[Phantom Hoover]

Think of all that new real estate on the market 👍👍

although the real estate market in the UK is suspended just like everything else

[Su-tehp]

It just boggles my mind that a disease outbreak has become a partisan conspiracy theory thing. It's not like the virus cares what your political affiliation is. But in a world where people are stupid enough to think that prayer can prevent you from getting infected by a virus, anything's possible.

[manwiththemachinegun]

I seem to recall a little verse about not throwing yourself off a building to tempt God, but that kind of common sense is lost on the people we're talking about.

[General Battuta]

I think we can all take reassurance, in these hard times, that our per capita infection rate is not the highest in the world, and that it's the Swiss who've really botched their coronavirus response. Nobody do the math on just New York state versus Switzerland or it'll make us look bad.

[jr2]

China didn't go far enough,

Then you know that what the US is doing right now isn't going far enough either.

If Trump had proposed a nationwide lockdown in late January / early February (while impeachment articles were being delivered and Pelosi, deBlasio, and others were encouraging gathering in mass numbers in NYC and other places, and Italy was doing 'hug a Chinese person' day), you known darn well that every.single.user posting here condemning the US response RIGHT NOW would have been SCREAMING about the DESPOTIC POWER GRAB by the TYRANT Trump that was OBVIOUSLY in response to his HORRIFIC CRIMES that he was being impeached for.  I'm done here.  You guys enjoy your little echo chamber. 

EDIT: I'll add that the 'experts', thanks to faulty data coming from China, pretty much ignored the threat.  NO ONE saw this coming.  Thanks CCP.

[Scourge of Ages]

If Trump had proposed a nationwide lockdown in late January / early February (while impeachment articles were being delivered and Pelosi, deBlasio, and others were encouraging gathering in mass numbers in NYC and other places, and Italy was doing 'hug a Chinese person' day), you known darn well that every.single.user posting here condemning the US response RIGHT NOW would have been SCREAMING about the DESPOTIC POWER GRAB by the TYRANT Trump that was OBVIOUSLY in response to his HORRIFIC CRIMES that he was being impeached for.

Perhaps at first. But every single person here, would be absolutely thrilled to be proven wrong about that. Because people are dying, right now.

[Grizzly]

Nah not even at first.

They'd just be critiquing the lack of testing.

Note how he's trying to suddenly shift focus to January despite the complaints being there during March? Note how the focus has suddenly shifted from saying it was not a big deal to saying that outside forces were preventing the government from doing more? This is what embracing cowardice looks like. Even when friends are dying the focus is still on fleeing from responsibility.

And hell, look at how jr2 is running away, calling this an "echo chamber", with voices from all around the world debating him on each and every point he raises! Mabye the only echo chamber here is you jr2, considering how consistently you've refused to actually engage with people talking to you.

[IronBeer]

What am I doing why am I wading in help

If Trump had proposed a nationwide lockdown in late January / early February...

I for one wouldn't have been mad actually (probably). There were some trips I was planning to take around mid-March that I cancelled around early February from an abundance of caution.

Coronavirus is basically an epidemiologist's nightmare- highly infectious, truly severe symptoms in bad cases, and a lengthy asyptomatic transmission period. Hard to say how I'd have reacted in this alternate timeline, but I'd probably still be watching with horror as the bodies stack up elsewhere in the world. Exponential growth is really really powerful yo.

(while impeachment articles were being delivered...)

Not strictly a direct response, but there's an interesting timeline relating actions and statements regarding impeachment and the outbreak.

Yeah yeah "ew reddit" but this guy has receipts.

Also was impeachment only resolved a couple months ago? Time is broken..... that feels like years ago now.

(snipped image)

I see an opportunity for media literacy here. Shall we actually take a look at the headlines in this collage?

Most of them are some riff on "the flu is more dangerous than coronoavirus". While I can't cross-reference every article that's on display here due to the collage being, well, a picture, I'd be curious to see just how many of these articles are drawing from the same source.

Also scientists knew even then that COVID had/has about 10-20x the fatality rate of the flu. Comparing absolute numbers is dumb, and journalists should know better.

[Grizzly]

"No one saw this coming" says man who does not read the threads he posts in, where he previously argued that everyone was overreacting.

[Grizzly]

I saw this coming, claims man who said it was going to be fine in january.

"We're seeing this coming" says world health organization in January.

No one saw this coming, says man who shows images of... err...

regional news sources and gaming news websites downplaying the virus and other websites mentioning that it doesn't kill everyone and spreads quickly, or at the time of writing hasn't spread very far.

Gee it's almost as if this virus wouldn't have been as much of a big deal because everyone counted on proper measures being taken!

You know mabye it's better if JR2 leaves the thread considering how much of an embarrassment this is. It's like he hasn't even read what any of those snippets say!

