Coronavirus / COVID-19

[CrossLOPER]

I like the retconning of regulations pertaining to travel, to the point where they are reviewing fines issued in the past. That's a new one. Even the US hasn't really pulled something like that so openly.

[Pannonian]

Boris Johnson: "I've been forbidden from announcing any more targets or deadlines."

Forbidden by whom? He's the PM, the chief executive in the UK government who, with the majority he has, is effectively an elected dictator. Who forbade him?

[CrossLOPER]

Boris Johnson: "I've been forbidden from announcing any more targets or deadlines."

Forbidden by whom? He's the PM, the chief executive in the UK government who, with the majority he has, is effectively an elected dictator. Who forbade him?

I think there are a number of western governments that have simply given up, and are hoping things won't be as bad as they are clearly going to be. The populism meme only gets you in the door, and you actually have a plan when you get in. It's kind of like that Brexit thing you like to talk about all the time, where there were a lot of people who wanted it, but then had no idea what to do when they got it.

[Montmorency]

From the James Walker Tableau resource I linked sometime.
https://public.tableau.com/profile/p...ared/4432NYZC2

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

New York in March and April has such a high value it literally does not display on the graph (which is probably a technical oversight).

[Viking]

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.

The thing that's the same in both cases is that you have one or more essential components that are missing. Voluntarism performed by the citizens of a state on territory controlled by that state is not anarchism, because the state is still there - the other essential component.

People dressed in actual battle gear employing actual battle tactics and firing rubber bullets at each other in the woods does not constitute a real battle, and an attempt to evaluate the performance of battle tactics in such a setting may be of minimal value.

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.

I see it as being more of a case of splitting redwood trees. But with the stock of the different ways to reformulate the positions rapidly depleting, the discussion may perhaps not move more than the breadth of a hair strand from here.

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?

So, which TV series have you been watching? You've mentioned Occupied in the past, which is about occupation by a foreign country. Now you mention Beforeigners, which is about people from earlier time periods emerging in present-day society. At n = 2, an equally compelling hypothesis might be that there is a trend in which TV series you have decided to watch..

I have not concerned myself much with changing culture, my main focus has been on the effect of heterogeneity on a society's ability to function optimally. Preserving homogeneity does not necessitate the conservation of culture. In fact, the more different cultures in a society influence each other, the more the members of the different cultures might be interacting with each other, in which case the more likely it would be that the two groups would end up merging over time and make the society culturally homogeneous (the melting pot concept). That's not to say I would not place any value on conserving culture in the same way I might place value on conserving nature or individual species or subspecies.

Related to the topic at hand, it would be interesting to see how the performance in the handling of the pandemic varies among countries with respect to heterogeneity. I guess that all the other variables will muddy the waters to such a degree that not much of value is easy to obtain. Though, a theme that has occurred a few times is differing infection rates among different ethnic groups in the same country, something that should undermine the sentiment of being in it together if the differences are perceived to be significant.

[Furunculus]

norway having a change of heart, gonna be a little more swedish in future:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/202...e-like-sweden/

[edyzmedieval]

I find the cherry picking of statistics to confirm Sweden's model rather disingenuous - Sweden has a population of about 10 million people, with a density of 22 per square kilometre.

It works for Denmark, Norway and Sweden - it does not work for heavily populated areas.

[Furunculus]

who is doing this?

[Montmorency]

I'm not looking any further into this, but it sounds about right for our planet.




In more serious news, there's evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was already circulating domestically in France as early as November or December??
https://www.livescience.com/coronavi...-december.html
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/n...-zero-n1207871

The thing that's the same in both cases is that you have one or more essential components that are missing. Voluntarism performed by the citizens of a state on territory controlled by that state is not anarchism, because the state is still there - the other essential component.

I won't accept this equivocal premise that we can't speak of characteristics except in total systems - which don't exist.

People dressed in actual battle gear employing actual battle tactics and firing rubber bullets at each other in the woods does not constitute a real battle, and an attempt to evaluate the performance of battle tactics in such a setting may be of minimal value.

Tell that to wargaming military brass around the world.

So, which TV series have you been watching? You've mentioned Occupied in the past, which is about occupation by a foreign country. Now you mention Beforeigners, which is about people from earlier time periods emerging in present-day society. At n = 2, an equally compelling hypothesis might be that there is a trend in which TV series you have decided to watch..

