Do you need to vent about things COVID-19?

[Amina Sopwith]

What a surprise, Dominic Raab has pissed me off. This time by telling us he's confident that Johnson will recover (which I truly hope he does) because he's a "fighter".

Seriously, Raab, just f*** to the far side of off and then come back so you can f*** off again. Dying isn't a sign of some kind of weakness of character, especially with a disease that's so contagious and so serious that it's literally put the world on lockdown, but unfortunately not your stupid blaring blowhole. You've insulted every single casualty of this disaster and even every single person who ever died of any illness that is sometimes survivable. Yes, this offends me deeply for personal reasons, you guff cloud. 

Thank you Seicher, I feel a bit better now. 

[Luna Bliss]

1 minute ago, Amina Sopwith said:

Dying isn't a sign of some kind of weakness of character, especially with a disease that's so contagious and so serious that it's literally put the world on lockdown

Oh those conservatives and their bravado.  It would be funny if they didn't use it to punish those who are down and out in the world.

[Tolya Ugajin]

5 hours ago, FairreLilette said:

Regarding the "states rights" to be prepared and to make decisions regarding staying at home issues, etc...I think it should be changed in times like this.  I think a President should have the right to declare a shelter in home for the whole USA during a pandemic.  

How do you feel about that, Prokofy?  Should it be changed.  

Just Generally Speaking About Other Stuff: 

And, is that what Marshall Law is more or less...a President and the it's armed forces taking over these "states rights"?  Well, with almost 9 states of last week having no shelter in home declared, I think a President needs more power here.   

 

Power is a funny thing.  Once people have it, they seldom wish to give it up.  The more it is used, the more addictive it becomes, and the more acquiescent people become in it being used, even when it is no longer really needed and starts to be used to their disadvantage.  People who willingly give more power, and give away their rights, because they are afraid very often find out they cannot get that power back later.  It is rather amusing to see all the people who for 3 years have been calling this president a tyrant and a fascist suddenly insisting that the tyrannical fascist get and more importantly use more power.

As far as states without shelter at home orders, Arkansas is leaving it up to local authorities, and several cities have them.  Iowa, rather than having a knee-jerk reaction, has established a scale which would determine if and when one would be put in place, and has imposed various bans of types of businesses and gatherings, etc.  Nebraska is leaving it to the counties, and the majority of them having taken various such measures on their own (covering more than 80% of their population).  North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming have all responded similarly to Nebraska.  All of these states, with the possible exception of Arkansas (I am not very familiar with Arkansas) are largely rural, most people live in small towns (Wyoming for instance has only 10 cities with 10K+ people, and not one with over 70K), not at all like California, New York, Washington, etc.  Combined, they have about the same population as New York state, and yet far fewer cases (and deaths) than New York City alone.  Perhaps their leaders know what works for their constituents better than some doctor in DC who has likely never visited most of them?

[Amina Sopwith]

1 minute ago, Luna Bliss said:

Oh those conservatives and their bravado.  

You mean like when Johnson told us we would be "pleased to know" that he was shaking hands with COVID-19 patients???

None of us wanted you in ICU, Boris! Losing the election would have sufficed! 

 

[LittleMe Jewell]

10 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

12 minutes ago, Amina Sopwith said:

Dying isn't a sign of some kind of weakness of character, especially with a disease that's so contagious and so serious that it's literally put the world on lockdown

Oh those conservatives and their bravado.  It would be funny if they didn't use it to punish those who are down and out in the world

That's the kind of bullsh** generalization statement that makes me question so much of what you say.  

Those kind of crap statements about dying and being a fighter and such have been made by plenty of folks on both sides of the aisle -- it's called general human stupidity.

But you truly seem so jaded that absolutely every negative thing that goes on in this world is apparently only being done by the other side.

 

Edited April 7, 2020 by LittleMe Jewell
phrasing

[Mollymews]

22 minutes ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

 Not sure how things are where Mollymews is, but over here my husband can go to a liquor store, which is much smaller than the grocery store and thus has a much smaller line to get in, and does not interfere with people shopping for general groceries.

we have dedicated liquor stores that are open as well. Being able to buy alcohol with the rest of the super market shopping is quite convenient tho

my vent wasn't really about the beer. It was more about what happened at the door afterwards.  It was funny to me, because of how well the door people handled the conversation. The guy fell right in

[LittleMe Jewell]

Just now, Mollymews said:

Being able to buy alcohol with the rest of the super market shopping is quite convenient tho

Definitely, but going to the grocery to only buy beer is selfish and taking a spot away from someone else the whole time he was in the store.

