I agree that pinning our hopes on a vaccine is a losing proposition. We can't stop everything forever.
A big problem is that our healthcare system is terrible. You can't tie healthcare to employment and keep a pandemic in check. You can't rely on states to have money available to suddenly come up with emergency supplies to combat somethin…
I agree that pinning our hopes on a vaccine is a losing proposition. We can't stop everything forever.
A big problem is that our healthcare system is terrible. You can't tie healthcare to employment and keep a pandemic in check. You can't rely on states to have money available to suddenly come up with emergency supplies to combat something like this. The response at the federal level has to address the problem directly and coordinate the response. The borders between states are porous, there is no provision for keeping movement in check. When it comes to handling a pandemic the country has to be considered as one entity.
Yes, urban areas will be more prone to spread of the virus, but there is no place in this country that doesn't contact an urban area in some fashion at some point. If people were willing to wear masks everywhere it's likely that rural areas could be open by now.
The main problem with letting the chips fall where they may is that you will have bodies piling up in the streets by the time it is all over. People are all fine about risking their lives to the virus until they get sick, at which point they suddenly don't want to die and tie up hospital beds. We have an inadequate supply of both healthcare providers and facilities to handle this.
People keep pointing to Sweden as the way out, but Sweden has had over 5700 deaths compared to Norway, Denmark and Finland with a total of 1200 for all of them and Sweden's economy is still contracting by 6%. So, what's the advantage in letting people die?
Even if we assume a case fatality rate of .5% that's 1,640,000 dead here and if we don't flatten the curve that will happen extremely rapidly. The federal government right now is not directing the response appropriately in any way at all and Trump's psychotic Twitter rants don't help.
I agree regarding the tying of healthcare to employment.
The honest to God truth about this is just messy. Yes, Trump has not been helpful but there was never much he could do in any case. The fact is that it is up to the states to set shutdown practices. The CDC has not been up to this for at least ten years. (I worked there for a year) They have had so much mission creep that they have almost forgotten what their original reason for existing is. Trump did not offshore all of our PPE production or the production of 90% of our critical medicines. That started 20 yrs ago and has been nothing but encouraged by industry and lobbyists and so politicians because they though it would drive prices down. Same with durable medical equipment like ventilators. Those things could not change with the flip of a switch. Crony capitalism killed the economy. Ironic.
Trump did not tell the Chinese to lie and coverup and neither did he convince the WHO to tow the line. Remember, it was the WHO that believed the Chinese when they said that person to person transmission was highly unlikely. It was the Chinese that imprisoned doctors that spoke out and tried to warn people. Fauci went along. Trump did not control that.
Apart from the bully pulpet there really was nothing he could do directly. Even activating the defense production act was questionably legal but he did it.
No, this mess is systemic and has been building for decades.
Has Trump been helpful? Not particularly, but being an ass does not make him responsible for a lack of national preparedness at the state, local level and in private industry. Heck, even at the national level the CDC, NIH and Congress had roles to play. Hell, Nancy Pelosi was calling for people to come out to Chinese New Year at the same time Trump and Fauci were thinking this was not gonna be a risk. I cannot think of one state, local or national politician or one leader in industry that was screaming about our lack of preparedness.
This is a NATIONAL fuck up not just Trump's. Were you voting on pandemic preparedness issues? I was not. Heck, I had no idea that we could not produce PPE or drugs until this started and I would bet that 99% of the population and politicians were in the same boat.
My point is that the chips ARE going to fall where they may regardless of what we do. This is NOT very likely to get a whole lot better, a vaccine is not going to be a silver bullet even if we get one. Our best hope is that we develop accurate tests that are quick and that we develop therapies that are effective. Then, we get on with things knowing that some or even most of us are going to get this at some point. It is not going away so we can try to hide in our homes and hope or we can get up, accept the risks and go on living.
The voters cannot be expected to micromanage our Public Health preparedness. We have a right to expect that our leaders will install competent managers where they are needed. So the buck stops with sticky fingered Obama at least as much as Trump, and behind that lies the failure of our political/economic system. Something is fucking rotten in the State of America.
