By few you mean 135,000 dead and growing, and all those who survived with long term ill effects.
R&D could be paid for by rescinding the Trump tax cuts on the rich. (Middle class ones are probably useful in growing the economy.) But I suppose you’d rather see tens of thousands of deaths rather than a tax hike.
And the economy will surely grow if going to a restaurant or bar or theater means a good chance at getting sick. Look at Sweden - ignoring the virus did not help their economy. The states that followed your advice are having to backtrack - or do you think Texas is full of wimps.
BTW, I wouldn’t expect a vaccine by the Fall if I were you. Even if there was one approved, unlikely, it would be limited to only essential healthcare workers and maybe those most at risk.
Time and resources. Almost sounds like you’re talking about something paid for with taxes.
Indeed - taxes paid by people who have the money and who’ve benefited from their membership in the American economy and have the money to pay it. Absolutely correct.
Raging wildfire is not a good analogy because the vast majority of people survive it without complications. So what you’re talking about is something that requires a healthy economy to fund research and allocations toward the few who are vulnerable.
You can’t have a healthy economy until you have consumers who feel confident about going out into the economy and consuming. So take care of that problem first. There’s evidence to support what I’m saying.
Yes, absolutely, in a nation of 340 million that’s a few. And we’ve spent trillions keeping the numbers low.
My advise has always been to open in a controlled manner and mitigate locally as needed which is what all the states are doing.
I’m not sure why you’re mentioning Texas beyond what appears to be political motivation.
Texas is averaging the same per capital death rate as California. Both states are engaging in the mitigation process.
The problem is that nobody can seem to agree on what “controlled manner,” “mitigate,” and “locally” really means. Until you have some protocols, there’s nothing really “controlled” about reopening; it’s more like state governors trying to see if they really can pull elixirs out of their asses, which they can’t of course.
What we know so far is that the states and countries that were aggressive in not just lock-downs but a full range of mitigation methods have generally fared better than those that haven’t. More to the point, those states that have employed a methodical public health response have generally out-performed those that have not.
Most countries will have spent vast sums of money in relative proportion to their gross domestic production to control the spread of the pandemic, but those the expectation is that those states and countries that are more methodical in their approach to controlling COVID-19 will probably recover faster, both healthwise and economically,
Florida with 15,000 cases yesterday. There’s no controlled manner to that at all.
135,000 is few? Guess you weren’t upset by 9/11 then. That was very few. Why do anything about it, since 40 attacks would still be few.
I mentioned Texas because they are backtracking at the state level - good for them - unlike Florida.
But if you think all the states are opening in a sane and controlled manner, you’re not paying attention. They are violating even Trump’s guidelines. And the results of this have been clear.
To make sure you don’t think it is political, California has been screwing up also. Because of lack of consistency, counties next to each other have different reopening policies. Sure big counties with few cases can reopen faster without regard to what LA does, but Santa Clara and Alameda counties are inconsistent.
Meanwhile, bars in my region are already starting to shut down again - not because of a government mandate but because in a few cases, the majority of their staff have been infected. It’s not clear whether they’re physically unable to work or just don’t want to be on the hook for knowingly infecting and potentially killing patrons and having to deal with lawsuits.
Either way, this is exactly why it’s stupid to suggest that we’re being chicken little-ish and that we should just somehow ‘man up’ or ‘power through’. Even if people don’t feel particularly vulnerable about being at work, they don’t want to bring home the virus to their elder parents or anyone else who might be at risk.
Christ, we’ve been running on this treadmill for damn near 4 months, and it’s still not sinking in. Why is it so hard for people (I have to say it, yes, Americans in particular) to get this?
what are you talking about? We have protocols from the CDC. They’re designed to work on a state and local level which is what we’re seeing. There’s no reason for Alaska to use the same protocol as New Jersey.
Why did you mention Florida? Looking over the last 11 days Florida is averaging .224 deaths per 100,000. New Jersey is averaging .368 deaths per 100,000.
Those numbers are wholly fictional. That would mean no one had died of COVID-19 in Florida in the last 11 days - that is less than one death in that entire time. 95 people died just yesterday, and that’s from people who were largely infected BEFORE the current wave. The three worst days Florida’s had for deaths are the last three.
And New Jersey is averaging 300 or so cases a day. Florida is averaging 300 new cases about every forty minutes. Number matters.
The pandemic’s out of control in the United States. The math is indisputable.
