Coronavirus

www.greensboro.com/sports/watch-now-fans...c5-2e176402d6c1.html

I guess we've just officially said fuck it at this point

Ah_Pook wrote: www.greensboro.com/sports/watch-now-fans...c5-2e176402d6c1.html

I guess we've just officially said fuck it at this point

I'm pleased and happy to repeat the news that we have, in fact, caught and killed a large predator that supposedly injured some bathers. But, as you see, it's a beautiful day, the beaches are open and people are having a wonderful time. Amity, as you know, means "friendship".

Ah_Pook wrote: www.greensboro.com/sports/watch-now-fans...c5-2e176402d6c1.html

I guess we've just officially said fuck it at this point

Be sure not to hurt anyone's feelings by pointing out how stupid this is.

Ocean City was packed and the weather favored to boardwalk over the beach. It will be a vector for 5 states and the district. Maryland's R0 is over 1.0 again so it looks like our issues will continue.

A local nurse said the reason the hospitals are no longer in crisis is because they have engineered a business process to handle the load. So as things stand, in spite of testing, Maryland remains a net exporter of the virus after this weekend.

Ah_Pook wrote: www.greensboro.com/sports/watch-now-fans...c5-2e176402d6c1.html

I guess we've just officially said fuck it at this point

Fucking morons, the lot of 'em.

jason10mm wrote: Anyway, some of you folks really need to take a step back and consider how you are viewing your fellow countrymen and the insults so casually tossed around. This thread is so full of internet vitriol it makes me question the value of the site as a whole when I want to think about gaming. At least it is mostly contained in this thread.

Like you, I grew up proud to be an American. I firmly believed that America was an exceptional country because Americans were exceptional people. I felt that our melting pot of immigration was a strength, because we got highly-motivated people from all over the world moving here and working to achieve the American Dream. Now I feel that our country is on the wrong track and headed towards disaster.

I think that it's entirely possible that some people think of politics the same way that they think of sports. You pick a team to support, and you stay with them even when they are having a bad season. You never, ever switch teams. An election is like a big game, and as long as the refs don't mess things up too much, the best team will win. A certain number of fouls are acceptable, especially if it helps your team win.

But a democracy is not a sports league. Voters owe it to themselves and to society to make an informed choice when voting. Blind allegiance to a particular party is bad for democracy, because it takes away an incentive for that party to represent the will of the people. Once they start taking our votes for granted, the government is no longer accountable, and the democracy is effectively lost.

I have lived long enough to see three Presidents face impeachment. The first one had the decency to resign before getting impeached, but it was also crucial that many of his fellow Republicans were prepared to vote for impeachment based on principle instead of party loyalty. By the time the second impeachment proceeding started, the voters and politicians had become more polarized, and perfectly willing to put party loyalty ahead of principle. Same thing happened with the third impeachment. In between those two impeachments, we had a Republican and a Democrat who both utilized drone assassinations against non-military targets without even a pretense of due process.

America is going off the rails because we stopped holding our Presidents accountable more than 20 years ago. As voters, we sometimes need to set party loyalty aside and see clearly when things are going wrong. In my opinion, things are going badly right now. I absolutely do not blame the President for COVID-19. He didn't cause it, and it was coming for us no matter what. However, we could have handled this better, and probably saved many lives. I think that it was a mistake for him to initially dismiss the virus as a hoax, and then downplay it as no worse than the flu. I do think that he was right to try to shut down incoming travel, but there was resistance due to his previous attempts to shut down incoming travel due to xenophobia. Ideally, we should have implemented a strong combination of testing and contact tracing beginning in late February, because then we could have kept the economy running normally while only a few sick people were in quarantine. But here we are, and now 100,000 Americans are dead from COVID-19, while many millions are unemployed.

I dunno, most of the discourse I see these days runs along the lines of "you do something I personally dislike..you f$*@ piece of s$&# d%&@^#bag c$$&sucker!" regardless of how bad said behavior really is.

Look at corona. 40-50% of deaths are in nursing home type environments. The hospitalizations are massively weighted to 70 years of age and above. We went through SARS, MERS, H1N1, etc with a very similar death rate, and didn't destroy our economy. Why? What is so different about covid? Why are fellow humans, all of whom can weigh personal risk and evaluate data just as well as we can, suddenly human garbage because they see only the horrible economic impact and not the, for most of us, abstracted human cost.?

Sure this site used to throw some jabs at each other because of some differences but I've never seen such polarized hate speech like covid has enabled. Should we wear masks? Probably, but WHO said no just a few weeks ago. Should we spray packages down with lysol? Now they say it isnt necessary. Are there super spreaders? Can you get reinfected? Is this virus suddenly radically different from all the corona viruses we've seen to date? There is a lot of ambiguity in this and I feel that a little human decency and respect towards those walking a different path is probably warranted. A gaggle of 20-30 year olds has virtually no chance of dying or even suffering serious consequences from covid, so long as they dont cohabitate with the elderly. This is pretty clear from the data and I dont think they deserve nearly all the abuse slung at them from the safety of a keyboard.

Texas, Georgia, and a few others have opened up a bit and there has been no catastrophic spike in hospitalizations or deaths. Whatever benefit to lockdown there was, we have achieved it IMHO.

I have spoken.

(And yes, I'm on my 2 or 3rd Manadalorian rewatch while in lockdown

Except that your honest opinion doesn't correlate with the reality or the science. Georgia started opening things up right when it had 5 of the 10 highest counties in new cases. At this point, every other nation can be compared to places like Hong Kong, South Korea, and even Mongolia, who treated the virus as a real problem and acted swiftly. Mongolia, a nation of 3.2 million people has ZERO cases and, thus, ZERO deaths. I don't suppose I need to point out the fact that the gulf in wealth and resources between the US and Mongolia is ridiculously vast. As the wealthiest nation in the world, the American response could've been among the best. Instead, with only 4% of the world's population, we have 31% of the confirmed cases and the highest death total that anyone knows of.

