Coronavirus
Coronavirus, COVID-19, is spreading exponentially. So far we have seen news reports from countries where there is an organised and rapid response to outbreaks. But what we are beginning to see now is it's rate of infection in countries without such preparedness. Italy and more worrying Iran. Italy is adopting a very strict strategy now, after being slow to tackle the infection. Whereas Iran is in denial, they are refusing to quarantine suspected cases. They have refused to lock down an important religious site which appears to be the epicentre of their outbreak. Also it has been spreading amongst the political class. There is talk of it's spreading rapidly throughout the Middle East.
What concerns me is that the chaos which will ensue in the Middle East, the virus will find a breeding ground and develop into a more deadly strain. Similarly to the way that Spanish Flu developed during the chaos of the First World War.
Should we be worried, or should we just wait until a vaccination is developed so that we can irradicate it through a vaccination programme?
Or is this the beginning of a deadly pandemic?
What concerns me is that the chaos which will ensue in the Middle East, the virus will find a breeding ground and develop into a more deadly strain. Similarly to the way that Spanish Flu developed during the chaos of the First World War.
Should we be worried, or should we just wait until a vaccination is developed so that we can irradicate it through a vaccination programme?
Or is this the beginning of a deadly pandemic?
Comments (8466)
I suspect there is a little more to it than simply not acting quickly enough. There are environmental, demographic, healthcare and other situational factors that should be considered.
I was responding to this not criticizing you.
Quoting ssu
This is Trump we're talking about. It seems to me a cover for premature openings.
Quite, and the obesity and borderline diabetic epidemic is a liability.
I would say it will go backwards in slow motion.
First the most stringent restrictions will be opened after the infection rate (and the death rate) has dramatically fallen. Then the next thing will be that smaller gatherings will be allowed yet with events of 100 or 500 people still being restricted. Finally, large events will be allowed. The next thing is when people will people will start to flock to these larger events and then finally when they come without having head masks.And if you have looked at older Asian tourists, some of them use all the time masks when walking in urban areas. Social distancing might be for a while, but then again, even those who experienced the Spanish flu didn't take precautions later in the roaring 1920's. People forget. And always there's going to be a new generation that hasn't experienced the corona-virus pandemic later (assuming there isn't a larger deadlier pandemic later).
Yes you do, you just walked up to an old lady and potentially infected her while sensible people were moving away to keep her safe. It's idiocy like this that needs to be controlled.
That’s untrue, I kept my distance. But it’s fantasies like yours which result in the knee-jerk measures we now find ourselves in.
That’s the key to the successes of places like Japan, South Korea and Singapore. They remember the SARS outbreak and took it seriously. They never forgot.
According to your own story, you went up to her to try to carry her groceries, which would involve obliterating the 2m rule. If you are too stupid to obey simple precautions, just stay the fuck at home. People like you are the reason the rest of us have to be put on full lockdown.
Again untrue I simply asked her. Carrying someone’s groceries does not entail me violating any “rule”. But I’m sure you would need a government to tell you that.
Regardless of government advice, I would just use my common sense and not put a vulnerable person at risk.
I can respect that. And you're right, the irresponsible are indeed partly to blame for the conditions we find ourselves within. I was pleasantly surprised that western governments at least tried the educational approach. I could tell it was tough choice for them. But many people hardly even tried. In the states they are throwing "Corona parties", believe it or not. Maybe the draconian measures will help drill it in their thick, self-concerned skulls.
:up:
It entails getting within transmittable range of a vulnerable person, in your case, unless you two coordinated otherwise. It also entails direct contact with things that she will be in direct contact with, unless you were equipped with protective gear.
What would you have done had she accepted your irresponsible offer?
Guns are not going to solve anything in this scenario.
I think we are seeing the best of humanity come together to live another day, all of us. Our world was in need of a crisis because the unexpected consequences are bringing us together and that is huge.
There is little bickering between nation's and more cooperation and that my friend is something to take stock in. We are being tested, We as inhabitants of this Earth and we will beat this as best we can. :strong:
I feel like you are trolling me. :down:
Iggy :flower:
Climate change, mass extinctions, pollution... Oh, sorry, I got hysterical there for a moment.
My kind offer? I would have done what any delivery person would do: carry her bags to her door and be on my merry way. Does that mean I’m going to spread my germs? No.
What would you do? Avoid her?
Avoid, unless I had a high degree of confidence that I wasn't a carrier (I don't currently), or if I wore a mask and gloves that I had a high degree of confidence were uncontaminated. We are talking about someone who is old and feeble, right?
Ask from across the street before approaching, "Would you like help with your groceries?". If yes, "Are you sure? It seems you're in an at risk group for this bloody virus thing.", "Oh I know, have you been following the guidelines?" "I've been isolating, working from home, I washed my hands before coming out, and I've not been to see anyone non-necessary in person for about 10 days." "Ok then"
What is more likely to happen:
"No thank you"
My bad. Stupid of me.
Quoting NOS4A2
I agree.
And for example when the 2003 SARS outbreak didn't hit us (US & Europe) so much, we likely patted us on the back on a job well done and how good our system was. China was then humiliated and had a political urge to do something about it. Just look at the stats:
Deaths to SARS outbreak by country 1 Nov 2002 - 11th July 2003:
Australia: 0 (cases 5)
China: 646 (cases 7083)
Singapore: 32 (cases 206)
Italy: 0 (cases 4)
Spain: 0 (cases 1)
Germany: 0 (cases 10)
USA: 0 (cases 75)
So I guess the positive side of this pandemic is that we'll take prevention of pandemics seriously next time. This is obvious as all the Western countries that have been hubs for tourists and business have been severely hit.
Much more practical, though you run the risk of the elderly person not fully grasping the gravity of the situation, in which case things could quickly get awkward.
"Would you like help with your groceries?"
"What, dear?"
"I said, would you like help with your groceries?"
"I'm sorry, you'll have to speak louder."
"WOULD YOU LIKE HELP."
"No thank you, my doctor said to stay away from kelp."
"Uh, okay... HAVE A NICE DAY"
Wellcome to the club, Hanover.
And nationalized the health care sector for the time of the pandemic, which will make many here really happy and interested.
:clap: :clap:
It's still a bit unreal in my immediate neighborhood. Many weekend cyclists gather around our local shops before setting off on their various cycle routes, and they were still hobnobbing this morning, all standing a bit too close to each other for comfort in my opinion (although I didn't say anything).
The local greengrocer now has crosses on the floor where customers are supposed to stand for service, and their staff are wearing face-masks and disposable gloves. Virtually every shop window has COVID-19 notices taped to it. As of now, we're not in lockdown, but we're being told constantly on radio and television not to go out unless necessary. In my case, not difficult as I live in a large house with a recreation reserve adjoining; many others are not so fortunate.
April is going to be brutal; worried about New York, in particular.
The above clip made me think of the one major f*k up that my country's officials have done.
Yes, they closed schools, libraries, swimming halls and went to lock down even before the first death happened. They closed restaurants, closed the borders (including with Sweden) and they have put the Capitol region to quarantine with police and the army creating checkpoints. What they didn't anticipate is that when the general shelter-in and closing of Europe happened, about 200 000 Finns (out of 5,5 million) returned to Finland including many retirees coming from Spain. A strict quarantine? No, at first there weren't even clear instructions at the main airports and still there's no enforcement of the two week quarantine. Nothing like in China or Taiwan etc. At least the Prime Minister said she was sorry this error happened.
Oops.
Also, the corona parties happened in Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands that I know of. There too it was painfully obvious that people take personal responsibility only so far as it directly concerns them. In light of that, the measures aren't draconian but simply necessary in a society where most are trained to be selfish gits.
Good thing, they were about to flatten the Brazilian rainforest and do maximum exploitation.
That's the point: the 'demand' for perfect information is nothing but an excuse to inaction, a setting of an impossible bar in order to better mystify and distract. It's also a terrifying demand by the very standard of those who might call for it - 'perfect information' is the kind of thing best gleaned by - yep - more institutional intrusion into everyday life. No surprise given that NOS is a state bootlicker and lover of all things government.
Sorry to hear about Brazil's situation. Whoever stabbed Bolsonaro in the stomach way back when should have used a bigger, more serrated knife.
No one demands perfect information. I just don’t want important decisions to be made on information that is off by orders of magnitude and based on unreliable data and assumptions. But I suppose that is the sort of thing you’re used to given your fake, bad faith interpretation of my argument. You wanted authoritarianism and you got it. Enjoy.
I’m sorry to hear about your grandmother contracting the virus, friend. I suspect we’ll all have it soon enough.
Quoting NOS4A2
I wonder how much effort it takes to suppress your conscience so much that you can offer personal condolences while at the same time spreading propaganda designed to ensure the virus spreads further.
Again a strawman. Nobody is making important decisions on the models but on the information that is available. Exponential growth, limited healthcare capacity. The corona parties underscore the importance that isolation is enforced. You call it authoritarianism, we call it public health management the rules for which are temporary.
Then there is the glaring inconsistency here :
Quoting NOS4A2
Without a model or knowledge you conclude everyone is going to have it, which is far more than any model had projected. Well done.
Agreed. All the more reason why the fact that nearly everyone was caught with our pants down on this needed more and more stringent measures to be taken faster than we could have predicted. So far, the only people to have been exposed as utterly unreliable and totally useless are those who have continually downplayed the effects of the virus. Put them all in a bin, including yourself.
I will most certainly enjoy the fact that we aren't having 600+ deaths a day as Italy has been having all week. 'Authoritarianism' is a fantasy boogyman here dangled by idiots like you for other idiots to suck on, so the old, sick and poor can get fucked harder than they already are.
The economic plight from this could wreck and ruin far more than people seem to appreciate.
Compelling argument if you're an idiot.
More of the same; impressive.
The general view is to slow the spread not stop it (that’s fantasy at the moment).
He's empirically right.
The data:
Countries that vacillated, gave contradictory signals, and resisted "authoritarian measures": An uninterrupted rising log curve. Practical result so far: Close to maximum infection rate, maximum deaths.
Countries that embraced "authoritarian" measures but were slow in doing so: A gradually flattening log curve. Practical result so far: Maximum infection rate and deaths to begin with, now gradually reducing, but not before inflicting chaos.
A country that had no problem immediately applying "authoritarian" measures: A quicky flattened log curve. Close to minimal infection rate/deaths.
See also, Taiwan, Singapore etc.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
This is why the talk of authoritarianism is weasel talk. There is a winning strategy here. It's illustrated by the final log curve. It's called "The Hammer". Done right, it takes about a month and you minimize both economic damage and loss of life. You don't have to be authoritarian to support it, you just have to be not stupid. (And ironically not implementing it results in having to apply even more authoritarianism down the line just so your country doesn't fall to pieces.)
There's the data. Again, those arguing against "authoritarian" moves are empirically wrong. In a situation like this, you play the winning strategy and return to your political starting point, or you vacillate, play politics, and descend into chaos.
(And this doesn't mean you only rely on "authoritarian measures", mass testing and tracking is also important, but there is nothing more effective than an immediate and total lockdown. No contact, no spread.)
Well, thank you... STALIN!
And he's historically wrong.
Emergency powers are never rescinded.
@NOS4A2 is correct: you bought it, you own it.
No one will ever be allowed out of the house again.
Which is another reason why I'm voting for Gordon Brown, and not you: he's much more subtle.
He's the undisputed world heavyweight champion of subtlety .
If you say so.
I do not really want to argue the point, because I think ultimately you are probably more right than wrong.... but that data don't really 'proof' that one policy is definitely better than the other, because you cannot separate out other factors like the general culture of a country or for instance the fact the Chinese population have dealt with outbreaks recently.
It's an indication, sure, but I sincerely believe that no matter what measures countries like the US or Italy would have taken, it still would probably have been worse than in China... unless maybe you would go that far to shoot down people in the streets who don't follow the rules. Measures can only be as effective as people are willing to follow them.
Useful talk: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe8fIjxicoo
The are lots of caveats, but if you can enforce the hammer, it works, and to the extent you can enforce it, all other things being equal (testing, tracking etc) you get less infections and less deaths. Wanting that is not an ideological position. Not wanting it because it's "authoritarian" is and proportionately irrational.
"What really bugs me is this new version of coronabro who thinks we are all being hoodwinked by science and the powerful. To what, keep us in our homes not working? What even is this conspiracy?"
You can only laugh - if it wasn't so utterly stupid: a conspiracy made by stupid people for other stupid people.
My remark was flippant, but there is a grain of seriousness in there, Bolsanaro (who presumably survived his infection) is fully intending to destroy the forests as it is, so I can't see it getting much worse.
In reality we have no idea, were this will end, or what will rise from the wreckage. A much smaller Global economy will reduce the rape of the planet a bit, as its full steam ahead at the moment.
China will end up far more dominant, I expect, so it's going to be mobile phone surveillance for all of us.
Compelling argument if you're stupid.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
And nipping an epidemic in the bud when it starts is the real way to defeat these. And then follow a policy of strict quarantine, containment and exposing all infection paths and make proper precautions.
Singapore, South Korea and Japan show the way. They already learnt what to do after the 2003 SARS outbreak. And It has been working far better than in the West in general.
The West will learn only after this pandemic. That's the truth. I'm pretty sure that Western countries will take far more seriously the prevention of pandemics. Hence if there's somewhere, either in Africa or China or in Nebraska a local epidemic of a new zoonotic disease OH BROTHER!!! If you then come from that epidemic area on a plane and land to JFK (be it a domestic or an international flight), they will treat you nearly like a possible Al Qaeda terrorist and whisk you away into a 14 day obligatory quarantine in a heart beat no questions asked. Or as in China, you have to report you health condition daily to the officials.
If you think the US Constitution and human rights will protect your "freedoms" in this case, nope, wrong, happy quarantine!
That's the future post-corona World we will have.
We still have the military parading around in our train stations after the 2016 terrorist attacks...
It's all so reactionary, no vision to be found at all.
Prediction: people in the US media will soon start framing the inflated death toll from shit poor US admin response to the coronavirus as inevitable. Whereas before, it was just that the data was poor and worst case scenarios were unjustified doom and gloom.
Simultaneously, framing the response to the virus in military terms will cast the elderly, sick and poor as soldiers patriotically giving their lives to keep liberty and democracy and all that bullshit going.
It will be interesting though, because 'the State' in question belongs to Trump, whose balls these same people enjoy sucking on. Normally the response would be then to blame local government, except it's clear that local governments have done far more than the incompetence of the federal government. Not that they've ever let facts get in the way of a good narrative. It will be incoherence all over.
The resident troll has already told us what the narrative will be. The right-wing media will blame the CDC and FDA, treating them as individual institutions uncoupled from the Trump administration. It'll be their fault for not testing enough, and not providing Trump with the necessary information. Of course, this will just be further proof that these "big government" organisations mess everything up. Thank God Trump and private entrepreneurs jumped into the breach!
So, overall, 0.4 of a person has died from coronavirus? Wow, it really is a hoax then.
Anyway, yes, let's open things up now, because no matter what the death rate is, we need MORE.
Edit: *The current increase in death rate from most recent figures from below is actually closer to 20% but is accelerating (March 24=18,000 deaths >> March 27th = 27,000 deaths). Anyhow, whether it's a month or a year or somewhere in between, it's in the near future and we don't have time to faff about.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-toll/
**When basically everyone has it. (Result comparable to the 1918 Spanish flu which caused the death of somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5% of the world's population).
I provided. accurate raw data. The incorrect commentary is your own.
It'd actually be 27,000 / (8 billion x 100).
It's 4 not 0.4, but 0.4 was funnier. In any case your figure...
Quoting Hanover
...is completely wrong. There are 8 billion people in the world. 1% of 8 billion is 80 million. 0.1% is 8 million. 0.01% = 800,000. 0.001% is 80,000 (roughly twice the current death rate). 0.0001% = 8,000. 0.00001% = 800. 0.000001% = 80. 0.0000001% = 8. 0. .00000004% (your figure) is about 4.
There are two people having this [s]conversation[/s] argument, Hanover. What number and what percentage of them are right?
1 (number of correct people, me)/2 (total number of people, me and you) = 0.5. Now multiply by 100 = 50% of the people in this [s]conversation[/s] argument are right.
Your calculation would give 1/(2x100) = 0.5%. See?
You are dehumanising a number of contributors there good buddy. Moderator elitism of the most blatant sort.
Sorry, dude. I was specifically referring to our argument and just wanted to make things simple. :halo:
The juggling act, as NOS puts it, is between human lives and the life of the economy. I would expect that someone who brands themself with phrases like "loving people" wouldn't be so quick to support juggling lives.
Perhaps you could you explain to me how these medical experts (commenting four days ago) have it so wrong?
Quote reputable data from a reputable source if you want to debate the issue. And quote where the data contradicts anything I've said. Don't send me to conspiracy/pseudoscience sites unless it's to inform me that you're a nutjob not worth engaging with.
[Category: "CONSPIRACY-PSEUDOSCIENCE"
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/offguardian/ ]
That is the way it goes.
Especially with the military parading around. Usually it's just a photo op and to calm the people by showing that the government has done something. But there are also effective policies and actions that can be implemented which can be especially with fighting pandemics be successful.
And they can be harsh. You see it for example in Australia: people coming back from abroad are put into mandatory two week quarantine to hotels from where have to be inside and cannot leave or face a hefty fine.
The police and the army enforce quarantine. Just like in China. So the future way to handle these kind of threats even in Western democracies is already implemented.
The overreactions are also noticeable. Here one official had the brainfart of tweeting the idea that perhaps for the shelter-in time one should ban all selling of alcohol. Well, likely if that proposal would be seriously discussed, then alcohol would be hoarded like toilet paper. Finns would react like Americans to buying guns if the government introduced legislation to limiting firearm sales!
Of course they are rescinded. Where do you get such nonsense?
- https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k6nLfCbAzgo
- https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gxAaO2rsdIs
Spreading confusion via trying to ‘win’ an argument doesn’t really help anyone. Just provide people with the resources to look for themselves - generally people are rational enough to know not to drink fish tank cleaner (generally!).
Statistics used by to predict are not the same as stats used to manipulate the public. Scientists and mathematicians lean heavily toward the former whilst politicians and conspiracy theorists lean heavily toward the latter.
My general advice is to generally ignore people/articles/reports that are more concerned with finger pointing than anything else.
My VERY basic understanding of the situation at present is the developed countries better clamp down severely and get sorted in order to help the developing countries and halt second, third, fourth and multiple seasonal waves of this that would certainly lead to as good as 100% infected. That in my mind is the challenge - turning inward and nationalistic rather than viewing a global problem as a global problem that we have to, both morally and practically, pull together for despite the cultural differences and personal agendas.
It could’ve been a LOT worse and it could be a LOT worse too. We’ve got choice on our side though. Such an event may actually help the human race in the long run - silver linings are there :)
The other reality is that less developed countries will become endemic and then, as you say, keep infecting travellers. Unless an effective vaccine is developed.
Also it has occurred to me how fragile the state of the food chain is in my country (UK), even now most supermarkets have many empty shelves and they are struggling to fill them. It is this bad with only maybe 50,000 infections (again, we don't know how many). What about when we get over a million and the key workers involved in this supply chain start to fall away (not to mention a staffing crisis in healthcare). Such problems could emerge in the media in a sensational way causing mass panic. By this point, it would have to become an army operation with rationed food supplies only available from specified depots.
There have been reports today of unreast and civil disobedience in Italy, as a result of the population being confined to their homes.
Remember Wuhan has been in total lockdown for as good as 3 months. In Europe and North America the response has been much slower because we’re not as experienced with this and we’ve dismissed it in the past - I dismissed it too at first and thought it was an overreaction (I’m still concerned about the developing countries though and the economy killing many).
There are positives though, but complacency is in developed countries could lead to us bloodying our hands with the starving from developing countries because we didn’t react in time and would’ve been better off carrying without further breaking the backs of poorer nations.
I think the best thought is ‘Okay, this is shit. But at least I’m not in a slum in Cape Town sharing a toilet with 30 people whilst scraping a living from day to day to feed myself and my family.”
We’re better off talking to each other. I cannot think of any situation where discussion and information sharing doesn’t have more benefits than deficits.
If there is a real chance of civil unreast, the authorities will control information. Also with panic, once you have let to cat out of the bag, you can't put it back in again easily. The public is still calm and sleepy, while worried and a bit alarmed, it won't take much to push them over the edge. In London the situation is fraught, a disgruntled population becomes more difficult to nudge into effective social distancing measures. Meaning you need the army on the streets. They will want to avoid this.
If I’m wrong we get what we deserve. If the ‘truth’ is too much for some they can join the ranks of the flatlanders. Tell people what to expect and they won’t generally freak out when it happens. Lie, cheat and deceive, and you’re essentially digging your own grave.
Why do think I’m worried about starvation? The threat of catching a virus isn’t all that terrible on a full stomach. The developed world won’t starve, they’ll just get a brief and dilute version of what billions of others are going to have to cope with in far less comfortable circumstances.
Jeremy Konyndyk, who led the US government’s response to international disasters at USAid from 2013 to 2017, frames the past six weeks in strikingly similar terms. He told the Guardian: “We are witnessing in the United States one of the greatest failures of basic governance and basic leadership in modern times.”
In Konyndyk’s analysis, the White House had all the information it needed by the end of January to act decisively. Instead, Trump repeatedly played down the severity of the threat, blaming China for what he called the “Chinese virus” and insisting falsely that his partial travel bans on China and Europe were all it would take to contain the crisis."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/28/trump-coronavirus-politics-us-health-disaster
Frikkin banana republic.
The non-latitudist term is "failed state".
Fair enough.
Being concerned with science fact (as opposed to science fiction), you will no doubt be interested in the comments of these 12 experts from the original media sources linked in this spurious article.
After:
1) Searching each source on medibiasfactcheck to ascertain bias, and
2) Actually listening to, or reading, said comments,
Please don't forget to quote anything which has not been accurately reproduced in said spurious article.
I admit that the videos could be deepfakes.
Try the first two for starters:
1) Sucharit Bhakdi
2) Wolfgang Wodarg
You will recall your main contention: "we don't have time to faff about."
According to the foregoing expert testimony, this panic, and the extraordinary public measures being introduced, are unfounded (have no justification in medical fact).
So now perhaps you could explain to me how these medical experts have it so wrong? I assumed that your familiarity with the relevant raw data, graphs, calculations, and the models current projections are based on, qualified you to render an informed opinion in this regard. My mistake if that is not the case.
Who is spreading pseudoscience here? Could it be these 12 experts? Neil Ferguson? You? Me?
Also, you will recall how Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany "disappeared" their intellectual elite. So it's no surprise to me that only a few forum members are concerned about the possibility of authoritarianism or fascism arising from emergency legislation.
What distinguishes conspiracy theory from conspiracy fact, and who makes that determination? I will have a good laugh when The Philosophy Forum "disappears" comments/members which/who contradict official narratives.
I can't find any argument in your post relating to something I said except the false claim that I'm promoting panic. I would be against that. I am also against faffing about. I'll leave you to work out why those are consistent.
And we will make no apologies for banning crackpots. That has nothing to do with official narratives. If you find that funny, feel free to laugh into your Kool aid.
Full determination, absolute consistency, and a clear unwavering plan = the virus.
Weakness, incoherency, and movement in random directions = Trump.
Wonder who's going to win this one?
Which means Trump, who is failing miserably in his response...
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/03/27/cell-phone-tracking-analysis-shows-where-florida-springbreakers-and-new-yorkers?fbclid=IwAR3yEj38_9LF_gOiVilEoqKNOL46sPwkTJ5F9DWcOOY1aLYPbd176tRw61c
A staunchly positional query relished by gaslighters the world over.
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-source-data
With these sorts of errors, and things like tweeting CCP misinformation, I wager the WHO will not come out of this event unscathed.
[tweet]https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152?s=21[/tweet]
This post makes it sound like the WHO has no idea what they're talking about. It's really not true. If you check the link from Ourworld in Data, they're changing to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control's data because (1) the update time from the WHO changed:
and (2) minor typographical errors that do things like change the global number of new cases in a day by 2.
They will probably "come out unscathed" because of course there are going to be typographical errors somewhere in a quickly updating global data set aggregated and recorded under incredibly stressful conditions.
I never said nor implied that. I just think there will be a contingent of people who, whether warranted or not, will say that the WHO has blood on its hands.
Our World in Data explicitly states:
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus
From Worldometer: there have been approx 150.000 deaths today. That site also gives various daily averages for different causes of death. We don't have an average for CoViD 19, of course. If we simply use yesterday's total (horribly inaccurate, I know) here's how it compares:
About 3 to 4 times the normal seasonal flu deaths.
About 1.5 times the deaths from malaria or suicide.
Slightly fewer deaths than those from HIV
About half the deaths from alcohol
Less than one fifth of the deaths from cancer.
About 10% of all communicable disease deaths.
As I said, a bunch of caveats applies. CoViD doesn't yet affect the whole world equally. The averages probably underestimate the deaths during winter etc etc.
Ahh I see. You did the following things:
(1) Said that the WHO was spouting Chinese Communist Party propaganda based on a Tweet about a "preliminary report" from scientists in China on Jan 14.
(2) attempted to discredit the data they output for minor typographical errors and a change in their daily reporting time.
And you're trying to claim that many people will think the WHO has "blood on its hands", and won't escape THE HORRIFYING SCANDAL OF THE MINOR SPREADSHEET ERRORS AND AMBIGUOUSLY WORDED TWEET because you're completely supportive of the WHO and its track record for providing excellent advice on how to deal with a pandemic.
He isn't really trying to claim that. He's just putting the words out there so they can be found by search engines, and so other members will oblige to debate him on them so he and his posts get even more exposure. It's just trolling, and not the fun kind.
I usually don't correct the man for those reasons. I made an exception because of how obvious this was.
Oh dear. Silly me.
Far as I remember, the WHO first implied the virus was part of a Democratic hoax and then said everything would be fine because it would melt in April. Blood all over their hands! No, wait...
And I have a Dear Abby question for you: why do North Americans call housemates/flatmates 'roommates'?
She might find a new interpretation of the stay-at-home-order in order decompress herself, perhaps.
Roommate is apparently 160 years older than flatmate. Possibly there were more shared rooms at that time. :smile:
roommate (n.)
also room-mate, 1789, American English, from room (n.) + mate (n.). Short form roomie is from 1918.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/roommate
First Known Use of flatmate
1955, in the meaning defined above
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/flatmate
Illuminating stuff, right?
They tweeted it while the CCP was engaged in a coverup. In late December, Taiwan warned the WHO that the virus was infectious, but because of China’s influence , the WHO didn’t warn other nations. By then it was too late.
According to Our World in Data, they “found many errors in the data”, which made the data “unfortunately impossible to rely on ”. And this from “the international agency with the mandate to provide official estimates on the pandemic.”
Why would you give them a pass on this?
If the preferred result is moving out rather than paying rent, just start coughing a lot.
(Thread 1)
The COVID 19 pandemic piqued my interrogation of the balance of staff safety and duty of care to imperilled communities. Front line clinicians fear for themselves and their families. Despite our valorization by communities, I as a frontline emergency specialist have noticed a surge in absenteeism among well nursing staff that claim “mental health days off” to avoid catching corona and spreading it their kids. Their defence of fraudulently claimed sick paid leave is not risking passing on the corona-contagion to young children when they return from school or day care (they remain open in Australia). One commented that as non-parent, I should take up additional burden of COVID19 health care presentations. This increases the number of my daily encounters with, and the cross-infection risk posed by, patients being screened or treated for corona. Without the nurse, I now take every throat swabs as the patient coughs or gags. There are no hospital contingency plan to make up for unplanned shortfalls in clinical staff. “No kids at home sacrificed” clinicians should not be subjected to the acute stresses, physical and psychological toll exacted by having to compensate for our well colleagues that refuse to turn up for work. How do you cope if an epidemic disrupted daily life, closing schools, packing hospitals, and putting social gatherings, sporting events and concerts, conferences, festivals and travel plans on indefinite hold? As a frontline doctor, staying healthily uninfected whilst we strive for containment remains a cause for celebration. Albert Camus’ The Plague is balm to the fear-riven tear in the fabric of global society. Just as the decimated inhabitants of Shakespeare’s London outlasted the plaque, without modern medicine and public health interventions, the burgeoning coro-demic is but one of Camus' "many plagues in history…yet plagues and wars (still) take people equally by surprise.“ Camus’ contagion will surely go “unaccountably” when it pleases, the sooner if communities adjust and adhere to “bewildering portents” with care and caution to the lives of others. Camus urges the social distancing and lock-downs that today will mitigate the coro-disruption’s festering tenacity, and encourages that the pandemic threat is not fated to last forever. As we face the rigours of self-isolation, the consumptive poet -doctor John Keats, exiled in the Bay of Naples as typhus raged, reminds the reader of life coming to a premature stop. The threat of cross-infection in my daily patient encounters incites Keat’s “mortality weigh(ing) heavily on me like unwilling sleep,” yet there is consolation in being “half in love with easeful death.” We should all salute the unsung scores of imperilled, some now dead, doctors and nurses that have risen to the occasion. Joseph Ting, MBBS MSc (Lond) BMedSc PGDipEpi DipLSTHM FACEM. Adjunct associate professor, School of Public Health and Social Work O Block, Room O-D610 Victoria Park Road Kelvin Grove, Brisbane QLD 4059 Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane Australia Mob 0404826650
(Thread 2)
Emergency services and police staff deserve our respect and admiration for risking life and limb in respnding to recent terrorist attacks at the Manchester Arena and in Central London. This is in addition to people throw themselves in the path of London Tube trains several times a week. Most are horrifically and mortally injured. The train driver is often traumatised. Medical workers face grave hazards trying to access the injured survivor, having to crawl underneath the train along potentially electrified tracks. Commuter journeys are lengthily disrupted. Apart from the ethical dilemma surrounding attempts to take one’s own life, is one obliged to not put others at risk of occupational hazards and inconvenience, more so now when rescue crews have to deal with frequent innocent mass casualties from barbaric acts?
Declaration: I was a prehospital doctor working in England until May 2013.
(Thread 3)
I was trying to insert a central venous catheter to help stabilise the condition of a critically ill man with suspected blood stream infection and dangerously low blood pressure on a busy shift in resuscitation. I had to work by myself as several doctors had called in sick, including my resident who recently told me she had cause to be aggrieved after being refused leave for the school holidays. There were many parent-doctors who had applied successfully ahead of her and leave was no longer available. I unfortunately punctured the patient’s carotid artery after being distracted with urgent information that several major trauma cases were due soon with no senior medical cover available from other hospital units.
Although the patient fared well and I completed the resuscitative procedure in time to attend to the incoming traumas, I believe that sick leave taken fraudulently by doctors (and nurses) lead to more stressful workloads and adverse risks for staff that turn up. Half of all sick leave taken in Australia is as a selfish entitlement to have rest and recreation. The expectation is that work presenters make up the shortfall as well as assuming responsibility for clinical and stress related errors and delays or deficiencies to care. I think this is grossly unfair-the average Australian takes most of their 10 days of sick leave each year.
(Thread 4)
Benefits intended to assist workers with an injury or illness is often abused. In 25 years of working as a hospital physician, I have taken three days off for acute injuries and for my mother’s funeral. My residents are predisposed to calling in sick on days that bookend their free weekend or a stretch of days rostered off work. The department’s secretary leaves early on a Friday or puts in a no-show. I regularly get a last minute phone call from residents who call in sick, which means that the doctors who are present are required to work an extra shift. Some get sent home from a day shift and are asked to return for night duty that cannot be filled in otherwise. It is common knowlege that a substantial proportion of sick leave in my clinical area is used for recreation. I have had to work marathon shifts for absent colleagues while fatigued and sleep-deprived. This has incurred errors in the care of the seriously ill. On one ocassion I have fallen asleep at the wheel on the way home and run through a red light. Dishonest sick leave takers are abusing an altruistic safety net and imposing risks to others who have to shoulder additional clinical work. Is it worth considering sick leave be paid at half to three quarters full pay, and the difference paid to a locum that can turn up for work at short notice, in the hope that patient care isn’t compromised?
