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THE PANDEMIC CHAT ROOM


Erwin

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2 hours ago, Sublime said:

the Anti Japanese stuff is almost comical.  Ive seen clips from Chinese action films where a soldier does a flip kick on a grenade and takes out a Japanese zero with it. (seriously) VICE news did an interesting piece on it a few years ago.  They even have the same like 10 actors as Japanese in all their films, and theyre told to act as rapacious and stereotypical as possible. and of course they have their anti japan museums that foreigners arent allowed in.

Flip side of that is Japan's denials of their actions in ww2.  My wife and I tend not to discuss the pacific war  It just gets too stressful. 

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6 hours ago, 37mm said:

You may have a tendency to mock the heavens themselves with your games... but you have the correct narrative on this thing.

Thanks.  I think as long as we don't take such narratives and turn them into games, we should have a better future as a planet.  Which is why when people have asked us to make a game that involves a conflict between the West and China we've said "no".  It would be interesting only until a real work broke out within 1-4 years of beta testing.  Let's not go there.

6 hours ago, 37mm said:

China is not the issue (heck it's an astroturfed argument anyway & probably is being used as part of a "play off Indian peasant workers vs Chinese peasant workers" scheme)... the West has had a LOT of issues, getting progressively worse, long before this virus ever emerged.

When 9/11 happened many of our non-US customers (and quite a few US customers) pointed out that voluntarily destructive foreign and economic policies of the West, and in particular US, basically invited such attacks.  As the horror was unfolding I emphatically clamped down on such criticisms here because it wasn't the right time for it.  I have a similar feeling about the Pandemic we're in now.  We need to get through this crap first, then figure out what went wrong, and hopefully set ourselves up to do better next time.  Just because that sort of thing didn't happen after 9/11 doesn't mean it won't happen after COVID-19 is in the rear view mirror.  One can dream, right?

Steve

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12 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Thanks.  I think as long as we don't take such narratives and turn them into games, we should have a better future as a planet.  Which is why when people have asked us to make a game that involves a conflict between the West and China we've said "no".  It would be interesting only until a real work broke out within 1-4 years of beta testing.  Let's not go there.

When 9/11 happened many of our non-US customers (and quite a few US customers) pointed out that voluntarily destructive foreign and economic policies of the West, and in particular US, basically invited such attacks.  As the horror was unfolding I emphatically clamped down on such criticisms here because it wasn't the right time for it.  I have a similar feeling about the Pandemic we're in now.  We need to get through this crap first, then figure out what went wrong, and hopefully set ourselves up to do better next time.  Just because that sort of thing didn't happen after 9/11 doesn't mean it won't happen after COVID-19 is in the rear view mirror.  One can dream, right?

Steve

One can dream, and hope.  Unfortunately the rear view might be a while yet. Well my belief is that a second wave of this is coming. Where I live, a little island province of 155,000 we have been virtually untouched. Not a single case yet in the hospitals. 27 positives cases resolved at home, no new cases, and no deaths. Once the regional borders open up we'll have our turn, and this will play out similarly in other semi isolated jurisdictions all over the world. But we did buy some time.

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New reporting puts the estimate of actual COVID-19 related deaths in the US about 1.5 times higher than currently stated (~65,000).  If correct, that puts the number of COVID-19 related deaths up to 100,000 and counting. 

The basis of the new report are provisional death certificate numbers for the earlier part of the pandemic period.  They compared those against the expected normal deaths for the period and that produced an "Excess Death" number.  From this number the official COVID-19 count for the period was subtracted and the result is a large number of deaths that are neither explained by the normal range of deaths (car accidents, suicides, cancer, etc) nor recorded COVID-19 statistics.  This number likely represents unreported reported COVID-19 deaths, people who died because they did not get the normal level of care (slower ambulance response time to a heart attack, for example), people who died at home and nobody noticed because of the lockdown, etc.

The takeaway from this is yet another reason to kick the "it's not worse than the flu" arguments into a deeper gutter than where they were even a few days ago.  At this point it wouldn't surprise me to find out that people still arguing that COVID-19 is no worse than the normal flu are also card carrying members of the Flat Earth Society.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/05/02/excess-deaths-during-covid-19/?arc404=true&utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most

Steve

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I recall in a NTY article a couple weeks ago mentioning that NYC EMTs were extracting dead folk from apartments at 8x the usual number, and none of those people got counted as Coronavirus deaths.

