Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/06/25/new-york-times-shows-how-the-v.html
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This is all going to be background noise against the result of “Reopening Fever”.
And “reopening”, “masks are unconstituntional!”, “drink bleach!” will up that by an order of magnitude.
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Yeah but can we get back to the part where Hillary Clinton’s inaction allowed four Americans to die in Benghazi? I’m pretty sure that’s the scandalous failure of American governance that future historians will REALLY care about.
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In a better timeline, where Hillary won the Electoral College, the GO₽ would be impeaching her for ordering quarantine in February.
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It’s cute that you think she would have made it this far without being impeached on some bogus pretext sometime in 2017. Chances are we’d be on the third or fourth round of impeachment by now (stalling in the Senate).
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The visuals are neat, but the title supposes defeat to a war that just started and won’t be over until we have universal testing and contact tracing. The universal adoption of masks would also help tremendously.
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We will never have universal testing and contact tracing, ergo…
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Our country’s economy will not fully reopen until the virus is under control by mass testing and contact tracing. Eventually, people will realize it is enormously cheaper to test test test then to stay closed.
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…how the virus won
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Agreed. It won’t be over until there’s a vaccine (hopefully). So maybe next year.
In the meantime, my wife and I have canceled the last of our summer trip plans. Hoped to go up and see family in Maine and rent a cottage for a week to stay as socially isolated as possible, but going to forgo it now. Too risky for them and us.
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The Coronavirus is still waging war, but America has surrendered. Worse still, in many states, a treasonous population, misled by propaganda and blinded by entitlement, is collaborating with the enemy.
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I agree with your assessment, however people “realizing” has not been a strong suit of the US for some time now.
Unfortunately, that “eventually” may be quite a ways away still.
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Agreed… There’s likely quite a distance in time, a mounting death toll, and worsening economic pain. All I’m saying is it doesn’t stop until we do the right thing.
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You are very optimistic that “people” are that intelligent to make that kind of cost benefit analysis. “People” aren’t even smart enough to wear a mask in public. To me this pretty much means the virus won. It isn’t likely that it will be controlled in any sense in the US such that the virus will either go extinct or stop fatalities in a way that would indicate that organized opposition to it was any better than just luck or a fluke of nature.
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Except the people aboard Trump’s “test less and things will be better” train, with an engine made out of solid “Save the economy!” You know, ostriches and assholes.
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This. Despite lack of consensus over exactly how much masks actually hel, it is basically free and it helps some. If it turns out to help a lot it could seriously reduce the economic impact. If we can’t do something trivial like that, we are just giving up.
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I wonder how many people in the US will die in the next few years. I’m guessing in the tens of millions at least.
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the link in the article just takes me to the NYT paywall.
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Probably not. I would guess somewhere around 1 to 2 million by the time the various strains of COVID-19 mutations run rampant through the US population. The number of people infected will certainly rise to 10-15 million, even if they don’t all fall ill or have lasting health issues from it.
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I’d take that bet. People will regulate their behaviour by staying home once enough people close to them have been severely affected. My guess is that once the you see thousands of people dying locally, you’ll see changes in behaviour. (That’s the tragedy of having a disease where the death rate lags the infection rate by several weeks. By the time people start to care, it’s weeks too late.)
Of course, that will be too late for hundreds of thousands, especially the old and the immune compromised, and it will be especially tragic that so many will die who could have been saved if the hospitals hadn’t been overwhelmed.
My guess is that it the US will see approximately 100,000 deaths a quarter until (and if) the vaccine is developed. The “hot region” will bounce around the country as regions that aren’t hit hard fall into bad practices until it is too late.
The only open question is whether regions will tighten more quickly when rates start to rise a second time. My guess is if it’s more than a year, the answer will be no, as people feel they’re “done” with the virus.
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