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Post by hippopotamus on Sept 2, 2020 22:53:18 GMT
Anyone thinking of taking a break before schools start again next month? Flying across the water, even? We can't go anywhere because we're having trouble getting a passport for the baby. I'm sure if we had one we'd be gone to Germany to see the family. I'm secretly a bit glad we Can't fly, because I'm not sure it would be the right thing to do. I'm still a bit nervous just leaving my home.
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Post by sloopjohnc on Sept 17, 2020 23:02:21 GMT
Interesting column by Nicholas Kristof in this Sunday's NY Times.
What if President Trump had fought the virus as hard as he fought for his wall? What if President Trump had fought the virus as hard as he fought for his wall? What would America be like today if President Trump had acted decisively in January to tackle the coronavirus, as soon as he was briefed on the danger?
One opportunity for decisive action came Jan. 28, when his national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien, told Trump that the coronavirus “will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency.” Trump absorbed the warning, telling Bob Woodward days later how deadly and contagious the virus could be, according to Woodward’s new book, “Rage.”
Yet the president then misled the public by downplaying the virus, comparing it to the flu and saying that it would “go away.” He resisted masks, sidelined experts, held large rallies, denounced lockdowns and failed to get tests and protective equipment ready — and here we are, with Americans constituting 4 percent of the world’s population and 22 percent of Covid-19 deaths.
There’s plenty of blame to be directed as well at local officials, nursing home managers and ordinary citizens — but Trump set the national agenda.
Suppose Trump in January — or even in February — had warned the public of the dangers, had ensured that accurate tests were widely distributed (Sierra Leone had tests available before the United States) and had built up a robust system of contact tracing (Congo has better contact tracing than the United States).
Suppose he had ramped up production of masks and empowered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to lead the pandemic response, instead of marginalizing its experts.
Suppose he had tried as relentlessly to battle the virus as he has to build his wall?
If testing and contact tracing had been done right, then we would have known where hot spots were and large-scale lockdowns and layoffs might have been unnecessary.
The United States would still have made mistakes. We focused too much on ventilators and not enough on other things that might have been more useful, like face masks, blood thinners and high-flow nasal cannulas. Because of mask shortages, health messaging about their importance was bungled. Governors and mayors dithered, and nursing homes weren’t adequately protected.
But many of our peer countries did better than we did not because they got everything right but because they got some things right — and then learned from mistakes.
Because of Covid-19, Trump called himself a wartime president, but he didn’t heed his generals and never ordered ammunition. In World War II, a Ford plant was configured to turn out one new B-24 bomber every hour, yet today we display none of that urgency even though Americans are dying from the virus at a faster pace than they fell in World War II.
It wasn’t as if the United States was unready. A 324-page study in October 2019 found that America was the best-prepared country in the world for a pandemic — but it didn’t imagine that the United States would fumble testing, data collection, contact tracing, communications and just about every other facet of managing a novel virus.
“The administration made every single mistake you could possibly make,” Larry Brilliant, an epidemiologist who early in his career helped eradicate smallpox, told me.
“We could have beaten it back,” Brilliant said. “We could have prevented the horror story we have now.”
Jeffrey Shaman, a public health expert at Columbia University, calculated that if each county in the United States had acted just two weeks earlier to order lockdowns or other control measures, then more than 90 percent of Covid-19 deaths could have been avoided through early May.
Shaman told me that his team didn’t model even earlier interventions, in January or February, but that he believes it would have been plausible for the United States to enjoy the Covid-19 mortality rate of South Korea. That would mean almost a 99 percent reduction in mortality.
Linsey Marr, an expert on disease transmission at Virginia Tech, isn’t sure that we could have achieved South Korean or (somewhat higher) Japanese levels of mortality, because both of those countries have more of a tradition of mask-wearing. But she does believe that we could have perhaps achieved German levels (meaning an 80 percent reduction in deaths).
“We would have saved a lot of lives,” she said. “Kids would be going back to school.”
Natalie Dean, an expert in infectious diseases at the University of Florida, said she is troubled by a public fatigue, a desensitization to a death toll that has continued to pile up recently at the rate of about 1,000 a day.
Trump still hasn’t embraced the basic step public health officials sought more than a century ago during the 1918 pandemic of encouraging mask-wearing. Instead, he seems to have surrendered to the virus at least until a vaccine is available — while encouraging delusions among his supporters.
“There’s no Covid,” an unmasked man attending a Trump rally the other day told CNN. “It’s a fake pandemic.”
When a pandemic response has become so politicized, when leadership is so absent, when health messaging is so muddled, when science is so marginalized, it’s easier to understand how the best-prepared country in the world for a pandemic could have lost 190,000 citizens to the virus.
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Post by cousinlou on Sept 18, 2020 10:03:21 GMT
Trump, downplaying deaths, once claimed US would never see 100,000 milestone
Trump suggested throughout April the country wouldn't reach 100,000 deaths.
The president's response to COVID-19 has been criticized since the first cases began appearing in the United States in late January. Here’s a look at how his response has evolved since then.