I agree that we can't blame ALL of this on Trump and that our outsourcing of production to China is bipartisan fuckery of the highest order, but he definitely exacerbated a bad situation and I think you're giving him a pass on a lot of things.
He ignored warning signs for months and increasing numbers of infected both abroad and here in the USA claiming that it would all blow over. In January when the WHO was actually saying there was a high global health risk and we had cases rising in Washington state he was claiming there were no worries about a pandemic.
In early March he downplayed the lack of testing, claiming at various times that, "Anyone that wants a test can get a test." He kept tweeting blaming the Democrats and the media for inflaming the situation saying it was all under control and that there was nothing to worry about. Then on March 17 he held a press conference saying he knew all along it was a pandemic.
Then as states shut down in March Trump basically decides we should open back up by April and starts tweeting about this all the time. Suddenly by the end of April he is advocating for opening everything back up to get the economy going again and a bunch of southern governors decide to throw in with that and we get ourselves another big surge of infected.
At one of his coronavirus briefings in April he suggested off the cuff that ingesting or injecting disinfectant were interesting possibilities for combating the infection.
He continues to point to the number of infections being tied to the amount of testing and that if we didn't do as much testing we wouldn't have as many infections, which is absolute stupidity.
There are so many stories out there about the Trump administrations mess ups on acquiring PPE. The latest is the Jared Kushner dream team one. It took Trump until July to actually recommend wearing a mask and before that he publicly downplayed the risk of not wearing one and both he and Pence were never seen wearing them even when they were visiting locations that required them.
And yes there were many Governors that were looking for a national plan and complaining about preparedness as the virus started accelerating. When they found they were on their own many of them were scrambling to acquire PPE and finding themselves battling other states and the feds for those resources. It's a true clusterfuck and while our system sucks and we were not prepared a lot of the problems with the response falls at the feet of the Trump administration.
Ok...we can disagree about the timing of when Trump or the government generally decided that this was serious.
BUT....I would point out a few things.
1. It was Fauci, back in Jan or Feb that was saying that this virus was a low risk to the US. That is the guy that all the Trump critics love. It was Fauci that said that masks would not help and he was backed up by the WHO.
2. There are STILL prominent scientists saying that anything less than an N95 mask is a waste of time and that wearing them is essentially just to give people a sense of having some control.
3. There were scientists from Stanford epidemiology, that were telling Trump not to shut down the economy and who still stand by that. Stanford, not some little ho dunk community college.
The science on this has been all over the map. Wear masks. Do not wear masks. This only effects old people. No, this does really bad things to young people.
THEN, because the science has been all over the map, the politics has been all over the map. Because no matter what Trump says, even if he is right on the science in the moment or the policy in the moment, everyone who hates him is going to do the opposite and work to find experts who say he is wrong.
On this though, he is ABSOLUTELY RIGHT. We will kill more people through a depression than will die of this virus. 12 MILLION people looking at eviction. Homeless. No Food. No healthcare. No clean water.
HUGE waves of personal and small business bankruptcies.
Millions of kids educations handicapped.
There is going to be a massive and prolonged wave of misery and desperation for tens of millions of people.
The eviction moratoriums are over.
There is not a limitless supply of money to keep paying $2400 a month to the unemployed or provide them medicaid.
Now we are going to start seeing large layoffs in the public sector at the state and local level. Fewer teachers. Fewer social workers. Fewer cops. Less water testing. Less food inspection.
Were the federal government not in debt up to its eyeballs before this crisis, were state and local budgets and the personal budgets of individuals in good shape with savings and reserves to cover 6 months or 8 months, then we could shut down for that long. Problem is most of our states are nearly bankrupt, the federal government is only getting by because it can print money and that only so long as the dollar holds its status as the worlds reserve currency.
THERE IS NO WEALTH LEFT. So, we work or we starve. We pissed it away on wars. We pissed it away on sending jobs to China in exchange for cheaper iPhones. We pissed it away on bailing out the banks. We pissed it away on excessive pensions. We penalize saving and we reward buying on credit.
The price is that as individuals, as states, and as a country we no longer have the reserves or the wealth to withstand a shutdown of any length without the whole thing collapsing in on itself. This situation has been building since the 1980's.
