[Skuj]

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-ho...be-far-fetched

Clearly, Dotardism is spreading faster than Covid-19, especially in Texas. The facts just do not support this outlook. Let's bump this at Easter, shall we?

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by Bertrand

Boris Johnson's been tested positive.

Maybe there is a god.

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by ilduclo

for all you fans of Ron Paul ( ?!? ) I give you his spin on the virus

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives...onavirus-hoax/

From The Washington Post:
One factor coronavirus modelers failed to predict? Accusations their work is a hoax.

[Skuj]

Originally Posted by The Soup Nazi

From The Washington Post:
One factor coronavirus modelers failed to predict? Accusations their work is a hoax.

Doesn't Pence think the world is 6000 years old?

I might start calling this the GOP Virus. I'm convinced that the GOP are going to be at fault for it being worse than it needs to be.

[ilduclo]

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/03/17-...ing-insurance/

17 fucking years OLD. no doubt some "pre-existing condition" like thin wallet syndrome. That's fatal in the USA

[ilduclo]

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-en...id-coronavirus

surprised? not me

Cynthia Giles, who headed the EPA’s Office of Enforcement during the Obama administration:

“This EPA statement is essentially a nationwide waiver of environmental rules for the indefinite future. It tells companies across the country that they will not face enforcement even if they emit unlawful air and water pollution in violation of environmental laws, so long as they claim that those failures are in some way 'caused' by the virus pandemic. And it allows them an out on monitoring too, so we may never know how bad the violating pollution was."

[Skuj]

Everyone crowded together behind Trump as he signs the Bill......once again showing the world what NOT to do during this crisis.

Fuck me.

[The Soup Nazi]

Like Katrina in 2005, this is exposing the brutality in both depth and quantity of the United States' "hidden" poverty. From The Guardian:

'It's what was happening in Italy': the hospital at the center of New York's Covid-19 crisis
Elmhurst hospital, located in one of the poorest areas of New York City, is 'overwhelmed' as people line up outside for tests and treatment

The U.S.' number of cases has now surpassed China's and Italy's. As far as the land of the free and the home of the brave goes, this is not getting better by any stretch of the imagination.

From The New York Times:

As schools shut down, parents and students struggle to keep up.
This week New York City’s public schools began remote learning. But for the more than 100,000 students who are homeless, virtual education may be out of reach.

Allia Phillips, a fourth grader on the honor roll, was excited about picking up an iPad from her school in Harlem last week after her school was forced to close. But the shelter she lives in with her mother and grandmother does not have internet. And her mother worries that she will be left behind.

An estimated 114,000 children in New York City live in shelters and unstable housing, and many worry that school closures will hit them the hardest.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Skuj

Everyone crowded together behind Trump as he signs the Bill......once again showing the world what NOT to do during this crisis.

Fuck me.

that's fucking fantastic, maybe they all get it

--

ok, moving on, i am about the break down and buy a big fucking tv

i held on as long as i could but this lockup is a bit much

[Skuj]

What about chess?

P-K4. Go.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Skuj

What about chess?

P-K4. Go.

lml...

can i cheat?

--
pk3

[_tunic_]

Originally Posted by _tunic_

Also the singer of Rammstein is reportedly recovering at the IC in a Berlin hospital

The story about the Rammstein singer has been corrected: he had stayed in the ICU in Berlin, but was tested negative for Corona according to a statement by the band.

[Skuj]

GOP holding with the Trumpy line: https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4...ouple-of-weeks

If, by Easter, things are turning around in USA, I fully expect to be attacked/harangued.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Skuj

GOP holding with the Trumpy line: https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4...ouple-of-weeks

If, by Easter, things are turning around in USA, I fully expect to be attacked/harangued.

well, social distancing will take a few weeks show its effect because lacking tests we have no way to detect the infection rate. so yes maybe we will slow it down and see results, but also, the percentage of the infected population at that point will be much greater, so...

the classic growth curve goes like this:

 

that works for a bacterial population or some other organism but we can assume the same here. works with humans too. some scientists have theorized our population on earth will stabilize around 11 billion (we're currently 8)

first the organism reproduces at an exponential rate-- the upward curve. then it's still exponential but the exponent is reduced. growth begins to slow down as resources (space, food, infectable hosts, etc) are less available, they growth becomes more or less asymptotic with the limits of the environment.

so in the case of covid, that would be when 80 or 90% or more of the population has been infected.

then comes the decline phase which is when we start to develop herd immunity due to antibodies in individuals who were exposed but recovered.

social distancing should work, but we can't see results until patients stop coming in because we don't actually have tests to track who is actually infected. but we will also have more absolute numbers of people infected by the time we know how the rates are doing.

so yes, the curve will inevitably bend, either because of preventive measures or because we all got infected. the question is if it will bend soon enough for the number of sick not to use up all the ventilators.

the ventilators are the problem.

speaking of which, after spending all day saying new york didn't need the respirators it had requested, el dotardo finally ordered gm to start making them.

thanks obama for saving gm.

[Skuj]

Sure, I get that. I just don't get the part where the exponent is reduced/declining by Easter, based on everything I see/hear from science. The GOP must have access to Alternative Science.

