[BeesKnee5]

Rumours on twitter that Trump has had a covid test after feeling unwell.

I have no idea how true this is.

[Patrickov]

Rumours on twitter that Trump has had a covid test after feeling unwell.

I have no idea how true this is.

Good riddance if he's killed by the virus, and by some kind of luck Pence is offed too.

If Pelosi takes power we can see the true colours of the Democrats.

The best way to see how one group of people are doing is letting them do it.

[Doug64]

And here's where we stand now:



There's a great thread on Twitter showing how things are going in Florida, distributed by age and demonstrating why, when looking at the increased number of cases, the important question is what the age distribution is.

[Vanasalus]

I follow the website, linked below, to monitor the data for various countries.

https://covid19.healthdata.org/

My conclusion: Covid-19 doesn't kill. Neo-liberal consensus in post-Reagan/Thatcher era does.

No way possible for sugarcoating it.

The age of revolution is loading fast. Unless a cascade of political reforms revitalizing social state and fixing income distribution enacted fast, there is no way of stopping it.

[Doug64]

An interesting look at the shifting perceptions of face masks around the non-shifting science:

The Science of Mask-Wearing Hasn’t Changed. So Why Have Our Expectations?

Before every fashion retailer was selling their own cloth face covering, before a piece of fabric over your nose and mouth became a personal political statement, and before Goldman Sachs was saying a national face mask mandate is as good as a lockdown, Lara Martin was unsure whether homemade cloth masks were even a good idea.

The executive director of the United Methodist Committee on Relief, Martin was one of the people I interviewed back in March for a story about the science of masks. Back then, I found that masks were an excellent example of the scientific uncertainties swirling around the novel coronavirus. Remember, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the surgeon general once told the general public not to wear masks. The data that existed on mask effectiveness largely dealt with medical respirators and surgical masks. It wasn’t clear how protective a cloth mask would be, and Martin worried that wearing masks might lead people to feel more safe than they actually were — and make choices that increased their risk of contracting or transmitting COVID-19.

Today, a lot has changed. But the science around cloth masks hasn’t.

Yes, the CDC now recommends cloth face coverings, the surgeon general starred in a video showing how to make them, and many businesses, and even cities, require them. Martin herself owns three and wears one every time she goes outside. But she told me that’s not because the evidence has significantly improved. “I don’t know enough, I don’t see enough evidence. Nothing has changed except that I care about my neighbors, I care about my colleagues, I care about people I don’t even know that I come across at the grocery store,” she said. “I am now saying to my community that I care about them, and that actually feels important to me as a scientist.”

Cloth and DIY face masks sit at the intersection where scientific data, public perceptions, and political opinions crash headlong into each other. Making smart decisions isn’t just about having data — it’s also about how we interpret the data we have. Safety moves along a spectrum with different relative levels of risk. Behavioral norms also matter, regardless of how much evidence backs them up. In the midst of a pandemic, masks are a reminder that science is seldom as simple, or as certain, as we want it to be — and that reasonable public health recommendations are sometimes based on more than just data.

Do cloth face coverings work? Probably, to some extent. But just how much they work depends on the material, how they’re used, and what you’re expecting them to accomplish. And — regardless of what you’ve seen in highly shareable memes — we definitely don’t know enough to say that wearing these kinds of coverings will reduce risk of transmission by a specific percentage, let alone a high percentage. Those were the conclusions of an expert report published by the National Academies of Sciences on April 8, and two of the lead authors of that paper recently told me the science hasn’t significantly changed since then. Some studies have come out showing a correlation in certain regions between mask mandates and reduced spread of the coronavirus, but several of those not-yet-peer-reviewed studies have turned out to have important flaws — such as failing to account for factors like other behaviors (such as higher rates of social distancing) that went along with wearing masks in those places.

Instead, experts say what has changed is how both the public and public health institutions interpret this situation and the data surrounding it.

“Back in March, it was difficult to even have anybody take you seriously when the CDC and WHO said the opposite,” said Jeremy Howard, a data scientist and entrepreneur who has become a major advocate of universal mask requirements. In response to the lack of support, he launched a bipartisan campaign called Masks4All that lobbied for widespread mask-wearing and argued that masks were a crucial, if not the most important, part of the COVID-19 response.

