Rules for us. Rules for them…
Then you have the cronyism that seems to be this government’s stock-in-trade…
12 Likes
Why? Change the name of an old product, run some marketing, double the price. What’s the point of innovation when you have a functional monopoly?
5 Likes
Works for the pharmaceutical industry.
13 Likes
“Ah, see, we put the hydroxy group over there, instead of over here. It’s a completely different drug! Except with the same therapeutic effect. And twice the liver toxicity…”
12 Likes
New outbreak spotted in a tourist destination just after a major national holiday results in blanket testing policy
18 Likes
14 Likes
An interesting comparison, considering Baumgartner, like most of these borderline far right figures, is a bit of an anti-mask activist.
8 Likes
20 Likes
And that 40 miles includes only the US deaths.
ETA that like the count, the 12” average torso thickness measurement is probably 30% too low.
8 Likes
These guys actually think Trump is their friend? Have none of them studied their own history? He does seem to enjoy the support of religious fundamentalists, Jewish, Muslim and Christian. Strange and a bit scary.
15 Likes
Trump said 1,000 deaths a day was acceptable losses, then he seized the record keeping, then the numbers leveled off at around 1,000 a day from then on. Are there people who think that is a coincidence? I tend to think even the ones who say so really know better, they just don’t care.
11 Likes
Over the last month or so cases have distinctly turned north, while deaths have continued to decrease. Either the stats are completely made up, or the demographics have shifted to younger, more healthy victims who are much less likely to die, but more likely to spend the rest of their lives compromised by the neurological aftereffects (among other long term problems.) Unlike some, I don’t see the decreasing death rate as a good thing, in the face of increasing cases. We truly have gotten better at treating the critical cases, but with little understanding of the lingering aftereffects, we have not gotten any better at preventing or treating them. We are protecting our elders better, but sacrificing the functioning of the next generations. This is a disaster.
22 Likes
US: People have difficulties social distancing and wearing masks. In turn Disney had issues with their Florida park having enough people entering to keep that park profitable while the California parks still can’t really open yet because of restrictions.
Japan: People wore masks from the very start and stuck to the rules very well to help each other to avoid the illness. They have theme parks actually opening up but with very tight rules to keep each other safe
You know things are bad in the states when you’re much more likely to catch a killer virus in a supermarket in the south than at a porn theme park in Tokyo.
18 Likes
I do believe we are better at treating it. I think if Trump had gotten it in April, he wouldn’t have survived.
The predictability of the death numbers strains credulity, though. It’s almost like an algorithm designed to balance how few deaths people will think reasonable while keeping the numbers low enough to not trouble Republicans. I think comparatively the excess numbers of pneumonia, stroke, heart attack, etc. numbers for this year are going to be astronomical.
10 Likes
And I wonder if that’s by design?
At first, I thought that stuff like the anti-lockdown protests, funded by billionaires like the DeVos family, was a classism “get back to work peons!” thing, but now I wonder if it’s a deeper malfunction of Libertarian* culty thinking?
A public health crisis, like a pandemic, is one of those things that the libertarian myth of “rugged individuals doing their own rational things without being directed by the government” is inherently unable to handle.
The sane approach of central government listening to consensus medical experts, providing leadership and direction to the populous, who follow it out of civic duty (and threat of punishment), and (hopefully) mass-immunizations, is unthinkable to them. And to avoid thinking about it, they’ll grasp any kind of fringe crackpot idea, no matter how irrational.
When Trump babbles about the Coronavirus magically disappearing, miracle cures, etc, that’s partly him, but it’s also the advice that he’s getting from the True Believers like Peter Navarro and Scott Atlas.
I don’t think that all the anti-lockdown, anti-masker (and probably anti-vaxx) problems are only the Know Nothings, but also funded and amplified by Libertarian billionaires, as they did for the Tea Party.
The Koch network has been busy coughing up hairballs like Scott Atlas, and the now the “Great Barrington Declaration” promoting herd immunity, and faster spread of the virus. They’ve also probably been funding the court challenges to government health measures.
That worries me. Classism and capitalist greed are at least grounded in reality. A melt-down by people with a lot of money and influence, who see sane public health measures as unthinkable blasphemy is much worse.
* by libertarian, I mean the people who’ve appropriated the term: Koch libertarians, Randites, “Classical Liberalism” (a neologism they coined). George Mason University, Austrian Economics, Chicago School, Hayek and Mises, etc.
18 Likes
“Whoever we are, wherever we’re from
We shoulda noticed by now, our behavior is dumb”
Frank Zappa – Dumb All Over
19 Likes
Worrisome, given that people (in the U.S. at least) have become pretty relaxed about the possibility of contracting the virus from surfaces…
From the Abstract: “While the role of fomite transmission is not yet fully understood, precise data on the environmental stability of SARS-CoV-2 is required to determine the risks of fomite transmission from contaminated surfaces.” In the lab, in the dark (no UV): “We obtained half lives of between 1.7 and 2.7 days at 20 °C, reducing to a few hours when temperature was elevated to 40 °C. With initial viral loads broadly equivalent to the highest titres excreted by infectious patients, viable virus was isolated for up to 28 days at 20 °C from common surfaces such as glass, stainless steel and both paper and polymer banknotes. Conversely, infectious virus survived less than 24 h at 40 °C on some surfaces.”
14 Likes
If we can get to a point where fomite transmission is the mode we need to worry about, we will have made huge strides from where we are currently. Good research, good info, I can only hope it becomes applicable soon.
17 Likes
They all worship the same demon, just with different names.
8 Likes
They’re taking the doctors to Isengard!
27 Likes
