Will We Stand The Corona Test of Time? - Covid #7

[Luzifer's right hand]

12 minutes ago, Agnessa Schizoid said:

There was a talk about Russia in the thread and you guys either overestimate or underestimate Russian people. We're not scared organized crowd living in fear of police or MVD (not sure i've ever seen anyone from MVD in my life), we're more like part fatalist/part devil-may-care with some pointless panic thrown in people, who as soon as they hear about a new law, start coming up with ingenious ways to work around it (or ignore it straight up). Cops mostly only pretend to be busy, authorities are mostly lazy and/or corrupt, and nobody trusts them. I am surprised that at least Moscow citizens seem to have taken recommendations somewhat to heart.

Here in my city, the stores, public transport and official organizations are full of elderly people sitting or standing as close to each other as possible. We have a week long moratorium on work beginning Monday (you know what I mean) and already tons of organizations are planning to keep on working anyway. 

People buy everything like crazy b/c they realize that the prices are about to shoot up so everywhere is very busy and orders are on the rise. 

I understand where this fatalism is coming from, I'd feel similarly myself if I didn't have to worry about my mother, though I'd still not act like a total asshole - why people can't stay two meters away from each other or take turns riding elevator is bizarre to me.

I think typical russian attitude is this: 2 days after terrorist attack in our subway, journalists tried to enter subway with lots of metal in the bag. The gates at the entrance were pinging, however, the guards simply waved them through. It happened everywhere, including the very station that was hit by attack. 

There is a saying in my country (bad translation time) "The severity of laws is diminished by how unnecessary it is to follow them". 

At least Putin is looking after numero uno and dresses for the occasion. 

https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/corona-pandemie-ploetzlich-nimmt-auch-wladimir-putin-das-virus-ernst-a-c2589502-b89f-4d5e-8f67-5fed68b66e85#bild-33c9f406-ea56-4864-9536-d0467c6a8e59

(Hospital visit)

[rotting sea cow]

35 minutes ago, Triskele said:

Sounds like AMLO is not exactly doing a kick-ass job with this in Mexico.  

 

Please mention a western country which is doing an decent job right now. There seems some that are performing better but time will tell if It was enough.

[Fez]

5 minutes ago, rotting sea cow said:

Please mention a western country which is doing an decent job right now. There seems some that are performing better but time will tell if It was enough.

Possibly New Zealand. It's too early to know for sure; but its seems like they might be the one western country that took the lessons of other countries to heart and locked down before things got terrible.

[Larry of the Lawn]

3 minutes ago, Triskele said:

That's a strange response.  My point sure isn't that things look good elsewhere.  

The point about AMLO is that he's way behind the curve in terms of being square with the public and getting people to distance.  Given how much of an example other nations ought to signal by this point this seems like it could be a disastrous mistake for Mexico.  

Klobuchar is wondering why you keep misspelling "Alamo".

[Cpl. Tunny]

22 hours ago, Maithanet said:

WaPo Article (limited clicks) on the spread of coronavirus in US by state.  It is looking at how the hardest hit states were initially all more urban states that voted for Clinton (Washington, California, New York).  New York is completely dwarfing all states (50% of all cases are in NY state, with only ~6% of the US population).  But the states with the fastest spread in the past week are states that voted for Trump:  Michigan, Missouri, West Virginia, Mississippi, and Arizona. 

In addition, it also compares the number of tests conducted with the number of positive tests, to see if this is just a function of states that test more get more positives.  Answer: no.  Missouri, Arizona and Mississippi for example, are below the national average in terms of how much they expanded testing this week, but they are still finding 10-27 times as many cases as they did a week ago.  That's bad. 

EDIT:  Note that many of the states with the fastest spread have not taken precautionary measures like closing bars and businesses (or if they did, they only did it in the past few days).  So there's every reason to expect that infections will spread dramatically in these areas in the next two weeks.  For example, businesses are still open in Arizona and BARS are still open in Missouri. 

One, who gives two shits what state voted for whom? Two, West Virginia shut schools and businesses down very early. 

I find it completely hilarious that people are trying to correlate shutdowns and such with who they voted for. Nonsense! This and so much more is why we stay divided as a country. Let it go. Come together. Who cares about red and blue states? This political contest is actually disgusting, and shows that even in times of a crisis we cannot let politics take a back seat and come together and beat this. Roughly 40% are Trump supporters through and through. I'm surrounded by them, you cannot sway them. Ive tried. Was talking to my uncle last night (Trump supporter) and asked him about what he thought about Trump saying this was a hoax about a month ago. He got defensive and said I watch too much MSNBC and Trump never said that. LMMAO! Point is, if 2 million people die, Trump supporters will blame Pelosi or someone they find convenient. But, correlating outbreaks to red and blue states is fucking ridiculous. 

