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America is giving up on the pandemic?

theatlantic.com

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Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#681

Post by Dumblydorr »

shibeouya wrote: post #615

When I see health experts saying we can have groups of up to 12 people outside BUT protests up to 100 people, it really does not look good for the credibility of these experts. Nobody denies that the pandemic is/was a real thing. But at that point it has been politicized ad nauseum and this is bad. It will for sure have an impact on how much people trust experts, and general trust in experts was already bad before th…

Everything is politicized, especially that which affects the economy and elections. The pandemic will continue even if public health experts are not willing to go against the grain and admit protests will lead to more infections and more deaths. These experts may be succumbing to pressure and there is clearly backlash against non-woke voices within the left.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#682

Post by javagram »

mvid wrote: post #393
manfredo wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When one group of people is holding signs that say "stop murdering people" and the other group is holding signs that say "I need a haircut," and you're mad that "the commenters" are not treating them the same, the problem is not with the commenters. This is at best an extremely distorted comparison of the two messages. 40 million people are unemployed. The stakes are much larger than just getting a haircut.

Yet those were the signs being held. There are clear goals for police brutality protests. The anti-quarantine protests had no clear goal, the narrative seemed to be “the government hit their ‘disable economy’ button and we want them to turn it back on” as if relaxing legal restrictions would suddenly make everyone ok with the rampant disease and go spend time rubbing shoulders again. People were self quarantining bef…

There were many other signs being held. You’re choosing to focus on the people holding a haircut sign.

In any case as a legal matter it makes no difference. Government restrictions on 1st amendment rights to assemble and protest can only survive strict scrutiny if they are viewpoint-neutral.

As soon as governors are deciding which protesters to fine/ticket based on their agreement or disagreement with the contents of their protest signs, as a matter of law the protest/gathering ban is done for. (See the recent 5-4 Supreme Court decision where justice Roberts ruled that, at the time, there wasn’t evidence that church services in California were being treated unequally with other equivalent non-religious services. When the case comes back up again with Gov Newsom’s approval of protestors marching outside, but not Christians marching in religious processions, the ban is going to fall apart in court).

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#683

Post by Dumblydorr »

Barrin92 wrote: post #4

The concerns are right but public assembly is critical in a democracy, and cannot be put on hold indefinitely. It's probably the most fundamental right in any civil society and with all these takes I have seen on twitter about COVID and the protests, a lot of people seem to seriously unerestimate the value that free assembly has. Covid as bad as it is will be an issue of the near future, civil rights gains or losses…

Covid will last for decades, the virus will become a new common way to get sick. Theres simply no lying about the numbers, the virus will kill old folks in massive numbers, disproportionately those of color as well. Sad to say many lives will be lost, I hope some positive change is wrought despite the spikes in infections we are bound to see.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#684

Post by [deleted] »

rpiguy wrote: post #583
newjersey wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're asking police officers to be less armed then the general public. Can we at least agree that off-duty police officers working as security guards at a hospital or elsewhere should not under any circumstance carry a weapon (other than perhaps a stick or something) while on non-police duty? > Soon, from inside the room, there was shouting, sounds of a scuffle and a loud pop. During an altercation, two off-duty H…

Hospitals have millions of dollars worth of equipment, contain huge amounts of narcotics, and deal with psyche patients. They need to be armed. My mother was a nurse and had guns drawn in the hospital by opposing members of a gang there to inspect someone who was shot. There are three main problems. District attorneys who do not like to charge cops. Police unions protecting cops. And the justice system requires a una…

[deleted]

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#685

Post by unethical_ban »

neonate wrote: post #200
Barrin92 wrote: post #4

The concerns are right but public assembly is critical in a democracy, and cannot be put on hold indefinitely. It's probably the most fundamental right in any civil society and with all these takes I have seen on twitter about COVID and the protests, a lot of people seem to seriously unerestimate the value that free assembly has. Covid as bad as it is will be an issue of the near future, civil rights gains or losses…

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.

I'm torn, a little bit. Against your point: The current protests are at least mostly respecting the fact the disease exists, and encourages masks. Also, these protests are much more organic than the "re-open America" protests. And the left-wing who got mad at the anti-public-health protests never called for cops to shoot them or round them up. IOW: We respected their freedom to be out there, no matter how fucked the cause.

Toward your point: I fundamentally don't respect most conservatives, much less those who think they need to protest against public health measures. So to an extent, yes, this is a lot more important than what they were complaining about.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#686

Post by acroback »

So no one is going to talk about how the Model is a mathematical model which follows Bayes Theorem in it's core. It updates it's priors based on new evidence presented every day.

The whole point of the Model is to detect things which are uncertain by nature. Being wrong is not bad, it's good TBH.

CMIIW.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#687

Post by javagram »

drusepth wrote: post #525
rayhendricks wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this statement. At least here in Seattle the protesters and police are packed closely together and are yelling at oneanother. Very few if any police are wearing masks (I was ~20ft from anyone & wearing a mask but wanted to see things 1st hand). IMO this will create a level of pandemic similar to NYC unless we really start testing and contact-tracing. It does feel like much of the left is OK with this, wh…

Do you think most protestors would be okay with contract tracing, especially when the most critical times to trace are during protests?

Contact tracing a protest makes no sense anyway.

Taking down a list of people who dined at a restaurant during a certain time period is one thing.

How are you supposed to contact trace a 10,000 person protest? No one is going to know the random people they happened to be standing next to and chanting at a specific moment.

If these protests are super spreading events it blows a huge hole in any attempt at contact tracing & targeted quarantine/isolation. Hopefully it turns out the virus somehow can’t spread well in these conditions otherwise this is a huge setback for a country that just sacrificed so much to reduce the virus prevalence.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#688

Post by deanCommie »

rayiner wrote: post #498
smsm42 wrote: post #373

Earlier 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.…

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Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#690

Post by jtbayly »

marcosdumay wrote: post #607
jtbayly wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment seems to actually mean that “science is partisan the moment it is being applied at all.”

Well, science is partisan the moment it is being applied at all. The most science can tell you is what are the consequences of some act. Deciding if they are good or bad and if they are worth taking is a completely politic act.

Don’t get me wrong. I agree with the thrust of what you’re saying. It’s just that the parent said it was partisan because it was being misapplied as opposed to applied at all. I was trying to point out the contradiction in the comment. That’s all.
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