COVID-19/Coronavirus thread

[caulfield12]

1 hour ago, Tony said:

The response from the “other side” will be “Oh you trust CNN, NBC, The Wall Street Journal and the rest of the LAME STREAM MEDIA?!?” 

The quintessential beating heart of a Romney Republican, the WSJ, is now LSM?   Because if that paper is not center right, I don’t know what is...just Breitbart and the National Review, Washington Times, etc.

I remember growing up in the 80s and 90s, a Republican meant something between William F. Buckley and George Will/Bill Kristol. With the current monetary policy of creating seemingly endless amounts of IOU’s, not sure what is still recognizable beyond abortion and gun rights.

[caulfield12]

15 minutes ago, southsider2k5 said:

While we probably couldn't have stopped it,  we could have prepared and mitigated the problem a heck of a lot better than we did. We closed our eyes and pretended nothing was happening until the middle of March. 

I’m not even sure that would have happened as quickly as it did without the twin shocks of the NBA and NCAA tourney cancellations that week of conference tourney play, with Rudy Gobert/Jazz being the first domino to fall.

 

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/09/politics/coronavirus-testing-cdc-fda-red-tape-invs/index.html

(CNN) A weeks-long testing delay that effectively blinded public health officials to the spread of the coronavirus in the US might have been avoided had federal agencies fully enacted their own plan to ramp up testing during a national health crisis.

The plan, which is spelled out in an April 2018 agreement between the Centers for Disease Control and three of the biggest associations involved in lab testing, called for boosting the capacity of public health labs, bringing big commercial labs into the testing process early, and making sure labs would have whatever they needed to mount a rapid, large-scale response.

But over January and February, agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services not only failed to make early use of the hundreds of labs across the United States, they enforced regulatory roadblocks that prevented non-government labs from assisting, according to documents obtained by CNN, and interviews with 14 scientists and physicians at individual laboratories and national laboratory associations.

 

Edited April 10, 2020 by caulfield12

[StrangeSox]

Sports shutting down was definitely the "oh crap, this thing is serious" moment for a lot of people.

[Balta1701]

https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/1248367716114796546?s=20

 I'm not embedding it but that's an American mass grave, caught via drone. 

[mqr]

1 hour ago, StrangeSox said:

Sports shutting down was definitely the "oh crap, this thing is serious" moment for a lot of people.

Oh for sure. I was losing it like end of February and my parents were laughing at me. I called my mom at one point to offer to pick my sister up from school in Alabama because the school I went to shut down the day before sports shut down and they told me to relax. 
 

Day after sports shut down they drove to Alabama and back. 

Edited April 10, 2020 by mqr

[default]

1 hour ago, Balta1701 said:

https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/1248367716114796546?s=20

 I'm not embedding it but that's an American mass grave, caught via drone. 

Did you even bother to read the article??

[ron883]

3 hours ago, default said:

My response is I don’t trust any of them.  Just report the facts and let me form my own opinions.  

This. Don't get me wrong, Fox News is as bad as it gets, but CNN has absolute disdain for Trump. They will rarely ever give him a shred of credit when he does good. It's all about attacking him, constantly. They give credence to his fake news complaints unfortunately.

[caulfield12]

9 minutes ago, default said:

Did you even bother to read the article??

Increasing the rate burials by a factor of 7x isn’t necessarily the sign of a genocidal apocalypse, but is certainly alarming and shows the scale of the problem.

Just like 42,500 urns here in Wuhan would be 12,500 more (30000 the number of expected natural deaths over that time frame) than would be needed if you stopped all burials/funerals in a city larger than NYC for almost 70 days...and then had them altogether over a 3-5 day period.

One is an increase of approximately 33%, the other 700%.  Statistics!!!

Edited April 10, 2020 by caulfield12

[The Beast]

1 minute ago, Yearnin' for Yermin said:

This. Don't get me wrong, Fox News is as bad as it gets, but CNN has absolute disdain for Trump. They will rarely ever give him a shred of credit when he does good. It's all about attacking him, constantly. They give credence to his fake news complaints unfortunately.

It is also a cable news channel running 24/7. He is a content machine and they can’t leave him alone. If they left him alone, he would hate not having attention!

[Quin]

3 hours ago, default said:

My response is I don’t trust any of them.  Just report the facts and let me form my own opinions.  

You say this, but on election night 2016, two of my fellow classmates were reporting on the local Republican watch party.

They were a sophomore and junior in college, working for the local newspaper. People at the watch party started yelling at them for being there, then gloating saying "Trump is winning and the media is going to be sad."