But Howard has also seen changes in how political actors interpreted his message. Back in March, he told me, before not wearing a mask became a signifier of conservative politics, Howard actually got the most traction talking about the need for masks on conservative news shows. “Going against the CDC was very on brand,” he said. “I was on “The Laura Ingraham Angle” talking about important masks were, and she was all for it.”

When the political alignments shifted, that support vanished. Although a majority of Americans report wearing masks regularly, those numbers are 16 percentage points lower among Republicans compared to Democrats. In the last week, that’s begun to shift again, with Republican leaders advocating for mask use and criticizing President Trump for not wearing one. The politicized landscape has also made it difficult to have a nuanced conversation about mask effectiveness, experts said. Public health officials who issued mandatory mask-wearing orders have found themselves hounded by intense criticism and even death threats. More than two dozen have resigned in recent weeks.

At the same time, Michael Osterholm, a public health and disease expert who is worried that mask effectiveness is being over-hyped, has also found himself threatened and harassed. Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told me he’s received vulgar emails from people who read his statements questioning the efficacy of cloth masks. Osterholm said that his position was not that masks shouldn’t be worn — he wears one in public, himself — but that there is limited data on how effective DIY cloth masks are at stopping small particles, either from passing through or being forced out the sides of the mask. Without that information, he said, physical distancing and isolation remain the most important tools in stopping the spread of the coronavirus. But as more Republicans say the worst of the coronavirus is behind us, and usage of masks tracks tightly along the partisan spectrum, Osterholm told me he felt like well-meaning people were making him out to be a pandemic denialist.

The on-off, yes-no nature of this debate has also been frustrating for Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at Yale. Circumstances may mean that for some people the benefits of wearing a mask may not outweigh the risks. “There are conversations in a lot of Black and brown communities … ‘[Does] the risk and threat in terms of personal safety go up wearing a mask because of police action and being seen as a threat?’” she said.

At the same time, though, Nunez-Smith said masks might actually be more important for those communities because the distancing and isolation favored by experts like Osterholm hasn’t really been possible. Black workers are more likely than other workers to have jobs that are classified as essential. Because of that, reopening means something different for predominantly Black neighborhoods than it does for white neighborhoods. That also applies to the idea of social distancing and how practical that even is — something that could account for why self-reported mask usage is higher among nonwhite Americans, despite the possible police risk. “These are important contextual conversations,” Nunez-Smith said.

Ultimately, experts said, all the nuance and complication around masks is a challenge that public health messaging has to face up to. It’s difficult to make one-size-fits-all recommendations for situations that don’t readily lend themselves to a one-size-fits-all reality.

The good news is that there’s more agreement than disagreement on where to start. Just look at Osterholm and Howard, two experts who might easily be seen as having opposing viewpoints in this battle. Yet they hold similar positions on one issue: They both wish the CDC would have given the public the nuanced information about masks back in March and trusted them to understand it. Granted, that might mean presenting the public with a complex message, such as: “We don’t know how well cloth masks work, so distancing should come first, but masks are likely to work to some extent and not everyone can distance themselves.” That’s a mouthful and harder to fit on a bumper sticker than “yes, you should,” or “no, you shouldn’t.” But it comes down to what builds trust more: certainty or honesty?

“We owe it to the public to help them understand what kind of protections they’re getting,” Osterholm said. “We owe it to the public to tell them what we know.”

[Pants-of-dog]

Wearing masks is a good idea. We may not know the exact percentage of reduction in transmission, but we do know it is significant and worthwhile.

Wearing masks is not going to make you immune and allow you to live as if the Trump virus is not a lethal reality.

And the science around masks has changed. Our knowledge about which materials and designs work best has definitely shot forward in the last few months.

[Drlee]

Oh we are doing just lovely. Under republican national leadership we have astonished the world with our outstanding progress fighting this disease. Yesterday Florida reported more new cases than did the entire European Union even though the European Union numbers were based on far more testing.

The Trump/Pence virus is going to needlessly murder 250,000 Americans in the near term because of the lack of national leadership. SO what is Trump doing to stop the virus? He is tweeting about protecting the names of military bases named after people who traitorously took up arms against their country and in violation of their oaths of commission in the US Army. That ought to show that old virus that it better not fuck with Trump.

