in the first place.
I'm not sure if this is an argument for herd immunity as a policy goal or not. But assuming it's not, this sounds like its falling squarely into the paradox of prevention -- if you stopped a thing from happening, or from being as bad as it could have been, you'll look like you overreacted. No good deed, and all
You are right that most of the time we bought with lockdown was squandered. It wasn't pointless, however. Each day we failed to lockdown in early march led to tens of thousands more dead than would have died. There is the counterquestion of inevitability -- if the virus is going to ripple through the population anyway, even if more slowly, why hobble the economy in the meantime? Well for one thing, inevitability is not a given; even though the federal government has dropped the ball in a criminal way here, time bought is time scientists and researchers have to learn about the virus, how it transmits, what its real dangers are, what can be mitigated, best modes of treatments and therapies, etc., potentially saving more lives (there have been some promising gains already but none of them are hydroxychloroquine). For another, the economy is not hobbled because of the lockdown, it is hobbled because of the virus. States that have lifted their lockdowns are not seeing the rubberband snap back to economy productivity. People are afraid to get sick and die. Businesses that live by volume--like dine-in restaurants--are not thriving.
The squandered time isn't just the failure to build hospital capacity. It was the failure to build industrial/supply chain capacity through powers like the DPA -- producing tests, ventilators (to the extent they are still believed to be life-saving at the margins, cause it seems like if an old person is intubated, their chance of survival is just over single-digits), PPE, sanitary products, pulse oximeters, etc. It is also the ongoing failure of Congress to open the relief spigot and deluge the unemployed of America with money that they must spend into the economy, and the same for essential workers but with hazard pay. It is the failure of the federal government to coordinate across states not only for supply procurement, but for triaging capacity -- the movement of healthcare personnel from less-hotspot areas to high-hotspot areas, for example. The federal government also could have helped states develop testing capacity, train contact tracers, and share information with other states less affected so they could prepare for the inevitable.
The time was bought through lockdown, and a lot could have been achieved with it. I don't think even the most cynical alarmist expected this government to fail so utterly in seizing the moment to do even the most basic things when the problem could no longer be ignored (signed, one cynical alarmist)
Pretty sure the "warmer weather" will solve this has been debunked. Hell, given what a capitalist hellscape the US is, I imagine we're primed for a big spike on the second wave because of people still believing that is a thing and that's probably going to be yet another thing that ensures people don't do anything to minimize their chance of getting infected or infecting others. Some chunk of that is likely a result of more people taking time off in the summer and doing outdoorsy things in the past. Worth noting again, we'ere a capitalistic hellscape, so a ton of people are likely to get told they already had their time off for the year, get your ass in the office and make your boss money to make up for all the lost profits during the pandemic.
I consider myself someone that keeps abreast of the news. It can be troublesome in the attempt but I feel like it pays out in that I can pierce the veil of bullshit most days.
But this past week? It's gone from news to something like incompetence porn. Which is like disaster porn but is more of the lead up to the disaster we're all living through. Don't get me wrong, we should totally be aware of how people like the President* has fucked up. But the sheer size of the fuckups, the complete lack of empathy and sympathy from the man has finally eclipsed my ability to deal with it. Last night, I found a bootleg of Charlie Brooker's Anti-Virus Wipe on youtube. Started watching it but had to stop about a quarter of the way in because all it was becoming was a montage of malicious incompetence. Very little commentary was needed from him. The images and the people in them spoke for themselves. And it just began to hurt to watch. Worse than any horror movie I've ever seen. The monstrosity of the right-wing is painful. Which is the point, I know.
One does not like to get repetitive with the "OMG, this is a shitshow and it's going to get really bad". But the news coming out of the US is like watching the opening act of a horror movie. "Why would you go into the spooky abandoned house and then split up? Who would do that?" is the kind of question that just doesn't seem as damning as it used to.
This is gonna get bad and it seems like there's no way to stop it.
I'm not totally sure what the point of shutting down was, anymore. "To flatten the curve," yes, but.. it needs to be flattened until a vaccine is made or more than half of people are immune. If I recall correctly, something like 5% of Wuhan is probably immune/resistant from exposure, and a vaccine is nowhere near ready. You need to reopen at some point, you need some level of economic activity, but as far as I can tell, most jurisdictions are opening up when they have not flattened the curve or modeled sufficiently to be sure that opening up won't cause the exponential increase. I have mostly only been paying attention to BC, admittedly, but it also seems like BC is the only place I've seen where some opening up makes sense - the curve has been flattened hard, and modeling suggests that even doubling our present social contact still maintains a <1 R0. So it seems like we can probably fine-tune ourselves to the point of having some amount of sociability and economy while still being protected enough to prevent a severe outbreak. But BC's case numbers are very different from most other places I've seen.
Am I wrong? Is it not as bad elsewhere as I've been assuming? Or are most states' actions making the lockdowns retroactively pointless? Most people aren't immune, nothing has been gained, only a month or two of economic suffering and delaying a month or two of refrigerator death trucks errywhere.
Depends which state you're talking about. The first benefit of flattening is to prevent the hospitals from being flooded and overwhelmed. I think even a lot of the states fucking up might have managed that.The second part is to keep the infection rate down (ideally under 1 but ahaha not likely without more support). But yes most states are fucking up hard. The stupid thing is if they just followed the model from the states not fucking up they wouldn't be restricted that much longer and their economies would benefit. But nope, gotta ignore the overwhelming majority opinion and fuck it up.
Right, I guess I'm saying that I don't think the capacity of hospitals has increased a lot, and that the coronavirus infection curve wants very much to be exponential, so unless people are building up immunity, letting it get to the point of uncontrolled increase is pretty much identical to not bothering to try and stop it in the first place.
This is where a vast test and contact tracing regime should come in to help isolate the virus and give people confidence that they can go outside without being as worried about everyone else being infected because everyone should have a good idea of their status.
Instead we got Barber Militias and told to drink bleach.
+9
Options
HakkekageSpace Whore Academysumma cum laudeRegistered Userregular
It sure feels like the quarantine efforts are over in Pennsylvania. Governor Wolf and Dr. Levine are doing all they can, I think, and people have been pissing and moaning and protesting and threatening their lives and now everyone is talking about Memorial Day picnics and vacations
A week after Memorial Day is going to be a wake-up call for a lot of people; even without picnics and various whatnot social events, there are going to be a lot of retail outlets having blowout sales to recoup some of the losses of the last couple of months.
Yeah, I live in the Philadelphia suburb area, and it seams like the dam is slowly starting to break. Since this area (and a lot of eastern Pennsylvania) is a relative short drive to the coast, I'm expecting a lot of people to head to the beach for Memorial day weekend. Gov. Wolf, for his part, is maintaining his very-much-out-of-fucks attitude about telling people to stay home and not go to the beach, but he can't really do more than voice his displeasure about what the Govs. of Jersey and Maryland are allowing.
