Most of the various states of emergency distinguish between “essential” businesses and, well, everyone else.
These “essential” businesses possess a level of expertise and competence that, clearly, leaves lesser busineses in the dust. They are able to enact policies and procedures for public safety that are so far beyond the ken of the mere prole, they are indistinguishable from magic.
I saw some of this voodoo at an “essential” local merchant – and was nearly struck dumb by the grandeur of its reasoning. And it made me think “This, truly, is the level of intellectual and scientific chops that separates the wheat from the chaff”.
What was this voodoo?
Brace yourselves:
Ready?
I know, right? Limiting people in the store, and separating people by six feet while they wait.
And – not merely asking people to stand six feet apart, but giving the spatially-challenged visual indicators about how far apart that is!
Or – strap yourselves in, people – in businesses catering to cars, have people stay in their cars.
No wonder it’s only big box stores and “essential” businesses that are open.
These are the people that got America to the moon.
Stand back, peasants.
Keep in mind that nearly everyone you are keeping your “social distance” from do not have covid-19.
These were recommendations from “public health experts” who have either offered advice that is banal (“if you are sick, stay at home), to unproven snake oil (“stay six feet apart”).
These rules were devised by people who told us six weeks ago that wearing a mask was foolish and unnecessary, and are now behind rules, with the force of law, that require that you wear a mask in public places.
While you were driving in that neighborhood, did you happen to notice all the shuttered restaurants? Red Lobster. The Good Earth. Willowgate II. La Casita.
Okay, Davannis and Wendys are open for take-out. Is Joe Senser’s open? Axel’s Bonfire? The Indian Palace?
There are three dozen jobs or more – locked down – and for what? Restaurant tables too close together? Fine, rope off every other one. Give them a fighting chance to survive.
For those of you that may not have seen this, I thought that I would post it. One Chicago restaurant had a humorous take on explaining social distancing.
https://twitter.com/CraycraftBrett/status/1248060149580943378/photo/1
These are the people that got America to the moon.
Wrong. The people who got America to the moon were educated in the pre-globalist/progressive agenda school system of 1st half of the 20th Century. Back then, it was the 3 Rs that were taught and not self esteem strategies, safe space policing, the religion of environmentalism, nor the benefits of collectivism/evils of capitalism.
I just now saw that tweet, boss. I notice our host is a bit quiet about it. Heh.
Germany is already planning on lifting their lockdown — largely based on their ability to test and trace — and they have *very* stringent privacy laws so don’t assume China-type surveillance. They plan enough testing that they can reopen borders…test the incoming/outgoing travelers too!
If we had a government that believed in data instead of “truthiness” this would be easier. But it’s possible that individual states can do this without Trump & Co. Look to other countries — it doesn’t have to be invented here!
I hope the CDC is listening — they fumbled the initial test efforts by trying to invent their own when other countries’ tests (including Germany’s) worked well enough and were readily available.
The test for the covid-19 antibodies approved by the FDA has ~20% rate of false positives.
Don’t be a test fetishist.
^^ “The U.S. should at least double coronavirus testing in the coming weeks before easing into reopening the economy, the government’s top infectious disease expert [Dr Fauci] said Saturday.” ~ Politico
If you start late in something that’s good, it’s not as good as if you started early. Which nobody in the world could disagree with, yet the Trump administration found a way to disagree with it.
EI;
What will the tests prove if they are resulting in false positives? A lot of the tests are still defective.
From what I’ve read, the false positives result from the test falsely idenitifying other types of coronavirus antibodies as covid-19 antibodies.
“Don’t worry about leaving granny with us hear at shady acres! All of our 80 emplyees have tested positive for having covid-19 antibodies, so only 16 of them can potentially pass her the infection!”
Would you would prefer something more in line with the Swedish Model?
Yes, And I am in a risk group, male, ex smoker, over age 60 (though just barely).
I really would prefer the Swedish model. We are all going to be exposed to a covid-19 carrier eventually,aren’t we? And the vast majority of us, 99%+ will survive. Most of us won’t even know we are sick.
No one in my neighborhood pays attention to the social distancing rules. And in all of Puna, not one confirmed case of covid-19. Something is happening that the model-makers did not consider. That should be obvious to any honest person.
Beware of the shifting goal posts. The state government here initially said the lockdown was intended to keep the hospitals from being overwhelmed. They were predicting 50,000 hospitalization at the peak on April 19th. Instead of 50,000, we had less than a hundred. So the goal has shifted to preventing infections.
It is madness.
Sweden’s confirmed coronavirus deaths, on a per capita basis, are 50% higher than the US’s, and their death rate curve is climbing. This is a good thing?
At some point, people will realize that “developing herd immunity” is code for doing nothing and letting the virus keep killing lots of people until everyone who could ultimately be susceptible to dying from it is dead. This is a strategy?
While I wait for the heavy hand of SiTD moderation….
The informed, educated Swedes trust themselves, each other, their transparent institutions and government.
So socially distancing, sanitizers, masks and general common sense to prevent the spread of infection occurs without much fuss.
Nobody’s running around with guns demanding for the right to be infected and attack frontline health carers like in the US.
Sweden has taken a radically different approach to healthcare than the US.
Health care is universal for all citizens in Sweden.
Sweden’s Pubic Health Agency, rather than politicians, has complete authority to decide health policy.
And also, the preconditions in the US if you want to do Sweden, I mean, no mention here of obesity. No mention of type 2 diabetes. The fact that American healthcare is nowhere close to what Sweden’s is. Sweden is also much more homogeneous. Makes the two systems so different.
And Sweden’s main focus is on TESTING.
EI,
Is this a good thing?
Strawman. It’s not a “good thing”. But if their healthcare system isn’t overwhelmed (like Italy, Spain and NYC), then they are likely deaths that would happen at some point in the curve no matter what.
