Governors On East and West Coasts Form Pacts To Decide When To Reopen Economies (cnn.com) 267
gollum123 shares a report from CNN: States on the country's East and West coasts are forming their own regional pacts to work together on how to reopen from the stay-at-home orders each has issued to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus. The first such group to be announced came Monday on the East Coast. Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said his state, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Rhode Island each plan to name a public health and economic official to a regional working group. The chief of staff of the governor of each state also will be a part of the group, which will begin work immediately to design a reopening plan. Later on Monday, the West Coast states of California, Washington and Oregon also announced they are joining forces in a plan to begin incremental release of stay-at-home orders. When announcing the three-state coordination of the western governors during his midday briefing on Monday, Newsom quoted an old proverb: "If you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together." The report notes that other regional pacts could be in the works as well.
"Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz told reporters on Monday that he spoke with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers about working together to open those states from their respective stay-at-home orders," reports CNN. "But the only way that this can happen is if we have widespread testing," Walz said.
"Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz told reporters on Monday that he spoke with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers about working together to open those states from their respective stay-at-home orders," reports CNN. "But the only way that this can happen is if we have widespread testing," Walz said.
Interstate compacts? It starts (Score:3)
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More than two, actually.
There are two in this state (WA) alone, reasonably accurately divided by the Pacific Crest Trail.
Nevada has gambling to the south and ranching/mining to the north.
Wisconsin (I grew up there) has Madison/Milwaukee vs the rest is the state.
Even Idaho has quite a bit of yelling between the forested north in Pacific time and the Snake River Plain in Mountain Time.
A long time ago there was a book called The Nine Nations of North America. Leaving out Quebec, the other eight apply to the US
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In order to better coordinate their efforts to combat the coronavirus, the nation's governors are considering the extraordinary step of forming a country. [...] While the idea of the fifty states coming together to form a country is still in the embryonic stage, DeWine said that the states would ideally create a "federal government" led by a "President". "We're all in agreement that it would be amazing to have a President right now", DeWine said.
Filling the leadership vacuum? (Score:3, Interesting)
You should have included a stronger warning or more explicit description of that story...
My take on this story is that Trump dropped the ball because he was trying to dodge the responsibility. It's the ONLY thing he's learned from his MANY business failures. All of his later deals were structured so that he could get paid up front without having any personal financial exposure if the deals imploded later--and many of them did implode, sometimes spectacularly.
That's why Trump was so desperate to avoid gettin
Public masturbation of 4874633 (Score:2)
Z^-1
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Pull your head out of your ass. There's nothing special about Grand Rapids. People work for a living in every county. There's nothing special about you. Yeah, you've built yourself a very nice city there. Been to Grand Rapids a couple times in the last 5 years. It's very nice. But the virus doesn't give a shit. You think you're special because you only have 287 cases. Guess what. Grand Rapids (or more specifically, Kent County) only had 29 cases on the day Whitmer issued the stay at home order. So it's bal
In the absence of Federal leadership... (Score:3, Interesting)
...the states are working together. Good for them, this resiliency may save us yet.
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The US was specifically set up where states have most of the power. So something like this is how it should work. Anyone who actually thinks the fed government should be helping out in meaningful ways doesn't really understand how things work. At best, the feds just send money to the states who accomplish the work.
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The Fed coordinating national actions is the most efficient way to run the country, not expecting/hoping 50 independent governments to coordinate themselves. I'd say that this recent action is a redundancy in our system for when we have an inept Fed. So it proves that we need strong state governments along with a strong Fed.
Re:In the absence of Federal leadership... (Score:5, Informative)
The Fed coordinating national actions is the most efficient way to run the country
More than 600 people died in NY yesterday. Meanwhile, Hawaii has had no deaths in the past week. Several of the Hawaiian islands no longer have any active cases.
It is silly to believe we should all follow a single policy.
