And the cringe continues
Reporter: What do you say to the americans out there who are scared?
Trumpet: I'll say to them that you're a terrible reporter
Maybe you want to, oh, I dunno, provide a little context? Kind of effing important
He means Rachel Maddow, an MSNBC host who often serves as a convenient scapegoat for where "dem lib'rals" get all their news.
I presume it's just a coincidence that google tells me she's the first open lesbian news anchor?
I honestly had no idea. I just know that she was hell bent on the Russian collusion story for 3 years straight.
Judging by current statistics I think there is a good chance the US will end up having the worst response in the entire world to this disease. If not, we'll probably be top 5.
NY picked up about 5000 new infections yesterday. Here in NYC we're looking at about one death an hour. Army's looking at setting up field hospitals in stadiums. Witness the true power of The Doubling
I read that NY is 10x worse than the rest of the nation at the moment. Hopefully it didn't get spread too far, some other state governors are issuing mandatory 14 day quarantine for visitors from NY.
I guess it would in theory...AFAIK there's been no evidence of either re-infection or mutation.
So far we have 400,000 cases worldwide. Herd immunity requires about a hundred times that number. I wouldn't want to roll the dice that an RNA virus (which is a kind famous for a higher mutation rate) won't mutate into something nastier if our entire data set composes of 1% of the cases we would end up with.
Good news on that front, at least for now****ing incredible
Let me make a comparison: If I were to tell you that taking a shot of alcohol would help with a gum infection, and you went home and chugged an entire bottle of Isopropyl rubbing alcohol and died, would that be my fault?
The details are: they took
fish tank cleaner, which uses Chloroquine Phosphate, not the Hydroxychloroquine used in the malaria drug, AND, they took IIRC 1.5x the lethal dose ~3,000 mg? Correct dose for COVID would be 500 mg, lethal is 2,000 mg or so I recall. See
https://www.rt.com/usa/483908-media-blame-trump-chloroquine/]here for more on that.
The only "cure" for this kind of pathogen would be to devise a really quick way to test vaccines, in order to turn 18 months of trials and checks into 18 days or something. As far as I can tell, this is complete science fiction.
So no, we will suffer this for many decades still, if not centuries.
The reason it takes so long is they have to monitor for negative effects or at least that's what I've read and it makes sense.
As we all know easter is about sacrificing your grandparents to Nurgle.
The concern is that we will be heading into much worse territory if society starts to collapse. People need to eat and have a roof + heat which requires fuel, electric, and food, which requires paying other people who also need those things. :rolleyes: If we get to hyperinflation and wheelbarrows of cash you could start seeing more dead from the effects of economics than from the virus (depending on how the virus goes of course).
Yet another story of the US's failure to test people. How the hell does someone who as told by her family doctor that she might have the virus still not know two weeks later!
As for testing, apparently this was a bipartisan, multi-administration blunder.
Bloomberg, 2020-3-18:
The national stockpile used to be somewhat more robust. In 2006, Congress provided supplemental funds to add 104 million N95 masks and 52 million surgical masks in an effort to prepare for a flu pandemic. But after the H1N1 influenza outbreak in 2009, which triggered a nationwide shortage of masks and caused a 2- to 3-year backlog orders for the N95 variety, the stockpile distributed about three-quarters of its inventory and didn’t build back the supply.
As for South Korea: they learned their lesson from their outbreak of MERS and have a system in place, see
here.
Why we failed at first on testing (Reuters):
The administration of President Donald Trump was tripped up by government rules and conventions, former officials and public health experts say. Instead of drafting the private sector early on to develop tests, as South Korea did, U.S. health officials relied, as is customary, on test kits prepared by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, some of which proved faulty. Then, sticking to its time-consuming vetting procedures, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration didn’t approve tests other than the CDC’s until Feb. 29, more than five weeks after discussions with outside labs had begun.
Meanwhile, in the absence of enough kits, the CDC insisted for weeks on narrow criteria for testing, recommending it only when a person had recently been to China or other hot spots or had contact with someone known to be infected. As a result, the federal government failed to screen an untold number of Americans and missed opportunities to contain the spread, clinicians and public health experts say.
South Korea took a risk, releasing briskly vetted tests, then circling back later to spot check their effectiveness. {{The Elon Musk approach}} By contrast, the United States’ FDA said it wanted to ensure, upfront, that the tests were accurate before they went out to millions of Americans.
“There are always opportunities to learn from situations like this one,” FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, who has been on the job only three months, told Reuters. “But one thing I will stand firm on: We cannot compromise on the quality of the tests because what would be worse than no tests at all is wildly inaccurate test results.” {{Which is why you spot-check them, you obfuscating dope - learn to chew gum and walk at the same time}}
In a statement, CDC spokesman Benjamin Haynes said, “This process has not gone as smoothly as we would have liked.” But he said “more and more state labs have come online, increasing our public health system’s ability to detect and respond to cases.”
Bombarded by criticism amid a re-election campaign, Trump vowed on Friday to ramp up production of test kits in partnership with private companies and to make the diagnostic tests more widely available at hospitals and in-store parking lots. This week, the FDA said more than 35 universities, hospitals and lab companies had begun running their own tests, under the agency’s revised policy.
The American social safety net is gone and the private sector has (of course) absolutely no incentive or responsibility to do anything but extract the maximum profit from its workers before they die. Amazon is literally crowdsourcing pay for sick leave, presumably because their ideology of “turn no profit, just reduce costs” has them totally unable to provide for their people.
This is the destination Reagan set a course for. If anyone still believes in the deregulated neoliberal America after this...but who are we kidding. Of course they will.
Plox 2 examine those regs in action at the CDC and FDA ^
