Florida has pretty strong sunshine laws. Normally DeSantis wouldn’t stand a chance of burying it.
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there is no treatment, only mitigation of symptoms.
there is no such assumption. america remains the richest country on earth. the problem is wealth is unequally distributed. we can afford the lockdown if wealthy people are willing to pay for it.
herd immunity means 80-90% of a population has been infected and developed resistance. the us has 328.2 million people, 80% is 260 million, lets say the fatality rate is an unexpectedly low 1/2 percent – that’s 1.3 million people dead. ( and that’s even assuming individual immunity is possible, which we don’t know yet. )
if people don’t think that death rates like that will tank the us economy, increase suicide, self-harm, and domestic violence i have no words.
the reason not to exceed hospitalization capacity is to keep the death rate as low as possible. ( more towards a half percent, and not say 4 or 5 percent. ) so that people who need symptom mitigation ( respiratory support, cardiac support, limb amputations, etc. ) can be helped.
the only sane objective is to keep as many people alive as possible… which means not exposing people to the virus.
he squandered our ability to get the rate of testing above the rate of infection. if we had started with adequate testing, we could have isolated sick people before the spread got out of hand.
right now it’s anyone’s guess if we can get testing rates growing faster than infection rates. we aren’t there yet. and that’s got to be step 1.
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Strong laws or not, DeSantis has already used considerable political pressure to stop sunshine from rearing its ugly head. So far, his pressure caused the Herald’s law firm to step away from ehat had been a longtime client. The paper has since secured new legal representation toward prying sunshine from DeSantis’ cold, dark hands.
Treatment is mitigation of symptoms, and at the moment, we don’t really have that except for oxygen and ventilators. I think there’s some chance that will change, which argues for a strong lock-down, initially because fatality rates may be significantly better in the future.
You understand that the wealthy are wealthy because they own lots of stock. If the rest of us aren’t working, it isn’t worth anything. Same with dollars in the bank. They have no intrinsic worth if few people are producing goods.
One thing I notice a lot, especially in the U.S., is to pretend how the average person doesn’t count, only the leaders. That economically, only the billionaires that matter. They are of course, disproportionately important, but the wealth and power of the any country is in its people, all of its people. They stop working for a year or two, and you don’t have a country, you have an economic wasteland, and no set of billionaires (who aren’t, any more) can save you.
Yes, that’s the brutal truth. Weighed against the fact that a vaccine may not be possible, may be that herd immunity may be impossible as we may lose our antibodies against this in 3-4 months.
Of course I do. But if people stop lending the government money in a few months and we’re at 70-80% unemployment (as most businesses collapse because demand is essentially zero), then we end up with no lock-down, 10% immunity, and then we have the epidemic to end all epidemics, and we end up 10 million dead because everyone who requires hospitalization dies.
I’m not saying this is what happens, but pretending it isn’t a possibility is also tunnel thinking.
I agree with the first statement part. But if you have already decided the second (and the second may be right), then you have already excluded possible truths, and that is never the right mind-set to have in a crisis. (For the record, I believe there’s about a 65% chance the entire of your statement is true. How certain are you?)
I agree. But then I noticed the same is true for every other country outside of Asia, and we’re not all run by Trump.
Honestly, I think Americans give Trump way too much credit for events (part of their “only the powerful matter” culture). He is the most powerful man in the world, but that’s still fairly small potatoes compared your other 300 million.
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outside of italy ( which may well have unique circumstances ) england’s government is the only european country to stick its head as fully in the sand as ours.
by dismantling the parts of the government that deal with infectious diseases, by actively blocking state government’s responses, by failing to test and failing to take responsibility this administration has done enormous harm.
where we are doing well at least shows you’re right. the administration has limits. we arent all dead yet. here’s to hoping for florida.
that’s one reason, hardly the only. mainly i’m talking about taxes and forgiving debt ( long term solutions ), and freezing mortgages and rent ( short term solutions. )
as it stands the people and businesses who will make it out of this well are those with cash, stock, and capital reserves. ( as well as friends in congress. )
which is why we don’t want to kill a million people by being cavalier. ( and why focusing on bailing out main street instead of wall street is best. )
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Well, I look at Italy and New York. Did they “stick their heads in the sand”? Not any more (or less) than pretty much everyone else. What’s interesting to me is that if you discount the rhetoric, pretty much every nation in the West has had very similar actual responses for the casualties they’re suffering - even Sweden (they just don’t need laws to get social distancing).