Then, when facts are reported, they're called lies. Literal facts. COVID-19 was declared a hoax to start because of Trump.

Trump's own words will be read back to him, and he will deny them.

If you can't split editorial and reporting, that's fine, but don't pretend like reporters that "just report the facts" get called liars for no reason other than people don't like the facts.

[caulfield12]

13 minutes ago, Quin said:

You say this, but on election night 2016, two of my fellow classmates were reporting on the local Republican watch party.

They were a sophomore and junior in college, working for the local newspaper. People at the watch party started yelling at them for being there, then gloating saying "Trump is winning and the media is going to be sad."

Then, when facts are reported, they're called lies. Literal facts. COVID-19 was declared a hoax to start because of Trump.

Trump's own words will be read back to him, and he will deny them.

If you can't split editorial and reporting, that's fine, but don't pretend like reporters that "just report the facts" get called liars for no reason other than people don't like the facts.

The race was always going to be close from an electoral college standpoint...as most have been since 2000.

National polls having Clinton up 2-4% are perfectly understandable looking at the popular vote.  Bill Clinton himself was already worrying the last two weeks that Wisconsin had been totally taken for granted and they tried to save MI and PA in the last week but it was too late to reverse the late changing tide (Comey on server/emails.)

It was certainly an upset and a shock to many...and the amazing leveraging of limited ad dollars through social and free media, but it also wasn’t reinventing the wheel.  I was more upset that HRC was the best candidate we could come up with, and many certainly feel similarly this cycle.

Not sure when this “us vs. them” mentality will be overcome...it’s going to take more than a global pandemic IMO. 

 

Edited April 10, 2020 by caulfield12

[caulfield12]

16,691 vs. 18,279

We are now poised to pass Italy over the weekend for most deaths related to COVID-19, but certainly not the highest mortality rates.

[southsider2k5]

1 hour ago, Quin said:

You say this, but on election night 2016, two of my fellow classmates were reporting on the local Republican watch party.

They were a sophomore and junior in college, working for the local newspaper. People at the watch party started yelling at them for being there, then gloating saying "Trump is winning and the media is going to be sad."

Then, when facts are reported, they're called lies. Literal facts. COVID-19 was declared a hoax to start because of Trump.

Trump's own words will be read back to him, and he will deny them.

If you can't split editorial and reporting, that's fine, but don't pretend like reporters that "just report the facts" get called liars for no reason other than people don't like the facts.

Louder for the cult members in the back.

The man lies about his own words, and people buy it.

[default]

9 hours ago, Quin said:

You say this, but on election night 2016, two of my fellow classmates were reporting on the local Republican watch party.

They were a sophomore and junior in college, working for the local newspaper. People at the watch party started yelling at them for being there, then gloating saying "Trump is winning and the media is going to be sad."

Then, when facts are reported, they're called lies. Literal facts. COVID-19 was declared a hoax to start because of Trump.

Trump's own words will be read back to him, and he will deny them.

If you can't split editorial and reporting, that's fine, but don't pretend like reporters that "just report the facts" get called liars for no reason other than people don't like the facts.

Yeah people are assholes and Trump is a dickhead.  This isn’t a new revelation.  This was a thing even before he was a president.
 

All I’m saying is that I’m capable of forming my own conclusions with facts as an input.  And I believe other people can do this too.   This group think that’s been created by the opinions of polarized media outlets is destroying the willingness of people to think for themselves.

Edited April 10, 2020 by default

[Dick Allen]

12 minutes ago, default said:

Yeah people are assholes and Trump is a dickhead.  This isn’t a new revaluation.  This was a thing even before he was a president.
 

All I’m saying is that I’m capable of forming my own conclusions with facts as an input.  And I believe other people can do this too.   This group think that’s been created by the options of polarized media outlets is destroying the willingness of people to think for themselves.

Well, if you are getting it from what is called fake news, CNN, ABC,NBC, CBS....you aren't getting the most accurate. For that, there is Fox News

 

Or maybe you just want it straight from the WH. Here's his new press secretary

 

 

Edited April 10, 2020 by Dick Allen

[tray]

10 hours ago, caulfield12 said:

With the current monetary policy of creating seemingly endless amounts of IOU’s, not sure what is still recognizable beyond abortion and gun rights.

The Southern Strategy 2.0.

[default]

33 minutes ago, Dick Allen said:

Well, if you are getting it from what is called fake news, CNN, ABC,NBC, CBS....you aren't getting the most accurate. For that, there is Fox News

 

Or maybe you just want it straight from the WH. Here's his new press secretary

 

 

Legendary stuff there...

