StrangeSox

Zero community spread, like the countries that have this under control, is where you stop. Cuomo is an example of an incompetent governor who did very little and at times actively undermined an appropriate response. I can't take care of my family without them being exposed to a deadly virus right now if we leave our house. What you do impacts your community around you when it comes to contagious diseases. This is why relying on "I take care of my family, you take care of yours" has lead to 270,000 dead Americans is less than a year, with hundreds of thousands more to come. It's why millions more are slipping into poverty. It's an approach completely doomed to failure. Some people will have to work, of course. Especially people doing COVID response, or providing (actually) essential services. But right now, restaurants and bars should be shut down, and we shouldn't be dooming their employees and owners to destitution for situations far beyond their individual control. The same goes for many other sectors of the economy. Countries that have limited the human and economic damage took strong measures. Countries that are suffering roiling health crises and substantial economic impact didn't. Both categories include autocracies, single-party "democracies," and actual democratic states. I know which option I'd take. Much of our economy is service sector or retail and it's in-person. Tens of millions can't stay home if they want to pay the rent and put food on the table. Absent a strong federal response including financial support, a whole lot of people couldn't do the right thing and stay home until the virus was squashed. They were put in a position to make the least bad choice of bad choices. That's what failure to have sufficient public health crisis response gets you. That, and hundreds of thousands of deaths. edit: basically just going in circles at this point, so bottom line, yes we absolutely should have taken strict lockdown measures that were actually enforced from the start and we'd all be much better off and a couple hundred thousand people wouldn't be dead right now.

Oh, I don't disagree with this at all. Our current political structure is a pile of suicide timebombs. This was one of them going off.

What sort of idiot insists without any evidence and in contradiction with numerous international experts that COVID is obviously much worse in China and they haven't actually controlled things? Double, triple, add a factor of ten to their numbers and they're still far better off than most other places and certainly much better than a majority of the world today. If there were still unchecked spread there, there'd be information leaking out and epideologists and other experts around the world would be sounding alarm bells. They aren't. There isn't uncontrolled spread in China right now.

Public health crises require public policy measures, and relying on "do the right things as individuals" is basically an empty, meaningless statement. We see exactly how well that approach works compared to competent public responses. Many people have no choice but to go out and face exposure for their jobs every day in this country because there's no closures and no financial support otherwise. Others will disregard it and partake in activities that are still open. I don't think the measures taken by many democracies to control this are "full blown authoritarianism." It's not "just so people can freely pack into wedding halls again," either. It's so there's not another three thousand dead people in this country today, tomorrow, the next day, and every day for the next month or two. It's so businesses like wedding halls can get back to functioning again. The countries that handled this well with strict, early containment are the ones with the least economic damage. They're the ones where their citizens can more or less live like normal again. Are South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and others now authoritarian states because they imposed temporary restrictions to control a deadly contagion? Get community cases to zero again before you open'r up or you're doomed to repeat the cycle again. It's the path taken by many countries, including many democracies, who have managed to contain this and aren't facing increasing mass death. For what it's worth, consider that the current ruling party in Australia is there conservative party. Same in Japan. This isn't some sort of lefty thing. It's a "competent government response to a major public health crisis" thing. The answer doesn't always lie in the middle of possible paths. Much of Europe tried more of the middle path. It didn't work.

Yeah, what sort of idiot country gets 86k cases of COVID, just lol. They are one of many countries that handled this in a way I'd say is "pretty good."

Thousands of Americans are dying every day. We'll be at 20,000+ a week by Christmas, and that'll just be the start of any infections driven by Thanksgiving. If contact tracing apps are what it takes to avoid mass death and deprivation, so be it. If actual lockdowns with actual enforcement (which occurred nowhere in the US) are what it takes, ok. The alternative is what we're barreling towards right now, which is a health care system so overwhelmed that it collapses in many cities around the country while the pandemic continues to grow. 100,000 people are in hospitals with COVID right now. Officially, 270k are dead, most likely we're already decently above 300k. We'll break 500k by mid-winter, and while vaccines will be rolling out, there will still be a lot of pain to come at that point. Things are shut down, people are suffering, businesses are suffering, state and local governments are going to be decimated. This is how already burnt-out, PTSD suffering medical staff are preparing for what's coming: Meanwhile, an old college buddy's brother just had his 100-person wedding in New Zealand last month without any concerns, though they did have to have an approved COVID safety plan in place.

Checkpoints were also a key part of the Australian approach: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/sep/16/ring-of-steel-melbourne-residents-face-5000-fines-for-trying-to-flee-to-regional-victoria#:~:text=There are now seven permanent,established on the Mornington Peninsula.

Perdue has made more stock trades in his time in the Senate than anyone else, including plenty of questionably timed ones and stocks linked directly to companies that fall under the committee he controls. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/02/us/politics/david-perdue-stock-trades.html It's completely legal for them to trade on information gained in non-public hearings or in laws and appropriations they write and pass. When Madison modeled the Senate off of his ideas of the old Roman one, he was closer than he might have thought!