In just under four months, more than 100,000 Americans are now reported to have died from the novel coronavirus, a grim milestone President Donald Trump once suggested the country would never see.
Roughly a month ago, Trump, at a White House task force briefing, said, "It looks like we'll be at about a 60,000 mark, which is 40,000 less than the lowest number thought of."
A few days later, on April 24, he again sought to highlight a lesser number: "Minimal numbers were going to be 100,000 people. And we're going to be, hopefully, far below that."
John Hopkins Institute today: 197,644 deaths.
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Post by sloopjohnc on Sept 18, 2020 13:35:06 GMT
I heard yesterday that the US postal service was prepared to send out five masks to every household in America in April, but the White House nixed it.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 20, 2020 4:08:10 GMT
The government's handling of this has been a disgrace. They don't seem to have made a single correct decision. We're never going to get out of this because we're being led by incompetent buffoons. I'm totally fucked off with it all.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 20, 2020 7:41:58 GMT
Three words for Lil Donnie: PANDEMIC RESPONSE TEAM..(or Directorate of Global Health Security and Biodefense)..A body designed to head off pandemics BEFORE they reach our shores, which mushroom dick basically eliminated in 2018 saying:
"Some of the people we cut, they haven't been used for many, many years....And rather than spending the money — and I'm a business person — I don't like having thousands of people around when you don't need them."
Of course, we did need them. We and other nations, would not be in our current position if this body, created in 2016, still existed when we NEEDED them. Sadly, the size of the team was around 430 people and with the subsequent gutting of the CDC, did not equal "Thousands" and the only REAL reason this was done was because Obama created it and the micropenis-in-chief is deeply threatened by anything to do with him.....We are here because of trump's ego..
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Post by Deleted on Sept 21, 2020 11:24:28 GMT
My county went from being one of the best of keeping numbers of affected down to one of the worst now. Fuckin hell.
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Post by sloopjohnc on Sept 21, 2020 13:54:27 GMT
So, California's unemployment dept. has shut down for two weeks, re-opening Oct. 5th to take care of the 600,000 backlogged applications while 10,000 roll in a day.
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Post by Mr. FOLLARD on Sept 21, 2020 14:01:55 GMT
What a laugh, eh?
If you're actually LOOKING for conspiracy theories then why not go for the 'this thing was deliberately created in labs to fuck up as many lives as possible' and not the 'this thing is harmless we don't need to wear masks really'? I mean they're both stupid but why do I mostly see the latter?
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Post by sloopjohnc on Sept 21, 2020 14:13:14 GMT
What a laugh, eh? If you're actually LOOKING for conspiracy theories then why not go for the 'this thing was deliberately created in labs to fuck up as many lives as possible' and not the 'this thing is harmless we don't need to wear masks really'? I mean they're both stupid but why do I mostly see the latter? Yesterday, San Francisco's Catholic archdiocese and parishoners marched in San Francisco to allow indoor worship. San Francisco has been extremely tough on re-opening. The only advantage I can see for them is it drums up funeral services. In another economic story, I read yesterday that business closings will potentially lead to 30% to 40% of nail salons permanently closing. Nail salons have traditionally been an easy business access for the state's Vietnamese population. San Jose has the second largest next to Houston, I believe, but the economic fallout will affect the whole region. The place I go to get my haircut is run by a Vietnamese couple who sometimes bring in their 4 to 5 year-old son on the weekends when I drop in.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 21, 2020 14:34:35 GMT
If anyone still needs evidence why a strict lockdown was necessary it's the last month. Maybe a laissez faire approach would have worked in a more egalitarian society that actually gave a fuck about anyone but give Brits an opportunity to take the piss and a significant number will take it.
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Post by bungo the mungo on Sept 21, 2020 14:43:51 GMT
If anyone still needs evidence why a strict lockdown was necessary it's the last month. it's the same here in spain. why the political parties didn't choose to wait and lift the lockdown until after the summer (most of spain shuts down in august anyway) is beyond me. i understand the need and desperation to get businesses back up and running again, but instead of an extra 2-3 months of lockdown, we now face further lockdowns which look set to carry on well into the new year.
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Post by sloopjohnc on Sept 21, 2020 16:17:34 GMT
If anyone still needs evidence why a strict lockdown was necessary it's the last month. it's the same here in spain. why the political parties didn't choose to wait and lift the lockdown until after the summer (most of spain shuts down in august anyway) is beyond me. i understand the need and desperation to get businesses back up and running again, but instead of an extra 2-3 months of lockdown, we now face further lockdowns which look set to carry on well into the new year. The two steps forward, six steps back philosophy of economic recovery.
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Post by tory on Sept 26, 2020 18:34:05 GMT
I was intrigued to see that around 77% of the UK populace support the new lockdown measures.
I had really felt that people would be really pissed off by new measures - obviously not.
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Post by Mr. FOLLARD on Sept 26, 2020 19:09:50 GMT
People are frightened.
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