StrangeSox

The people who are playing it safe and staying home are still impacted by the larger societal and economic damage from the reckless behavior, though. The more our politicians allow reckless behavior, the deeper and longer this thing goes. The more people engage in reckless behavior, the deeper and longer this thing continues. And since nobody is 100% contact free (you still need groceries and essentials even if you're otherwise entirely shut in, or you may need medical care but oops the ICU is full), there's still increased risk of exposure. Much of the world got this epidemic under control using these nefarious "communist democrat ideas," and now their whole societies are safer and can more freely engage in normal activities, even if things are a ways from completely normal there. We have a raging uncontrolled epidemic that's once again severely taxing our medical resources and still driving over a million people to file for unemployment every single week. This isn't about individual choice, because those individual choices impact everyone else.

do they do it as a full-time job though

My proposed Idea is to let people drive drunk. But Betsy Devos has presented the perfect option of having drunk driving choice, so if you are willing to drive drunk, do it. And if not, use a different option you find appropriate. Common sense. Be American, do what's best for your family and don't oppress others with communist democrat ideas.

Test, trace, isolate, and get case numbers way way way way down. Then you can implement actually safe reopening plans for schools.

Yeah. Their places of work should be shut down until this is under control and we have adequate testing, tracing, and isolation for positives like millions of others.

It's not new cases increase for a rolling 7-day average, which would be a good metric. It's if the positivity rate increases for 7 straight days and hospitalizations increase in the same period. Positivity rate just tells you if you're testing enough to make informed decisions. It doesn't tell you if you actually have things under control, and it's something you can essentially artificially lower if you can get your testing capacity high enough even with high case counts. Without robust contact tracing and isolation efforts, it's kinda meaningless. And you'd expect hospitalizations to lag increased cases or positivity by a week or two anyway, so triggering both at once may mean you've let the thing continue to grow exponentially for another couple of weeks. Very disappointing.

Per Rich Miller (Capital Fax guy/Illinois politics reporter heavy hitter), Illinois has roughly 1/3 of the number of contact tracers we need currently. Gotta ask again, how on earth did we get to Phase 4 while clearly not meeting the requirements for contact tracing? JB was really strong out of the gate on this, but since about mid-June, he's caved to a lot of pressure to reopen. It's inexcusable to still have bars and indoor dining open. Opening the schools is going to be a huge disaster.

Is Israel handling it this badly in schools? Other school districts across the country have popped up with similar liability waivers and absurd 1-3 day quarantines for staff with symptoms or even PCR positive test results. We're going to intentionally and knowingly infect, harm and kill a whole lotta people. e: in states like Tennessee, Texas and many others, any striking teacher can be immediately fired.

There have been some signs from Asian and European countries about lower danger from spread in schools, and there's some consideration that needs to be taken about how widespread the virus was when they opened schools vs. how it is here. But either way, Israel provides a counterpoint: https://www.thedailybeast.com/israeli-data-show-school-openings-were-a-disaster-that-wiped-out-lockdown-gains Israel's population is only a little bit larger than the Chicago metro, and they had 1,400 cases in a whole month. We're talking about reopening schools with hundreds of cases a day. What is our spread going to look like?

it's a comedy video where they obviously cherry-picked the most ridiculous or funniest answers yup lol One of my friends went to the Indiana Dunes mid-week last week with her kids (middle school aged). It was relatively uncrowded on the beach. She's been taking this very seriously and felt perfectly safe there. The trails there are pretty narrow depending on where you're at though.

Thread on the more immediate impact of this (long-term impact is destroying the public's trust in the CDC for years to come)

lol, also infuriating

My wife's union sent out a letter and a survey to every teacher last night after her district's plans were made public. They stated that they've told the district from day 1 that the measures that were ultimately put into place were completely unacceptable. We'll see what happens. Even my wife's principal has been sending emails for a couple of weeks very clearly stating that she's seriously uncomfortable with the plan and expects huge pushback. Her district's HR sent out an email to everyone just reminding them of the procedures and forms for telework request (limited availability and need a pre-existing condition) or also for long-term leaves of absence. I modeled out our budget for the next 12 months. We can swing her taking a leave of absence without pay if we need to. Very seriously considering this. How many other staff are doing the same? Her building has half a dozen cancer survivors and at least a dozen teachers in their late 50's or older. That's one building in one district in suburban Chicago. There's already teacher shortages in Illinois. Anyway today's the first day where all hospital data is being fed straight to a no-bid, private company's server at the White House rather than going to the CDC. So my guess is we'll soon have very low positive test results!

Lake Zurich HS is already fighting an outbreak. 36 students who participated in summer training camp activities have tested positive. They believe the exposures for many if not most occurred prior to the camps, but that these kids participated and may have spread it to other students. https://www.dailyherald.com/news/20200714/36-lake-zurich-high-students-test-positive-for-covid-19 This is 36 cases in one high school before classes even start and we cram hundreds into indoor spaces for hours on end. Hong Kong shut down again over 45 or so cases across the entire city of 7.4M. Now imagine these cases were discovered Day 1 of in-person classes at Lake Zurich HS. How many hundreds of staff and students would now need to go get tested and then isolate until they got their test results back? What's the plan to cover for all the quarantined staff? Now multiply that out to every school in the state and ask yourself "how are we going to substantially increase our testing capacity and shorten the lead time?" Quest and LabCorp, the two biggest testing labs in the country, are now saying results can take as long as 10 days. What do you think that lag will look like once we massively increase potential exposures all across the country as schools reopen?

The mortality rate for COVID in that range is high, but it's not 100%. Just like some people live to 105 and smoke for 90 years and never get a spot of cancer. The false positive rate for a lot of the antibody tests are really high, but the false positive rates for the active-infection PCR tests are really, really, really low.

Asymptomatic is very common with this disease though?

Seems likely that national data will be cooked, but we'll still get state level reports (which may also be cooked, e.g. Florida)

Some thoughts on the failures of both the federal and state govenrments. I'd disagree with the statement that "the world" is filled with the sorts of people you described, though. The US is one of a handful of nations that have handled this so poorly. Most other countries have done much better and actually come together collectively.

Social media is a huge net negative on our society.

My wife's school district announced their plans last night. Students will be in-person 5 days a week. They will be doing block-scheduled A/B days. So, a student will go to let's say their math, science, and spanish classes for double class periods on Day A, and the other classes on Day B. Other students would be flip-flopped. Oh but the school day is shortened to 830-1230, so it doesn't actually help parents with childcare at all anyway. So ultimately, you still have every student in the building every day, and class sizes of 30+ every period. We have five weeks to decide if she's going to resign over this.

One big global hoax all targeted at Trump, sure.

Interesting

oof

We're facing serious national testing shortages/delays and now PPE shortages again. The Trump admin's federal purchasing for syringes we'll need for a vaccine are going through two small, untested suppliers. https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-07-08/trump-coronavirus-vaccine-strategy-syringe-providers