I saw two articles that have given me hope.
The first from Politico:
Senior Dems call for national plan to reopen U.S.
Several senior Democrats are now calling on Congress to create a national plan that decides when to reopen businesses and schools in consultation with agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services and state governments, not just the president’s pulpit. And after the reopening, it would also require adequate testing and contact tracing to prevent a second outbreak.
There is still a lot of political wrangling in what they want to do but this is a start.
Then this article originally from FOX News:
Cuomo, northeastern governors announce ‘coordinated’ regional effort to reopen amid coronavirus
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, along with the northeastern governors of New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Delaware, on Monday announced a regional effort to eventually reopen the economy in a “coordinated way” amid the coronavirus crisis.
During their news conference, Cuomo announced that states will begin to coordinate efforts to reopen society. As for the timeframe of reopening, Cuomo said: “It has to be weeks.”
It seems like some Democrats have gotten the news that they CANNOT shut down the economy in perpetuity because of a virus.
I listened to a little bit of Rush Limbaugh yesterday, and one caller said that he was a Las Vegas police officer and he had been furloughed. With the Vegas Strip and casinos closed, the city is not collecting its usual tax revenue and the city is having to furlough municipal workers.
I suspect that high tax and spend blue cities and states are feeling the squeeze right now, and unlike the federal government, they cannot just print more money to stay afloat.
They might also be hearing the rumblings from the people outside of the hotspots who are pissed as hell about having to live in lockdown, not working, going bankrupt, in what was less than a month ago the best American economy in decades.
When it comes to the Coronavirus, it seems that there is a dichotomy in America.
From Miguel’s recommendation, I read Divemedic’s posts on his son’s account of what the Coronavirus is doing in Harlem.
Let me take a moment to say Divemedic’s son is a hero for volunteering to work under those conditions.
His report really seems like the stuff of a dystopian nightmare. What you would expect to see in the opening scene of a Hollywood blockbuster about a pandemic.
But…
I went to Huntsville Hospital last week, the apocalypse week according to the models, and it was empty. I wasn’t sick, the Hospital is where the clinic is for the physical, drug screen, and other tests that I had to take for a DOD contract job.
Nurses prowled around in PPE, taking everyone’s temperature. I was swabbed, interviewed, scanned, and liberally doused with hand sanitizer. The worse part was waiting because they had to clean everything in between each patient.
I will say, given what I saw, I expect hospital-based infections of everything but COVID to go down drastically during this time. I do hope that in the return to normal, medical centers maintain the new sterility procedures and tackle the problem of patients picking up an infection like MRSA or phenomena at a hospital and dying.
Huntsville Hospital was nearly empty. When I saw the news that it was furloughing employees, I can see why.
The difference here is that Harlem is one of the poorest urban areas in the country, has one of the highest population densities in the country, and some of the people seem to be going out of their way to avoid social distancing.
Huntsville is a moderate size city, with an average and median income above the national average and median, few large apartment complexes, and has been voted one of the best places to live in America.
The apples-to-oranges differences in living conditions have naturally led to an apples-to-oranges difference in Coronavirus outbreaks. Harlem is a hotspot, Huntsville is not.
I know people up in Oneida and Herkimer counties in New York. They are out of work and are not sure why, because life for them is very different than in New York City. Yet, Governor Cuomo’s initial lockdown plan was clearly based on treating all of New York State like it was New York City.
One person I know in Utica said that if they had just stopped people from NYC from leaving to hide out with family in Utica, there probably would have been no cases of Coronavirus in Utica.
I think that what we are seeing is the realization that the entire United States is not New York City and applying a nationwide lockdown that might be useful in a high-population density urban area to much of the US did little direct health benefit and caused a great deal of economic damage.
For the naysayers out there who like to vomit up the thought-terminating slogan “not dying for Wall Street.” I just came off of four months of unemployment and the weight I feel lifted off my shoulders from that is unbelievable. The misery that I experienced being out of work and not sure when my finances would not be in jeopardy is not something I would ever want to experience again.
I think the worst moment came during one of our Saturday errand-running trips, where the family loads up into the SUV and we make our rounds grocery shopping and whatnot. We had to go to Wal-Mart for some things we couldn’t get at Kroger. I think the little girl needed clothes or something, I forget exactly.
By that time I was out of work for about 10 weeks and my severance was all used up. We were pinching pennies to try to stretch what I had in the checking account as long as possible. My son is five, so had no idea what unemployment is like. It was our habit, I’m not sure if it was good or bad, but if he behaved on our shopping trips, he would be rewarded with a $0.98 Hot Wheels car at Kroger. We figured that a buck a week to get him to sit in the cart and behaved was money well spent. Positive reinforcement.
