There is nothing much Govt can do; You're on your own; https://masks4all.co
America is giving up on the pandemic?
661–670 of 1001 posts
Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?
#662Earlier quoted context omitted.
I fear it might be more pernicious than that. There’s reason to believe states are misreporting their numbers to hide what’s going on with it. But I think the media senses the protests and racism issues have to take up all the available oxygen, “or else”.
I think this is a lot of it, for better or worse. I feel like a lot of people are afraid to talk about anything but the protests lately, lest they be branded as not supporting the protests.
Yeah it's called mob rule
Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?
#663Earlier quoted context omitted.
For example, countries permitting residents to "gather in groups of 12", or "protest in groups of up to 100". For example, https://cchealth.org/press-releases/2020/0602-Businesses-Reo... Why create specialized rules for protests that allow an order of magnitude more people to gather than those allowed in a "close cohort" gathering?
All such advice/regulations is weighing the benefit of imposing the restriction vs. the cost of imposing such restriction. And, importantly, all this is not in the context of individual risk, but population risk. The distinction is tricky but important, and one that trips most people up. For any single individual, the personal risk from COVID19 tends to be small, often seemingly vanishingly small. However, since we d…
The freedom to practice religion is also a very fundamental right of our democracies, yet it is still illegal in many places due to the lockdown such as California.
Yes, the frequency that people attend protests is on average much less, but the number of other people that one is exposed to is much greater hence why "larger gathering venues at a pace consistent with public health and safety, such as nightclubs, concert venues, and live audience sports" (which are often outdoors as well) are in the very final phase of California's reopening plan. If policy makers agree that protests have a low aggregate risk, why would they place things like concerts or sports events which happen mostly on the weekends in the final phase when there are now protests happening every day?
I do agree that political protest is a very fundamental right and rarely ever be restricted, but many who share your opinion were against the anti-lockdown protests which is contradictory if one believes BLM protests should not be restricted because they are political protest. People protesting the lockdown is also democracy in action, even if one believes the reason for protest is not as important. The democratic right to protest is not dependant on how important the issue is seen to be.
Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?
#664Earlier quoted context omitted.
> However, as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission That's a shining example of weasel speak. They don't explicitly say it's not risky - because that would be plain lying, it is obviously risky - but they are saying they are not condemning it as risky. Which most people would take as implying it's not actually risky - even though they are not saying that. They…
Don’t forget public health officials outright lied and said masks don’t help reduce the spread of the disease, putatively to help conserve masks for medical personnel: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-... > When news of a mysterious viral pneumonia linked to a market in Wuhan, China, reached the outside world in early January, one of my first reactions was to order a modest supply of masks.…
FWIW, I don’t think the majority of the officials intended to lie about this. It wasn’t anything that started this year or anything - they’ve had the same message about masks since as far back as the 2009 H1N1 pandemic.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/23/face-masks-much-more-t...
> But the CDC has recommended against mask use. I hypothesized that the CDC was intentionally lying to us, trying to trick us into not buying masks so there would be enough for health care workers.
> But that can’t be true, because the CDC and other experts came up with their no-masks policy years ago, long before there was any supply shortage. For example, during the 2009 swine flu pandemic, their website offered the following table:
> [table in link]
> And during the 2015 MERS epidemic, NPR said South Koreans were wrong to wear masks:
> “[ . . . ] Masks can be helpful for protecting health workers from a variety of infectious diseases, including MERS… But either type of mask is less likely to do much good for the average person on the street…Wearing a mask might make people feel better. After all, MERS has killed about a third of the people known to be infected. But there are no good studies looking at how well these masks prevent MERS transmission out in the community, says Geeta Sood, an infectious disease specialist at Johns Hopkins University. “On the street or the subway, for MERS specifically, they’re probably not effective,” she says. One problem is that the masks are loose fitting, and a lot of tiny airborne particles can get in around the sides of the masks.”
> So if studies generally suggest masks are effective, and the CDC wasn’t deliberately lying to us, why are they recommending against mask use?
Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?
#665Earlier quoted context omitted.
> However, as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission That's a shining example of weasel speak. They don't explicitly say it's not risky - because that would be plain lying, it is obviously risky - but they are saying they are not condemning it as risky. Which most people would take as implying it's not actually risky - even though they are not saying that. They…
This isn't weasel speak at all. They're pretty clear that it's risky. They're just saying that they won't condemn protestors as taking frivolous risks the way anti-lockdown protestors or fun-seekers are. Police brutality, systemic racism, income inequality are all major public health risks in their own right.
