michelangelosmonkey

Neither is it as simple as saying that worst case scenario is 900 will get it and 1-2 will die. 1 out of 450 versus 1 out of 75,000...one is scare tactic the other is boring old stats. And while random sports teams might be more likely to get it...MLB will be doing constant testing and isolating. The fear mongering is amazing...same age group you have 15,000 dead a year with drug overdoses versus 400. We shouldn't let the players go to parties.

I just checked CDC website there have been roughly 400 Covid-19 deaths in males between 18-34. There are about 30 million American men in that age group. So to say 1-2 might die from this in MLB this year? To date one out of 75,000 in that age group have died...so more like one baseball player every 80 years. Of course that one will probably be Luis Robert next month but I still think they should take this enormous risk to entertain us for millions of dollars each.

But science in a crisis?? Throw spaghetti at the wall. Like when someone has inoperable cancer and you can't get laetrile because it's not been double blind tested by the FDA so you have to go sit in your hospital room and wait for your death because...well why try stuff that isn't 100% safe.

60 recorded cases out of 330,000,000 people at the end of February in US and zero deaths. I suspect you are right...I suspect a lot of people in NYC, Seattle and California had it in December. A monster came out of the mountains of China. We had never seen this monster before. Our Monster watch organization didn't see it coming and had no real plan in case we encountered a monster. China sends the monster over to the US. When the death rate from the monster stood at zero in the US...we should have had the country locked down. The president took some actions but fell short of screaming for everyone to hide in their basements. Turns out the monster is pretty bad. Monster kills a lot of people. Moral of the story...President is a bad guy.

F) models...repeatable double blind tested trial

I think many of your ideas are useful. I think the next time we will be better prepared. I think there are zero presidents in my lifetime that would have ramped up production in January for a virus unknown outside of China at that time....or end of February when twenty Americans had it. I think outside of a few in the CDC most people in the US were not that freaked out about Viruses. I asked my parents if they remember the 1957 outbreak (in their thirties at the time) they can't even remember it...and it was BAD. I was a young kid in 1968 and remember the Hong Kong flu...but more as a comedy punch line than something I was "afraid" of. Sars, Mers, Swine flu? The annual flu? Meh. Only 40% of Americans were even bothering with the flu vaccine. But NOW....every weird disease is going to be treated as if it is the big one. I for one wouldn't mind seeing 10% of the $700 defense budget being shifted over to the CDC. Of course we are always fighting the last battle...five years from now it will be a super volcano and everyone will be saying the president is an idiot because he didn't prepare us for it...or alien invasion...or polar shift...or solar flares that knock out all electronics. So many terrors out there.

And those idiots in France...and those Idiots in Spain...and those idiots in Belgium...and those idiots in England...and those idiots in Sweden...if we could only have you as world despot there would have been zero deaths.

Come on Caulfield...CDC gets billions every year to prepare for this. The president has no idea about viruses...he has a multi-billion dollar organization that has been running for decades and a pandemic comes along and the life long veterans that are there...gave this? Institutions run irrespective of their leaders. GM can have a bad CEO but the guys throughout the organization still understand cars. The test launch is an embarrassment. France has been worse. UK worse. Were they too stupid to copy the Koreans too? The Canadians?

That's interesting. It's amazing what a truly totalitarian state can do. As you rightly say it doesn't offer much guidance to the swirling democracy we live in. I'm not sure it's fair to say "well if it would have been Obama it would have been worse." I'm ideologically opposite of most of where President Obama stood...but I always thought he was elected and had a right to try and truly was good-hearted in his attempts at doing things I disagreed with. Sure Fox news had negative stuff on him but only 30% of it was shrill. But 90% of all news articles about Trump have been negative. It's exhausting. Honestly everything he's done has not been horrible. His responses to this virus have not been horrible. But it seems there is no sense reason on the other side. I used to love the Sunday political talk shows...not for the canned politicians reciting their talking points...but the moderators and talking heads dissecting the events. Smart guys thinking and saying smart things in opposition but well thought out. Now it is just who can howl the loudest Trump hate.

Spain, Italy, France, UK, Sweden, Belgium, Canada all have more deaths per capita than the US. So to suggest we are the only ones stumbling in the dark on this thing is just wrong. As I wrote earlier...we are also uniquely positioned to have it hit us hardly. Seems like the villains in this drama are 1) China 2) CDC, 3) WHO (for getting billions in funding over the years and being completely flat footed on this). If you want to put Trump and other EU leaders up there...fine.