Your attitude is just like every GOP Congressperson who decries the concept of national healthcare... right up to the point where a segment of their family goes bankrupt trying to deal with a major illness. Then, suddenly, they see the light because, just like most self-centered Americans, they have to be hit in the face before they bother to think about other people. Who cares that the majority of cases have hit the elderly? THEY'RE HUMAN BEINGS, TOO! They had just as much right to the kind of protection the government should have been organizing and supporting from the beginning. Instead, the idiot man-child in the Oval Office deliberately stalled and thwarted the work that his own health agencies were trying to put into motion in order to salve his own ego. Every one of those deaths and every one of those people who've now been impacted for life by this thing (and there are many of them) is on him and the others in government who decided to profit off of this crisis, rather than do their damn jobs.

Got news for you: You think Texas and Georgia and other places haven't seen a spike and have decided things have passed them by like a weather pattern? Just wait. Because it's coming. Just over the weekend, we had a bunch of people from out of state defying Michigan's lockdown order and traveling to Traverse City, where there had been no cases. Now there's three confirmed and who knows how many more. We don't know, because those young people whose social lives you think are more important than the actual lives of the people dying from this thing, can easily be spreaders of the virus without exhibiting symptoms.

So, no, I have no "decency and respect" for people who think their personal pleasures are more important than the right of others to, y'know, live.

jason10mm wrote: Look at corona. 40-50% of deaths are in nursing home type environments. The hospitalizations are massively weighted to 70 years of age and above. We went through SARS, MERS, H1N1, etc with a very similar death rate, and didn't destroy our economy. Why? What is so different about covid? Why are fellow humans, all of whom can weigh personal risk and evaluate data just as well as we can, suddenly human garbage because they see only the horrible economic impact and not the, for most of us, abstracted human cost.?

I don't recall 100,000 Americans dying from SARS or MERS or H1N1. We didn't have to destroy our economy, because we could have started testing everybody entering the United States from abroad back in January or February, along with contact tracing anytime someone tested positive. That would have allowed our society and economy to function normally, with only a small number of sick people in isolation. We could have done that, but our President didn't take action. He left that up to the states, possibly so he could scapegoat them, and the states responded with 50 different plans and no coordination.

Probably should look at % positive given the number of tests given. Raw positive counts are likely misleading due to increases in number of tests.

jason10mm wrote: Why are fellow humans, all of whom can weigh personal risk and evaluate data just as well as we can, suddenly human garbage because they see only the horrible economic impact and not the, for most of us, abstracted human cost.?

This pandemic is showing the antithesis of humans displaying rational behavior, precisely because the information asymmetry is so extreme. Outside of the world's sharpest actuary who also can process the most up-to-date studies on epidemiology, I can't fathom anyone who could accurately triangulate personal risk against economic outcomes against the potential harm one's actions could have on a given population of people. I sure as shit can't, so I am instead acting under the premise that no amount of short-term economic gain is worth infecting and potentially killing someone.

The mindset of "growth at any cost" was thoroughly baked into the collective consciousness of American capitalism long ago, it just took something like a pandemic to shine a big enough light on it and confirm that human lives still qualify as an acceptable "cost," even in the year 2020. While not "human garbage", I certainly would characterize this attitude and the behavior that stems from it as a goddamn dumpster fire.

And the "horrible economic impact" is, of course, a uniquely American tradition at this point, because every other developed country in the world has somehow figured out how to leverage healthcare and social support systems to minimize the impact on the most vulnerable populations.

jason10mm wrote: We went through SARS, MERS, H1N1, etc with a very similar death rate

You're wrong.

Global Deaths (US Deaths):

SARS: 774 (0)
MERS: 858 (0)
H1N1: ~284,000 (12,469)
COVID-19: 350,000 (100,000) ...and counting.

Greg Aleknevicus wrote:

jason10mm wrote: We went through SARS, MERS, H1N1, etc with a very similar death rate

You're wrong.

Global Deaths (US Deaths):

SARS: 774 (0)
MERS: 858 (0)
H1N1: ~284,000 (12,469)
COVID-19: 350,000 (100,000) ...and counting.

You can pick which estimate you want. Do you believe China's numbers to be accurate? Or Vietnam, Mongolia? Folks even accuse US states of inflating or suppressing numbers. Those older diseases didn't have widespread testing like COVID (except maybe H1N1) and some of them never really got out of Asia. But the numbers, from a global perspective, are close. Millions infected, only thousands die. And for COVID it is a very specific population at risk that could have been protected while the rest of us kept working. I have little doubt that there will be papers written showing that the lockdown related death toll (suicides, domestic violence, delay in medical diagnosis/treatment, loss of income leading to poor health, etc) will meet or even exceed the COVID toll, except that will affect younger people, not octogenarians. And we won't even get into the potential mass starvation as countries dependent on outside food supplies see those dry up. But hey, so long as the first world is safe, right?

Stay locked down if you want. If you have the resources to do so go ahead. But SOMEONE has to keep small businesses open, not to mention the large transportation and shipping corporations that enable our globally connected economy and it can be done in as safe a manner as possible. This virus has continued to spread despite the lockdown. But no health system has collapsed, we have resources now, we know more about effective treatments. No vaccine is realistically gonna be ready for months. Time to open up for those who are at low risk.