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I think you underestimate people's dissatisfaction with the government's over reach and distrust of the so called "experts" who have orchestrated this catastrophe. When things start to open up, there will be an uptick in infections. No argument there. But the hospitals will not be over run. The fear mongers want to push this vision of doom, but this outcome is highly unlikely. Looks to me like the virus is starting to burn itself out, but that's just my opinion. I'm not an "expert".
What is clear is simply this. Continuing our lives in lockdown mode is NOT an option. We can't afford this kind of mentality either economically or psychologically. We can either surrender and live our lives like frightened sheep, or we can reclaim our lives and move on. If you choose to remain in lockdown, that's okay with me. Makes more room for me on the roads, in the grocery stores, hair salons, and in the malls.
What we can't afford is the mindset of idiots being allow to make decisions that they are too stupid to not make. Like idiots going to church with no masks on in big groups. That's just dumb. We need to SLOWLY test the waters here coming out of lock down. As long as someone can return to work safely with a mask and limit their time of exposure to others until widespread testing is available, then that is what we should do if the experts advise that course of action. There is no reason to leave the house other than work, groceries, exercise, or essentials. Does it suck? Yes. But guess what... others dying because someone unknowingly spread the virus to them sucks even more.
What we can't afford is the mindset of idiots being allow to make decisions that they are too stupid to not make. Like idiots going to church with no masks on in big groups. That's just dumb. We need to SLOWLY test the waters here coming out of lock down. As long as someone can return to work safely with a mask and limit their time of exposure to others until widespread testing is available, then that is what we should do if the experts advise that course of action. There is no reason to leave the house other than work, groceries, exercise, or essentials. Does it suck? Yes. But guess what... others dying because someone unknowingly spread the virus to them sucks even more.
Who are the experts here? Ohio is re-opening many businesses under the guidance of Dr. Acton.
Also, "safe" does not have a concrete definition that everyone agrees on. It's a spectrum ranging from complete and total lock down to living like 2019.
What we can't afford is the mindset of idiots being allow to make decisions that they are too stupid to not make. Like idiots going to church with no masks on in big groups. That's just dumb. We need to SLOWLY test the waters here coming out of lock down. As long as someone can return to work safely with a mask and limit their time of exposure to others until widespread testing is available, then that is what we should do if the experts advise that course of action. There is no reason to leave the house other than work, groceries, exercise, or essentials. Does it suck? Yes. But guess what... others dying because someone unknowingly spread the virus to them sucks even more.
OMG. Wow!! So the people are idiots and too stupid to know what is good for them. So the government needs to step in and make sure they are required to make the right choices. I've got news for you. I'm too old to be spooked by all of this crap. I'm 70 years old so I've seen a lot. And I have a pretty good grasp on history and know what has been going on over the last hundred years. Let's say the last few thousand years.
I hope that when this thing burns out, state legislatures will reexamine the powers that have been granted to the governors of their states. Whatever good they have done has to be balanced against the damage they have done. And that would include Il Duce in Ohio.
OMG. Wow!! So the people are idiots and too stupid to know what is good for them. So the government needs to step in and make sure they are required to make the right choices. I've got news for you. I'm too old to be spooked by all of this crap. I'm 70 years old so I've seen a lot. And I have a pretty good grasp on history and know what has been going on over the last hundred years. Let's say the last few thousand years.
I hope that when this thing burns out, state legislatures will reexamine the powers that have been granted to the governors of their states. Whatever good they have done has to be balanced against the damage they have done. And that would include Il Duce in Ohio.
Yes, mature people with a basic sense of empathy understand this exactly. Some posters here do not though, it's quite sad to see the I-got-mine selfish attitudes on here.
OMG. Wow!! So the people are idiots and too stupid to know what is good for them. So the government needs to step in and make sure they are required to make the right choices. I've got news for you. I'm too old to be spooked by all of this crap. I'm 70 years old so I've seen a lot. And I have a pretty good grasp on history and know what has been going on over the last hundred years. Let's say the last few thousand years.
I hope that when this thing burns out, state legislatures will reexamine the powers that have been granted to the governors of their states. Whatever good they have done has to be balanced against the damage they have done. And that would include Il Duce in Ohio.
OMG. Wow!! So the people are idiots and too stupid to know what is good for them. So the government needs to step in and make sure they are required to make the right choices.I've got news for you. I'm too old to be spooked by all of this crap. I'm 70 years old so I've seen a lot. And I have a pretty good grasp on history and know what has been going on over the last hundred years. Let's say the last few thousand years.
I hope that when this thing burns out, state legislatures will reexamine the powers that have been granted to the governors of their states. Whatever god they have done has to be balanced against the damage they have done. And that would include Il Duce in Ohio.
Sadly, yes.
