I really don’t give a shit about people getting tired of doing the goddamn right thing to get this over with. I’m tired of the complaining about it. Y’all want this to last forever? Then keep bitching about the things that work to get it under control and you’ll get your wish - masks forever.
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“Nearly every continent”
Sorry CNN but there were 36 cases in Antarctica at a military base so Covid-19 is on every continent.
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Worldometer hit 500k a few days ago. This article refers to the Johns Hopkins numbers which run a bit lower. Don’t know why.
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Tena, love you and all, but not everyone is positioned as you are to be in a great spot to sit at home for the full duration. There is always going to be some significant level of activity going on just to literally keep the lights on, for starters.
That governments have had no problems ordering tons of people to be “essential workers”, and have them going to work all day, but somehow it’s suddenly a problem if someone meets another person and it’s not in the line of “essential work” it’s a big risk… You only have a limited time that that works.
We activated 25k troops to the Capitol, guess we shouldn’t have done that, because it led to outbreaks.
One can recognize that there are things which need to be better addressed, since two years of being homebound really isn’t going to end up working very well.
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It looks to me that social mobility, a factor of affluence and urbanization are major factors in Covid-19 transmission. A comprehensive post mortem on Covid-19 will be necessary and informative.
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Hard to do that when, so far as I can tell, hardly any data is being collected to determine where/when/how people are getting infected. There are small-scale studies, of course, but nothing comprehensive.
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It’s deliberate. They prefer to define it as being only spread by people being naughty, don’t really want too many more stories out there about how much is being spread around by “essential workers”, as that would undermine their lockdown rules. Remember the coverups at the meatpacking plants. Those aren’t the only workplaces, but the economic engine of Amazon needs to keep plugging along, no matter how many of their warehouse folks end up sick.
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There are tangential methods for sussing out the relevant numbers.
There is a website that collects digital thermometer data from hospitals and clinics throughout the country then creates a national “hot spot” map for instance. Comparing this with traffic data as well as departure/arrival data for public modes of travel could be informative. These and other forms of Metadata that already exist as well could lead to interesting and important conclusions.
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Let’s hope that everyone appreciates all of the advantages that the country experienced from electing a republican president and Senate who support “small government”.
If a party feels no obligation to govern, and is utterly lacking in any ethical concern, a few hundred thousand are small price to pay.
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So one other sobering statistic to keep in mind - the total death toll from the 1918-19 influenza in the US was 675,000. We are on-track to exceed that. Granted, there were fewer of us back then, but our medical infrastructure and scientific knowledge base are much better now. Tragic and unnecessary, no matter how you look at it.
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The economy will boom along for the next decade thanks to millions in medical bills that families will face.
So there is that bright spot.
For pharmecutical and insurance companies I mean.
Maybe I can start collecting refrigerator boxes at appliance stores and store them to rent out to bankrupt families - 10% discount if you have 2 or more kids.
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Yes. Except their health safety net ensured medical care when they could, and no crippling medical bills afterwards. Just loss of income from the death of a parent or their continuing disability from the after effects.
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C’mon gang, we’ve gotta try harder than that! Who’s up for a road trip to Branson?
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On the bright side, it really is looking like the vaccine also prevents airborne transmission after the second dose ‘takes’.
@tena
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Qaren McCain has an opinion.
She began by sharing a clip of Fauci on CNN’s State of the Union over the weekend resisting Dana Bash’s plea to give concrete advice to vaccinated grandparents about how to visit their unvaccinated grandchildren. “There will be recommendations coming out. I don’t want to be making a recommendation now on public TV,” he said. “I would want to sit down with the team and take a look at that.”
rather than looking back and saying what the heck happened here, now let’s just go forward and be completely committed as a unified country to just go at this together,” Fauci said.
It is extremely important to look back and figure out what the heck happened here. If we don’t do that we will be bound to repeat the disaster over and over. Of course, in broad strokes we do know what happened here, we just need to explain it to the 40% of the country who refuse to accept reality.
The most telling contrast is between the similar neighbors Norway and Sweden in “Excess deaths since country or city’s first 50 covid deaths”: -2 and +106 per 100k, respectively. Policy matters.
ETA:
Interesting large gaps between covid-19 deaths and overall excess deaths for Russia, Belarus, and South Africa.
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That’s an important distinction. We are undercounting, may be as much as 30-50%.
It’s likely less developed nations are also undercounting, not having the resources or expansive healthcare systems that the “First World” does.
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Very much agreed. Deaths are far harder to miss than infections, and the counts are missing a lot of infections.
ETA: I mean that we’re most likely undercounting infections by upwards of 50%. We are definitely not undercounting deaths by anywhere close to that, at least not since the very early days in the NYC region. Excess mortality numbers suggest we’re undercounting COVID deaths by somewhere around 10% these days.
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