The model predicts about 81,000 deaths by August 4.
"There was a flood
A world of water
The mason’s wife
Swam for her daughter.
One thousand people
Did what they could.
They found the steeple
And tore out the wood.
Five hundred pieces
Means five hundred float.
One thousand people means
Five hundred don’t."
Anyone can read them and see otherwise. What is weird is why anyone would refrain criticizing the WHO, and worse, obfuscating any criticism of them. That’s strange.
Yep, crazy times.
You were almost right. Our resident shit-for-brains has been sicced onto the WHO instead. We should take bets next time.
You guys have lost it. While you stretch your imagination to blame “capitalism”, there are verifiable links between the spread of this virus and the Chinese Communist Party’s coverup. Fucking hilarious.
The Chinese Communist Party is so perfectly aligned with Marx's vision it's uncanny.
We'll just have to stand against scapegoating.
One of my favorite albums. Are you familiar with Spencer Krug's work in Frog Eyes?
"All fires have to burn alive to live."
There's no such thing. Lol
It isn't anybody's fault.
The currently existing state of China begs to differ.
That said, technically all capitalism is state capitalism, as Polyani pointed out long ago.
I am! Tears of the Valedictorian. One of my big high school albums. Frog Eyes is by far the grimiest (in a good way) of all his projects, though, to be fair, that album's largely Carey Mercer. I saw Krug live, with/as Sunset Rubdown, a few times at the Middle East in Cambridge. i was 18 and 19 and those shows still mean a lot to me. Of all of his stuff, Dragonslayer is still my favorite album, but it goes too close to the nerve if I try to listen now. Too many hard memories bound up with it.
@frank @StreetlightX
I must agree here. Although China finally did what they needed by isolation measures (new cases are being contained it seems), the officials at the local level were the ones suppressing the information and/or only selecting partial information (only those who had direct contact with the animal market were to be considered counted). They also did not want to tell Beijing what was going on at first, often blocking doctors at hospitals from proclaiming an possible emergency (i.e. the information had to be leaked to get to the wider public). Based on an article I have linked below, this could be cultural, as it seems the bearer of bad news is often shunned for giving the bad news I guess. Also, it is function of totalitarian bureaucratic systems to suppress bad news from the public. Chernobyl comes to mind in this regard. It took so long, and so much information for the government to finally do something about it. Now, this doesn't discount the fact that OTHER countries that are non-communist may also deceive and suppress data about catastrophes and war causalities and the like, it is just pointing out this does have a precedent in communist/totalitarian ones.
Two major downfalls that enabled this in Chinese government were 1) the inability to follow their own infectious disease emergency measures (that were supposed to have been put in place and constantly reiterated since in the Sars epidemic), and 2) shutting down all exotic trade market places. No wild bats, exotic animals, or otherwise caught from the wild, put in cages on top of each other, cooked on the spot, etc. It just has to go.
Here are two good articles on it if anyone gives a shit:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-china-cause.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/world/asia/coronavirus-china.html
That said, China has been the most dogged after their initial bungling to contain it within their own country, so other countries should look at what they are doing and have done. Unrelated, but we should also look at what Korea did.
Polyani rules, but this sounds like a blurb of a blurb. Polyani was cool, he was in it, he wrote what he experienced. If you've read The Great Transformation and are drawing from that, I apologize. The quote just feels like a skipped rock.
Yeah I was kidding when I said there's no such thing...
In most minds there's no such thing.
Whoops, that's who I meant: Carey Mercer. Insane and a shame the youtube video of Tears of the Valedictorian (full album) has less than 8,000 views. I guess it's because it's so strange.
What does this have to do with the topic at hand? I was trying to engage with you about the topic you were discussing on this thread.
I get a sense that he was determined to do exactly what he wanted to do in Frog Eyes, come hell or high water. He's does some seriously crazy shit with his voice: just close enough to ridiculous to be jawdropping-amazing.
Anyway, I'm a huge fan of Frog Eyes.
Mercer made a living as a teacher, if I remember right.
It was absolutely a skipped rock. Current apocalypse listening:
I didn't really know if there was a wider debate here.. I just saw NOS's last comment and had to agree with at least that part of it. As far as racism and bigotry and such, obviously that is terrible, ignorant, etc. I'm all for multiculturalism but whether you call it "bizarre cultural practices" to showcase the ignorance of the West or not, wherever the source comes from (Western or industrializing societies polluting the globe for example), it should be pointed out where certain problems begin to prevent it.. Apparently it is now well known that the wild animal meat markets are one major source for modern contagions and will probably continue if there isn't an attempt to prevent it. Can we agree on that? Another example of this is Ebola from bats, and HIV starting from the consumption of chimp meat.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ru8qsQ9wQs
What do people on here think? When do you expect things will begin to go back to "normal"?
It would probably be both more interesting/useful to discuss future and present courses of action. Leaving the posturing to the politicians and exchanging information would be more beneficial.
Note: I say this under the assumption that people may visit this site looking for a balanced view of the situation. The disruption globally means we’re now all responsible and our words on this subject do actually count for something.
I WON’T be responding to some counter argument on this point - feel free to discuss that with me on a fresh thread though
Take care
The best I can make out suggests the developed world needs to get into severe lockdown in order to gets through this as quickly as possible in order to support the developing world. Remember that ‘economy’ essentially means distribution of resources. Poor allocation of food and medical supplies/equipment could lead to the progress made in the developing world the past few decades being nullified.
No matter what the most important thing is international cooperation as this is a problem for humanity not merely a nationalistic game of favour exchanges. Are we up to the task, who knows. One thing for sure, we’ll make more mistakes before this is over so it’s a matter of how we cope with the mistakes to come I think.
gut take - I think April is going to be horrible. We're still at the beginning. It will get real, next month, when cases overwhelm hospitals. I think that will carry on into may and, at least, June. I think we'll all be collectively traumatized going into july. My guess, as of now, is August will be when things will start kind of adjusting to normal (where 'normal' means merely 'not a disaster') (obviously this is all wild speculation, but thats my spur of the moment reaction)
On the positive side, as very introverted person the stay-at-home order has made my job much more comfortable and enjoyable. I'm eating healthier and exercising regularly. Obviously this is not the case for many people, especially those who have lost their jobs. Silver lining, I suppose.
What areas of progress do you have in mind here?
Darth, what do you think of the idea of a worldwide effort try to shutdown wild animal markets to prevent spread of viruses like COVID-19?
I've felt weird about this, but same. I've lost 6 pounds since this started (or to be precise, since when I started working at home the beginning of this month) I've felt happier and more relaxed. I *look* much better, almost dramatically so. I've felt significantly happier. I've been thinking about this - is it that I'm usually so morose and anxious with no clear cause that that makes me feel isolated - but when everyone feels similarly, I feel more connected?
You perhaps felt more acutely that we are just finding ways to occupy time, survive, maintain. Others who are used to routines and getting caught up in some sort of task, might have to be more introspective than they are used to. This causes mass existential questioning of life itself, purpose, and what the hell is the point of perpetuating it, maintaining it, dealing with it in the first place. Of course, existential reflection will just become a passing fad.. "That was so 2020" they might say.. Back to unreflective living it is.
They should be shutdown regardless.
Agreed.. I gave the example of SARS, COVID, Ebola, and HIV all starting from wild meat/bush meat practices. Was there a concerted effort to shut this down sooner? I don't recall, but clearly not enough.
that doesnt sound like my experience, but it does put me in mind of the revolving door of your thinking. i don't want to jump to conclusions, but maybe you're thinking of what you think about?
Yeah, I can see that. I think for myself I just prefer to work by myself, undisturbed by people. My productivity has skyrocketed, lol
I don't know, you said Quoting csalisbury
But I see now you meant something along the lines of "We are all in this together" maybe.
Way more jobs can be done from home than is allowed. Doesn't make sense except for old ideas of control in the workplace.
Can people stop bypassing the 'What are you listening to right now' thread and posting their music every which where. @unenlightened has been especially guilty of this recently I've noticed
https://transversal.at/blog/to-quarantine-from-quarantine
"Such is perhaps the most difficult challenge in a lockdown situation: to clear a space where to be on one’s own while already separated from the community. Being cooped up on a boat with a few others of course generates a feeling of estrangement, but estrangement is not solitude, and solitude is, in reality, what makes confinement bearable. And this is true even if one is already on one’s own. I noticed that what made my isolation extremely distressing was in fact my incapacity to withdraw into myself. To find this insular point where I could be my self (in two words). I am not talking here of authenticity, simply of this radical nakedness of the soul that allows to build a dwelling in one’s house, to make the house habitable by locating the psychic space where it is possible to do something, that is, in my case, write.
I noticed that writing only became possible when I reached such a confinement within confinement, a place in the place where nobody could enter and that at the same time was the condition for my exchanges with others. When I was able to get immersed in writing, conversations through Skype, for example, became something else. They were dialogues, not veiled monologues. Writing became possible when solitude started to protect me from isolation. One has to undress from all the coverings, clothes, curtains, masks, and meaningless chattering that still stick to one’s being when one is severed from others."
Flying blind. At the other extreme, New Zealand have been on lockdown for several days and had its first death yesterday.
I don't think we will be over the peak anytime soon, in the UK the experts announced yesterday that the lockdown is expected to last for at least 6 months, with only tentative attempts at relaxation of measures towards the end of this period. Personally, I expect it to be for a few more months than that before significant restrictions can be lifted.
While in these kind of lockdowns, developed countries won't be able to offer effective support to other countries experiencing difficulties. China may come to the rescue, but I doubt it, or that they may only be able to help a few countries.
I worry about Gaza, it's not going to be pretty, and who would help, would the Israelis end the blockade to help, I doubt it.
We had too our first death after implementing the lockdown. Yet I'm not sure if Sweden is totally opposite to New Zealand. I think there's a lot more variables than the policy measures taken especially if you haven't chosen the South Korea / Singapore option right from the start.
Sounds somewhat in line with what Fauci has estimated.Well, you'll see how correct the model is in a few weeks.
Quoting ssu
So the numbers are in:
Confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States:
Mar 26: 81,966 (+26%)
Mar 27: 100,997 (+23%)
Mar 28: 121,105 (+20%)
Mar 29: 141,701 (+17%)
@Baden: Your prediction of 150,000 is pretty much on the money.
The difference with the models is that yours assumes that measures applied in March had an appreciable effect on "flattening the curve" (similar to Italy's growth curve). Whereas mine simply assumes the prior average growth (approx. +35%/day) until two weeks after lockdown (i.e., to see an effect in the data).
Some candidate measures: voluntary social distancing has been gradually increasing; testing and isolating positive cases has rapidly increased. Also several one-off events as noted in the timeline below (italicized). Since New York was the significant case contributor, I've included both NY-specific events and national events.
Timeline for March:
March 1 - First confirmed NY case
March 2 - US confirmed cases pass 100
March 5 - Two confirmed cases in NY without trace
March 11 - US confirmed cases pass 1,100
March 13 - US confirmed cases pass 2,100
March 14 - First death in NY
March 15 - Europe travel ban
March 16 - UK/Ireland travel ban
- NY public schools close
- [i]Trump issues guidelines to avoid gatherings > 10 people
- Trump restricts discretionary travel[/i]
March 20 - Cuomo issues state-wide order that all non-essential workers must stay home
- confirmed cases pass 7,000 in NY, 19,000 in US
March 26 - US confirmed cases pass 82,000 (surpassing China)
March 29 - US has 141,701 confirmed cases, 2,462 deaths
It's been an eventful month for the US. Unfortunately, many more states besides NY will begin to factor significantly in the next week.
What's stopping you?
Quoting ssu
Yes, agreed. South Korea/Singapore got ahead of the curve early on, which NZ was not able to do (before lockdown).
My uni halls had single and shared rooms. I had a single thankfully.
As misanthropist i don't see nothing wrong here. :razz:
Baden wins!
People (like Bitter Crank, Benkei etc.) have made good forecasts on this thread, which was started 25th of February. I have to admit that I'm not one of them. I assumed that this would be on the line of previous outbreaks in this Century and thought it would be something equivalent of the SARS outbreak. No cigar for that one.
I lived in a caravan next to a field of pigs, rather than pay rent and spent the money in the pub.
That’s not exactly what was said. They said restrictions would hopefully be completely lifted in 6 months, not there will be 6 months of lockdown. At the moment the message in the UK is quite clear, and they are being open about the unpredictable nature of this - if you’ve run any mathematical models yourself you’ll see that the EXACT same figures ran twice through identical models DO NOT show exactly the same results (that is the nature of nature).
The message was they hope to have a better idea about the flattening of the curve in 3 months time, that after that period (if it is falling off) they will VERY slowly lift restrictions.
The key point being they don’t really know and will be able to tell us more in 2-3 weeks once the virus does what it does to those infected.
Think of this akin to predicting the weather. We know summers are hot, but we cannot say exactly how hot they will be and the accuracy of our predictions improves the closer we get to the time and we learn how to predict better due to observing patterns.
Note: I think it is wise to look at this going beyond 6 months. It helps to be pessimistic in these situations. Where I am schools closed as a continuation of the New Year Holiday with plans to open within 2 weeks ... then 2 more weeks, then ... you get the idea. As soon as I heard about this I told myself June, now I’m saying September but I wouldn’t be completely shocked if schooled simply shutdown all year - it depends whether or not cases go up here.
The possible benefit of this whole situation is that less developed countries can now clearly see what happens if you don’t stop the spread early doors. Hopefully Europe and North America’s mistakes can help those much more vulnerable countries act quickly - I really hope so because they just don’t have anything like the kind of healthcare in place that they do.
I wonder if that might actually somewhat lessen the impact the illness has on these countries psychologically and possibly economically. I know it sounds callous, but the poorer people in those countries often die of preventable diseases. Things that are considered only in dire situations in more affluent countries, like simply not treating people that don't have good chances of survival, are more common even under normal circumstances. Of course the sheer displacement due to illness, death, and fear of either will have a significant impact regardless.
--
Otherwise, one of the interesting effects this virus might have is to forge far stronger international cooperation with respect to health. Everything's so interconnected now that an outbreak in India or any other developing nation will inevitably have pretty terrible effects on the so-called developed world. The global north will be forced - out of sheer self-interest - to help fund, train and shore up the healthcare systems of the rest of the world in order to contain its spread. Virus' don't give a flying fig about borders, and, if played right, nationalism will be seen as a strategy of massive failure with respect to a properly global threat. This comes with dangers of its own but I'm hopeful here that this is one of the few cases where a rising tide lifting all boats may actually be meaningful.
The story continues....
See article
However, not everything is at what it first seems like. Perhaps this interview with Falwell clears a little bit the situation (and shows what Falwell's is really thinking about the pandemic). From four days ago:
Eh, student loans paid for my rent so I'm all good there.
Yes, but when and how are such countries going to assist poorer ones?
I don't think any government had any choice in the action they took, each developed country has gone the same way, except those where religion trumps all other considerations. There is some variation in the action, but the result is the same.
Regarding the tentative relaxation of the measures. I can't see any timely progress, as each time there will be another spike. Although there is great uncertainty about how this will pan out. Perhaps Italy will give us some hope soon.
India is very worrying, there are simply to many people in a mainly poor unresourced country.
Good day at the office.
Well, they got their version of South Korea's Patient 31, the "Super-spreader".
Bad luck if true, I guess. But politically correct for the current administration, as the case is about a sikh, not a hindu.
Individual governments understand their capabilities better than me. They will, and do, respond to public pressure though. That’s our collective job.
Each developed country has most definitely not gone the same way. The reason the virus has had a minimal impact in both China, Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea is because they’ve had plenty of experience dealing with this kind of thing before - as a few other Asian countries have too. Only Germany listened and prepared testing, hence the low number of cases.
Relaxing too soon is certainly a problem. What they will mean (the experts in the field) is easing off every 2-3 weeks and assessing the situation once they see the effect of the measures taken.
For a more visual understanding of how the models can play out I HIGHLY recommend watching this:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gxAaO2rsdIs
It’s not modeling this actual virus but gives a tangible appreciation of both the random nature of this and the effects of different possible measures - although represented in an abstract way.
India is taking drastic steps because they simply can’t do anything when it comes to medical aid for its citizens. There option is basically do nothing OR lockdown before it overwhelms them. Ironically what has happened it Italy may have helped.
:sad:
The hope you have lived by for the last four years.
Perhaps finally Mexicans will build that wall and we Trump-doubters have all been wrong:
See Coronavirus: Mexicans demand crackdown on Americans crossing the border
There was in vitro effect for both drugs on SARS but that was ultimately too low to pursue it as a drug against SARS in 2012. There has not been controlled phase 1 testing for this purpose. Some anecdotal evidence for it but here's some that shows no difference with the control group: http://subject.med.wanfangdata.com.cn/UpLoad/Files/202003/43f8625d4dc74e42bbcf24795de1c77c.pdf
So at this point, we really don't know, which is why approving it is not a fact-based decision. I suspect lobbying: https://www.propublica.org/article/republican-billionaire-group-pushes-unproven-covid-19-treatment-trump-promoted
Both drugs have severe interaction with a long list of drugs and especially in the case of chloroquine severe side effects, including organ failure.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52087002
Fine, but let's use Boris Johnson as the guinea pig then rather than people who are worth caring about.
We'll all stand in line to give him head (figuratively).
Yep. It's supposed to be an optimistic prediction because it depends on social distancing.
The problem with wishing death upon your opponents is that it creates future credibility problems when you attempt to claim you've objectively rejected some of their positions.
For example, let's say you wish upon Joey a diminished lung capacity, so much so that he begins to suffocate, and then you further hope he reaches such a desperate state that he attempts a medication that then kills him slowly and miserably. Let's then say that despite your best wishes for his failure and death, he survives and advocates for lower taxation. You then take a stand against his position and claim that your position is well reasoned, which maybe it will be, yet there might be some detractors who will understandably suggest that your position is simply one of being contrary to Joey, so much so that you actually wished and continue to wish he'd die.
I'm just saying I might not take your future criticisms of Boris Johnson seriously because the statement "Oh yeah, I hate the fucker, wish he'd die, and he's not worth a piece of shit, but I actually find him well reasoned" is not a common sort of way people talk. Yep, your credibility is forever ruined. Totally hate it for you.
I'm not sure where the 27% came from, but let's assume it valid. If we can screen the patients and only provide it to those who will likely not have negative reactions, why wouldn't we give it to them? I don't see where there's much to lose, and what you're suggesting is that there is a 27% chance we might be sitting on a cure. Can you really wait for controlled testing so that you can tell everyone a year later after they're through burying their loved ones that it would have worked had we just used it, but we didn't want to get ahead of ourselves?
But yes, there's a reason we wait for controlled testing. One of the more famous episodes before controlled testing was mercury treatment for syphilis. That was absolutely wonderful and killed more people than it cured them of syphilis.
I'm all for moving into concrete testing on a larger scale, controlled phase 1 testing, and giving it to people who are on the brink but it shouldn't be prescribed widely until it's gone through and successfully completed phase 3 testing. It needs to be clear however that it's testing.
Where did I wish death on him??
New York has also done more testing than the UK, France, Norway, Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_testing
And we got our first Euro-Dictator with Hungary's Victor Orbán. Now he got powers include sidelining parliament and giving himself the power to rule by decree indefinitely.
With Trump talking about possibly millions of deaths and hoping that we could get it to hundred thousand, I think Donald is finally understanding the scope of the issue. This is the good time for a power grab by emergency powers.
True. Yet the death toll then? For example, the Nordic countries far have more people (27 million) than New York State (19 million) and the death toll now:
Norway: 32
Sweden: 146
Denmark: 77
Finland: 13
Iceland: 2
New York State: 1218
Anyway, here comes to play the status of NYC being a global hub and the simple fact that without a lock down there is extreme difficulty for social distancing in Manhattan.
And that was for crappy waves. If there's a swell in the next few weeks at the peak of the virus and with more stringent isolation measures there's gonna be a lot more of this.
You can reg for free. I know I ain't payin' and I saw it.
:brow: :death: :fear:
Yeah, I think I know what she's talking about. It sounds trivial, but it really is frustrating to just want to be home, like just be at home, and then have to either make small talk, or awkwardly remain silent every single time you have to go to the bathroom or make a sandwich. It makes my living room/kitchen feel like the break room at the office when there's just one other person there, you know that weird feeling?
Sounds like a meditative state.
I know that feeling, maybe the solution is to reach some degree of friendship with her. Through laughter, or mutual appreciation of something. I know that this might not be possible if there is some kind of personality dissonance.
It's kinda nice being a shut-in in a tiny mountain town in the middle of nowhere.
(Yes, I know things will eventually get worse here too, but for now, when I'm out in a meadow looking at baby owls and wild bunnies and ducklings in a pond on a beautiful spring day covered with mustard flowers, lupines, and California poppies, it makes me feel quite lucky to be here, in contrast to all the unfortunate people locked in their apartments in NYC).
I have a similar experience, I live in a quiet place in the countryside. I work mainly from home and have plenty to do as it is a small holding. There are no reports of anyone in my local town having the virus, so life is normal, apart from most shops are shut and there are social distancing measures at the supermarket.The shelves are nearly empty though, so we have to be a bit creative at meal times. I will be growing most of my own vegetables over the next few months.
Our social calendar has been cancelled, but it's hardly noticeable, as there is still communication. My wife works for the government, so she will have full pay for the duration. I can still work, but don't need to.
My only hardship is not being able to buy flour, so will try grinding some of my chicken's grain in a coffee grinder. Also we cannot go travelling in our camper van for now.
I brew my own wine and have planted about 30 vines recently, so will be self sufficient soon.
My wife and I might move up to SM strangulation with the possibility of not stopping on time. With a bit of luck they'll call it corona due to the asphyxiation. And it's only week 3. :cry:
EDIT: For the benefit of those who always think I'm serious about corona-Olympics and the like: I'm just kidding. I love my wife.
I also like most Americans in an adorable dog kind of way, too stupid for its own good but you want to hug them anyway.
(not literally).
I'm not an alcoholic, I'm actually going the other way. So I might brew all that wine and then not drink much of it.
"...I'm a drunk. Alcoholics go to meetings."
Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all night. Try the veal.
Clearly this relates to the way you count, and the number of tests, so the statistics can not be easily compared. As you know, Germany is testing like crazy, so of course, they are finding more infections, with the result that the fatality rate becomes low, as most cases are mild. Also, Germany does not automatically record a "Corona death" if is a case of co-morbidity like Italy does.
About the China numbers, you might was well watch a Hollywood movie as believe the CCP. They are fiction. Take the numbers of HK and Taiwan, they are reliable.
Hallsinki and Islamabathroom
Yes, the UK is surging and will be a basket case within a week sadly.
Hope Britons never forget that Boris and Cummings' initial strategy of culling the herd is the reason for the totally avoidable chaos to come.
"Culling the herd"?? Can you point to a reference where or Cummings (whoever that is) said that??
They closed all parks and some beaches yesterday but trails are still open in the county. They’re monitored though, whatever that means.
I guess Pfhorrest is sleeping in. Around where he lives is a great area for plein-air painting, incidentally.
A few hundred thousand, perhaps a couple of million, dying in the developed world is barely worth mentioning when we dare turn our eyes to the ensuing horror of the situation in India.
A rough estimate of 50% of the population infected and a 2% mortality rate would mean 10-15 million dead. Considering they don’t have the facilities or infrastructure to control anything much pretty much everyone is likely to be infected and mortality rate at least double that. But that is not all, when it comes to income and starvation we’re essentially witnessing what could be the most horrific loss of life unless the developed world does step in now (would still likely be horrific, but maybe they could reduce the toll).
Without any serious aid or help it’s likely we could see 30+ million dying in India due to a combination of starvation and a lack of means to stop the disease ripping through the country like wildfire.
Look at this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fgYxy3Py6V0
Can they walk and chew gum at the same time? Seems to indicate incompetence.
He's just lobbing back the gratuitous attacks on the president and the GOP in general.
Instead of looking at raw numbers to gauge what's happening, go to worldometer and go to the right side of the graph. Look at serious cases and deaths per mil.
The deaths per mil for Italy, for instance, tells you how unprepared Italy was for the onslaught. Germany's figure tells you that they fucking kick ass at taking care of critically ill people (no surprise there).
The UK's numbers suggest to me that they're further along into it than the US, but doing a pretty good job (no surprise there either).
I have no idea what China's numbers tell us. That their society is completely shut down? That they aren't giving out their data right now?
I’m certain there’s a better way of doing that than pointing out the administrations inabilities.
Let's see how Sweden goes. Interesting to see.
(Our neighbors taking it easy. Remember when cafes and restaraunts were open?)
The government has enormous resources at its disposal. You suggest that it’s an unreasonable expectation that it could effectively deal with both issues?
I dont think McConnell was directing the statement to people like you, who would dissect it logically.
It’s a serious condition though, and not to be take lightly. I think lockdown policies for some countries could be far more damaging than letting the virus do its thing - see above.
What bothers me is how developing countries are attempting to react like other developed nations when they quite clearly don’t have the economic clout to do so and run the horrible risk of taking on two terrible paths at once instead of one.
Hmm.. I think that when your President is speaking about the option of 100 000 dying being the option where they have done a 'good job', that might spread a bit hysteria.
Right, it’s divisive in nature, essentially promoting what it ostensibly condemns.
I think you'd have to be really neutral to see how Bloomberg's and Cuomo's attacks were aimed at political gain. You should expect that, though. You want your politician to exploit all opportunities. That's why they all end up being fairly hypocritical.
If you reject this concept, just wait for an actual trump supporter to appear so you can vent your self-righteousness with full effect. :wink:
The worldometer is where I get all my data, and that's what I'm basing this on, including all columns, the log curve, and the situation on the ground in the UK (my brother lives in London, which is soon to become New York in terms of cases). Germany, China, and South Korea are maybe the most interesting countries to talk about though. More on that later.
It’s about x10 as contagious with an incubation period that is around x5-10 as long AND there is no immunity.
When they say 1-3% they tend to expect 2%, and when they say 20-50% they tend to mean 35%. You can go and do the math for 2% mortality rate with 35% infected.
Have an insincere apology with your data. Mix it with the news that care homes can only test 5 people (Most carers move between homes) and only when someone has symptoms, and old folks are being encouraged to sign non-resussitation forms and not to expect to be taken to hospital, andI wonder if you are drawn to the conclusion I have reached, that government policy is to spread the virus amongst the old and not treat them.
https://www.irishnews.com/coronavirus/2020/03/29/news/michael-gove-apologises-to-company-that-offered-to-procure-25-000-ventilators-for-the-nhs-but-got-no-reply-1882862/?fbclid=IwAR3JJVffnGiv-cm8TBqbt6-F4iYr_O3gq-nJsSUMrcmoT7IsKSxC8Ff9v84
I live in a small town in the mountains, so "near home" is close to many hiking trails for basically anyone. Here's a view of pretty much the whole town from one of the closest trails:
I employed a phrasal synonym aptly descriptive of my targets' scientific quasi-euphemism, not a direct quote from either; hence no quotation marks. Next time, please engage cognitive gears before digital flexors.
My locale (fairly similar spot to yours I reckon):
It'd be remiss not to consider that conclusion given what's going on.
+ You might be interested in this, frank. I think we discussed South Korea before.
And let's face it, this old man really has a lack of empathy and doesn't have the capability to focus on multidimensional issues. For a lot of people it's hard to understand what is the difference 10 000 people, 100 000 people or a million people. You can picture ten people, perhaps a classroom, but thousands is more difficult. Trump may understand the difference in dollars, but dollars aren't people with families and loved ones.
Anyway, let's hope the US gets it act together and we don't go from the tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands or a million, because at the worst possible case it could do that. The positive side is that after this ordeal the US could get a genuine true health care reform. If only Americans start looking at defense against viruses in order to save American lives as they look at the defense against terrorist attacks.
Here's a good recap of why the present system has made United States so weak and vulnerable unlike other OECD countries.
The normal flu causes about 50,000 deaths each year. Where do you arrive at the number of 20,000 that it "should be"?
And why do you call Trump a cunt for having actually more foresight that his political rivals, who downplayed the Corona threat well into February?
The epidemologist experts are predicting 200,000. I would say half of that is a good job. What number would you, in your apparent infinite wisdom, call a good job?
China Concealed Extent of Virus Outbreak, U.S. Intelligence Says
It's a good prediction...if you still have some states open and without a serious lock-down as you already have lost the containment phase and aren't prepared for it. Something equivalent to other OECD countries would be good.
Italy has now 218 deaths per million. South Korea 3 per million. Now the US is at 14 per million. Now to have the similar death rate as Italy now would mean 71 940 deaths. So that will give you roughly the ball park where 100 000 deaths is.
Like which countries? And why is 20,000 "still generous", when then normal flue is about 50,000? Where do you get that figure from, anyway?
Sunshine,
I actually listened to the first part of that video, and he made a really interesting point, which was that masks work and that a critical difference between the West's response and the East's response (and their clearly different results) was that the East wore masks. What this means is that the answer is as much in mass producing masks as it is in all the other much more difficult things we're doing. The doctor felt the reason masks were not being touted as effective was because there was a shortage for doctors and they didn't want average citizens to wear one, which prompted his next comment of why would doctors need them if they were ineffective.
You would think that at least one European nation would have tried the mask idea.
I found this mask online that I'm now wearing. I feel like it provides just the perfect mix of protection and sass.
Also, why Trump is a cunt. Here he is on March 15:
“This is a very contagious virus. It’s incredible. But it’s something we have tremendous control of.”
March 7: Trump isn't concerned at all. Which is why he doesn't do anything.
March 6: he lies about the fact not enough tests are available.
March 2: "We'll have vaccines soon." Fauci same day : no we won't.
So that's well into March.
But the winning comment on February 27:
It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear. And from our shores, we — you know, it could get worse before it gets better. It could maybe go away. Well see what happens. Nobody really knows.
So really, what foresight are you on about, Trumpanzee?
Quoting Nobeernolife
Well, you have those travel bans, right? Even for China it may be difficult to hide hundred thousand deaths (hundreds or thousands, yes). Actually Trump's great fan, the Brazilian president Bolsonaro is quite open about that he simply doesn't like the numbers either (as the Chinese).
From Brazil:
Well, you would have to take that up with the epidemologists who came up with the 200.000 figure. I am pretty sure Trump did not do the math himself.
About the extreme numbers in Italy, you should also consider other factors, such as the way deaths are counted. In Italy, every death is counted as "Corona", if the virus was ALSO present. In countries like Germany (and I am sure Korea), co-morbidity is considered.
Statistics can be quite misleading
Sweden Defies Lockdown Trend
What do you think a lock down is?
No name-calling, eh?
The foresight I was referring to was quickly stopping flights from China in February, for which he was heavily criticized by such wonderful foresighted experts like Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden.
Is he perfect? No. Is he better than the current alternatives? You bet.
Yes, absolutely. It's predominantly spread in droplets, so it's nuts that we all haven't been wearing masks from the beginning. Interesting also the comment about eyes. A huge percentage of East Asians wear glasses and that provides a barrier from absorption through the eyes. Glasses and masks. Get a pair of goggles to go with your fancy get-up there. Again, if we had done that from the beginning in conjunction with a short lockdown, we might not all be in the shit now.
When the virus is already in the country and spreading, stopping flights is not of much use. That horse has bolted. Sounds good to the xenophobes, of course. But one look at New York will tell you how relatively pointless it was.
It also, in no way or form, would've excused him from not implementing social distancing much earlier, even if he would've implemented the travel ban in a sensible manner.
To put it clearly for you, if I'd save someone from drowning, that action doesn't excuse me from murdering someone else.
The pandemic in Italy isn't contained yet. So there is that issue as now it's just really starting in the US
If we assume that South Korea has beat the first wave of the pandemic (and trust South Korean stats), their turning of the tide happened when they hit 5100 infections. Now they are at nearing 10 000 cases in all. So I guess at the peak very roughly half of the infections have happened. So there comes the 200 000 figure.
