COVID19 Kibosh

[leslie]

17 minutes ago, fuzzynormal said:

Unfortunately If you can't access a ventilator to keep you alive during a contagion, you very well might die.  And, you're right, there's only so many ventilators on hand.  I don't know if people realize this and why the WHO have been extremely aggressive regarding their advice. 

And I shudder to even mention the problem of viral load for health care workers, of which I have numerous family members.

Throw in the mix a POTUS spending weeks yet again claiming he knows better than anyone else -- that it's all nothing to worry about, burning time off the clock to be usefully proactive.

Now imagine criticizing the POTUS for this behavior, knowing that the delay can cost lives, and having people defend his attitude for... reasons.  I gotta say, American citizens can like the guy because he's brash, upsetting the norm, or generating librul tears, but excusing his behavior regarding COVID should simply be a bridge too far.

Personally i'm not a fan of the current president. I didn't vote for for him, so i leave it in the hands the americans  for them to sort out

 

10 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

A teeny part of me wonders "what if we should have got this disaster over and done with double quickly while we enjoyed the peak of summer time, rather than delaying the worst of it until we reach the middle of our winter?? Hmmm"

I mean, I think the current approach NZ is doing is right?? But I do hope we don't look back with hindsight and realize we got the timing completely wrong!

I dont know how you could  get it over any quicker with out actively spreading it, which would make someone or someones, mass murderers if it did go pear shaped. Thats not something i would want hanging on my shoulders. Nobody is really ready for anything like this and we are all hoping that it doesn't turn out as bad as it could be. Countries are already battling various things nobody is putting stuff aside for pandemics. WE were heading towards a surplus but i suspect corona virus has put a dent in that idea. Its kinda ironic that a few microbes can pretty much bring a world to its knees.

[fuzzynormal]

31 minutes ago, leslie said:

Personally i'm not a fan of the current president. I didn't vote for for him, so i leave it in the hands the americans  for them to sort out

Well, at the very least, and as you can tell from my posts, I think he's a study in what not to do in this situation.  Hopefully your government is using this example to their advantage.

I guess it's sort of like watching a bad movie; seeing what mistakes to avoid to make yourself a better filmmaker.

And to try and pull the convo back to where it started, getting gigs in this market is stressful!

Add on top of that the fact that we've been trying to juice the US economy for waaaaaay too long. COVID plus a bubble burst and market correction?? No thanks.

Seriously, I've been having exestintial episodes about this career for awhile now, not sure where I'll be by mid-summer if this is our track. 

[BTM_Pix]

The German government are taking the report seriously enough to be discussing it today in their crisis meeting so we will see what we see.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/16/not-for-sale-anger-in-germany-at-report-trump-seeking-exclusive-coronavirus-vaccine-deal

A cynic might wonder why if such a report as this, with attributed comments from named German politicians is indeed "fake news", why a certain someone who is so enamoured of that phrase isn't tweeting precisely that.

With caps locks on and many, many exclamation marks.

Great exclamation marks.

The best exclamation marks ever, in fact.

[fuzzynormal]

5 hours ago, eleison said:

I bet you the number of deaths in the USA will be lower than that of Italy

Good God I want to lose that bet. 

Maybe I will?  Italy has an older population than the US. 

[sanveer]

4 hours ago, Jonesy Jones said:

Well... is this another way of saying there is only 1 source? In other words, to dispute... or confirm? 

The title. Think it’s an accident that it briefly makes it sound like Donald Trump is trying to personally profit from this?

Though the above is clarified in the first line, there are quotes around large sum of money. Are vaccines on this large a scale usually cheap? 

Exclusive, and for the US only. This could mean so many things and so easily be spun incorrectly. And the only competing view is given literally 1 word, “wrong”. Like could there be any more an unfair and unbalanced a discussion?

They are planning to have the vaccine by summer. This factoid alleviates the impression that Trump is trying to snatch the vaccine out of the world’s currently dying hands.

And then this whole ranking the US healthcare system thing. Have you heard Shapiro’s discussion on this? The ranking is ridiculously subjective to say the least.

 

I just don’t. I’m tired of. 

Around the months leading up to the Presidential Elections in 2016, for many months, there were all sorts of fake polls and campaigns, which suggested that Trump had  less than 1% chances of winning, and that Hillary was GUARANTEED to win.

I realised that this fake narrative constitutes the majority of mainstream media news (I have realised that they are fake news, after all). So, while I do believe Trump has his foot in his mouth (or both), any criticism of Trump from the liberal presstitutes isn't believable, by a long shot. 

 

43 minutes ago, fuzzynormal said:

Good God I want to lose that bet. 