In California for example, the government shouldn’t have to threaten people for breaking the rules. People should be smart enough to obey them in the first place.
Nonessential businesses that continue to operate as normal is irresponsible and selfish. No different than 100 people congregating in a church with no masks on.
When some posters here realize that self accountability and self responsibility are important, they’ll get the big picture.
It's not all about you. Be considerate of other people.
My belief is we are all here to help other people and if you can't do
that at the very least, please don't hurt them.
A large number of Ohioans and Americans continue to follow the Deceitful, Mad Buffoon (inject disinfectant, take a dangerous drug as a prophylactic, proclaim that nothing has been done wrong) down the rabbit hole, as evidenced in many posts lately in this thread. Under competent political leadership, we should have been able to contain this epidemic without devastating our economy. My fear, as explained below, is that much more pain lies ahead given our poor and insufficient policy responses, both in Ohio and nationally.
Just listening to news reports in the last few days, and a visit yesterday to a few grocery stores, reinforced my contempt for the prevalent strain of imbecility which characterizes a large minority, perhaps even a majority, of American society. Perhaps this is understandable given the poor quality of COVID-19 journalism in Ohio, especially northeastern Ohio. Check out the now Gannett-controlled Columbus Dispatch for far superior COVID-19 reporting; the Dispatch COVID-19 reporting is now outside of its paywall as a public service.
Just sticking to just the public health aspects of the COVID-19 epidemic, and ignoring the dire economic consequences of America's relatively feeble public health response, let alone even more threatening non-COVID-19 topics, I am disgusted.
Given an immediate concern, I will begin with a discussion of Brazil, which is experiencing an out-of-control COVID-19 epidemic. On the NBC Nightly News on Friday, 5/22, there was a short segment on the Brazil epidemic -- "Brazil's coronavirus cases surge as hospitals overwhelmed."
Most hospitalized patients in Brazil are in their 40s, or younger, according to the report. So much for the belief in this thread that COVID-19, if allowed to run its natural course, is only an old persons' disease. Despite a raging COVID-19 epidemic in Brazil, the Trump administration hasn't imposed a ban on travel from Brazil to the U.S. Anybody traveling from Brazil is free to enter American society, with not even any COVID-19 test screening, let alone a quarantine.
The lack of a U.S. ban on travel from Brazil, or any other South American country despite mushrooming epidemics in other SA nations, likely stems from President Trump's mutual admiration friendship with Brazilian President Jair Bolsinaro. Like Trump, Bolsinaro rejects a coordinated, effective national response to the COVID-19 epidemic, as explained in this more in-depth report from NBC News.
The 5/22 NBC News also has a segment on Mexican hospitals being so overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients that ambulances are being turned away (so much for the theory about hotter temperatures suppressing the COVID-19 epidemic). More disturbingly, the report showed how Mexico's government dismisses the need for testing. Without testing, there is no contact tracing and no quarantines to reduce transmission. Likely not coincidentally, if a person dies without testing positive for the COVID-19 virus, there is no need to report the death as COVID-19 related in official death statistics.
By contrast to the inept U.S. international travel policies, Australia quarantines ALL incoming travelers for 14 days, even if they test negative for the COVID-19 virus, as they can carry the COVID-19, not test positive for several days, and be asymptomatic carriers capable of rapid-firing community spread. Australia also has banned foreign travel by its citizens. It even allows its states and territories to impose their own bans.
My emphasis on travel bans in this post is because it is the LATEST of U.S. policy failures relative to other nations.
The most egregious U.S. policy failure is the lack of national testing, contact tracing and quarantine policies. The federal government continues to devote grossly inadequate resources to these necessities of epidemic control, regardless of the virus. Worse, U.S. testing statistics are shamefully unreliable.
One of the great tragedies IMO of modern America, especially during this COVID-19 epidemic, is that the likes of Trump and Mitch McConnell have supplanted the likes of Bill Frist, let alone George H.W. Bush and Jim Baker, in the leadership of the Republican Party. Here is a recent interview of former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, also a cardiac surgeon.
<<CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Our next guest, a surgeon and former Senate majority leader from Tennessee, doctor senator, Bill Frist, raised the alarm about preparing for pandemics 15 years ago....
FRIST: ...Containment is the only way to prevent death and destruction. But is it excessive and costly containment? Or is it more of an affordable containment. Poverty, job loss 30 percent of unemployment has a huge human cost that is — goes beyond just having money to put food on the table, but actually leads to death and leads to depression and leads to suicide. So that’s the pressure that some of these, not just governors, but every small business person listening to us now who says, I don’t know if I can keep my business going for weeks and months, and now you’re talking about six months and a year....