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Who said anything about following a single policy? The Fed is supposed to coordinate response to help mitigate issues, put out fires, and spread information and resources. A competent and responsible Fed could know that California is doing something that is working and then pass on that data to NY officials to help them in their response. A competent and responsible Fed has the power to acquire and distribute resources to the states that need them. A competent and responsible Fed would have already had
Re:In the absence of Federal leadership... (Score:4, Insightful)
Who said anything about following a single policy?
If there are going to be multiple policies, then who decides what they are? State, local, and regional officials? Or should decisions be imposed by the federal government?
The Fed is supposed to coordinate response to help mitigate issues, put out fires, and spread information and resources.
The Fed is doing all of that. You just don't like how they are doing it and don't agree with Trump's decisions.
So your solution is ... to give Trump more power.
A competent and responsible Fed ...
I see. So the main issue here is that you don't like the results of the 2016 election.
Look, the federal government is not "competent and responsible" and other than abolishing democracy, it isn't going to be (at least not consistently). So in the realm of REALITY the best solution is the distribute power to state and local governments.
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Right now we have areas that are harder hit than others and are in need of resources. The entire reason that you want coordination for NATIONAL disasters like this is because the Feds have a lot more resources than state and local governments do. It also has the power to shift resources to areas of need. Alabama has a ton of masks but isn't being hit that hard? Great, the Feds can send some of those masks to NY who is being harder hit without NY having to waste time negotiating for those resources. So
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It's called bartering and worked for hundreds of years before bankers and money lenders took over on behalf of a King.
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Oh geez
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How is forcing hundreds of entities to negotiate between one another more efficient?
Well, regardless of the reasons, it IS more efficient. Adam Smith once wrote a book explaining why, but it's a little to long to summarize here.
When Kruschev visited America, he was amazed at how food flowed into NYC, was efficiently distributed to markets, and consumed with very little waste. So he insisted on meeting "the man in charge of NYC's food supply". He refused to believe that it could be so efficient without a central authority.
Kruschev's faith in centralized authority was excusable in the 195
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You're debating two things. I am speaking to a national disaster response. You are speaking to the every day running of the economy. They're two different things.
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They are not so different. Whether distributing masks or food it is better for stakeholders to talk directly to each other rather than pushing decisions up to a committee located thousands of miles away with out-of-date information and their own agenda.
I really don't understand why you are arguing about this. You openly agree that the federal government is doing a TERRIBLE job. Yet you think the solution is to concentrate even more power and decision making at the level. Do you really think that makes se
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I'd like to point out that you're the one arguing. You don't need to continue arguing if you failed to convince me.
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The fact that the federal government is doing a TERRIBLE job could be for one of two reasons:
1. The federal government is inherently incapable of doing better by its nature, irrespective of who's running it
2. The federal government is being run by a bunch of evil morons who are fucking up the response, and could be doing a good job if it were run by better people, or even just run by the same people but with them listening a tiny bit better to the non-evil, non-moronic people who can advise them
You may thin
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Do you know what happens with markets? Hoarding.
No. This is absolutely false.
Hoarding is what happens when there is no functioning market.
The recent toilet paper shortage was caused by retailers underpricing the product to maintain goodwill rather than pricing to market.
If retailers had been greedier, there would have been no hoarding and no shortage.
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You left out the 3rd option, which is the actual truth:
3. Sometimes competent people are running things, and other times incompetent morons are running things.
The problem is that when you give power to a competent leader, and that leader is later replaced by an evil moron, the evil moron will inherit the same power.
Don't ever give power to your champion unless you are comfortable with your nemesis wielding the same power.
Trump angrily lashed out at these blue-state governors a few hours ago, saying they sh
Re:In the absence of Federal leadership... (Score:5, Interesting)
The Fed coordinating national actions is the most efficient way to run the country,
In theory. Obviously somewhat flawed theory, as it can also be - by far - the least efficient; witness the downfall of the Soviet Bloc.
