COVID-19 (2): Turns out it's going to be pretty bad actually

https://twitter.com/marklemley/status/1257870942199406593?s=20

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Pretty hard to view that anything other than a preemptive cover up.

Nothing there indicated there was a legitimate reason for the University to stop. Even if the state is getting data from elsewhere it is invaluable experience as a modeling exercise.

We keep seeing signs from current and former leaders of various states that they are pushing ahead with reopening even though they know it will absolutely kill people.

Here is a slant for you:

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All I see is sweet beautiful freedom.

That type of societal collapse is not going to happen. The virus doesn’t kill enough young people to affect production over a sustained period and plenty of countries have already shown they can control it and keep essential production going. On top of that vaccine testing has already shown that there is at least some lasting immunity response possible so you don’t end up with everyone being sick.

Rationally yes but I can’t fault people for feeling like the world is “ending”.

To see people fall for the Trumpaganda is what makes me almost despondent. I just got “just flu” response on LinkedIn and I am on life tilt over it.

What I want to know is when did the non nazi Germans just give up and just go along? There had to be a point.

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Cases, I’m assuming everywhere, are artificially low. Easy to game and tough to know without random samples of the gen pop being tested.

Deaths are tougher to game. When people die, at unusual rates especially, people notice. I am always also assuming there have been lots of people in every state/country that have been undercounted, like flu deaths are undercounted routinely, because people die of multiple system failure, or pneumonia, or whatever and it’s just not documented.

What I think is a stretch would be to say that certain states are dramatically more forthcoming or simply have the necessary data which would make them so
much more accurate than other states. This is especially the case when the State one is claiming is more forthcoming, because of some partisan bullshit like they have a Democratic governor (who, by the way, is becoming Trump’s favorite), has actually taken less significant sheltering actions than the State supposedly covering shit up Stalin style.

Get the Fuck Out . Ari

From the very beginning, just like us.

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What is happening in the US amazes me every day and I can understand people living there are a lot more anxious about what is going to happen. There will definitely be a lot of deaths that could have been avoided and sadly it will probably not be the idiots that want to reopen that die.

It’s probably a mistake to think there was sort of single point. Germany went from huge unemployment to almost none under the Nazis.

People like a winner. Republicans understand this, which is why they have fixated on the politically potent strategy of denying anything that can be spun as a Democratic victory, even if it is bad for the people or the nation. The Nazis had several victories that they could spin as undoing the harm and humiliation of Versailles. These include the remilitarization of the Rhineland and the Anschluss plebiscite.

I’m sure there are more examples, but I have only a basic knowledge of WW2. I’m probably missing something.

There’s a lot of inertia in public opinion. Non-Nazis Germans went along because they had no reason not to. Those that weren’t Jews weren’t subjected to anti-Semitism. They had jobs they were grateful for, even if they weren’t the best of jobs. And their side was winning. Once they felt like badasses for running over France, many German people were emotionally pot-committed to winning the war and were going to be loathe to surrender, even if they weren’t Nazis.

You’ve been listening to Donny again?

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This article has a couple nice graphs from a paper on the D614G mutation.

I mean, that’s all you really need to know right there. This is useful too:

Note that these are positive test samples received and don’t translate directly into case numbers, but look at NY. D614 variant arrives, is just sort of meandering along, G614 arrives and wrecks their shit.

Edit: Also confirming that Australia had all D614 pre-lockdowns, which is what I had suspected.

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Of course he fucking is. It’s only due to our own inability to accept reality and/or laziness that we aren’t taking turns getting White House jobs, leaking like a sieve, sabotaging like a motherfucker, getting some crazy shit on tape, getting fired, and writing a book. I mean, seriously, how easy is it?

  1. Scrub social media of liberal content
  2. Post a bunch of Pro-Trump stuff on Twitter
  3. Write a book DOW 50K TRUMP MAGA KING
  4. Start a blog about how awesome Trump is
  5. Tweet at Trump daily
  6. Wait for the call

My problem would be associating my name with 2 through 5. It’d really suck on the off chance the plan didn’t work and everyone just thought I was a MAGA piece of shit.

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One more graph taken from the paper itself showing the G614 takeover:

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Thank you for posting these. Very interesting. If the dominant strain in the US is G614 that does not bode well for getting OPEN FOR BUSINESS right?