There are plenty of democratic countries that enforced strict containment measures that have worked and this has meant that their populations are now free to engage in more or less normal life and without the substantial, ongoing, no-clear-end-in-sight economic damage we're seeing in the US. China isn't the only country that managed to get a hold of this. It's not just authoritarian one-party states. Victoria state (Melbourne) in Australia went into a tight lockdown for two months when they hit 100 cases a day. It sucked for the people there, but it was actually enforced and their government was able to help people get through it. You can't just point to the scary CCP and say that strict lockdowns aren't possible in democracies. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/victoria-australia-manitoba-analysis-1.5804343 Meanwhile, many of us are still essentially in self-imposed lockdown because a deadly pandemic is raging across the country and particularly in the Midwest. I'd much, much rather the US had gone through two months of tough restrictions in the spring so that we're not staring at another 55,000 or more dead Americans by Christmas day and no real end in sight after that.

I said they a pretty good job, not that there was nothing to criticize. It's pretty hard to argue that isn't representative of a good job, given how things are going in so many other places around the world. Australia did a good, but not perfect job. So did New Zealand, Singapore, Vietnam, South Korea and many other Asian and African countries. Nobody's response has been perfect, but all things considered, China's was "pretty good." The information in the CNN story doesn't change that.

China took what now look like extreme measures in January and February, when the world knew much less about what's going on. If there was still a raging epidemic there, there would be signs of it. Even if you quadrupled all of China's numbers, we'd still be blowing by them on a nearly daily basis. There's no basis to assume that China did not actually manage to effectively contain the spread and that they haven't taken very proactive measures whenever there have been a handful of new cases. Other, more democratic countries also took necessary and effective public health measures which included actual lockdowns compared to the joke response we got here. They had the benefit of a little bit of forewarning and a little bit more knowledge than China did. The tradeoff in handling public health crises isn't "freedom vs. not having massive piles of dead bodies."

People should remember that all of the rules are really about probability risk curves, and nothing is 100%. 6 feet isn't some magical barrier. edit: my wife's district is still planning on going back to in-person in January. Unless you're within 6 feet of someone who tested positive for more than 15 minutes without masks, you won't be notified. The message from administration is "we're allowing enough spacing, so we don't even have to worry about contact tracing!" This is similar to several other SW surburban district policies. Massive coverup of transmission within schools.

I'm responding to the idea that China didn't do a good job handling this. Good job doesn't mean perfection. Nothing in the CNN story contradicts the idea that China did a good job containing the coronavirus outbreak in their country.

Or they have to go to work or face homelessness and starvation because their government has failed them.

That document dump didn't really have anything that groundbreaking that we haven't seen from plenty of western countries. Oh, they underreported by a few thousand cases sometimes? Double their total 2020 case count and we are still surpassing it every single day. Yes, they had bureucratic screw-ups, and politically motivated public disclosures. But they also sequenced the virus and made that public very early on, which allowed Corbett's team at NIH (and others at other labs around the world) to develop their spike protein target by February so that we're looking at effective vaccines being widely available globally next year. There is certainly things to criticize about China's handling, but many western countries have done much, much worse. They had flawed testing that slowed down clinical diagnoses? Take a look at the CDC's initial fuck up where they insisted on developing their own test rather than using an already proven one, and oops, it didn't work! They did lock everything down, and it worked. So did some other countries. Australia's Victoria province just got out of a strong two-month lockdown. Even relatively poor countries like Vietnam were able to get things under control with actually meaningful lockdowns and strong public health responses. It worked. Meanwhile, we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas and we're hitting 3k deaths a day before we get the Thanksgiving and Christmas tsunamis that will finally overwhelm our health care capacity across the country. We're staring at many more months of this. They're partying in the streets. It's not that there's nothing to criticize about China's handling, or the handling by any of the other governments that have done well with this. Nothing is ever perfect, and there is always something to learn and improve. But they got this under control in a reasonable timeframe. The US's response has been catastrophically bad, and we will be paying the price for this for a long time to come. What were the human rights violations China used to stop people's movements?

China did do a pretty good job, though.

Trump is the outcome of modern Republicanism, not the cause of the party base's current feelings.

The Medicaid expansion was really good, shame that one unelected judge got to rewrite that important part of the law and kept millions from accessing healthcare for years.

Right, these were the "tipping point states." And the ultimate outcome is that a 3M+ popular vote loss in 2016 netted the exact same number of Electoral Votes as a 7M+ popular vote win did in 2020. It's a fundamentally broken system if what you want is an actual democracy.

What GM wants to step into that shitshow with not enough picks to fix things and no cap space?

My hope is that Trump goes scorched earth in the "backstabbing" GOP and costs them both seats in Georgia. McConnell said something about "the new administration" as well today. They're ready to cut bait, but there's 0% chance the man with an iron grip on the party's base will go away.

The other stuff is good even if it's not enough, but it clearly shows where the priorities of a lot of the ruling class are. The economic divide has been made that much worse by COVID, and we're responding with policy measures that'll only continue to deepen it. edit: it's really just a lament that the structure of our government ensures that we can't have nice things

Sure am glad we've come to a bipartisan compromise that companies can't be held liable for negligently endangering people, and also no stimulus checks.

they had a drone inspecting the cables at the moment of collapse