Lol America. Finally found a problem that can’t be solved by shitting on the poor and powerless, that can’t be bought off, that can’t be blamed on minorities. It’s going exactly as you’d have expected.
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No clue. I’m trying to talk them out of it. Average age of attendees is like 55+ with obesity. Recipe for disaster. Only saving grace is that the county it’s in only has 87 confirmed cases.
But I’ve been back in the office for a week now and a cousin is coming from New York.
Well, they are still shitting on the poor. The official policy of the Federal government is basically “minimum wage workers must die because stocks”.
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That was a good article.
Indeed, but in this case it is merely collateral shitting.
Shitting on the poor won’t solve the problem. But it will be necessary to maximize wealth for rich people. And that’s a tradition as old as America itself.
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No surprises in this interview. Without an effective vaccine, which is at best many many months away and isn’t guaranteed anyway, 60% to 70% of us are going to get it. And his take on how to deal with that is pretty much where we’ve ended up ITT:
There’s this strongly held view by some that we should follow a modified Sweden model. They point out that there’s all this death and pain and suffering from a collapsed economy. And that if we’re going to herd immunity and as long as the healthcare system can absorb the cases, we should just speed to herd immunity. What’s wrong with that thinking?
MO: First of all, the Sweden model no longer exists. It was a myth to begin with. And it now is even being heavily criticized within Sweden to the point where there’s actually a criminal investigation going on about what did or didn’t happen in their long-term care. Sweden has one of the highest death rates in the world in terms of number of people that have died per population. They have not advanced any meaningful way towards a herd immunity level and are not much higher than the United States is right now. And they recognize in retrospect that maybe they didn’t accomplish all that they thought they were going to.
The adjoining countries of Denmark, Finland, and Norway – who did go into more extensive lockdown activities — have kept their death rates significantly lower than Sweden has. And they’re bringing back the economy, very similar to Sweden is doing. So, I think that one of the problems we have is everybody seems to have a magic answer for what’s going on. And my response is that it might be a magic answer today, but let’s wait a week and see what happens. And that has happened time and time again. We’ve heard about how China was successful in tamping down that initial outbreak in Wuhan and throughout Hubei. But now we see they’re having a resurgence of infection with large parts of Wuhan now being tested again and other major outbreaks in China. So everyone may have a perfect solution today, but following my leaky bucket concept it may not be that way tomorrow at all.
DB: So we should be continuing to lockdown and wear masks and proceed with caution.
MO: I think one of the things we have to understand is we can’t just lockdown. I look at this with two guardrails. On one side is a guardrail where we are locked down for 18 months to try to get us all to a vaccine without anyone having to get infected or die. We will destroy not just the economy but society as we know that if we try to do that. The other guardrail is to just let it go and see what happens. We will see the kinds of deaths we just talked about and we will see healthcare systems that will literally implode. And not just for COVID-19 care, but for heart attack, stroke, and all other causes of disease in our communities. That’s not acceptable.
And so we’ve got to thread the rope through the needle in the middle. The very question you asked me about, what do we recommend to our older citizens of this country — our parents, our grandparents — what do we tell them? That’s the part that we haven’t done a good job of addressing. We have to learn not only how to die with this virus, which tragically we’ve had to do, but we also have to learn how to live with it.
Those are the kinds of discussions we need to have now. If we’re not going to lock up and we’re not going to open up willy-nilly, then what is the approach? And what we’ve been trying to do is facilitate those very discussions so that people can make hard choices. What are the things that we can do to change society that will help us maintain society to the best we know but at the same time also reduce transmission? That’s a key activity right now that public health needs to be playing a very important role in.
And the problem remains that in the best of times people absolutely suck at taking a middle path, and these are not the best of times. Many people are toddlers who will not accept anything other than getting their own way, and a huge percentage of the country looks up to King Toddler, the worst leader in history. People think stuff like “I never compromise” and “refuse to negotiate” are positive attributes. This attitude is stupid and wrong in most everyday cases people encounter, but it is especially misguided when the “opponent” is a force of nature.
