Why should we wait 20 days for things to get terrible before going to quarantines and lock down? Surely China and Italy have shown us our future.
I partly think the problem is political. If you quarantine and the virus is controlled, then it looks like you panicked over nothing, because you took this huge reaction and nothing much happened. However, if you wait till it's sufficiently bad and then you quarantine everyone will understand what you did, and later, you may get praised for your decisive leadership in a time of struggle.
What I mostly wish is that citizens could throw some sort of flag now to say "This crisis is being poorly handled. If this goes badly, let's have a review, figure out why, and correct the problem once this is settled."
Nails it. You could be so good at your job that people think your job isn’t even necessary; or you could be putting out fires caused by your incompetence all day every day and people think you’re a hero.
His base is, however, going to be disproportionately impacted by this virus.
While I don't agree with the US's lackluster response, bear in mind there's other repercussions besides "just political". The quarantines and shutdowns will almost certainly destroy a lot of people's livelihoods. From people that aren't getting paid so can't pay their bills, to small business owners that will lose their businesses because they can't pay their bills. The effects of even a 1 week shut down can expect to be massive, and impact exactly the people who are already most struggling financially.
This need not be this case. Any authorities who take action to shut down social contact now, before they turn into Italy, will be praised several months hence for being forward thinking because it will be clear what happened in every jurisdiction where they didn't shut down social contact, i.e. absolute catastrophe.
The election season is in full swing and you should have the opportunity to vote on how well you think the crisis has been handled by November.
Example: Why didn't we start testing with 100x or 1000x the number of tests? Maybe the reason is regulation on independent labs doing their own tests. Maybe there wasn't enough money banked up at the CDC such that, when a pandemic it's recognized, we can't immediately start mass producing tests.
The point is, I want it documented and explained what the failures were so that future people handling future disease outbreaks will perform better or at least not make the same mistakes. Further, a practice of exploring major mistakes would help motivate government bureaucrats to avoid making them. There should be a potential political cost to be dramatically wrong in vital scenarios.
https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-testing-covid-19...
Yep. People do this with Y2K, for example. "Nothing happened, what an overreaction!"
Nothing happened because an enormous amount of work was done in advance, but people don't see that side of it as it's reasonably hidden.
Though to be fair, most of the media predicted bad outcomes were completely unrealistic and wouldn't have happened even if no effort was put into mitigation.
I think this is exactly what's happening. It's an extension of the way individuals feel -- no one wants to be seen preparing too early, because people might think they're silly.
As some point one might consider if governments see COVID-19 as an opportunity to "cull the herd". Japan and Italy have the two largest aging populations of any countries. The US has a large number of citizens with COVID-19 comorbidities.
I'm not sure if the long term savings on entitlements and health care costs would outweigh the short term economic damage, though.
If they go away, we might lose on the knowledge or their investments might stop working and the new youth might not manage it any better. So a total loss of society.
Massive knowledge -- retired and not using it
Making money for the healthcare system -- fundamental life science advances could be lost or slowed down, but most healthcare spending is pure consumption, the labor could be better deployed to something more productive
China got COVID-19 first. And got over it first. US and Europe are going to be devastated by it. I'm guessing Russia will fare no better. In the aftermath, who's going to be on top on the global scene?
A chilling, and somewhat likely simulation.
The possible death of nn millions of people is way worse than a global lockdown for a couple of weeks/months.
China didn't get over COVID-19. They're still seeing double-digit deaths daily and new infections. They're going to see recurring new networks and pockets appear repeatedly. Endlessly if the virus has endured in other countries. They aren't coming out on top of this, especially given the absolutely enormous GDP damage they've already endured.
Just saying the situation is handled badly is easy. Just like being a better football coach after a big game. There is a german saying that everytime the national soccer team looses Germany has 81 million national soccer trainers. Providing better solutions is the hrd part, almost as hard a judging why exactly current solutions are not sufficiet.
Drive-through testing where everybody with any symptoms can get themselves tested.
A good public education campaign with calm TV documentaries that show the facts of what was going on in Wuhan and is now going on in Italy, and explains why these actions need to be taken.
Report by an italien doctor from Bergamo: https://www.ecodibergamo.it/stories/bergamo-citta/con-le-nos...
Translated to english: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1236933818654896129.html
The only next step is large scale lock downs.
This is true until last Thursday, but now the government had acknowledged at least 19 confirmed cases. Still super late though.
I don't want to go into longer detail as it will be subjective and seem political, but I'm expecting things to Get Weird.
And people distrust anything coming out of China's government so they simultaneously think China covered up a lot and there were way more dead, and they exaggerated how bad the virus is...
He's behaving entirely consistently with how he always has: deny everything, project perfection.
There's no signal here of a secret weapon, it's a complete shit show.
> There's no signal here of a secret weapon, it's a complete shit show.
Can't really disagree, but I feel like I'm taking crazy pills with the way people in the US are talking about the response now. Was the US MSM not spending all of January and February telling us "calm down, you know the common flu kills WAY more people than this thing and we don't freak out about it!" and complaining how Trump's proposed Chinese traveler ban was both a) racist and b) would have little to no effect?
People not trained well in math and science don't even have/know the tools to help them understand it analytically.
We need (much) better math education for people studying all majors.
I wish I was making this up.
The whole song is disturbingly accurate/prophetic.
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/nofx/idiotsaretakingover.htm...
I'm completely unsurprised by what you're describing. I observed similarly disturbing behavior waiting in line @ Home Depot the other day. A customer was excited to find they had hand sanitizer in stock, and another customer told him there's a whole aisle full of the stuff and that all the covid stuff is fake news which devolved into nonsensical madness between yokels I had to just walk away from. Of course our Home Depot had some in stock, we're in rural bumblefuck middle of nowhere. Our stores only run out of things when the employees forget to do their jobs.