I appreciate you being there at the epicenter...and we all pray for you Caulfied. I've been to China many times and I'm familiar with the totalitarian state. I'm sure they have Hubei completely locked down. But there are 65 cities in China with more than a million people. Hundreds of thousands left Wuhan on crowded planes, buses and trains to every region of China. There are 13 cities in China with more people than NYC and NYC has 25,000 dead. Something is missing.

Most Asian airports that I have gone to have always had those heat sensing stations and a lot of the populations already wearing masks. You could say we should have started this after Swine flu when Obama was president but that might seem political. Anyway I think this is an incredible lesson for us to learn for the future and I think for the remnants of us alive once this thing is gone we will rise up and rebuild a new greater nation.

What are you smoking? I have NEVER said this wasn't a big deal. This is a very big deal. Viruses are bad. I didn't CALCULATE the numbers for ten million. How about a million? It's about 100,000 in the US. They have 4 times the population, are a month ahead of us on the curve and have a population with damaged lungs. I don't believe their numbers but I'm pretty sure if the real number was half a million some dissident would have sent that information.

But half a million people left Wuhan province the weeks before the shut down. The epicenter of this and they spread to every region of the country...every city and village in China. If you do any modeling of a super infectious virus with moderate death rates China should be swimming in corpses.

January 24h we didn't know anything. The Chinese had just gone to the extraordinary measure of quarantining 40 million people and Trump was being supportive and at the same time drafting a plan a few days later to restrict travel from China.

Because I was trying to show the hypocrisy of your position? Of COURSE it's not Pelosi or Cuomo's fault. It's a new virus, it was early day's and humans try to make the most of sketchy information and balance hundreds of interests. No one knew until everyone knew.

OK that's all sounds reasonable but how...how do you have flight or airports that aren't cesspools for diseases? How do you enforce quarantine? How do you deal with damnable Americans that say "no one's going to tell ME what to do". And are we certain that this is the right path? How much economic destruction can we tolerate? And what happens after we have a 12 month shut down and some idiot comes from China with it and infects five people? We are right back here and the country falls off a cliff.

But see that's the problem with something unknown. You make firm conclusions about what would have happened and what's going to happen and we just don't know. I still can't figure out why there aren't ten million dead in China if all you say is true.

I really think it is fascinating what has happened in China. I mean there should be ten million dead there, right? Everyone has damaged lungs from the smog, everyone smokes, backwards medical care compared to US, massively crowded cities. Sure they shut down Wuhan...after a MONTH...and after letting hundreds of thousands travel all over China for the New Years...to every village...to every big city. They aren't telling us something or there is something unique about the virus. There is a missing bit of evidence. How can India have only a couple of thousand deaths? Its really weird.

I get so twisted in the arguments. He was an asshole for not doing anything about the spread of the virus from Italy and he is an asshole for doing something to stop the spread of the virus from Italy. And you are really positioning yourself as arguing in a non-partisan way?

You honestly can't believe the numbers from China??? Still India, Indonesia, Pakistan? Something weird about this virus. Oh thats right...they don't have Trump as president intentionally killing us.

And three days later he shut down travel from Europe. You pull little quotes out of the 10 million words the president has spoken in the last four months and twist them into a narrative that makes him look like he wasn't doing anything. The total deaths on February 26th from Corona virus in the US were zero. ZERO!!! Should we have shut the country down then? Hello all Americans...I know no one has this and no one has died from this and the cure will cost trillions of dollars but we are going to shut this place down February 26th. Honestly its stupid hindsight argument.

I was JOKING to my class. But yes...the president should have done something...like declare it a public health crisis and put in travel restrictions from China a few days later...which is what he did in spite the criticisms of racism that he received (and both Pelosi and Cuomo encouraging their citizens to go to Chinese New Year celebrations over the warning of the Federal government. But...you know...all Trumps fault. What would have you done?

It was completely ridiculous of me to try to come to DNC headquarters and try to argue that the virus is a virus and people are going to die almost no matter what we did and that non-stop blaming of the president is boring. But you win.

Sorry...yes I was thinking of 1918...100 million people and 675,000 dead, 1957: 172 million people 116,000 dead, 1968 200 million people 100,000 dead. Today 330 million 85,000 dead. So balancing for today's population 1918: 2.2 million 1957: 222,000 1968: 165,000 Today: 85,000 And just for fun, bubonic plague Italy 14th Century: 200,000,000 How do you figure it is 6 times more deadly or 3? Not semantics...math. Either way its a deadly virus. Viruses can be bad. China's actions were those of a totalitarian state that was purposely hiding things. I've looked at the time lines we took and the deaths and trying to be fair minded thinking how do you decide where the prudent decision is. I think the president took, and was deeply criticized for, some big decisions. He missed on some too. If you want to live in your tent and blame all unknown on him...whatever.