Lol, sure. But I don't investigate shows before I watch them, I go off interesting premises or recommendations. The other Norwegian show I've watched is Lillyhammer (Mafia-American expat corrupting small-town Norway). It's an amusing correlation. I'm sure you could draw plausible themes from a personal sample (though invariably larger) of American shows.

norway having a change of heart, gonna be a little more swedish in future:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/202...e-like-sweden/

Every country or locality that reduces transmission plans (in concept) to loosen restrictions and cruise on flexible safeguards. It would be misleading to say China, for example, has embraced the Swedish model since the winter.

(Although notably, China is unusually-prepared to reintroduce aggressive measures on a case-by-case basis.)

[rory_20_uk]

A story that seems to have received a lot less coverage than it should have done: Link

In 2016 the UK government did an exercise to see how the UK would cope with a pandemic. Not well apparently. And since then are very keen to suppress the release of the information with their excuse being releasing it would prevent Civil Servants saying anything. As getting someone to redact the names / ranks would be impossible...

Now, either the UK was MASSIVELY unprepared and has spent 4 years getting to the abysmal state we are currently in, or did very little and would rather the narrative was "who could have predicted this?" As opposed to "yeah, we knew but really didn't bother to fix it".

The opposition are not pushing to have the data released. I imagine as they are aware sooner or later they'll be in power and want to ensure their mistakes can equally be hidden from the general populace.

So we the pubic are indirectly encouraged to focus on the daily deaths toll and the week day Punch and Judy update presentation where we are told little of any value - but it really helps fill up the News cycle with stuff, right?

[Montmorency]

The opposition are not pushing to have the data released. I imagine as they are aware sooner or later they'll be in power and want to ensure their mistakes can equally be hidden from the general populace.

Well...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...pandemic-drill

[rory_20_uk]

Well...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...pandemic-drill

After it was released to the papers, no harm in jumping on the bandwagon now. And besides urging, are they going to join in the court battle? Provide finding? Put money where their mouths are?

Is it the case that a Pandemic response exercise can be undertaken and the Opposition have absolutely no idea whatsoever about it? Perhaps that is true - which itself is rather concerning for oversight of the Government.

[Strike For The South]

What has happened at these meat packing plants is infuriating. The American government is treating these people as disposable because apparently they aren't "regular folks" to quote a Wisconsin judge. These guys make Americas comforts possible, it is disgusting how they are being treated. An utter lack of humanity.

[CrossLOPER]

Americas comforts

You can probably stop the conditions at these plants, global warming, animal abuse and 100 other problems if you just stop eating or even slightly reduce the amount of meat you eat.

[ReluctantSamurai]

Why am I not surprised

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...on#maincontent

Nomi Health was contracted to have the TestIowa website built and to supply the state with 10 machines for testing and 540,000 coronavirus tests over six months at an eventual rate of 3,000 tests a day.

By 13 May, three weeks after its launch and two days before the state officially started to reopen, TestIowa had sent results to only 4,000 Iowans.

Hmmmm....$26,000,000 for 4,000 tests in a three week period? That's $6,500 per test...seems reasonable to me...

“If someone doesn’t own a computer, tablet or mobile phone with internet connection, they cannot access the TestIowa site independently,” she said. “They are advised to have a family member or friend help them enter their data. This is inappropriate because the assessment asks personal medical information.”

This is considering that only 65% of Iowans have the necessary broadband i-net speeds needed to complete an application

In addition, the platform is only offered in English and Spanish, making it inaccessible to speakers of other languages common in the factories where Covid-19 is most prevalent in Iowa, where immigrants from Mexico, Bosnia and Burma work.

See accompanying data below on this bone-headed snafu....

And in Nebraska, the Journal Star reported the TestNebraska initiative results were showing a 2% positive rate, which is “well below the 18% average positive rate for all other tests conducted in Nebraska since testing began in early March”.

Nice! Only a 2% positive rate? Let's get the state open ASAP

Meanwhile:

Iowa is one of the fastest-growing states for cases of coronavirus, fueled in part by spikes at meatpacking plants where hundreds of mostly immigrant workers have fallen ill. Nearly 60% of employees at one Tyson plant in Perry, Iowa – 730 employees – reportedly were infected with the virus. Another Tyson plant, in Waterloo, Iowa, had 1,031 reported cases among about 2,800 workers. An additional outbreak was revealed in a news conference in May in Storm Lake where 555 of the plant’s 2,517 employees have tested positive.

