All things political. Coronavirus Edition. (2 Viewers)

[Maxp]

I fear we are really going to be in a bad place due to the obvious cuts to the federal agencies that deal with infectious disease, but also the negative effect the Affordable Care act has had on non urban hospitals. Our front line defenses are ineffectual and our ability to treat the populous is probably at an all time low. Factor in the cost of healthcare and I can see our system crashing. What do you think about the politics of this virus?

 

[UncleTrvlingJim]

It's interesting to me you would be puzzled by someone being concerned about what is happening in states across this nation. I am not saying you intended that as a diversionary tactic, but I noticed you did not meet the substance of the complaints again what that government is doing either.

So, you missed my edit that I made as you were posting this. However, you didn't actually bring up the substance of those complaints. You just made a generalized fear and claimed it was strong arming without actually saying why. I didn't think that was the thrust of your post. If you want to discuss specific issues and policies and potential motivation, it would probably useful to isolate that without a bunch of other things.

I will ask, why do you think this is a strong arm tactic instead of someone taking the virus more seriously than you do? You're assigning a qualitative description to an action by someone I'm assuming you've never met, correct? What's a simpler explanation - Gov. Whitmer put together a risk averse strategy as quickly as possible before waiting for everything is known, or Gov Whitmer drunk on power decided to abrogate civil liberties due to an extreme disregard for the Constitution and uses this as an excuse to expand government power?

I think it is pretty straightforward, if politicians can get away with strong arm tactics those can spread across the nation. Having said that, it's bad enough that it is happening to citizens anywhere in the U.S. It is certainly worth discussing.

Based on your framing of the discussion, I infer that you're not interested in a nuanced discussion. There's no question in your framing of any conclusion other than government overreach. No hint that you could be wrong and that maybe someone has a different risk calculus than you do. So, it makes it difficult to frame a response.

As far as having fewer restrictions as Sweeden does, my point, once again, is that we don't know how all of this will look over the long run.

Again, this seems like a big difference between us. We don't know, but we have enough data to make a pretty good guess and enough information to start formulating responses along with the need to be flexible to adjust as more data comes in. If the only thing you will except is after the fact analysis, then you can never prevent anything. It's a costly strategy.

And it's not just a matter of the economy vs lives. We know for a fact that a recession will also cost lives. I hate to think about what a global depression will do.

Meanwhile people are not receiving treatment for other illnesses and our medical community as a whole is suffering, not due to the virus itself but our response to it.

And it seems that you keep glossing over the fact that 2 million people dying over the course of a year would damage the economy as well. The only economic analysis that I've seen that assigns an economic value of life conclude that doing nothing would damage the economy more. I'd love to read more economic analysis if you've got any, b/c there haven't been many done yet.

 

[Optimus Prime]

How dare you provide proof that I was lying?!
===================================
Vice President Pence’s office threatened to retaliate against a reporter who revealed that Pence’s office had told journalists they would need masks for Pence’s visit to the Mayo Clinic — a requirement Pence himself did not follow.

Pence’s trip to the clinic Tuesday generated criticism after he was photographed without a surgical mask — the only person in the room not wearing one. The Minnesota clinic requires visitors to wear masks as a precaution against spreading the coronavirus.

Pence’s wife, Karen Pence, said in an interview with Fox News on Thursday that he was unaware of the mask policy until his visit was over.

But Steve Herman, who covers the White House for Voice of America, suggested that there was more to the story after Karen Pence’s interview........

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/pence-staff-threatens-action-against-reporter-who-tweeted-about-visit-to-clinic-without-surgical-mask/2020/04/30/27c63056-8b0a-11ea-9dfd-990f9dcc71fc_story.html

 

[Beach Friends]

So, you missed my edit that I made as you were posting this. However, you didn't actually bring up the substance of those complaints. You just made a generalized fear and claimed it was strong arming without actually saying why. I didn't think that was the thrust of your post. If you want to discuss specific issues and policies and potential motivation, it would probably useful to isolate that without a bunch of other things.

I will ask, why do you think this is a strong arm tactic instead of someone taking the virus more seriously than you do? You're assigning a qualitative description to an action by someone I'm assuming you've never met, correct? What's a simpler explanation - Gov. Whitmer put together a risk averse strategy as quickly as possible before waiting for everything is known, or Gov Whitmer drunk on power decided to abrogate civil liberties due to an extreme disregard for the Constitution and uses this as an excuse to expand government power?



