Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

You want people to stop thinking COVID-19 has jumped the shark?

Stop tweeting ridiculous nonsense like the above one. If you've run out of helpful advice, just stay silent.

 

Arkansas moving to Phase II reopening - despite not hitting the benchmarks laid out by the Governor months ago and rising infection percentages.

 

Oklahoma (0.96), California (0.97), Georgia (0.97) and Tennessee (0.99) neck-and-neck in Rt numbers.

Those SECcessionist states just gotta stick together.

Rt Covid-19

 

My feeling is that it's more a case of people deciding that, unfortunately, shutting down and taking/living with precautions for, seemingly forever, isn't going to make much difference, and so, why do it, seemingly forever, actually?

We've all used masks, we've all used social distancing, shut down shops and businesses to the point of practically shutting down the economy entirely, we've stopped most hobby-ist type things, we've cut out schools, etc., for going on four months now, with still no firm timelines in sight. And we've still got 112,000-plus deaths, anyway.

I'd say a case of, um, fatalism, is setting in, and people are becoming willing to just take chances and come what may in a tradeoff for losing all these inconveniences and life changes that they're not sure have really helped that much anyway.

 

But all those things DID work. There was a study estimating that anti-virus measures prevented around 60 million infections in the US. That's about 2 million lives saved. No lockdown was going to last forever. But some precautions, like mask wearing, are easy and so far seem to be effective. People shouldn't feel nothing they did mattered. They should think, "hey, we helped a hell of a lot of people in a very profound way."

 

I've said this before, but it all depends on how we choose to view numbers.
At some point this year, the Trumpandemic's death count will hit 165,000. How do we view this number?
1) "It's 165,000. That's a big number. I'd like to make $165,000 this year. It represents at least tens of thousands of needless/premature deaths."
or
2) "It's 1 of every 2,000 Americans; one of every 2,000 is a small number."

 

Arizona Hospitals Told To Activate ‘Emergency Plans’ Amid Coronavirus Spike

 

Again, how many of those lives saved were due to no crowded arenas, stadiums, airports . . . and had practically nothing to do with shutting down parks and Joe's Shoe Repair?

I believe there would have been a LOT less pushback --- and close enough to an equal number of lives saved --- had we made it Priority 1 to eliminate all places of mass gatherings and not worry about closing small businesses in which no more than 10 people were ever in the building at the same time anyway. Or AT WORST allowing them to remain open but require masks. But then, we couldn't even decide if masks were needed at the time these blanket decisions were made.

To put it another way, I can put 10 deadbolt locks on my front door and claim it saved me from a break-in. But it's foolish to think that 10th deadbolt had a thing to do with it.

Law of Diminishing Returns.

 

Nope. The idea was to shut everything possible down to keep people home and separated from each other as much as possible. Maybe for the second wave shutdowns can be more microtargeted, but there really wasn't time (or knowledge) to use anything but blunt instruments. This was true of every other country as well as ours, many of whom had far more severe shutdown policies than we did.

 

We’ll easily hit 165,000 by the first week of August. That’s if it stays at 1,000 deaths per day.

 

It was proudly posted on this board that if two people are wearing masks, the odds of transmission are reduced by 98-99 percent.

Tell me again why Joe's Shoe Repair could not have stayed open and required masks?

 

Yeah, but it's hard to prove a negative. 110,000 dead people can readily grasp. Two million people who never got sick, projected by scientists, are theoretical.