And how about dealing with the economy? Trump got right on it and tweeted calling a US Senator a racist name. Pence has been busy though coming here to Arizona and saying how surprised he is that we are doing so badly what with how well we were doing before. Of course our Republican Governor refuses to impose mandatory mask use and allowed an indoor rally for a few thousand people.

It is wrong to call this Wuhan Virus. It is the Trump virus now. The Wuhan virus ceased to be a major problem in most of the world except here in the land of Putin's suck buddy and Moscow Mitch.

[Doug64]

Here's where we stand this week. I've added a couple columns, one for the number of new deaths and the other for the difference in new deaths from the previous week. Mind, those numbers for the US and New Jersey are off because a few weeks ago New Jersey adjusted their numbers by several thousand.

[Drlee]

Where we stand can be stated very easily.

The pandemic is spreading rapidly and the Trump administration is doing nothing about it. They can't even keep their staff from getting sick. Red states are crashing and burning with Florida (population 21 million) having far more new cases than the entire European Union (population 445 million).

Now it is easy to come up with yet another lame excuse for why Trump is not to blame and the worst mass murderer in US history. What is hard for republicans is to explain how the leaders of every one of the 27 nations in the EU figured out how to do what Trump, with the full resources of the largest economy and best science in the world cannot figure out how to do. And, it appears, he is too arrogant to pick up the phone and ask.

Maybe Trump should ask the president of Montenegro. You remember him. He was the guy Trump shoved out of the way on world television. Hopefully he has forgiven Trump's boorish behavior and will tell us why his country has become the first Corona free country in Europe.

It is time Doug for you to man up and tell us you are going to vote for Biden. Not pussy out and throw your vote away in some empty gesture. Tell us you are going to vote for Biden to have a chance of stopping the bloodshed. Every single Trump voter has blood on his/her hands. This is not funny. It is not about "rights". It is not about abortion. It is not about the second amendment. None of those things matter in the face of the slaughter we are seeing at home and will live with for years. It is all Trump. Every other country in the world (save one) was able to muster the leadership to stop this thing. We can't. Why? The fucking republican party that is letting this guy get away with mass murder.

Now post some bullshit statistics.

[quetzalcoatl]

the question is whether the complete nationwide shutdown of our economy was really necessary, and what level of restrictions are needed going forward—and for that, a comparison to the number of deaths from the flu we are not only willing to tolerate but not even really notice is useful.

IMO the economic damage of the lock-down was, for the most part, unnecessary - economic pain was the result of economic policies designed to pump up asset prices rather than focusing on stabilizing jobs and income at the ground level. At any rate, any temporary flattening of the curve ended up being totally squandered in the following months, as Trump lost interest in the pandemic. We might as well have gone with just rolling the dice right from the beginning.

It's like removing the control rods from a reactor. Yeah you're gonna have problems until all the fuel is consumed. In this analogy, once enough of the population is infected the "fuel" runs out. However, it makes zero sense to try the shut down the reactor in the normal way, then later decide that's too expensive and instead decide to let it flame out.

What's missing is that we don't know the ultimate medical and productivity cost of letting it ride. We won't know for decades.

[Doug64]

IMO the economic damage of the lock-down was, for the most part, unnecessary.

I tend to agree, in hindsight most of the domestic economic pain was unnecessary. But that's in hindsight, at the point those decisions were made the politicians were expecting that the hospitals would be overwhelmed if we didn't. We couldn't know then that the models the "experts" had produced were no more accurate than their climate models.

[Godstud]

The economic damage would have been there, regardless of lockowns, as people changed how they shopped, and everything. You guys are dreaming! The damage is going to be even greater as the covid-19 cases in the USA spike even higher.

Also, if you stupid fuckers had done a proper lockdown, instead of doing a half-assed one, you might already we past this, but alas, you had shit leadership from an orange cockwomble.

[Drlee]

I tend to agree, in hindsight most of the domestic economic pain was unnecessary. But that's in hindsight, at the point those decisions were made the politicians were expecting that the hospitals would be overwhelmed if we didn't. We couldn't know then that the models the "experts" had produced were no more accurate than their climate models.

I see. Like your hero Trump, you look upon this as largely an economic problem. How very sociopathic of you. Oh wait. You are going to make the argument that all these people had to die anyway...That is a lie. With prompt action at the federal level we could be looking at a tiny fraction of deaths. With a bill to replace income at an individual level the economic damage could have been significantly reduced.