As to 'excess deaths', I recall reading a translation of a Russian report about Chernobyl. In the region downwind of the accident they counted 150,000 (or a similar number) excess 'spontaneous abortions' (miscarriages) than one would typically expect of a population of that density. Shortly after reading that I spotted an American 'opinion' column (from industry shills, no doubt) claiming only two people had died from the Chernobyl accident.

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2 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

At this point it wouldn't surprise me to find out that people still arguing that COVID-19 is no worse than the normal flu are also card carrying members of the Flat Earth Society.

To be fair, one of the problems with these comparisons is a massive institutional hoax has been played for many years across the West.

 

I've mentioned this before but here we see a Doctor make very similiar points.

Allow me to translate a few of his phrases...

 

it occurred to me that, in four years of emergency medicine residency and over three and a half years as an attending physician, I had almost never seen anyone die of the flu. I could only remember one tragic pediatric case.

 

What he actually means is that he's always known the flu numbers were hoaxed.

 

I decided to call colleagues around the country who work in other emergency departments and in intensive care units to ask a simple question: how many patients could they remember dying from the flu? Most of the physicians I surveyed couldn’t remember a single one over their careers. Some said they recalled a few. All of them seemed to be having the same light bulb moment I had already experienced: For too long, we have blindly accepted a statistic that does not match our clinical experience.

 

The phone calls never took place of course, what he actually means is that he & his colleagues have long known that the flu numbers were hoaxed & they have discussed it for years over drinks & rounds of golf.

 

The CDC should immediately change how it reports flu deaths. While in the past it was justifiable to err on the side of substantially overestimating flu deaths, in order to encourage vaccination and good hygiene, at this point the CDC’s reporting about flu deaths is dangerously misleading the public and even public officials about the comparison between these two viruses.

 

I have my suspicions that "vaccination and good hygiene" means "vaccination and vaccination"... as for his final point? He clearly realizes now that, whatever the benefits the hoax was meant to generate, it has backfired substantially during a real crisis.

 

 

 

I suggest to you, that having institutions pushing hoax agendas for decades is probably more responsible for the breakdown of trust in our societies than a few fringe quacks... the Flat Earth society didn't tell me that Iraq did 9/11.

Edited by 37mm
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37 minutes ago, 37mm said:

To be fair, one of the problems with these comparisons is a massive institutional hoax has been played for many years across the West.

Now you've gone and done it!  Look, I've been trying to cut the doubters some slack by presuming the seasonal flu stats are apples to compare against the apples of the COVID-19 numbers.  I figure that instead of arguing the minutia and veracity of the established numbers (which is what I said in my first post) that I'd take those numbers at face value because the argument "this is normal flu" can be successfully trashed as it is.  Now, if you want to dive in and say that the CDC type seasonal flu numbers are an order of magnitude OVER reported while the COVID-19 are likely UNDER reported, I'm all for that too.  Now instead of this thing so far being 3 times worse than the average flu season, it's probably 30 times worse.  I don't mind resting my case on even stronger evidence.

As for the regular seasonal flu death numbers in previous years, yeah... pretty obvious they are inflated.  Though the reason I've seen stated is that because nobody dies of old age, something has to on the death certificate.  Flu seems to be a catchall when there's nothing screamingly obvious to write down.

Quote

I suggest to you, that having institutions pushing hoax agendas for decades is probably more responsible for the breakdown of trust in our societies than a few fringe quacks... the Flat Earth society didn't tell me that Iraq did 9/11.

Nah, the problem with trust is that the average person gets exposed to something they don't understand and react based on incomplete/flawed assumptions.  I see this all the time.  Having statistics easily available for people to digest is akin to leaving a loaded gun on a playground.  Someone's going to pick it up and do something stupid with it.  One can suggest that maybe leaving guns on the playground isn't such a good idea, but I think the NRA would disagree with your point of view.  So we're left with yet another paradox of an open society where anybody can look at anything and voice an opinion no matter how ill informed it might be.

Seriously though, this is the problem with people trying to interpret things they don't understand instead of at least giving experts the benefit of the doubt.  It is exactly why Combat Mission doesn't show much of what goes on under the hood.  Players would not understand the data, but that wouldn't stop them from using it to back up their flawed observations.  "See, that number there?  It's a 2 and THAT is why I always lose my Tigers.  The fact that I drive them backwards has nothing to do with it".

