61–65 of 65 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To put some numbers to it - Thailand: population 70 million, number of confirmed cases < 4,000, number of deaths 60, not an island - borders Myanmar on the west, Laos north and northeast, Cambodia east, Malaysia south.
They were also the first country outside China to detect COVID19 patient
> With more than 230,000 Americans dead from a virus that could have been contained It could not have been "contained" in the United States. Half the (ineffectual) stuff we do now is unconstitutional. You cannot restrict religious or other forms of peaceable assembly under our constitution. We've observed quite a bit of that in the past few months. Moreover, 230K is 1/10th the projected number of deaths (2.2M). The "…
This part of the US perspective on covid-19 I don't understand. Everywhere I keep reading comments that suggest you pretty much deserved what you got and americans only have themselves to blame because 'if everyone just wore masks' it 'could have been contained'. Literally nothing suggests that, no other country in the world shows any statistics to back this up, and the situation is pretty much as bad as or worse in…
In the months after the first wave nobody bothered leasing new vehicles for an already over-capacity public transport network. Excuses abounded, someone even claimed the form for the vehicle registration certificate didn't have separate fields for owner and leaser... I'm not joking. The real reason? Debt. There's no money left and 20 years of defunding and spending-diversion left behind a crippled and stunted administrative apparatus. So, people and students traveled face to face in early September when schools and workplaces reopened.
Hospitals are under-staffed after years of austerity measures trying to tame monstrous debts. General Practitioner networks have also been shut-down to favor private clinics and centralized hospitals. Infected people sat in ER waiting rooms for hours, and the few GPs that still operate were given 5 protective masks per month to work with.
"COVID Hotels" - normal hotels rented out wholesale by government to keep low-grades and convalescents were never made operational and people were left home to infect family members or in hospital to infect other patients while overwhelming the already thin infrastructure. Some criminally-stupid civil servant even ordered them back to nursing homes, killing more of the aging population that fortuitously survived the first wave.
This has nothing to do with the effectiveness of masks, but all to the culturally ingrained disorganization of Italians.
Eg: In Germany the government is already planning the logistics for mass vaccination, while in Italy the Special Commissioner for Health of Calabria (try to imagine this like a bankruptcy executor, but for a regional government) resigned after an interview where to the question "where is the COVID plan for Calabria" he answered "why are you asking me? Do I have to make this plan? - shuffles papers - Oh yes, according to this document I'm responsible. Hmm." They're trying to find a replacement, but two other resigned for various reasons... it might have to do with the last political murder of Calabria some years ago: the hospital supply chain is in the hands of the 'Ndrangheta (the local organized crime syndicate)
“Our estimates imply that nationally implementing mandatory face masks for employees in public businesses on March 14th would have reduced the growth rate of cases and that of deaths by approximately 10 percentage points in late April. [...] We estimate that business shutdowns have roughly the same impact on growth rates as mask mandates, albeit with more uncertainty.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pi…
What is the “outgroup”?
Basically, the people who politically lean the other way. Nowadays the debate has become so toxic that "the other side" will be against whatever your side wants, just because it's what your side wants.
2 or 3 days ago I had an argument in an online game. MMO people are usually on the short end when IQ and social IQ were distributed. I was complaining in guild chat about I'm sick of people who don't wear masks on public transport. And the silly person claims that you have the right to not wear a mask. I'm thinking, "you dumb b.... you have the right to infect other people potentially killing them?" Then 3 people "st…
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful. Note this one: "Please don't fulminate."
Life expectancy + 10 years, not sure what the story is here. People don't live infinitely.