Cont: The all-new "US Politics and coronavirus" thread pt. 2

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Gavin said:
Plus ignored my data I gave you only 11,371 Americans under 55 have died plus 80% of the fatalities where 65 and above and had prior illness.
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Speaking as someone over 55 and with a prior illness, I'm not comforted.


Here's the issue. If Governor DeSantis, or Governor Kemp, or President Trump carefully evaluated the issues, weighed the costs, and decided tht the number of deaths caused by the virus was not enough to justify restrictions that took away the normal quality of life, I could respect that.

What Trump should be doing is get a whole bunch of smart, educated, people together and ask them, "What will happen if we ______ ?" Fill in the blank with "open schools" or "mandate masks" or "enforce a 'lockdown'...i.e a ban on non-essential employment" or whatever else has been controversial.

If he did that, then I could respect him, or the governors who eased restrictions.

That's not what happened, and that isn't what continues to happen.

Instead you have people picking and choosing isolated data points to support arguments, which is all well and good on the internet, but not so good in the Oval Office.

You have the President of the United States saying he disagrees with the head of the CDC. That shouldn't happen, ever. Really. If the head of the CDC is sufficiently ill informed that the President knows better than the head of the CDC, the head of the CDC should be fired. It's his job to know better. The President should be contacting him, and asking him, and taking that advice.

Or, on issues of real scientific controversy, the President ought to be able to note that there is a lot of disagreement among scientists, and that more data is needed, but in the meantime a decision must be made so....and announce a decision. That isn't happening either. "I saw some guy on the news say...." is not seeking an expert opinion. Multiple talking heads on a discussion show is not the same thing as scientific controversy. He's just yapping and saying that things are the way he wants them to be. He's great. America is doing great. Under his leadership, we're awesome. Yay us.

Sadly, it isn't true. Germany has 80 million people, and 9,000 deaths. American has 300 million people, and 170,000 deaths. Do the math. We suck.
 
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Resume said:
Kawasaki's and MIS-C are both well-observed conditions a simple google search away, as is the virology and contagion of COVID-19. What we don't know it how much more serious these will be with added millions of viral vectors thrown together willy-nilly; we can however logically deduce a negative outcome.

Once again, we are only 7 or 8 months into this pandemic and we have only that much data with which to make sound public health decisions, and so far, the US has made demonstrably poor ones. There is conflicting data concerning COVID-19 in school-age children and good reason to err on the side of caution concerning their health, or their ability to spread the virus to a vulnerable population.

You are not an epidemiologist, which is abundantly clear with every post you make; neither am I but the difference is that I recognize there is much we need to learn about the virus, and no reason to make rash public health decisions based on misinterpreted, incomplete or insufficient data.
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We had countries and states who had school closures and who didn’t to compare to South Dakota hasn’t had rise in excess deaths with out lockdowns are school closures.
 
cherry-picking.jpg
 
Gavin said:
[qimg]https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/50235299652_6c0338c9f8_c_d.jpg[/qimg]
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To poke here a bit, this pretty much runs the gamut...

What does Turkmenistan know that we don't? How to effectively ban the word coronavirus. If one wants to get more technical, it's not totally banned, but the media there is extremely not free.

Are you sure you think that they're a good model to hold up?

On the other end of things - South Korea. South Korea took COVID quite seriously from early on, implemented notable restrictions and went very heavily in the test and contain direction from the start - and yes, managed to avoid a full lockdown. Of note, South Korea had their first official case on the same day as the US. What do they know that we don't? Their leaders knew to trust the science and they've long been investing in their public health system. They have Universal Health Care and it seems to be working great for them. In the US, well, the very influential Republican party has been working HARD to undermine science and trust in science, as well as thoroughly opposing anything remotely resembling universal health care.

South Korea is a good model, yes, and the US absolutely should have gone heavily in the test and trace direction from the start, with heavy relevant quarantine/testing restrictions in sensible areas like the airports and borders. Lockdowns could very well have been averted pretty much entirely if we had done so. One party - the one that happens to be in charge at the moment - was too busy trying to downplay the virus, actively discouraging testing of highly likely to be exposed people, and completely screwing up the response in general, though.

Next, Sweden - There's been a fair bit of controversy surrounding their approach, but there are a couple simple things of particular note. As a population, they have a lot more trust and respect for their government and, from what I've read from people who claim to be Swedes, it was made quite clear to them that the restrictions that were put into place were only that light because they were choosing to trust in their people to take things seriously, with the warning that more serious restrictions would be put into place if things started to look like they were anywhere close to getting out of control.

