Corona Horse, Corona Rider - Covid #9

[Fragile Bird]

Jim Acosta, CNN WH reporter, said what really struck him at today's Task Force press conference was the fact that Trump was afraid. He said being there in person you could just feel the fear.

[Jaxom 1974]

33 minutes ago, Triskele said:

Out of curiosity in what way do you mean unfathomable?  Just that they're saying the possible prediction out loud.  

Yes. That's what I mean.  That it's being talked about so openly (though I still think he's playing on numbers to bolster his own reelection in November when the numbers come in lower).  But also, that I've not seen other countries talking in such dire terms...and yes I know that the population densities of European countries (for example) are smaller than the US, but still...

The sheer incompetence of this situation is staggering for a country such as the US.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

3 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

Jim Acosta, CNN WH reporter, said what really struck him at today's Task Force press conference was the fact that Trump was afraid. He said being there in person you could just feel the fear.

Nasty comment!

(but totally true)

[Fragile Bird]

Ok, this is fun.

The Defence Production Act has been used hundreds of thousands of times so far during Trump's presidency.

Just not against the coronavirus.

The government uses it routinely in contracts to make sure it gets it's goods first, ahead of the other customers of it's suppliers.

Instead of asking for companies to make masks and PPE for the government, Trump wanted companies to 'volunteer'. Because they didn't want to nationalize US industry.

This will be a story in the WaPo tomorrow.

 

 

[Paxter]

8 hours ago, Ran said:

Interesting paper out of Harvard modelling different types of social distancing strategies (PDF link) which finds long periods of very high R>0 reduction (60% effectiveness) merely punts the peak down to later in the year unless you resume some level of social distancing at that time. Their model suggests reducing R>0 by 20-40% using more modest efforts (not full lock downs) leads to lower overall peaks.

I'm guessing this is the Swedish thinking, and the thinking that other Nordics are starting to consider (Finland apparently already reversed some of their emergency declarations from the other day, Denmark is talking about easing up after Easter, Norway has partially re-opened its borders).

Delaying the peak I guess is still a worthy goal if it allows the health care system to adapt. Perhaps the Nordics are more confident in their systems with more wealth and a smaller population.

[Guest]

21 minutes ago, Triskele said:

I'm not certain I follow which side of this you're on, but isn't there an argument to a starker message like this in order to get people to take the distancing guidelines more seriously?  

There is such an argument to be made, but if that were the case, they'd be hyping the 1-2 million number, not the 100,000. Trump is just trying to acclimate his supporters to thinking that 100,000 deaths is a good thing, and anything less than that is a win.

In the meantime, the state of Oklahoma,.USA, is lagging seriously behind on testing. Between 3/28 and today, the state only processed 237 tests. 188 of them were confirmed positive, only 49 were confirmed negative. That tells me that there is a bad backlog in test processing, even though the state has began to ramp up actual testing. It also tells me that there is still a shortage of tests, as it appears only the sickest people are being tested.

I just checked the stats, and Oklahoma appears to be running dead last when it comes to number of tests reported. Even Alaska has conducted nearly twice as many tests as Oklahoma has. The crazy thing about that is that it was in Oklahoma City when everyone realized the shit was going to hit the fan economically, when Rudy Gobert tested positive and the NBA cancelled its season.

Nearly 1/3 of all tests conducted in Oklahoma are positive, which is a rate far higher than any other I've seen. Expect things to get bad in Oklahoma.

[Jaxom 1974]

39 minutes ago, Triskele said:

I'm not certain I follow which side of this you're on, but isn't there an argument to a starker message like this in order to get people to take the distancing guidelines more seriously?  

Sorry. I suppose I am a little jumbled.  

I'm heavily in favor of distancing, even as it drains. But it's needed.  The lack of seriousness I get from the administration is telling.  It seems making people comfortable with the 100k number is more vital to them.  Because the tact of letting the states fend for themselves unless homage is paid is disturbing. 

But I'm also curious if countries like Germany or England worry about tens of thousands of deaths, or are even bracing for such a thing?  China, well, it is hard to know what's really going on there, but you'd think they'd have more than 10k deaths reported minimum, yet they currently don't (I think, I may have missed something)...and that only makes 45 look worse, right?

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

Real talk question.

Today I got the "you can work from home now email." It was sent out after nearly everyone was gone, and it's closed organizational wide, but I usually come into work an hour late because I can so I leave after everyone. And the idiot managers were meeting and openly discussing how they will cut staff. 

I'm going to still go in for the time being because I can still help a lot of patients, even if I'm learning different fields on the fly. Two weeks ago I had no idea how work comp claims even worked. Now I'm correcting the work of those who were supposed to be working on this for years. 