[Bryan See]

I was crying. And nobody noticed it. People started to ignore me. Because of flooding the zone with propaganda and ****, which is distilled by Steve Bannon, and is put to use by Trump, Putin and Boris Johnson.

Crying because of the outbreak and being a victim by the Red-Brown coalition of alt-rightists and their Online Left dupes. I am not part of both of them.

[theperfectdrugsk]

I suspect that a lot of those headlines are probably photoshopped. But one thing I am sure of: That Washington Post "Get a grippe [sic]" headline is fake...simply because anyone with at least a 2nd grade education knows that the word "grip" is NOT spelled with two Ps and an E. The Post would never make a rookie editing mistake like that.

If jr2 couldn't tell that that headline was faked, then he's not smart enough to realize that he's been taken for a ride by the coronavirus deniers. Or he's just a dumb troll who doesn't believe one word of what he's saying. Either way, his credibility is shot.

It's the internet, so I can't tell if you're joking or not, but the "grippe" is an old-timey term for the flu. And that headline is actually a real one (but the WaPo editor should probably still be ****canned for allowing it).

[Su-tehp]

I can't believe that the Washington Post of all places actually posted a headline misspelling the word "grip", but then I discovered it was a play on words. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the definition of grippe is: an acute febrile contagious virus disease. Which is exactly what the coronavirus is.

EDIT: theperfectdrugsk, yeah I deleted my original post as soon as I stopped being outraged and checked the actual headline to see if it really did exist. As soon as I saw that it was a real thing and that "grippe" really is a real word, I erased my post. But damn, you guys are fast. But yeah I was wrong and I admit it. But I wholeheartedly agree with you that whoever edited this article really should have chosen a less inflammatory title especially since the article itself talks far more about influenza and barely mentions the coronavirus.

[MP-Ryan]

The following message brought to you by myself, my two children, and my wife / their mom, who is a Registered Nurse:

STAY THE **** HOME.

Also keep 6 feet apart if you must go out and regularly wash your hands with soap often.  Thank you.

[Luis Dias]

I've been teleworking for the past three weeks now.

It's getting on my ****ing nerves.

[karajorma]

So the US removes the commander of the USS Theodore Roosevelt and at the same time attempts to complain about China causing the virus by covering things up.

I've been saying for years that it's actually quite astonishing how similar the US and China are in the end.

[GhylTarvoke]

Firing people doesn't really compare with "disappearing" them.

We can't even tell what happened to those whistleblowers in China. Were they imprisoned? Tortured? Harvested? Who knows.

[Dysko]

Update from Italy.

First of all, please understand that every region in Italy has some decision-making autonomy on several issues, including healthcare.

This is what happened:
Every region except for Lombardy: "Let's perform swabs on every suspect case, especially if they are sure they were in contact with a confirmed positive case, so we can trace the outbreak"
Lombardy: "Naah, let's perform swabs only on those who are hospitalized"

Result:
Every region except for Lombardy: the outbreak is more or less contained. Death rate is on par with rest of the world.
Lombardy: positive cases are coming out of the goddamn walls. Death rate is 4x than the rest of the world. Several people who were told to just self-isolate are often found dead at home (especially the elderly) without ever being tested (so they do not even appear in the official statistics). This March several towns reported 5x the number of deaths compared to the average number of deaths in March in the last few years, and often less than half of these are officially recognised COVID-19 cases.

Not only that, but in the last days a decrease in the number of daily discovered positive cases in Lombardy was reported.
It turned out that less daily swabs were performed.
As they increased again the number of daily swabs, daily positive cases started increasing again. Who could have imagined so.

I fear the situation here in Lombardy will still worsen for few weeks, as the outbreak reached Milan, the most populous and densely inhabited city in the region and northern Italy.

In Milan a new field hospital has been recently completed. And to celebrate its opening, hundreds of journalists were invited in a cramped conference room for a press conference 

The lockdown should have ended this weekend, but it has been prolonged for another week, and still it will not be enough.

[GhylTarvoke]

Watching the US' response has been infuriating. We seem to be doing exactly what Italy did: mixed messages from the government, piecemeal shutdowns, slow tightening of restrictions.

Also, DeSantis finally shut down Florida on April 1... with an exception for religious gatherings. Oh joy.

[karajorma]

Firing people doesn't really compare with "disappearing" them.

We can't even tell what happened to those whistleblowers in China. Were they imprisoned? Tortured? Harvested? Who knows.

For the person disappeared, yes it's absolutely worse. But in terms of allowing the government to continue to do what it as doing without needing to worry about dissent, it's surprisingly similar. America of course has a higher baseline of civil liberties and that's a good thing but look at this case and compare it with the case of Li Wenliang and tell me you don't see similarities.