Cant imagine working in India right now. Last medical story I remember from there was a mob murdering a doctor. There’s no way there’s some massive surge of supplies coming like we got in NYC. This wave isnt going to end until it just dies out like a fire that’s run out of fuel to burn. Feels so much worse.
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I mean fuck. This is the google image search for India Train
I’m almost impressed India actually managed to fight the first wave. Except they fucked it all up. I can’t help but wonder if this would be what USA would look like if not for vaccines in the nick of time
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100% have the same thought.
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I’ve ridden trains all over India and never seen anything like that. They are crowded. Everywhere in India is crowded. But not that crowded. Whatever causes those pictures is not a common occurrence ime.
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The image I’ll never forget from this pandemic is the nurse in Egypt slumped in the corner, clearly in catatonic shock over not being able to save the patients in her ward from dying when the oxygen suddenly ran out.
I just listened to a 30 hour audiobook about the Panama Canal. Literally the only time in the whole book that the black West Indian workers were described as treated anything other than deplorably by whites - is when they went to the hospital to be treated by American nurses. Any call to duty powerful enough to transcend race in 1910 must be insanely strong.
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Just think if the election had gone the other way…
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I don’t think that would have been enough to turn us into India wrt COVID. Vaccines were here and distribution would have been worse, but not nearly as bad as India. A lot of distribution is handled on state level, so Trump would have fucked it up some, but not completely.
Vaccine distribution is one factor, but the continued downplaying of the virus and vaccines, and inflaming of dismissive public sentiment among roughly half the population by the previous administration are other factors that we avoided by a whisker, which in a worse-case scenario might have turned the tides in a completely different direction.
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It’s weird how these “perfect storms” keep happening to institutions that take risk on multiple fronts. Quite a coincidence.
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1 avoid unmasked indoors
2 avoid long exposures indoors
3 avoid crowds outdoors
4 close as much as possible
5 obtain and distribute vaccine
Probably more. USA would look similar under Trump right now.
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Indeed. This is also an issue that is broader than covid. Just risk management in general is extremely poor in contemporary institutions. Maybe its always been thay way but its kind of wild how many risk professionals there are that produce lots of PowerPoint decks listing risks with corresponding “mitigations” but don’t generate any, you know, actual safety nets for outlier scenarios.
Yeah this. We’d have states like NY with their vaccine shipments yanked because Cuomo pissed off Trump one day. Also the latest stimulus helped a lot with funding for vaccine distribution. That would not exist with Trump.
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I agree, but I still don’t think we get to India levels of badness with respect to COVID. Last I checked only ~2% of India is vaxxed, we were probably pretty close to that around inauguration day. Also the poverty and population density make things much worse.
Oh, yeah, we were probably never looking at the situation India is in now, i agree with that.
That wasn’t necessarily directed at you specifically. However, it has definitely been suggested by some that if Trump won, we’d be in India’s shoes. I can’t keep track of exactly who is in that camp.
US reporting 30,800 cases today. Lowest one day total since September 9th.
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First research I have seen about learning loss due to school closures (in the Netherlands):
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/17/e2022376118
Conclusion is that students learned basically nothing during the remote learning period, or even regressed, with losses significantly higher among children of less well-educated parents. They didn’t do a comparison by parental income, which would have been interesting.
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So much this. My heart rate shoots up every time I hear his voice. If I was still living in America, I’d probably be getting PTSD flashbacks or something.
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“Lighting a fire in China VS lighting a fire in India.”
