The all-new "US Politics and coronavirus" thread

[Dr.Sid]

The next step will be to insist that a death is only classified as a Coronavirus death if:

• The deceased has tested positive for Coronavirus
• The deceased has unambiguously died from Coronavirus and there are no other factors

That, combined with much reduced testing will ensure a low official Coronavirus death toll regardless of the actual number.

Well then history would know Trump as the president of absolutely random spike in natural deaths of 2020.

 

[Andy_Ross]

Three senior officials guiding the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic were in self-quarantine on Saturday after coming into contact with someone who had tested positive for the disease, their agencies and spokesmen said.
Anthony Fauci, Robert Redfield, director of the CDC and Stephen Hahn FDA Commissioner.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...rantine-after-covid-19-exposure-idUSKBN22L096

 

[newyorkguy]

The news from Arizona is mixed. I looked at a website called AZ Family dot com, sponsored by a local CBS News affiliate. First the good news,

The rate of new hospitalizations is the most important indicator of how we are doing overall, and those numbers are dropping with less than a handful reported in the past two days. Link

Then the bad news,

But the former director of the state's health department says the number of people showing up in emergency rooms from coronavirus and the number of patients reported intubated are also significant. Those numbers have shot up.

The state is relaxing the guidelines effective tomorrow when non-essential businesses like restaurants, barbershops, nail salons, will be able to reopen although they will be required to limit capacity and practice social distancing. Some doctors in Arizona have said with cases continuing to increase they think it may be too soon. AZ Family asked the governor to comment.

We reached out to Governor Doug Ducey's office to ask if, given these numbers, the governor still believes starting to open the state is the right call. They sent us a statement saying: "The governor's Stay Home, Stay Healthy, Stay Connected order is in place until at least May 15. We are following the data closely ...and working with public health officials, and will have more updates next week."

What concerns people, of course, is the fact the state is not following the guidelines public health officials have recommended, which even the White House has accepted, that no restrictions be relaxed until a state has fourteen consecutive days of cases trending downward. It seems to some that because that target is hard to hit, some of the states -- under political pressure to 'open up' -- are relaxing restrictions anyway. Some doctors in Arizona have said publicly they do think its too soon and are worried as to how this may play out. Arizona thereby becomes a kind of test case for the rest of us.

I guess we'll see.

 

[slyjoe]

Not sure how AZ is a test case - hasn't Georgia already opened up?

 

[Mader Levap]

The next step will be to insist that a death is only classified as a Coronavirus death if:

• The deceased has tested positive for Coronavirus
• The deceased has unambiguously died from Coronavirus and there are no other factors

That, combined with much reduced testing will ensure a low official Coronavirus death toll regardless of the actual number.

As Russia shows, even outright lying can't go indefinitely.

 

[Crazy Chainsaw]

Are you SURE ?

I am sure we have seen Trump's brand of Idiocy before here in this very site, though it was in the 9/11Conspiracy Theories section.

 

[newyorkguy]

Not sure how AZ is a test case - hasn't Georgia already opened up?

My understanding is, Georgia has and so has Florida. To really get an accurate picture, isn't it better to have more than one test case? It's conceivable that, maybe Georgia won't see much rise while Arizona's increase could be steep. Or the other way around, who knows? At this point, none of us do. That's what we want to find out.

 

[slyjoe]

My understanding is, Georgia has and so has Florida. To really get an accurate picture, isn't it better to have more than one test case? It's conceivable that, maybe Georgia won't see much rise while Arizona's increase could be steep. Or the other way around, who knows? At this point, none of us do. That's what we want to find out.

Georgia and Florida have to different degrees. AZ has its own degree of openness. We may not know, but we can make educated guesses.

 

[newyorkguy]

Georgia and Florida have to different degrees. AZ has its own degree of openness. We may not know, but we can make educated guesses.

What are the differences between the three states, do you know? They seem fairly similar to me other than Florida opening the beaches.

As for educated guesses, educated guesses as to what? I was referring to case numbers, hospitalizations and fatalities. Those are going to be hard numbers. Do they rise, fall, remain constant? I think that's what health officials will be looking at. Arizona governor Ducey told CBS News that the state will be following those numbers too.

 

[johnny karate]

Except if wasn't a misrepresentation, and it wasn't a rhetorical gotcha. You're probably right that it's a gotcha, but that's not my fault and what I was getting at in the first place. Saying with a high degree of confidence that C-19 is like a really bad cold and thousands of times less deadly than the flu, and then complaining that Trump didn't "do his job" makes me wonder what that poster thinks the job should have been.

Probably what his job actually is based on all the well-documented ways in which he failed to do it.

Why do you think that some random person’s potential misunderstanding of the coronavirus would change that? Or even matter?

 

[Giordano]

I don’t see how Obama can be taken to task for the leaked comments about Trump’s failed covid-19 response. He was speaking in a phone conversation that he apparently had no reason to believe was other than private. It was not even equivalent to accidentally being captured on an open mic at a public gatherings; this was not a public setting. It was equivalent to speaking face to face to another individual.

IMO Obama has, in anything, been too careful to stick with the unwritten code that ex-presidents should not publicly criticize sitting presidents. Do people believe that he should not be able to criticize Trump in any setting, including private conversations with any other individual? How about what he says to other Democrats in political strategy meetings? Or just in casual conversations! To Michele Obama over dinner?

 

[slyjoe]

What are the differences between the three states, do you know? They seem fairly similar to me other than Florida opening the beaches.

As for educated guesses, educated guesses as to what? I was referring to case numbers, hospitalizations and fatalities. Those are going to be hard numbers. Do they rise, fall, remain constant? I think that's what health officials will be looking at. Arizona governor Ducey told CBS News that the state will be following those numbers too.