I'm expecting my area to have another big surge of cases in the next few weeks. *sigh*
As a resident of Delaware, this is what has and continues to terrify. We have a LOT of summer temporary (Weekly, Monthly, and full season) residents from other states. A large percentage are from Pennsylvania. I feel our outlook has a fair amount of relation to the surrounding states' outlooks...
I saw Delaware described as "Baja Pennsylvania" once and guffawed mightily. Fortunately for DE most of its residents are corporate persons so that one building is safe
What regimen though? Like there's no treatment plan for this shit? Especially taken proactively!
It sounds like he thinks taking it for a period preventatively is basically a vaccine.
I highly doubt anyone told him that, and I don't at all doubt that that's what he has heard or internalized at this point.
Which, if the sugar pill theory is correct (or it's just such a tiny dose that it might as well be one, thus technically accurate without presenting any substantial risk of harm), would just exacerbate the aspect of him thinking it's no big deal, telling people to take it, and then having them fare poorly under the idiotic megadoses some have taken, let alone even regular amounts.
But that's thinking more deeply about any of this than.. well, he seems to have thought about anything while President, but laying it out like that helps me feel less crazy, at least.
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
+7
Options
ShivahnUnaware of her barrel shifter privilegeWestern coastal temptressRegistered User, Moderatormod
I consider myself someone that keeps abreast of the news. It can be troublesome in the attempt but I feel like it pays out in that I can pierce the veil of bullshit most days.
But this past week? It's gone from news to something like incompetence porn. Which is like disaster porn but is more of the lead up to the disaster we're all living through. Don't get me wrong, we should totally be aware of how people like the President* has fucked up. But the sheer size of the fuckups, the complete lack of empathy and sympathy from the man has finally eclipsed my ability to deal with it. Last night, I found a bootleg of Charlie Brooker's Anti-Virus Wipe on youtube. Started watching it but had to stop about a quarter of the way in because all it was becoming was a montage of malicious incompetence. Very little commentary was needed from him. The images and the people in them spoke for themselves. And it just began to hurt to watch. Worse than any horror movie I've ever seen. The monstrosity of the right-wing is painful. Which is the point, I know.
One does not like to get repetitive with the "OMG, this is a shitshow and it's going to get really bad". But the news coming out of the US is like watching the opening act of a horror movie. "Why would you go into the spooky abandoned house and then split up? Who would do that?" is the kind of question that just doesn't seem as damning as it used to.
This is gonna get bad and it seems like there's no way to stop it.
I'm not totally sure what the point of shutting down was, anymore. "To flatten the curve," yes, but.. it needs to be flattened until a vaccine is made or more than half of people are immune. If I recall correctly, something like 5% of Wuhan is probably immune/resistant from exposure, and a vaccine is nowhere near ready. You need to reopen at some point, you need some level of economic activity, but as far as I can tell, most jurisdictions are opening up when they have not flattened the curve or modeled sufficiently to be sure that opening up won't cause the exponential increase. I have mostly only been paying attention to BC, admittedly, but it also seems like BC is the only place I've seen where some opening up makes sense - the curve has been flattened hard, and modeling suggests that even doubling our present social contact still maintains a <1 R0. So it seems like we can probably fine-tune ourselves to the point of having some amount of sociability and economy while still being protected enough to prevent a severe outbreak. But BC's case numbers are very different from most other places I've seen.
Am I wrong? Is it not as bad elsewhere as I've been assuming? Or are most states' actions making the lockdowns retroactively pointless? Most people aren't immune, nothing has been gained, only a month or two of economic suffering and delaying a month or two of refrigerator death trucks errywhere.
Depends which state you're talking about. The first benefit of flattening is to prevent the hospitals from being flooded and overwhelmed. I think even a lot of the states fucking up might have managed that.The second part is to keep the infection rate down (ideally under 1 but ahaha not likely without more support). But yes most states are fucking up hard. The stupid thing is if they just followed the model from the states not fucking up they wouldn't be restricted that much longer and their economies would benefit. But nope, gotta ignore the overwhelming majority opinion and fuck it up.
Right, I guess I'm saying that I don't think the capacity of hospitals has increased a lot, and that the coronavirus infection curve wants very much to be exponential, so unless people are building up immunity, letting it get to the point of uncontrolled increase is pretty much identical to not bothering to try and stop it in the first place.
I'm not sure if this is an argument for herd immunity as a policy goal or not. But assuming it's not, this sounds like its falling squarely into the paradox of prevention -- if you stopped a thing from happening, or from being as bad as it could have been, you'll look like you overreacted. No good deed, and all
You are right that most of the time we bought with lockdown was squandered. It wasn't pointless, however. Each day we failed to lockdown in early march led to tens of thousands more dead than would have died. There is the counterquestion of inevitability -- if the virus is going to ripple through the population anyway, even if more slowly, why hobble the economy in the meantime? Well for one thing, inevitability is not a given; even though the federal government has dropped the ball in a criminal way here, time bought is time scientists and researchers have to learn about the virus, how it transmits, what its real dangers are, what can be mitigated, best modes of treatments and therapies, etc., potentially saving more lives (there have been some promising gains already but none of them are hydroxychloroquine). For another, the economy is not hobbled because of the lockdown, it is hobbled because of the virus. States that have lifted their lockdowns are not seeing the rubberband snap back to economy productivity. People are afraid to get sick and die. Businesses that live by volume--like dine-in restaurants--are not thriving.
Just trimming this down, I guess my contention is that having done as little to prepare during lockdowns, and lifting them as early as they are, means that in the end things aren't going to have been prevented from being as bad as they could have been. I fully expect an exponential spike leading to bodies being stuffed wherever there's space, just a couple months later than it would otherwise.
The advancing science is a gain, though, so I guess I can't really assert that they did no good overall.
0
Options
ShivahnUnaware of her barrel shifter privilegeWestern coastal temptressRegistered User, Moderatormod
I consider myself someone that keeps abreast of the news. It can be troublesome in the attempt but I feel like it pays out in that I can pierce the veil of bullshit most days.
But this past week? It's gone from news to something like incompetence porn. Which is like disaster porn but is more of the lead up to the disaster we're all living through. Don't get me wrong, we should totally be aware of how people like the President* has fucked up. But the sheer size of the fuckups, the complete lack of empathy and sympathy from the man has finally eclipsed my ability to deal with it. Last night, I found a bootleg of Charlie Brooker's Anti-Virus Wipe on youtube. Started watching it but had to stop about a quarter of the way in because all it was becoming was a montage of malicious incompetence. Very little commentary was needed from him. The images and the people in them spoke for themselves. And it just began to hurt to watch. Worse than any horror movie I've ever seen. The monstrosity of the right-wing is painful. Which is the point, I know.
One does not like to get repetitive with the "OMG, this is a shitshow and it's going to get really bad". But the news coming out of the US is like watching the opening act of a horror movie. "Why would you go into the spooky abandoned house and then split up? Who would do that?" is the kind of question that just doesn't seem as damning as it used to.
This is gonna get bad and it seems like there's no way to stop it.
