The dysfunction in our government is due to years of slow decay that have culminated in the present situation. This crisis will hopefully force enough people to realize the problem exists and its scope that we can finally take steps to correct the issue.
Electing a different party won't help, because we still have the electoral college, voter suppression, unlimited corporate donations, the spoils system, seniority in the legislature, and partisan judges on the supreme court. The Democrats are Corrupt and the GOP is corrupt. The two party system and first past the post have to go. We need to amend the constitution to avoid the situation recurring in the future.
People are about to die because our president is a fool, and the fact that he's still in charge is the fault of all of us who voted or didn't vote over the past half century.
In all honesty, I don't see anything in the government changing for this crisis... they can't change. Lots of people are going to get sick and die, and hopefully in the aftermath people will finally be angry enough to repair our country.
Assuming there are enough of us left.
This point of view is sobering. I am tired of people thinking that replacing a politician with another would solve every problem.
If I had to choose one thing that should change right now, it is this. Aggressive testing of everyone, starting with contact persons, persons travelling from high risk areas and then basically everyone. Would allow a much better understanding of the situation and make any measures way more effective.
Other than that, the measures taken seem reasonable based on the situation when they ware taken (for expectations, refer to testing).
The poor without insurance also cannot afford the test or treatment.
Testing is important but providing real benefits to those that are potentially infected will incentivize them to get tested. Otherwise we are going to struggle with getting this contained.
But you are right. So right. Because I would do the same if I were in that position. And again the weakest people and families are hit worst. Maybe it serves as a wake-up call why universal health care is important. It enables so many things, not just robust disease response.
Edit: Fixed the first sentence.
Best we can do is "flatten the curve" by isolating people as much as possible. Realistically, all the hand washing and testing does next to nothing in terms of modifying behaviour.
Could be so, that once a certain number of people are infected, full quarantine measures will be taken anyway. So on could just jump to these measures right away. Which would leave increased transparency as the main benefit. Would still be worth it, even if actual countermeasures don't necessarily change.
The same top economists who didn't see the financial crisis coming? More like the top economists hired/backed by bankers felt that bankers would lose a lot of money and made the excuse of bread lines to dupe congress.
> But if there were ever a time for us not to be partisan and tribal, it's now.
No. I prefer the partisanship. It's when the government is united that you know bad things is going to happen. Everytime there is an illegal war, the government unites. Everytime the american people gets screwed over, it's always the united government. And the same messaging is used "if there were ever a time for us not to be partisan and tribal, it's now."
But then again, the partisanship is just for show anyways. They all work for the same masters.
> We need to act boldly, now.
Like what? Give more money to bankers and wall street? Like last time?
Every time there is a fear mongering event - 9/11, Financial Crisis, Red Scare, etc, it's the american public that loses more rights/privileges and the elites/government/state that gets more control.
No, "we" didn't blow anything. Plenty of us have been preparing for this for well over a month. And now, you want taxpayers, savers, the conscientious, and the prepared to bail out the people who were buying TSLA at $800 and selling VIX with a 10-handle with a pandemic on our doorstep, all while name-calling those of us who bothered to read the research "crazy"?
No, let them all blow up. They deserve to soak in their margin calls.
- The GOP (the current ruling party) bears a majority of the blame for the recent screw ups (though _both_ parties are to blame for the decades-long problems with the healthcare system)
Both things are true.
Maybe a lot of people are so skeptical today about the virus because of the crisis fear mongering in 2008.
We are in the middle of a problem exacerbated by politics, that will require political decisions to solve.
When politicians are doing nothing, or making the problem worse, this is not the time to shrug our shoulders, and be apolitical. Political decisions have consequences.
It's not "partisan and tribal" to criticize this administration and the GOP for their failure to respond. If they were doing a good job here, it would be one thing. But they're not, and for that we need to hold them accountable.
Question 1) Is the spread inevitable, or can we achieve containment?
Question 2) If it can't be contained, and worldwide spread is inevitable, approximately how many new cases per day do you want to see for the next 6 months?