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The Soviet block fell due to too much federalism not too little. The USSR actually had a right to secede for the constituent SSRs in their constitution so unlike the US when constituent states seceded the central govt had no legal basis to use force to keep the Union together.
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The Soviet block fell due to too much federalism not too little.
Yes, that's certainly one way to paraphrase my point.
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No one is talking about absolutes here. As I said, if you get an incompetent Fed then yes a centralized coordination falls apart. But fortunately we have state governments willing to work together to coordinate out response on a more regional level. But to get to that point we lost a lot of time and lives. If the president weren't so petty and incompetent then the states wouldn't have to take the time to band together.
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Believe me, I don't like the Soviet way of doing lots of things. I experienced them firsthand.
However, the basic health service was one of the very few things the super centralized Soviet government handled decently. This included swift coordinated response to pandemics and mass inoculations.
This is a complete opposite of what Russian federal government is doing now. There is no coordination and no real financial support to local authorities.
The constitution has plenty of room (Score:3)
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Re: In the absence of Federal leadership... (Score:5, Funny)
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Or senators from sandwiches, apparently.
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Or senators from sandwiches, apparently.
Hey, speak for yourself. I know the difference between Senator Reuben and a Durbin sandwich.
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That's not a problem of corruption, it's a natural result of a voting populace that can't tell a president from a potato.
Maybe, but it seems that they can tell the difference at some level between potatoes that are and aren't rotten.
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This is because they actually prefer the rotten one - birds of feather, or maybe potatoes of peel.
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In the last election the rotten one was discarded.
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2016. One guess.
Don't be a bad egg. Metaphor and all that.
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It only applies to the other side, right?.. right?
Which side, the right or left?
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Re:In the absence of Federal leadership... (Score:4, Insightful)
Dude, you're right, it is: "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to... provide for the... general Welfare [cornell.edu] of the United States."
Which would be why I didn't controvert that. Grandparent wrote "The Federal government has the responsibility of coordinating country-level responses to issues like this very one. Which is a very different thing.
GGP wrote "At best, the feds just send money to the states who accomplish the work." Which was called horseshit, yet is exactly what Art. I sec. 8 authorizes -- taxing and spending money to support the general welfare.
No. The Federal government doesn't have the ability to step in and "provide real leadership." The Federal government has the ability to offer advice, resources, and logistics, but it does not have the ability to take command and declare the opening of state economies [thehill.com].
There's not, especially since you self-selected what "this" is and then attempted to twist my post to be against it. The Federal government cannot self-appoint itself leader of a public health response, and States are free to reject its incompetent leadership in this area. Also, it's "precedent," not "precedence."
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I'm calling it like most of us are seeing it. Did you even read the article or watch today's White House briefing? Egads.
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"The Federal government has the responsibility of coordinating country-level responses to issues like this very one."
If that were true, wouldn't that be "coordinating State-level responses"?
BTW, it's not my straw man [thehill.com], it's what the Federal government is openly claiming as its remit.
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To be clear, the Federal government should be initiating and co-ordinating the responses of the Federal agencies, and co-ordinating but not controlling the responses of the States, in national emergencies like this. Trump can advise and make recommendations to the States on their actions, but not overrule them by decree - only where provided for by Federal law, as enacted by Congress (and even then, the States can nullify that).
Trump is clearly not constitutionally able to force the States to reopen, as he
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So is this just going to be a "orange man bad" no matter what?
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So is this just going to be a "orange man bad" no matter what?
Where the hell have you been?
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What it boils down to is this...
If it's a liberal idea, the Republicans say it's a Federal issue so they have a say.
If it's a conservative idea, the Republicans say it's a State issue so Democrats don't.
Trump gets what he wants anyway (Score:2)
Union of States! (Score:2)
What a great idea. Maybe they could form a more perfect Union to establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for the union of states! They may be on to something.