The information coming out of the CDC and other federal agencies has been late and confusing. The testing has been an abject failure in terms of its timing. There is no single response; there are, as Republican Governor of Maryland Larry Hogan has said, 50 different statewide responses. It’s trial and error. Don’t take my word for it, though: look at the results. It’s the results that tell the story, and the results have a history behind them - a history of different states enacting different policies and people in different states interpreting very confusing (and frankly outdated and inaccurate information) in different ways. Look no further than the confusion over the recommendations to wear a mask. It took the US at least 2 months to figure out what East Asian countries knew on day one, which is that masks incontrovertible slow the spread.
To be fair, there was a shortage of PPE early on and there was real worry that there just wasn’t enough for medical staff - and in fact there wasn’t.
At that particular time they were trying to reduce public use of masks to make the most of what they had.
You can argue about the fact that they were slow to increase production of PPE - they could have started that off in February, but they didn’t.
We were all told that the use of masks for the public was, at best, marginal and at worst would be depriving those who really did need them.
The most effective thing was lockdown, no question about it - nations that locked down early and completely fared far better than those who did it late and made significant exceptions.
The thing in the US is that lockdowns became part of an economic/political issue and in my opinion the discussion over masks in the US is largely a smokescreen to cover for the fact that lockdowns were were responsibility of leaders, they failed for various reasons and those leaders either failed to implement effective lockdowns or they opened up too early.
The use of masks is nothing more than an attempt by the failed political leadership to attempt to shift responsibility from themselves to the public and all the while not maintain an effective lockdown.
Do not be misled, when it comes to the final campaigning in the presidential election there is one thing the current leadership and their party do not want you to mention, that is, the abject failure to put in lockdown measures, including enough finance to support workers and their refusal to implement a lockdown effectively.
you’re missing the decimal point and yes, they are accurate. I keep track of each state by day and also each country by day.
Even with a few hot spots the total numbers of deaths in the US are not spiraling out of control by even a little.
here are the last rolling 10 days in the US:
617
557
517
471
520
583
645
655
661
630
Here are the actual numbers for the last 10 days for Florida:
Florida
26-Jun 37
27-Jun 26
28-Jun 27
29-Jun 28
30-Jun 58
1-Jul 49
2-Jul 64
3-Jul 68
4-Jul 17
5-Jul 75
6-Jul 0
7-Jul 63
8-Jul 49
9-Jul 119
10-Jul 93
11-Jul 44
12-Jul 45
Worldometer has 11-Jul as 95. 12-Jul is still low, but that will probably go up as reports come in. Both the 3-day and 7-day moving average show that the death rate in Florida is higher now than it has ever been. ETA, rather than death rate, I should say the daily new-deaths, I have not looked at the rate of deaths to reported infections.
I assume you understand that the deaths on any given day don’t all show up in the stats immediately. So the total on e.g. the 12th (yesterday as I type) is a preliminary total and will continue to increase in the days ahead as more data flows in. No, nobody is retroactively diying on the 12th. But yes, word is only filtering up to the stats agencies and out to the websites after the fact.
If all the numbers in your table were gathered on their first day after, they’re all low compared to what you’ll find if you go back to the same sourcenow . The tardiest US data typically trickles in about 10 days after the date in question. So totals from July 2 and prior should be very stable. Later ones, not so much. And the more recent they are, the more they understate reality. Not out of some evil conspiracy, but just because the websites are real-time readouts of non-real-time data sources.
Wait, you’re doing deaths as a portion of the whole population? You do realize that if the infection spirals out of control that’s gonna be cold comfort?
You are correct. I’m using a different site for states and they are not keeping to their 7:30pm posting time. I’ve found updates past 8pm. I’m now reviewing all days listed for any changes as I go forward.
I keep track of each day’s total for states and countries. In order to make relevant comparisons I calculate per capita numbers which is what I gave you in the form of the average of the previous 11 days.
Generally when making comparisons you need to do it per capita and also use some type of averaging because the numbers tend to swing wildly.
The estimated economic value of a human life is between $7 million and $9 million. The economic loss due to the lives lost so far is therefore between $945 billion and $1.2 trillion—let’s just low-ball it and say, a clean trillion dollars.
In New York, ~1,600 people per million have died from the virus (again, likely a low estimate). Scaled to the whole of the US, that would make about 519,000 people, equating to an economic loss of $3.6 trillion to $4.6 trillion.
Thus, spending a couple trillion dollars to keep things from getting as bad as New York as of now everywhere is entirely reasonable; but even New York, of course, isn’t the ceiling on how bad things could get without any measures at all, since even there, measures were enacted to slow the spread of the virus. And even in New York, it’s not over.
Wow, we should triple the world’s population and use that to solve hunger.