At some point, people will realize that “developing herd immunity…
Every time some “progressive” says they revere “science”, I point them to comments like this.
There’s not going to be a vaccine. Not for a couple of years, maybe not ever. All this talk of “Staying shut down until there’s a virus” is pure magical thinking.
“Developing herd immunity” is inevitable – eventually. The whole point of “flattening the curve” is not to prevent people from catching Covid – eventually, nearly everyone will, whether via community spread or via a vaccine. It’s about getting to ‘herd immunity’ without destroying the healthcare system’s ability to care for patients.
Due to government hamfistedness, we have preserved that ability at the cost of making most other healthcare difficult to impossible – but that’s a tangent.
Point being, EI, you’re wrong.
We need to find solution to American herd, not try to fit the solution of Swedish herd. In Sweden, the income inequality is one of the lowest while in this country it is highest. Swedes have free education and health care, while millions of Americans are without education and without healthcare. Swedish leaders don’t promote to ingest household cleaners to kill the virus, while our leaders do. A country that elected Trump to be their leader is unique and needs to find its own unique solution.
In Sweden, the income inequality is one of the lowest while in this country it is highest.
Non-sequitur.
Swedes have free education and health care, while millions of Americans are without education and without healthcare.
Non-sequitur.
Swedish leaders don’t promote to ingest household cleaners to kill the virus, while our leaders do.
Good news! This isn’t a fallacy, it’s just a LIE.
In case you missed it, in all it’s glory:
“Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light — and I think [Dr. Deborah Birx] said that hasn’t been checked but you’re going to test it. And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that, too. Sounds interesting. I see disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute, and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that. So you’re going to have to use medical doctors, but it sounds interesting to me. So, we’ll see. But the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute, that’s pretty powerful. ” It will take a truckload of ignorance or irrational love for the guy to conclude anything other than that he seriously thought that just because a cleaning agent kills the virus on the outside, somehow we should inject it inside and ‘test’. ~ Donald Trump
A lot of readers here don’t appear to be reading. The point is not that “doing nothing” yields roughly the same result as we’re seeing in the US. The point is that Sweden planned their approach against a backdrop of a much stronger safety net than we have.
The Trump administration had no plan, either in the abstract or for the pandemic they were warned about.
Sweden has a higher per-capita death rate from coronavirus than the US and is doing far worse than its neighbouring Nordic countries. Maybe the argument here, though, is that sacrificing grandma and grandpa is okay if it allows us to eat in a restaurant again.
If Sweden has had 11 times the deaths of Norway next door, the question I’d have is how many dead people does it take before they decide their “experiment” didn’t work?
Huh. There seems to be a contradiction here. As in “older corona patients are strangled painfully to death without oxygen over multiple days. Nurse Latifa Löfvenberg from the Gavleborg region is alerting people to. They are strangled. Slowly”.
Äldre coronasjuka patienter kvävs plågsamt till döds utan syrgas under flera dagars tid. Det larmar nu sjuksköterskan Latifa Löfvenberg, verksam i Region Gävleborg, om.
– De kvävs. Långsamt
https://rairfoundation.com/exclusive-swedish-doctor-pleads-for-help-govt-denies-elderly-coronavirus-patients-life-saving-oxygen-watch/
Strange safety net.
Perhaps this would be interesting?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ycw-nBp94
In case you missed it, in all it’s glory:
Perhaps I was too harsh, Emery, calling it a lie. Maybe you just suck at reading comprehension, so here’s your “evidence” with the key phrase in bold:
I see disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute, and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning.
Can we “do something like that”? Isn’t that called chemotherapy?
It will take a truckload of ignorance or irrational love for the guy to conclude anything other than that he seriously thought that just because a cleaning agent kills the virus on the outside, somehow we should inject it inside and ‘test’.
GASLIGHTING AND LATENT PSYCHIC ABILITIES! You go, Emery!
No, seriously, go get your f**king shinebox.
There are countries that stood out with their effective mitigation responses. Taiwan is one and it used science and experience from SARS to map its mitigation plan. It started to track, trace contact, and quarantine right away along with test, test, test. It did it without closing schools, but did enforce social distancing. Taiwan benefited too by having a strong healthcare system for its citizenry.
The more successful countries paid attention to the science and public transparency. They had leaders who worked together as a team and looked to mitigation as a public health objective instead of playing William Bligh on a doomed Bounty.
These countries did it without political doomsday finger pointing or dismissing Covid-19 as a hoax and “harmless to 99% of the population”, because clearly it harms far more than the 1%.
@Ian: If it did turn out to be a miracle cure and that resulted in Trump’s re-election, then we can truly say that the cure is worse than the disease.
Ian: Thanks for clarifying. Everyone was just listening to the actual words that came out of his mouth.
There’s video. We all saw it, you know.
@Emery: “something like that” != “inject household cleaners into the human body.”
Seriously, seek help.
It occurred to me today that one place I can clearly object to in terms of the quarantine is the suspension of elective medical procedures. OK, St. Mary’s in Rochester recently had 5 people in ICU, most of the hospital shut down, um, is it possible that a few beds could remain open/ a few ORs could remain in use for this? I’m guessing yes.
There is also the question of “margin”. It strikes me that if I’m going to handle a few hundred cases of a highly infectious disease, I’d prefer to do so at a series of small hospitals in Podunk towns where all involved could be quarantined–and leaving big hospitals like St. Mary’s free to make good choices and be relatively COVID-free.
And then we’d have another week or two in an epidemic before things really got out of control, and a bit higher threshold for pain in terms of “when we don’t have enough ventilators” and such. And that might allow us to think through other provisions of quarantine, and whether they’ll actually be helpful.