Is that the job of health officials to determine? Whether a particular political cause is worth the risk?
Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?
#666Earlier quoted context omitted.
The CDC revised their risk estimates towards the end of last month. "The fifth scenario is the CDC's "current best estimate about viral transmission and disease severity in the United States." In that scenario, the agency described its estimate that 0.4% of people who feel sick with Covid-19 will die. For people age 65 and older, the CDC puts that number at 1.3%. For people 49 and under, the agency estimated that 0.0…
Those CDC numbers are really weird btw. 0.4% of symptomatic cases is like a 0.2-0.3% IFR. 0.3% of the New York City population has already died of corona-virus. So assuming everyone in New York was infected that gives us an IFR of .3%. But if a more realistic 20% of the population was infected then the IFR could be as high as 1.5%. I tried going through all the most recent research and almost all of it came up with a…
Maybe the 20% of the population was more susceptible? It seems that the outbreak was concentrated in long-term care facilities, healthcare workers (who received a larger viral load than average), and the poor (who tend to have more pre-existing conditions). If the 20% is not randomly distributed the math can still work out.
Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?
#667Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue is the double standard with which some protestors were condemned while others were lauded based solely on which causes (and which classes of people) the commenters happened to politically support. It's transparently unprincipled, to the point of being a sad joke.
That isn't a double standard but a fundamental result of judgement of costs, values, and outcomes. Somebody who shoots an armed and dangerous spree shooter is lauded as heroic while someone who shoots a kid thought they was shoplifting a one dollar drink is regarded as a psychopath with no regard for human life. Circumstances and outcomes vary, a form of 'neutrality' that ignores that fundamentally isn't a useful met…
It's the clearest most basic example of a double standard. For you to try and talk your way out of it proves it further.
Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?
#668Earlier quoted context omitted.
He's already been impeached. He wouldn't be indicted. There's so many better things to go over now like the actual cause of the protests.
He was impeached for abuse of power and obstruction of congress, both pertaining to Ukraine. He can be impeached again on First Amendment charges. > He wouldn't be indicted. A First Amendment violation might be harder for some Republican senators to stand behind. > There's so many better things to go over now like the actual cause of the protests. With Trump threatening military action to break up protests? I think p…
> A First Amendment violation might be harder for some Republican senators to stand behind.
Not really, as senators their first loyalty is to the voters who elect them. Polls show trump has >80% loyalty from GOP voters, who are the ones who control senators via primary elections.
Even a single GOP senator voting against trump in the first trial was a shocking and unexpected result, it’s likely if impeachment was done again the Senate would simply vote to ignore it and not hold a trial (as they have done in the past re: certain judicial impeachments). The only reason the first ‘trial’ was held was to provide political cover for certain moderate senators in their 2020 races.
Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?
#669Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also in the letter > Prepare for an increased number of infections in the days following a protest. Provide increased access to testing and care for people in the affected communities, especially when they or their family members put themselves at risk by attending protests. The sentence "we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission" is a bit ambiguous, maybe on purpose. The idea is that they…
A clearer stance would help, but I feel like there's a fundamental problem with taking any stance. For public health authorities to affirmatively endorse political causes severely compromises their authority as neutral arbiters.
The problem is not that they took a political stance. If a group of doctors wants to come out in support of Flat Earth, so be it. The problem is they potentially compromise the health of the public at the expense of their political message. Again, nothing was stopping them from acknowledging there is a risk, but that it is worth it.
Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?
#670Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand -- are keeping people out of work and isolated at home not public health risks? If non-Covid related factors are being considered in weighing against the risks of exposure they should all be considered, not only some of them, selectively.
Don't be obtuse. Of course all factors were considered. Keeping people out of offices and shops is not a public health risk. People becoming impoverished and losing health insurance is. That's why the federal government spent $2T protecting people's financial health to offset the damage. The bigger question is why health care access is tied to employment, but there's no way the current regime would consider dealing w…
> Of course all factors were considered.
That's not entirely accurate. Even Faucci answered, in response to Rand Paul, he was a virologist. Not a economist, etc.
There's been little public acknowledgement of increases in suicides, illness from delayed med treatments, economic fall out affecting deaths, etc.