China. Tested 92% of Wuhan city. 300 new asymptomatic cases out of roughly 10 million people. Post-lockdown PCR tests.
Their bottom line, of course: lockdown works.
However, a Chinese-style lockdown in the US would probably cause a civil war, I guess.
ETA 2: “There were no positive tests amongst 1,174 close contacts of asymptomatic cases” is also relevant.
I said it very early in the pandemic, with all those news we need to be very careful generalising, because a lot of factors are not mentioned and often not transferable 1:1 - many of them deeply rooted in local and regional culture.
So here are two items that are not in the press yet; treat this as well-sourced local gossip. I’ll post separately…
Recall that Toronto and surrounds were just put into something that (more or less) looks like a lockdown for 4 weeks (two months too late). We shall ignore, for the moment, the reaction of local malls, which was to extend their weekend hours .
It seems that Torontonians, and folks from the surrounding locked-down areas, are heading out to smaller towns to do their shopping, where the lock-down hasn’t hit yet.
The reaction in those small towns has been to start carding shoppers and turn them away if they aren’t local.
Small-town Ontario can be a “little insular,” but I have to say that this reaction isn’t completely nuts.
In other news, COVID is ripping through the conservative Mennonite community in Centre Wellington, Ontario. Many old-order Mennonites moved away from traditional areas near Waterloo after selling up at good prices, making this a geographically broader concern. Unfortunately, the more conservative Mennonites have resisted the closure of their schools and churches and, after the Ministry of Health set up a testing site just for them, nobody showed up. Suspicion is that case counts are severely under-reported, since they are not co-operating with contact tracing either.
What’s interesting is that Steinbach, Manitoba is also becoming a dire hotspot. The CBC rather delicately omits the fact that Steinbach is Mennonite-central. (Edit: Mennonites there may indeed be off the hook.)
Disclaimer: I used to be married to someone of Mennonite background. The community shares a lot in common with the Jewish diaspora, including widely differing degrees of conservatism. If someone from Steinbach meets someone from, say, New Hamburg, near Berlin Kitchener, Ontario, the next 20 minutes will be devoted to working out how they are related, but I digress…
This is a shame, I took lots of courses at the Mennonite college, Conrad Grebel, at the U Waterloo and this is a something the community does not need.
you’d have to go back in time and find the moments where significant numbers of americans moved from trusting science to believing in vast shadowy cabals of elites controlling the world from their underground bunkers
the road from getting out from under this and then pivoting towards addressing climate change - the effects of which, if we follow this same pattern, will be far worse than covid’s… it’s a hard one
this was like some live fire test, and we’ve been failing miserably
I wondered about that when I saw anti-mask protests that included women in long plain dresses, but this article, paraphrased from a Winnipeg Free Press article, says the Steinbach protestors were from the Ohio-based Church of God, and Hutterites (Mennonites) were not involved.
It still could have been accomplished if their orange-creamsicle prophet had told them to wear masks and socially-distance. Instead, he did the opposite.
I don’t know much about these religious sects, but that inflatable rainbow unicorn in this context strikes me as hilarious.
(And also, fuck them for bringing the kids into this.)
he never would have. and they voted him into office because he’s the sort of person who never would. and voted for him again because he followed through. that’s actually my point. ( and maybe, granted, a wrong headed one… so i’ll put it in the form of a question instead… ) was there some time, perhaps a subtle one, when america could have taken a different road? or is white supremacy so baked in that, we’ll continue to get people like the trump family and the mcconnells of the world who aim to burn the whole place down to spite us all?
@teknocholer Steinbach-area church, not Hutterites, behind well being order-breaking…
Honestly, I would have been surprised if the Hutterites were not doing the right thing in all of this. My introduction to them was a visit to a Hutterite farm as a young teenager and I came away with a pretty positive impression. It was a modern operation and people were friendly and open. They appear to be working openly and positively with health officials.
As for the Church of God… let’s just say I lost my interest a long time ago in keeping up with the latest developments of that nature… Not surprised…
I think T could totally have played it to his advantage (and probably won re-election) if he had any sense of the real world and consequences. Early on, he could’ve amped up the “Kung-flu” rhetoric, and made it every “red-blooded American’s” patriotic duty to mask up, socially distance, and avoid the bars for a few weeks to “eradicate this foreign scourge.”
They had a plan all in place to send us all 5 masks, but ditched it.
ETA: to bring it back to your post, I think that he could’ve brought his followers along on this path. I think it would’ve been pretty easy.
I didn’t know about the timing.
I did know that the mask-mailing plan was estimated to cost about $1B, and instead we had a $2T relief package, which has since proven inadequate.
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I didn’t know about the timing.