Covid-19 Discussion (moderated)

Becoming a wayward contrarian for it's own sake is an American virtue these days.  It doesn't matter what you oppose, so long as you feel right about something.  How else can anyone explain why people are still saying measures need to be even further relaxed when the spread of Covid right now is like wildfire, and approaching a quarter million new cases a day?

Sure - and the expert advice you quoted was from back in February. As the severity of this pandemic became clear, experts updated their advice, and the administration has not changed its behaviour at all. The government is going to make mistakes, and it's going to cost lives - here in Australia, Victoria didn't get their hotel quarantine right and COVID got out into the community and they had to lock down for 6 weeks to get it back under control - but that's understandable and forgiveable. Refusing to learn from your mistakes and repeating those errors is exactly the problem the current US administration has.

You're calling stalemate on a game you never played.  But we do agree to disagree. 

Some real numbers:

https://news.yahoo.com/coronavirus-pandemic-most-new-covid-cases-worldwide-cdc-195412834.html

The US last week averaged over 48 new cases daily per 100,000 population.  Next highest numbers for other countries?  A little over 30.

The CDC is estimating up to 500,000 deaths by the time this outbreak is a year old.  Almost 10 million people flew Thanksgiving week, and it's going to get worse before it starts getting better.  

The daily death count is more than 9/11...and that will increase, so every single day.  Why was the Patriot Act, a fearful capitulation to terrorism and a severe curtailing of privacy rights, so embraced after 3,000 people died, while Covid measures are dismissed and sneered at with 100 times the death toll? 

Ask yourself that question.

All the "US response is the best, because we're still #1" people need to take note and stop blindly listening to people shoveling you apple pie and baseball BS.

75 million cases worldwide, 17.5 million in the US.

That's 3.5 million new cases in the US since I last posted the count 15 days ago, and at that time, the US had totaled 1 million new cases in a week.  Now it's averaging 1.75 million each for the past 2 weeks.  At, say, an average of 2 million per week, we'll have 27.5 million cases by the inauguration, almost double what we had 3 weeks ago.  In 2 months, we'd have reached about the same total as the previous 9 months.

The vaccines will barely be distributed to anyone by then.  Stop ignoring this and pretending it's almost over, and follow the measures being taken in your communities.

Do you have any commentary about the outbreak beyond one-liners? 

Carrying this link over from another thread...good article by the Washington Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/12/21/covid-why-we-ignore-deaths/

Wait I thought no politics

The Washington Post is not just political by default...

If you are just talking about the thread in general, the no politics/no religion rule is a rule about discussions.  You won't get muted for referring to politics indirectly, or for mentioning that politics exist, etc.  The "no political discussions" comes into effect when a thread gets into a back and forth arguing politics, or when one person gets on a soapbox and challenges everyone to engage with them in a political discussion.

Back and forth banter leads to warning and then locking.

Casual mentions are often just removed, and action is only taken if such mentions persist.

I've read the Washington Post article above and I didn't think it was political at all - I think it's fine and I'm pretty sure the other moderators would agree with me.

David, moderator

You must have a guilty conscience.  Numb does not necessarily imply callous.  It's a Washington Post article, written in the USA about the USA by a citizen of the USA, so how would it be "pointing a finger at only one country?".  The article is only *about* one country, Sherlock .

There's plenty of "garbage journalism" tossed around here, but this isn't it.

P.S. I said I carried this over from the other Covid thread, and it's a thread you frequent more often than here...but you didn't say boo about it there.  Ergo, you have an agenda complaining about it solely here.  Mods are not blind, so you might want to ixnay the arrassmenthay.

Because Trump refused to put a mask for a very long time and he is was a very bad example of what not to do! 

That was not the case in the UK or Canada or Australia or France and Belgium and Germany and Asia! etc etc etc...only a few right wing president refused to be clear and followed the guidelines from the healthcare experts! 

Covid is all about politics so if i can't talk about politics I'm going nowhere with this.

You are welcome anytime

In many country yes;not in mine! 

Well, without getting partisan, we could discuss creative, innovative, and fiscally sound public policy to combat it. Sadly, in America, we took the least restrictive means of curtailing Covid of any developed nation, elevated talking heads who said “it’s not that bad,” and ”It’s just the flu.” We argued and opposed shutdowns, masks, social distance, and for the most part continued on with the holidays and work. Making matters worse, most of us won’t even get this vaccine.

We could argue the politics of it (not here of course), but fact is our response to this is not too dissimilar from white starting a game with 1.f4 followed by g4.

You didn't really read the article, you saw it was from the Washington Post and made an assumption.