I'm not totally sure what the point of shutting down was, anymore. "To flatten the curve," yes, but.. it needs to be flattened until a vaccine is made or more than half of people are immune. If I recall correctly, something like 5% of Wuhan is probably immune/resistant from exposure, and a vaccine is nowhere near ready. You need to reopen at some point, you need some level of economic activity, but as far as I can tell, most jurisdictions are opening up when they have not flattened the curve or modeled sufficiently to be sure that opening up won't cause the exponential increase. I have mostly only been paying attention to BC, admittedly, but it also seems like BC is the only place I've seen where some opening up makes sense - the curve has been flattened hard, and modeling suggests that even doubling our present social contact still maintains a <1 R0. So it seems like we can probably fine-tune ourselves to the point of having some amount of sociability and economy while still being protected enough to prevent a severe outbreak. But BC's case numbers are very different from most other places I've seen.
Am I wrong? Is it not as bad elsewhere as I've been assuming? Or are most states' actions making the lockdowns retroactively pointless? Most people aren't immune, nothing has been gained, only a month or two of economic suffering and delaying a month or two of refrigerator death trucks errywhere.
Depends which state you're talking about. The first benefit of flattening is to prevent the hospitals from being flooded and overwhelmed. I think even a lot of the states fucking up might have managed that.The second part is to keep the infection rate down (ideally under 1 but ahaha not likely without more support). But yes most states are fucking up hard. The stupid thing is if they just followed the model from the states not fucking up they wouldn't be restricted that much longer and their economies would benefit. But nope, gotta ignore the overwhelming majority opinion and fuck it up.
Right, I guess I'm saying that I don't think the capacity of hospitals has increased a lot, and that the coronavirus infection curve wants very much to be exponential, so unless people are building up immunity, letting it get to the point of uncontrolled increase is pretty much identical to not bothering to try and stop it in the first place.
This is where a vast test and contact tracing regime should come in to help isolate the virus and give people confidence that they can go outside without being as worried about everyone else being infected because everyone should have a good idea of their status.
Instead we got Barber Militias and told to drink bleach.
Don't be silly, you've got to inject the bleach. It's sunlight you're supposed to drink.
+21
Options
HakkekageSpace Whore Academysumma cum laudeRegistered Userregular
I consider myself someone that keeps abreast of the news. It can be troublesome in the attempt but I feel like it pays out in that I can pierce the veil of bullshit most days.
But this past week? It's gone from news to something like incompetence porn. Which is like disaster porn but is more of the lead up to the disaster we're all living through. Don't get me wrong, we should totally be aware of how people like the President* has fucked up. But the sheer size of the fuckups, the complete lack of empathy and sympathy from the man has finally eclipsed my ability to deal with it. Last night, I found a bootleg of Charlie Brooker's Anti-Virus Wipe on youtube. Started watching it but had to stop about a quarter of the way in because all it was becoming was a montage of malicious incompetence. Very little commentary was needed from him. The images and the people in them spoke for themselves. And it just began to hurt to watch. Worse than any horror movie I've ever seen. The monstrosity of the right-wing is painful. Which is the point, I know.
One does not like to get repetitive with the "OMG, this is a shitshow and it's going to get really bad". But the news coming out of the US is like watching the opening act of a horror movie. "Why would you go into the spooky abandoned house and then split up? Who would do that?" is the kind of question that just doesn't seem as damning as it used to.
This is gonna get bad and it seems like there's no way to stop it.
I'm not totally sure what the point of shutting down was, anymore. "To flatten the curve," yes, but.. it needs to be flattened until a vaccine is made or more than half of people are immune. If I recall correctly, something like 5% of Wuhan is probably immune/resistant from exposure, and a vaccine is nowhere near ready. You need to reopen at some point, you need some level of economic activity, but as far as I can tell, most jurisdictions are opening up when they have not flattened the curve or modeled sufficiently to be sure that opening up won't cause the exponential increase. I have mostly only been paying attention to BC, admittedly, but it also seems like BC is the only place I've seen where some opening up makes sense - the curve has been flattened hard, and modeling suggests that even doubling our present social contact still maintains a <1 R0. So it seems like we can probably fine-tune ourselves to the point of having some amount of sociability and economy while still being protected enough to prevent a severe outbreak. But BC's case numbers are very different from most other places I've seen.
Am I wrong? Is it not as bad elsewhere as I've been assuming? Or are most states' actions making the lockdowns retroactively pointless? Most people aren't immune, nothing has been gained, only a month or two of economic suffering and delaying a month or two of refrigerator death trucks errywhere.
Depends which state you're talking about. The first benefit of flattening is to prevent the hospitals from being flooded and overwhelmed. I think even a lot of the states fucking up might have managed that.The second part is to keep the infection rate down (ideally under 1 but ahaha not likely without more support). But yes most states are fucking up hard. The stupid thing is if they just followed the model from the states not fucking up they wouldn't be restricted that much longer and their economies would benefit. But nope, gotta ignore the overwhelming majority opinion and fuck it up.
Right, I guess I'm saying that I don't think the capacity of hospitals has increased a lot, and that the coronavirus infection curve wants very much to be exponential, so unless people are building up immunity, letting it get to the point of uncontrolled increase is pretty much identical to not bothering to try and stop it in the first place.
I'm not sure if this is an argument for herd immunity as a policy goal or not. But assuming it's not, this sounds like its falling squarely into the paradox of prevention -- if you stopped a thing from happening, or from being as bad as it could have been, you'll look like you overreacted. No good deed, and all
You are right that most of the time we bought with lockdown was squandered. It wasn't pointless, however. Each day we failed to lockdown in early march led to tens of thousands more dead than would have died. There is the counterquestion of inevitability -- if the virus is going to ripple through the population anyway, even if more slowly, why hobble the economy in the meantime? Well for one thing, inevitability is not a given; even though the federal government has dropped the ball in a criminal way here, time bought is time scientists and researchers have to learn about the virus, how it transmits, what its real dangers are, what can be mitigated, best modes of treatments and therapies, etc., potentially saving more lives (there have been some promising gains already but none of them are hydroxychloroquine). For another, the economy is not hobbled because of the lockdown, it is hobbled because of the virus. States that have lifted their lockdowns are not seeing the rubberband snap back to economy productivity. People are afraid to get sick and die. Businesses that live by volume--like dine-in restaurants--are not thriving.
Just trimming this down, I guess my contention is that having done as little to prepare during lockdowns, and lifting them as early as they are, means that in the end things aren't going to have been prevented from being as bad as they could have been. I fully expect an exponential spike leading to bodies being stuffed wherever there's space, just a couple months later than it would otherwise.
The advancing science is a gain, though, so I guess I can't really assert that they did no good overall.
That is descriptively true. I object to fatalistic framing, though, because the objective analysis (halfassing lockdowns is bad and premature reopening undercuts the point of locking down in the first place) is currently being used as a normative argument (halfassed lockdowns are JUST AS BAD as no lockdown at all, so we should not have lockdowns). That last proposition is untrue and dangerous
I was 34 years old when I learned some states don't have a fucking income tax and that's a large part of why they need to reopen so quickly because the entire government is based on sales tax?