I'm glad the door folks handled it the way they did.  Would have loved to have witnessed something like that with a few folks here in my locale.

[Luna Bliss]

18 minutes ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

24 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

27 minutes ago, Amina Sopwith said:

Dying isn't a sign of some kind of weakness of character, especially with a disease that's so contagious and so serious that it's literally put the world on lockdown

Oh those conservatives and their bravado.  It would be funny if they didn't use it to punish those who are down and out in the world

That's the kind of bullsh** generalization statement that makes me question so much of what you say.  

Those kind of crap statements about dying and being a fighter and such have been made by plenty of folks on both sides of the aisle -- it's called general human stupidity.

But you truly seem so jaded that absolutely every negative thing that goes on in this world is apparently only being done by the other side.

The best statement I heard of late was given by Elizabeth Warren in a Rachel Maddow interview. Elizabeth said, "I don't get my power through division".  And I truly try to live my life that way, though i don't always succeed, as when times gets tough it flat out feels good to blame "the other".  I don't see things in black and white, and I frequently notice times when CNN twists things that Trump says to fit their narrative. Knowing I can't stand the narcissist (Trump) makes it  very easy to assume the worst of him.

This bravado, however, is much more prevalent on the 'right'...have you read anything by Ayn Rand, their darling?  Very disparaging of the poor, and all about strength.  A good majority of the right views poverty as a moral failing.  You only need to see their proposed policies for the disadvantaged to have proof of what I say.

I'd appreciate it if you'd stop projecting your cr*p theories on me as if you know who I am.

Edited April 7, 2020 by Luna Bliss

[Luna Bliss]

20 minutes ago, Tolya Ugajin said:

It is rather amusing to see all the people who for 3 years have been calling this president a tyrant and a fascist suddenly insisting that the tyrannical fascist get and more importantly use more power.

There are some situations where more power is called for by leaders, and other times it is not.  All situations are not the same.

[Qie Niangao]

19 minutes ago, Amina Sopwith said:

Dying isn't a sign of some kind of weakness of character, especially with a disease that's so contagious and so serious ...

I care about Boris exactly as much as he'd care about me, but the whole thing about who lives and who dies with this virus is bizarre. If we really understood why only some folks have such a lethal auto-immune response to it, a very effective drug should be easy to find or engineer.

[LittleMe Jewell]

10 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

I'd appreciate it if you'd stop projecting your cr*p theories on me as if you know who I am.

As to be expected on forums, I only know you via your posts here -- which also happens to be the only way you know me.  

Practicing what you preach might improve that image that you project............ at least IMO.

 

(other stuff that I deleted....... not going there)

[Luna Bliss]

2 minutes ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

As to be expected on forums, I only know you via your posts here -- which also happens to be the only way you know me.  

Practicing what you preach might improve that image that you project............ at least IMO.

 

(other stuff that I deleted....... not going there)

You zero in on me frequently.  You might want to examine that.

Edited April 7, 2020 by Luna Bliss

[LittleMe Jewell]

Just now, Luna Bliss said:

You zero in on my frequently.  You might want to examine that.

Possibly because you get on your soap box more than most others here than I pay any attention to.  From my (very possibly warped) viewpoint, you seem to love to interject your political views into a large majority of your posts here, regardless of how much of a stretch it is that the topic gives political vibes.

[Prokofy Neva]

7 hours ago, FairreLilette said:

Regarding the "states rights" to be prepared and to make decisions regarding staying at home issues, etc...I think it should be changed in times like this.  I think a President should have the right to declare a shelter in home for the whole USA during a pandemic.  

How do you feel about that, Prokofy?  Should it be changed.  

Just Generally Speaking About Other Stuff: 

And, is that what Marshall Law is more or less...a President and the it's armed forces taking over these "states rights"?  Well, with almost 9 states of last week having no shelter in home declared, I think a President needs more power here.   

As far as further preparedness and with a slew of these zoonotic viruses, most except perhaps Ebola are from China, makes me believe every country needs to make their own PPE gear from now on and stock their own because there have been a lot of these zoonotic viruses, especially in the 21st Century and every country needs access to their own PPE gear quickly in their stockpile because even if anti-virals are developed, if these wet markets are not stopped, more viruses will mutate and will come.   

And, yes, China and other countries need to stop their "wet market" practices; wherein farm raised non-vaccinated rodents are brought for slaughter in the marketplace where other food is being sold.  Preparing raw meat in the best of conditions has health hazards.  I know I was a house wife for nearly 20 years and had to disinfect the area thoroughly in case any blood droplets got on the sink or on the counter top.   

