Maybe some agent/room screwed some players. That did not happen with my clubs/agent. PokerBros has tons of different clubs and they aren’t related to each other. With everything happening in the poker world having some of the operators of these clubs or the agents blow up or scam is not remotely surprising. I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing it if I didn’t trust my agent.
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Never say never.
Please vote for Biden and then crow endlessly about how, being from a swing state, you have voted harder for Biden than most everyone here.
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No but his handmade Scott Walker 2024 sign is ready for action.
Then you aren’t voting Biden which means you are ok with Trump even if tired of having to defend him.
And it’s ludicrous to say our response wouldn’t be better under someone else. We have one of the worst responses in the world. He literally threw away the playbook on how to handle a pandemic. He downplayed it, he pushed to open up too soon, he threatened schools to reopen. He didn’t increase testing, supplies, etc.
Sure the Fox News mouth breathers wouldn’t have taken it as seriously, but the rest would have.
Leadership does matter.
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It’s still an incredibly stupid take, and to think that any other president, Democrat or Republican, would do basically the same as Trump is, shall we say, deranged. Under a remotely competent president, Democrat or Republican, we would have had researchers on the ground in Wuhan at the immediate outset to start gathering samples and researching the disease. We would have already had a pandemic response team ready to go with an actual plan in place rather than waiting around to appoint a religious zealot and a real estate failson and a bunch of people who aren’t actual epidemiologists to be in charge. We would accept tests from the WHO in February if not late January when it was already clear that the CDC test was borked. We would not have tried to stop the University of Washington from its testing, which could have better caught the first outbreak that was caught. We would have had more testing in NYC to spot that outbreak sooner, lock down sooner, and save perhaps tens of thousands of lives. We would have ramped up PPE production in late January, when the president knew the virus was airborne and much more lethal than the flu. We would have had universal cloth mask recommendations by April, and a president who’d lead by example. We would have had organized distribution of ventilators and PPE from our federal stockpile and from industrial suppliers rather than forcing states to bid both against each other and against the federal government. The supplies procured by the federal government would have gone to desperate cities and states rather than shuttled away to wealthy cronies. And of course, we would have had an administration delivering useful, accurate information on a regular basis to governors, state health organizations, and to the American public rather than muzzling our top health experts and feeding the public wishcasting and outright lies on the situation.
Doing all that is not some sort of heroic or unprecedented pandemic response. That’s just basic stuff. It doesn’t require any stroke of genius or herculean feat. It’s just taking the plans that were already in place and following them. The failure to do that basic stuff is why college parties are so much riskier now. It’s why the economy is still fucked. It’s why South Korea has full baseball stadiums now while we’re killing off our teachers rather than admitting that our pandemic response has been such an utter failure that the disease is still rampant after so many long months.
I grant that we’re too big to really be New Zealand. We wouldn’t save everyone. We probably wouldn’t even be South Korea, as their smaller number of potential outbreak sites is an advantage. But we could have been like Canada. With similar per capita death numbers, we’d have over 100000 fewer dead people. Maybe we could be 100 South Koreas, where every state has 2 outbreaks that get managed well. That’s could be over 150000 lives saved compared to right now and an economy that’s almost totally unfucked.
That you see fit to blame college students rather than the president who failed at every step either through inaction or by deliberate sabotage of our response at the most critical point in the pandemic, its outset, is far more absurd and unhealthy than whatever caricature you have in your mind of liberals who, of the pandemic, are telling it like it is.
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Also we could have given every American 2k/month for a year and people could have stayed home instead of risking their life for work. And it wouldn’t have cost more than we are spending on packages anyway
We’ve had over 250k deaths so far and it should be more like 50k. His response is the vast majority of that difference.
Also masks work and a different administration could have mandated them.
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I talked to a friend of mine the other day in CA whose wife is a nurse in LA County. I asked him how it was going for her since near the peak he’d said they had a huge regimen for her to get back in the house safely and that she slept in a different room, etc.
My expectation was that he was going to say, ‘it’s going better, new treatments are making it better’ or something to that effect. Instead, he said it was pretty much the same as before but with the key difference being that people were just dying. He said it was starting to slow down again a little but knew it was about to pick up again. I wasn’t encouraged by any of his news.
For the other post, I’m working up some numbers and will get back to you with any further questions. Testing/cases is really off this week due to Labor Day weekend, so it’s skewing the data probably to the point that I won’t be able to do even a remotely accurate 14 day positive sum until 2 weeks from now…sigh.
As a point of reference for how stuff is going now, the usual low case reporting previously was Sun-Tue, with upticks beginning Wed each week. The peaks each week were Fri-Sat nearly 100 percent of the time. Now it looks like low reporting is starting to consistently happen Sun-Wed (deaths very low every Mon/Tue now and very high on Wed), with Thu numbers looking more similar to old Wed numbers and Fri and Sat numbers still usually following the old trend (with a handful of states that don’t report anything on Sat and/or Sat/Sun). In other words, for nearly 7 weeks we’ve been flying nearly completely blind at a worse level than the beginning of the pandemic in probably at least 30 states (a number of states are doing fine with reporting though I haven’t actually broken them out yet). I’m so not looking forward to October and will be voting in person as early as possible.
Like, does anyone here think that a first term president Mitt Romney, who pretty much just follows the pandemic response plan by the book and gives some regular, boring updates, does anything less than cruise to re-election to the tune of 40+ states?
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Of course he does. Look at the popularity boost every leader other than Trump got for just doing the fundamentals.
Crises are slam dunks for politicians. Trump probably could’ve become dictator if he played it right.