Washington doesn't have an income tax, but most of the people here including the governor is still taking it extremely seriously.
I think a bigger problem is that a lot of states rely primarily on tourist dollars, where they import consumers rather than exporting goods.
Pretty sure the "warmer weather" will solve this has been debunked. Hell, given what a capitalist hellscape the US is, I imagine we're primed for a big spike on the second wave because of people still believing that is a thing and that's probably going to be yet another thing that ensures people don't do anything to minimize their chance of getting infected or infecting others. Some chunk of that is likely a result of more people taking time off in the summer and doing outdoorsy things in the past. Worth noting again, we'ere a capitalistic hellscape, so a ton of people are likely to get told they already had their time off for the year, get your ass in the office and make your boss money to make up for all the lost profits during the pandemic.
Warmer weather will likely make things a lot worse. More people socializing both outdoors (because it's sunny) and indoors (because the restaurant has air conditioning and their house does not).
I recently purchased a portable AC for the first time ever in anticipation of a miserable summer of trying to work from home. And I expect their to be a shortage once more people realize the same thing.
Pretty sure the "warmer weather" will solve this has been debunked. Hell, given what a capitalist hellscape the US is, I imagine we're primed for a big spike on the second wave because of people still believing that is a thing and that's probably going to be yet another thing that ensures people don't do anything to minimize their chance of getting infected or infecting others. Some chunk of that is likely a result of more people taking time off in the summer and doing outdoorsy things in the past. Worth noting again, we'ere a capitalistic hellscape, so a ton of people are likely to get told they already had their time off for the year, get your ass in the office and make your boss money to make up for all the lost profits during the pandemic.
Brazil is rapidly gaining on us. Mumbai is a disaster zone. Tropical climates both.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
As a reason to tag this thread, here are two reasonably mobile-friendly reference tools I've been using:
County-level data map with a time slider useful both to amuse yourself by watching the bubbles spread and grow, and to do a quick "what was it like last week?" check.
Useful for seeing how your county is tracking against your state if, for example, your county is trending up despite statewide numbers being cited as a reason to relax.
I consider myself someone that keeps abreast of the news. It can be troublesome in the attempt but I feel like it pays out in that I can pierce the veil of bullshit most days.
But this past week? It's gone from news to something like incompetence porn. Which is like disaster porn but is more of the lead up to the disaster we're all living through. Don't get me wrong, we should totally be aware of how people like the President* has fucked up. But the sheer size of the fuckups, the complete lack of empathy and sympathy from the man has finally eclipsed my ability to deal with it. Last night, I found a bootleg of Charlie Brooker's Anti-Virus Wipe on youtube. Started watching it but had to stop about a quarter of the way in because all it was becoming was a montage of malicious incompetence. Very little commentary was needed from him. The images and the people in them spoke for themselves. And it just began to hurt to watch. Worse than any horror movie I've ever seen. The monstrosity of the right-wing is painful. Which is the point, I know.
One does not like to get repetitive with the "OMG, this is a shitshow and it's going to get really bad". But the news coming out of the US is like watching the opening act of a horror movie. "Why would you go into the spooky abandoned house and then split up? Who would do that?" is the kind of question that just doesn't seem as damning as it used to.
This is gonna get bad and it seems like there's no way to stop it.
I'm not totally sure what the point of shutting down was, anymore. "To flatten the curve," yes, but.. it needs to be flattened until a vaccine is made or more than half of people are immune. If I recall correctly, something like 5% of Wuhan is probably immune/resistant from exposure, and a vaccine is nowhere near ready. You need to reopen at some point, you need some level of economic activity, but as far as I can tell, most jurisdictions are opening up when they have not flattened the curve or modeled sufficiently to be sure that opening up won't cause the exponential increase. I have mostly only been paying attention to BC, admittedly, but it also seems like BC is the only place I've seen where some opening up makes sense - the curve has been flattened hard, and modeling suggests that even doubling our present social contact still maintains a <1 R0. So it seems like we can probably fine-tune ourselves to the point of having some amount of sociability and economy while still being protected enough to prevent a severe outbreak. But BC's case numbers are very different from most other places I've seen.
Am I wrong? Is it not as bad elsewhere as I've been assuming? Or are most states' actions making the lockdowns retroactively pointless? Most people aren't immune, nothing has been gained, only a month or two of economic suffering and delaying a month or two of refrigerator death trucks errywhere.
Depends which state you're talking about. The first benefit of flattening is to prevent the hospitals from being flooded and overwhelmed. I think even a lot of the states fucking up might have managed that.The second part is to keep the infection rate down (ideally under 1 but ahaha not likely without more support). But yes most states are fucking up hard. The stupid thing is if they just followed the model from the states not fucking up they wouldn't be restricted that much longer and their economies would benefit. But nope, gotta ignore the overwhelming majority opinion and fuck it up.
Right, I guess I'm saying that I don't think the capacity of hospitals has increased a lot, and that the coronavirus infection curve wants very much to be exponential, so unless people are building up immunity, letting it get to the point of uncontrolled increase is pretty much identical to not bothering to try and stop it in the first place.
I'm not sure if this is an argument for herd immunity as a policy goal or not. But assuming it's not, this sounds like its falling squarely into the paradox of prevention -- if you stopped a thing from happening, or from being as bad as it could have been, you'll look like you overreacted. No good deed, and all
You are right that most of the time we bought with lockdown was squandered. It wasn't pointless, however. Each day we failed to lockdown in early march led to tens of thousands more dead than would have died. There is the counterquestion of inevitability -- if the virus is going to ripple through the population anyway, even if more slowly, why hobble the economy in the meantime? Well for one thing, inevitability is not a given; even though the federal government has dropped the ball in a criminal way here, time bought is time scientists and researchers have to learn about the virus, how it transmits, what its real dangers are, what can be mitigated, best modes of treatments and therapies, etc., potentially saving more lives (there have been some promising gains already but none of them are hydroxychloroquine). For another, the economy is not hobbled because of the lockdown, it is hobbled because of the virus. States that have lifted their lockdowns are not seeing the rubberband snap back to economy productivity. People are afraid to get sick and die. Businesses that live by volume--like dine-in restaurants--are not thriving.
Just trimming this down, I guess my contention is that having done as little to prepare during lockdowns, and lifting them as early as they are, means that in the end things aren't going to have been prevented from being as bad as they could have been. I fully expect an exponential spike leading to bodies being stuffed wherever there's space, just a couple months later than it would otherwise.
The advancing science is a gain, though, so I guess I can't really assert that they did no good overall.
Well the other thing is that the second wave starts with ~5-10 percent of the population immune (or perhaps even up to 15-25% in really hard hit areas). Its not a huge difference, but it will mean things will ramp up slower and overshoot the point of herd immunity less than if nothing ever was done at all.
What regimen though? Like there's no treatment plan for this shit? Especially taken proactively!
Why would you even take it only temporarily as a prophylactic when the pandemic is still going on?