Based on your framing of the discussion, I infer that you're not interested in a nuanced discussion. There's no question in your framing of any conclusion other than government overreach. No hint that you could be wrong and that maybe someone has a different risk calculus than you do. So, it makes it difficult to frame a response.



Again, this seems like a big difference between us. We don't know, but we have enough data to make a pretty good guess and enough information to start formulating responses along with the need to be flexible to adjust as more data comes in. If the only thing you will except is after the fact analysis, then you can never prevent anything. It's a costly strategy.



And it seems that you keep glossing over the fact that 2 million people dying over the course of a year would damage the economy as well. The only economic analysis that I've seen that assigns an economic value of life conclude that doing nothing would damage the economy more. I'd love to read more economic analysis if you've got any, b/c there haven't been many done yet.

I appreciate the earlier edit.

IDK what the problem is with the MI governor. What I do know is her decisions are not reasonably tailored to stopping the infection and they don't appear to try to take into consideration fundamental rights. Whether she is making them because she is power hungry or she is just way to nervous to be in charge, the people are paying the price.

She made it unlawful for people to travel from one home they own to another.

When questioned, she stated that her "rationale" was that if people travel they will have to buy gas and if they buy gas they will have to touch the fuel pump.

I doubt any epidemiologist went running to the governor stating that science required that restriction. All one has to do to avoid the virus is to avoid touching your face during fueling and to disinfect their hands afterwards.

 

[Lapaz]

I also think that the truth is that there is not a clear cut long term strategy that the scientific community can agree on as the best approach for handling the virus. Right now it seems we have adopted a stay home and pray approach, with the idea that when we decide to reemerge something good will have happened.

On it's face, wider availability testing sounds like something worth waiting on. But, how long will that we be? Do we know have an anticipated timeframe - and for what exactly? Once we have achieved whatever capability we are waiting on (and again, that's not clear), how exactly will that prevent fewer deaths, hospitalizations etc and are we only talking about over a short term? Will the end result be close to the same over time if we had fewer restriction like Sweedeen? I think the truth is that no one knows for certain.

Right now I feel like what we are doing is somewhat similar to going under water if bees were circling your head, holding your breath for as long as possible, only to find that when you reemerge the bees are still there.

Then we have issue of private social media ready and willing to engage in censorship. Take the banning of those two doctors for example. Before their video was taken down, I listened to part of it, but even for me - the guy who doesn't want to math - I thought there were issues with the way they were extrapolating data. Nonetheless, I am concerned when these giant tech companies start censoring for "misinformation." I am also concerned when I see deputies knocking on people's doors demanding that posts be taken down for causing a "public disturbance." That's the exact terminology used by the CCP when they told doctors that discussion of the virus was not tolerated. It's also the same method the CCP used on its citizens when they demanded that the citizens not post anything to dispute the party line that there were no cases in a location.

BF,
That was a good post, and I agree with most of it, but it was such a long post, that I deleted most of it in my quote, so that I can focus on just a couple of things you said. You said there isn't a consensus on a long term approach, and we've adopted a stay home and pray approach. I think that is wrong. I think the consensus is to increase test and contact tracing capacity, mandate precautions as we open, and wait to re-open when active cases start declining, so you know you've hit your peak. I think it is the opposite of your assessment, because I believe most places have taken the "open and pray approach". If we had a competent federal government leading the effort, we could easily do these things. Since we don't, state governments are doing it, and a few are doing it right, but most are not.

With respect to the civil liberties concern, we should always be leery of government overreach, but if anything, our government has underreached to control the spread. Some European countries have gone further, and their cases are declining. This fear of over-reach is what led us to slow-roll the shutdowns until the virus had already spread widely, and now has us re-opening prematurely. Of course if we had gotten tests and contact tracing ready earlier, we probably would've been ready to open much sooner. Since we have botched that and still aren't ready, we're about to exacerbate the problem by re-opening too soon. We better get ready for the surge by building more test and tracing capacity, because it is coming.

 

[MT15]

BF and UTJ, nice discussion. I just have one addition.

The stay at home policy is IMO most likely the result of our failure to detect and deal with community spread. This was due to a few things, mostly the CDC‘s decision to go with their own test early on, which failed miserably, leaving us completely blind to whether the disease was here or not, or where it was. We are still trying to recover from that truly horrific mistake. We (actually epidemiologists) do know how to curtail an epidemic, but they have to be able to test people freely. We knew what to do, but couldn’t do it. Even after the CDC began testing, they irrationally limited tests to people who had either traveled to China, or been exposed to someone who had traveled to China. While they were doing this, infected people from Europe were spreading the virus all over NYC. This virus causes a pretty specific pneumonia that appears different from usual cases of pneumonia in the imaging. There were doctors who were fairly certain they had cases, but were unable to confirm by a test due to the CDC restriction on testing. We should have tested every pneumonia of unknown origin right away, as soon as there was a test available, but that wasn’t allowed. And due to the 6weeks or so we lost because the CDC test didn’t work and we couldn’t get the test kits, we may have lost our chance to contain by then anyway.