Finally, Belarus - Honestly, it's a little hard to say what's happening in Belarus. At last check, though, it looks like Belarus is literally in the middle of an uprising against a leader that has been committing a heck of a lot of wrongdoing in a lot of ways. I wouldn't put any trust in the numbers there to be accurate.
 
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Gavin said:
We had countries and states who had school closures and who didn’t to compare to South Dakota hasn’t had rise in excess deaths with out lockdowns are school closures.
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We also have data from Israel that opening schools was a disaster.

Israeli Data Show School Openings Were a Disaster That Wiped Out Lockdown Gains.
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Hyperbole and politics aside, there is simply no need to be reckless, and millions of reasons to be cautious, and to be suspicious of those who choose to be reckless based on insufficient data. Creating millions of new vectors unnecessarily is plain stupid; there is no other word for it.
 
Gavin said:
Doesn’t anyone here provide any data are sources to back up there claims?
Plus ignored my data I gave you only 11,371 Americans under 55 have died plus 80% of the fatalities where 65 and above and had prior illness.

And there are countries and one state that I know that had no lockdowns are restrictions to go by.
Like South Dakota
Coronavirus Cases:
10,274
Deaths:
153

[qimg]https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/50235299652_6c0338c9f8_c_d.jpg[/qimg]
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You know why South Korea has low deaths? Because they did everything the US didn't do RIGHT AT THE START, and hence were able to avoid strict lockdowns.

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-exemplar-south-korea

Firstly, wearing masks is the norm, so like many Asian countries, their population got on board with that immediately. Not months after, not after complaining, not after back and forth with mandates, not after protesting. They just did it straight away. As is the case here in Hong Kong now, mask wearing is universal, 100% compliance. No complaints, people just do it.

Then they had a pandemic infrastructure already in place, having learned the lesson from MERS, and put it into action swiftly. Their key was to do wide spread testing and tracing right from the start, before it could gain a foothold and spread too far; they tracked literally every single case and their contacts, ensuring infected were isolated.

If you do that at the start, you can keep the numbers down, and keep a lid on it without needing full lockdowns. That's why they have 15,000 case overall. The US had 36,000 just yesterday!


As for Turkmenistan, you are having a laugh surely. You are talking about a dictatorship with a cult of personality, where and I am not making this up, its leader Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow has his face on all the yoghurt pots, named the month January after himself, banned ballet, demonstrated his marksmanship at a firing range whilst riding a bicycle, entered the country's first ever car race at the last minute and won.

It has the lowest ranking for press freedom IN THE WORLD, worse even than North Korea. So when it is reporting 0 deaths because it has had 0 cases, it is clearly untrue. If they had implemented a lockdown, we would likely not get to know about it anyway.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52186521

"My acquaintance who works in a state agency told me that I shouldn't say that the virus is here or that I heard about it, otherwise I may get into trouble," said a resident of the capital Ashgabat, who asked to remain anonymous.

"For the past decade they have claimed to have no people living with HIV/Aids, a figure that is not plausible. We also know that, in the 2000s, they suppressed evidence of a series of outbreaks, including plague."
 
In addition to Aridas’ points, which are valid, it’s worth looking into SK in further depth. Because of MERS, they really stepped up their game on novel infectious disease. They have a range of measures which they can bring into play, including - as they have just done again - closing many types of businesses for 2 weeks or more. They also closed schools, reopened, then had to close again. Their ‘lifestyle quarantine’ regime resulted in trains having to run half empty, and their public information approach to tracing would probably be seen as a gross infringement of personal liberties in many countries, as it was based on scraping mobile phone mast and CCTV data plus card/online banking transactions (including posting to-the-minute details of infected people’s daily lives - one man looked to have spent a couple of hours in the red light district, which his wife probably wasn’t happy about!). So while media can say ‘no full lockdown’, in certain areas it looked a lot like a lockdown, and it definitely wasn’t business as usual.

Also South Koreans aren’t dicks about wearing masks.
 
All of this is just a red herring anyway.

Are we ever going to get explained to us what exactly we're balancing the scales against here?

Okay fine cherry pick whatever "Only X percent of Y demographic will die" data out of thin air you want.

Why do they have to die? What's the upside? What's the positive? What side of what scale is going up?

The economy? A vague arguments about your rights? An even vaguer argument about other causes of death?

This isn't triage or a trolley problem. It's holding a gun to someone's head and telling them "Don't worry statistically you're more likely to die in a car crash." I don't care if the Highway Safety Commission agrees or not, it's not the point.
 
