Coronavirus / COVID-19 [Archive] - Page 3

Montmorency

04-08-2020, 20:45

Does anyone have a legitimate source on recovered South Korean COVID patients testing positive in large numbers?

Welcome more discussion of the undercount issue. By now I have a strong suspicion that even apparent "peaks" in official caseload are actually artifacts of stagnant testing capacity. If you test only x persons a day, then the growth of positive cases will be linear - on paper. From a NYC study (https://www.nber.org/papers/w26917.pdf) discussing the possibility of flat NYC curve, using late-March data:

https://i.imgur.com/vDhJo1v.png

To my eye that is a perfect correlation between testing levels and reported cases + hospitalizations. This has to be the figurative tip of the incidence iceberg.

As long as testing capacity grows over time - as we have seen in the US so far - it will appear as though the rate of growth in cases is accelerating. If testing capacity is stable, growth in cases will appear stable. But this will not necessarily reflect the underlying reality. Is there a surefire way to distinguish an epidemic losing steam than a combination of (1) static testing alongside declining daily positives; (2) decreasing healthcare utilization of potential and confirmed cases.

Relevant (https://twitter.com/MarkLevineNYC/status/1247155043171741696) from the chair of the NYC Council health committee:

NYC’s “city morgue” is the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME), which luckily is the best in the world.

But they are now dealing w/ the equivalent of an ongoing 9/11. And so are hospital morgues, funeral homes & cemeteries. Every part of this system is now backed up. 2/

A typical hospital morgue might hold 15 bodies. Those are now all full. So OCME has sent out 80 refrigerated trailers to hospitals around the city. Each trailer can hold 100 bodies. These are now mostly full too. Some hospitals have had to add a 2nd or even a 3rd trailer. 3/

Grieving families report calling as many as half a dozen funeral homes and finding none that can handle their deceased loved ones. Cemeteries are not able to handle the number of burial requests and are turning most down. 4/

It’s not just deaths in hospitals which are up. On an average day before this crisis there were 20-25 deaths at home in NYC. Now in the midst of this pandemic the number is 200-215. *Every day*. 5/

Early on in this crisis we were able to swab people who died at home, and thus got a coronavirus reading. But those days are long gone. We simply don't have the testing capacity for the large numbers dying at home. 6/

Now only those few who had a test confirmation *before* dying are marked as victims of coronavirus on their death certificate. This almost certainly means we are undercounting the total number of victims of this pandemic.

And still the number of bodies continues to increase. The freezers at OCME facilities in Manhattan and Brooklyn will soon be full. And then what? 8/

John Roberts won't have a court before his term is through if he keeps this up. [Video]
https://twitter.com/NYTnickc/status/1247508440051847172

The Supreme Court (https://twitter.com/Leahgreenb/status/1247517553628450816)has started issuing decisions remotely in order to protect their own safety.

One of their first remote decisions was that Wisconsin voters will have to show up in person and risk their lives if they want their votes counted.

https://i.imgur.com/Gvb6zNk.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/Jrw5cPK.png

Insisting that all responsibility for testing be offloaded from the federal government to states and hospitals, while demanding congratulations for states and hospitals increasing their testiing capacity, is a chef's kiss.
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1247292542162546694

Acting Navy Secretary Modly justifies himself in person to the crew of CVN-71. They do not substantially approve. Audio included.
https://taskandpurpose.com/news/navy-secretary-blasts-fired-aircraft-carrier-captain

Modly resigns (https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/07/politics/modly-resign-crozier-esper-trump/index.html).

I'm surprised Fox News had this guy on, it's on a level with the guest they had 4 years ago who offered that Trump's blandishments to black voters were actually meant for the white suburban middle-class.
https://twitter.com/LisPower1/status/1247233437519536129

Also surprising: the Trump admin has designated unauthorized workers to be essential workers! Of course it's actually SOP once you realize this essential status doesn't afford the unauthorized any relief or benefits today. This story is older than living memory.

The Avengers of the Pandemic
https://twitter.com/tifffanycuh/status/1246227095522553857

https://i.imgur.com/DPFQiKB.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/9ltyJdA.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/uCHQzwR.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/nGY8ZUp.jpg

Montmorency

04-09-2020, 00:37

It's time.

New York City officials say they will begin to report those who’ve died in their homes from suspected coronavirus complications without an official lab diagnosis. (https://www.thedailybeast.com/nycs-coronavirus-death-toll-expected-to-surge-as-officials-include-deaths-at-home)

The coronavirus death count in New York City, already unfathomable, is expected to surge in the coming days as officials begin including people who have been dropping dead at home without an official diagnosis.

Emergency Medical Service data first reported by Gothamist suggests the undercount of individuals who have likely died from the virus is massive. On Tuesday alone, 256 people were pronounced dead at home across the five boroughs. Until this month, about 25 people in New York City were found dead in their homes on a typical day, suggesting that most of Tuesday’s calls were related to the outbreak that has already killed over 5,400 people across the state and infected 140,386 more.

According to New York City Fire Department data obtained by The Daily Beast, first responders have reported 2,192 “dead-on-arrival” calls over the last two weeks. On average, the department handled about 453 of those calls over the same period last year.

That data also showed that the number of cardiac or respiratory arrest calls has exploded, from 20 to 30 a day at the end of March and the beginning of April in 2019, to 322 on one day in April in 2020—with more than 100 calls every day since March 28. While 30 to 50 percent of those calls ended in a death in 2019, more than 50 percent of those calls have ended in a death every day since March 22 this year, with the percentage steadily rising to 75 percent as of April 5.

One emergency room doctor told The Daily Beast that his hospital is “aggressively sending people home.”

“Being in the hospital is not going to change their course of illness,” the physician said, indicating the hard choices medical professionals face during this pandemic.

De Blasio said that he was hopeful the virus was starting to slow after seeing indications that the city’s overwhelmed hospital system was seeing fewer admissions—until he learned that hundreds of people are dying in their homes without seeking medical care.

A slightly older (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/05/us/coronavirus-deaths-undercount.html) article on reporting and tallying:

More than 9,400 people with the coronavirus have been reported to have died in this country as of this weekend, but hospital officials, doctors, public health experts and medical examiners say that official counts have failed to capture the true number of Americans dying in this pandemic. The undercount is a result of inconsistent protocols, limited resources and a patchwork of decision making from one state or county to the next.
[...]
Late last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new guidance for how to certify coronavirus deaths, underscoring the need for uniformity and reinforcing the sense by health care workers and others that deaths have not been consistently tracked. In its guidance, the C.D.C. instructed officials to report deaths where the patient has tested positive or, in an absence of testing, “if the circumstances are compelling within a reasonable degree of certainty.” In infectious outbreaks, public health experts say that under typical circumstances it takes months or years to compile data that is as accurate as possible on deaths.

The federal government does not expect to produce a final tally of coronavirus deaths until 2021, when it publishes an annual compilation of the country’s leading causes of death.[...] “It is not a ‘real time’ count of Covid deaths, like what the states are currently reporting,” Jeff Lancashire, a spokesman for the National Center for Health Statistics, said.

But those who work with death certificates say they worry that relying only on those documents may leave out a significant number of cases in which coronavirus was confirmed by testing, but not written down in the section where doctors and coroners are asked to note relevant underlying diseases. Generally, certificates require an immediate cause, and encourage — but do not require — officials to take note of an underlying disease.

Then there are the many suspected cases.

Susan Perry, the funeral director from Virginia, said that she was informed by health workers and families that three recently deceased people had tested positive for the virus so that she and her staff could take necessary precautions with the bodies. Only one death certificate mentioned the virus.

“This probably happens all the time with different diseases, but this is the first time I’m paying attention to it,” Ms. Perry said. “If we don’t know the numbers, how are we going to be able to prepare ourselves and protect ourselves?”

Experts who study mortality statistics caution that it may take months for scientists to calculate a fatality rate for coronavirus in the United States that is as accurate as possible.

Some researchers say there may never be a truly accurate, complete count of deaths. It has happened before. Experts believe that widespread news coverage in 1976 of a potential swine flu epidemic — one that never materialized — led to a rash of deaths recorded as influenza that, in years prior, would have been categorized as pneumonia.

“We’re still debating the death toll of the Spanish flu” of 1918-19, said Stéphane Helleringer, associate professor at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. “It might take a long time. It’s not just that the data is messy, but because the effects of a pandemic disease are very complex.”

I've read similar things about the situation in other states, such as Texas.

drone

04-09-2020, 03:12

With the egregious state of testing in the US, the death count is really the only number you can sort of trust, and with the hospitals full that will no longer be as accurate (statisticians can extrapolate). Positive tests and hospitalizations are meaningless. We only test the obviously sick or the privileged, and will never know the infected rate unless we do an antibody census to count the asymptomatic cases.

With the various state lockdowns, we should be screening at the choke points (grocery stores, essential workplaces, etc) with temperature checks followed by swab tests. Most of the country has no clue how good or bad it is.

Shaka_Khan

04-09-2020, 03:15

The WHO originally claimed that there was no person-to-person infection with this virus (at 5:49)...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmsqeFAlSGA

And this other guy talks about it at 6:10...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkpuVdCGEPs

And the WHO originally claimed that travel bans weren't needed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ja1lL_f846o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLwYS6TQyS0

rory_20_uk

04-09-2020, 10:26

Beskar

04-09-2020, 18:58

I would have thought for tests to be worth it they'd need to be 99%+ accurate (sensitive and specific) and so far it seems a lot of them are way short of this metric.

People are being tested at least 3 times before it is 'confirmed', with test 1 and 2 being negative, despite a clear presentation.

Montmorency

04-10-2020, 03:34

I wanted to do some original research toward a crude little validation of my hypothesis about testing masking incidence. What's a country with a putatively flat curve with a well-documented testing regime? South Korea is arguably the best representative available.

Here's an official South Korean resource (https://www.cdc.go.kr/board/board.es?mid=&bid=0030) compiling various vital (!) statistics, including testing.

Without taking the step of registering a prediction, here is what I found.

DATE
TESTS ADDED
POSITIVES ADDED
TESTS TO-DATE
POSITIVES TO-DATE

4/9
8708
39
494711
10423

4/8
8699
53

4/7
10500
47

4/6
5571
47

Week ending 4/5
67092
654
461233
10237

4/5
6201
81

4/4
11759
94

4/3
11530
86

4/2
10196
89

4/1
10983
101

3/31
15370
125

3/30
1053
78

Week ending 3/29
62361
686
394141
9583

Week ending 3/22
63568
735
331780
8897

Week ending 3/15
79694
1028
268212
8162

Week ending 3/8
89597
3398
188518
7134

Week ending 3/1
74352
2970
98921
3736

According to my hypothesis, a testing ceiling could potentially falsely give rise to the impression of a ceiling in case growth. For example, if you test 10000 a day and identify 1000 positives among them consistently over time, it will appear as though the disease reproduction number (R0) has been suppressed to 1 or lower, which is to say that exponential growth in caseload has been decisively contained. But this testing ceiling could be misleading as these indicators alone would not allow an observer to discern between a contained outbreak and one that is growing at an increasing rate with hundreds of thousands or millions of unconfirmed true cases. In such a situation, it might be expected that growth in the testing rate (e.g. 10K > 11K > 12K daily) would produce a corresponding case growth as more true cases are uncovered.

[Caveat: I am not doing any proper statistical analysis here, only eyeballing]

In the South Korean figures above, from the beginning of March to now, we see the following overall trends:

1. A gradual decline in testing.
2. A gradual decline in new positives.

Could South Korea be falling afoul of the trap? Breaking down the trends should offer insight.

The number of tests being administered daily has dropped a lot since early March, as has the number of new positives added, which would be predicted under my hypothesis. However, the decrease in new positives has been proportionally greater than the decrease in tests performed. We can see that in the week ending March 1, there were 74352 tests conducted for 2970 positives, while there was even more testing in the week ending March 15 at 79694, yet there were only 1028 new positives - not even half as many. Comparing the week ending March 22 to the week ending March 29, testing each week was about the same at ~63K give or take; in the second week there were 98% as many tests as the first, but only 90% as many new positives. In the week ending April 5, more testing was done than in either of the two aforementioned weeks, yet fewer new positives.

In the daily figures I included for the past 11 days, testing frequency has varied dramatically. On March 30 there were 1053 tests and 78 positives, compared to 15370 tests and 125 positives on March 31. On April 6 and 7 the same amount of new positives - 47 - was added each day. This was despite there being 5571 tests reported on April 6 against 10500, nearly double, on April 7. Over the past two days, April 8-9, there has been the same amount of testing - ~8700 - with 53 and 39 new positives, respectively. That there could be so much variation in testing frequency that still produces positives clustered so closely together in magnitude, yet also following the overall downward trend, is evidence that the outbreak is resolving within the observed time period and that testing captures a representative sampling.

In the US the ratio of tests to positives has been (using Covidtracking.com and the John Hopkins map) 2,360,512 : 462,135 or 5.1. In South Korea it has been 47.5 per the latest cumulative figures (see top of table). At the beginning of March (see again table) it was 26.5. In the last day it has been 223.3. South Korea could be very bad at selecting testing subjects, or it could be identifying most of the true positives. With the latter scenario the skyrocketing ratio of tests to positives could reflect a genuine decrease in the rate of new infections.

Unless South Korea is astoundingly bad at picking people to test, and only getting worse with time, then the combination of low absolute case growth and steadily negative rate of growth we see above really does seem consistent with a contained outbreak rather than a masked one. The testing frequency, though inconsistent and by some intuition low, would therefore prove to be well above the ceiling at which true cases begin to slip under the cracks. This conclusion would also be consistent with most news reports on South Korea's relative success, and their trends can thus serve as a point of reference (or contrast) to American ones.

Addendum: Another avenue of validating the hypothesis for a country, one way or another, would be a view from the ground, i.e. hospital utilization, excess death rates, etc. I have not looked at South Korea's indicators for this exercise, but given the above I would expect them to comport with a contained outbreak.

Montmorency

04-10-2020, 04:32

Denver Post (https://www.denverpost.com/2020/04/09/coronavirus-editorial-trump-gardner-polis-supplies/) on the federal government confiscating purchased supplies.

Trump had only days before prevented Colorado Gov. Jared Polis from securing 500 ventilators from a private company, instead, taking the ventilators for the federal government. Polis sent a formal letter pleading for medical equipment, but the president took the time to make clear he was responding to a request from Gardner. We are left to believe that if Colorado didn’t have a Republican senator in office, our state would not be getting these 100 ventilators. How many ventilators would we be getting if we had a Republican governor and a second Republican senator? Would that indicate we had more Republican lives in our state worth saving for Trump and resources would start flowing? Should Utah be concerned that Sen. Mitt Romney voted to remove the president from office?

This behavior comes, of course, weeks after Trump informed states they would have to compete against one another in the procurement of medical supplies at a time of global shortages due to the coronavirus pandemic.

If the federal government turns out to be running a double-dip scam, outbidding states or outright stealing medical equipment to resell to connected private contractors who then turn around and front to the states and hospitals, that alone would be a transgression worthy of life imprisonment.

Toward the intersection of the pandemic and the electoral:

https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1247658663617138691
https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1248031484532928514

Absentee Ballots are a great way to vote for the many senior citizens, military, and others who can’t get to the polls on Election Day. These ballots are very different from 100% Mail-In Voting, which is “RIPE for FRAUD,” and shouldn’t be allowed!

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/trump-mail-voting-fraud-coronavirus-vote-suppression.html

“Mail-in voting is horrible. It’s corrupt,” declared President Trump earlier this week. When a reporter asked how he could reconcile that position with the fact that he had personally voted by mail in the last election, Trump replied, “Because I’m allowed to.” This perfectly circular logic — if more voters were permitted to vote by mail, they would also be “allowed to” — seemed not to satisfy him. Trump has refined his view, explaining that casting a ballot by mail is fine for members of the military and senior citizens, but is “ripe for fraud” when used by others:

Trump is not even attempting to formulate a facially neutral principle. He is simply asserting that members of the military and senior citizens — constituencies that lean Republican — can be trusted not to commit voter fraud, but that constituencies that might vote Democratic cannot. He is willing to support accommodations to allow Republican-leaning voters to vote without risking their health, but refuses to support any such accommodations for Democrats. (Trump campaign officials already confirmed this to Politico — they will allow mail voting for senior citizens, but not others.) The travesty that was Tuesday’s election in Wisconsin is his plan to win in November.

It’s not clear if Democrats have fully grasped the gravity of what Trump and his party are attempting to do. The coronavirus poses a threat to elections in general, but a special threat to urban voters, who tend to face more crowded polling stations. Republicans are very willing to take active measures — like strict voter ID, or the poll tax Florida Republicans have tried to impose — but the virus makes active measures unnecessary. Republicans have calculated that the public-health threat of the virus will suppress the urban vote for them. All they have to do is block any changes to the election system and allow nature to run its course.

That Trump has never offered any nominal commitment to neutral application of government is a kind of defense if being sardonic. We're -this- close to banana republic status.

(Grimly, Trump mentioned "when they grab thousands of mail-in ballots, and they dump it" in disparaging broadened mail-in voting. I say grim because North Carolina Republicans were discovered to have perpetrated this exact form of electoral fraud in the 2018 midterms, so egregiously that the courts vacated the election result. It's like a kiddy diddler pulling a minor into their van with the admonition that 'there are a lot of creeps out there.' :daisy: criminal scum.)

These last years have convinced me that we need to amend the Constitution to reintroduce attainder.

Shaka_Khan

04-10-2020, 06:54

South Korea is arguably the best representative available.
I'd also check out Taiwan.

In the South Korean figures above, from the beginning of March to now, we see the following overall trends:

1. A gradual decline in testing.
2. A gradual decline in new positives.

Could South Korea be falling afoul of the trap? Breaking down the trends should offer insight.

Interesting...

Seamus Fermanagh

04-10-2020, 16:15

...These last years have convinced me that we need to amend the Constitution to reintroduce attainder.

I wonder sometimes, just how much of your sociopolitical outlook revolves around the belief that any wealth is an inherent evil. Many (Most?) of the rest of your positions seem to flow from that.

"From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" is poetic, but seldom materializes in practice and then not for long. Nor can it be effectively enforced by authority.

As I am condemned to never see government minimized and localized because of the practicalities of the economy of scale, I suspect that you are condemned to never getting the governance you think we all need -- even if you get every law or change enacted that you seek. Neither of us can remake humanity in a different image.

Montmorency

04-10-2020, 23:25

I wonder sometimes, just how much of your sociopolitical outlook revolves around the belief that any wealth is an inherent evil. Many (Most?) of the rest of your positions seem to flow from that.

"From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" is poetic, but seldom materializes in practice and then not for long. Nor can it be effectively enforced by authority.

As I am condemned to never see government minimized and localized because of the practicalities of the economy of scale, I suspect that you are condemned to never getting the governance you think we all need -- even if you get every law or change enacted that you seek. Neither of us can remake humanity in a different image.

Wealth? WEALTH??!??!

Your comment conveys the impression that the possession of massive wealth can excuse or diminish world-historical crimes to the violation of millions. What's the relevance of someone's wealth in these circumstances, other than a reminder of the depth of their depravity - there isn't even any meaningful material standard to gain for themselves - and the stark truth that wealth translates directly to the power to avoid accountability. But most of these goons aren't even particularly wealthy, which itself is irrespective of the fact that they're not sitting around at home meticulously folding banknotes in peace.

I remind you that the Nuremberg Trials did not have any independent framework embedded in or legitimized by some system of "rule of law." Sometimes to deliver justice a bespoke mechanism suited to extraordinary circumstances is necessary. And it's abstract deontology anyway, we all know few of the principals will ever see the inside of a court, let alone a stamp of attainder.

I'm still stunned that my writing about points of political malfeasance could prompt your post, as though I were the one reducing everything to wealth inequality or class dynamics. As though someone would fundamentally need to have a different notion of just distribution of resources than you to condemn plunder and terror, rather than even the most casual shared adherence to ideals of sound government.

What an example of barking up the wrong tree. I hope by now you understand my sheer befuddlement at your post.

As for the subject of wealth per se, read (https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/06/its-basically-just-immoral-to-be-rich) these (https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/02/why-equality-is-indispensable), which is ethically a little more radical than I would subscribe to but well-put in principle.

Speaking of constitutional turmoil...

Gavin Newsom Declares California a ‘Nation-State’ (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-09/california-declares-independence-from-trump-s-coronavirus-plans)

California this week declared its independence from the federal government’s feeble efforts to fight Covid-19 — and perhaps from a bit more. The consequences for the fight against the pandemic are almost certainly positive. The implications for the brewing civil war between Trumpism and America’s budding 21st-century majority, embodied by California’s multiracial liberal electorate, are less clear.

Speaking on MSNBC, Governor Gavin Newsom said that he would use the bulk purchasing power of California “as a nation-state” to acquire the hospital supplies that the federal government has failed to provide. If all goes according to plan, Newsom said, California might even “export some of those supplies to states in need.”

“Nation-state.” “Export.”

Newsom is accomplishing a few things here, with what can only be a deliberate lack of subtlety. First and foremost, he is trying to relieve the shortage of personal protective equipment — a crisis the White House has proved incapable of remedying. Details are a little fuzzy, but Newsom, according to news reports, has organized multiple suppliers to deliver roughly 200 million masks monthly.

Second, Newsom is kicking sand in the face of President Donald Trump after Newsom’s previous flattery — the coin of the White House realm — failed to produce results. If Trump can’t manage to deliver supplies, there’s no point in Newsom continuing the charade.

Third, and this may be the most enduring effect, Newsom is sending a powerful message to both political parties. So far, the Republican Party’s war on democratic values, institutions and laws has been a largely one-sided affair, with the GOP assaulting and the Democratic Party defending. The lethal ruling this week by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Republican bloc, which required Wisconsin residents to vote in person during a pandemic that shut down polling stations, is a preview of the fall campaign. The GOP intends to restrict vote-by-mail and other legitimate enfranchisement to suppress turnout amid fear, uncertainty and disease.

At some point this civil war by other means, with the goal of enshrining GOP minority rule, will provoke a Democratic counteroffensive. Newsom, leader of the nation’s largest state, is perhaps accelerating that response, shaking Democrats out of denial and putting Republicans on notice. California, an economic behemoth whose taxpayers account for 15% of individual contributions to the U.S. Treasury, is now toning up at muscle beach.

My compliments to California and the West Coast for their recent kind gesture (https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/04/06/california-sends-500-ventilators-back-to-national-stockpile-1272393).

California is loaning 500 ventilators to states like New York where the coronavirus is exacting a deeper toll, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Monday.

The act of generosity completes a bi-coastal aid package after both Washington and Oregon lent medical supplies to New York, which is battling the nation's worst outbreak. Ventilators from California will flow into the Strategic National Stockpile. Oregon announced Saturday it was sending 140 ventilators to New York, while Washington said Sunday it was returning more than 400 of the machines.

Imagine if all the states got together and coordinated their response, forming some type of super-organization to share supplies, personnel, and information. I wonder what they could accomplish then...

Pannonian

04-11-2020, 01:51

Wealth? WEALTH??!??!

Your comment conveys the impression that the possession of massive wealth can excuse or diminish world-historical crimes to the violation of millions. What's the relevance of someone's wealth in these circumstances, other than a reminder of the depth of their depravity - there isn't even any meaningful material standard to gain for themselves - and the stark truth that wealth translates directly to the power to avoid accountability. But most of these goons aren't even particularly wealthy, which itself is irrespective of the fact that they're not sitting around at home meticulously folding banknotes in peace.

I remind you that the Nuremberg Trials did not have any independent framework embedded in or legitimized by some system of "rule of law." Sometimes to deliver justice a bespoke mechanism suited to extraordinary circumstances is necessary. And it's abstract deontology anyway, we all know few of the principals will ever see the inside of a court, let alone a stamp of attainder.

I'm still stunned that my writing about points of political malfeasance could prompt your post, as though I were the one reducing everything to wealth inequality or class dynamics. As though someone would fundamentally need to have a different notion of just distribution of resources than you to condemn plunder and terror, rather than even the most casual shared adherence to ideals of sound government.

What an example of barking up the wrong tree. I hope by now you understand my sheer befuddlement at your post.

As for the subject of wealth per se, read (https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/06/its-basically-just-immoral-to-be-rich) these (https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/02/why-equality-is-indispensable), which is ethically a little more radical than I would subscribe to but well-put in principle.

Speaking of constitutional turmoil...

Gavin Newsom Declares California a ‘Nation-State’ (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-09/california-declares-independence-from-trump-s-coronavirus-plans)

My compliments to California and the West Coast for their recent kind gesture (https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/04/06/california-sends-500-ventilators-back-to-national-stockpile-1272393).

Imagine if all the states got together and coordinated their response, forming some type of super-organization to share supplies, personnel, and information. I wonder what they could accomplish then...

On a similar and parallel note though, does it help to fill your posts with longer than necessary (and rarely seen) words, and emotional adjectives? During my educational years, I was taught to cut down my writings to be as concise as possible; convey the maximum of information with the minimum of verbiage.

Montmorency

04-11-2020, 02:47

On a similar and parallel note though, does it help to fill your posts with longer than necessary (and rarely seen) words, and emotional adjectives? During my educational years, I was taught to cut down my writings to be as concise as possible; convey the maximum of information with the minimum of verbiage.

Well, OK? You have your own rhetorical style, which often involves repetition and reframing for emphasis (as opposed to concision). You use formats like 'Brexit will cause this bad thing, which will lead to this other bad thing. Do Brexit supporters accept that bad thing X will lead to bad thing Y?' I have my own style, which tends to strive for including or alluding to as many relevant points as I can remember. I'm not saying one is necessarily better than the other, or that all instances are as well-put as they could be in their own right, but...

Give me an example by truncating the 270 words in my response to Seamus.

Strike For The South

04-11-2020, 06:07

We will not all sleep, but we all will be changed.

Shaka_Khan

04-11-2020, 11:41

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsV_YXq-1x4

CrossLOPER

04-12-2020, 04:01

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsV_YXq-1x4
Economist ANNIHILATES China, ERASING it from HISTORY - Calls Coronavirus the next HOLOCAUST x10000!

Seamus Fermanagh

04-12-2020, 05:17

Wealth? WEALTH??!??!

Your comment conveys the impression that the possession of massive wealth can excuse or diminish world-historical crimes to the violation of millions. :inquisitive:

...and the stark truth that wealth translates directly to the power to avoid accountability. Numerous forms of power do this and have throughout history. Less so, though sadly only marginally, in many Western societies.

How does one negate power? Not counter it or shift it or redistribute it -- all of these have been tried, are being used and none of them answer the problem of power completely. So how does one negate it? And if successful, how does anything get done in its absence?

I remind you that the Nuremberg Trials did not have any independent framework embedded in or legitimized by some system of "rule of law." Sometimes to deliver justice a bespoke mechanism suited to extraordinary circumstances is necessary. And it's abstract deontology anyway, we all know few of the principals will ever see the inside of a court, let alone a stamp of attainder.

Some justice was meted out at Nuremburg. Some punishment and vindictiveness as well. It was, as you note, an imperfect tool. Attainder, either in the meaning of legislative determination of guilt absent trial or the confiscation of all real property and chattels has been, historically, much abused. Was your comment (which I thought a hyperbole when I read it) prompted by justice or vindictiveness? Only you know.

As to malfeasance, everything connected to this pandemic will be under a microscope for years. If such has occurred, it will out and criminal charges can be leveled as appropriate.

As to those pumps, the stated purpose was to build up a federal "reserve" that could be deployed to hot spots in danger of being overwhelmed. Mind you, setting up such a reserve in the manner it was done and with those hot spots already appearing and clamoring for resources was poorly handled -- but I am generally readier to believe in ineptitude and ham-handed reactive efforts by government in general (and this sad sack administration in particular) than I am to assume malfeasance. Hanlon's Razor is one of my favorite tools with which to analyze organizations and organizational conflict.

The man is an asshat, a poor leader, and has begat an administration which does things sloppily at best and all too often incompetently into the bargain. I will have little trouble voting for Biden come November. Though I pity the man and what he will be wading through at first.

Montmorency

04-12-2020, 06:53

BOY TELL 'EM (Watci this)
https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/1248398068464025606

Reporting on NY state and city preparation and response to the crisis through February and March, and what went wrong at first.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/nyregion/new-york-coronavirus-response-delays.html

Even as deaths rise in New York, slack remains in the healthcare system while hospital admissions are declining. Fingers crossed - but then what?
https://twitter.com/RebeccaJarvis/status/1247546048291143681
https://twitter.com/brianmrosenthal/status/1248275715465850881

Paul Romer has a pandemic phase-out proposal that relies on daily testing capacity of over 20 million. In the United States. (We've only just reached 150K/day nationally.)

And here I thought 1 million daily would be a solid achievement for this country.

Reminds me of the archmair generals who estimated that if Nazi Germany had built 20000 Tiger tanks or whatever, it could have held out.

Singapore (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52232147) seems to have lost containment of its outbreak. Nationals returning from abroad were not adequately quarantined, and now the disease is widespread among barracks-concentrated guest workers.

Bodies (https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/28670/ecuador-is-a-grisly-sign-of-how-covid-19-will-devastate-the-global-south) in the streets of Ecuador (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/03/theyre-leaving-us-to-die-ecuadorians-plead-for-help-as-virus-blazes-deadly-trail). Official death toll 315.

Seamus, I'll reply later. In the meantime, enjoy.

https://i.imgur.com/NVyhUnL.png

ReluctantSamurai

04-12-2020, 17:23

Mostly, these are coming from densely-packed migrant worker accommodation.

This is the scary part about what comes next. Not only in the US, with it's huge population of undocumented immigrants, but in areas like Africa, and especially in India, which has millions of poorly-treated migrant workers (who, btw, are making a mass exodus from the big cities to rural areas, spreading the virus wherever they go).

It [Singapore] also has one completely dominant political party and a compliant media, but Prof Dale says even with "clear, crisp messaging to a community that trusts the government" he is concerned that "the average Singaporean still isn't quite grasping the importance of their individual role".

Multiply by a magnitude of factor for the US. Which is going to make a restart that much harder.

Reminds me of the archmair generals who estimated that if Nazi Germany had built 20000 Tiger tanks or whatever, it could have held out.

And some of the currently proposed methods of restarting economies are just as unlikely as that:

https://www.vox.com/2020/4/10/21215494/coronavirus-plans-social-distancing-economy-recession-depression-unemployment

Potential problems with Romer's proposal:

So far, America is struggling to get into the millions of tests per week. This plan requires tens of millions per day. Most experts I’ve spoken to doubt that’s realistic anytime soon, though some believe it’s possible, eventually. So far, we’ve added testing capacity largely by repurposing existing labs and platforms. To add more, we need to build more labs, more machines, more tests. And there are already shortages of reagents, swabs, and health workers.

But even if those constraints could be overcome, how are these 22 million daily tests going to be administered? By whom? How do we enforce compliance? If you refuse to get tested, are you fined? Jailed? Cut off from government benefits? Would the Supreme Court consider a proposal like this constitutional?

A sobering outlook:

these aren’t plans for returning to anything even approaching normal. They either envision life under a surveillance and testing state of dystopian (but perhaps necessary!) proportions, or they envision a long period of economic and public health pain, as we wrestle the disease down only to see it roar back, as seems to be happening in Singapore.

Can't keep lock-downs in place indefinitely. At some point, economies will have to be restarted. The path and methods chosen to accomplish this will determine how things will unfold.

Shaka_Khan

04-12-2020, 21:32

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9jFN9ibtLM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9V3n0M8jaw

https://www.yahoo.com/news/dumped-milk-smashed-eggs-plowed-160839647.html

Dumped Milk, Smashed Eggs, Plowed Vegetables: Food Waste of the Pandemic

David Yaffe-Bellany and Michael Corkery

In Wisconsin and Ohio, farmers are dumping thousands of gallons of fresh milk into lagoons and manure pits. An Idaho farmer has dug huge ditches to bury 1 million pounds of onions. And in South Florida, a region that supplies much of the Eastern half of the United States with produce, tractors are crisscrossing bean and cabbage fields, plowing perfectly ripe vegetables back into the soil...

a completely inoffensive name

04-12-2020, 23:01

Do we really need to produce this much milk in the first place?

Greyblades

04-13-2020, 01:15

Montmorency

04-13-2020, 02:47

(Standard) eggs are now $3.50-$4 a carton. Used to be like $1.50.

As some forms (e.g. meat (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-meatpacking/smithfield-shutting-u-s-pork-plant-indefinitely-warns-of-meat-shortages-during-pandemic-idUSKCN21U0O7)) of production are disrupted, food becomes more expensive. Falling incomes combined with rising food cost has typically been a recipe for riots in most times and places. Let's see how that works out.

:inquisitive:

The immediate context. I'd been posting about the colossal, civilization-shaking ineptitude, negligence, corruption, and malice of the Trump administration, the sort that led Noam Chomsky to declare Trump the most dangerous criminal in history. You quoted my sentiment regarding a mechanism to punish society's maximally-destructive actors. Under the quote you made a comment imputing a premise about the sociopolitical significance of wealth. Practically speaking, you linked the two despite them - as I pointed out - having no strict relationship to one another. That was a very strange thing for you to do. Basically it looks like me complaining that 'these crooks are a disaster' and you interjecting with 'Why are you such a Commie?' It's a non-sequitur, or if it's not a non-sequitur then you would have to be saying that criticism of Trump necessarily reduces to the belief that wealth is an inherent evil.

Either way it's disturbing. Do you get it now?

If you're interested in wealth as a separate topic though, start with the two articles I linked.

Numerous forms of power do this and have throughout history. Less so, though sadly only marginally, in many Western societies.

How does one negate power? Not counter it or shift it or redistribute it -- all of these have been tried, are being used and none of them answer the problem of power completely. So how does one negate it? And if successful, how does anything get done in its absence?

First of all, I object to taking for granted the idea that there are no answers to the question of the distribution of power. There have been different distributions of power in this country within living memory, albeit flawed in many dimensions. I swear, there is this conservative tendency to act as though things that have been tried and succeeded are impossible, in order to justify persisting with systems that are continuously failing right now. To wit, how many thousands of years of failed conservative policies does it take? This exchange unavoidably reminds me of the other one in the Democratic primary thread, where you seemed to be saying - I still don't quite understand - that because resources are not unlimited, it is impossible to adequately prepare for disasters and crises. Even though that seems to me so obviously, demonstrably wrong at face value at all levels and forms of governance, on the personal and institutional levels, and in all places.

The deeper leftist dream of spreading power out as widely as possible has indeed never been achieved comprehensively, but the case against trying to do even what we know can be done is the circular logic of futility, that there are always budding or resurgent oligarchs and aristocrats lurking somewhere like thirsting Chaos gods. It's an argument that amounts to humanity being eschatologically-doomed by its flaws (as opposed to redeemed by its virtues), which is like, maybe, but don't take pleasure in being part of the contras, and fully accept the ramifications of syllogistically-inevitable self-destruction (as some on the alt-right do).

At the top of the thread you referenced an ideal of "local control." Many leftists do explicitly organize their ideas around that concept, but there's a more general form of the argument that every individual should have some input on the local conditions that affect their lives. I oscillate on what this should mean in practice, since time and again we have seen "local control" mean space for parochial racists, NIMBYs, and cushy insiders to run rampant over their petty fiefdoms (thiefdoms).

Maybe you'd like to talk to the anarchists (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqYVdvauW6A). (Is this what you mean by local control?)

Some justice was meted out at Nuremburg. Some punishment and vindictiveness as well. It was, as you note, an imperfect tool. Attainder, either in the meaning of legislative determination of guilt absent trial or the confiscation of all real property and chattels has been, historically, much abused. Was your comment (which I thought a hyperbole when I read it) prompted by justice or vindictiveness? Only you know.

If you want to have a conversation on what actual mechanisms are either abstractly desirable, or practically available, for extraordinary cases of wrongdoing, that is naturally a very complex topic and I'm not comfortable carrying on about it in this thread. There are so many considerations. It could be that the law does not capture the nature of the crimes committed, or their scope is so vast and destructive and the need for resolution so acute that no preexisting process is adequate to the task (e.g. Nuremberg).

In Trump's case it's more a matter of his insulation from all accountability. Trump ought to suffer something like attainder based on his world-historical record of carnage, but the availability of attainder to Congress would not ensure its correct application for the same reasons that Trump achieved and remains in a position to perpetrate attainder-worthy deeds.

So yes, it's basically just venting.

As to malfeasance, everything connected to this pandemic will be under a microscope for years. If such has occurred, it will out and criminal charges can be leveled as appropriate.

Continuing the above, we are a broken society, so it will never happen on any scale. Generally, a society that produces great crimes and the criminals who do them will not in the first place have what it takes to reckon with those symptoms - without revolution. As far as I am aware that is simply a descriptive fact of life; there is no specific form of either reform or revolution that I can think to advocate for to fix that.

Another aspect to the attainder, etc. discussion is that there is probably no way to engineer legal or institutional failsafes for extraordinary social circumstances, because those circumstances will tend to overwhelm pre-existing structures. If attainder became available tomorrow it would only become another tool for bad actors to subvert and abuse, for example by trying to strip Barack Obama of US citizenship for being a Kenyan Muslim or something.

In another callback to earlier in the post: it's very common to successfully prepare for natural disasters, but I don't think there is a way to plan for fundamental social disasters, those disasters being chronic and constitutive of human actors. In these social disasters the problem itself recursively handicaps any self-correction without a disruptive force majeure. Or to paraphrase HL Mencken, maybe we get the government we deserve, good and hard. I would rephrase that to say in a degraded environment all of us are subjected to the government deserved by the worst.

Look at those who reflexively say that the President must not be criticized during a time of national emergency, for the sake of preserving norms of comity.

They are incapable of admitting that the COVID emergency supervenes on the Trump emergency. For the existence of Donald Trump, the worst man ever elevated to high office is an emergency, an ongoing and overlapping one. But how did that come about?

Trump as emergency can only unleash the devastation it does because of its enabling by the whole Republican Party, so the Trump emergency supervenes the emergency of the Republican Party, of the biggest right-wing party in the world embracing fascism. But how did that come about?

If Republican politicians represent their voters well, and Trump represents them perfectly, then these voters being (at best) political nihilists in the 19th-century sense, who revel in cruelty and mysticism to the point of willingness to die if they can take down some Others with them, then the incentives that make all the preceding possible are established upon the common Republican individual. The emergency of the Republican Party supervenes on the Republican base at the bottom of it all. But the existence of such people in such numbers is itself an emergency whose effects are magnified over time.

In the space of a single generation, Republican leaders, by Republican politicians, by Republican voters, have brought this country - and so much of the world - to its knees. How much more can we survive?

When there is such a fundamental underlying conflict, everything else follows from it, and to surmount the latter is conditional upon surmounting the root. If we were the sort of country to elect Biden-type centrists to every single political office, then we would be the most progressive and prosperous country in the world - and I admit that as a leftist.

In conclusion, there is arguably no greater human threat to the average person than the existence of the Republican base. Americans have a duty to themselves and to the world to reckon with that gutting reality.

As to those pumps, the stated purpose was to build up a federal "reserve" that could be deployed to hot spots in danger of being overwhelmed. Mind you, setting up such a reserve in the manner it was done and with those hot spots already appearing and clamoring for resources was poorly handled -- but I am generally readier to believe in ineptitude and ham-handed reactive efforts by government in general (and this sad sack administration in particular) than I am to assume malfeasance.

Hanlon's Razor is defeated by the coexistence of incompetence and malfeasance, which are both in evidence in the administration's handling of the pandemic (https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/04/10/contact-tracing-coronavirus-strategy/), and in basically every aspect of its policy agenda from Day 1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13769). The benefit of the doubt applies only when you don't know the score, or else it's just an unconditional allowance.

a completely inoffensive name

04-13-2020, 06:03

Whats in a need? There was a massive, seemingly permanent demand and that has started to dry up in the coronavirus' wake, pun intended.

Only short term alternative to dumping milk is to kill the cows. You cant just turn off the milk making; you can interrupt the required pregnancy cycle for milk production but they're still going to make milk for the current offspring. If they dont get the milk removed regularly they are going to start developing infections, and what do you do with excess milk? Cant just stick it in a silo and wait for better times.

Blades, please stop it man. Just google once before shooting from the hip.

US Dairy is one of the most regulated and controlled goods by the USDA, we have several policies mandating minimum levels of prices, production, and subsidization of milk and dairy products.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/animal-products/dairy/policy.aspx

You can go on the official website where they track supply and demand on a monthly and annual basis:
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/dairy-data.aspx

We have American milk consumption per capita decreasing since the 1970s, but our policies have only pushed production higher and higher per year.

The farmers are not even profiting from the subsidies now that this discrepancy is so out of wack, so even they don't want to be producing this much:
https://www.realagriculture.com/2018/02/u-s-dairy-subsidies-equal-73-percent-of-producer-returns-says-new-report/

So again, I ask the question. Do we really need to make this much milk?

Also, you can store milk 6-12 months by pasteurizing with an ultra high temp process and then aseptically filling into a tetra-pak or similar container.
https://scidoc.org/IJFS-2326-3350-09-001e.php
You could also just turn it into cheese or butter.

a completely inoffensive name

04-13-2020, 06:19

words

I'm looking at what the local Republicans are saying on FB. CUrrently holding a poll on whether they would take Bill Gates vaccine or Hydroxychlorquine.

The unproven drug is winning 228 to 24. These are the same people saying that not being allowed to go on the beach is one step away from willingly hitching a ride to a concentration camp.

Seamus says similar things that my parents say, which to me is not so much being blind to the reality but simply not willing to accept the implications it entails.
It always has to be a problem with 'both sides' or some intrinsic sin of humanity that we are facing our current problems because how can you even acknowledge living in an America where a specific segment (that you may still nominally identify with) has devolved so far underneath your nose.

Greyblades

04-13-2020, 10:19

Blades, please stop it man. Just google once before shooting from the hip.

Good job covering for your failure to communicate by blaming the reader for not picking up a context you made no effort to allude to. Doesnt make you look like an asshole at all.

Also, you can store milk 6-12 months by pasteurizing with an ultra high temp process and then aseptically filling into a tetra-pak or similar container.
https://scidoc.org/IJFS-2326-3350-09-001e.php
You could also just turn it into cheese or butter.

All of which requres production capacity that didnt exist when the drop in demand came. Even were the pasturisers, cheese and butter makers inclined to keep processing with little guarentee of even breaking even let alone turning a profit you would be bottlenecked by the need to process much more milk than the existing infrstructure is capable of, thats not even getting into storage of both milk waiting to be processed and the finished product.

Fortunate then that milk production can be stalled through holding off on the next cycle of insemination instead of something drastic like a culling. Less traumatic for aĺll involved to be disposing of milk than bodies.

ReluctantSamurai

04-13-2020, 12:24

but our policies have only pushed production higher and higher per year.