I would say the answer to #1 is that spread is absolutely inevitable. There are way too many vectors, and it is way too virulent. I'd go further and say that I believe tens if not hundreds of millions of people have already been infected and will never have serious illness, but such a claim is really besides the point.
I would say the answer to #2 is; just so many as you don't run out of ventilators. And absolutely start setting up rows of ventilators in dedicated facilities in major cities.
So to those saying we should have done more, sooner... I ask, to what end? Follow through on the hypothetical "done more sooner" scenario. Worldometer says the US has 1,518 active cases, of which 10 are serious. So 10 people in the country are in an ICU for COVID-19 right now?
"Test everyone!" To what end? You don't need to test people in order to know if they need an ICU. The ICUs are not full - and you don't need more testing to tell you that. The main benefit to more testing would be that people who are self-quarantining due to potential exposure could maybe stop self-quarantining earlier. That's a fairly marginal benefit.
This isn't a situation where the world is going to shut down until a vaccine is available and administered to a billion people. This is a situation where the vast majority of people have mild symptoms, then herd immunity, and then will very much need to get back to work in order to buy groceries and pay their mortgage.
The WHO disagrees: https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-...
> "Test everyone!" To what end? You don't need to test people in order to know if they need an ICU. The ICUs are not full - and you don't need more testing to tell you that. The main benefit to more testing would be that people who are self-quarantining due to potential exposure could maybe stop self-quarantining earlier. That's a fairly marginal benefit.
Germany was ahead of the curve testing people and as a result (so far) they are weathering the virus much better than most other countries (including the US):
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-03-10/german...
It's not all about the testing for them but in the article they do count it as a key reason why they are doing well so far.
Germany apparently has 10 people in serious condition. Availability of resources obviously isn’t a factor...
You underestimate human stupidity :) People self-quarantaing is a sign of great awarenes of the danger. Meanwhile there are millions of people who ignore symptoms because "it's just a common flu, not coronavirus, don't be paranoid". Testing everyone would help identify and quarantaine those people (against their will, if necessary).
Otherwise politicians can hide behind relatively low numbers of confirmed cases as an excuse for inaction.
You say that like both parties are trying to deny testing and are refusing to provide the social safety net for workers to stay home when they're sick. This is very much not a "both sides" discussion. This is: the GOP needs to stop trying to pretend like nothing is wrong and actually DO SOMETHING to prevent this from becoming an even bigger disaster.
Ahh, the old cowardly downvote without comment because you don't like the reality of the situation that there is one party that's very much to blame.
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/487258-senate-republican...
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/486559-trump-fak...
https://theweek.com/speedreads/901405/seattle-lab-uncovered-...
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/anthony-fauci-donald...
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/487014-trump-officials-cu...
Yes, the administration bears a huge amount of responsibility for sandbagging and obstructing the initial response, mis-informing the public, ignoring their own subject experts, etc.
Fresh Air did a great long-form report today summarizing the ways the administration has obstructed and worsened the crisis. No transcript yet but it's worth a listen.
https://www.npr.org/2020/03/12/814881355/white-house-knew-co...
(<3 Terry Gross, she's a wonderful interviewer who is fantastic at asking insightful and probing questions while being incredibly kind and gentle. Probably the single most informative show on the air, for whatever topic she covers.)
The focus needs to be on slowing the spread and treatment.
The treatment is about supporting the body while it fights the virus, and highly dependent on how & where the virus manifests. Some need oxygen therapy, some need antivirals, some even need lung transplants. In cases where the virus affects other organs, totally different treatment applies. The resource constraint there is general medical capacity - doctors, beds, ICUs, oxygen support, and probably a hundred other things.
The issue with our lack of testing is that we have no idea what we're dealing with, which is a big part of why the market's freaking out. If we had been ramping up testing months ago, when it was already a massive disruption in China and should have been clear that it was only a matter of time before it got to the US, then we would have a lot more information now.
This is why we need competent administrators running things like the CDC, the DoE, Homeland Security etc..., not political hacks.
The GOP has a conflict of interest here. They don't want to give evidence that government can work. Their goal is to break government and then go "see, government doesn't work!" It's a splendid position to take, because anything that comes up you simply shrug and wipe your hands clean. You're not responsible for anything.