I mean as far as "wet markets" would you shop in your local Market with blood and other toxins strewn from rodent like slaughter "meat" or any kind of slaughtered animal all over the place right their in your market?   

To these "wet markets" and their practices...I say "nuts".  That's insanity and it needs to be put to an end period.

https://thehill.com/policy/international/491291-un-biodiversity-chief-calls-for-international-ban-of-wet-markets

No, of course states' rights should not be changed, are you kidding? Especially with Trump as president. But even if it were Obama or some more likeable president that outsiders want, like Sanders (who would be a disaster in my view), you don't take a system that is set up from the ground up and suddenly make it top down. It doesn't work. When FDR was forced to put national programs in place before the Depression and WWII, he did so very cunningly and politically with getting allies in key states and so on and simply not doing things that maybe Easterners or Westerners thought were prudent because Southerners rebelled, and so on. The US is a big country now of huge territory and very diverse groups  of people:

Area: 3.797 million mi²

Population: 327.2 million

 

It's not your little country with a homogenous ethnic group, if you are in one, or even your little country that used to be a world colonialist and has many diverse races and ethnicities but still has a predominant culture maintained by various institutions, even the Queen.

 

I think you mean to say "martial law" as in military law although George Marshall was a very important historical figure to study both in terms of improving readiness of the US for WWII and for the famous Marshall Plan from which you benefited. When countries declare states of emergency or martial law they have to notify the UN that they are derogating from certain human rights -- and may not of course if they hold the UN in disdain as the US does. But there are still checks and balances and a roster of conditions to be met and we are not there yet. You have to weigh the problem 

Take my large housing complex of 4000 people across from hospital row, with many hospital workers and UN people living in it. Already has 3 confirmed cases. As it is run by the same people who built the NYC subway, they are people who know how to run large systems effectively. Way before anyone else they closed unnecessary shops built into this community, they made elder hours for the supermarket and laundry room, they began washing all the elevator buttons and door handles daily, etc. They urged people to stop ordering packages they didn't need as the doormen were overwhelmed. First they allowed children to play on the large open plaza but urged them to keep the social distancing of 6 feet. Children could not do this, especially those 9-12 unsupervised by parents. So they closed the plaza completely, because parents and children would not self-govern. NYC parks are closed -- but the mayor has also ordered all the basketball hoops to be unscrewed and removed because they cannot stop people from going there and this way might work.

My housing complex can likely succeed with a draconian measure as they are mainly middle/lower worker class, medical and UN people largely who are educated and will largely comply even if they grumble. But a big park with no hoops in it may now spark a revolt that in fact makes things worse. You probably never heard of a "BMX hood swarm" or the Hasidim but these are two groups in NYC defying the Governor's and Mayor's orders and themselves getting sick and making other sicks -- and their actions constitute rebellion against rules that is the effect you can expect when you have not Germans as your population but Americans, who are from every country in the world.

 

Some of the states with no "shelter in place" have huge open spaces and sparse populations and don't need the drastic measures of NYC (and even technically NYS has not risen to that drastic state but has something else called "Matilda's Law" named for Cuomo's grandma which is basically "stay home" or even "stay at work if you can't get home") . Yet some states that thought they had wide open spaces and sparse populations like Idaho forgot that when the all-black Brotherhood of Skiers flew into their country, they got sick in Idaho that wasn't as scrupulous about disinfecting, and then took that back to their states and got sick or died in large numbers, in part because they were in a vulnerable group that had less access to health care. The lack of access to both health care and justice is something I have personally witnessed with large numbers of experiences in NYC waiting in the same waiting rooms as they are waiting in, often one of the few white people, simply because of my rare disease and its expense, etc.

It's easy to say every country should make their own PPE -- hey, for that matter they should make their own iphones and gadgets and then not have them so cheap so that people like you or me can have them. The global economy is not so easily dismantled. When China needed less of these as their pandemic ebbed, they sent some to NYC and NYC was glad to have them. Of course China is taking a political star turn as Russia was doing the same but any port in a storm.

I am not surprised that you are obsessed with wet markets and I don't expect you to grasp that a typical mediocrity with an MBA running a hospital in NYC and making decisions based on ideology or insanity rather than medical facts in dispersing PPE is as bad a problem as a "wet market".