So let's just shut the hell up about what's really going on in our state:

the Iowa department of public health said it would not be publicly announcing continuing outbreaks at meatpacking plants unless directly asked by reporters. The Iowa department of public health and the governor’s office declined to respond to questions about the number of coronavirus hotspots in the state, and whether those would be tracked by TestIowa.

How many other states have such idiots overseeing their recovery program?

.......thankfully I live in Michigan where our leadership is making intelligent decisions on how to reopen the state

[Montmorency]

Whoooaaaa...




I-I'm pretty sure that isn't mathematically possible.

[Viking]

norway having a change of heart, gonna be a little more swedish in future:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/202...e-like-sweden/

I find the cherry picking of statistics to confirm Sweden's model rather disingenuous - Sweden has a population of about 10 million people, with a density of 22 per square kilometre.

It works for Denmark, Norway and Sweden - it does not work for heavily populated areas.

Yet there is little appetite to take the same approach as Sweden. The biggest change in strategy probably relates to the closing of schools and kindergartens, whose role in the spread of the disease is uncertain. They have been open for a while now, and it would probably take more to see them closed now than it took the first time around.

Regarding population, I've seen Bergamo named the worst affected Italian city. It has a population of around 120,000, which even by Nordic standards is not very large. Things get hairier when comparing metropolitan areas, but I am not sure that it would change the conclusion by much.

I won't accept this equivocal premise that we can't speak of characteristics except in total systems - which don't exist.

Now it sounds like you are saying that a society that most people would agree is anarchist is impossible in practice for whatever reason.

Of course you can attempt to study a subject by studying something that is related in some fashion, and then attempt to correct for the differences. Maybe you can figure out something about how dinosaurs walked by studying chickens that have extra weight attached to their rear ends. Figuring out what you need to correct for and how to correct for it is non-trivial, and of course it is impossible to correct if the differences are too large.

In this case it is not obvious that you can correct for something as fundamentally different as having versus not having a state.

Tell that to wargaming military brass around the world.

Practice in circumstances that are superficial similar to the real thing might have its use. But preparing oneself for the real thing and testing hypotheses concerning the real thing are mostly different things. So preparing yourself for an anarchist society by immersing yourself in voluntarism on a state controlled territory might be useful, just don't expect the real deal to be very similar to the scenario you've immersed yourself in, or that the tactics and strategies that seemed useful then will still work.

[Montmorency]

Now it sounds like you are saying that a society that most people would agree is anarchist is impossible in practice for whatever reason.

Well, I might have a belief like that but it's totally separate from the semantic discussion here. Which is that there are no absolute sociopolitical frameworks in practice, and that it's petty to reject classification of events or practices by attributes where they don't exist in a qualitatively-homogenous environment.

An anarchist or communist system typically involves a comprehensive arrangement of mutual aid and cooperative economic activity. In our world, most mutual aid and cooperative economic activity (e.g. legally or formally organized in such a way) is non-ideological, and all of it is embedded within the larger capitalist system. That doesn't mean these practices cannot be connected to abstract philosophies. The same goes for authoritarianism, transhumanism, anarcho-capitalistm, or whatever. The possibility of analysis is always there.

Of course you can attempt to study a subject by studying something that is related in some fashion, and then attempt to correct for the differences. Maybe you can figure out something about how dinosaurs walked by studying chickens that have extra weight attached to their rear ends. Figuring out what you need to correct for and how to correct for it is non-trivial, and of course it is impossible to correct if the differences are too large. In this case it is not obvious that you can correct for something as fundamentally different as having versus not having a state.

Practice in circumstances that are superficial similar to the real thing might have its use. But preparing oneself for the real thing and testing hypotheses concerning the real thing are mostly different things. So preparing yourself for an anarchist society by immersing yourself in voluntarism on a state controlled territory might be useful, just don't expect the real deal to be very similar to the scenario you've immersed yourself in, or that the tactics and strategies that seemed useful then will still work.

Correct for what, though? What question or explananda are you imputing? The question is not:

Does this offer insight into how an anarchist society would work in practice?
Will these practices contribute to an anarchist revolution?
Are these practices reflective of latent anarchist ideology among Swedish people?
etc.

It's just, Is the expectation placed on Swedish people instantiating a typical anarchist ideal? Is this, in a narrow sense, part of how anarchists would want people to behave?

