U.S. weekly jobless claims 5,245,000 last week

boing
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Two things need to happen before the world can start to return to normal:

  1. widespread availability of accurate testing
  2. a vaccine is found

We’re fooling ourselves thinking the worst is passed until these 2 things happen. Just like the 1918 pandemic, COVID will continue to circulate in wave after wave - each time becoming stronger and more deadly.

To paraphrase a health expert I heard recently: think of this as a 4-quarter game and we’re only just now finishing up the 1st quarter. We need to play out the entire game before declaring victory.

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These numbers are clearly wrong. Claims does not = actual jobless numbers. (at the (virtual) office) we’re looking at close to 50% medicaid eligibility nationwide, meaning more than 150 million are now below the poverty line, if only temporarily, jobless or not.

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I think you had better advise your wife to maybe stop depending on your location and how much personal protective gear she’s wearing every day. (- advice from someone at the health dept … me) … thank you for sharing this video.

Currently, persecution based on finance is illegal in most states. They can’t alter your credit score, they can’t take your shit. If they try, they are breaking dozens of executive orders and could be sued into oblivion. Check your local department of state website for state-level details more relevant to you.

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We might not find a vaccine for a year. Or two. Or ever.

But what the hell, we can get everything we need at Walmart or from Amazon, and learn to cut our own hair.

(And don’t think Bezos and the Walton family aren’t loving every minute their local competition is shuttered)

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The purpose of all the shutdowns was to flatten the curve and avoid a crushing nationwide shortage of hospital beds. In another two weeks we will know whether it has worked. It seems to be trending that way.

The purpose of the shutdowns is not, and was never stated as, reducing coronavirus infections to a horizontal line graphed at y=0.

Now, there should be a metric in between at which we can reopen. What should it be?

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This goes beyond health care to disaster planning in general.

Raise your hand if you remember the Y2K thing.

Remember how it turned out to be a big nothing burger? How we got all wound up, partied like it was 1999, and then the year 2000 came along and it was no big deal?

That’s because we spent half a decade and half a trillion dollars in mitigation, prior to the fateful date.

Disaster preparedness is only ever observed when it fails. When it’s successful, it’s invisible. In fact, when it’s successful, you get people coming along second guessing, saying it had never been necessary in the first place.

Would you feel better about all this if the B-I-G S-U-R-G-E had materialized and your wife had been putting in 80 hour weeks (or got sick herself…) and there were hundreds or thousands of deaths per day?

If our Dear Leader had got off his fat orange ass back in February, this would all be in the rearview mirror by now. But he pissed away between 4 and 8 weeks because he was more concerned with how the Dow Jones Index affected his re-election chances.

And for the record, I have some skin in the game too.

I have a family member who recently had a carcinoma removed, but it was margin positive, so they need to go back in to get the rest. That’s considered non-emergency surgery now, so it ain’t happening until all this is over.

The shortest path to the other side of this thing is to do the right thing at the right time. We missed our chance to do it at the right time (Thanks ⊥rump!). If we fiddle-fart around with half-measures and piecemeal responses, we’ll never have done the right thing, and we’ll still be dealing with this in November.

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Hospitals in many places are strained right now. Do you want your local hospitals to look like the hardest hit areas of NYC?

11th-doc-this|nullxnull

At this point, we likely all do. If it’s not us directly, it’s family or friends who can’t stay home, or those with pre-existing conditions, or family/friends in healthcare. We’re so accustomed to thinking of ourselves as individuals, we are struggling to think beyond our own households.

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We don’t have these, which I think will help.

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How about instead of a screen shot that you found that can be faked, you find the original link.

And yeah, if that’s indeed people on the subway, it’s likely people who HAVE to work, many of whom might get it and die. :woman_shrugging:

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Thank you. That’s actually helpful

Again, this is only working to spread the virus, so I’m not sure what point you’re attempting to make? That how dare those hoity-toity city slickers go out while the good virtuous Americans are forced to stay home? I suspect that many of those people have no choice but to take this risk, because they are going to lose their apartment/house or have to watch their kids go hungry if they don’t. They shouldn’t have to, but watching your kid complain about being hungry isn’t fun, so off they go. But now they risk bringing it home to their families. These are the communities being hardest hit, because they have no choices about work vs. staying home.