From my experience (and polls seem to back this up), the people that say "I don't trust the media" are the ones most likely to religiously ingest the most unreliable forms of media out there.  I would find the irony of this humorous, but there's consequences I could point to that aren't at all funny.

Steve

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37 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

From my experience (and polls seem to back this up), the people that say "I don't trust the media" are the ones most likely to religiously ingest the most unreliable forms of media out there.  I would find the irony of this humorous, but there's consequences I could point to that aren't at all funny.

Steve

I don't deny that... I just don't think the Flat Earth Society or other fringe quacks can be "blamed"... quacks have always existed.

I certainly don't blame the people who are confused & (justifiably) skeptical after decades of institutional lying on so many different subjects... and, let's not forget, have also been told to support themselves with a measly $1200 cheque (whilst Wall Street recieves its usual Trillions).

If institutions are not trusted then perhaps the Institutions themselves need to look in a mirror... trying to implement "suspicion control" seems a process doomed to failure.

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The key question will be did a person die because of the effects of the China virus or died with it in their system from another reason. How those numbers are registered at the county level and further massaged while passing through states into the CDC is very important. I have read that hospitals are getting additional funding if they declare a patient that they care for is China virus positive regardless of the symptoms. And more money if they die in their care regardless of the symptoms. Why? Elective procedures are way down and declaring a China virus patient is a fiscal band aid. I wish to be proven wrong because this scenario is scientifically horrible. Locally in NJ, I have been told that this is happening. Not that it will bring back a life, but inaccurate classifications will not help us figure out how to handle the the next outbreak. In the end, the direct China virus deaths will have been deemed overstated because the classifications are being massaged. But it will take years to prove I am right or wrong. By that time we will be talking about another China outbreak if we don't learn from this one. 

Kevin

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22 minutes ago, 37mm said:

I don't deny that... I just don't think the Flat Earth Society or other fringe quacks can be "blamed"... quacks have always existed.

I certainly don't blame the people who are confused & (justifiably) skeptical after decades of institutional lying on so many different subjects... and, let's not forget, have also been told to support themselves with a measly $1200 cheque (whilst Wall Street recieves its usual Trillions).

If institutions are not trusted then perhaps the Institutions themselves need to look in a mirror... trying to implement "suspicion control" seems a process doomed to failure.

While I don't disagree with the sentiment, the alternative is to reactively disbelieve without first engaging brain.  Anybody who was arguing COVID-19 was as bad as a normal Flu year because "I don't trust numbers" quickly loses their credibility when they also don't believe hospitals and morgues are overrun or they somehow think that still is within the bounds of "normal".  The former can be excused to some extent, the latter can not be.

Yup, there's always been quacks and always will be.  There's also always been people looking to exploit them for their own gain.  Where we get into serious problems is when the latter convince impressionable folks, who might not otherwise be quacks, that quackery is normal and normal is quackery.

Steve

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13 minutes ago, kevinkin said:

In the end, the direct China virus deaths will have been deemed overstated because the classifications are being massaged. 

Deemed by who?  I just posted an article that came to the exact opposite conclusion.  Please cite some credible sources that are establishing that the overall number being reported is incorrectly inflated.

Aside from that, this is still arguing about how much smoke there is in a burning building.  The fact is we are in a genuine pandemic and very large numbers of people are dying very quickly from it.  What should be done about the reality we face needs to be the focus of national discussions.  And at this point in the cycle it is how to get our economy back up and running safely.  That's a far more important goal than arguing about meaningless numbers (and yes, in the grand scheme of things they are meaningless).

Oh, and I'm glad to see you back!  Guess what my wife picked up at the store today?  Generic "not for retail sale" toilette paper.  IIRC you (correctly) pointed out how stupid it was to not see that stuff on the shelf.  Our local grocery store would never sell anything illegally, so there must have been an executive order to loosen the regs for now.  There's been a lot of that going on around here.

Steve

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Glad to hear about your paper products. Number 2 sandpaper just won't do. We talked about the packaging requirements commercial vs retail. And I do say the supply is back to about 50% as observed over the past few days. The supply chain has adapted. Even seeing big bags of apples like you mentioned re: potatoes.