Bad or Good? (Score:2, Flamebait)
Re:Bad or Good? (Score:5, Informative)
It is consistent, Trump forced the states to come up with their own plans because he refused to follow both Bush and Obama's examples of how it is supposed to work. Now that some states have their act together enough in the total absence of federal support and even federal obstruction Trump wants to swoop in now that its a much easier problem to solve.
Unless he is going to actually start showing leadership he needs to stay out of the way now. Hell, if he would have stayed out of the way and let Fauci run the ball we still would have been a whole lot better off. This is frankly disgraceful.
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Okay what specifically did you want to Trump to do that he hasn't already done?
resign.
or just leave the earth, entirely.
you asked for one, but I gave you two. its two-for-one day. enjoy!
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Because a leadership crisis is exactly what we need right now. Perhaps you should leave earth entirely, the world will at least be better off.
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We've had no leadership from Trump. He's not a leader nor will he ever be a leader.
Re:Bad or Good? (Score:5, Insightful)
You would use the logistics of the U.S. military to mobilize and procure PPE for all the locales that need it rather than forcing states to get it on their own or even worse competing with states. You know, like they do for hurricane relief.
That's how I know you haven't been asking people anything. It's painfully obvious right on the face that Trump should not have been going around telling the governors they are on their own. They should never have been on there own. A lot of responsibility still falls on them even when the federal government actually provides real leadership. Instead you have California implementing wearing masks in public before federal guidelines are changed to match. Same with shelter in place. That is totally backwards. The federal government has access to the best resources all over the world, it should not be left up to states to guess at which mitigations strategies to try first.
You don't have to have a single nationwide shelter-in-place policy either. You people are acting like its all or nothing and there is no room for nuance in executing policy. I also have no idea how there is no compelling evidence that a shelter in place order wouldn't have helped or even help now. That is basically you saying there is no way for you to be convinced its a good idea no matter what the evidence is. Every place that has done it has seen a flattening of their curve. How is that not compelling evidence?
It does remain to be seen if Fauci was actually in charge if things would have been different. Frankly, you only need to watch a presser to see how not in charge he is. He has been a singular source of honest information and even that is rocky as he contradicts Trump so much it becomes hard to tell how much he is actually holding back.
You are clearly choosing to blind yourself to the course of this virus. BBC Timeline graph to illustrate the ineptness of our response. [times-standard.com]
There are plenty of other densely populated countries handling this a whole lot better than we are. Guess what? They are almost all doing shelter in place.
The problem with all public health crisis situations is that success means people complain you overreacted. Failure is what you have right now instead.
Re:Bad or Good? (Score:5, Interesting)
Okay what specifically did you want to Trump to do that he hasn't already done?
The biggest thing (though there are many smaller ones) is that he should have spent February focusing on building up medical supplies and getting good test kits into mass production. He should have exercised the DPA earlier, and aggressively, to get PPE, oxygen generators and ventilators in mass production, and in late February, early March he should have recommended social distancing, wearing of masks in public, banning of group gatherings and selective shutdowns early, before the virus got a good foothold.
But it's actually less about what he should have done and more about what he should not have done. In fairness, it's likely that no president would have done the right things as soon as they should have been done (though most would have listened to the experts and done them much earlier than he did), but nearly all of them would have avoided doing all of the wrong things so thoroughly and so continually. He should not have spent six critical weeks denying that there was a problem or promising that it would miraculously disappear. He should not have overridden his healthcare officials and demanded that all messaging go through the White House when those officials were bypassing the White House precisely because the White House was ignoring them and they knew their message needed to be heard. He should not have worried more about the economy than about health (more precisely; he should have listened when people pointed out that the economy would be more damaged by not reacting). He should not have ordered the military not to take actions to prevent the spread of COVID-19 because that might send a conflicting message -- I'm pretty sure that order was precisely what caused Captain Crozier to have to step outside of the chain of command to protect his sailors. He should not have asked to have a cruise ship kept offshore rather than getting the people on board into treatment because it would make the numbers go up. He should not have threatened to ignore states whose governors were insufficiently nice to him. He should not have spouted numerous falsehoods about the disease and its treatment in his narcissistic attempt to dominate the press briefings, and instead should either have learned the material well enough to present it correctly himself, or stepped back and let the experts do their jobs.