One problem with these narrow semantic disputes is that it's easy to lose sight of what it is one is talking about in the first place.

[Viking]

Which is that there are no absolute sociopolitical frameworks in practice [...]

What?

That doesn't mean these practices cannot be connected to abstract philosophies. The same goes for authoritarianism, transhumanism, anarcho-capitalistm, or whatever. The possibility of analysis is always there.

'Connecting' them in and of itself is fine.

It's just, Is the expectation placed on Swedish people instantiating a typical anarchist ideal? Is this, in a narrow sense, part of how anarchists would want people to behave?

How does the preceding relate to the following?

Very fascinating that Sweden's pandemic response has become a de facto case study in anarchism; I never would have predicted it.

For those studying anarchism, could the approach taken in Sweden be interesting to study? Sure.

[Montmorency]

What?

IOW people live under political systems that lie on continuums and don't display a uniform set of rules or traits essential to that system. With that in mind, that one framework is more dominant than others for a given context is not itself a conceptual barrier to assessing a phenomenon in terms of another framework.

For those studying anarchism, could the approach taken in Sweden be interesting to study? Sure.

The confusion is probably that you read this sentence as a categorical statement, as in the sense that now Sweden exists under anarchy and before it didn't. That's not what I meant. I think you get it already.

[Pannonian]

Britain gave Palantir access to sensitive medical records of Covid-19 patients in £1 deal

[Shaka_Khan]

My sister lives near Houston...

https://www.today.com/health/fort-be...-event-t183646

13 high school students test positive for coronavirus after unsanctioned prom

...At least 13 students from Foster High School and George Ranch High School have tested positive for COVID-19 after reportedly attending a prom event in Katy on May 28. The event was not sanctioned by the schools, and the group then spent the weekend at a beach house in Galveston, according to the Fort Bend Herald...

[rory_20_uk]

Britain gave Palantir access to sensitive medical records of Covid-19 patients in £1 deal

True. Gave them access to help model the spread of a pandemic in the country.

When I work for clients I get access to their data for free as well! I need their data to... do the job they're paying for.

Whether the exchange of the data for the service is a fair deal I do no know - but your description at best is highly misleading.

[Pannonian]

True. Gave them access to help model the spread of a pandemic in the country.

When I work for clients I get access to their data for free as well! I need their data to... do the job they're paying for.

Whether the exchange of the data for the service is a fair deal I do no know - but your description at best is highly misleading.

Blame CNBC then. I copied and pasted their headline.

[rory_20_uk]

Blame CNBC then. I copied and pasted their headline.

OK, Trump

[Furunculus]

OK, Trump

OK, brexit. #muhmustbebad

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

Karol Sikora on UK deaths:

Essentially - we front-loaded deaths that were going to happen in summer autumn into spring.
Thus, while excess deaths for the months of April/May were considerable, the excess deaths over the year might look rather more normal.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/202...-has-recorded/
(can usually read a pay-walled'ed article by stopping the page loading half way thru #capitalism)

[Montmorency]

Eastern Europe is a land of contrasts.

Essentially - we front-loaded deaths that were going to happen in summer autumn into spring.
Thus, while excess deaths for the months of April/May were considerable, the excess deaths over the year might look rather more normal.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/202...-has-recorded/
(can usually read a pay-walled'ed article by stopping the page loading half way thru #capitalism)

Deaths have been frontloaded only in the unlikely event where no reliable vaccine or treatment is forthcoming. Otherwise those are better termed "deaths we failed to prevent."

[ReluctantSamurai]

Didn't have to be a virologist to figure this one out:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...some-us-states

According to data tracked by the Washington Post, since the start of June, 14 states and Puerto Rico have experienced their highest seven-day average of new coronavirus cases since the pandemic began. The states are Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Kentucky, New Mexico, North Carolina, Mississippi, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Utah.

The surge in cases, which public health experts have described as worrying, and had warned about repeatedly, shows that while Covid-19 is now in retreat in New York City and other major urban centres, it is sweeping across rural areas, infecting smaller towns.

Again, one didn't need to be a brain surgeon to figure out that rural America was in for a rough ride. Folks must not have passed their math classes in school....if it got from China to just about every nook and cranny in the world, why wouldn't it get from the urban areas to the rural areas?