I stated that the data was being massaged, not inflated. It could go either way, and in my personal view the numbers of deaths will be deemed overstated when all is said and done - but it will take years for this to be proven. Yes. I am going by annedotical info provided by doctors in Monmouth County NJ that I have known for years. Would I take a stock tip from them ... maybe not. If they are informing me on how the China virus health care costs will be finance ...yes. 

Kevin

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2 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

While I don't disagree with the sentiment, the alternative is to reactively disbelieve without first engaging brain.  Anybody who was arguing COVID-19 was as bad as a normal Flu year because "I don't trust numbers" quickly loses their credibility when they also don't believe hospitals and morgues are overrun or they somehow think that still is within the bounds of "normal".  The former can be excused to some extent, the latter can not be.

Again, to be fair, there were a lot of "experts" (who obviously should have known better) comparing the exact same scenes in Wuhan as "just a flu" not that many weeks ago... if it takes some of the people a little while to catch up to the rapidly changing circumstances I'm not overly concerned.

Of far more concern are institutions (like Oxford & Stanford University) & experts basically selling the same "it's just a flu" message.

Where were all these people concerned about the economic consequences of a potential lockdown in January & February?

Why are all these supposed experts using the "seasonal flu" numbers without any hesitation (often using the colloquial phrase 'seasonal flu' rather than the correct "Influenza Like Illness' term)?

Why are some experts, all of a sudden, considering asymptomatic cases as cases for the purposes of producing a mortality rate? I'm pretty certain that's never happened before... certainly counting asymptomatic flu cases would decrease that mortality rate much further?

Personally, I think quite a few bank accounts need to be checked after all this... and I doubt you'll find much money being flung around by a few fringe quacks.

Edited by 37mm
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2 hours ago, kevinkin said:

Glad to hear about your paper products. Number 2 sandpaper just won't do. We talked about the packaging requirements commercial vs retail. And I do say the supply is back to about 50% as observed over the past few days. The supply chain has adapted. Even seeing big bags of apples like you mentioned re: potatoes.

The glut of potatoes and french fries up here is really bad.  I'm friends with someone high up in the food pantry side of things and she said they are having problems finding anybody to take them because people just don't go through them that fast.  I know when we get a 10 pound bag it stays with us for a month, so if someone tried to offer us one a every week... yeah, we'd be turning it down too.

French fries are just a sad thing.  Freezers are a requirement, so they either they go to a home relatively quickly or they are bound for the compost pile.  The cost of keeping them frozen at the wholesale level eats into the profit margin pretty quickly I should think.

Quote

I stated that the data was being massaged, not inflated. It could go either way, and in my personal view the numbers of deaths will be deemed overstated when all is said and done - but it will take years for this to be proven. Yes. I am going by annedotical info provided by doctors in Monmouth County NJ that I have known for years. Would I take a stock tip from them ... maybe not. If they are informing me on how the China virus health care costs will be finance ...yes.

Agreed we won't know for a very long time.  And massaged... well, there's that.  I cited the case of Florida apparently deliberately under reporting, so an example of massaging in the other direction.  There's also the early days when tests weren't available, so they wrote the deaths off as something else.  From what we know so far, it seems likely that the under counting is higher than the over counting and that means the net number (the only one that matters) is likely lower than what it really is.

The situation that intrigues me is all the cases that likely were COVID before anybody was really looking for it, therefore they weren't counted.  We already know that COVID made landfall in the US at least three weeks earlier than initially thought.  Could it have been here even earlier?  Not important for us, though still interesting.

1 hour ago, 37mm said:

Again, to be fair, there were a lot of "experts" (who obviously should have known better) comparing the exact same scenes in Wuhan as "just a flu" not that many weeks ago... if it takes some of the people a little while to catch up to the rapidly changing circumstances I'm not overly concerned.

I agree.  As with most things there's a time when it can be "forgiven" to be wrong, usually before something hits the fan.  But arguing for 2 months into the pandemic that it ain't a big deal?  That's a different matter completely.  There's also the difference between being wrong and being a propagandist.

As for those we put in charge to manage such things, I have an entirely different opinion.  Unlike us wee people running around doing our daily stuff, like keeping the economy going, those in charge are supposed to have a plan and a backup plan (perhaps several).  They have information and access to experts that we do not.  I do not accept excuses from them, despite excuses being the primary thing out of some of their mouths.  China did not eat their homework.

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Where were all these people concerned about the economic consequences of a potential lockdown in January & February?