To put it in a nutshell, he should have listened to the experts and acted on their advice, rather than treating the pandemic as a political problem to be managed with spin and message control. Because viruses don't respond to spin and message control.
Oh, and now he shouldn't be attempting to insert himself so that he can take credit for the good work that others have done in the absence of much coherent strategy from the White House. And he definitely should not be trying to get the country re-opened before we have (a) beat the active case count down much further than it is now, (b) built enough testing capacity and (c) established a thorough test-and-trace program to keep the virus suppressed until we can get a vaccine. Re-opening before we're ready will cause a massive explosion in cases, with much, much faster growth than we've seen before because it will have many more points of origin.
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As the OP said, you wanted him to be Nostradamus in January when China and the CDC were saying "no human transmission" and silencing critics. Most people believed China in February when they said they had locked down Wuhan, while they let ~4M people leave the area and as Trump was locking down the country EARLY February from China, people everywhere said it wasn't necessary, that it was just xenophobia and Canada, Washington and NY specifically permitted people being blocked the direct way to route people t
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Translation: By phrasing it this way, I can reject any and all suggestions that don't Praise Him.
If you don't view the abundant evidence that sheltering and s
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People complained about Bush just as much as Trump. What's different? Obama fucked up his emergency responses much more in comparison, Puerto Rico still isn't back to what it was and we are now half a decade further.
You don't want government to resolve your problems, the Federalist papers and framers warned against that and increasing the footprint of FEMA, FDA, CDC etc for them to just sit around pushing paper isn't going to help.
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I am confused by your post. So you think the Federal government should be in control of the response now despite ceding control for the last 3 months why? If they weren't smart to even recognize there was an issue what do you think they would do differently?
Trump made his bed and abandoned a lot of states when they needed help dearly. Many lost their lives as a different result. He can lay in it now and let the adults figure this out since he dismantled any institutional knowledge that would have seen this
"Widespread testing" (Score:2)
> But the only way that this can happen is if we have widespread testing
There is such a shortage of testing supplies and such a high demand for them globally, this isn't going to happen anytime soon. We need another way forward, either by cutting the vaccine trial to 6 months, by choosing to let people without underlying conditions to get sick, or to isolate areas without cases from areas with and let those areas without function normally. Regarding a 6-month trial, there are two strong arguments for it.
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Adding something on that I left off: in addition, nearly all of the countries that were relying on the testing strategy have since had to implement lockdowns.
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Plenty of research happening across the world to figure out exactly what makes a high risk case. I think once they can do that, perhaps identify those 4-5 most significant risk factors then that will be a big deal. Send those not at risk back out into the world, knowing that of course we still have the facilities to treat them if they need it, the rest of the high risk population stay in more severe isolation until the vaccine is approved and then we don't have to give it to everyone anyway.
This is a 'no confidence' vote against Trump (Score:5, Insightful)
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Stop apologizing for Trump and his bullshit, you're just embarassing yourself.
He is quoted as saying early on "It's all a Democrat hoax!" How do you explain that!? Rhetorical question, you can't, other than "He's a piece of shit".
I'm sorry, but it's TDS, and it's terminal (Score:2)
By pointing out that even Snopes says [snopes.com] "Despite creating some confusion with his remarks, Trump did not call the coronavirus itself a hoax."
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So you just gloss over the fact that you repeated a lie.
He did not call it a hoax, and the only confusion was in the democrats and medias head.
Everyone else understood clearly what he meant.
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Now be sure to be a Trump Apologist, otherwise you might have to admit how wrong you are and what a piece of shit he is. Then you'd have to kill yourself.