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Social media echo chambers (and “news” organizations) are going to complicate the rest of this pandemic in ways that remain hard to predict. How do all the mask-less COVIDiots react to their cognitive dissonance when the death toll is spiking three months from now? 70 years ago they would be forced to read the paper and engage in some legitimate self-reflection and growth (e.g., gasp learning to appreciate science/experts). Now? Recent precedent suggests they’ll just climb down increasingly-extreme rabbit holes to retain assertion of their correctness.
There are a significant number of Catholic climate-deniers and racists (some of my family included, unfortunately) who have reacted to the pope’s social and environmental consciousness not by by adjusting their beliefs, but by determining that the pope has been corrupted by the devil. This is actually a thing! Like, do you want to keep being a racist and throwing your trash in the ocean? Just pretend that empathic church guidance is a sign of evil! Zing zang zoom, dissonance goes boom!
People really don’t like to admit they are wrong unless there are no alternatives. But the internet has given us an infinite number of alternatives, complete with communities of insecure morons who - equally-committed to suppressing their own dissonance - will gleefully welcome our participation and reinforce our polarization. COVID will be bad enough on its own, but almost certainly will continue to be exacerbated by ongoing social decay.
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It’s not clear to me where he’s getting this from. Seems like New York and New Jersey have reduced the R to <1 without 60% of the population getting it, unless we’re massively undercounting the cases, which is possible.
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He’s talking long-term. That’s the estimated number required to hit herd immunity.
I get that but it seems like we only get there if we go multiple years without a vaccine.
60 to 70 percent is what’s required for herd immunity at R 2.5 to 3. If we can bring R to less than 1 with other measures, then herd immunity requires fewer people to get it.
Got COVID tested this morning. I had my phone mounted in its holder on the center console at the perfect angle to video the test for your entertainment, but some lady came over and in a super bitchy tone snapped “we can’t proceed until you turn the camera off!”
The test certainly isn’t pleasant, but it’s really not as bad as you might think. To be fair, I unfortunately have a lot of experience getting NG tubes (several times the diameter of a COVID swab and long enough to reach your stomach) put in, so I kind of knew what sensation to expect. Comparatively this test was a walk in the park.
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Here’s my part of the plan:
Go ahead and open your business. Go to your bars, your restaurants, your gyms, your massage parlors, your Trump Two Hours of Hate Rallies. But before that, you’re gonna sign this waiver (similar to the one Trump requires of you) only this one states that you waive your right to a hospital bed once you get sick due to your stupid, irresponsible, reckless behavior. It gets filed with the state health department and cc’ed to every hospital and clinic in the state and they will be bound by it, no soup for you mf’er.
The rest of us can’t stop you from being an idiot but we sure as shit shouldn’t have to pay for it.
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But then if we relax R is no longer 1. We are talking about herd immunity in terms of going back to normal with a “tolerable” level of spread.
Trolly I have such a hard time if you are naive, playing devils advocate or just trolling. It’s clear from the article that we get to herd immunity over a long period of time at the current rate but if we OFB it’s conceivable we can get there in 1.5-2 years. We are at 20k/day or 7M/y. If we allow for 4 doublings of growth that’s 320k/day or over 100m/y which gets us there is 2 years. If we let it get out of hand by OFB and then lock back down to R=1 then stay at the higher number, not drop back down to 20k/day. And of course 320k/day is essentially Armageddon on our healthcare system.
He was really talking about some in between option which I agree seems likely.
Right, so it’s a worst-case scenario IF there’s no vaccine for several years and IF we abandon any preventative measures. It’s far from a given that this will be the case.
Florida with another record high
Even we stay as is we are probably looking at 500-1,000 dead per day and shrugging our shoulders. Depending on the hotspots could be some real shit shows.
Constantly having to shut things back down and the trying to reopen.
Doesn’t seem like NYC and the hardest hit parts of NYC are going full OPEN FOR BIDNISSSS, either. It certainly seems possible to keep R < 1 without 60% of the population getting it, but only if people wear masks and mostly stay the fuck at home.
NYC going to phase 2 of Open for Business on Monday.
Still no indoor service at restaurants, no gyms, no movie theaters, no malls, etc.