Canada didn’t have a madman as its leader and their people respected public health science. Unlike the U.S. and the completely unhinged Trump regime and the GQP.
1 Like
Funny, I don’t think of Emanuel Macron as a madman. Angela Merkel certainly isn’t. I’ll grant you Boris Johnson and Viktor Orban.
1 Like
Understood. But I’d hardly put Merkel’s response in the same basket as Trump’s.
1 Like
There’s a pretty useful discussion of the current relationship between officially reported deaths due to COVID and overall excess mortality compared to the normally expected average here.
3 Likes
US deaths per 100k are almost twice Germany’s. I think I’d say that’s appreciably worse.
2 Likes
Germany did really well with containing the virus last spring, and really terrible with it – worse than the U.S., at least as measured by per capita deaths – this winter. It’s hard to chalk that up as a COVID success story for Germany’s public health policy. Seems instead like they either just got lucky with the first peak, or they had something that actually worked in the spring and decided to abandon it this winter. Either way is pretty bad, IMO.
1 Like
I’m going by Johns Hopkins as of this morning. They say fifth, you say seventh. With an official policy of denial and inaction I’m pretty sure we might well have done substantially better under different circumstances. Of course I don’t know how the fates would have treated us if we’d acted differently. But what our national and many state governments did and did not do was disgraceful.
5 Likes
True! But note that I did not claim the U.S. was better off than all of our peer countries, just many of them. And as I keep having to reiterate, the death rate from Germany’s winter spike was actually worse than the United States’ own winter spike.
3 Likes
Fauci: …fighting the “common enemy.”
All: The Judean People’s Front!?
3 Likes
It’s true that few peer countries have done particularly well. Still, each country is a unique case. I’m with Fauci that the US has fucked things up in a uniquely bad way.
Covid fatigue. The places with the most strict lockdowns have had the biggest backlashes against them.
Here in VA, where the governor promoted measures and actively limited businesses and lockdowns, but made the individual things recommendations, no big backlash ever took off, and neither did Covid to crisis points.
2 Likes
This means roughly 1 of every 660 Americans has died from Covid in the past 12 months. That’s unimaginable, but yet, here we are. And the undeniable fact is it didn’t have to be this way, but is directly related to the misinformation and incompetence of the previous Administration.
It’s probably fair to say that the U.S. found unique ways of fucking up our approach to COVID, but I don’t think it’s fair to conclude that the results have been “uniquely bad” when many of our peers are pretty much just as bad or even worse than the U.S. If our approach had been exactly the same as Germany’s, and if it achieved the exact same results, we’d still have more than 250,000 dead Americans. And I don’t think we would chalk that up as a win.
4 Likes
Hawley on same hobby horse as Cruz. Blech.
At the same time, Garland is perfect.
ETA: Oops wrong thread. Cotton’s grandstanding now. though.
2 Likes
Well, agreed on that point. And perhaps it’s ghoulish to argue about, given the scale of loss and grief, but still, twice 250 thousand seems uniquely horrible.
2 Likes
American Exceptionalism delivers again.
1 Like
Nears? I thought we passed it two days ago.
1 Like
There is something that can be added and to my dismay my family in Germany needs to be included. Even well educated and generally level headed and liberal people, like them, have been heavily bombarded by bots and otherwise on social media.
Last week I spoke to my brother and I was shocked at what he and my nephews think. They have succumbed and call it a hoax. The eldest has gone to anti mask demonstrations and that’s someone who has never been political.
Edit: I suggested therapy. lol. You should have seen the email I got from my bro.
6 Likes
To be fair, I’ve got friends over in Germany and Poland, and folks are really just getting tired of all the restrictions and lockdowns. Situations like getting stopped by police to ask for papers while walking to buy groceries. Puts a lot of pressure on people, makes everyone feel like they’re treated like criminals and have this over-bearing police presence hovering and watching everything.
Not at all surprised that things are going south, I’ve been saying for months that, once it became apparent this was a long-haul thing, governments needed to get smarter about approaches, not just putting everyone on permanent home confinement.
3 Likes
Still waiting for a vaccination.
Abbott cut our shipment in half this week and I suspect it’s because our county judge, Clay Jenkins, publicly criticized Abbott for the power outages.
4 Likes