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You know he didint call the virus a hoax. You are the one lying.
You are asking him to do what, if you think he didint go far enough?
When there was 1 case in the USA. you wanted him to shut down the country, right then and there?
Its easy to complain in hindsight, but you are full of shit.
You can clearly see there where very few cases until March here: https://www.worldometers.info/... [worldometers.info]
I setup a task force en January 29th when there where barely any cases in the USA. He directed them immediately to start setti
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It was an awesome press briefing.
He was destroying the press lies and fake narrative left and right.
Re:This is a 'no confidence' vote against Trump (Score:4, Interesting)
The so-called China "travel ban" only applied to Chinese people. Americans could return from China *without being tested and without mandatory quarantine*. If you want to know the success of that policy, look around. It failed.
But it's almost irrelevant. *Everybody* failed at keeping the virus out of their country. And if you look at the US on a state by state basis, the initial stages of the growth curve look startlingly similar when you adjust for the date the epidemic gets rolling.
That actually shouldn't be. The curve for states where the epidemic gets started later should look far more favorable. That shows a lack of coordination. The curves should flatten *much faster* in a state that reported its first case in the beginning of March than one that reported its first case in January.
We're only at the "end of the beginning" phase of this, and now we're facing the biggest problem: we aren't anywhere near prepared to restart the economy. There is no coordinated plan; managing supplies and getting them to people has been a disaster, and it's only going to get more demanding.
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Time to Move (Score:2)
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idiotic (Score:2)
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Re:You are focused on the past (Score:5, Informative)
If there were 671 deaths today, assuming a .3% IFR (current best guess estimates say that the number is likely somewhere around there), then there were somewhere in the neighborhood of 224,000 people with active coronavirus infections in NYC two weeks ago.
I don't see any scenario in which there are not at least 100k people with active coronavirus in NYC today. So no, it is absolutely not safe to open up New York right now. If you do, you can expect it to quickly resume a similar case growth rate to what it was showing prior to the lockdown, or doubling every three days. So in 21 days, 100% of NYC residents would be infected, give or take.
And that's not a solvable problem without keeping people from going outside in an area with the density of NYC, short of doing an evacuation over the course of a month into several neighboring states. You can't socially distance yourself when you are literally walking a couple of feet away from someone else the whole time, or crammed into a subway car shoulder-to-shoulder with other people. Absent a cure, a vaccine, or some huge improvement in fatalities, it is not POSSIBLE to safely open up NYC until this virus burns itself out to at most double-digit cases, and maybe not even then.
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You are glossing over the practically complete last of testing in this country.
Until there is broad testing no one can know if we're overreacting or not reacting strong enough. It would have been far cheaper and far less damaging to the economy if the CDC and FEMA had gotten together in the beginning to start a full force effort to test the population.
Otherwise you're playing Russian roulette with no idea how many bullets are in the gun.
If 10 million people in this country are actually infected and you o
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So you're going to keep the country closed for another year? Broad, working tests are as of yet unavailable at scale. The ones from China which Italy and Spain have been using are 30% accurate and even the best tests are at 80-90% accuracy. Until you get to 98-99% accuracy, it's pretty much pointless to do wide-scale testing since you'll just keep re-introducing those 10% that are sick into the workforce. Besides a data point to help doctors diagnose someone that is having breathing problems there is no fun
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"New Your" also has quite a lot lower rate of hospitalization than it did two weeks ago.
Of course it does...
That's the entire point of the lockdown...
Glad you agree it's working.
Re:Open it all up ASAP (Score:5, Insightful)
What makes you think that?
Articles everywhere are suggesting that the infection peak was last weekend. You don't stop fighting at the *peak*. If you do, it's no longer the peak. Because if you stop social distancing then you increase effective infectivity and it accelerates again, and we're back to the original estimates of hundreds of thousands to low millions of preventable deaths. The most generous estimates of asymptomatic+presymptomatic infection and recovery are something like 50% (Iceland study). Then there's the symptomatic but unconfirmed cases. We have a little under 600000 confirmed cases now. It's really hard to estimate the rate of unconfirmed cases, but it's difficult to imagine that they are 50x the confirmed cases, which would take it to a little under 10% of population immunized, where herd immunity can just barely make a dent into things.