But hey, Trump has a re-election, so let’s get that economy going again… /s

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For protective gear, they are doing what they can with gloves and masks; but they aren’t N95 masks, so they are more in the realm of security theater than they are in the realm of actual protection. They aren’t taking cash though, and are only doing curbside pickup so no customers come into the building.

As for our location, we are in El Paso County, Colorado (Colorado Springs, specifically) and the number of cases I just looked up are 668 confirmed, and 43 deaths as of 19 hours ago.

Yeah, that would be a great idea to just stop working because it’s unsafe except for the capitalist hellscape we live in, where the bills don’t get paid if you aren’t working, you end up on the street eventually, and if you quit – rather than be “let go” – you don’t qualify for the dwindling unemployment.

The system has been rigged/designed to keep us in our places because we don’t have the luxury of social safety nets thanks to years of whittling them away to bones or nothing, or strong savings accounts due to over a decade of wage stagnation.

I appreciate that you’re trying to help, I really do, but at some point the pandemic will end and things will try to recover.

With 22 million people already out of work – and this not being over yet – choosing to walk away from a job right now – no matter how sensible it may appear from a distance – means that a person will be competing with all of those other people in an effort to find work, at a time when the temporary restrictions against financial persecution have been lifted.

They can’t alter your credit score or take your shit yet. Unless everyone ends up in the same boat, at some point they will. And this government will let them. Hell, they already said that banks have been given the green light to snag stimulus checks.

Oh, and that dick thinks you can live on $1,200 for 10 weeks.

https://twitter.com/bwestbrookaz8/status/1250563107874918400?s=12

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That’s exactly my point. It usually takes a year or so to successfully develop and distribute a new vaccine. What this means is we are not out of the woods - far from it. We all need to have the proper expectations that we will be dealing with this virus for at least the next 18-24 months.

So what happens if we open up the economy again without extensive testing and vaccine in the works? Simple answer is that many more people will get sick and die.

How much money is a human life worth? How much is your wife or your childrens lives worth to you?

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I think the point @CashUNutt was making was that in their area, they don’t have that, so it won’t spread like it has in NY.

That said, if they don’t have accurate infection numbers – determined through accurate testing – in their area and everyone returns to the way they were living in February, they will see a surge anyhow due to the long period before symptoms start to show. THAT – from what I can tell – is what has elevated this whole thing to get us where we are now. Asymptomatic viral hosts.

I was thinking about a possible vaccine after my last grocery run, while pulling up to the house. I thought, "If this virus has roots in the common cold, and we don’t have a vaccine for that, how will that impact the development for a vaccine for this? Is it just because a cold is so mild that the resources haven’t been poured into curing it, and this will be different because it has to be?"

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In my opinion the point is this:

NYC has about 1000 square ft per person.
Atlanta has about 7600 square ft per person.
Where I live in NC is closer to 30,000 ft/person.

A pandemic of this nature hitting a population density of NYC was almost certain to max the health care system. Short of a zero tolerance lock in, where supplies are being brought to people and only absolute critical people are allowed to work (medical and infrastructure) it was always going to be bad for NYC. Basically NYC had to be locked down Wuhan military style in order to protect it from what it is.

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I guess, yet, these are not the only kind of gatherings that can spread it.

And it should be noted that posts that don’t have any sort of context isn’t particularly helpful in creating understanding… but maybe that person doesn’t think it’s worth it to try to explain their meaning to me, because they see it as obvious.

Right.

Exactly.

Except that people are still going to work because they have no choice, which exacerbates the problem.

I refuse to shrug away deaths, because “it was inevitable” because I don’t believe that. There is no such thing as a natural disaster.

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I’ve seen you say that more than once now, but I am unable to process it in any meaningful way.

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Quoted for fuckin’ truth!

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It’s short hand for the fact that the human disasters that come out of natural events are more an outcome of public policy (human failures) than of the events themselves. We’re seeing a real time expression of that right now - the failures of the current administration made this much worse than it would have been otherwise.

More indepth. The book is very good, but it’s been years since I’ve read it.

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Experts: The death toll will be catastrophic if society doesn’t take extreme measures to slow the pandemic.

Society: [takes extreme measures to slow the pandemic]

Ingraham: The death toll is less catastrophic than experts feared! How does that make you feel?

Society: Relieved and gratified that our sacrifices have been working?

Ingraham: …FURIOUS, right!?

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