Probably true for more than just dairy. Certainly corn is in that category, especially with the asinine use of corn to make ethanol.

Btw, panic-buying is not restricted to the average city-dweller:

https://www.feednavigator.com/Article/2020/04/10/Coronavirus-Huge-increase-in-animal-feed-demand-globally

And a possible use for the excess milk:

https://www.feednavigator.com/Article/2020/04/09/Coronavirus-UK-pig-sector-could-take-surplus-milk

edyzmedieval

04-13-2020, 13:55

As a European, I'm shocked at the labour practices in the USA.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s4Bx7mzNkM

Seamus Fermanagh

04-13-2020, 14:28

Monty is right that a longer reply on any number of issues are not germane to this particular thread. So I will opt out of such here.

As to the current pandemic, I am of the opinion that pretty much every government malf'ed this one. As with all "black swan" events, the warning signs were mis-read or ignored, the potential for a crisis of this kind was known in advance -- but the specific occurrence itself so infrequent -- that complacency set in and preparation levels were allowed to slip. So collectively nobody was prepared for when the, in retrospect clearly inevitable, crisis arrived.

This is a norm of human history and human nature (only partly answered by Santayana's advice), for we are flawed beings however good our intent and our workings are flawed as well.

Last I say on this vein in this thread. Open a political philosphy line or summat if you wish for other stuff.

I pray daily for those affected by this virus and for us all to weather this crisis as best may be. I will social distance and wear a mask to protect my family and immuno-compromised mom-in-law. I will grade my students' assignments. I will adjust to what comes and make the best of it.

Pannonian

04-13-2020, 16:23

Probably true for more than just dairy. Certainly corn is in that category, especially with the asinine use of corn to make ethanol.

Btw, panic-buying is not restricted to the average city-dweller:

https://www.feednavigator.com/Article/2020/04/10/Coronavirus-Huge-increase-in-animal-feed-demand-globally

And a possible use for the excess milk:

https://www.feednavigator.com/Article/2020/04/09/Coronavirus-UK-pig-sector-could-take-surplus-milk

It has long been a common practice to turn waste food into pork. It might be worth looking at turning fresh food into shelf stable versions as well.

Pannonian

04-13-2020, 16:27

This is a norm of human history and human nature (only partly answered by Santayana's advice), for we are flawed beings however good our intent and our workings are flawed as well.

I will grade my students' assignments. I will adjust to what comes and make the best of it.

Did the first come from the second? Are you going to make your students aware of their flawed workings, or are you going to adjust to what comes in front of you and make the best of it?

Advice: make a potato stamp with "Must try harder" etched in it.

Seamus Fermanagh

04-13-2020, 17:19

Did the first come from the second? Are you going to make your students aware of their flawed workings, or are you going to adjust to what comes in front of you and make the best of it?

Advice: make a potato stamp with "Must try harder" etched in it.

Deadlines have essentially shifted to "anything that doesn't have me issuing an 'incomplete' for the course. My required live observation assignment went to livestream acceptable, etc. Conditions are as they are. My single mom students are now at home teachers, still working online like me, and trapped with their children. To not respect that would be unkind.

Generally, "try harder" is a waste of time. The ones who try hard will do so under almost any adversity. The ones who want to skate whenever possible will do so regardless. The ones who are truly trying but floundering we can help out a bit and/or refer to counselors etc. They are my clients and I am there to help them as best I may.

ReluctantSamurai

04-13-2020, 18:28

Anybody else besides me see legal proceedings being brought against the USN as a result of this:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52272249

With 585 more sailors having tested + for SARS-2, chances are good that more deaths will follow.

And yes, military personnel can sue the navy (unless I'm reading this wrong):

https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2020/03/daniel-perrone-feres-doctrine-ndaa/

The NDAA [for fiscal year 2020] created a limited exception to the Feres Doctrine “for personal injury or death incident to the service of a member of the uniformed services that was caused by the medical malpractice of a Department of Defense health care provider,” provided that the “act or omission constituting medical malpractice occurred in a covered military medical treatment facility.” The term “Department of Defense health care provider” means “a member of the uniformed services, civilian employee of the Department of Defense, or personal services contractor of the Department [of Defense] …” while a “covered military treatment facility” includes certain military medical treatment facilities maintained by the Secretary of Defense.

And this is how bad it's gotten here in the US:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/as-feds-play-backup-states-take-unorthodox-steps-to-compete-in-cutthroat-global-market-for-coronavirus-supplies/2020/04/11/609b5d84-7a70-11ea-a130-df573469f094_story.html

Elsewhere, some governors and lawmakers have watched in disbelief as they have sought to close deals on precious supplies, only to have the federal government swoop in to preempt the arrangements. Officials in one state are so worried about this possibility that they are considering dispatching local police or even the National Guard to greet two chartered FedEx planes scheduled to arrive in the next week with millions of masks from China, according to people familiar with the planning. These people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, asked that their state not be identified to avoid flagging federal officials to their shipment.

"This is Blasphemy. This is Madness!"

:shame:

a completely inoffensive name

04-13-2020, 20:54

Good job covering for your failure to communicate by blaming the reader for not picking up a context you made no effort to allude to. Doesnt make you look like an asshole at all.

When you jump in with an opinion that has zero research, you are the one putting yourself in the position to be called out. If you asked "who will be the next Labour leader" and I start talking as if it was a US style open primary with Lib Dem and Tory moderates voting, you would rightfully tell me that I have no idea what I am talking about and that the UK operates on 'one member, one vote'.

All of which requres production capacity that didnt exist when the drop in demand came. Even were the pasturisers, cheese and butter makers inclined to keep processing with little guarentee of even breaking even let alone turning a profit you would be bottlenecked by the need to process much more milk than the existing infrstructure is capable of, thats not even getting into storage of both milk waiting to be processed and the finished product.

Fortunate then that milk production can be stalled through holding off on the next cycle of insemination instead of something drastic like a culling. Less traumatic for aĺll involved to be disposing of milk than bodies.

A few things:
1. We shouldn't have been producing this much milk anyway because the demand wasn't actually there and we have known this for decades now. Counter to original point that there was a 'constant, permanent demand'. This was incorrect. If you check the stats, there is always surplus carried over from the previous year for several years which indicates a consistent over production of product. We should have done what the UK has done recently: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/milk-production-reduction-scheme-how-to-apply
2. Production machines are typically not running 24/7. This would inhibit the ability to perform proper preventative maintenance activities and increase the need for labor to operate and monitor. There is always the potential to increase output without having to buy a whole new machine by paying for the labor costs associated with the higher run rate. It's an over simplification that increased production comes from new machinery.
3. Both UK and US have programs to pay cheese and butter makers for their surplus and store it for long period in order to ensure they stay afloat during high surpluses: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/intervention-and-private-storage-aid-schemes

So again, its a matter of being defiant in pushing your intuitive thought without following-up. 'They can't make a profit with such surpluses, they don't have the machines, how could they anticipate such a drop in demand.' All of these issues were tackled by farm bills in the US dating back to the 1930s and for the UK even earlier.

a completely inoffensive name

04-13-2020, 21:14

I will admit now looking back I was a bit of dick in how I worded the response last night.

Pannonian

04-13-2020, 22:21

When you jump in with an opinion that has zero research, you are the one putting yourself in the position to be called out. If you asked "who will be the next Labour leader" and I start talking as if it was a US style open primary with Lib Dem and Tory moderates voting, you would rightfully tell me that I have no idea what I am talking about and that the UK operates on 'one member, one vote'.

A few things:
1. We shouldn't have been producing this much milk anyway because the demand wasn't actually there and we have known this for decades now. Counter to original point that there was a 'constant, permanent demand'. This was incorrect. If you check the stats, there is always surplus carried over from the previous year for several years which indicates a consistent over production of product. We should have done what the UK has done recently: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/milk-production-reduction-scheme-how-to-apply
2. Production machines are typically not running 24/7. This would inhibit the ability to perform proper preventative maintenance activities and increase the need for labor to operate and monitor. There is always the potential to increase output without having to buy a whole new machine by paying for the labor costs associated with the higher run rate. It's an over simplification that increased production comes from new machinery.
3. Both UK and US have programs to pay cheese and butter makers for their surplus and store it for long period in order to ensure they stay afloat during high surpluses: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/intervention-and-private-storage-aid-schemes

So again, its a matter of being defiant in pushing your intuitive thought without following-up. 'They can't make a profit with such surpluses, they don't have the machines, how could they anticipate such a drop in demand.' All of these issues were tackled by farm bills in the US dating back to the 1930s and for the UK even earlier.

Can't you blame the EU for any inefficiencies like we do here in the UK?

a completely inoffensive name

04-14-2020, 00:29

Can't you blame the EU for any inefficiencies like we do here in the UK?

I actually refrained from talking about EU and tried to focus solely on US and UK because I am not entirely sure EU agricultural policies are based on sound principles.

Not sure if you want to take the Brexit route on this topic...

EDIT: Well, let me rephrase. EU policies are very confusing to me and although I can from a high level understand the goal and method of many policies (many which the US and UK also have implemented individually), I can not wrap my head around the implementation of those policies. In particular how the EU does not pick and choose winners and losers and whether it is allowing individual states to internally compete and specialize in agriculture sub-fields.

Montmorency

04-14-2020, 01:02

I for one appreciate ACIN's dairy industry knowledge, and would say it's an honor to be corrected by someone who knows their stuff.

https://twitter.com/ddale8/status/1248700582120042496

Trump says it's true that opening up could lead to death, but: "Staying at home leads to death also. And it's very traumatic for this country. Staying at home, if you look at numbers, that leads to a different kind of death, perhaps, but it leads to death also."

Staying at home is the mindkiller, the little death that brings total obliteration.

How this Texas grocery chain was more prepared for the pandemic than most national states.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/food/heb-prepared-coronavirus-pandemic/

A nurse revealed the tragic last words of his coronavirus patient: 'Who's going to pay for it?' (https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/11/health/nurse-last-words-coronavirus-patient-trnd/index.html)

Certified registered nurse anesthetist Derrick Smith is no stranger to the horrors of losing patients. But now, the coronavirus pandemic has pushed him into a completely different, "much more terrifying" reality.

Smith, who is predominantly treating Covid-19 patients at a hospital in New York City, revealed the tragic last words of a dying man he was about to place on a ventilator: "Who's going to pay for it?" the coronavirus patient asked Smith in between labored breaths.

Beyond satire.

Report: Stockpile of 39 million masks exposed as fake (https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Report-Stockpile-of-39-million-masks-exposed-as-15195606.php)

A major California labor union that claimed to have discovered a stockpile of 39 million masks for health care workers fighting the coronavirus was duped in an elaborate scam uncovered by FBI investigators, according to a newspaper report Sunday.

Investigators stumbled onto the scheme while looking into whether they could intercept the masks for the Federal Emergency Management Agency under the Defense Production Act, the U.S. attorney’s office said Friday.

The federal government has been quietly seizing supplies across the country as the outbreak spreads. But in this case, there was no warehouse, and there were no masks to seize, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Also beyond satire.

Monty is right that a longer reply on any number of issues are not germane to this particular thread. So I will opt out of such here.

As to the current pandemic, I am of the opinion that pretty much every government malf'ed this one. As with all "black swan" events, the warning signs were mis-read or ignored, the potential for a crisis of this kind was known in advance -- but the specific occurrence itself so infrequent -- that complacency set in and preparation levels were allowed to slip. So collectively nobody was prepared for when the, in retrospect clearly inevitable, crisis arrived.

This is a norm of human history and human nature (only partly answered by Santayana's advice), for we are flawed beings however good our intent and our workings are flawed as well.

Last I say on this vein in this thread. Open a political philosphy line or summat if you wish for other stuff.

I pray daily for those affected by this virus and for us all to weather this crisis as best may be. I will social distance and wear a mask to protect my family and immuno-compromised mom-in-law. I will grade my students' assignments. I will adjust to what comes and make the best of it.

We can continue by PM, but here we should distinguish between material and institutional preparation, and deployment in the actual time of need. As I said in another thread (or earlier in this one), you can truly have unlimited resources, but if leadership refuses to make use of them then they are trivial. Few countries have had "good" responses to the pandemic through and through, and those that have have been clustered around past experiences with both the Chinese state and local epidemics.

But here in America, based purely on our material and institutional readiness on paper, we should have been one of the best-placed countries on Earth to contain the disease. Never forget. That we failed was not due to any shortage of money, time, expertise, planning, nor was it a function of inauspicious geography - just the opposite.

Deadlines have essentially shifted to "anything that doesn't have me issuing an 'incomplete' for the course. My required live observation assignment went to livestream acceptable, etc. Conditions are as they are. My single mom students are now at home teachers, still working online like me, and trapped with their children. To not respect that would be unkind.

Generally, "try harder" is a waste of time. The ones who try hard will do so under almost any adversity. The ones who want to skate whenever possible will do so regardless. The ones who are truly trying but floundering we can help out a bit and/or refer to counselors etc. They are my clients and I am there to help them as best I may.

Lot of professor stories on Twitter about how hard this transition has been for many students, from their financial or living arrangements to their ability to follow the coursework.

Anybody else besides me see legal proceedings being brought against the USN as a result of this:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52272249

With 585 more sailors having tested + for SARS-2, chances are good that more deaths will follow.

And yes, military personnel can sue the navy (unless I'm reading this wrong):

https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2020/03/daniel-perrone-feres-doctrine-ndaa/

Mmm. Like the cruise ships, it does form a sort of ad hoc test chamber for observing the spread of the virus. I may have seen the story of a contagion on a naval vessel play out in fiction too. :sweatdrop:

These look like good expert reads on the Theodore Roosevelt situation. The outbreak began with the reactor team.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/12/us/politics/coronavirus-roosevelt-carrier-crozier.html
https://twitter.com/KimWooster11/status/1249480330404417538

ReluctantSamurai

04-14-2020, 02:49

Well, Fearless Leader finally did it. Declared himself absolute ruler of the United States:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52274969

"The president of the United States calls the shots," Mr Trump said during a combative press conference in which he feuded with reporters.

But when journalists queried whether he had the authority to over-ride stay-at-home orders imposed on a state-by-state basis, Mr Trump said: "When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total. "It's total. The governors know that."

I think Fearless Leaders' actions meet the criteria of Section 1088 of the USN Regulations:

1088. Relief of a Commanding Officer by a Subordinate.

1. It is conceivable that most unusual and extraordinary circumstances may arise in which the relief from duty of a commanding officer by a subordinate becomes necessary, either by placing the commanding officer under arrest or on the sick list. Such action shall never be taken without the approval of the Commandant of the Marine Corps or the Chief of Naval Personnel, as appropriate, or the senior officer present, except when reference to such higher authority is undoubtedly impracticable because of the delay involved or for other clearly obvious reasons. In any event, a complete report of the matter shall be made to the Commandant of the Marine Corps or the Chief of Naval Personnel, as appropriate, and the senior officer present, setting forth all facts in the case and the reasons for the action or recommendation, with particular regard to the degree of urgency involved.

2. In order that a subordinate officer, acting upon his or her own initiative, may be vindicated for relieving a commanding officer from duty, the situation must be obvious and clear, and must admit of the single conclusion that the retention of command by such commanding officer will seriously and irretrievably prejudice the public interests. The subordinate officer so acting

a. Must be next in succession to command.

b. Must be unable to refer the matter to a common superior for the reasons set forth in the preceding paragraph.

c. Must be certain that the prejudicial actions of the commanding officer are not caused by instructions unknown to him or her.

d. Must have given the matter much careful consideration, and have made such exhaustive investigation of all the circumstances as may be practicable.

e. Must be thoroughly convinced that the conclusion to relieve the commanding officer is one which a reasonable, prudent and experienced officer would regard as a necessary consequence from the facts thus determined to exist.

God I hate this stupid megalomaniac....~:mad

Montmorency

04-14-2020, 03:10

God I hate this stupid megalomaniac....~:mad

That's Dumb Criminal Bigot - sir.

How would a president nullify a lockdown? I've heard of using emergencies to declare martial law, but I'm not sure I've ever heard of - what, sending federal troops to force people out of their homes and into the workplaces and businesses? A big burly Marine looking mean on the street corner beside a flowing megaposter of Trump's face captioned with "CONSUME"?

ReluctantSamurai

04-14-2020, 03:28

How would a president nullify a lockdown?

He can't. 10th Amendment. And besides, he never instituted a national lock-down in the first place. The man has completely lost cabin pressure:dizzy2:

Montmorency

04-14-2020, 03:40

He can't. 10th Amendment. And besides, he never instituted a national lock-down in the first place. The man has completely lost cabin pressure:dizzy2:

Right, the states are the ones who have (inconsistently) applied various social distancing or lockdown policies. But the Constitution is a piece of paper that Trump has never much feared, so I'm asking how he would physically override the governors. The only way I can imagine is literal men with guns forcing civilians out of their homes. Almost certainly a dumb and corrosive bluff.

One can never get enough of Trump's idea of political philosophy. The president has unlimited authority to do what they want, but it's not the federal government's responsibility to provide material assistance to saving American lives. A common joke over the past years has been that, previous historiography has tended to regard ancient and medieval historical works with a grain of salt where they denounce particular kings and rulers, because often the criticisms seem so hyperbolic or outlandish to modern eyes that they have to be apocryphal exaggerations or outright fabrications - right? Now we know (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02bHO9t6fuI), yeah, Caligula for sure had a horse consul.

ReluctantSamurai

04-14-2020, 05:38

Almost certainly a dumb and corrosive bluff.

Actually, it's typical Fearless Leader. When he feels that the narrative is focusing on someone, or something other than himself ......(ie. the NYT article on what he knew about the outbreak):

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/us/politics/coronavirus-trump-response.html

......he does, or says something to bring that focus back to himself and tries to take control of the narrative.

Hopefully, other news sources besides CNN and MSNBC (who cut away to commercial from the propagandist-like video reel he played at Monday's "Fearless Leader Show") start cutting short their coverage altogether:pray:

a completely inoffensive name

04-14-2020, 06:14

Right, the states are the ones who have (inconsistently) applied various social distancing or lockdown policies. But the Constitution is a piece of paper that Trump has never much feared, so I'm asking how he would physically override the governors. The only way I can imagine is literal men with guns forcing civilians out of their homes. Almost certainly a dumb and corrosive bluff.

If Trump were to say tomorrow that he hereby revokes all stay-at-home orders and to disobey the state governors orders, you would have a third of the country congregating and spreading the disease to the point that we would be fucked anyway. WOuldn't even matter if the rest of the country continued to follow social distancing.

Montmorency

04-15-2020, 04:00

New US map tab on John Hopkins COVID resource. Seems to be missing some data however.

Another examination of the federal government's failures.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/us/politics/coronavirus-trump-response.html

Trump wants to make sure the $1200 relief checks are held back to ensure they come printed with his name (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/coming-to-your-1200-relief-check-donald-j-trumps-name/2020/04/14/071016c2-7e82-11ea-8013-1b6da0e4a2b7_story.html).

The first tranche is supposedly out. I haven't received anything yet; we're going to need more administrative capacity. But can we have an automatic countercyclical universal income (such as Rashida Tlaib, Ro Khanna, and even - Tim Ryan! - propose) linked to unemployment rate and other indicators? $2000 a month for all adults (and $500 per child) would be swell in hard times. In a sane world it would be a sound compromise as a temporary stimulus.

Attention Americans: The NIH is soliciting volunteers for a pilot serological survey of coronavirus antibodies in the population.
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-begins-study-quantify-undetected-cases-coronavirus-infection

If Trump were to say tomorrow that he hereby revokes all stay-at-home orders and to disobey the state governors orders, you would have a third of the country congregating and spreading the disease to the point that we would be fucked anyway. WOuldn't even matter if the rest of the country continued to follow social distancing.

De Santis already overruled counties that tried to institute stronger measures than those adopted by the state. I think other governors applied similar restrictions too (in keeping with (https://progressive.org/dispatches/the-republican-war-on-local-control-180108/) the typical governing philosophy of state Republicans).

Shaka_Khan

04-15-2020, 06:45

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yani7kRqsKg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cDGwxURG3k

Meanwhile...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMPVhVYiUhU

Hooahguy

04-16-2020, 00:32

Trump wants to make sure the $1200 relief checks are held back to ensure they come printed with his name (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/coming-to-your-1200-relief-check-donald-j-trumps-name/2020/04/14/071016c2-7e82-11ea-8013-1b6da0e4a2b7_story.html).
Got mine today. Good thing I have direct deposit set up!

De Santis already overruled counties that tried to institute stronger measures than those adopted by the state. I think other governors applied similar restrictions too (in keeping with (https://progressive.org/dispatches/the-republican-war-on-local-control-180108/) the typical governing philosophy of state Republicans).
I mean he also declared that WWE was an essential business in Florida so common sense doesnt seem to be his strong suit.

Montmorency

04-16-2020, 04:17

Got mine today. Good thing I have direct deposit set up!

Yep, today here too. Sucks for the analog people.

I mean he also declared that WWE was an essential business in Florida so common sense doesnt seem to be his strong suit.

I would look into any financial connections with the McMahons.

South Dakota’s governor (https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/south-dakotas-governor-resisted-ordering-people-to-stay-home-now-it-has-one-of-the-nations-largest-coronavirus-hot-spots/2020/04/13/5cff90fe-7daf-11ea-a3ee-13e1ae0a3571_story.html) resisted ordering people to stay home. Now it has one of the nation’s largest coronavirus hot spots.
...
As governors across the country fell into line in recent weeks, South Dakota’s top elected leader stood firm: There would be no statewide order to stay home.

Such edicts to combat the spread of the novel coronavirus, Gov. Kristi L. Noem said disparagingly, reflected a “herd mentality.” It was up to individuals — not government — to decide whether “to exercise their right to work, to worship and to play. Or to even stay at home.”

And besides, the first-term Republican told reporters at a briefing this month, “South Dakota is not New York City.”

But now South Dakota is home to one of the largest single coronavirus clusters anywhere in the United States, with more than 300 workers at a giant pork-processing plant falling ill. With the case numbers continuing to spike, the company was forced to announce the indefinite closure of the facility Sunday, threatening the U.S. food supply.

“A shelter-in-place order is needed now. It is needed today,” said Sioux Falls Mayor Paul TenHaken, whose city is at the center of South Dakota’s outbreak and who has had to improvise with voluntary recommendations in the absence of statewide action.

But the governor continued to resist. Instead, she used a media briefing Monday to announce trials of a drug that President Trump has repeatedly touted as a potential breakthrough in the fight against the coronavirus, despite a lack of scientific evidence.

“It’s an exciting day,” she boasted, repeatedly citing her conversations with presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner.

At least it's a small state.

EDIT: Protestors in Ohio (https://www.dispatch.com/news/20200413/gop-lawmakers-protesters-call-on-dewine-to-begin-re-opening-ohio) demanding Governor DeWine lift restrictions on business operation. Yes, it does resemble that. You (https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/shaun_of_the_dead_xlg.jpg) know (https://www.zombiepit.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/zombie-window-2-522x396.png).

https://i.imgur.com/SIvgAmk.jpg

Hooahguy

04-16-2020, 05:14

That picture is terrifying for a whole bunch of reasons.

It would certainly be a tragic irony if those protests ended up being hot spots. Reminds me of that lady in Texas who said COVID-19 was a hoax and then two weeks later died (https://twitter.com/sunnmcheaux/status/1246340425893453825?s=20) from it.

Montmorency

04-16-2020, 06:23

I've made posts, including an in-depth one, regarding the relationship of testing volume to true incidence. It turns out Nate Silver was writing about that contemporaneously, I just missed it.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/coronavirus-case-counts-are-meaningless/
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/new-york-coronavirus-curve/?ex_cid=trump-approval

BTW, New York, if not yet the country in aggregate, has the outbreak more or less under control for the moment; we've bent our local peak under the max capacity of the healthcare system (which we also did a good job in expanding). We desperately need results for serological surveys, the sooner the better. The current US CFR is 5% (640K positives/31K dead). If the true incidence has been vastly higher than what is directly measured, then we have a best-case scenario where the disease really isn't noticeable for the vast majority of the population and we can transition to targeted policies for a low attack rate. If the true incidence is 5 or 10 times higher (e.g. ~3-6 million infected so far), then prolonged quarantines are necessary to avoid a surge of tens of millions of hospitalizations, and at least a million deaths, in a short period of time.

As I mentioned in a recent post, NIH is soliciting volunteers for serological survey. What's going on in other countries? The more data the better for everyone.

Shaka_Khan

04-16-2020, 09:27

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vtX0s-nHKo

ReluctantSamurai

04-16-2020, 12:27

BTW, New York, if not yet the country in aggregate, has the outbreak more or less under control for the moment

But I'm afraid we here in the States are headed down this road:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52305055

In the last week, Hokkaido has recorded 135 new confirmed cases of Covid-19. Unlike the first outbreak in February, there is no evidence the virus has been re-imported from outside Japan. None of the new cases are foreigners, nor have any of those infected travelled outside Japan in the last month.

Even now, more than three months after Japan recorded its first case, it is still only testing a tiny percentage of the population. "The major lesson to take from Hokkaido is that even if you are successful in the containment the first time around, it's difficult to isolate and maintain the containment for a long period. Unless you expand the testing capacity, it's difficult to identify community transmission and hospital transmission."

The big rush to restart the economy here by Fearless Leader and some of the state governors, is going to mirror the same results as Hokkaido, seeing as how we are not testing anywhere near what we should be.

And then you have ignorant governors like Kristi L. Noem bloviating about how S. Dakota "is not New York City". How do you like like it now, sweetheart??

And then you have these idiots in my home state:

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/15/835250693/michigan-stay-at-home-order-prompts-honking-traffic-jam-protest

Matt Seely, a spokesman for the conservative group that organized the protest warned, "If something isn't put in place soon, you'll see in the form of a protest—businesses just opening. Because, truthfully, for the $1,000 fine, most businesses could sustain that fine because they'll at least be able to make a living."

Anyone else besides me think that India is the next powder-keg waiting to explode?:

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/migrant-labourers-gather-at-mumbai-station-to-go-home/articleshow/75148094.cms

ReluctantSamurai

04-17-2020, 13:21

The US thinks it's ready to reopen business to some degree. With this kind of attitude, we should think again:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52311877

But according to Smithfield employees, their union representatives, and advocates for the immigrant community in Sioux Falls, the outbreak that led to the plant closure was avoidable. They allege early requests for personal protective equipment were ignored, that sick workers were incentivised to continue working, and that information regarding the spread of the virus was kept from them, even when they were at risk of exposing family and the broader public.

On the same day that Helen received her results, the issue of the Smithfield plant had turned fully political. Mayor TenHaken formally requested that Governor Noem issue a shelter-in-place order for Sioux Falls' surrounding counties as well as an isolation centre. She denied both requests. Despite the steep increase in cases, Noem also continued to decline to issue a shelter-in-place order in South Dakota, specifically saying that such an order would not have prevented the Smithfield outbreak. "That is absolutely false," she said. Instead, she approved the first state test of hydroxychloroquine, a drug that President Donald Trump has frequently cited as a possible treatment for coronavirus.

Will the stupidity ever end?

:shame:

Idaho

04-17-2020, 18:08

Montmorency

04-17-2020, 19:01

https://i.imgur.com/LAj2kYd.png

But I'm afraid we here in the States are headed down this road:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52305055

I told ya Japan was in for it with their cavalier attitude to testing (or I expressed it offline).

I've seen various comments online and off, including quoted in news reports, from individuals in the US and other countries, to the effect that the subject didn't make much of the pandemic because 'if it was serious the government would be acting like it.' I think this isn't just a widespread sentiment, but a more basic psychological heuristic. The signals the authorities send to the public can be as important as any material decision. Thus the maxim to act fast and have no regrets.

And then you have these idiots in my home state:

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/15/835250693/michigan-stay-at-home-order-prompts-honking-traffic-jam-protest

Several thousand cars flooded the streets around the state Capitol in Lansing, Mich., on Wednesday to protest the governor's extended stay-at-home order. Cars jammed the streets around the Capitol building, filling the air with a cacophony of honking. People draped in American and "Don't Tread on Me" flags blared "We're Not Gonna Take It" and "God Bless The USA" out of car stereos.

A very American kind of protest protest, in a bad sense.

Yeah, India is screwed. I can only hope this pandemic weakens rather than strengthens the grip on power men like Modi and Putin have.

How you know you've lost containment: Singapore edition.

https://i.imgur.com/x8rjLA8.png

This is the part where we get Dutch angles and POV-cam of monsters bounding through the hallways of a research complex as employees howl in the background. New Zealand and Taiwan still looking golden though.

Here's an article (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-southkorea-respons-idUSKCN21X0MO) for your interest, on how South Korea plans to maintain containment in the medium-term without freezing normal life or the economy.

South Korea’s virus-containment strategy will build on an intensive contact tracing and testing campaign that experts say has been instrumental in uncovering webs of infections that might otherwise have gone undetected. Besides the testing kits and tracing techniques that have already been rolled out, South Korea plans to build out a “smart city” database and get quarantine violators to agree to use tracking bracelets. The database was designed to share information between cities on things like traffic and pollution. Health authorities plan to leverage that network to reduce the time it takes to find and isolate coronavirus cases. The database will be operated by the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC), giving epidemiological investigators real-time data feeds on patients, including their whereabouts, times spent at specific locations, CCTV footage, and credit card transactions.
[...]
Another key to the South Korean virus containment strategy is stepping up border controls. Around half of new cases in recent weeks have been found in people arriving from overseas, according to the KCDC. Rather than outright bans, South Korea is using widespread testing and technology-enabled tracking to allow people to travel to the country. Mandatory testing and quarantines now apply to nearly all arrivals from overseas, including citizens. South Korea installed walk-through facilities this month at Seoul’s Incheon International Airport to test anyone who arrives with symptoms. Those who don’t show symptoms will also be tested within three days. All arrivals must download a government app that tracks their location and requires users to report any symptoms. Then everyone, regardless of nationality or whether they tested negative, must self-isolate for two weeks.
[...]
Some of the long-term policies being discussed include making workplaces less crowded, and persuading Koreans that it is not a virtue to show up at work when sick, Yoon Tae-ho, director general for public health policy at the health ministry told Reuters. In a glimpse of what could become long-term practices, the KCDC last week outlined preventive measures for schools, churches and some entertainment facilities that included disinfection schedules, guidelines on how close people can be to each other and temperature checks. “Our goal is to be able to control infections in a way that our health and medical system, including personnel and sickbeds, can handle them at usual levels,” Park, the health minister, said. South Korean officials say that means keeping new cases under 50 per day, a level first reached last week. On Tuesday, South Korea reported 27 new cases. The country is also stepping up efforts to improve testing and boost resources for hospitals. Hospitals are testing all pneumonia patients, and staff at places like nursing homes and medical facilities will be regularly tested. Authorities have designated two new hospitals and are building a third to specialize in treating infectious diseases.

“We will have to step up our daily hygiene and disease prevention standards,” Yoon said. “It will be a tedious battle, but we have to do this.”

ReluctantSamurai

04-17-2020, 21:23

I genuinely worry for you Americans. I just don't think you are culturally and economically able to manage this kind of event. You have a (quite right) mistrust of government (while being nationalistic and prone to support bombast), combined with an individualist overt culture (with a system that's designed to both reward the rich and powerful, while maintaining the pretense that it's easy to be rich and powerful).

I agree with the cultural and economic deficits in US society in regards to this pandemic. However, in looking around the world at how other countries are dealing with it, I don't see many countries doing much better. In fact, the countries that seem to be dealing with this pandemic the best, are authoritarian regimes that use police and military to enforce local edicts, and highly invasive technology to track its' population. I'm personally willing to adhere to temporary lock-down orders, even if it's enforced. I am not willing to be subjected to personally invasive tracking technology. Yet to be seen is what will happen with Germany loosening their economy a bit, Sweden's trust in its' citizens to voluntarily adhering to social distancing, and Denmark's "deep-freeze" approach to its' economy.

Cultural rift here has been happening for a very long time. Lately that's no more evident than in our politics. Blue vs. Red, Urban vs Rural, Rich vs Poor. Picking just one issue (amongst the many), the Affordable Care Act of 2010, highlights the rift quite well.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/03/what-covid-19-debate-has-common-aca-fight/608797/

Before the law, people with significant health needs were either charged much higher premiums for coverage in the individual-insurance market, or denied coverage altogether because they had a preexisting condition. Those rules benefited healthier people buying individual coverage: Because those with greater needs were systematically excluded, insurers had to pay out fewer claims, allowing them to hold down premiums for everyone else. The ACA upended that arrangement. Through a long list of reforms, it required insurers to sell coverage at comparable prices to those with greater and lesser health needs—a policy known as “community rating.” It asked the young and healthy to pay more for coverage so that it would be affordable, and available, for older and sicker consumers.

The widespread lockdowns now being implemented to contain the spread of the coronavirus rest on the same underlying principle. In even the most adverse scenarios, most Americans will not be seriously sickened or killed by the disease. That means the nation is now imposing costs on many people who are less likely to die of the coronavirus, in order to reduce the risk for those who are the most vulnerable.

It’s not too surprising to see Trump and other Republicans bridle against social distancing: Their complaints fit with the right’s long-standing unease about any policy that shares risk by imposing costs broadly. The entrenched power of that belief is why Corlette is pessimistic the country will preserve widespread limits on activity while the disease remains concentrated in relatively few places. “I have zero optimism we will be able to sustain that,” she says. “It may be sustained in pockets of the country, certain states or certain cities. But it’s hard to see this nationwide for much longer. As a country, we are not great at embracing the social contract.”

That last part is what it's all about. In those places that the pandemic is lightly affecting (mainly rural America), those places want to get back to work right now, damn the torpedoes; essentially throwing more susceptible (read as the elderly and the poor) portions of our society under the bus, so-to-speak. Getting a paycheck (for the less well off) and raking in dividends (for the rich) is more important than risking infection and the possibility of death. My own personal caveat in judging the correctness of that attitude, is that my children are grown and on their own; I am a single divorcee; I own my home and truck outright; and I have no outstanding debts including credit cards. Hard to say if my attitude would be different were I 30 years younger and carrying lots of debt.:shrug:

As to our economic woes....hell, that's been going on for decades, and it's only going to get worse. The next crash is going to be worse than this one, despite how catastrophic this one is because we are repeating the very same mistakes we've made in the past.

So yes, the worry is warranted.

Idaho

04-18-2020, 07:54

I agree with the cultural and economic deficits in US society in regards to this pandemic. However, in looking around the world at how other countries are dealing with it, I don't see many countries doing much better.

I think almost all countries are dealing with it better - you've already got the highest death rate. And we are really only starting with this. Yes we might be approaching the middle of the actual first wave covid deaths in most countries - but the us isn't. It will open up sooner and have more waves of death. And, more significantly, I don't think it will deal as well with the really critical phase - managing the impact of the economic contraction.

a completely inoffensive name

04-18-2020, 09:04

I think almost all countries are dealing with it better - you've already got the highest death rate. And we are really only starting with this. Yes we might be approaching the middle of the actual first wave covid deaths in most countries - but the us isn't. It will open up sooner and have more waves of death. And, more significantly, I don't think it will deal as well with the really critical phase - managing the impact of the economic contraction.

Only time will tell. We have no idea in the long run what the numbers will be from India, Brazil, or even China (unless we assume their numbers are honest).

At the end of the day, American politicians in Congress will do what they need to maintain our hegemony and keep industry knee deep in profits. Our political dysfunction is a manifestation of the lack of a real competitor.

ReluctantSamurai

04-18-2020, 11:56

I think almost all countries are dealing with it better - you've already got the highest death rate

I would disagree with this. The US is the most populous country outside of China to be dealing with this, and I would suspect has the most number of urban areas outside of China, as well. Stands to reason there will be more total deaths. The US currently has the 9th highest # of deaths per capita. Belgium has the highest, followed by Spain, Italy, France, and then the UK. Going by just numbers, the US has almost half the per capita deaths than the UK (and btw, less than even Sweden). Does that mean we're doing twice as good a job? Hardly. The total # of deaths, IMHO, is not a good indicator of how well a country is handling the outbreak.

And we've yet to see what's going to happen in India and Africa, as well as the Soviet Union. All three are just starting to ascend the all too familiar "curve". Then there are the unmitigated disasters of Spain and Italy, and the emerging disasters in Brazil and Ecuador. So I would say the US is doing better than some, worse than others. Now if you want to bring in the supposed level of medical treatment....that's another story.

As far as dealing with the economic depression, that's yet to be seen. I don't think it's going to be pretty anywhere on this planet.:shrug:

Viking

04-18-2020, 14:02

Regarding countries were things are going well, here is an update to the graph I posted some time ago. Hospitalizations in Norway due to SARS-2 are legitimately plunging:

https://i.imgur.com/5txZ4Ua.png

Here is the same data at the level of individual hospitals and health organisations, showing no major deviation from the general trend. The three top curves belong to entities in the greater capital region:

https://i.imgur.com/ERtRvsl.png

(source: Norwegian Directorate of Health (https://www.helsedirektoratet.no/statistikk/antall-innlagte-pasienter-pa-sykehus-med-pavist-covid-19))

The curve is not just being flattened, it is being squashed. This is achieved without curfews and with face masks hardly used by anyone in public.

I think some of the most important contributors to this result have been to cancel all major public events, get people away from public transport and out of the offices, and otherwise keeping the levels of socialisation lower than normal.

Furunculus

04-18-2020, 18:20

This is all true in its narrow terms, but a stamped curve speaks nothing to the total damage these nations will face over the next few years in terms of direct covid damage from deaths, and indirect damage from rolling lockdowns, lost economic potential, and labour market hysteresis.

hot takes are of little use here, come back in two years.

ReluctantSamurai

04-18-2020, 18:31

hot takes are of little use here, come back in two years

Holy shit, that says it all. I guess there's nothing else to say....:quiet:

Montmorency

04-18-2020, 20:12

Republicans added a provision (https://www.forbes.com/sites/shaharziv/2020/04/14/why-are-rich-americans-getting-17-million-stimulus-checks/?) in the last round of relief legislation suspending a limitation on deduction of pass-through income [EDIT: losses]. This suspension is projected to result in loss of $90 billion in revenue, and 95% of benefits will go to 87000 taxpayers with 200K annual income or up. Half of those individuals having annual income of over $1 million, who will receive an average benefit of $1.7 million. This is all on top of the hundreds of billions in goosed real estate depreciation deductions included in the legislation. Who said the Republican Party is the party of billionaires? (To be fair, with all the looting Trump has done through the tax code and through dirty dealings, he's probably technically a billionaire by now.)

“For those earning $1 million annually, a tax break buried in the recent coronavirus relief legislation is so generous that its total cost is more than total new funding for all hospitals in America and more than the total provided to all state and local governments,” said Doggett.

More on Republican priorities, and probable corruption. Is this what they call the "giant sucking sound?"
https://www.thedailybeast.com/army-decides-a-coronavirus-pandemic-is-a-good-time-to-give-gop-donors-dollar569-million-to-build-the-wall

On Tuesday, the Army Corps of Engineers announced it awarded BFBC, an affiliate of Barnard Construction, $569 million in contract modifications for building “17.17 miles” of the wall in two California locations, El Centro and San Diego. That works out to over $33 million per mile—steeply above the $20 million-per-mile average that the Trump administration is already doling out for the wall. Construction is supposed to be completed by the end of June 2021.

And it’s only the latest wall contract the firm has gotten. BFBC, a reliable contributor to Republican politicians, has gotten over $1 billion in taxpayer money in less than a year to build a mere 37 miles worth of wall. Scott Amey, the general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, urged federal watchdogs to investigate the new BFBC contract.

That last part is what it's all about. In those places that the pandemic is lightly affecting (mainly rural America), those places want to get back to work right now, damn the torpedoes; essentially throwing more susceptible (read as the elderly and the poor) portions of our society under the bus, so-to-speak. Getting a paycheck (for the less well off) and raking in dividends (for the rich) is more important than risking infection and the possibility of death. My own personal caveat in judging the correctness of that attitude, is that my children are grown and on their own; I am a single divorcee; I own my home and truck outright; and I have no outstanding debts including credit cards. Hard to say if my attitude would be different were I 30 years younger and carrying lots of debt.:shrug:

Speaking of - as we know, the US is not a Communist dictatorship, yeah? So there's no way that the federal government - or even state governments - can "open up" the economy short of G-Men with guns throwing you out of your home and forcing you to work. The nominally voluntary nature of the private sector is such that many or most businesses, depending on location and other factors, will decline to reopen (assuming they acquired or maintained the capital to keep operating). Or even if they do resume operations and desperation/absence of government relief drives a steady labor supply to them (the UI expansion will mitigate this), many consumers will continue to avoid their unessential establishments or products out of fear-driven social distancing, or just because financial burdens restrict their discretionary spending.

To save our economy we need a steady, nationally-coordinated approach.

Which is to say, get ready for a lo-o-ong recession.

At the end of the day, American politicians in Congress will do what they need to maintain our hegemony and keep industry knee deep in profits. Our political dysfunction is a manifestation of the lack of a real competitor.

We already know Republicans won't, and they've been acting against your imputation of priorities for decades. Follow the logical consequences of Republicans being a death cult and existential threat to civilization - those consequences can rise to the loss of our hegemony! Bush-Obama-Trump-Biden is the progression of a degraded country.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/opinion/trump-coronavirus-economy.html

I think some of the most important contributors to this result have been to cancel all major public events, get people away from public transport and out of the offices, and otherwise keeping the levels of socialisation lower than normal.

If that's the case, then you just have to keep it up for months at a time, right? Possibly more than a year.

labour market hysteresis.

Since some (and, I believe, you included) have complained about my use of words slightly-uncommon to everyday speech, let me just adjust "hysteresis" to path-dependency.

Furunculus

04-18-2020, 20:17

Holy shit, that says it all. I guess there's nothing else to say....:quiet:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=emb_logo&time_continue=1009&v=bfN2JWifLCY

we might all be headed to the same place in the two years it takes to roll out a mass vaccination plan.

what matters:
you keep new cases below the threshold your health service can cope with.
you minimize the medium/long term economic damage.

those nations that do better in these two measures will eat the others lunch.

Montmorency

04-18-2020, 20:48

Terminological notes: Where I have been using the term "incidence" the correct term would usually have been "prevalence (https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dsepd/ss1978/lesson3/section2.html)."

Prevalence refers to proportion of persons who have a condition at or during a particular time period, whereas incidence refers to the proportion or rate of persons who develop a condition during a particular time period. So prevalence and incidence are similar, but prevalence includes new and pre-existing cases whereas incidence includes new cases only. The key difference is in their numerators.

I grasped at a term that captured the unknowns inherently excluded in "case fatality rate" (CFR); the appropriate term is "infection fatality rate" (IFR).