Its like we have been riding a bike at really high speed down a hill. So long as we keep moving and dont hit any bumps or try to turn to quickly we can get by but one wrong move and we crash hard.
We hit a really big bump. If we are lucky and we are able to avoid crashing we are going to have to peddle like hell.
If this same thing had happened in the 1960's or 70's or even the 80's we could probably pull off a shutdown of a few months. Now? We cannot stand up to a single month without risking the entire fabric of the country.
We did this to ourselves. We allowed Wall Street, politicians, neoliberal economists and neoconservative war hawks to lead us here and we were dumb enough to follow.
Daniel you are almost right. But the point is that the crash is inevitable and it was so even before we hit the bump. To keep the economy going we had to let the national debt grow exponentially, and that was not sustainable.
And I don't think we did it to ourselves. The Owners did it to us. The people who own Wall Street and the politicians and the war industry and the health industry also own the news and entertainment industry, and they filled our minds with disinformation. They manufactured our consent, and I don't think we are to blame.
But now that we are catching on I think we had better take the country away from them, and if we don't do that we will deserve what we get.
I disagree. We have about the same actual wealth as we had last year or the year before, by which I mean material stuff people can use and real skills they can deploy, not the phony wealth of funny money printed by the government to fatten the purses of the rich. Hard times are going to come, not because we don't have the stuff we need to ward them off, but because so many of us still have delusions about what's real and what's useful.
Thats right...we have the same amount of wealth, which is almost none at all. We have lots of paper wealth owned by about 10% of the population.
Sure, we have skills, we have resources to put to use but they are only good if the economy is open.
WEALTH is what you have to have to draw on when you cannot have cash flow.
Our entire economy is built on PAYMENTS.
People do not buy a house for a price, they buy it for a payment over 30 yrs.
People do not buy a car at a price, they buy it at a payment. Thats why dealers always advertise payments.
Businesses dont want single payments, they want cash streams. Investors in debt want cash streams.
The whole damn system is designed to concentrate wealth and make everyone else into a debt slave that lives paycheck to paycheck to make payments on those debts.
I agree that pinning our hopes on a vaccine is a losing proposition. We can't stop everything forever.
A big problem is that our healthcare system is terrible. You can't tie healthcare to employment and keep a pandemic in check. You can't rely on states to have money available to suddenly come up with emergency supplies to combat something like this. The response at the federal level has to address the problem directly and coordinate the response. The borders between states are porous, there is no provision for keeping movement in check. When it comes to handling a pandemic the country has to be considered as one entity.
Yes, urban areas will be more prone to spread of the virus, but there is no place in this country that doesn't contact an urban area in some fashion at some point. If people were willing to wear masks everywhere it's likely that rural areas could be open by now.
The main problem with letting the chips fall where they may is that you will have bodies piling up in the streets by the time it is all over. People are all fine about risking their lives to the virus until they get sick, at which point they suddenly don't want to die and tie up hospital beds. We have an inadequate supply of both healthcare providers and facilities to handle this.
People keep pointing to Sweden as the way out, but Sweden has had over 5700 deaths compared to Norway, Denmark and Finland with a total of 1200 for all of them and Sweden's economy is still contracting by 6%. So, what's the advantage in letting people die?
Even if we assume a case fatality rate of .5% that's 1,640,000 dead here and if we don't flatten the curve that will happen extremely rapidly. The federal government right now is not directing the response appropriately in any way at all and Trump's psychotic Twitter rants don't help.
I agree regarding the tying of healthcare to employment.
The honest to God truth about this is just messy. Yes, Trump has not been helpful but there was never much he could do in any case. The fact is that it is up to the states to set shutdown practices. The CDC has not been up to this for at least ten years. (I worked there for a year) They have had so much mission creep that they have almost forgotten what their original reason for existing is. Trump did not offshore all of our PPE production or the production of 90% of our critical medicines. That started 20 yrs ago and has been nothing but encouraged by industry and lobbyists and so politicians because they though it would drive prices down. Same with durable medical equipment like ventilators. Those things could not change with the flip of a switch. Crony capitalism killed the economy. Ironic.