I still don't think the WH doc would have risked it, because killing the president because he demanded you give him poison isn't gonna be great resume fodder; but it is conceivable that he requested them for the two week wait-and-see period after those two staffers tested positive.
I consider myself someone that keeps abreast of the news. It can be troublesome in the attempt but I feel like it pays out in that I can pierce the veil of bullshit most days.
But this past week? It's gone from news to something like incompetence porn. Which is like disaster porn but is more of the lead up to the disaster we're all living through. Don't get me wrong, we should totally be aware of how people like the President* has fucked up. But the sheer size of the fuckups, the complete lack of empathy and sympathy from the man has finally eclipsed my ability to deal with it. Last night, I found a bootleg of Charlie Brooker's Anti-Virus Wipe on youtube. Started watching it but had to stop about a quarter of the way in because all it was becoming was a montage of malicious incompetence. Very little commentary was needed from him. The images and the people in them spoke for themselves. And it just began to hurt to watch. Worse than any horror movie I've ever seen. The monstrosity of the right-wing is painful. Which is the point, I know.
One does not like to get repetitive with the "OMG, this is a shitshow and it's going to get really bad". But the news coming out of the US is like watching the opening act of a horror movie. "Why would you go into the spooky abandoned house and then split up? Who would do that?" is the kind of question that just doesn't seem as damning as it used to.
This is gonna get bad and it seems like there's no way to stop it.
I'm not totally sure what the point of shutting down was, anymore. "To flatten the curve," yes, but.. it needs to be flattened until a vaccine is made or more than half of people are immune. If I recall correctly, something like 5% of Wuhan is probably immune/resistant from exposure, and a vaccine is nowhere near ready. You need to reopen at some point, you need some level of economic activity, but as far as I can tell, most jurisdictions are opening up when they have not flattened the curve or modeled sufficiently to be sure that opening up won't cause the exponential increase. I have mostly only been paying attention to BC, admittedly, but it also seems like BC is the only place I've seen where some opening up makes sense - the curve has been flattened hard, and modeling suggests that even doubling our present social contact still maintains a <1 R0. So it seems like we can probably fine-tune ourselves to the point of having some amount of sociability and economy while still being protected enough to prevent a severe outbreak. But BC's case numbers are very different from most other places I've seen.
Am I wrong? Is it not as bad elsewhere as I've been assuming? Or are most states' actions making the lockdowns retroactively pointless? Most people aren't immune, nothing has been gained, only a month or two of economic suffering and delaying a month or two of refrigerator death trucks errywhere.
Depends which state you're talking about. The first benefit of flattening is to prevent the hospitals from being flooded and overwhelmed. I think even a lot of the states fucking up might have managed that.The second part is to keep the infection rate down (ideally under 1 but ahaha not likely without more support). But yes most states are fucking up hard. The stupid thing is if they just followed the model from the states not fucking up they wouldn't be restricted that much longer and their economies would benefit. But nope, gotta ignore the overwhelming majority opinion and fuck it up.
Right, I guess I'm saying that I don't think the capacity of hospitals has increased a lot, and that the coronavirus infection curve wants very much to be exponential, so unless people are building up immunity, letting it get to the point of uncontrolled increase is pretty much identical to not bothering to try and stop it in the first place.
I'm not sure if this is an argument for herd immunity as a policy goal or not. But assuming it's not, this sounds like its falling squarely into the paradox of prevention -- if you stopped a thing from happening, or from being as bad as it could have been, you'll look like you overreacted. No good deed, and all
You are right that most of the time we bought with lockdown was squandered. It wasn't pointless, however. Each day we failed to lockdown in early march led to tens of thousands more dead than would have died. There is the counterquestion of inevitability -- if the virus is going to ripple through the population anyway, even if more slowly, why hobble the economy in the meantime? Well for one thing, inevitability is not a given; even though the federal government has dropped the ball in a criminal way here, time bought is time scientists and researchers have to learn about the virus, how it transmits, what its real dangers are, what can be mitigated, best modes of treatments and therapies, etc., potentially saving more lives (there have been some promising gains already but none of them are hydroxychloroquine). For another, the economy is not hobbled because of the lockdown, it is hobbled because of the virus. States that have lifted their lockdowns are not seeing the rubberband snap back to economy productivity. People are afraid to get sick and die. Businesses that live by volume--like dine-in restaurants--are not thriving.
Just trimming this down, I guess my contention is that having done as little to prepare during lockdowns, and lifting them as early as they are, means that in the end things aren't going to have been prevented from being as bad as they could have been. I fully expect an exponential spike leading to bodies being stuffed wherever there's space, just a couple months later than it would otherwise.
The advancing science is a gain, though, so I guess I can't really assert that they did no good overall.
That is descriptively true. I object to fatalistic framing, though, because the objective analysis (halfassing lockdowns is bad and premature reopening undercuts the point of locking down in the first place) is currently being used as a normative argument (halfassed lockdowns are JUST AS BAD as no lockdown at all, so we should not have lockdowns). That last proposition is untrue and dangerous
Benefits of doing the lockdowns were this...
1) Flu season ended completely, this frees up about 10-20% of beds in hospitals
2) We discovered more of the things which the virus does to injure and kill people, and are putting that knowledge to work. If you get treated now, they know a lot more about what to do and look out for than they did a few months ago
3) Hospital staff got to practice working with Covid19 patients and develop better PPE procedures and infection prevention procedures re-using PPE. Healthcare workers will be infected more slowly than before -> In addition, as a depressing benefit, in many places a lot of healthcare workers probably have already been infected, and so should not be as at risk during the latter peak
4) We've learned that outdoor transmission of the virus is weaker than indoor, and with winter being over, more interactions can be outdoors. Which will slow the growth of the virus vs what it would have been in March
5) The virus probably isn't that hard hit by heat, but it doesn't like warm weather and sunlight, so having the peak hit in July is probably going to mean a marginally slower and lower peak
6) Remdesivir does seem to work to shorten hospital stays.
7) There are more contact tracers working in hard hit, well prepared states, albeit not enough. Contact tracers eliminate follow on infections, which means a lower and slower peak
8) Testing is faster, cheaper and more advanced. 300k tests is not enough, but its a hell of a lot better than 10k which we had in March. Tests can also be run quicker than then. This means more follow on infections can be eliminated. Not enough, but a marginally slower and lower peak, with marginally less burden from unknown patients on hospitals.
But, unfortunately I'm still vaguely of the opinion that if we'd known we were just going to fuck up and not do any federal level preparations it probably would have been better to have a smarter lockdown plan where we were like, 3 weeks in lockdown, 2 weeks out of lockdown. We might have been able to keep that up way longer, and it would have drastically slowed disease spread.
As for what we should be doing now? Closing all inter county travel other than for essential work, allowing counties to make some level of local decisions as to opening if their case burden is low, but immediately shutting them down and going to full isolation if cases hit a trigger.
The pressure by fall to open sports completely back up is going to be extremely high. I think the NHL did a study that if they actually tried to cut down things so there could be social distancing they'd be playing every game at a loss. (And would have many unhappy season ticket holders)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Views of how government at all levels is handling the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. have deteriorated somewhat over the past month, as a growing minority of Americans prefer that states lift restrictions on social and economic life.