Coronavirus testing and antibody testing are complementary. The former is a view into the ongoing course of the disease in the near-term, but the latter exposes the history of the outbreak. Comprehensive serological survey will also allow us to gain the measure of the virus and determine exactly what kind of testing regime is minimally necessary. If it turns out a hundred million people have already been infected, then clearly COVID is not much worse than seasonal flu and we can focus on voluntary social distancing and targeted testing and risk reduction. If only a few million have been infected on the other hand, the Non-Administered Tribal Areas of the country are in for a lot of hurt and the areas taking the pandemic seriously are essentially under siege lest they risk another surge with any loosening of the quarantine. The latter scenario is the one where we need millions of tests daily.

More on unreported deaths. Excess deaths suggest we have had at a minimum at least twice as many deaths as are officially recorded. (Indeed, NY and other states are beginning to retroactively revise their death counts upwards. Even China is (www.nytimes.com/2020/04/17/world/asia/china-wuhan-coronavirus-death-toll.html)!) Double the official tally, at least for the United States, seems like a reasonable estimate for now.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/more-on-excess-mortality-and-covid19s-hidden-toll
https://www.propublica.org/article/theres-been-a-spike-in-people-dying-at-home-in-several-cities-that-suggests-coronavirus-deaths-are-higher-than-reported

Since I asked what other countries are doing with antibody testing, here's some preliminary results:
Netherlands (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-netherlands-study/dutch-study-suggests-3-of-population-may-have-coronavirus-antibodies-idUSKCN21Y102): I can find very little on this study - is this (https://www.tweedekamer.nl/sites/default/files/atoms/files/tb_jaap_van_dissel_1604_1.pdf) it? - but the estimate is a prevalence of 3% of the Dutch population infected so far (compared to <0.3% positive tests).
Germany (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/18/world/europe/with-broad-random-tests-for-antibodies-germany-seeks-path-out-of-lockdown.html): Buried in the article is a bit about the Gangelt study, which found 14% with antibodies and 2% active COVID infections in a sample of 500. However, that's a small and geographically-limited sample. [Also in the article, Germany is testing almost as many as the whole US daily!]
Speaking of Germany, apparently they're confident enough to reopen (https://www.ft.com/content/6751dafc-117a-47d2-ada3-44223254f2d2) some businesses next week and schools by the beginning of May. One to watch.
Western Europe (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.10.20060426v1): An estimate that contagion has run its course through ~6% of the population of the countries included. I've checked none of the work.

More on testing, test-positivity rates, true prevalence, true IFR.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/04/us-coronavirus-outbreak-out-control-test-positivity-rate/610132/#prevalence2

Because the number of Americans tested for COVID-19 has changed over time, the U.S. test-positivity rate can’t yet provide much detailed information about the contagiousness or fatality rate of the disease. But the statistic can still give a rough sense of how bad a particular outbreak is by distinguishing between places undergoing very different sizes of epidemics, Andrews said. A country with a 25 percent positivity rate and one with a 2 percent positivity rate are facing “vastly different epidemics,” he said, and the 2 percent country is better off. In that light, America’s 20 percent positivity rate is disquieting. The U.S. did almost 25 times as many tests on April 15 as on March 15, yet both the daily positive rate and the overall positive rate went up in that month. If the U.S. were a jar of 330 million jelly beans, then over the course of the outbreak, the health-care system has reached in with a bigger and bigger scoop. But every day, 20 percent of the beans it pulls out are positive for COVID-19. If the outbreak were indeed under control, then we would expect more testing—that is, a larger scoop—to yield a smaller and smaller proportion of positives. So far, that hasn’t happened.
[...]
The test-positivity rate, then, is a decent (if unusual) proxy for the severity of an outbreak in an area. And it shows clearly that the U.S. still lags far behind other countries in the course of fighting its outbreak. South Korea—which discovered its first coronavirus case on the same day as the U.S.—has tested more than half a million people, or about 1 percent of its population, and discovered about 10,500 cases. The U.S. has now tested 3.2 million people, which is also about 1 percent of its population, but it has found more than 630,000 cases. So while the U.S. has a 20 percent positivity rate, South Korea’s is only about 2 percent—a full order of magnitude smaller.
[Ed. That's the average. As I showed in my analysis post, the rate has been decreasing the whole time, last I checked down to less than 0.5%, or a ration of >200 tests:1 positive.

South Korea is not alone in bringing its positivity rate down: America’s figure dwarfs that of almost every other developed country. Canada, Germany and Denmark have positivity rates from 6 to 8 percent. Australia and New Zealand have 2 percent positivity rates. Even Italy—which faced one of the world’s most ravaging outbreaks—has a 15 percent rate. It has found nearly 160,000 cases and conducted more than a million tests. Virtually the only wealthy country with a larger positivity rate than the U.S. is the United Kingdom, where more than 30 percent of people tested for the virus have been positive.

At the beginning of a pandemic, both the actual number of infections and the number of tests per day shoot up, and the positivity rate is controlled by whichever happens to grow faster, he said. In this case, the faster-growing number appears to have been infections. “As things stabilize, if the testing rate declines and the positivity rate declines, you have some good signal that the epidemic is declining,” he said.

The high positivity rate also suggests that new cases in the U.S. have plateaued only because the country has hit a ceiling in its testing capacity. Looking solely at positives, the U.S. is steaming toward 650,000 confirmed cases, but the number of new cases per day appears to be plateauing or even declining.
[...]
This tight correlation suggests that if the United States were testing more people, we would probably still be seeing an increase in the number of COVID-19 cases. And combined with the high test-positivity rate, it suggests that the reservoir of unknown, uncounted cases of COVID-19 across the country is still very large.

https://i.imgur.com/CwTzgxN.png

I feel so clever for having figured this out independently. I should be up there with the president at his briefings. :grin:

Anyone think they can round up similar analyses for other countries? Looking at the John Hopkins database, most countries, but especially poorer or smaller ones, have tremendous daily variability in number of positives reported, to the point of hindering identification of broad trends. I have a strong suspicion testing capacity on any given day is a typically-limiting factor globally.

ReluctantSamurai

04-18-2020, 21:57

For a different perspective on how Sweden is doing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8JhC7jaiIc

CrossLOPER

04-18-2020, 22:32

For a different perspective on how Sweden is doing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8JhC7jaiIc

Who would have thought that pretending nothing was wrong wouldn't work out too well?

a completely inoffensive name

04-19-2020, 03:57

We already know Republicans won't, and they've been acting against your imputation of priorities for decades. Follow the logical consequences of Republicans being a death cult and existential threat to civilization - those consequences can rise to the loss of our hegemony! Bush-Obama-Trump-Biden is the progression of a degraded country.

The US for better or worse is still, even now the hegemonic power. Republicans will continue acting in their current manner all the way until we are not. Once they feel the threat of a foreign Chinese politburo calling the shots in world affairs, there will be somewhat of a shift internally. Even Trump's praising of China is specifically towards the structure of China's government (which GOP wishes to copy here), but never towards the actors themselves or the state as a whole.

I recall Roman Senators being openly bribed by Numidia who's leader thought of Rome as "a city for sale and doomed to quick destruction, if it should find a buyer,", it didn't turn out well for Numidia. Monty, what's the bigger driving factor among the GOP, greed or power? If you agree with me it is power.

Montmorency

04-19-2020, 05:00

The US for better or worse is still, even now the hegemonic power. Republicans will continue acting in their current manner all the way until we are not. Once they feel the threat of a foreign Chinese politburo calling the shots in world affairs, there will be somewhat of a shift internally. Even Trump's praising of China is specifically towards the structure of China's government (which GOP wishes to copy here), but never towards the actors themselves or the state as a whole.

I recall Roman Senators being openly bribed by Numidia who's leader thought of Rome as "a city for sale and doomed to quick destruction, if it should find a buyer,", it didn't turn out well for Numidia. Monty, what's the bigger driving factor among the GOP, greed or power? If you agree with me it is power.

Neither per se.

If they were purely venal, they would be easy to negotiate with, since they would tend to seek individual and group gain. If they were purely power-hungry, they would act in ways constructive to maximizing the power of the party, which would tend to involve more prudence and preservation of the things to be ruled.

They are ideological, which means they have a vision of the world, the ideal of which overrides even self-preservation or its own smooth implementation.

Since such people are incapable of building institutions, and do not understand them, there won't be a moment when they "come to their senses" regarding the vestigial liberal international order. My prediction is that they would emphasize belligerent militarism and brinksmanship in reaction to noxious foreign stimuli. Hopefully at least not in as haphazard a manner as Trump, because very few of them are individually quite as stupid. Don't expect a reversion to the aspirationally-liberal principles of the Bushes.

Furunculus

04-19-2020, 09:02

For a different perspective on how Sweden is doing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8JhC7jaiIc

good video, thank you.

"come back in 8-12 weeks to see how well sweden has done".

Also, parts of sweden may be close to achieving herd immunity effects:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/18/stockholm-will-reach-herd-immunity-within-weeks/

Montmorency

04-19-2020, 16:59

More details (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2010025) about what hospitals are doing to avert seizures of supply shipments by the NSF MJ12 federal government.

MUST READ

A lead came from an acquaintance of a friend of a team member. After several hours of vetting, we grew confident of the broker’s professional pedigree and the potential to secure a large shipment of three-ply face masks and N95 respirators. The latter were KN95 respirators, N95s that were made in China. We received samples to confirm that they could be successfully fit-tested. Despite having cleared this hurdle, we remained concerned that the samples might not be representative of the bulk of the products that we would be buying. Having acquired the requisite funds — more than five times the amount we would normally pay for a similar shipment, but still less than what was being requested by other brokers — we set the plan in motion. Three members of the supply-chain team and a fit tester were flown to a small airport near an industrial warehouse in the mid-Atlantic region. I arrived by car to make the final call on whether to execute the deal. Two semi-trailer trucks, cleverly marked as food-service vehicles, met us at the warehouse. When fully loaded, the trucks would take two distinct routes back to Massachusetts to minimize the chances that their contents would be detained or redirected.

Hours before our planned departure, we were told to expect only a quarter of our original order. We went anyway, since we desperately needed any supplies we could get. Upon arrival, we were jubilant to see pallets of KN95 respirators and face masks being unloaded. We opened several boxes, examined their contents, and hoped that this random sample would be representative of the entire shipment. Before we could send the funds by wire transfer, two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents arrived, showed their badges, and started questioning me. No, this shipment was not headed for resale or the black market. The agents checked my credentials, and I tried to convince them that the shipment of PPE was bound for hospitals. After receiving my assurances and hearing about our health system’s urgent needs, the agents let the boxes of equipment be released and loaded into the trucks. But I was soon shocked to learn that the Department of Homeland Security was still considering redirecting our PPE. Only some quick calls leading to intervention by our congressional representative prevented its seizure. I remained nervous and worried on the long drive back, feelings that did not abate until midnight, when I received the call that the PPE shipment was secured at our warehouse.

Pannonian, do you have a video for this?

Well its not officially a plague until someone blames the Jews, right?

https://i.imgur.com/TyYjRYK.jpg

Columbus, Ohio protest yesterday. :uhoh:

I'm certainly willing to be agnostic about Sweden's pandemic doctrine, but do expect an extra burden of accountability on those who make contrarian wagers. I might just be ignorant of Sweden, but I was surprised when I first learned they - currently governed by a Social Democrat-Green coalition - would adopt the same approach as the right-wing governments of the Netherlands and UK.

Conveniently, these are the first two results for a simple Google search of "Sweden."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/19/anger-in-sweden-as-elderly-pay-price-for-coronavirus-strategy
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-19/sweden-says-controversial-covid-19-strategy-is-proving-effective

CrossLOPER

04-19-2020, 17:49

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-19/sweden-says-controversial-covid-19-strategy-is-proving-effective

“We’re on a sort of plateau,” Tegnell told Swedish news agency TT.

Whenever I come across people who misuse words and phrases and state that "language evolves", I would like to present them situations like this where a standardized meaning of words is helpful towards meaningful communication.

For instance, when someone says that something is "sort of (a) plateau", when they actually mean that it is an upward slope increasing by hundreds of cases daily, their message is somewhat confusing.

Seamus Fermanagh

04-19-2020, 22:16

Neither per se.

If they were purely venal, they would be easy to negotiate with, since they would tend to seek individual and group gain. If they were purely power-hungry, they would act in ways constructive to maximizing the power of the party, which would tend to involve more prudence and preservation of the things to be ruled.

They are ideological, which means they have a vision of the world, the ideal of which overrides even self-preservation or its own smooth implementation.

Since such people are incapable of building institutions, and do not understand them, there won't be a moment when they "come to their senses" regarding the vestigial liberal international order. My prediction is that they would emphasize belligerent militarism and brinksmanship in reaction to noxious foreign stimuli. Hopefully at least not in as haphazard a manner as Trump, because very few of them are individually quite as stupid. Don't expect a reversion to the aspirationally-liberal principles of the Bushes.

Monty and I are often at angles to one another in thinking. Here he is quite correct.

Trump's cadre has managed to push out those in the party with different principles -- G. Will, M. Boot, myself, quite a number of others -- and the GOP is now led by a cadre of folks who more or less think "we're number one, so we should kick a little ass and remind folks who they should fear." THAT is the voice of this new GOP.

Was at a Quest to get bloodwork done the other day. Brought wipes for the doors and wore my mask. Followed the procedures. Sat waiting in my chair to be called back. Next fellow up to the intake desk, no mask, picked up the bottle of hand sanitizer sitting there, shook his head and snickered then put it back. He sits across from me and tells me that the coronavirus is just natural -- the whole world is a "petrie dish" [I intuited a basic attitude of "I am too tough for this to be more than an inconvenience, so FIDO]. He then complains about regulations slowing down action, but assures me that "at least we have the right guy in there to take care of that." I responded with a generic "Trump isn't known to be a fan of red tape," having decided that saying "Trump is an asshat who staggers from one under-informed decision to the next on 90% of the issues he bothers to address" would feed the fellow's desire to pick an argument with a liberal, mask-wearer type. Social distancing is not furthered by face-to-face shouting matches or fisticuffs, so I demurred.

Thankfully I was called in before I had to endure more of his 'conversation.'

Pannonian

04-19-2020, 22:56

More details (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2010025) about what hospitals are doing to avert seizures of supply shipments by the NSF MJ12 federal government.

MUST READ

Pannonian, do you have a video for this?

Given that I've not been keeping in touch with the news, and I live in the UK, I doubt I have a video of what's going on with health services in the US. Did you mean someone else?

Montmorency

04-20-2020, 00:43

Trump's cadre has managed to push out those in the party with different principles -- G. Will, M. Boot, myself, quite a number of others -- and the GOP is now led by a cadre of folks who more or less think "we're number one, so we should kick a little ass and remind folks who they should fear." THAT is the voice of this new GOP.

It was hard to get it aroused, and it is hard to get it aroused, but Trump got it aroused?

Thankfully I was called in before I had to endure more of his 'conversation.'

They say everyone knows you just can't go to Flushing these days (:eyebrows:), but apparently you mustn't talk positively about any cultural or consumer products of Asian countries, because everyone hates Asians these days and being an Asian-lover will rub off by association.

If you can dig it.

Given that I've not been keeping in touch with the news, and I live in the UK, I doubt I have a video of what's going on with health services in the US. Did you mean someone else?

The episode reported by the good physician executive

A lead came from an acquaintance of a friend of a team member. After several hours of vetting, we grew confident of the broker’s professional pedigree and the potential to secure a large shipment of three-ply face masks and N95 respirators. The latter were KN95 respirators, N95s that were made in China. We received samples to confirm that they could be successfully fit-tested. Despite having cleared this hurdle, we remained concerned that the samples might not be representative of the bulk of the products that we would be buying. Having acquired the requisite funds — more than five times the amount we would normally pay for a similar shipment, but still less than what was being requested by other brokers — we set the plan in motion. Three members of the supply-chain team and a fit tester were flown to a small airport near an industrial warehouse in the mid-Atlantic region. I arrived by car to make the final call on whether to execute the deal. Two semi-trailer trucks, cleverly marked as food-service vehicles, met us at the warehouse. When fully loaded, the trucks would take two distinct routes back to Massachusetts to minimize the chances that their contents would be detained or redirected.

Hours before our planned departure, we were told to expect only a quarter of our original order. We went anyway, since we desperately needed any supplies we could get. Upon arrival, we were jubilant to see pallets of KN95 respirators and face masks being unloaded. We opened several boxes, examined their contents, and hoped that this random sample would be representative of the entire shipment. Before we could send the funds by wire transfer, two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents arrived, showed their badges, and started questioning me. No, this shipment was not headed for resale or the black market. The agents checked my credentials, and I tried to convince them that the shipment of PPE was bound for hospitals. After receiving my assurances and hearing about our health system’s urgent needs, the agents let the boxes of equipment be released and loaded into the trucks. But I was soon shocked to learn that the Department of Homeland Security was still considering redirecting our PPE. Only some quick calls leading to intervention by our congressional representative prevented its seizure. I remained nervous and worried on the long drive back, feelings that did not abate until midnight, when I received the call that the PPE shipment was secured at our warehouse.

reminded me of this, which you posted.

https://streamable.com/gmr38

Seriously, what the federal government is doing here - I'm not sure what kind of psychology could conceive it.

Hooahguy

04-20-2020, 03:37

The cynic in me thinks that Trump is ordering those shipments seized to make those states more desperate for supplies which in turn will force their governors to plead/make a deal. Terrible, I know but I wouldn't put it past him.

Furunculus

04-20-2020, 10:06

Pannonian

04-20-2020, 10:44

some welcome nuance on the perils of hot-takes and partisan vilification of strategies for which no-one has the tools yet to make a competent assessment:
https://www.conservativehome.com/platform/2020/04/liam-fox-league-tables-death-rates-bed-numbers-and-other-mistaken-media-measurements-lets-stick-to-the-facts.html

How about this for a strategy.

1. Better fund the health service.
2. Try to train more medics.
3. Facilitate keeping what medics we have.
4. Facilitate equipping the health service (in all its various aspects).

All rather complicated, I know. But I do know that the following acts against all the above.

i. Cut funding, with the aim being to reduce public expenditure to a percentage of GDP determined by political-economic theorists.

The first group of strategies may need some fine tuning in details. But the second has been shown to be wrong. Will quibbling over the first group allow the second to be persisted with?

Strike For The South

04-20-2020, 13:48

I think almost all countries are dealing with it better - you've already got the highest death rate. And we are really only starting with this. Yes we might be approaching the middle of the actual first wave covid deaths in most countries - but the us isn't. It will open up sooner and have more waves of death. And, more significantly, I don't think it will deal as well with the really critical phase - managing the impact of the economic contraction.

Per capita America has less deaths than Belgium, Spain, Italy, France, UK, Sweden, Holland, Switzerland, and Ireland
Per capita America has done more tests than S.Korea, Finland, Holland, Sweden, France, UK, Taiwan, and Japan
America has nearly administered double the number of raw tests than any other country.
Lombardy has double the deaths per capita than New York City.

By what metric would that be the "worst"? Beyond the handful of countries who should be rightly praised for containment? Everyone is doing poorly, America is not some massive outlier.

Furunculus

04-20-2020, 13:49

How about this for a strategy.

1. Better fund the health service.
2. Try to train more medics.
3. Facilitate keeping what medics we have.
4. Facilitate equipping the health service (in all its various aspects).

All rather complicated, I know. But I do know that the following acts against all the above.

i. Cut funding, with the aim being to reduce public expenditure to a percentage of GDP determined by political-economic theorists.

The first group of strategies may need some fine tuning in details. But the second has been shown to be wrong. Will quibbling over the first group allow the second to be persisted with?

sure, sure, but can you win an election on that platform?

and if not, is the voters fault that they "just won't see sense!"?

ReluctantSamurai

04-20-2020, 13:57

partisan vilification of strategies for which no-one has the tools yet to make a competent assessment

Certainly a lot of that going on in trying to explain, and/or cope with the reality of this pandemic. The "8-12 weeks" approach may be closer to the truth when evaluating any country's overall strategy. Having said that, there are glaring errors of omission; lack of action might be a better term.

Our Fearless Leader here in the States likes to flaunt his ban-that-wasn't-really-a-ban on flights to and from China, as "saving a lot of lives" (the "ban" only restricted those of Chinese nationality; US citizens could still fly in or out of China; the "ban" didn't include imports arriving by air or sea). OK, one could give him the benefit of the doubt and say it had some impact on the emerging situation, but it was what came afterwards, or rather it was what didn't come afterwards where heavy criticism can be laid.

Despite his attempts at shifting the blame to the WHO (and the WHO should come under scrutiny), Fearless Leader had ample warning (this despite his gutting of agencies designed to give such warnings) of what was unfolding in China. A prudent leader would've at least taken the time to check national stock piles of medical equipment, called for a gathering in Washington of heads of medical and social leaders to assess the situation. Nope. Instead we got denial that it was a problem at all (like a miracle it will just go away), and then internalizing it as a personal attack by the Dems.

The net result is what we have here today---medical teams STILL short of equipment and supplies; states having to compete on the open market for said equipment/supplies; and even more incredulous having the federal government (aka FEMA) actually moving in and expropriating purchases made by states under the guise of the need to accrue the national stockpile (which is then doled out favorably to those states that play "nice" with his administration).

And then openly urging states residents to defy local leaders? (Liberate Minnesota; liberate Michigan; liberate Virginia). Are you f-ing kidding me???

Party vilification? I don't think any tools are necessary to make an assessment of this administrations competency. Just watch the daily Rocky and Bullwinkle show every evening at 5pm.

:clown:

is the voters fault that they "just won't see sense!"

Polls are what they are, take them with a grain of salt, but if this one is any indication, then voters are acquiring some sense:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/19/politics/trump-approval-rating-rally/index.html

In terms of his reelection prospects, it should be worrying to the President that even with a black swan pandemic occurring, he couldn't get his net approval rating above 0 points. It's going to be difficult to win the election if his net approval rating is -8 points among voters on election day.

Pannonian

04-20-2020, 14:53

sure, sure, but can you win an election on that platform?

and if not, is the voters fault that they "just won't see sense!"?

There used to be a consensus among political parties that they wouldn't put forward anything actively harmful to the country. Does the fetishisation of democracy mean that anything that wins a vote is automatically the way to go?

Greyblades

04-20-2020, 15:55

Monty and I are often at angles to one another in thinking. Here he is quite correct.

Trump's cadre has managed to push out those in the party with different principles -- G. Will, M. Boot, myself, quite a number of others -- and the GOP is now led by a cadre of folks who more or less think "we're number one, so we should kick a little ass and remind folks who they should fear." THAT is the voice of this new GOP.

Who are G. Will and M. Boot and where was this supposed non american-empire-enforcing republican party that you are so nostalgic for during the 20 or so years before trump?

ReluctantSamurai

04-20-2020, 16:15

The cynic in me thinks that Trump is ordering those shipments seized to make those states more desperate for supplies which in turn will force their governors to plead/make a deal

Well, he's about to be getting requests from places firmly in his camp:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/08/us/coronavirus-rural-america-cases.html?campaign_id=57&emc=edit_ne_20200408&instance_id=17485&nl=evening-briefing&regi_id

The coronavirus has officially reached more than two-thirds of the country’s rural counties, with one in 10 reporting at least one death. Doctors and elected officials are warning that a late-arriving wave of illness could overwhelm rural communities that are older, poorer and sicker than much of the country, and already dangerously short on medical help.

“Everybody never really thought it would get to us,” said Ms. Rhodes, 18, who is studying to become a nurse. “A lot of people are in denial.”

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/04/15/coronavirus-rural-america-covid-19-186031

Many rural hospitals were in dire financial straits even before the virus appeared. Buffeted by rural flight, rising costs, state budget cuts and restricted Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements, more than 170 nationwide have closed since 2005, 128 of them since 2010 and eight since January. Most were in the South and lower Midwest, particularly in states that did not expand Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act; Texas lost 24, Tennessee 13, and Alabama 7. (Those are also states with high shares of uninsured rural residents.)

No Gov. Kristi Lynn Noem, South Dakota is definitely not New York City. It could turn out to be worse.....

You all know what's coming next---1 becomes 3, 3 becomes 9, etc, etc, etc. Next comes the inevitable doubling-rate curve and.....hello rural America, welcome to the world of SARS-CoV-2.

Yep....you can't bullshit a virus, and it definitely won't disappear like a miracle:rolleyes:

Viking

04-20-2020, 17:07

The descriptions I have seen in the media concerning the approach Sweden is often inaccurate and/or lacking context.

The approach taken in Sweden is significantly different from that of the other two Scandinavian countries, but not radically so. Some of the the biggest differences are that in Sweden gatherings of up to 50 people are allowed (up to 5 in Norway, 10 in Denmark); and for a while the limit was at 500 people. Schools and kindergartens have not been closed; these are currently being reopened in Norway and Denmark (with extra measures in place to limit infection).

Another big difference is the role of law enforcement. In Sweden, police seems to take more of a passive role. Here (https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/folkhalsomyndighetens-besked-faran-ar-inte-over) is an article from the Swedish state broadcaster from today, where it is described how police found restaurants where the public guidelines concerning the number of allowed guests were not followed, but there is no mention of the police themselves intervening directly. What is mentioned is that a different agency did their own controls and issued warnings to some restaurants. This fits with an older article (https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/presskonferens-efter-krishanteringsradets-mote) I've read, where it is said that is primarily not the job of the police to intervene in such matters, although they have done so in a few cases.

In comparison, here is a Norwegian article (https://www.nrk.no/osloogviken/restaurant-anmeldt-for-brudd-pa-smittevernloven-1.14979537) on a restaurant that got fined for having too many guests (many restaurants in Norway have also remained open), and there is no mention of other agencies there, it seems that it was treated entirely as a police matter. Police here have also dispersed (https://www.aftenposten.no/sport/fotball/i/BRXJkl/politiet-maa-jage-bort-barn-og-ungdommer-fotballsjefer-vil-stenge-alle-banene-i-landet) youths playing football in larger numbers than allowed. In general, I get the impression that law enforcement is much more hands-on here.

In sum, the thing is not that Sweden's approach is radically lax compared to other countries. Rather, the main thing is the question of whether the restrictions are too lax to keep the average reproductive rate of the virus below 1 in the short to medium term, which should be necessary to avoid the health care system being overwhelmed. Another question is how many extra deaths they may end up with even if the healthcare system is not overwhelmed.

Also, parts of sweden may be close to achieving herd immunity effects:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/18/stockholm-will-reach-herd-immunity-within-weeks/

With around 100 deaths per day during the last week or so (on a national level), the epidemic in the Stockholm metropolitan area might well reach the point in the next couple of months where 60% (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/03/uk-backed-off-on-herd-immunity-to-beat-coronavirus-we-need-it/) (to use a number that could be accurate) of its population have been infected, and where 0.3-0.6% of the same population have been killed as a consequence.

Which is to say that in the process of achieving this herd immunity, a big percentage of those it was supposed to protect in the first place (and who evidently were among those who needed it the most) will already have been killed by the disease. Meanwhile, there is a possibility that many of those who survived after falling seriously ill have a health that is permanently weakened in the medium to long term, and might not make it past the next flu season, or be less likely to survive should SARS-2 come around for a second time in a mutated version that few will be immune against (another big risk factor for any approach that assumes widespread immunity).

Seamus Fermanagh

04-20-2020, 17:33

Who are G. Will and M. Boot and where was this supposed non american-empire-enforcing republican party that you are so nostalgic for during the 20 or so years before trump?

George Will and Max Boot. Conservatives and authors both. Both opting out of the GOP during the 2016 election. Mostly because they thought Trump was a demagogue, not a real conservative, and not prepared to lead at the level he was then seeking.

Nostalgic perhaps, but for me personal history as well. Unlike most of those on this site, I actually voted for Ronald Reagan for President. Reagan-esque conservatism had its problems -- the national debt increase that funded the military expansion that helped break the back of the Soviet economy was a huge debt hit for us in then-dollar terms and quite a few of our 'support any anti-soviet regime efforts were short-sighted -- but it was not the currently anemic foreign policy efforts of the Trump admin.

Today's crowd is full of bluster and bravado, "America is Great Again -- fear us!" with more-or-less none of the hard work of being a superpower being accomplished. Trump wants and expects us to be feared and respected while never having to actually intervene in anything or do the hard work of quiet and effective negotiation without kow-towing by others or personal accolades. He expects to have his cake and eat it too -- and we all know the historical track record of that.

Beskar

04-20-2020, 20:10

America sure loves to get in a big crowd, chanting liberty or death during a pandemic.

Montmorency

04-20-2020, 20:17

Interesting analysis that reports a positive correlation with automobile utilization and CV19 geographic spread in New York City, along with a counterintuitive negative correlation with subway (metro) utilization. Our epidemic is not strongly related to density.
https://marketurbanism.com/2020/04/19/automobiles-seeded-the-massive-coronavirus-epidemic-in-new-york-city/
https://slate.com/business/2020/04/coronavirus-new-york-city-outbreak-blame.html

More (https://chicago.suntimes.com/coronavirus/2020/4/3/21207488/coronavirus-illinois-medical-supplies-wild-west) on what states and organizations are doing to procure supplies.

About two weeks ago, Illinois officials tracked down a supply of 1.5 million potentially life-saving N95 respirator masks in China through a middleman in the Chicago area and negotiated a deal to buy them.

One day before they were expecting to complete the purchase, they got a call in the morning from the supplier informing them he had to get a check to the bank by 2 p.m. that day, or the deal was off. Other bidders had surfaced.

Realizing there was no way the supplier could get to Springfield and back by the deadline, Illinois assistant comptroller Ellen Andres jumped in her car and raced north on I-55 with a check for $3,469,600.

From the other end, Jeffrey Polen, president of The Moving Concierge in Lemont, drove south. Polen isn’t in the medical supply business, but he “knows a guy,” an old friend who specializes in working with China’s factories.

As they drove, Andres and Polen arranged to meet in the parking lot of a McDonald’s restaurant just off the interstate in Dwight. They made the handoff there.

Polen made it back to his bank with 20 minutes to spare. Illinois already has received part of the mask shipment. There’s more on the way.

That’s just a taste of the “Wild West” world of emergency procurement taking place over the past several weeks as the state fights for equipment and supplies to protect frontline workers and patients in the battle against COVID-19.

What the actual fuck. But approaching anarcho-capitalist dreamscape. It is impossible to read such stories without conjuring a kaleidoscope of mediatized images from cinema and videogames.

Per capita America has less deaths than Belgium, Spain, Italy, France, UK, Sweden, Holland, Switzerland, and Ireland
Per capita America has done more tests than S.Korea, Finland, Holland, Sweden, France, UK, Taiwan, and Japan
America has nearly administered double the number of raw tests than any other country.
Lombardy has double the deaths per capita than New York City.

By what metric would that be the "worst"? Beyond the handful of countries who should be rightly praised for containment? Everyone is doing poorly, America is not some massive outlier.

Although I should point out that we've been stuck at ~150K tests daily for 2 weeks, and by now Germany has caught up to that number despite being 1/4 of the population. I mean, I recall reading they were 50K daily at the beginning of April, and ~120K daily about a week ago, so I assume they've caught up.

Also, New York City should be compared to other big cities, not regions. It has a relatively high per-capita death rate.

Our central government arguably has the worst response among other central governments, and most of its competition is (other) authoritarian right-wing regimes.

sure, sure, but can you win an election on that platform?

and if not, is the voters fault that they "just won't see sense!"?

By my awareness of party manifestos a majority of British voters did just that in 2019, but even the plurality voting for the Conservatives were voting for a more moderate NHS platform than previous Conservative manifestos - right?

The descriptions I have seen in the media concerning the approach Sweden is often inaccurate and/or lacking context.

Not designating and closing non-essential businesses in general is a major component. Most articles I've seen mention some of these features. I don't think you'll find articles comprehensively detailing a country's response unless it's dedicated to laying that out.

George Will and Max Boot. Conservatives and authors both. Both opting out of the GOP during the 2016 election. Mostly because they thought Trump was a demagogue, not a real conservative, and not prepared to lead at the level he was then seeking.

Nostalgic perhaps, but for me personal history as well. Unlike most of those on this site, I actually voted for Ronald Reagan for President. Reagan-esque conservatism had its problems -- the national debt increase that funded the military expansion that helped break the back of the Soviet economy was a huge debt hit for us in then-dollar terms and quite a few of our 'support any anti-soviet regime efforts were short-sighted -- but it was not the currently anemic foreign policy efforts of the Trump admin.

Today's crowd is full of bluster and bravado, "America is Great Again -- fear us!" with more-or-less none of the hard work of being a superpower being accomplished. Trump wants and expects us to be feared and respected while never having to actually intervene in anything or do the hard work of quiet and effective negotiation without kow-towing by others or personal accolades. He expects to have his cake and eat it too -- and we all know the historical track record of that.

I'm gonna do you a solid and not mock "real conservative" or describe the history and character of men like Will, Boot, and Frum. I will say they're welcome here if they're committed to preserving democracy.

As for Reagan, he seemed to have some personal commitment to not destroying the world, which is more than can be said about Trump.

If one day we can have better conservatives than Will, Frum, and Reagan, perhaps there will be no more Trumps. Or Bushes, or McConnells, or McCains, or Cottons, or Cruzes, or Vermeules, or Millers, or Spencers...

:mean:

Btw, when I mentioned the Bushes here, despite a theoretical commitment by the neocon/PNAC Bush admin to promote liberal values abroad, even the second Bush's administration was infamously (at the time) characterized by intrinsic hostility toward multilateral institutions and treaties. Kyoto Protocol. Landmines. Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. One of John Bolton's - yes, that John Bolton (https://2001-2009.state.gov/t/us/rm/15158.htm) - proudest accomplishments was withholding the US imprimatur from the International Criminal Court. It's all an example of the American right intensifying a pattern of behavior over time.

The power brokers and donors who cynically manufactured a fake legitimating philosophy deserve no credit for not being true believers, since the subsequent generations themselves became indoctrinated into the scam without a clue.

Montmorency

04-21-2020, 01:51

L-Lanius?

https://www.manisteenews.com/news/article/Protesters-head-to-Capitol-as-more-restrictions-15212731.php

https://i.imgur.com/pmgndzj.jpg

At least they're masked.

https://i.imgur.com/YXV06ve.jpg

I'm sorry, but I have to do this (https://www.reddit.com/r/polandball/comments/fupmjn/a_metaphorical_note_on_whats_happening_in_sweden/).

https://i.imgur.com/OClk9PE.png

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_lYoENIffI

Csargo

04-21-2020, 05:00

America sure loves to get in a big crowd, chanting liberty or death during a pandemic.

:sweatdrop:

Furunculus

04-21-2020, 08:27

There used to be a consensus among political parties that they wouldn't put forward anything actively harmful to the country. Does the fetishisation of democracy mean that anything that wins a vote is automatically the way to go?

there is [nothing] in what [we] have discussed here in this thread that would fall foul of that proscription.

----------------------------------------

an interesting exploration of the social element leading different strategies:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2020/apr/21/sweden-covid-19-policy-trust-citizens-state

Furunculus

04-21-2020, 08:33

Originally Posted by Furunculus View Post
sure, sure, but can you win an election on that platform?

and if not, is the voters fault that they "just won't see sense!"?
By my awareness of party manifestos a majority of British voters did just that in 2019, but even the plurality voting for the Conservatives were voting for a more moderate NHS platform than previous Conservative manifestos - right?

You have just revealed the uber-secret of the tory party that has been successfully hidden from the left wing for nearly a quarter of a millenia now:
Despite popular assumption that they are "ideological wreckers" (read="doctrinaire), they in fact evolve and adapt. perpetually, and to a greater degree than their less 'ideological' competition.
Somehow, this secret persists....

Pannonian

04-21-2020, 09:26

It was hard to get it aroused, and it is hard to get it aroused, but Trump got it aroused?

They say everyone knows you just can't go to Flushing these days (:eyebrows:), but apparently you mustn't talk positively about any cultural or consumer products of Asian countries, because everyone hates Asians these days and being an Asian-lover will rub off by association.

If you can dig it.

The episode reported by the good physician executive

A lead came from an acquaintance of a friend of a team member. After several hours of vetting, we grew confident of the broker’s professional pedigree and the potential to secure a large shipment of three-ply face masks and N95 respirators. The latter were KN95 respirators, N95s that were made in China. We received samples to confirm that they could be successfully fit-tested. Despite having cleared this hurdle, we remained concerned that the samples might not be representative of the bulk of the products that we would be buying. Having acquired the requisite funds — more than five times the amount we would normally pay for a similar shipment, but still less than what was being requested by other brokers — we set the plan in motion. Three members of the supply-chain team and a fit tester were flown to a small airport near an industrial warehouse in the mid-Atlantic region. I arrived by car to make the final call on whether to execute the deal. Two semi-trailer trucks, cleverly marked as food-service vehicles, met us at the warehouse. When fully loaded, the trucks would take two distinct routes back to Massachusetts to minimize the chances that their contents would be detained or redirected.

Hours before our planned departure, we were told to expect only a quarter of our original order. We went anyway, since we desperately needed any supplies we could get. Upon arrival, we were jubilant to see pallets of KN95 respirators and face masks being unloaded. We opened several boxes, examined their contents, and hoped that this random sample would be representative of the entire shipment. Before we could send the funds by wire transfer, two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents arrived, showed their badges, and started questioning me. No, this shipment was not headed for resale or the black market. The agents checked my credentials, and I tried to convince them that the shipment of PPE was bound for hospitals. After receiving my assurances and hearing about our health system’s urgent needs, the agents let the boxes of equipment be released and loaded into the trucks. But I was soon shocked to learn that the Department of Homeland Security was still considering redirecting our PPE. Only some quick calls leading to intervention by our congressional representative prevented its seizure. I remained nervous and worried on the long drive back, feelings that did not abate until midnight, when I received the call that the PPE shipment was secured at our warehouse.

reminded me of this, which you posted.

https://streamable.com/gmr38

Seriously, what the federal government is doing here - I'm not sure what kind of psychology could conceive it.

We've got the opposite.

Millions of pieces of PPE are being shipped from Britain to Europe despite NHS shortages (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/20/exclusivemillions-pieces-ppe-shipped-britain-europe-despite/)

Millions of pieces of vital protective equipment are being shipped from British warehouses to Germany, Spain and Italy despite severe shortages in this country, The Telegraph can disclose.

Lorries are being packed with masks, respirators and other PPE kit before heading back to supply hospitals in the EU, it has emerged.

On Monday night, UK firms said they had “no choice” but to keep selling the lifesaving gear abroad because their offers of help had been repeatedly ignored by the Government.

Pannonian

04-21-2020, 09:33

there is [nothing] in what [we] have discussed here in this thread that would fall foul of that proscription.

----------------------------------------

an interesting exploration of the social element leading different strategies:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2020/apr/21/sweden-covid-19-policy-trust-citizens-state

Depends on what you mean by "this thread". If you're talking about this thread on this forum, I haven't raised it because I've tried to avoid it, as all and sundry have moaned at me about it. If you're talking about a thread of discussion, then the cutting of NHS funding has been a problem for the last 10 years of Tory government. The winter period has been a yearly crisis the likes of which were never seen under the previous Labour government. And according to you, reducing government spending to a determined percentage of GDP is one of the principal drivers of Brexit, to move us towards a more American model.

So, I ask, does the 2016 referendum result and the 2019 election result mean that cuts to government spending, principally NHS, should continue until it reaches the levels advocated by Minford? It has plenty of democratic backing, after all.

rory_20_uk

04-21-2020, 10:39

We've got the opposite.

Millions of pieces of PPE are being shipped from Britain to Europe despite NHS shortages (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/20/exclusivemillions-pieces-ppe-shipped-britain-europe-despite/)

Have no fear! They've appointed a PPE Tsar who isn't purely there to deflect the blame in exchange for a six figure salary away from the incompetents in the Civil Service...

Which ever party is in government the Civil Service is still there and continues to do what it does best - centralise decision making, enforce monolithic approaches and avoid innovation wherever possible.

Depends on what you mean by "this thread". If you're talking about this thread on this forum, I haven't raised it because I've tried to avoid it, as all and sundry have moaned at me about it. If you're talking about a thread of discussion, then the cutting of NHS funding has been a problem for the last 10 years of Tory government. The winter period has been a yearly crisis the likes of which were never seen under the previous Labour government.

Labour did manage to indirectly cripple the NHS with PFI which appeared to solve problems today merely at the cost of the long term which was someone elses's problem. Of course, they could have raised the money from taxes but why be honest with the voters when you can load on stealth taxes and off the books debt? Just in case this wasn't enough, they failed to run a fiscal surplus - and indeed increased national debt - during the boom years due to Gordon Brown ending boom and bust. Which turned out to be at best hubris.

As long as we just overlook this then I suppose we can just focus on how eeeeevil the Tories are.

~:smoking:

Pannonian

04-21-2020, 11:11

Have no fear! They've appointed a PPE Tsar who isn't purely there to deflect the blame in exchange for a six figure salary away from the incompetents in the Civil Service...

Which ever party is in government the Civil Service is still there and continues to do what it does best - centralise decision making, enforce monolithic approaches and avoid innovation wherever possible.

Labour did manage to indirectly cripple the NHS with PFI which appeared to solve problems today merely at the cost of the long term which was someone elses's problem. Of course, they could have raised the money from taxes but why be honest with the voters when you can load on stealth taxes and off the books debt? Just in case this wasn't enough, they failed to run a fiscal surplus - and indeed increased national debt - during the boom years due to Gordon Brown ending boom and bust. Which turned out to be at best hubris.

As long as we just overlook this then I suppose we can just focus on how eeeeevil the Tories are.

~:smoking:

Actions taken under Labour government: Labour's fault.
Actions taken under Tory government: Civil service's fault.

Furunculus

04-21-2020, 11:33

Depends on what you mean by "this thread". If you're talking about this thread on this forum, I haven't raised it because I've tried to avoid it, as all and sundry have moaned at me about it. If you're talking about a thread of discussion, then the cutting of NHS funding has been a problem for the last 10 years of Tory government. The winter period has been a yearly crisis the likes of which were never seen under the previous Labour government. And according to you, reducing government spending to a determined percentage of GDP is one of the principal drivers of Brexit, to move us towards a more American model.

So, I ask, does the 2016 referendum result and the 2019 election result mean that cuts to government spending, principally NHS, should continue until it reaches the levels advocated by Minford? It has plenty of democratic backing, after all.

We spend £130+ billion a year on the NHS, and we have always spent on this level.
We are spending ever more as a percentage of total spending - when most other dept's take a hit in recent recessions.
We spend about 11% of GDP where comparable nations like Germany spend roughly 12.5%, and other nations spend similarly less than us.
We could spend more or less as political preferences dictate, but nothing justifies the quote below:

"There used to be a consensus among political parties that they wouldn't put forward anything actively harmful to the country."