Trump did not tell the Chinese to lie and coverup and neither did he convince the WHO to tow the line. Remember, it was the WHO that believed the Chinese when they said that person to person transmission was highly unlikely. It was the Chinese that imprisoned doctors that spoke out and tried to warn people. Fauci went along. Trump did not control that.
Apart from the bully pulpet there really was nothing he could do directly. Even activating the defense production act was questionably legal but he did it.
No, this mess is systemic and has been building for decades.
Has Trump been helpful? Not particularly, but being an ass does not make him responsible for a lack of national preparedness at the state, local level and in private industry. Heck, even at the national level the CDC, NIH and Congress had roles to play. Hell, Nancy Pelosi was calling for people to come out to Chinese New Year at the same time Trump and Fauci were thinking this was not gonna be a risk. I cannot think of one state, local or national politician or one leader in industry that was screaming about our lack of preparedness.
This is a NATIONAL fuck up not just Trump's. Were you voting on pandemic preparedness issues? I was not. Heck, I had no idea that we could not produce PPE or drugs until this started and I would bet that 99% of the population and politicians were in the same boat.
My point is that the chips ARE going to fall where they may regardless of what we do. This is NOT very likely to get a whole lot better, a vaccine is not going to be a silver bullet even if we get one. Our best hope is that we develop accurate tests that are quick and that we develop therapies that are effective. Then, we get on with things knowing that some or even most of us are going to get this at some point. It is not going away so we can try to hide in our homes and hope or we can get up, accept the risks and go on living.
The voters cannot be expected to micromanage our Public Health preparedness. We have a right to expect that our leaders will install competent managers where they are needed. So the buck stops with sticky fingered Obama at least as much as Trump, and behind that lies the failure of our political/economic system. Something is fucking rotten in the State of America.
I agree that we can't blame ALL of this on Trump and that our outsourcing of production to China is bipartisan fuckery of the highest order, but he definitely exacerbated a bad situation and I think you're giving him a pass on a lot of things.
He ignored warning signs for months and increasing numbers of infected both abroad and here in the USA claiming that it would all blow over. In January when the WHO was actually saying there was a high global health risk and we had cases rising in Washington state he was claiming there were no worries about a pandemic.
In early March he downplayed the lack of testing, claiming at various times that, "Anyone that wants a test can get a test." He kept tweeting blaming the Democrats and the media for inflaming the situation saying it was all under control and that there was nothing to worry about. Then on March 17 he held a press conference saying he knew all along it was a pandemic.
Then as states shut down in March Trump basically decides we should open back up by April and starts tweeting about this all the time. Suddenly by the end of April he is advocating for opening everything back up to get the economy going again and a bunch of southern governors decide to throw in with that and we get ourselves another big surge of infected.
At one of his coronavirus briefings in April he suggested off the cuff that ingesting or injecting disinfectant were interesting possibilities for combating the infection.
He continues to point to the number of infections being tied to the amount of testing and that if we didn't do as much testing we wouldn't have as many infections, which is absolute stupidity.
There are so many stories out there about the Trump administrations mess ups on acquiring PPE. The latest is the Jared Kushner dream team one. It took Trump until July to actually recommend wearing a mask and before that he publicly downplayed the risk of not wearing one and both he and Pence were never seen wearing them even when they were visiting locations that required them.
And yes there were many Governors that were looking for a national plan and complaining about preparedness as the virus started accelerating. When they found they were on their own many of them were scrambling to acquire PPE and finding themselves battling other states and the feds for those resources. It's a true clusterfuck and while our system sucks and we were not prepared a lot of the problems with the response falls at the feet of the Trump administration.
Ok...we can disagree about the timing of when Trump or the government generally decided that this was serious.
BUT....I would point out a few things.
1. It was Fauci, back in Jan or Feb that was saying that this virus was a low risk to the US. That is the guy that all the Trump critics love. It was Fauci that said that masks would not help and he was backed up by the WHO.
2. There are STILL prominent scientists saying that anything less than an N95 mask is a waste of time and that wearing them is essentially just to give people a sense of having some control.
