My lovely buddhist wife is in pain watching the news. "Donald Trump is so bad the Devil doesn't want him in Hell."
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Five Thirty Eight has a good analysis of why Trump's approval has gone up. It's the "rally around the flag" effect which happens in disasters. Trump's approval boost has been fairly modest compared to other leaders.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-explains-the-bump-in-trumps-approval-ratings/
To people who have been watching the feet instead of the bloviating at the podium, the response has been sub-par at best. But we haven't hit the high water mark yet. Some parts of the country have been aggressively flattening the curve and in most of those places the peak will probably be manageable. There are also parts of the country that are still in denial there is a problem.
The next two months are going to tell the tale whether this administration managed to muddle through despite massive incompetence (mostly due to heroic efforts by people outside the administration) or if this is going to turn into a major disaster.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-explains-the-bump-in-trumps-approval-ratings/
To people who have been watching the feet instead of the bloviating at the podium, the response has been sub-par at best. But we haven't hit the high water mark yet. Some parts of the country have been aggressively flattening the curve and in most of those places the peak will probably be manageable. There are also parts of the country that are still in denial there is a problem.
The next two months are going to tell the tale whether this administration managed to muddle through despite massive incompetence (mostly due to heroic efforts by people outside the administration) or if this is going to turn into a major disaster.
It's already a major disaster.It will get worse.
In a month we may be looking at the "good old days" April 1 when death toll was only 5000.
Lee County Florida has a 5% mortality rate, 10dead, 200 confirmed cases, state is almost 8,000 cases (we’re #5), 2 cruise ships with ~2,500 passengers for 3 weeks, 4 bodies, unknown number cases want to dock today on other side of state. Religious services are exempt from statewide shutdown which finally starts today.It's already a major disaster.
LN1_Casey
Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus
It's almost as if Florida wants to get rid of the elderly. Religious services are very largely dominated by the higher age ranges. And the few younger populous would be little plague rats to bring in the disease.
I mean, look at South Korea. One person who attended two services infected the majority of the country.
Religious services exempt. What could possibly go wrong...
This has been discussed on the coronavirus thread, but it has political implications too.
US Health Weather Map by Kinsa
Kinsa Health has an internet connected thermometer and they track temperature trends around the country. They were able to predict the coming outbreak in south Florida before the CDC. Their data went wonky about a week ago because the self isolation also put an unusually abrupt end to the seasonal flu about a week ago. They shifted to some new ways of looking at the data and the Trends map was solid blue for most of the last week because of the crash in flu cases (which were much more numerous than COVID-19), but now that the 7 day rolling average is beginning to come out of that sudden change, new patterns are emerging.
It looks to me like the next outbreaks are going to be in the more rural parts of Texas, Oklahoma, much of Appalachia, and Maine. Maine looks especially bad. I saw an interview with Jay Inslee last night and he said that west of the Cascades case numbers are dropping rapidly, but they are beginning to see an increase in the more rural parts of the state. It's only a subtle shade of lighter blue on this map, but there is a strip in the middle of Washington state that is a bit lighter. That's a very rural part of the state. The lighter county in the SW corner of that swath (sticking out at the bottom) is Skamania county. It's the next county to the east of us and has about 12,000 people.
Like most of the country, that part of Washington is Trump country. It has the safest Republican congressional district in the state.
Right now Trump is riding high with his base because most of the parts of the country having bad cases are Democratic areas. Most of the parts of the above map that are showing more warmth on April 1 are Republican areas and heart of denial about COVID-19. Many of those places have medical services on par with Skamania County. If they're lucky they might have a doctor's office, but no hospital, or if they have one, it's not equipped to deal with more than one or two serious cases at a time and the hospital is almost bankrupt to begin with.
I also heard on Rachel Maddow that the strategic medical supply reserve is almost exhausted. My SO came across stories that Trump sent supplies form the reserve to China and Brazil early in the epidemic. Most of the ventilators in the reserve are non-functional because Trump decided to save a few dollars and terminated the maintenance contracts over a year ago. The feds have also not cracked down on price gouging or exporting medical supplies by distributors. Tons of supplies needed in this country are going overseas because of this and there are bidding wars for what's left between states, the federal government, and foreign entities who are all competing for a dwindling supply.
Now the reddist parts of the country are going to have large outbreaks and there will be no supplies. When California got some broken ventilators from the national stockpile, at least the state had the resources in state to get them quickly fixed. Does Alabama or Tennessee? Texas has the most resources of the next states to be hit hard, but they are dealing with their biggest industry cratering.
In another brilliant move, US oil producers have kept the pumps running as the world has developed a massive oil glut. There is talk about parking super tankers and leaving them filled with oil. In some parts of the US the price of oil has gone negative (Wyoming crude hit $0.19 a barrel) meaning the producer would have to pay to have someone take it off their hands.
Good news for those of us who think we should be phasing out oil, but it also means the state of Texas has lost one of its biggest sources of tax revenue.
IMO, this month is make or break for Trumpism. If this month pans out like I think it will, there will be a lot more cases on red states this month and a higher percentage may die because of a higher number of people with risk conditions (obesity, smoking, etc.) and lack of medical resources and preparation.