So the way I interpret it is that the epidemiologists think the US is going the way as Italy.
Quoting NOS4A2
I've mentioned it few times on the thread. It will surely be interesting to see as this will be something that experts will be looking at later.
I think sooner or later prime minister Stefan Löfven will crumble under the pressure if the death toll starts rising too much compared Denmark, Finland and Norway. Btw there's here a serious row here about workers going cross the Northern Swedish-Finnish border to work even if the country ought to have closed it's borders. Sweden wouldn't like if all those Finnish health care workers wouldn't come to work there. For us it seems that the close-borders-lock-down isn't as air tight. So I guess we can have it here as bad as everywhere else.
I hope you’re wrong for the obvious reasons.
The “lockdown” metaphor is used to describe the strict nation-wide measures to implement social distancing, like locking up prisoners in their cell.
A friend of mine works at a hospital where they wear one N-95 mask all day long. On top if that, they put on a different surgical mask for each patient.
We're going to start doing that at my hospital.
So 1) arrogance isn't why the general population didnt start wearing them sooner, we didnt have enough, and 2) would masks really help outside of really overcrowded areas like SK?
It's high transmissability might be related to its long life on inanimate objects. We'll know after more research, I guess.
I don't think it was arrogance. We weren't given good advice and, yes, there weren't enough masks to go around. We weren't prepared and we were let down.
The Netherlands hadn't prohibited gatherings but prohibits any event for which a license is required, regardless of size. Outside people should keep 1.5 meters distance but theoretically a lot more than 50 people can be in one place, like the beach or a park. All are schools are closed though, as are the cafés and bars.
So which lock down is stricter?
Yes, this occurred to me, it can apparently last up to 72 hours on a hard surface. I also think it is very sticky like it's covered in Velcro. So if it gets onto door handles, hand rails and key pads which large numbers of people touch regularly. It will spread far and wide rapidly.
My neighbour build a CPAP with this: https://contents.mediadecathlon.com/p1576986/k$8b56c4956b2622eaaabe33999f2d1229/sq/Snorkelmasker+Easybreath+marineblauw.webp?f=550x550
We're recycling masks now. I think the reason we're switching to keeping the masks on is that taking them to the recycling bin is just one more way to spread it.
Cool about the mask. Hope he helps someone with it. We have one mask of that kind for BiPAP, but we haven't used it. I think the danger of spewing the virus everywhere would be high even with it being filtered like that. Just based on my experience with CPAP and BiPAP.
I’m not aware of the extent of the measures in place in either country. Can you get fined in the Netherlands for disobeying any public health order?
Panic is the appropriate and rational response when you discover a fire is tearing through your neighborhood.
COVID-19 is that fire and it is in your neighborhood. The only difference is that the devastating effects of infection are not realized for two weeks (from date of infection to symptoms requiring hospitalization), after which many more people have become infected.
But just as the virus grows rapidly, so it can be killed off rapidly. That is done by eliminating all paths of infection and waiting a few weeks (the infectious period).
That is the action that all countries must take, and sooner is overwhelmingly better than later.
In concrete terms:
1. Isolate COVID-19 individuals and the people they touched
2. Identify and isolate individuals with symptoms (colds, etc.)
3. Reduce social connectivity (social distancing, masks, hygiene, etc.)
4. Stop transportation and contact between geographical groups (close borders, prevent domestic travel, etc.)
The best thing that developed countries can do to help developing countries is to make that message absolutely clear by actioning it themselves and providing an example for them to follow.
Here's the mathematics that undergirds that message.
The choice between stopping the virus or protecting the economy is a false choice. If the virus is not stopped, then health systems will be overwhelmed, the dead bodies will pile up, and economies will be devastated anyway.
I dont think that's going to happen. China came down off lockdown and went right back on. I think it has multiple options for transmission.
Of course they faked them. We didn't need an intelligence agency to tell us that.
Of the 88 homes for the elderly and nursing homes in the Stockholm area at least every third has corona infections. :mask: (article in Swedish)
So I guess NOS4A2 shouldn't get his hopes up that Sweden will be an exemplary model on how to deal with the corona-virus without lockdowns and other "police-state measures".
Question: Given the human toll of this plague, am I a bad person for having such joy?
I would ask you, Would 100,000 deaths be "good" if the alternative was 100,000,000.
Also, I would agree with you that 100,000 is a fuck-up if the alternative was 100 deaths.
By the way, I am not an American.
For the US, yes. For less developed countries? I’m far from convinced because they lack the basic infrastructures to police this or the beds, staff and equipment to treat the waves of patients.
I have no serious concerns for developed countries other than the possibility of slow creeping authoritarianism - Hungary being the first real flash of that.
And I guess it's more of a BIPAP this way?. (I'm not familiar with every piece of equipment as I don't work in health care).
100,000 is an extremely low figure for a country like the US whose medical system is extremely disjointed and given the freedom of movement people have.
I imagine NOS is crying out about governmental control inhibiting citizen rights? It’s good to have someone reminding us of this. For the developing world it is certainly something worth keeping an eye on - see Hungary.
Overall I think the situation looks under control at present, but we shouldn’t just let new laws and legislation creep in without questioning and combatting them to some degree. This point might grow more relevant as the strain shows over the coming months.
1. The new rules/laws associated with the pandemic are nothing more than the expansion of what conservatives call the "nanny state."
2. The nanny state is required because of the adults who behave like small children.
3. Therefore, the new rules/laws are necessary because of the mayhem caused by egocentric unripe adults.
To answer your question, it sounds like the Dutch lockdown is far more strict than the Swedish one.
It's very reminiscent of the tragedy of the commons really, where certain behaviour makes sense on a personal level but it's terrible behaviour for the group as a whole.
It is not a low figure. In no fucking universe is 100,000 people drowning in their own lungs a low figure, and anyone who says otherwise can get fucked. This is especially the case for the richest, supposedly 'most advanced' nation on Earth, which at every step along the way has botched its response and exhibited failures of leadership that ought to be, by any rational standard, considered criminal. That the 'medical system is extremely disjointed' is not a given but a social and political failing that itself ought to be subject to extreme critique and remedy.
So you want to reverse the travel bans all over the world? Gee, the world-wide all governments have now turned to xenophobes, don´t they. And by implication, you`d also complain about the self-isolation orders that are popping up everywhere, as they are just a micro form of travel bans, designed to minimize contact.
Any figure that is HALF of what the experts predict is a low figure in my book.
And, for reference, what about the figure 60,000? Is that alow figure in the "fucking universe"? Because that was the death toll from your normal, standard, everyyear flue in 2018. And the China virus is obviously more lethal than the flu.
No, it isn't. It's a disgrace. Like alot of other things about the US.
Let's ask, What was the solution for the tragedy of the commons? It was "property rights, government regulation, the development of a collective action arrangement." Germain to the pandemic are the solutions of government regulation and collective action. Note that collective action can be merely social pressure not to break wind in the elevator - which works.
I do not know where I am going with all this. I feel that much of this Coronavirus thread is whining about not getting to do whatever, whenever, wherever one wants. There is a term for that. (I am not looking at you :-) )
Yes, to keep the figures this low, the whole US will need to go into lock down immediately. It looks like this is not going to happen for maybe a week or so. Once the virus has got a widespread foothold it is very difficult to prevent the spread because it becomes pervasive. This is what happened in London during the few days before the lockdown, the spread would have been exponential and infect large numbers in just a couple of days.
I see the same mistakes being made all across the US.
We’re in danger of seeing the developing world falling even further behind the rest of the world. A single country’s concerns right now isn’t my primary focus. If it’s yours, that’s great! I’m saying it should or shouldn’t be. Just explaining where my words are coming from.
Or for a quick read on the work on Elinor Ostrom.
You can guarantee governments are mostly guessing and relying on experts in the field. The end result will be the best experts in the field/s will hopefully shine through and help governments decide how best to mitigate the problem/s.
International communication is an essential part fo this as far as I can see. Luckily scientists are very much about the science more than the politics so are more likely to show no concern for political/geographical boundaries.
Note: y’know, silver linings and all that :)
I don’t think a lot of people understand that exactly the same situations in two different countries can have almost polar outcomes. This is the nature of nature. We can at least push and pull the curves around to a certain degree, but there is quite a large element of chance involved
See here (again): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gxAaO2rsdIs
Cool. I just meant that inevitably, patients are going to pull it off or try to adjust it and in the process fill the air with CV laden aerosol. The aerosol hangs in the air for a couple of hours. But as long as it's in a negative pressure room, it should be ok.
For every patient whose needs are met that way, it would save a ventilator for someone else.
Yes, this is the hidden policy of the UK government. It kills three birds with one stone, clears out all the geriatrics and health compromised, solves the looming social care funding crisis, and removes the biggest pressure on the health service. "Just get it done"
It clears the way for a rip roaring independent GREAT Britain, Singapore on Thames. This is what those people voted for in December.
More good news: they're pretty sure now (at least in the Netherlands) chloroquine is beneficial during treatment. However, the people coming in for the IC are often also constipated and aren't capable of eating themselves. All the medicines they're already getting have an effect on the QT-interval as does chloroquine. So it's difficult to dose correctly.
That's a ray of hope. :grin:
It seems rather strange to be accusing my government of genocide.
I have some evidence of them not buying ventilators that they were offered, not testing carers and health workers or providing any protection. My daughter, for example, is an OT in a major hospital dealing with the old and disabled extensively with, count it, zero protective equipment and zero testing.
You make it personal, but I am not afraid at all for myself. Snap out of your complacency and condescension; I am not a conspiracy theorist by nature, and generally prefer cock-up theories. But in this case, there are too many consistent cockups, backed up by the words of chief adviser Dominic Cummings to the effect that this is the government policy.
I told you what I'd want you to tell me if...
I listened to an interview on radio4 earlier today with a careworker caring for 65 elderly people in a carehome. She said in a calm accepting voice that over two thirds were showing symptoms now and that she has some protection equipment and that there was help available if needed. The assumption was that they would all die peacefully there, rather than waste resources in the local hospital.
This state of affairs was accepted by the interviewer, an interviewer who wouldn't let such an issue pass her by ordinarily.
I wonder where the staff for those ventilator less beds will come from?
Are you incapable of writing a post without a strawman based on an inability to read simple English? Please just go back to Reddit. You can't cut it here, honestly. You just don't have the capacity.
Try saying that once more and see what happens.
No, can't understand why they're ok with 100,000 dead either. Especially as it did not need to happen. China, 4 times the population, <10% that number of deaths.
Why are you writing in such a vulgar way, and what is "Reddit"?
I know what a strawman is. Strawmen arguments are very common, especially in political discussions. I try to stay away from them.
However, I do not know what "ROI potential" is, I still do not know why are so rude towards me, and why you write personal messages threatening to kick me out of the forum. Are you the site moderator?
Lol. You got a regular PM warning for using a term with xenophobic/racist connotations.
I think you already answered your own question:
Quoting Baden
The premise that having Trump supporters around to represent what their cult is saying at any given time is now just wasting everyone's time now. Nobeernolife's goal is clearly to just demonstrate to other Trump trolls that there is a troll posted here and dilute debate so it loses it's edge and potency, and so no need for any Trump supporter to worry.
These are serious topics, and I would submit it's more important than ever, in a time of crisis, to arrive at a lucid synthesis quickly, without bad faith distractions. The whole point of this forum is to arrive at a higher discursive quality than can be found elsewhere on the internet, which does require quality control. Nobeernolife has tried to use more sophisticated trolling tactics which do provide some entertainment value and, over a short period of time, some value in analyzing such tactics as a sort of living propaganda specimen. But, when bad faith can no longer be plausibly denied, there should be no fear that trolls doth protest too much, in doing the right thing.
Copied to mod thread for discussion. Now let's get back on topic.
I’ve no idea why you’re being treated like a villain either (other than the above ‘China virus’ remark - kind of silly in hindsight I’m sure you’ll admit?).
I assume they think you’re an easy target. It’s up to you to show otherwise.
Tip: If you see emotions spilling over the best advice I can give to you is go silent and ignore the bait - people don’t like being wrong and to others it is quite clear what is over emotional drivel and ranting.
Note: Mods here are certainly not all cut from the same cloth! Some are more belligerent than other though depending on how the wind blows - but hey, who isn’t? :)
I did see Baden being Baden - avoiding answering questions, trying to befuddle and doing their best to infuriate others in order to turn around and accuse them of childish behavior.
Note: Someone mocking Trump’s ability to count probably isn’t all that enamored by him. Did you spot Nobeer making that remark?
Frankly I find it appalling that a number of people stuck at home may actually think ‘maybe a philosophy forum could inform me a little - instead they find the usual Trumpfest (be it pro or con). Guys! The world doesn’t really give a fuck at the moment so take it to the dedicated Trump thread perhaps?
What's vitriolic?
I apologise for befuddling, nobeer. I didn't have an evil plan in mind, but I'll try to be more restrained the next time. On this thread anyway.
Amen Sushi. Unfortunately the TDS is going to get worse before it gets better. (On both sides btw, I see TDS on both sides, constantly.)
There is still so much mixed messaging about this virus, and this strange defiance of “freedom over life” and “id rather die than destroy the country by not working” is pretty infuriating. People are just so fucking stupid. There are hidden triggers people have so that even the most reasonably offered request will be dismissed because of some so and so news source or medical advice.
Whats especially baffling to me is how over and over, and with the virus now as well, is how when we have very solid, very well known information on whats happened elsewhere (like with Covid and Italy for example) and yet we continue to play put the exact same procedures. Religion, politics and now with this virus, too many people just flat out refuse to learn from history or in the case of Covid 19 from actual, fresh current events.
They have a bunch of different groups. The critical theory group is doing a reading of a Lefebvre work on Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche, for instance. They're quite a bit more hard core than our collection of kindergartners and sophists. :)
Touché, frank.
It does, but China has time and options now for learning more about the virus, and figuring out what actions work and what do not.
If the virus spreads again in China, it does so from a small base and ideally within bounded geographical areas. So it will be easier to suppress again, whether by lockdown or test-and-trace.
This really comes down to whether countries have the collective will to do what it takes to stop the virus. If they do, then it will be much easier to contain the second time around.
Quoting I like sushi
I don't think they have a choice. If developing countries just let the virus run its course, then millions of people dying is the predictable result. People can either fatalistically accept that default outcome, or they can act now to try to change it. It's really up to a country's leaders to properly communicate what actions are needed and then help local communities do them effectively.
Yes. Hopefully their next attempts at easing off lockdown will work. If not, that will be worrisome. They will continue trying to discover the answer while knowing that their ability to stay in lockdown is limited.
Quoting Andrew M
If I could just vent for two seconds here. We hope it's a matter of human will. I don't think we know that yet because we aren't through it. The assumption that our leaders are supposed to be geniuses with time machines has us turning on each other already. If it turns out that nature really does have the upper hand here, the arrogance of assuming that humans were supposed to dominate it and just failed because they're stupid or evil can have potentially ugly consequences like scapegoating.
This makes zero sense.
You even have the premise of why it makes no sense in your previous paragraph.
Quoting frank
Obviously, discussing whether easing the lockdown will work or not, presupposes the lockdown is working, and that "man can dominate it".
None of the steps that would have significantly slowed the growth of the pandemic, nor any of the steps taken that would have made better short-term preparation once it was clear containment was failing, nor even the "zeroeth step" of not disbanding the pandemic team, requires being a "genius with a time machine". It's laughable.
Don’t bother. They believe China is a race and the Politburo is a knight in shining armor. Then they’ll spin around and shit on Americans and call for the executions of their leaders.
Never forget that you are among those who opposed the measures that are now Americans' only hope of keeping the death toll under a million. Even Trump has come around on that. So, maybe show the proper level of humility at being hideously wrong and get in line.
Getting back to more serious stuff. One reason there are those among us appalled at the minimizing of the importance of 100,000 or more dead to this disease is the horrible way people die. Slow suffocation and organ failure while isolated from their families. You won't even get a proper funeral.
It’s a nice little racket. If your predictions are right you can say I told you so but if they’re wrong you can say your measures worked.
Just to squash another lie.
Quoting StreetlightX
Quoting StreetlightX
I make my predictions distinct from my comments on what measures should be taken. And Trump has eventually fallen into line behind the likes of me and Street. Time for you to follow suit. There is no-one out there now arguing that measures aimed at enforcing social distancing are a bad idea.
Bad timing bro:
Quoting Nobeernolife
Quoting Nobeernolife
No, sorry, I will not fall in line behind these authoritarian schemes. Street likes being told what to do; I don’t.
I fully agree with this. Metaphorically, of course.
So, now that Trump has turned authoritarian, you're making a break with him?
Now that he has turned authoritarian, you support him?
Here's what I want to see: Everyone getting a gas mask and it being made illegal not to wear one for a period of time, so we gradually wean ourselves off lockdown, something no-one wants, but is simply necessary to save lives. In Thailand, you get fined if you don't wear a mask. That's the way to go.
That would work. I just don’t think we need fines to wear masks. I would prefer a solution that is both effective and that doesn’t result in the suspension of rights and movement.
But if we acquiesce to such draconian measures who knows what else will slide down the slippery slope. :mask:
The reality is we need a combination of things to get back to full freedoms. But we need to err on the side of caution. Take the video above and multiply that pain by a million and it should be clear why.
Fines for bad haircuts?
Oh, I'll take a look. Zizek, Chris Hedges, and Chomsky have all spoken on this. I'm on Chris Hedges now, which looks the most promising. I'll maybe link later.
I’d be immune.
Speaking of about faces, WHO and the CDC said masks weren't effective, which was the apparent lie told because they feared doctors wouldn't have enough if the average citizen did. The net result of a lie is distrust, which isn't what you need when you're trying to get the public to do as you ask because you lack the means of meaningful enforcement otherwise.
We're all excited about placing the corpses on the shoulders on someone, so to any public health official that has suggested anyone not wear a mask, how about them taking a visit to those suffering in the hospitals due to their not wearing a mask.
And this anti-malaria drug, it appears to be showing more promise every day. What are the chances it'd be getting this much attention had Trump not decided to make it his cause.
https://bylinetimes.com/2020/03/23/covid-19-special-investigation-part-two-government-documents-reveal-concern-for-economic-and-business-impacts-prevented-early-action/
https://bylinetimes.com/2020/03/31/behind-closed-doors-johnson-and-his-cabinet-do-not-applaud-the-nhs-they-ideologically-oppose-it/?fbclid=IwAR0Ya1alIzgZVvYJ0NYnxNT5MkbVn4Qh2EM-1PxAof7F3NyiGA77F04IihU
Not at all happy with that either. Needs to be investigated.
I think you got that quote slightly wrong. The usual sentiment that I see has a conjunction, not a dysjunction.
Behind every scheme there is an authority.
Perhaps NOS4A2 hope is now that Sweden is successful in it's permissive stance in order to get herd immunity. But then again, this policy has authorities and their schemes behind it too. Above all, it has NOTHING to do with political ideology:
It may be they trust the population to implement social distancing themselves to a degree effective enough to flatten the curve, which seems not unfounded.
"Although schools are open, many parents are keeping their children at home. Many Stockholm-based companies made an early decision to close offices and move to homeworking. And those who could afford it went to a self-isolation in their houses in the countryside."
But it's a very risky strategy.
"The number is very similar to the infection rate in Norway, yet twice as many people live in Sweden. While the infection numbers are difficult to compare, the difference in death rate is more clear-cut. By 1 April 230 people with coronavirus have died in Sweden. In Norway, that number stands at 44."
"...members of Sweden’s scientific and medical community are already feeling panic. A petition signed by more than 2,000 doctors, scientists, and professors last week, including the chairman of the Nobel Foundation, Prof Carl-Henrik Heldin, called on the government to introduce more stringent containment measures. “They are leading us to catastrophe"."
https://europost.eu/en/a/view/who-will-finally-get-right-sweden-or-the-rest-of-the-world-27874
I hope we at least get it right next time. Because it will happen again.
It's hard to predict what the next mutant virus will do.
The lock down option is basically just to flatten the curve. Not to have that overflow of patients in the hospital and put the doctors into the worst spot to choose priorities. And then use this time to ramp up the defenses, get all that needed material and hospital beds and personnel ready to counter the possible next wave.
Quoting Baden
It really is. The effectiveness of Herd Immunity will basically be seen once the pandemic is over. The results of lockdown will basically start to be noticed in few weeks. Containment with large scale testing would be the optimal policy, but that option has been lost nearly everywhere. The difference may simply become too big and the public outcry for tougher measures might force political leaders to change the strategy.
Quoting Evil
That's the American spirit.
No really, when you start to think about this issue as really as an enemy which kills Americans and you can either fight it or surrender, then people will get the right attitude about this.
On this matter I think according to principle rather than political ideology. The authoritarian measures have been taken by governments spanning the entire political spectrum. So perhaps you’re projecting a little bit.
The regimes abusing the pandemic to centralize power and implement authoritarian measures are either already dictatorships or populist administrations, usually so-called anti-elitists, like Orbán of Hungary and Bolsonaro of Brazil.
At least the Trump administration is quite honest about the situation. Pence admitted that there estimates forecast that the situation will be as dire as in Italy. That's the starting point. Honesty is a good thing these times.
Ah, my mistake!
Yep. Herd immunity, here we come!!!
This is not a war. It is a pandemic, more analogous to a natural disaster, a plague. The coming economic collapse, and the reason many of us will be without work and homeless within a year, is entirely man made.
I've said it from the start of this pandemic: in this Century (or Millennium) people aren't willing to have epidemic diseases ravage through our population as in the old times. They aren't taken as a given.
[I]This[/i] is the creeping authoritarianism people need to look out for.
I think it’s simply untrue that people would have done nothing, as if there was no virus ripping through the population. Only a population that has been trained to await the orders of its masters would do nothing in the absence of their guidance.
The Great Recession a decade ago was entirely man made. You lived through that. If this downturn is similar in severity, would you prefer the death of 1.25 - 2 million Americans in order to avoid it? White House estimates show 100 - 240k deaths with social distancing and 1.5 - 2.2 million without.
This of course assumes that the economy would somehow not be effected by the pandemic if it were somehow ignored, and also that no one would adopt social distancing without direction.
How many of those in NY? I think it is bit misleading to gather data from country that covers a whole continent with vastly different areas int one number. It is a bit like citing fatalities from "Europe" or "Asia".
Our leaders don't need to be geniuses with time machines. They simply need to observe what is happening in the world around them (or listen to experts that do) and take every precaution when it comes to systemic, asymmetric risk. If it turns out that they were overly cautious, then so be it. At least we survived and we should be happy to pay the insurance premium for that. But if they were not cautious enough, then millions of people can end up dying as a result of their actions.
Note that pandemics have happened before and they will happen again, even if the timing and severity are unpredictable. That requires vigilance and preparation. I think it's fair to hold our leaders and government bodies accountable to that standard.
And their hosts I suppose? Now that would be Evil!
Any boundary is arbitrary. Using the arbitrary boundaries known as "Europe" or "Asia" and citing the relevant statistics is as valid as using any other, except in the cases where studying the effects of governance or jurisdiction is desired.
If you really believe that, you should simply use the world figure and stop discussing the differences that living condition, climate, government action, etc. make. Do you?
As opposed to what? Socialism?
It’s a stupid and bad faith argument because it is not about preferring death to recession. That’s a false dilemma. The argument is that we do not need to tank the economy and suppress basic liberties to teach people wash their hands, to sneeze into their sleeves, to self-quarantine, or to physically distance themselves from others.
As opposed to what? Socialism?
What about a society where socialist parasites don't fuck workers at every opportunity and especially during crises? Because that is the predictable outcome if you hand over the right to make decisions to a group of self-declared leaders of the masses.
Err? I am not arguing over phantasies, you are. My observation about socialism is what has happened in every single case in real life.
No, you are.
But this childish tit-for-tat is pointless.
If you can show a functioning example of socialism, I will respond. Otherwise, bye.
"The difficulties experienced by national populists are unsurprising given they are no friends of the issues at the heart of this crisis: health, welfare and science. On the health front, the crisis reveals the folly of decades of underfunding and privatisation of the health system. Trump, Johnson and Salvini have embarrassing questions to answer in regard to their record as enemies of public healthcare. Furthermore, the crisis calls for a sea change in economic policy that is at odds with the ideological premises of national populism, which combines chauvinism on the cultural front and ultra-neoliberal policies on the economic front.
The glaring need for state protection of strategic national industries, starting with health equipment and pharmaceuticals, is no anathema for national-populists who have already embraced trade protectionism. But the populist right has strongly opposed welfare measures that are becoming a matter of necessity to avoid social catastrophe. Having repeatedly branded these policies as “dangerous” and “anti-patriotic”, these politicians find themselves in the embarrassing situation of having to espouse them.
...If the coronavirus crisis has momentarily disoriented the populist right, this does not mean it is vanquished. It would be misguided for the left to believe that this crisis will work out in its favour. ... The authoritarian measures implemented on Monday by Viktor Orbán in Hungary, with the suspension of parliament and the introduction of government by decree, may be the shape of things to come. In Italy, Salvini had no qualms about applauding Orbán’s move. We are also likely to see an exacerbation of anti-Chinese rhetoric. Trump made no apologies for calling Covid-19 “the Chinese virus”, while Steve Bannon argued that Covid-19 is a “Chinese Communist Party virus”. Salvini has proposed that “if the Chinese government knew [about the virus] and didn’t tell it publicly, it committed a crime against humanity”, and allies in Brazil and Spain are adopting a similar line.
Given the ties among national-populists, including their botched attempt to establish a “nationalist international” under the auspices of Bannon’s Movement, this synchrony should not be taken as accidental. It has all the look of a coordinated strategy to channel the rage and despair caused by the crisis’s brutal human and economic toll towards a racial and ideological enemy conveniently identified in the Chinese government. Along with self-proclaimed socialists, all opponents are likely to be smeared as “Chinese collaborationists”: centrist US presidential candidate Joe Biden has already been termed “China’s choice for president” by the conservative National Review."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/01/populist-right-coronavirus
---
The above has already been disseminating into the public. In the Australian context:
"The “don’t come” signs popping up in regional towns are a sign of it, and this week’s alarmist language from federal agriculture minister David Littleproud, who called caravans the “cruise ships of the outback”, doesn’t help. The crackdown on Bondi backpackers is part of it, too. As is rising racial abuse, which Victorian premier Daniel Andrews today called out, tweeting: “A health crisis is not an excuse to be racist. We’ve seen some disgusting behaviour directed towards Asian-Australians over the past few months. And it’s getting worse.” Rising Sinophobia is also part of it, and the prime minister was on thin ice with 2GB’s Alan Jones this morning, agreeing furiously about the health threat from Chinese wet markets."
https://www.themonthly.com.au/today/paddy-manning/2020/03/2020/1585889237/corona-phobia
--
Precepts for action: continue to embarrass the right (and the centre), and continue to radicalise all those for whom COVID has exposed the utter morbidity of the current system and its (cheer)leaders.
Yes, capitalist. Singapore residents can make their own economic decisions. Of course, there is no 100 percent "pure" capitalism anywhere and has never been. However, 100 percent pure socialsm we have seen. In Cambodia, cultural revolution China and North Korea.
That's 19 of February. They've been giving it since then at least in the Netherlands and it's been given attention in China, Japan and South Korea. Trump may have sped up the process to allow testing in the USA though.
Second, given it's widespread use in other countries and the fact people are still dying en masse, don't confuse this with the miracle cure Trump suggests it is.
So one might expect that socialism would make it worse, and individualism would make it better. But the opposite seems to be the case. My suspicion is that individualism and libertarianism are not what it says on the tin, that they are merely anti-socialism which is as social as socialism, but more disorganised and unpleasant - like a Mafia is a disorganised and unpleasant government..
One thing has become apparent; that lack of trust makes it harder to make the social arrangements that are necessary to control things. We know that with proper self-isolation backed up with proper protective equipment and testing, the virus can be stopped completely. But governments are still lying and no one believes what they say, and will therefore not cooperate. And individuals can do nothing...
I beg to differ.
Lock says that the solution to the tragedy of the commons is to allow individuals to take over the property rights of a resource, that is, to privatize it. John Locke, "Sect. 27" and following sections in Second Treatise of Government (1690).
"The epidemic overturns the cliché that if I love my fellow men or women I should hug them, kiss them or stick to them like sardines … Today I display my love for the other by keeping her or him at a distance. This is the paradox that collapses all the lazy ideological frameworks (ideological not in the Marxist sense) of the left and right, not to mention of the populists.
The edifying propaganda of some politicians and the media appeals to our selfishness as well as to our altruism: “If you avoid others, you are protecting them, but yourself too.” Now, very often this is by no means true. It is now common knowledge that young people can be infected like everyone else but that it’s quite rare for them to fall ill; it’s also common knowledge that this pandemic is a geronticide,that those really at risk are the over 65s.
A young friend of mine keeps me at a distance of at least three meters and smiles. I very much appreciate this non-gesture of his, because I know that it is mainly he who is trying to protect me; because I’m old. It’s true that he’s also protecting the elderly in his own family: his father, his mother… But in any case I’m grateful to him. The more the others keep at a distance from me, the closer I feel to them.
...In recent days I came across several people who did not respect this secure distance and didn’t even wear gloves or face masks; and they expressed their scepticism on the gravity of the disease… I could gather from their arguments that they were basically cynical and ultimately antisocial individuals. Today the sociable avoid society."
[Url=http://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/coronavirus-and-philosophers/] Sergio Benvenuto - Forget about Agamben[/url]
And the response is these kind of things that you feel are authoritarian. Society simply doesn't work the way that somehow without any coordination each individual just comes to the conclusion that voluntarily social distancing is necessary.
Land is separate issue, especially in a tiny city state like Singapore. Doesnt the US also have huge areas of publicly (i.e. government) owned land?
You are correct that this isn't an anathema for the right wing and not every right-wing populist party has a problem with this. It's only the populist who read eagerly Ayn Rand and believe in libertarianism that think this way. But even they can change their views.
For example, in my country the populist True Finns-party demanded alongside the conservative party (both parties in the opposition) that the Socialist-Centrist administration would impose a lock down immediately as the pandemic was breaking out. The administration first hesitated, but then agreed with the opposition and implemented this and the lock down came days before the first victim of the pandemic died in the country. Then, to the amazement to our young Prime minister, the opposition was satisfied and started to support the administrations actions. The opposition even withdrew an interpellation they had made earlier as it was deemed to be a distraction in the fight against the pandemic. Very few times in our history the ruling parties and the opposition has found an agreement what to do. This naturally this boosted the popularity of an otherwise wavering administration which was earlier floundering from one political crisis to another, but at least I'm happy that political parties can sometimes put aside the struggle for power and work together. Which isn't the case in all countries.
To prevent a pandemic will be an easy thing to accept as a collective measure. After all, armed defense of the country is widely accepted as a collective measure by otherwise libertarian people, who are against socialism. It's not difficult to reason that actions that prevent death on a large scale
Who is going to choose the next US president, China or Russia? Sad, but let those two fight it out amongst themselves.
The vast majority do survive COVID-19, so that was never the issue. You're kind of talking to yourself here, which is normal. We're all inhabiting and animating myths in the face of the unknown. It's how we deal with the stress of that when sickness and death have been raised up.
In the old days, people would have sacrificed animals or walked through the streets beating themselves with barbed whips trying to control it all. But the trick of mythology is that people don't recognize it as fiction. They think its science, and it is in a way.
And so I talk to myself also, living out my own myth.
Quoting Andrew M
And this makes absolutely no sense to me. We're in the middle of a pandemic and we're trying to figure out what works and what doesn't. How on earth could politicians have been ahead of the game without time machines?
No. We prepare for what we know and understand. We leave the unknown alone until we get to it.
We live in a world where Trump is elected POTUS, and this in the midst of things that Streetlight is pointing out. To me that’s a strong indication that socialism would fail miserably in the US.
Do you honestly think that the economy won’t tank regardless of what the government does? Or that people would adequately social distance themselves without coercion?