While we all sit and ponder whether we're all going to die and if the economy will disappear overnight, let's all just remember the travesty that is Puerto Rico. If that's not enough, then kids in concentration camps. Oh? People care now because it impacts their little world?
"No time for politics" says the people actively breaking the world.
We needed information 2 months ago, we needed early action like quarantines, travel bans a month ago. Testing is the response to an old problem at this point.
Large democratic, decentralized institutions are uniquely bad at the kind of fast response needed here and the government continues to act 1 months behind, so I have little faith that much will change. Most of the world will get it, but medical systems are mobilizing and hopefully most people will make it out ok.
During H1N1 in 2009, within 30 days we tested 1 million people. This led to a vaccine developed within 6 months. Testing is core to understand spread.
"Containment is making sure all the cases are identified, controlled, and isolated. It’s what Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan or Taiwan are doing so well: They very quickly limit people coming in, identify the sick, immediately isolate them, use heavy protective gear to protect their health workers, track all their contacts, quarantine them…"
https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...
Lack of testing does not appear to have been a technology or supply chain problem, possible supply chain probs in future...
They were.
do any of these commentators have any idea how long it takes to develop a reliable, sensitive and hopefully specific test
The CDC forbade King County from using their own home grown test.
that probably didn't exist in its current form until around 3 months ago.
The US CDC also declined to use the WHO test (and presumably the Chinese and Korean ones as well)... even as a temporary measure.
why not criticize them for not yet developing an effective antiviral treatment and vaccine for the condition too?
Because the tests were widely available, widely distributed, and non-CDC labs have already developed tests. The same is not true with a vaccine. IIRC antivirals are being tested in Seattle.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-de...
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/06/coronavirus-testing...
A pandemic is not the time to be picky - if anything, a high false positive rate helps. Would you rather 10 people quarantined, of whom only 2 are sick, or all 10 released into the wild because no test kit (of any sort) was available?
Not saying that's what happened here (perfect is the enemy of the good!), just that it could be worse. It could always be worse.
Now is the time to unite and act. We can fight, argue and point fingers once this is all behind us.
if we are lucky, hopefully he’s learned from that but i’m not holding my breath
[0] https://www.newsweek.com/mike-pences-pray-it-plan-combat-ind...
This is time to fall in line or be thrown out of your job.
https://www.salon.com/2020/03/12/gop-delays-coronavirus-bill...
Sorry, I am perfectly capable of acting while still pointing my finger at the people who are actively trying to make this worse.
Maybe you can afford to play kum-bay-yah but perhaps it's not your life or the lives of your loved ones which have been doomed by this ineptitude. Civility is poison to irrational discourse.
I don't expect to be able to craft useful public health policy in discussion with an antivaxxer or space exploration policy with a flat earther – the idea of "unite and act" is be absurd when dealing with people who lack the ability to admit they can be wrong/consider multiple perspectives/think critically. And yet that's basically where we stand today politically.
> Fact-checkers and scientists have scrambled to correct the misinformation coming out of the White House. (No, the virus has not been “contained” in America; no, testing is not available to anybody who wants it; no, people shouldn’t go to work if they’re sick.) But Trump’s message seems to have resonated with his base: A Quinnipiac University poll released this week found that just 35 percent of Republicans are concerned about the virus, compared with 68 percent of Democrats. [1]
If the other side doesn't even agree with you this is a problem that needs serious attention to be solved, how are we going to get our act together?
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/03/trump-c...
Now is absolutely the time, because:
> We have to get our act together and handle the situation.
And identifying the problems in the approach to date is an essential element of course correction.
> Now is the time to unite and act.
No, now is the time to identify the problems in our actions to date and course correct to appropriate actions. “Unite and act” is pointless or counterproductive without that.
https://www.propublica.org/article/cdc-coronavirus-covid-19-...
The states with "local outbreaks" (NY, CA, WA) are the ones that told the CDC to get bent and did it anyway. It's everywhere, the states with low case numbers just aren't testing for it.
https://theweek.com/speedreads/901405/seattle-lab-uncovered-...
This is what I can't get people around me to understand.