Still, Americans remain more likely to approve of the actions of their state government than of the federal government or Congress. At the same time, the new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows ratings of President Donald Trump’s overall performance remain remarkably steady, as they have for much of his presidency.
Among other findings in the survey of American adults, conducted May 14-18:
— Only about a third of Americans approve of how the federal government is handling the pandemic, while more — roughly half — now disapprove. The balance of opinion has shifted from one month ago, when 4 in 10 approved and about as many disapproved.
— Meanwhile, approval of how leaders in Congress have responded during the outbreak remains low, with just about a quarter expressing approval and half disapproving. Disapproval is up from roughly 4 in 10 one month ago, shortly after the passage of a well-received $2 trillion rescue plan that sent direct payments to millions of Americans and provided loans to both small businesses and large corporations.
— The bleak assessment of the federal government and Congress compares with more positive opinions of how state governments are doing dealing with the coronavirus outbreak. Currently, 51% approve of state governments’ response, while 33% disapprove. Still, approval of states has also dipped since April, when 63% approved of the response from state governments.
— While overall views have soured, state governments still see bipartisan support from Americans who favor COVID-19 restrictions. Among those who support stay-at-home orders, close to 7 in 10 across party lines approve of their state government’s response.
But Americans who oppose stay-at-home orders — most of whom are Republican — are far more negative in their assessments, with 56% saying they disapprove of how state governments are handling the outbreak.
— Stay-at-home orders and other virus restrictions are still supported by majorities of Americans. But there’s been a modest dip in support over the past month, concentrated particularly among Republicans. Just 45% of Republicans now say they favor stay-at-home orders, while about as many (41%) are opposed. In April, 70% of Republicans expressed support. Seventy-eight percent of Democrats are in favor, down from 91% last month.
But while majorities of Democrats think of many other things as essential for reopening, fewer than half of Republicans describe any other condition asked about in the poll that way. That includes requiring people to wear masks when around others outside of their homes, to keep six feet apart in most places and to have their temperature checked before entering businesses or crowded places.
While the dip in Democratic opinion for restrictions is bad, it looks like overall the views of how governments should handle the coronavirus are becoming polarized thanks to Trump. That is pretty bad.
Pretty sure the "warmer weather" will solve this has been debunked. Hell, given what a capitalist hellscape the US is, I imagine we're primed for a big spike on the second wave because of people still believing that is a thing and that's probably going to be yet another thing that ensures people don't do anything to minimize their chance of getting infected or infecting others. Some chunk of that is likely a result of more people taking time off in the summer and doing outdoorsy things in the past. Worth noting again, we'ere a capitalistic hellscape, so a ton of people are likely to get told they already had their time off for the year, get your ass in the office and make your boss money to make up for all the lost profits during the pandemic.
Brazil is rapidly gaining on us. Mumbai is a disaster zone. Tropical climates both.
"Developing nation" and "authoritarian leadership" are basically the two worse traits you can roll in this pandemic game. Getting both is a recipe for a fucking charnel house, even if we only see the numbers after the fact.
The US is only king because it's very visible and the numbers are getting reported (for now anyway). Which isn't to say the US is doing good of course.
Every now and then I remember we’re getting ready to enter tornado season and then I just stare into the void for several uncountable moments trying to figure out how the fallout of that will factor into the pandemic as people’s homes are destroyed and they’re forced to mingle together until able to find new homes
I am a terribly biased source here but I think college football is least able to abide a lost season and popular enough to be the reason we end up with sports by fall
Pretty sure the "warmer weather" will solve this has been debunked. Hell, given what a capitalist hellscape the US is, I imagine we're primed for a big spike on the second wave because of people still believing that is a thing and that's probably going to be yet another thing that ensures people don't do anything to minimize their chance of getting infected or infecting others. Some chunk of that is likely a result of more people taking time off in the summer and doing outdoorsy things in the past. Worth noting again, we'ere a capitalistic hellscape, so a ton of people are likely to get told they already had their time off for the year, get your ass in the office and make your boss money to make up for all the lost profits during the pandemic.
Brazil is rapidly gaining on us. Mumbai is a disaster zone. Tropical climates both.
"Developing nation" and "authoritarian leadership" are basically the two worse traits you can roll in this pandemic game. Getting both is a recipe for a fucking charnel house, even if we only see the numbers after the fact.
The US is only king because it's very visible and the numbers are getting reported (for now anyway). Which isn't to say the US is doing good of course.
Yeah.
I've heard a good rule of thumb for the US is to multiply cases by 5-10 and deaths by 1.25-2 to get close to real numbers (based on statistical modelling and antibody surveys in places like NY)...
A good rule of thumb for places like India and Brazil is probably just to throw official numbers in the trash can and assume they are around the same or more per capita as the US.
Yeah, another thing driving me nuts, is that people are trying to act like all viruses behave the same. Some do better in certain temps than others, but plenty of indications that warmer weather doesn't actually do much against covid. At that point, you're reliant on weather changes resulting in behavior changes that work against virus spread. For instance you tend to get people that take time off and do more outdoor activities. Of course, I doubt you'll see much of that because most business likely forced people to use their PTO during the lockdown. I'd also argue most of modern society has been working against that concept as well. Climate change has likely result in many areas seeing less people spending time outside because the heat index is high enough that humans can't really survive and thus spend time indoors. Also you've had the shitty rich people trying to cut costs, so your restaurants, malls, workplaces ect are even more cramped. Oh, and even if you had something that didn't like warm weather, which isn't the case for covid, that hardly matters if it gets plenty of time to hang out in a temperature controlled enclosure that isn't too hot. This again gets to my other pet peeve, the population density of where you live doesn't matter if society has setups that create optimal setups for disease spread. So even fi the only time you spend with others is at church for 1-2 hours a week, that is more than enough if the church environment is idea for spreading around the latest plague. Also modern transportation tech makes it easier for diseases to spread quickly. In medieval times, the rural backwater might not see the current plague until years, decades or never after it first appears. Now, it can get to the rural backwater half a globe away, within 24 hours after appearing, if someone infected by it has some reason to travel to that backwater from the region it first appeared in.
This might help convince people you know, so I am posting it here. The incredible difference in the rate of death is just staggering.
IDK what to do with my coworkers, they flat out don't believe the deaths are covid related at all, everyone's just making them up
they have glommed onto the single data point that prisons have 95+% asymptomatic positive rates, and the low death count in prisons nation wide as proof that the virus is not a threat at all
Ask them to calculate how many will die if the Virus has a 0.2% death rate (which would be a miracle equal to like, Jesus descending from the sky and curing us) and 80% of people catch it in the US.
Quick hint for them. Its 575,000 people.
The virus is new. Noone is immune. Even if it literally WAS flu, it could still kill 300,000 Americans if there was no immunity and no vaccine.