Corona has shown what a house of cards the “entirety man made” economy is.
They are authoritarian, and no amount of euphemism can disguise that. Ordering people under de facto house arrest, checkpoints, curfews, fining people if they get too close to one another, locking down the people and the economy, is not “coordination”.
Let me ask. Would you physically distance yourself from others if there was no authority to force you to do so?
Do you need to be coerced to practice physical distancing?
The virus has exposed how inadequate most governments are: their preparedness, their healthcare systems, the ease with which they turn to tyranny.
Except that anyone who knew anything about disease had been warning that this or something like it would happen. In the US, the government's own reserve stockpile of PPE - which Bush2 had begun to set up in 2005 - was at 1% of what the targets that the government itself had set. This idea that this was some 'unknowable' event that governments needed 'time machines' to predict is reality-unbound trash made to defend the indefensible. Not only did the relevant people know and understand, there were plans in place to react to this. Moreover, anyone with a pulse understood just how shit the US healthcare system is and remains, a topic so prominent that's it's the debate of the democratic primaries, not to mention household knowledge that makes the US a laughing stock of the world. The idea that 'no one could have seen this coming without a time machine' is so stupid and belied by facts at every turn that anyone arguing it has zero credibility.
Wrong question. Do most Americans need to be coerced? I think they do. In any case, you’re not taking power dynamics into account. For instance, if someone refuses to work in unsafe conditions due to the virus, is it okay to fire them?
I was ‘coerced’ to participate in jury duty this month. What if they didn’t cancel it?
You can whine all you want about how evil governments are and dream about an utopia, but the actions taken now are quite normal when pandemics hit.
(Even they had to be quarantined. Just in case at the first time...)
I’m not doubting the effectiveness—Chinese authorities welding the doors of apartment buildings so residents couldn’t leave was effective; shipping the ill to a coronavirus colony would be effective—what I’m doubting are the ethics and proportionality of such measures.
That didn't happen. The disdain of Chinese authorities for human rights is well known. The propensity of the West to focus on Donald Trump rather than the crimes of the Chinese government (even to the point of approving of Chinese methods), is on display. There's really no need to distort the facts.
It makes me wonder how things would go if Trump were re-elected into a depressed economy in 2020. I understand that Democrats are often elected in bad economies because they employ effective methods like Keynesian economics. This worked out for Obama, for instance. So maybe the Trump administration simply isn’t equipped to deal. Lowering taxes for the wealthy further, if that’s even possible, and slashing away more vigorously at regulations and entitlements won’t work, I understand.
From your link: “ Police have welded doors shut in order to monitor who enters and leaves buildings.”
Ah yes, one of the leaders that Trump likes.
Yes, very effective. Perhaps effectiveness isn’t the best principle to be utilizing here.
But some people like "strong" leaders.
Yep. You can tell that Americans have a lot of respect for the Chinese, thus Trump's attacks. He believes China is what the US once was. The racism is just coming from a need to be underhanded.
Russia? No respect. They're too weak and economically crippled to be worthy of respect (per American mythology).
Racism? China is a country, not a race. In fact it’s racist to imply otherwise, and such a charge is an underhanded political ploy to absolve a totalitarian regime of guilt.
No shit.
So, your theory is there is a conspiracy to insist China is a race not a country in order that people don't believe the CCP is guilty of... something. Please explain how that works and what evidence you have to support the assertion. Also, who do you suspect is involved and what do they have to gain by helping the CCP in this way?
I also tried to explain that to nobeer by PM before he self-imploded.
If the Chinese are not a race, how can it be racist to criticize the Chinese response to this pandemic?
I said the charge of racism for criticizing the Chinese response to the pandemic is used to suppress criticism of the Chinese. I say this because Chinese propaganda makes the same claim, and this from a country that puts ethnic minorities into concentration camps.
Fallacy of association.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy
You can turn off javascript in Chrome to get around the paywall.
tl;dr: We fucked up. Let's blame China.
Biological race is something different from how people use the term race.
So yes, your usage of the "Chinese virus" was a racist remark. And no, that's not a conspiracy but how the word had been used for a century now.
It's pure fabrication, let's say the Chinese shouted it from the rooftops right at the beginning, no administration in the west would have done anything to mitigate the pandemic. We know this because they had the opportunity to halt its spread after the Chinese did alert the world and they didn't take it. If they had grounded all flights at the beginning it could have been stopped. But they were caught napping, just as they would have been if the Chinese hadn't tried to cover it up.
Trump spent about a third of February playing golf, a third at Mar a Lago, and the other third giving rallies. Yet it's the Chinese and the Dems' fault he couldn't figure out that COVID was a threat. Sounds like the Republican governor of Georgia, who just discovered a few days ago that COVID is infectious before symptoms show and finally issued a stay at home order on that basis. Feckless, intellectually lazy, self-serving parasites.
No, using the adjective “Chinese” is not racist by any stretch of the imagination, save for perhaps in the pliable brains of the politically correct. Your European (oops, racist) double-speak doesn’t translate well over here.
So you are a mystic after all ;)
There is a popular myth in the UK, that the EU is the enemy, that Britain is great and that we must take back control immediately whatever the cost. Indeed the team assembled to fight for the leave vote during the EU referendum in 2016, namely, Vote Leave, is now in power in No10.
In fact this myth was so important that it was going to be worth the loss of a million or so people from Corona so that we could stay on track with Brexit and surge ahead with a strong economy. Hence the herd immunity debacle, which was the official UK policy at the beginning of March. Even now this myth is so strong that the government is still insisting that the UK will leave the EU come what may in December, after the transition period, even though there evidently won't be any reasonable opportunity for an amicable trade deal to be agreed during this period. So even now that we are going into a recession equal to the Great Depression, we are still going to jump of a cliff afterwards, because the EU is so bad.
The only reason why we are not continuing at full pace with unfettered heard immunity strategy is that the experts told the government that if the hospitals become overwhelmed the death toll would be much higher than if measures were taken to reduce the peak. Something which they couldn't live down when it became exposed in the media.
Fortunately they have finally woken up to reality, Dominic Cummings has run away and they are beginning to knuckle down to dealing with a serious crisis.
Myths are powerful indeed.
Uh oh, Benkei has run out of arguments again. Surprise surprise.
You’ve said that before, abruptly left debates, then kept coming back for more. Hilarious.
I don't think that the reason had anything to do with Brexit. Besides, I think Johnson hasn't been a similar early denier like Trump was on this issue. If you've followed the discussion here we've talked about the similar policy that Sweden is still following on herd immunity option. They aren't leaving the EU.
Quoting Punshhh
It's quite obvious that the rising cases of infection and the death toll did scare the UK administration to change course. And the example of Italy is shown on the television. With a polarized political environment, it's would have been a very risky gamble.
Likely we would know the answer which is more better, lock down or trying to get a herd immunity with more lax approach (still with social distancing) only let's say in the summer. Assuming there would be still then a country still with a "let's keep the shop open, have lax rules and hope people follow social distancing guidelines" policy. I think that the lock down option is better, but then again this pandemic could go on for a year and a lock down isn't so great for one year.
We've got over the major hump though, which is convincing the vast majority of people that this is serious. And to the point where not taking it seriously is likely to result in pariah status, i.e. we've got a "trained" public. That leaves open the possibility of a weaning off lockdown on a shorter timescale as long as we've got proper systems in place, such as an ongoing publicized option of a return to lockdown at a given threat marker, married with mandatory masks, widespread test and track, constant public awareness campaigns on effective social distancing techniques etc. And governments should be preparing this strategy now or, yes, we could find ourselves still stuck in limbo in a few months and with no good options going forward.
Plus I admit to not totally grasping the Brexit stuff.
The Chinese government is to blame for the pandemic. https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/chinas-devastating-lies/
Quoting Baden
It's all bullshit from top to bottom. The CDC announces today you should wear a cloth over your face when you go to the grocery store because they just realized (1) any sort of mask helps and (2) they didn't realize how the disease could spread among the asymptomatic until now. Total bullshit. They just wanted to save masks for doctors and their secret is out, so they about face in this.
And this isn't just an American thing. No European country wears masks and WHO said they did no good.
At the end of this this, we'll realize that a box of masks and a pair of goggles was all we ever needed. You can't get it any way except through your eyes, mouth, and nose. Incompetence from the CDC to WHO from the US to all of Europe.
My takeaway isn't greater reliance on government, but outright distrust either due to their arrogance, incompetence, or malice, but whatever their motive, total distrust. I actually trust Trump's hunches and wild accusations more than the calm deliberative bullshit I hear from the "experts."
Don't be an idiot. "Racism" is a term used to denote cultural chauvinism. The biological notion of 'race' is totally irrelevant in that context.
Uh huh, and you keep those on twenty four hours a day, seven days a week until there's no more infected people in the world?
Correct. The actual issue is that when faced with a risk where the downside is large (or should I say yuuuge - in this case, millions of lives lost), we should not take that risk. We also should not try to tread a narrow path on the edge of the precipice, as many countries are doing. We should instead err on the side of extreme caution.
Quoting frank
We know what works as China, South Korea and other countries have demonstrated in their different ways. Eliminate the paths of transmission to prevent the virus from spreading.
The president has one job. To make that message crystal clear to Americans. Then it is up to the American people to collectively act on that message until the virus has been brought under control.
Quoting frank
By our myths, philosophy is revealed to be not just a game, but a matter of life and death.
There is much that is unknown. But there is also such a thing as reality, the growth of knowledge and the ability for people to act locally and make a difference. In this case, extreme social distancing. Our local choices have global consequences.
Questionable. The article you quoted doesn't support that unqualified assertion if you mean the extent of the pandemic: E.g:
"Clearly, the U.S. government’s response to this threat was not nearly robust enough, and not enacted anywhere near quickly enough."
But maybe there didn't need to be a pandemic at all. We'll find out more as things progress. It does certainly support the assertion that the CCP are culpable as they did what Trump did, i.e., tried to downplay the seriousness of the situation. Only it seems in a much more sophisticated and coordinated way, which is typical of them. In any case, my assertion was that China was not to blame for Trump downplaying things. And as the CCP cat was out of the bag by Jan 23rd when Wuhan was quarantined, but Trump continued to assert everything was just fine right through into February, that's obvious.
I won't argue with you that the CCP is a pernicious, dangerous, dishonest, and murderous actor nor will I argue with you that the CDC and WHO fucked things up and very possibly deliberately lied over masks, but it would be just silly to disregard expert opinions and data altogether because of this. Just apply critical thinking. Trump's position changes with the direction of his farts. You can't rely on that for anything.
Just while in public.
Some good data here.
https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections
Well, governments should do that, but likely they are just coping with keeping up the health care system now on a day-to-day and fearing how bad it will be until the curve flattens, if they aren't Taiwan, Singapore or South Korea. Thinking about months ahead might be difficult.
But Americans can feel assured everything is going to be just fine because Jared Kushner is involved and is giving advice to Trump. Trump's go-to-man get things done like the Middle East peace process, remember? Jared handled so that so well. Now to organize a response to a pandemic:
Yes, Jared solved the Middle East with one wave of his over-inflated ego, so this should be a piece of cake for him. :lol:
The Italians have had more deaths so let's call it the Italian Virus. When us Americans have more dead, we can call it the American Virus.
Not many people do, well except the people who still want it to happen, but they've got their heads firmly stuck down some rabbit hole somewhere.
Traditionally viruses have been named after where they come from—west Nile virus, MERS, Zika virus, Spanish flu, Hong Kong flu, Asian flu, Russian flu, Ebola virus. But I won’t be using that nomenclature to describe this virus because it appears some people have difficulty differentiating between the origin of the virus and the people living there.
Florida Pastor Arrested After Defying Virus Orders
Patricia Mazzei; The New York Times; Mar 2020
Dumbasses (pardon my French).
Meanwhile, India has run into problems related to resources, logistics and such:
Hungry, desperate: India virus controls trap its migrant workers
Tish Sanghera; Al Jazeera; Apr 2020
Organizing stoppage of the virus isn't easy.
Hopefully COVID-19 can work as an exercise to learn from.
Second, the Mexican flu is also racist, it's called the swine flu.
Third, Zika, West Nile, Hong Kong, Middle-East don't refer to ethnicities.
The Spanish flu didn't originate in Spain.
Russian flu is from before the term racism originated.
So that leaves Asian flu in a time when we had apartheid in South Africa and Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of a bus.
Based on the majority of those names the Wuhan virus would've been in keeping with naming usage.
But then, this flu already had a name (as did the swine flu) and this attempt at rebranding is indeed racist and politically motivated to divert attention and shift blame.
On the surface Johnson sounded rational at the beginning, although there is no denying his response was quite low key, for a long time flights were not restricted, passengers weren't checked, the only message was if you have arrived from an infected area, or you have flu like symptoms, make your way home (while interacting freely with the population) and stay there for a week. Followed by a week of saying wash your hands, wash your hands, oh and masks are ineffective.
All quite benign stuff, a balanced moderate approach. But look beneath the surface, the new government which was elected with an 80 seat majority in December literally was the Vote Leave campaign team. The group who hoodwinked the public into voting to leave by claiming there would be hoards of Eastern Europeans and Turks flooding into the country, as Turkey was supposedly about to join. That the migrants already here were the cause of the crisis in our struggling public services, forcing house prices up due to a housing shortage and pushing wages down. The team which masterminded a blizzard of biased and false social media posts, adverts and targeted messages during the last few days before the vote in 2016.
These were the people who had just got their feet around the table in Downing Street as the virus emerged. They were poised to have an almighty row with the EU during the negotiations and make an all out assault on the British constitution to remake it in the image of some Machiavellian fantasy of Dominic Cummings. Cummings had spent 30 years as a radical anti EU campaigner to get to this position. It was the crowning glory of his carrier and just as he reached his goal rumours started spreading about some new virus on the other side of the planet.
It kept getting in the way and the government tried to ignore it to begin with like the spectre at the feast, it warned of global pandemics and social an economic collapse. They had to stay focussed on their modus operandi, to talk the economy(which was struggling) into a good place, to spread the optimism of "make Britain Great again", to negotiate tirelessly and win a great new trade deal with the EU in just a few months. To pull us through a teetering crisis, which the Brexit debacle had become. A Herculean feat.
This was what was going on under the surface when the government adopted its moderate response to the pending outbreak of the virus. Their first concern was to keep the economy on track, so everyone would carry on as normal while we would prepare for heard immunity, which would naturally minimise the impact of the virus in the country. Then the theatened pandemic chaos would go away and they could keep to their Brexit course. If they took hard measures to keep out the virus from the beginning, they risked crashing their whole modus operandi and the economy at the first hurdle. The government would collapse, Brexit would be lost and socialists would get their hands on No10. A total political disaster right at the beginning of Johnson's term in office. He would become a national laughing stock and the privelidged classes would face the wrath of a socialist government.
It was certainly a small price to pay, to lose a few hundred thousand of the countries most vulnerable and old people to preserve all this. Indeed, if all the old people die it would help the Brexit utopia by eliminating the pending social care funding crisis.
Why would'nt Johnson follow the kind of draconian lockdown adopted by countries like China and South Korea?
https://www.ft.com/content/c4155982-3b8b-4a26-887d-169db6fe4244?shareType=nongift&fbclid=IwAR1EOiZDX_SK-tXIbcfgcbnrH6kTUJ_xw4tYVzexg888Itdhk5bBxJxMx9o
Because you are aiming at a genocide of the elderly and disabled, obviously.
You won't be using that nomenclature because it is not the name of the virus and a politically motivated xenophobic rebranding is not allowed here. Full stop. Future whining about this will be deleted.
Centrists and the right now: China deceived us and caused us to die!
These are a much nicer set of flip flops:
Yeah, consider this the trial run (only a few million lives at stake, a small percentage), the drill, getting us prepared for when germ warfare really kicks in. Genetic manipulation is a scary thing. And, there are people who think that to kill everyone, and have the world to oneself (king of the world, ruler of no one), would be a great thing.
Here I think there is a very good answer to this, as is for why Italy, Spain, France and yes, the UK also, didn't go the way of South Korea, Taiwan or Singapore:
The Asian countries were hit by SARS in 2003, South Korea was the second worst hit country after Saudi-Arabia by the 2015 MERS outbreak. The UK had no deaths from these epidemics. Hence European countries thought they had it under control. The Far East Asian countries had felt the impact of epidemics and had learned their lesson. Just look at the statistics.
SARS (2002-2003) deaths by country:
Taiwan: 84 (671 cases)
South Korea:0 (4 cases)
Singapore: 32 (206)
Italy: 0 (with 4 cases)
Spain: 0 (with 1 case)
UK: 0 (with 4 cases)
The Swine flu was a bit different, but notice it didn't ring so much the alarm bells.
2009 Swine flu (H1N1/09) pandemic:
Taiwan: 35
South Korea: 170
Singapore:19
Italy: 178
Spain: 232
Uk: 457
(In the US the SARS epidemic killed nobody and 2009 H1N1 epidemic 12 469 people.)
The UK thought it could handle these situations well. There was a lot of this attitude that we in Europe and the US are well prepared. A Daily Mail article from October 25th 2019, few weeks before this pandemic started in Wuhan, wrote the following about the UK and pandemics:
See article, worth reading now: A deadly pandemic could sweep the world in hours and kill millions because NO country is fully prepared, report claims
Has the UK known that a pandemic is a threat? Of course! Just to give an example (from likely a multitude of various papers and recommendations), in 2008 a parliamentary committee released
this report which estimated that 75,000 Britons will in die in an inevitable flu pandemic that could kill as many as 50 million people worldwide,. From that report:
And furthermore:
That was 12 years ago. During the Brown administration. The information has been there and here one shouldn't look at an specific administration or an individual Prime Minister, but the establishment of your country as a whole. There was no wake up call as had been with Singapore, South Korea or Taiwan with SARS. To have a slow response can have more things to do with a slow response from the government medical sector than the political leadership. So if you argue that Boris Johnson was slow to react because of Brexit or for ideological reasons, then there clearly should be an obvious mismatch between the medical professionals who's job this is and the political leadership. This is totally obvious in the Trump case, but I'm not so sure with Johnson. And of course, the conservative party has been ruling the UK for ages, hence this wasn't like they were incompetent because they were new to running a government.
I remember talking to pulmonologists who were genuinely confused by China's reaction to this virus. It wasnt until Italy that we all started taking it seriously. I do think a lack of familiarity with a significant pandemic was part of that early confusion.
Thanks for being a sane voice. :up:
Jesus Christ!
Did anyone take the time to show an iota of empathy or extend some kind of compassion to what unenlightened just said?
Fer fucks sake, we are ALL in this together and I pray we all make it through this.
Until then grab some grace for what others are going through before fingers are pointed.
I think there has been many sane voices here, as usually there are on a Philosophy Forum.
I myself didn't think this was going to be a big issue exactly because of the SARS, MERS, H1N1 outbreak etc. and the outcome of these outbreaks. Let's remember that WHO was at first against drastic measures at first and only later declared this a pandemic.
And this is what we have to remember with the slow reaction of the West. In hindsight we may have this urge to paint the leaders to be blind fools walking directly to the fire without doing anything and being blissfully ignorant about the possibility and the dangers of a pandemic. This is just how history is written. Any warnings before about a pandemic, which has been a topic of discussion for decades, is going to be seen as this event that was missed. What is evident is that there is going to be a divide between pre-pandemic and post-pandemic era. Just like we think the people of the era pre-1914 to be naive and we have a different viewpoint post WW1 and WW2. What I've said doesn't mean that really wrong decision can have been made, but a bit of slack can be given here.
What I just cannot understand why US President's have not prepared for these emergencies: hurricanes, earthquakes and pandemics with a OPPLAN as the military does for war. These events do come, the administration is judged by it's performance and even in the libertarian US there is a consensus that it's the government's role to react to natural disasters, pandemics and war. Having a gameplan before would make any government be far more responsive and smart.
Deaths rising 12% and the rate of infections rising also quickly. Sweden is leading the Nordic countries in infections and deaths by any measure.
I have my paranoid suspicions; but, it doesn't really make sense that all developed nations got this disease.
The guy who wanted to quit immediately when Katrina happened and was replaced by a general? Yes.
Quoting tim wood
Some people want a smaller government! What would be a better place to save and make the government smaller than cutting spending on preparations against something that hasn't happened?
But oh well, UNFORTUNATELY all those drastic cuts that Trump wanted to make on the CDC, those wily bureaucrats wiggled their way to keep funding for their stupid unnecessary prevention programs etc. But if Trump would have had his way, the US would have been in a far worse situation now...
One could say he had foreknowledge on the issue...?
Really doesn't make sense that Italy got decimated and Pakistan, Russia, and India just entirely dodged the bullet here...
Call me paranoid, I don't care. I'm anxious and spastic as fuck.
Fine.
The response to disasters in the US is premised on the federalist system. The State and local governments own the assets to deal with disasters, each with their own laws, emergency services, hospitals and Emergency Operations Plans. Local and state governments are responsible for the response and preparedness in their jurisdictions. The federal government only offers support if/when they need it. They do this through FEMA.
The view is that the scientific advisors were groomed to bend a little towards the position that a lockdown, like in Wuhan, was not required because as we are all going to get the virus anyway in the long run and herd immunity was in the end going to be the natural way in which the virus would be defeated. You should imagine the scene where the head of public health and one or two scientific advisors are talked round by these right wing spin doctors, given the message that we can't risk a shock to the economy right now with the Brexit talks at a critical stage. Dominic Cummings was involved at that stage and the grooming narrative was probably very sophisticated. Plus his disposition of shouting and bullying people to fall in line.
As I said earlier, the main conduit for the virus coming into the country was air travel at this point and no restrictions at all were implemented, no checks, nothing, this went on for I think a couple of weeks. Until commentators politicians and the public were demanding action to reduce this influx and nothing was done by the government. Then the action taken was an advisory that anyone coming in from countries with many infections, or people with flu like symptoms, should look to stay at home for a week on their return. No checks, nothing. This was followed by the government putting out a plea for everyone to wash their hands frequently. Again no checks, no restrictions at airports. The policy right up to the partial lockdown was please wash your hands, nothing else.
I realise what you are saying about preparedness etc. I think the issue was lost in the attempts to recover from the subprime mortgage crash of 2008. The austerity hollowed out the health service, which became more and more strained until it is now on its knees in many respects.
I really need a benzo now.
Economic turmoil, depression and anxiety gonna be the new norm, suicide rates sky high. Mother of God.
The unpreparedness is a world-wide phenomenon. According to the Global Health Security index, "no country is fully prepared for epidemics or pandemics, and every country has important gaps to address". The US, however, was ranked first in preparedness out of 195 countries. So they do take it seriously.
2019.
Well, surely we'll get the truth from historical studies about the events. If there are articles directly saying this, it would be interesting to see.
Quoting Punshhh
To be fair, I think you would have to compare the response to other countries (like France, Germany, Netherlands etc.) to see if the UK response would really stand out from other countries. I don't think it would. You can see from other examples that especially in January governments around Europe were totally dismissive about the epidemic, in February few measures were taken and in March the whole thing started in earnest. If the lockdown came for UK the 23rd of March, for Germany that general lockdown came just one day earlier (Bavaria issued it on the 20th of March). Here we had it few days earlier and some Eastern European countries opted for a lockdown also rather early, but I guess the time difference is in days, not weeks.
https://www.ghsindex.org/country/united-states/
That is the interesting part here and that study you linked is informative. Especially now at hindsight. In overall ranking for example South Korea for was ranked far lower (9) and Singapore was 24th, below countries like Brazil!
-The US ranked in "preventing zoonotic diseases" 2nd while South Korea was 23rd and Singapore 53rd
-The US ranked in "real time surveillance and reporting" 7th while South Korea was 3rd and Singapore 57th.
-In the robustness of the health sector to handle the sick the US ranked in capacity in clinics at 12th while here South Korea was 2nd and Singapore 15th.
Perhaps you should read a little more.
Some people will never look at evidence and see what is going on. I'm not sure if it is willful ignorance, a personality thing, and upbringing thing, or what. When someone is repeatedly shown to be inept as a leader, and people look the other way or don't acknowledge it, they are either not acting in good faith or can't admit their original pick was wrong. Most likely it is upbringing. Political persuasion is often strengthened by the family and social groups one was enculturated in while growing up. Either that or some piece of legislation affected someone in such a way as to waiver little with the party that enacted it.
I’m of the opposite opinion. Because of the federalist system, any blaming of the federal response is misguided at best, political at worst. Since each state and local government are responsible for their emergency response, each local and state government have at least a large share of the blame in how they react to this crisis.
This is why when Trump mentioned that they were considering quarantining New York, Cuomo said it would be a federal declaration of war, and he’s right. New York is out of the jurisdiction of the federal government, and as such, so is its response to the crisis. So if you want to look for people to blame, look no further than state and municipal governments.
IOW, the US would have to privatize crisis response in order to match what SK did.
Quoting frank
I'm not so sure about that. Did you have to privatize the armed forces when you were caught with your pants down in Pearl Harbour and the Japanese took the Phillipines so quickly from you? People in the government can do a great job if only they are lead to do so and are given the resources.
This is a strawman to the real point here- how much should the federal government do to help states? In general, why not have more money to help those more needy? I think the Civil War, the Great Depression, WWII, and the like has shown that when a crisis occurs, people would rather have help from a federal level than not. People who need help don't give a shit what level of government the money is coming from. Someone dying of a conditions from a natural disaster or a pandemic isn't going to be like "Oh no, don't help me, I'm a states righter, and I don't take no darn tootin' federal handouts!".
It took the USA two years to ramp up to effectiveness for WW2. That's not very agile.
With less technology and the government wasn't fully committed to the war until December 1941.
That's false.. there were battles in the Pacific in early 42.
Critical thinking is generally suspended when one is required to appeal to authority. But since we're all limited in our expertise, we must defer in certain matters. How do we decide who to defer to? We are forced to assess credibility, which requires us not only to look to credentials, but to look at bias, ulterior motive, political agenda, prior acts of honesty or dishonesty, etc. So, based on this, I reject what they say for now on. Fool me once...
Starting from a far smaller military than Belgium, that's quite a thing to do. And once it started going there was no stopping. I guess that the Soviet Union could only produce a similar amount of tanks, but that was about it, all other vehicles the US assistance was important. And the Soviet economy had been in a war footing since, well, the birth of the Soviet Union.
Quoting schopenhauer1
(There was also Operation Torch in Northern Africa. And in two years from Pearl Harbour the US was already fighting in mainland Italy.)
So there is a way, if there's the will. So I guess with some effort the US could have an even better system than now.
But wouldn't it require something like a depression to break the current power structure?
I've been looking into the mask thing. I think the motivations for the official slipperiness on it were probably something like the following:
1) A lack of masks
2) A lack of experience with masks in western countries leading to:
a) Incorrect usage
b) Resistance to compliance for cultural reasons
3) 1) and 2) leading to not enough people wearing them and wearing them properly to be effective enough to offset 4) =
4) A false sense of security that might detract from effecting other more reliable measures, such as proper social distancing/handwashing behaviours etc.
5) 3) and 4) making it more difficult for the government to know if any of this was working before it was too late.
6) A desire to keep masks for health workers who know how to use them and will use them when necessary.
Communities are better able to serve their members than some distant authority by sheer proximity alone. The American revolution was founded on such a premise.
I guess this means that they're really bad at implementing their preparedness.
Quoting NOS4A2
Oh you sound like you're regurgitating Trump's nonsense. We're not giving any of the states any of the emergency supplies out of the federal stockpile, because this is federal supplies and none of the states have a right to any of it.
Quoting NOS4A2
Isn't that a great leader? All you States and municipalities fend for yourself, that's not my responsibility, I'm the leader of the nation, and this is not a national crisis, it's a local crisis. What a load of crap.
But anyway, they're now advocating mask use and there's been no change in the West's know how. We should therefore expect people to be putting them on their nuts or however else they might misuse therm.
Why would it? Besides, you alredy have that sharp dramatic downturn.
Prior to 9/11 in the US the security checks on domestic flights were nonexistent. It was a joke. I remember it well when I flew in the states. That changed. So if we are talking about a threat that may kill tens or hundreds of times more people, why think the power structure would have to change? What difficulty is there to understand that pandemics are a threat?
Shouldn't be a problem for the at least 10% of Americans that mistakenly wear their underwear on their face.
No rather, the American Revolution was mainly about representation in British Parliament. The interests of the states were not represented in Parliament in England, and therefore they were out of the decision-making process via Parliament's insistence on "virtual representation". Thus issues like the Royal Proclamation of 1763, Sugar and Stamp acts etc. disproportionately affected colonists without their consent. The British Parliament under the Prime Minister Grenville thought that the French-Indian war was on American soil, so they should have to pay the majority of the bill. The American colonists thought this was unfair, especially since they helped British standing army during that conflict. Anyways, we all know the story.
However, the federal government officials are elected democratically by the citizens of each state, and thus reflect the direct vote of the interests of the elected. With the federal government able to provide more money by pooling more resources from the various states, and with a crisis that is NATIONWIDE, why would you not invoke the full powers of the federal government? Who cares at what level the money is raised? The pool is much larger at a federal level than at a state level. Since the advent of technology, communication, and transportation, the concerns of localism has become much less over time since we are a globalized interdependent nation that depends much more on the different regions than in previous generations.
Sadly, most of what I've read on the situation in the UK today lends support to un's contentions, dramatic as they are. i.e. It's quite possible that Herd Immunity (which amounts to sacrificing the old and weak for the sake of the young and strong) was never really taken off the table, but is just being done more gradually.
Oh the idea is quite simple. In the interests of continually sucking on Trump's balls, devolution of blame must go to the states, despite them having generally done much more than the federal government in trying to ameliorate the effects of the virus. The utter incompetence of the federal government, no longer possible to deny without one coming off as a total miscreant, must instead be excused by shifting blame downwards. It's simply the new narrative that's at work right now, which NOS is dutifully relaying. The best example of this devolution of blame is the rewording of the National Strategic Stockpile website which overnight went from this:
To this:
After Jared Kushner - somehow in charge of the National response despite being a failure at any endeavour in life - fucked up his description of the stockpile on live TV. Anytime NOS says something stupid - which is all the time - you can be assured he is following a script, handed down from above that sits upon his open-mouthed face.
Yeah I'd have to agree with that assessment as far as I'm seeing.
Ask the EU how difficult a task that is. They are now balkanizing in contradiction to their open border agreements.
The US is invoking the full powers of the federal government—deploying FEMA, the military, the CDC, the FDA and signing the biggest bailout in history. They are pulling out all the stops, and far too much in my opinion.
It doesn't seem enough actually, and he's only sparingly done this. I've heard that he is distributing supplies to states based on how much they are sucking up to him. That is practically criminal to say the least. Too much in your opinion, doesn't mean shit when people are dying. If you think liberty is waiting by while people die, then that definition of liberty isn't worth it.
And I suppose zero criticism for those who are in charge of, and have jurisdiction over, their own emergency responses.
If you think liberty has anything to do with "waiting by while people die" then you deserve your chains.
No NOS, that's what I'm saying YOUR belief in what this administration (and apparently the limits of federalism in a crisis) amounts to.
The governors in most blue states actually seem to be doing the most they can.. can't say that much for the ones kissing up to Trump..
I can't comment much on the response by other European countries, however in the UK the government changed its response suddenly on the 23rd of March. This has been pointed out by commentators at the WHO and is a commonly held position by commentators now. Up to that point the policy was to allow the virus to spread and develop herd immunity, with a nod to slowing it a bit. Commentators have said that this change of course was due to the projected figures of deaths when the hospitals were overwhelmed being spelled out to the government. I heard someone saying that in London alone a million ventilators would have been needed in April where there were only 2 or 3 thousand ventilators in place.
This shocked the government into action, this is when Brexit fell of the table, which meant the influence of Cummings had been rejected and the UK finally got with the programme. Up until this point the virus was allowed to spread freely around London, Indeed I remarked on this on this thread at the time.