He asked for a little toy. Nothing expensive. Under normal circumstances, it would not have been an issue. I said no. He countered that he had behaved – which he had. At which point I lost my shit. Not that he had done anything wrong. It was all me. Here I am, a fucking 37-year-old man with three fucking degrees in engineering, out of work like a fucking bum, unable to buy my son a $3 toy because I don’t have an income and I felt impotent and angry and like my fucking dignity had been stolen.
The mental anguish that chronic unemployment brings is unbelievable. You cannot inflict that on human beings. Right now there are 17 million people out of work, any of whom are not sure when they are going to be going back.
Is doing that to millions of people who live in counties that might have only had a few dozen Coronavirus cases worth the cost?
Probably not and it seems like a few Democrats are coming to terms with that.
We were under-prepared because China lied. I believe that nothing short of the Western world engaging in a massive coordinated nuclear saturation strike of mainland China to cauterize the land with ionizing ration will ever be enough to make up for what they did to us.
Then we overreacted and have done an unbelievable amount of damage to the livelihoods of people who most likely not had the virus or would not have thought they had a bad cold for a couple of days.
Now it’s time we do what we probably should have done from the beginning, and take an approach that applies the proper amount of control to the local conditions. New York City needs to be locked down. Rural upstate New York and small-town Middle America don’t.
Don’t harass people for attending a drive-through church service. Do ban big street fests like Marto Gras (and throw the mayor of New Orleans in prison).
I honestly believe we can probably get 15 of those 17 million people back to work in the next 30 days without causing a second outbreak. We need to do it before the gut-clenching fear of chronic unemployment causes more death injury than the virus itself.
I will say the nedster has had a pretty good response to this and has been doing a decent job. Tribal councils have also been working with the state instead of fighting it in most instances so that also helps. It is also sad to say that being chronically underfunded and not collecting enough revenue is nothing new to CT so in this one instance that kind is an advantage for us because nothing is new in that department. They were this very morning talking about regionalized reopening and responses as we wind down the lock downs on npr.
Long term unemployment is my greatest fear having had to help my parents through it in 2006-2010 years at times. I guess fortunately I was old enough to help and to understand my dad got fucked similar to you. My wife does not quite grasp what the grimness of reality looks like even if you are prepared and have savings when money stops coming in having never experienced it herself. To grind away l of my hard work and possessions to just keep my house is a nightmare to me.
I’d also say even if China didnt lie, I think we would have been better prepared but not adequately prepared, that’s not really our style as we look more and more like and Atlas Shrugged blame the next guy for you failings and nobody take initiative society.
I live in a rural part of Upstate New York’s most populous county, Erie, which is where Buffalo and it’s metro area is. We’ve had a total of 73 confirmed deaths since this all started. People will say “but we’re social distancing, that’s why”, but the thing is, people really aren’t. Grocery stores are as bustling as ever, and parks are swarming with people. I’m starting to genuinely believe any reduction we have in Corona cases has probably more to do with people being cognizant of the need to wash their hands and practice good hygiene than with the “benefit” of businesses being closed down.
This all said, I’ve only heard stories about what quarantine life is like in NYC, but up this way, you wouldn’t know anything was any different if stores weren’t closed. Police are not harassing or citing people for being in public. Drive in church services aren’t being cancelled. There are even some regular church services that have been conducted, and aside from vile reporters at a local news station attempting to make a story out of it to vilify Christians, no one cares.
Democrats all held their mouths shut about this before Easter. Now that it’s passed, they can talk freely.
Not because of science or economics… Simply because somebody mentioned optimism about reopening by that day.
The “call for a national plan” does not give me hope. I may be overly cynical about D politicians, but it feels like a sinister plot to continue breaking the economy.
The point is this: right now those in control are (a) state governors, and (b) president Trump. That means by default that the restart will involve those same people. Most governors are pretty sane about this, as they must be since they live closer to the voters. And since there are 50 states, governors that want to keep things closed for TDS reasons can’t get away with that for very long.
So my take on the “national plan” notion is an attempt to take that away from the states, and put Congress in charge of when, or if, to restart the economy. And given that the Dems control the House, the answer they want is “not until after the November election”.
Regarding abridging freedoms, Borepatch linked this piece.
