Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

I think from the beginning it's been too much of a patchwork.

Some things closed here, but not there. Masks over there but not over here. Travel between states never really regulated except on the honor system.

Areas with good average compliance border areas with no compliance or politically driven resistance.

We needed to lock down tight in the spring, ease restrictions in the summer and lock down tight again in the fall - when we knew the second wave was coming.

By mid-April we were already into the 'Liberate Michigan' backlash and a coordinated national response became impossible. A series of huge outdoor protests and a summer of haphazard regulation followed, compounded by a series of campaign rallies and motorcycle meet-ups, 'essential' exemptions that included almost everyone and no federal effort to get anyone anywhere pointed in the same direction.

So I don't think we've ever engaged any of these restrictions with near the unanimity your post suggests. We never got a national testing or tracing network. Everything was left to the states and the cities.

We're still arguing over masks. In December.

We had a hundred years warning a second wave was coming and still couldn't rouse ourselves to respond.

I don't think there's any mystery to why things are as they are.

 

“As the circle tightens and friends of friends get it, the anti-maskers will see the light,” I thought. Nope. Their denialism only hardens. And those who criticize the freedumb klan? Well, they’re far worse than the targets of their ire. Or so say the Shy Trumpists, who are outraged by the critics’ elitism and moral superiority.

 

Turning the corner, Donnie? Over 1 million new cases in less than a week.

"Every single day, thousands more people are getting this virus, and we know that means that in a few days, in a week, hundreds of people are going to be coming to the hospital and hundreds of people are going to die," Dr. Shirlee Xie, a hospitalist and associate director of hospital medicine for Hennepin Healthcare in Minneapolis, told CNN's Ana Cabrera, her voice breaking with emotion.

"I think that sometimes when you hear statistics like that, you become numb to what those numbers mean," she said. "But for us, the people that are taking care of these patients, every single number is somebody that we have to look at and say, 'I'm sorry, there's nothing more I can do for you.'"​

1 million new coronavirus cases have been added to the U.S. total — in only 5 days | CNN

 

This is amazing reporting and packaging.

The Epicenter

 

It adds up more than you give it credit. There is no “control group” for us to compare the spread against a nation where no restrictions were in place. It would be worse.

However, as others note, COVID 19 is spreading where people gather - like offices and cafeterias and locker rooms. It probably would not spread much at grocery stores, even without masks.

Perhaps in the checkout lines.

 

I think that’s the emotionally tempting answer. It will always be a politically popular opinion that a small number of secret bad people are holding us all back. I just don’t think it’s particularly in evidence.

I’m not saying the things we have done have had zero effect, just that there’s a diminishing return. Maybe my perspective is skewed by where I live. Here in California, we have a state-wide mask mandate, no mass gatherings, have swapped between no indoor dining and capacity-limited indoor dining. And we aren’t really any better off than a Freedom!! state like Florida or Texas.

The next response i get to this is a-ha, don’t you have anti-maskers in California? We sure do, but not many and there doesn’t seem to be any correlation between where they live and where our outbreaks are the worst.

Just to make up some numbers, let’s say that out of every 100 cases with no mitigation rules, 40 come from private gatherings, 35 come in the workplace and 25 come in random public encounters.

Once you’ve shut down mass gatherings (sports, concerts), bars and indoor dining, and made everyone wear a mask, you’ve probably eliminated most of those 25. You’re not going to get more blood from the stone by shutting down even *more* public spaces. Let’s say your 40/35/25 has now turned into 35/30/5. Unfortunately, that still leaves your R0 above 1, so you still have rising cases.

At this point, I’m not convinced that coming down harder on those last 5 is going to do you any good. If people are already wearing masks in retail stores, shutting them down completely is going to gain you very little. Same with shutting down playgrounds or outdoor dining. What that will do, however, is force people to seek more private gatherings because there isn’t shit-else to do. So you’ve probably canceled out more than your very minimal gains and turned 35/30/5 into 40/30/0, effectively achieving nothing.

The US isn’t going to go after “essential” work because it isn’t interested in a broad social safety net to pay people long-term while they aren’t working. It also isn’t interested in marshaling up the police power it would need to start attacking private gatherings. And we seem to have agreed pretty quickly that shutting down state borders was a non-starter.

So we aren’t going to fight the virus where it’s spreading, we are just arguing over turning the dial up from 8 to 8.5 on a small portion of our spread problem.

 

Just wear it.

 

I'll only trust a vaccine when it's been tested on Keith Richards.

 

By “huge outdoor protests,” do you mean the George Floyd protests?

 

Joke’s on you, bub! Keith Richards’ cells are the source of the vaccine.

 

The missing 9/10 can be called the Trump Vaccines.