I hear you and Unenlightened, it is difficult to express compassion when you feel overwhelmed by events, I do feel it, but tend to focus on how events are unfolding.
The issue of carehomes has just started showing up on the radar today after deaths in a carehome in Scotland. This might blow up into a storm for the government, but I expect they are confident that most homes are infected now, so they won't have to come to the rescue, just claim that they tried, or blame it on a delay in ppe provision or something.
Not tested, and therefore not counted in the infection rates or the death rates. Old people don't count. When did you say that radical change of policy was again?
But they're really going to start testing health workers quite soon, as soon as possible, really quite a lot of them - maybe even 10 % a day, eventually, and then they might start testing carers, and then possibly providing them with PPE. - well some sort of mask anyway. Really, as soon as possible. Working their little socks off they are, even getting the queen to gee us up and remind us how we won the war.
:rofl: Always a popular political ritual, and hand wringing too. Roman origins I believe.
Sweden's administration is changing it's course, doesn't go anymore with the "lax restrictions & herd immunity" - policies, but wants go the same road as every other European country. Has to still get the changes passed in the parliament. So likely Swedes will have similar restrictions as everybody else.
So that didn't take much time, actually, roughly two weeks. But I guess they started to get afraid of the death rate compared to their neighbors.
Deaths in Nordic countries now:
Iceland: 4
Finland: 25
Norway: 62
Denmark: 161
Sweden: 373
Now the Swedes might be sorry about getting rid of their Strategic wartime/crisis materiel: Sweden either donated to other countries or simply threw away first-class equipment and kit of 50 field hospitals which included 630 ventilators.
They were probably archaic. The lungs of a COVID person become fragile. You need a good computer controlled vent to avoid doing more harm than good.
I wonder if the Swedes did modelling or just succumbed to pressure from hospitals.
States are in charge of public health. The federal govt. just assists. I guess FEMA would have to be given a new directive and increased authority.
So maybe part of the reason the US is sluggish is jurisdictional stuff.
In some countries saying coronavirus is illegal, how is the rate of disease in their country?
What?
Exactly.
Maybe I am the new Nostradamus! :yum:
From the same article :
The discussion is about the method of financing and what conditions to attach to any funds released above and beyond what the EU is already making available. The wealthier EU countries aren't against helping Spain and Italy in principle and they will help, it's a matter of how. This is why the "corona bond", eg. the much maligned euro sovereign backed bond is actually on the table as an option when a lot of countries had been against it before.
Meanwhile, goods and services are being shared; Germany is taking care of French, Dutch and Italian patients and now that the Dutch have it under control we will be able to take part of that burden as well in the near future.
Since they're sovereign states though, the comparison with the USA is totally irrelevant to begin with.
(A Swedish field hospital in Göteborg in 2018. They do still have some, which are now used in Stockholm and are waiting for patients.)
Quoting frank
Something that might likely happen. Or for example, Homeland Security takes a central role in this as the issue of handling a pandemic likely isn't just left to FEMA (which is already under the United States Department of Homeland Security).
At least you are very lucky in accurate timing. But :up:
Then I'm a believer. :wink:
Let's see, Trump started with blaming all the other countries, and foreigners, for America's problems, when he was first elected. Now he's blaming all the internal actors. states and municipalities. If things don't straighten themselves out quickly, America may never be great again. Oh, I almost forgot, he's supposed to be the leader of the country, and the one assigned with the task of straightening things out. Maybe his good buddy Putin will give some assistance. But Putin does nothing for nothing, and the actual cost would remain a secret.
We have to be careful when speaking about different nation strategies so that we don't just interpret good or bad based on a statistical number that doesn't really show the whole truth. It's easy in these times for people to just recite numbers or do their own interpretations of statistics, even not knowing themselves that they do.
We have to account for more factors, like that Sweden was almost a month earlier in their curve than the other Nordic countries, that we hade a large number coming back from a vacation week in northern Italy just as the breakout happened there, that we've had the unluck of spread within elder communities and homes, that our testing has been lower compared to other countries meaning the statistical percentage deaths against confirmed cases becomes higher than nations with higher testing numbers.
We will actually not know anything about which strategy is working best until all factors are accounted for in all nations after the crisis is over. It's dangerous to rule out or praise strategies in any direction when the statistical analyses are done by people without any knowledge of analyzing statistical data.
I see media outlets, people without education (at all or not in the area of expertise) all making their own interpretations of statistical data on a daily basis and it's one of the main reasons of spreading panic. One day we have a country doing great and then they're not and people are confused.
If we are to do something like calculating who's actually doing good and who's doing bad in this crisis, there has to be a much more rigorous and scientific approach to the data we have. Anything else risks spreading misinformation and chaos.
That’s a shame. I think that was the last hope for a less authoritarian, herd immunity approach.
Absolutely. We're lucky we can compare notes and depend on one another to give accurate data. For all the spit-balling, we're actually a pretty enlightened world.
Indeed. A very major factor is testing policy, and related hospitalising policy. If, like the UK, you make it a policy not to test people in care homes but only those in hospital, and also not to admit inmates of care homes to hospital, Your figures for both infection rate and death rate are going to look better than they are in reality. As long as tests are selective and rationed, figures are somewhat unreliable. They don't even want to test the hospital staff for fear of causing a panic...
Quoting Christoffer
I think we have to take the risks though, because we need to do things even if they are not all the best things. Doing nothing, I am sure has a bad statistical outcome. It looks like Germany is doing a rather good job, so if you haven't a better idea, let's do what we can of what they do.
I agree that action is still better than inaction. However, problems arise when the mass influences decision making and the mass form their base of knowledge on faulty analysis of statistical data, dramatized news media with simplified writing and the entirety of post-truth behavior around knowledge.
In times of crisis, we need philosopher-kings and not demagogues. Even if we don't know whether or not Sweden's approach to this crisis will pay off, both short and/or long term, I still find it refreshing that the government give the populistic populus the finger and let the experts and scientists show them the way. It's a rarity today when most politicians act as demagogues and the decisions are based on calming the populus rather than fighting the virus spread.
Are you Swedish?
I'll vote for that in any old time, but unfortunately we are particularly well endowed with demagogues just now. It is a time to value truth and honesty amid a constant stream of bullshit and lies. I think we can do a little bit of sieving here, but actually the populous has to be kept calm too, and for that governments need to earn some trust with some honesty, not keep pretending things that people would wish for. Oh for a politician who can say 'I changed my mind, because I think I was wrong before'. I think a lot of the populous could respect that.
Yes, but I'm not defending or condemning the current approach to the national handling of the crisis, because at the moment there are far too many unknown factors in the statistics which makes any interpretation heavily biased or plain wrong. As I said, I don't think anyone at this time can praise or criticize a certain nation's strategy because we have so little data to make such a conclusion.
What we can conclude though, is that leaders and politicians who make bad decisions when there's room for good ones, is objectively bad in terms of public health. Some nations create a business around breathing masks instead of supporting wherever they are needed, which is objectively bad. Making money on masks at this time can be argued through a libertarian point of view as justified, but no one gains from having the virus spread around, not even the ones doing a profit on masks, so it's an ouroboros point of view that doesn't hold up in any kind of long term perspective.
I completely agree with your sentiment. It is a very fluid and dynamic situation and the lack of data makes predictions difficult.
But I do think we can (and should) criticize approaches that deny citizens their basic civil liberties and throw the global economy to the wind. Sure, that approach may work to stave off a pandemic or to prop up our inadequate healthcare systems, but the unintended consequences of such actions may end up being far worse.
The biggest problem with the balancing act of keeping the populus calm and at the same time informed is that media is doing such a poor job. This is the problem with the kind of privatized media that do news based on where their funding comes from instead of informing the public based on knowledge and careful rhetoric. News dramatize and pushes emotion when emotions are the last thing we need governing how people should act through this and it's not a foundation for taking responsibility as a citizen.
Media today lacks the intelligence to inform the public in a good way. If reporters aren't pushed by who's funding them, they often lack the attributes to actually inform the public. Like the old saying: "if you read the news you're misinformed, if you don't read the news you are uninformed." It's media's fault that the public act with such panic and misinformation as we have institutions that provide lacking and badly interpreted data to a populus even less capable of handling that data. A big sign of this is how many youtubers who are scientists, or channels carefully going through data and the scientific information provided by publications, manage to handle the populus concerns much better than official news. But then you run into the problem of the lack of "markings" which channels and people online who truly are trustworthy.
The bottom line is that media can be blamed for a lot of the bad things that have happened, but we still need media in order to spread the things people need to know. I just wished the media could fire every journalist or personal who push uneducated dramatized bullshit into the publics eye, while highlighting journalists who are wise, educated and have good authority and rhetoric to bring necessary information to the public while minimizing the risk of misinformation and riling up emotions.
But as long as news media is a business before anything else, we will never have that.
If Jefferson had the order right: Life comes before liberty because without a life, there is no liberty to be had. Without civil liberties, there is no pursuit of happiness. But you still need that life there first. How bad does it have to be then, for any intervention? Let's say Ebola was highly contagious and airborne, would it be acceptable then? Also, global economies ultimately depend on a more-or-less healthy population. Without the healthy population, you have an economic collapse anyways as everyone is sick in hospitals- organizations that would have no measure of help in your scenario.
It is a weird utilitarian calculus to try to boost a future economy but not help those who are dying now. Apparently the golden rule idea doesn't apply to government, only crass utilitarian ones that calculate current death with economic depressions. Depressions do indeed hurt people, but usually they don't lead to outright death. Poverty does suck as a close second though, that I'll admit, but it is second.
I think it's a delicate balancing act. People who can't see more than five days ahead scream of quarantining everything in society, shutting down everything and people who see far but aren't in groups who will suffer much from the virus argue for not shutting down anything. I think that keeping the curve down is a priority and in the cases where that needs to happen fast, there have to be much harsher restrictions.
There are also some interesting factors here. Sweden's approach is basically based on the notion that the people here, for the most part, listen to experts and scientists more than in many other nations. We also have a culture that already has social distancing built into it to some degree. So leaving the country semi-open with the recommendation that people stay at home and work from home as much as they can, actually works. How well, that's for the times to tell, but comparing this to a nation like Spain (which I have a contact in who's given me some grounded info on it), they continued social-cultural behaviors far into the spread of the virus, kissing on cheeks etc. This can also factor into why the spread there is so massive. Not a singular reason, but one of the reasons.
So cultural differences in how people behave in day to day life can also dictate how harsh the restrictions need to be in order to contain the spread of the virus. The balancing act can be a very complex question to solve and I don't think there's any good answer that is right for every nation; it's up to everyone to handle the situation out of the complexity it has, therefore discussions on which strategy is best between different nations become a bit fruitless.
Its in the long term that a scientific view wins out. Give it time.
I agree. But I don't know if scientific views always win out. I think that in order for scientific views to win out, it needs to be repeated and repeated how important that view is, otherwise the pseudo-science and tin foil hat mass wins out and dictates what is science and what is not as they influence public opinion.
So I had a scenario where this plays out and it turns out not well, due to employee pitted against employer and other employees. This was when the lockdown measures were not as stringent in most countries.. and I think this will be the same in any country, including Sweden. Check out the discussion here: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/7913/business-ethics-and-coronavirus/p1
This is exactly the kind of dilemmas that businesses in Sweden are facing today. They don't have orders to lock down and send home employees, but they have the option. This is where the trust in the public comes into play. There are many employees who's been vocal against their employer if they didn't change anything of how the business should go about through this crisis. And the employees generally win such arguments and the business changes their day to day routines. I don't have any numbers on this, but from what I've heard, there is plenty of businesses who without orders from the government already and early changed so that everyone who can work from home does so.
The hard part has been the non-essential and essential staff. But I think most companies have argued that by keeping as many as home as possible, it also lessens the risk of the essential staff, who needs to be at the company, to get infected.
So the ethical thing to do is to do everything that is rationally possible to help stop the spread and suffering, even if there aren't any orders from the government to do so. It is irrational to only follow the guidelines and orders from the government if there is a possible choice to be made that doesn't negatively affect the business and employees by doing so.
I.e Priority one is to follow the official guidelines and then ask what else you can do. I think the biggest mistake we can do as a people, is to view this crisis as a separate entity from the government. We have the government, but we are also a people fighting against this virus and if everyone accept to be a part of this fight, we can ask ourselves what we can do to help. If staying at home and not interacting with anyone is something we can do, that is a part to be played and everyone has a part to play. To not play a part in it, is to be an obstacle for everyone and unnecessarily endanger other people.
Again I don’t think it’s that black and white. You are literally not helping others, protecting others, or soothing any suffering by hiding in your house. You are hiding. You have retreated. You have cowered. Those who are helping people are the first line in this pandemic: doctors, nurses, “essential workers”. So let’s stop pretending we are in some way morally better because we hide in our bedrooms.
In my mind the utilitarian calculus is the one that claims to save lives by denying basic civil liberties and human rights while ruining the very means with which we provide for our families. It does not follow that such measures need to be enforced in order to practice them. Do you yourself require a police-state and a ruined economy to physically distance yourself from others, to practice hygiene and to follow common-sense steps to avoid infection?
Which of the following statements do you think is false?
1) By going outside I am statistically more likely to come in contact with people.
2) By coming in contact with people, I am statistically more likely to transmit the virus.
What does this have to do with the argument? That is such a red herring! The argument was civil liberties vs. federal government intervention. Oddly you are making my case by saying how little it as asking people to do.. Most people it means stay at home as much as possible. This is the best and minimal thing you can do as a citizen. Then there is federal aid to hospitals, etc. done in a fair, quick, and smart way. That part requires federal action and money, and the orange clown in office isn't going to get us there.
Quoting NOS4A2
So first you say quarantining isn't eve a big deal, and now its police-state. Which is it? But anyways, the major point is yes..clearly people do need to be told about this, as can be shown when many people were at bars and restaurants despite the order and some employers circumvented the intent of the law by mandating people come to work, even if they were non-essential and can work from home. It's that simple. You have watched too many reruns of Red Dawn, dude.
I don’t think either are false.
OK, this is false then.
Quoting NOS4A2
[as 1) + 2) above>> by staying inside, I am less likely to transmit the virus >> which helps to protect others.]
Asking people to give up their livelihood and the means with which they support themselves and their family isn’t asking a little. It is asking a lot, and with dire consequences.
I think it’s reasonable to quarantine the sick. I don’t think it is reasonable to quarantine healthy.
So you do need to be forced or otherwise coerced into taking proactive measures to protect yourselves and others?
It takes stretch of the imagination to say hiding in one’s house is helping others, especially when others are actually out there doing so.
Yeah, freakn' blows...so is dying or transmitting a potential lethal virus with no cure.
Quoting NOS4A2
Hmm, how do those people get sick in the first place? How do you contain the spread of a virus? Oh yeah, not being in contact with people!
Quoting NOS4A2
Nope, but apparently others do. Que the guy who goes to a crowded spring break beach, with all the other people going there...
You just agreed that it does.
(Your characterization of "staying at home" as "hiding" is just empty rhetoric and makes no difference to whether or not going outside infects more people, which is the only relevant factor related to whether you "help" them or not.)
Right, we’ll live apart from others for the rest of our lives. What if it only prolongs the inevitable?
Measures for three but not for me.
Umm, no I did not. You pretended I did.
All the countries who have done containment well is showing a decline in number of cases, and to the point where they are going back to work, so there is empirical proof there..
Also, the goal of isolation is not to completely eradicate the disease but to "flatten the curve" which means not expose oneself to the point where hospitals cannot even save people that can normally be saved.
Quoting NOS4A2
What does that even mean in this context?
Quoting Baden
Quoting NOS4A2
Therefore, you agree that:
1) By going outside, I am statistically more likely to transmit the virus.
Understand, so far?
That also implies
2) By staying inside, I am statistically less likely to transmit the virus.
And we help people by not transmitting the virus to them.
Do you get it now? Or is there something in the above you can show to be false?
Yes, I can show that I never agreed that hiding in one’s house is helping others. I can show that you made that part up. One can avoid contact with others even outside. It’s called “physical distancing”, meaning you keep a certain amount of distance between you and others. This can be done outside.
You realize you're just humiliating yourself here, right?
No. Do you think one must remain isolated in his house to practice physical distancing?
I'll try again:
You just agreed that by going outside, you are statistically more likely to transmit the virus.
It's above in black and white.
That means that by staying inside, you are statistically less likely to transmit the virus.
That implies by staying inside you are helping people.
If any of the above is false, explain why.
This is a red herring.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring
No, I agreed that one is more likely to transmit the virus if he comes into contact with people. What I disagree with is the implication that going outside means I’m going to come into contact with people, that I would not maintain an adequate distance.
It was a question.
Quoting NOS4A2
Quoting NOS4A2
You've directly contradicted yourself.
No, both are true. The statistical likelihood of me coming into contact with someone when I go outside is greater. Does this mean I necessarily come into contact with people when I go outside? No. In fact I maintain the proper distance as prescribed by the experts.
What about you? Do you think one must remain isolated in his house to practice physical distancing?
This argument is not about you or me, personally. It's about people in general. I responded to this:
Quoting NOS4A2
Not anything about you, specifically. But you know that, don't you?
I think it’s an important point. The conflation of physical distancing and self-isolation has reached an absurd level. One can easily maintain the advised distance without self-isolation. Isolation may also have significant adverse effects on health.
I can empathize with that.
That's a somewhat different point. But leaving it aside. Do you want more or less people to be infected than there are now?
There is a fine line between courage and stupidity. The above overtly implies that self quarantine is cowardly, and not doing so is courageous.
I'm reminded of the ignorance behind "the cure cannot be worse than the disease" where the cure is quarantine.
Not doing so is stupid because it increases the possibility for harming others. It spreads the disease.
Obviously less, though I think a herd immunity approach has some merit. I simply do not know enough to give a reasonable answer.
But before you try to trap me in a contradiction, realize that I also do not want a global depression and the subsequent poverty and famine. I also do not want my friends and family to be homeless within the year, our social security gone, while passing massive debt onto my children.
The herd immunity approach requires many more people to be infected (at least 60% of the population). So if your answer is "obviously less", then you are obviously against herd immunity.
Quoting NOS4A2
You did that without my help. The two ideas, less people becoming infected and more people becoming infected (necessary for herd immunity) are diametrically opposed.
Red herring. No-one wants any of those things.
I can see these tedious little gotcha games a mile away. I said I don’t know enough to give a reasonable answer, which you suspiciously left out of the quote.
Obviously I don’t want anyone to get infected with Covid-19, a deadly virus. But maybe more infections equals more immunities. Again I do not know enough to give a reasonable answer,
I didn’t say anyone did. WTF is this?
Go and find out what you think. When you know, come back and argue for it.
Since you accept we all agree on it, it's irrelevant re the argument at hand. Hence, red herring.
I know what I think and I’ve explicitly stated it.
What argument? You asked a question I answered. This is nonsensical.
Well, right now it's the argument between @NOS4A2 and @NOS4A2 on whether he wants more or less infections. Go figure it out, and then come back and argue for whichever you decide on.
Why won’t you make an argument? I’ve made mine.
No, you literally are helping others by staying home. You are reducing the paths of transmission that the virus can take. If you are sick, you are then not infecting others outside your home. If you are not sick, you will then not be infected by others outside your home. Either way, by staying at home, you reduce the chances of people becoming infected and, in a week or two's time, needing to be treated in hospital.
That's what both health care workers and epidemiologists are asking you to do. The moral course of action for the overwhelming majority of people is to stay home.
Quoting NOS4A2
Denying civil liberties and human rights is dangerous. However risking the health of yourself and others in a pandemic is not a human right. Context matters.
The next day a law was passed that allows police to fine people.
Personal responsibility is all well and good when other people's lives aren't at stake. In this situation not so much. The risk is too abstract when a people see .2% CFR.
I could be wrong (no shit), but don't we end up with the same number eventually infected whether we isolate or not? Isolating spreads out the infection over time, allowing health providers better opportunity to care for the patients, but the herd gets immune more quickly without isolation.
The better question is whether you want more preventable deaths or not. Would you shut down the economy like we've done to save a single person? Probably not. 1m people? Probably so. Now we just need to figure out the specific number we can let die. It's somewhere between 1 and 1m, but it is a number. Do you acknowledge we agree in principle that there is such a number and our only quibble is what that actual number is?
People are trapped inside, some of them are in that particular the future is uncertain state.
Thoughts?
No. Herd immunity requires infecting at least 60% of the population. You do the hammer and the dance and it's a lot less even when spread out over time, especially because you hope for a vaccine. In China, they're looking at less than 1% even long term. That's what we should be aiming for and is in line with what the US is looking at, 2-3 million infected and about 100,000 deaths in the near term, maybe a little more in the long term, but certainly way below herd immunity figures.
Check out the link I shared earlier, which describes the US's current strategy and projects no new deaths at all by mid-July (which implies new infections tending to zero).
https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections
With herd immunity you'd be (deliberately) getting lots of new infections all year and beyond.
Quoting Hanover
The absolute critical number you want to be below is ICU respirator capacity. Because after that you won't be able to even offer treatment to a proportion of patients who need it, who will then be guaranteed to die. That number presumes you don't go the herd immunity route. And it's also less than what we're guaranteed in the US right now. So, yes, it's impossible to save everyone, but I would say you are obliged to try to maintain numbers low enough that give you a fighting chance of at least being able to treat everyone. Some level of economic shutdown is required for that.
But this avoids the question. If quarantining saved only 1 life and it required the economy be shut down 3 months, would you do it?
No, I wouldn't. The implication of my answer is that you do whatever you can to keep below that critical level, including shutting down the economy. What you're asking me beyond that is how many grains of sand make a heap. One doesn't, beyond ICU respirator capacity does. In between there's room for debate.
Total number of eventual infected is not a constant.
As people get the disease and recovered (and immune), many still vulnerable people just end up being surrounded by these immune people and just don't end up getting exposed.
This depends on how easily a disease spreads as well as society's response.
In this particular virus, "letting it burn" in a totally unmitigated way would likely end up infecting 80-90% of the population within a short period of time. The "slow burn" of whatever social distancing maintains a functioning healthcare system, would likely infect less than 50% of the population. It can be much less depending on the policies taken. It also then buys time to understand more and build up equipment capacity to better treat everyone. Outcomes are radically different between an unmitigated spread, an overwhelming due to too slow response in preparing and social distancing, and an optimum strategy.
Though I see @Baden has replied much the same while I drafted this answer.
Quoting Hanover
If priority is human life, then the balance is simply where the social distancing measures are doing more harm than good in terms of life saving quantity; such an analysis could also be done in a weighted "quality of life years left".
However, the "real problem" is not simply applying this simple concept of implementing social distancing until it does more harm than good, but rather the value of the economy as an engine of inequality (making the rich richer, mainly through diversified stock increases and dividends) and social control (keeping most people wage slaves who have no time, energy, nor education to make trouble). The pandemic creates a situation where it is obvious the productive capacity of modern society can be used to keep everyone alive without a large group of poor people working for slave-wages.
For societies with a social safety net, such as where I live in Scandinavia, the net simply springs into action on a mass scale. The vast majority of people on the edge economically are already kept alive by the immense productive capacity of society without needing to work. The vast majority of everyone else has enough wealth to wait the 1 month lead time to get some sort of bailout, which are administered through temporary tweaks to existing welfare state institutions. For instance, normally entrepreneurs and business owners cannot "fire themselves" and collect unemployment without first dissolving their business one way or another; this law has been temporarily changed. The pandemic is highly disruptive and causes all sort of short and long term problems, but people here do not really wonder "how am I going to eat" nor "how will I afford healthcare if I get the disease", at least for the vast majority.
In other words, the pandemic has created all sorts of practical problems, but not really any conceptual problems of how society should be organized to begin with. For instance, maintaining the social safety net in a depression is a practical problem, but no one really has a conceptual problem of questioning that goal.
However, in a society where there is no social safety net, such as the United States, this pandemic situation demonstrates most ways that is a terrible idea.
So, it is in this context that the subtextual debate is occurring between people who want to let people die, not in some "life saving" optimization scheme due to knock on effects of the lockdowns, but rather to let them die to preserve an ideal of power relations where there is no safety net; in other-words, let people die to preserve the status quo. Of course, these people say their argument is about "people also need the economy" but what they really mean is that "wage slaves will die in lockdowns, or from unemployment and losing their insurance and homes later anyways ... unless we create a social safety net which we don't wan't to do". So it's more or less the "let them eat cake" moment of the American "fiscal conservative" elite.
A or B? No other options. No buiilding more respirators etc. Assume under Option A we built as many respirators as humanly possible but one man didn't get one.
Quoting Hanover
Quoting Baden
I directly answered your question.
Quoting Hanover
Silly. If the respirator capacity is overwhelmed by one, many would have already died. 50% of patients getting put on respirators end up dying. You need to pose a hypothetical that's a possibility and I'll answer it.
1) Nobody can give anything other than a range in answer to the economy vs lives question as there are too many variables to give a specific number. I've also given you a rational benchmark.
2) It's not a purely money vs life question. A depressed economy will cause some excess deaths due to increased suicides, crime, and lack of money for healthcare related to other diseases (re the US) (but of course nowhere near the millions letting the virus loose would).
3) Anyone who's being intellectually honest needs to bite the bullet and admit that there is always a point at which a huge economic loss will outweigh the loss of one life. So, I have no problem with that. Was that your sticking point?
There is no dichotomy here.
No one is claiming the lockdowns won't have lethal knock-on effects that can be statistically quantified.
Furthermore, the social distancing measures take such considerations into account. We could truly lock everyone inside, no leaving at all. Why don't we? Because most people would starve to death. Ok, so we let people go out to get food and the food supply chain run. We could stop there. Why don't we? Because if people can't get a water pipe fixed they might thirst to death or can't flush the toilet leading to dysentery and/or cholera problem etc. So we let plumbers go around fixing problems. And this logic continues until we hit activities that simply don't have a life-saving component that is greater than the life-saving benefit of social distancing to mitigate the virus.
The entire concept of "essential service" already has the resolution of your dichotomy built in.
You are simply refusing to engage with what's going on and why even Trump is now advocating for and trying to organize, as haphazardly as that organization maybe, this basic idea.
E.g. I need a kidney transplant to survive. The only compatible kidney belongs to a guy who says he will sell it for no less than $1 billion dollars. I've got Medicare. Should they pick up the bill because if they don't, I'll die? I would say, no, it's an unreasonable level of expense. I can't make it clearer than that.
Definitely feels that way.
Doesn't seem to be a photo from today, which would of course reassure the public if it was just tests.
May also explain why the queen made a appearance on the tele, if there's real worry of Boris's prospects then the queen would be a comforting figure of governing continuity.
It would be a truly bizarre turn of events for UK politics ... we may need to get the brexit thread spinning again to think about it.
Yes that's an excellent example. In that context, passing such a law does not violate human rights, it protects them (i.e., no-one has the right to risk people's health in a pandemic).
Whereas going Hungary's route and voting to give the government absolute power to rule by decree does trample human rights.
These distinctions matter and shouldn't be blurred.
I expect he'll pull through, but he's sicker than they're admitting. I don't think we'll be seeing much of him for a while. I'd be more concerned about his partner who's pregnant and not responsible for having a dummy of a bf who thought shaking hands with COVID patients was a good idea.
Correct.
Yes, I agree its statistically likely he'll survive. Even on a respirator, half of patients survive, and I think UK is democratic enough to be obliged to say the PM can no longer lead; so I don't think it would be at that 50-50 prognosis state at the moment.
However, unless it really was "just some tests" -- maybe a happy photo opp will emerge -- he'd be well over the roughly 1% risk profile of his age group if this is a sign it's getting serious, which would then explain the no recent photo and maybe queen speech. But yes, definitely all only speculation for now.
https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest
No, it's not. Look at your government's models and follow the numbers.
We talked about this a lot already. Look at South Korea, for example. Continued social distancing, masks, track and trace etc until we get a vaccine. This is the dance part of the hammer and the dance. It does not involve 60% of the population needing to be infected, which is the proportion required for herd immunity against COVID. And though the worst case is not absolutely impossible (we never get a vaccine, we can't impose proper measures, it keeps mutating), so 60% of us still end up getting it, I don't see that happening. And if you look at the curves in South Korea, China etc, it's not going to happen there.
tl;dr They could end up being the same thing if the current strategy fails or isn't done right. The evidence suggest to me that's unlikely.
It's too late for the US to do what SK did, and take a closer look at information coming from there. Their scientists have warned that it's not over and it's possible they could end going down the same path as the rest if the world.
Until there is a vaccine, it will spread through human contact, through its long viability on steel and other surfaces, it's hours of viability on swirling aerosol, and the continued presence of carriers.
On the bright side, some are working on a medication to neutralize it.
Don't disagree much. Only want to emphasis that there are three distinct strategies, herd immunity, mitigation, and suppression. The world is tending towards suppression right now and I'm both on board with that and cautiously optimistic about it.
https://towardsdatascience.com/a-data-science-view-of-herd-immunity-what-do-we-have-to-pay-to-stop-the-virus-3a05fc2ce720
Yes, we could actually get herd immunity via vaccination like we did with smallpox which would be a good result. So, 60% don't actually need to get the disease. I'm arguing here against herd immunity as a political strategy like the UK was proposing (and isolate vs don't isolate re Hanover). But, yes, it's good to clear that up. (And I don't expect we'd reach 60% naturally with suppression done right.)
No. A tiger got it though. In other news, the UK has moved passed Italy to third in daily deaths. It will blow past Spain within a few days.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52177586
She DOES have a cat in hell's chance
"The Spanish government is working to roll out a universal basic income as soon as possible, as part of a battery of actions aimed at countering the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, according to Economy Minister Nadia Calvino.... But the government’s broader ambition is that basic income becomes an instrument “that stays forever, that becomes a structural instrument, a permanent instrument,” she said."
Woahhhh.
@ssu
If we had a 1 000 km border in the East with Canada, everything would be different.
A local newspaper says that thanks to the corona-virus lock down, overall death figures in the US are collapsing:
Especially deaths of children and teens, people under 18 has decreased -20%.
Reasons have said to be lower traffic, less accidents and less drunk people doing stupid things when people stay home. Also the common flu is getting now a beating alongside the corona-virus. They did report that the stats are preliminary. Have not been able to verify it from another media outlet.
So, something good about the pandemic?
Yeah, I was wrong. This should be treated more seriously by me than it has been. If we're not here to occasionally change our minds, then why do we visit here?
My best friend, an old schoolmate, died suddenly early last month. I was planning to go with my family and with his other friends to the funeral last Friday. His sister was planning to come from Austria here. The sister naturally couldn't come now and the parents, who are quite old, kindly asked that people wouldn't come to the funeral and proposed that a proper memorial service would be held afterwards at the time of the burial, likely in the summer. With gatherings of over ten people not being permitted, even if funerals are allowed, it's an understandable and reasonable decision.
The pandemic effects our lives in various ways.
The personal tragedies are terrible. There are good reasons now not to go to the hospital so that at least your last moments can be with your family.
Of course it’s true that not going outside will reduce the “paths of transmission”. I would argue that you’re not so much reducing a path of transmission as you are storing it for later, but the point is taken.
I’ve been following the case of Sweden intently due to its different approach. The chief epidemiologist, Anders Wallensten said people will eventually ignore stay-at-home orders if they are too stringent, so it's better to adopt measures that can be sustained over a long period of time. Another epidemiologist who earlier criticized the UK’s lockdown approach, Anders Tegnell, said that they are only pushing the problem ahead of them, merely kicking the can down the road so to speak. He also said that mass unemployment and a ruined economy brings with it its own public health problems.
Do you disagree with them?
"As an appalled world watched, India revealed herself in all her shame — her brutal, structural, social and economic inequality, her callous indifference to suffering.
The lockdown worked like a chemical experiment that suddenly illuminated hidden things. As shops, restaurants, factories and the construction industry shut down, as the wealthy and the middle classes enclosed themselves in gated colonies, our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens — their migrant workers — like so much unwanted accrual.
