Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

I thought I'd be back by midsummer.

 

Same. I’m reminded of the stories of people who thought the civil war thing would only last a month or two

 

Can somebody tell me how college basketball is going to be played in a lot of places in a month?

 

We were warned. Same number of infections. Only variable was how long it lasted.

Coronavirus: What is 'flattening the curve,' and will it work? | Live Science

Instead, we treated every case as a moral failing. Especially when the epicenter moved away from nursing homes --- and the northeast.

 

When the epicenter was in the Northeast, the thing was so new that nobody had time to react. Particularly in densely populated areas.
By the time it moved to SEC country et al, those places had plenty of advance notice. They knew -- or should have known -- it was real. But they refused to act. Governors in Georgia, Florida et al pledged their allegiance to Trump above all else. So, yes, it was a moral failing in those places. It was a moral failing when the Governor of South Dakota bashed those who accurately predicted that having a biker klan meeting was a bad idea. It was a moral failing when said governor refused to impose a mask mandate, joining others in picking Trump over public health.

 

This is really good. It's the thing leaders generally didn't do: Create alternatives.

And that's because they were either too stupid, or were waylaid by the most extreme doomers, or they didn't fuckin care. Trump, too. Trump especially.

 

"Everybody is doing exactly what we need to do. We have been ahead of this since Day 1."
--- Andrew Cuomo, March 1

 

The problem with preparing for a marathon is that if you had told people in April that they'd be working from home for a year and that public life would be in stasis throughout the summer and probably until the holidays and beyond, the response wouldn't have been better compliance levels, it would have been "Fuck you," even if I think most articles on the topic heavily pointed toward that. Humans are bad at delaying gratification as a species, and when a significant chunk of them claim one of the most impulsive, narcissistic examples of the kind as a spiritual leader of sorts, they are extra bad at it.

"I’ve said from the beginning, we cannot shelter in place or stay at home until we get a vaccine. That’s not sustainable. We knew that." - That's Tim Walz in a story from April 14. The state's stay-at-home order was lifted the weekend after Memorial Day.

And though Minnesota regulations during the mid-summer were looser, they were definitely present. Just about every outdoor civic festival in the state was canceled up to and including the state fair, and I don't think anyone held out a reasonable hope they were going to happen.

And when you look at the rest of the planet, even the "responsible" countries like Germany haven't opened up that much and have still had major surges as soon as it was no longer feasible for the general public to be outdoors for hours at a time.

Whether government was fooling itself or deliberately misleading the public, I think there was a limited quantity of cooperation they were going to get. At least the lot of cooperation for a little while meant that the peak (which spring attempts to 'flatten the curve' had a goal of pushing it into July) happened with a vaccine on the horizon as opposed to when the medical community was kludging together a response. I remember we did a story on a guy who was using his 3-D printer to make widgets that connected two or four people to a single ventilator. Wonder whatever happened to those widgets.

 

Just once it would be nice if you would bring to this thread helpful info instead of weak i-told-ya-sos.

 

Frankly, I think the forces of reason as it related to COVID lost a big chunk of the American people during the George Floyd riots.

The counterargument was made with a tremendous amount of bad faith, but for government to say that we can't have Memorial Day and Fourth of July parades this year but Black Lives Matter Boogaloo Bois and a lot of white outside agitators could flood the streets and burn down South Minneapolis permanently damaged the credibility of regulations. Trump was repeatedly flouting gathering size restrictions, either in deed or in spirit by calling them "MAGA Peaceful Protests".

 

Point taken. Then again, 93.6% of this thread has been weak "I told you sos."
(89.6% if you combine the dozens of "Great job voting, America"s into one post)

Unless there was some other point to breathlessly posting each and every update of case numbers from red states that (gasp!) opened a couple weeks earlier than their blue counterparts.

 

I always wonder how different things could have been in blue state leaders had set up outdoor spaces and equipment to churches, offered grants for webcasting, produced guidelines for improving airflow, etc.

Instead we got “fuck you, church is banned, if you don’t like it you’re a goddamned grandma killing sicko.”