StrangeSox

Cover-up begins https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/05/06/coronavirus-update-us/

OTOH they've packed the courts top-to-bottom with judges who would love to go back to Lochner.

Good news! Jared's in charge of finding a vaccine! https://www.thedailybeast.com/kushner-botched-the-covid-response-now-trumps-tapped-him-to-get-a-vaccine-by-the-end-of-2020

JB's plan seems reasonable. Trib has a thorough breakdown of it. https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/ct-cb-pritzker-plan-reopen-illinois-20200506-erfvitdovffmzd7ativx4hj57q-htmlstory.html

They don't care if you die, Balta. We're finding out what they're doing with the ppe they're stealing from states:

This actually highlights the false choice pretty well, accidentally. The biggest hotspots in the country right now are prisons and...meat processing/packing facilities. Forcing low-wage workers back to work in these conditions (while simulatneously giving their megacorp employers lots of money + legal immunity!) is causing these outbreaks to worsen, which means the plants have to throttle back or shut down because a huge percentage of their workforce is now sick, some probably dead. The kicker of course is that these workers almost definitely don't have health insurance, either, or still face 5-figure bills if they get hospitalized. And this process will repeat itself over and over and over again as we "open up the economy!" Because it's not a choice we can actually make right now. We can't just decide, "eh, a few hundred thousand dead people is worth it" because we won't be getting a functional economy out of that trade-off.

It's the path we're heading down at an accelerating pace. The conservatives on the WI Supreme Court just made very clear that they don't value the life of the working class in the least, and they compared Evers' SAH order to Japanese internment and tyranny. They will be striking down Wisconsin's order, which means that state will be completely "open" soon. People will be forced to choose either their health (as well as the health of their family) or economic destitution as they'll be ineligible for UI. Small Businesses are still going to be in rough shape as they won't be back to the same revenue levels they were at before. State and local payrolls and services are going to be devestated in next year's budgets. Our federal leadership is largely choosing to just wash their hands of any responsibility for responding to this. We can't come together as a society when one portion doesn't place any value on the lives of the other, but that's where we are. edit: and there's more at stake in the WI than just this single order: https://www.vox.com/2020/5/5/21246697/republican-lawsuit-wisconsin-stay-at-home-legislature-palm Meanwhile the House of Representatives can't be bothered to meet or figure out remote/proxy voting and the Senate is only interested in confirming more FedSoc judges like the ones on the WI Supreme Court.

GOP is a literal death cult at this point. People working at meat-packing plants aren't even real people according to Wisconsin Supreme Court judges, and this: They want to march the working class back to work at significant risk of illness or death.

Things are looking better in NYC but worse in the rest of the US: Meanwhile, the White House is explicitly saying that "blue states" shouldn't get any federal money and are relying on 'models' like this: If your government is completely incapable of responding to internal or external challenges, how functional is the state? edit: and at the state level:

Hey by your estimates we must be at 500m-1000m Americans already infected

I think support will drop among the non-GOP crowd as well. I hope you're right.

It's not a terrible result, at least right now, but we do have Fox News pushing not just "reopen the economy!" right now but also actively agitating against social distancing and mask-wearing. I fear the support will only get weaker across the board as this drags on with no real plan or leadership and active opposition to doing anything about it from one side.

How would the US react if we had a 9/11 happening every day for a month straight?

Of course this is becoming a culture war issue like everything else these days. I wonder if other countries see similar political splits on pandemic response measures?

What is that base don?

Add in that the official death totals are almost definitely an undercount when you compare to excess deaths, and we're looking at a very grim summer.

Lots of other states are taking different paths than Kansas, greg. edit: forgot to include the NYT link above, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/us/coronavirus-updates.html This is largely hitting poorer and non-white communities along with the elderly in nursing homes, all groups that are already regularly marginalized.

I saw Indiana is planning on allowing 4th of July parades/festivals and gatherings of 250 people starting in mid June. Meanwhile, the New York Times got details of an internal Administration report The Trump administration projects about 3,000 daily deaths by early June. As President Trump presses for states to reopen their economies, his administration is privately projecting a steady rise in the number of cases and deaths from coronavirus over the next several weeks, reaching about 3,000 daily deaths on June 1, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times, nearly double from the current level of about 1,750. The projections, based on modeling by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and pulled together in chart form by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month, up from about 25,000 cases now. The numbers underscore a sobering reality: While the United States has been hunkered down for the past seven weeks, not much has changed. And the reopening to the economy will make matters worse.

Hopefully I'm wrong but it seems like the US is largely giving up on the idea of containing this. We're nowhere near the testing levels we need, and states are either just opening up right now as their numbers go up up up, or they're announcing plans to open up more and more within a month or so. Even states like Illinois are relaxing restrictions weeks before the predicted peak let alone a ways down the slow decline.

I had to do a grocery pickup this morning at Meijer, and it shares a parking lot with a Home Depot. I was glad to see at least 90% of the people going into Meijer had masks, but the Home Depot percentage was definitely less. Still high, maybe 60-70%, but not as high. Both parking lots completely full at 1030 on a Friday. We're really only kinda-sorta closed down even in states like Illinois. It is completely baffling that states like Georgia and Texas and Florida are reopening at the same time as they post their highest daily numbers. It's silly to me that Illinois is loosening up in some ways too knowing full well that the project peak isn't for another few weeks.

It can be, sure. Think of society using shame to keep LGBT in the closet, and the damage that does. I'm not making a universal statement on whether shame is good or bad, but it can be effective in shaping external behaviors (vs internal behaviors like say fat shaming someone into losing weight). Shame (and guilt) has always shaped behaviors in different cultures and always will. I'm not sure how it's "lazy" or what you mean by that, though. Edit: keep in mind here that the context is Greg whining about his long hair giving him headaches (??)

This is the length states are having to go through to avoid the federal government stealing their supplies.