CharonY

I think that is an important distinction. From what I have seen armed police in the UK usually engage in situations which go beyond situations where deadly force by police are considered justified in the US. There appears a large gap between what is considered a threat in the UK vs in NA.

I think it is a very good model and evidence suggest that, too. Some of the issues is that the departments and their leadership are too entrenched into their ways and often trying to change it is difficult to impossible. Also trying to change a mindset of folks who are used to an adversarial mindset to do proper community policing is also somewhat unlikely. Studies suggest that one of the impediment is resisting police culture. Sometimes it is necessary to change the whole thing and often the change has to come from the outside.

No, you are reading too much into semantics. You could instead they they were designed as such. Which means that their internal mechanisms reflect their purpose. It is not that the police works in an innocent vacuum and are only doing someones bidding. And I think this is where the our differences in view appear. You seem to think of the police force as something is something reactive, and if things go wrong it is due to failures of a few individuals on either side of the matter. This view does not acknowledge systemic issues within the system were a combination of police, lawmakers and of course big swathes of the populations itself have created a system where deadly force by the police and especially against certain groups (outcasts of society, poor folks, and minorities) are kind of accepted targets. Again, while in other countries the police may not be perfect and have other issues, they lack certain elements that are apparently part of the North American system, which leads to rather dramatic differences in outcome. Or in short, the difference between systemic issues of the system vs individual responsibility. I should probably add that in recent times there are police agencies actively trying to change, including changing accountability rules. The Camden police department was one of the models where the whole department was disbanded, due to corruption, accusations of police planting evidence, and a deluge of complaints. At the same time Camden saw huge crime rates. Crimes went uderreported as the the black residents were afraid of the police. After disbanding the whole police force and building it from the ground up and starting a community-oriented policing, crime rates dropped, they hired more black officers (as Camden was a mostly black community) and so on. So here a radical rebuild was an effective measure to root out the system that has been set up in the former Camden police force.

Here is the thing, you have to wonder why. And the reason as has pointed out is that historically the police has been used to subjugate certain groups. It is small wonder that these groups do not accept them as valid authorities. It is not a problem just now. It is only that now finally white folks are also starting to understand the issue on a broader scale than it used to be. You cannot just look at the point of impact and decide whether the process works. You have to look at the whole mechanism and figure out why the observed impact happened in the first place. Because if you don't all you are going to conclude is that the plane was too fast and the ground too solid.

Perhaps, but not for market. It is special approval track (from what I understand) for emergency military use with a time limitation.

Actually basically all are going through the phases (but accelerated) and at least AFAIK I have not seen anyone beside Russia registering a vaccine before phase 3 data have been published. In fact, even the Phase 1 and 2 data has not been published, which is especially worrying as they did a combined Phase 1 and 2 trial with only 38 volunteers. That is roughly the scope of Phase 1 from virtually all other developers. They now have declared that they want to start Phase 3, but again with much fewer folks than the other trials. As a whole, I would not put a lot of money into this particular vaccine (after all, they manufacturer apparently did not, either).

That is a salient question. Too often it is pointed out that someone did something that prompted to police to a presumably justified shooting. However, especially as someone who grew up with a different type police, I have to wonder what are the steps leading up to the fatal interaction, and why does it not happen that often in most European countries? Why is an interaction with a drunk and belligerent more likely to end in death in the US (or Canada, for that matter). One part could be police training, but is it really all? I found it befuddling when talking to my US colleagues and friends that they think that if you do not immediately follow police orders or if you startle them somehow, you risk being shot. And again, for someone growing up elsewhere this is just mind boggling.

It think the basic issue for the lengthy argument that leads nowhere is that the assumption being made (more police interactions automatically lead to more negative interactions) fails to address the second dimension of the quality of interactions. If you reduce the likelihood of a negative outcome per interaction, you can obviously increase the number of interactions without also increasing the number of negative interactions. A simple example is looking at other countries where police shootings are extraordinary rare events. They reduce their issues not by having a smaller police force (in fact in many cases they are on average larger than the US) but by having a different system of policing. I suspect if that is not being acknowledged, we will go another round of identical arguments for a couple more pages.

This is not exclusively matter of number of police, but type of policing. What you describe is typically known community policing. Unfortunately especially large police forces tend to forego it in favour of hard responses (certain narcotics and anti-gang groups are notorious for that). That being said, it is true that effective community policing often requires more manpower. But again, the important bit is to change the approach. In fact, studies have shown that increase in police force has to be balanced with policies. In areas where e.g. things like stop and frisk events increased due to increased police presence, there was no benefit in terms of crime reduction, but there was an increase in complaints and violent incidents. So having more force on the beat and building community connections is indeed a good way to reduce crime as well as complaints, but it has to be part of a larger package. In other words, it would make sense to defund the areas dedicated to the most aggressive measures (say, military equipment, heavily armed plainsclothes units and so on) in favour of hiring folks that get to know the folks that they are policing.