Wet markets exist in Africa and Eurasia and Latin America, yet they did not prove sources of the virus in the past or present. Why? Because other factors like an authoritarian communist government that suppressed facts and lied to the public were important, too, and the population's resistance and lack of resistance at the same time, and other things. It seems common knowledge that the virus started in a wet market -- or perhaps a lab studying viruses that did not deliberately release it, but accidentally did so, but it doesn't matter after that because other countries have a chance to do better or worse to stop it -- Germany and South Korea did better, Spain and the US did a lot worse. One thing I can say, it is more complex than you seem to grasp. This is a good article to read: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/opinion/coronavirus-science-experts.html

 

Edited April 7, 2020 by Prokofy Neva

[Luna Bliss]

Just now, LittleMe Jewell said:

4 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

You zero in on me frequently.  You might want to examine that.

Possibly because you get on your soap box more than most others here than I pay any attention to.  From my (very possibly warped) viewpoint, you seem to love to interject your political views into a large majority of your posts here, regardless of how much of a stretch it is that the topic gives political vibes.

As I've tried to say before, it's really a Social Work view/agenda vs a political side....helping the disadvantaged. When i see anyone or any party (can be either side) treating the disadvantaged unfairly I fight against it as best I can. I speak up, and I hardly think that's getting on a "soap box".

[FairreLilette]

36 minutes ago, Tolya Ugajin said:

As far as states without shelter at home orders, Arkansas is leaving it up to local authorities, and several cities have them.  Iowa, rather than having a knee-jerk reaction, has established a scale which would determine if and when one would be put in place, and has imposed various bans of types of businesses and gatherings, etc.  Nebraska is leaving it to the counties, and the majority of them having taken various such measures on their own (covering more than 80% of their population).  North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming have all responded similarly to Nebraska.  All of these states, with the possible exception of Arkansas (I am not very familiar with Arkansas) are largely rural, most people live in small towns (Wyoming for instance has only 10 cities with 10K+ people, and not one with over 70K), not at all like California, New York, Washington, etc.  Combined, they have about the same population as New York state, and yet far fewer cases (and deaths) than New York City alone.  Perhaps their leaders know what works for their constituents better than some doctor in DC who has likely never visited most of them?

That leaves a you can only hope response.

Some of these counties are now calling for more Federal and State HEEEEEEEEEEELP!!!!!!!!!!!

I cannot blame them.

He called for a stronger federal response.

"I think that this crisis needs to be managed more decisively from a federal and state level," Mayor Bo Dorough told WABE, Atlanta's public radio affiliate. "I think we have, at a minimum, the whole country should be in a shelter-in-place position."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/how-a-small-georgia-city-became-one-of-the-worst-coronavirus-hot-spots-in-the-country/ar-BB12hc3X?li=BBnb7Kz

[FairreLilette]

13 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/opinion/coronavirus-science-experts.html

I cannot read that.  It wants a subscription.  No thanks.  

Edited April 7, 2020 by FairreLilette

[Luna Bliss]

1 minute ago, FairreLilette said:

I cannot read that.  It wants a subscription.  No thanks.

Most coronavirus info is free to read now on all these paid websites.

[FairreLilette]

4 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

Most coronavirus info is free to read now on all these paid websites.

Not for me when I clicked...it quickly turned to subscription (create account) only choice.  Now it's saying I can sign in with my Google, FB or Apple account or something like that.  It's just more phishing and more spam.  I'm not interested.

[Lyssa Greymoon]

20 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

Most coronavirus info is free to read now on all these paid websites.

It was for a couple days on NYT, but it's back behind their paywall now.

[Luna Bliss]

17 minutes ago, FairreLilette said:

more spam

I understand...they will spam you forever trying to get a subscription.  Here you go:

IN THE FOG OF CORONAVIRUS THERE ARE NO EXPERTS

Since the election of Donald Trump, the American media has become invested in the idea that the modern information landscape is defined by a great struggle between truth and falsehood, facts and misinformation, the real news and the fake. In this drama, there are enemies of truth, and then there is a besieged edifice of expertise, which needs to reclaim ground — whether via better fact-checks or better Facebook regulations — that’s been lost to trolls, populists and scam artists.

This has always been a dubious and self-regarding framework, but in the coronavirus era it has become particularly useless. Not because it misdiagnoses Trump himself: Our chief executive is, indeed, bumptiously dishonest, a manure-shoveler without precedent in the modern presidency, a man with little capacity to handle even a mildly inconvenient truth. No one expects a truthful and realistic appraisal of the crisis from this president; any sensible person should look elsewhere for the truth.

