This is misleading. Trump wasn’t ahead of the game wrt hcq use. Doctors everywhere were using it based on the Italians and French using it combined with some promising lab data. It helped that it was a relatively safe drug with a good side effect profile. That was also when hospitals were getting overrun. It’s a very different landscape and process to when a vaccine would be released.
It’ll be awhile before distribution gets to a point where they matter. Figure something like: health care workers, essential workers, people in group homes (nursing homes, etc), pre-existing condition people would be heavily prioritized… probably most emphasize the HCWs.
Sure, but working in fast food isn’t like some fun gig where you get to hang out with people. Though I don’t know know maybe some people like it.
But just be a normal teenager, take dads money, and tell him you’re going for a solo hike and meet up with some friends. Or I feel like dad would rather her meet up with friends outside masked up than working in an indoor place like fastfood. I can promise you they aren’t wearing their masks at all times there, I’ve walked by a papajohns a few times and since you can see in clearly with the store being all windows, every time I’ve walked passed they all had their masks off. They only put them on when a customer comes in. It’s gonna be the same everywhere young people work.
Quick Japan update. Things are getting worse here, not better. A 7-day average of over 1,000 new cases per day. Deaths rising daily. Mostly concentrated in Tokyo and Japan’s other major cities. My weekly Sunday trip to the local grocery confirmed that despite there not being a single recorded case in my town, mask-wearing where people gather is still near 100%.
However, like many of you, the stress of isolation is starting to eat away at me. Not being able to go anywhere or see anyone. I live in rural Japan. It’s a nice, peaceful lifestyle, but what makes it work is being able to travel–both abroad and throughout Japan–see friends, do fun things intermittently and then coming back to recharge before doing it again.
Looking at the worsening numbers, I’m starting to wonder if I’ll ever be able to visit Tokyo again without putting myself at serious risk–much less ever travel back to the States to see my family and friends there.
I’m tempted to crack, say fu** it, and jump on the next bullet train for Tokyo–damn the consequences. But then I think that if I were to get sick due to giving in to a stupid impulse, possibly endangering my wife and others in the process, erasing months of discipline…I back down from the ledge–for now.
Meanwhile, my sister in Ohio is traveling, bar and restaurant hopping, enjoying life, socializing, having fun, and I wonder what the hell I’m doing again. Is it me that’s crazy or is it her?
Hang in there. She’s the idiot. Look at the zombie movies. The people doing the best are the ones holed up in their bunkers you don’t see until year 4. The ones out bar hopping…
I assume so. NYC-based. Got sick for a weekend in mid-March. Body aches and feverish but got better quickly except for abnormal fatigue for another week. Then Mrs. JordanIB had a good 4 weeks of difficult/painful breathing and extreme fatigue. Basically could not take 10-15 steps without having to sit down and rest.
Nobody got a COVID test because lol USA#1 testing in March. She later tested positive for anti-bodies. I got 2 antibody tests but never received results for either because lol USA#1 testing.
I’m not saying everything is futile. I just don’t have faith in the best-case scenario timeline for rolling out a vaccine. I’d rather plan my life in the near future based on an assumption that it will be three-ish years before a vaccine is proven and readily available. Part of that is a belief that I’ll be in the last quartile of people to get it in any roll out of the vaccine.
If I don’t believe I can afford to lock things down until we have a vaccine, what’s my play in life?
The answer to this is always “yes”. Please. Unless you are allergic to the flu shot or have an immune issue that prevent you from vaccinating, you should always get one. Some people, like my sister, can’t get one. They rely on those of us who can to protect them.
My sister got the flu in late February this year. Hospitalized for 10 days. On oxygen. Very, very sick. Please get you flu shots.
And the Czech government catches on. Masks indoors and on public transport are mandatory starting September 1st (a.k.a. the beginning of the school year).
No idea how they’re gonna get primary school students to wear masks all day at school though. Also looks like my quest for getting in shape is over since I assume people aren’t gonna want to play sports while wearing a mask.
Teacher’s union chairman is gonna address the plan live on TV. I’ll be sure to catch the translation and find out if we’re going on strike.
That’s fair. I believe my confusion on your stance was a limitation of the language then with pessimism vs cynicism. My bad. Things really are quite bad!
Actual remote learning started today for my kids and i gotta say its nice to get some structure back into their day, its not back to normal, but it feels alot closer.
This is the kind of problem that so obviously requires strong government intervention - loosely analogous to a tragedy of the commons issue. Many, probably most people can live life normally and nothing bad will happen to them personally. But obviously if everyone or even a good chunk of people do so the result is mass death.
Even though this is a super easy concept to understand people are too dumb, or more often too damn selfish, to act appropriately on their own. This is basic shit, almost every other country gets it.
Yeah I mean you can’t tell people for 50 years that the individual is the only unit of accounting that matters and that satisfying your individual personal preferences (as if such a thing could exist in such a propagandised society) is basically the only goal of existence and then expect them to behave for the greater good when a crisis hits.
Thatcher said “there is no such thing as society” the right wing has spent the last 5 decades making sure that came true, atomising and individualising anything that could be thought of as a social space and now we want people to act in favour of a thing they no longer believe exists? Madness.
This is a very good post. A little obvious for a best of mention, but good solid work. It will seem a little obvious to people on this board, but we want nuggets of real observable wisdom like this sprinkled everywhere for random people who come across this board who might just be starting to learn about politics.
Consider the parlay required for the best-case timeline of 12-18 months. The science has to be good. The trials have to be good (and if you think I am going to take a vaccine that hasn’t undergone proper trials, think again). Production and distribution have to be good, likely requiring a solid partnership between pharmaceutical corporations and government. And, then, you need people to buy into taking the vaccine and that’s’ not a given.
I don’t think it’s wise to plan on a good vaccine being widely distributed before the end of 2021 and the smart play is to give some weight to the possibility that we’re looking at 2023 or later before that happens.
I want to think about my future over the next five years. And I want to think about what I should do and what society should look like using a Monte Carlo simulation for risk analysis that considers an optimistic best-case scenario of 12 months, a more realistic scenario of 3 years, a pessimistic scenario of 5 years, and an apocalyptic scenario where this never ends. I’m frustrated that people seem to not want to consider those longer time frames, as if it’d be too depressing so they can’t let themselves think about those things.