People are not happy about the USPS situation:
We had a period of trying to flatten the curve and now we’re in a period of trying to manage the outbreak and keep it to a constant rate of death that we don’t mind too much. We expect to stay in this phase until a vaccine is invented.
Containment: The act of keeping something harmful within limits.
Your first complaint with the article is that you don’t like that he used a word according to its definition. We are, in fact, in a phase of trying to manage the daily death count and limit it to a certain level.
When that is true, that you’re complaining about perceived and not-existent slights, I find it unlikely that you read with an honest gaze. You were ready to attack, regardless of anything, and it didn’t matter whether the attack was sensical or not, you were coming out punching.
Let me suggest that, that’s not the best way to read something.
The problem with trying to counter Trump is that he careens from one clusterfuck to another and you can never pause long enough to properly castigate him. He’s like a 5-year-old rampaging through your house; while you’re getting after him for knocking the lamp over he’s using crayons on the wall. In the middle of telling him he’s punished he’s hammering nails into the dining room table. While you contemplate how many years his time-out will be he’s setting fire to the drapes. It just never stops.
Remember when even some conservatives were saying that “delay the election” was an impeachable offense? That was like 5 clusterfucks ago and now it’s hardly on our mind.
I agree with the first half of your post; with a competent administration the hiring of Atlas might help the president navigate between the two poles of health and economy. My issue is that’s not at all why he’s there; he was chosen by Trump to throw his weight as a physician behind whatever Trump pin-balls to next.
Happy, I love the canned cranberry!
This is where the Electoral College might come in handy, actually. It meets in mid-December and it’s they who determine who the President is, not whatever the popular vote might have been.
I haven’t checked but I’d bet most if not all the faithless EC voter legislation that’s been passed in the past few years have no proviso for how to vote if the popular vote in that state is still unknown.
If the same system that let Donny Two-scoops fall backward into the White House is the same system that throws him out, I’m gonna laugh my ass off.
And that premise what I was disagreeing with. A competent administration would not see those as two separate poles. Most economists do not see a full economic recovery that does not take public health into account. So, a competent administration would see the solution to one as a prerequisite to the other. This is borne out in Asia and Europe - most nations did not take the same economic hit the US did and they were able to protect their people better. This is no accident or coincidence.
It’s a false dichotomy to choose between health and the economy to begin with. And the choice of people like Atlas serve merely to reinforce the inane notion that we must commit to this false dichotomy.
I agree that Trump’s intentions are bad.
But, Trump is a lazy bastard who doesn’t understand things. He wants other people to solve the problems and just let him watch TV.
There is no “helping the President to navigate the waters” but there’s also no “doing things to help him in his active pursuit to destroy things”. That pursuit is accomplished, in general, by him appointing someone and then going back to TV.
Fauci and Atlas will debate with each other and either jointly they’ll start issuing a revised guidance or one of them will - Atlas with the new approach or Fauci with the old. Trump won’t be involved, either way.
But, fundamentally, there is no “zero death” option. Are you better to have more healthy people exposed to a tiny risk, so that you can build herd immunity quickly and protect those at high risk? Or, are you better to try and protect everyone, even if that means that you give the disease a longer duration to find the susceptible and attack them?
Today, no one is running computer simulations of the alternate strategy.
Given that we knew the fatality rates and risk brackets back in March and are several versions in to our epidemic models, that’s a serious, glaring hole that we’ve never even run the math on alternate approaches.
Right now, we have a million college kids going out partying with no masks, and we’re spending our pandemic money to pay for advertising space to ask to not do that. I strongly doubt the efficacy of that.
Is that money really better spent in that way, than in spending it to protect people who are at risk?
Fundamentally, this is about logistics. You have a limited pool of money and workers. Can you more effectively manage the safety of the whole population, or a tiny fraction of the population? It’s definitely the latter, since that’s just the basic law of logistics. That being true, can you identify risk groups and strategies well enough to protect that group? If yes, then that’s something you need to look at and analyze.