COVID-19 infections are a trailing indicator by about 5 days (although variance is huge). Combined that with generous assumptions about when in the weekend we peaked, and we might be as much as a week past peak in the US as a whole. No model that I can find suggests that's nearly enough time for the snapshot right now to be less than when shelter-in-place was implemented. Implying, if we let people go ASAP, the new peak will be far worse and hospitals overwhelmed quickly in many states.
I see you suggest people will "be more careful" in another post. I'm sure you can find cases where that's possible -- perhaps people can start having haircuts, for example, in small, un-crowded salons and barber shops. Or sit-down service at restaurants that were previously stuck on delivery, again if you're spacing them out. A theater at 25% capacity or a stadium at 10% (numbers produced from ass, would need actual analysis). Short of having an ultra-quick COVID-19 test at the door with reasonably low false-negative rates*, you can't really open up to capcity.
We are only talking about straggler cases if we don't let up now.
Yes, people are being hurt by this, and yes, it disproportionately impacts the poorest (almost everything does). People are also hurt when there's mass death, and surprise surprise, it disproportionately kills the poorest. And it affects the economy too.
What we need are criteria for ending social distancing, and for re-implementing it if and when it becomes necessary, with the understanding that yes, the trigger may be pulled again. Because yes, the current state of affairs can't go on forever. But no, we haven't gone "beyond" flattening the curve yet, the time for that argument is when we have line of sight to new infections being around the level when shelter-in-place was first implemented (or an alternative of some kind that would reduce expected transmission per person, such as an effective treatment, widespread frequent re-testing, or dystopian cellphone tracking).
* Such a test might be as simple as "taking people's temperature" *if* the hypothesis that asymptomatic and presymptomatic carriers don't spread the virus much is proven, rather than just conjectured.
Re:Open it all up ASAP (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree -- we can't stay shut down forever. We're going to have to accept some increase in in transmission when we do restart the economy.
But... This thing is *explosive*. We went from 65 active cases on March 1 to 202573 active cases on April 1. There's not enough immunity in the herd yet to prevent the return to unrestrained exponential growth. "Flattening the curve" is not like flattening the dent in a piece of sheet metal; it won't *stay* flattened until the underlying conditions change.
If we tried to go back to the status quo ante tomorrow, we'd have millions of *active cases* by May 1, and tens of millions by the middle of May. We would definitely see the health care system in some regions collapse. We could see an internal refugee crisis as people flee from hard-hit areas, spreading the virus even faster. Essential services like food supply could be disrupted -- heck that could happen anyway.
This is total war, like WW2. Sooner or later we need to have our D-Day, preferably sooner, but not before we've got plans laid, materiel stockpiled, and troops prepared for what they'll be asked to do. Landing on Omaha Beach is a good idea; doing it before you've prepared in the hopes the Germans will ignore you is a bad idea.
We can't have the status quo back any time soon. It's out of our power. But we are *not* helpless. There are things we can do that will make a difference.
Re: (Score:2)
We went from 65 active cases on March 1 to 202573 active cases on April 1.
No, we went from 65 tested and confirmed cases on March 1 to ~200k tested and confirmed cases on April 1. Two major things are involved in those numbers:
1) the spread of the disease
2) the spread of testing for the disease
So your numbers are only truly useful if the numbers of people being tested were consistent across that period. That is not even close to true. Not by a longshot.
Re: (Score:3)
We went from 65 active cases on March 1 to 202573 active cases on April 1.
