Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

I agree. Repeated that too many times to remember here.

Flattening the curve assumes the same number of infections, albeit over different time spans. Because humams aren't bears. We can't hibernate.

The difference in deaths is to what degree a compromised health care system cannot provide adequate care. So far, anyway, that has not happened. Still could, though.

 

I think more people ended up dying than needed to because he was responsible for convincing a lot of people that it wasn't something to take seriously. But the number still would have been in the hundreds of thousands, unless we had a great leader and perfect execution in Jan/Feb/March. The biggest thing Trump is responsible for is the economy, the schools debacle, and everyone's misery.

 

We could have a flood of testing and a rigorous contact tracing program.

We could have spent some effort trying to convince people to mask up.

Messaging matters, and the President used his platform to - for some stupid reason - foment unrest against any measure meant to slow the spread.

Stop trying to excuse it away.

 

Could have. But contact tracing is only as good as the honesty --- and memory --- of those contacted. You call John Q. Trumpist to tell him he was exposed and needs to quarantine, and he'll tell you, "Sure thing, right after next week's MAGA rally."

Could have. But the Surgeon General stepped on his dick and opened the door for the anti-maskers to question the changing guidelines of experts.

 

The chance of honesty in contact tracing died when Trump and his klan's governors decided to pretend this virus didn't exist. Denial and dishonesty, two of Trump's traits, were now required for any member of the klan. If you dared tell the truth about this issue, you were excommunicated.
As to the Surgeon General, he was Pence's lap dog back home again in Indiana. More politician than physician. His arrival was a precursor -- although unknown at the time -- to the politicization of death and disease.

 

Man. Who could have seen this coming?

I never thought “not electing a moron” was going to matter; I figured Hillary’s emails, MS and Uranium One were surely the most important issues in 2016.

 

Blame freedom.

Good for a lot of things. Not so good for guns and pandemics.

 

I can think of a dozen things the left did wrong to fight the pandemic. It doesn't change the fact that Trump is more responsible because he was supposed to be providing leadership, but the left has been overly obsessed with business shutdowns, eager to capitalize it for political purposes, willing to distort the truth to try to influence behavior, and shockingly unwillingly to look at ways to encourage safer activities.

As an example, instead of shutting down churches and triggering a showdown, blue states should have been working with them to facilitate outdoor services. Provide grants for equipment to webcast services when outdoors wasn't feasible. Would that have worked in places where power had to be shared with republicans? Probably not. But lots of states are unilaterally blue, and they didn't even try, and instead focused all their time and energy deciding exactly how much business shutdown was needed, as if that was the only tool in the bag.

And an entire generation of people is going to have fucked up views of how the immune system works because of all the half-truths and misinformation that was spread to try to make sure the "let's just let everyone get it" people didn't get a foothold.

 

It did in New York.

 

The left's messaging is that leaving your house is tantamount to killing your neighbor.

The right's messaging is that fuck you, I'll do what I want and fuck your neighbor.

The answer is in the middle.

I've gone to a rotation of three places -- inside -- for the last five months or so, with no issues. Capacity has been capped. Masks are required when you leave the table. You can't intermingle with other tables, etc. There is an in between. I'm fucking sick of people telling me that I'm killing grandma by leaving my house. I'm also smart and careful enough not to do something stupid like go to a 100-person gathering.

 

I think you make a good point. The mask scolds are certainly not as dangerous as the mask scofflaws but they can be comparably annoying, and the mask scoldery (not sure if that's a word) stoked a moral superiority complex a lot of liberals have been accused of.

I think another big problem is that the goalposts moved significantly over the course of this process. For example, Minnesota's state government did a fairly effective job in March and April of selling lockdowns/stay at home as a means of buying time for building health care capacity/PPE stocks, as opposed to convincing people that it would fix the problem. But as we got into the summer months, I think the focus shifted. I think the medical community and the more responsible government types realized there was no way to reach or maintain a medically acceptable level of transmission without holding the line on things like mask mandates and heavy restrictions on gatherings and sports and such, strategies that they themselves openly said were not sustainable early in the outbreak.

And as Cosmo said, even without Trump's naked self-interest clouding things, the choice basically veered toward a binary of murdering Mom and Pop businesses or murdering Mom and Pop.

 

I probably left a crucial oxford comma out in my post. Oops.