What we need to do two — we need to do two things. We need as many as 30 million tests a week. We’re only doing about a million tests a week. And coupled with that, we need to do contact testing, contact tracing. And all that means is, if you test positive for the COVID virus, that is, you have the virus now, you need to tell the last 10 people or 10 people who — or 15 people who you have had more than 15 minutes of contact with over the preceding two weeks. That list, you generate. You give it to a person, or technology can be used. Those people need to be contacted, and contacted right now, told that they were in contact and could be infected. They need to get tested. So we need to test, A, and then they need to be quarantined for 14 days if they cannot be tested. That absolutely has to be done.>>
It's ridiculous that U.S. testing statistics are unreliable. Ohio's testing statistics are especially pathetic and testing levels remain grossly inadequate. Somebody should ask Gov. Mike DeWine why Los Angeles County for weeks has offered FREE Covid-19 testing to EVERYONE and we still have inadequate, and expensive testing, options in Ohio.
Locally, on my visits to grocery stores yesterday, mask wearing has fallen precipitously from those observed levels even a week ago. I estimate that less than 20 percent of customers were wearing masks.
We also still have a shameful lack of personal protection equipment in Ohio and elsewhere in the nation, and consumers still can not readily buy N95 masks.
For those who contradict the experts and don't believe that social distancing or prevention measures such as mask wearing make a difference, how do you ignore the rampant infection rates experience in the likes of Italy, New York City and now Brazil and Mexico. Summer weather isn't protecting Montgomery, AL, where the ICU units now are full. Hopefully, the Cleveland Clinic hasn't yet dismantled its temporary, flow-over hospital erected in the new medical school building across from campus.
<<Social distancing and masks "really work," she said. "This emphasis on personal responsibility is fantastic. If everybody did that we wouldn't need to worry about arguing about these restrictions. The challenge is we all have different ideas of personal responsibility in a civil society."
In a public service announcement, University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban scolds mascot Big Al for not wearing a mask.>>
<<“While our models show that rising temperatures and humidity levels are having an impact on reducing the spread of COVID-19, those hot, humid days of summer are not going to eliminate the threat of virus resurgence,” said Dr. Gregory Tasian, faculty member at PolicyLab, assistant professor of Urology and Epidemiology and senior scholar in the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. “The areas of the south that our models project have a high risk of resurgence in the next few weeks may already be approaching their average summertime temperatures and humidity levels. Therefore, their risk for seeing increasing case counts rests solely on how cautiously they reopen communities and manage crowding.”>>
The above model is available for several Ohio counties, but they are useless because they assume that current social distancing policies remain in place, and those policies, thanks to the Republican Ohio legislature, are being eviscerated.
BTW, while most Ohio deaths TO DATE, have been among the elderly, often in nursing homes, 38 percent of hospitalizations have been among those younger than age 60. Ten percent have been among those less than age 40.
More strict and well complied with social distancing policies in Ohio likely have protected the younger Ohioans. When these persons no longer practice social distancing, the rate of transmission among them will increase, as well hospitalization and even death rates.
I could write a much more about the economic consequences, both immediately and for many years and even decades, of our inept response to this epidemic. Note that the costs experienced by businesses of reopening then experiencing weak customers counts as the epidemic intensifies or as more wealthy and older consumers practice continued social isolation. Also, the U.S. leadership is ignoring the possibility of a second, perhaps larger, wave of COVID-19 infections beginning this fall, especially in combination with the seasonal flu.
Americans and their leadership also are ignoring the immense difficulty of developing a COVID-19 vaccination. Few Americans know that humanity has NEVER developed an effective and safe coronavirus vaccine, and the develop of one will be the equivalent of the introduction of the polio vaccines in the 1950s.
<<Researchers at Oxford University recently analysed blood from recovered Covid-19 patients and found that levels of IgG antibodies – those responsible for longer-lasting immunity – rose steeply in the first month of infection but then began to fall again.
Last week, scientists at Rockefeller University in New York found that most people who recovered from Covid-19 without going into hospital did not make many killer antibodies against the virus....
So far, the Sars-CoV-2 coronavirus seems fairly stable, but it is acquiring mutations, as all viruses do. Some genetic changes have been spotted in the virus’s protein “spikes” which are the basis of most vaccines. If the spike protein mutates too much, the antibodies produced by a vaccine will effectively be out of date and might not bind the virus effectively enough to prevent infection....
Vaccines that contain weakened strains of virus can be dangerous for older people, but might be given to younger people with more robust immune systems to reduce the spread of infection.
Meanwhile, older people might get vaccines that simple prevent infections progressing to life-threatening pneumonia. “If you don’t have the ability to induce immunity, you’ve got to develop a strategy for reducing serious outcomes of infection,” says McCauley.