I'm pretty down in the dumps about our prospects here, but, I just don't see any way that anyone could believe the virus is completely harmless. It's very dangerous simply from its novelty. The fact its at 5-10 x as deadly as a bad flu season is just an extra shotgun in the face.
They don't think the virus is killing anyone except the elderly and think we should reopen everything and infect everyone deliberately to "Get it over with"
I mentioned a 19 year old BP worker here who died and they said she probably died from an OD and they're lying about the cause of death
We're reopening June 1, I work in a small IT office with 8 other people, about 3 feet of space between each of us
The Illinois' governor's reopen order "recommends" telework, but doesn't require you provide that if its an option. It also "Recommends" accomodating people who have significant risk of death from Covid-19.
I have several commodities (i get pneumonia once a year on average) and have been teleworking for the last two months. I am required to come in.
Really enjoying how even hyper-liberal states are kid gloves with employers...
I mean I'm not going in, I probably won't get unemployment if they fire me, but I'm just going to continue to do trouble tickets from home until they can me for job abandonment or whatever. Since they dont reimburse for unused PTO do to some probably illegal scheme they got going where you "Rent" pto in advance or some shit, I"m going to use all of my PTO if I get written up for not coming in, then continue to not come in
Ugh, frustrated with my parents. They've been retired for nearly three years now and have developed a love of going on cruises (with Disney, not that it matters much) now that they have the time. Nevermind my issues with the cruise industry in general; now they've booked a new trip in November of this year, as soon as Disney is reopening booking I believe.
When I said I wasn't happy or comfortable with that, both sidestepped it with "we aren't fully either, but we also don't think the cruise will actually go out that early." Admitting the booking is to take advantage of a likely rebooking credit if it is cancelled. Nevermind that they're taking isolation and distancing seriously aside from that, I can't be comfortable with the idea of them going onboard a ship when covid-19 will almost certainly still be spreading if not resurgent.
This on top of local covid cases still climbing and the state (Arkansas) going back to reopening non-essental businesses. So the entire area is now under greater risk if people are intermingling more.
I just hate so very much that our government (read: Republicans) is rejecting the moral imperative it has to take collective actions to provide for the people. I'm not surprised at all, but it's infuriating to see my low expectations utterly shattered.
Posts
Income taxes will still be taking a large hit as people arent working. Even if that tends to be lower income people.
Additionally in states without income taxes (like Washington) there is usually property taxes which would not fall*
*i mean...they will fall because people will be unable to pay them. But assessments will not update fast enough to have an apreciable effect and, having gotten some experience with the city/county’s methods of assesment i doubt there would be a significant decrease even if it was warranted there
Right, I guess I'm saying that I don't think the capacity of hospitals has increased a lot, and that the coronavirus infection curve wants very much to be exponential, so unless people are building up immunity, letting it get to the point of uncontrolled increase is pretty much identical to not bothering to try and stop it in the first place.
Why should I pay for your state's mismanagement of the virus out my personal bank account, the US Treasury?! If you had all just taken hydrocloroxaqueenofhearts like I had said everything would be fine!!1!
-Trump, basically
There's a part of me impressed that the sheer depth of his brand of narcissism is still capable of surprising me.
As a resident of Delaware, this is what has and continues to terrify. We have a LOT of summer temporary (Weekly, Monthly, and full season) residents from other states. A large percentage are from Pennsylvania. I feel our outlook has a fair amount of relation to the surrounding states' outlooks...
Oh, yeah. What's the point of first doing a half-assed spotty lockdown for about 2 months during which you do nothing whatsoever to prepare and in fact fire a shitload of medical personnel, then abandoning it because you got bored and waiting for the exponential growth to ramp up again?
You get like 2-ish months of slightly less horror, followed by the exact same thing happening in June that happened in March.
Trump is really proving why he is impossible to educate on anything. Anything that suggests he should have done anything different or should do something he doesn't want to do is bad and evil.
It isn't a second wave if the first never crested.
Yeah like, if April really was the 'peak' then by all accounts we hit the peak and then just kind of stayed there
Which just tells me that April was absolutely nowhere near the peak and it can in fact get a whole lot worse
I'm not sure if this is an argument for herd immunity as a policy goal or not. But assuming it's not, this sounds like its falling squarely into the paradox of prevention -- if you stopped a thing from happening, or from being as bad as it could have been, you'll look like you overreacted. No good deed, and all
You are right that most of the time we bought with lockdown was squandered. It wasn't pointless, however. Each day we failed to lockdown in early march led to tens of thousands more dead than would have died. There is the counterquestion of inevitability -- if the virus is going to ripple through the population anyway, even if more slowly, why hobble the economy in the meantime? Well for one thing, inevitability is not a given; even though the federal government has dropped the ball in a criminal way here, time bought is time scientists and researchers have to learn about the virus, how it transmits, what its real dangers are, what can be mitigated, best modes of treatments and therapies, etc., potentially saving more lives (there have been some promising gains already but none of them are hydroxychloroquine). For another, the economy is not hobbled because of the lockdown, it is hobbled because of the virus. States that have lifted their lockdowns are not seeing the rubberband snap back to economy productivity. People are afraid to get sick and die. Businesses that live by volume--like dine-in restaurants--are not thriving.
The squandered time isn't just the failure to build hospital capacity. It was the failure to build industrial/supply chain capacity through powers like the DPA -- producing tests, ventilators (to the extent they are still believed to be life-saving at the margins, cause it seems like if an old person is intubated, their chance of survival is just over single-digits), PPE, sanitary products, pulse oximeters, etc. It is also the ongoing failure of Congress to open the relief spigot and deluge the unemployed of America with money that they must spend into the economy, and the same for essential workers but with hazard pay. It is the failure of the federal government to coordinate across states not only for supply procurement, but for triaging capacity -- the movement of healthcare personnel from less-hotspot areas to high-hotspot areas, for example. The federal government also could have helped states develop testing capacity, train contact tracers, and share information with other states less affected so they could prepare for the inevitable.
The time was bought through lockdown, and a lot could have been achieved with it. I don't think even the most cynical alarmist expected this government to fail so utterly in seizing the moment to do even the most basic things when the problem could no longer be ignored (signed, one cynical alarmist)
NNID: Hakkekage
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
pleasepaypreacher.net
This is where a vast test and contact tracing regime should come in to help isolate the virus and give people confidence that they can go outside without being as worried about everyone else being infected because everyone should have a good idea of their status.
Instead we got Barber Militias and told to drink bleach.
I saw Delaware described as "Baja Pennsylvania" once and guffawed mightily. Fortunately for DE most of its residents are corporate persons so that one building is safe
NNID: Hakkekage
Why would you even take it only temporarily as a prophylactic when the pandemic is still going on?
It sounds like he thinks taking it for a period preventatively is basically a vaccine.
I highly doubt anyone told him that, and I don't at all doubt that that's what he has heard or internalized at this point.
Which, if the sugar pill theory is correct (or it's just such a tiny dose that it might as well be one, thus technically accurate without presenting any substantial risk of harm), would just exacerbate the aspect of him thinking it's no big deal, telling people to take it, and then having them fare poorly under the idiotic megadoses some have taken, let alone even regular amounts.