Pannonian

04-21-2020, 12:20

We spend £130+ billion a year on the NHS, and we have always spent on this level.
We are spending ever more a percentage of total spending - when most other dept's take a hit in recent recessions.
We spend about 11% of GDP where comparable nations like Germany spend roughly 12.5%, and other nations spend similarly less than us.
We could spend more or less as political preferences dictate, but nothing justifies the quote below:

"There used to be a consensus among political parties that they wouldn't put forward anything actively harmful to the country."

Let me ask the question that this current affair has raised then. I've asked it before, but the government has answered one aspect of it since I last asked it. How will our food supply be next year? There have been no problems with our supply situation compared with the norm, but there have been problems at the user end anyway. We are currently in transition out of the EU, so our trade and supply situation is currently the same as before we voted to Leave. Once we practically leave, our UK-EU freight (which accounts for around 50% of our trade, including a similar proportion of our food imports) will drop by 95%. What will our food supply be like when that happens?

You can quibble and say that government has always been heartless, and thus the heartlessness of this current government is justified, and thus the above question about our food supply need not be answered. Or you can try and answer the question of how our food supply will be once we've practically left the EU.

Furunculus

04-21-2020, 12:32

Pannonian

04-21-2020, 12:59

seems irrelevant to the questions over whether tory funding for the health service goes beyond some implicit moratorium on putting forward policy agendas that are 'substantially' harmful to the welfare and well-being of the electorate...?

You were querying the fundamental point of the government not putting forward policy agendas that are substantially harmful to the welfare and well being of the electorate (to quote your post above).

1. The UK cannot wholly feed itself (source: NFU).
2. Around 50% or more of the UK's food imports come from the EU (source: numerous studies on the balance of trade between the UK and the EU).
3. The UK's freight will reduce from the current 30,000 lorry trips to 1,500 permits allocated to an outside country of our size (source: studies on logistics drawn up by the government that I posted last year).
4. The UK government will not extend the period of transition (source: recent announcement).

1 and 2 are currently the case. Because of 4, 3 will be the case. Do you disagree that reducing our trade with the EU by 95% will be harmful to our food security? If you agree that it is harmful, how would you describe point 4?

Furunculus

04-21-2020, 14:07

Seamus Fermanagh

04-21-2020, 15:28

Monty:

I was careful to NOT label Will or Boot as "real" conservatives. I believe both are, but there are differing views as to what conservatism is or should be. I recognize the point is arguable. I was labeling Trump as being NOT a real conservative. I think any real review of his record and decisions will show a disdain for anything except his personal authority. Trump panders to the worst elements of the reactionary fringe, has no guiding principles save those of the moment, and talks conservatism as a demagoguery to play to his deplorables base.

Will and Boot and even Buckley were all "flawed" as conservatives but attempt to evince and advance a mostly coherent set of conservative principles. The "current occupant" of 1600 PA Ave., has one principle he adheres to: "I'm a winner." THAT, he will adhere to under any all conditions, even those that directly contradict the 'principle' he thinks he embodies.

And, in more pandering to the base, Trump has suspended immigration (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-says-he-suspending-immigration-over-coronavirus-need-protect-jobs-n1188416). This is the nativist (and all too often also racist) dream -- and sadly ironic coming from the 'chosen' leader of the 'deplorables' and reactionaries (and even more vile types). After all, haven't Limbaugh and Hannity spent years decrying the Obama Administration for using Saul Alinsky tactics and taking advantage of any crisis to advance their political agenda regardless of the broader will of the people? This would constitute what? Wonder how Limbaugh will spin this...

Pannonian

04-21-2020, 21:56

two points in reply:
1. brexit isn't party policy - its electorate policy.
2. if europe [won't] meet our need for food imports - because of arbitrary quotas on trucking - then we will engage alternative import partners.
oh, and:
3. again, this is a diversion from the point quoted multiple times above, re: not doing substantial harm in relation to NHS funding.

What about the decision not to participate in the EU-wide procurement of ventilators? The electorate certainly didn't mandate that, as we didn't know about Covid-19 when the last election took place. It wasn't a policy recommended by the civil service. It was a political decision made by the elected government. Does that count as a government pushing something that actively harms the nation?

Beskar

04-21-2020, 22:33

:sweatdrop:

Texas lt. governor on reopening state: 'There are more important things than living'

RIP Strike for the South. Master wants his money.

Furunculus

04-21-2020, 22:45

What about the decision not to participate in the EU-wide procurement of ventilators? The electorate certainly didn't mandate that, as we didn't know about Covid-19 when the last election took place. It wasn't a policy recommended by the civil service. It was a political decision made by the elected government. Does that count as a government pushing something that actively harms the nation?

i'm sorry, but you're shifting the goal posts again - from major strategic electoral questions of what falls within this overton window of an acceptable policy platform (to seek election upon) - and operational decision making of a frankly tactical nature (within government).

at no point has the nhs fallen through capacity thresholds into crisis (covid or non-covid), and how much as a proportion of new capacity has this scheme even delivered (the joint eu procurement scheme on ppe has as yet delivered nothing).

i can quote the original statement again if any further clarity is needed?

Csargo

04-21-2020, 22:56

Texas lt. governor on reopening state: 'There are more important things than living'

RIP Strike for the South. Master wants his money.

:on_dark:

Montmorency

04-22-2020, 02:15

As I'm reading these articles I get the sense Sweden has a fairly anarchist-compliant culture, oddly enough.

This might be the main Swedish-language interface for coronavirus stats. Is there anything in here about testing (I can't read Swedish)?
https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/09f821667ce64bf7be6f9f87457ed9aa

Kim Jong Un is apparently indisposed. Some (https://twitter.com/TheEdMix/status/1252444800483315712) cute jokes (https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/04/worlds-second-worst-leader-may-now-also-be-brain-dead) about it:

Abbott: "Kim Jong Un is Ill."
Costello: "No, that was his father."
Abbott: "Yes, that was Kim Jong Il. I'm talking about Kim Jong Un."
Abbott: "That's the son."
Costello: "Yes, I know, he's Ill."
Abbott: "No! That's the father!"
---
Abbott: "Un's dad is Ill and grandpa, Sung.
Costello: "That was very rude"
Abbott: "What's rude?"
Costello: "Grandpa singing while his dad was dying"
Abbott: "No, Un is dying"
Costello: "Nobody is dying?"
Abbott: "Kim Jong Un is dying."
Costello: "WHAT!?"
Abbott: "He's on second"

[Poem from Trump to Kim]

I heard you're in some trouble, friend,
The news has made me sad.
Just know you are a special guy,
Second only to my Vlad.

I hope you get back on your feet,
And write me some more notes.
The things you tell me help a lot,
Like how to get more votes.

So Dear Leader hang in there,
I hope you get well soon.
Of all the Kims I've ever loved,
My heart's with Kim Jong-un.

Monty:

I was careful to NOT label Will or Boot as "real" conservatives. I believe both are, but there are differing views as to what conservatism is or should be. I recognize the point is arguable. I was labeling Trump as being NOT a real conservative. I think any real review of his record and decisions will show a disdain for anything except his personal authority. Trump panders to the worst elements of the reactionary fringe, has no guiding principles save those of the moment, and talks conservatism as a demagoguery to play to his deplorables base.

Will and Boot and even Buckley were all "flawed" as conservatives but attempt to evince and advance a mostly coherent set of conservative principles. The "current occupant" of 1600 PA Ave., has one principle he adheres to: "I'm a winner." THAT, he will adhere to under any all conditions, even those that directly contradict the 'principle' he thinks he embodies.

And, in more pandering to the base, Trump has suspended immigration (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-says-he-suspending-immigration-over-coronavirus-need-protect-jobs-n1188416). This is the nativist (and all too often also racist) dream -- and sadly ironic coming from the 'chosen' leader of the 'deplorables' and reactionaries (and even more vile types). After all, haven't Limbaugh and Hannity spent years decrying the Obama Administration for using Saul Alinsky tactics and taking advantage of any crisis to advance their political agenda regardless of the broader will of the people? This would constitute what? Wonder how Limbaugh will spin this...

Regardless of any conversation on who is more principled, my rant was meant to prevent from being submerged in mythology the alarming fact that Trump and Trumpism are not a mystery but an overdetermined output of formulaic Republicanism, what a handful of Cassandras have been wailing about for decades as the deepening Republican rejection of democracy and reason. A trend the current crop of veteran center-right commentators played a key role in cultivating.

I will always stress that without understanding how we got here there can be no escape.

Limbaugh can spin any way he wants, his audience will rationalize. He has always been one of many conscious operators. By now these operators are probably just as epistemically assimilated as the typical consumer of RWNJ media, but they are conscious of what they do and their political role nevertheless. Movement conservatism has always followed Alinsky's playbook far more, and more successfully, than liberals. Why do you think they know his name?

You asked a few years ago whether prosecuting Nixon would have been worth the national angst and conflict. Even then I had the vague sense your question was turning the issue on its head. The fact of consistent and persistent right-wing impunity and lawlessness with every single episode of Republican rule recursively demoralized the public, corrupted our institutions and culture, and emboldened the wrongdoers and their pupils to escalate their transgressions and belligerence.

The neoconfederate project of always writing the first draft of the historical record is an Orwellian one. There is no civic tranquility without breaking the spell for good. That means exposing the whole sordid genealogy. That means never allowing Never Trumpers to wax nostalgic for a "better" conservatism. No uncontested apologia. No memory hole.

See this David Frum tweet (https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1151669588808986624):

When this is all over, nobody will admit to ever having supported it

Then refer to the replies.

Greyblades

04-22-2020, 10:50

George Will and Max Boot. Conservatives and authors both. Both opting out of the GOP during the 2016 election. Mostly because they thought Trump was a demagogue, not a real conservative, and not prepared to lead at the level he was then seeking.

Nostalgic perhaps, but for me personal history as well. Unlike most of those on this site, I actually voted for Ronald Reagan for President. Reagan-esque conservatism had its problems -- the national debt increase that funded the military expansion that helped break the back of the Soviet economy was a huge debt hit for us in then-dollar terms and quite a few of our 'support any anti-soviet regime efforts were short-sighted -- but it was not the currently anemic foreign policy efforts of the Trump admin.

Today's crowd is full of bluster and bravado, "America is Great Again -- fear us!" with more-or-less none of the hard work of being a superpower being accomplished. Trump wants and expects us to be feared and respected while never having to actually intervene in anything or do the hard work of quiet and effective negotiation without kow-towing by others or personal accolades. He expects to have his cake and eat it too -- and we all know the historical track record of that.

I cannot speak for Reagan, before my time obviously. Can speak for Dubya, Mccain and Romney though.

America wasnt a superpower in the 90's, it was a hyperpower: the last man standing. It's economy unmatched, its influence supreme and what do the neocons do when they get thier hands on the reigns of that power? Squander it on chinese treasure, mexican sweat and muslim blood, all while leaving hearth and home to atrophy.

That Trump was apparantly too much for these men, when they stuck around with the Neocons doing then encouraging worse for two decades, its downright comedic.

rory_20_uk

04-22-2020, 11:29

Actions taken under Labour government: Labour's fault.
Actions taken under Tory government: Civil service's fault.

The former was an example of Party Strategy
The latter is an example of government implementation

See? They're different!

~:smoking:

ReluctantSamurai

04-22-2020, 16:35

Being a firm believer in the KISS principal (Keep It Simple, Stupid), I found this discussion from an emergency physician, and president of a company that teaches courses in intubation and airway management:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/20/opinion/coronavirus-testing-pneumonia.html?algo=top_conversion&fellback=false&imp_id=98223092&imp_id=165442834&action=click&modu

We are just beginning to recognize that Covid pneumonia initially causes a form of oxygen deprivation we call “silent hypoxia” — “silent” because of its insidious, hard-to-detect nature.

To my amazement, most patients I saw said they had been sick for a week or so with fever, cough, upset stomach and fatigue, but they only became short of breath the day they came to the hospital. Their pneumonia had clearly been going on for days, but by the time they felt they had to go to the hospital, they were often already in critical condition.

A major reason this pandemic is straining our health system is the alarming severity of lung injury patients have when they arrive in emergency rooms. Covid-19 overwhelmingly kills through the lungs. And because so many patients are not going to the hospital until their pneumonia is already well advanced, many wind up on ventilators, causing shortages of the machines. And once on ventilators, many die.

There is a way we could identify more patients who have Covid pneumonia sooner and treat them more effectively — and it would not require waiting for a coronavirus test at a hospital or doctor’s office. It requires detecting silent hypoxia early through a common medical device that can be purchased without a prescription at most pharmacies: a pulse oximeter.

Widespread pulse oximetry screening for Covid pneumonia — whether people check themselves on home devices or go to clinics or doctors’ offices — could provide an early warning system for the kinds of breathing problems associated with Covid pneumonia.

Reliable (+/- 2%) Pulse Oximeters can be had for less than $50 US.....:shrug:

Viking

04-22-2020, 18:05

Not designating and closing non-essential businesses in general is a major component. Most articles I've seen mention some of these features.

And that's not unique to Sweden. I've lost control of much of the rest of the continent (what were are the restrictions like in Germany, again?), so maybe we can find yet more examples there. If you mean not closing any 'non-essential' businesses, that might change things. Denmark and Norway shut some of these (like barbershops), while perhaps Sweden did not shut any (?).

Haven't seen a good media example in the last couple of days; though the video posted a couple pages ago displays a sentiment that reminds of what I have read:

the experiment that Sweden is doing is different from the rest of us

To which I would reply that things seem to be on a relatively smooth spectrum. The Swedish approach might be the most relaxed one among Western democracies, but without studying the details carefully, I get the impression that the approach in Belarus is much more relaxed..

Montmorency

04-22-2020, 19:39

https://twitter.com/MarcZenn/status/1251975162926227457

Very fitting, since dregs like these blocked hospitals and ambulances.

And that's not unique to Sweden. I've lost control of much of the rest of the continent (what were are the restrictions like in Germany, again?), so maybe we can find yet more examples there. If you mean not closing any 'non-essential' businesses, that might change things. Denmark and Norway shut some of these (like barbershops), while perhaps Sweden did not shut any (?).

Haven't seen a good media example in the last couple of days; though the video posted a couple pages ago displays a sentiment that reminds of what I have read:

Germany followed other countries in shutting down much "non-essential" business, to the point of needing to adopt payroll protection with similar goals as Denmark (in Germany, Kurzarbeit).

To my understanding Sweden (https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/03/24/sweden-coronavirus-open-for-business/) has not ordered any mass closing of businesses.

Word of the day: Dugnad

To which I would reply that things seem to be on a relatively smooth spectrum. The Swedish approach might be the most relaxed one among Western democracies, but without studying the details carefully, I get the impression that the approach in Belarus is much more relaxed..

I'm confident predicting that the dictator of Belarus will not prove to have handled his country's crisis well.

a completely inoffensive name

04-23-2020, 03:32

That Trump was apparantly too much for these men, when they stuck around with the Neocons doing then encouraging worse for two decades, its downright comedic.

Neocons fully believed that the powers exercised by the Bush admin were fully compatible with a reading of the Constitution that permits a unitary executive to make wide spanning decisive actions in many policy areas with only the limitations being what Congress and SCOTUS places on it.

Trump is too much for them because like we have been saying for 4 years now, he indulges in a very basic strongman mentality and bypasses Constitutional arguments with emotional arguments towards fascistic values (outsiders are bad, opposition is unpatriotic, rules undermine strength) to force his position. This is why neoconservative intellectuals have effectively split from the base, the former understand the implication of this new politics and the latter simply see a new type of politician.

The failing of neoconservatism boils down to this: A philosophy which holds character and ethics in politics as unimportant since raw power must be fought (i.e. elections) and argued (i.e. SCOTUS rulings) for within an existing legal framework will inevitably devolve into a philosophy that believes the legal framework itself must be tossed if elections and arguments cannot give them the power they want.

Anti-Trump conservatives are the most poignant in addressing the state of the GOP since they are the ones who felt this transition occur in front of them while mainstream America looked in from the outside in confusion.

Gilrandir

04-23-2020, 05:16

I'm confident predicting that the dictator of Belarus will not prove to have handled his country's crisis well.

The population of Belarus is 9.5 mln, the number of the infected is 7 281.
Just to compare: the populaton of Ukraine is circa 40 mln, the number of the infected is 6 592.

ReluctantSamurai

04-23-2020, 18:49

Just to compare: the populaton of Ukraine is circa 40 mln, the number of the infected is 6 592.

Very likely a big undercount:

https://www.kyivpost.com/ukraine-politics/disorder-shortages-undermine-large-scale-covid-19-testing-in-ukraine.html

As of April 23, Ukraine has conducted 67,520 tests, according to the Center for Public Health. But the center does not track the number of people who have been tested, only the number of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) analyses conducted. The number of tests per day is between 3,500 and 4,500, the center said. Many people, especially those who have the disease, are tested multiple times. Someone is considered recovered only after two consecutive negative PCR results. Doctors who spoke to the Kyiv Post estimate the actual number of people tested is much lower than the number of tests. Pavlo Kovtonyuk, a former deputy health minister under ex-Minister of Health Ulana Suprun, said that while Ukraine is “crawling in the right direction,” it has a long way to go until it starts doing the appropriate amount of tests. Given the number of potential contacts each infected patient has, the country should be doing thousands more tests per day.

Pretty much the same story as most areas of the world...:shrug:

Gilrandir

04-24-2020, 04:42

Very likely a big undercount:

https://www.kyivpost.com/ukraine-politics/disorder-shortages-undermine-large-scale-covid-19-testing-in-ukraine.html

Pretty much the same story as most areas of the world...:shrug:

So it is true of Belarus as well? Then we have to go by official figures. And they are not in favor of Belarus. So far.

Idaho

04-24-2020, 09:01

Looks like covid will soon be a thing of the past once we all start injecting bleach.

rory_20_uk

04-24-2020, 10:58

Looks like covid will soon be a thing of the past once we all start injecting bleach.

I hope Dopey Donald follows his own advice.

~:smoking:

Shaka_Khan

04-24-2020, 12:03

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cs6GL0Vv4Ag

At 5:17, she talks about the second wave of infections that occurred during the autumn of the 1918 pandemic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3x1aLAw_xkY

ReluctantSamurai

04-24-2020, 12:59

Then we have to go by official figures.

Most official figures are short by at least a factor of two, some initial studies claim an even higher miscount. Many cases go undetected, deaths occur outside the medical system, and then there all the convoluted ways that cases are counted and logged.

Gilrandir

04-24-2020, 13:55

Most official figures are short by at least a factor of two, some initial studies claim an even higher miscount. Many cases go undetected, deaths occur outside the medical system, and then there all the convoluted ways that cases are counted and logged.

Still, we don't have any other figures except the official ones. I suspect that both in Ukraine and Belarus they are played down. But in either case the incentives are different: in Ukraine the authorities are just terrified to announce the real figures (that is if they know them) not to scare the population even more.

In Belarus their autarch is explicitly sceptical about the existence of this disease (like a journalist interviewed him after a hockey match in which he took place and Lukashenka said: "When I was playing I didn't see any virus. Have you?" or when he reopened schools and said that masks for students are ridiculous) so the medical autorities of Belarus may be playing down the real figures because their leader says there is no virus.

ReluctantSamurai

04-24-2020, 17:15

in Ukraine the authorities are just terrified to announce the real figures (that is if they know them)

I would suspect both are true; terrified that the numbers are higher, and just as afraid that they are in the dark about just how many infections there are (which, except in a few select areas of the world, is the norm).

so the medical autorities of Belarus may be playing down the real figures because their leader says there is no virus

You think maybe Trump, Lukashenko, and Bolsonaro should just buy a remote island somewhere, gather all their rabid followers, and go live in their own fantasy world away from those with some sanity......:rolleyes:

Montmorency

04-24-2020, 21:23

OH NO
https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/1253451487415619586

https://i.imgur.com/8Sewveo.png
https://i.imgur.com/iLLZp9T.jpg

OH NO
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/why-did-so-many-new-yorkers-covid-19-wait-until-n1190111

Excess mortality for various locales.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronavirus-missing-deaths.html

Another very good resource.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs/

Survey (https://www.newsweek.com/only-1-10-americans-back-liberate-protests-poll-shows-1499053): 10% of Americans support ending social distancing. Now that's wingnut. I'm pretty sure you could poll higher support for deporting Muslims.

Heard from a Trumpist: 'The government should protect the people and do something to control food prices. Instead, the New York state government is only concerned with black welfare.' [Hint: States don't really have tools to regulate the prices of commodities and retail food, unless you would like to see Venezuela-style price controls on staple products. I hope the other layers of stupidity are readily evident.]

ReluctantSamurai

04-24-2020, 22:52

From the above NBC News link:

The experts and the data suggest the reasons are linked to the patients' home addresses — but also to effects of the virus on the body that have come into better focus only after six weeks of deaths. Many patients probably didn't know how sick they really were.

Which is why I believe the doctor in the previous NY Times article I quoted is on to something:

To my amazement, most patients I saw said they had been sick for a week or so with fever, cough, upset stomach and fatigue, but they only became short of breath the day they came to the hospital. Their pneumonia had clearly been going on for days, but by the time they felt they had to go to the hospital, they were often already in critical condition.

Covid-19 overwhelmingly kills through the lungs. And because so many patients are not going to the hospital until their pneumonia is already well advanced, many wind up on ventilators, causing shortages of the machines. And once on ventilators, many die.

By the time the 911 call is made, it's already too late.

If you haven't read the article, I highly recommend you do.

[Disclaimer] No I do not own stock in any company that manufactures oximeters [Disclaimer] ~;)

rory_20_uk

04-24-2020, 22:55

From the above NBC News link:

Which is why I believe the doctor in the previous NY Times article I quoted is on to something:

By the time the 911 call is made, it's already too late.

If you haven't read the article, I highly recommend you do.

In the USA, for many there's a massive incentive to not get seen by a Doctor. The cost will be crippling just as people have lost their jobs. So they battle along for as long as possible and yes, one can cope with a massive reduction in lung function.

But Freedom, right?

~:smoking:

Beskar

04-24-2020, 23:00

https://i.imgur.com/iLLZp9T.jpg

Well, would be one way the election leading to the Democrats winning...

Montmorency

04-24-2020, 23:25

By the time the 911 call is made, it's already too late.

As far as I can tell it sounds like a good proxy, but the providers would need to adjust too. I have been reading that people without severe symptoms tend to be turned away by providers even after they have called 911 and been transported to urgent care or the emergency room. Early detection of hypoxia is of limited usefulness where the response is 'Well, come back when you feel like you're dying.'

ReluctantSamurai

04-24-2020, 23:41

Early detection of hypoxia is of limited usefulness where the response is 'Well, come back when you feel like you're dying.'

Testing for hypoxia takes less than a minute, and while not the be-all-end-all of a prediagnosis, a very low spO2 reading should raise red flags. Every ambulance has an oximeter on board. Just sayin'......:shrug:

Montmorency

04-25-2020, 00:18

Testing for hypoxia takes less than a minute, and while not the be-all-end-all of a prediagnosis, a very low spO2 reading should raise red flags. Every ambulance has an oximeter on board. Just sayin'......:shrug:

My concern is, what's the process, and Tx? Someone self-examines and gets a reading of 85% without many overt symptoms. They take a car to the hospital to make a report (or maybe they call in first). It would be a relatively fortunate event for there to be a prompt examination of the patient, with oximetry, CT scan, and hopefully a COVID swab for better-equipped locations. AFAIK it would be even more unusual for such a patient, upon testing positive, to benefit from some early intervention (e.g. oxygen therapy).

I'm sure state governments and hospital administrations can figure it out, but I doubt self-advocating prospective patients will be the vanguard in changing procedures. Or maybe my information is too limited and hospitals are already doing aggressive screening and treatment of mild cases - but the practices and death rates I've read about for New York City suggest otherwise.

ReluctantSamurai

04-25-2020, 00:45

AFAIK it would be even more unusual for such a patient, upon testing positive, to benefit from some early intervention (e.g. oxygen therapy).

It would take some re-education of medical personnel, maybe? Obviously hypoxia can be caused by things other than SARS-2, but if I'm understanding what I'm reading correctly (and quite possibly I'm not), hypoxia is almost as good an indicator of infection as fever or dry cough:shrug:

Just when I thought I've seen everything about just how stupid, greedy, and completely oblivious some people can be to others of their species, there's this:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/23/politics/carolyn-goodman-anderson-cooper-las-vegas/index.html

It appears as though Goodman is offering up Las Vegas as a petri dish to see what happens when you open a major American city back up amid a pandemic. I'm not sure she has cleared this with the actual people who live in the city

https://www.8newsnow.com/news/local-news/mayor-carolyn-goodman-releases-statement-on-safely-reopening-las-vegas/

https://abcnews.go.com/US/las-vegas-mayor-slammed-suggesting-workers-covid-19/story?id=70306241

"I offered to be a control group, and I was told by our statistician that you can't do that because people from all parts of Southern Nevada come in to work in the city. And I said, 'Oh, that's too bad because I know that when you have a disease, you have a placebo that gets them water and the sugar, and then you get those that actually get the shot. We would love to be that placebo side so you have something to measure against.'"

I do believe there's nothing in the language of humans to describe this:wall:

Montmorency

04-25-2020, 01:34

It would take some re-education of medical personnel, maybe? Obviously hypoxia can be caused by things other than SARS-2, but if I'm understanding what I'm reading correctly (and quite possibly I'm not), hypoxia is almost as good an indicator of infection as fever or dry cough:shrug:

What I'm getting that is that by my understanding hospitals haven't been proactive enough about getting people treatment - during this pandemic, or perhaps more generally - before their cases turn critical (as opposed to turning them away or giving them antibiotics and a followup appointment or something). In that light, for oximetry screening to take off as an early warning I assume management would have to change their procedures a fair amount to be more proactive and permissive, even as hospitals are already under strain. Since a warning being actionable means you have to proceed to test, diagnose, and treat. It's certainly a question that demands professional insight into how hospitals are operating right now, which I lack.

I do believe there's nothing in the language of humans to describe this:wall:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong

ReluctantSamurai

04-25-2020, 02:51

https://twitter.com/wcwyt/status/1253743267633442818/photo/1

:bounce:

It's sure to make this list:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/29/18029280/consumer-product-safety-commission-twitter-memes-social-media-barks-mcwoofins-injuries

:laugh4:

ReluctantSamurai

04-25-2020, 16:04

For those living in the US, this is a pretty cool site for "the resilience of communities when confronted by external stresses on human health":

https://svi.cdc.gov/

Viking

04-25-2020, 16:46

Haven't seen a good media example in the last couple of days

Eventually a new example showed up (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52395866):

https://i.imgur.com/OCyF78j.jpg

Together with the UK, Denmark and Norway are described as having a "lockdown" while Sweden is not. In reality, the measures taken in both Denmark and Norway are much more similar to those taken in Sweden than to those taken in the UK.

You don't need a good reason to leave your house in either Denmark or Norway. I would describe the measures taken here as a partial shutdown; your appointment with the hairdresser might have been cancelled, but you can still go for a hike. You might be urged to not travel more than necessary, but that's also the case in Sweden.

Ultimately, the illustration is misleading.

From the above NBC News link:

The experts and the data suggest the reasons are linked to the patients' home addresses — but also to effects of the virus on the body that have come into better focus only after six weeks of deaths. Many patients probably didn't know how sick they really were.

Overlapping with the content of that article, I read in an article in a national medical journal that one thing that is unusual about this disease is how severe symptoms might not show up before the later stages of the disease.

I've also read how patients can progress rapidly from symptoms that appear to be of low or medium severity to high severity. This combination could explain the videos from China showing people collapsing in public. Those individuals probably did not know how severe their situation was, and their symptoms might have gone from just about manageable to severe or critical in a matter of hours, or maybe even minutes, as their oxygen levels dropped.

Montmorency

04-26-2020, 06:46

Man Just Buying One Of Every Cleaning Product In Case Trump Announces It’s Coronavirus Cure (https://local.theonion.com/man-just-buying-one-of-every-cleaning-product-in-case-t-1842493766)

Throwing bottles of bleach, ammonia, and Drano into a cart at his local grocery store, area man Troy Mitchell was reportedly stocking up on one of every cleaning product he could find Wednesday in case President Donald Trump announces it is a coronavirus cure. “I got toilet bowl cleaner, carpet cleaner, Swiffer WetJet refills—you name it—just so me and my family will be ready if the president announces one of these things can treat Chinese virus,” said Mitchell, indiscriminately throwing containers of laundry detergent, Scrubbing Bubbles, grout whitener, steel wool, Febreze, Tilex mold and mildew remover, and laptop screen wipes into the cart, the contents of which rang up to $2,513.67 at checkout. “I’m not getting caught without some oven degreaser should Trump say it’s going to save us, so I better go ahead and grab me a bottle. After this, I’m hitting the hardware store to pick up a 5-gallon bucket of roof sealant to make sure I’m prepared in the event that turns out to be what gets rid of the Wuhan. Could just be 10 or 20 squirts of Windex into each nostril. You never know what might work in a pinch!” At press time, neighbors confirmed Mitchell had been found unresponsive on the floor of his bathroom with several empty aerosol cans of Rust-Oleum wax-and-tar-removing solvent by his head.

3/25/20 2:18PM

Glitch in the matrix.

Ultimately, the illustration is misleading.

The terms "shutdown" and "lockdown" are broad enough to become misleading. The US is not like France and Italy; in addition to those areas where few measures have been taken, anyone anywhere can leave the home at any time for any reason, without the need for authorizing documentation. Depending on various personal characteristics, a dick cop might decide to harass you for not wearing a mask or not, allegedly, adhering to social distancing guidelines, but no more. As Furunc said, one has to be careful not to abstract too much when doing comparative analysis of pandemic responses.

Furunculus

04-26-2020, 09:33

"one has to be careful not to abstract too much when doing comparative analysis of pandemic responses."

as an anecdote to support this:

i have been taking my son for a ride up the river path out of town for an hour or two most days.
my wife works in the health service, and I am WFH - so he is left to occupy himself for roughly three days a week.
(oh how I laugh at all the nonsense about chillaxing at home and/or how easy homeschooling is!)

the aim of the game (as he is only five), is to get to a nice pebbly beach up-river where we can have a picnic, he can play with his toys and throw stones and have a paddle.
not exactly within the definition of acceptable exercise - but we are socially distanced so who cares as it is what he [needs].

the police spend most of their time moving people on from the seafront/harbour - sit down and they will wander up to you and have a polite chat - but they don't go much the other way out of town as there is 'nothing' out there.
well, last week, just as we approached the pebbly river beach we saw two coppers walking down on to it to talk to the half dozen parents kids down there, so we carried on riding as we saw no point in having a polite conversation.

when we came back the same way half an hour later, the police were still there having a chat with people on the river, and people were still happily enjoying the pebbly beach with there kids.
so the police weren't demanding everyone move on - they recognised that groups were 20m apart, mainly parents and kids, and that our rural part of the world has very few cases... and they responded appropriately.

frankly - i still think the UK approach is closer to Sweden than the countries that have attempted to crush the outbreak.
stated policy is to "squash the sombrero", and while health service capacity for covid19 has been massively increased the gov't seems extremely comfortable in using that capacity. and quite content to keep using that capacity at 95% for the foreseeable future!

so rather than crushing the outbreak and investing in track-n-trace to squash new outbreaks - the aim [remains] to keep processing the population through to the other side of antibody resistance as fast as that expanded health service capacity allows.
in this vein - i rather suspect that primary schools will reopen outside of urban hotspots after half-term. kids do not seem to 'suffer' much from covid and they do not appear to be very contagious - so they may well be the perfect vector to keep spreading low viral-loads around in the community.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/26/dominic-raabhints-special-guidelines-schools-lockdown/

Viking

04-27-2020, 22:18

Word of the day: Dugnad

I'm confident predicting that the dictator of Belarus will not prove to have handled his country's crisis well.

Speaking of dugnad and Belarus, Belarus held a national dugnad Saturday last week (https://www.dw.com/en/millions-take-part-in-belarus-civic-labor-day-amid-coronavirus/a-53243951), perhaps lending the virus a hand as well.

Yet, the precise role of outdoor spaces in the spread of the virus seems most uncertain at this time, so maybe the dugnad did not matter much.

Montmorency

04-28-2020, 05:09

Next excess deaths analysis: in 14 countries assessed, up to 60% (120K EDIT: Sorry, that's the total number of excess deaths, so 45K) more excess deaths than expected but not accounted for by confirmed CV19 deaths.
https://www.ft.com/content/6bd88b7d-3386-4543-b2e9-0d5c6fac846c

Reinfection vs. reactivation/relapse: recovered patients putative lack of immunity probably not a big problem, or at least it isn't in South Korea.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/coronavirus-quandary-patients-south-korea-200426235141488.html

Long article with more on how the West Coast's initial pandemic response was much superior to the East Coast's (i.e. New York). To Cuomo's marginal credit he actually stepped up and improved, which is a rare thing these days.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/04/seattles-leaders-let-scientists-take-the-lead-new-yorks-did-not

About the more general failure of American government and civilization.
https://www.salon.com/2020/04/27/american-vandal-trump-reveals-our-staggering-incompetence-before-the-whole-world/

O'Hehir rightly observes that empires inevitably collapse, but America's almost childlike inability to admit it even is an empire, even as it crumbles, may be unique in human history.
[...]
Now the country that sent men to the moon and brought them home again, all the way back in the 1960s, is a fumbling mess, unable to manage the simple logistics of getting supplies from one place to another or coordinating a national set of guidelines in a public health crisis. The vaunted CDC, long thought of as the greatest scientific disease research facility in the world, fumbled in making a test that had already been produced in other countries.
[...]
But it’s not just him, is it? The U.S. government seems to have lost its capacity to act, and the private sector is so invested in short-term profit-making that it’s lost its innovative edge. The result is that the United States of America, formerly the world’s leader in science and technology, now only leads the world in gruesome statistics and body counts.

It’s still unclear exactly why the CDC felt it had to make its own test when another test, created by a German lab, was already available. According to those in the know, Americans just don’t use tests from other countries, ostensibly because our “standards” are so high. Apparently, they aren’t. In this case, the test we created was faulty, causing weeks of delay, and there was some kind of contamination in the lab. How can this be?

The government’s inefficiency and ineptitude in producing, locating and distributing needed medical supplies, combined with Trumpian corrupt patronage toward his favored states, is staggering. Stories of FEMA commandeering shipments of gear that were already paid for by states, and governors having to bid against each other for supplies because the federal government refused to use its power to take control in a global emergency, are simply astonishing. The country that planned the D-Day invasion is incapable of coordinating the delivery of medical supplies to New York City?

Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a rising Republican leader, evidently wants to ensure that American never attracts any expertise again:

"If Chinese students want to come here and study Shakespeare and the Federalist Papers, that’s what they need to learn from America. They don’t need to learn quantum computing. It is a scandal to me that we have trained so many of the Chinese Communist Party’s brightest minds."
[Spoken like a true troglodyte.]

The rest of the world is moving on without us. This week 20 global leaders held a conference call pledging to “accelerate cooperation on a coronavirus vaccine and to share research, treatment and medicines across the globe.” No one from the United States was among them.

frankly - i still think the UK approach is closer to Sweden than the countries that have attempted to crush the outbreak.

That's debatable, but also subjective in that depends a lot on your value of "close." The UK imposed heavy restrictions on business operations (extended well into May), as did most of continental Europe. Sweden basically didn't at all. I don't know about Germany, but the main difference between France/Spain/Italy and either the UK or Sweden is that the former are much stricter about individual movement.

stated policy is to "squash the sombrero", and while health service capacity for covid19 has been massively increased the gov't seems extremely comfortable in using that capacity. and quite content to keep using that capacity at 95% for the foreseeable future!

Every country almost by definition has the same goal. But the tendency, after a spell, is to seek a less chaotic and lethal approach. These distinctions are measured in thousands of lives. Even in Sweden's example, as I understand it to the extent their strategy would be working (and it's not clear that it is) it is to the extent Swedes are obeying anarchist principles - non-coercion, independent concerted action toward common good - by individually deciding to drastically curtail consumer and commercial activity as a solidarity measure. (Very fascinating that Sweden's pandemic response has become a de facto case study in anarchism; I never would have predicted it.)

If you want a picture of shocking laxity however, look at Japan.

A source for UK healthcare capacity (beds? ventilators?) being used at 95%, please. I can't find anything from more recent than early April (though I did find some articles on UK's difficulty expanding testing).
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/world/middleeast/coronavirus-antibody-test-uk.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51943612
https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-why-isnt-the-uk-using-its-full-testing-capacity-11977115 [Seriously, how can the UK be testing below-par with a US state with 1/3 the population (with the exception of this past weekend)?]
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/uk-coronavirus-testing

But if true, it would be horrifying, comparable to Soviet shenanigans with the Chernobyl reactor configuration.

so rather than crushing the outbreak and investing in track-n-trace to squash new outbreaks - the aim [remains] to keep processing the population through to the other side of antibody resistance as fast as that expanded health service capacity allows.
in this vein - i rather suspect that primary schools will reopen outside of urban hotspots after half-term.

kids do not seem to 'suffer' much from covid and they do not appear to be very contagious - so they may well be the perfect vector to keep spreading low viral-loads around in the community.

That sounds grossly irresponsible. The whole premise of suppressing the outbreaks to the point of containment is so that we can buy time to establish these guidelines as the new normal:
https://www.propublica.org/article/coronavirus-advice-from-abroad-7-lessons-americas-governors-should-not-ignore-as-they-reopen-their-economies [Recommended for Samurai]

1. Contact tracing at scale.
2. Mass testing at scale.
3. Isolation of confirmed and suspected cases AWAY from family.
4. Protect health care workers
5. "Normalcy" is a mirage.
6. Be prepared for future waves.
7. Communicate clearly and truthfully with the public.

Allowing the virus to 'burn' through a population unchecked is national self-harm to a degree not even Johnson's government seems willing to contemplate.

Furunculus

04-28-2020, 09:14

"A source for UK healthcare capacity (beds? ventilators?) being used at 95%, please."

That is not intended to be factual statement. :) Merely to convey that available capacity is to be expanded and used, rather than left underutilised because we've squashed it SK stylee.

"That sounds grossly irresponsible. The whole premise of suppressing the outbreaks to the point of containment is so that we can buy time to establish these guidelines as the new normal:
1. Contact tracing at scale.
2. Mass testing at scale.
3. Isolation of confirmed and suspected cases AWAY from family.
4. Protect health care workers
5. "Normalcy" is a mirage.
6. Be prepared for future waves.
7. Communicate clearly and truthfully with the public. "

That's an interesting view, and yet the UK is not doing: #1 and #3.
There is clearly a difference between those countries that have attempted to squash the outbreak vs those those that have attempted to manage the outbreak.
And as you say, there is a continuum along that spectrum from sweden to taiwan, rather than an absolutist binary choice.
I merely suggest that UK sits closer to Sweden than is commonly recognised...
The UK doesn't even want to 'know' if you have Covid19 - merely stating that if during your self-isolation the symptoms become bad enough to require hospitalisation then please "give us a call".
Ringing your GP won't result in an appointment and an official diagnosis based on symptoms; "yeah, sounds like Covid, take a paracetamol and put your feet up."
Ringing 111 won't result in being sent to a testing centre; "please don't call this number unless your are struggling to manage at home, take a paracetamol!"
So from a management perspective the gov't doesn't know or much care about containing the outbreak, it's stats are purely focussed on NHS demand in order to calibrate NHS capacity.

"Allowing the virus to 'burn' through a population unchecked is national self-harm to a degree not even Johnson's government seems willing to contemplate. "

I would agree, but I have not suggested that anyone does or should follow such a policy.
If you presume - as I do - that there is no solution to this beyond a vaccination program that covers the whole population in approximately two years time, then any attempt to squash the outbreak - with massive contact tracing and full carrier isolation - while maintaining 'normal' economic activity is likely to resemble riding-the-clutch with countries lurching into and out of lockdown in a most disruptive manner. i.e. we'll all end up with similar numbers two years down the line (excepting where a health system has been overwhelmed), its just a question of how much damage the economy suffers in the interim.
What i describe 'might' be a smoother process of just managing the progression of the disease so economic activity can achieve a new equilibrium...

Seamus Fermanagh

04-28-2020, 14:37

Monty:

Liked your jibe at Cotton. The use of USA universities by many Asian countries has been a brain-drain for those countries. A notable percentage come here, learn, love our comparative freedom and lack-of-graft, and decide to make a future here.

Link (https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2018/05/10/number-of-foreign-college-students-staying-and-working-in-u-s-after-graduation-surges/)

Strike For The South

04-28-2020, 21:37

Texas lt. governor on reopening state: 'There are more important things than living'

RIP Strike for the South. Master wants his money.

I am essential. Been at work the whole time.

Montmorency

04-28-2020, 23:26

Behold

https://i.imgur.com/yZ2gWWu.png

the Holy American Empire. This is your correspondent from the Regional Advisory Council*. :cool2:

*Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island (and apparently Vermont??)

ReluctantSamurai

04-29-2020, 15:25

Kinda looks like this map, no?

https://www.nationalgeographic.org/photo/union-confederacy/#boundary-between-the-union-and-the-confederacy

Furunculus

04-29-2020, 15:42

an entertaining look at the malign effect of dominic cummings on uk covid19 policy response:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-28/top-aide-to-u-k-s-johnson-pushed-scientists-to-back-lockdown

#evil
#moreevilthantheorangeman
#theworst

Greyblades

04-29-2020, 18:24

Neocons fully believed that the powers exercised by the Bush admin were fully compatible with a reading of the Constitution that permits a unitary executive to make wide spanning decisive actions in many policy areas with only the limitations being what Congress and SCOTUS places on it.

Trump is too much for them because like we have been saying for 4 years now, he indulges in a very basic strongman mentality and bypasses Constitutional arguments with emotional arguments towards fascistic values (outsiders are bad, opposition is unpatriotic, rules undermine strength) to force his position. This is why neoconservative intellectuals have effectively split from the base, the former understand the implication of this new politics and the latter simply see a new type of politician.

The failing of neoconservatism boils down to this: A philosophy which holds character and ethics in politics as unimportant since raw power must be fought (i.e. elections) and argued (i.e. SCOTUS rulings) for within an existing legal framework will inevitably devolve into a philosophy that believes the legal framework itself must be tossed if elections and arguments cannot give them the power they want.

Anti-Trump conservatives are the most poignant in addressing the state of the GOP since they are the ones who felt this transition occur in front of them while mainstream America looked in from the outside in confusion.
The failing of neoconservatism boils down not to character and ethics but to adhiering to thier voters expectations.

I agree in practice they valued raw power over character and ethics. The issue isnt they were impeded from getting raw power by legal frame work, but that when it did get them power they used it against their voters interests in outright hideous ways.