Many driven out by their employers and landlords, millions of impoverished, hungry, thirsty people, young and old, men, women, children, sick people, blind people, disabled people, with nowhere else to go, with no public transport in sight, began a long march home to their villages. They walked for days, towards Badaun, Agra, Azamgarh, Aligarh, Lucknow, Gorakhpur — hundreds of kilometres away. Some died on the way.
They knew they were going home potentially to slow starvation. Perhaps they even knew they could be carrying the virus with them, and would infect their families, their parents and grandparents back home, but they desperately needed a shred of familiarity, shelter and dignity, as well as food, if not love.
As they walked, some were beaten brutally and humiliated by the police, who were charged with strictly enforcing the curfew. Young men were made to crouch and frog jump down the highway. Outside the town of Bareilly, one group was herded together and hosed down with chemical spray.
A few days later, worried that the fleeing population would spread the virus to villages, the government sealed state borders even for walkers. People who had been walking for days were stopped and forced to return to camps in the cities they had just been forced to leave.
Among older people it evoked memories of the population transfer of 1947, when India was divided and Pakistan was born. Except that this current exodus was driven by class divisions, not religion. Even still, these were not India’s poorest people. These were people who had (at least until now) work in the city and homes to return to. The jobless, the homeless and the despairing remained where they were, in the cities as well as the countryside, where deep distress was growing long before this tragedy occurred. All through these horrible days, the home affairs minister Amit Shah remained absent from public view."
https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca
"What is this thing that has happened to us? It’s a virus, yes. In and of itself it holds no moral brief. But it is definitely more than a virus. Some believe it’s God’s way of bringing us to our senses. Others that it’s a Chinese conspiracy to take over the world.
Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next."
"It is now rapidly becoming clear that the “spontaneous order” of the market cannot save us from the medical, economic, and social emergency at hand. Whether we like it or not, large parts of the world are already moving toward a partially planned economy — or at least a much more state-guided or state-directed one — in order to deal with the extraordinary challenges of the moment. The only real question is: Will the emerging economic model take the form of a business-friendly “disaster capitalism,” geared toward preserving corporate power in a more nationalist and statist shell, or will it take the form of an internationalist “disaster socialism,” geared toward protecting workers and preserving the fabric of our democratic societies?"
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/04/coronavirus-capitalism-disasters-socialism-economic-collapse
Implicit in the above: it's not a troglodyte question of: 'is state intervention good or bad?', but 'what state intervention, to what ends, for whose benefit?'.
"Fighting the pandemic in this individualistic way is a neoliberal fantasy. The confinement measures are seen as an end in themselves and an opportunity for our heads of states to showcase war-time leadership, while neglecting to implement all other measures requested by the World Health Organization, such as setting up massive and systemic screening for the infection, training of personnel and building new health infrastructures. The strict enforcement of confinement via law-and-order measures while also not implementing rigorous testing and tracing regimes thus amounts to coronavirus ‘greenwashing’ – doing the absolute least with maximum fanfare. There is no deficiency of competent advice, which is largely being ignored. Thus, despite much rhetoric about the “return of Big State”, Western governments remain trapped in the very neoliberal policy logic that brought us here.
...Our hospitals are overwhelmed not because this is a rare natural disaster for which no government can ever have on-hand capacity to cope, but because, unlike South Korea for example, Western governments have been under-funding public healthcare for decades, neglecting medical infrastructure, and outsourcing the production of key ingredients to countries with cheap labour."
https://www.iwm.at/closedbutacitve/corona-focus/albena-azmanova-our-neoliberal-war-on-the-pandemic/
Quoting StreetlightX
:up:
As I thought.
Ireland (pop. 5m) has just ordered 11 million masks. You can see where this is going.
Some good news. The US is flattening the curve.
:clap:
I don't know. It would be a pretty fucked up thing for a family to witness and the sick person wouldn't be conscious at the end. Plus the hospital might be able to save them.
Yep.
Kim Jong-Un :flower:
Bashar al-Assad :flower:
Mohammad Bin Salman Al Saud :flower:
Recep Tayyip Erdo?an :flower:
Xi Jinping :flower:
Vladimir Putin :flower:
Donald Trump :flower:
Benjamin Netanyahu :flower:
Jair Bolsonaro :flower:
Boris Johnson :flower:
I've been wondering about when infections will peak in Canada and the U.S...New cases in New York started to plateau last I checked, which is a good sign that the peak is close.
The flattening is relative to whatever else is on the scale. It's just easier to discern on the log scale because it's less steep.
The vast majority of state lockdowns happened around March 16-21. Within about 5 days of that last date (the average virus incubation period) you can see the curve begin to fall off slightly and the new trend is becoming more and more obvious. Suppression is working. The trick will be making sure it's permanent.
I was thinking the same thing...
I disagree with their priorities - they are missing the forest for the trees. If there's a tiger roaming the streets, you get your family inside first. Then you have time to figure out what to do about it.
In the same way, countries are not prepared for the virus and so suppressing it buys valuable time to get prepared and act more effectively. Time to discover more about the virus, to comprehensively test-and-trace, to build up capacity such as masks, ventilators and medicines, to discover new treatments or cures, to train additional health workers, to educate the public, to address the issues you raise. Time is what China and South Korea now have and every week helps.
Conversely, there is large potential downside risk to just winging it. An overwhelmed health system, more deaths sooner, virus mutations resulting in re-infections, possible health problems for those that recover from the virus such as lung, heart or brain damage. And mass unemployment, a ruined economy, and public health problems anyway.
The options are to buy time now and prepare properly, or to fly blind and hope for the best.
Indeed, a natural phenomenon so perfect as this could only be characterized by an act of God, the human God... And so, because of the automated and irrevocable decision making process which rules out human meddling, the doomsday machine is terrifying. It's simple to understand. And completely credible, and convincing
But Stranglove certainly could. And probably Brigadier General Jack Ripper
You'll be gone soon then.
Because a lot of humans are inferior to a virus. by the way one weeds because the crops one is growing are weaker than the weeds. Darwinism takes out the crops.
Yay!
:clap: Hopefully that will put an end to the conspiracy theory that the virus is still raging over there.
Yep.
:point: :fire:
:up:
:snicker:
I fear the dude may eventually succumb to the 5G. But, ok, even bad parody is fun sometimes.
I've already been gone for decades. . . but not because of of some overhyped boogey-virus, that is for pussies and cowards.
Yes true, but these sub-human swines that have become hysterical about this virus-hype are inferior to much much lower shit than a simple virus.
:yawn:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/new-zealand-isnt-just-flattening-the-curve-its-squashing-it/2020/04/07/6cab3a4a-7822-11ea-a311-adb1344719a9_story.html?tid=pm_pop&itid=pm_pop
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/coronavirus-new-zealand-lockdown-curve-flatten-cases-deaths-jacinda-ardern-a9452791.html
"We must go hard and we must go early. We must do everything we can to protect the health of New Zealanders."
:strong: :strong: :heart:
Studly brave dudes don’t practice social distancing or wear masks etc?
Maybe. Do you think the Chinese government is above killing its citizens to protect its image?
I'm not saying that's happened, but I have 0 trust in their motives. I'm not sure why you think otherwise.
I read stuff, watch videos, I lived there for three years, I'm not paranoid, I eat my veggies. Lots of reasons.
Look, they took extreme measures against the virus. I've seen vids of guys in Hazmat suits dragging people out of their apartments for not obeying quarantine. Food being delivered on sticks. 76 days of lockdown in Wuhan just ended. Etc etc. Harsh, but effective. Doesn't mean their fatality figures aren't understated. But it's pretty clear to me that they have done well and why.
Yes, they don't do that. But not because social distancing or wearing masks is in itself a pussy or cowardly thing to do, but because buying into the hype that is compelling the social distancing and wearing of masks is pussy and cowardly.
Before all this pandemic hysteria popped off, I frequently practiced social distancing and wore masks on the reg.
:starstruck:
What were you up to, robbing banks and holing up?
I just heard him saying that the WHO is China centric, and he's going to review US funding of the WHO.
Likely the numbers are underestimated. But not much.
I think the Chinese aren't able to hide hundreds of thousands of deaths. Thousands? Sure. If the death toll would be as bad as in Spain, over 400 000 would have been killed.
Quoting Punshhh
Of course. Who would need an international organization to fight pandemics?
And likely Trump won't like high numbers of death, so the administration likely try to fudge the numbers lower and hide them. Which will just raise the number of Americans distrusting their government.
So I guess they have had the epidemic as Italy well before corona-virus was on everybody's radar. This might be at least one reason.
They don't like being told what to do, especially if they are being told to be all standoffish and British. Moi, j'ai un gilet jaune. C'est pour toi le recule.
They have a lot of critically ill. Lot of older men? Lot of smokers?
Another invisible difference might be in how long an ICU team waits before giving up.
I wore a mask for the first time in public at Wholefoods the other day. It wasn’t as embarrassing as I thought because about half the people there were using them and also, with the help of a cap, the chance anyone could recognize me was slim.
So basically you could double the numbers and get a rough number of the actual deaths.
I think you have to decide how you are intending to use the data (and for the record, I am talking about data, not the deceased human beings represented the data). If you're objective is it to compare this to other types of death, you have to assume the same type of error might exist with other deaths. That is, there have probably been a good number of people who owe their death to the typical flu who have their cause of death listed as pneumonia, which means if you're going to compare the two, the error rates might be the same.
Then again, there's the data how many people actually died. That is quite accurate, just like births.
That the numbers are estimates is quite common in the cases epidemics and pandemic. The number of soldiers killed in a small war can be far more accurate, in epidemics it never has been.
I think there will be a good consensus on just how many people died in this pandemic in let's say ten years. Then historians and epidemiologists have fought it out then and looked at the statistics carefully.
And naturally the importance of this pandemic is defined by the future: the less similar events happen and especially if they aren't so deadly, then the importance of this pandemic is greater and vice versa. Things can be later seen just as preludes to something else or defining moments of history: all depends what things this Century brings us next.
Face masks cannot stop healthy people getting Covid-19, says WHO
https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/07/face-masks-cannot-stop-healthy-people-getting-covid-19-says-who
"Heymann said masks could create a false sense of security that could end up putting people at greater risk. Even with the mouth and nose fully covered, the virus can still enter through the eyes."
This and the recommendation that carers of covid-19 patients should wear masks both contradict the headline. In fact, the whole article is confusing, and it's not the fault of the article.
It seems that the WHO has been downplaying the protective utility of masks so as to emphasize the more important things, namely distancing and hand washing, etc. Fair enough, but I don't believe masks offer no protection at all, neither does the evidence show that. After all, the virus can enter through the nose and mouth.
If you feel the urge to wear a mask in public, then you are unfit to be in public, stay home. Let the unafraid humans live normal.
This might explain it better.
The short version is, most members of the public who use them don't use them properly, and there's a shortage so they should be saved for people most at risk.
Yeah that's what I figured, though it seems to be mixed in with a message about masks actually being somehow ineffective - although a bit of dancing around the point on that last part. Suspect it's a matter of not trusting the public in some manner.
e.g. https://www.businessinsider.com/who-no-need-for-healthy-people-to-wear-face-masks-2020-4?r=US&IR=T
Well, your health care system just sucks, that's all.
Sure, even in other countries there's a difference in the health between the rich and the poor. And when povetry goes somewhat along racial lines and when covid-19 is deadly for those with underlying health conditions, then that's why you have this result. Add the fact you have a lousy health care system. Here's how bad the downfall has been:
So from first to 31st. Now the US is at place 46 or something.
The evidence is clear that a mask will help to reduce the spread from an infected person. And, a person might be infected without even knowing they are infected. But it's not easy to get people to think, I might be infected therefore I ought to wear a mask for the sake of others. Many people, like Merkwurd, would not be inclined that way:
"If you feel the urge to wear a mask in public, then you are unfit to be in public, stay home."
So people would be more inclined to wear a mask if they thought it was giving themselves some protection. The governing agencies could use a form of reverse psychology, hinting, or openly saying, that there is some degree of self-protection involved with mask wearing, and this would make people more inclined to wear them. However, it's a double edged sword because the false sense of security would make people less careful in other ways, and this could do more harm than good because people like Merkwurd would still be out there spreading the disease everywhere anyway.
Therefore to be effective the mask wearing would most likely need to be enforced, to ensure that it was carried out by everyone who might be infected. And some people take a very negative view to the enforcement of anything.
.
Not actually true: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/annual-flu-reports
That is a pretty comprehensive report.
I’m still not convinced shutting down the world’s economy is a reasonable response (at least not for developing countries).
If we knew then what we know now, I dont think we would have. Some places needed it and some didn't. We took the most conservative approach in the face of the unknown.
If you had a time machine, would you go to Wuhan and contain it there?
Like social distancing and the rest, it’s not just about fear of infection but fear of spreading it to others. If I’m a carrier a mask should offer those around me some protection. I understand masks are more effective in containing the virus to the wearer.
https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/04/08/world/europe/08reuters-health-coronavirus-eu-scientist.html
But really, with so many deaths in the region, I feel like the EU will see many resignations.
You should look at how these figures are actually arrived at and you will see that there is a good deal of uncertainty. Just read any study of flu morbidity/mortality.
We can't know this, firstly because we don't have a developed country which didn't have a lockdown and secondly the less developed countries, which are more vulnerable are behind us in the timeline, so we will have a much better view on this in a couple of months.
I live in a quiet corner of Norfolk and in theory we might not have needed such stringent lockdown measures, but I am happy we do, even though I have to stand in line for shopping etc. The point is that if we didn't lockdown in my neighbourhood, we would probably be experiencing infection rates equivalent to London right now, just as the hotspots of London, Birmingham and Manchester are struggling to cope with the wave of serious cases. We should bare in mind the numbers of medical staff falling ill, meaning they can't do their jobs. Any less of a lockdown would have resulted in more infections to medical staff along with more admissions. The whole system is only just managing to deliver the basic respiratory requirements and all elective surgery has been cancelled including all but a handful of cancer patients.
At the end of the day, what price is a human life?
Wuhan develops new cluster of cases.
Yes Norfolk England, the back of beyond.
When I said what price a life, I was thinking of the monetary calculation, rather than how much people value other people's lives.
What kind of rat bastard question is this...f'ing dirtbag trying to bait me into low quality posts...damn it worked. My apologies.
Also:
Quoting Benkei
Very racist thing to say. Tsk tsk.
"If" you're a carrier? It is a very dangerous thing, to base your life around "ifs". And when the state begins to base its policies around "ifs", then systemic tyranny is very close at hand.
I’m still waiting on the figures for deaths in UK from all causes to compare to last year.
Norfolk is for the north folk, Suffolk is for south folk. The east folk were in Doggerland and no longer exist, presumably. And as for the west folk... Cambridgeshire?
The ‘conservative’ reactions may have just caused disruption that will linger for decades in developing countries increasing infant mortality, malnutrition, unemployment and homelessness.
This has been my concern since the beginning and the longer this ‘lockdown’ continuing the worse things will be. The mortality rate of covid is pretty much seen as being under 1% now. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out it is as low as 0.3%.
It’s not very manly of you to have such fear of uncertainty, Merk.
When did I fear uncertainty? Please explain or consider your accusation invalidated.
Also...
It sounds like you are implying that fear is a womanly quality. Kinda sexist dont'cha think?
Quoting Merkwurdichliebe
Kinda hypocritical, me thinks.
Invalidated.
Quoting praxis
What do you mean? How are you misinterpreting these terms? From what context have you removed them?
Some countries surely will have accurate statistics. Others not. And what's the time frame? Viruses have all the time in the World. If someone dies of Covid-19 in 2023, will that person count?
Quoting I like sushi
Firstly, the world economy isn't shut down. I think the supermarket close to you is open. It's simply just a economic recession.
And how would there even be that other option? Tell us, I like sushi.
A censorship on the pandemic? No media outlet ought to report on it? Have people go on as they have? Say perhaos that it's just a nasty flu, but these come and go. I think that news that in some places the morgues are full might get the attention of people and could spread around in
Herd immunity? That's the option you think? Doesn't work to save the economy. I've been watching how Sweden copes with the pandemic and still, even if they have their schools and restaurants open, the economy is in free fall.
So what do you have in mind?
In what context does this not imply a lack of courage, which means being scared and/or fearful?
This is bollocks. USA has the most cases but at least they are honest about it unlike Beijing.
I am getting kinda pissed the fuck off at my employer who as I've previously mentioned cut all of our hours in half about three weeks ago "because things are really slow due to the coronavirus" but I keep all the fucking statistics for my department and I have the numbers to show that I am still getting exactly the same amount of work piled on me and just expected to get it done in half the fucking time for half the fucking pay and I'm really starting to lose my shit.
If they cut your hours doesn’t that mean you’re being paid hourly now? What do they say when you point out the situation to them?
Seems like you should be paid for every hour worked, and depending on you situation, perhaps even earning overtime pay.
After years of things increasing in pace to 300% what it was when I started, I finally insisted he hire someone else to split the load with a year ago; actually I didn't even insist on that, I asked for a half-time assistant, but he instead hired someone with skills we don't need and lacking the skills I needed in an assistant and gave her half my workload and some of my decision-making powers, which scared me at the time, but has since come to be an okay status quo, better than the fucking meltdowns of spending all fucking day rushing faster than humanly possibly to keep up I had been doing for years before.
Now "because of coronavirus-related slowdowns" we all had our hours cut in half, which means I come in halfway through the day to a half day's worth of work already backlogged and then rush faster than humanly possible to try to make progress on that faster than more work is being added to the fucking pile so I can have it all fucking done at the end of the fucking day.
Anyway, hope things improve.
Exactly. In no way or manner does it imply that these are womanly qualities. But, if that is where a person's mind goes when they hear those words, then the fault lies with their demented mentality.
So you’re a felinist then.
Well, that's perhaps a bit too much of a stretch.
:wink:
It definitely lets the original speaker know one thing for certain... the connection between women and weakness does not come from the speaker. The only other option... is... well... the (mis)translators' own belief system. Knowing that also allows the speaker to witness what psychologists call "projection"...
All that being said...
Praxis seems alright most of the time.
It hasn't. As far as I can tell, the author of that piece just made that up. He links to another LA Times article that doesn't even mention Wuhan.
Using slang for a woman’s body part to mean “coward“ very much implies that cowardice is a womanly quality.
If you call a man a dick does that mean being an asshole is a male quality to the extent that being an asshole means being a bastard to the extent being a bastard is like being a dick?
You're confident. Are you there in Wuhan by chance?
All you needed to do was point out the LA Times' lack of justification, but you didn't do that. Instead, you made an unsubstantiated claim when you said, "It hasn't".
Does that bother you?
I pointed out the LA Time's lack of justification - I said the author's reference didn't mention Wuhan. And I made my claim after doing a lengthy search and finding no other reports of a new cluster of cases in Wuhan.
Surprise, surprise
Lack of evidence is evidence of lack?
It's not.
So I'm happy to start over. The LA Times' claim that there is a new cluster of cases in Wuhan is unsubstantiated.
Only for those looking to be offended.
The term "pussy" when used as a slight for someone with cowardice is not referring to female genitalia, it's referring to the coward.
Some people who use the term "pussy" are also misogynists. However - and this is the important part - others who also use the term to refer to a coward do not think that women are lesser in any substantial way just because they are a women. Those men and women also use the term "pussy" for rhetorical effect when belittling someone they believe are cowardly.
So, not all use of the term "pussy" to refer to cowards and cowardly behaviour comes from those who do not place equal value upon women... misogynists.
I know plenty of women who are dicks.
So...
:wink:
I’m saying anything conclusively. My concern is about focusing on the short term (months) compared to long term effects (years, perhaps even decades).
Quoting ssu
Hyperbolic statements don’t really help. To imply I don’t care about people dying, subtle or otherwise, is unhelpful if you wish to discuss this subject in a balanced manner.
Sometimes death rates vary +/- 5000 from month to month. I don’t see a huge outpouring of national mourning when this happens - perhaps because it isn’t reported. Yes, there are more disease related deaths than usual due to covid. I’m questioning whether or not the reaction to this event is proportionate to the problem.
I’m inclined to er on the side of caution, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to put aside all doubt and just listen to what suits my sense of personal responsibility.
The point remains. They do have a pretty good understanding of flu outbreaks - that was not meant to undermine whatever your original point was. It was just a little nudge to prevent opinion over ruling facts. I have opinions about this subject and I’m sure I’ll say things that are less than accurate. I hope others will point out when I do so, and/or question what I say rather than guess why I’m saying it.
Some reasons why there wasn't a way to avoid this:
1) There was already a huge speculative bubble in the global financial markets as the 2008 "Great Recession" was just papered it over. This event came along and burst it.
2) Earlier epidemics (SARS, MERS, Ebola) had been already followed by media and had far lower numbers of death. When this pandemic hit, with higher death toll the media was sure to follow. Governments around the World had to respond.
3) Just social distancing creates problems for the economy. If the countries now in lock-down would have chosen the "Swedish-model", the global economy would still be in recession at least for now.
To put it shortly, there simply is no other option than to have at least a sharp recession. No alternate route. A longer economic depression won't be because of just the pandemic, but many other institutional issues and long term problems. If it happens.
This coronavirus pandemic has proven deadly - thousands have met their end and thousands more are ill with the specter of long lasting psychological and physical harmful effects looming over them. It appears then that there is nothing redeeming about the coronavirus - it might very well be the work of the devil himself. Yet, we know that even the devil must be given his due.
This pandemic has had a, dare I say, "positive" impact on civilization for it's done what I think is impossible - make us recognize the essential from the non-essential and, perhaps, in that knowledge, lies the seeds of a revolution in thinking and living. A lot of what people've been doing are completely unnecessary - you don't need to go to a school for an education, you don't need to go to the stadium to watch a game and enjoy it, you don't need to go out so often, you don't need to be in an office to do some jobs, you don't need to shake hands or kiss to greet someone, etc.; the mobile phone, the internet, and TV are true marvels of the modern age. Notice that in every case, an essence has been extracted and retained while the merely accessory has been discarded. This is essentialism philosophy blooming in all its glory.
If one is to believe the news, there's less air pollution, rivers and oceans have become cleaner, etc. Does this not, in its own way, prove that much of the damage humans are doing to the environment comes from non-essential activity?
How long will this hiatus in human hyperactivity last? Will we come out on the other side changed for the better or will we return to our old ways and forget the lesson of essentialism this pandemic is teaching us?
Exactly. :grin:
From my perspective, you've learned the wrong lesson, which isn't that we ought to reconfigure the way we maintain our hedonistic lifestyle, but instead to recognize there are higher goods than hedonism.
We could say it's because of the strict social distancing that has occurred in the US (despite the ridicule heaped upon the US and Trump in particular for not taking this seriously and doing too little too late), or we can just say it's another load of bullshit we've been asked to endure through this whole crisis in order to achieve some agenda we've yet to decipher.
I grieve every death like the rest of you guys, but I think anyone who believes in the accuracy of the reporting or the various agencies without considering political motives here is terribly naive. This crisis has obliterated the credibility of the scientific community for those who were already skeptical, especially to the extent that scientists are used to form public policy.
:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:
Right!
Doesn't this still imply reconfiguring the hedonistic lifestyle? If we want a cleaner world we should consume less...
Or if we want to avoid pandemics we should take a cue from the Japanese and stop hugging, shaking hands and kiss for greetings.
Or we can learn from the South Koreans and be done with privacy.
How so? Most scientific bodies warned of the dangers of a pandemic in this specific case very early on.
I'm sure the numbers from certain countries aren't correct (China, Iran) or incomplete (the Netherlands) but the picture was clear even for me (a layman) end of February beginning of March.
I take hedonism to be the promotion of pleasure as a goal. What you've described appear just to be pragmatic responses to threats of illness. But of course, take whatever bitter medicine you need to survive.
My suggestion is that the primary lesson of this slowed pace of life isn't that we now have been shown that we can reconfigure our world so that remote learning and working, for example, can now become the norm, but it's that we might want to rethink how important the busyness of our lives was to our overall well being in the first place (which I do not describe in simplistic hedonistic terms).
True there were political motives, but the American models were wrong. Even the "wildly optimistic" ones overshot it.
I could go on and on about the terrible cost of relying on those mistaken models, but it's water under the bridge now.
But that would destroy the economy. :scream:
I think they came up with those high numbers with strict social distancing policies already factored in. We’ll just have to say they were wildly inaccurate. The credulity about those numbers and the dogma around their infallibility led to making decisions that should take years to deliberate.
Americans are trained from birth to be good producers and consumers. Retraining would take a very long time, and it would require a desire to change.
Because general social distancing has been used, all those models regarding virus epidemics can be thrown off.
Spain has now 342 deaths per 1 million. If the US number (now 54) would climb to that figure, it would be well over 100 000. But to double it, then a totally new twist ought to happen.
Speaking of Sweden, hospitals in there have stopped using the malaria drug chloroquine on coronavirus patients after reports it was causing blinding headaches and vision loss.
Another tough break for POTUS.
Must be giving wrong dosages. Hydroxychloroquine has been used for years to treat malaria and lupus.
No, the one that assumed optimum social distancing predicted 81000 deaths by August.
Go back and listen to what that Swedish epidemiologist said about how we don't know this virus yet. He was right.
Or maybe it reacts differently to covid, Dr. Nos4a2.
Maybe it does, Dr. Praxis.
Nice to hear that Sweden is close to your heart on this issue!
(Btw. those strategic reserves that my country had (and Sweden hadn't), after nearly a month the PPE from the reserves have been nearly depleted and the first cries that hospitals are running low on facemasks have been picked up by the media. And the government again falls into it's normal bureaucratic ineptitude of dismal performance (as usual). Now they were suckered by shady businessmen into buying half a million useless masks (But hey, they were cheap!!!). At least the administrator in charge resigned.)
Quoting frank
I was referring to the higher estimates of hundreds of thousands and even millions.
Then you're still wrong. Good social distancing is not the reason the models are wrong.
I want everybody participating in this thread to stop, look in the mirror, and repeat these words:
"I have no idea. I don't know. I'm without facts. I'll just stop broadcasting my opinions as if I know what I'm talking about, because I don't know."
It's not hard. Just do it.
It’s more so the approach than the country that interests me.
You'll get the answer at the earliest in the summer and at the latest next year or so. You see, the lock-down option works instantly, but the effectiveness of the herd immunity strategy can be seen only later.
And the media and politicians, don't have any patience.
Quoting frank
Never said I was right. Especially about the future.
I’m not sure if that’s the case. Italy has been on lockdown for a month now. We do not yet know what will occur when and if it can relax their lockdown. It doesn’t work instantly, plus the economic and social effects of such draconian actions can not yet be ascertained.
Indeed but I'm hoping for some kind of residual afterglow from the ongoing tide of essentialism.
I’ve seen less a less reason for other people (under 60’s) to be overly concerned as this has wore on. Of course, something that spreads faster than the flu and is 3-4 times more deadly is going to burden healthcare. In a few months this will still likely be doing the rounds in terms of political posturing and media hysteria, but things - other than a hard hit economy - will return to some degree of normality. If some idiots in governments prolong the lockdowns beyond 2-3 months some people around the world will be feeling the economic damage for a couple of decades.
That’s my current view of the situation. Any new outbreaks of this strain will be more readily dealt with two, but there could be glitches as a worldwide vaccine won’t likely cone into play for 2 yrs.
Note: I’m still curious to see the figures for deaths in the UK these past two weeks (will be released on April 14).
If I understand you, you might want to use a term like forced austerity or minimalism rather than essentialism.
It would overload the system even with a death rate similar to the flu.
Not me, not ever. Human touch is necessary for life :sparkle:
In a few months the World will be surprisingly adapted to the pandemic. Just as now it starts to be obvious that the health care system of New York State will not crash and manages through this reasonably well. But digging mass graves in the US isn't ordinary, I think.
Who knows, but I don't think the lockdowns go beyond 2-3 months. What is likely that the restrictions will be lifted gradually with the restrictions on large public events being the last things they hold on to. And in many places the "lockdown" isn't the Chinese type where you have a curfew literally.
Happy Easter 2020!
The death rates of confirmed cases in hospital are published every day. Today (actually the 24hrs up to 5pm yesterday) are 980. The actual figure can only be estimated because all the death certificates won't be tallied until later, also many deaths will be put down to some other cause. But a rule of thumb is probably about double the hospital death rate. The total hospital death rate for the UK is approx 9,000 as of yesterday.
The daily death rate is still going up, but is beginning to level out. I doubt it is going to flatten because the lockdown is quite porous with many people still going to work and interacting on public transport etc. Also there are spikes happening currently in a few places in other parts of the country.
It will be interesting what policy changes there will be if the daily rate goes over a thousand, or fifteen hundred.
Going back to the less developed countries, I saw a scary report on UK Channel 4 tonight from Ecuador it has hit them big time with hospitals and morgues piled high with bodies. I expect to hear sporadic reports like this from many countries over the next few weeks.
That was from Ecuador
We should spare a thought or a prayer for the millions of unfortunate souls who will suffer at this unfortunate time.
Thanks for correcting me, I'll correct it.
Oh going back to the north folk and the south folk, it was to do with who lived to the north or south of the river Waveney.
That's a good suggestion. Thanks. I had my doubts about using the term "essentialism" but in defense of my usage of the term, I'd say, for example, people viewing games on TV might've come to realize that it was as much fun as actually being there at the stadiums where the games were held. In other words, the appeal of games, their essence as it were, wasn't lost in the transition from an actual stadium to the idiot box.
At this stage it appears to have more like a 30-40 times greater fatality rate than seasonal flu, and that's not to factor in its much greater infectiousness.
Coronavirus threatens to upend a delicate balance of power in the Middle East
[i]Beth Gardiner
National Geographic
Apr 2020[/i]
NO[sub]2[/sub] down in various areas, in the range of 20%.
[quote=Gardiner]Nevertheless, air pollution still kills more than 100,000 Americans every year.[/quote]
I know. That’s why I said ‘burden healthcare’.
My point remains. It looks like the virus has been over estimated. The only serious problem it poses is keeping the elderly safe and managing healthcare (not a serious issue for developed countries). Doctors and nurses working 12+ hour shifts isn’t exactly abnormal. Maybe it’s just that other people didn’t realise the hours they worked until now?
I don’t for a second think there are any easy decisions. The true test comes when poorer nations ask for support over the coming decade/s.
Politically I find it disconcerting that some people are treating it like boon for socialism and almost hoping for a huge prolonged economic down turn - showing no concern for the poorest people around the globe as their more interested in their ideological revolution.
Very little that I’ve seen suggests this has been handled well. A lot has been learned I hope. Next time something like this happens I imagine they’ll be vastly more prepared (akin to countries in Asia). The reaction in China was understandable but seemingly disproportionate, as they had little to no idea what they were up against. It also helps that the culture in asia is better suited to dealing with a national crisis like this.
Another worry is, humans being humans, in 5-6 months people will have pretty much forgotten about this, or that any mention of a possible reoccurrence will cause needless panic and disruption.
In our decadent Western countries as much as 10% of the population are in "vulnerable groups", the size of this group is larger in such places due to the success of modern medicine. In poorer parts of the world perhaps half or more of such a group would have died already, so the virus wouldn't have so much of an effect on their population.
In terms of an overreaction, I can only see this being the case from the perspective of the economy, as otherwise people are simply being asked to spend some time at home, not a bad thing. And in terms of public health it is a beneficial response. Surely economically, provided economies can be put into hibernation, on life support, temporarily, what harm is done? Economists keep saying it will bounce back afterwards.
Perhaps the vulnerability of our economies is a consequence of narrow minded human behaviour in large populations resulting in an economic house of cards( it certainly feels like this in the UK at the moment) which will collapse at the merest hint of a down turn and that exposing this weakness will be a good thing. Resulting in more robust systems developing. Although historically this sort of progress does not often happen in humanity.
I think the overestimated response was due to political expediency more than anything else, that in our decadent countries such loss of life, in an undignified way, is not to be tolerated.
:ok: :up:
Again, my constant concern is precisely framing the situation as a money versus life choice. The simple fact is that economics is about the distribution of resources. Take away people’s ability to access resources and they will die.