A somewhat dated article, but useful, IMHO:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/healt...ns-since-june/

If the pandemic’s first wave burned through dense metro hubs such as New York City, Chicago and Detroit, the highest percentages of new cases are coming from places with much smaller populations: Lincoln County, Ore., an area of less than 50,000, has averaged 20 new daily cases; the Bear River Health District in northern Utah has averaged 78 new cases a day in the past week, most of them tied to an outbreak at a meat processing plant in the small town of Hyrum.

The biggest bugaboo for rural areas is hospital care which is sparse, or non-existant in many counties. And the hospitals that do exist, have nowhere near the capacity or the resources to deal with a large influx of critically ill patients. A good mapping of rural trends in the US:

https://dailyyonder.com/rural-counti...ns/2020/06/03/

Of the 100 counties nationally with the highest infection rates for May, three quarters were rural.

A general description of hospital care in rural America and how medical care is trying to adapt:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/s...-telemedicine/

Last year was already the worst in a decade of ongoing rural hospital closures. In that time, 120 locations have shuttered, and earlier this year another 453 were marked as vulnerable to closure before the pandemic even started. Moreover, federal pandemic aid has been disproportionately allocated to urban hospitals already buttressed by large financial reserves, and not to struggling rural medical centers.

And it looks like America (and elsewhere) are going to the 'herd immunity' method by default:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...ll-win/612946/

it is now difficult to imagine that anybody could muster the political will to impose a full-scale lockdown for a second time. As one poll in Pennsylvania found, nearly nine out of 10 Republicans trusted “the information you hear about coronavirus from medical experts” back in April. Now just about one in three does. With public opinion more polarized than it was a few months ago, and the presidential election looming, any attempt to deal with a resurgence of the virus is likely to be even more haphazard, contentious, and ineffective than it was the first time around.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/...ndemic/612796/

But as the pandemic persists, more and more states are pulling back on the measures they’d instituted to slow the virus. The Trump administration’s Coronavirus Task Force is winding down its activities. Its testing czar is returning to his day job at the Department of Health and Human Services. As the long, hot summer of 2020 begins, the facts suggest that the U.S. is not going to beat the coronavirus. Collectively, we slowly seem to be giving up.

[Viking]

IOW people live under political systems that lie on continuums and don't display a uniform set of rules or traits essential to that system. With that in mind, that one framework is more dominant than others for a given context is not itself a conceptual barrier to assessing a phenomenon in terms of another framework.

This debate seems to be going in circles.

The confusion is probably that you read this sentence as a categorical statement, as in the sense that now Sweden exists under anarchy and before it didn't. That's not what I meant. I think you get it already.

No, not that there is anarchism practised in Sweden, but that the conditions in Sweden can be used as a 'trial' or 'case study' of anarchism, or principles of it. I think there could be a significant underlying disagreement here, cf. the unresolved issue above.

[Montmorency]

I completely forgot about the Netherlands until now, but they were an initial example of an aspiring light-touch intervention. While their testing regime has been even less robust than Sweden's, I can't argue with these trends and ratios that the Netherlands aren't doing better. It should be noted that the Netherlands did have a lockdown with school, and some business, closures.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/featu...owed-the-rules




On the negative side, despite the two countries having similar cumulative case counts (Netherlands 48,640, Sweden 50,931), the Netherlands has sustained 6,076 confirmed deaths to Sweden's 4,874 (12.4% vs. 10.4%), and if I'm reading the FT COVID tracker right the Netherlands have seen twice as many excess deaths since March (concentrated in early Spring).


In Europe only Central Europe, the non-British island states, and the non-Sweden Nordics look particularly felicitous.

No, not that there is anarchism practised in Sweden, but that the conditions in Sweden can be used as a 'trial' or 'case study' of anarchism, or principles of it. I think there could be a significant underlying disagreement here, cf. the unresolved issue above.

The disagreement is being inflamed by the insistence on relating the idea to some 'pure' anarchist model, when we can parcel out variables and episodes (which is what a case study is for). As an Internet anarchist recently pointed out, when people (non-ideologically) return shopping carts to their holding areas without being prompted, they are upholding anarchist values. In terms of a case study one can obviously debate whether these observations have significance for the wider constellation of social and political functioning, how generalizable they are, but measuring prosocial behavior like shopping cart maintenance does admit an anarchist lens. If for some semantic reason you refuse to recognize it for a case study in "anarchism" as such because it's not behavior within a comprehensive setting (e.g. shopping-cart-like maintenance of commons in a commune/cooperative) - then let's leave it at that.