Indulge me in really weighing fairly the following question: If the COVID 19 broke out in Arizona instead of New York, would the desicision to shut the country down have been the same?
Would people in Chicago be staying at home?
I just ask that you ponder it before answering.

Good question. Hawaii has 12 deaths but is on strict lockdown because of the state of affairs in New York. Yet it is almost half way around the globe.

The scapegoating is marvellous, but predictable. It’s been the going rate for opinion pieces in The Atlantic for a few years now. Trump has already been blamed for everything from climate change to war in the Middle East, so it’s no wonder he’ll be blamed for a pandemic. He is their whipping boy after all. But note that they can only come up with few out-of-context reasons why he is to blame, most of which revolve around his apparent word crimes.

Of course this comes with zero blame on the governors, who have the most power and jurisdiction over what goes on in their states during emergencies. New York, for instance, has a policy that readmits coronavirus patients to nursing homes. There has already been over 3000 deaths in nursing homes in New York alone. Is that Trump’s fault? No, because Trump doesn’t set the policy for New York. They have their own health officials, their own laws, their own systems. The best Trump could do for New York was provide the USS Comfort, build the Javits Center into a hospital, provide military and financial support, which he has done in spades. Every governor has been laudatory about Trump’s leadership.

No, Trump has done his job, has done it well, and all without seizing any new powers for the federal government.

But you can start anywhere... and you get the same number.

I don’t get it. Maybe I’m counting wrong, because I’ve never used “1” to refer to the third count in a counting sequence.

Frightening. State-enforced economic collapse. Capitalism hasn’t failed; it was murdered by the state.

A hidden agenda? The agenda could not get any more explicit.

The problem with Trump’s case is you cannot compare him to any other person. He’s one of a kind. It’s why you waste time fantasizing about hidden agendas while you search the lexicon of archetypes and past leaders for any hint of what you’re actually dealing with.

But US citizens won't do those low grade low paid jobs. It's the same problem we've got in the UK. Now large numbers of Eastern European workers have gone home, which the Brexit backing government was urging them to do. UK citizens aren't stepping in to fill those low grade jobs. A consortium of farmers is chartering planes to bring in seasonal workers from Romania to bring in the harvest, because The British workers won't do it. Even though the Brexiters have been assuring us for two years that UK workers will fill these vital jobs.

Evidence of a lack of joined up thinking.

It’s wrong to assume immigrants only occupy low-grade jobs. But if a company has difficulty attracting workers they need to become more competitive on the job market.

What is it, exactly, you trust Trump for? If and when he does anything, how often can you say, "I understand why he did that."

I don’t trust Trump. I would never leave the guy around my wife, for example. The best I can do is try to empathize with him.

Its a pointless exercise, wherever they fly in from there will be less infected people than there are in the US. The Mexicans will be building that wall to keep them out.

The reasoning behind it is to reserve jobs for the millions of citizens who have lost theirs, not to reduce infections.

"1" has the superficial grammar of a noun, but this is misleading.

Rather "1" is to be understood through its role in the process of counting. It is understood in learning how to count, not in pointing to individuals.

And of course this goes for other mathematical entities, too. They are things we do, not things we find.

If 1 is to be understood through it’s role in the process of counting, wouldn’t it refer to a specific point in that particular sequence?

Looks like ol’ Trump is temporarily suspending immigration for 60 days due to the pandemic. Cue the cries of racism and xenophobia.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-to-temporarily-halt-immigration-into-the-u-s-amid-coronavirus-crisis-11587436960

Working from your playbook...I am an introvert to disguise from the public that I’m just another scumbag.

You ghoulishly mock the death of my grandmother because you have can’t muster any other argument.

This is interesting and somewhat contrary to what we’ve been told.

Low incidence of daily active tobacco smoking in patients with symptomatic COVID-19

Conclusions and relevance: Our cross sectional study in both COVID-19 out- and inpatients strongly suggests that daily smokers have a very much lower probability of developing symptomatic or severe SARS-CoV-2 infection as compared to the general population.

https://www.qeios.com/read/article/574

Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.

Oh it wasn’t me, and I stopped paying my research team when this whole corona thing started.

All that effort, added a little image too. I guess I have a fan.

