There is a difference. With federal plan of this kind individual states may be less able to prevent all the unnecessary and avoidable deaths that will happen.
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Point granted.
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Turns out that “The Final Solution” was, in fact, NOT better than no solution at all.
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To say nothing of the millions who don’t yet know they are long-haulers.
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I think the only meaningful difference is in accountability, and that’s probably only theoretical when it comes to this administration anyway. At least with a plan (even a shitty one) we are at least able to evaluate whether things are working or not as they intended. Again, all theoretically, but we know how that plays out in reality here.
But please don’t misunderstand me–this is not praise, just a recognition of how low the bar is.
Holy shit, if that’s anything even remotely that my comment indicates, then it did not come across as intended. I’d hope you’ve seen enough of my thoughts to know that’s definitely not what I was going for.
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Don’t worry, I don’t think you’re a genocidal fascist. I was just pointing out that a terrible plan is not necessarily a “step up” from no plan.
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But do they vote?
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The ones I know do, highly motivated. I can’t speak for all, but especially this election, when older people are more fearful of getting sick, I think the numbers won’t be insignificant.
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Even the “herd immunity” so-called" strategy" depends on flattening the curve. That’s because unchecked exponential growth gets all of those 2+ million corpses before January, and in that case there won’t be only 2+ million because even the mildest cases, or the cases of other conditions, plus the other treatable diseases, plus the diseases from lack of routine care, plus the holes punched in so-called “essential” functions, plus the diseases resulting from unburied unrefrigerated corpses, etc. etc.
And yes, that list includes bubonic plague. Corpses->rats_fleas->plague. I’ve been posting the calculation from TFA, with the same numbers, since March. Now that it seems to be official US Government policy it’s time to dust off the secondary factors that I (cynical as I am) thought would never need to be pointed out.
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I, um, guess it doesn’t count as a “death panel” if you are sufficiently haphazard and disorganized about the process?
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Just like how it doesn’t count as murder if you close your eyes when you fire into the crowd.
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They aren’t imagining anything like January. They are assuming a consistant 500-1500 per day death rate, as Trump said he could accept. They aren’t considering seasons, though.
That’s the problem. It’s sadly funny that they are the ones that said summer would slow the virus. It didn’t, but people’s summer behaviors tend to. They aren’t, however, remembering that summer is almost over, and those behaviors will change back into being enclosed with others for long periods.
Mr Atlas my be backpeddling hard by about December.
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Herd immunity is a legit medical concept. In terms of public health it’s almost exclusively talked about in context of vaccines. Basically the minimum vaccination rate needed to ensure those who can’t be or haven’t been vaccinated yet are still protected from infection.
The anti-vax crowd have been heavily criticized for undermining herd immunity when it comes to dangerous diseases. So in attempting to legitimize themselves, and make what they’re doing sound scientific. They adopted the concept and used it to justify and promote the idea of deliberately infecting their kids with shit. The classic “pox party”. Arguing “natural”, immunity is better than that provided by vaccines, and citing unrealistically low numbers for herd immunity (like 65%, the lowest legit number I’ve heard is 85%).
So it’s not just spin with some sinister undertones. It’s the wholesale adoption of quack medicine as public health policy.
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That’s good, upstanding, open-casket patriot thinking. Stay loyal citizen!
Yeah, about that.
The current death rate seems to be higher:
…but whatever it is now that is with full medical support (or at least I don’t recall any stories about hospitals running out of beds…many about how they had to convert other wards, or get creative), and none about being so busy nobody can treat you.
Without medical support way more people will die (my previous estimates are about 18%, but those were total guesses; my current guess would be “almost everyone that would normally need to go to the hospital, but can’t because it is full”).
If you “want” around 240 million people to get it, you either have to be very patient, or well, full tilt infection, which means hospitals will be overrun very very quickly. I think 2.13 million deaths would be a low figure here. More like 20mil to 40mil (either not an entire Texas of dead, or California plus some of those smaller states).
Obviously this isn’t really a useful forum to argue against a mass death policy since I doubt anyone will seriously take up the pro-death side, but well, I already feel like changing my mind about being out of bed today, so I’m not sloshing into mass of pro-deathers to try to talk sense into anyone.
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Yes, and that is still only buffer. Many millions can still be sickened or die, the assumption is just we have enough people vaccinated to prevent the easy spread to these people. Given that, and time, it’s possible to achieve something that looks like herd immunity, but it is not “immunity.” It’s completely a misnomer.
We’ve never achieved what Atlas and the anti-vaxxers are suggesting, with any disease, at all, ever, of any kind. If smallpox got loose somewhere today, we’d quickly see what kind of “herd immunity” we have.
.
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I referred to this elsewhere as by-catch or collateral damage. When the healthcare system collapses is when truly horrific numbers come into play. We came perilously close during the NYC crisis, and averted it only by employing strategies that are apparently no longer on the table. States that have pushed school reopening are performing a pretty dreadful experiment in real life, and gambling with lives not their own. Future historians are going to have words for us that I suspect we will not enjoy.
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In this metaphor, the crash is due to pilot error, but the investigators all really like that pilot, even though he’s a massive fuck-up, because he’s got great connections, just the best, everyone says so.
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This is fucked up beyond belief. We now have multiple cases of proven reinfection (including at least one case where the second infection was much worse than the first), and no idea how rare this is - which means we have no idea if getting infected provides anyone with immunity. Researchers are now questioning whether herd immunity is even possible, especially through infections. What an utterly insane thing to propose, given what we now know.
I’m guessing “herd immunity” isn’t actually the Republican strategy, it’s this:
https://twitter.com/smotus/status/1300136730998091776
It is, because right now there are questions about whether herd immunity is even possible.
Yeah, and these fake statistics are actually much worse than that. Apparently this deliberate misreading of the statistics is based on those death certificates that only, lazily, have “covid-19” as cause of death - those that do not specify the actual cause of death, e.g. (covid-19-caused) “heart failure” or “lung failure” etc. So it’s not even remotely based on anything real.
In this particular case, it’s stupider than that. They would have looked at the medical examiner reports and said, “Look, the causes of death are all things like ‘blunt force trauma’ and ‘laceration’ - none of them say ‘plane crash’! Obviously no one died of the crash!”
I don’t think so. Even in not having a plan, their (ostensible) goal was to decrease infections. Now, the actual plan is to increase them. It wasn’t easy, but they actually managed to make things worse. I’m kind of impressed.
I feel like, given vaccines aren’t part of this, that we should really stop calling this “herd immunity” but “letting people get sick.” Especially given the high rate of organ damage in those who live.
Yeah, it’s “enough people already got it that it can’t easily spread, now.” And with the new evidence of re-infections, raising questions about whether that’s even possible, well…
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