Yeah I don’t disagree. Obviously everything I’m typing is based on the fact that this administration can’t actually manage the healthcare end inside the economic deadlines. I mean we’re still nowhere near testing enough people to even begin to think about reopening… but at the same time there’s a very real point we’re approaching where the economy simply won’t restart when we try to restart it.
Like you’re speechless because you probably think I don’t realize that I’m saying that letting 1-5M people die was the right thing to do. I absolutely do realize that and I think it’s a tragedy. I’m just looking at the situation and realizing that we’re going to have 1-5M people die anyway + we’re going to take 400k a year extra deaths from economic damage for 10+ years for another 4M extra deaths.
There are no good options when your government has been sabotaged and can’t get its shit together.
I can agree that first and foremost, the virus fucked everything up. The virus is definitely the worst part of all of this, and even if every country in the world currently had their all time greatest leader in power, everything was still going to get fucked.
That said, the world picked a super shitty time to elect clownshow fake strongmen in many places, which has certainly made things far worse than it could have been.
There could have been dozens of New Yorks or worse around the country. And it certainly does seem like there has been significant testing capacity increases, including antibody tests, in the last 45 days.
We have plateaued around 150k tests a day for the last month. Experts say we need 20m/day. There is no plan or system to do contract tracing. The antibody tests we have are likely not reliable.
Yeah let’s be real… if Obama/Romney was president right now there would have been a full court press done in China by the entire global health community and it probably would have been stopped there, and none of this would be happening. The Chinese would have been cooperative because they would still at least be pretending to be friendly with the rest of the world. Also we would have had something to offer them (a fully functional CDC) that they actually needed, which would have created a lot more cooperation.
It would have been trench warfare, at the local level, near where this thing started with crazy contact tracing of every human who had entered/exited the place this started.
Instead we have Donny Dumbfuck who dismantled the thing that the Chinese would have cooperated with and then pretended like nothing was wrong because nothing bad has ever happened to him and nothing ever would as far as he was concerned.
In the end this global pandemic can safely be laid at the feet of the GOP. Global pandemic has been the #1 big risk to the world order for forever. The fact that preventing that wasn’t a bit overfunded is an example of the raw toxicity of the Baby Boomer generations propensity for short term thinking. To think that we have F-22’s but the CDC’s entire budget in 2019 was 12B dollars… yeah. Wow. Just wow.
We can’t even begin to calculate how much economic damage has been done. Where we’re at now 2 months in doesn’t matter all that much in comparison to the long run impacts.
There’s absolutely no question in my mind that a short 3-5 month period of just complete chaos where almost everyone gets sick at once would have done way less economic harm than shutting the entire economy down for 2+ months, reopening it, and then having that 3-5 months of pure chaos happen anyway… but after we disrupted every supply chain in the country in the biggest imaginable way.
I dont think this is quite right because things are worse if X thousand people arrive at the ER at once vs. spread out over a few months. Obviously opening up is stupid at this point but things would have been worse with no lockdown.
The bottom line is that the conditions now are much much more ripe for this thing to explode than 40 days ago. And yet we so want things to get back to normal (which isn’t even possible) we are going to ignore that and instead just hope it works out.
No lockdowns or reopening too soon would/will also result in just as much economic damage as lockdowns. And more chaos and death.
The idea was to lockdown, build capacity in the healthcare system, drastically ramp up testing, and buy time to learn about the virus and hopefully develop treatments and make progress toward a vaccine. Only morons thought locking down for a short period of time and doing nothing else would have much of a benefit.
Sure… that was the idea. That second part absolutely hasn’t happened though. As a result in hindsight the whole thing was probably a disastrous mistake.
NYC and SF locked down two days apart. SC had its first death almost a full month before NYC. How did NYC end up with so many more infections at the time of lockdown? Actually, the best news would be that NYC was uniquely situated for the spread of the virus due to density or whatever, which would imply that everywhere else in the US would not suffer as badly. I don’t really buy that explanation though.
I’m living pretty comfortably on unemployment in California right now, so we should definitely stay locked down until the extra $600/wk runs out. Got pretty stressed for a week or two there, could only imagine the struggle people are going through as they run out of money and options or have families to support. Pretty thankful that this whole process of getting laid off and my life ruined has gone smoothly so far.
Lockdowns happen naturally when death is massive. People have understood that disease comes from other people (though sometimes it’s not direct eg malaria and cholera)
Lockdown (on it’s own with no other strategy) or no lockdown results in basically the same economic damage, and maybe fewer deaths overall. And certainly the lockdown has offered a better result for our healthcare workers so far.
Not doing everything else that needed to be done is a failure of leadership.