But partially effective vaccines have their own problems: a vaccine that doesn’t stop the virus replicating can encourage resistant strains to evolve, making the vaccine redundant.>>
Competent American leadership, rather than promising that a "Warp Speed" project will deliver a vaccine by year-end, conveniently AFTER the November elections, should be discussing "antibody-induced enhancement," which concerns many of the infectious disease and vaccine experts that I've heard discuss the prospect for a human COVID-19 vaccine. From the above article:
<<Another serious concern is “antibody-induced enhancement” where the antibodies produced by a vaccine actually make future infections worse. The effect caused serious lung damage in animals given experimental vaccines for both Sars and Mers.
John McCauley, director of the Worldwide Influenza Centre at the Francis Crick Institute, says it takes time to understand the particular challenges each vaccine throws up. “You don’t know the difficulties, the specific difficulties, that every vaccine will give you,” he says. “And we haven’t got experience in handling this virus or the components of the virus.”>>
Competent leadership admits mistakes and tells the truth.
<<"This damn virus is going to keep going until it infects everybody it possibly can," Osterholm said Monday during a meeting with the USA TODAY Editorial Board. "It surely won’t slow down until it hits 60 to 70%" of the population, the number that would create herd immunity and halt the spread of the virus....
During the 1918 flu pandemic that sickened one-third of the world's population, New York City and Chicago were hit hard in the first wave of illness that largely bypassed other cities such as Boston, Detroit, Minneapolis and Philadelphia. The second wave of illness was much more severe nationwide.>>
Competent leadership also encourages and, when necessary, institutes penalties for the failure to take vaccines, rather than coddling the anti-vaccine cult. Polls indicate as many as 25 percent of Americans would refuse to take even an effective COVID-19 vaccine.
When considering the adequacy of the U.S. COVID-19 policy response, consider that other nations, including South Korea and Germany, have used highly effective testing, contact tracing and quarantine policies to control the COVID-19 epidemic. In South Korea's case, which used massive testing very early in the epidemic, its economy has been relatively undamaged.
Consider the mortality rate in the U.S. relative to other nations, even presuming, as do most experts, that COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. are significantly understated.
While U.S. deaths per 100,000 are over 29, many countries have kept the death rate below one, including South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.
Greece, which like Australia, instituted a very effective travel quarantine, is under 2, and Germany and Austria, which share a border with hard-hit Italy, have mortality rates under 10. Of course, the U.S. mortality rate will continue to increase as we "re-open" despite serious policy deficiencies compared to other developed nations....
BTW, while most Ohio deaths TO DATE, have been among the elderly, often in nursing homes, 38 percent of hospitalizations have been among those younger than age 60. Ten percent have been among those less than age 40.
The statistics were as of 5/22 and may subsequently change. With the reopening of the Ohio economy, the statistics should trend younger given the likelihood of lessened social distancing among younger persons. It's possible, however, greater numbers of asymptomatic young persons may increase infection rates among more elderly family members, friends, and associates, if those more elderly persons don't maintain social distancing with the younger persons.
Nothing was done in South Korea to contain the COVID-19 epidemic that could not have been done in the U.S., especially a ramp up of national testing, contract tracing, effective quarantine policies, and travel bans early in the epidemic.
The U.S. likely will spend at least $4 trillion on COVID-19 relief just in its fiscal year 2020, ending Sept. 30. Reflecting about $3 trillion of COVID-19 relief already in the pipeline and authorized by Congress, the Congressional Budget Office is projecting a 2020 FY deficit of $3.7 trillion, up from about $1 trillion prior to the COVID-19 epidemic. There is bipartisan acknowledgement that additional relief is needed.
Less focus has been placed on the CBO's projection of a 14 percent U.S. unemployment rate for calendar year Q2, 16 percent for Q3, and still 11.7 Q4. The permanent harm to the economy inflicted by our inept policy response is reflected in the CBO projection that the unemployment rate will exceed 10 percent in 2021!
By contrast, South Korea, which implemented extremely effective national COVID-19 control policies at the beginning of the epidemic without shutting down its economy, actually reduced unemployment in April compared to the same month in 2019!
Additionally, the Federal Reserve Bank will provide over $3 trillion of monetary stimulus, much by purchasing federal debt with newly created U.S. dollars (a process called debt monetization). Such Fed actions increase the risk of debasing the U.S. dollar and causing a painful stagflation such as the U.S. last experienced in the 1970s and early 1980s.
Click on "Max" here, in order to understand how inflation-adjusted housing and other asset prices might collapse due to higher interest rates demanded by investors to compensate for inflation.
Of course, if the U.S. does not institute effective COVID-19 containment policies, the economic impact could be far greater than currently projected, especially if a second wave of the epidemic emerges later this year, in conjunction with the flu season.
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The bottom line...