No, we went from 65 tested and confirmed cases on March 1 to ~200k tested and confirmed cases on April 1. Two major things are involved in those numbers:
1) the spread of the disease 2) the spread of testing for the disease
So your numbers are only truly useful if the numbers of people being tested were consistent across that period. That is not even close to true. Not by a longshot.
We went from 0 deaths in January and then
1 death in February and then
4,063 new deaths in March
And then the first 13 days of April had another 19,577
That is much less reliant on testing.
12,745 / 23,640 = 54% [worldometers.info] of all the deaths in the US have been in just the last 7 days. The lockdown is only just starting to slow that growth down.
There is every indication that the rate would skyrocket again if everything went back to the pre-lockdown situation.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You do understand that there has also been exponential growth in the numbers of tests applied, right?
It is a gross misuse of statistics to imply that you can compute the rate of growth based on test results without dividing by the number of people tested by those dates. That's not a margin of error, that's the only accurate way to do the math. The margins of error (false positives, false negatives, and the sample bias due to the fact that rationed testing has focused on symptomatic individuals) are actually
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Clearly the people modding the parent post down to -1 live in some alternate reality in which you can simply turn off an entire nation's economy and imprison people in their homes for an indeterminate period of time while more testing and/or a vaccine becomes available. In this alternate reality, apparently if the people who occupied jobs that were deemed non-essential and were most likely already living paycheck to paycheck before they were stripped of their earning potential happen to get evicted and are
Re: (Score:2)
Hope to hear from you on the other side, but not holding my breath.
I love that you used that idiom, because it is the prefect example of what we are all doing by staying home. We're holding our breath. COVID-19 is a toxic gas that just got released in the room we are standing in, and to avoid breathing it in we are holding our breath. Which works in the short term, but pretty soon, we're going to need to breath. Otherwise we'll run out of oxygen (food, water, and other resources).
Breathing this toxic gas generates more toxic gas. Every molecule inhaled causes 2-3 molecules to be exhaled. Luckily, a molecule that doesn't get inhaled breaks down into harmless constituents in a few days, so while we hold our breaths the amount of gas in the air is decreasing... but at this point the remaining molecules are also widely distributed, not concentrated. So if we go back to breathing before we implement some additional countermeasures, the gas will be produced rapidly from every part of t
Re: (Score:2)
There is a vast and growing crowd that has had just about enough of this shit, and large marches on state capitals are already being planned.
Shame that it will take significant numbers of those marchers getting sick for them to figure out they're idiots.
Re: (Score:2)
We're past the point where we're worried about overwhelming hospitals
Yes, because of the lockdowns...
You do understand what will happen if everyone just starts running about infecting everyone again don't you?
Re: (Score:3)
Your math does not add up. Over 7000 people have died in NYC in the last couple of weeks, and, given that once a person is on a ventilator, the chance of survival is about 20%, that 8500 beds number means just the ICU beds and that is just for the coronavirus patients. Considering that the US ratio of hospital beds to ICU beds is 8:1, and the typical occupancy rate of 64% for non-coronavirus patients, 140000 beds doesn't seem so far off. Germany has added 10000 ICU beds alone to deal with the coronavirus de
Re: (Score:2)
Well, you can look at the numbers yourself. If there was such a need for beds, there is an entire hospital ship with thousands of beds, pretty much unused. Most hospitals have been operating at 65% occupancy which is unprecedented for US healthcare systems. In places like Europe, occupancy is running at 80-90% on a regular day, hence why you see Italy and Spain rationing care to those under 65yo and as a result, much more deaths.
The survival rate once you're on a ventilator is about 50%. Not ideal but it's
Re:Overruled! (Score:5, Informative)
"The President of the United States has the authority to do what the President of the United States has the authority to do, which is very powerful."
"The President's power is total."
-- Trump, right now, over the most incredible WH presser i've seen in my life
Re: (Score:2)
The President's power is total. -- Trump
I imagine Melania has other thoughts about that.
Re: (Score:2)
Unless the President is black. Then it's state sovereignty all the way.