Coronavirus / COVID-19

[ReluctantSamurai]

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]

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]

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/opini...proach-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...ictory/611323/

Numbers from a recent NY Times article concerning reopening criteria:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...-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]

Meanwhile, more shenanigans in Michigan---Dixieland of the North:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...htwing-protest

Not going to be pretty when this group shows up at the same time as the Michigan Liberty Militia

Any comments from the UK folks here about this?:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...ovid-19-advice

[Pannonian]

Meanwhile, more shenanigans in Michigan---Dixieland of the North:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...htwing-protest

Not going to be pretty when this group shows up at the same time as the Michigan Liberty Militia

Any comments from the UK folks here about this?:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...ovid-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]

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/st...se/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.

Rock On, Donny Baby!

[Montmorency]

Latest jobs report 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. It's the United States. With huge boats (with guns). Gunboats. Open the country. Stop having it be closed."

Louisiana Senator John Kennedy (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 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/2...rus-in-prisons

Similar goings in meatpacking plants. 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? 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/20...ovid-19-advice

First-world (for now) problems.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/...e-study-536950
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/...-trump-1445271
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/...ration-1753631
https://www.theguardian.com/science/...s-point-report

[Furunculus]

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]

Rock On, Donny Baby!

Donny Baby Donny B. Goode

[Furunculus]

an entertaining opinion piece of the 'response' to the UK response:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/a....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]

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]

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]

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/commenti...navirus-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

....btw, there's no chance of anyone becoming worse than the US.....we'll be well over 100,000 deaths by summer....and counting

[ReluctantSamurai]

You'd think that the intelligence required to build this could produce a better name than Spot:

https://globalnews.ca/news/6925970/s...k-coronavirus/

Data would be proud.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

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/commenti...navirus-crisis



Probably simplistic, but the world's second highest death toll doesn't speak well to Britain's response

....btw, there's no chance of anyone becoming worse than the US.....we'll be well over 100,000 deaths by summer....and counting

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 ), 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]

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]

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.

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.

[ReluctantSamurai]

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...

[edyzmedieval]

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]

Obesity?

We're pretty tubby by all accounts...

[Csargo]

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]

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...ess-conference

[edyzmedieval]

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]

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]

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]

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/l...sars-outbreak/

[Montmorency]

Tijuana 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-ger...ic-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...-pre-pandemic/

https://twitter.com/davidlparsons/st...88672084373505




Colorado Restaurant Packed After Defying State Order By Opening Up For Mother's Day [VIDEO]


'If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me': Elon Musk confirms Tesla is restarting its factory against local rules

Nevertheless.





(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.

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.
https://www.vox.com/2020/5/6/2124105...tten-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 ), 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...-unemployment/
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/04...se-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]

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

[ReluctantSamurai]

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.

[Greyblades]

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.

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/Americ...Protection_Act / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_U...s_steel_tariff / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presid...or_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?

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.

Ladies and gentlemen we've finally found a victim complex the Dems dont want to sustain in perpetuity!