These are always 'the good old days.' It depends on your attitude according to a sage of note.
bkp_duke
Well-Known Member
Pretty much explains all your posts. Thanks for the clarification.
Is it not odd that things have become so polarized in the US that one can be readily typecast by who one listens to? It has mostly been like that, a little more so now.
I'll offer one, but mostly observed by reading articles in Science, among others. My own political bias is pretty much data driven.
The countries that have been most notably successful in holding death rate down have also been one that use mobile phone data to determine the movement patterns of people who were identified with SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19. They thn notified other people whose phones indicated they'd been in the same locations and arranged testing. China, South Korea and Germany used one version or another of that, and Germany's electronic ID cards make that easier.
Countries that could not or did not have those capabilities have had much more difficult containment. There are those who argue that one or more of these countries falsified data. From an epidemiological perspective, such capability can quickly facilitate 'clustering' and often eliminate/attenuate unfettered transmission. In closed communities (e.g. U.S. Military) such clustering is easy, fast and effective.
In countries that have split authorities between multiple political jurisdictions (e.g. Spain, Italy, US, Brazil) such clustering is difficult to impossible. When that is so both resources and identification suffer.
So, the question of the day is: Is the price of local autonomy and personal license* worth the cost?
* replace that word with 'liberty' if one wishes to do so. In this context I thought 'license' the better word.
I admit to mixed feelings. However i think the benefits of such capabilities to be worth the costs, assuming it is possible to make the system apolitical. South Korea and Germany seem to have done that. A side effect is the ability to allocate resources quickly and efficiently once a need is identified.
Why did not other major countries begin resource accumulation the moment the COVID-19 was identified publicly?
The WHO made the first notification on 8th dec 2019 and made a World Declaration of Concern on 30th January 2020. Acute concern should have begun the moment a novel form was identified, and large scale response begun on 30th January.
Italy banned flights with China on the 31st, followed by the Czechs and the US a few days later. Of course that was classically described later as "locking the barn door after the horse is gone". Italy really did not respond otherwise with alacrity, nor did the US. The real missing links for arresting spread would have been aggressive and comprehensive clustering immediately, coupled by careful isolation of people known to be at risk. At the time that was a very large political risk, but could have been quite temporary.
So back to the question: Is it worth the political cost to stop communicable disease spread?
The near future will certainly have more of these question, driven by globally increasing climatic instability that will enable easier disease vectors and more extreme climactic events. How we respond will define probability of catastrophic consequences.
bkp_duke
Well-Known Member
I basically have a high degree of suspicion for anyone registered with any political party or ascribes to the party line on either side. That mindset indicates a high degree of "group think" and when that happens, you lose independent thought and objectivity. You get lazy and believe what you are told instead of doing your own homework, your own research, and thinking about something for yourself (i.e. "does what he/she said make sense as I understand them?" - if not, is my understanding of the situation lacking, or are they reasoning incorrectly)
Basically, that's my beef, and when some people quote certain sources on either side, its a dead giveaway. I prefer to go to the original source material and make my own decisions. Similar to like how Elon wants engineers and employees that can reason from first principles, instead of working by analogy.
This lack of critical reasoning is why the masses that follow both parties are so easily manipulated, and why things are so polarized, IMHO. If people reasoned for themselves, these groups would meet more in the middle than they do.
Reason is not the normal control over human feelings or politics might work. Cf the Grand Inquisitor in the Brothers Karamazov. More on point in attacking rationality is from his Notes from the Underground: "...reason...satisfies only the rational side of man's nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses." Anything less reveals a crippled understanding of science.
The enlightened want the real thing not the feeling of certainty. A clear verdict of the 2016 election and that is likely to be repeated in 2020. As Hegel said almost poetically: "The Owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk."
The enlightened want the real thing not the feeling of certainty. A clear verdict of the 2016 election and that is likely to be repeated in 2020. As Hegel said almost poetically: "The Owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk."
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JRP3
Hyperactive Member
I can't say I've seen much of this in your postings, they are as polarized as anyone's.
bkp_duke
Well-Known Member
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
The difference being that I'm not pretending. However you'll see quite a lot of bashing of the Dems from me in this thread as well as the Reps.
bkp_duke
Well-Known Member
As I've openly stated, I sit further right and identify as a conservative (not a Republican). Just given the sheers number of far left posts in this thread the law of averages dictates that you will see me post against those heavily.
I line up very nicely with most here, however, on the environment.
bkp_duke
Well-Known Member
Even a broken clock...
Pot meet kettle. . .
Too bad there is not an emoji more appropriate than 'love'. Choosing partisan information or just viewing objective data as if it were a political issue drives me up a wall. The currently advanced notion that the good Dr. Fauci is advancing a political agenda is among the silliest. There might even be a clue in that he had superb relationships with both Bushes and Barack Obama. There may be legitimate criticism of the man, but he's not being accused of errors of fact, but of lack of political deference.
Thus my preferred sources are original reports when I can easily find them or Science or similar when I cannot.
Laziness cannot be a trait in a person of integrity. Integrity counts. Thus I find it easy to agree with someone who has evidence that corrects an erroneous opinion I have held. I do tend to be slightly abrupt when opinion is presented as fact.
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