What is different is the rhetoric or the narrative that goes along with the actions. I won’t be surprised to see Trump claim he’s “freed America” because in some states, the state government (not him!) has allowed an additional 5% to back to work, and many of those employees will choose the better part of valor.
Certainly in Canada, while our rhetoric is vastly preferable to the US president, but it turns out we’re less draconian than almost all of the states. There’s no shelter in place here. But our rhetoric focuses only on saving lives, so we’re obviously taking this seriously and far less cavalier about human life. Except we’re not.
Of course, but again what keeps hitting me is that it is the rhetoric and the small details that are cavalier, but the over all actions of governments seem to be remarkably similar.
Which is just part of what I’ve realized as Trump got elected. What you do matters vastly less than what you say. Trump can say he cares about Middle Americans, and it doesn’t matter if his policies punch them in the face. Obama cares about people, so stepped up deportations don’t fit with our internal narrative and we ignore them. It appears that words speak way louder than actions.
Anyway, I’ve drifted far off topic. As I mentioned in a different topic, for me, figuring out testing seems to be the most important thing, and I haven’t seen any unified action by left or right Western governments. Perhaps there is, and we’re not party to it yet.
this is false - or, if you want to split hairs and include your next two words “similar responses for the casualties” - misleading.
as has been clearly documented the administration has not worked towards a coherent national response. in fact, it has actively worked against such a response. ( not the least of which has been forcing states to buy their own ppe, then seizing the ppe which has been purchased. )
so, no. our federal government’s response has not been not like the response of germany, sweden, norway, ireland, iceland, france, or spain. nor even italy, who was hit early but has worked hard from the start to stop it.
as i said, our response most nearly follows england. a slow response guided by ideas like herd immunity and worries about the economy instead of public health.
we need more testing. moreover, our testing capacity has to be growing faster than the rate of infection.
this takes clear federal and state leadership. and rather than people like desantis encouraging people to head to the beaches, we need leaders who can face the fact we’re not where we need to be to open for business.
the poor federal response, and as you brought up also the rhetoric, is literally killing people
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This is almost exactly what I am getting at. In a health emergency, the Federal government is completely peripheral to the governments that actually make policy decisions such as lock-down, public health initiatives, school closures, etc. Sure the Federal government has some resources to allocate, and they’re certainly important on the economic impacts, but its the states responses that actually matter.
So, the United States does not have a response, it had 50 responses (and Canada 12).
But we’re unable to look beyond the poisonous rhetoric of the buffoon in the White house because his rhetoric is far more important than the actual policy decisions that are being made. His bloviating is way more important to us than the decisions upon which millions of lives will rest. What he says is far more important than what is actually happening.
It’s impossible to know the counterfactual, but I’m pretty certain that in a reality where Hillary Clinton won, I’d be looking at numbers that are a only few percent from where they are now and I’d be feeling that the US had dodged a bullet because they had an administration that took this seriously. (Thinking how I feel about New York.)
As an aside, here’s some interesting graphs indicating that the countries I tend to respect most had the slowest responses: https://twitter.com/DToshkov/status/1252164094355963905
the cdc, fema, the pandemic response team, the federal stock pile, the nation defense authorization act, who funding, international coordination, interstate coordination. these are all in the president’s purview.
trump’s administration has failed at managing these core aspects of the united states response. ( and as i have said several times. not only has he failed at this. he and his administration has actively impeded these. )
yes. you’re beginning to see the problem.
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