Maybe I will?  Italy has an older population than the US. 

It's a mystery why Italy has handled the crisis so badly. Or maybe the Politicians in Italy are busy doing the Bulosconi, with illegal money and underaged girls, and that's why they have Done Almost Nothing to fight the Pandemic. Hopefully, once this gets over, heads will roll (they should probably introduce the guillotine again). 

[Grimor]

44 minutes ago, sanveer said:

It's a mystery why Italy has handled the crisis so badly. Or maybe the Politicians in Italy are busy doing the Bulosconi, with illegal money and underaged girls, and that's why they have Done Almost Nothing to fight the Pandemic. Hopefully, once this gets over, heads will roll (they should probably introduce the guillotine again). 

We in Spain are doing the same. Exactly as bad as Italy, only 10 days behind.

[Mokara]

7 hours ago, eleison said:

Yes, lets revisit this thread 12 months from now.  The total death is now around 60 -- mostly elderly. We have a ways to go until it's 12,000.  Considering most scientist seem to think it will wane just like any other flu, and china cases are already going down, I highly doubt it will get that far.  Also, my nephew is an healthcare professional and he says doctors and nurses are being extremely vigilant with respect to taking care of their elderly patients (most testing kits go to them first).   Lets see how the USA health care system does.  The USA health care which ranks below 25th.  I bet you the number of deaths in the USA will be lower than that of Italy - a "top 5 health care system".  If that happens, you should probably go back and ask yourself if your sources are biased.  

Patients are getting much sicker than the flu (coronavirus is a completely different virus from influenza btw). Being vigilant will not help, none of these people are going to have immunity to the virus. They will get sick and there is little the doctors will be able to do other than put them on ventilators to try and keep them alive long enough for the virus to be cleared.

The main issue is the health system being swamped by numbers, when there are not enough ventilators then any extra patients will simply be left to die. This is the basic problem Italy is having at the moment. How that will play out in the US remains to be seen, but the US probably will not have enough either. 

Keep in mind that about 8-9% of Americans have no health insurance of any kind. What do you think is going to happen to these people if they all get sick more or less at once? ICU beds are going to go to those with insurance, if there is not enough left over then all those folk who had their health care stripped from them by the Republicans are going to be in real trouble.

[Mokara]

1 hour ago, sanveer said:

Around the months leading up to the Presidential Elections in 2016, for many months, there were all sorts of fake polls and campaigns, which suggested that Trump had  less than 1% chances of winning, and that Hillary was GUARANTEED to win.

I realised that this fake narrative constitutes the majority of mainstream media news (I have realised that they are fake news, after all). So, while I do believe Trump has his foot in his mouth (or both), any criticism of Trump from the liberal presstitutes isn't believable, by a long shot. 

 

It's a mystery why Italy has handled the crisis so badly. Or maybe the Politicians in Italy are busy doing the Bulosconi, with illegal money and underaged girls, and that's why they have Done Almost Nothing to fight the Pandemic. Hopefully, once this gets over, heads will roll (they should probably introduce the guillotine again). 

Actually Clinton did win the election by about 3 million votes, and the margin was pretty much what the national polls predicted. Polls were less accurate in individual states because the n numbers were lower and error margins higher, which was a factor in close contests in a few critical states. Trump became president because the system is rigged by the electoral college setup. Most Americans did not vote for Trump.

The problem in Italy is that they did not take it seriously until it was too late and the virus had already spread extensively within the community. It seems like the same thing is happening in a few other European countries, and will likely happen in the US as well. I live in Canada, and Thursday was the day that everything changed in terms of people's attitudes to the problem (the day that Sophie Trudeau was tested positive). Was that soon enough to make a difference in the shape of the infection curve - time will tell.

The other problem is that Italy is one of the oldest countries in the world. More old people = bigger health care crisis.

[Mokara]

2 hours ago, BTM_Pix said:

The German government are taking the report seriously enough to be discussing it today in their crisis meeting so we will see what we see.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/16/not-for-sale-anger-in-germany-at-report-trump-seeking-exclusive-coronavirus-vaccine-deal

A cynic might wonder why if such a report as this, with attributed comments from named German politicians is indeed "fake news", why a certain someone who is so enamoured of that phrase isn't tweeting precisely that.

With caps locks on and many, many exclamation marks.

Great exclamation marks.

The best exclamation marks ever, in fact.

It would not happen. The German government would simply seize the product under imminent domain if a company tried anything like that. Any government that wanted to remain in government would do that, their citizens would come first.

[Mokara]

3 hours ago, fuzzynormal said:

Well, at the very least, and as you can tell from my posts, I think he's a study in what not to do in this situation.  Hopefully your government is using this example to their advantage.

