This is a great post. Absolutely nails it.
I’ve mentioned Swankysprog before (data analyst prepaing official covid data for public health in south east England) and her opinion is exactly what you have stated. Lockdown properly and the new strain wouldn’t even be part of the conversation.
In UK for sure this new variant talk is pure political expediency. Infectious viruses are more infective in Winter- no fucking surprise there
Okay, this is a bit of a gotcha, but what would you do during the BLM protests? How do you keep from spreading the disease among the National Guard or whoever is enforcing martial law? And, and I’m not kidding, if Trump had been all in on masks, then liberals would have resisted it.
hard disagree.
Also your takes about how the rest of the world is doing really bad too are pretty off-base IMO. There are degrees of “doing badly.” And the US is very nearly in a league of it’s own.
The land border thing is definitely an excuse, but I think the general isolation argument is valid. For example Australia has approximately 10 international airports for the entire country. And they’re out of the way enough that people aren’t flying through Australia to get somewhere else too often.
Yeah. The truth is…Trump’s initial plan to “reopen” society was pretty damn solid. I don’t remember exactly what it said about masks if anything, but plan was generally good, and I think Democrats would have been on board with it. But Trump trashed it a day or two later and demanded that states like Michigan and Virginia needed to be “liberated”. Had Trump supported masks, democrats would have gone along imo and we’d be in a better place than we are now.
All this talk what-ifing everyone across America joining together to lock themselves inside for weeks is dumb. There is no scenario that will ever exist that would elicit that kind of national response. If aliens hell-bent on annihilating the planet come to earth from space a solid 30% of folks will be on Team Alien.
Every man woman and child for themselves isn’t just the reality of the situation, it is the literal ethos of the country.
Otoh, just because people will rally around taking lives doesn’t mean they’ll rally around saving them.
Yeah, I’m gonna lol microbet on this one as well.
lol no
Maybe Trump went against his initial plan because he could tell that a decent percentage of his core supporters were going to turn against him if he pushed it.
I don’t know about every man for themselves. But I do think that they need to just get rid of the categories of people ASAP. Just dump vaccine through the same channels they use for flu vaccine. And let people sign up. In normal times, it’s not like health care providers or elderly people have any problem getting a flu shot.
The only reason not to do this is that the doses are limited. However, we’re so slow in getting the shots in the arms, that we aren’t limited by number of doses yet. And given how many people don’t want it, it is not clear that we will run up against that any time soon.
Even if I’m wrong, our worst case is that more overall people are vaccinated, but some people in high risk groups get delayed. That’s bad, but it’s better than what we’re actually doing.
It’s really hard to come up with a way to justify staying home to own the libs. It’s easy to rally the right-wing troops in opposition to the left. I don’t think you can push them to accept that the left is right about COVID.
These aren’t sheep who you can push to believe in anything. It has to make sense within their culture of grievance.
Really doubt the Pfizer vaccine can go through same channels as flu vaccine because of its requirement for ultra-cold storage. I think more people will take the corona vaccine than the flu vaccine and then double the challenge because each person requires two doses. This effort is nothing like the normal flu vaccine routine. It really required a special task force and teams of people in every state trained to handle and deliver the vaccine. In my area, the number of new coronavirus cases isn’t that far off the number of people being vaccinated on a given day. And that’s just absurd.
You’re right that Pfizer can’t, but Moderna doesn’t need the super cold freezer, so it can I think. All they would have to do is modify things a bit so the Pfizer goes to places with deep freezers and Moderna goes where there aren’t any.
As far as the two doses is concerned, that does change things a bit (they just have to hold a dose for every first one they give), but I don’t think that’s a dramatic change.
I meant that Moderna doesn’t need a super cold freezer, just a regular one.
-20 c isn’t that hard? I think a pharmacy could buy like a retail standalone freezer to get to that temp. I mean I just checked the thermometer in my own standalone freezer that isn’t even set to the coldest setting and it’s -10F which is -23C.
My freezer is at 1 degree Fahrenheit and it can go lower.
In this era of heightened identity politics, I am not sure that there was ever going to be a scenario in which “both sides” embraced masks, social distancing, etc.
It is fairly obvious (to most it seems, not all) that “liberals” would be the first on the mask train as they support/embrace/advocate social programs and government programs with widespread societal benefits. Often with attendant sacrifices.
And once “liberals” were on the mask train, there is nowayinhell that “conservatives” would hop on. Their world view is anti-government, anti-society, anti-liberals, anti-intellectual, anti-science, and a whole bunch of you-can’t-tell-me-what-to-do.