All of this to say that if we had taken the correct steps early, this whole shut down wouldn’t have been necessary. It seems like we should all just acknowledge that this didn't have to be this bad, both in a public health and an economic sense. We didn’t have to lose 100,000 people to this disease, and we didn’t have to wreck the economy had this been handled competently. it seems to be a bit counterproductive to blame the draconian measures we are having to take on the governors who have to take them, rather than acknowledging that the federal government, specifically the executive, should rightly be on the hook for this truly awful situation.

If we had not shut down like we did, even in the half assed way we have done it, we could have seen 1-2 million people die.

 

[wardorican]

Majority of Michiganders support Whitmer's handling of this.

Poll: Michigan residents favor governor's COVID-19 handling over Trump's

Michigan residents prefer how Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) has handled the coronavirus outbreak over President Trump’s response to the pandemic, according to a statewide poll released Monday.

thehill.com

and..

A Michigan court on Wednesday denied a motion for a preliminary injunction against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s (D) stringent stay-at-home order, finding that the state had the authority to enact such a policy “when faced with a public crisis.”

"Although the Court is painfully aware of the difficulties of living under the restrictions of these executive orders, those difficulties are temporary, while to those who contract the virus and cannot recover (and to their family members and friends), it is all too permanent," Michigan Court of Claims Judge Christopher M. Murray wrote.

Murray added that Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's (D) order was "consistent with the law" and that residents' constitutional rights are "subject to reasonable regulation by the state."

CORRECTED: Michigan court refuses to halt governor's stay-at-home order

A Michigan court on Wednesday denied a motion for a preliminary injunction against Gov.

thehill.com

 

[Beach Friends]

Majority of Michiganders support Whitmer's handling of this.

Poll: Michigan residents favor governor's COVID-19 handling over Trump's

Michigan residents prefer how Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) has handled the coronavirus outbreak over President Trump’s response to the pandemic, according to a statewide poll released Monday.

thehill.com

and..

CORRECTED: Michigan court refuses to halt governor's stay-at-home order

A Michigan court on Wednesday denied a motion for a preliminary injunction against Gov.

thehill.com

Soooooo Ward, you wanna share your thoughts on your links?

 

[wardorican]

Soooooo Ward, you wanna share your thoughts on your links?

I did. First sentence. My thought was a factual statement.

I see you gave up defending that other bit about the disinfectant.

 

[wardorican]

I'd normally share this on the SR EE thread, but since it's DeSantis, it invites too much political chatter.

he has a good snipe and people really hammering Jacksonville for opening the beach. I think he was correct to do so. We can be outside smartly.



Personally, I'm very upset at the cluster that the "Re-employment" system is, but he is laying it all out there about what they needed to fix.

 

[Lapaz]

CNN is reporting a new projection that by June we’ll have 3000 deaths per day and an incredible 200,000 new cases per day! I wonder if those would be confirmed, because that would be 60M new cases by the end of June. I think this is based on the new openings. I would think that would crash our economy if 20% of those people are symptomatic for 3 to 4 weeks, and 3% die!

 

[Beach Friends]

I did. First sentence. My thought was a factual statement.

I see you gave up defending that other bit about the disinfectant.

I was waiting for you to make a point that did not include misrepresenting what Trump said. It's amazing, you quoted Trump's actual words and then when you summarized them you went right back to suggesting that people ingest those cleaners. Bad faith ruins a discussion Ward.

About you post about a poll, that's the point about Constitutional protections of individuall liberties - they can't be overridden by a simple majority.

And if you are going to point to the opinion upholding the order, do you mind sharing your opinion of the judge's rationale?

 

[Beach Friends]

CNN is reporting a new projection that by June we’ll have 3000 deaths per day and an incredible 200,000 new cases per day! I wonder if those would be confirmed, because that would be 60M new cases by the end of June. I think this is based on the new openings. I would think that would crash our economy if 20% of those people are symptomatic for 3 to 4 weeks, and 3% die!