I don't know, but for sure none of them were in charge of policy making in the US Federal government.  As for state governments, seems about half thought the Federal government would be in charge of things and didn't plan for them to drop the ball, the other half didn't think there was any reason to worry and didn't plan either.  Everybody was wrong to start with, but some stubbornly insisted on being wrong long after.  Some still are.

Quote

Why are some experts, all of a sudden, considering asymptomatic cases as cases for the purposes of producing a mortality rate? I'm pretty certain that's never happened before... certainly counting asymptomatic flu cases would decrease that mortality rate much further?

Yeah, the argument over the fatality rate is silly to do at this point.  Sure, the epidemiologists need to know this, but do we really need to know?  All we need to know is that it is bad and it's not like the regular flu but it also isn't Captain Trips bad. 

Quote

Personally, I think quite a few bank accounts need to be checked after all this... and I doubt you'll find much money being flung around by a few fringe quacks.

You might have heard that at least three US Senators (2 Repub, 1 Dem) got caught already.  A small consolation is that the ones that were most in denial were probably least likely to have moved around assets before things tanked.  Serves them right.  Not that much else will come from it.

Steve

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There tends a corresponding increase in the amount of vitriol and rhetoric that emerges from America as its slice of world GDP declines and another power's rises. We saw this most recently in the 2000s when China's growth began to takeoff, we saw it in the 1970s as Japan's market power grew rapidly prompting American pundits to launch into vicious and dishonest tirades about a resurgent Empire of the Rising Sun taking over the Pacific through bank accounts and not warships, as if the Americans weren't abandoning the Gold Standard to do precisely that. In the end Japan's growth fizzled out as its population growth capped, and China's was slowing before COVID, but no one was sure it would continue to lose steam and in fact it may be ideally positioning for another growth cycle while our consumer markets are crippled. 

What I have no doubt about is how the growth of China's GDP slice will prompt many, not all, but many American leaders and media pundits to double time their circulation of vicious and contemptible filth anchored on many tired (but clearly effective) entertainment-media industry cliché's. Rise of the Asian menace, oh no the Soviet Union is back, they're just jealous of our freedom, etc and other Great Hits on this Album!  Some Americans have a bizarre perception that the world is some sort of zero-sum game where there's only one winner and everyone else is a loser and while many obviously don't think that way the question in American popular-electorates will be as always how many believe that. Even the more seemingly benign mythology, like the false-equivalency stuff comparing American "liberties" to Chinese "oppression" is loaded but i'm sure we will be seeing more and more of that in the coming decade. American leaders of all backgrounds know that the path to power is never a question of the entire electorate, just the electorate you need to cross the barrier. 

Issue to me now, and here is a big mistake American Social Liberals (and many right wingers) have made. The logic of zero-sum games, of one winner in a world of losers, that only the strong deserve to survive, etc will be an assumption taken for granted by all of that rhetoric. The foundation of all it will be, basically, that either America has to be first, or it's last. This is in fact utterly Hitlerian reasoning and will almost certainly be the grounding for American fascist movements if it isn't already. Unfortunately the last 30 years of Nazi Wolf cries has left everyone a bit tired of the cliche but that's where America's media has genuinely failed it. Not because our media circulates lies, but because it circulates nothing except advertising. By exhausting the meaning behind the term to push ratings up (and ergo profits) Americans are clearly less informed and totally ignorant of what Nazism actually is, which leaves them really defenseless to it. Because they think it's about the superficial items, the flags, the tanks, the rallies, the salute and not the ideology which is totally anchored on (discredited) notions of Social Darwinism, and behind that, Eugenics.

Perhaps I will be proven wrong, but the lessons of history have not reached a sufficient number of people in my view. 

 

Edited by SimpleSimon
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2 hours ago, SimpleSimon said:

There tends a corresponding increase in the amount of vitriol and rhetoric that emerges from America as its slice of world GDP declines and another power's rises. We saw this most recently in the 2000s when China's growth began to takeoff, we saw it in the 1970s as Japan's market power grew rapidly prompting American pundits to launch into vicious and dishonest tirades about a resurgent Empire of the Rising Sun taking over the Pacific through bank accounts and not warships, as if the Americans weren't abandoning the Gold Standard to do precisely that. In the end Japan's growth fizzled out as its population growth capped, and China's was slowing before COVID, but no one was sure it would continue to lose steam and in fact it may be ideally positioning for another growth cycle while our consumer markets are crippled. 