American healthcare. 

Anyways, what I am seeing is not sustainable. And moral is hanging on a thread.

But you have to go in. Right foot, left foot. 

[The Marquis de Leech]

9 hours ago, JoannaL said:

Were they socialist like the old east German government, then they would be dictatorial. One of the only socialist country left today is Venezoela , which was my first example.

Venezuela has a smaller state-sector than Thatcher's Britain did. Its "socialism" consisted of spending its oil wealth on programmes for the poor. 

[The Marquis de Leech]

By contrast, the largest nationalisation programme ever seen outside the Communist states was Britain 1945-1951 - half of British industry, and a quarter of the economy. I think you would struggle to call Clement Attlee a dictator.

(And if you still want to argue that that wasn't really socialist... well, Poland had private farms throughout the Communist era. By your reasoning, Poland wasn't socialist either).

[Rorshach]

1 hour ago, Triskele said:

 

It also seems like another huge example of such short-sighted thinking even from a Trump self-interest standpoint.  While it seems there's a prayer of being around this lower number it also seems very much on the table that the eventual number of deaths will blow way past this.

Not a problem. If it blows past, he'll just move the goalposts again.

I mean, he has in under a month moved them from 0 to 100 000 and not blinked an eye. There is infinetely more space into which he can - and will - move his goalposts. 

I am so grateful I'm not American these days.

[DaveSumm]

6 hours ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

That's the US is openly discussing 200,000 deaths is unfathomable. What are other countries saying about their death rates...?  

UK said a while back 20,000, but they’ve indicated that it may be lower now due to the distancing measures. And no, we don’t have a tenth your population. I do get the impression that individual states are doing all the work here and aren’t being lead from the top. It’s incredible to me that 200,000 people could die on Trump’s watch, and I still wouldn’t be confident that he wouldn’t get re-elected.

[Raja]

12 hours ago, polishgenius said:

Italy's reported new cases starting to drop again and Germany's after two weeks of lockdown are tapering off as well, so it seems, hopefully, that the lockdowns work.

We had evidence from Wuhan too that it does too! - though a big take away for me is the need for a multi pronged approach of testing, central quarantine ( for cases & suspected cases and close contacts),  social distancing & screening using symptoms - which is basically what the WHO have been advocating for as well.

[Toth]

Absolutely lovely. So I've wasted two days preparing lessons for refugee children after getting notified that we should give them tasks for the lock-down and then the class teacher says she can't give the lessons to them and had hoped I had an idea how to contact them. -.-

Are you fucking kidding me?!?

[RhaenysBee]

Over 500 cases and people are looking for manicurists online. The amount of new patients per day is completely random. There were 74 new cases yesterday, now there are 33. I think it’s down to the frighteningly small amount of testing we do. 

[Chaircat Meow]

1 hour ago, DaveSumm said:

UK said a while back 20,000, but they’ve indicated that it may be lower now due to the distancing measures. And no, we don’t have a tenth your population. I do get the impression that individual states are doing all the work here and aren’t being lead from the top. It’s incredible to me that 200,000 people could die on Trump’s watch, and I still wouldn’t be confident that he wouldn’t get re-elected.

If US = 325 million and UK = 68 million that means the US has a 4.7x larger population, so if they were as 'optimistic' as we are being they would have 94,000 fatalities. 

[BigFatCoward]

So another 800+ deaths day in Spain but that figure has been roughly holding steady for close to a week now.  The US looks like it will be the first country to have a 1000 day, probably today or tomorrow.  Maybe the psychological impact of that will lead to some necessary changes. 

[felice]

12 hours ago, JoannaL said:

Please give me an example of a country with multi-party democracy and personal freedom and full public ownership of the means of production? As far as I know such a country does not exist. Whenever socialism was tried it ended in the loss of personal freedom

Please give me an example of a country with widely available internet access in 1920? That something doesn't exist at one point in time isn't evidence that it can't exist. Would you object to your country implementing large scale public works programs to help address post-coronavirus unemployment? That would be an increase in the percentage of the economy under government control. At what point does the inevitable descent into dictatorship kick in? Is it a certain percentage of GDP? Is there some specific industry that can't be nationalised?

[Ran]

This is a thread about COVID-19. Take German politics elsewhere.

[Arakan]

1 minute ago, Ran said:

This is a thread about COVID-19. Take German politics elsewhere.

Correct, sorry for OT. But the question who will pay for all of this will be asked in a lot of countries. The system question* will be asked in a lot of countries due to the pandemic. It already happens right now (e.g. Hungary). BAU won’t cut it this time (like in 2008/09). 

*political/socio-economical