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M-m-m-my Corona! NCOVID-19 #5


Ran

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1 minute ago, Tywin et al. said:

I’m quite calm. Being realistic about this is calming. Pretending everything will be fine and go back to normal sooner than later is a farce. And if the supply lines break down, society is going to spiral out. Hopefully the national guard is doing its prep work, because this has a good chance to get ugly a lot quicker than you might expect.

 im not pretending everything will be fine, but calling for people to arm themselves and that society will collapse its not realistic,  you dont know how this is going to develop and it is counterproductive  to say that we are all doomed. and to be honest you dont sound calm at all, and being fatalistic doesnt really help anybody.

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1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

Which leaves us two choices:

1. Get everyone sick right now and accept a mass die off.

2. Drag this out forever, leading to a slow mass die off and the economy gets nuked.

Either way, buy bullets. Looting will probably happen.

FDR's famous quote seems to resonate now.  Really no point in getting hysterical about this.  At least in the US, two things we have an abundance of is food and mass transportation.  I don't see food lines or riots for basic necessities.  The biggest danger is obviously the economic impact which will have big time short time consequences, but will probably rebound whenever this crisis passes (and yes it will pass).  I do feel for those who were planning on retiring in the next year or so, man plans and god laughs (or something to that affect).

Personally, we have the opportunity to turn a crisis into a positive, even though it doesn't appear that the current US administration seems to have the will or desire to do it.  If you are going to call it a war than treat it like a war.  Allegedly we're going to force certain industries to start mass producing items specifically needed to treat and house those who become severely ill.  The next step (though I doubt anyone has the will to propose it much less enact it) is to draft young people without any preexisting medical conditions into a nursing boot camp, specifically to give them the skills needed to treat this particular virus.  While too late to help out the medical profession now, we might be able to train reserve "nurses" when this ramps up again in November.

The side affect is that many of those who may become unemployed receive beneficial skills and employment.

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14 minutes ago, Conflicting Thought said:

 im not pretending everything will be fine, but calling for people to arm themselves and that society will collapse its not realistic,  you dont know how this is going to develop and it is counterproductive  to say that we are all doomed. and to be honest you dont sound calm at all, and being fatalistic doesnt really help anybody.

The first step to being calm is to have clarity. Everything is dancing on a knife’s edge, and it seems like most people are still blind to this. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people are going to die. The global economy is going to get caved in. Food supply lines will probably collapse. And people have no idea just how stressed the health care system already is.

I know people want to hope for the best, but my backgrounds are in political science and psychology, and I have little faith that people en masse will work together to get through this. And we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg in the West.

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48 minutes ago, Conflicting Thought said:

shouldnt we try to maintaing calm and try not to panic?, i feel like some of us are falling to a desperation pit and it doesnt help anyone. like you dont have any way of knowing how this crisis is going to turn out, i personally dont think this is going to be the end of the world, i think its going to be transformative and many things will change (or should change, with capitalism you never know), buy how is calling for people to buy bullets and saying society will break down helping anybody?. You dont even know how is this going to turn out, i understand we are scared but please try to keep some perspective. at least try to not say things that will cause panic and sever anxiety  to people.

Is trying to analyze how this will play out panicking?

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7 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Food supply lines will probably collapse.

This is where you lose me. There’s no evidence of that. Governments know they need to keep these up and running. We can reduce the impact of this virus and feed ourselves, other countries have proven that.

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6 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

I know people want to hope for the best, but my backgrounds are in political science and psychology, and I have little faith that people en masse will work together to get through this. And we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg in the West.

Please don't blame your "backgrounds in political science and psychology" for your pessimism. There are others of us on this board who have backgrounds in one or the other of those subjects who don't have your seeming lack of faith in people's ability to get through this without a complete collapse of society. I think things are going to be bad, but in many ways I am pleasantly surprised at how many people are taking this seriously. 

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8 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Food supply lines will probably collapse.

There's really no reason to think this is likely to happen even in the worst case forecasts for how this might go. Rein it in a little bit.