[tw2113]

The GOP have investors to answer to.

[ilduclo]

asymptotic so far

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by Skuj

Yeah, I'll try to do Dotard fucking up against Covid-19 here, of which there is a truckload of material, and Dotard being at 50% in the polls there. Inbetween these two threads there is some kind of alternate universe which inverses everything.

Which brings me to Fareed Zakaria's Washington Post column this week. (Don't misread the line below the title; he doesn't let him off the hook ):

US Has Met Crisis With Incompetence
It’s easy to blame Trump for this fiasco. But there’s a much larger story.


When a crisis hits the United States, the country’s general instinct is to rally around the flag and wish the best for its leaders. That’s probably why President Trump has seen his approval ratings rise, even though he has had a delayed and fitful approach to this pandemic. But at some point, we Americans must look at the facts and recognize an uncomfortable reality. The United States is on track to have the worst outbreak of coronavirus among wealthy countries, largely because of the ineffectiveness of its government. This is the new face of American exceptionalism.

The United States now has the highest number of cases of covid-19 in the world, outstripping both China and Italy. The first line of defense against the disease is testing. On this key metric, the U.S. experience has been a fiasco: We started late, using a faulty test, and never quite recovered.

Trump’s claim that “anybody that wants a test can get a test” is a cruel hoax. Access to tests remains much worse than in most advanced countries. His assertion that the United States has tested more people than South Korea is nonsense because it doesn’t take into account that South Korea has less than one-sixth America’s population. Per capita, South Korea has done five times more testing than the United States, as of Wednesday. But forget about South Korea. Italy, a country not known for the smooth workings of its government, has tested four times as many per capita as the United States.

The United States has shortages of everything — ventilators, masks, gloves, gowns — and no national emergency system to provide new supplies fast. New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) says his state will need 40,000 beds for critical care. It has only 3,000. That means many patients will die simply because they lack access to care that is available under normal circumstances. Not even three weeks into this pandemic, health-care workers are reusing masks, sewing their own and pleading for donations. In a searing essay in the Atlantic, Ed Yong writes, “Rudderless, blindsided, lethargic, and uncoordinated, America has mishandled the COVID-19 crisis to a substantially worse degree than what every health expert I’ve spoken with had feared.”

Why did this happen? It’s easy to blame Trump, and the president has been inept from the start. But there is a much larger story behind this fiasco. The United States is paying the price today for decades of defunding government, politicizing independent agencies, fetishizing local control, and demeaning and disparaging government workers and bureaucrats.

This was not always how it was. America has historically prized limited but effective government. In Federalist 70, Alexander Hamilton wrote, “A government ill executed, whatever it may be in theory, must be, in practice, a bad government.” President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the modern federal bureaucracy, which was strikingly lean and efficient. In recent decades, as the scope of government has increased, the bureaucracy has been starved and made increasingly dysfunctional. In the 1950s, the percentage of federal civilian employees compared with total employment was above 5 percent. It has dropped to under 2 percent today, despite a population that is twice as large and a gross domestic product that is seven times higher (adjusting for inflation).

Federal agencies are understaffed but overburdened with mountains of regulations and politicized mandates and rules, giving officials little power and discretion. The Food and Drug Administration’s cumbersome rules and bureaucracy — which have proved a huge problem in this case — are just one example among hundreds. The scholar who has long studied this topic, Paul Light, notes that under President John F. Kennedy, the Cabinet departments had 17 “layers” of hierarchy. By the time Trump took office, there were a staggering 71 layers. Both political parties have contributed to the problem, making the federal government a caricature of bureaucratic inefficiency.

Most of these dysfunctions are replicated at the state and local levels with their own smaller agencies. The challenge of creating a national strategy is complicated by the reality that the true power in public health lies with 2,684 state, local and tribal systems, each jealously guarding its independence. We like to celebrate American federalism as the flourishing of local democracy. But this crazy patchwork quilt of authority is proving a nightmare when tackling an epidemic that knows no borders, and where any locality with a weak response will allow the infection to keep spreading elsewhere. What happens on Florida’s beaches doesn’t stay on Florida’s beaches.

It’s an easy cop-out to say the United States can’t mirror China’s dictatorship. The governments that are handling this pandemic effectively include democracies such as South Korea, Taiwan and Germany. Many of the best practices employed in places such as Singapore and Hong Kong are not tyrannical but smart — testing, contact tracing and isolation. But all these places have governments that are well-funded, efficient and responsive. In today’s world, with problems that spill across borders at lightning speed, “well executed government” is what makes a country truly exceptional.

[Skuj]

I'd be very interested in how we weave the whole Obamacare / "Trumpcare"* / medical insurance aspects into this whole thing, as a Canadian.

*I'm not really sure what Trump has done on this front, other than trying to kill Obamacare. Bytor, please help me out in this regard. Thanks.

[The Soup Nazi]

Prediction: once this is all over (if it ever is...), Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson will inevitably be invited to a late night talk show. Host: "So you guys were quarantined together for a long time... You MUST have made a LOT of monkey love, right?"