It amazes me that there are people who think the president is handling this well. My uncle said my workplace was able to recover so well thanks to the tiny stimulus. Had to inform him that no, most people spent that on bills because the pandemic caused them to be layed off. He didn't believe that. Seems the supporters are ignoring the pandemic and substituting their own idea. Heck, most of my family don't even know that no, the US is not doing well. They are usually shocked to discover that we have the most deaths by a large margin. Then they say the case numbers is because we are doing so many tests. Again, in pure denial that the tests don't just create magic cases out of nowhere. They were sick regardless of the test.
Guess you don't need to screen for travelers when every other country is banning people from traveling to you in the first place. Though, if my family is any indication, most people simply have no idea wtf is going on.
Things were reopened and for a while it was fine, so people relaxed and did not care much about the light restrictions and recommendations that were in place. Then we also like out mass weddings, our nightlife, our weekly protests and our religious gatherings - so over time cases started rising again.
The writing was on the wall and there was a lot of talk about it, but this time around various political parties pulled their own agendas, whether it's religious parties that demanded to go on with religious crap en-masse or restaurants/clubs/hotels/etc resisting with their lobbies and a super populist head of parliamentary committee that's supposed to approve restrictions decisions canceling whatever little restrictions government managed to agree on.
All the while we had an appointed projector for the strategic planning that came up with flexible "semaphore" restrictions system, where cities would enter various restrictions levels based on their cases amount on color grade (red/yellow/green), but because of government deadlock it took so long to approve, that by the time it got approved - it became pointless. That was a week ago, so it basically was dead on arrival already.
It's the unfortunate side effect of Democracy in this case, to pass measures government has to actually to agree between most coalition members, so they can actually pass them as a vote. Various parties worked tirelessly to put sticks in the wheels, either shooting down proposals or making them toothless token measures, just to please their electorate. There wasn't simply enough pressure for them to give in.
All this kerfuffle went on for months, until we got here and now there is a realization that lockdown is again necessary, because half-measures no longer can cut it.
So we go to lockdown for at least 2 weeks (expected 3 weeks) starting Sept 18th. There is finally agreement on that between most coalition parties, it still has to pass the vote at Sunday, but expectation is that it will.
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On the bright side we do a lot of tests per 1m pop and our deaths statistic is pretty decent too, healthcare system handles this well, but right now there is a red flag rising there that another several weeks of this and they will start getting stretched too thin - that is literally what pressured the decision for lockdown.
Here the goverment is now sending people to download stupid app. HELL NO.
We have the app here, some use, some don't.
I do use it, I don't mind. If the government wants to track me, they can anyway, so might as well get some benefit of it.
It's not horribly useful tbh, it did notify me a couple of times about intersections I had, but these notifications came a good 5 days or so after it happened, so I'm not sure how it's useful in reality.
It's also not super precise, but good enough there. For example it can tell you that a positive person was detected in a supermarket in a rather wide time window, like let's say 11-14 o'clock. That's decent, IMO, but the delay is killing it, really.
Last edited by Gaidax; 2020-09-11 at 06:37 PM.
It lasted substantially less, they resumed it earlier today:
https://www.astrazeneca.com/content/...in-the-uk.html
Not true. The virus simply won't go away on its own. The only way to establish herd immunity is to have a large portion of the population either get sick or get vaccinated. Sitting at home does neither. The intention of the lockdown was never to eradicate the virus but to not overwhelm the health care system, which we successfully did. Remember "two weeks to flatten the curve"? Remember "experts" were predicting +2 million US dead if we didn't flatten the curve and 1 million dead regardless. Well that clearly didn't happen.
“I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.” -- Voltaire
"He who awaits much can expect little" -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
To get herd immunity with what is the current believed spread rate we would need to get between 50-75% of the population either vaccinated/catch it. We'd have to get that number to at least 164.1 million to get it/vaccinated. With the ~3% mortality rate we'd kill off 4.9 million people unless those are vaccinated people.
Fun times there. Also we really don't know the chance or effect of being infected the second or third time. Reports of decreased lung function have been reported. The second time could be much higher than 3%.
I still say we opened up in the US a month too early. Should have waited bailed the economy/citizens out and we might could have squashed Covid-19 out into extinction. Didn't have the heart for it. Here in GA we had to have our nails and hair done and to go bowling.
https://v.redd.it/d1ul4b1julm51
The magnitude that this pandemic has hit is just a symptom of the human condition. Maybe it is who we are, maybe it's what we've become but directly advanced better than virus could have on its own.
I linked a video where an officer is called to what looked like a frat party in the middle of the day. House full of people breaking a gathering ordinance.
I went to college, I partied but my immediate thought is these people look like a bunch of 'fine people', fuck that they are bums, who do nothing but drink and yell 'wooo' all the time while leeching off their parents and complaining about any real work. The shit they are doing doesn't even look fun, it looks pathetic and like they are trying to cover their own demons. Rant over.
So the officer rolls up to the house. He is kind, polite, respectful. He is assertive, explains to the man why he is there, what they did wrong, why they should not be doing it, even explains to them how this behavior actually stops things from getting back to normal. The man (who is in charge of the house I guess) is clearly unremorsful, and apology is basically 'this is what I'm supposed to say in this situation even though I don't care', devoid of any ounce of intelligence or sense of responsibility. Even as the cop is like, "the university might fuck you for this" and looking for some ounce of remorse the man can't muster any.
So the cop pulls the man's idea. Runs it and boy is the cop in for a horrible surprise. The man is actually registered in a database as being positive for COVID19. As in he already had some sort of official run in somewhere and they felt it necessary to flag is this mother fucker. The rest of the video becomes hard to watch if you have any amount of empathy in your body.
The cop get out and questions the man again with this new found knowledge but you can sort of hear it in the cops voice that he is all types of hurt, disappointed, and pissed. Not only did the man and his friends knowingly hold a party while sick, they are actively spreading it, and some of them had just walked off, no masks, to spread it to others. They didn't even have the nuts to tell the officer, instead this poor guy has is now exposed. They wouldn't even had said anything to him about it had it not been for the flag in the computer so the LEO (hopefully he doesn't get sick) would taken the virus home, to he workplace, and all throughout the community without knowing any better. AND STILL the man is really only sorry his party got broken up and he was caught.
These are the people are the world who like any sort of common decency. The virus is just along for the ride. At the very least they could have had their fucked up COVID19 party without endangering countless innocent people. Society is actually broken because this mindset exists with or without COVID19.
Resident Cosplay Progressive
Yet. Have a look at this, specifically starting in Oct.:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile...-ending-29.png
Our baseline level of infection is far worse. Come Fall/Winter, if people don't get smarter about masks and distancing, we are fucked. So basically, we are fucked.
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Yet. Have a look at this, specifically starting in Oct.:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile...-ending-29.png
Our baseline level of infection is far worse. Come Fall/Winter, if people don't get smarter about masks and distancing, we are fucked. So basically, we are fucked.
Also, eat shit putting experts in quotes. You don't have the brain power to comprehend what is meant when an expert qualifies their model predictions by describing its uncertainties, don't blame them for your misinterpretations of what they say and what they don't say. Public displays of ignorance should be illegal.
Think we did a pretty good job about 6k dead overall mostly elderly with a 10million population and now it's like one or two dead each day.
Do you hear the voices too?