They spend thier elections acting the good right winger: Secure the border, cut taxes, push american interests, uphold the constitution! Only to forget it the rest of the term; encouraging american industrial to be leached away by china, doing jack in the face of overflow from the perpetually failing mexican state (failure that thier drug war maintained, by the by) spending american blood and treasure toppling nations on dubious justification and taking a hatchet to civil liberties in every opportune moment national tradgedy gave.

I do not value their philosophical pandering over their actions, or inactions, thats what I share with the republican base and thats largely why it rejected them in favour of trump.

What gets me is this intellectual class: the people who espoused conservatism's principles found trump unbearable when in practice the neocons they persisted through were worse in nearly every fasion.

And why do they do that? Trump is abrasive and doesnt give them the lip service the neocons did.

It's a sad joke.

ReluctantSamurai

04-29-2020, 19:45

Something I thought was going to happen here in the States:

https://www.vox.com/2020/4/28/21239536/coronavirus-georgia-south-dakota-missouri-nebraska-rural-america

“The epicenter of this outbreak really has shifted into the smaller rural areas,” said Angela Hewlett, associate professor in infectious disease at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, in a recent Infectious Diseases Society of America briefing. And that’s a major problem, given that the health systems of many of these places are the least equipped to deal with a sudden surge in cases.

Most epidemiology models predict that initial peaks in less-densely populated states may still be weeks away, making understanding these kinds of nuances — and not relaxing social distancing prematurely — critical.

“When you have a large outbreak associated with an industry like the meatpacking industry,” Hewlett says, “then you can have a sustained community transmission.”

And couple that last statement concerning the meat processing industry with this:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52466502

Without strict adherence to safety guidelines - which are not currently being deemed "mandatory" by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration - it's not hard to picture new outbreaks at factories, or resurgences of the virus in factories that shuttered but reopen prematurely.

It's going to be a long, long summer.......:no:

Montmorency

04-30-2020, 02:48

A neat set of graphs from the excess deaths article if you didn't see it.

https://i.imgur.com/AhhjHfQ.jpg

The joys of being an island, like New Zealand...
('New Zealand anticipates eradication of Covid-19' (https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/covid-new-zealand-eradicate-chris-brown-cbc-1.5540021))

EDIT: Furunc should know that Sweden's (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/28/world/europe/sweden-coronavirus-herd-immunity.html) projected GDP annual contraction is 7%, more than projected for the US. That's what attends mitigation and social distancing of any form. Though in truth, regardless of what measures they do or don't take, every country on the planet can expect to be in recession at least. Sounds like an opportune moment for pursuing unprecedented robust transnational cooperation up to unionism, but what do I know.

[I]That is not intended to be factual statement. :) Merely to convey that available capacity is to be expanded and used, rather than left underutilised because we've squashed it SK stylee.

I hope it's obvious in concept why pricing in stability for a healthcare system operating continuously at near-peak capacity is inadvisable.

That's an interesting view, and yet the UK is not doing: #1 and #3.

1-3 flow into one another. Testing enables tracing enables isolation. Very few are doing 1 and 2, or are prepared do it, to the appropriate extent. I'm not aware of anyone doing 3 other than the well-known East Asian examples. On a very small scale some US localities have offered voluntary isolation quarters for confirmed or suspected cases, and this could certainly be expanded nationally. Even better with financial inducements, but the mere availability of reasonable accommodations (empty hotels abound!) with honest presentation of facts would ensure high voluntary uptake. Ah, this was something that should have been planned out in February.

4-7 are hard to grade, beyond the obvious no-mark countries. Apparently Ecuador of all places is leading on some aspects of 7.

What i describe 'might' be a smoother process of just managing the progression of the disease so economic activity can achieve a new equilibrium...

I can't comment on the UK's current healthcare protocols, but anything that sounds like "take the punch" should have us wary.

Ideally - assuming a worthwhile treatment in 2021 and a vaccine by 2022 - you want to minimize the death toll. That is achieved by limiting transmission to or below R0 = 1 for an extended period, which itself can be achieved by containing a national epidemic, by minimizing interpersonal contacts. Afterwards restrictions can be relaxed in a graduated fashion. What permits relaxed restrictions is the organization of a mass testing/tracing regime; without one in place containment will rapidly be lost and the country enters a disruptive shutdown cycle as you remark. (If there are tens or hundreds of thousands of concurrent infections, then tracing becomes both out of reach and superfluous.) Most of the world is unfortunately not well-placed to achieve these benchmarks, and even some of those countries that are well-placed are not realizing their advantages.

If we expect neither treatment nor vaccine by any foreseeable timeline, then even with vigilant travel quarantines all but the most successful countries can only stagger the death rates we all slouch toward (adjusted for population age and underlying condition distribution, baseline medical system, etc.). At least the experiences of Italy and others have been an education to individuals around the world.

In a bad scenario, sars-cov-2 dissolves into the viral landscape and merges permanently with the yearly flu season, considerably elevating the costs thereof.

And couple that last statement concerning the meat processing industry with this:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52466502

Good on you for mentioning what they're doing with OSHA. They've already waived an assortment of environmental regulations on an emergency basis. Their current plan is to limit business liability related to the pandemic (tort reform!).

a completely inoffensive name

04-30-2020, 04:07

The failing of neoconservatism boils down not to character and ethics but to adhiering to thier voters expectations.
I agree in practice they valued raw power over character and ethics. The issue isnt they were impeded from getting raw power by legal frame work, but that when it did get them power they used it against their voters interests in outright hideous ways.

I don't think this is true. But I don't blame you for thinking this; right wing media makes conservatives think they lose all the time so that people become more receptive to radicalization.

They spend thier elections acting the good right winger: Secure the border, cut taxes, push american interests, uphold the constitution!
Secure the border: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Fence_Act_of_2006
Cut taxes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_tax_cuts
American Interests: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Protection_Act / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_United_States_steel_tariff / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President%27s_Emergency_Plan_for_AIDS_Relief

Conservatives never looked to uphold the Constitution.

Only to forget it the rest of the term; encouraging american industrial to be leached away by china, doing jack in the face of overflow from the perpetually failing mexican state (failure that thier drug war maintained, by the by) spending american blood and treasure toppling nations on dubious justification and taking a hatchet to civil liberties in every opportune moment national tradgedy gave.
Half of this I have already shown above is false. The other half is revisionist history. Everyone approved of the War in Afghanistan. Conservatives and moderates approved of the war in Iraq. Everyone approved of the PATRIOT Act when it came out. They agreed with Guantanamo Bay. Public support collapsed for these things years later.

I do not value their philosophical pandering over their actions, or inactions, thats what I share with the republican base and thats largely why it rejected them in favour of trump.
Consider yourself fooled.

What gets me is this intellectual class: the people who espoused conservatism's principles found trump unbearable when in practice the neocons they persisted through were worse in nearly every fasion.
Leftists would disagree, and if that doesn't make you rethink your position you are simply in it for the movement not the meaning.

And why do they do that? Trump is abrasive and doesnt give them the lip service the neocons did.
With the exception of trade, Trump is still giving them everything they would want. Aggressive foreign policy to Iran, tax cuts, devolution of powers to the states, appointment of conservative judges.
There is another reason why they disagree, perhaps you should actually read what they say.

It's a sad joke.
Yeah, its sad how easily recent history is forgotten to continue the victim complex of conservatives.

Furunculus

04-30-2020, 07:40

A neat set of graphs from the excess deaths article if you didn't see it.

The joys of being an island, like New Zealand...
('New Zealand anticipates eradication of Covid-19' (https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/covid-new-zealand-eradicate-chris-brown-cbc-1.5540021))
good graphs, thank you.

EDIT: Furunc should know that Sweden's (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/28/world/europe/sweden-coronavirus-herd-immunity.html) projected GDP annual contraction is 7%, more than projected for the US. That's what attends mitigation and social distancing of any form. Though in truth, regardless of what measures they do or don't take, every country on the planet can expect to be in recession at least.

Sounds like an opportune moment for pursuing unprecedented robust transnational cooperation up to unionism, but what do I know.

i'm not sure why you are telling me - but thanks - given my principle argument is that this is a complex system with too many variables for anyone to [know] what the correct macro-strategy is (or for that to be deemed a template for any other country).

"Up to unionism" - would you expand on that?

I hope it's obvious in concept why pricing in stability for a healthcare system operating continuously at near-peak capacity is inadvisable.

no. it is not obvious, given the alternative might increase the likelyhood and impact of second/third peaks.

1-3 flow into one another. Testing enables tracing enables isolation. Very few are doing 1 and 2, or are prepared do it, to the appropriate extent. I'm not aware of anyone doing 3 other than the well-known East Asian examples. On a very small scale some US localities have offered voluntary isolation quarters for confirmed or suspected cases, and this could certainly be expanded nationally. Even better with financial inducements, but the mere availability of reasonable accommodations (empty hotels abound!) with honest presentation of facts would ensure high voluntary uptake. Ah, this was something that should have been planned out in February.
agreed, it is a continuum.

I can't comment on the UK's current healthcare protocols, but anything that sounds like "take the punch" should have us wary.

Ideally - assuming a worthwhile treatment in 2021 and a vaccine by 2022 - you want to minimize the death toll. That is achieved by limiting transmission to or below R0 = 1 for an extended period, which itself can be achieved by containing a national epidemic, by minimizing interpersonal contacts. Afterwards restrictions can be relaxed in a graduated fashion. What permits relaxed restrictions is the organization of a mass testing/tracing regime; without one in place containment will rapidly be lost and the country enters a disruptive shutdown cycle as you remark. (If there are tens or hundreds of thousands of concurrent infections, then tracing becomes both out of reach and superfluous.) Most of the world is unfortunately not well-placed to achieve these benchmarks, and even some of those countries that are well-placed are not realizing their advantages.

If we expect neither treatment nor vaccine by any foreseeable timeline, then even with vigilant travel quarantines all but the most successful countries can only stagger the death rates we all slouch toward (adjusted for population age and underlying condition distribution, baseline medical system, etc.). At least the experiences of Italy and others have been an education to individuals around the world.

and yet you do. :)

re: minimise the death toll - sure, as a statement of general principles - but this is a complex system with many, many variables:
as you note, NZ has an enviable social isolation (it also has a very low population density).
the UK does not have this advantage, given the following characteristics:
a nation with a very high populations density (england is about fourth densest in europe excluding micro-states)
at the heart of which is a global mega-city of ~15m, i.e. London.
and London is intimately connected to the rest of the world by a major hub airport - heathrow (as well as large international airports - gatwick and stanstead).

so i would suggest again that we need a little humility in recognising just how little we know, and won't know for some time to come, about both the:
1. efficacy of national strategies in minimising the death toll and economic damage over the medium term, and;
2. the portability of those strategies to other nations whose own strategies are deemed to have been less successful
Yes, we can point to a collapsed health system like northern italy, and yes we can point to poor communication like trump, outside of that it is too early to tell much.

WHO lauds lockdown-ignoring Sweden as a ‘model’ for countries going forward:
https://nypost.com/2020/04/29/who-lauds-sweden-as-model-for-resisting-coronavirus-lockdown/

Perils of early predictions based on poor assumptions:
https://twitter.com/PhilWMagness/status/1255700441985355776

Children may in fact be carrying the same viral load - despite showing less serious symptoms:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/30/coronavirus-scientists-caution-against-reopening-schools

Montmorency

04-30-2020, 23:10

Dumped potatoes and cars lined up at a food bank.
https://i.imgur.com/oshN5Qh.jpg

From my own 'original' calculations, based on crudely comparing preliminary antibody surveys against excess death estimates and confirmed death counts, I have figured the 'true' (i.e. global) IFR of CV19 to be 0.5%, more or less, and not really more than 1%.

This informal meta-analysis of available IFR studies around the world comes to a similar conclusion (though the range arrived at is 0.5-1.0% with a point estimate of 0.75%).
https://medium.com/@gidmk/what-is-the-infection-fatality-rate-of-covid-19-7f58f7c90410

"Up to unionism" - would you expand on that?

Just what's implicated by an economically and ecologically-interdependent world system.

Tangentially, it should be noted that global leadership on the worst pandemic in a hundred years has been vastly worse than that for smallpox, AIDS, SARS, malaria, Ebola, avian flu, swine flu...

no. it is not obvious, given the alternative might increase the likelyhood and impact of second/third peaks.

There is no way to engineer a scenario in which only a certain amount, but close to maximum, of healthcare capacity is committed in a time interval, because disease outbreaks can't be controlled so precisely and because labor and material resources will be depleted over time above replacement in such an intense environment. Trying to price in such a benchmark, which is to say make it doctrinal, would perversely lead to a very high risk of overrun without a lucky break in the qualities of the pathogen. Much better for there to be multiple low peaks, which is the consensus.

Not to mention, even, that the medical sector is not like a physically-abstracted machine; its function is not like a switch, where on one side of some threshold it functions perfectly, and on the other it fails. It is more like a real machine, in that it will be increasingly degraded the more it is abused. The 95% scheme is like planning to drive across the Sahara at 95% of a vehicle's rated top speed without stopping. A good way to get the engine killed in the middle of the desert, leaving you stranded. I guarantee the car fares better, and gets you across faster, if you pace it. Under any circumstances, a medical system fluctuating between 10-33% over a year would expect fewer deaths, fewer adverse outcomes in general, than one somehow constantly at 50%, and 99% is about as catastrophic as 101%.

Should be readily apparent.

and yet you do. :)

I'm not commenting on the facts of the matter about the NHS' current practices.

the UK does not have this advantage, given the following characteristics:

Airports are natural chokepoints if the controlling country has the will to do screenings. It could even throw up its hands and kill travel to buy time.

Density only becomes a problem with rampant community spread. It's possible to head it off in the first place, or, you know, lock down to limit spread, ramp up testing, suppress the outbreak, and staunch transmission below a threshold indefinitely.

The UK could absolutely look like New Zealand here with different choices.

Yes, we can point to a collapsed health system like northern italy, and yes we can point to poor communication like trump, outside of that it is too early to tell much.

There's more to say about Trump than "poor communication."

But I reject your seeming premise that the proof of the pudding must be in the stool. It is not impossible to assess an ongoing public health response, despite all the uncertainties. If that were the case then there would be no discerning how to act between random policies or a basis to make predictions - yet there is. And it is uniquely informative to have a whole region - Nordic - to compare against. That Norway, Denmark, and Finland are all clustered together for deaths per capita, but range from 6-10 times less than Sweden's, is a fact open to interpretation. But it must and can be interpreted. Anything else is deflection.

WHO lauds lockdown-ignoring Sweden as a ‘model’ for countries going forward:
https://nypost.com/2020/04/29/who-lauds-sweden-as-model-for-resisting-coronavirus-lockdown/

I think the fellow is being taken out of context a bit. His overall remarks were more balanced, and the locus of the praise came down to cultural exceptionalism (which is, as you say, not portable). The part about ramping up testing is questionable though, as Sweden (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-tests-per-thousand-since-5th-death) appears to be below European average, as of now, on tests per capita. Norway and Denmark (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/full-list-total-tests-for-covid-19?time=2020-03-16..&country=NOR+SWE+DNK+FIN+ISL) have, to their great exultation I'm sure, each tested more than Sweden despite being smaller (Iceland has like 3% of Sweden's population btw). The Swedish government has promised a ramp-up to 100K weekly (they've tested a little more than 100K so far); we'll see how they and the UK perform.

Perils of early predictions based on poor assumptions:
https://twitter.com/PhilWMagness/status/1255700441985355776

Models in general have underestimated the adjustments made by governments and individuals, as well as the typical fatality of the virus (see above, the pandemic probably can't kill more than 100K Swedes total). In the model linked, a new fact I learned is that 95% of Sweden's workplaces have 1-9 employees, which on top of ~40% single-occupancy households is a shocking sparseness for normal Swedish society. Sweden's low density outside Stockholm, plus the cultural attributes and practices, will also prove to have limited its spread so far.

It would be great though to have hard data on the behavior of Swedish consumers. Something like this (https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/_sRLnQLDzJcNKoPqeifS7OMjgmc=/0x0:2478x1954/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:2478x1954):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19915436/Screen_Shot_2020_04_21_at_12.42.24_PM.png) (restaurant bookings) for example. I'm not going to look it up, but I do recall seeing a visualization of mobility in Stockholm; the drop from normal movement was similarly-dramatic to New York's.

Furunculus

05-01-2020, 09:00

And yet...

... you will note - just as I do - that every single evening briefing from the gov't in the last week when questions of easing the lockdown arise say precisely this:

"our absolute ambition when considering how to ease the lockdown is that the R number must not rise above 1.0!"

Not "must stay below 0.5", or 0.7, or even 0.9!
No, the phrase used is "must not rise above 1.0".

So if the R number in the UK is considered right now (as of last night), to be somewhere between 0.5 and 0.7, then what they are looking to assess in the next week is which social isolation measures can be relaxed and ensure that we go no higher than every person in population right now with covid infects no more than one other person.

Not "with every measure we take we must ensure that the R number drops by X percentage for every X measure of time", or any similar such formula of words.

The wording is quite precise, and quite deliberate: "must not rise above 1.0".

The government seems quite content to cycle the population through the pandemic as quickly as NHS capacity will allow.

Population density map of europe:
23660

ReluctantSamurai

05-01-2020, 13:55

This is not going to end well:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/4/30/21243462/armed-protesters-michigan-capitol-rally-stay-at-home-order

At some point, a self-proclaimed Rambo (you've got three of them right there in the lead photo) is going to take issue with something a legislator says, or something a state trooper says, and a blood bath will ensue.

And yet:

As of April 30, Michigan has over 41,300 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and over 3,700 deaths

That's the third highest in the US. I am simply dumbfounded at the sheer stupidity of all this......:shame:

Seamus Fermanagh

05-01-2020, 14:11

And yet...
The government seems quite content to cycle the population through the pandemic as quickly as NHS capacity will allow.

There are epidemiologists who are asserting that this novel coronavirus, because of its easy communicability, will spread to roughly 2/3 of the global population over the course of the next 18-24 months. Vaccines normally take between 24-48 months to develop, test, and manufacture in quantity.

Presuming your assessment is correct, your government could argue that cycling the population through as quickly as possible is the rational response in a world where we all are going to get this anyway.

ReluctantSamurai

05-01-2020, 17:37

It's increasingly frustrating to me to see the continued Don't Tread On My Rights while I continually Tread On Yours mentality occurring on a weekly basis here in the States. So I did a bit of digging and found this:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3582626

I have several problems with this study not the least of which is its' limited scope, and the lack of inclusion of minorities. It's also hard to determine whether this study crosses the urban/rural divide so prevalent here. And it is not peer reviewed, as of yet. Having said that, there are some interesting points raised, and I hope there will be more follow-ups to come.

I don't pretend to understand all the statistical jargon, but I think I get the general gist. Read the whole paper if you have the time, or if you don't trust my following Cliff Notes to be unbiased.

Results indicated that gender, health issues others, trust in science, and trust in media were significantly associated with compliance. More specifically, women, people who knew someone with health issues, and people with higher levels of trust in science and media reporting showed greater compliance with COVID-19 mitigation measures. Age and personal health issues were not related to compliance.

Results indicated that specific moral alignment, negative emotions, and impulsivity showed significant associations with compliance; participants who more strongly believed people should follow the COVID-19 mitigation measures, who experienced more negative emotions, and who were less impulsive, showed greater compliance with the COVID-19 mitigation measures.

Results indicated that these measures all showed significant associations with compliance; people that had greater ability to comply, perceived the measures to be clearer, and had less opportunity to violate. All showed greater compliance with the COVID-19 mitigation measures.

the more participants indicated that they only obey the authorities handling the Coronavirus because they are afraid of them, the less they complied.

The results revealed that political orientation was not associated with compliance. (notsure I agree with this as many polls show that political leanings DO influence compliance---see my following post)

This shows that what really matters for compliance is not whether people think the measures are appropriate or necessary to protect themselves or loved ones, but rather whether they hold the belief that morally people should comply. Overall, it shows that at this time, moral support for the measures does play a role in compliance.

within the American population, there are individual differences in compliance. People who are more impulsive are less likely to follow the measures. This is important knowledge, as it supports measures that make it practically harder to refrain from social distancing, for instance the measures in New York City where basketball hoops were removed.

The more individuals fear the authorities enforcing the measures, the more they disobey the measures, likely in a form of rebellion to authority they deem to be coercive.

And some conclusions:

Social norms and moral views appear to shape compliant behavior more strongly than political orientation. Only time will tell whether this will remain true in light of the recent politically-laden protests in states like Michigan and Arizona. That is, it is possible that the impact of political views on compliance may be changing with time; initially, it may have been strongly associated with compliance during March, weakly associated during early April, and increasingly associated during mid-to-late April, exhibiting a U-shaped curve. For the long run, we speculate that maintaining current levels of social distancing will become increasingly difficult. It is likely that governments, in light of economic and societal demands, will lift some of the restrictions on public spaces, thereby increasing opportunities for people to gather. Unfortunately, opportunity to break rules was consistently associated with non-compliance, and lifting restrictions will inherently create opportunity. As people see the number of infections and deaths decrease as a result of the initial measures, they will likely have less substantive moral support for compliance with the measures. Also, we expect that the longer people have to maintain social distance and stay at home, the higher the costs of compliance will become. At some point, this may undermine their capacity to comply, as they potentially lose income or even housing. We speculate that at that point, the measures themselves may spur negative emotions, which will enable people to cope through offending. Once more people start to offend, social norms will start to shift and non-compliance may normalize.

Non-compliance due to shifting social behavior is the most worrysome part. Risks starting the whole process all over again.

ReluctantSamurai

05-01-2020, 18:04

AFAIAC, politics are playing a big part in "anti-lockdown" protests:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/26/devos-family-michigan-protest-rightwing-donors

It was a Michigan organization that has landed DeVos in the news over the past two weeks. The Michigan Freedom Fund, which “fights to champion conservative policies on behalf of Michigan taxpayers” – including lower taxes – helped promote a rally in Michigan against the state’s stay-at-home order. The MFF, which is chaired by Betsy and Dick DeVos’ longtime political adviser, Greg McNeilly, helped promote, rather than organize, the Michigan rally. But the MFF exists, in large part, due to the DeVos family’s largesse.

This is certainly no co-incidence coming less than a day after the latest protests in Lansing:

Trump is once again weighing in on the anti-stay-at-home protests that have been popping up across the country, suggesting Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer should “make a deal” with the demonstrators. “The Governor of Michigan should give a little, and put out the fire,” Trump wrote in a tweet. “These are very good people, but they are angry. They want their lives back again, safely! See them, talk to them, make a deal.” The president’s tweet comes one day after protesters descended on the Michigan capitol in Lansing to rail against Whitmer’s stay-at-home order. A number of the demonstrators were photographed carrying assault rifles, causing alarm among the legislators who were at the Capitol.

Fearless Leader is definitely afraid of losing Michigan come November....:creep:

Montmorency

05-02-2020, 03:57

The US has reached up to 1.5 million tests weekly. If we can get that to daily I will call it an accomplishment, but it sounds hard with effectively nil federal component. Meanwhile, New York has dropped from its peak of a quarter of daily US tests (and far more cumulative) to 1/7 cumulative and a similar proportion daily.

At first I thought face coverings and surgical masks were hardly useful in a clinical setting, and useless outside it. Then I was embarrassed for thinking so after encountering research touting the effectiveness of face coverings, especially in combination with other measures, at reducing disease transmisson. Soon after reading about this the CDC changed its recommendations to include face coverings in general public settings. Then I read that there is basically no evidence for face coverings reducing transmission of respiratory disease outside of healthcare settings. Now, I'm reading that surgical masks specifically are actually contributing to infection in healthcare workers. AAaahaghghghkghre
https://khn.org/news/widely-used-surgical-masks-are-putting-health-care-workers-at-serious-risk/

On expanded unemployment insurance and labor consciousness:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-relief-often-pays-workers-more-than-work-11588066200

oughly half of all U.S. workers stand to earn more in unemployment benefits than they did at their jobs before the coronavirus pandemic shut down swaths of the U.S. economy, a result of government relief that employers say is complicating plans to reopen businesses. The package of coronavirus stimulus laws Congress passed and President Trump signed in March included a $600 boost to weekly unemployment benefits through July 31. As that support is added to state benefits over the coming weeks, the average weekly payment to a laid-off worker should rise to about $978 from the nearly $378 the Labor Department said was paid on average late last year. Qualified workers will receive the government payout every week through July, and in most cases, the combined $978 weekly payout amounts to better pay than what many workers received before the crisis hit. Labor Department statistics show half of full-time workers earned $957 [median weekly income] or less each week in the first quarter of 2020.

Tracy Jackson, 50, of Nacogdoches, Texas, started receiving unemployment benefits after losing her job as a cook at a college. Her benefits total $1,200 every two weeks, almost twice what she would earn on the job.

She wants to return to work, but being stuck at home has given her time to reflect. The extra money she receives in unemployment benefits has made her conclude she had been underpaid at her previous job, earning $10.30 an hour after five years.

“I like the college, I really do,” she said. “But they’re going to have to come with more money. If they don’t, I’m not going to be there.”

You love to see it. (Of course, UI expansion expires in the summer and in a mass-unemployment environment near-literal beggars can't be choosers - just how employers like it.)

The wording is quite precise, and quite deliberate: "must not rise above 1.0".

The government seems quite content to cycle the population through the pandemic as quickly as NHS capacity will allow.

So, I don't understand - your preferences are not met by this policy, which are closer to my own and the general scientific consensus, because the whole point is that it slows down the incidence (in the proper sense) among the general population.
?????

According (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/what-r-value-mean-coronavirus-lockdown-uk/) to a pre-print study from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine published at the start of April, the average number of people an individual comes into contact with each day dropped by 73 per cent since the UK’s lockdown began.

“This would be sufficient to reduce R0 from a value from 2.6 before the lockdown to 0.62 during the lockdown, indicating that physical distancing interventions are effective,” the study, which tracked over 1,300 adults and has not yet been peer reviewed, concluded. The government's more recent estimates have since backed up this data.

So if it is working, why are not out of lockdown yet?
The R0 is not the only figure the government is tracking. It is also making sure that the pandemic does not overwhelm the NHS, looking for a "sustained and constant" fall in death rates, ensuring there is enough personal protective equipment (PPE), and finally, being confident that any changes do not risk another peak.

In Germany, where some lockdown measures were lifted once the R value made it to 0.7 - with some shops reopening, for example - R0 has crept back up to around 0.76, the head of the country's Robert Koch Institute on said on Thursday.

As such, its government plans to keep many social distancing measures in place for a longer period than initially expected. It is likely that the UK, too, will have to walk a similar tightrope, lifting some restrictions while keeping a close eye on R0 and cases, and adapting its plan depending on what happens.

Presuming your assessment is correct, your government could argue that cycling the population through as quickly as possible is the rational response in a world where we all are going to get this anyway.

Even in a world with no treatment or vaccine, slow and steady wins the race. Well, "win" isn't the right word.

The UK and Sweden both agree in principle. China agrees. The Jews agree. (Not sure about the Dutch...)

This is not going to end well:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/4/30/21243462/armed-protesters-michigan-capitol-rally-stay-at-home-order

At some point, a self-proclaimed Rambo (you've got three of them right there in the lead photo) is going to take issue with something a legislator says, or something a state trooper says, and a blood bath will ensue.

At some point we need to enforce the understanding that terrorism is not protected speech. We've long been clear on this when it comes to the boogeyman of "radical Islamist terrorism."

AFAIAC, politics are playing a big part in "anti-lockdown" protests

Interesting study in how it dovetails with other work on social trust and lack thereof.

We might make a distinction here between personal compliance with guidelines in practice, and political opinions about the guidelines. There won't necessarily be perfect alignment. And speaking of impulsivity, in Georgia (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/us/coronavirus-georgia-oklahoma-alaska-reopen.html) last week:

“I still say stay at home,” said Amanda Jackson, a customer and a nurse at the public hospital downtown. But she made an exception for her birthday — to get a tongue piercing.

I agree with the potential of social deconditioning leading to increasing non-compliance, since much of compliance will follow from that referenced moral intuition, reinforced by perceptions of 'what others people are doing.' It's a general mechanism. A little "cheating" degrades into complacency, and the less positive modeling there is to be observed (or incentivized) the faster the process.

But in principle the overwhelming support for stay-at-home policy is still there. You will be very interested in the following:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/04/27/those-whove-lost-work-or-pay-virus-still-broadly-support-stay-at-home-measures/

https://i.imgur.com/vj9Qfjy.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/f0wboPQ.jpg

We have almost never been this united as a country. America's closed, and don't let the jackals out front tell you otherwise.

Montmorency

05-02-2020, 04:31

Illinois.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EW9_t6GUYAEyLvg.jpg

Tennessee.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EWcgbIoXkAA923A.png

Sounds oddly familiar.

CrossLOPER

05-02-2020, 06:39

This is not going to end well:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/4/30/21243462/armed-protesters-michigan-capitol-rally-stay-at-home-order

At some point, a self-proclaimed Rambo (you've got three of them right there in the lead photo) is going to take issue with something a legislator says, or something a state trooper says, and a blood bath will ensue.

And yet:

That's the third highest in the US. I am simply dumbfounded at the sheer stupidity of all this......:shame:
I never understood why liberals never just brought their own guns.

Furunculus

05-02-2020, 07:35

Uk looks to relax the 2m rule to help with easing lockdown measures (inc schools):
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/05/01/two-metre-rule-reviewed-amid-hope-relaxed-restrictions-could/

The difference between national 'success' rates:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/01/britain-ended-one-worst-world-fighting-coronavirus-experts/

Prof Keith Neal, Emeritus Professor of the Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases, University of Nottingham

I believe that comparing epidemics between countries is erroneous. I say epidemics despite, because although it has been called a pandemic, we are seeing essentially lots of epidemics in different nations, and in different regions.

There are a lot of different dynamics, and there is a genuine uniqueness both between counties, within countries. And the number of travellers is important too. Someone pointed out put the other day that the death rate is so much lower in Ireland .

This is partly because Ireland’s population is 1/13 the size of ours with 1/13 the number of international travelers.

The UK is also home to more people than France, or Spain. Germany has been held up as an example of an effective response, with a similar population to the UK. But we must consider that the population of Berlin is 3.8 million, and London is home to nine million.

Add to this the issue of having the busiest airport in Europe right next door at Heathrow, and a more nuanced set of problems begin to defy direct national comparison.

Now to get the global financial centre of London, travellers will enter one of the busiest public transport networks in Europe. And it must be realised that the virus in all probability entered this unaware and particularly vulnerable ecosystem of mass transit and international visitors long before the alarm was raised in China.

New Zealand has been praised, but they are in far greater isolation, and have longer to prepare. There will always be people who say you can go into lockdown a week earlier, or a week earlier than that - then that will be too early!

We will only know how everybody has fared when this is over, and excess mortality rates have been calculated.

ReluctantSamurai

05-02-2020, 10:56

“To think I’m going to work and am leaving this mask at home on my kitchen table because the employer won’t let me wear it,” Scott said. “You feel sacrificial in a way.”

This doctor was asked to sacrifice a bit too much:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/27/nyregion/new-york-city-doctor-suicide-coronavirus.html

Probably going to see much more of this, especially when round II arrives....

At some point we need to enforce the understanding that terrorism is not protected speech.

I never understood why liberals never just brought their own guns.

By what, bringing a shitload of LEO's or the military? The ensuing bloodbath would give these idiots exactly what they want.....publicity. Wanna shut them down? Stop plastering their "Fake Protests" in the media. These people are much like their Fearless Leader---they suffer from attention deficit.

America's closed, and don't let the jackals out front tell you otherwise.

You can't continue to be closed indefinitely. At some point, the nation has to resume life, albeit at a different normal. You can't wait until the R0 figure gets to zero, because that will never happen.

Viking

05-02-2020, 14:11

Even in Sweden's example, as I understand it to the extent their strategy would be working (and it's not clear that it is) it is to the extent Swedes are obeying anarchist principles - non-coercion, independent concerted action toward common good - by individually deciding to drastically curtail consumer and commercial activity as a solidarity measure. (Very fascinating that Sweden's pandemic response has become a de facto case study in anarchism; I never would have predicted it.)

You have instructions from a state institution in combination with legal enforcement of specific measures. Behind the instructions is also an implicit threat that more legal enforcement could start if the spread of the virus is not adequately contained. It is pretty far removed from anarchy.

CrossLOPER

05-02-2020, 23:45

at a different normal.
This requires centralized planning and execution, of which there is none at the moment. The president advocated injecting Lysol and UV irradiation, and is still marketing a miracle happening. McConnell is advocating protecting businesses from being sued in case the second wave ends up claiming tens of thousands of more lives.

The US is in a worse position administratively than most "developing" nations.

By what, bringing a shitload of LEO's or the military?
It was a joke, but I still don't understand why this is allowable.

I swear, Americans are so afraid of government that they weakened theirs to be of any use. It's a path down Greek city-statism where everyone is in their own corner doing whatever they feel like.

ReluctantSamurai

05-03-2020, 01:02

The US is in a worse position administratively than most "developing" nations.

At the federal level, yes. The states banding into local groups, not as much. Testing is still a problem, and the virus is just beginning to burn through the rural areas. If our Fearless Leader was any kind of a leader at all, the testing could be brought under better control if the federal government used its' considerable powers to take control of procuring the necessary testing.

It was a joke, but I still don't understand why this is allowable.

And neither do I. I can understand the right to bear arms, but exactly what is the purpose of allowing people to bear arms (and assault rifles, at that) in a place of government? To shoot a legislator if you don't agree with them? It's insane~:confused:

Montmorency

05-03-2020, 04:21

Another Trumpian Leader is hopefully on the verge of suffering political consequences.
https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/28723/in-brazil-bolsonaro-is-writing-his-political-obituary-with-covid-19

The coronavirus pandemic has so far proven to be a boost for many autocratic leaders around the world, who have managed to exploit the crisis to expand and tighten their hold on power. But the situation is different for at least one far-right demagogue, for whom the pandemic is shaping up to become the key line in his political obituary: Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.

The political future of a president who has been called the “Trump of the Tropics” now hangs in the balance as Bolsonaro continues to actively exhort Brazilians to reject public health measures, even as the number of COVID-19 cases in the country climbs rapidly. In recent days, Bolsonaro has lost two of the most popular members of his Cabinet in circumstances that left him politically wounded. Now, the Supreme Court is looking into allegations—from Bolsonaro’s own justice minister—that the president meddled with the police and obstructed justice, a move that could ultimately sink his presidency.

Each day, it seems, brings a new development in the troubles swirling around Bolsonaro. Some are not directly related to the pandemic—like his move to appoint a new, politically pliant head of the national police, allegedly to protect his family from accusations of corruption. But his evident mishandling of the coronavirus crisis has put his incompetence and demagoguery in full view, magnifying the impact of scandals of his own making. The possibility that Bolsonaro will end up being impeached and removed from office is now very real.

Like many populists, Bolsonaro spent months denying and downplaying the threat posed by the virus. He called COVID-19 a “measly cold,” uttering a slew of nonsensical arguments, including the claim that Brazilians are uniquely protected because they can swim in raw sewage and “don’t catch a thing.”

He was one of the last populist leaders anywhere to acknowledge the threat of the coronavirus. But even then, in a televised speech in late March, he rejected the widely accepted prescription of social distancing and quarantine-like measures. In terms similar to those used by President Donald Trump in his rambling and incoherent White House appearances, he has said the measures against the virus cannot be worse than the illness. Just days ago, Bolsonaro joined a controversial pro-military demonstration against the stay-at-home orders that he has been unable to thwart.

By now, it is obvious that Bolsonaro was wrong in dismissing the risk of the pandemic. The deaths of more than 5,000 Brazilians have been officially attributed to COVID-19, and Brazil has the second-highest number of reported cases of the virus among countries in the Western Hemisphere, after the United States.

The situation would be even more dire had it not been for other government officials, along with Brazilian citizens themselves, who rejected Bolsonaro’s quack views and moved to follow the recommendations of public health experts. They did it as Bolsonaro accused the media of “tricking” the public to stoke panic and recommended unproven malaria drugs, just as Trump did. State governors defied Bolsonaro. Brazil’s most populous states, following the experts’ advice, ordered quarantines, and the public sided with them.

Then Bolsonaro locked horns with his own health minister, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, who had become a focus of national admiration with his own regular, public briefings. The situation became untenable when Mandetta publicly called for a unified public message, essentially suggesting that Bolsonaro should fall in line. The president fired Mandetta in mid-April, a shocking move in the midst of a public health crisis. By then, Mandetta’s approval rating had soared to 76 percent, more than double Bolsonaro’s dismal 33 percent.

But that was just the beginning. Brazilians were even more shocked when Justice Minister Sergio Moro—a star in Bolsonaro’s Cabinet—resigned in protest last week, accusing the president of firing the country’s top police chief in an effort to protect his sons from criminal investigation and gain access to classified information. Moro’s resignation could not have been more dramatic, since it came in an extraordinary speech in which he detailed the devastating accusations.

That it was Moro who lodged the accusations magnifies their impact immeasurably. The now-former justice minister had near-mythical status in the country, having led the sprawling anti-corruption investigations known as Operation Car Wash that rocked Latin America and resulted in the imprisonment and resignation of presidents, ministers, members of Congress and prominent figures in countries across the region, including Brazil.

By appointing Moro justice minister, Bolsonaro had cemented the central theme of his election campaign: that he would battle entrenched corruption. Now Moro accuses him of being at least as corrupt as any of his predecessors.

Police have Bolsonaro’s sons in their sights. Flavio and Carlos, both politicians, are under investigation for embezzlement, with new and damning stories surfacing in the media regularly. In the most recent bombshell, the daily Folha de Sao Paulo reported that police have accused Carlos Bolsonaro of running a fake news ring to disseminate misinformation. The president denies all the accusations.

Bolsonaro also denies Moro’s accusation that he fired the national police chief so he could appoint someone who would acquiesce to illegal requests. As president, he said he has the right to hire anyone he wants as head of the national police. But Moro provided the press with screenshots of messages he received from Bolsonaro that back his claims.

The question now is what will happen to Bolsonaro. The Supreme Court is launching an investigation into Moro’s allegations that the president was engaging in obstruction of justice. The popular pot-banging demonstrations in cities and towns across Brazil, which started as a protest against the government’s inaction on COVID-19, have turned into a ritual call for Bolsonaro’s impeachment, and they are gaining strength.

Bolsonaro appeared in public on April 19 to support a pro-military protest in Brasilia where some of his backers urged him to reinstate a 1968 law that allowed the president to dismiss the Congress and essentially become a dictator. Bolsonaro has been an avowed admirer of Brazil’s past military dictatorships and has taken care to maintain close relations with the military, which he sees as a good insurance policy.

But the military was reportedly uncomfortable with the recent demonstration, which was strategically staged in front of the army’s headquarters. Former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso tweeted his criticism of Bolsonaro, saying it was “deplorable” that he joined anti-democratic protests. “Time to unite,” he wrote, “against all threats to democracy.”

The difference between national 'success' rates:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/01/britain-ended-one-worst-world-fighting-coronavirus-experts/

I'm just not clear on what bounds are placed on this sort of logic.

It is possible that countries cannot be compared to countries. It is possible that we cannot assess the differences between what is going on in London and what is going on in Dublin, or London and Manchester, or New York and Newark. It is possible that nothing is like anything and knowledge of the world is inaccessible or unavailable. But with all due respect, to the extent we do not take this posture to everything else in life, we should reject the kind of dismissive stance that because complex factors must be taken into consideration as to the effects of public health measures, we cannot have a consideration in the first place. With this mindset it would never have been possible for us to develop a body of public health expertise, which is very much reliant on comparison of practices and outcomes across time and place.

Now, I'm sure no one takes the kind of extreme stance I alluded to, but something approaching it does tend to be deployed as a sort of convenient deflection. It's so on the nose that Professor Neal's section of the article was headed by "Just bad luck?" I mean come on. As though having cities and airports makes a country incomparable to another country, despite the very predicate being that comparison. It's incoherent.

I believe that comparing epidemics between countries is erroneous. I say epidemics despite, because although it has been called a pandemic, we are seeing essentially lots of epidemics in different nations, and in different regions.

That's literally what a pandemic is. 'You say pandemic, I say [pænˈdɛmɪk]'

By what, bringing a shitload of LEO's or the military? The ensuing bloodbath would give these idiots exactly what they want.....publicity. Wanna shut them down? Stop plastering their "Fake Protests" in the media. These people are much like their Fearless Leader---they suffer from attention deficit.

Oh, the media should cover the protests. But they should call them terrorist incidents and cover them as such. They should explain who has organized them, and how their strings emanate from the Trump cabinet itself.

And they should prominently display the image of armed and angry men storming our public institutions (whichever version (https://twitter.com/travisakers/status/1256299745032769543) fits the tone), alongside clips like these:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kkBseVTUow

You can't continue to be closed indefinitely. At some point, the nation has to resume life, albeit at a different normal. You can't wait until the R0 figure gets to zero, because that will never happen.

We may well go forward into the summer having little to show for the time passed. Not enough testing, chaos among providers, no advent of national coordination. What do we do then? I can't answer that. It's tough to bear a sense that what we're doing is futile and our rulers are indifferent to suffering.

I'll accord Newsom and Cuomo the benefit of the doubt that their road maps are appropriate to our respective jurisdictions. I don't know what the prospects for the rest of the country are.

You have instructions from a state institution in combination with legal enforcement of specific measures. Behind the instructions is also an implicit threat that more legal enforcement could start if the spread of the virus is not adequately contained. It is pretty far removed from anarchy.

Anarchism the political philosophy, not in the colloquial sense.

Furunculus

05-03-2020, 09:18

I'm just not clear on what bounds are placed on this sort of logic.

It is possible that countries cannot be compared to countries. It is possible that we cannot assess the differences between what is going on in London and what is going on in Dublin, or London and Manchester, or New York and Newark. It is possible that nothing is like anything and knowledge of the world is inaccessible or unavailable.
Of course there are bounds - i am already on record as saying that Britain's approach [remains] closer to that of sweden than many people appreciate.
Given our 'gotcha journalism' headlines of "gov't u-turns" most people assume we [reverted] to a model closer to the suppression end of the spectrum.
What I have been responding to is the certainty and absolutism in the judgements on strategy and success - because there is simply insufficient information to justify such judgement.

UK to announce next sunday the reopening of primary schools from June 1st (after half term):
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/05/02/primary-schools-reopen-june-part-blueprint-unlock-britain/

The world misunderstands Sweden's strategy:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/02/world-misunderstands-swedish-response-coronavirus/

Prof. Wold also disputed the notion that Sweden had deliberately set out to create ‘herd immunity’ by letting the virus run rampant.

