outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

TBC, no question his messaging was damaging. But I could imagine a counterfactual where Obama is president and people in places like Texas and South Dakota rebel against his rational guidance.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Monday, November 16, 2020

sounds like an excuse for Trump's covid inaction. If this happened under Obama we would have had funding for on the ground support and clear coordinated rational advice from the CDC and medical experts

If Hillary had been President, we probably would have still had Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.

You gotta work that into the equation somehow. In an election year are they giving her even the stimulus we did get?

don't know what you're talking about, but Obama (or Hillary) wouldn't have politicized it like this

It's an inherently political situation, but what I'm talking about is that the Democrats wouldn't have retaken the House in the midterms and now the Democratic President would have had to deal with Ryan and McConnell in an election year to get the funding that allowed our quarter-assed shutdown to start with. Note that now, without an election for two years, McConnell has zero interest in a stimulus that would benefit the incoming Democratic President. The anti-mask freaks would have been emboldened as much in opposition to Clinton as in support of Trump.

Any Democrat would have been better than Trump - but they would have been concerned with keeping the economy open as well, and they would have been hamstrung by a Republican Congress and Republican state governments as well.

it's not an inherently political situation, it's public health

Who lives and who dies is always subject to politics tho

Which is as political as it gets - Medicare For All, Obamacare, vaccines, abortion, Planned Parenthood, birth control, sanitation of urban areas, clean drinking water, elder care, ad infinitum.

Even in terms of their own internal response, Democratic centrists' first move wasn't (and, uh, still isn't) "pay everyone to stay home," it was tax credits.

I'm out of my depth with these political arguments but we've never just decided to let such a huge number of people die of disease like this without addressing it

Well I’m not gonna argue the numbers but uh

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_in_the_United_States

But we do, every single day. Not from a pandemic but from poverty, lack of healthcare, deaths of despair, pollution.

(https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/c-change/subtopics/coronavirus-and-pollution/)

silby you are right, it has been the thing that has had the most impact on my life

the Democrats wouldn't have retaken the House in the midterms and now the Democratic President would have had to deal with Ryan and McConnell in an election year to get the funding that allowed our quarter-assed shutdown to start with.

Maybe your alternate version with HRC winning would have played out as you state. There is no way to know. Nut HRC did not win and it was Trump who in 2020 was situated as the head of state, was leader of his party, and held most visible and powerful position in the nation. He chose his irresponsible words and actions. If Ryan and McConnell had been the ones who abused their power as Trump did, then in that alternate universe they would have deserved the revulsion now aimed at Trump.

I blame Trump for the simple reason that he deliberately screwed the entire country for totally selfish reasons. He was given ample good advise by experts that he simply kicked to the curb and ignored.

we've done nothing about this except to provide some minor economic relief from the fallout. there has been no coordinated effort to help with the pandemic, but instead active disinformation which has been broadcasted by the administration for partisan political reasons, and which has been really damaging

silby and milo arguing that hypothetical dem responses would have been as bad as Trump is so on brand it's funny. Keep up the fight!

Did I say that? I don’t think I said that.

I took issue with the idea that public health “isn’t political”

If I’ve gotten to the point where I seem to have a predictable shtick I guess I need to change it up a bit, I guess I could try blaming Bernie Bros for Joe Biden’s loss to Donald Trump?

I guess what I meant was that public health *shouldn't be political, and agree that what happened with AIDS in the 80s was devastating

that hypothetical dem responses would have been as bad as Trump

You should probably wait until posts that directly contradict you are off the page before you say dumb shit?

"Any Democrat would have been better than Trump - but they would have been concerned with keeping the economy open as well, and they would have been hamstrung by a Republican Congress and Republican state governments as well."

Even in the best-case scenario of American politics facing this pandemic, we were still going to - by some leaps and bounds - do worse than our peers among the wealthiest nations. Why? Federalism, Republicans, American Protestantism, capitalism and the lack of a social safety net.

Please go shit up a different thread. Please.

Truly don’t know what milo is doing to “shit up” the thread rn I think you’re just knee-jerk reacting to a poster you don’t like

I still can't see this a political. I'm long since used to gay men being dismissed in any conversation about public health, but this affects everyone, and the callousness of this administration has been notable

as political

ftr as much as he drives me up a wall I don't even dislike milo but why does every thread have to be the milo show, particularly a thread reserved for updates about the pandemic.

Anyone can post

Dan, it is absolutely political. Who lives and who dies, who gets care and the quality of care they receive if they receive it, who profits off of that care, who profits and who loses when millions of people are told to stay home, and the list goes on.

To even call what the US government has done ineffective would be the height of understatement. The response has been to let the population starve and die.

particularly a thread reserved for updates about the pandemic

Except for the 30 posts above mine about our response?

Yes, public health is always political on some level, but Trump's COVID response was only political and completely ignored public health altogether. There's a difference.