But once you look elsewhere, it quickly becomes clear that no unitary and reliable edifice of truth exists. The only place you can find it is in fiction, specifically the cinematic anticipation of this outbreak, Steven Soderbergh’s film “Contagion” — in which the professional health organizations are admirable, nimble, evidence-based, with just enough rule-bending here and there to make the necessary leaps toward a vaccine. Meanwhile, the internet is terrible, embodied by a sinister blogger peddling a quack cure. Only institutions can be trusted; outsider “knowledge” leads only to the grave.

That’s the movie; the reality has been otherwise. In our actual pandemic, most of the institutions that we associate with public health expertise and trusted medical authority have failed more catastrophically than Trump has.

 

The worst offender was the World Health Organization, which didn’t side with “facts” and “science” in the early days of the pandemic: It followed its own political imperatives and sided with China, accepting false and propagandistic assessments and ignoring crucial evidence because it came from Taiwan and not Beijing.

 

Less corruptly but no less disastrously, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration committed serial malpractice across the crucial month of March, botching, delaying and impeding the development of the necessary tests. Both American and international medical authorities lied to people (or, if you want to be kinder, to themselves) about the efficacy of masks. And Britain’s public health experts confidently rolled a complex plan that was supposedly smarter than a simple lockdown — except that it turned out to have missed some basic facts about the virus.

 

• Help us report in critical moments.

Subscribe today to support The Times

 

Failure and recklessness aren’t universal; plenty of public health authorities have acquitted themselves better than Boris Johnson’s advisers or the W.H.O. But there is no definite pattern of outsiders being wrong and dangerous and insiders being trustworthy and good, and indeed up until mid-March you were better off trusting the alarmists of anonymous Twitter than the official pronouncements from the custodians of public health.

In part this reflects the decadence and incapacity of Western institutions (Pacific Rim institutions proved themselves a lot more trustworthy), but in part it isn’t any institution’s fault. A pandemic is a novel circumstance and challenge, a pandemic in a globalized world even more so, and the institutional ways of acquiring information and acting on it — the bureaucratic approach to science and policy — were never going to be commensurate to the problem the coronavirus posed.

That doesn’t mean you should ignore experts and just take random posts and Twitter rants as gospel. But under conditions of fog and uncertainty, armchair epidemiology will sometimes reach truths sooner than officialdom. If one Medium post foolishly lowballs the disease’s contagiousness, another will make a cogent case for masking long before the C.D.C. did. If one nonscientist offers some dubious casualty projections, another may tease out a high-profile model’s crucial faults. And if a certain line of argument is bad — as I think, and argued last week, that the right-wing anti-lockdown argument is bad — then it has to be judged on its own merits, not just dismissed because it lacks the C.D.C.’s patina.

Editors’ Picks

Five Swipes on Exercising Outdoors

Good Looks Ran in the Family. So Did Schizophrenia.

Coronavirus and Sex: Questions and Answers

 

The official experts, under such conditions, are most trustworthy insofar as their admonitions track with nonexpert common sense. The approach that most experts are currently urging, for instance, is not some complicated high-science approach to disease management, but the most basic pre-modern method of disease control, as obvious to 15th-century Florentines as to 21st-century New Yorkers — shut things down, quarantine the sick and hope for the best.

Whereas the more specific and granular the experts get, the more the fluidity and chaos of the situation makes their pronouncements dubious. It’s good that we’re modeling the arc of the pandemic, but that doesn’t make any of the models trustworthy. It’s good that we’re trying to figure out how the disease spreads, but none of the claims so far about how you’re most likely to get it (from air, surfaces or otherwise) or who is most at risk (whether from viral load or pre-existing conditions) can be considered at all definitive. It’s good that we’re practicing social distancing, but all of the rules we’re implementing are just rough and ready guesstimates.

And you don’t want to overweight the pronouncements of official science in a situation that requires experimentation and adaptation and a certain amount of gambling. Yes, you should trust Anthony Fauci more than Donald Trump when it comes to the potential benefits of hydroxychloroquine. But the exigencies of the crisis require that experiments outrun the confidence of expert conclusions and the pace of bureaucratic certainty. So if you’re a doctor on the front lines trying to keep your patients from ending up on a ventilator, Dr. Fauci’s level of caution can’t be yours, and you shouldn’t be waiting for the double-blind control trial to experiment with off-label drugs that Spanish and Chinese doctors claim are helping patients.