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People are talking as if this is the black death or something. Most of the people infected don't even have symptoms.

We urgently need to protect the elderly and those with compromised immune systems, but I don't see how the virus brings about the societal collapse some are predicting.

 

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China has got this well under control zero cases now from well over a hundred. As long as proper isolation is enforced the virus can't spread. One thing that make make it harder in the US is everywhere in China has a "gate" which creates natural checkpoints everyone lives in apartments so the building security check my temperature each time I exit and enter, if I had a fever presumably I've be tested. 

This thing can be handled with proper measures. Though Americans living in spread out suburbs will make it harder to check everyone's temperature constantly and keep stuff locked down.

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I wouldn't necessarily trust the Chinese numbers. I'm sure things are getting better (mass deaths would be too hard to hide even for that government), but they're desperate for a PR win and are clamping down harder than ever on the free press (see all the US reporters who got credentials revoked yesterday).

Also, I'm quite pessimistic as well, but even I don't think we're going to see societal collapse from this. I do think we're going to end up with way more deaths than we should though, almost entirely because of that fucking shithead in the WH. Turns out that, even though the Defense Protection Act was activated, they aren't actually doing anything with it yet (Trump even had a line at the press conference today about how the federal government "wasn't a shipping company" and that governors should do more. That fuck). It's just fucking insane incompetence over and over again.

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1 minute ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

So, don’t plan for the worst hope for the best?  That’s panicking?

Yes, it's panicking. Because you're not planning for the worst likely outcome - you're planning for some bizarre The Road McCarthyesque grimdark fantasy. And that actually hastens problems. That leads to overbuying at the grocery store, of not trusting others, of mistrusting government and people who can help. And it makes you less likely to help as well.

There's no sign that supply chains are going to stop. There's no sign that agriculture - which is one of the most socially distant things around - is going to be particularly impacted. While it is infectious, it isn't insanely so, and based on actual data like in South Korea and China we can see what happens with sane, rational, science-based treatment and control plans. 

We aren't going to get back to 'normal' for 18 months - until the  vaccine is widely ready. But that doesn't mean the end of the  fucking world.

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33 minutes ago, Darryk said:

People are talking as if this is the black death or something. Most of the people infected don't even have symptoms.

We urgently need to protect the elderly and those with compromised immune systems, but I don't see how the virus brings about the societal collapse some are predicting.

 

the virus doesn't, up to 18 months of nobody getting paid might though. 

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I find myself really agreeing with both Fez and Kalbear.

Things are going to be very bad. Much of this is due to the incompetence of the federal government under Trump. But many of the governors are actually "doing more" than they should have to. Here in Nebraska Pete RIcketts (who I still think is more incompetent than the average governor) is doing better than Trump. He suspended some trucking regulations that were making it harder to quickly resupply stores that had had runs on TP and other items, and this really did help. 

It would be completely wrong to be Pollyannish and not steel oneself for major problems, But as Kalbear says, expecting a "grimdark fantasy" really doesn't contribute to being able to figure out how to deal with those problems any better than being Pollyanna would.

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50 minutes ago, Ormond said:

Please don't blame your "backgrounds in political science and psychology" for your pessimism. There are others of us on this board who have backgrounds in one or the other of those subjects who don't have your seeming lack of faith in people's ability to get through this without a complete collapse of society. I think things are going to be bad, but in many ways I am pleasantly surprised at how many people are taking this seriously. 

Why would I not cite my educational background or the fact that I work at a hospital and can see the sweeping pessimism internally? That makes no sense.

And I am not seeing people taking it seriously. I’m seeing the media take it seriously, but tell that to the kids party on South Beach. Or better yet, to our managers, who yesterday led a large meeting about how we need to stay six feet apart from no another and proceeded to talk face to face a foot away from one another.

I am not trying to be an alarmist, you should know from our long interactions that I’m very laid back, but this is getting incredibly serious and recent developments are making things much worse.

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