No cases near me simply means no one has been tested for it at this point.
On a phone call the day after the C.D.C. and F.D.A. had told Dr. Chu to stop, officials relented, but only partially, the researchers recalled. They would allow the study’s laboratories to test cases and report the results only in future samples. They would need to use a new consent form that explicitly mentioned that results of the coronavirus tests might be shared with the local health department.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-de...
The problem is it's ramping up to where it should've been weeks (months?) ago. We're way behind.
The US is not built that way the CDC can't just fix it. That's the power and weakness of our system compared to other countries.
Here the leaders of CDC explains the problem in a nutshell.
People are probably downvoting silently this time because explaining to you that you're obliviously consuming propaganda is one step deeper into flamewar territory which is unpopular on HN (and against the rules).
Case in point? Media reports that bill forcing employers to provide sick leave failed to pass because of evil Republicans. What you won't see on the news is the nuance that such a bill can't be passed without possibly bankrupting small businesses.
That's just one example. The administration shut down the border early on and was enthusiastically rewarded with accusations of sinophobia.
All politicians play this game. The US government institution has been rotting for decades, and yes, it really is a "both sides" issue when one side is so blinded by hatred that they refuse to acknowledge positive decisions.
There are literally almost as many people on the Republican side blindly dismissing everything Democrats do. Remember, Trump only lost the popular vote by 3%. Now is not the time for partisan idiocy.
The bill literally includes the funding to pay for sick leave. That's why it's a FUNDING bill - I think you're confused about who is being mislead by propaganda.
Meanwhile, the GOP is trying to insert language about abortion into the bill because...?
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/341...
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/6150...
However, the press release from Murray and DeLauro makes it sound like businesses are paying: https://www.help.senate.gov/ranking/newsroom/press/coronavir...
If you have a primary source that shows that government, not businesses, are paying for the costs of sick leave as it relates to S.3415 and HR.6150, please share it.
I also can't find a single search result that includes the term abortion as it relates to either S.3415 or HR.6150.
And all I could think was 'it's a PATRIOT act...'
My experience in large enterprises are that there are two kinds of "politics" that get played.
In one form, the leadership makes moves or take actions that benefit themselves but also help the company. Often that is called out as "leadership."
In the other form, the leadership makes moves or take actions that benefit themselves but hurts the company. That form is called "politics."
You can see examples all around of this. For example a CEO that buys another company, the result of which is hitting a milestone that triggers a big bonus for them but saddles the company with a bunch of debt and expense that drags down its productivity. That is bad. Versus the same example where the CEO buys another company and the combination results both in them getting a bonus as well as the combined company doing better than the sum of the individual companies. That is good.
So I agree with you that both parties are playing games, the differentiator for me is what is the ratio of benefit to the country vs benefit to the party/individual from the game being played? If that ration is 1:1 or greater I see it as a positive thing rather than a negative thing.
In my experience, if the move "benefits the company" and the overall company governance is not dysfunctional, then the leader responsible does not get hurt by it. At least not in the long term.
Mergers are always risky. CEO can do all the analysis possible but can't know for sure if combined company will do better or worse than individual parts. That part of the job is called "taking calculated risks".
True, but growth-by-acquisition is a lot "easier" than organic (R&D-driven) growth, particularly when money is cheap.
A CEO looking for a quick win - usually quarterly, sometimes annually - will almost always default to an acquisition. It won't be clear for at least 2-3 years whether or not it was worthwhile.
I think a CEO who spurns acquisitions in favour of organic R&D will always, almost by definition, be putting the company's interests ahead of his/her own.
The gp's(grandposter) comment uses the word companies. Which companies? Well we're talking about the US and health care so it has gotta be the health insurance companies? No, the bill Lamar disagreed with was to make employer's provide sick time to their employees.
Also, pp(parentposter) is what I use. OP is reserved for poster of the content.
No, the bill Lamar disagreed with was to make employer's provide sick time to their employees
It's also a mistake to just look at who controls the White House to figure out which party is in control when the economy does well economically. Both the executive and legislative branches matter and for the legislative, you need to control both houses. Even if one party controls the excutive and both houses of congress, it's hard to attribute the success of the economy to the current controlling party. Somethings the economy might be doing better because of current policies and sometimes it might be doing better because of policies enacted by the previous administration and congress, but the effects were latent.