This debate with jman fascinates me, because I could argue both sides. Most red states will fudge the numbers. They will avoid testing. So, like, how high can “pneumonia” deaths go before people figure it out. Like, if someone loses an elderly relative to pneumonia, will they think anything of it? What if the doctor says, “It was likely coronavirus, but we couldn’t test.”

We live in a post-truth society where there are two huge sets of people: the ~57% of us who believe in real facts and the ~43% of them who are in the MAGA cult. We’re about to run a massive social experiment to see how far people will go to keep believing their bullshit. How much pain and death do they tolerate while still trusting Donald Trump? How many people can lose parents to COVID-19, be told there are no tests and it’s officially pneumonia, then listen to Dear Leader telling them how awesome a job he’s done and keep loving him? We’re about to find out, I’m afraid.

I just don’t know. Will hospitals get overrun? Or will they manage to do just enough to keep the curve juuust flat enough? There’s an amount of death they can basically hide in the statistics, you’ll have some people suspicious but if they’re on the GOP Kool Aid they legit might not even think grandma died from COVID.

There is clearly a pain/fear threshold where as a country we basically force them to shutdown because people are more scared of going to work than they are of starving. I don’t think 3K-5K deaths a day is it, and I think it’s more regional. I also don’t think a lot of deaths of the 60+ demographic do it, I think people just isolate their parents/grandparents and stay at it.

When jman talks of societal collapse but being kind of unsure about it, I see it as domestic government disputes, at least here in the US. Societies will collapse over this, but the first to go down will be third world countries with food shortages… Probably within the next 1-3 months if nothing else happens first to fix the issue, the early warning signs are already there with people standing out with flags in Guatemala to show they need food, Zimbabwe begging for loans, etc.

Here it will be more political and more nuanced, at least at first. What happens when Abbott (TX governor) tells Austin, Houston, San Antonio, etc to open back up for business and keep a stiff upper lip as the virus rips through there and their mayors tell him to go fuck himself? Same for Atlanta, Miami, etc… What will happen when blue states shut down, Trump blames them for being incompetent un-American snowflakey pussies, and Mitch cuts off their stimulus and unemployment? We’re drawing live to a lot of scary/crazy shit, but it’ll likely start with emergency SCOTUS sessions. Losing RBG right now could be even more catastrophic than we usually think, because any hope we have relies on Roberts doing something relatively sensible.

So the way we have a societal breakdown in the US imo would be something like:

  1. Liberal city in a red state has an outbreak, shuts down.
  2. Red state governor orders liberal mayor to stay open, announces that everything is fine.
  3. They sue each other, it goes to SCOTUS.
  4. If SCOTUS rules for the city, I think we’re fine societally. If they rule for the state, you may get extreme unrest and societal breakdown because the political will in the city will be for the mayor to still defy the order.
  5. That could lead to some form of martial law to enforce the open for business policy.

From here it’s interesting, because IANAL and I don’t know who has the authority here on these issues in our federalized system. But I also don’t know if the Supreme Court ruling will be ultimately based on who has the authority legally or on what needs to be done to protect the societal structure of the United States. Roberts will have to consider that in his ruling, I’m sure.

If it happens with a state trying to stay shut down without UI assistance from the federal government, I’m not sure where it goes. A governor tries to have his residents withhold federal taxes? Cuomo has his AG sieze some of Trump’s assets? There are a lot of ways this could be played, and I’m sure Cuomo, Newsom, Pritzker and a few others are already gaming out some strategies with their most trusted staff members. They’re intelligent enough to know that there’s a high likelihood of having to shutdown without federal assistance, and they know they will need it… they must be strategizing.

Meanwhile under all of this is another question… How bad can this get and how close to the brink of societal collapse would the GOP let it go before they removed Trump from office and told Pence to fucking shut it down? There’s some threshold where that happens, but I can’t begin to guess whether it’s 500K deaths by September or 1M or 3M? Ultimately it has more to do with people’s reaction to the deaths, and the economic impact of that reaction. That’s all that our corporate overlords care about.

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Depends how you want to look at it. From the looks of it, we’re going to get to herd immunity REAL fucking quick. Just take one of those charts, get out your blue Sharpie and draw a vertical line for good ol’ USA#1.

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When you say real quick I assume you mean 6-12 months still minimum right?