Literally millions of people around the world living hand to mouth have lost all sources of income. This means they cannot afford to feed themselves or their children. This also means if they are lucky enough not to die of starvation, and remain healthy enough to work once restrictions are lifted, then the wealthy people lining in relative comfort will have less disposable income with which to pay them leaving them in a much worse position than they were already in.
If I sound callous sometimes, forgive me. I’m simply not inclined to think short term about these things. Such thinking can look like a lack of apathy, I’m just trying to approach this problem in as measured a manner as I can and highlight possible future traumas - foresight would’ve prevented a prolonged lockdown if the developed world had made relatively minimalistic preparation after all.
Let’s look at India as an example. Already, over 2.5 million people die of hunger in India every year. Let us say that at a 1% fatality rate and half the population infected we’ll see 6.5 million die on top of that. If we’re to imagine something like minimal lockdown then that would undoubtedly up the numbers to something like 10 million at 80% of population infected (rough total of virus deaths and hunger deaths at 12.5 million for the year and then a return to roughly 2.5 million deaths from hunger the follow year/s). The other, if we assume double the fatality due to hunger, would give us roughly 11.5 million deaths, and in the following years an almost certain increase in hunger deaths due to the economic downturn.
I am not saying one is better than the other, but I am worried about that people aren’t considering the long term fallout outside their own borders. It’s a horrible thing to say but saving 100,000 lives in one part of the world could lead to an extra 1,000,000 dying elsewhere.
I think it’s easy not to think about this as it serves us to only take limited responsibility. I’m just saying if an comprehensive analysis is done and turns out that different actions could’ve saved literally millions of lives we can say with false comfort ‘maybe’ because it would cover up the horror of understanding that maybe for every one of ‘our own people’ we saved it led to the deaths of one thousand ‘others’.
In developed countries there is little to nothing to complain about other than an instilled ignorance as to how other people around the globe struggle to live. The outrage of thousands of people dying to a force of nature as opposed to 9 million people starving to death every year around the world is something that it would pay us well as a community of creatures to pay more attention to - as hard as it is to look at let alone give serious thought to.
This is a time for humanity to look beyond their immediate neighborhood. Most of the reporting I’ve seen on this was self obsessed drivel to begin with. Thankfully many reports have now started to view this on a global scale rather than as a political agenda - some governments have reached out to each other and their is promise. Still many people are crying out about the rich from their homes like they are some destitute individual suffering under the burden of tyrannical oppression while others around the world haven’t eaten for days and have no idea how they can find food because there is literally no jobs, food or money available to them in the foreseeable future.
Anyway, got that off my chest! Haha!
Don't be so hard on yourself, I think we're all here willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're extremely apathetic.
For instance, not bothering to read what's already been discussed here and address existing counter arguments to your position. A very time honored apathetic virtue found often in many schools of conservative thought.
The first problem in your analysis is that wage slavery (dying within a few weeks without a job) is not a necessary state of affairs.
The second problem in your analysis is that you're using numbers of deaths based on social distancing and economic shutdowns. If you want to "continue as normal" for the sake of the economy then you need to estimate deaths and casualties in that scenario. You can not take the benefits of social distancing and then compare that number to some number of knock-on deaths of economic shutdown.
An unmitigated spread of the virus in the US, for instance, would result, based on what we know so far, in millions of deaths based on case fatality rate so far and a health system so overwhelmed that essentially no one else can be treated for curable problems.
If your argument is "maybe the virus isn't so bad", which does have a very small but not entirely zero chance, then lock-down is still necessary to establish such a fact, as if it's wrong and current case infection fatality and hospitalization estimates are correct then the result is millions dead, a health system severely damaged and no one else getting adequate care for any other problem for a while.
Quoting I like sushi
A valiant effort to string together a bunch of maybes to get to the conclusion that "we need to sacrifice people for the economy". If the numbers can't be lined up within the US, then maybe some imagined series of facts can make the numbers lined up elsewhere and every American that is sacrificed saves thousands of others in a far off land.
Again, deaths from joblessness in India is a resource allocation problem that can be solved outside the market. Not perfectly, there will be many knock-on economic casualties, but it is far easier to save people's lives by just getting people food by just transferring them money and then try to solve economic problems, than it is to save people's lives in an unmitigated spread of the virus.
The reality of the situation is that non-market-based distribution of resources can simply work, which is why each country where the virus outbreaks we find the leaders within all come to the same conclusion that the consequences of unmitigated spread of the virus has far, far more terrible consequences than trying to solve the economic problems by social collectivist actions. In countries that already have strong social collectivist institutions, these policies are fairly simple and easy to implement.
In countries that don't have such strong institutions, such as the US and the UK, there was much more delay as the conceptual and organizational cost is much higher and the practical results much less efficient, but the logic is inescapable which is why Trump and Boris Johnson have come to the same policies as elsewhere (and the delay and mixed-messages simply caused more damage and costs than was necessary).
However, the conclusion to draw is not that in some alternative fantasy based view of the world that this point of view is only "short term" and there is a more noble "long term" analysis available where saving people's lives now is a selfish thing and just letting the virus take it's course to maintain market based distribution of resources would be the altruistic thing ultimately saving more peoples lives. Rather, the conclusion to draw is that large systemic shocks is 1. just another in a long list of reasons to have institutions that care for all members of society insulating them from death due to market forces, 2. that neo-liberal arguments that free-trade and deregulation (that results in outsourcing critical production and not even stockpiling critical stuff but efficient "just in time" supply chains) is simply analytically wrong, 3. electing a corrupt narcissist with limited analytical abilities who then spent years purging the bureaucracy of people unwilling to lie and grift wherever they interfere with corrupt scheming results in a sub-optimal strategy and execution in the face of a real crisis, 4. electing someone incompetent enough to believe a preventative team, in this case to prevent a pandemic, is a waste of resources as those people can simply be re-hired in the event they are needed and will do just as good a job under such a management paradigm, again, has all the expected consequences.
Quoting boethius
You’ll have to explain this further please.
Quoting boethius
That isn’t the case, but I can see why you’d think that. I didn’t work backwards with my numbers. I wouldn’t argue that letting the virus rampage across India would kill more if there were no lockdown measures in place. I was pointing out that the knock-on effects could cripple and lill many, many more. I’m well aware that diseases kill more humans than anything else, but many people already starve to death every year and many more will due to the lockdowns for years to come. I hope you agree that this is something that needs some serious consideration as it’s akin to climate change (slow creeping).
Nowhere near ‘millions’ of people will die in the US without a lockdown. The mortality rate is now considered to be lower than 1% with current estimates of 0.3-0.4%. Call it 0.5 for the sake of argument and then extrapolate to the population of the US (1.6 million assuming literally everyone gets infected which is highly unlikely).
Quoting boethius
That isn’t even an argument let alone an argument made by me. The mortality rate is now considered to be below 1% (rough estimates being 0.3-0.4%). The is still BAD because it spreads fast. From the outset a number of experts were saying this was about 10 times worse than the flu - and I agree that the ‘tsunami’ of cases, often reported, is no joke and that without stemming the flow in developed countries the death rate would mirror something like what we’ll see in less developed nations (because they don’t have anything near the kind of resources that North America, China and Europe have at their disposal).
Quoting boethius
If you’re using quotations make sure you refer directly to them. Also, I came to no conclusion and have repeated pretty much the same message - I am concerned that people are not considering the longterm fallout for quiet understandable reasons (if your house is on fire you ain’t gonna help your neighbor with their own personal inferno). I am worried more about once the fire has subsided people will be too preoccupied rebuilding than they will helping put out other fires.
There is no ‘social distancing’ in India among the poor and they have, like many, many less developed nations, a severe lack of beds equipment and facilities. They are more concerned about starving than the virus.
Quoting boethius
The US and UK don’t have ‘strong institutions’. Compared to what countries? I have not said ANYWHERE that the UK or the US shouldn’t go into lockdown. One of my first posts on this thread was to state clearly that it is useful to look at the extremes to understand what options are available.
To repeat. I am not saying developed countries should or shouldn’t stop lockdown. I have said I am concerned that they will be far too cautious in lifting the lockdowns due to media pressures and scaremongering (maybe not in those words though). I’ve also stated that if there are few cases and it’s not dealt with elsewhere it will come back in waves unless strict measures are put in place to inhibit global movement (which will likely hurt the poorest even more).
There is no good option.
Quoting boethius
Again, never said this. Haven’t come to a steadfast conclusion. I was pointing out something horrible though so I perfectly understand the venom in your tone. I have dealt with such moral hypotheticals before and I am well aware that some people refuse to digest questions that put them in a position of two terrible choices (they tend to say it’s unrealistic or change the parameters so as not to have to deal with the horrific problem posed).
Stop putting up unsourced data. Those of us who have bothered to source have already put up numbers that contradict yours.
So, countries are in lockdown, travel suspended, extreme measures of personal distancing in practise, and the virus is held to manageable levels as intended by these practises, and demonstrated by the models as what would be the case if these practises were implemented, yet you conclude that the virus has been over estimated?
"Many cases of COVID-19 are acute and resolve quickly, but the disease can also be fatal, with a mortality rate of around 3%."
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=covid+mortality+rate&btnG=#d=gs_qabs&u=%23p%3DvPVpdSzOlWQJ
This figure may not be the final one either, but the idea there is a consensus that the mortality rate is 0.3-0.4% is rubbish. "Current estimates" vary widely.
You're entire analysis is predicated on people dying shortly without a job and there's nothing that can be done about that.
You are quite explicit that saving 1 life in the US maybe at the cost of 1000 Indian lives. I took note that these are only "maybes" but for this maybe argument to work requires the presupposition that no policy exists to mitigate the consequences of wage slavery.
I am taking issue with your argument even in it's apathetic "maybe" form.
Quoting I like sushi
You base this on what?
It is entirely possible to social distance among the poor as well as for the poor to benefit from social distancing among the well-to-do (such as travel restrictions etc.).
Iran is a poor country that ran the unmitigated spread experiment; there was no economic benefit for bold unmitigated spread and they went into lock-down.
I agree, starving is an issue. However, government policies that slow the spread of the virus and government policies that avoid starvation (as in avoid far more starvation than unmitigated spread of the virus) are not mutually exclusive. You are ignoring the fact governments can do something about starvation.
If Western government's are concerned about starvation in poor countries they too have policies available other than sacrificing their citizens to the virus to get economic growth rolling again. They can send food, funds and supply chain support.
You have setup a false dichotomy that leads to what you believe is a good point which is:
Quoting I like sushi
Without your false dichotomy, being cautious is not a big problem that results in many poor dying.
When faced with an enormous risk, caution is advised. Keeping people alive and fed is not a very difficult policy task as supply chains and houses still exist.
Why the UK and US have been so desperate to avoid such policies is because it sets a bad precedent of market failure and the ease at which governments can intervene to correct such market failures; however, it's simply an unavoidable conclusion in this situation so even they are implementing such "people bailouts", just reactively and inefficiently while ensuring plenty of bailout money to the investor class is both more swift and more generous, instead of proactively and without large amounts of corruption.
To backtrack a bit:
Quoting I like sushi
I was very specific that the US and UK do not have strong social collectivist institutions to insulate people from dying due to market forces, compared to welfare state countries (i.e. continental Europe, Japan, South Korea, with a large variations in strength). In numerical terms, the life expectancy of poor people in the US and UK is significantly lower than the wealthy classes.
If you are talking about other institutions like the military, the US and UK do have these social collectivist institutions well funded, but they do not many insulate people from dying of market forces.
I don't think it's controversial that the US lacks such institutions.
It maybe more of interest the case of the UK, which has nominally welfare state institutions but has been mostly simply under-funding them since Thatcher in an attempt to get to the US system.
Quoting British Medical Journal - though doesn't seem an academic paper, just reporting on such papers and is simply the first search engine hit I get
Why the lack of strong welfare state institutions, such as public healthcare, housing and money for the poor and infirm, paid sick leave, free education, strong union legal protections, minimum wage and worker and consumer protections, public transportation, is that both dealing with the virus itself as well as the economic consequences of the virus is far harder without these institutions already in place.
A few examples:
1. Without public health care and paid sick leave, people have the habit of simply working sick; this increases the spread of the virus and results in people only seeking care when it becomes an emergency or then just dying at home either actually preferring death to medical debt or then simply fearing it so much as to miscalculate when death is nearly inevitable without care.
2. Without welfare programs that keep the poor and infirm in good conditions, their conditions rapidly deteriorate with a disruption such as the lock-downs. Whatever they were depending on to manage to live is far more tenuous than well funded government institutions providing a better help. It also creates an additional problem to solve of housing homeless people compared to a system where homeless people are already housed.
3. Without strong worker protections and unions, then people simply live far more precarious lives (less wages and more predatory lending and unhealthy products) and are less able to deal with any disruption; and trying to "one-off" such institutional actions with one-time payments is far harder to implement. I.e. people need help sooner but will get it later due to this institutional setup.
4. Lives of students is far less disrupted if education is free and they already get a stipend and housing to live on.
5. Efficient public transport is highly correlated to working one's way out of poverty. Yes, gasoline prices have crashed, but if one can't repair one's car and there's no efficient public transportation option, one is already maxed out on predatory debt, then one is easily in the classed American catch-22 of needing a car to get a job but needing a job to afford to buy / repair one's car. Furthermore, well-kept public infrastructure in general means that faced with a large economic disruption these existing investments continue to payout massive public dividends, whereas a dealing with failing and inefficient public infrastructure becomes an additional problem.
The above is by no means an exhaustive list, but I hope gives some insight into why the poster-child case of welfare state institutions, Scandinavia, where I live precisely because of these institutions, people are annoyed by the lock-downs, and it's highly disruptive, but no one is fearing starting to death. People have already got bailout money, including gig economy workers due to a simple tweak in unemployment law.
Of course, not everyone in the world benefits from such an institutional framework and there will be many poor people dying from knock-on economic effects. Where my position differs from yours is that the lesson from the pandemic is to build such institutions wherever they are lacking, without delay, rather than try to "time it right" so as to be sure to start sacrificing people to the virus as soon as their sacrifice will help more wage slaves by getting back to normal and putting all the obvious and enormous examples of market failures behind us, never to speak of them again (like the media managed to do after the 2007-09 crisis).
True.
It is estimated to be below 1% : https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/fauci-offers-more-conservative-death-rate-academic-article-public-virus
The 0.3-0.4 was for people below 60 yrs of age. Big mistake on my part there! My point in stating that was in line with the idea of funding for elderly whilst everyone else got on with their lives as best as possible - that said many experts believe that the elderly taking flu shots does little to help protect them and that it would be better for younger people to be vaccinated to stop the spread (as they spread it more readily).
As I said, 0.4% is no picnic anyway given the rate this virus spread at.
Quoting boethius
I base this on common knowledge, personal experience and, knowing that the population density of Iranian cities is minute in comparison to cities in India, Mexico and the Philippines for example.
Quoting boethius
Actually, that is precisely what I am trying to highlight here. I’m concerned, dare I repeat myself again, that there won’t be enough attention focused on developing countries due to nationalistic interests. Unity and cooperation is a potential path through this - at the moment the haranguing in the EU is the focus fro Europe at the moment. Once that’s sorted out - the quicker the better - then perhaps efforts will be focused elsewhere too.
Your other points about the lack of social institutes is a little out of focus within the scope I am talking about. The social care systems in place in India, the Philippines and Mexico do not come close to the institutions in place in the US and the UK (or anywhere else in the developed world).
You seem more interested in pushing a political agenda. Not really interested in that for this thread. I expect we’d agree and disagree in certain areas regarding how to implement better social institutes - but my focus is not really on any specific country’s internal system.
Five years ago Obama made a speech suggesting the Americans stock up on ventillators/masks for a type of health crisis that we are seeing today. Of course America did not. There are also rumours that Americans prevented a shipment of masks and ventilators from crossing to the Canadian border (my country). I also read somewhere (people can research this) that there is a hospital in San Franscisco that stands empty due to privatization...yet the STATE of New York alone has more cases than any other COUNTRY in the world.
America is, to put it nicely, in shambles. But it has been in shambles for a long time-and of course, other countries face similar problems but on a smaller scale. I think we'd need about ten other threads to properly discuss the failures of the American electoral system, democratic capitalism, the influence of big PHARMA and the NRA, their use of extremist christianity to pursue a xenophobic and homogenized populace ect. ect.
The Biden/Trump vote will go to Trump, I think anyone would have to be an idiot not to see that...the only advantage Biden has over the regressive right, MAGA idiots, and the moderate voters that think Biden is a creepy ineffective wimp (which he certainly is), is the die-hard democrats (that IMO do not constitute the real Left at all, there hasn't been a real Left in America since the early 1900s) that will try to convince previous Bernie voters not to waste their vote and still vote for Biden in a kind of "strategical" voting game with the end goal to defeat Trump (we see that in Canada a lot). I'm not going to pretend Bernie was perfect, I don't think a cult-of-personality helps anyone-but I think his politics were reasonable (radical to some) and well-founded. But I'm also not going to pretend that a Bernie win wouldn't mean a complete civil war for America...the MAGA and the regressive right have grown to strong in popular imagination to simply allow for such "radical" changes as free education, healthcare, medicaid, to occur; not to mention these rednecks would have the support of the billionaires who also don't want these changes...and since we live in a democratic capitalist society, thats even scarier than some illiterate idiots with their guns...If Biden wins, nothing will get better or really get worse. If Trump wins, we might see some rallying and rioting-but mostly we will watch the continued deterioration of America...
Congratulations on your country acting so efficiently, I'm not going to pretend I'm not jealous..I've always wanted to go to Australia/live there. I've always considered it to be like the "warm" version of Canada.
I live in the UK right now. I have to say, not much going on here. The British people are a pretty mild people, but they still have that old British "rallying" spirit so they're doing what they can to "protect the NHS (their healthcare system)" and most seem pretty rueful about this, but in good spirits. I get the sense that in other countries the general mood is much more desolate...
The current 3.4% is almost certainly higher than the true figure. 3.4% - as of today - is NOT a complete picture by any stretch of the imagination. This is because on a global scale the vast majority of people tested are tested because they show symptoms and manage to get tested.
There are estimates and CRUDE estimates.
I’ve been looking at sites like this: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105088/south-korea-coronavirus-mortality-rate-by-age/
Looking at stats where mass testing has been done can help see through some of the uncertainty.
Regardless. My point remains that I am most concerned for developing nations - a vaccine isn’t going to come anywhere near in time to help anyone within the next 12 months at least. It seems reasonable to point out that many are going to suffer and to encourage active concern that extends beyond our own borders as much as possible.
There has been a shift in media attention toward a more global picture over the past month, but that doesn’t mean helping to keep the momentum going is a bad thing.
Sorry, didn't notice your last question. I mean, India has to figure out its own political workings...as India has been committing genocide against the Sikh people (ethnic minority in comparison to Hindus) for the last 40 years or so, and now in Pakistan the Muslims just recently murdered a bunch more Sikhs ect. ect. I know in Syria as well this crisis has really affected the country.
In other countries, I don't think they're so much affected by the virus as they are by the disruption to the economy. I mean second and third world "Developing" countries rely on a lot of the tourism/manufacturing industry from "Developed" nations, thats how global capitalism works-so the fact that no one is travelling, major corporations are seeing a decrease in sales (ie. clothing) ect. means that anything from resorts in Punta Cana to sweatshops in Korea are also suffering from this.
There is occasionally talk about the Americanization of Australian politics. Which is of course the worst possible thing that could happen because who wants to end up that like third rate POS country.
"G'day folks, I won't pretend to be other than from down under and it looks like we've been reasonably lucky so far. Thus I've no idea exactly how I'd be coping in the States or Europe, still a couple of thoughts. Our national government has formed a so called national cabinet with all the heads of our states and territories and it seems to be a considerable help in seeing things through. These leaders come from both major sides of our peculiar form of politics and indeed our, till now, very conservative national leadership have had no trouble working with our union leadership as well as business both large and small. I'm not sure but the Germans seem to have it reasonably together as well.
Now to the tricky part, I'm distressed about the current tragedy occurring throughout the disparate regions of the USA and dreading what the future may hold in store for the poorer regions of our world. Brazil already shows ominous signs (pardon me if I've just stood on sore toes), but here I go. Citizens of the States are you happy with your leadership? Both Trump and Biden appear not only unappealing from here, but close to disastrous. Is there a possibility that concerned folks could pressure the leadership of your nation to start working together? How about Congress dropping the Democrat/ Republican divide and getting the immense resources of your nation going? Your rich are incredibly so, yet your poor are dying, it really does not seem a good look from the outside. Britain does not seem much better, I just hope not too many people die.
I know Australia is small cheese, (is California's GDP larger than ours?), our manufacturing base is pretty much zilch these days, but what could the focused productivity of the States, China, Europe, Japan and India achieve, if quickly harnessed, to prevent tragedy in the poorer societies in the world? "
A lot. There would need to be a leader.
Can't say what the Aussies do, but what I do is disagree with you and then vote for them.
No.
I think that you are underestimating the lengths that societies will go to prevent deaths today. Death from pestilence like this pandemic simply isn't tolerated. It simply isn't acceptable. Not by the people and not by the politicians. People dying from cancer or heart disease is tolerated. We haven't gotten a cure for heart disease, it could be caused by a infectious disease and if it could be cured, we would only then in hindsight understand that an infectious disease has terrorized us, but now we don't know it. But this pandemic (like SARS and MERS etc) are preventable and people know that. They could be contained at start. Social distancing works. And people will want the pandemic to be prevented. The economy really doesn't matter.
This is the point you aren't getting. It doesn't matter if the number of deaths are low. The pandemic isn't "over estimated". The US deaths are will break twenty thousand soon and in my country likely we will have, oh my gosh, over 50 people killed likely today or tomorrow. That is not much in either country, yet both countries have now staggering amount of unemployed and both economies are in free fall for the time. That really doesn't matter so much to people. Unlike some people think, societies aren't as neoliberal as they seem and don't put money over human lives. There is social cohesion. I think it is a good thing.
Simply put it, societies will sacrifice their economies in the case of a threat...easily. In this pandemic this is a positive thing. In other crisis situations, it would be ugly. Trust me, if a conflict between China and US would erupt, Trump and even the Democrats would shatter all the prosperity built by the long period of globalization, the friendly ties and international cooperation IN AN HEARTBEAT.
Quoting I like sushi
When have the leftist thought that capitalism wasn't crashing down?
I think they have believed always that the capitalist system is on the brink of total collapse and NOW is the time for change. And they will be again disappointed when the system makes it's rebound. And even if they get some things of their agenda through, they won't even be happy about it: It's always just a meager start to curtail the evils of capitalism, which doesn't go far enough.
Quoting I like sushi
They didn't forget 9/11, and they will surely not forget this one. And likely the CDC among others will get more funding. A threat of a pandemic will be there up along with threat of terrorism and threat of war. And when people write the history of the 2020's, this won't be forgotten. It's only "forgotten" if a worse pandemic or disaster hits us, when it's considered a minor tragedy compared to the larger disaster. Do remember that after 1918 people referred the war that just had ended as "The Great War". Little did they know what was going to hit them then 21 years and that they were living the "interwar years".
- This pretty much echos my voiced concerns: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H6iy9GVqs_c
- More on conditions in India: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uNd7KwFpW8A
My point was that the mortality rate has been overestimated. It isn’t as high as first expected. That is not to say that most nations were almost completely unprepared.
Note: I did make a horrible error in saying 3-4 times worse as I meant for people below 60! Big mistake. The overall view is probably something like 10-12 times (very roughly!) worse than flu due to the combination of speed of spread and mortality rates.
Yes, but as ever there is the problem of extending natural human empathy further afield. This is a huge test for human empathy because it’s harder and harder not to look at what is happening elsewhere - if people are readily encouraged to seek out reports.
I’m actually optimistic. If I wasn’t I wouldn’t waste my time. The brief report above encapsulates the majority of my concerns.
Quoting ssu
The economic pack is going to be reshuffled. Economics isn’t something a paid much attention to until a few years ago. There is going to be a new world order, much like the aftermath of WWII, only we’re in a completely different world now - that’s gist of what I’ve heard from various projections (all of which amount to a shrug and best guesses).
To repeat (which I tend to have to do a lot because I’ve said as much several pages ago), I don’t believe there was an overreaction - but at first I thought it might have been like many did. Either way my concern was for how those living hand to mouth could possibly be expected to sit at home (if they had a home). I am not suggesting that everyone go back to work, but I do ask people to ask themselves horrible questions about trade offs today for tomorrow.
If there was a time for people to consider making a choice between two horrific outcomes it is now or never.
I said I disagreed with you, so bad to you, good to me.
On the other hand, the US has used military spending to boost its economy since WWII and I don't understand why spending on health and education would not do the same.
One state governor seemed to suggest the high number of people of color dying from the virus is their fault for having bad health. I am wondering how many of those deaths were because the poor can not afford medical care, therefore, they died at home without medical care. I hope those deaths are well researched and my concern is proven unfounded.
Not a joke but Wrestlemania mentality. Have you seen the video of Trump shaving a wrestler's head? He is the ring taking full part in the freak show of abusiveness. Who wants a president with no dignity and so ignorant of science his careless increased the spread of the virus? And his lies and womanizing, and his poor wife. Not in my time have we had such a pathetic first lady. She is no Elenor Roosevelt, but more like the victimized females of Wrestlemania.
At least Biden is speaking in favor of science. It would be nice if we realized what science has to do with democracy and why we are doing better than when religion, not science, ruled. The problem is not limited to Trump but includes our national opposition to science and my Christian friends make it obvious where that comes from. :mask:
I think I'm failing to realize that. What's the connection?
And have you thought of returning to your motherland?
I will continue to pray for all the of Mother Nature's creatures both human and nonhuman.
My friend Scott Neeson is on the front lines in Cambodia and I try not to alarm him.
(So the coronavirus nut narrative mirrors the anti-vaccine nut narrative. "Why do we need all these vaccines? Hardly any one gets these diseases any more." Fucking. Dumb. Fucks.)
Not directed at anyone in this thread btw. Just looking at the media.
Isn't that something that we can say after the pandemic when we have a vaccine against it? Second wave was worse with the Spanish flu, you know.
Quoting I like sushi
?
Quoting I like sushi
People adapt. People survive war times too, which are even worse than now. And my point has been that actually there isn't much of a trade off as there aren't actually many options in our time. Without any strict lock downs social distancing would already hurt the economy a lot. Sweden is the best example of this: their economy is hurting too.
:up:
Blimey, Tim Wood, Streetlight, Frank, my little post doesn't seem to have generated much in terms of new ideas, oh well, might as well have another go! Before I start though Streetlight, I might have wished you had left my post separate for a little longer from this overwhelming thread, just to see if some of us, other then me/I ( never could work that bit of grammar out.) picked up some threads and ran with them while I slept. Grre was the only one who had a chance to respond free of the cloud of conflicting invective on this thread that persuaded me to attempt to start another.
Tim I can't imagine how I 'd feel if I was a Yank, other than extremely unhappy! I also realise we managed to offload, due to his greed, little Rupert Murdoch which you almost certainly don't need! Perhaps that's one way to handle the objectionable amongst us? I'm afraid we don't seem, up till now any better at dealing with self serving individuals than you in the states, especially once they have achieved some clout it's just that their numbers pro rata have not reach those in the States. I used the term "States" deliberately. From here, it appears that from the Reagan years on, despite some long Democrat terms your national infrastructure has been crumbling. From out here you are no longer the States United rather a mismatched uncoordinated bunch of neighbours. Covid-19 don't care, it's just a bloody virus, kills off those of us in no great shape, but it can't and doesn't think or act purposely. We can and occasionally in the past have.
Your current crop of top dog leaders with a couple of honourable exceptions are either derisively incompetent, your politicos, or unaccountable for their power, our little Rupert for example. Treasure young Billy Gates and partner and your current governor of New York, a political hack who is, not just seems to be, rising to the Challenge. Forget Biden the bloke tells fairy tales none of us need that! Trump is a disgrace whose fault must be squarely shouldered by the middle class voters of America. Here's a thought, for reasons innumerable, start a mass campaign on all your congressmen. Ask the young amongst us to show in my case teach the rest of us how to IT the hell out of your representatives to declare a national state of emergency and take interum control of the reins of governance.
Tell them to bypass the White House, you really, in this day and age, don't need to elect a king for four years, your constitution is the oldest existing stab at democracy, over two hundred years old and almost that far out of date. Extend The social media (what ever you call it) campaign to your over politicised Supreme Court to oversee checks and balances, and fight to stop the idiots of all sides from stopping the responsible amongst the national electorate from controlling your nation's course. Should keep us busy for a while, you can't afford Trump and your major parties need to be completely overhauled, remember you've only got another six months there about's.
Remember we need to be in a position to aid the developing nations in this anti Covid-19 struggle asap. and the situation will not be helped if the USA is one of those who need rather than can give aid. Frank, your thoughts, some positive proposals perhaps?
Of course. That doesn’t mean that the non-crude estimates have fallen as more testing has been done. To repeat, I am saying we’ve overestimated the effects of the virus on society (the opposite is clearly true). I am saying that the crude estimates don’t reflect the actual mortality rate - this is not something that has been widely disputed by the scientific community, but they’re being careful with their words.
I would also caution against direct comparisons to Spanish Influenza. This is a different beast, but still clearly dangerous. Spanish Flu hit younger people mainly - which is generally worse because social contact is much higher among younger people (hence previous the report I briefly mentioned regarding suboptimal use of vaccines in flu season - if you didn’t see the point was that elderly people taking shots for seasonal flu is not very effective at all because it is the younger folk who have more social contact and spread the virus more quickly: likely part of the initial ‘herd immunity’ thinking some countries took).
Note: I meant to type “I” not “a”. To highlight that I’m concerned about that area because it is not something I know a lot about.
Quoting ssu
It seems so. I’m just thinking ahead and trying to instill a sense of international unity. Like I said several pages back it’s basically a chance for humanity to step up and help the less developed countries. If they don’t then we deserve a second, third and fourth wave of this.
I don’t think a second wave would necessarily be as bad. The Spanish Flu was in a completely different time. That doesn’t mean I don’t think it could be the case, I just think we have enough information and communicative capacity to prepare for a second wave. In that respect helping less developed nations as much as we can would perhaps serve us better than preparing for a second wabe within our own borders whilst the rest of the world suffers.
There is no ‘better’ choice that I can see, only less ‘worse’ choices that are hard to differentiate.
Here’s a site whose articles I often find to be good avenues to start in terms of finding useful underlying information:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/coronavirus-covid19-control-measures-impact-global-death-toll?fbclid=IwAR33BF2oBiL-oCJUOqYYub0fTJ-Lqi5jnRnOVK8sqOv82KwQjppORg_1uF0
100%! There are things being done in a minimalistic fashion. It’s not all bad news. Some, repeat SOME, private companies have stepped up - yes, even the stereotypical self-interested business folk are not all emotionless robots. At the moment it appears the developed nations are mainly reaching out to each other right now, which is a promising sign. I hope the EU gets on track and sorts out the allocation of debt sooner rather than later (I think they will). China has actually stepped up too apparently? So I hear from an economists, in terms of stabilising the global economy (I don’t pretend to understand exactly how?).
Of course, they’ll still be political maneuvering but I’m inclined to think the bigger picture of ‘humanity’ has at least shuffled closer to the front of the line.
Unfortunately coronavirus threads are as infectious as the disease itself. They need to be contained otherwise they spread through the forum and kill all the philosophy topics. Most will be quarantined here for the safety of others. It's the best option for the economy of threads on the front page too.
You're forgetting the key elements that the left is to blame for the shutdown (somehow the left is in charge and setting policy in the white house), that Trump has had essentially no agency through the entire ordeal, poor thing, while simultaneously believing Trump has done the best he could possibly do, but also believing that the obvious failings at every step represent unreasonable demands of perfection from someone who is literally God's emissary on earth and therefore beyond reproach.