The rich are not getting their promised ROI. Gotta sacrifice a few (tens or hundreds of thousands of blue collar workers, predominantly african-americans) to get the ball rolling again. It's the American Way - shit on your blacks and poor for some dough.

What a head fake: pretend you’re defending blue-collar workers and the poor as you tacitly advocate for the criminalization of their livelihoods. I’m beginning to believe there is something to this privilege thing.

I did, and the blank was filled with he's lying.

I’m flattered you spent the time.

We need to get to the bottom of this. Are you retired or about to go bankrupt due to the failure of your business? What was your business anyway?

Just cross-reference a couple of my posts and fill in the blanks. It’s the scrupulous thing to do.

Your imagination is getting the better of you friend.

I retired from the Kremlin many years ago.

Thank you, friend.

The UN is now predicting famines of “biblical” proportions within the next few months.

Addressing the UN Security Council during a video conference, Mr Beasley said the world had to "act wisely and act fast".

"We could be facing multiple famines of biblical proportions within a short few months," he said. "The truth is we do not have time on our side."

In a call to action, he added: "I do believe that with our expertise and our partnerships, we can bring together the teams and the programmes necessary to make certain the Covid-19 pandemic does not become a human and food crisis catastrophe."

The WFP's senior economist, Arif Husain, said the economic impact of the pandemic was potentially catastrophic for millions "who are already hanging by a thread".

"It is a hammer blow for millions more who can only eat if they earn a wage," he said in a statement.

"Lockdowns and global economic recession have already decimated their nest eggs. It only takes one more shock - like Covid-19 - to push them over the edge. We must collectively act now to mitigate the impact of this global catastrophe."

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-52373888

If this does come to pass, it will be a man-made catastrophe.

I especially liked this at the end: How do you see science changing after the pandemic?
We’re reporting on how research and researchers’ lives may be permanently changed by the coronavirus. In what ways do think things will be different in the years ahead?

Personally I think the modelling approach to prediction took a big hit during this pandemic. Even as educated guesses they were way off, but were nonetheless used to guide public policy. I bet we’ll see a new generation of climate change deniers and conspiracy theorists because of it. I think the opposite will be said of research and the medical profession.

Reading your words turned my stomach back to 2008 when we lost our health insurance because it was that or the mortgage. We lost that margin and never recovered it. My parents are watching their lifetime investments decimated and I have no idea when I will see either of them. My only blessing is that my Dad (biological) passed away before this because isolation would have taken his life and he would have had to passed alone.
Hardly a comfort but trust me it is...

I’m really sorry about your father. I suppose that is a comfort. My grandmother passed away peacefully last week. She didn’t get sick from the virus and has been in palliative care since January, but I wasn’t allowed see her. There can be no funeral, no wake, no nothing.

My own business has dried up so much that I’m living on my savings. I’m not sure how long that can last.

I suspect China will be a political cudgel this time around, as Russia was last time. But this time the evidence of foreign interference and espionage is insurmountable, and not just relegated to Facebook ads and twitter posts. Chi-com spying, hacking, and intellectual theft have been on the books for years and years now. But as this pandemic has taken over, the campaigning has taken a back seat.

As this pandemic unfolds the certainty around Trump’s re-election have diminished in my view.

Here’s an interview in Nature with epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, who remains positive about the Swedish case. The voluntary approach shows no clear deviation from the draconian approach, and it has the added benefit of herd immunity, a semi-functioning economy, and no denial of basic liberties. As of now they are better equipped to return to normal.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01098-x

It’s crazy to think about. Many of us might be without homes within the year. I suspect that within the decade historians will look back and say we took the wrong approach. Best of luck.

So the Russian trolls will be backing off of improvising and focusing on just repeating native conspiracy theories (I read). Just trying to add oomph to already existing conflicts.

Can you imagine having that job? Pathetic.

They probably regret their pro-Trump efforts. Besides, it’s the ChiComs we have to worry about.

I lean towards anarchism, but I’m still unsure whether it is feasible. There are few of any anarchist societies, so unlike socialism, we can’t weigh their failures to their successes.

Check out this fire meme, from the leader of the free world himself.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot about them Russians. Thanks for reminding me.