I guess it's sort of like watching a bad movie; seeing what mistakes to avoid to make yourself a better filmmaker.

And to try and pull the convo back to where it started, getting gigs in this market is stressful!

Add on top of that the fact that we've been trying to juice the US economy for waaaaaay too long. COVID plus a bubble burst and market correction?? No thanks.

Seriously, I've been having exestintial episodes about this career for awhile now, not sure where I'll be by mid-summer if this is our track. 

The basic problem with Trump is that he is an ignorant buffoon. While that be entertaining and amusing under normal circumstances, in a crisis like this the US needs a real leader, not a fake one. The presidency is not a TV show.

The US economy has been promoted over the last few years by runaway deficit spending (it is funny how it is always the Republicans that end up doing this in spite of their claims to be fiscally responsible). They don't have any leeway to stimulate the economy, interest rates are almost at zero if not zero. What else can they do when the country goes into recession as a result of the pandemic? They can't reduce interest rates to negative values, that would be paying people to borrow money. The only other option is to massively increase the already inflated deficit.

[BTM_Pix]

12 minutes ago, Mokara said:

It would not happen. The German government would simply seize the product under imminent domain if a company tried anything like that. Any government that wanted to remain in government would do that, their citizens would come first.

No, I know.

Germany has a specific foreign trade law to scrutinise and prohibit takeovers from non-EU countries if it threatens national security and order.

https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/guides/germanys-foreign-investment-regime

The issue at hand really is whether he tried rather than whether he was thwarted Scooby Doo style by the meddling of those pesky kids.

 

 

[FranciscoB]

Please, let's not turn this into a dick measuring contest between liberalism and conservativism in America. Different choices were made, let's hope for the best and stay safe everyone. No good will come from this bickering on Trump or "fake news". 

[IronFilm]

5 hours ago, leslie said:

WE were heading towards a surplus but i suspect corona virus has put a dent in that idea.

100% Australia (and NZ) won't have a surplus at the end of this current budget cycle. 

The whole world is going to go into a recession. 

  

5 hours ago, fuzzynormal said:

Add on top of that the fact that we've been trying to juice the US economy for waaaaaay too long. COVID plus a bubble burst and market correction?? No thanks.

#EndTheFed

Without The Fed artificially pumping up the economy then the USA wouldn't need to go through the double pain of the coronavirus and the bubble bursting at the same time. 

  

3 hours ago, fuzzynormal said:

Good God I want to lose that bet. 

Maybe I will?  Italy has an older population than the US. 

You also have many many more multi generational homes in Italy than in the USA, which could contribute to a higher death toll. 

However, I personally still believe that in the long run the USA will have a higher death toll than Italy, simply because USA's population is so so much bigger. 

However which will have the higher number of deaths per capita? I really do not know. 

  

2 hours ago, Mokara said:

Actually Clinton did win the election by about 3 million votes, and the margin was pretty much what the national polls predicted.

Clinton didn't win the election. 

The election wasn't a popularity contest. (and if it was, then both candidates and both parties would have run their campaigns completely differently, it is almost impossible to predict what would the result have been if it has been a contest on the basis of the popular vote instead)

And those predictions based on polling (such as The New York Times saying Clinton had an over 90% chance of winning, or  The Princeton Election Consortium gave Clinton a 99 percent chance of winning. Or The Huffington Post’s forecast giving Clinton 98 percent, or how PredictWise gave her 89 percent etc etc) was all based on the fact it is a federal election with an electoral college.

(in other words, their predictions were not about her "winning" the popular vote, they were very very very confident about her winning the electoral college. What the actual contest was about)

[Emanuel]

There's no mechanical ventilation nor medical staff for everyone to fall in critical condition, got it...?

This can end as the tragedy of the century if people will abstain to understand the magnitude of it. Still hope not though.

E : -)

 

[fuzzynormal]

One of my big fears about the USA and COVID is simply that I don't believe our society is set-up to effectively stop it peaking and overloading hospitals.  That's one of the disadvantages of being a mostly free culture.  However, reports coming out of South Korea offer hope as their cases are on the down slope without lock-down measures like China:

“Without harming the principle of a transparent and open society, we recommend a response system that blends voluntary public participation with creative applications of advanced technology,” South Korea’s Vice Health Minister Kim Gang-lip told journalists.

Conventional and coercive measures such as lockdowns of affected areas have drawbacks, he said, undermining the spirit of democracy and alienating the public who should participate actively in preventive efforts.

“Public participation must be secured through openness and transparency,” he said.

South Korea has been proactive in providing its citizens with information needed to stay safe, including twice daily media briefings and emergency alerts sent by mobile phone to those living or working in districts where new cases have been confirmed.

