“Politics is the least effective possible way to get things done” is a tight paraphrase of one of my favorite Kevin Williamson quotes. And it may as well be the theme in this piece, from far-from-right Pro Publica,
Pullquote from among many contenders:
[San Francisco Mayor London] Breed, it turns out, had sent de Blasio a copy of her detailed shelter-in-place order. She thought New York might benefit from it.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, however, reacted to de Blasio’s idea for closing down New York City with derision. It was dangerous, he said, and served only to scare people. Language mattered, Cuomo said, and “shelter-in-place” sounded like it was a response to a nuclear apocalypse.
Moreover, Cuomo said, he alone had the power to order such a measure.
For years, Cuomo and de Blasio, each of whom has harbored national political ambitions, had engaged in a kind of intrastate cold war, a rivalry that to many often felt childish and counterproductive. When de Blasio finally decided to close the city’s schools, it was Cuomo who rushed to make the public announcement, claiming it as his decision.
“No city in the state can quarantine itself without state approval,” Cuomo said of de Blasio’s call for a shelter-in-place order. “I have no plan whatsoever to quarantine any city.”
Cuomo’s conviction didn’t last. On March 22, he, too, shuttered his state. The action came six days after San Francisco had shut down, five days after de Blasio suggested doing similarly and three days after all of California had been closed by Newsom. By then, New York faced a raging epidemic, with the number of confirmed cases at 15,000 doubling every three or four days.
Being a leftist publication, the elephant in the room – population density is a key vector of transmission – got skipped.
But tinhorn imperial personality poiltics? That just plain killec.
Babylon Bee reported on this:
https://babylonbee.com/news/mayor-de-blasio-lays-naval-minefield-to-deter-swimmers
Really, there is something really impressive about a major who does prohibit the use of open beaches (not just requiring spacing, all out ban), but does not bother to clean the subways. I seem to remember as well that at least relatively recently, they didn’t even have standard, regular trash pickup there. You would almost think that they were trying to design the city for infection.
Message to US public from the president:
1) Don’t wear a mask
2) Try hydroxychloroquine
Feels a little stupid
Yea, Emery, but you lefties are always screaming “follow the scientists and doctors”, yet you ignore the fact that Trump did listen to them early on when they all said that this virus was “nothing to worry about” and “no need to wear masks” and “masks won’t protect you” and “shutting down travel between China and Europe is stupid, racist, misogynistic and (inset other left wing moonbat meme here)”. But, then why did China and the EU shut down travel within a week after Trump did it. Your TDS, stupidity and hypocrisy are the issues.
Even the vaunted U of MN has a study that cloth masks are useless against COVID.
Even the vaunted U of MN has a study that cloth masks are useless against COVID.
To be fair, the U study may have been produced by surveying the night shift janitors during Spring Break.
NW;
Or grad students.
Regarding face masks, they’re not useless, but their benefit is sometimes eliminated as people think they’re invulnerable because they’ve got their armor on. You see the same thing with bike helmets, body armor, and the like. That’s not going to stop me from using any of those three when appropriate–when it mitigates a real risk.
In hospital settings, where there is real, tangible risk of transmitting an infection, they have N95 masks and follow strict protocols in handling them.
“Cover your mouth and nose with a piece of fabric” is homeopathy.
Wearing a mask as most people do — handling it improperly, washing it irregularly, may slow the community transmission of the Chinese flu, but I have seen no evidence that it does. I keep reading advice from the CDC and state health officials recommending or mandating the use of cloth masks, and I look for the little footnote ref where they cite the data that underlies there recommendation. Ain’t found one yet.
Yeah, yeah, but I still want to wear a “Wolf Man” or “Darth Vader” mask to the supermarket someday.
Or a skull and go with a black robe and a scythe and shop as “Death”.
“Regarding face masks, they’re not useless”
That’s true. No one wearing a maskie ever had a bee fly into their mouth. And they are a boon to people who work around those don’t brush their teeth at least once a day.
I actually tried to buy a medieval Plague doctor mask….sold out everywhere. I still want one.
Liberty Maniacs web page has Guy Fawkes-style neck-gaiters, and some that have Gadsden Flag versions that say “Don’t breathe on me.”
