101–110 of 237 posts
Starve the beast is working as intended. Mission accomplished.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/02/amid-coronavirus-out...
Our government is led by idiots, this is the result
Hate to break it to you, but nearly all governments are led by idiots who don't know anything and don't care to know. Becoming a non-idiot is hard, time consuming work that's incompatible with politics needed to get elected into a public office. At least our executive branch had enough common sense to ban flights from China on Jan 31st (and was panned by the "free press" and Democrats in congress for it at the time).…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hate to break it to you, but nearly all governments are led by idiots who don't know anything and don't care to know. Becoming a non-idiot is hard, time consuming work that's incompatible with politics needed to get elected into a public office. At least our executive branch had enough common sense to ban flights from China on Jan 31st (and was panned by the "free press" and Democrats in congress for it at the time).…
And yet somehow most other countries have still managed to come up with a significantly more competent response. Germany is tracing contacts of all cases and has capabilities to test 20,000 people per day. How many is the US testing right now? And that's a country with 1/3 the population. There are probably thousands of infections in the country already, we just don't know it yet.
Now try Italy or South Korea. Germany still has twice as many cases as the US, and 7.5x as many cases per million of population (12.1 vs 1.6 CPM in the US). Proximity to Italy doesn't do them any favors. To their credit though, they have zero deaths.
If you order the stats by cases per million, the US comes in 40th, so containment doesn't suck too bad, compared to others. By deaths it's the 5th though - the main cluster basically took out a bunch of very old, medically problematic folks at a senior care facility. As the officials from the facility said, about 7 people die there per month under the normal circumstances, but this month they were additionally hit with the coronavirus. Bad luck.
Korea is doing drive-through testing with results available in three days. [1] That the US is still at the level of doing testing in a private and haphazard fashion is effectively criminal and seems likely to have a serious impact fairly soon. The US had a difficult time even testing all the workers at the nursing home in Washington where 11 people died.[2] [1] https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-south-korea-uses-…
I think this epidemic will expose a lot of weaknesses in public health sector globally. Hopefully, we will learn valuable lessons, but I wished we didn't have to learn them at the cost of losing numerous lives.
Staying alone for 14 days in self imposed quarantine is a potential death sentence anyway for many in our JIT hand-to-mouth sectors of society.
Korea is doing drive-through testing with results available in three days. [1] That the US is still at the level of doing testing in a private and haphazard fashion is effectively criminal and seems likely to have a serious impact fairly soon. The US had a difficult time even testing all the workers at the nursing home in Washington where 11 people died.[2] [1] https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-south-korea-uses-…
I think part of it may be intentional. No matter what, and the end, you will get accurate numbers for death, and there's not much that can be done for viral infections, other than cancelling large events and other means of transmission. Some can't be avoided though (elections are happening in the US). Could the CDC intentionally be avoiding increasing testing to avoid panic? If the numbers are to be believed, no matt…
Same is happening in South Korea, Italy, and other places.
Korea is doing drive-through testing with results available in three days. [1] That the US is still at the level of doing testing in a private and haphazard fashion is effectively criminal and seems likely to have a serious impact fairly soon. The US had a difficult time even testing all the workers at the nursing home in Washington where 11 people died.[2] [1] https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-south-korea-uses-…
I think part of it may be intentional. No matter what, and the end, you will get accurate numbers for death, and there's not much that can be done for viral infections, other than cancelling large events and other means of transmission. Some can't be avoided though (elections are happening in the US). Could the CDC intentionally be avoiding increasing testing to avoid panic? If the numbers are to be believed, no matt…
Facetiousness aside, that doesn't sound like the CDC. "Hide the numbers even from ourselves and hope it goes away" is the antithesis of what a scientist stands for. No way someone at the CDC wants that as official policy.
But you know who has tons of influence over policy, an estranged relation with objective facts, a disdain for experts, values the perception of a good economy over everything, and is worried about re-election this year?
Call me excessively partisan / bringing politics into it / whatever else. The danger here needs to be stated and I don't care what it makes me look like. Trump and his surrogates have already made public statements suggesting Corona virus isn't real, is a hoax, is a ploy by democrats to crash the economy etc. This is a guy who fudges numbers even on trivial things like the size of his inauguration crowd. He already calls all news that makes him look bad "fake". Why wouldn't he give an order to keep the true infectious numbers hidden? Maybe not a direct order to fudge the numbers, but certainly by way of proxy like limiting the amount of testing.
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> Health insurance is good enough until surprise they don't want to cover you or you get surprise bills in the mail from the hospital. Constantly amazed this can be a thing in a first world country. Can this actually happen?
Yes it happens in many countries. For example in UK someone mentioned they have Phenylketonuria and their NHS will not cover a medicine Kuvan that would improves their quality of life by allowing them to consume a reasonable amount of protein.
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Tech feudalism sounds pretty good about now. I trust bill gates to manage this far more than I trust our government, which so far has been worthless.
I don't get why the people elect presidents and parties whom interestst clear don't align with theirs. They elect people which promise them they will basically destroy governmental institutions and THAN complain the the government doesn't work. That's like ordering poisoned food and than complaining about the cook...
Of course when an external shock does hit an incompetent or paralyzed government the results can be catastrophic, as we're seeing now.
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because it never works like that, never that simple, there are always bigger costs in the end this will be used against you and others next thing you know you are not allowed on a bus if you haven't tested yourself today
This is mindless hysteria. And I suspect you know it. On the other hand, maybe you do, in fact, believe it. Let's make a good faith attempt to test how truly we believe in our predictions. I predict that the Gates Foundation permitting home testing in Seattle will not result in Seattle's public transit system only permitting COVID-19 tested individuals by the end of 2020. In order to back that, I will put up $1000 at…
Not sure why you assume "hysteria" on my side. My opinion could be wrong, but that does not make it a hysteria. Isn't the fear of COVID more a hysteria?
As for your bet - it is overly specific - there could be thousands of similar, equally negative outcomes that would not be in Seattle, or a bus company, etc yet could all be triggered the same way.
I would be most worried of people that want to infect others about finding out anonymously that they are infectious.