What I have no doubt about is how the growth of China's GDP slice will prompt many, not all, but many American leaders and media pundits to double time their circulation of vicious and contemptible filth anchored on many tired (but clearly effective) entertainment-media industry cliché's. Rise of the Asian menace, oh no the Soviet Union is back, they're just jealous of our freedom, etc and other Great Hits on this Album!  Some Americans have a bizarre perception that the world is some sort of zero-sum game where there's only one winner and everyone else is a loser and while many obviously don't think that way the question in American popular-electorates will be as always how many believe that. Even the more seemingly benign mythology, like the false-equivalency stuff comparing American "liberties" to Chinese "oppression" is loaded but i'm sure we will be seeing more and more of that in the coming decade. American leaders of all backgrounds know that the path to power is never a question of the entire electorate, just the electorate you need to cross the barrier. 

Issue to me now, and here is a big mistake American Social Liberals (and many right wingers) have made. The logic of zero-sum games, of one winner in a world of losers, that only the strong deserve to survive, etc will be an assumption taken for granted by all of that rhetoric. The foundation of all it will be, basically, that either America has to be first, or it's last. This is in fact utterly Hitlerian reasoning and will almost certainly be the grounding for American fascist movements if it isn't already. Unfortunately the last 30 years of Nazi Wolf cries has left everyone a bit tired of the cliche but that's where America's media has genuinely failed it. Not because our media circulates lies, but because it circulates nothing except advertising. By exhausting the meaning behind the term to push ratings up (and ergo profits) Americans are clearly less informed and totally ignorant of what Nazism actually is, which leaves them really defenseless to it. Because they think it's about the superficial items, the flags, the tanks, the rallies, the salute and not the ideology which is totally anchored on (discredited) notions of Social Darwinism, and behind that, Eugenics.

Perhaps I will be proven wrong, but the lessons of history have not reached a sufficient number of people in my view. 

 

the first time I read this.... annoyance at the anti americanism...

towards the end decide to read again...  yeah you kinda nailed it.

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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/coronavirus-live-updates-trump-administration-models-predict-near-doubling-of-daily-death-toll-by-june/ar-BB13zfhE?ocid=spartanntp

 

The Trump administration projects about 3,000 daily deaths by early June.
As President Trump presses for states to reopen their economies, his administration is privately projecting a steady rise in the number of cases and deaths from the coronavirus over the next several weeks, reaching about 3,000 daily deaths on June 1, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times, nearly double from the current level of about 1,750.
The projections, based on government modeling pulled together in chart form by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month, up from about 25,000 cases now.

The numbers underscore a sobering reality: While the United States has been hunkered down for the past seven weeks, not much has changed. And the reopening to the economy will make matters worse.
“There remains a large number of counties whose burden continues to grow,” the Centers for Disease Control warned.
The projections confirm the primary fear of public health experts: that a reopening of the economy will put the nation right back where it was in mid-March, when cases were rising so rapidly in some parts of the country that patients were dying on gurneys in hospital hallways as the health care system grew overloaded.
“While mitigation didn’t fail, I think it’s fair to say that it didn’t work as well as we expected,” Scott Gottlieb, Mr. Trump’s former commissioner of food and drugs, said Sunday on the CBS program Face the Nation. “We expected that we would start seeing more significant declines in new cases and deaths around the nation at this point. And we’re just not seeing that.”

On Sunday, Mr. Trump said deaths in the United States could reach 100,000, twice as many as he had forecast just two weeks ago. But his new estimate still underestimates what his own administration is now predicting to be the total death toll by the end of May — much less in the months that follow. 

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4 hours ago, SimpleSimon said:

Perhaps I will be proven wrong, but the lessons of history have not reached a sufficient number of people in my view.

Sadly, that is so.  The more someone leans to one side or the other of the political spectrum, the more history is cherry picked for only those things that reinforce a particular point of view.  And that's when history is even consulted!  Most often it's ignored as if it has no value.

That said, most of the disappointment you expressed about America's direction is not new (in some ways things are better, even now, than earlier) nor is it exclusively an American problem.  Swap out "China" for "European Union", "American" for "British", etc. and you'll have a pretty good statement about Brexit.  Swap around some other words and you have something that applies to France, Italy, Germany, etc.  What we're seeing now is nothing new, nor is it limited to any one country.  The specifics don't even change that much from one to the other.  The term "illegal migration" is certainly not hard to find.

