10 years of grad school is good for something! 
9 Likes
Yes, but: the underlying lack of trust is not merely because of the Koch brothers neoliberal propaganda, it’s also because of sustained malice and failure by the bipartisan US ruling class. Neither party possesses the will to solve the core problems, and what minor concessions they occasionally make to the public need are utterly awash in corruption and incompetence.
It’s a chicken vs egg sorta deal. Trump isn’t solely responsible for Americans lack of healthcare, job security and basic government services, but that lack is a matter of material reality rather than psychology. The material conditions drive the psychology more than vice-versa.
The solution requires redistribution of power, not just a superior marketing campaign.
2 Likes
Masks are one of a range of options. Here in Australia, masks were never compulsory or even strongly recommended and if you go out on the street it would be only about 1 in 50 wearing a mask, and they would be predominately Asians who would have been used to wearing them pre COVID-19 anyway.
What we did here which was our effective measure was encouraging everyone to stay at home as much as possible, shutdown pubs and restaurants and enforce social distancing everywhere.
The other factor was of course that we reacted early.
3 Likes
Yeah I have a feeling right now that stay at home is working against us (I am in Melbourne). We might be better off if more people were out in parks and on golf courses. A lot of our cases have been transmitted inside houses.
1 Like
Me three. How the hell do you make some opinionated jackass realize that, to a virus, they are merely rich virgin farmland, and nothing else. The farm’s opinions count for zilch.
7 Likes
I was speaking to my family in TX over the past couple of days. One of them’s in Austin, where the local authorities actually put more of an effort into prevention, but the whole state’s a hotspot now. In Tarrant Co.my folks are wearing masks but not really trying to stay home. None of them (after all this time) really had much of an idea how things got here just outside DC but I’m afraid it’s what’s in store for large portions of the country. (Obviously I hope I’m wrong. I saw a headline go by yesterday suggesting that the virus could die out on its own without any vaccine; I didn’t read the article and it hasn’t bubbled back up to wherever I found it.)
4 Likes
Well, yes. Anyone who’s seen what I’m describing happened over the last 40 years understands the role of the Third Way Dems in normalising the neoliberal-default substrate that’s led to the occupation of the White House by this trash heap. Thank you for once again highlighting that which is obvious to most regular commenters here but may be new information to casual readers.
If you take the time to follow the discussion, though, you’ll note that we’re specifically discussing supporters of the duopoly party that’s more fully descended into denial of scientific fact. What’s your take on that? Is it “victim-blaming” to point out that there’s some correlation between various countries’ or regions’ success in addressing the pandemic and the level of trust their citizenries have in government as discussed above?
2 Likes
Well I have two daughters and a beautiful wife so maybe not that virgin 
1 Like
You’re not wrong. Texas is nearing its ICU maximum capacity. Texas Children’s in Houston is taking adult patients overflow from the other hospitals. And not only is Texas hip deep in Coronavirus: it’s NECK deep in bullshit. The number of naysayers and anti-maskers is reaching a deafening level. They think it’s all a big overreaction. One asshole told me, “If your scared stay home.” [sic] I was going to launch into a diatribe on why his mother should be regretting his birth, but then I realized that I am far outnumbered by bacteria. My best response is to wash hands with warm soapy water for 20 seconds and dry them with a clean towel.
Every day my neck grows stronger from shaking my head in utter disgust.
7 Likes
Well we have a much, much, much denser population on the whole than you guys do.
But that critical thing seems to be shutting down early. You guys cut it off before it could really take hold. The initial restrictions here in NY were just as strict, but barely slowed anything down until we added masks.
We’ve also seen a number of places, including places that look a lot more like Australia, have resurgences when restrictions loosened without enough mask use. Just from the US that seems to be what happened in California. And just recently there are worrying spikes in numbers in NJ.
NJ has rushed to reopen beaches, malls, boardwalks and amusement parks before the 4th of July weekend. And clusters of new cases are appearing in beach towns and traces to specific bars. Driven by college and high school students gathering there in numbers without masks.
So the story seems to be you can get out of the house and loosen things up. But it’s broad use of masks that allows that to work.
If you have transmissions within house holds, what do you think happens when multiple members of that household head out into the world?
They come in contact with larger numbers of people. Which increases the number of transmissions a single sick person causes.
Healthy people have more chance of contacting a sick person out in the world, because they’re in contact with more people. And they’ll carry it home to their families.
It isn’t about the amount of time you spend with a particular person. It’s all about how many people you come in contact with.
That’s why the masks are useful. They reduce the chance and number of transmissions from already sick folks. It’s also why the social distancing works.
Basically these things let you lighten restrictions.
I think the mistake NY and NJ are making is assuming they let you remove restrictions entirely. They can’t get over large groups of people, and shit where people gather in crowds let non compliant people cluster up. Where they get infected and carry it home. And promoting tourism and night life just means those people carry things from a larger geographic area.
Masks aren’t a replacement for any measure, but they improve things as part of the total system.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