The gall of these governors, like the asshole in Iowa, who spent months obnoxiously resisting even the most minimal of mitigation efforts and now, with cases surging and hospital capacity shrinking, are pleading with their populations to wear masks, social distance, etc. And yet, having long ago backed themselves into a political corner, they're *still* unable or unwilling to fully commit to that position even in the face of disaster. I wonder how many of these dickheads secretly look forward to Biden? I guess it doesn't matter, because it'll probably remain their little secret while they publicly keep up the same disingenuous front of BS.

as we saw from 2010-2016 there are plenty of these numbnuts who would nothing more than a Democratic president to blame for their shitty policies

Usual caveats apply, but this seems positive.

The research, published online, has not been peer-reviewed nor published in a scientific journal. But it is the most comprehensive and long-ranging study of immune memory to the coronavirus to date.

“That amount of memory would likely prevent the vast majority of people from getting hospitalized disease, severe disease, for many years,” said Shane Crotty, a virologist at the La Jolla Institute of Immunology who co-led the new study.
The findings are likely to come as a relief to experts worried that immunity to the virus might be short-lived, and that vaccines might have to be administered repeatedly to keep the pandemic under control.

And the research squares with another recent finding: that survivors of SARS, caused by another coronavirus, still carry certain important immune cells 17 years after recovering.

Our daily update is published. States reported 1.5M tests, 155K cases, and 1,565 deaths. 77k people are currently hospitalized with COVID-19 in the US. pic.twitter.com/tY6FB4eIic

— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) November 18, 2020

oops, meant to post this one:

20 states are at their record currently hospitalized today. pic.twitter.com/pwcRlsbaJ2

— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) November 18, 2020

~3 week lag between cases and deaths. Case doubled in the past 3 weeks, from ~80k to ~160k cases/day.

US hospitals seem more reluctant to triage at entry than to set up rooms like UMC El Paso's "The Pit", where revival attempts are limited.

Meanwhile, the latest on 'Long covid': Damage to multiple organs presents in young, low risk patients

data from 201 patients suggest that almost 70% had impairments in one or more organs four months after their initial symptoms.

The most commonly reported ongoing symptoms—regardless of hospitalisation status—were fatigue (98%), muscle ache (88%), shortness of breath (87%), and headache (83%). There was evidence of mild organ impairment in the heart (32% of patients), lungs (33%), kidneys (12%), liver (10%), pancreas (17%), and spleen (6%).

Multiorgan impairment was significantly associated with risk of prior covid-19 hospitalisation (P<0.05).

Is it just me or does Karl's map look suspiciously, um, red?

To embrace death is to overcome it, amirite?

so rhode island, huh?

NYT has more about the Pfizer vaccine:

Pfizer and BioNTech’s trial included nearly 44,000 volunteers, half of whom received the vaccine. The other half received a placebo shot of salt water. Then the researchers waited to see how many in each group developed Covid-19.

The companies said that out of 170 cases of Covid-19, 162 were in the placebo group, and eight were in the vaccine group. Out of 10 cases of severe Covid-19, nine had received a placebo.

Pfizer and BioNTech said that the vaccine’s efficacy was consistent across age, race and ethnicity. The most common serious adverse event was fatigue, with 3.7 percent of volunteers reporting tiredness after they took the second dose. Two percent of volunteers reported a headache after the second dose. Older adults reported fewer and milder side effects, the companies said.

“It’s pretty amazing,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University. She said the results in people over 65 were the most promising. “We know from the influenza vaccine that it’s very difficult to achieve protection in this age group with vaccines,” she said, so 94 percent efficacy in that group “is really remarkable.”

you can take your kids to brunch, but you can't take them to school
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/11/18/world/covid-19-coronavirus#nyc-will-shutter-public-schools-on-thursday-as-virus-cases-increase

he blamed restaurants staying open on Cuomo. no idea if that's true or not between all their bickering

Those freaks would blame each other for earthquakes

my understanding is that only cuomo can declare businesses have to shut down
these two guys are so spectacularly wrong for this moment. DeBlasio in particular.

I will say our restaurants around here went from kinda just nudging people about the masks to all putting signs on their doors requiring facemasks. granted, there is still an ordinance here requiring it, but it's the toothless kind, as Desantis stripped counties of the ability to fine people for not wearing them. some of them are still even imposing capacity restrictions despite Deshitnis saying it wasn't required anymore.

tbh - it's kind of accepted here, which is good to see, except there's an awful lot of dicknosin. and employees who do chin-diapering.

i stayed in a hotel while my house was going through repairs and woman came to the glass mask-free even though there was a big sign on the door requiring guests to wear them.

yet at the Walmart, the greeter outside refused entrance to one person who didn't have one.

yet go to Cocoa Beach, and they talk shit about you if you have one on (I heard someone behind me mocking me til I glared at him)

i feel like it's kinda crazy that people are getting excited about results based on 9 or 10 people?

i mean, the fact that 21K volunteers haven't gotten some kind of obscure heart damage as a result of taking the vaccine is a plus, don't get me wrong

we're all so desperate for any hope, it's not surprising.
let's see how the first million take it

I think it’s more that out of 22k vaccinated people, 8 got COVID