I have heard similar stories. A big issue is PPE shortages. Even in places that aren’t hard-hit by the disease, you still need masks and gloves and gowns to do surgery, and you need those things more in the hard-hit areas. Plus, there’s a lot of specialization in medicine–an eye surgeon can’t work on coronavirus and he can’t work on eye surgery, so he is out of a job right now, and so are his nurses, etc.
Spain saw its first reduction in active cases yesterday. Even if the Easter weekend numbers will have to be taken with a grain of salt they seem to be close to their peak. Czechia and Canada should soon follow.
Switzerland is on a slow but steady decline for 11 of the last 12 days.
Dad is a cancer specialist, revenue down 25% even for his group. There is a new Big C in town.
Meat shortages incoming. Will be the same for poultry once those inevitably hit.
Your pony is going to get ground up and served for it’s meat.
What number of new cases a day would you feel comfortable “re-opening” the economy? In my mind it would definitely need to be below 1,000. The US is probably at least 2 months from hitting anywhere near those kinds of numbers (if ever) and no way they wait that long.
Whoops, Fauci accidentally told the truth about the administration’s shitty response to the pandemic and now it looks like he’s going to get axed:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/04/13/trump-fire-fauci-coronavirus/
Indiana is now tracking the number of available ventilators and icu beds. Seems like one of the few red states that have their shit together. Helps that Indy makes up a significant part of the population.
JFC the headlines are so dumb. Trump didn’t retweet - he replied to her. And you never know because he’s so dumb and vague - but Trump seems to be saying that what she’s implying Fauci said is fake news because it’s all on video.
I swear right now idiot nutjobs like OANNN and the left-wing side of the MSM are trying to drive a wedge between Fauci and Trump.
Not now. Our lives depend on this shit.
Yeah I don’t understand why everyone made such a big deal about that tweet, Trump doesn’t pay attention to half the shit he’s doing. Was probably Scavino doing the tweeting anyway.
You can’t have a narrative without conflict… That’s basic story-writing.
Not now dammit. We need Fauci on that wall. Trump actually seems to listen to him somewhat.
It’s pretty infuriating to see such a dramatic reduction in the number of tests being processed as of late in the Czech Republic.
It’s more obvious now that the number of new cases are being doctored to push forward the opening of the country’s economy. After all, the PM here said that it was critical to see how the loosened restrictions would affect the number of new cases. But if you’re cutting testing by the more than half, naturally you’ll see fewer new cases.
Can’t believe they’re fucking it up like this. It’s not quite Trump bad but it is definitely insidious.
This to me is the great question that we are currently faced with. If we assume that locking everyone down (not that we are) helps keep infections and subsequent deaths down, unlocking portions of folks necessarily will cause an increase in cases and deaths.
I think most agree that we can’t just stay in lockdown for another year plus while we wait for a vaccine at scale, so, we’re going to have to take the trade-off of easing restricts vs. increasing deaths at some point.
I certainly wouldn’t want to be making those decisions, but there definitely is a number of extra deaths that people would be willing to “trade” for the benefit of increased liberty and reducing the vast economic hardship that a great many of our most vulnerable are facing.
So, how do we pick that number? What metrics can we use to determine whether we should opt in to increased cases and death? I think we can all agree that if hospitals have no capacity, that would be a bad time to increase cases. But what about areas where there is hospital capacity? What about when NYC has 50% hospital capacity available?
My parents are convinced that at some point during summer, restrictions will be eased. They understand that means more cases, more spread, more deaths. I don’t share their believe that in July we’ll be back to normal, but I know we can’t just lock everyone in their homes until November 2021, either. Arrgh.
I thought we were over the “adults in the room” delusion. What positive steps has Fauci gotten Trump to take? The cities and states are the only ones with a coherent or useful response, while Trump has Jared boosting trucks full of respirators off of them. Then he’s going to steal tens of billions of dollars from the CARES Act.
I don’t know if this is exactly true or not, but allow yourself to believe that Fauci is just the latest sucker in the endless parade to think he can escape his tenure in Trump’s administration with his reputation intact, but he’s actually being played to provide a thin veneer of respectability and Science to the grift.
I understand very clearly what Trump gains from having Fauci show up at his press conferences. It gives him record ratings to boost his vanity and secure an audience to spout propaganda to. He benefits enormously from being able to pretend that the shutdown is a tough choice he’s making reluctantly because he relies on his respectable Science advisor, when it’s really not his choice at all, but an individual and local and inevitable response to his administration’s catastrophic bungling.
I’m a little hazier on what policies Fauci is pushing through for us though. I am equally anti the Trump vs. Fauci narrative getting manufactured as you are, but not because I think it endangers Fauci. If Trump thought firing Fauci would be politically beneficial, he would do it in an instant. He didn’t need some media narrative to fire all those IGs. So, the implication is that he thinks keeping Trump on is beneficial to him. If that’s because Fauci is going to clean up the epidemic with less life lost and Trump is counting on getting a benefit from that, fine. But I suspect that Trump thinks he benefits politically from having Fauci up there whether 100k people die or a million. And I think the adult-in-the-room stories are part of the undeserved political benefits he gets.
I like Fauci. He seems to know what he’s doing. One less competent person at the top trying to lead us out of this mess can’t be a good thing.
Everything else is not consequential. Lives are at stake.
Unless we willing to accept millions of deaths, we might not have a choice. The virus doesn’t care about capitalism. The sooner people figure that out, the sooner we can address the problem. Just freeze the economy and give UBI until a vaccine is developed. Tough shit that the elite class has to take a timeout from syphoning billions off everyone else.
Hard to say, but I imagine if Fauci wasn’t in the room we’d have had packed churches yesterday and America would be open for business.
Trump can’t open the economy. All the businesses like sports leagues, Disney, cities shutting down all did this independent of the orange turd.
To me, once the basic reproduction rate of an area is below 1 and the number of total active cases regularly declines, that’s when it’s time to start removing restrictions.
The CR probably won’t see that until the end of April at earliest and even then that’s pushing it. Yet restrictions are being removed now.