It seems that your making the point that considering how bad Iran turned out with unmitigated spread, that therefore more densely populated areas should be very proactive in mitigation.
I'm not seeing how you somehow arrive at other conclusions.
I'm not sure what your point is exactly. That social distancing will be difficult in highly dense places and so tragedies will unfold as we have already seen, despite social distancing doing what help it can? Or that, because these tragedies are inevitable the entire world should not social distance, or stop as soon as possible?
For the tragedy part, there is no disagreement; poor places hit hard by a disaster fair much, much, much worse than rich places, such as we see with hurricanes, earthquakes, droughts, the current locust plague.
Where I disagree is with your point that "booting back up" early, at the cost of western lives, is going to help these poor regions in some indirect way. We can help them, but it is through helping them, not helping ourselves get back to normal. Normal Western imperial capitalism wasn't really helping these people to begin with, that's why they're poor. We can and should send aid, some Western governments and UN agencies are talking about doing so as well as taking some steps (such as the EU helping Iran in contradiction to the US's sanctions). This is simply fantasy economics reasoning that people kept at a precarious state always close to death due to structural policies (kicking them off their land, forcing competition with subsidized foreign industries that can externalize their costs to a high degree, corruption enabled and usually encouraged by the west), can only be helped through more of the same: that the only way to help slaves in an economic downturn is to help the slave-master get back in profitable business.
Quoting I like sushi
So you are abandoning your shower thought that booting backup early can somehow allow us to sacrifice 1 western life to save 1000 Indian lives due to starvation, through some mysterious economic working? You agree that that's a false dichotomy you presented?
If you are simply concerned about poor countries, then I share your concern.
The issue here is what policies would be effective in helping poor countries. You posited that the policy of getting back to economic normalcy as early as possible at the cost of lives will be effective at stopping an inevitable wave of starvation due to poor people losing their jobs. I argued against this, and you seem to not abandon, nor reformulate, nor defend your position but rather try to hide behind the idea that "you're at least concerned".
Quoting I like sushi
This is a health crisis, and you're arguing that discussing institutions of care is out of focus?
Furthermore, you really believe that institutions in the US and UK are far superior to institutions in the rest of the developed world? Wouldn't we then expect the course of the disease in the US and UK to be far better managed? What's the evidence for this? Or are they "strong" but don't manifest that strength in competent management? What are you trying to say.
Quoting I like sushi
So you posit that the economic normalcy will help all these starving people, and when someone points out that's a false dichotomy and that other institutions apart from the market can intervene to prevent starvation, you dismiss that criticism as "a political agenda". Look at your own free market political agenda and your crazy belief that that's not a political agenda and alternative view points are not by definition also an agenda. You're just a pot calling a kettle black in this situation, but thinking you're so high on the shelf as to be on another plane of existence.
All proposed responses to the crisis are inherently political projects to achieve ethical goals.
You're concern for poor people in other countries, which I share, is a political agenda, for instance, due to an ethic of caring about them and desiring to help them not starve if we can. Someone who doesn't mind that they starve, because they are "weak" and need to be naturally selected or then the earth is overpopulated or just no moral obligation to people in other countries, will not agree with the goal nor the political project.
So what you really mean to say is that you haven't thought about politics long enough to realize what your political agenda even is, nor the few seconds more to realize that every alternative to what you view as some sort of default non-agenda position is also a political agenda.
I didn't forget your comment, but I'm honestly hard pressed to understand where these arguments are going.
Are you proposing an armed insurrection to depose Trump?
If not, it's not clear what these musings are supposed to mean. A symbolic frustration with the left's support for social distancing ... before republican politicians and news outlets also adopted the same policies because it's due to unavoidable facts?
You do realize "taking to arms" would immediately be a run in with the Feds (such as various "taking to arms" initiatives that ended violently opposing Obama's "rules") and that Trump is in charge of the Feds? How is this supposed to be somehow spinned against the left in this situation.
The EU has bungled its response to coronavirus and it might never fully recover
The mental health crisis is just starting to come to people as they are able to slow down enough to recharge and the mind starts to process what they did see ie the first responders and what the mind has not been able to see /grasp as people with loved ones die alone to protect the living. For those denied the right to hold the hand of their loved ones during their final breath, they have not begun the grieving process.
We need one another and no one will survive this alone. Together we can push on in memory of those lost, in spite of our political differences. We are being given a chance to reform, recalibrate, reorder our priorities. Let's make sure before we rush back in, that what we rush to is really something we want back.
It really goes to show that when some institutions are actually put to the test they reveal how effete and powerless they really are. It makes you wonder why people put so much faith in them.
The greatest mountain fills a trench
Off the continental shelf
In time
This is incredibly unlikely.
The economics of leaving the EU are terrible, and it's the worse possible time to negotiate other trade deals. UK politicians aren't saying "phewf, glad we got out just before the pandemic crisis! Now we are free to ... something". No one in Europe is envying the UK right now and wishing to follow suite.
The "acrimonious negotiations" and "each member pursuing their self interest" (ironically said on the right to make the argument "of course it's inefficient and it will fall apart, those greedy nations!") can be said about any EU negotiation on any topic whatsoever.
However, the EU is not in some dysfunctional paralysis; has already agreed to send aid to Iran for instance.
But to be clear, you're saying we shouldn't discuss any of these topics closely, just be contented with platitudes that encourage us to ignore beliefs of many that, collectively, contributed to making the crisis happen and doctors and nurses (and supply chain workers and everyone else essential, and everyone else) not even have any masks? That we need to put our political differences aside so as to avoid self-introspection leading to uncomfortable conclusions about endeared market ideology or things like, I don't know, electing a corrupt incompetent who would obviously not be able to handle a real crisis?
I'm reading you correctly? Or is there something more to your comment.
What's NOS?
But whatever it is, to the whatever point you're trying to make without arguing for it.
What's happening here is simply the advanced state of delusion of the American right, and particularly Trump supporters.
That a lack of social safety net institutions would be very fragile against any systemic shock is one of the classic justifications for social safety net institutions; you may really need them, and just like a tree the time to plant them is 20 years before you need them.
We're now running the experiment of which governing paradigm can indeed better withstand a crisis.
(The payout to Americans is admission by republican politicians that this argument has been correct all along. You do indeed need a social safety net.)
It's totally reasonable to discuss it, more-so in a philosophy forum dedicated to high quality discussion.
"It's not the time to discuss politics" is a phase more suited to within the right wing echo-chamber to dissuade adepts from leaving the flock, but there's no reason to expect sympathy with such a position outside the cave.
This is completely false.
Where do you want me to start? Republican vs Democrat or US vs EU?
Well colour me surprised.
But for what it's worth, I am genuinely confused as to what your position became after your first comment; so, it's difficult to paint a picture of a nebulous mist, and if I've failed you I do apologize.
We’ll see about that. The EU's chief scientist just resigned from his position at the head of the European Research Council. So, unless Brussels has no accountability, there will be an audit of its efforts during this time.
Why would you say such a thing? Perhaps your own soul is rotting.
You completely overestimate this one resignation.
To be clear, I share the EU's chief scientist criticism of the EU and support his resignation. I have been just as critical of the EU's response as the US; the EU is better off not because the crisis was better handled by our leaders but because there's many more institutions in place to handle the health crisis and cushion the economic blow.
However, extrapolating this one resignation to countries leaving the block during or anytime remotely close to the crisis, is a vast stretch. For Europeans, the continuing Brexit fiasco is just confirmation that leaving doesn't solve any problems, and just makes problems worse.
I meant there will be an accounting of their efforts, that the resignation of the chief scientist is a sign things weren’t handled well. I wasn’t saying member states will leave the block because the scientist did.
We completely agree here.
Quoting NOS4A2
We agree here too.
Long term, definitely the EU needs to fix a lot of problems or countries may leave. But at the moment, and for the foreseeable future, the interdependence is so high that countries don't have much incentive to leave and the EU and other countries have a big incentive to do, at least the minimum, what's needed to appease countries. However, this "stability through interdependence" gives rise also to each side staking out a very radical position at the the start of any negotiation. The Germans for instance are always afraid of "perverse incentives" if they forgive debt, as an example, but they did keep Greece "alive".
Sanctimoniousness is like chicken soup for his soul.
Italy is in a state of marshal law. Of course, they don't call it that.
For the US, I don't see how you could be smug about avoiding marshal law. Seems like a tinderbox to me and that emergency powers already declared are a big step towards marshal law.
But this whole idea the right has that when the left makes a warning about something bad happening if government non-legal-corrupt institutions aren't created to handle it ... and then those bad things happening and subsequently either inexistent, failed or captured institutions can't adequately deal with it, that this somehow makes us happy.
It's always, "oohh, so you warned us about this smarty pants. Are you happy now that everyone is suffering from what you warned us about!" Instead of "hmm, yes, we definitely made bad predictions and bad decisions and have no coherent worldview that can even process the present situation, maybe we should think about that."
When I started in this thread I was arguing for aggressive containment, exactly to avoid whole economies shutting down simultaneously. You were arguing that I was "blowing it out of proportion"; now with whole major economies shutdown simultaneously, you seem to think that your position was my position and my position was that there would be literally an apocalypse.
And as we speak, there's been a mass shooting of some sort of party goers; one of the kinds of events I mentioned would lead towards marshal law, or then equivalent other than in name only.
Perhaps an isolated event, perhaps a sign of things to come, but very concerning from my perspective and nothing to dismiss.
I did not wish this situation; I was actually really taken by surprise that containment was abandoned. Before that, when things were exploding in Wuhan, I actually thought to myself "well, good thing we have the teams that dealt successfully with SARS and Ebola still around; one good thing about the CDC and WHO and global governance structures, this being on-top of pandemics things -- it's not like Trump messed with the pandemic team in the CDC that took the lead on those fights; like, what would be the incentive?", and I canceled a trip to not get stuck in quarantine... but then no travel quarantines or anything else started to happen, which is when I became concerned.
However, what I do wish is that people learn from the mistakes that have led us here, both in short term leadership decisions but also long term structural institutional wherewithal of society in general. It seems an appropriate topic for a philosophy forum: to learn.
Sanctimony, yum. I'm doing a mural inspired by sashiko mending. It's cool.
Quoting boethius
"martial" :smile:
To clarify, the question is what is the connection between science and democracy.
When we prepared for WWI and WWII schools and bookmakers focused on American values to mobilize the United States for war. This focus would include a list of democratic characteristics. One of them is... "The search for truth".
You might be aware of the ongoing disagreement between Deist and Christians about truth and self-evident truth. A self-evident truth is an empirical truth. it is a fact that can be verified through the scientific method. European countries were Christian and Christianity supports the notion of kings and a hierarchy of authority over the sinners, that supposedly has God at the top. Democracy comes from Greek and Roman classics and coming from this source, truth is based in reality and empirical information. In a democracy, that is not contaminated by Christianity, there is no god whispering in the king's ear it will be safe for people to return to life as normal by Easter, "such a special day". :roll:
Moa was worshipped by communist followers and Moa had the power to make farmers plant everything deep in the soil with the wrong notion that this would lead to deep roots and strong plants. It lead to famine and thousands starved to death. Just as Trump's denial of the reality of a pandemic lead to its spread before the medical system could be prepared to manage the problem. No one could vote Moa out of office, but in the US, a democracy, the citizens can vote ignorant people out of office. That is what the American Revolution was all about. We rely on science- the search for truth, not faith in someone chosen by God to be our leader. Or we did until education for technology left moral training to the church and resurrected a past of ignorance and superstition and distrust of science.
As my Christian friend said, she is forgiving and loving. Inferring I am not because I do not believe Trump is a great father for our country and I can no longer tolerate her denial of his serious errors and lies. I think he is the wrong leader for this time in history.
My Christian friend is as about as anti-science as a person can be. Science has become the snake that told Eve to eat the forbidden fruit. Innocently she has no idea how Trump could have known what would happen and what steps needed to be taken because she does not turn to science to know such things. It seems many Christians think if they do not know something, it is something that can not be known. For some reason, education for technology has made Americans more anti-science and more religious than they have been in 200 years! :gasp:
Yeah, many people have had doubts about the survival of the EU for decades. :groan:
Last person to say that the EU is at the verge of collapse if it doesn't get it's sh*t together is the Pope.
But hey! It's just an assortment of independent nation states. What else would it be, really?
That would look like a clusterfuck. France is smack-bang in the middle of Germany, Spain and Italy
There is zero chance of this happening.
One party. Two wings. Things are a little different in Europe, but it depends where you're at.
I think most of us believe that 'nothing' is the best Trump could possibly do.
If you look past the dumb statements, what he has actually done in the end is probably not much different to what a Dem president would have done (although maybe they would have started earlier). It could have been a lot worse.
https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/the-new-coronavirus-threat-to-the-world-is-the-usa,13788
"The reality is that America’s response to the pandemic has been disastrous. The latest data shows that the USA:
Most Americans are unaware of these facts, however, because the Trump Government is loudly proclaiming the opposite. ... There is no sign that the spread of the pandemic in the USA is slowing. Friday saw 33,752 new infections, 35.7% of the world’s new cases. This was the 18th daily increase in the last 20 days and the second-highest daily increase on record. Friday saw 2,035 more deaths, 29.2% of all deaths recorded across the globe. This was the 15th daily increase in the last 20 days and the highest daily increase on record."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3csz781
^ Listen for a good explainer on what's happening with EU finances and CV atm.
https://see.news/sweden-reports-worst-death-count-among-nordic-countries/
In this case, not many people in Rome (NYC) drive cars. A coworker has family there who report that people are still crowding onto the subway because they're all essential workers and it's the only way they can get to work. Nowhere else in the US is like that, thus we're all locked down way too early for a storm that probably won't get here for another couple of weeks. But how could we have known?
I know, I was just testing you.
It's probably best if you don't stray into areas you don't understand.
The Netherlands and other EU countries refused to subsidise economic bailouts of Italian companies if Italy refused to get its debt and economic policies in order. All of them offered to give money to cover medical costs without any strings attached.
Italy has flaunted the EU budgeting rules for years and it has no buffer as a consequence. It needs aid because it hasn't adhered to EU guidelines for years and this causes the high interest rates on Italian bonds. Coupled with the high debt it cannot afford bailing out companies like the Netherlands and Germany can. So that problem is of their own making.
If they want money for economic support, the other EU countries are still prepared to do that but not without strings attached.
The idea that solidarity means you can't demand they finally start adhering to previous agreed rules is false and in fact would be disastrous for the economic union in the long run as it would create a precedent for no member state to ever follow agreed rules.
That's good news. An earlier reaction means less lives will be lost and less damage to the local economy. They have a chance of getting test-and-trace programs in place and perhaps avoiding a storm altogether.
Quoting U.S. States Prepare Test-and-Trace Programs to Reopen Their Economies
Us deaths from covid-19 totaled less than 2 percent of all deaths in March.
https://mises.org/wire/march-us-deaths-covid-19-totaled-less-2-percent-all-deaths
Or else what?
Ok. Will do.
But that's just what they want! They're a step ahead of you!
Guess the conspiracy nuts are out now.
That was meant to be mockingly ironic, given the ridiculous degree of panic that is currently consuming the globe. And the state is a step ahead of everyone, otherwise it couldn't get away with running shit like it does.
Yet the UK, France, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands have more cases and more deaths per million, so Sweden isn't here the hardest hit in Europe by any means. And as has been said a lot of times, you have to look how they perform when the other Nordic countries have to loosen their lock downs. If there comes that second wave.
Quoting Benkei
But it's a genre that some people really like!
What? The whole point is to note the difference in outcomes that follow from differences in approach. This is as stupid as staying that you can't compare Stalins gulags with countries without gulags because you have to wait until Stain no longer has gulags. A stupid point to make.
Panic not! Just follow these instructions.
:lol:
However, it's not idiotic to think that the shelter in restrictions have to be lifted sometime. So what happens then, if we don't have the vaccine? The disease isn't so deadly that it will kill itself. A second wave might hit in the fall and basically the corona-virus might stay with us just like the common flu. Hence the case for "herd immunity" hasn't been show yet to be totally wrong. It's likely a wrong move at the start, perhaps, but we don't know yet. Just look at how China hasn't gotten over it:
I might start saying that the US states should all become independent, or that the US, Canada and Mexico should form a Union making them the largest trading block.
Views coloured by my political views.
What in God's name are you rambling on about? I made a comment about the present being-fucked-of-Sweden with no reference to 'how the pandemic will play out' so the fact that you are incapable of keeping track of time tenses or something is your problem alone.
Quoting StreetlightX
Seriously?!?!?
:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:
It's weird how often people forget that the world is larger than the US, and the CDC can therefore not fabricate numbers across the globe.
We're in agreement here, in principle at least. However, I think we would also agree that violence of this kind is a last resort, and it must be first established that not only are democratic processes broken in the US (which I think we'd agree on that) but broken to a point that the effort to overwhelm those democratic processes to reestablish democracy is greater than some violent revolution.
But yes, I agree at some fundamental level, if the state derives justification by representing the general will of the people and state violence is morally speaking the people's violence in any case, then if the state no longer effectively performs that function and has lost legitimacy, re-appropriating the use of violence that was delegated to the state encounters no problem in principle. The problems are entirely practical, in that violence rarely accomplishes anything; discussion and argument have been far more powerful forces in history.
However, the reality of the situation at the moment, as you say, is infantilization and just deluded individuals, the loss of community, generally speaking, to do anything relevant at all. It makes no sense to call for armed revolution, if, for instance, general strikes have not been tried.
Quoting tim wood
If you basically mean Trump is the symptom and not structurally relevant nor intelligent enough to create some sort of despotism, then we agree.
Quoting tim wood
Here we disagree. The American founding fathers were quite self-conscious of making a system where only the wealthy could wield power; the rabble needed to be kept out. As such, Trump is entirely consistent with the system. Trump is the best proof of the advantages wealth has in the US system, and Bernie is the best proof of the disadvantages of "regular person". So, in this sense, Trump beating Bernie (because Bernie can't even get to the general, the system works so well) is demonstration of the system working exactly as intended. What the founding fathers didn't consider seriously enough is that the wealthy class, having such an electoral advantage, can systemically corrupt the whole system. In other words, the American system is simply "Aristocracy light" and the time frame from going from a "true educated and courageous elite" of the founding fathers to what we see now, is not even a good performance for an aristocratic systems.
The solution to insufficient democracy is always more democracy. Countries that have fixed feelings of disenfranchisement due to clearly unfair electoral processes, do well in maintaining a civil and coherent public discussion; countries that stagnate in this regard all up in both extreme polarization of the political discourse while simultaneously in a general political apathy of most people giving up on politics because their views aren't represented fairly.
Switzerland has, at the moment, the most fair democratic system and innovations such as "7 person presidency" so that one person cannot have too much power under any circumstances. They also have not only universal conscription but each conscript then keeping an assault riffle at home, precisely because the government really is the people and the people have no reason to fear themselves.
:up:
Yes, and this is one reason a Dem probably wouldn't have done things hugely differently in the current crisis. It would still have been a case of putting "the economy", i.e. the interests of the aristocracy, first too. And the extreme partisanship on the issue, as on just about every other issue, only obscures the problem. Aristocracy party A are not the answer to the problems caused by Aristocracy party B.
European governments vary widely in structure and implementation. So, it depends somewhat on what country you're in, but, in general, we're better at keeping money out of politics and giving the electorate more meaningful choices. For example, in Ireland, the two traditionally largest parties got a combined less-than 50% of the vote in the last election for our equivalent of your House. Our Senate has very little power and our President is just a figurehead, so that vote really matters. (And moneyed interests don't get to buy politicians. Anyone who can afford to buy a few posters and print a few leaflets has a chance of being elected.)
The failure of NYC to contain the virus is a little better understood now. NY just didn't know what they were dealing with. Interestingly, for the most part, NY's exposure came from Europe, not China. So Europe's failure to contain became America's failure.
To what extent did monied interest delay the US response compared to Europe's reaponse? Honestly, it's not obvious that there was a big difference in the responses except the US got a head's up and so haven't had deaths related to an overwhelmed hospital system the way Italy did.
I await the Frontline documentary to fill in details that we dont see on the surface. I'd be glad to blame 1%'s for thousands of deaths, I'm just not seeing it.
In broad outlines, yes.
But I disagree strongly in this particular situation.
The Democratic aristocracy are competent custodians of Empire; stabilizing the Empire is what Obama achieved. Hillary would have done mostly the same, just being slightly more aggressive with respect to Russia (and unknown vengeance factor against Republicans for humiliating her with the blow job).
In the case of the pandemic, the Democrats (and even Republicans before Trump) understood that a true pandemic like we're seeing is an incredible threat to both US imperial security and the aristocracy. There's simply no way to competently respond in a for-profit system nor social safety net to deal with the economic disruption.
This is why the US had the pandemic response team and the CDC would lead pandemic response anywhere in the world. I believe there's an answer Obama gave about "why are we spending money to stop Ebola in West Africa" which was basically "hey! this is in our interests too! Idiots!".
The great irony in the modern US political epoch is that it's Democrats trying to diligently preserve the empire that the Republican base loves so much. Clinton consolidated American soft power dominance post Soviet Union. Bush put the empire into free fall, Obama saved it. Trump has done severe damage to the Empire already before the crisis: purging the entire "soft power" diplomatic corp, making a mockery of the office of the president, embracing dictators, disregarding treaties, creating a trillion dollar deficit, having no coherent Imperial foreign policy, appointing corrupt sycophants to run everything (or then not appointing anyone at all!).
And Trump's biggest mistake in managing the crisis was firing the pandemic team. Yes, China covered it up, but, knowing they might do this, the US previously had people on the ground to not rely on China's honesty (and it seems US intelligence agencies were on top of this issue to fill the civilian side anyways; just now must embarrassingly admit to intelligence capacity rather than rely on either the correct functioning or then the plausible deniability provided by a civilian team with boots on the ground, given the scale of the F-up, US intelligence agencies can't contain these infos even if they wanted to). So, the whole "blame China" thing is basically akin to leaving a kleptomaniac alone in your house and then working oneself into a righteous fury when things are stolen.
The mitigating affect of public health care and a social safety net is also why the EU simply delegated pandemic policing to the US. It's their Empire, it's them without public health system, it's them with most to lose, let them police pandemics; not as a conscious policy, just that risk analysis puts pandemic much lower down for Europe, and then the US has a big investment already, so the result is such a policy effect; hence, pandemic preparedness is just a bureaucratic health system issue rather than a potential existential European issue.
Of course, if you don't want US empire, then Trump and the absurd levels of corruption and propaganda of the Republicans is a good thing, in a sense; not good in itself, but the lesser of two evils (better to have a bumbling crime boss who makes a mess of things, than some genius Machiavellian psychopath).
The reason why the Democratic elites are legitimately "closer to the facts" and constantly virtue signal this belief, is because facts are genuinely needed to competently run an empire, whether for corrupt purposes or some laudable transcendent goal. Why the neo-cons were called "the crazies" by their more liberal, but equally devoted to Imperial maintenance, counter-parts. However, like all aristocratic systems, this goal of facts and competency, and being "long term greedy", is simply not maintainable; corruption and fantasy narratives always become endemic in any aristocratic system (Troy, Egypt, Athens, Sparta, Rome, Carthage, First Temple, Second Temple, Rajah's, China dynasties, the Khans, British Empire, French Empire, the Confederacy, Bismark, Ottoman's, the Tsarists, the Japanese, Nazis, the Soviets); the pattern is always the same, just more or less quick depending on various cultural and stabilizing external threat factors (threats large enough to force meritocratic processes within the elite and society at large, but not so big threats as to just show up and win).
I can help you out there ol'buddy.
Governments have whole great big departments devoted to something called 'security'. They spend a lot of time and money looking at all the possible disasters and difficulties that might come along and how they can be managed and minimised. It's what governments are for, organising our mutual security. And those departments have been predicting a covid pandemic specifically, and an infectious respiratory virus in general. Of course the fine details of the computer models do not match the actual events, but everything in general about this was predicted and all the possible responses pre-evaluated.
But it turns out that the 1% are extremely sanguine about the death of mainly old and infirm people as a social cost-saving measure. So the preparations were not made and the planned responses were not implemented.
Source?
There's a whole crowd on here whose comments I rarely bother to read. You're one of the them.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fema-report-warned-of-pandemic-vulnerability-months-before-covid-19/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/03/28/exercise-cygnus-uncovered-pandemic-warnings-buried-government/
for examples.
Just to compete with the other analysts and predictors, here's my op from a whole 4 months ago.
Quoting unenlightened
Though this is true, the media (due to corrupt incompetence when it comes to science literacy to protect corporate interests) insists on presenting computer modelling as predictive and simplifying assumptions and error bars as some sort of problem where we need to wait and see (we see this in the global warming debate).
People making these models are not even attempting to predict actual events, they are trying to evaluate risk and cost bounds of different scenarios and identify the actions that have the highest cost-reward (for both informational and containment/mitigation purposes).
One of the previous health experts that's been on the TV a bunch (I'll try to track him down) was continuously making this point: the price is high in any scenario, but investing upfront can radically reduce costs on the back-end. All epidemic models easily show why this health expert is correct. As even in diseases that end up being not so bad (like swine flu), the local costs invested in containment as best as possible are anyways insignificant compared to the global costs if you underestimate the threat.
Ironically, the media was correct that swine flu was a big issue, but because risk analysis is taboo on mainstream television (otherwise you end up teaching people global warming is an irrational risk to take, giving the benefit of the doubt to chemicals is stupid, tolerating systemic fragility with just-in-time supply chains is moronic, outsourcing critical production is self-defeating, etc.), created a sort of "boy who cried wolf" effect and people were desensitized to this pandemic. Had they had scientifically literate people allowed to speak, then the risk framework (and what numbers ultimately drive the consequences and response level) would have been easy to point to: "see, swine flu ended up having these numbers, why it didn't shut down the global economy, but we now have 95% confidence level Coronavirus has these way high numbers that will shut down the global economy if containment isn't serious and disruptive to a lot of flyers, and yes Boeing stock too, which is a big kick while their down from the Max fiasco, but it's not society's job to run cover of a systemic risk to make mental life comfortable for a few Boeing executives ... a few weeks anyways".
The models end up having pretty good predictive accuracy anyways in this case because the phenomena of epidemics is really well understood and repetitive both throughout human history and other species. But this isn't really relevant for the purposes of decision making, it just makes decision making even easier if the goal is containment/mitigation (which it wasn't; stock market was the goal but epidemiologists didn't have a model to explain how the pandemic might interact with the stock market to Western leadership).
Thanks. So there's foreknowledge of the threat of pandemic.
What we're saying is that 1%ers knew this, knew that COVID-19 was this very organism, and suppressed it in order to keep the economy running.
So what happened? How did NYC end up locking down and weathering the crisis fairly well in the face of no cure and no vaccine?
Why didn't businesses stay open and let the hospital overflow as happened in Italy?
And was the Italian disaster a result if 1%ers?
Cool.
You need to look at the timing, because all you have to do to turn a crisis into a disaster is delay a little. It turns out that you cannot quite get away with saying you want a lot of old and frail people to die because it's good for the economy, so you have to act. But you delay acting enough to maximise the deaths, but not so much that even frank will realise you are deliberately letting people die.
We're accusing them of putting money ahead of lives. So why did they allow the economy to shut down?
Remember the Arab spring, it didn't last but it sure took off in a hurry. You all deserve to be heard, but too many of you can't even listen and connect to each other. There's more than a little noodle in among all these posts and I'm certain that at least a few of you carry some local clout and have some worthwhile community connections. There's a meaningful challenge or two in all this crisis if some of us choose to take it up. Also as "I like Sushi" has noted, there are some positive things already being done, mainly on individual private bases, I'd encourage shouting about them. cheers, good luck, you need it, all of you.
"Even as patients died in the hallways of hospitals and their bodies piled up in the makeshift morgues outside, the governor and legislature enacted billions in cuts to health care. They cut $300 million from hospitals, hundreds of millions more from long-term care programs and community health centers that keep seniors and the disabled out of hospitals, and shifted hundreds of millions in costs onto localities that will have no choice but to raise the sales tax (in other words, the price of groceries) or cut social services to bear them.
The governor did delay the implementation dates of some cuts in order to accept upwards of $6 billion in emergency federal Medicaid funds which he’d been threatening to reject (and would have made New York unable to accept the federal funds), a concession that multiple legislators cited as informing their votes for the budget. That accepting billions in free health care aid was a “concession” gives some indication of the perversity of the governor’s priorities.
...The single time a reporter at a coronavirus press conference asked him recently if he would consider increasing taxes on the wealthy, Cuomo answered: “I don’t know how you raise taxes on people who are out of work and their business is closed because government needs more funding.” But the only one raising taxes on hard-hit New Yorkers is Cuomo, whose budget’s Medicaid cost-shifting will force counties to raise sales taxes. ... Cuomo is lying when he tells families he can’t “protect them from the reality” of cuts. He could, were he willing to ever so slightly expose his Wall Street campaign donors to that same reality."
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/04/andrew-cuomo-new-york-budget-austerity-cuts-coronavirus
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/03/andrew-cuomo-medicaid-coronavirus
You do realize we can read your previous comments?
The position you started at was:
Quoting frank
For instance, your idea now that things are "progressing nicely" and you're the calm and steady hand among us doomsayers I already addressed a month ago (how I already explained it before even that):
Quoting boethius
You're just going in delusional circles now; you're just imagining you've been right all this time by adopting our previous positions and thinking we were predicting some even more extreme apocalypse.
When I was arguing for competent containment it was to avoid this as a worst case scenario of shutting down the major economies all at once (which means stressing the worlds resources to deal with pandemic all at once, and the obvious economic depression level implications). Now that we're here, yes, things can get even worse which merits discussion; martial law, out-of-control inflation, geopolitical dislocations. But considering your haughty dismissal of the risk of getting to this point, and the obvious advantages that would have been reaped if the US administration wasn't in denial about getting to this point, maybe it's time to review your analytical capabilities before jumping in again with your Apocalypse straw-manning and trying to portray the US response as competent with as little research as you did a month ago.
It's not just bad faith, but ridiculously and transparently so (since we can read your previous comments! just like we can watch Trump claiming the problem will magically go away and that he doesn't feel responsible anyway) to pretend the current situation was your "a ok, everything on track scenario". It's bizarre fantasy.
The bad ones go into a condition called DIC. I dont remember what that stands for, but it's a systemic inflammatory response indicating an overwhelming infection. It gets bloody. Is there CV in that blood? If course!
So here I am covered in plastic, thank God I remembered my anti-fogger spray, turn the vent off, pull the ETT, cover head in plastic, prepare for the long journey of cleaning this vent up for the next person.
What's so weird is that when I usually withdraw support, the whole family is in the room. It's only with homeless people that the RN and I do this alone. But now everybody dies alone. I haven't gotten to know any of these people.
If I seem dispassionate, maybe it's because this is what I do for a living.
Did I just pull the healthcare worker card on ya? Damn right!
Why would it wait until the fall? The second wave would come right away.
Quoting rob staszewski
We're practising distancing, congregating with the neighbours would be counterproductive.
You do realize we already had this conversation, that I already explained over a month ago:
Quoting boethius
There was zero reason to be surprised about "we are getting more young ones than I expected". The information was available to expect exactly what we are seeing, and the sooner actions are taken the less doubling times happen: and every doubling time you let happen due to inaction doubles the problem!
You were happily drinking the Republican cool-aid a month ago, smugly comfortable that whatever consequences for believing such propaganda are safely in the future, certainly secretly assuming things "won't be so bad" and you'll be able to pop out with this sentiment with the entire right-wing echo chamber roaring to the rescue.
That's not the timeline we're in though. Pretending this is more-or-less what you expected all along, with a few little details missed, is just pathetic trolling at this point. But, I am not calling you a troll like the beer guy; I think you're a genuine believer in this propaganda; even as it falls off the rails and plunges into the abyss, you're a happy passenger. Indeed, sailing has gotten noticeably smoother with a total lack of contact with the ground.