I think most differences are fairly small. Florida opened beaches to large gatherings, but also exempted certain counties. I think the biggest difference is when they opened. April 24, April 30, May 4, other dates for other "open" activities. I think any state that opens before 14 days of declining new cases will see a rise in new cases. How big it is - those are the educated guesses.

Ducey said he would follow the guidelines, but he is not doing that. He will take 1 or 2 days and claim its in the right direction, and then the new cases will rise again. None of these states are following the guidelines. How could they with crappy test numbers?

Be careful with Ducey - note he doesn't say he is following the guidelines, he is following the numbers, which means nothing if you don't act on them. As an old boss used to say, don't bother with metrics if you aren't going to use them.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

The next step will be to insist that a death is only classified as a Coronavirus death if:

• The deceased has tested positive for Coronavirus
• The deceased has unambiguously died from Coronavirus and there are no other factors

That, combined with much reduced testing will ensure a low official Coronavirus death toll regardless of the actual number.

No need for that. He's reportedly already started saying in private that the death toll is inflated.

Why bother decreeing how deaths are classified when you can just call it all a lie?

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

I'm in the process of trying out a bunch of different podcasts at the moment to see what sticks. As such I've got a bunch of random episodes from random podcasts just waiting to be listened to. Well, yesterday I listened to one from January entitled "How worried should we be about Coronavirus?" That was an odd trip back in time to take. At the time of the podcast "only a handful" of cases had happened outside of China, and a lot of the talk was about whether or not it would be likely to spread more globally.

Most of the experts they had on were bang on the money. Some of the things they were saying about what we were likely to find out about the virus have been borne out, but a lot of answers from them were, quite rightly, saying that it's too early to make any predictions about what will happen.

But the thing that stood out like a sore thumb to me was from a brief interview with Fauci. Again, almost everything he said was along the same lines as above, but he was asked whether if there was an outbreak in New York (a place seemingly picked at random, rather than because it was considered particularly likely to occur there) whether it could go into lockdown. Fauci was extremely sceptical of the idea. He didn't think it at all likely that anywhere like that (he also mentioned San Fransisco and Los Angeles) could go into lockdown.

That didn't age quite as well as the rest of the podcast.

 

[Andy_Ross]

Eric Trump Tweeted

Why are governors and elected officials from states that are closed still getting paid? Is @realDonaldTrump the only one in government refusing a salary? I vote to stop paying them until their states are reopened and their constituents are back at work.

 

[Horatius]

The state is relaxing the guidelines effective tomorrow when non-essential businesses like restaurants, barbershops, nail salons

This is the part I don't get. I understand the desire to start re-opening businesses and get people back to work. I don't agree with the timing, but I understand the argument that the US can't just keep a few million people on unemployment for months on end.

What I don't get is why these businesses are part of the first wave of re-openings. They're just about the worst type of business to be running right now, because they all require far too much close personal interaction. Hair cuts and manicures simply can't be done at a safe distance, and waiting tables while maintaining safe practices seems quite difficult. These should be the last things to re-open, not the first.

Where I live, we re-opened construction sites last week. There are two major ones near my house, and you can see that the workers are, by the nature of their work, well spread out. This weekend, we re-opened some major retailers for in-person shopping, which again, doesn't require up-close interactions. We apply the same rules we've been practicing at the grocery stores for the last month.

But restaurants? Nail Salons? Why are they pushing to open businesses like this so soon? It's just ridiculous.

 

[newyorkguy]

A few weeks ago when Texas Lt. Gov. Dan "There's more important things than living" Patrick was on the Tucker Carlson show he complained about the way the threat from Covid-19 was being exaggerated. Including by Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom, Patrick hastened to add, "I have great respect for."

Patrick groused that first it was supposed to be one to two million deaths. Than one hundred thousand. Now less than sixty thousand!

Somebody want to let Big Dan know the U.S. passed 80,000 dead yesterday?

 

[johnny karate]

I'm in the process of trying out a bunch of different podcasts at the moment to see what sticks. As such I've got a bunch of random episodes from random podcasts just waiting to be listened to. Well, yesterday I listened to one from January entitled "How worried should we be about Coronavirus?" That was an odd trip back in time to take. At the time of the podcast "only a handful" of cases had happened outside of China, and a lot of the talk was about whether or not it would be likely to spread more globally.

Most of the experts they had on were bang on the money. Some of the things they were saying about what we were likely to find out about the virus have been borne out, but a lot of answers from them were, quite rightly, saying that it's too early to make any predictions about what will happen.

But the thing that stood out like a sore thumb to me was from a brief interview with Fauci. Again, almost everything he said was along the same lines as above, but he was asked whether if there was an outbreak in New York (a place seemingly picked at random, rather than because it was considered particularly likely to occur there) whether it could go into lockdown. Fauci was extremely sceptical of the idea. He didn't think it at all likely that anywhere like that (he also mentioned San Fransisco and Los Angeles) could go into lockdown.

That didn't age quite as well as the rest of the podcast.

In fairness, Fauci probably didn’t anticipate that the Trump administration would sit on their hands and do nothing while the virus spread like wildfire.

 

[thaiboxerken]

Eric Trump Tweeted

Why are governors and elected officials from states that are closed still getting paid? Is @realDonaldTrump the only one in government refusing a salary? I vote to stop paying them until their states are reopened and their constituents are back at work.

LOL. I find it ridiculous that Trumpanzees point out that Trump donates his POTUS salary since it is a pittance compared to the millions that Trump and his cronies have stolen from us tax payers.

 

[thaiboxerken]

In fairness, Fauci probably didn’t anticipate that the Trump administration would sit on their hands and do nothing while the virus spread like wildfire.

This kind of denial is killing people. Denial of the virus. Denial of Trump's incompetence. Denial of Trump's priority to make $$$ over protect lives.