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COVID-19 in America

Not a very subtle move by Florida there. Trump also revealed via his 'joke' about slowing down testing the other day that the instincts to suppress information about outbreaks is stronger in these clowns than any instincts to suppress the virus. It was almost surprising that their shit priorities took a backseat at the earlier stage of the pandemic, but for a while it did look like they might just manage to do enough of the right thing to make a real difference. Now things dont look so good and business as usual means, well, it means we are going to find out just how bad it can get in this sort of scenario.

I havent posted any scary Florida graphs because I never did find decent hospital data for that state, which doesnt necessarily mean there wasnt any but I dont know how much those ICU bed numbers were ever public. If they were public then it sounds like I am too late anyway.

I always get flashbacks to the various times the UK stopped publishing certain data, the anxiety this caused me, and the not knowing how much to read between the lines in terms of timing. At least its obvious what the story is in Florida, policies tied to targets and data, and the blatant manipulation or exclusion of data as a result. Wheras in the UK I could often only tell what the story was with hindsight. For example they published intensive care figures by region for England for a while early on, then they stopped and nobody even said anything about this (although I expect I moaned at the time). With the benefit of hindsight, I can say that they stoppe publishing this data right when we were hitting the peak of first wave deaths, with April 9th being the last data I have in that series. Some weeks later they stated publishing again but not by region, and initially in terms of percentages which they kept retroactively fiddling with. More recently still they returned to giving us actual numbers, but not by region like they were in the early days.
 
NoXion said:
How so? The CDC's response to the outbreak could have been absolutely textbook (well maybe not literally textbook, as elbows might point out), and there would still be malcontents squealing about how encouraging people to wear masks is "Chinese communism tactics". Not sure how the relevant public health bodies could respond adequately to such stuff, but I'm open to ideas.



Although I will grant that a proper response would probably involve enough public education to mean fewer people who seem to think that hardly anybody is dying or that Covid-19 is no worse than the flu. But I don't think the deeply entrenched Red Scare bullshit would have been as easy to respond to.
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here in nyc, there has been a massive campaign. media saturation, intervention on neighborhood message boards, the fact of school closings, the full exploitation by the governor of his bully pulpit on broadcast and twitter, literature sent to every address in 6 languages, nightly noisy demonstrations of support (at 7 pm and continuing weeks upon weeks) for nurses and emt. for some posters here, living 3000 miles away and ignorant of the situation, that's not enough, though what would be enough isn't indicated. the indisciplined shits who wanna drink and snog with their friends know all this and are pridefully ignoring it, as has been richly documented in the local media. red scare bullshit gets no purchase in nyc, the indisciplined shits of whom i speak are party people who wanna party. it's no deeper than that. they're indisciplined shits, individualists who have no community (much less class) understanding and are gonna do what they wanna do in the face of excellent public health communication, because they're indisciplined shits.
 
petee said:
here in nyc, there has been a massive campaign. media saturation, intervention on neighborhood message boards, the fact of school closings, the full exploitation by the governor of his bully pulpit on broadcast and twitter, literature sent to every address in 6 languages, nightly noisy demonstrations of support (at 7 pm and continuing weeks upon weeks) for nurses and emt. for some posters here, living 3000 miles away and ignorant of the situation, that's not enough, though what would be enough isn't indicated. the indisciplined shits who wanna drink and snog with their friends know all this and are pridefully ignoring it, as has been richly documented in the local media. red scare bullshit gets no purchase in nyc, the indisciplined shits of whom i speak are party people who wanna party. it's no deeper than that. they're indisciplined shits, individualists who have no community (much less class) understanding and are gonna do what they wanna do in the face of excellent public health communication, because they're indisciplined shits.
Click to expand...

There was always going to be a portion of the population who would inevitably flout whatever restrictions are put in place. Those people are responsible for their decisions, but I think that the state (that is, the US gov not the State of NY) also bears significant responsibility for worsening the situation. As far as I know the the Federal government has been less than helpful with enacting containment measures, leaving it to individual States to make their own. I imagine that there are limits to what States can do, they are after all constituents of a larger sovereignty rather than fully-fledged polities of their own.