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Trump completely panicked and thought that the economic downturn that would result from taking the necessary steps would doom his reelection and possibly land him in jail. No one else would have been in that position.
Our provincial premier here in Ontario (the brother of Rob Ford, crack-smoking mayor of Toronto) is right out of the Trump mold and was deeply unpopular before the pandemic hit. He’s probably going to get reelected now because he actually did a lot of things right at the outset and appeared to care.
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Correct. Tens/hundreds of thousands of people are dead because our country is run by a narcissist. This is how things work when you elect people who literally do not care about you. Trump will burn the country to the ground if he thinks that is what it will take to keep him from dying in jail.
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If there’s one thing Trump does it’s: everything wrong
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https://twitter.com/ParkerMolloy/status/1304091803814178822
Idiots on chiefsplanet still parrot the completely made up strawman, “You all called Trump a racist when he did the China ban!” (which no one did, nor did it matter).
Your Monday morning quarterbacking is just as laughable as the notion that Donald Trump personally stopped any of that from happening.
The boots on the ground within the relevant agencies do not answer to Donald Trump.
I’m glad you were able to get that rant off your chest, though. It must’ve been rather cathartic.
lol Monday Morning QB
These were all things we posted as logical steps to take here on UP back in January/February/March
It didn’t take hindsight
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You should maybe read the news about how every public health related agency has been completely politicized during the pandemic to do what Trump wants.
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Steven Millman update:
September 10th COVID Update Hypothetical: How many Americans would have died of COVID-19 by now had we followed the path of European national responses?
SHORT VERSION: 77,305 meaning we have seen more than 113,000 unnecessary deaths SO FAR with more every day. Take this estimate with a grain of salt, because error margins are wide, but there’s no doubt the death toll could have been far lower than the current 190,000.
tl;dr as though I even need to say that anymore
Given the news of the day, a question I’ve not been generally interested in answering has come up so often that I’ve finally decided to run it. That question is, How many Americans would have died of COVID-19 by now had the government and the population reacted to the pandemic in much the same way as other developed nations which were initially hit hard? This is pure conjecture, and please take it as such. I’ll do my best to spell out the assumptions clearly.
To make a reasonable comparison, I’ve modeled the answer to this question based on countries which (1) took a heavy toll before reacting effectively, (3) eventually reacted effectively – looking at YOU Sweden, (3) are Western democracies with well-developed individual freedom, and (4) have modern medical care systems. For this thought experiment, I therefore selected Spain, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom. These four countries managed to get the virus under control (more or less) after disastrous early death tolls.
On average, these countries reached their peak death rate as defined by their highest seven day average in about 32 days from the date of the first death (range: 27-37) at which point they were averaging 886 deaths per day (range: 760-975). After this sharp increase, deaths began to decline quickly, albeit at a slower rate than they rose. On average, these countries dropped to ½ of their peak death rate on 22 days later on day 54 (range: 16-27), to ¼ of their peak 18 days after on day 72 that (range 12-22) and reached an equilibrium state of just under 10 deaths per day (range 2.5-19) on about day 130.
To build a more or less similar curve, I assumed that had we responded like our European counterparts we would also have peaked on day 32 and used our actual death count on that date as the starting point for the models. I then assumed we would have dropped to ½ of that rate on day 54, ¼ of that rate on day 72, and reached equilibrium on day 130. Because of the simplicity of this approach the attached figure has a sharp peak rather than a rounded one, but it effects the estimated death count with only marginally. The attached images show the US actual 7-day average death rates as well as Italy, Spain, France and the UK along side the simplistic model of the US death rates following European models. The best fit model created an asymptote (leveling off) at about 40 deaths per day in the US. That’s much higher than the other countries, but then again, the US is a much larger country as well.
The current death toll from COVID-19 today – day 189 – in the US based on Johns Hopkins data is 190,862. The total death estimated death toll for the US on day 189 based on the European model is 77,305. Based on these assumptions, the US has allowed itself 113,557 unnecessary deaths SO FAR.
Making matters worse, we are currently averaging about 1,000 deaths each day in the US, not 40. This means that the number of unnecessary deaths is increasing by almost 1,000 Americans each and every day. My current published model for the US has us reaching equilibrium at 574 deaths per day, so when we do eventually level off (before rising again in all likelihood) we will be adding 534 unnecessary deaths per day.
REMEMBER: There are a LOT of assumptions in here to generate a best fit model estimate for the US based on the experiences in Europe. I don’t have tons of faith in the EXACT 77,305 estimate and neither should you. It is, however, quite reasonable to believe based on the data that the real unknowable answer to this hypothetical is between 50,000 and 100,000 deaths had we reacted more forcefully as a nation. No matter how you slice it, it’s a LOT lower than the results of our half-hearted and occasionally outright oppositional response to the pandemic.
So how do we get out of this literal and figurative death spiral? Simple. Do the things you already know you need to do. Avoid crowds, especially indoors. Wear a mask when around others and wash your hands frequently. Social distance. As I’ve said many, many times, we have never been much more than one month from getting the virus under control and having our normal(ish) lives back if we all collectively did these things. We can do it – all of our peers have. Please?
I understand the news of the day and that virtually everyone reading this will want to toss political blame, but honestly, I don’t find that particularly helpful. Just follow the science, encourage people to do the same. It makes no difference at this point which political tribe you follow, just do the obvious stuff and then we can get back to gleefully arguing about regular things like tax cuts, budget deficits, and judicial appointments. That sounds a lot better to me than doing these damnably depressing models.
Data are drawn from Johns Hopkins University’s COVID tracking project. As always, don’t forget I’m not a medical professional or epidemiologist. I’m a professional statistician with too much on my mind.
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