Agreed. Downward trend is good. Lack of vigilance will eventually result in an upward trend.
Yes - it is important to consider local data as well as national data. There are areas doing better than the national average, and worse than the national average.
That depends very much on where you are. It’s fairly rare to see folks without masks here in NY. More than half of people were wearing them before it was required, and before you could reliably get them. And now out of the hundreds of people I encounter every day during work, I only see a couple of people a week who refuse to wear a mask.
That said it’s still mandatory here. Restaurants can lose their liquor licenses for serving people without a mask outside of the strict confines of distanced outdoor table service (low capacity indoor dining starts this week). And personal fines for having no mask within 6 feet of others are like $1400. And covid hit early and hard here. It’s much harder to be dismissive when your neighbors are dead.
It’s largely states that haven’t made masks mandatory or refuse to enforce those policies where masks aren’t the default.
And most of the maskless people I’ve run into lately are wealthy European tourists. Seem to be a big influx of French, Germans and Italians the last 3 weeks or so. That’s part of our usual summer tourist crowd, and I couldn’t tell you if they came out from NYC or flew in as things opened up. But almost none of them will wear masks.
The spike vastly exceeds what you’d expect purely based on testing. And hospitalization and death rates are spiking in many places, testing shouldn’t have an impact on that. Just as the nationwide infection rate was being skewed downward through May by early, large states getting it under control. But the rises in other states have now begun to drive national numbers up. You are going to see national death rates head back up as the states being hard hit now tap out their hospital capacity in the coming weeks.
This argument is the one Trump’s administration has been pushing. It’s already been glossed by the press and experts, and it doesn’t add up.
The thing that probably shouldn’t surprise me is how closely this cuts to everyone’s predictions on when a second set of states would get hammered if we didn’t have a consistent, persistent, national response. Southern states began “reopening” after just a couple weeks of quarantine measures in April. And “watch what happens in two months” was almost a catch phrase it was so common a criticism.
Two months later…
I was hoping that pressure would be so immense that the Trump administration would feel backed into a corner and follow the lead of successful countries like S. Korea, even Italy, and whip states into action on Covid. Instead, and I’m not complaining, the second black swan event of George Floyd’s televised execution and protest aftermath caused them to dig in their heels even more and become HYPER-RESISTANT to reality. Thus, causing the governors of red states to follow along and act like dumbasses, too.
Alas, I, too, was farrrrrr too optimistic. THIS TIMELINE SUCKS!!! I HATE THIS FUCKING TIMELINE!!!
In the final tally, allowing for missteps (e.g. coming late to the mask game) and adjusting for the strength of the local economies, the difference in outcomes between any given regions within or amongst the OECD countries will likely come down to the public’s trust in government to address crises – a trust the GOP has been attacking for two generations.
All valid context. I’m speaking only to the personal preferences expressed to me by people from countries in the Global South.
Sure. Fair enough. Just wanted to point out this larger context, since the term third world is generally used as a stand in for poor countries by people in the west.
The response was heterogeneous. Places like Washington, Oregon, and California responded early and with stronger restrictions. NY & NJ went full lockdown after they saw huge spikes in cases and deaths, and are trending down right now. But many states never even instituted restrictions, and others were half-hearted at best, then reopened like nothing had changed. Most of the new cases are from the latter states.
Even places where there were restrictions and gradual re-opening are seeing increases. Oregon is only a few weeks into phased re-opening, but is seeing a high rate of new cases, and the governor jumped in with a mandatory mask order for all public indoor places starting this week to try to counter it.
Even though that looks good for the Northeast, it’s just a matter of time until the other shoe drops. A second wave anywhere is a second wave everywhere.
Thank you for making that point. I was out fishing the other day and encountered someone from Arizona who was living out of their car, traveling north to escape the heat and pandemic. They were lost on a maze of forest roads, headed towards an area closed off by a landslide years ago, that doesn’t show up on printed maps, and would likely have run out of gas. I got them pointed in the right direction, but wore a mask the whole time just in case.
i dunno. i think i get what you mean, but it sounds a bit like victim blaming.
in brazil, reports are bolsonaro was sending troops to indigenous regions thus (possibly deliberately) helping covid to spread there.
here in the us, trump, kushner, and pompeo were sending the ppe we had to other countries, refusing to restock, and using what was left as a political tool – all while downplaying the crisis, undermining testing, and talking up unfounded cures.
anyways – the worst of the spread doesn’t come down to people’s trust in government. it comes down to governmental actions to both encourage the spread and discourage people’s trust in experts.
