I acknowledge the fact that people do need every good news possible, because reality just bites. Hard. In your scrotum. (Or, I suppose, your mammae, if you don’t have one of those other dangling bits).
But the overblown and often simply false announcement by the sitting inhabitant of the White House are the single most important thing which makes the success of any vaccination campaign in the world less likely.
This FUD is mighty. Nothing else about this PORUS is as mighty.
So, we need to be aware of this, and try to counter it by not getting anyone’s hopes to high. I just would caution against letting this sorry excuse of an inspiration for Biff Tennan makes us believe or disbelief that we will have viable save vaccination … “soonish”.
The Syracuse students had all been asked to sign a pledge to not do exactly what they did, so they were all aware that it was a rules violation. One could argue that the decision to open campus was the real problem, but that assumes that students are unable to control themselves, and while that might be true I think you can’t build that into official campus policy, and can’t absolve the students of blame for this.
BTW, there was another similar gathering on campus 2 nights later.
It was the position of many European health directorates – including Norway, for example – that children were better off in school, where their contacts could be monitored and controlled, than at home.
I have no problems with things like ramping up production capacity while simultaneously completing phase 3 trials. I am not at all ok with just skipping or half-assing those trials. I am one who will be responsible for assuring compliance and discussing risks with the public. If I have no reliable phase 3 data to go by, I cannot in good conscience do that. Every scheme to get a vaccine out by the end of the year absolutely requires phase 3 trials be curtailed or abandoned simply based on time frame. You cannot complete and meaningfully analyse the study in that period of time. Can not be done. I am open to suggestions as to how I might be wrong, but it would require some amazing skills to convince me. I see summer '21 as the reasonable go date for any such vaccine.
Shit how many more dead by then, how many more businesses and peoples’ dreams crushed.
Meanwhile just watched out my window as about 20 people gradually parked on the street and went in to a house party, no masks, didn’t seem to be distancing. smh
Even though cases are still 2-300 PER DAY, the county has come off some sort of state watch list and is allowing certain reopenings including schools. Something like 3000 new cases in the last two weeks but this is somehow great news because the case rate-per 100k has gone below 100.
Which I would also like to complain about, this “case rate per 100k” is needlessly confusing. I know it’s somewhat standard, but just state a percentage so we don’t have to do the math. I have yet to be able to reverse engineer the numbers they are coming up with from the data.
But…that would mean publishing numbers that look bad. Owners of some major news outlets seem to have been convinced to avoid that at all costs. They are complicit in making this situation much worse by soft-pedaling the figures on cases and deaths. At the same time, they put people who act on their misinformation (by partying and/or refusing to wear a mask) on the front page.
Husband and 3 yr old kid ran across 20+ people in a front yard doing a piñata. No masks. They tried to ask my kid if she wanted to hit the piñata before my husband shut that terrible idea down.
Better he was there than me.
No, it assumes that 100% of students will control themselves 100% of the time, which is stupid to assume of any group of people. I have a hell of a lot more confidence in students than in, say, school adminstrators on that count. But it’s not enough.
I think it’s pretty clear at this point that the circumstances in the UK and the US are not even worth comparing to Norway, much less conflating.
There is plenty of good news to be had, and the only biting reality is the absence of qualified leadership in the majority parties of the US and the UK, which is not only responsible for the dire but unnecessary economic conditions but also crimes against humanity leading to hundreds of thousands of murders. The good news is all around us: people across the political spectrum (in the US, the UK seems pretty fucked in every direction) support sensible behavior and are beginning to band together to fight the idiots and liars, meanwhile we look like we might have a vaccine in under two years which, and I’m not a medical historian, but I’m pretty sure that’s faster than we were able to develop vaccines for AIDS or malaria.
It’s routinely the most corrupt position in American politics, at least in states where you don’t have elected county judges, and they’re largely the same Blue Lives Matter fascists as city cops, but without even the veneer of oversight provided by a municipal government.
I would argue that the issue is not a lack of “qualifications” for leadership, whatever that may be. It’s not even really a matter of incompetence, although that is a factor.
The core of the problem is greed and malice. The ruling class of the UK and US aren’t trying and failing to contain the pandemic; they have made a decision that effective action would be unacceptably costly to their personal wealth and power, and are instead choosing to let the pandemic run its course.
Whatever vaccine comes second in the US should be trustworthy, but I would still want to dig into the clinical study pretty deeply before rolling up my sleeve.
100% compliance is not necessary to control the epidemic. If a few more of those Syracuse students had been wearing masks, and they had kept a bit more distance in this outdoor setting, there would have been very little risk of transmission. (For example, there is very little evidence of transmission from the BLM protests.) I don’t know how Syracuse came up with their opening protocols – whether it was a unitary decision on the part of some administrators, or it was a community decision – but at some of the quality private schools there has been considerable pressure from students to open.
Whoever made the decision, once the decision was made and protocols agreed, any member of the community who violates them bears responsibility. In this case, these students were not ignorant of the pandemic nor of the protocols their community adopted, they should have known better. This impromptu party was an egregious violation of common sense.
They tell us that the bar in their village was closed because of the coronavirus, so they decided to come to the capital to have some fun and “see the big, wide world.”
Alejandro Ruiz, a watchman on the street where the disco is, told RPP that parties had been held there previously.
“The noise could be heard two blocks away,” said Ruiz. When police cars passed by, people in the disco turned off the lights and lowered the volume of the music, he said.
If you leave a pile of explosives and cocaine in the middle of a college quad and tell all the college students “please don’t touch the explosives or the cocaine,” then you’re still arguably the one who deserves most of the blame when something bad happens.
The people running the colleges have long known the likely consequences of reopening. If they chose to do so anyway then they don’t get to wash their hands of the matter.