At present, the issue in front of us (and relevant to this thread) is China being used as a scapegoat by (mostly) the political right wing to deflect criticism away from taking responsibility for the way things are instead of the way they would like them to be.  Having a bunch of unmasked armed numbnuts link arms with the anti-vaxxers and Q-ANON loonies so they can wave Confederate flags in state capitals doesn't help out either.

Even if China had done everything right (which they didn't) I don't think much would change with the discussions being driven by (mostly) the right wing of the spectrum.  Because it's far better to suck up all the time pointing fingers at a scapegoat than it is to spend time reexamining domestic policies.

Case in point... look at how much time we've spent talking about what might have happened in China months ago instead of what is currently going on in our own respective countries.

Steve

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54 minutes ago, sburke said:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/coronavirus-live-updates-trump-administration-models-predict-near-doubling-of-daily-death-toll-by-june/ar-BB13zfhE?ocid=spartanntp

 

The Trump administration projects about 3,000 daily deaths by early June.
As President Trump presses for states to reopen their economies, his administration is privately projecting a steady rise in the number of cases and deaths from the coronavirus over the next several weeks, reaching about 3,000 daily deaths on June 1, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times, nearly double from the current level of about 1,750.
The projections, based on government modeling pulled together in chart form by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month, up from about 25,000 cases now.

The numbers underscore a sobering reality: While the United States has been hunkered down for the past seven weeks, not much has changed. And the reopening to the economy will make matters worse.
“There remains a large number of counties whose burden continues to grow,” the Centers for Disease Control warned.
The projections confirm the primary fear of public health experts: that a reopening of the economy will put the nation right back where it was in mid-March, when cases were rising so rapidly in some parts of the country that patients were dying on gurneys in hospital hallways as the health care system grew overloaded.
“While mitigation didn’t fail, I think it’s fair to say that it didn’t work as well as we expected,” Scott Gottlieb, Mr. Trump’s former commissioner of food and drugs, said Sunday on the CBS program Face the Nation. “We expected that we would start seeing more significant declines in new cases and deaths around the nation at this point. And we’re just not seeing that.”

On Sunday, Mr. Trump said deaths in the United States could reach 100,000, twice as many as he had forecast just two weeks ago. But his new estimate still underestimates what his own administration is now predicting to be the total death toll by the end of May — much less in the months that follow. 

Yes, this is troubling.  And if one looks at Sweden (which I've been watching closely), the pattern is there as well.  Spain and Italy, two of the hardest hit countries, are significantly over peak new cases and headed down fairly steadily.  The US and Sweden have appeared to stalled on their peak daily new cases.

That said, the majority of problems in Sweden are in Stockholm and the bulk of the problem in the US is in the NYC area.  When you look at other areas in each country you see something significantly variation.  In the US some areas are still climbing towards peak, some have already peaked, and some are fairly similar to the national average.  Some have pretty much no viral activity at all.  Which is why it seems appropriate for some areas to reopen more than others.

Steve

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16 hours ago, sburke said:

If I lived in Russia, the first thing I'd do is put unopenable metal grills on my windows.  I'd also offer to pay everybody else in the building to have grills on their windows.  That way I could be assured of dying of a "heart attack" instead :)

In economic news, we're starting to see a culling of the retail herd here in the US.  The first major bankruptcy of a retail chain (J Crew) was announced a couple of days ago.  Earlier a buyout of Victoria's Secrets was put on hold and is now officially scuttled.  There will be a lot more of this, much more.  Even before COVID-19 hit the economy these companies, and many more, were in the equivalent of hospice care.  One report I was reading a while back predicted that within a few years (2025?) fully 50% of all retail mall space would be unoccupied.  It doesn't take a retail industry expert to see the shutdown has greatly accelerated this trend.

Funny side note.  A few weeks ago I rewatched "Minority Report", which takes place a few decades in the future.  There was a scene in a GAP store inside a mall.  My wife and I chuckled a bit and said "there's two things they predicted wrong".  Sure enough, a few days later GAP announced they have enough resources to survive a year, then they're done.  It's interesting to look at science fiction set way in the future and see what they got right and wrong.  The "Foundation" series has a lot of hilarious misses, yet still one of the best series ever.  Harry Harrison had a future universe where disposing of outdated telephone books was a central (humorous) plot point.  Etc.

Steve

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