TL;DR version: Of all the quarantine/social distancing measures, the only one that might be effective beyond statistical noise is closing the
mandatory-attendance indoctrination petri dishesschools, and even that reeks of statistical noise. And even if they were effective, “flattening the curve” doesn’t reduce the number of deaths by COVID-19 at all; at best, it prevents the health-care system from overloading so people don’t die of normal stuff while the focus is on COVID patients.So we’ve done trillions of dollars of damage to our economy, which will take years or decades to recover, and because most COVID deaths also had other underlying health issues that would eventually prove fatal without COVID, at best we’ve extended the lives of people who would have died anyway by a few weeks.
We’re not “saving Grandma” with all these restrictions. We’re preventing “The Rona” from triggering the heart condition she already has, and which will likely end her life later this year, with or without COVID. In the meantime, cancer treatments and surgeries are considered “non-essential”, so how many Grandmas are going to die of cancer while waiting for restrictions to lift?
We won’t ever know, because that’s a number that’s not being tracked. Dr. Fauci and Trump’s Coronavirus Response Team are good at what they do, but what they do doesn’t include a cost/benefit analysis. They only see the benefits.
(On a larger note, that’s not unusual for a doctor in today’s health-care system. That’s how you, as a patient, get stuck with five- and six-figure medical bills; they can’t tell you the actual cost of your treatments because they don’t know and can’t check. They just run the treatments and let you worry about the costs later.)
Could not agree more with questioning the effectiveness of the mandatory stay at home and social distancing orders.
I agree, if you stay far enough away from other people, you are less likely to contract any disease. However, it is questionable whether this tanking of the economy had any effect whatsoever for this particular disease.
This virus was likely running rampant throughout the population long before any restrictions were put in place. Seriously, there are/were three/four flights a week from Wuhan direct to both NYC and San Fran. They were running uninterrupted for months before the first confirmed case was found in the US.
If this virus is so contagious that standing closer than six feet to another person is unacceptably risky, it is a statistical impossibility that none of the thousands of people getting off the planes from Wuhan were infected, and they did not spread that infection throughout NYC and SanFran, or wherever their final destination was. For three months, thousands of potentially infected people were entering the US unabated and unchecked.
Yet, starting in March, we think we can stop the spread by staying at home? Too late people.
There is a reason why the models are all getting updated to show that we are past the peak. It is because they were spectacularly incorrect, and no one questioned them. Instead, they saw a scary number, and ran with it. Net result… the US economy is tanked, we are $2T further in debt, and it was all to prevent a disease that was already out there.
That’s one of the things I’ve been saying about this. Most of the talking heads and their statistician “experts” want to draw the curve with the zero-point starting in January, with the first confirmed case in the U.S. With that origin point, the sharp spike in confirmed cases looks huge.
However, the Chinese government was watching and responding last fall, in October/November, and there were daily flights coming into the U.S. from Wuhan for another 2-3 months after that, before Trump (NOT China — draw whatever conclusions you like from that) closed them down.
Put simply — and bolstered by so many cases being asymptomatic or mild enough to mistake for other maladies — statistically it’s nearly impossible that the “first confirmed U.S. case” was actually the first U.S. case, and the origin should be at least 6-8 weeks (if not 10 or 12) further back.
If you accept that the virus was already loose in America at least 6-8 weeks before we started testing for it, and re-draw the curve from there using current numbers, the up-slope is not nearly so sharp. “Flattening the curve” happens naturally when you stop artificially shortening the timeline. And the argument can be made that the virus is not nearly as virulent as we’re led to believe. (With so many asymptomatic cases, that’s hard to prove, but the argument can be made.)
But that’s not news-worthy, so the MSM talking heads will never report this.
I’m not an MD nor do I play one on TV, but I remember the term “virus loading”. My impression is that infection, and disease, is not a binary (on/off) thing. Instead, it’s a question of degree, and one of the parameters is the amount of virus you were hit with.
If that is accurate, then contact-reducing measures do make a difference, by reducing the average virus loading on people. As you pointed out, in the absence of immunity, much of the population will be infected. But if the infections are on average low-load ones, more of the people will get either mild or no symptoms, rather than severe ones, and have a better chance of recovery and immunity.
I do not think anyone is arguing against the contact reducing measures.
What I am arguing against is putting mandatory distancing requirements in place after the virus had (statistically) already spread throughout the population. What good is social distancing if 50% of the population is already infected?
It keeps the other 50% of the population from getting infected.
The Dems don’t change, they don’t get it, they are trying to play moderate to get reelected. Then business as usual.
The Dems do change … to become more “Progressive”.
They do get it … but The Agenda[TM] is all that’s important, so they don’t care.
But they are trying to play moderate to get re-elected. And after they do, then it will indeed be business as usual.