So the State of New York did the public education thing right, from the looks of it. But what about enforcement? What could they have done, what have they done, and how well do you think they did it?
 
NoXion said:
There was always going to be a portion of the population who would inevitably flout whatever restrictions are put in place. Those people are responsible for their decisions, but I think that the state (that is, the US gov not the State of NY) also bears significant responsibility for worsening the situation. As far as I know the the Federal government has been less than helpful with enacting containment measures, leaving it to individual States to make their own. I imagine that there are limits to what States can do, they are after all constituents of a larger sovereignty rather than fully-fledged polities of their own.

So the State of New York did the public education thing right, from the looks of it. But what about enforcement? What could they have done, what have they done, and how well do you think they did it?
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Covid19 has exposed the depth of the fractures in the US that could threaten its unity some day soon. Compare and contrast with Germany. The German constitution doesn't give the central govt the power to enforce a nationwide lockdown. Similar situation to the US in many ways, except of course that this is Germany not the US. So no constitutional crisis - state heads in Germany got together with the central govt and worked together to coordinate a lockdown policy in a way that none of them were constitutionally obliged to do. This is becoming strained now cos some states want to go different ways as they ease - but the strain is showing in Germany as it emerges from its crisis, not while it is slap bang in the middle of it.
 
petee said:
here in nyc, there has been a massive campaign. media saturation, intervention on neighborhood message boards, the fact of school closings, the full exploitation by the governor of his bully pulpit on broadcast and twitter, literature sent to every address in 6 languages, nightly noisy demonstrations of support (at 7 pm and continuing weeks upon weeks) for nurses and emt. for some posters here, living 3000 miles away and ignorant of the situation, that's not enough, though what would be enough isn't indicated. the indisciplined shits who wanna drink and snog with their friends know all this and are pridefully ignoring it, as has been richly documented in the local media. red scare bullshit gets no purchase in nyc, the indisciplined shits of whom i speak are party people who wanna party. it's no deeper than that. they're indisciplined shits, individualists who have no community (much less class) understanding and are gonna do what they wanna do in the face of excellent public health communication, because they're indisciplined shits.
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I think you're misunderstanding what I've tried to say. There are indisciplined and selfish shits everywhere, in New York, in London, in Berlin and in Wuhan. One of the key aspects of the public health response by government to a pandemic is how do you deal with the selfish and indisciplined shits, and each of those places has had different approaches to dealing with them, and different results.

I appreciate that in America you have a president who is wildly at odds with the local state government on any number of aspects of the response, which is exacerbating the indisciplined and selfish shit problem, among other things: that in itself is a failure of governance, and a failure of the public health response.

I don't necessarily think there's anything the New York state government could be doing better or differently - and the numbers I've seen suggest they're on top of the local infection and numbers are trending downwards, and may continue to do so even with a reasonable number of selfish and indisciplined shits about - but if they do start going up again, it'll be a failure of the (federal, mostly) government, not of the unruly and disobedient mob.
 
Parts of Texas are resorting to using childrens hospitals to provide capacity for adults.

www.theguardian.com

Texas Covid-19 cases hit all-time daily high as Houston hospitals near capacity

Increase in coronavirus infections prompted governor to tighten public health restrictions after resisting calls to slow reopening
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

In response to the hospital admitting adults, its endowed chair in tropical pediatrics, Dr Peter Hotez, tweeted: “We knew this day would come, I thought perhaps later this summer or fall, but the exponential rise came a bit early.”
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I'm not surprised, looking at the latest data.

Screenshot 2020-06-25 at 16.42.03.png

Abbott tightened lockdown restrictions on Tuesday – one day after declaring that Texas would remain “wide open for business”.

“We want to make sure that everyone reinforces the best safe practices of wearing a mask, hand sanitization, maintaining safe distance, but importantly, because the spread is so rampant right now, there’s never a reason for you to have to leave your home,” Abbott told local news station KBTX-TV on Tuesday. “Unless you do need to go out, the safest place for you is at your home.”
Click to expand...
 
killer b said:
I think you're misunderstanding what I've tried to say. There are indisciplined and selfish shits everywhere, in New York, in London, in Berlin and in Wuhan. One of the key aspects of the public health response by government to a pandemic is how do you deal with the selfish and indisciplined shits, and each of those places has had different approaches to dealing with them, and different results.