As to your other post I think you are right about where we are headed and the possible outcomes. I’m not sure I think there is ANY threshold for the MAGA dumbasses to take this seriously now. They have gotten their marching orders from Daddy and these people live their entire life reveling in their own ignorance so there is no chance they ever admit they were wrong here. So it will come down to what blue state/city governors and mayors will do. Relying on Democrats to stand up for anything has been a fools errand for a long time.

So bottom like I think we are most likely going herd immunity and the 1m+ dead scenarios that the right wing media is currently mocking are very much possible over the next 18 months. 1m dead is less than 2k/day over the next 18 months. If we don’t find a cure/vaccine or if we don’t get lucky with a mutation or summer I don’t see how we avoid that and maybe worse.

That’s just a telephoto lens

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Yeah, I was being hyperbolic there. It totally depends how long they go with little/no restrictions, whether or not it slows down as we start to get to 30, 40, 50, etc, % infected and (hopefully) immune. I told a friend yesterday that if we basically just let it go, I think it possibly burns out sometime in the fall, possibly by election day, and I don’t think it’s a total coincidence that we seem to be gearing up for that strategy just in time for that timeline. It’s just impossible to accurately project as a layman, because you have to factor in the changes in the Rt as the curve grows.

Of course there would still be a legit chance for a second wave, too, I would assume. Like that’s the problem, what if half of the infected people’s immunity wore off by December/January? We just go right on back up the roller coaster curve of death, I assume?

I don’t think the US has the stomach for months of overrun hospitals without attempting to mitigate, but I’ve been nothing but shocked and horrified by the lengths to which people have gone to protest for their right to go die for their corporate overlords to get richer. I would assume the GOP has some plan for this, but who the fuck knows? I assume they aren’t dumb enough to think they can just open up and it’ll all be ok, because they’re trying to suppress the data… so they’re also going to have to do some sinister shit to suppress what’s going on at hospitals or to make them appear overrun.

That said, we basically did it in New York and hardly anyone is talking about it. Like, to me that’s a HUGE thing in this that’s gone under the radar. New York’s hospitals were overrun. They were past capacity. People were showing up in need of urgent medical care and not getting it, then dying. But you didn’t hear about it the way you did with Italy. Why? I think a few reasons.

  1. They didn’t turn people away by some pre-existing criteria, like being 60+ or having an underlying illness, they did it by severity of case.
  2. They didn’t deny care to hospitalized people explicitly, they rationed it. (Like we did 2 to a vent instead of turning away old people from vents.)

So, the mortality rate was probably way higher than it would have been with proper care, but there weren’t stories of people being told, “Nothing we can do, you’re totally fucked, go home and die.”

Instead it was people being told they weren’t sick enough to be in the hospital, go home and get better. Call us if it gets worse. But then these people ended up dying, paramedics called to the scene to pronunce them, etc. Even the paramedic resources ran low, the wait times were up, they were pronouncing people dead instead of a doctor at a hospital, etc. But most people don’t know how that’s supposed to work anyway. Those who weren’t directly impacted also probably thought that if they got sick enough they’d get hospital care, so you didn’t see the level of urgency as in Italy…

At least that was my impression from watching the news. Maybe some of our New Yorkers can shed more light on what it was actually like there. I don’t think a lot of people around the country are as terrified of the virus as they should be, because I think New York managed to make it look like they were less overrun than they were. I’m not sure the degree to which medical professionals’ cooperation would be necessary with this, obviously quite a few talked to the press about how bad it was, but you never heard about them sending people home explicitly to die, because that wasn’t happening.

I would expect DeSantis and Kemp to try to orchestrate something similar, but the degree to which doctors and nurses go along with it will probably be a lot different because in NY at least Cuomo was doing his best to flatten the curve and mitigate. It’s an easier sell to try to use a system of rationing that doesn’t panic people when you’re actually doing the right thing at that point in time. I assume in places like FL/GA/TX, you’ll just see blatant non-counting of at home deaths, and you’ll see Fox News spinning that as a liberal conspiracy to get after the president, blah blah blah.

I feel like just about anyone on this forum’s guess is as good as anyone else’s at how far they can take it and how successful they’ll be. We’re in a totally unprecedented situation here. A death cult of personality is about to square off with a lethal pandemic, and we’re all strapped in there with them to some degree or another.

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