[Dick Allen]

Just now, default said:

Legendary stuff there...

The scary thing about it is POTUS is still listening to them and seems to be inclined to blowing off the science when it comes to "opening up the country"> 

[caulfield12]

For example, “the A team comes in Monday morning, the B team comes in Monday afternoon, and then the C team comes in Tuesday and the D team comes in Tuesday afternoon,” he told Yahoo Finance’s “On the Move.”

Gary Cohn says the key is to isolate the teams from each other so “the Monday crowd and Tuesday crowd never cross, because if someone gets sick in the A and B crowd, we don’t want them to contaminate the C and D crowd.”

The success of this strategy, however, depends on regular testing for COVID-19. “If we don’t have testing when someone starts feeling ill and we don’t know what group to isolate, we’re going to end up having to isolate everyone again,” Cohn added.

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/gary-cohn-restarting-economy-after-coronavirus-not-going-to-be-an-overnight-big-bang-204735941.html
 

This is the strategy they used with essential office workers returning over the last month here in Wuhan.  Ongoing staggered rotations.  Even VP Pence now realizes there’s not going to be one big grand reopening without mass-scale testing.  Otoh, “one prominent voice pushing for a return to normalcy, according to The Washington Post, is the vice president’s chief of staff, who is not a medical professional.”

 

Iceland's 10% figure, confirmed by Stefansson, is not about bragging rights. 

Among the Nordic nation's findings: about half of its citizenry at any given time who have coronavirus but don't know it, will be asymptomatic – a large percentage many experts studying the virus have suspected, but have had little firm data to corroborate. 

"That's a bit scary," said Stefansson, who noted that Iceland is testing its citizens at random by selecting names out of the country's main telephone directory, another large-scale testing strategy that has not been adopted elsewhere.

"They could be spreading it and not knowing it," he said.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/iceland-tested-more-population-coronavirus-081244404.html
 

Which means we would have to test at least 32 million Americans to get to 10%.

 

Edited April 10, 2020 by caulfield12

[default]

Duplicate

Edited April 10, 2020 by default

[caulfield12]

1 minute ago, default said:

 

Even if you listen to Washington Journal on C-Span for three hours every morning, you’re simply going to absorb biased opinions from BOTH sides of the spectrum in roughly equal number, but an infinitesimal number of objective or at least nuanced opinions. 

[hi8is]

1 hour ago, default said:

Legendary stuff there...

It really is like we’re living in a bad Mike Judge film.

[default]

10 minutes ago, caulfield12 said:

Even if you listen to Washington Journal on C-Span for three hours every morning, you’re simply going to absorb biased opinions from BOTH sides of the spectrum in roughly equal number, but an infinitesimal number of objective or at least nuanced opinions. 

I get it man; I really do.   It seems, however, that understanding the difference between a fact and opinion, no matter how unbiased, is unimportant to when it fits a identity-supporting narrative.   

[NWINFan]

10 hours ago, Yearnin' for Yermin said:

This. Don't get me wrong, Fox News is as bad as it gets, but CNN has absolute disdain for Trump. They will rarely ever give him a shred of credit when he does good. It's all about attacking him, constantly. They give credence to his fake news complaints unfortunately.

CNN, like any other news organization, is far from perfect. But Trump adds to this situation with his stupid tweets and anger. Not to mention he has no respect for the truth.

For one thing, I am sick of the fake news slogan. Any time Trump or any Republican is confronted with something they need to answer, they simply say fake news and walk away. There is inaccurate and slanted reporting. I watch MSNBC, but I even I can see the bias at times, and some of the things they do make me sick. Really sick. I was glad to see Chris Matthews go. That man was awful.

But if I want real bias and real fake news, it's Fox. Those people have no shame. They don't care how they lie or who they smear. And they are still not taking this crisis seriously, and that is dangerous.

[NorthSideSox72]

I just gave up on all the "news networks" (Fox, CNN, MSNBC, other alphabet soups), and my news diet is almost exclusively from journalistic sources. My regular reads are WSJ, Economist, WaPo, the Trib. Occasional reads on NPR, NY Times. Some of those have their biases too (some right and some left in there) but A) they do quality journalism and just as important, B) they separate reporting from analysis/opinion and do it clearly. I think that second thing is a big part of the problem with network news, it's all blended together so that opinions start to obscure facts.

I highly recommend making a switch like this. Clarifies the mind quite effectively.

That said, none of those networks - even Fox - lie or manipulate at as high a rate as our own damn President. Just watch his COVID briefings for G-d's sake.