I was at the Home Depot in Bloomington yesterday evening and saw three guys wearing masks with the Punisher on them. There are some of varied designs/styles on Etsy.
Consider this. The higher the density, the greater the chances you’re sharing physical space with galactic fuckwits like D_K. Who wants that? Think about it, you might end up getting a Big Mac and fries from one. Talk about contact tracing!
Well, I just heard from my mother that two of her oldest friends have died of covid-19 in the last seventy-two hours. Both were around 80 years old, both were in nursing homes in Minnesota. These were women in the neighborhood when I was growing up in Fridley in the 60s and 70s. One of them was my stepfather’s sister in law. These were my friends’ moms.
To the extent that they died from covid-19, they did not die because there was no coordinated federal response, they did not die because of a lack of testing, or because of a lack of ventilators, or because of a lack of masks or contact-tracing. They died because Walz is more interested in shutting down barber shops and schools than he is in protecting at-risk Minnesotans.
So on the killing my friends’ moms score card, Walz is ahead of Trump, 2-0.
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It now appears that the reason that some governors sent nursing home residents with covid-19 back to the nursing home from the hospital was because they believed the epidemiologists’ gloomy predictions & they wanted to free up hospital beds for an inundation of covid-19 patients that never materialized.
In other words, they had tunnel vision and they put the epidemiologists in charge of public health policy.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. Epidemiologists are famous for making predictions that are far too pessimistic. Niall Ferguson, the disgraced epidemiologist who designed the UK’s current lock down regime, predicted, back in 2002, that as many as 150,000 Britons would die from Mad Cow disease. His prediction led to a near panic in Britain. Many healthy herds of cows and flocks of sheep were slaughtered and their meat discarded.
The total number of human deaths due to Mad Cow Disease were closer to a hundred than to 150,000. And if you think that the slaughter of the herds and flocks prevented more deaths, guess again. Later research has shown that the prions that cause Mad Cow disease fail to spread in human populations who eat tainted sheep and cows.
Uh-0h!
I don’t demand that my political leaders have the ability to foretell the future. But I do demand that they act like responsible adults, and not ideological worshipers of anyone that wears a goddam lab coat.
Wearing a mask is politically correct virtue-signaling. Displaying the “Confederate” flag is politically incorrect hatred. *
If I wear a mask with the “Confederate” flag on it, do they cancel each other, like a math equation resulting in zero? Or do they act like matter-antimatter and destroy the universe?
Only one way to find out . . . .
* Yes, yes, pedants, I know, the Stars and Bars was not the national flag of the Confederate States of America, it was the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, but you know what I mean so leave me alone.
Joe, the flag built off St. Andrews’ cross is actually called the “Southern Cross”. The “Stars and Bars” was actually an official flag of the Confederacy that resembles the original U.S. flag, but with only three stripes instead of 13. It was jettisoned as a battle flag for that reason–confusion was getting too many people hurt and killed in battle.
Back to the subject, as the dad of three young ladies who work in a nursing home, my thoughts about regulations in NY, NJ, PA, and MN regarding allowing COVID patients and workers to go back in without being cleared are quite unprintable. OK, you shut down everybody’s favorite stores and employers and leave the barn door wide open to the most vulnerable institutions in the state? And keep the trains and buses running, knowing those are great avenues for transmission, not even making a serious attempt to clean them each day?
And it’s only two months into the epidemic that we’ve finally gotten serious about testing residents and workers there to protect there?
I don’t know if it’s incompetence, love of political theater, or malice, but this is bad. And I say this as someone who is amenable to the notion that in an epidemic, some degree of lockdown/restriction is necessary to reduce the odds that the idiots among us are going to get the rest of us sick or killed.
I guess the unfortunate fact is that in NY, NJ, PA, and MN, the idiots are living in governors’ mansions and working in the state departments of health.
The study by the U of MN:
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/04/commentary-masks-all-covid-19-not-based-sound-data
There is also this:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25903751/?utm_source=gquery&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=CitationSensor
And the CDC had this to say about masks and influenza:
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/5/19-0994_article