Nothing, absolutely nothing is out of our collective control on COVID-19. It’s a very contagious virus, so it needs to be respected, but it is NOT “ingenious” or mysterious, as President Banana said.
It’s just a virus. It is dumb.
You deprive it of bodies, it’s dead. That all we have to do. New Zealand just did it. South Korea did it. Taiwan did it. Ireland is doing it. (San Francisco is doing it. Hell, Oklahoma may even be doing it, although the jury is out on that.)
We can do it. Yes, even after it has spread. The only question: how much do we value the lives of our people?
The public health doctors and research scientists are not doing nearly enough to counter the madness offered by President Banana about rushing back to work, which will just cause a massive second wave.
They never educate people that it is not a given that the curve, once flattened, will stay flattened. It can and will fly right back up 2-4 weeks after we recongregate together.
Repeat. A brief look at the various curves of the COVID-19 virus’s behavior in the various countries in which it has spread shows that there is no such thing as a disembodied “curve” to this virus. It is entirely dependent on what public policy is implemented. South Korea’s curve is not Italy’s curve, which is not New York’s curve, which is not Washington State’s curve, which is not New Zealand’s curve. They are formed by us, not the the other way around (NOT the virus).
In fact, we need not look abroad.
All one has to do is compare the course of the virus in California, where the state issued orders requiring home quarantines that were widely criticized at the time they were issued as being overboard, as compared to New York, which dithered for weeks before acting. Both had the first cases roughly contemporaneously.
We control the virus if we choose to.
It is not an act of God, it is a virus.
One more time, the virus needs bodies to jump to or it dies. The only question is, do we have the will to extinguish it in enough people so that we bring ourselves back to contact tracing with testing from mitigation?
Do we have the will to save our people? It’s up to us, and it is still within our power if we decide to do so.
If we choose money over our people, millions will die.
It’s about a lot more than money to me, and reject the premise of your final sentence.
I agree that the media have been and continue to be chock full of misinformation. I see essentially continuous misuse of statistics literally minute-by-minute.
Last night, Rachel Maddow yet again made a HUGE show of posting the “top five” nations in the world, ranked by COVID cases. Her big point was that the number in the US is more than the other four combined. We are all obviously supposed to shocked, scared, and who knows what. Who are the other four? Spain, Italy, France, and Germany. Be scared. Be VERY SCARED.
Here are the case counts (from another source):
US: 708,297
Spain: 190,839
Italy: 172,434
France: 147,969
Germany: 141,397
Except she failed to mention something important — as she has done every broadcast since this hysteria began. She failed to mention relative populations.
The current population of the US is 331 M.
Here is the population of the aforementioned nations:
Spain: 46 M
Italy: 60 M
France: 65 M
Germany: 84 M
Total: 255 M
Here is the same case rate data as above, but normalized by the population of each country. The result is expressed in units of cases per thousand:
US: 2.14
Spain: 4.15
Italy: 2.87
France: 2.28
Germany: 1.68
Take another look at those numbers — SPAIN jumps out, at 4.15 cases per thousand. That’s TWICE the rate of the US. Italy is next at just under 3. France is a bit worse. Germany is apparently doing the best job.
If I told you that I saw TWENTY FIVE taxi cabs pass by me in ten minutes, that would be headline news in Podunk, Nebraska. It would be non-event in downtown Manhattan.
The reality is that the US is fourth of five in terms of current risk.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t be concerned. The US is also MANY TIMES larger than these four, and so it takes MUCH LONGER for the pandemic to run its course here. The other four nations may have already passed their peak of daily new infections, and the US is likely still at least a few weeks away.
Nevertheless, last night’s lead segment by Rachel Maddow — the highest-rated anchor on television — was flagrantly dishonest. She lied to us about the meaning of the data she presented.
@All one has to do is…:
I don’t think it’s nearly that easy. There are no cities in CA where people are as densely packed as NYC. There are large swaths of CA that are sparsely populated in comparison to the state of New York. California has a much larger land area than New York. It takes time for an epidemic to advance across a large area, especially if that area is sparsely populated.
I think we should all take deep breaths and calm down.
I think we should be very reluctant to draw dichotomies between “those who have the will to save our people” and those who do not, or between those who “choose money over our people” and those who do not.
There is some chance that millions of people will die — eventually — even if all of us have the best of intents and the best-placed motivations. A boatload of people will do very well financially as a result of our extreme actions to combat this pandemic. Those people will do much better if our actions are longer and more extreme. That’s the nature of a consumer economy. This is a good time to be in the telecommunications equipment business and terrible time to be in the event planning business.
I think we need cool off and pay more attention to data and science and less attention to fear, panic, and hysteria. Nobody wants to see people die.
I agree with you that these curves are crucially important. I agree with you that they can change rapidly. We learned during the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic that relaxing restraints too soon is likely to bring about a second wave more crushing than the first.
I think we all will do better if we listen to doctors, public health professionals, and scientists (in relevant fields) rather more and politicians, news anchors, and social media rather less.
It may make more sense to treat the EU as the equivalent of the US and each member nation of the EU as more like our individual states.
Agreed. The most important thing, though, is to demand that media outlets “normalize” raw statistics so that they can be legitimately compared.
This is a concept that should be familiar to anybody who buys groceries in Massachusetts (I don’t know what other states demand this). Massachusetts law requires that a “unit price” be displayed on the shelf in the immediate vicinity of each item.
This “unit price” shows the price of each item divided by the relevant number of units — $0.08/each or $1.23/pound or whatever. Most consumers understand that an opaque container of some brand-name remedy that costs $9.99 and contains 20 capsules is MUCH more expensive than a same-sized container of a generic version of the same remedy that costs $4.99 and contains 100 tablets. The unit price of the brand name is $0.50/item — the unit price of the latter is $0.05/item.
When Ms. Maddow and the mainstream media loudly hype these raw and unadjusted numbers, they do precisely the same thing as predatory suppliers who intentionally package over-priced merchandise in deceptive containers. It is common to see brand-name remedies packaged in large boxes that, when opened, contain a small plastic bottle next to a void created by a piece or two of folded cardboard. The resulting box is much bigger than the bottle it contains.
With all due respect to the First Amendment, it seems to me that some sort of consumer protection regulations are desperately needed for information providers.
If unit pricing can be required for merchandise on store shelves, then surely some sort of analogous requirement on advertising-supported commercial broadcasts can pass constitutional muster.
I’ve long been in the habit of comparing unit prices, but I didn’t realize such is required by law, nor do I recall how VA handled that when I lived there.
It is indeed required by Massachusetts law. My recollection is that it became law in MA in the mid-1980s (1986?).
My brief Google search suggests that such laws vary state-by-state. The only thing I’ve found cites a Virginia statute that requires that each item have a posted retail price, but is silent about unit pricing.