I wonder whose work CNN is depending on. You do have to be careful with those guys. Hell, they could not even run a story on their very own Coumo without getting caught in a lie. (Claimed they were filming him coming out of the basement for the first time when he had actually traveled with his family during his "quarantine.")

 

[The moose]

CNN is reporting a new projection that by June we’ll have 3000 deaths per day and an incredible 200,000 new cases per day! I wonder if those would be confirmed, because that would be 60M new cases by the end of June. I think this is based on the new openings. I would think that would crash our economy if 20% of those people are symptomatic for 3 to 4 weeks, and 3% die!

Yeah even that one from Washington state that trump touts all the time because the numbers are super conservative put out a new deaths by August 1 of double of their last one. 134k.

The reason was their whole model was based on the entire nation taking public distance seriously.

Now that it obviously is not they upped the number to 134k and that is still conservative compared to others.

They were the ones that started at 40k and we blew thru that blinding fast.

The numbers are gonna get scary in the flyover places.

 

[Intensesaint]

CNN is hoping a new projection that by June we’ll have 3000 deaths per day and an incredible 200,000 new cases per day! I wonder if those would be confirmed, because that would be 60M new cases by the end of June. I think this is based on the new openings. I would think that would crash our economy if 20% of those people are symptomatic for 3 to 4 weeks, and 3% die!

Fixed that for you.

 

[wardorican]

I was waiting for you to make a point that did not include misrepresenting what Trump said. It's amazing, you quoted Trump's actual words and then when you summarized them you went right back to suggesting that people ingest those cleaners. Bad faith ruins a discussion Ward.

About you post about a poll, that's the point about Constitutional protections of individuall liberties - they can't be overridden by a simple majority.

And if you are going to point to the opinion upholding the order, do you mind sharing your opinion of the judge's rationale?

Where did I say ingest?

She's an idiot or a criminal. But, Trump was also stupid for saying to inject disinfectant, and not understanding much about UV light. See, both can be true.

And sure, the judge seemed reasonable, based on the little blurb I read. I didn't see the whole thing. A public health crisis gives the state a compelling argument to exercise emergency authority. A short term inconvenience doesn't have the same lasting effect as potential death.

Just like how the State has a compelling interest to keep food safe, buildings safe, etc. Making sure something is up to structural code isn't infringing on a builder's rights. There is always a balance between rights, responsibilities, and the public welfare.

I'm more curious as to why Michigan is getting so much attention when most states have issues similar bans and measures. I really do need to talk to more of my friends from back home, but most of them are just as confused about it.

 

[MT15]

Fixed that for you.

This is a horrible sentiment, do you actually think lapaz is rooting for tens of thousands of people to die? Be better.

okay, rereading, maybe you are accusing CNN of rooting for tens of thousands of people to die. This is also a crazy way to look at this. So let’s say Fox came to be in possession of an internal CDC projection as CNN did. Should it be suppressed? Is that what you are advocating?

Do you actually think CNN made up the projection? Just trying to gauge the level of conversation we would be able to have here.

original source was NYT, CNN is merely reporting on their story. Jeez.

 

[Lapaz]

I wonder whose work CNN is depending on. You do have to be careful with those guys. Hell, they could not even run a story on their very own Coumo without getting caught in a lie. (Claimed they were filming him coming out of the basement for the first time when he had actually traveled with his family during his "quarantine.")

I trust CNN, but I'm sure they make mistakes. I'll add that after I posted this, the same study was cited by PBS, which is beyond reproach in my estimation. That aside, it is being reported widely as a draft CDC report. Here is a link:

US projects 200,000 new COVID-19 cases per day, 3,000 daily deaths by June

Leaked gov’t document predicts rise in deaths as Trump aims to “open up America.”

arstechnica.com

As you can see from the link, the model has been underestimating the daily deaths, but is doing a good job of tracking daily cases. Note how the model stops at 1 JUN, but the slope is steep, so if it is 3000 deaths at the beginning of June, it could be far greater by the end of June, and much more than 200k/day infected. It implies that it will be like a wildfire spreading throughout the country. It would suggest that we'll exceed the 70% of our population that is supposed to yield the so called herd immunity. The economy and health care system would probably crash. This is unacceptable. We have to prevent this surge, and we don't have much time to prepare for that. Just to cope with local surges, we need a vast increase in our health care capacity. We need vast fast test and tracing capacity, and trained armies to do it. We need vast increases in PPE. We should make it a federal crime to infect others due to your careless practices.

 

[Lapaz]

Fixed that for you.

That's ridiculous and bankrupt thinking.