I appreciate that in America you have a president who is wildly at odds with the local state government on any number of aspects of the response, which is exacerbating the indisciplined and selfish shit problem, among other things: that in itself is a failure of governance, and a failure of the public health response.

I don't necessarily think there's anything the New York state government could be doing better or differently - and the numbers I've seen suggest they're on top of the local infection and numbers are trending downwards, and may continue to do so even with a reasonable number of selfish and indisciplined shits about - but if they do start going up again, it'll be a failure of the (federal, mostly) government, not of the unruly and disobedient mob.
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And to be fair to New York State, at the start of this, when it was mostly NY/New Jersey being badly affected, there were lots of wider things, such as restricting travel into and out of New York, that the state could do nothing about without help from federal level, help that did not come.

It is a staggering situation, though. Federal help for NYC failed to come in part at least because it's in a state Trump can't win in the upcoming election. It takes a lot to be more politically fucked up than the UK, but that is.
 
elbows said:
Parts of Texas are resorting to using childrens hospitals to provide capacity for adults.

www.theguardian.com

Texas Covid-19 cases hit all-time daily high as Houston hospitals near capacity

Increase in coronavirus infections prompted governor to tighten public health restrictions after resisting calls to slow reopening
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com



I'm not surprised, looking at the latest data.

View attachment 219385
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Speaking on quite a selfish note, this, plus news from elsewhere, does rather suggest that covid-19 is pretty unbothered by hot weather.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
Speaking on quite a selfish note, this, plus news from elsewhere, does rather suggest that covid-19 is pretty unbothered by hot weather.
Click to expand...

The oversimplified conventional wisdom that I went into this pandemic with is that seasonal factors are enough to make the big difference to outbreaks of diseases which have been with us for a long time, but are not enough to prevent outbreaks of novel viruses which humans havent experienced before (ie pandemics). Hence swine flu first wave in the UK in July 2009, Covid infections in Singapore which is tropical, etc. With the idea being that levels of immunity within populations against existing viruses are high enough that the virus is only able to remain viable but not explosive in growth for much of the year, and winter offers a temporary tiping point where some years it can achieve epidemic levels of outbreak for a while before running out of sufficient targets. The picture is clearly different with novel viruses because that big bulk of immunity isnt there to start with so the virus doesnt need to rely on seasonal factors to tip it over into explosive growth.

If we assume that seasonal factors make a difference to the range which R might fluctuate around, also depending on various aspects of human behaviour, then the summer gets you a bit more wiggle room but its easy to squander that advantage. We will be better placed to judge this once we've seen the opposite, just how bad it can get in winter. I dont know whether we will get an unmitigated look at a winter with covid-19, really I hope not since I favour being pro-active and cautious when dealing with this pandemic and the coming winter.
 
spring-peeper said:
I wanna see what Trump's reaction to the EU ban.
Click to expand...

He'll probably have a pop at the EU just for the sake of completeness, but Trump doesn't seem to be taking much interest in coronavirus-related subjects lately and is obsessing over vandalism of statues of dead white people instead, which leaves Americans in the weird position that their president would give more of a shit about them if they were made of stone.
 
Raheem said:
Not sure bout that. Texas has quite a lot of aircon.
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Wouldn't going from those sometimes chilly airconned environments into a hot outside area, even briefly, be somewhat worse for your immune system? It has been in my totally anecdotal experience wrt general colds and bugs. But presumably epidemiologists have considered that so I might be talking shit.
 
Yossarian said:
He'll probably have a pop at the EU just for the sake of completeness, but Trump doesn't seem to be taking much interest in coronavirus-related subjects lately and is obsessing over vandalism of statues of dead white people instead, which leaves Americans in the weird position that their president would give more of a shit about them if they were made of stone.
Click to expand...

So Trump is a believer in BLM after all. Bronze Lumps Matter.
 
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