iNow

Obama isn’t going to be the blame talking point. You watch. These next weeks and months... ANY time ANY republican gets challenged on the pandemic response... the IMMEDIATE pivot will be China. They will be the scapegoat du jour now through the election... with a sprinkle of immigration hate and talk of border walls. China, not Obama. Ask not what you can do for your country, ask who you can blame for grifting so hard and failing it so miserably.

Perhaps, and perhaps his administration should’ve done better. I can get on board with that. However, Trump is claiming the current problems with testing right now during the current covid pandemic are Obama’s fault... the pandemic which began 5 months ago due to a virus which didn’t exist while Obama was President. Surely we can agree that’s horseshit.

How do you know your management of the spread is or is not working if you fail to measure net new daily cases?

Why not both? They’re not mutually exclusive.

Meanwhile: https://www.yahoo.com/news/japanese-island-suffering-avoidable-second-100937097.html

They’re not mutually exclusive, I reckon

For now, at least, institutional investors, asset allocators and managers appear to agree with me about keeping the lockdowns in place (some handy charts at the link): https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1ldfxffpnl8yz/The-II-Fear-Index-Investors-Expect-Long-Lockdown

FYI: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_Iowa#Statistics

I was always a fan of the sticky mats we had to walk across before going in. Made me feel like I was on human flypaper.

It does, indeed

Yes and our county is the hardest hit in the state. The meat packing plants, however, are a close second (especially now that Trump has ordered them to stay open despite their strings of mass infection and lack of worker protection). On another note, it seems the costs of staying locked down are actually lower than opening rapidly https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/the-value-of-lives-saved-by-social-distancing-outweighs-the-costs/

The governor in my state is re-opening most things on Friday, but many of the local businesses I love and frequent have already responded and posted things on their various social pages that can be paraphrased as... "Uhh... yeah, we're really glad the government is so optimistic and that's all well and good, but we're most decidedly NOT re-opening until we see more reductions in cases for a few weeks in a row. Absent that, we're not willing to put our staff and customers at risk... Hope shouldn't be Plan A and for now we'll stick to limited online ordering and curbside pickup." Meanwhile, the POTUS wants to re-open schools for May before summer starts, too. So tired of being led by incompetent grifters.

We have no quarrel or disagreement on the impact of the shutdown. Where we differ is in the acceptance of your conclusion that the risk of opening up today will result in fewer direct deaths than these indirect ones you cite. Indeed. I thought we were talking about the present, though?

More people will die, people that otherwise could've had a vaccine or a hospital bed and ventilator in a medical facility that would be overwhelmed if we do today what you are suggesting.

Except, no. It's not. It's based on actual data from actual humans responding to actual questions. At best, you will unlock a FRACTION of the previous economic activity by lifting the orders. https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/issue-brief/kff-health-tracking-poll-late-april-2020/ You can think whatever you want. It's both a false choice and also unsupported by the data

I wasn't presenting it as a solution. I was presenting it as a counter argument to your claim that I have no way of knowing the economic slowdown will be temporary. It does no such thing. Please stop reading things that I'm not typing. Focus on the words I say, not the words I don't say. This isn't jazz (h/t swansont) Opening too soon without proper testing and without any vaccine changes none of those things... and, in fact, quite likely makes them worse.

They appear very much to be only at the margins. Most of the experts rightly discuss phased approaches, not indefinite ones. Do you think the ONLY reason people are staying home is because the government said so? Governors lifting stay at home orders won't magically restart the economy. People still support social distancing and will not be patronizing businesses the way they used to. It's not an on/off switch on this thing. It's a dimmer. Lifting the orders will only bring back a fraction of the business until a vaccine and quick scale-able testing are in place, especially since opening too soon will result in a more extensive economic shutdown later when Phase 2 of this illness hits in conjunction with the fall flu. Kindly please elaborate. I said this economic impact will be temporary. I did not say how many days/months/years temporary would be. How is that nonsense?

On a long enough time scale, everything is temporary

We can recover from a temporary economic slowdown. We cannot recover from death. X-posted with MigL

Your personal incredulity is irrelevant. There are valid and enforceable limitations on both free speech and protest. That was my only point.

And there too (much like yelling fire in a crowded theater) exist valid limitations: https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/protesters-rights/

It’s known as Police Powers, and it comes directly from the 10th amendment to the Constitution https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_power_(United_States_constitutional_law)

Well, yeah. Drilling in the arctic is the most intelligent move right now, clearly /sarcasm