But that's thinking more deeply about any of this than.. well, he seems to have thought about anything while President, but laying it out like that helps me feel less crazy, at least.
Just trimming this down, I guess my contention is that having done as little to prepare during lockdowns, and lifting them as early as they are, means that in the end things aren't going to have been prevented from being as bad as they could have been. I fully expect an exponential spike leading to bodies being stuffed wherever there's space, just a couple months later than it would otherwise.
The advancing science is a gain, though, so I guess I can't really assert that they did no good overall.
Don't be silly, you've got to inject the bleach. It's sunlight you're supposed to drink.
That is descriptively true. I object to fatalistic framing, though, because the objective analysis (halfassing lockdowns is bad and premature reopening undercuts the point of locking down in the first place) is currently being used as a normative argument (halfassed lockdowns are JUST AS BAD as no lockdown at all, so we should not have lockdowns). That last proposition is untrue and dangerous
NNID: Hakkekage
Washington doesn't have an income tax, but most of the people here including the governor is still taking it extremely seriously.
I think a bigger problem is that a lot of states rely primarily on tourist dollars, where they import consumers rather than exporting goods.
Warmer weather will likely make things a lot worse. More people socializing both outdoors (because it's sunny) and indoors (because the restaurant has air conditioning and their house does not).
I recently purchased a portable AC for the first time ever in anticipation of a miserable summer of trying to work from home. And I expect their to be a shortage once more people realize the same thing.
Brazil is rapidly gaining on us. Mumbai is a disaster zone. Tropical climates both.
pleasepaypreacher.net
County-level data map with a time slider useful both to amuse yourself by watching the bubbles spread and grow, and to do a quick "what was it like last week?" check.
https://data.pnj.com/coronavirus/confirmed/
County/state/national-level trend lines with ability to compare two of them
https://data.pnj.com/coronavirus-curve/new-york-ny/84036061/united-states/00/
Useful for seeing how your county is tracking against your state if, for example, your county is trending up despite statewide numbers being cited as a reason to relax.
Well the other thing is that the second wave starts with ~5-10 percent of the population immune (or perhaps even up to 15-25% in really hard hit areas). Its not a huge difference, but it will mean things will ramp up slower and overshoot the point of herd immunity less than if nothing ever was done at all.
I still don't think the WH doc would have risked it, because killing the president because he demanded you give him poison isn't gonna be great resume fodder; but it is conceivable that he requested them for the two week wait-and-see period after those two staffers tested positive.
22.7% in Michigan in April.
Benefits of doing the lockdowns were this...
1) Flu season ended completely, this frees up about 10-20% of beds in hospitals
2) We discovered more of the things which the virus does to injure and kill people, and are putting that knowledge to work. If you get treated now, they know a lot more about what to do and look out for than they did a few months ago
3) Hospital staff got to practice working with Covid19 patients and develop better PPE procedures and infection prevention procedures re-using PPE. Healthcare workers will be infected more slowly than before -> In addition, as a depressing benefit, in many places a lot of healthcare workers probably have already been infected, and so should not be as at risk during the latter peak
4) We've learned that outdoor transmission of the virus is weaker than indoor, and with winter being over, more interactions can be outdoors. Which will slow the growth of the virus vs what it would have been in March
5) The virus probably isn't that hard hit by heat, but it doesn't like warm weather and sunlight, so having the peak hit in July is probably going to mean a marginally slower and lower peak
6) Remdesivir does seem to work to shorten hospital stays.
7) There are more contact tracers working in hard hit, well prepared states, albeit not enough. Contact tracers eliminate follow on infections, which means a lower and slower peak
8) Testing is faster, cheaper and more advanced. 300k tests is not enough, but its a hell of a lot better than 10k which we had in March. Tests can also be run quicker than then. This means more follow on infections can be eliminated. Not enough, but a marginally slower and lower peak, with marginally less burden from unknown patients on hospitals.
But, unfortunately I'm still vaguely of the opinion that if we'd known we were just going to fuck up and not do any federal level preparations it probably would have been better to have a smarter lockdown plan where we were like, 3 weeks in lockdown, 2 weeks out of lockdown. We might have been able to keep that up way longer, and it would have drastically slowed disease spread.
As for what we should be doing now? Closing all inter county travel other than for essential work, allowing counties to make some level of local decisions as to opening if their case burden is low, but immediately shutting them down and going to full isolation if cases hit a trigger.
"Developing nation" and "authoritarian leadership" are basically the two worse traits you can roll in this pandemic game. Getting both is a recipe for a fucking charnel house, even if we only see the numbers after the fact.
The US is only king because it's very visible and the numbers are getting reported (for now anyway). Which isn't to say the US is doing good of course.
Every now and then I remember we’re getting ready to enter tornado season and then I just stare into the void for several uncountable moments trying to figure out how the fallout of that will factor into the pandemic as people’s homes are destroyed and they’re forced to mingle together until able to find new homes
Yeah.
I've heard a good rule of thumb for the US is to multiply cases by 5-10 and deaths by 1.25-2 to get close to real numbers (based on statistical modelling and antibody surveys in places like NY)...
A good rule of thumb for places like India and Brazil is probably just to throw official numbers in the trash can and assume they are around the same or more per capita as the US.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
They don't think the virus is killing anyone except the elderly and think we should reopen everything and infect everyone deliberately to "Get it over with"
I mentioned a 19 year old BP worker here who died and they said she probably died from an OD and they're lying about the cause of death
We're reopening June 1, I work in a small IT office with 8 other people, about 3 feet of space between each of us
The Illinois' governor's reopen order "recommends" telework, but doesn't require you provide that if its an option. It also "Recommends" accomodating people who have significant risk of death from Covid-19.
I have several commodities (i get pneumonia once a year on average) and have been teleworking for the last two months. I am required to come in.
Really enjoying how even hyper-liberal states are kid gloves with employers...
I mean I'm not going in, I probably won't get unemployment if they fire me, but I'm just going to continue to do trouble tickets from home until they can me for job abandonment or whatever. Since they dont reimburse for unused PTO do to some probably illegal scheme they got going where you "Rent" pto in advance or some shit, I"m going to use all of my PTO if I get written up for not coming in, then continue to not come in
When I said I wasn't happy or comfortable with that, both sidestepped it with "we aren't fully either, but we also don't think the cruise will actually go out that early." Admitting the booking is to take advantage of a likely rebooking credit if it is cancelled. Nevermind that they're taking isolation and distancing seriously aside from that, I can't be comfortable with the idea of them going onboard a ship when covid-19 will almost certainly still be spreading if not resurgent.
This on top of local covid cases still climbing and the state (Arkansas) going back to reopening non-essental businesses. So the entire area is now under greater risk if people are intermingling more.
I just hate so very much that our government (read: Republicans) is rejecting the moral imperative it has to take collective actions to provide for the people. I'm not surprised at all, but it's infuriating to see my low expectations utterly shattered.