The hoax you guys peddled back and forth to each other for years. Man, you guys were so sure of yourself. It was brilliant.

If you're three years old maybe.

Remember when you guys got outraged at a sharpie mark on a map? Three years old.

The Trump campaign has a sophisticated digital team. The worst you could do is underestimate it, just like last time.

Dunking on Pelosi. A sign the political season is going to be great this year.

Trump’s federalist take on the current emergency has put statists on edge, but for me it is a turn away from the common ploy of seizing powers during emergency.

An excellent op-ed:

Washington’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic is upending one of the most durable patterns of American politics. Throughout history, national emergencies have led to a more powerful and centralized federal government and to the transfer of federal power from Congress to the executive branch. This time, the federal response rests largely on state and local government and private enterprise, with a wave of deregulation clearing the way. The Trump administration has seized no new powers, and Congress has stayed energetically in the game.

Trump Rewrites the Book on Emergencies

It’s starting to look more and more like the infection fatality rate of covid-19 is in the ballpark of the seasonal flu, at least according to this study.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463v1

Here is the lowdown:



This is good new, if true.

I’ll leave that to the living.

We know what happens to ourselves after death and have the cadaver farms to prove it. We rot. But we can choose to do so in a dignified manner, for instance through burial or cremation. One can even donate himself to science if he chooses to.

Sunlight may kill the virus quite quickly.

Preliminary results from government lab experiments show that the coronavirus does not survive long in high temperatures and high humidity, and is quickly destroyed by sunlight, providing evidence from controlled tests of what scientists believed — but had not yet proved — to be true.

A briefing on the preliminary results, marked for official use only and obtained by Yahoo News, offers hope that summertime may offer conditions less hospitable for the virus, though experts caution it will by no means eliminate, or even necessarily decrease, new cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. The results, however, do add an important piece of knowledge that the White House’s science advisers have been seeking as they scramble to respond to the spreading pandemic.

The study found that the risk of “transmission from surfaces outdoors is lower during daylight” and under higher temperature and humidity conditions. “Sunlight destroys the virus quickly,” reads the briefing.

While that may provide some good news about the outlook for outdoor activities, the Department of Homeland Security briefing on the results cautions that enclosed areas with low humidity, such as airplane cabins, “may require additional care to minimize risk of transmission.”

https://news.yahoo.com/sunlight-destroys-coronavirus-very-quickly-new-government-tests-find-but-experts-say-pandemic-could-still-last-through-summer-200745675.html

You said my reasoning “speaks volumes about my ideology”, without telling me what volumes they speak of. So I told you that it wasn’t about any ideology, that you and I probably differ on ethical grounds. I believe it is right to withhold funds pending an investigation into said failures, especially when decades of funding just proved useless precisely the time we needed it.

Besides laundering the CCP’s image, spreading their misinformation to its members and the world, the WHO advised against travel bans between China because it would create “stigma”, and other PC piffle. That turned out to be dead wrong. When the WHO declared a public health crisis of international concern, the director spent most of it obsequiously applauding the CCP’s efforts, which as we now know was rife with the typical communist censorship and narrative-building, and we get another lesson in the eternal efforts to disguise a failed and bloody political ideology.

Some “seroprevalence” studies are beginning to come out. This one is not peer-reviewed, but it’s conclusions are profound.

Under the three scenarios for test performance characteristics, the population prevalence of COVID-19 in Santa Clara ranged from 2.49% (95CI 1.80-3.17%) to 4.16% (2.58-5.70%). These prevalence estimates represent a range between 48,000 and 81,000 people infected in Santa Clara County by early April, 50-85-fold more than the number of confirmed cases. Conclusions The population prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in Santa Clara County implies that the infection is much more widespread than indicated by the number of confirmed cases.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463v1

I would have taken the threat of Covid19 seriously from the beginning of January. Indeed I did, but I am not in a position of power, so there was little I could do. Trumps bans of flights was a good move, but it was to little to late. The whole global airline industry should have been closed down at the beginning of January to contain the virus, all the Western powers where guilty of this one.

No western country could have known enough that early.

Here’s a decent timeline of events.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019–20_coronavirus_pandemic_from_November_2019_to_January_2020