“It’s never been the policy. Like every other country the strategy has been to protect hospitals from being overwhelmed and to protect the elderly and most vulnerable,” she said. “The difference is in the means Sweden has used to achieve this.”
....
“What it has done differently is it has very much relied on its relationship with its citizenry and the ability and willingness of its citizens to implement self-distancing and self-regulate. Sweden represents a future model if we want to return to a society that we do not have to close.”

Viking

05-03-2020, 09:42

Anarchism the political philosophy, not in the colloquial sense.

Yes, refer to what I quoted.

Of course, as long as humans possess fear, take the consequences of their actions into account when considering what do to do, and have conflicting interests, coercion, in some form, is a given.

CrossLOPER

05-03-2020, 18:13

What do we do then?
Ignore mass graves?

Crandar

05-04-2020, 00:50

I'm not sure how the article managed to miss it, but Sergio Moro was much more important to Bolsonaro than it suggests. He played a crucial at disqualifying the most threatening opponent of Bolsonaro, Lula, openly abusing the integrity of his office.

https://theintercept.com/2019/06/09/brazil-archive-operation-car-wash/

ReluctantSamurai

05-04-2020, 04:03

One good reason to question published data:

https://twitter.com/jmbrkphd/status/1256223999446659073

Well, until recently, the Georgia DPH was reporting new cases based on the date of confirmation. There was an inherent lag b/c it can take awhile to get test results back, but at least this gave us a sense of where things were headed. But now... They’re backdating positive diagnoses to the date the test was administered or the date on which an individual first started showing symptoms. But they are still graphing the data up through the current day. The net results is an artificial downward slope.

(From a Trump tweet):

....And then came a Plague, a great and powerful Plague, and the World was never to be the same again! But America rose from this death and destruction, always remembering its many lost souls, and the lost souls all over the World, and became greater than ever before!

This is going to become more common-place in the next few weeks:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/5/2/21245163/california-counties-defying-state-stay-home-orders-reopening-businesses

I'm slowly becoming convinced that the only way to put an end to this kind of stupidity is to let everyone out of their cages, let the firestorm have its' way, and hundreds of thousands deaths later the gene pool might hopefully be cleansed of many of these morons. A "great and powerful Plague" indeed.

Gag order on one of the few voices of reason here:

https://www.vox.com/2020/5/2/21245061/white-house-anthony-fauci-house-committee

Any suggestions for my new home?:no:

ReluctantSamurai

05-04-2020, 14:06

What I have been responding to is the certainty and absolutism in the judgements on strategy and success - because there is simply insufficient information to justify such judgement.

And relying on a deeply flawed model to make policy judgements only makes the situation worse:

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/5/2/21241261/coronavirus-modeling-us-deaths-ihme-pandemic

The criticism of the IHME model, and an emerging debate over epidemiology models more broadly, has brought to light important challenges in the fight against the coronavirus. Good planning requires good projections. Models are needed to help predict resurgences and spot a potential second wave.

it has become clear that the IHME’s projections have been too optimistic, and slow to adjust to reflect the fact that deaths have plateaued rather than rapidly decreasing to zero. The IHME has been regularly updating its model as new data comes in, but the updates have often been slow enough that the numbers are absurd by the time they’re changed in an update.

In the report explaining the model, the researchers write that they look at four measures: “School closures, non-essential business closures including bars and restaurants, stay-at-home recommendations, and travel restrictions including public transport closures. Days with 1 measure were counted as 0.67 equivalents, days with 2 measures as 0.334 equivalents and with 3 or 4 measures as 0.” In other words, the model has a built-in assumption that once three of those measures have been put into place, cases will rapidly fall to zero. No new data can change that assumption, which is why the model continues to project zero deaths by mid-May in any area that hasn’t lifted social distancing restrictions, even though case numbers have only plateaued rather than declined in many areas.

“We need to value scientists and listen to experts, but part of listening means understanding that right now, what they’re saying is that they do not have all the answers.” Given the enormous uncertainty ahead, responsible scientists are avoiding giving dramatic topline numbers they’re unsure of, emphasizing the very wide confidence intervals on their estimates, and being careful not to publish results that the Trump administration or the public may interpret as definitive. But people keep searching for definitive answers (understandably so), and so any model that is presented more confidently will rise to prominence over models that are humbler and better reflect the confusion.

In other words, the fact that many epidemiological models are performing badly isn’t great, but it could be part of a productive process of arriving at better models. But the media, policymakers, and the public need to be conscious of what kind of models we gravitate to and why. If we elevate the ones we like and quote numbers from them as if they’re definitive, then the models will certainly end up shedding more heat than light.

:inquisitive:

CrossLOPER

05-04-2020, 22:25

I'm slowly becoming convinced that the only way to put an end to this kind of stupidity is to let everyone out of their cages, let the firestorm have its' way, and hundreds of thousands deaths later the gene pool might hopefully be cleansed of many of these morons. A "great and powerful Plague" indeed.
A few things:

1) This is unethical.

2) This is contrary to the function of government, which is to create and maintain order.

3) Morons tend to reproduce faster.

I am also not inclined to live in in a country with an imploded healthcare system.

Hooahguy

05-04-2020, 23:38

The main problem now is that while we are (mostly) all social distancing and flattening the curve, there doesnt really seem to be a plan to get us to a place where we can reopen. Its like we are in a holding pattern while the pilots bumble about trying to find where the map is so they can land the plane.

ReluctantSamurai

05-05-2020, 01:55

This is unethical.

Is it any more unethical than bailing out multi-billion dollar businesses who've been practicing unsustainable economics for years knowing that the feds will bail them out when the shit hits the fan; while leaving thousands of small businesses to fail? Is it any more unethical than telling people in so called "essential" work to either go to work and risk death, or stand to lose everything if you refuse; all so those who have the financial security to be able to work from home or hunker down in their million dollar homes to continue to receive their Amazon packages, have their local grocery store deliver their food, have their garbage picked up, have a medical team treat them if they need hospitalization, or have police and fire departments continue keeping their cities safe? Is it any more unethical than what's playing out in inner city ghetto's or on Native American reservations; where there is not enough food, medicine, or anyone that gives a crap whether they live or die? Is it any more unethical than the tragedy playing out in elderly health care facilities, not only here but across the world? Is it any more unethical than Mitch McConnell advocating that states (read as Democratic states) should just declare bankruptcy; all so he can retain his grip on power? Do I need to go on? The whole f@#$ing process since Patient 0 has been one unethical action after another.

This is contrary to the function of government, which is to create and maintain order.

The actions of our governments, both federal and state, has sown the seeds of violent civil unrest that this country hasn't seen since the 60's. When you have twenty or thirty million people out of work, many thousands who cannot pay their mortgage or rent, and combine that with all the guns that people are allowed to carry (assault rifles in a state legislative house, anyone?), there WILL BE cities burning this summer and it won't be from the hot sun.

A sample of what's to come:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52540266

Morons tend to reproduce faster.

I'll leave that for others to decide.

Montmorency

05-05-2020, 08:02

https://www.apple.com/covid19/mobility
Apple has a resource tracking Apple IDs, relating to how much movement (walking, driving, public transit) has changed since the pandemic in various locales. It's an interesting proxy, though of course Apple ID aggregation can't give a comprehensive picture of how a population is moving.

Coronavirus: What is the UK's test, track and trace strategy? (https://www.bbc.com/news/health-52475688)
The UK is perhaps starting to do better than I expected.

On the easing of restrictions across Europe, India, South Africa. Russia incidence rate is skyrocketing, but this is partially because Russia (surprisingly) is well on its way to becoming one of the top few global leaders in testing.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/italy-lockdown-eases-coronavirus

New York celebrates 1 million tests. But California has finally overtaken New York in average daily testing: 27100 vs. 25800 as of Sunday.

https://i.imgur.com/d39UIT1.png

If you exclude New York and New Jersey, AFAIK the incidence rate in the country overall is growing. Look to (https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2020/04/22/as-covid-19-spreads-newly-affected-areas-look-much-different-than-previous-ones/) the South and Midwest for new hotspots. Speaking of which (https://twitter.com/ginasue/status/1255847979740794885):

Top 10 Coronavirus clusters in the US? Prisons, meat packing plants, a Navy battleship. Next 10? Prisons, meat packing plants, nursing homes. Next 10? And the 10 after that? Prisons, meat packing plants and nursing homes....

Canada compares favorably to the US on a number of pandemic metrics. It's because they have a government and not a Russian-style kleptocracy, single-payer medical coverage, and a saner populace.
"Canada’s not perfect. But America is clearly worse." (https://www.vox.com/2020/5/4/21242750/coronavirus-covid-19-united-states-canada-trump-trudeau)

Per capita, the United States is currently seeing about twice as many confirmed coronavirus cases as Canada and about 30 percent more deaths. When you look at per capita cases and deaths across the course of the entire outbreak, the comparison looks even worse: the United States has over two times as many confirmed coronavirus cases as Canada and roughly twice as many deaths. Canadian testing rates have been consistently higher, especially during critical early stages for the two countries: In mid-March, the Canadian testing rate was roughly five times higher than the American one.
[...]
There are a number of factors that have enabled Canada to perform at a higher level than the United States, including more consistent pre-virus funding for public health agencies and a universal health care system. But one of the most important seems to have been a difference in political leadership. The American response has become infected by partisan politics and shot through with federal incompetence. Meanwhile, Canada’s policies have been efficiently implemented with support from leaders across the political spectrum. The comparison is a case study in how a dysfunctional political system can quite literally cost lives. The Canadian approach has not been perfect. Its death rate is currently much higher than best-in-class performers like Germany and South Korea; Canadian officials have fallen down, in particular, when it comes to long-term senior care and the indigenous population. But given the interdependence between these two large neighboring economies, Canadians are not only vulnerable as a result of their own government’s choices but also because of their southern neighbors’ failures.

The Republican governor of Maryland confirmed in video interview (https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/postlive/wplive/maryland-gov-hogan-says-tests-procured-from-south-korea-are-under-guard-at-undisclosed-location/2020/04/30/908994c8-237a-4b02-b23d-e461424355fd_video.html) with the Washington Post that the Maryland National Guard is tasked with escorting and guarding half a million COVID tests delivered from South Korea, presumably from the federal government. "...we guarded that cargo from whoever [original emphasis] might interfere with us..."

When can we say Trump is worse than Buchanan?

The tried-and-true prescribed pandemic response is to suppress, suppress and contain. Apply restrictions untilR0 is well below 1, relax them and monitor until you're still short of 1, and hold the line until the outbreak dissipates. We as a country were well-positioned to follow this strategy for any prospective pandemic - until now. Just remember, if we do attain a treatment or vaccine soon enough then our collective failed responses will amount to millions - millions - of preventable deaths across North America and Europe alone.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/us/coronavirus-updates.html

As President Trump presses for states to reopen their economies, his administration is privately projecting a steady rise in the number of cases and deaths from coronavirus over the next several weeks, reaching about 3,000 daily deaths on June 1, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times, nearly double from the current level of about 1,750.

In public Trump is inconsistently promoting "opening" the economy as the Department of Justice under Barr continues to ignore authorization from Congress in the CARES Act to release some prisoners from federal prisons.

The plan is to have no plan.

Of course there are bounds - i am already on record as saying that Britain's approach [remains] closer to that of sweden than many people appreciate.
Given our 'gotcha journalism' headlines of "gov't u-turns" most people assume we [reverted] to a model closer to the suppression end of the spectrum.

Everything I'm reading recently about the UK gives me the impression that their designs are more aligned to my standards than yours. I'm not sure what the source of this dissonance could be.

What I have been responding to is the certainty and absolutism in the judgements on strategy and success - because there is simply insufficient information to justify such judgement.

Judgements, yes. Absolute, no. There is something to say before 'the curtain drops', make no mistake. Let's be reasonable.

Yes, refer to what I quoted.

Of course, as long as humans possess fear, take the consequences of their actions into account when considering what do to do, and have conflicting interests, coercion, in some form, is a given.

This is on par with the people who refuse to call any country, institution, or organization "democratic" because no perfect democracy has been achieved. Semantic rigidity like that becomes facile and uninformative in my opinion. Sweden's plan is guided by anarchist principles because it depends on the self-direction of an informed and conscientious citizenry; that a state backstop can be invoked does not change that. Meanwhile, in South Korea, the restrictions on overall business activity and movement are at the moment loose, but confirmed infected individuals are placed under rather strict monitoring and government control (viz. mandatory isolation, the infamous - though probably voluntary - tracking/reporting app). One response is clearly more, and more than trivially, anarchist than another.

From Furunc's latest Sweden article:

“What it has done differently is it has very much relied on its relationship with its citizenry and the ability and willingness of its citizens to implement self-distancing and self-regulate. Sweden represents a future model if we want to return to a society that we do not have to close.”

I'm slowly becoming convinced that the only way to put an end to this kind of stupidity is to let everyone out of their cages, let the firestorm have its' way, and hundreds of thousands deaths later the gene pool might hopefully be cleansed of many of these morons. A "great and powerful Plague" indeed.

The main stumbling block to this theory is always that, well, there is no marking the doors of the Chosen to spare them from a plague. As Republicans in rural hotspots are learning, disease doesn't target only people whom you dislike. (And even were this not true, even if only Trump-voting 50+ whites were buying it from the virus, it's not like they have much remaining potential to contribute to the gene pool.)

BTW, this resource on state coronavirus metrics from one of your links is another great one. There is a lot of different data represented here. Thanks.
https://public.tableau.com/profile/peter.james.walker#!/vizhome/shared/4432NYZC2

rory_20_uk

05-05-2020, 10:55

The Civil Service Strikes again: Link (https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/05/uk_coronavirus_app/)

We have the opportunity to allow the Government to collect data from our phones and store it forever for any purpose because... Well, the Civil Service likes centralised approaches and also refuses to ever admit to being wrong.

Don't worry! It worked on an airbase and they're going to pilot it on the Isle of Wight so all will be fine. What are the outcomes of the pilot that are being assessed? How will success be assessed? Such are not the questions for plebs! Leave it for your betters, vermin.

Britain again stands alone... More King Canute than Churchill.

~:smoking:

ReluctantSamurai

05-05-2020, 16:39

In public Trump is inconsistently promoting "opening" the economy as the Department of Justice under Barr continues to ignore authorization from Congress in the CARES Act to release some prisoners from federal prisons.

Much of what the Trump administration, and indeed many state administrations, are using as base information to guide policy decisions is based on a very flawed model, IMHO.

Again:

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/5/2/21241261/coronavirus-modeling-us-deaths-ihme-pandemic

This model is consistently under-estimating cases and deaths despite constant revision:

its next-day death predictions for each state were outside its 95 percent confidence interval 70 percent of the time — meaning the actual death numbers fell outside the range it projected 70 percent of the time.

So why do we keep using it when there are clearly better models available? One answer:

For one thing, it’s more simplistic compared to other models. That means it can be applied in ways more complicated models could not, such as providing state-level projections (something state officials really wanted), which other modelers acknowledged that they didn’t have enough data to offer.

Meanwhile, its narrow confidence intervals for state-by-state estimates meant it had quotable (and optimistic) topline numbers. A confidence interval represents a range of numbers wherein the model is very confident the true value will lie. A narrow range that gives “an appearance of certainty is seductive when the world is desperate to know what lies ahead,”

That projected hospitalization rate was one of the things that set it apart, IHME researcher Ali Mokdad told me. It was one of the few models offering that projection, and it was actionable information governments could grab on to and plan around.

And the possible reason Fearless Leader chose it as THE model to use:

and the lower death numbers the model churned out as a result reportedly led to it being received favorably by the Trump administration.

And now:

But as the weeks have passed, it has become clear that the IHME’s projections have been too optimistic, and slow to adjust to reflect the fact that deaths have plateaued rather than rapidly decreasing to zero [and actually increasing as the virus spreads to rural areas]. The IHME has been regularly updating its model as new data comes in, but the updates have often been slow enough that the numbers are absurd by the time they’re changed in an update.

So what is the perceived flaw in the IHME model?

The IHME model is unusual compared to other epidemiological models for its design, too. While most of the models use standard epidemiology modeling tactics like SEIR (susceptible-exposed-infected-recovered modeling) or use computer simulations, the IHME model is effectively just about fitting a curve from early data in China and Italy to the disease’s trajectory elsewhere. The IHME model is based “on a statistical model with no epidemiologic basis,” the Annals of Internal Medicine critique argues.

Check out the model's prediction for the state of California:

But on May 20, the model is entirely sure there will be zero deaths. The 95 percent confidence interval runs from zero deaths to ... zero deaths. Mokdad said the model’s zero-deaths predictions were correct: “Based on the graph, in certain states, yes — in California, May 17, zero. The virus is not circulating anymore; you would expect it to go to zero.”

I'm not an epidemiologist, but my own two eyes tell me that the daily death rate in California will NOT be zero in two weeks:rolleyes:

Another big flaw with the IHME model:

It assumes that social distancing measures, once put in place, are always sufficient to rapidly decrease case numbers to zero.

In the report explaining the model, the researchers write that they look at four measures: “School closures, non-essential business closures including bars and restaurants, stay-at-home recommendations, and travel restrictions including public transport closures. Days with 1 measure were counted as 0.67 equivalents, days with 2 measures as 0.334 equivalents and with 3 or 4 measures as 0.”

In other words, the model has a built-in assumption that once three of those measures have been put into place, cases will rapidly fall to zero. No new data can change that assumption, which is why the model continues to project zero deaths by mid-May in any area that hasn’t lifted social distancing restrictions, even though case numbers have only plateaued rather than declined in many areas.

There is one thing for certain---there are no certainties concerning this pandemic, and models are just that...possible outcomes. But some seem to be better then the IHME model at predicting possible outcomes:

https://covid-19.tacc.utexas.edu/media/filer_public/d8/c1/d8c133e3-8814-4b30-9d3f-f0992ca66886/ut_covid-19_mortality_forecasting_model.pdf

The incorporation of real-time geolocation data and several key modifications yields projections that differ noticeably from the IHME model, especially re-garding uncertainty when projecting COVID-19 deaths several weeks into the future.

As opposed to the IHME model which:

“Statistical model” refers to putting U.S. data onto the graph of other countries’ Covid-19 deaths over time under the assumption that the U.S. epidemic will mimic that in those countries. But countries’ countermeasures differ significantly. As the epidemic curve in the U.S. changes due to countermeasures that were weaker or later than, say, China’s, the IHME modelers adjust the curve to match the new reality.

Quote from this article by Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch:

https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/17/influential-covid-19-model-uses-flawed-methods-shouldnt-guide-policies-critics-say/

“This appearance of certainty is seductive when the world is desperate to know what lies ahead,” Britta Jewell of Imperial College and her colleagues wrote in their Annals paper. But the IHME model “rests on the likely incorrect assumption that effects of social distancing policies are the same everywhere.” Because U.S. policies are looser than those elsewhere, largely due to inconsistency between states, U.S. deaths could remain at higher levels longer than they did in China, in particular.

Another model:

https://reichlab.io/covid19-forecast-hub/

The flaws I’ve noted above were also features that made the model appealing when it was first launched. It was optimistic, projecting lower deaths than other models. It was clear and precise, with narrow confidence intervals. It projected hospitalizations, which few others were doing — though those projections turned out to be wrong because not enough was known to project hospitalizations well at that stage. In a time of uncertainty, the IHME model was compelling. But it turns out the uncertainty being reflected in a lot of other, better models is showing up for a reason — there really is still a lot unknown about the course this disease will take.

Time to move on from the IHME model, and its' battle cry "flatten the curve"?:shrug:

ReluctantSamurai

05-05-2020, 16:52

And even were this not true, even if only Trump-voting 50+ whites were buying it from the virus, it's not like they have much remaining potential to contribute to the gene pool

Like this deranged individual:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-05/church-selling-bleach-claims-cures-coronavirus-australia/12201348

"There is so much evidence proving it is a wonderful detox through oxidation that kills 99 per cent of the pathogens in the body, that is why we have so many testimonies," he said.

"In spite of all the media hype, we see no credible evidence of a pandemic," he said.

Glad to see the US doesn't quite have the corner on wack-jobs just yet~D

Viking

05-05-2020, 19:35

This is on par with the people who refuse to call any country, institution, or organization "democratic" because no perfect democracy has been achieved. Semantic rigidity like that becomes facile and uninformative in my opinion. Sweden's plan is guided by anarchist principles because it depends on the self-direction of an informed and conscientious citizenry; that a state backstop can be invoked does not change that. Meanwhile, in South Korea, the restrictions on overall business activity and movement are at the moment loose, but confirmed infected individuals are placed under rather strict monitoring and government control (viz. mandatory isolation, the infamous - though probably voluntary - tracking/reporting app). One response is clearly more, and more than trivially, anarchist than another.

From Furunc's latest Sweden article:

Again, people are following the instructions from a state institution (and the state is also intervening directly, closing pubs (https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/stockholm/fem-krogar-i-stockholm-riskerar-stangas) that do not follow the instructions).

Anarchism rejects the state. How is it at all meaningful to study a situation that fundamentally goes against the philosophy of anarchism as an example of anarchism in practice? The institution issuing the guidelines was created by and is run by the state, and relies heavily on this fact for its legitimacy.

Since you mention democracy: is studying the case of an authoritarian state that gives instructions to the population for which political candidates they should vote for a study of democracy in practice if the government initially does not sanction candidates it does not want people to vote for?

ReluctantSamurai

05-05-2020, 21:58

It is possible that countries cannot be compared to countries. It is possible that we cannot assess the differences between what is going on in London and what is going on in Dublin, or London and Manchester, or New York and Newark.

Perhaps one of the reasons is this:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-05-05/mutant-coronavirus-has-emerged-more-contagious-than-original

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.29.069054v1.full.pdf

The mutation Spike D614G is of urgent concern; it began spreading in Europe in early February, and when introduced to new regions it rapidly becomes the dominant form. Also, we present evidence of recombination between locally circulating strains, indicative of multiple strain infections. These finding have important implications for SARS-CoV-2 transmission, pathogenesis and immune interventions.

Wherever the new strain appeared, it quickly infected far more people than the earlier strains that came out of Wuhan, China, and within weeks it was the only strain that was prevalent in some nations, according to the report. The new strain’s dominance over its predecessors demonstrates that it is more infectious, according to the report, though exactly why is not yet known.

If the pandemic fails to wane seasonally as the weather warms, the study warns, the virus could undergo further mutations even as research organizations prepare the first medical treatments and vaccines. Without getting on top of the risk now, the effectiveness of vaccines could be limited. Some of the compounds in development are supposed to latch onto the spike or interrupt its action. If they were designed based on the original version of the spike, they might not be effective against the new coronavirus strain, the study’s authors warned.

Still unknown is whether this mutant virus could account for regional variations in how hard COVID-19 is hitting different parts of the world.

The Los Alamos study does not indicate that the new version of the virus is more lethal than the original. People infected with the mutated strain appear to have higher viral loads. But the study’s authors from the University of Sheffield found that among a local sample of 447 patients, hospitalization rates were about the same for people infected with either virus version.

Even if the new strain is no more dangerous than the others, it could still complicate efforts to bring the pandemic under control. That would be an issue if the mutation makes the virus so different from earlier strains that people who have immunity to them would not be immune to the new version. If that is indeed the case, it could make “individuals susceptible to a second infection,” the study authors wrote.

Let's just hope that further mutations don't exhibit more lethality, or it's 1918 all over again:inquisitive:

Viking

05-05-2020, 22:25

Let's just hope that further mutations don't exhibit more lethality, or it's 1918 all over again:inquisitive:

There's that, and then there's the fact that in less than 20 years we have seen the appearance of no more than three species and strains of coronaviruses capable of causing severe pneumonia at high rates. If this is a new trend rather than an aberration, then with some special amount of luck, we could have a new SARS-like virus appearing on top of that again. It's only eight years since the appearance of MERS, and that outbreak still haven't been stamped out, meaning it is another virus that presents a current mutational threat.

CrossLOPER

05-06-2020, 03:21

Let's just hope that further mutations don't exhibit more lethality, or it's 1918 all over again:inquisitive:

Lethality is one thing. It has already apparently mutated to be more contagious, and we have seen the result. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/05/the-coronavirus-mutated-and-appears-to-be-more-contagious-now-new-study-finds.html

Montmorency

05-06-2020, 07:48

Hahaha Samurai you're going to love this from the White House Council of Economic Advisers Coronavirus Embiggenment Apparatus.
https://twitter.com/WhiteHouseCEA/status/1257680258364555264

For the math people
https://twitter.com/seanjtaylor/status/1123278396308353024
https://twitter.com/kjhealy/status/1257736949714104322

(This one (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUy-CTJUMAA-idO.jpg) might be good for a Fearless Leader joke.)

Wisconsin Supreme Court Republicans probably going to strike down the state's stay-at-home orders.
https://twitter.com/mjs_DC/status/1257699256451895296
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/05/05/wisconsin-state-supreme-court-hears-gop-lawmakers-challenge-stay-at-home-order/

Chief Justice Patience Roggensack said the increase in cases in Brown County was the result of an outbreak in a meatpacking facility and that it wasn’t from “the regular folks.”

Chris Christie on pandemic response:

Christie spoke about the U.S. sending young men to other countries during World War II "knowing that many of them would not come home alive.""We decided to make that sacrifice because what we were standing up for was the American way of life," he said. "In the very same way now, we have to stand up for the American way of life."
[...]
"Of course, everybody wants to save every life they can ― but the question is, towards what end, ultimately?" Christie said. "Are there ways that we can thread the middle here to allow that there are going to be deaths, and there are going to be deaths no matter what?"

Trump on (https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1257778264241844224)...

I'm viewing our great citizens of this country to a certain extent and to a large extent as warriors. They're warriors. We can't keep our country closed. We have to open our country. ... The people aren't going to accept it. They won't accept it, and they shouldn't accept it ... I created, with a lot of other very talented people and the people of our country, the greatest economy in the history of a-of the world. The greatest that we've ever had. The greatest employment numbers, the best numbers we've ever had, the best stock markets - I think we had 144 days of record stock markets - and then one day they said "We have to close our country." Well now it's time to open it up, and you know what? ... And yes, will some people be affected? Yes. Will some people be affected badly? Yes."

Well your wishes and your feelings
Your bad dreams and intuitions
Are about as much good to me right now as a brand new set of golf clubs
We've been this close to death before, we were just too drunk to know it
Guess the price of being sobers being scared out of your mind

When it comes your time to go, ain't no good way to go about it
Ain't no use in thinking bout it
You'll just drive yourself insane
There comes a time for everything
And the time has come for you to shut your mouth and get your ass on the plane

Ain't nothing I'd rather do right now than just go on home and lay around
But that ain't never an option for a working man like me
How much is enough you ask
I'll ask the man when I get a chance
All I know right now, there's somewhere else I'm suppose to be

When it comes your time to go, ain't no good way to go about it
Ain't no use in thinking bout it
You'll just drive yourself insane
There comes a time for everything
And the time has come for you to shut your mouth and get your ass on the plane

Screaming engines, shooting flames
Dirty needles and cheap cocaine
Some gal's old man with a gun
To me it's all the same
Dead is dead and it ain't no different than walking around if you ain't living
Living in fear's just another way of dying before your time

When it comes your time to go, ain't no good way to go about it
Ain't no use in thinking bout it
You'll just drive yourself insane
There comes a time for everything
And the time has come for you to shut your mouth and get your ass on the plane

Bad luck (https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1257812004435361793) that a third GOP presidency in a row is going to end with the economy in shambles for contingent reasons that are no reflection on the underlying conservative ideology or structural properties of the movement.

Why do the far-right across the world agree that coronavirus lockdowns are unacceptable?
https://twitter.com/Natascha_Strobl/status/1247606764914302979

In gooder news:

Irish Return an Old Favor, Helping Native Americans Battling the Virus (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/world/coronavirus-ireland-native-american-tribes.html)
In 1847 the Choctaw people sent $170 to help during the potato famine. Irish donors are citing that gesture as they help two tribes during the Covid-19 pandemic.

More than 170 years ago, the Choctaw Nation sent $170 to starving Irish families during the potato famine. A sculpture in County Cork commemorates the generosity of the tribe, itself poor. In recent decades, ties between Ireland and the Choctaws have grown. Now hundreds of Irish people are repaying that old kindness, giving to a charity drive for two Native American tribes suffering in the Covid-19 pandemic. As of Tuesday, the fund-raiser has raised more than $1.8 million to help supply clean water, food and health supplies to people in the Navajo Nation and the Hopi Reservation, with hundreds of thousands of dollars coming from Irish donors, according to the organizers. Many donors cited the generosity of the Choctaws, noting that the gift came not long after the United States government forcibly relocated the tribe and several other American Indian groups from the Southeastern United States, a march across thousands of miles known as the Trail of Tears that left thousands of people dead along the way.
[...]
News of the donations from Ireland came as the coronavirus has been ripping through tribal lands. The Navajo Nation has had one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in the United States. There had been more than 2,700 cases and 70 deaths as of Monday, according to the Navajo Nation. A high prevalence of diseases like diabetes, scarcity of running water and homes with several generations living under the same roof have enabled the virus to spread with exceptional speed in places like the Navajo Nation, according to epidemiologists. The Hopi reservation is surrounded by the Navajo Nation.

I mean, Navajo and Hopi aren't Choctaw - kind of almost opposite sides of the country originally - but it's a nice gesture. (Maybe in the future the Navajo will donate to the cause of Scottish independence?)

In bad news again:

Native American health center asked for COVID-19 supplies. It got body bags instead. (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/native-american-health-center-asked-covid-19-supplies-they-got-n1200246)

The Civil Service Strikes again: Link (https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/05/uk_coronavirus_app/)

The article itself indicates that a lot of different countries are using this model, such as France and Australia. Sweden (https://www.thelocal.se/20200430/sweden-launches-app-to-help-trace-spread-of-the-coronavirus) just rolled out a similar app, apparently. Someone with technical knowledge could probably round up and synthesize more detailed sources.

The most comprehensive system, and one we should have the most information on, were the South Korean apps. I wish the author would have described the results of its implementation, or its archictecture, or anything.

My search suggests the South Korean apps support a national "centralized" approach.

In South Korea, a non-app-based system was used to perform contact tracing. Instead of using a dedicated app, the system gathered tracking information from a variety of sources including mobile device tracking data and card transaction data, and combined these to generate notices via text messages to potentially-infected individuals.[46] In addition to using this information to alert potential contacts, the government has also made the location information publicly available, something permitted because of far-reaching changes to information privacy laws after the MERS outbreak in that country.[47] This information is available to the public via a number of apps and websites.[47]

South Korea is watching quarantined citizens with a smartphone app (https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/03/06/905459/coronavirus-south-korea-smartphone-app-quarantine/)

Under current guidelines from the Korean Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, anyone who has come into contact with a confirmed coronavirus carrier is subject to a mandatory two-week self-quarantine. “Contact” is defined as having been within two meters of a confirmed carrier, or having been in the same room where a confirmed patient has coughed. Once self-quarantine subjects receive an order from their local medical center, they are legally prohibited from leaving their quarantine areas—usually their homes—and are instructed to maintain strict separation from other people, including family members. Those in lockdown are assigned to a local government case officer, who checks in twice a day by phone to track the development of any symptoms, and mobile testing teams are deployed to collect samples if things escalate. Now those in quarantine can use the app to report their symptoms and provide status updates to officials. And if they venture outside their designated quarantine area, an alert will be sent to both the subject and the case officer.
[...]
“The number of self-quarantined people nationwide has reached around 30,000, and there is a limit to the human resources available to local governments to monitor these people,” said Jung Chang-hyun, the ministry official who supervised development of the app. “The app is a support service aimed at making this more efficient.” The app is not mandatory, and because some people may have difficulty downloading or using it, the current system of monitoring through traditional telephone calls will continue. Others can simply opt out. Equally, officials say they are taking a flexible approach to GPS tracking rather than draconian enforcement.

Seoul’s Radical Experiment in Digital Contact Tracing (https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/seouls-radical-experiment-in-digital-contact-tracing)

Still, he said, somewhat cautiously, “I think we should try to disclose as much information as we can, rather than holding back.” For Song, this has meant including patients’ age and gender, their neighborhood of residence, and the names of businesses and apartment complexes they had visited, which he sees as a way of assuaging other residents’ anxieties. “
[...]
Emergency text alerts, because of their character limit, linked recipients to these entries rather than relaying them in full. “For the text alerts, we use something called a ‘remote broadcasting apparatus,’ ” Song said. “Then it’s sent to every phone in a five-kilometre radius through a nearby base station.” Public appetite for this information is voracious. “Most of the residents’ feedback is asking for more information, for us to be even more revealing,” Song said.

When a patient tests positive here, Kim’s team retraces their movements based on their oral testimony, and then combs through relevant C.C.T.V. footage in order to locate others who might have been exposed. Restaurants, where people must take their masks off to eat, are the most common sites of exposure. “Say there’s someone who was within two metres of the patient at a restaurant, but we don’t know who that person is, except what they look like in the C.C.T.V. footage,” Kim said. “Then we ask the credit-card company to pull up that customer’s information and ask them to tell them to contact us.” That person is then put under monitored self-isolation for two weeks, using an app that tracks his phone to insure that he isn’t breaking quarantine.

Behind this model of contact tracing is a vast surveillance apparatus expressly designed for such outbreak scenarios. Under South Korea’s Infectious Disease Control and Prevention Act, health authorities, with the approval of the police and other supervising agencies, can make use of cell-phone G.P.S. data, credit-card payment information, and travel and medical records. As of March 26th, the government has also officially launched the Epidemic Investigation Support System, a data-analysis platform that automates the process, allowing investigators to get clearance and pull up patient trajectories in under a minute. (Previously, the process took about a day.)

Although some had anticipated a backlash to such sweeping electronic surveillance, public outrage has been nearly nonexistent. According to Kim Min-ho, a law professor and one of the country’s human-rights commissioners, this is because these measures can be used only in the context of disease outbreaks, making it impossible for them to be co-opted for, say, anti-terrorism campaigns.

“I think there’s a difference in reasoning and perception at play here,” Kim told me, by phone. “The United States was quick to ban businesses, while countries like France instituted lockdowns. But South Korea hasn’t been able to do the same because we’re very cautious about these kinds of measures, in the same way that other countries are cautious about privacy.” Mere weeks after the initial flurry of articles pondering whether or not democracies were better equipped to deal with pandemics, few countries were getting away with not sacrificing some kinds of freedom. As Kim pointed out, the true question was which freedoms to prioritize. The chaos of the mers outbreak had left the public with a grim conviction: sacrificing some individual privacy was simply the upfront cost of avoiding more debilitating consequences down the line.

South Koreans have decided that, during an infectious-disease outbreak, there is a strong, pragmatic case to be made in favor of what might be called virtuous surveillance—a radically transparent version of people-tracking that is subject to public scrutiny and paired with stringent legal safeguards against abuse. Despite its imperfections, South Korea’s policy is striking for the fact that it brings the mechanisms and outcomes of surveillance into the public forum. In doing so, it appeals to a deeper sense of civic trust—the belief that, in a crisis, the citizenry can be relied upon to play its part.
[...]
Eom said, “If there’s a major outbreak here, what happened in Daegu may not even compare,” adding that more than half of South Korea’s population of roughly fifty million lives in the capital area. Moreover, Seoul is nearly twice as dense as New York City. If infections proliferated, he warned, “This sort of patient-movement disclosure or contact tracing will become meaningless.” Far more drastic measures, such as military-enforced lockdowns, might well occur. Seoul poses a far more vexing set of challenges than Daegu did. The vastness of the greater capital area makes potential infection routes difficult to pin down or predict. There are too many blind spots, such as crowded subways and buses, where C.C.T.V. footage provides few usable leads. When I asked Eom what the likelihood of a major outbreak in Seoul is, he let out a loud, unsettled laugh. “I’m just praying it doesn’t happen,” he said. Resisting complacency, Eom said, would be critical. But in recent days, public life in Seoul has begun filling out again. Despite the closure of high-risk businesses like clubs and churches, lines at popular eateries and cafés have reappeared. In the parks and on the esplanades along the Han, the river winding through Seoul, crowds of picnickers have begun to materialize among the cherry blossoms, with the dazed, sleepy air of animals emerging from their dens after a long winter. If another crisis loomed, it was hard to tell. “All of the control and containment procedures essentially rely on the same thing,” Eom told me. “And that is the coöperation and responsible conduct of the citizenry.”

It was uniquely controversial in reporting the age, gender, and even address (the later was apparently later redacted to just neighborhood) of the suspected/confirmed cases to eligible users. IT isn't my beat; any good articles assessing these issues in South Korea or elsewhere, and not just in theory?

...

After cogitating a little longer, I realized the system for notifying people of potential exposure - SMS alerts assembled from databases - is distinct from the reporting/tracking app that isolated individuals are encouraged to use. So comparing to what digital mechanisms various European countries are introducing is probably more fraught than I appreciated. :sweatdrop:

Again, people are following the instructions from a state institution (and the state is also intervening directly, closing pubs (https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/stockholm/fem-krogar-i-stockholm-riskerar-stangas) that do not follow the instructions).

Anarchism rejects the state. How is it at all meaningful to study a situation that fundamentally goes against the philosophy of anarchism as an example of anarchism in practice? The institution issuing the guidelines was created by and is run by the state, and relies heavily on this fact for its legitimacy.

Seriously? I just said I reject this rigid characterization because it's not descriptively useful. Anarchists acknowledge that states exist today; few would say their philosophy demands the rejection of expertise promulgated by states.

When the United States became a democracy is open to debate. Critical milestones are the 15th, 19th, 24th, and 26th Amendments, as well as the Civil and Voting Rights Acts. It's clear each of those milestones made the country more democratic than it had been. We are backsliding on a number of measures today. But then there are positions to the effect that we have never been a democracy because democracy is inherently a comprehensively-direct exercise of popular sovereignty and America never lived up to that. To me that's not more than a rhetorical device.

Since you mention democracy: is studying the case of an authoritarian state that gives instructions to the population for which political candidates they should vote for a study of democracy in practice if the government initially does not sanction candidates it does not want people to vote for?

Bad analogy. The correct analogy is to the study of comparative government in e.g. Europe. All those countries were, until recently and to varying degrees, democracies. But if you want to talk about authoritarian countries, they usually do and did hold elections to create the illusion of participation. In some instances, these are not even purely sham elections but work as a kind of feedback mechanism. Even that much can be described as an element of democracy.

ReluctantSamurai

05-06-2020, 10:39

"We decided to make that sacrifice because what we were standing up for was the American way of life," he said. "In the very same way now, we have to stand up for the American way of life."

Here's what Christie's cryptic babble actually means in terms of Fearless Leaders plan for reopening the US economy:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/03/donald-trump-reopen-us-economy-lethal-robert-reich

Remove income support, so people have no choice but to return to work.

By threatening to deny unemployment benefits, the Labor Department is forcing workers (read as all those poor bastards who draw a weekly paycheck) to choose between rolling the dice at the COVID-19 Casino, or losing their livelihood.

Hide the facts.

Use a deeply flawed epidemiological model that consistently under-reports both cases and deaths in order to make the situation look better than it is. And, of course, put a gag order on Dr. Fauci so that he can't contradict anything that's being said.

Pretend it’s about “freedom”.

When there is no choice given to people who are about to lose their jobs, their homes, and everything they've been working for most of their lives, except to take a dance with death, I'd hardly call that freedom.

Shield businesses against lawsuits for spreading the infection.

The icing on the Trump Hotel Truffle (as applied by The Man Who Never Smiles):

The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, insists that proposed legislation giving state and local governments funding they desperately need must include legal immunity for corporations that cause workers or consumers to become infected.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

....and get to work you effin' bastards, I have an election to win come November---Fearless Leader

Look, Trump is right about one thing, an economy as large as the United States can't be kept in limbo any longer otherwise there won't be an economy. His administration botched the initial response back in February by not taking the threat seriously and lost nearly two months that could've been spent getting hospitals and PPE stockplies prepared (and with Patient 0 now identified in California as early as the first week of February, containment was already lost). Now, the entire month of April has been wasted by the anemic role of the federal government in organizing the procurement of supplies, and expediting their dispersal. Instead, states were forced to compete with each other and pay exorbitant prices for the much needed PPE and other medical equipment.

The lock-downs and stay-at-home orders kept hospitals from being washed away by a tidal wave of cases, but now have no more effect other than keeping new cases and deaths on a plateau line (and even that's not going to happen much longer). The situation has come down to trying to save every life possible and to hell with the economy, or open back up and to hell with whomever has to die.

Jesus, I'm embarrassed to be called an American:shame:

@ Monty

The snafu (supposed) with sending body bags to the Navajo instead of medical equipment is a sad commentary on our entire treatment of Native Americans from the first day settlers got here.:shame:

Viking

05-06-2020, 17:39

Seriously? I just said I reject this rigid characterization because it's not descriptively useful. Anarchists acknowledge that states exist today; few would say their philosophy demands the rejection of expertise promulgated by states.

I am talking about the simple fact that you are looking at the performance of the ideals that would underpin an anarchic society in an archic society. Where is the meaning in that?

CrossLOPER

05-06-2020, 20:03

or open back up and to hell with whomever has to die.
There are several articles about that explain why sacrificing lives to save the economy is not possible. No one is going to go out if there are ~3000 death a day and everyone is in a makeshift hospital for six months. You either move to save both or you get neither. This administration seems to think it can pretend the issue does not exist and just keep telling people to deal with it. People can deal with it to the extent that they will be resigned to the fact that the government won't be doing anything, but they aren't going to go eat at a restaurant or engage in something that they believe will get them sick or killed.

It is genuinely difficult to understand what the Republicans think will happen if the disease is allowed to progress mostly unchecked.

Personally, I always thought that restaurants are a wasted cost and never go out unless it's a really special occasion. Meaning I went out once or twice a month at most. I also found it increasingly difficult to justify paying for a gym membership versus just setting up a home gym. I can always sell my equipment or stow it away. I can't do that with membership fees. I might get a professional haircut once a month, but beauty shops are a massive money sink.

Frankly, this situation revealed how pointless an economy based purely on limitless consumption is. Stop buying stuff. You'll be happier with what you have.

Montmorency

05-06-2020, 22:38

Social distancing in New York.
https://twitter.com/AndrewBloch/status/1257938868537614336

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1257814281330069504

They blasted “Live and Let Die” while Trump walked around a Honeywell plant today in Arizona without a mask. It’s hard to believe this clip is real.

Reminder that Trump's idiot son-in-law has been in "charge" of the federal pandemic response.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/us/jared-kushner-fema-coronavirus.html

This spring, as the United States faced a critical shortage of masks, gloves and other protective equipment to battle the coronavirus pandemic, a South Carolina physician reached out to the Federal Emergency Management Agency with an offer of help.