[Maithanet]

Just now, Cpl. Tunny said:

One, who gives two shits what state voted for whom? Two, West Virginia shut schools and bussineses down very early. 

I find it completely hilarious that people are trying to correlate shutdowns and such with who they voted for. Nonsense! This and so much more is why we stay divided as a country. Let it go. Come together. Who cares about red and blue states? This political contest is actually disgusting, and shows that even in times of a crisis we cannot let politics take a back seat and come together and beat this. Roughly 40% are Trump supporters through and through. I'm surrounded by them, you cannot sway them. Ive tried. Was talking to my uncle last night (Trump supporter) and asked him about what he thought about Trump saying this was a hoax about a month ago. He got defensive and said I watch too much MSNBC and Trump never said that. LMMAO! Point is, if 2 million people die, Trump supporters will blame Pelosi or someone they find convenient. But, to correlating outbreaks to red and blue states is fucking ridiculous. 

It has been speculated that a lot of the reason that Trump and the conservative media have underplayed the importance of coronavirus is that it has been hitting "blue" states the hardest.  For previous disasters, it is pretty easy to make the case that Trump cares more when it strikes in "red" states like Texas and Florida, compared to California.  In addition, many conservatives (governors and everyday people alike) take their cues from Trump and Fox News, and if they continue to talk like this is something that isn't that serious and is going to pass soon, the virus will spread that much faster.

The sooner it becomes obvious (really, undeniably obvious) that this isn't just a problem for people in big cities like NY and Seattle, the better for the country. 

[aceluby]

2 hours ago, Triskele said:

Does anyone know anyone, on facebook, in their personal lives, etc...who still admits to being a libertarian today?  

Yup, and they are bitching about their freedoms being infringed on and how easy it is for everyone to just willingly give them up.  Also had a moron text a group I'm in "welcome to socialism" with a bunch of people agreeing.

Yes, many of my friends are idiots.

[Arakan]

The US is escalating rapidly. Will be number one in cases when the day is over. France is escalating as well. They asked Germany for military aid, Helicopters, to fly some of the patients out of the most hit regions. Furthermore ICU patients from Italy and France are brought over to us. Good thing, solidarity is important. Germany so far has „only“ 800 ICU patients, so a lot of spare capacity but this is expected to escalate within the next two weeks. 
 

Thank god for growing European solidarity. The first few days were embarrassing. I hope Italy can forgive us. 

[Paxter]

1 hour ago, BigFatCoward said:

663 deaths in italy. It does look like the 600-750 range is fairly static now. 

Is anyone prepared to call a peak yet in terms of fatalities/day in Italy? The national lockdown is about 2.5 weeks old now, so in theory we should see the number of new cases fall quite steeply. 

[Cpl. Tunny]

Well, as I stated, WV shut down way earlier than most. A "soft" order was issued weeks ago, believe the 17th and a complete shut down was issued Monday night. And we are a red state, I dont see the correlation. Business and schools have been shutdown here since March 17th. That also came with advise to stay at home. Monday a stay at home was issued. Its being taking serious by most. Even if people are Trump supporters, they're staying home. They just like to make it clear that Trump is the hero in all of this. They forget/ignore all the B.S. he said about it being a hoax. Those who support him will always do so. Nothing will change that. Yes, they are very uneducated, the stereotype is true. But, I see no sense at all in making it a red and blue state though. The reason NY, CA and WA was hit so hard is that they are hubs of international travel...thats it. 

[Ormond]

2 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Hey @Ormond, still mocking me now? 

When have I ever MOCKED you? If you truly believe I ever mocked you, I am sorry, that was not my intention. 

[Arakan]

7 minutes ago, Paxter said:

Is anyone prepared to call a peak yet in terms of fatalities/day in Italy? The national lockdown is about 2.5 weeks old now, so in theory we should see the number of new cases fall quite steeply. 

It seems the original lockdown was not enough. Still too many points of contacts. New cases today 6000+. I think it will get worse when the poorer South is fully hit. 

[Maithanet]

1 minute ago, Cpl. Tunny said:

Well, as I stated, WV shut down way earlier than most. A "soft" order was issued weeks ago, believe the 17th and a complete shut down was issued Monday night. And we are a red state, I dont see the correlation. Business and shutdown have been shutdown here since March 17th. That also came with advise to stay at home. Monday a stay at home was issued. Its being taking serious by most. Even if people are Trump supporters, they're staying home. They just like to make it clear that Trump is the hero in all of this. They forget/ignore all the B.S. he said about it being a hoax. Those who support him will always do so. Nothing will change that. Yes, they are very uneducated, the stereotype is true. But, I see no sense at all in making it a red and blue state though. The reason NY, CA and WA was hit so hard is that they are hubs of international travel...thats it. 

