Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

What Cosmo said.

 

If that’s what you want to do with my neighbor and you can talk him into it, what you do is your business.

 

Residents in city of Los Angeles to ‘remain in their homes’ amid COVID-19 surge, mayor’s office says | KTLA

Looks like LA is getting a full lockdown for Christmas.

Does anyone else get angry when they read about lockdowns or related things in other areas that don't even effect them, not because derp de derp freedom but because of some sort of misplaced desire for accountability (or something like that?) As I've said before, I think one of the reasons Americans have struggled so much with this is that the vast majority of them can't be convinced of the existence of a "can't be helped" problem. Anything bad that happens to them can be fixed by a lawsuit, a right cross or demanding the government give them a carve-out. Assigning blame to an "other" is something that is as American as apple pie, baseball and Chevrolet. The novel coronavirus does not have a "manager."

I'm not an anti-masker, and the riskiest thing I think I've done in six months was forgetting a mask when I gave a neighbor whose car was in the shop a ride across town (two weeks ago this afternoon -- looks like I dodged a bullet!). I live by myself, and I play by the rules. But does the fact that we're needing second and third lockdowns not mean that the first ones were failures? Does the fact that some people won't wear masks constitute a failure in messaging? To some degree, does every single infection and death in this country constitute a failure of some sort, either in public health, government, medical research or just society? Of course a lot of this comes back to entities who refuse to accept the blame, mostly because they have too much power to fight (Trump for being an asshole, the Chinese government for having 1 billion subjects, a large military and a multi-century inferiority complex). But does anyone else get messed up like that, they want to have someone to point at and scream, "YOU FUCKED THIS UP!"

I had a bit of a rage spiral at work today, mostly because we've apparently had an outbreak at our press facility, which is going to fuck up our already fucked up deadlines while we print somewhere else for the next two weeks. We've had infections in the newsroom and I've never thought that way about those people, but apparently the press guys are just far enough away (in the local industrial park) that I have to fight off the impulse to feel like this was a problem inflicted on me like as if the press had broken down or if we'd lost Internet.

Please don't think of the previous paragraphs as anything more than a thought experiment. I know there are folks around here who have suffered this or have family members who have and I'm not trying to trivialize that. I just find that trying to trace my anger normally goes in that direction until there's no trail to follow and I just end up swallowing it, going to bed and hoping to reset for another day. Honestly, I was overdue for one of these for several days.

 

We just don't believe this anymore. Somebody MADE it happen.

 

finger snap finger snap

 

The end of March is four months away. If we stay at the current 2,000 deaths a day, total deaths will be near double the current 270,000. So I guess that's hopeful but horrific. I can't put a number on the upcoming average, but more deaths than now for a while and a gradual drop makes the 2k figure seem something approximating reasonable.

 

It's not like it would be exactly this bad until March 31 and then fall off. It's going to start getting better quick by the end of January.

But yes, it's going to be *really fucking bad* before then. People in general still don't realize how much of a tsunami of death and injury we've locked in already, just waiting to play itself out in the next few weeks. We broke 100k hospitalized this week. Previous highs peaked at almost exactly 60k. And there's every reason to think it's still growing. Cases proceed hospitalizations proceed deaths, and cases are probably still rising (although I can't say definitively because we're still in the post-holiday data weirdness).

 

Cases overall are down a touch recently, but the Thanksgiving infections really haven't had time to get hospital bad quite yet. This is one where I really don't want to be right, you know?

 

It's just the holiday reporting weirdness, same as labor day. Labs take the long weekend off, so do the reporting agencies. You get what looks like a dip for a week, then a rapid shot back up to the previous levels at the backlog is caught up. It looks like a weird little v in the chart:




We might have been looking at a bit of a plateau before Thanksgiving, definitely. The rate at which cases were growing seemed to be leveling off.

 

I do not think it is helpful to give virus guidance to people as the CDC did yesterday that recommends behavior they really cannot follow. Every person under 40 who interacted with someone outside their household over Thanksgiving should consider themselves as having the virus? All people over 65 should not leave their homes at all and get their groceries and medicines delivered? Has anyone at the CDC tried signing up for local grocery delivery lately? It's kind of full, and that's here in a suburb. Residents of central Queens or central Wyoming, well they'd be shit out of luck. All this kind of stuff does is leave people feeling frightened or guilty or resentful or all of the above. Why not a simple "stay the hell home as much as you possibly can, but when you do go out, minimize human contact and wear your mask."

 

Does that mean you agree 10o-person gatherings should be banned?