Dr. Jeffrey Hendricks had longtime manufacturing contacts in China and a line on millions of masks from established suppliers. Instead of encountering seasoned FEMA procurement officials, his information was diverted to a team of roughly a dozen young volunteers, recruited by the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and overseen by a former assistant to Mr. Kushner’s wife, Ivanka Trump.

The volunteers, foot soldiers in the Trump administration’s new supply-chain task force, had little to no experience with government procurement procedures or medical equipment. But as part of Mr. Kushner’s governmentwide push to secure protective gear for the nation’s doctors and nurses, the volunteers were put in charge of sifting through more than a thousand incoming leads, and told to pass only the best ones on for further review by FEMA officials.

As the federal government’s warehouses were running bare and medical workers improvised their own safety gear, Dr. Hendricks found his offer stalled. Many of the volunteers were told to prioritize tips from political allies and associates of President Trump, tracked on a spreadsheet called “V.I.P. Update,” according to documents and emails obtained by The New York Times. Among them were leads from Republican members of Congress, the Trump youth activist Charlie Kirk and a former “Apprentice” contestant who serves as the campaign chair of Women for Trump.

Trump allies also pressed FEMA officials directly: A Pennsylvania dentist, once featured at a Trump rally, dropped the president’s name as he pushed the agency to procure test kits from his associates.

Few of the leads, V.I.P. or otherwise, panned out, according to a whistle-blower memo written by one volunteer and sent to the House Oversight Committee. While Vice President Mike Pence dropped by the volunteers’ windowless command center in Washington to cheer them on, they were confused and overwhelmed by their task, the whistle-blower said in interviews.

“The nature and scale of the response seemed grossly inadequate,” said the volunteer, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity and, like the others, signed a nondisclosure agreement. “It was bureaucratic cycles of chaos.”

The fumbling search for new supplies — heralded by Mr. Trump and Mr. Kushner as a way to pipe private-sector hustle and accountability into the hidebound federal bureaucracy — became a case study of Mr. Trump’s style of governing, in which personal relationships and loyalty are often prized over governmental expertise, and private interests are granted extraordinary access and deference.

Federal officials who had spent years devising emergency plans were layered over by Kushner allies, working with and within the White House coronavirus task force, who believed their private-sector experience could solve the country’s looming supply shortage. The young volunteers — drawn from venture capital and private equity firms — were expected to apply their deal-making experience to quickly weed out good leads from the mountain of bad ones, administration officials said in an interview. FEMA and other agencies, despite years of emergency preparation, were not equipped for the unprecedented task of a pandemic that affected all 50 states, they said.

But the officials acknowledged it was difficult to identify specific contracts the volunteers had successfully sourced.

At least one tip the volunteers forwarded turned into an expensive debacle. In late March, according to emails obtained by The Times, two of the volunteers passed along procurement forms submitted by Yaron Oren-Pines, a Silicon Valley engineer who said he could provide more than 1,000 ventilators.

Mr. Kushner’s volunteers passed the tip to federal officials who then sent it to senior officials in New York, who assumed Mr. Oren-Pines had been vetted and awarded him an eye-popping $69 million contract. Not a single ventilator was delivered, and New York is now seeking to recover the money.

“There’s an old saying in emergency management — disaster is the wrong time to exchange business cards,” said Tim Manning, a former deputy administrator at FEMA. “And it’s absolutely the wrong time to make up new procedures.”

“When I offered them viable leads at viable prices from an approved vendor, they kept passing me down the line and made terrible deals instead,” said Dr. Hendricks, who has since sold supplies to hospitals in Michigan and elsewhere.

The agency’s [FEMA] career staff is filled with military veterans and disaster specialists whose careers trace the history of recent American catastrophes: Katrina, Sandy, Deepwater Horizon, Irene. The volunteers, most in their 20s, had different names in their résumés: Stanford, Goldman Sachs, Google. One had graduated from college just the previous spring. They were recruited from Insight Partners, from Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, from other investment firms and consulting companies in New York City.

Fuck.

The Masters of the Universe show us once again why elevating the Party of Government-Doesn't-Work to power turns government into a disaster zone and looting frenzy.

I am talking about the simple fact that you are looking at the performance of the ideals that would underpin an anarchic society in an archic society. Where is the meaning in that?

Because this is the real world, not a Platonic ideal, which observation holds with regard to almost any political concept.

ReluctantSamurai

05-07-2020, 00:59

but they aren't going to go eat at a restaurant or engage in something that they believe will get them sick or killed

But people will. Yes, large portions of the population understands that social distancing and wearing a mask out in public is the prudent thing to do. Unfortunately, there are enough people that don't give a crap (like all the idiotic protesters we see in the news) and we all know how that goes. 1 becomes 3, 3 becomes 9, 9 becomes 27, etc, etc, etc. And if D614G is indeed more contagious, those numbers get worse.

No one is going to go out if there are ~3000 death a day and everyone is in a makeshift hospital for six months. You either move to save both or you get neither.

If your existence relies on you going to work, you are going to go to work regardless the consequences. The alternative is losing your home or apartment, and living on the street begging for handouts. The ability to save both lives and the economy has passed. Social distancing is not reducing new infections or deaths in many places. It's maintaining a level curve and nothing more. With a serious lack of testing and people to do tracing, it will be nearly impossible to stay ahead of the virus. We have our non-existent leadership to thank for that.

Montmorency

05-07-2020, 01:17

23698
23699

:coffeenews:

But people will. Yes, large portions of the population understands that social distancing and wearing a mask out in public is the prudent thing to do. Unfortunately, there are enough people that don't give a crap (like all the idiotic protesters we see in the news) and we all know how that goes. 1 becomes 3, 3 becomes 9, 9 becomes 27, etc, etc, etc. And if D614G is indeed more contagious, those numbers get worse.

If your existence relies on you going to work, you are going to go to work regardless the consequences. The alternative is losing your home or apartment, and living on the street begging for handouts. The ability to save both lives and the economy has passed. Social distancing is not reducing new infections or deaths in many places. It's maintaining a level curve and nothing more. With a serious lack of testing and people to do tracing, it will be nearly impossible to stay ahead of the virus. We have our non-existent leadership to thank for that.

I can see where you're coming from, but gosh it would have been straightforward in concept (and despite the snags, we know we can implement the middle item): shutdown, organize comprehensive cross-sectional testing, cash transfers to people and businesses so they survive during the shutdown, relax, test, trace, isolate. The West Coast and Northeast will by and large be able to carry out the program it seems, though less well and with much more expense than under other circumstances.

If the federal government responded, even with these unforgivable delays the country would be ready to take necessary measures. When you despair that financial pressure and social deconditioning is going to force a critical mass of people back into circulation in most of the country, that is literally something the federal government could address anytime. We mustn't forget that. :wall:

EDIT: One saving grace is that the expanded unemployment insurance lasts until the end of July. That will incentivize a lot of people to stay at home.

Shaka_Khan

05-07-2020, 03:55

A producer named Michael interviews his friend Jacob Arabo, the founder of Jacob & Co. He's interviewing Jacob because Jacob had caught the coronavirus...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePiwFEOvlN0

ReluctantSamurai

05-07-2020, 16:36

If the federal government responded, even with these unforgivable delays the country would be ready to take necessary measures.

In a move typical of our Fearless Leader, suppression of information from the CDC designed to provide some guidelines to states on how to restart businesses continues:

https://apnews.com/7a00d5fba3249e573d2ead4bd323a4d4

The Trump administration has instead sought to put the onus on states to handle COVID-19 response. This approach to managing the pandemic has been reflected in President Donald Trump’s public statements, from the assertion that he isn’t responsible for the country’s lackluster early testing efforts, to his description last week of the federal government’s role as a “supplier of last resort” for states in need of testing aid.

Individual states probably have already made contact on their own, so suppressing the report likely isn't anything critical. It's just another stupid political ploy to keep people off balance, and keep the chaos going.

Viking

05-07-2020, 17:31

Because this is the real world, not a Platonic ideal, which observation holds with regard to almost any political concept.

What we are looking at here is not merely an imperfect instance, but one that is fundamentally different from what we are supposed to be looking at. Anarchism rejects the state. Here we have a state that is well within the normal area for what states look like, so if the term 'anarchism' applies here, the term would describe a concept that contradicts itself. If you wanted to discuss the broader topics of 'self-regulation', decentralization, and so on, we'd be having a different debate.

To approach it from a slightly different angle:

One response is clearly more, and more than trivially, anarchist than another.

I would say that, no, this is not a trivial conclusion. More or less, water is either frozen, or it is not. Water slightly above freezing is not more frozen than water close to boiling. While it might not be possible to make a similarly sharp boundary between a state and no state, it cannot be assumed that you will have a linear response for most variables as you make a state weaker or smaller until, and as, the entity (if we still have an entity at this point) is no longer a state. Indeed, one thing that we could see was that the distinction between state and no state is not that interesting because it turns out that there is such a large diversity at one or both sides of the divide for the factors that are the most interesting for consideration.

At the same time, if we did look at a state that was exceptionally weak, or that only very rarely, and only very briefly, intervened in a particular geographic territory, then we might have something that we could meaningfully describe as an imperfect instance of anarchy. This could be a situation where the people might view the existing state more as a force of nature that can be entirely dormant for years or decades on end (like hurricanes or volcanoes), rather than something that has a major presence in the daily lives of people. You could here have people that live almost like if the state that claims the territory did not exist.

In contrast, the state's influence on the daily lives of people is especially prominent in contemporary societies, like the society we are currently looking at. Owning phones and using the Internet, and being aware of the satellites orbiting above, most citizens of contemporary societies know that is it is necessary to put in a certain effort if they want to reduce the odds to a minimum that the watchful eye of the government (or even foreign governments) can reach them almost instantly in some way if it wants to.

ReluctantSamurai

05-08-2020, 15:47

Here we go. In a letter to The Washington Post, five Midwest governors are Trumpeting success at managing their COVID-19 outbreaks well before the results are in:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/05/republican-governors-our-states-stayed-open-covid-19-pandemic-heres-why-our-approach-worked/

Here in the country’s heartland, decisions have been made based on sound medical and social science, positioning our states to thrive individually as our economies reopen. Our approach has created a model for success that can be applied throughout the country.

The Plains states have managed this emergency exceptionally well by many measures. Our states have simultaneously ranked low in terms of infection rates and deaths. We are all using expanded testing, rigorous contact tracing and strong pipelines for PPE to keep people safe in the coming months. Getting this job done the right way will be key to slowing the spread of the coronavirus and protecting our nation’s health-care system in the long run.

The facts concerning these five states (Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Wyoming, Nebraska) tell a different story:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/05/coronavirus-republicans-governors-victory/611323/

Numbers from a recent NY Times article concerning reopening criteria:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/07/us/coronavirus-states-reopen-criteria.html

As of this writing, three of the U.S. metro areas with the most new cases relative to their population are in Iowa, Nebraska, and Arkansas. Take Iowa, for example. Exactly one month ago, the state surpassed 1,000 confirmed coronavirus cases; this week, that number is up to 10,400. Sioux City, in the northwest part of the state, has the highest number of new cases per capita in the entire country: 13 cases per 1,000 people. Meatpacking plants in Iowa and Nebraska have experienced major outbreaks, including one Tyson pork-processing facility in Perry, Iowa, where 730 workers—more than 58 percent of the plant’s employees—have tested positive for the virus, state health officials announced on Tuesday.

It’s possible that these states aren’t identifying even more cases, because there simply isn’t enough testing. All five states rank somewhere in the bottom half of the country’s testing capacity, offering 15 to 19 tests per 1,000 people, according to The Atlantic’s COVID Tracking Project. Compare that with North Dakota, another Plains state, which is administering 48 tests for every 1,000 people. “If you don’t test enough, you can’t know what things are going to look like,” Lisa Berkman, a public-policy and epidemiology professor at Harvard, told me. And each of these states is still working to ramp up their contact-tracing systems. Iowa doesn’t have “an implemented plan for widespread testing, contact tracing, and PPE in the community,” said Eli Perencevich, an epidemiology professor at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine. “We should be getting ahead of this by protecting the workers and not waiting for the outbreak.”

In the week since Governor Kim Reynolds opened up 77 of Iowa’s 99 counties, experts say they’ve already seen an increase in positive tests. Cases in those areas used to make up about 5 percent of the state’s total, but that share has increased to 20 percent, Perencevich told me, citing numbers from Reynolds’s recent press conferences. “It’s concerning that the opening-up is increasing the spread,” he said.

At least three of these five states might soon see flare-ups in infection, because metro areas with a high number of cases and a high daily growth rate are especially at risk for large outbreaks in the future. According to the Times data, cities that fall under that criteria include Des Moines and Sioux City, in Iowa; Omaha and Lincoln, in Nebraska; and St. Joseph, in Missouri. “[Of the] places that we’re really worried about increases, Iowa is just completely on the top of that list right now. Nebraska is not far behind,” Berkman said. “This is exactly the wrong time to be opening."

It is also a strange time—and perhaps an unnecessary political risk—for any state leader to be trumpeting a coronavirus win when the pandemic is still raging. Only two of the five states responded when asked why governors decided to write the Post op-ed this week. Governor Asa Hutchinson said in a statement that Arkansas has “consistently been below state and national trend line predictions,” and argued that there are also “no hot spots of community spread.” (There is a massive outbreak inside at least one correctional facility in the state, and the Arkansas health secretary this week identified several cities as soon-to-be hot spots.)

Sure governors. Maybe you get lucky at the COVID Casino but we'll check back in two or three weeks to see how you're doing.

Using this interactive map, you can find any county in any state of the US, and look at number of social factors. For the above mentioned states, a look at the healthcare workforce per 10,000 people is informative. Those 5 governors better hope they don't roll snake-eyes at the craps table:

https://www.ruralhealthinfo.org/data-explorer

ReluctantSamurai

05-08-2020, 16:35

Pannonian

05-08-2020, 18:33

Meanwhile, more shenanigans in Michigan---Dixieland of the North:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/07/michigan-lawmaker-armed-escort-rightwing-protest

Not going to be pretty when this group shows up at the same time as the Michigan Liberty Militia:creep:

Any comments from the UK folks here about this?:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/08/revealed-uk-scientists-fury-over-attempt-to-censor-covid-19-advice

The Tory government have a comfortable majority and high poll ratings. As long as they have these, they can do whatever they like. Past governments may have felt a duty of care to the nation and people. But these don't, and the British people don't feel inclined to hold them to it either.

ReluctantSamurai

05-08-2020, 19:15

and the British people don't feel inclined to hold them to it either

Despite having a rather poor performance overall at dealing with this pandemic?

Not that I'm picking on Iowa, per se, but the 29th state is on the verge of becoming a new "hotspot" here in the States:

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/2020/05/06/iowa-gov-kim-reynolds-meets-president-donald-trump-white-house/5177154002/

Check out the time-lapse map near the page bottom. Now couple that with this newest Trumpism:

On Wednesday, Trump said the amount of testing in the country hurts the perception of how far the virus is spreading. "In a way by doing all this testing, we make ourselves look bad... we're going to have more cases" because of increased testing, Trump said.

:thrasher: Rock On, Donny Baby!

Montmorency

05-08-2020, 22:20

Latest jobs report (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf) has 15% unemployment for April. These surveys are generally conducted around the middle of the month, so you can bet it's much worse than that.

Democrats' consensus facing these facts:
*Renew UI expansion, PPP grants
*Funding for states and hospitals
*Automatic fiscal stabilizers so that Congress doesn't have to constantly make these adjustments above
*$2000 monthly UBI for the duration of the emergency

Republicans' consensus facing these facts:
*We've done everything we need to do for April and May; check back in June, maybe
*UI renewal over our dead bodies (Lindsey Graham)
*Tax cuts
*Tort reform
*"Knock knock (https://youtu.be/Mh5LY4Mz15o?t=283). It's the United States. With huge boats (with guns). Gunboats. Open the country. Stop having it be closed."

Louisiana Senator John Kennedy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LCsiWL6gn0) (R) also had something to say, but it was indecipherable.

Well people in hell want ice water too, I mean, everybody has an idea and a bill, usually to spend more money. It’s like a Labor Day mattress sale around here

(Tangentially, another nail in the coffin of rule-of-law: Bill Barr (https://twitter.com/TPM/status/1258532162682236929) on dismissing charges against Mike Flynn and the judgement of history:

History is written by the winners, so it largely depends who’s writing the history.

Truly massive proportions of prisoners and inmates infected. Just that we know of.
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/05/01/a-state-by-state-look-at-coronavirus-in-prisons

Similar goings in meatpacking plants (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6918e3.htm). If there's 50% of any population that's been infected up to now, it's going to be a prison or a meatpacking plant. Or nursing home I guess.

Who's dying (https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/05/06/study-finds-that-disproportionately-black-counties-account-more-than-half-covid-19-cases-us-nearly-60-percent-deaths/)? Same old story.

What we are looking at here is not merely an imperfect instance, but one that is fundamentally different from what we are supposed to be looking at. Anarchism rejects the state. Here we have a state that is well within the normal area for what states look like, so if the term 'anarchism' applies here, the term would describe a concept that contradicts itself. If you wanted to discuss the broader topics of 'self-regulation', decentralization, and so on, we'd be having a different debate.

Just no. There is no categorical barrier. Anarchist ideas exist in this hierarchical world. The existence of those ideas is indisputable. Unless you take the position that the ideas are intrinsically self-contradictory, which I do not.

An event, behavior, or practice in the world as it exists can reflect a political ideal or concept.

Tell me that there are no autocracies because in dictatorships formal power and decisionmaking are always distributed to some extent.

I would say that, no, this is not a trivial conclusion. More or less, water is either frozen, or it is not. Water slightly above freezing is not more frozen than water close to boiling. While it might not be possible to make a similarly sharp boundary between a state and no state, it cannot be assumed that you will have a linear response for most variables as you make a state weaker or smaller until, and as, the entity (if we still have an entity at this point) is no longer a state. Indeed, one thing that we could see was that the distinction between state and no state is not that interesting because it turns out that there is such a large diversity at one or both sides of the divide for the factors that are the most interesting for consideration.

Water that is near freezing is colder than water that is near boiling. And whether or not water rejects states as political units doesn't matter for water's physical states of matter, because water exists whether or not states exist. You're raising a distinction that's simply irrelevant.

Any comments from the UK folks here about this?:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/08/revealed-uk-scientists-fury-over-attempt-to-censor-covid-19-advice

First-world (for now) problems.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/05/14/emails-white-house-interfered-with-science-study-536950
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/05/ziska-usda-climate-agriculture-trump-1445271
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/19/climate-studies-hidden-by-trump-administration-1753631
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/oct/03/science-trump-administration-crisis-point-report

Furunculus

05-09-2020, 07:03

Past governments may have felt a duty of care to the nation and people. But these don't, and the British people don't feel inclined to hold them to it either.
Can you evidence this extraordinary claim?

Gilrandir

05-09-2020, 12:31

:thrasher: Rock On, Donny Baby!

Donny Baby Donny B. Goode

Furunculus

05-10-2020, 09:35

an entertaining opinion piece of the 'response' to the UK response:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8303639/DAN-HODGES-dont-worst-Covid-19-death-rate-Europe-wicked-pretend-do.html#comments

Some excerpts:

In March, there was a recorded increase in excess of deaths of 50 per cent across the country. In northern Italy, the number of excess deaths virtually doubled. In Milan, the increase was a horrific 180 per cent.

But none of this matters. Remember the footage of the Italian field hospitals that resembled a scene from M*A*S*H? ‘This is Britain in 14 days,’ we were told. It wasn’t.

Last week, the Nightingale Hospital was mothballed. It never expanded beyond the first ward. A couple of days after the closure was announced, social media reacted in horror as images circulated of Covid-19 patients being forced to lie in corridors in another London hospital. Until it emerged that the hospital in question was actually in Spain.

But the Government’s critics don’t care. Cast your mind back to the referendum campaign, and the attacks on Leave’s ‘£350 million for the NHS’ pledge. The claim was devious and bogus, we were told. The bald figure may be accurate, but it didn’t stand up to the most simplistic statistical analysis.

The assertion that Britain has the worst Covid-19 death rate is the coronavirus equivalent. Those peddling this fake news have stopped short of painting the Grim Reaper on the side of a bus and touring it round the nation. But the effect is the same. They are working the political angles on the most deadly global pandemic for a century.

To what end? Obviously part of it is base hostility to Boris and his administration. As I’ve written before, there are those on the liberal Left who will never forgive him for winning that Brexit referendum, then cementing his victory in last year’s General Election.

There are also some who are astute – and cynical – enough to see political danger in the NHS’s remarkable resilience in the face of the Covid-19 crisis. For decades, the Left has hammered the mantra Britain’s health service was 24 hours from destruction.

As the scale of the crisis unfolding in Italy became apparent, I lost count of the number of times I was told: ‘Just you wait. Italy has double the critical care capacity we have.’ But it was Italy’s health service that buckled, and ours that withstood the coronavirus impact.

But to point that out is to commit a sacrilege. When I did so last week, one social-media commentator accused me of ‘pushing pro-virus propaganda’. A slightly less hysterical charge was that I was guilty of ‘British exceptionalism’.

Yet the problem is not British exceptionalism, but British nihilism. A need among sections of marginalised liberalism to debunk the simplistic notion British is Best by replacing it with the even more simplistic notion British is Worst.

Viking

05-10-2020, 16:55

Just no. There is no categorical barrier. Anarchist ideas exist in this hierarchical world. The existence of those ideas is indisputable. Unless you take the position that the ideas are intrinsically self-contradictory, which I do not.

An event, behavior, or practice in the world as it exists can reflect a political ideal or concept.

Tell me that there are no autocracies because in dictatorships formal power and decisionmaking are always distributed to some extent.

Of course ideas exist independently of the frameworks that employ them; but likewise, no idea is inherently exclusive to a framework. A specific evaluation of an idea does not necessarily inform how this idea would perform in the context of a particular framework that employs it. The performance of ideas can vary to extreme degrees depending on the environment in which they are evaluated.

Regarding autocracy, we use that term to point to states that already exist. As long we can meaningfully define a category for states that we refer to as 'autocracies', the concept itself is fine. The issues you refer to would then be a matter of terminology: is it really a kratos of the autos? But whatever you want to call these states, they seem to exist as a meaningful category.

Water that is near freezing is colder than water that is near boiling. And whether or not water rejects states as political units doesn't matter for water's physical states of matter, because water exists whether or not states exist. You're raising a distinction that's simply irrelevant.

The lack of a guarantee of linearity is the key here. There is no guarantee that 'more anarchist' is a meaningful comparison in the context we are discussing.

As the temperature of water drops below freezing, several properties of water has a non-linear response, such as its hardness. Ice is simply very different from liquid water, even though the difference in temperature between the two states can be very small.

Now, what tends to happen to the properties of societies that go from having a weak state to none at all? Do relevant variables have a mostly linear response to the changes, or do we have many abrupt transitions?

If we specifically look at how good people are following recommendations meant to decrease the spread of an epidemic, how similar are the results when we compare a country where the recommendations are generally not enforced by law, and an anarchic society? Are they close, or do we see dramatic differences?

Shaka_Khan

05-10-2020, 17:35

I'm afraid that we might live with this pandemic around us for a long time if there won't be a vaccine soon (like there's still no vaccine for HIV, except COVID is much more highly contagious). I expect the average life expectancy to go down to a level similar to the times when people just lived with their diseases due to unsanitary conditions.

ReluctantSamurai

05-10-2020, 20:23

I'm afraid that we might live with this pandemic around us for a long time if there won't be a vaccine soon

We may have to anyway, vaccine notwithstanding. It's too early to tell whether this virus will behave as a "one-off" type of pandemic, or a yearly recurring one. In the former case, the virus may well burn through enough world population to subside on its' own via humans acquiring immunities before a vaccine progresses to the point of mass distribution (which happened with SARS-CoV-1); in the latter case, a yearly vaccine much like the flu will be necessary and a certain number of people will die each year...again as with other types of infections.

A need among sections of marginalised liberalism to debunk the simplistic notion British is Best by replacing it with the even more simplistic notion British is Worst.

British is 2d Worst might be appropriate though:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/10/anglo-american-coronavirus-crisis

By the time Covid-19 hit their shores, the UK and US were lacking not just the politicians but the bureaucracies required to respond effectively. Prior to the crisis, Trump repeatedly attempted to defund the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In the UK, the pandemic inconvenienced a Tory cabinet embroiled in a feud with its own civil service. The intellectual and practical infrastructure to deal with facts had been vandalised.

Probably simplistic, but the world's second highest death toll doesn't speak well to Britain's response:shrug:

....btw, there's no chance of anyone becoming worse than the US.....we'll be well over 100,000 deaths by summer....and counting

:shame:

ReluctantSamurai

05-11-2020, 14:58

You'd think that the intelligence required to build this could produce a better name than Spot:

https://globalnews.ca/news/6925970/singapore-robot-dog-park-coronavirus/

Data would be proud.~D

Seamus Fermanagh

05-11-2020, 16:57

We may have to anyway, vaccine notwithstanding. It's too early to tell whether this virus will behave as a "one-off" type of pandemic, or a yearly recurring one. In the former case, the virus may well burn through enough world population to subside on its' own via humans acquiring immunities before a vaccine progresses to the point of mass distribution (which happened with SARS-CoV-1); in the latter case, a yearly vaccine much like the flu will be necessary and a certain number of people will die each year...again as with other types of infections.

British is 2d Worst might be appropriate though:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/10/anglo-american-coronavirus-crisis

Probably simplistic, but the world's second highest death toll doesn't speak well to Britain's response:shrug:

....btw, there's no chance of anyone becoming worse than the US.....we'll be well over 100,000 deaths by summer....and counting

:shame:

While the USA's response has been far from ideal, like most of the world (and admittedly NOT the best of the lot by any means :shame:), your last couple of statements presume we are getting anything resembling complete numbers from China. China has been great about sharing information regarding potential treatments and is doing its share to develop a vaccine, but I am leery, at least, of the numbers they claim.

edyzmedieval

05-11-2020, 17:12

Unfortunately, statistics and facts do not care about our feelings - for the most part, the Western world's response to this has been a mixed bag. Some good, some horrendously bad and some which are inexplicably high (Italy...) and which will force a serious rethinking of the current globalisation trend.

We knew a pandemic was going to happen, Bill Gates's TED talk from 5 years ago was spot on, but this immense impact was not something many predicted.

Pannonian

05-11-2020, 19:14

ReluctantSamurai

05-11-2020, 20:39

China has been great about sharing information regarding potential treatments and is doing its share to develop a vaccine, but I am leery, at least, of the numbers they claim.

I agree that China's data is probably very skewed by the government, and we probably will never know the true extent of the pandemic toll on its' population. Having said that, I don't believe the death toll there will resemble anything close to what we are going to see here in the States by summer. The one advantage they have (and by no means am I condoning their authoritarian government) is the absolute power in enforcing a lock-down. Is there something in between that and the "Don't Tread On My Rights" we have here? There is (Germany, Sweden, as two examples).

While the USA's response has been far from ideal

The USA's response has been nothing short of abysmal. Noone could be blamed for ignoring the early warnings of what a pandemic of this scale could do. It last happened 100 years ago. Once the scale of what was about to unfold became more clear, every effort should have been made to get prepared. Once the virus got here, there were going to be deaths, lots of deaths. But the extent of the impact, both medically and socially, could have been contained to something much less than an unmitigated disaster. Our government wasted nearly six weeks from the middle of February into March doing nothing but reacting (or down-playing) to the situation. Then, precious time was lost in April by not taking advantage of the window of opportunity presented by all the social distancing protocols. Instead of ramping up testing and tracing procedures, we got a federal government claiming it wasn't going to be a shipping clerk for the states by taking charge of procuring testing supplies and organizing testing labs. Our response has been so riddled with partisan politics, financial greed, and above all by the bombastic ego of our president, that it will likely go down as one of the worst (if not THE worst) responses of a sitting president to a national crisis. There are pockets of individual leadership and intelligence in dealing with this, but nothing resembling the co-ordinated effort that's required. Outside of maybe Brazil or Peru, I don't see a response that's worse...:shrug:

edyzmedieval

05-11-2020, 21:32

Looking at our ministers, I'd have cited the UK's response as being inexplicably high. Maybe we have a stash to fall back on.

Here lies the difference - UK kind of bungled the response but Italy did not. Italy experienced a severe outbreak from the beginning, and while they did fumble a bit in the beginning, they clamped down hard.

And yet... look where we are. Italy was hit by a hammer despite taking the best decisions most of the time. Something's wrong here. Is it genetics? Is it other environmental factors? Did COVID19 in Italy mutate? Why?

From my perspective, Romania handled it almost brilliantly, considering the beyond dire state of the Romanian healthcare system. Flattening the curve was our only goal (no chance of handling more than 1200 cases in ICU) and we did it really well.

Furunculus

05-12-2020, 07:40

Obesity?

We're pretty tubby by all accounts...

Csargo

05-12-2020, 09:58

Here lies the difference - UK kind of bungled the response but Italy did not. Italy experienced a severe outbreak from the beginning, and while they did fumble a bit in the beginning, they clamped down hard.

And yet... look where we are. Italy was hit by a hammer despite taking the best decisions most of the time. Something's wrong here. Is it genetics? Is it other environmental factors? Did COVID19 in Italy mutate? Why?

From my perspective, Romania handled it almost brilliantly, considering the beyond dire state of the Romanian healthcare system. Flattening the curve was our only goal (no chance of handling more than 1200 cases in ICU) and we did it really well.

The numbers are pretty similar for both countries currently, but the UK's numbers are growing far quicker than Italy's. Italy's growth is decreasing and the UK's looks like linear growth. I'm not sure what you're trying to say here honestly. Italy was(?) the first major outbreak in Europe, so the only difference is timing and Italy has a few weeks to a month over the UK.

The UK will most likely be worse than Italy, because of what Furunculus said, Italy's obesity rate is ~10% while the UK's is slightly less than 30%.

Crandar

05-12-2020, 13:40

Timing is very important. The main reason Eastern European countries, like Romania and Greece, performed better than their western neighbors is that they had more time to adjust to the situation, because they are less strongly linked to global trade and communications. We pretty much copied French response verbatim one week later than Paris, but we had much fewer casualties, because the virus had expanded much less here than in France. Italy was unfortunate enough to receive the full blunt of the pandemic just after China and Iran, which is why it has been affected so heavily. The same applies, at a smaller extent, to France and Spain.

In other news, shameful display, the fearless leader (tm) is waaaavering!

https://crooksandliars.com/cltv/2020/05/trump-storms-ending-press-conference

edyzmedieval

05-12-2020, 16:19

The numbers are pretty similar for both countries currently, but the UK's numbers are growing far quicker than Italy's. Italy's growth is decreasing and the UK's looks like linear growth. I'm not sure what you're trying to say here honestly. Italy was(?) the first major outbreak in Europe, so the only difference is timing and Italy has a few weeks to a month over the UK.

The UK will most likely be worse than Italy, because of what Furunculus said, Italy's obesity rate is ~10% while the UK's is slightly less than 30%.

UK bungled the response, Italy didn't. My point is that there's a significant problem because on one hand the UK kept things open for much longer, and obviously you get more cases, while Italy did almost everything required and their numbers are still on UK level.

There's a problem here because you're not supposed to have UK numbers when you do all of the lockdown measures and even more.

Csargo

05-12-2020, 18:39

UK bungled the response, Italy didn't. My point is that there's a significant problem because on one hand the UK kept things open for much longer, and obviously you get more cases, while Italy did almost everything required and their numbers are still on UK level.

There's a problem here because you're not supposed to have UK numbers when you do all of the lockdown measures and even more.

There's a gap of around a month from first confirmed case in Italy to the nationwide lockdown. I would guess culture and way of life are probably how Italy's numbers exploded earlier than the UK's, because Italy has multiple generations living in the same household(correct me if I'm wrong) and that's less common in the UK. That accounts for why the virus spread so much and quickly, plus add in the incubation period and you get a pretty nasty combination. And it's not as though Italy took it more seriously than the UK, because it's not hard to find articles about people not following guidelines pretty much everywhere.

I'm not going to say that the UK's original response wasn't bungled, because it definitely was.

ReluctantSamurai

05-12-2020, 20:06

I would guess culture and way of life are probably how Italy's numbers exploded earlier than the UK's, because Italy has multiple generations living in the same household(correct me if I'm wrong) and that's less common in the UK

Combine that with the the fact that nearly 23% of Italy's population is over 65 (vs just over 18% in the UK), and that was a recipe for disaster. About 15% of UK families are single parent households, and about 8 million people live alone. In Italy, 9% of families are single parent households, and roughly the same number (8.5 million) people living alone. Average household size in Italy-2.4; average size in the UK-2.3...so about the same.

Age distribution of recorded COVID deaths in Italy is: 60-69 (10.2%); 70-79 (25.1%); 80-89 (30.4%); 90+ (26.6%). In the UK: (it's damn hard to find a detailed age breakdown).

Viking

05-12-2020, 22:32

In the former case, the virus may well burn through enough world population to subside on its' own via humans acquiring immunities before a vaccine progresses to the point of mass distribution (which happened with SARS-CoV-1)

SARS was contained. Only a little over 8,000 cases of SARS were reported worldwide. It might not have been as contagious as SARS-2:

According to the doctor, one thing that wasn’t necessary was quarantine.

“When we learned more about the disease, it turns out that SARS is among the unusual infections that was not infectious before people got sick,” McGeer said.

https://globalnews.ca/news/6458609/looking-back-toronto-sars-outbreak/

Montmorency

05-13-2020, 04:32

Tijuana (\https://timesofsandiego.com/tech/2020/05/09/tijuanas-coronavirus-death-rate-soars-after-hospital-outbreaks/) is what happens when hospitals are overrun or offline. Double the Mexican CFR.

More than 21% of patients who have tested positive for coronavirus in the city do not survive, health ministry data showed as of Thursday. In the rest of Mexico, the figure was just under 10%

While Tijuana’s figure might be due partly to an unduly high proportion of very sick patients being tested for coronavirus, Alberto Reyes Escamilla, director of Tijuana General Hospital, said he thought it was directly linked to the hospital’s personnel shortage.

“It has a lot to do with the fact that we don’t have staff,” he said, adding that about 500 of his 1,200 person pre-pandemic staff are either off sick or furloughed because of vulnerability to the illness.

In unrelated news, here is an article on "How Germany, That Utterly, Utterly Unique Country, Kept Its Factories Open During the Pandemic."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-germany-kept-its-factories-open-during-the-pandemic-11588774844

Recent polling: While support for stay-at-home policies is not what it used to be, only about a third of the country supports abandoning them.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/most-americans-think-its-too-soon-to-return-to-what-life-was-like-pre-pandemic/

:daisy: https://twitter.com/davidlparsons/status/1258988672084373505

https://i.imgur.com/bjWmDs5.jpg

:daisy:
Colorado Restaurant Packed After Defying State Order By Opening Up For Mother's Day (https://www.complex.com/life/2020/05/colorado-restaurant-opens-in-defiance-of-state-order) [VIDEO] (https://twitter.com/nick__puckett/status/1259541624389955584)

:daisy:
'If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me': Elon Musk confirms Tesla is restarting its factory against local rules (https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-confirms-tesla-california-factory-open-risks-being-arrested-2020-5)

Nevertheless (https://slate.com/business/2020/05/south-reopening-restaurants-coronavirus-opentable.html).

https://i.imgur.com/bsCOAWD.png

(A note, that I've made before but needs to be emphasized in present context: Even if you can force people to work, you can't force them to spend. And if customers don't spend, then firms don't spend, and jobs are eliminated whether someone wants to work them or not.)

I did predict that the jobs report would be a gamechanger, but it appears the media, the stock market, and the GOP had already priced it in. So the effect on them is, if any, of the opposite valence. One of those times I'm most appalled at being wrong.

As expected, Democrats react to the moment by proposing solutions (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/12/coronavirus-updates-house-democrats-unveil-3-trillion-relief-bill.html).

Nearly $1 trillion in relief for state and local governments
A second round of direct payments of $1,200 per person, and up to $6,000 for a household
About $200 billion for hazard pay for essential workers who face heightened health risks during the crisis
$75 billion for coronavirus testing and contact tracing — a key effort to restart businesses
An extension of the $600 per week federal unemployment insurance benefit through January (the provision approved in March is set to expire after July)
$175 billion in rent, mortgage and utility assistance
Subsidies and a special Affordable Care Act enrollment period to people who lose their employer-sponsored health coverage
More money for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, including a 15% increase in the maximum benefit
$25 billion for the US Postal Service
etc.

McConnell retorted that “But what you’ve seen in the House is not something designed to deal with reality, but designed to deal with aspirations.” As he continues to brainstorm on the real issues facing Americans, such as curtailing business pandemic liability.

Recent Vox article making a case for suppression over mitigation. But we know it can't happen here. :rolleyes:
https://www.vox.com/2020/5/6/21241058/coronavirus-mitigation-suppression-flatten-the-curve

The United States, meanwhile, is moving to open up on the basis of a vaguely articulated assumption that settling for mitigation is good enough.

One reason for the pressure to open up is that while widespread orders to shelter in place have clearly succeeded in slowing the spread of infection, they’re not bringing case volumes down quickly. Authorities fear the economic pain of prolonged shutdowns, and it seems like the mass public is growing impatient and starting to bend the rules.

But the reality is that the United States has not really tried the strategies that have made suppression successful. To accomplish that, America would need to invest in expanding the volume of tests, invest in more contact tracers, and create centralized quarantine facilities so that infected people aren’t simply sent home to infect the rest of their household.

Since the US didn't spend April doing that, trying to achieve suppression — along the lines of Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, and New Zealand — would necessarily involve more delay and more economic pain. But doing so would save potentially tens or hundreds of thousands of lives and almost certainly lead to a better economic outcome by allowing activity to truly restart.

Regarding autocracy, we use that term to point to states that already exist. As long we can meaningfully define a category for states that we refer to as 'autocracies', the concept itself is fine. The issues you refer to would then be a matter of terminology: is it really a kratos of the autos? But whatever you want to call these states, they seem to exist as a meaningful category.

It should be difficult to dispute that societies have existed in forms that could be described as relatively anarchic. But the measures endorsed by the Swedish government and people also exist and are being put into practice. Another term for what's happening in Sweden is voluntarism, but of course voluntarism is a core component of anarchism. If your complaint is truly that you oppose the use of the label "anarchism" within any existing hierarchical framework, then that just strikes me as a frivolous foofaraw, maybe even a Catch-22. Would you say that there is only anarchism in a black bloc screaming "**** the state, the state is over?"

There is no guarantee that 'more anarchist' is a meaningful comparison in the context we are discussing.

What generally doesn't exist in anarchist thought is "rulers." Rules can exist. Division of labor and expertise are accepted. Advice is legitimate. It's an oversimplification, but as a schema for pandemic responses - in Sweden, the citizens execute; in South Korea, the citizens acquiesce and comply.

As the temperature of water drops below freezing, several properties of water has a non-linear response, such as its hardness. Ice is simply very different from liquid water, even though the difference in temperature between the two states can be very small.

People in hell want ice water too.

Now, what tends to happen to the properties of societies that go from having a weak state to none at all? Do relevant variables have a mostly linear response to the changes, or do we have many abrupt transitions?

If we specifically look at how good people are following recommendations meant to decrease the spread of an epidemic, how similar are the results when we compare a country where the recommendations are generally not enforced by law, and an anarchic society? Are they close, or do we see dramatic differences?

These are all fine questions as far as they go, but not strictly relevant to a debate over the validity of calling a phenomenon anarchic. Maybe you would be appeased by the formulation that the Swedish strategy is a trial in anarchist values.

While the USA's response has been far from ideal, like most of the world (and admittedly NOT the best of the lot by any means :shame:), your last couple of statements presume we are getting anything resembling complete numbers from China.

I think Samurai said it first, but if Trump and his team had convened in January specifically to devise the worst pandemic response they could imagine, and put it into action with present results, then Trump should be acknowledged for his deft follow-through. He is an active saboteur, a plundering arsonist - not a mere passive incompetent.

China has been great about sharing information regarding potential treatments and is doing its share to develop a vaccine, but I am leery, at least, of the numbers they claim.

There's a limit to what can be hidden. China isn't North Korea. Moreover, to the extent the Chinese government would mobilize the most expensive and thorough lockdown in history, it has an existential motive for the response to address a real problem, and to not abandon it unless there is something to show for the ordeal.

Surprisingly, I'm kind of inclined to trust Russia's numbers, given that a regime bent on concealment would probably not rapidly assemble a testing regime almost on par with America's (i.e. #2 in the world for absolute volume and gaining, with the caveat that China has never released testing numbers to my knowledge), one that has produced the world's fastest-rising case count. The main concern is that their official death tally is astonishingly low against the case count and Russian demographics. Who believes Russia would genuinely emerge from a pandemic with one of the world's lowest IFRs, on a tier with Iceland?

Unfortunately, statistics and facts do not care about our feelings - for the most part, the Western world's response to this has been a mixed bag. Some good, some horrendously bad and some which are inexplicably high (Italy...) and which will force a serious rethinking of the current globalisation trend.

We knew a pandemic was going to happen, Bill Gates's TED talk from 5 years ago was spot on, but this immense impact was not something many predicted.

There are three components to pandemic response:

1. Planning
2. Reaction (Onset)
3. Execution

Almost all countries that had not had prior experience with SARS failed comprehensively on #2. Some had #1 - such as the US with its superior technical readiness - but #2 is the bottleneck since decision-points are where latent capacities are realized. Solving theoretical technical problems means nothing without bureaucratic and political consent.

Where some countries, such as Germany, rebounded was in #3, the handling of an ongoing outbreak. One may trip and pratfall, but it's possible to dust oneself off with grace. America's disgrace is in a follow-up worse even than the beginning, worse than authoritarian countries like Russia, Brazil, and India* - in choosing to get even worse rather than better. The Trump administration has perpetrated a great many crimes against the country, including begetting unnecessary death and carnage from the disease itself, but the institutional destruction of the federal state during a time of crisis is quite possibly the most heinous and injurious. It's rare for nations to recover from this without inflecting from great devastation. It's literally the deciding factor among most historians for rating James Buchanan the worst president in American history.

*It's not clear just how bad those countries or others will sort themselves, but given that the US is on a persistent downward trend with each passing day, they would have to strive a ways to overtake us.

Couple articles comparing America to Europe on pandemic response:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/24/united-states-europe-coronavirus-pandemic-shutdown-unemployment/
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/04/kurzarbeit-coronavirus-pandemic-america-unemployment-apocalypse-europe-not/

Noone could be blamed for ignoring the early warnings of what a pandemic of this scale could do. It last happened 100 years ago.

We can levy some blame. SARS emerged during the War on Terror. Obama reacted precipitously to the swine flu and the US helped the world get a handle on it, for which he was alternately mocked and vilified. Trump was warned about the pandemic potential of SARS-CoV-2 starting in at least early January and like dozens of times over January and February.