I agree with almost all of this.  Some red states have absolutely made a good account for themselves.  Gov DeWine in Ohio has gotten a lot of credit for acting quickly to address the threat.  But I also think that the states that are dragging their feet the worst have almost entirely Republican governors, and in statements they've made, they almost always echo Trump's talking points about avoiding economic disruption and not seeing this as a huge problem yet. 

I have only limited evidence on whether that filters down the local/individual level.  But there are polls showing that Republicans are still not taking COVID as seriously as Democrats/independents (although that gap is closing since Trump finally did his reversal).  And the social distancing metric I linked to a couple days ago showed most of the states where people had reduced their travel the least were also "red" states, although that dataset isn't perfect, nor perfectly correlated. 

[DMC]

3 hours ago, Triskele said:

Does anyone know anyone, on facebook, in their personal lives, etc...who still admits to being a libertarian today?  

No but my mom recently retired from being a librarian.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

23 minutes ago, Arakan said:

The US is escalating rapidly. Will be number one in cases when the day is over. France is escalating as well. They asked Germany for military aid, Helicopters, to fly some of the patients out of the most hit regions. Furthermore ICU patients from Italy and France are brought over to us. Good thing, solidarity is important. Germany so far has „only“ 800 ICU patients, so a lot of spare capacity but this is expected to escalate within the next two weeks. 
 

Thank god for growing European solidarity. The first few days were embarrassing. I hope Italy can forgive us. 

Who would have ever thought that it would be the Germans who saved Europe. 

[RhaenysBee]

I’m watching the state channel news, never have I ever been manipulated with so little subtlety for ten minutes straight before. 
Between learning about how terrible the situation is everywhere else in the world and how everyone under the sun is helping public morale here, I would love to hear about OUR situation in facts.
I don’t want to hear paramedics and hospital staff singing to campaign for #stayhome, I want them to tell me how they are handling the growing number of patients, how many beds/oxygen machines/doctors/nurses they have left, how serious the condition of the infected is, under what circumstances they are quarantined and treated, how long testing takes, how many they have/can/will test(ed) every day, who they are testing and what their expectations for the upcoming weeks are and what they Are doing to ensure/better that. Just give me facts. Please. More facts, less singing. 

[Larry of the Lawn]

26 minutes ago, aceluby said:

Yup, and they are bitching about their freedoms being infringed on and how easy it is for everyone to just willingly give them up.  Also had a moron text a group I'm in "welcome to socialism" with a bunch of people agreeing.

Yes, many of my friends are idiots.

Just been texting with an old friend of mine who is absolutely THRILLED about all of this and is saying it validates all his prepping and everyone-for-themselves mentality.  He's also had respiratory issues in the past and has a couple other things that would be considered comorbidities.  It'd be funny if it wasn't sad.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

13 minutes ago, Ormond said:

When have I ever MOCKED you? If you truly believe I ever mocked you, I am sorry, that was not my intention. 

Perhaps "dismissive" would have been a better term. I just don't think most people are really gaming this out all that well and it would be unwise to find yourself in a situation where something happens to your running water.

I think it's a bit funny that people were so dismissive of the points I was trying to make like ten days ago. I can't remember if it was this morning or yesterday morning, but a journalist we both like, Stephanie Ruhle, is starting to have those worries too. It was hilarious to see her ask a few questions to an expert, her face got a little screwed up and she was processing it and then just blurts out "so the supply lines might actually be vulnerable????"

[Arakan]

8 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Who would have ever thought that it would be the Germans who saved Europe. 

Times are changing   

For the EU there are two options when this pandemic is over:

1) de facto break up and further rise of the far-right

2) finally they understand that only together we are strong enough. And the EU will become a true confederation. 
 

I see no middle ground. The financial devastation is a magnitude bigger than 2008/09. Without the community, many countries will be lost for a decade in economic terms. 

[Which Tyler]

5 hours ago, Fez said:

Interesting. One of the lead scientists behind the Imperial College model has significantly scaled back his estimates of the damage the UK will face.https://www.newscientist.com/article/2238578-uk-has-enough-intensive-care-units-for-coronavirus-expert-predicts/

His comments also have relevance for the rest of the world as well...

 

Have to say, the plans for the Excel Centre and NEC are absolutely fantastic, and will be making a HUGE difference.

ICU capacity will have been quadrupled, possibly more, between those 2, and the upscaling non-icu wards.

Provided that we can get our hands on enough ventilators, trained staff, and PPE to allow them to work