> it almost feels like Trump has some secret weapons ready to save the day. You would think that, since most of the leaders are in a high risk demographic and spend large chunk of their time shaking hands with strangers, they would be more vigilant
He's behaving entirely consistently with how he always has: deny everything, project perfection.
There's no signal here of a secret weapon, it's a complete shit show.
> He's behaving entirely consistently with how he always has: deny everything, project perfection.
> There's no signal here of a secret weapon, it's a complete shit show.
Can't really disagree, but I feel like I'm taking crazy pills with the way people in the US are talking about the response now. Was the US MSM not spending all of January and February telling us "calm down, you know the common flu kills WAY more people than this thing and we don't freak out about it!" and complaining how Trump's proposed Chinese traveler ban was both a) racist and b) would have little to no effect?
One of our older neighbors are inviting everyone on the nextdoor app to go to their house for movie night to prove that this is just a flu. The entire thread is people making fun of covid19 and how they are angry their retirement accounts are getting hit.
I'm completely unsurprised by what you're describing. I observed similarly disturbing behavior waiting in line @ Home Depot the other day. A customer was excited to find they had hand sanitizer in stock, and another customer told him there's a whole aisle full of the stuff and that all the covid stuff is fake news which devolved into nonsensical madness between yokels I had to just walk away from. Of course our Home Depot had some in stock, we're in rural bumblefuck middle of nowhere. Our stores only run out of things when the employees forget to do their jobs.
Yeah it's crazy. I suggested in the thread that they should take this a little more seriously and was immediately attacked for being a doom mongering idiot.
The last sentence applies to all stores, so. Unless people freak out and stock up for the apocalypse, in which case resupply might take a couple of days.
Geez, what part of the country if you don't mind me asking? Arrogance, ignorance, and disinformation is literally going to kill us. Thanks for sharing that.
It might help telling him that in some regions of northern Italy, patients over 65 with arrests are not assessed any longer and are not treated in an ICU, they are left to die.
I have to concede you're partly right. Darwin will solve more than you think though:
- Some old irresponsibly stupid males are still sexually active. Darwin would stop them reproducing.
- The old irresponsibly stupid neighbour is still a magnet for younger, sexually reproductive irresponsibly stupid people, probably more so than for others.
The whole “people don’t understand exponential growth” thing isn’t a very good explanation, considering that it applies to any contagious disease for which every person tends to infect some constant number of other people.
Which there are few in circulation, thanks to vaccines among other reasons (which lower effective transmission rate), so most people haven't really experienced it working. Somebody mentioned noroviruses the other day as probably the closest relevant thing people may have experienced - let someone with one loose on a cruise ship, and shit literally hits the fan very fast.
They also do this for serious political stuff, repeating the same phrases over and over again, but posting those video compilations would just invite downvotes.
Mainstream media has a blinkered center-right bias that on CNN and MSNBC rewards the center-right democratic party and punches left. They don't care about the well being of the population, only about selling ads and preventing reform. On Fox, it's borderline fascist, actually fascist if you think about immigration and the concentration camps.
I don't actually know why the ruling class in the US is taking this so easy. There's some kind of brain disorder they have that is located between American exceptionalism, raw stupidity, and a complete disregard for the welfare of the people. I hope they all shake hands with a COVID patient like they did at CPAC.
Yeah, the only major conservative cable outlet. Against CNN, NBC, ABC, MSNBC, CBS, NPR...Not to mention almost every major web source.
People know full well that Fox is part of the MSM, but regardless of which way you lean, there's no question that the deck is stacked against conservative viewpoints.
No, I think that some news outlets do have that and some do not. Do you think that every modern news outlet has a consistent, left-leaning, anti-Trump agenda?
Mainstream media tends to target their audience. Their audience is Americans who by popular vote are left of the government on average, and a higher percentage of them that live in cities, which adds to the left bias yet again. So no big surprise that most of the big MSM outlets appear left-leaning if you personally are right of center at all.
You must not have been paying much attention then.
> The Trump administration’s quarantine and travel ban in response to the Wuhan coronavirus could undercut international efforts to fight the outbreak by antagonizing Chinese leaders, as well as stigmatizing people of Asian descent, according to a growing chorus of public health experts and lawmakers.[0]
> The Trump administration’s decision to severely restrict travel from China to the US and to implement a mass quarantine, the first in the US in more than 50 years, could be an overreaction that causes unnecessary fear and weakens the global response[1]
I can provide more if you’re not convinced that, just like every single other thing Trump does, right or wrong, he was attacked for actions related to the Coronavirus earlier this year...
Yes, and this is a huge problem. Countries like Singapore which have managed to control the coronavirus have done so using travel restrictions much stricter than the US ones. The Washington Post found a solution to this though. They ran an op-ed "Coronavirus testing might have stopped it early. Now it's too late." pointing to Singapore's success as proof the coronavirus could've been contained, but completely omitting any mention of its use of border controls and pinning it entirely on aggressive testing. This went viral on social media, turning Singapore's success into a confirmation of people's existing belief seeded by the media that Trump's obsession with travel restrictions had screwed up the US coronavirus response.
The two statements don’t need be false or contradict the fact that it was mishandled.
A flight ban simply makes traceability harder, as people reroute through multiple hops. Victimizing Chinese communities is bad and will only make things worse (as people start hiding from authorities). And in the end, the virus was in Germany already in January, according to the tracing, so focusing on China would have helped little.
BUT
they could have mandated self-isolation for two weeks for all flight passengers disembarking, regardless of provenience. You get a tourism hit but slow down infection rates substantially.
They could have ensured better procedure for care in death. Those elderly people dying in high number right now, have probably infected hundreds of others already; they should have been tested weeks ago, and handled as infection carriers.
They could have prepared temporary field hospitals to spike capacity like the Chinese were forced to do. Chances are they will need them anyway, might as well do it advance than later under pressure.
They could have started shutting down large gatherings and prepare for curfew measures.
They’ve done none of that - and I say “they” as in US administration, UK administration, Australia (where they’ll even host a F1 GP with crowds this weekend!), France etc... They all hoped it would go away “on its own” like SARS did. Sadly, SARS was a lucky strike, this is the real deal.
It just turned out that being wrong was a political universal... when you have two parties that are completely set on disagreeing on a matter of fact, then it's guaranteed that at least one will have it wrong, at any given time. This doesn't change the fact that Trump is currently being more wrong.
He's behaving entirely consistently with how he always has: deny everything, project perfection.
There's no signal here of a secret weapon, it's a complete shit show.