The reporting system is to me a stronger indicator of organized central responses are going to be. There are countries with similar challenges (though being way smaller) which have been more successful than others. In most cases a strong coordinated response was the reason. Case in point, we got a rich, well-educated country high standard of living and much fewer issues with sanitation. But the response was half-hearted, to say the least.

Most likely. In a country of that size implementing effective containment is difficult. However, surprisingly China had a decent success to keep it contained, (even if they do underreport). But I do not understand the Indian system well enough to comment. The little what I heard is that their reporting system is mostly inadequate, which does not bode well.

Here is an interesting paper examining responses to COVId-19. It focuses on Europe but it highlights how important coordinated efforts are:

Just a guess, but maybe you cannot drive to Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam and/or Alaska? The latter being loophole that Canada tries to patch as folks do not want diseased folks from the South. Which, btw., is fricken ironic.

Do you mean in direct competition or overall efficiencies when comparing to a large state? What Canada has also done is trying to create a better supply chain for PPEs but also chemicals for required for testing. While Canada tried to help provincial labs and other test labs to get needed stocks (including asking research labs for unused chemicals at the beginning of the pandemic) in the US each state needed to secure their own supply and outbid each other, as well as the feds, which also outbid several states in the process. So even with California's buying power it meant that prices went up and on top, the fact that it is harder to secure a supply chain, it also meant that they needed to stockpile more, and thereby creating more scarcity.

And it should be added that in Canada feds heavily supported provincial responses, e.g. by negotiating and buying PPE in bulk on their behalf. Meanwhile, in the US the feds made the states outbid each other for PPE access and helped private contractors to enrich themselves in the process.

According to an article (in Vanity Fair of all places), the bumbling response in the US was not only sheer incompetence on the top, but also strategic: So far COVID-19 has killed over 155,000 people. In comparison, flu killed an estimated 24-62k throughout the 19/20 season (in addition, of course). And the deaths are trending upwards. Edit: and on top the WH decided not to have the CDC collect and publish COVID-19 data but rather now want to do it themselves. Certainly nothing shady going on here.

Well, the issue is that the anti gun control lobby has opposed safety regulations that would require guns stored safely. Accordingly, accidental gun deaths relative to population size in the USA are about 5 times as high as in countries such as Canada. There is also the weird mindset (mostly in the USA) that you need your gun locked and loaded as quite a few folks think that they need to defend themselves in a moment's notice. This, of course, increase accident risks.

alfa05 has been banned due to continuous spamming and failure to engage with the community after several warnings.

Very strong "I got a black friend"-vibe.

Ken123456 has been banned for abusive behaviour and continued soapboxing.

This is not really different from the other findings, and despite what I wrote earlier, a reduction in titers does not automatically mean lack of immunity per se and the authors of the actual report did not make comments to this effect. But it does mean that protective titers drop relatively fast and unless there is rapid recruitment from memory cells. In addition, some earlier studies found the presence of T cells in infected patients (but in a very small cohort), which is in principle good news. But as usual, the situation is still fluid and highlights the need for efficacy tests (which are going to be difficult) before one can rely on them.

I should also add that theoretically folks may still have long-term protection if sufficient memory cells are formed, which cannot be easily be tested with simple serological assays (i.e. the rapid tests). What the study calls into question is the usefulness of serological tests to establish how many folks may have been infected without detection as well as the length of immediate protection. Now, lack of immunity against RNA viruses in general is often the result of their high mutation rate. OTOH, coronaviruses have a proof-reading enzyme that reduces the mutations rates (but are still high compared to DNA viruses). Also, there a bunch of viruses that can cause cold symptoms so it cannot actually be traced back solely to the major human coronavirus strains. I have looked a bit into some older pre-SARS papers and found one from 1990 (Callow et al. Eipdemiol. Infect) in which 15 volunteers were infected with coronavirus 229E. Here they showed that some volunteers showed slightly increased antibody titres after one year, though it did not protect from re-infection. However, there was lower shedding, indicating a higher level of neutralization and none developed a cold. So there is some potential there, especially if vaccines result in a stronger response. At the same time, SARS-CoV-2 (and 1 for that matter) obviously elicit quite different responses, including massive inflammatory responses. So there are still a lot of unknowns at play (plus, we do still do not understand all that goes into long-term immunity and the literature is maddening at best).

It should be added that vaccines still might elicit different or stronger responses. But other than actually trying them out there is no way (that I am aware of) to predict the outcome. Theoretically if one could coordinate enough vaccinations worldwide even short term protection may burn the virus out. But looking at those in charge, I have low hopes.

Add the fact that studies suggest that black and Hispanic folks are disproportionately target (e.g. for jaywalking) plus the fact that poor folks get disproportionately punished for minor infractions it does not seem like a great system to begin with (or at least has substantial issues).

It is generally a immunological effect that is not due the disease per se (there are exceptions and certain diseases can effectively wipe out your adaptive memory, but this is not one of those). Roughly speaking it is the reaction of your body to the antigen that determines how long your body remembers it. However, there are a lot of unknowns regarding what precisely makes a response long-lasting. It is not my area of specialization so I cannot really say how far the research in the area has progressed, but from discussions it appears to me that the field is still wide open in that regard.