381–390 of 915 posts
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You talk about the MSM as if it was a thing, and not a term of propaganda. It may explain the confusion.
You seriously don't think that modern news outlets don't have a consistent, left-leaning, anti-Trump agenda? Perhaps you've been drinking too much of their coolaid. "Mainstream media" was a term long before people on the right started complaining about it.
I don't actually know why the ruling class in the US is taking this so easy. There's some kind of brain disorder they have that is located between American exceptionalism, raw stupidity, and a complete disregard for the welfare of the people. I hope they all shake hands with a COVID patient like they did at CPAC.
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Please note that Lombardy has a very very good health service. The OECD put a score on this [1]: 9.9/10. This is in the top 5% across all regions. Other european regions seem to have lower average scores and their governments are not taking serious actions. [2] How the US is reacting from my perspective (italian confined near Rome) seems borderline madness. Something about this situation confuses me a lot. [1] https:…
Politicians have no understanding of exponential growth. They look at low numbers and think "we have a lot of time" then are surprised later when they in fact don't.
You can also have non-exponential growth and still have many new cases, if people are getting over their infections faster than they're infecting new people. If a million people were currently infected and every week 500,000 new people were infected but 500,001 of the existing infected people recovered, that means the number of currently infected people declines over time, but you'd still have 500,000 new cases every week and just about everybody might eventually get infected before it dies out, even if it eventually does. (This is similar to what happens with the flu, except that it has exponential growth in winter and then below exponential growth in the other three seasons, so the actually dying out never really comes.)
To really get rid of it you want to have something like 100,000 cases last week and 75,000 cases this week and so on. But even then you might have 25,000 fewer cases this week because 50,000 people recovered but 25,000 new people got infected.
So whether it has exponential growth or not isn't really the issue. It's what the growth rate is. A small exponential growth rate isn't catastrophic -- the number of cases grows but not so fast that everybody is infected by the time they have a vaccine or other more effective countermeasures that get the growth rate back below exponential.
Most importantly, the growth rate isn't immutable. It's affected by things like people washing their hands and having effective testing and quarantines. So will things be fine? They will if people do the right things. Maybe some of them have been and some of them haven't. Maybe they'll get better at it going forward, maybe they won't. As a result there is a significant amount of uncertainty.
But panic is useless. Even if all they can do is reduce the growth rate from 150% to 130%, that still buys more time to respond. Even if everybody ultimately gets it, better that it happen over five years than five months. And if some people are doing it wrong, try to help them do better. Everybody likes to see the bad orange man look stupid on the television, but maybe this is a situation where we come out better off with everybody working together.
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There is an answer, and it is political (thank you for allowing me the indulgence to bring this room-elephant up). There is a slow burn civil war between mission-focused bureaucrats and administration loyalists. Consider: https://twitter.com/Imm_Judges_NAIJ/status/12371515163955363...
I'm not even sure who are the "mission-focused bureaucrats" and who are the "administration loyalists" in that thread. But for the love of God, can we please stop politicizing this issue? Can we please have a moratorium on blaming the other side for whatever measures should / should not be taken? Frankly, nobody knows what to do. Here we are, pondering what to do with the kids. * The school district is open for busin…
Hard to do, when the correct thing for the administration to do is to stand back and hand decision making authority and control of resources to the bureaucracy. As long as the administration keeps interfering in the response, anything about the issue can't avoid being political.
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Are there any presidential republics in Europe?
Belarus?
The fatality rate of Italy is scary high. I read the reason is that they have such a high percentage of elderly.
Somewhat ironically, this virus might be great news for the overall demographics: couples are now stuck at home with nothing to do, NYC-blackout-style; I fully expect an increase in births (and divorces) in the next 12 months.
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I am a Chinese living in Bay Area. What's described by the Italian doctor was exactly like the situation in Wuhan right after the lockdown for the first 2-3 weeks. Unfortunately, I think it will hit Italy harder this time, China locked down Wuhan but every other provinces send in supplies and doctors to help, just building new hospitals is not enough, and I don't see France/Germany doing the same to Italy. The US res…
It's not just the US though, you have other countries in Europe handling this abysmally like The Netherlands. Indonesia is still in the "pray to make it go away" stage despite multiple cases in Singapore being traced back to Indonesian travel (including one rich Indonesian who couldn't find anyone to treat them in Indonesia so deliberately flew to Singapore on a private plane to get healthcare).
This is true until last Thursday, but now the government had acknowledged at least 19 confirmed cases. Still super late though.
Here is KCDC's English daily reports about COVID-19. https://www.cdc.go.kr/board/board.es?mid=a30402000000&bid=00...
The Italian Department of Civil Protection is now publishing detailed confirmed case statistics on GitHub. I just finished throwing together a little animated map of of how it's been spreading across provinces: https://observablehq.com/@jashkenas/italy-coronavirus-daily-...
Super interesting. For once it doesn’t look like a population density map.