Absolutely. I was more speculating about how it probably would have been done considering the current climate, and how a lot of states would have resisted an unfunded mandate from on high, regardless of how reasonable or necessary it might have been.
And you’re right- it all comes down to political will and leadership; with both, we might have had something more uniform, as there wouldn’t have been the concern with externalities that you mention.
…to clarify: I’m talking about a “national lockdown” in the same sense as I’m assuming Dr Osterholm used it: gaining the co-operation of the governors to agree to a nationwide lockdown. Which is why as much as I agree with Dr Osterholm I don’t think its going to happen. Six weeks is the optimal time. But getting every state to agree on that would be a big ask even in the best of times. They might agree to a two week “circuit breaker”. Not long enough to ‘break the back’ of the coronavirus. But maybe just long enough to bring the curve down for a bit.
I don’t think there would have been much resistance from state governments to buy into things like mask mandates, even without additional funding. The democratically controlled states were already on board and the republican controlled states were more than happy to follow the leader wherever he might have taken them. The fact that wearing a mask was actually seen as political, and that people were harassed for wearing them, was the problem, and it came from the top down.
The C.D.C. is advising the use of nonmedical cloth face covering as an additional voluntary public health measure. So it’s voluntary. You don’t have to do it. They suggested for a period of time, but this is voluntary. I don’t think I’m going to be doing it.
I don’t wear masks like him. Every time you see him, he’s got a mask. He could be speaking 200 feet away from it, and he shows up with the biggest mask I’ve seen
I wore one (a mask) in the back area. I didn’t want to give the press the pleasure of seeing it.
My administration has a different approach: We have urged Americans to wear masks, and I emphasized this is a patriotic thing to do. Maybe they’re great, and maybe they’re just good. Maybe they’re not so good.
Joe feels very safe in a mask. I don’t know, maybe he doesn’t want to expose his face
You know what he should have said, but never did?
Wear a mask. If you are a selfish narcissist, it can help save your life. If you’re a normal human, it can also help save other lives. If we all wear them, we will have a fraction of the deaths that we’re going to end up with otherwise.
…quote the exact post that leads you to this conclusion. I dare you too. I never made this claim, none of my posts came close to even implying this claim.
The amount of passenger traffic doesn’t matter if you stop the flow of traffic. It doesn’t matter if you are a big country or a small country our a landlocked country or an archipelago.
If this were true then how is it that Hawaii has substantially more cases and more deaths than New Zealand when it has substantially less people and less land area?
Its because you don’t really understand how all of this works.
Here is a great primer.
Scroll down to “Exponential spread.” (But you probably should be reading the rest of it as well)
That model doesn’t change just because a city has more people in it than New Zealand. Exponential spread is exponential spread. Stopping exponential spread is a matter of stopping as many people as possible from moving and interacting, keeping people in their bubbles.
No you didn’t do that.
You really really didn’t.
You keep saying you did things that you didn’t.
You didn’t do a nationwide lockdown as you claimed.
They didn’t pay everyone to stay home for two months.
The paltry amount of money they did pay was delivered in the most inefficient ways possible because nothing in America works the way it should work.
The budget for the United States Space Force is 15 billion dollars. If they can afford to spend money on that then they can afford to pay everyone to stay home.
And you wouldn’t be repeating it because you never paid everyone to stay home for a couple of months in the first place.
I’m under zero illusions that any of this would be possible in a country as fundamentally dysfunctional as the United States of America. Although I support people like Dr Osterholm who looks like they will give it a good go.
All I was doing was answering your question. Do you consider your question answered yet?
Politicians on both coasts went out of their way to encourage public gatherings in support of Chinese businesses when flights were first shut down.
…why are you obsessed with China?
And were they businesses owned by the Chinese government, or businesses run by Chinese people, or were they businesses run by Chinese-Americans, AKA Americans?
No. An unfunded answer is a wish upon a star.
…I’m a random poster on the internet. You expected me to provide a budget and fund the Federal response to the pandemic in America as well?
Sure thing.
My rate is $1500 + GST an hour. I’ll start work on it now and I’ll have it ready for you about this time next week. Where do you want me to send the bill?
You’re a random poster on the internet with an idea that isn’t financially viable.
…I’m a random poster on the internet who explained what we did in a country that has a fraction of the resources, cash, and economies of scale that the United States has and what we did was absolutely financially viable. We did it. And we did it substantially under budget. If we can do it located at the ass end of the world then you can do it too.
Magiver–because the US is so fucked, here’s what we have cancelled this year so far–how does this scale?
$20000 of international travel
$10000 of domestic travel
$1-200 of dining out/entertainment/week
Our $1m construction project is threatened on a weekly basis by infection
As @Banquet_Bear has so ably explained:
The US’s stupid refusal to pay people to stay home has knocked far more money off our GDP than paying people would have cost. And will continue doing that every week until we smarten up and pay everyone to stay home. Or until magic causes SARS-nCOV-2 to die out everywhere else in the world.
Ultimately we’re paying far more and getting far less. Because half our populace is under the influence of malign delusions.
And all through 2019 people had mass gatherings and the Democrats never complained! Hypocrites!
But guysssss! America is EXCEPTIONAL! STOMPS FEET
Sounds exactly like your idiotic medical system. Pay more. Get less. Is this the American way?
Clearly the reason we didn’t do that is that we had absolutely zero reason to believe that it would have worked.
Other than !!SCIENCE!!
The science? That mandating everyone – well, not everyone everyone, of course – stay home for six weeks would, what, eradicate the virus? Or at least keep it away for a long, long time? Or maybe just, kinda make it less of a thing for a while?
Yeah, there’s no science that says any of that. And how could there even be? The third greatest tragedy of 2020 is how horribly the reputation of (real and true) science has been mangled throughout all this.
This is 100% patently untrue. It is very unfortunate that our soon to be former president and his cronies in the Senate have spent so much time and effort discrediting the very real and very useful science that has been done on this pandemic, and it is even more unfortunate that their supporters and enablers have bought it hook, line, and sinker. It has cost tens of thousands of lives, if not more.
Here is a link about why many of the epedimiological models give conflicting results, and why this shows that each model was designed under different assumptions to test different scenarios and worked just fine – and why the media coverage (coupled with intentional and malevolent misinformation, though the paper doesn’t really go there) is so misleading.
Please educate yourself before you continue spreading deadly misinformation. Thank you.