Dammit, why did they have to include Maryland in the SE region? Yeah, there’s that Mason Dixon line and all, but this isn’t about history, it’s about culture. We’re doing a bang-up job here and including us with the SE just helps their curve look better.
I should’ve included the source link for that image:
i had a pair of customers yesterday who said they were here in attempt to get away from coronavirus’s spread in nyc.
in my role as an essential worker and certified customer relations professional ( umm… okay, cashier ) i nodded and gave them their change.
in an alternative timeline, i pointed out their unexamined white privilege, their wealth privilege, and the fact they just endangered my life and the lives of countless people in my town.
My point is that, ceteris paribus, you’re more likely to get a better public health outcome in this set of countries (or regions within that set of countries) when there’s a trust in government* to find the right experts to resolve a problem (as distinct from populist autocrats who claim that they themselves have all the answers or in contrast to Libertarians counting on the market to sort things out).
In a country or region where there’s strong trust in government, citizens are going to follow instructions from the experts the government puts forward. In countries where that trust has been systematically degraded, experts are as likely to get death threats as they are compliance with their advice.
In practise, both of those are the result of campaigns to discredit government as a solution for a large-scale problems. You don’t get autocrats like Biff or Bolsonaro when the bulk of the citizenry is confident that the state is operating in good faith and in their interests.
[* in the sense of the consistent and regular mechanisms of the state as opposed to specific administrations or regimes]
the bulk of people here have never supported bunkerboy. he won because our country was built on enslaving people, and it was more important to setup voting to protect the enslavers than to allow all people to have a voice.
the vast majority of the people in the us agreed with the experts on covid. the problem is the constant drum beat of trump, the gop, fox, and conservative talking heads drowning out those voices. they made this into a culture war.
this is a failure by the current government, and things wouldn’t have reached this stage if the actual will of the people had been reflected in the last presidential election.
biden’s whole campaign is premised on restoring the prior status of government as something that people do trust. you can argue he needs to acknowledge the ways government has consistently failed – but most white middle class people don’t even perceive those failures.
[ so again, it’s not about trust. it’s about an administration actively working to undermine people who don’t support the president. ]
That’s the downside of living in a country where people are free to travel between areas with different state and local responses to the pandemic.
Me too. And I live here. Bah.
I agree with almost everything you said but I don’t think we get to isolate this failure in that way. Recall Regan’s famous line, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.” The failure of the current government is exactly the logical progression of decades of Republican thought. If the party’s mantra is that government can’t be a force for good, then expect them not to be.
My 'rents in FL are not even going out of the house since nobody is masking up and they are in the category of folks who might not make if they get it.
I wish people would just suck it up for a month or two and wear them out-and-about. Watch movies at home. Take time away from Disney parks. Get a sprinkler for your backyard and teach your kids about water pressure instead of going to a pool.
C’mon, people. We can be better than this.
At least 27% have, perhaps as high as 40%. That indicates that the bulk of the American citizenry (as opposed to the majority) does not trust that the state is operating in good faith and in their interests as is the bulk of (e.g.) the Danish or Canadian or German citizenry.
[Source]
That can also translate downward to regions within a country or within a U.S. state: the citizens of California will more likely trust government and its experts than will those of Mississippi, and the citizens of San Francisco will more likely trust them than will the citizens of Redding.
Via Republican and AynCap propaganda over 40 years, a lot of Americans have been trained not to trust or heed the advice of the state and its experts despite said advice being generally sound and reality-based and effective.
The current administration is the logical outcome of one duopoly party that’s been working since 1980 (see @CCinBmore’s comment above) to actively undermine trust in the ability of government to provide solutions to large-scale problems. Il Douche is a perhaps fatal symptom of a chronic disease spread by greedheads and racists, a disease that hasn’t taken hold in other OECD countries to the degree that it’s enabled the spread of a real pandemic.