3. There were scientists from Stanford epidemiology, that were telling Trump not to shut down the economy and who still stand by that. Stanford, not some little ho dunk community college.
The science on this has been all over the map. Wear masks. Do not wear masks. This only effects old people. No, this does really bad things to young people.
THEN, because the science has been all over the map, the politics has been all over the map. Because no matter what Trump says, even if he is right on the science in the moment or the policy in the moment, everyone who hates him is going to do the opposite and work to find experts who say he is wrong.
On this though, he is ABSOLUTELY RIGHT. We will kill more people through a depression than will die of this virus. 12 MILLION people looking at eviction. Homeless. No Food. No healthcare. No clean water.
HUGE waves of personal and small business bankruptcies.
Millions of kids educations handicapped.
There is going to be a massive and prolonged wave of misery and desperation for tens of millions of people.
The eviction moratoriums are over.
There is not a limitless supply of money to keep paying $2400 a month to the unemployed or provide them medicaid.
Now we are going to start seeing large layoffs in the public sector at the state and local level. Fewer teachers. Fewer social workers. Fewer cops. Less water testing. Less food inspection.
Were the federal government not in debt up to its eyeballs before this crisis, were state and local budgets and the personal budgets of individuals in good shape with savings and reserves to cover 6 months or 8 months, then we could shut down for that long. Problem is most of our states are nearly bankrupt, the federal government is only getting by because it can print money and that only so long as the dollar holds its status as the worlds reserve currency.
THERE IS NO WEALTH LEFT. So, we work or we starve. We pissed it away on wars. We pissed it away on sending jobs to China in exchange for cheaper iPhones. We pissed it away on bailing out the banks. We pissed it away on excessive pensions. We penalize saving and we reward buying on credit.
The price is that as individuals, as states, and as a country we no longer have the reserves or the wealth to withstand a shutdown of any length without the whole thing collapsing in on itself. This situation has been building since the 1980's.
Its like we have been riding a bike at really high speed down a hill. So long as we keep moving and dont hit any bumps or try to turn to quickly we can get by but one wrong move and we crash hard.
We hit a really big bump. If we are lucky and we are able to avoid crashing we are going to have to peddle like hell.
If this same thing had happened in the 1960's or 70's or even the 80's we could probably pull off a shutdown of a few months. Now? We cannot stand up to a single month without risking the entire fabric of the country.
We did this to ourselves. We allowed Wall Street, politicians, neoliberal economists and neoconservative war hawks to lead us here and we were dumb enough to follow.
Daniel you are almost right. But the point is that the crash is inevitable and it was so even before we hit the bump. To keep the economy going we had to let the national debt grow exponentially, and that was not sustainable.
And I don't think we did it to ourselves. The Owners did it to us. The people who own Wall Street and the politicians and the war industry and the health industry also own the news and entertainment industry, and they filled our minds with disinformation. They manufactured our consent, and I don't think we are to blame.
But now that we are catching on I think we had better take the country away from them, and if we don't do that we will deserve what we get.
I disagree. We have about the same actual wealth as we had last year or the year before, by which I mean material stuff people can use and real skills they can deploy, not the phony wealth of funny money printed by the government to fatten the purses of the rich. Hard times are going to come, not because we don't have the stuff we need to ward them off, but because so many of us still have delusions about what's real and what's useful.
Thats right...we have the same amount of wealth, which is almost none at all. We have lots of paper wealth owned by about 10% of the population.
Sure, we have skills, we have resources to put to use but they are only good if the economy is open.
WEALTH is what you have to have to draw on when you cannot have cash flow.
Our entire economy is built on PAYMENTS.
People do not buy a house for a price, they buy it for a payment over 30 yrs.
People do not buy a car at a price, they buy it at a payment. Thats why dealers always advertise payments.
Businesses dont want single payments, they want cash streams. Investors in debt want cash streams.
The whole damn system is designed to concentrate wealth and make everyone else into a debt slave that lives paycheck to paycheck to make payments on those debts.
Right. It's not a lack of wealth, then, but a bad financial system, an enormous parasitical superstructure sucking the life out of everything.