For God's sake, George "Shrub" Bush read a book about pandemics while in office and absorbed enough to decide to make preparing for them a priority. Maybe that sounds genius-tier in our fallen era, but almost any human would come off well measured against Trump. Our standards are far too low if we don't hold Trump liable for every count of 'mere' negligence. Whether the negligence compounds the larceny and the intensified evisceration of the national state, or the other way around, I can't say.

The UK will most likely be worse than Italy, because of what Furunculus said, Italy's obesity rate is ~10% while the UK's is slightly less than 30%.

The whole world got fat beneath our noses, didn't it?

The main reason Eastern European countries, like Romania and Greece, performed better than their western neighbors is that they had more time to adjust to the situation, because they are less strongly linked to global trade and communications.

It's kind of ironic considering Greece is one of the centers of the commercial shipping industry.

Unrelated news: Bolsonaro on track for impeachment? The polling over the past month has placed him in Trump territory for approval and impeachability.

Csargo

05-13-2020, 05:04

The whole world got fat beneath our noses, didn't it?

Apparently, and Italy's obesity rate is 19.9% according to the WHO.

Today I’m thinking about going in to this store, asking to see the manager, and having a coughing fit in his face—I’ll post the video if successful lol

https://media.giphy.com/media/65os7odbIW6pa/giphy.gif

ReluctantSamurai

05-13-2020, 14:06

This....is one tough woman:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52641659

she has lived through the flu pandemic of 1918-19, the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War and the coronavirus.

:hail::hail::hail:

Greyblades

05-13-2020, 18:23

I don't think this is true. But I don't blame you for thinking this; right wing media makes conservatives think they lose all the time so that people become more receptive to radicalization.
:inquisitive: Why are you acting like I said the republican party doesnt win power? I said they do win power and that they broadly dont use that power in the way they were expected to by those that vote for them.

Secure the border: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Fence_Act_of_2006
Cut taxes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_tax_cuts
American Interests: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Protection_Act / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_United_States_steel_tariff / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President%27s_Emergency_Plan_for_AIDS_Relief

Half of this I have already shown above is false. The other half is revisionist history. Truly these wiki links have dispelled my illusion that despite promising otherwise all the neocons were willing to give outside of thier own self interest were token efforts. I have been tricked, been misled and, quite possibly, bamboozled!

No wait, sorry that was before I actually read them to find out only three are relevant of which only the tax was an actual fulfilment: Bush's fence covered 680 miles out of 1,900, the steel tarrif was undone in a year and a half.

As for the rest I find myself baffled you thought overseas aids relief, emissions reduction and legal protections for the armed forces comes anywhere close to outwieghing allowing your industrial might to be moved overseas to a strategic rival, especially now its come back to bite you and the rest of the western world hard in this epidemic.

Everyone approved of the War in Afghanistan. Conservatives and moderates approved of the war in Iraq. Everyone approved of the PATRIOT Act when it came out. They agreed with Guantanamo Bay. Public support collapsed for these things years later. Didnt say my criticisms didnt also apply to the democrats did I? Knowingly and otherwise; everyone in positions of power partook in evil save a few notable outliers. Some of those same outliers are rather prominent these days.

Conservatives never looked to uphold the Constitution. You, uh, wanna run that by @Seamus_Fermangh (https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/member.php?u=13105)?

Consider yourself fooled. You know the whole "takes one to know one" insight requires the knowing one to have actually learned from being one.

I really dont think one still engulfed in every fantasy since your initial fooling can lend your experience into identifying current fools.

Leftists would disagree, and if that doesn't make you rethink your position you are simply in it for the movement not the meaning. Less leftists, more democrats methinks. Cant avoid people noticing your party supported Bush and Obama's middle east shithole making so you have to pretend it's stain isnt the evil it actually was, else you'd have to question why you keep voting for thier appointed leaders.

With the exception of trade, Trump is still giving them everything they would want. Aggressive foreign policy to Iran, tax cuts, devolution of powers to the states, appointment of conservative judges.
There is another reason why they disagree, perhaps you should actually read what they say.
I like how you reinforce my point when attempting to decry it. I wonder if you even read them yourself, what with you not actually using thier words to reinforce the point.

Hell you even touch upon a worse interpretation. screw lip service; maintaining a detrimental trade situation is more important to them than all the pro conservative things trump does.

Yeah, its sad how easily recent history is forgotten to continue the victim complex of conservatives.

:laugh4: Ladies and gentlemen we've finally found a victim complex the Dems dont want to sustain in perpetuity!

Greyblades

05-13-2020, 18:28

UK bungled the response, Italy didn't.

I agree for the most part, but I think it is amusing to highlight the exceptions of milan and florence whose intial reaction to the virus was to encourage people to hug chinamen.

Montmorency

05-13-2020, 20:20

I have been tricked, been misled and, quite possibly, bamboozled!

Sole correct statement.

ReluctantSamurai

05-13-2020, 23:26

Damn! Even the goats are protesting:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/13/goats-escape-san-jose-video

:bounce:

Montmorency

05-14-2020, 01:37

Aztec philosophy on how to handle disease outbreaks.
https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2020/05/10/aztec-king-rules-plague-covid-19-survival/ideas/essay/?fbclid=IwAR2_nZlQvmslrL0cCkqBywE05SOPyXSfLl-5bLhM6fxJkrdTWp2VIqL5FtY

The Aztecs were no strangers to plagues. Among the speeches recorded in their rhetoric and moral philosophy, we find a warning to new kings concerning their divinely ordained role in the event of contagion:

Sickness will arrive during your time. How will it be when the city becomes, is made, a place of desolation? Just how will it be when everything lies in darkness, despair? You will also go rushing to your death right then and there. In an instant, you will be over.

Facing a plague, it was vital that the king respond with grace. They warned:

Do not be a fool. Do not rush your words, do not interrupt or confuse people. Instead find, grasp, arrive at the truth. Make no one weep. Cause no sadness. Injure no one. Do not show rage or frighten folks. Do not create a scandal or speak with vanity. Do not ridicule. For vain words and mockery are no longer your office. Never, of your own will, make yourself less, diminished. Bring no scorn upon the nation, its leadership, the government.

Retract your teeth and claws. Gladden your people. Unite them, humor them, please them. Make your nation happy. Help each find their proper place. That way you’ll be esteemed, renowned. And when our Lord extinguishes you, the old ones will weep and sigh.

If a king did not follow this advice, if his rule caused more suffering than it abated, then the people prayed to Tezcatlipoca for any number of consequences, including his death:

May he be made an example of. Let him receive some reprimand, whatever you choose. Perhaps punishment. Disease. Perhaps you’ll let your honor and glory fall to another of your friends, those who weep in sorrow now. For they do exist. They live. You have no want of friends. They are sighing before you, humble. Choose one of them.

Perhaps he [the bad ruler] will experience what the common folk do: suffering, anguish, lack of food and clothing. And perhaps you will give him the greatest punishments: paralysis, blindness, rotting infection.

Or will he instead soon depart this world? Will you bring about his death? Will he get to know our future home, the place with no exits, no smoke holes? Maybe he will meet the Lord of Death, Mictlanteuctli, mother and father of us all.

Only an Ancient Alien or time traveler could have written this. :wacky:

Hooahguy

05-14-2020, 03:09

FBI serves warrant on Senator Burr (R-NC) in investigation of stock sales linked to coronavirus. (https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-05-13/fbi-serves-warrant-on-senator-stock-investigation)

If they take down Loeffler too I will be very happy.
:beam:

Furunculus

05-15-2020, 13:20

Obesity?

We're pretty tubby by all accounts...

apparently i was on the money:
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/coronavirus-latest-updates-uk-may-15-2020_uk_5ebe310cc5b6772bca216f5d?guccounter=1

Viking

05-15-2020, 15:51

It should be difficult to dispute that societies have existed in forms that could be described as relatively anarchic. But the measures endorsed by the Swedish government and people also exist and are being put into practice. Another term for what's happening in Sweden is voluntarism, but of course voluntarism is a core component of anarchism. If your complaint is truly that you oppose the use of the label "anarchism" within any existing hierarchical framework, then that just strikes me as a frivolous foofaraw, maybe even a Catch-22. Would you say that there is only anarchism in a black bloc screaming "**** the state, the state is over?"

[...]

These are all fine questions as far as they go, but not strictly relevant to a debate over the validity of calling a phenomenon anarchic. Maybe you would be appeased by the formulation that the Swedish strategy is a trial in anarchist values.

Suburb dwellers Anne and Frank believe in the value of having tidy lawns. If we use a hot new element from contemporary American political philosophy, namely alternative facts, we know that the value of having a tidy lawn is of course also an important aspect of Stalinism.

If we discover that the lawn value of Anne and Frank in practice makes life much better in the suburbs, this is of course not a validation of Stalinism, because Stalinism is so much more than this one value. It might be technically correct to say that the value is Stalinist, but there is more to it than that.

If we return to anarchism, anarchism is likewise much more than voluntarism. Removing the state from the equation is potentially a huge deal as far as outcomes are concerned. So even if the original statement is adjusted to say that we have a test of anarchist values in Sweden, that revised statement would seem to be more about rhetoric (you have an experiment that might be technically correct to associate with anarchism and which can have promising or disappointing results) than something of practical value (the experiment might not teach us much at all about what ideological anarchism would be like in practice).

Furunculus

05-16-2020, 09:07

very interesting article on the climatic/physiological effect on transmission and mortality:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/15/summer-weather-could-playing-large-role-lowering-coronavirus/

The University of Maryland found that most cases fall along a narrow east-west corridor of 30 and 50 degrees of latitude, which includes northern Italy, the Pacific Northwest, Japan, Iran, South Korea, France, Spain and Germany. All share similar climatic conditions.
...
Weather records in the hardest hit countries had similar average temperatures of between 5°C and 11°C and humidity of 47 to 79 per cent, which is close to laboratory conditions in which coronavirus thrives.
...
Researchers from the Anglia Ruskin University compared the numbers of coronavirus cases to the average levels of vitamin D for 20 European countries and found a significant correlation.

Italy and Spain have both experienced high mortality rates, and scientists found both countries have lower than average vitamin D levels.

This is partly because people in southern Europe, particularly the elderly, avoid strong sun, while their darker skin pigmentation also reduces the body's ability to produce natural vitamin D.
...
Dr Lee Smith, Reader in Physical Activity and Public Health at Anglia Ruskin University, said: “Vitamin D has been shown to protect against acute respiratory infections, and older adults, the group most deficient in vitamin D, are also the ones most seriously affected by Covid-19.

“A previous study found that 75 per cent of people in institutions, such as hospitals and care homes, were severely deficient in vitamin D.”

Viking

05-17-2020, 10:09

Wow, only one new covid-19 case confirmed during the last week (https://www.bt.no/nyheter/lokalt/i/opqo8W/kun-ein-positiv-korona-proeve-i-bergen-denne-veka) in the city where I live (> 280 000 inhabitants). 4 March (https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php/154051-Coronavirus-COVID-19?p=2053803276&viewfull=1#post2053803276) there were 15 confirmed cases in the city in total, compared to 222 people in all of Spain and 86 in all of the UK, according to the Johns Hopkins resource (https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html). It did not have to turn out this way; a bullet was probably dodged.

Montmorency

05-17-2020, 20:13

23738

Hooahguy

05-18-2020, 22:11

Trump says that he is taking hydroxychloroquine (https://twitter.com/Yamiche/status/1262479492829847553?s=20).

Just... wow. There is so much to unpack here. Does he have the virus and taking a risky drug to treat it? Or is he taking a risky drug as a preventative measure? Or is he lying and trying to get others to take it? Who knows. What we do know is its criminal for the VA to keep using the drug despite it having a nearly 30% fatality rate (https://www.stripes.com/news/veterans/veterans-group-accuses-va-of-using-coronavirus-patients-as-testing-subjects-1.627189).

The stupidity, it hurts.

CrossLOPER

05-19-2020, 00:20

Seamus Fermanagh

05-19-2020, 15:47

He is either trying to distract people (which works because the media seems incapable of ignoring him for a day), or he is really in deep in terms of believing his own BS.

You used the word "or." But those goals are not at all incommensurate.

C. Cuomo is advancing the theory that this is a) a distraction to keep the focus off a comparative lack of effort towards testing and tracing, and b) part of a political move to paint himself as "tough and moving forward" while implicitly labeling the Dems as a party of "no" and "We can't."

If the economy remains half-closed then Trump's chances of re-election are diminished. His "I freed the economy to grow" theme has been one of his better selling points outside his cadre of "deplorables." So, ask yourself, is Trump willing to accept 50k more casualties (skewed towards urban area losses) to enhance his chances of re-election when all of the authorities are asserting that a vaccine will not be available before the election and very likely not before the end of his term in office.

There is enough of a sense among various leadership cadres around the world that, having slowed things to enhance our health infrastructure as much as practicable so they are not overwhelmed, it is time to accept the casualties and move on. Trump cannot say that in public any more than could any other Western leader. But do I think he's willing to move on under those conditions? Yup.

CrossLOPER

05-19-2020, 19:59

There is enough of a sense among various leadership cadres around the world that, having slowed things to enhance our health infrastructure as much as practicable so they are not overwhelmed, it is time to accept the casualties and move on. Trump cannot say that in public any more than could any other Western leader. But do I think he's willing to move on under those conditions? Yup.
It's not that simple. If enough people start being careless, then we will be back to where we were and the situation will be even worse for those seeking reelection. The economy will continue to suffer if there is not enough confidence that going out to eat or getting your hair cut is potentially lethal or will result in a five digit medical bill.

If there is a combination of economic relief to counter the weak opening? Sure. Is that going to involve relying on the state to continue to give you unemployment on top of whatever check the IRS sends? These are questions that need to be weighed and I don't have confidence the current administration or federal government in general is going to be capable dealing with that. The state governments are limited in what they do and are strained, in addition to the Navy Seal rejects that keep showing up at their door asking them when they will open Apple Bee's

ReluctantSamurai

05-19-2020, 21:35

There is enough of a sense among various leadership cadres around the world that, having slowed things to enhance our health infrastructure as much as practicable so they are not overwhelmed, it is time to accept the casualties and move on.

Unfortunately, we have indeed come to that. The US wasted valuable time in February & March denying that this could be a serious problem. Our leaders, and many of those around the world, took a wait-and-see approach at the beginning. However, some leaders took immediate, and strong actions once the full scope of this pandemic became apparent. The virus was already running rampant in world populations, so there was no chance at "containment". The only tool available was the sledgehammer approach of social distancing (whether that be mandatory or voluntary). Social distancing works, but you cannot keep an entire nation of any size, let alone that of the US with 330 million people, locked down indefinitely. But social distancing bought some time, time which was wasted here in the US (ie. the latter part of March and the entire month of April). Those failings are well documented and publicized, so no need to rehash all of that.

So, ask yourself, is Trump willing to accept 50k more casualties (skewed towards urban area losses) to enhance his chances of re-election when all of the authorities are asserting that a vaccine will not be available before the election and very likely not before the end of his term in office.

Trump is willing to sacrifice whatever it takes to get re-elected. Let noone mistake that this man has a single ounce of empathy in his body, and that retaining his hold on the presidency for 4 more years is the ONLY issue at hand. And it's a mistake, IMHO, to assume that all the coming deaths here in the States will occur in the cities. I have been following the progress of this pandemic out into the rural areas ever since its' spread began to slow in the cities. There are areas in rural America that are already getting overwhelmed by the number of new cases, and there is no abatement in sight. It's progressing slower because of population densities being lower than urban areas, but it's progressing nonetheless. And that scares our Fearless Leader, which is why he's trying to discredit the current methods for tabulating cases and deaths saying that they are too high, when in fact, they are too low by just about any epidemiological form of measurement.

Going to be interesting to see what happens here in my home state of Michigan on Thursday. Trump is scheduled to tour some auto factories and Ford has gone on record saying NOONE is allowed in a plant without wearing a mask, and they have requested the President to do so. We shall see...:creep:

ReluctantSamurai

05-21-2020, 06:27

For all you State-Siders, I found this neat little tool to check on how well your state is doing with the pandemic response:

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/05/07/851610771/u-s-coronavirus-testing-still-falls-short-hows-your-state-doing

For all the shit Big Gretch has taken about lock-down policy, Michigan is one of the few states showing the number of new cases being significantly less than 10% of the total number of tests done (a number higher than 10% means there are still a lot of undetected cases; a number of 20% or higher means that there are A LOT of undetected cases). Still, the amount of testing is much less than it should be as it is in most places here.

And then there's this:

https://covid19-projections.com/about/

And individual states:

https://covid19-projections.com/infections-tracker/

However, it's hard to tell if the above data is being muddied by the recent trend of the CDC to combine the viral tests for COVID-19 with the anti-body tests, which throws a lot of doubt on testing trends and results:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/05/cdc-and-states-are-misreporting-covid-19-test-data-pennsylvania-georgia-texas/611935/

Because antibody tests are meant to be used on the general population, not just symptomatic people, they will, in most cases, have a lower percent-positive rate than viral tests. So blending viral and antibody tests “will drive down your positive rate in a very dramatic way,”

The intermingling of viral and antibody tests suggests that some of those gains might be illusory. If even a third of the country’s gain in testing has come by expanding antibody tests, not viral tests, then its ability to detect an outbreak is much smaller than it seems.

The chart in the very first link begs the question (again:stare:) of why we still use the IHME model when it is consistently the most inconsistent model being used.....:shrug:

Montmorency

05-25-2020, 02:13

https://i.imgur.com/4MvssUn.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/A5G9bJy.png

Industry data on commercial foot traffic in the states. Check it out.
https://www.safegraph.com/dashboard/reopening-the-economy-foot-traffic?s=SC&d=05-19-2020&i=all

For everyone: Epidemiologist writes on the relative individual risks of various activities with regard to COVID, with focus on respiratory exposure.
https://www.erinbromage.com/post/the-risks-know-them-avoid-them

if you don't solve the biology, the economy won't recover.

Remember the formula: Successful Infection = Exposure to Virus [dose] x Time

Basically, as the work closures are loosened, and we start to venture out more, possibly even resuming in-office activities, you need to look at your environment and make judgments. How many people are here, how much airflow is there around me, and how long will I be in this environment. If you are in an open floorplan office, you really need to critically assess the risk (volume, people, and airflow). If you are in a job that requires face-to-face talking or even worse, yelling, you need to assess the risk. If you are sitting in a well ventilated space, with few people, the risk is low.

California is likely to overtake New York in cumulative testing by the end of the month. Since the beginning of May their test counts have been turbocharged. On the other hand, the proportion of positives to tests conducted is now well below 10% in New York. At the height of the April surge it was approaching 50%, and beyond 50% in the city, which is probably more important than any virtual pissing match.

If anyone is interested, here is the New York relaxation schedule that I've mentioned from time to time. Upstate New York (but not the city or Long Island) is basically all in Phase I now.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/05/when-will-new-york-reopen-phases-and-full-plan-explained.html

Two articles on Cuomo and de Blasio's mismanagement of the New York epidemic. They're too long for me to commit to reading in full, but the root of it is that the longstanding rivalry and backbiting between the governor and the mayor had significant repercussions on policy and coordination. Lot of bad moves and missed shots in February and early March. Thousands of avoidable, or minimally deferrable, deaths. Government action matters.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/04/seattles-leaders-let-scientists-take-the-lead-new-yorks-did-not
https://www.propublica.org/article/two-coasts-one-virus-how-new-york-suffered-nearly-10-times-the-number-of-deaths-as-california

Now POTUS Trump. (https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/1263518696309313537)[VIDEO]

"I tested very positively in another sense so— this morning. Yeah. I tested positively toward negative, right. So. I tested perfectly this morning. Meaning I tested negative."

But who's on first? :drummer:

On the the meat.

How many licks does it take to get to the ruin of a nation (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/467815-there-is-a-great-deal-of-ruin-in-a-nation)? Let's find out. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4GPZIP9KR4) - von Wallenstein

Terminal stupidity amuse-bouche. [VIDEO]
https://twitter.com/OnlyInLVNV/status/1262335074516692992

According to the 2019 Global Health Security Index (https://www.ghsindex.org/), the US and UK were the most prepared countries in the world for a pandemic. Like I've been saying, everyone understood this in and before January 2020.

On the government ripping off the people.

More than 40,000 (https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/19/national-guard-coronavirus-267514) National Guard members currently helping states test residents for the coronavirus and trace the spread of infections will face a “hard stop” on their deployments on June 24 — just one day shy of many members becoming eligible for key federal benefits, according to a senior FEMA official. The official outlined the Trump administration’s plans on an interagency call on May 12, an audio version of which was obtained by POLITICO. The official also acknowledged during the call that the June 24 deadline means that thousands of members who first deployed in late March will find themselves with only 89 days of duty credit, one short of the 90-day threshold for qualifying for early retirement and education benefits under the Post-9/11 GI bill. The looming loss of crucial frontline workers, along with questions about whether the administration is shortchanging first responders, would require a delicate messaging strategy, the official — representing FEMA’s New England region — told dozens of colleagues on the interagency call.

Since early March (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/15/44percent-of-us-unemployment-applicants-have-been-denied-or-are-waiting.html), over 36 million Americans have filed for unemployment [Ed. Our workforce prior to the pandemic was ~165 million, with as few as 5 million unemployed] due to the coronavirus crisis, marking the biggest spike in unemployment in U.S. history.

In response to these claims, states have paid a record $48 billion in unemployment benefits to people out of work but several recent studies have found that this total could have been much higher. According to an analysis by One Fair Wage, a nonprofit organization that advocates for restaurant workers, only 56% of those who have applied for unemployment insurance are receiving benefits, meaning about 44% have been denied or are still waiting.

One of the primary motivators of Republican states to relax pandemic measures has been the desire to kick people off UI or avoid paying it out in the first place. Naturally, to the questionable extent Trump and the Republicans are willing to legislate any more relief, they demand cessation of UI expansion, coupled with liability protection for businesses. And when we signed that act we thought the hundreds of billions in tax breaks and hundreds of billions more in bailouts and subsidies would actually purchase something for the commoners. I would have preferred to avoid a depression, but if y'all insist...

...Trump threatened to impound federal money from Michigan if it expands mail voting, which is similar to a scenario floated during the impeachment investigation as a potential future instance of naked political corruption, and would mirror the illegal impoundment he directed with regard to Ukraine. What makes it especially pathetic is that the Congressionally-authorized disaster aid to Michigan (from the CARES Act) has already been disbursed; Trump gets even more incompetent as his despotic tantrums intensify.

Meanwhile in Michigan, "armed anti-government rebels in restive midwestern province force cancellation of upcoming legislative session due to threat of violence." Or that's what the headline should be.
https://twitter.com/AndyMorrison_DN/status/1260995547500068867
https://twitter.com/maxberger/status/1261025922762903552
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-14/michigan-cancels-legislative-session-to-avoid-armed-protesters?sref=Zd9D2evu

https://i.imgur.com/ZLYYNJN.jpg

Proto-Neo-New Black Panthers respond bravely to the threat.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/07/michigan-lawmaker-armed-escort-rightwing-protest

https://i.imgur.com/aQhxfvu.jpg

Long Island Republican protest. "Participatory anti-democracy" is a key phrase that captures the conservative approach to civil society. [VIDEO]
https://twitter.com/ZeeshanAleem/status/1261060441565990912

In foreign news, Brazil's total caseload has doubled in the past weak, surpassing Russia for second-highest in world, which latter had itself skyrocked to #2 less than 2 weeks ago.

A thorough serology survey in Spain so far finds that only 5% of the population has been infected so far, which if accurate would make Spain's COVID fatality rate especially high. But it is also troubling in that it is one of the strongest pandemic serosurveys conducted to date, so the general implications of its results may be more applicable than those of more sanguine studies. If someone wants to talk about antibodies and true prevalence, that would be great.
https://www.vox.com/2020/5/16/21259492/covid-antibodies-spain-serology-study-coronavirus-immunity

Also worth commenting on, the frequency of kidney (https://feinstein.northwell.edu/news/the-latest/first-large-scale-study-links-acute-kidney-injury-and-covid-19-hospitalizations) and myocardial (https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/new-study-warns-of-covid-19-impact-on-cardiovascular-health#Potentially-harmful-drug-interactions) injury in COVID patients - long-term damage even in mild cases?

In further foreign news, check out what's going on in Iran (left) and Singapore (right). Tut tut.

https://i.imgur.com/yV5G2vw.png

Pannonian

05-25-2020, 10:00

In case anyone has missed it, the UK PM's chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, has been found travelling up and down the country to visit relatives. At a time when the country was supposed to be in lockdown, and drivers have been fined for breaking said lockdown under Coronavirus-related legislation. The last time I left this town with a tiny high street was 2 months ago.

Do UK posters think Cummings should go? Or do they agree with the PM, that what Cummings did was admirable?

Furunculus

05-25-2020, 10:17

In case anyone has missed it, the UK PM's chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, has been found travelling up and down the country to visit relatives

This is a thoroughly deceitful way to present the story, and you ought to feel a little ashamed at treating your fellow orgahs' to such a willfully partisan 'truth'.

Facts:
He and his wife were coming down with Covid.
They had a young child.
They're based in Durham, and have no support network in London.
His wife's folks have an entirely separate residence on their (castle) grounds.
A relative was from this location able to offer childcare support while they were convalescing.
There is an exemption to assist vulnerable people (like young children).
The generality above was defined specifically in relation to a situation where both parent are ill.

What you are [choosing] to present to your fellow orgahs':
"been found travelling up and down the country to visit relatives"

Do you have so little respect for us?
There is a perfectly reasonable case to be made that his actions are politically questionable.
And that he must be prepared to face political pressure based on the questionable actions.
We could have a great discussion about the ins and outs of his actions, and what effect that will have on adherence to public policy...
...but that isn't what you did.

[edit]
Just to be clear; i'd have no objection if the quoted line was done so alone, as a witty aside or a scathing joke.
No, my objection is to misreprenting the situation without any source that would permit us to gain nuance from the invective, and in the same breath invite us to condemn him based in [this] reading of events.

This is the very opposite to the maxim: always think the best of people until they demonstrate otherwise.

rory_20_uk

05-25-2020, 14:35

As with all the other people from Parliament who have gone against advice, what Cummings did was technically in breach of no law. Drivers who have been fined for breaking lockdown were driving without one of the specific reasons for travel that are outlined in the law. The last one's excuse I recall said he was dropping off medication at his elderly parents. Again, technically allowed... Although one has to ask why his parents suddenly needed medications and as opposed to getting delivery from a Pharmacy they had their son deliver it. Could it be that this was an exemption to explain his actions that was technically legal...?

This reminds me of the scandal a few years back where many people in politics were found to have their money in offshore Foundations / Companies etc. Nothing was illegal - but to put it mildly - unwise.

Given Cummings knew right from the start more than the rest of us and he knows he is less able to isolate from the rest of us he had the means to isolate his child (and wife) and could have done this from the start. Much less well off NHS workers are having to make this call. Being separated from one's family in times of crisis?I believe it is called "public service".

Perhaps Cummings is an idiot? He's incapable of thinking ahead. But he's a senior advisor to the PM. So that one isn't a valid excuse.

Boris calling this "admirable" hardly helps. Acknowledging it was unwise and stating why it was not unlawful would frankly not have helped those who enjoy reading the Guardian who would more readily believe he drove over some orphans in his Limo on the way there.

Again, this is close to human interest noise. Far more important is that the model the government used appears to have been deeply flawed, and of course the PPE has been mismanaged over the course of decades.

Cummings has made few if any friends in the Civil Service. I am sure they'd been falling over themselves to stick the knife in over this - and ensure that we move away from less enjoyable matters.

~:smoking:

ReluctantSamurai

05-25-2020, 17:34

In further foreign news, check out what's going on in Iran (left) and Singapore (right). Tut tut.

The Iran curve is what's going to be seen Stateside. Most states are still testing far below the levels necessary, and to make matters worse, some are including anti-body tests which are a snapshot of where you've been, not where you are going and leads to the false impression that new cases are on the decline. There are only a handful of states where the incidence of new cases is less than 10% of the tests being done, and the R0 number is climbing again for many states. IMHO, the US is going to be back to something close to the situation we had in April....just look at all the idiots out on beaches with very little social distancing:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/25/large-crowds-gather-memorial-day-us-braces-100000-deaths

I highly recommend book-marking this model:

https://covid19-projections.com/about/

Models are just that...predictions with a degree of uncertainty, but some of the predictions in the C19Pro model are uncanny in their accuracy (they were only a -18 deaths for Michigan on 24 May, a bit high for NY, but spot on for the US as a whole~:eek:).

Then there's this warning:

Our model incorporates the concept of a second lockdown, which we estimate will happen approximately 30 days after the reopening. Additional mitigation strategies are only necessary if the effective reproduction number (R) after reopening is significantly greater than 1.

In reality, the US went from a roiling boil in April, to a slow simmer in May, with downturns in some areas offset by outbreaks in others (mainly rural areas, prisons, food processing plants, elderly care facilities, and Indian Reservations). The C19Pro model is predicting over 178,000 deaths by 4 Aug....god I hope they're wrong on that one:sweatdrop:

Terminal stupidity amuse-bouche.

Fortunately that incident wasn't as terminal as the recent one in Flint, MI where a store owner refused a woman entry for no mask, and was shot dead a little later by the husband and son:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/us/coronavirus-masks-dollar-store-shooting-flint-Michigan.html

Cummings has made few if any friends in the Civil Service. I am sure they'd been falling over themselves to stick the knife in over this - and ensure that we move away from less enjoyable matters.

And there's the crux of the matter, IMHO....click-bait news media looking for something new to capture attention. If he violated rules, then fire his ass, or pay the fines...hell, double the fine for being a government official. It's not like there haven't been any of the UK's rich and famous that haven't done something similar:rolleyes: Just get on with it, and prepare for another wave of cases as the lock-down eases.......

CrossLOPER

05-25-2020, 21:26

Models are just that...predictions with a degree of uncertainty, but some of the predictions in the C19Pro model are uncanny in their accuracy (they were only a -18 deaths for Michigan on 24 May, a bit high for NY, but spot on for the US as a whole~:eek:).
So >250k deaths before the end of the year?

Pannonian

05-25-2020, 23:52

According to Cummings, on 12th April, which happened to be his wife's birthday, he felt unsure if he was well enough to drive back down to London, so he, his wife and child, drove to a local beauty spot, 30 miles in 30 minutes (averaging 60mph), spending some time there before driving back. On that same day, his wife retweeted the PM's message urging people to stay at home.

And Furunculus accuses me of being deceitful.

FWIW, the head of police has urged people not to do what Cummings did. If you think you have problems with eyesight, do not drive. With the PM excusing what Cummings did, what authority does the government have left in telling people to do this and that for the good of the nation?

ReluctantSamurai

05-26-2020, 02:37

So >250k deaths before the end of the year?

The C19Pro model (and most other models) only makes predictions 3 months ahead. I am not qualified to presume your statement to be true or not. The fact that they have shown to be one of the top three models in accuracy, lends credibility to their forecasts. Personally, after watching the sheer lunacy of crowded beaches this weekend, and many churches clamoring for in-church services to resume (with some going ahead with or without government approval), and....(just can't resist) Donald Trump threatening to move the Republican Convention out of North Carolina (which still has a ban on such large gatherings) so that 50,000 supporters can kiss his ass, the death toll is going to steadily climb. We went from the first COVID-19 death in early February to 100,000 deaths by the third week of May---three and a half months. The end of December is seven months out. Utter lunacy to try and predict that far out with so many variables to consider.

With the PM excusing what Cummings did, what authority does the government have left in telling people to do this and that for the good of the nation?

Remove him from office then, and get on with it, already....:inquisitive:

Montmorency

05-26-2020, 09:31

Fun fact: The vast majority of US governors currently hold approval ratings of over 60%.

very interesting article on the climatic/physiological effect on transmission and mortality:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/15/summer-weather-could-playing-large-role-lowering-coronavirus/

Usually with this type of analysis the flaw is in overlaying a correlation with population density, but here I must congratulate the authors on having (re)discovered the concept of the Global North (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North%E2%80%93South_divide).

Anyway, does the 'summer weather' hypothesis itself account for what's been going on in South America or the Middle East for many weeks now? Probably not very well. Here is the cutting-edge on lack of effect of seasonality and local climate on SARS-CoV-2.
https://www.princeton.edu/news/2020/05/18/local-climate-unlikely-drive-early-covid-19-pandemic

I mean, it stands to reason as virtually all (i.e. approaching all) transmission takes place in enclosed or indoor spaces, which tend to be climate-controlled. No one's going around coughing on random rocks or walls or pavement outdoors that people then lick.

Facts:
He and his wife were coming down with Covid.
They had a young child.
They're based in Durham, and have no support network in London.
His wife's folks have an entirely separate residence on their (castle) grounds.
A relative was from this location able to offer childcare support while they were convalescing.

Does any of that matter?

There is an exemption to assist vulnerable people (like young children).
The generality above was defined specifically in relation to a situation where both parent are ill.

To judge whether there can be a justifiable invocation of codified exemption I would have to see the primary text.

Here is the text (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2020/350/regulation/6/made) of The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) Regulations 2020 with respect to restrictions on movement.

There are 13 categories of exemption, or "reasonable excuse." The one that potentially applies is

(d)to provide care or assistance, including relevant personal care within the meaning of paragraph 7(3B) of Schedule 4 to the Safeguarding of Vulnerable Groups Act 2006(1), to a vulnerable person, or to provide emergency assistance;

There is no claim that emergency medical action motivated the travel. The alternative is personal care for a vulnerable person as specified in another act.

(3B)Relevant personal care means—

(a)physical assistance, given to a person who is in need of it by reason of age, illness or disability, in connection with—

(i)eating or drinking (including the administration of parenteral nutrition),

(ii)toileting (including in relation to the process of menstruation),

(iii)washing or bathing,

(iv)dressing,

(v)oral care, or

(vi)the care of skin, hair or nails,

(b)the prompting, together with supervision, of a person who is in need of it by reason of age, illness or disability in relation to the performance of any of the activities listed in paragraph (a) where the person is unable to make a decision in relation to performing such an activity without such prompting and supervision, or

(c)any form of training, instruction, advice or guidance which—

(i)relates to the performance of any of the activities listed in paragraph (a),

(ii)is given to a person who is in need of it by reason of age, illness or disability, and

(iii)does not fall within paragraph (b).

From what I'm reading about Cummings' situation retroactively invoking the vulnerable person care exemption for his actions would be abusive.

I wonder if the UK government isn't needlessly inflating a PR disaster.

This is the very opposite to the maxim: always think the best of people until they demonstrate otherwise.

That's an extreme, but unfortunately not unique, grade of lenience to demand. Pannonian has no shortage of cause to think less than the best of Cummings. Along the road to improving the world comes dispensing with unlimited benefit of the doubt for conservative (white) men.

Suburb dwellers Anne and Frank believe in the value of having tidy lawns. If we use a hot new element from contemporary American political philosophy, namely alternative facts, we know that the value of having a tidy lawn is of course also an important aspect of Stalinism.

If we discover that the lawn value of Anne and Frank in practice makes life much better in the suburbs, this is of course not a validation of Stalinism, because Stalinism is so much more than this one value. It might be technically correct to say that the value is Stalinist, but there is more to it than that.

If we return to anarchism, anarchism is likewise much more than voluntarism.

The obvious problem with the analogy is that the voluntarism is an essential component and is universally recognized as such. Tidy lawns is not a particularly significant or meaningful component of Stalinism (leaving aside the conflation of scope, the difference between a mass movement of tidy lawns and a single family's preferences). Now, if Sweden looked like a one-party state in which the leadership emphasized heavy industry and violent suppression of political dissent, centralized consolidation of social control and intervention, it would be fairer and more insightful to say it was adopting Stalinist practices and values.

Removing the state from the equation is potentially a huge deal as far as outcomes are concerned. So even if the original statement is adjusted to say that we have a test of anarchist values in Sweden, that revised statement would seem to be more about rhetoric (you have an experiment that might be technically correct to associate with anarchism and which can have promising or disappointing results) than something of practical value (the experiment might not teach us much at all about what ideological anarchism would be like in practice).

I don't understand your distinction, but it sounds like splitting hairs. The political and economic behavior of groups has in any context potential implications for political philosophies in general, unless the stance is one of pure thought. How Swedish people behave in this event is just one more qualitative case.

Unrelatedly, I just watched the Norwegian show Beforeigners, and I notice that every Norwegian show I've ever watched has evidenced a preoccupation with outsiders changing Norwegian culture. Which reminded me of you. Is this a general tendency with Norwegians that I should understand?

Wow, only one new covid-19 case confirmed during the last week (https://www.bt.no/nyheter/lokalt/i/opqo8W/kun-ein-positiv-korona-proeve-i-bergen-denne-veka) in the city where I live (> 280 000 inhabitants). 4 March (https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php/154051-Coronavirus-COVID-19?p=2053803276&viewfull=1#post2053803276) there were 15 confirmed cases in the city in total, compared to 222 people in all of Spain and 86 in all of the UK, according to the Johns Hopkins resource (https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html). It did not have to turn out this way; a bullet was probably dodged.

The point is, where the disease is suppressed, lives are saved, period. Reduce transmission and you can sustain that permanent containment with a relatively-light touch, alongside testing and tracing infrastructure for any localized flareups (like the one South Korea dealt with in workmanlike fashion this month).

Countries that can't or won't do this will suffer the worst and will be judged.

As an aside, Sweden has over the past week or two (https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?yScale=log&zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-05-12..&deathsMetric=true&dailyFreq=true&aligned=true&perCapita=true&smoothing=7&country=GBR+ESP+FRA+SWE+BEL+ITA) has achieved the highest per-capita COVID death rate in at least Europe (sometimes tied with UK). Higher than Spain or Italy.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/20/sweden-becomes-country-highest-coronavirus-death-rate-per-capita

Also, despite claiming to be ramping up testing from late April their testing growth has been linear. And the first preliminary results from antibody survey (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/21/just-7-per-cent-of-stockholm-had-covid-19-antibodies-by-end-of-april-study-sweden-coronavirus) probably dramatically overstated the prevalence to-date of COVID among Swedes.

And this here is good for a chuckle.

https://i.imgur.com/Tmgcldu.jpg

Trump says that he is taking hydroxychloroquine (https://twitter.com/Yamiche/status/1262479492829847553?s=20).

Just... wow. There is so much to unpack here. Does he have the virus and taking a risky drug to treat it? Or is he taking a risky drug as a preventative measure? Or is he lying and trying to get others to take it? Who knows. What we do know is its criminal for the VA to keep using the drug despite it having a nearly 30% fatality rate (https://www.stripes.com/news/veterans/veterans-group-accuses-va-of-using-coronavirus-patients-as-testing-subjects-1.627189).

The stupidity, it hurts.

Lysenkoism, next on the checklist of the USA following in the footsteps of the USSR. I'm not sure whether I want to think he's lying this time.

Speaking of which:

Designer of Florida's COVID dashboard (pretty much every state has one of these interfaces by now) was ousted for refusing to restrict data to make the government look better and grease the push to reopen.
https://www.floridatoday.com/story/news/2020/05/18/censorship-covid-19-data-researcher-removed-florida-moves-re-open-state/5212398002/
https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/05/22/ousted-manager-was-told-to-manipulate-covid-19-data-before-states-re-opening-she-says/

The CDC and other states may be on a similar book-cooking page, as Samurai reported (antibody test in testing aggregates).

He is either trying to distract people (which works because the media seems incapable of ignoring him for a day), or he is really in deep in terms of believing his own BS.

It's typically safe to rule out anything that requires planning or foresight, so the latter. Remember that this is the "germaphobe" who has no problem doing pornstars unprotected and shaking hands during a pandemic.

https://www.ft.com/content/97dc7de6-940b-11ea-abcd-371e24b679ed

...an unnamed administration official is reported to have told the paper that trying to advise the president is like “bringing fruits to the volcano... You’re trying to appease a great force that’s impervious to reason.”

https://twitter.com/WindsorMann/status/1262542025641070599

Trump is crazy enough to take an unproven drug, dumb enough to say so, and dishonest enough to lie about it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/us/politics/presidents-daily-brief-trump.html

Mr. Trump, who has mounted a yearslong attack on the intelligence agencies, is particularly difficult to brief on critical national security matters, according to interviews with 10 current and former intelligence officials familiar with his intelligence briefings.
The president veers off on tangents and getting him back on topic is difficult, they said. He has a short attention span and rarely, if ever, reads intelligence reports, relying instead on conservative media and his friends for information. He is unashamed to interrupt intelligence officers and riff based on tips or gossip he hears from the former casino magnate Steve Wynn, the retired golfer Gary Player or Christopher Ruddy, the conservative media executive.
Trump rarely absorbs information that he disagrees with or that runs counter to his worldview. Briefing him has been so great a challenge that the intelligence agencies have hired outside consultants to study how better to present information to him.

https://www.vox.com/2020/4/7/21209887/coronavirus-covid-19-michael-lewis-the-fifth-risk-trump-administration-catastrophe

But there’s a third aspect to him that I find is almost the key to everything. So far, we’ve been talking about Trump as if he cares about risk and he wants to manage it well. I don’t think that’s true. I think that his whole life is about doing whatever his impulses tell him to do. And then, after the fact, telling a story that renders him the hero of the story — the person who saved the day. He’s always done this, no matter the facts. I actually think he moves through life thinking, whatever happens, I can undo it with a story. That’s why he’s so numb to [experts]. He has no use for them. So I don’t actually think he’s thinking in terms of risk.

And a hundred more excerpts like them over the years.

There is enough of a sense among various leadership cadres around the world that, having slowed things to enhance our health infrastructure as much as practicable so they are not overwhelmed, it is time to accept the casualties and move on. Trump cannot say that in public any more than could any other Western leader. But do I think he's willing to move on under those conditions? Yup.

How do you justify saying that? According to most Western leaders and public health experts in theory and practice, your premise is rejected outside those cases of total failure. In practice any death is very likely unnecessary and avoidable. That is why the general consensus is aiming at suppression and containment, and for Europe's part few countries are really failing. The whole point is that most governments refuse to "accept the casualties and move on." Anyone in power who immanentizes the worst case by reference to the mere potential of a worst case is a fifth columnist to the species at best.

This seems up your alley, by the way.
https://onethingyoucando.com/2020/05/14/support-the-lincoln-project-a-group-of-never-trump-republicans-and-ex-republicans-who-are-determined-to-defeat-trump-this-fall-2/

Also, of historical interest (Palin).
https://twitter.com/DavidNeiwert/status/1263271502536822784

Remove him from office then, and get on with it, already....:inquisitive:

Pannonian doesn't have that power. He's not Cummings' boss, and from what I gather while many (most?) Conservatives dislike Cummings personally they appreciate his willingness to move fast and break things in their service.