The reason you don't seem to be making progress is that no matter how much progress there is, your press has worked very hard to convince you that the necessary level of testing is always much higher than you currently have and you're uniquely failing to achieve it because of Trump. They use techniques like carefully only comparing the amount of testing to countries you're worse than, not comparing overall testing levels at all and instead falsely claiming test positivity levels were a measure of overall testing (by that point it mostly measured infection levels - the number of tests required to test, say, everyone with symptoms is almost entirely unaffected by the number of Covid infections unless you have so many of them your healthcare system is collapsing), and most recently literally using the fact that you've tested more to make it look like you're doing worse: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/us/coronavirus-us.html
For context, the big reason the US has "five times as many cases as in all of Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea and Australia, combined" is because you've been testing massively more than Europe, Japan and South Korea did during their outbreaks, and people are only counted if they're tested. European testing was particularly bad - from what I could tell, the countries with big outbreaks basically only tested people who were hospitalized, and the much higher test positivity rates and hospitalization and death rates amongst confirmed cases seemed to confirm this. That won't show up so well on more recent overall stats because everyone did plenty of testing after the outbreaks had died down, though still not at US levels. Though with the way European and South Korean cases are picking up that might change. (For bonus points, the other thing that article uses to prove that the US is a unique failure is the length of its outbreak... after everyone had been pushing for "flatten the curve" which literally extends the length of the outbreak.)
What other day? Victoria is totally locked down. Melburnians can't leave 5k from their homes, and they may only go outside for 1 hour per day for solo exercise or collecting essentials, or be subject to arrest.
I'm in Melbourne and while I 'may be subject to arrest' if I violate the rules, I am not in fear when I move about outside. Like I could go walk about the streets for the next 8 hours before curfew and I highly doubt I would attract any police attention unless I did something stupid.
On top of that the police here aren't really like the US police.
I’m curious, do you mind being more specific about what “realistically and appropriately” means in this context? Exactly how did the media miscommunicate the severity of COVID?
> Flu kills thousand of people as well, flu causes long term damage as well but yet doesn't cause this kind of panic.
Influenza killed just over 34,000 Americans last year. We are currently sitting at 170,000 deaths, and could see 300-400k dead by the end of this year. That’s roughly 10x what we see in a typical flu season. It’s unarguably the worst public health crisis in 100 years. What about this shouldn’t have people concerned?
The 1968 flu killed 1-4 million people, in a world with half the population of today. The 1957 flu killed a million people.
So much about covid has been exaggerated. So many screaming headlines in the news and a paucity of facts.
How are concrete numbers exaggerated? How are concrete numbers not fact? Neither of those figures you posted seem out of the realm of possibility here, we're still in the middle of this pandemic that will continue on for many more months.
It's kinda hard to compare previous viruses in their totality when we're still seeing thousands dying every day, no?
I was replying to your remark that "It’s unarguably the worst public health crisis in 100 years". Which just isn't true. It's exaggerations like this I was referring to.
The flu in 1918, 1957, and 1968 were worse. If not for vaccinations the flu is a more scary disease than coronavirus - it mutates yearly, has just as much if not a worse fatality rate than covid, and causes long-term damage as often or more so. Malaria is far worse, I just heard that 3000 children die of that every day. Then there's HIV, diabetes, heart disease, etc.
Through this pandemic headlines seem to always feature worst case scenarios, numbers without context, etc. This is a statistically complex subject, a moving target, and our brains are not wired for dispassionate risk assessment.
This article has quotes by multiple experts saying that this is good news, that the immune system fought off the reinfection, the person was asymptomatic, and this is how you'd expect an immune system to fight off a coronavirus.
In fact, this is all normal for a coronavirus. Experts predicted this would lessen in severity and probably end up like the common cold, or appear intermittently like a bad flu year. [1]
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/24/health/covid-19-reinfection-h...
[1] https://www.statnews.com/2020/02/04/two-scenarios-if-new-cor...
They should emphasize on recovery rate and the fact that for vast majority of people it will be either asymptomatic or only mild symptoms.
But instead the government and media treat it like it's a black plaque.
Learn from Sweden, they never lockdown. Their school, bar and businesses stay open, life pretty much normal.