The hitch in Korea vs. the USA is that our federal government is unwilling or unable to offer useful media briefings, and we can't effectively test.  Both of those things are unsettling to the public.  An unfinished google homepage isn't a solution.  It's a cruel joke.  Still, a bit of a glimmering light from other front lines.

[fuzzynormal]

8 hours ago, sanveer said:

there were all sorts of fake polls and campaigns, which suggested that Trump had  less than 1% chances of winning, and that Hillary was GUARANTEED to win.

I realised that this fake narrative constitutes the majority of mainstream media news (I have realised that they are fake news, after all). So, while I do believe Trump has his foot in his mouth (or both), any criticism of Trump from the liberal presstitutes isn't believable, by a long shot.

This is tangent to the COVID conversation, but I would like to point out that polls are simply pollsters asking a control group questions about how they're going to vote.  People answering those polls could have been coy, the posters themselves might have asked poor questions, people were legit undecided up 'til the end, ect.  Donald's win fell inside the margin of error for respectable polls that were held within the few days of the campaign.

So, no, reporting how people answered a well regarded poll isn't fake news.  It's just news.  I mean, if you want to hold up the less respectable news outlets as examples, by all means lift an organization like HuffingtonPost up on your petard. I guess we agree on that. 

They were ridiculous and stupid, but they're akin to Brietbart.com.  AKA: full of shit.  So much so they were founded by the same dude.  Even so, the HP pollster did her job so poorly during the campaign she had to issue a mea culpa on their front page before she was fired.

Still, let's not use yellow journalism or an 11th hour poll shift to dismiss all news reporting.  Very bad and unhealthy idea.

[sanveer]

22 minutes ago, fuzzynormal said:

Conventional and coercive measures such as lockdowns of affected areas have drawbacks, he said, undermining the spirit of democracy and alienating the public who should participate actively in preventive efforts.

If people were so moral and self policing, there would no need for government agencies. There would either be no crimes or all criminals would hand themselves in and be punished without lengthy court cases.

The majority of the cases are simply because people don't believe their cough and flu symptoms could possibly be covid-19, or because they believe they have no duty to stay in isolation, even after they have been tested positive (or disappeared before results are out). That's how South Korea got the numbers to seell so quickly, in the first place. 

 

 

26 minutes ago, fuzzynormal said:

South Korea has been proactive in providing its citizens with information needed to stay safe, including twice daily media briefings and emergency alerts sent by mobile phone to those living or working in districts where new cases have been confirmed.

Telling me that 3 people every day in my areas have developed the virus would make most people in my area get hyper and panicky. It's easier to just test people and isolate them, without insane levels of publicity, especially the mobile alerts of people having been found in localities.

 

The Media in the US and S.Korea aren't even in the same ballpark. Right now, the US media is too busy trying to make everyone believe that covid-19 was probably created in the US, and that no geographical references to Wuhan or China should be made wrt the virus.

They are busy with fostering all kinds of curious narratives, instead of helping people contain the problem. 

I read another report or watched some news saying that the FDA was to be blamed partially, for bureaucratic delays wrt to handling things. Maybe that will also be investigated soon enough, with guilty people punished. After all, this isn't just another flu.

[John Matthews]

I live in Eastern France. The hospital covering our area of 225,000 people has 14 ventilators. About 79,000 people will be infected over the next few weeks. About 800 will need the 14 ventilators. It's just math at this point. Old people are in the "sink or swim" situation. The younger ones will get them... The end. I imagine it'll be the same situation all over the USA. Just do the math. Don't tell me the Americans have such a better health system- they don't because I know both of them. The US system is only better when money is no object.

As people go into gradual lockdown over the next weeks, I encourage them to seriously think about how their leadership handled the situation and how they could have led better. Vote appropriately. This is potentially one of the biggest events of this new decade.

 

[Marcio Kabke Pinheiro]

Well, it always could be worse. Imagine if your president is suspect to have the virus, was recommended to quarantine, and suddenly steps down the presidential car, go to a crowd without mask or any protection and starts to hug people.

Oh, wait, it was what the piece of shit which is the Brazilian president has done yesterday.

[fuzzynormal]

1 hour ago, sanveer said:

Right now, the US media is too busy trying to make everyone believe that covid-19 was probably created in the US, and that no geographical references to Wuhan or China should be made wrt the virus.

So, in all seriousness, do you really believe this?  

I mean, I suppose if you bounce around the lefty crackpot websites that are the equivalent of "InfoWars," you might dig up some nonsense, but otherwise? You gotta show your work on this one.  If only to give the rest of us an idea where these sorts of assertions are coming from.