In general, you can't take a macro look to determine which party is better for business. Instead you've got to look at things on a policy by policy basis and look at the first and second order economic impacts of specific policies.
Also, while Republicans haven't been very fiscally conservative in many years, most of the "huge bills being run up" are only sometimes from new spending. Most of the time, running up the bills is just from tax cuts. The democrats pass spending bills with accompanying taxes and the republicans are unable to undo both the spending and the taxes at the same time, so they negotiate for at least cutting taxes to help the economy, but the spending gets left in place.
The truth is that both parties are generally drunken spenders, but that one party has no issue taking more money from productive Americans to pay for their drunken spending.
FWIW, I'm neither a republican nor a democrat. Both parties are awful, but at least the Republicans try to let people keep money they've earned and rarely try to raise new taxes.
The US has run less than 10k in total. That is a colossal failure.
Question claim in fact, although it is persistently being repeated everywhere constantly, for propaganda purposes. Three of the major private lab companies indicate they'll be at a 10,000 combined per day test capacity before the week is out.
The US doesn't know how many tests have been run in total nationally. A large volume of tests have been distributed to hospitals and private labs around the US, the majority of which do not report their numbers back to a central authority (such as the CDC). That's a failure of centralized reporting and organization, due to the US having dozens of separate healthcare systems which the Feds do not control.
State infectious disease registries are absolutely receiving ELRs (electronic lab reports) and transmitting case reporting back to CDC and data is currently moving for novel coronavirus as well.
The term you are looking for is NEDSS/NETSS reporting.
> Today, all 50 states and Washington, D.C., use NEDSS-compatible integrated surveillance information systems to send case notifications to NNDSS.
So you think we should celebrate that after a month to get ready, we'll have finally caught up with a country 1/7 our size in testing capacity?
The US is currently testing the smallest percentage of its population of any developed nation: https://twitter.com/nick_kapur/status/1238156462708477958
China, too, if you can trust their numbers, and South Korea's look positive after a big starting spike. Each of these countries took early (except for China, but they shut down Wuhan with fewer cases than the US has now), aggressive steps that should be considered a model for others.
No, it probably doesn't. It probably reflects the fact that we're not finding folks, because we're not testing enough.
Ohio's (Republican, incidentally) governor, for example, is stating that their five confirmed cases likely indicate 100,000 undetected in the community so far: https://twitter.com/GovMikeDeWine/status/1238177953126604801
If you don't think that affects how our numbers net out, I'm not sure we can have a rational discussion beyond here.
> In terms of per capita testing, Korea has run 3,600 tests per 1 million population. In contrast, U.S. has just run five tests per 1 million people.
Testing more people is not going to change anything, this virus is so easy to transmit that we should take for granted that we will catch it anyway.
What we can do instead is realize that we are facing something big and protect vulnerable people from it by asking them to stay at home and create a system to send them food safely, it is almost useless to prevent healthy and young people to work as it will just block the economy/transportation/health work/everything
But in seriousness, the next week is a critical time in the world. I remember sitting in an airport when news of Lehman Brothers collapse was flashing on the TV screens. I'm reminded of that time.
We learned later about how Hank Paulson got down on one knee and begged Nancy Pelosi to go along with is plan to save the economy. In retelling of that period, it's clear that the world's top economists felt we were perilously close to a full-blown disaster – trucks not bringing goods into cities, things grinding to a halt, etc.
Remember that when you see bold proposals in the coming days.
As I've commented over the past few weeks, I think we've missed critical steps in fighting coronavirus. The lack of testing will maybe turn out to be one of the biggest scandals of my lifetime.
My personal belief is that – at least in the United States – we did everything we could to prevent a short-term economic slowdown and instead we're on the verge of something much longer, much deeper.
But if there were ever a time for us not to be partisan and tribal, it's now. We blew the past few weeks. We can't afford to blow any more. We really do need to come together, globally, but particularly here in the US to try and agree on the right next steps. We need to act boldly, now.