I feel mask wearing will ultimately become an individual choice regardless of any requirement or recommendation in place—unless it is strictly enforced uniformly.
Fines would be good for anyone not wearing one within 6 feet of a non-family member.
This was deliberate incompetence.
It
is deliberate. I don't understand why. All it does is cost lives, dollars, and economic output.
I think the issue is having people trained to use the equipment, otherwise it's just that dust collector in the basement.
Yes. It takes money to train these people, and having a long-term contract with the government is what was requested by some of these manufacturers, so they didn't have to turn around and lay everyone off after 2-3 months.
I think today will mark the start of the second wave. I think we'll gradually see week-over-week numbers increase from here, at least for the next week or two (what happens after that will depend on measures that the states with problems take).
Looks like we have problems in:
Arizona, Arkansas, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and to a lesser extent, Florida, Mississippi, Kentucky, California, Alaska, and Utah. Oregon, Georgia, Alabama, North Dakota, New Mexico, South Dakota, Washington State and Nevada are showing troubling signs as well, which we need to watch carefully for trends (some of the blips may be due to localized outbreaks which are less of a concern).
I'm still hopeful that in response to the increase there will be more robust measures put in place (mandatory masking, etc., N95 masks and goggles recommended, and produced in large quantities) in the short term and we can crush the upward trend before it gets too far out of hand. Going back to being closed down is no longer really an option, so massive targeted active infection control measures are going to be necessary. Everyone should just pretend they are in a COVID ward of a hospital. I expect modeling of behaviors from the White House soon.
Unfortunately, testing has not continued to scale up rapidly (by now there's really no excuse for not doing over a million tests a day), and that may result in us not being able to thread the needle on this thing (meaning: reopen earlier than might seem prudent, but just late enough to allow massive testing capacity to squash any outbreaks).
We'll see. It's still really on a knife's edge, and it will depend on the "legs" these ongoing outbreaks have under them, and how well tested they are - if a lot of infections are being missed, things are likely going to at least temporarily get out of hand.
Arizona, for example, even in the presence of increasing test capacity, for PCR testing positivity, has gone from 6% to 9% to 12% to 14% (14% is for tests collected between June 1st and 7th, still being tabulated) in the last 4 weeks. That's a troubling sign of increasing momentum. Hoping that the final summary of June 1st-7th will somehow come in with a lower average, but their hospitalizations and intubations have also taken a big step up. As the infection density increases, it's going to be harder and harder to keep it out of vulnerable populations.