Plainly stated, we did not need to lose anything like the number have lost and God forbid will likely lose before Trump leaves office. We could have saved the economy to boot. This has been a debacle worthy of a third world nation managed by a party hoping that its profoundly unintelligent followers (Republicans) do not wake up and figure out just why it is that Granny did not have to die an agonizing death, alone, panting until she just could not breathe anymore. Or. As very well may soon happen, be sent home to die in pain because she is old and the beds are needed for younger patients.
Deaths as we speak and Douglas64 wants to talk about money. Is this the Mormon way? Hey Doug? Was the sermon today about tithing in the time of pandemic?

[Doug64]

No surprise, Drlee continues to emulate the president he despises.

[Godstud]

@Doug64 does the truth hurt you so much?

[Doug64]

@Godstud What truth? Drlee just went off on another Trump-like rant again. It's why I don't bother responding to them anymore, there's not really anything to respond to. And on the few occasions that there are, responding just results in yet another rant.

[Godstud]

@Drlee's post was dead on, and not a rant. You just don't like that it hit the mark so well.

[Pants-of-dog]

I tend to agree, in hindsight most of the domestic economic pain was unnecessary. But that's in hindsight, at the point those decisions were made the politicians were expecting that the hospitals would be overwhelmed if we didn't.

I have no idea how you think you can think you know this. It is not even possible to have evidence for this. You are assuming (without evidence at all) that the hospitals would not have been overwhelmed without the lockdown. This seems implausible since there were hospitals overwhelmed even with the lockdown. Significantly increasing infection rates would increase hospitalization, not decrease it.

As for the idea that you can look at this in hindsight, note that the USA seems to be merely approaching the second wave of infections and deaths. This would indicate that most of the economic damage (not to mention things like death and illness) is still waiting in the future.

We couldn't know then that the models the "experts" had produced were no more accurate than their climate models.

Please provide scientific evidence that the epidemiology models used for the Trump virus were incorrect.

If this is as true as your similar climate model claim, it is also incorrect. We shall see when we look at your evidence.

[Rich]

note that the USA seems to be merely approaching the second wave of infections and deaths.

Here we see the pathetic fantasy world of the Left on display for all the world to see. July 5th there are 251 recorded deaths in America for the Xi virus,the lowest figure since March 23rd. There is nothing about the current figures that suggests the death rate is about to increase.

Of course the USA is not doing as well Sweden, who avoided the Orwellian lockdown that so many Liberals hunger for. What's the deathrate for Sweden on July 5th 0? The Liberals were totally wrong about Sweden. As they were totally wrong about ventilators. Huge numbers of people died unnecessarily, but that was because of Liberals Trump hatred and the insatiable needs of the sickness-fear industrial complex.

[BeesKnee5]

Here we see the pathetic fantasy world of the Left on display for all the world to see. July 5th there are 251 recorded deaths in America for the Xi virus,the lowest figure since March 23rd. There is nothing about the current figures that suggests the death rate is about to increase.

Of course the USA is not doing as well Sweden, who avoided the Orwellian lockdown that so many Liberals hunger for. What's the deathrate for Sweden on July 5th 0? The Liberals were totally wrong about Sweden. As they were totally wrong about ventilators. Huge numbers of people died unnecessarily, but that was because of Liberals Trump hatred and the insatiable needs of the sickness-fear industrial complex.

Now why would someone use Sundays figures?

Could they have an agenda perhaps that requires the use of a day when figures are lowest. Why not use Fridays for example or better yet the 7 day rolling average?

Is 3,500 deaths per week by covid an acceptable number?

Then to compare Sweden where the number of cases has fallen off a cliff, to the USA where cases have been rising for three weeks.

The difference between Sweden and US is the Swedish public took the virus seriously, economic activity fell to similar levels to countries that did lock down. They are surrounded by countries that all but eradicated the virus and since adopting the same test and trace strategy a month ago to isolate those infected, have got on top of the problem. So they solved the problem by testing more people and ensuring those tested didn't pass on the virus, this doesn't match the rhetoric of trump who says stop testing and the virus disappears.

I'm yet to see such widespread acceptance in the US that this virus won't disappear simply by carrying on as normal.