StrangeSox

Michael McCaskey passed away

I doubt there'll be any reinstitution of lockdown measures in the US

Here you go

Nobody is calling for indefinite lockdown at current levels until there's a vaccine. The CDC put out a pretty good reopening guideline!

It seems like any elected official's reopening plan that sets arbitrary dates rather than metric to meet before moving to the next phase is fundamentally a political plan and not a scientific one. You should probably make sure you've taken appropriate measures to reduce r0 to a manageable level before you take actions that will increase it. Or don't and suffer the economic and mortal consequences.

I'm listening to what the experts say and judging the elected officials' plans based on that. I'm not taking the elected officials at their word given the widely demonstrated incompetence thus far. The quote was from your lt. gov, not Abbott. Appearing on Fox News, Patrick told Tucker Carlson, “No one reached out to me and said, ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’” But if they had? “If that is the exchange, I’m all in,” Patrick said. He continued: “That doesn’t make me noble or brave or anything like that. I just think there are lots of grandparents out there in this country, like me, I have six grandchildren, that what we all care about and what we love more than anything are those children. And I want to live smart and see through this, but I don’t want the whole country to be sacrificed…I’ve talked to hundreds of people, Tucker, and just in the last week, making calls all the time, and everyone says pretty much the same thing. That we can’t lose our whole country, we’re having an economic collapse. I’m also a small businessman, I understand it. And I talk with businesspeople all the time, Tucker. My heart is lifted tonight by what I heard the president say because we can do more than one thing at a time, we can do two things. So my message is let’s get back to work, let’s get back to living. Let’s be smart about it and those of us who are 70-plus, we’ll take care of ourselves. But don’t sacrifice the country, don’t do that, don’t ruin this great America.”

People in positions of authority have pretty clearly demonstrated reasons to be skeptical of their motivations and understanding to me. A lot of them are essentially at the same level as the crazy lady screaming out of a car window. I will listen to the actual experts on this. When elected officials are in line with actual experts, I'll support them. When they aren't, I won't think they have access to some sort of secret information or understanding. But of course we need to know what leaders are making these statements and what restrictions they're actually calling to be eased. A blanket statement includes everyone from the "masks are a liberal globalist conspiracy to enact communism" state rep to governors like pritzker who are going with a metric-based plan to lt. governors like yours in Texas who are saying they're fine with sacrificing thousands of lives.

Who are these people and are they infectious disease experts? What restrictions are they calling to be eased, and where?

Scenes like this were present around Milwaukee last night One of the conservative justices issued a concurrence doubling down on comparing Evers' order to Japanese internment

Nearly 3 million more people filing jobless claims last week, bringing the total to 36.5 million.

Similar numbers out of France

Bad news about the Abbott tests again

Death cult Credit to the lone dissenting conservative Justice, though.

I would agree with this, and it's not just the pretty massive failures of the federal government. There's even more minor things like Lightfoot getting her hair cut it JB's wife going to Florida that undercuts the unified message a little bit each time.

You've been saying "we already have 50-100m people infected in the US" the whole time. It's been obviously wrong the whole time. Virologists/epidemiologists/infectious disease experts will be the first to admit that there is a lot we don't know about covid-19 yet, and that we're learning more everyday. But they understand more than you give them credit for, and they pretty universally reject the ideas you keep bringing up. Quit pretending that nobody knows anything and that your guesses are as good as the people who have been studying these things for decades.

It's the "but-for" method of counting that's used all the damn time. It's not some sort of conspiracy of hospitals across the country (world?) to over-count deaths.

Oklahoma had to rescind it's mask requirements after violent threats

When the request is coming from actual experts and it's being echoed around the world, perhaps it'll be worth considering. When it's coming from the White House for transparently political reasons, you're being naive at best.

The current way things are being counted is how health experts and departments around the world have counted deaths in previous epidemics and how they're counting this pandemic. Just as with previous epidemics, we won't know the real toll until in-depth studies are done a few years down the road. That's how we arrive at things like "12k deaths from swine flu," after the fact epidemiological studies and surveys which are themselves estimates rather than just hard counts of death certificates. If the WH gets their way, we're going to see the media mainly reference the politically suppressed "official" death counts that don't include any of the nuance you're mentioning. It'll just be "oh only 80k people ever died, no big deal, everything else is a conspiracy." You've already seen it pop up in this thread today! It's not the medical experts pushing for this change for more detailed information. It's an extremely political White House doing it for very obvious reasons. Don't make excuses for them.

That's conspiracy nonsense. Hospitals are not falsely coding covid deaths.

there is one reason the White House is pushing for this change and it isn't for a more detailed analysis.