Oh well, I tried.
I wish I was making this up.
Edit: Source added.
https://twitter.com/jasonvanschoor/status/123714289107769753...
- Some old irresponsibly stupid males are still sexually active. Darwin would stop them reproducing.
- The old irresponsibly stupid neighbour is still a magnet for younger, sexually reproductive irresponsibly stupid people, probably more so than for others.
Ignorance is not transmitted genetically.
Conan O'Brien has some great segments on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM8L7bdwVaA
They also do this for serious political stuff, repeating the same phrases over and over again, but posting those video compilations would just invite downvotes.
Perhaps you've been drinking too much of their coolaid.
"Mainstream media" was a term long before people on the right started complaining about it.
I don't actually know why the ruling class in the US is taking this so easy. There's some kind of brain disorder they have that is located between American exceptionalism, raw stupidity, and a complete disregard for the welfare of the people. I hope they all shake hands with a COVID patient like they did at CPAC.
People know full well that Fox is part of the MSM, but regardless of which way you lean, there's no question that the deck is stacked against conservative viewpoints.
That doesn't mean Trump is doing a good job.
> The Trump administration’s quarantine and travel ban in response to the Wuhan coronavirus could undercut international efforts to fight the outbreak by antagonizing Chinese leaders, as well as stigmatizing people of Asian descent, according to a growing chorus of public health experts and lawmakers.[0]
> The Trump administration’s decision to severely restrict travel from China to the US and to implement a mass quarantine, the first in the US in more than 50 years, could be an overreaction that causes unnecessary fear and weakens the global response[1]
I can provide more if you’re not convinced that, just like every single other thing Trump does, right or wrong, he was attacked for actions related to the Coronavirus earlier this year...
0: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/04/coronavirus-quarati...
1: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/04/coronavirus-...
A flight ban simply makes traceability harder, as people reroute through multiple hops. Victimizing Chinese communities is bad and will only make things worse (as people start hiding from authorities). And in the end, the virus was in Germany already in January, according to the tracing, so focusing on China would have helped little.
BUT
they could have mandated self-isolation for two weeks for all flight passengers disembarking, regardless of provenience. You get a tourism hit but slow down infection rates substantially.
They could have ensured better procedure for care in death. Those elderly people dying in high number right now, have probably infected hundreds of others already; they should have been tested weeks ago, and handled as infection carriers.
They could have prepared temporary field hospitals to spike capacity like the Chinese were forced to do. Chances are they will need them anyway, might as well do it advance than later under pressure.
They could have started shutting down large gatherings and prepare for curfew measures.
They’ve done none of that - and I say “they” as in US administration, UK administration, Australia (where they’ll even host a F1 GP with crowds this weekend!), France etc... They all hoped it would go away “on its own” like SARS did. Sadly, SARS was a lucky strike, this is the real deal.
I am not sure what he is doing is even remotely serving himself that well either. Addressing the Coronavirus upfront is the only way to cheer up the market right now. Did he really think he can just fight this virus with speech or tweets?
This is bothering me no end, and severely impact my confidence in US itself overall. Damn it, this is a full on crisis, the shit is about to hit the fan so hard.
Is this administration doing what it should be doing to mitigate the spread of this pandemic?
And to be clear, a pretty heady amount of the criticism of Trump is coming from "The right". Sam Harris, George Conway, David Frum -- these are not "the left". They also think Trump is an imbecile at the worst possible moment.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12370273563148697...
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12370245512943820...
I'm amazed not only at these affirmations, but at the likes they get. Incredible.
Nobody knows the long term development of this virus. You could lock up everything, the economy collapses and it would hurt people even more than the virus might have. It is a gamble at this point.
Political games come into play if people demand answers that nobody can give. If some presume to be able to do that, they are lying to your face.
If this is over in June and 100,000 people died, what would we call this? It would just be another disease probably.
For people who lost loved ones it was a catastrophe, for other part of the normal life risk. Any publicly uttered judgement has to keep that in mind, so it will always be relative. Some are more forthcoming, but probably not public officials.
Of course the virus is not under control, how could it be? I would prefer measures to reduce its spread, but that is basically intuition and listening to some doctors with the knowledge that it just buys time.
Anyone using this crisis for political points doesn't really win any cookies with me personally, on the contrary.
The incentive to cover something up is just a reflex to save face. I don't like covering something up. There is a risk of disproportionate overreaction, but I think a bad information policy reinforces this. If they covered something up, it must be really bad, right?
More like few millions in US alone, based on what happened in Italy which is more representative than China. Italy has >4% mortality rate last time I checked. And we talk about very well equipped and highly rated healthcare. I can't imagine this not having brutal effects on global economy.
Another point - unless we have proper fully working cure / vaccine, this ain't going anywhere. June ain't some magical time when virus decides to roll back because enough is enough. Southern hemisphere will keep the virus going on through our summer, so it will come back in autumn.
An additional point - this might be early to judge but it seems immunity is not gained after recovery, so re-infection is probable.
There are more points, like its high infection rate etc.
We also talk about a country in which 20%+ of the population is over 65 years old [0], compare that to China (11%) [1]
[0] https://www.indexmundi.com/italy/demographics_profile.html
[1] https://www.indexmundi.com/china/demographics_profile.html
> so re-infection is probable.
I have the info the virus is not inclined to mutate. But it is just too early to tell.
“You know what solves it? When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell and everything is a disaster, then you’ll have a, you know, you’ll have riots to go back to where we used to be when we were great,”
https://www.rawstory.com/2019/01/country-goes-hell-2014-vide...