The same logic applies for policymakers, for whom there is never going to be a definitive, one-size-fits-all blueprint telling them how and when to reopen cities or communities. Every single reopening will be its own unique experiment, with confounding variables of climate, density, age and genetics that are nearly impossible to model, and the advice of epidemiologists will only go so far. Governors and mayors will have to act like scientists themselves, acting and re-acting, adapting and experimenting, with expert advisers at their shoulders but no sure answers till the experiment begins.

[Listen to “The Argument” podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt.]

And the logic applies to individuals as well. Most Americans who contract the coronavirus, at this point, won’t even get a test, let alone sustained medical care or supervision. Many people who do get a test will have solid reasons to doubt the negative result. Which means that they will have to make countless important decisions — about what to ask of their doctors, what medical websites to trust, how to take care of their spouse or kids or parents, whether and when to go to work — in a context where the only relevant sample size is one, themselves, and where there is no advice that can be considered medically definitive.

No doubt some of them will behave stupidly or recklessly, just as some governors and mayors will make terrible mistakes once reopening begins. But we don’t have enough information to know what counts as wisdom yet. Is it stupid to ask your doctor to prescribe you an off-label drug if your breathing is constricted, hospitals are overcrowded and 2 percent of people with your condition end up dead? Is it stupid for rural states to reopen schools if their infection rates seem low? Is it stupid for religious organizations or community groups to bend the rules of quarantine to help people survive isolation and avoid despair? Neither Dr. Fauci nor any official institution can answer all these questions. We’ll have to answer them one experiment at a time.

 

As a society our struggle with the coronavirus resembles the experience of the sick person afflicted with a disease that’s unknown and or misunderstood by medical science. Before falling ill, this person imagined the world of science as a stable room, well-built and well-lit, with a sturdy floor beneath. But now the floor has given way, the patient has fallen through, and in the basement there is darkness, strange shapes, things you can possibly identify by feel but not by sight.

There’s still some light coming through from above, from the world of certainty and expertise, and it’s important to make use of it, to see what can be seen in its illumination. But those shafts of light don’t fill the whole basement, and what they do light up can be partial and misleading. So if you’re going to find your way out and up to health and safety, you have to be prepared to grope, to stumble, to make your own light, and sometimes to move by feel or instinct through the dark.

Edited April 7, 2020 by Luna Bliss

[Qie Niangao]

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Some of the states with no "shelter in place" have huge open spaces and sparse populations and don't need the drastic measures of NYC

Yeah, but those states get flu every year - despite influenza being much less contagious than COVID-19, especially when half the population is vaccinated against a relevant strain. They'll be getting waves of coronavirus deaths sweeping through their population (and especially their seniors residences) if they don't lock themselves down, one way or another.

The other thing about "states rights" in this case is that state borders don't stop viruses. Any state not exercising some version of "shelter in place" is an agent of moral hazard against their neighbors, a "tragedy of the commons" writ in death statistics.

Apropos nothing in particular, it occurred to me today that no country dare relax constraints until it has enough testing that Death Rate is not the sole reliable metric of virus containment. When a state like S.Korea or Taiwan with sufficient (and spooky) surveillance can reliably trace and test all contacts, it's possible to relax and "get back to work" with enough confidence that the populace will return. In contrast, the Kudlow/Navarro/Forbes/Laffer fantasy of just declaring victory (no longer coincident with The Resurrection) will fail miserably: if any numbers return, they'll be driven away by another wave of sickness and death. They're off by three orders of magnitude: the US will need capacity to administer BILLIONS of tests for months, and tracing of contacts that practically everyone judges to violate personal privacy.

Edited April 7, 2020 by Qie Niangao

[Seicher Rae]

The Washington Post has a section on "all things coronavirus" that they are doing for free, no subscription required. https://www.washingtonpost.com/coronavirus/  I'm assuming those that read the NY Times also will read WaPo. 

[Seicher Rae]

Just a quiet reminder to keep the ad hominems to a minimum to keep the closing hammers at bay. Since the OP mentions politics I'm assuming "they" are watching closely. Maybe not. Dunno. "To a minimum" is a key phrase there for me to avoid total hypocrisy, which I vehemently deny.

 

[Seicher Rae]

46 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

IN THE FOG OF CORONAVIRUS THERE ARE NO EXPERTS

Well, yes and no. Some are much more expert than others. Scientists have been studying coronaviruses in people and animals for a long time. True, "we're" still scratching our collective heads on this version, but there are definitely experts that I would listen to waaaaaaaaay before, say le enfant terrible Cheeto vs someone from say John Hopkins. Basically anyone over FOX, etc.