>Influenza killed just over 34,000 Americans last year. We are currently sitting at 170,000 deaths, and could see 300-400k dead by the end of this year. That’s roughly 10x what we see in a typical flu season. It’s unarguably the worst public health crisis in 100 years. What about this shouldn’t have people concerns
Sure its 10x but its still only 0.05% of the population and highly skewed toward the elderly where any small diseases or complication can kill them anyway.
If covid is as deadly as anthrax or ebola than that is really when people should be concerned.
The government's job is to protect the health and safety of the community, right? How does a government do this by emphasizing that what is going isn't a big deal? We're still seeing 1,000 dead per day in the US, and they definitely aren't all old.
Healthcare workers in their 20's and 30's are dying, this is definitely killing people that don't fall into your broad category of those whose lives don't matter to you. It's killing black Americans at a much, much higher rate than white Americans. Should we not care about that?
And who really should get to decide which 0.05% die in this case? Do we not have a responsibility to ensure the health and safety of everyone in the country? The reality is that some ER doctors have had to make this decision. They had to decide between giving a ventilator to a young person instead of an old person. And the fact that we're still struggling to contain this and force our healthcare professionals to have to make these kinds of decisions underscores the fundamental failure that we are seeing as a society.
A hundred people may have died in the few hours we've spent discussing this. They're dying as we type right now. Are you really suggesting that instead, we should focus on those who are living, and just forget that we're losing a 1,000 of our countrymen and women every day?
Yes but we can't ignore the damage caused by lockdown.
Lockdown is not without downside, it incur immense cost and long term damage.
Lockdown is maybe justifiable if the threat is proportional to the severity.
>and force our healthcare professionals to have to make these kinds of decisions
That is normal part of being healthcare professionals.
>Should we not care about that?
Yes we should care about them, at the same time we shouldn't make the rest suffer.
Doesn't mean there is nothing that should be done, vaccine research still have to be done, finding treatment still have to be done, improving health care capacity still have to be done.
If someone would have told me one year ago that this discourse would have been seen as normal in a non-dictatorship country like Australia I would have branded said person as a lunatic.
You cannot have a nanny state and a free country at the same time. This is the sort of thing you have to accept and live with.
At this point anyone still complaining about “covidiots” is severely misguided at the general level of proaction/intelligence/mentality of people, and how it translates into having a stable, productive society. Learning to live with it should be groundwork for anyone who actually wants to do bigger things in life than just a 9-5.
As much as I love the panic and the incessant doom posting from every which way, the stark reality is that everyone’s time is running out anyway. The panic, when not driven to sell clicks, is driven by people who haven’t had an awakening with what it means to be mortal.
Upside: I do hope more people pick up general life philosophy and stop shopping and drinking as a means of ignoring their purpose in life, but I doubt that will happen.
You have to live with hemorrhaging 1000 lives daily to be free?
https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/17/upshot/corona...
US's response to covid-19 was better than all countries in the whole of Europe?
Or, did you mean to say the US's response was better than Europe's, on average?
In what way was it better?
But, in reality, they're dying in their homes because Americans are too afraid of surprise hospital fees ruining their entire life.
> Our response was better than Europe's
Americans had the brunt of the European and Chinese outbreaks to observe, learn, and listen, but none of these things come easy to us, so we instead decided to sacrifice our non-remote workers.
Also, according to the ECDC, there have so far been 179,793 total deaths in the EU [1] vs 169,870 in the US [2]. In terms of cases 1 946 748 for the EU, 5,422,242 for the US. Keep in mind the population of the EU is roughly 40% larger than the US.
We could also probably start looking into food insecurity rates increasing, eviction rates increasing, widespread civil unrest, but, hey, why throw more tinder onto the fire? The response has been exceptional, but in a brutally American way.
[1] https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/cases-2019-ncov-eueea [2] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/case...
The idea here is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do. That goes regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.
Heart disease kills 647k people per year, for consistency shouldn't we also mandate exercise and outlaw junk food?
Here we are months later, and ground zero for the epidemic seems to largely be operating business-as-usual while the US is still seeing ~1k deaths per day as we approach flu season. I was watching an Aussie rules football game the other day and they're allowing fans back in the stands. I couldn't dream of going to a sports event in many areas of the US right now.