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Gavin said:
You said I didn’t have proper links’s are facts so I assumed you would provide some sort of proof showing they where wrong
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I think it has been pointed out to you on more than one occasion that if you claim something is true, you should provide evidence, rather than expect people to prove you wrong.

Check out this link: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/burden-of-proof
 
Resume said:
We also have data from Israel that opening schools was a disaster.



Hyperbole and politics aside, there is simply no need to be reckless, and millions of reasons to be cautious, and to be suspicious of those who choose to be reckless based on insufficient data. Creating millions of new vectors unnecessarily is plain stupid; there is no other word for it.
Click to expand...

Your link didn’t work but looking at there cases on the world meter they have had very few fatalities ranked #59 on total number of deaths per capita and #24 on cases most countries would love to have these stats they have had a raise recently but are averaging about 15 deaths a day out of 9 million people since the rise a starting around the first of July but many that never had a closing and had no rise from school openings

Israel
Coronavirus Cases: 92,680
Deaths: 685

CLOSED CASES
69,195
Cases which had an outcome:
68,510 (99%) Recovered / Discharged
685 (1%) Deaths
 
Aridas said:
To poke here a bit, this pretty much runs the gamut...

What does Turkmenistan know that we don't? How to effectively ban the word coronavirus. If one wants to get more technical, it's not totally banned, but the media there is extremely not free.

Are you sure you think that they're a good model to hold up?

On the other end of things - South Korea. South Korea took COVID quite seriously from early on, implemented notable restrictions and went very heavily in the test and contain direction from the start - and yes, managed to avoid a full lockdown. Of note, South Korea had their first official case on the same day as the US. What do they know that we don't? Their leaders knew to trust the science and they've long been investing in their public health system. They have Universal Health Care and it seems to be working great for them. In the US, well, the very influential Republican party has been working HARD to undermine science and trust in science, as well as thoroughly opposing anything remotely resembling universal health care.

South Korea is a good model, yes, and the US absolutely should have gone heavily in the test and trace direction from the start, with heavy relevant quarantine/testing restrictions in sensible areas like the airports and borders. Lockdowns could very well have been averted pretty much entirely if we had done so. One party - the one that happens to be in charge at the moment - was too busy trying to downplay the virus, actively discouraging testing of highly likely to be exposed people, and completely screwing up the response in general, though.

Next, Sweden - There's been a fair bit of controversy surrounding their approach, but there are a couple simple things of particular note. As a population, they have a lot more trust and respect for their government and, from what I've read from people who claim to be Swedes, it was made quite clear to them that the restrictions that were put into place were only that light because they were choosing to trust in their people to take things seriously, with the warning that more serious restrictions would be put into place if things started to look like they were anywhere close to getting out of control.

Finally, Belarus - Honestly, it's a little hard to say what's happening in Belarus. At last check, though, it looks like Belarus is literally in the middle of an uprising against a leader that has been committing a heck of a lot of wrongdoing in a lot of ways. I wouldn't put any trust in the numbers there to be accurate.
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Good points but it’s what I was saying that it can be done with out restrictions and I don’t believe Turkmenista had no deaths either.
 
Gavin said:
Your link didn’t work but looking at there cases on the world meter they have had very few fatalities ranked #59 on total number of deaths per capita and #24 on cases most countries would love to have these stats they have had a raise recently but are averaging about 15 deaths a day out of 9 million people since the rise a starting around the first of July but many that never had a closing and had no rise from school openings

Israel
Coronavirus Cases: 92,680
Deaths: 685

CLOSED CASES
69,195
Cases which had an outcome:
68,510 (99%) Recovered / Discharged
685 (1%) Deaths
Click to expand...

I see.

So, Israel, 9 million people, 685 deaths.
United States, 300 million people, 170,000 deaths.

Observation number 1: Israel is doing a lot better than the United States. A lot better. I wish the United States were doing as well as Israel. I think the leadership of the United States should be pressed for answers on why we can't do as well as Israel.

So, we really ought to look at what they did, and see if we could emulate them in some way. We need to see how they are different from us.

I don't think we can take one aspect of what they did and say, "We should do that." I think we should look at the big picture, and see what their total response was. Maybe we could learn something.
 
Silly Green Monkey said:
What, South Korea didn't do lockdowns? I'd heard they were the first, while the US government insisted the virus would never come here. That it was why they'd almost stomped out the virus in their country before relaxing the lockdowns and having it crop up a little.
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They didn't... but had a *very* aggressive test, trace, isolate, quarantine and monitor regime
 
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