Electors are chosen by the popular vote. If the vote is unknown, there will be no electors to cast votes. In which case, the state that is unable to deliver electoral votes is disenfranchised, and the majority bears on the total number of votes cast, not on the total number of expected electors.
I disagree that we have contained the virus and I certainly disagree with his characterization of late April as having contained the virus. My cite is the fact that cases and deaths have greatly increased in the ensuing 3.5 months since he wrote that; my point stands.
Apparently Nancy Pelosi has come under some criticism for calling it the “Trump Virus”. Americans have difficulty tolerating redundancy.
That ain’t never gonna happen under Republicans. They don’t want to protect high-risk groups (or anyone). So there’s really no point IMO in discussing such a plan because it will never happen. We can’t even get the enhanced unemployment renewed through December. GOP wants to reduce it, so why would anyone think there could be a program to help the most vulnerable stay home?
When I look at the picture of Thayn in that article, I see a grown-up Alfred E. Neuman who maybe got his teeth fixed.
“What? Me listen to Experts?”
I don’t know. Is the Newsweek of today the same publication as it was in 1980? They apologised – though they did not take down the op-ed.
In any case, Asimov’s column appeared there, and that is the source of the quote.
I read speculation this morning that Republican legislatures may decide to have the Electoral College electors chosen by Congressional district, to make sure that if the state’s popular vote goes to the Democrat, the gerrymandered districts would vote for Individual 1.
Electors are actually selected “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct”. It has been commonly suggested that in case of extreme chaos a legislature is permitted to step in and appoint its own slate of electors.
No Fauci will give an expert assessment of the situation, Atlas will spout whatever rhetoric and flawed analysis makes the Trump administration look the best for November, as he was appointed to do. Fauci will be sidelined and Trump will use Atlas’ “expert” advice in his next stump speech.
I think there is an analogy to be made between Covid 19 and global warming. You have scientific experts who say that unless we get emissions under control we are screwed, you have economists saying that taking the steps necessary to get out climate under control would have a devastating effect on our economy, but the real economic experts say that as bad as it would be economically to cut green house emissions, allowing global warming to continue unchecked would be much worse.
Then you have Atlas saying “Now that we have entered the cooling phase of the climate…”
In a fitting metaphor, 20 assholes in Portland decided to have a Trump boat parade down the river. And either oblivious or not caring about their impact on others, their wake (in a no-wake zone) swamped and sunk another boat.
Actually, most economists reported early that following your alternative would be worse. (Someone did calculate and others made models too)
His initial modeling efforts showed that even a yearlong lockdown makes economic sense, to allow time for a vaccine to be developed. The pause would shrink the economy by approximately 22%—a cost of $4.2 trillion. By comparison, the model shows that without containment measures, the economy would contract by about 7% over that year—but as many as 500,000 additional lives would be lost, which translates into a loss of roughly $6.1 trillion.
But what would the cost be if governments had not imposed restrictions and simply let the virus run its course? Suppose, if unchecked, 30% of Americans became infected, far below most estimates, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s projection that 56% of his state’s residents would be infected without mitigation. Applying the same rates of hospitalizations and mortality to this higher rate of prevalence increases the cost of COVID-19 to nearly $3 trillion. And if we assume, quite reasonably, that mortality rates would rise from 0.5% to 1.5% as hospitals become increasingly overrun, the estimated cost of COVID-19 increases to $5.6 trillion, by my calculations.
Just like a pandemic, the economic toll is not linear. Small additional increases in prevalence and mortality rates lead to spiraling cost estimates that quickly reach tens of trillions of dollars.
And so did experts on infectious diseases:
Why is getting infected with SARS-CoV-2 to “get it over with” not a good idea?
With some other diseases, such as chickenpox before the varicella vaccine was developed, people sometimes exposed themselves intentionally as a way of achieving immunity. For less severe diseases, this approach might be reasonable. But the situation for SARS-CoV-2 is very different: COVID-19 carries a much higher risk of severe disease and death.
The death rate for COVID-19 is unknown, but current data suggest it is 10 times higher than for the flu. It’s higher still among vulnerable groups like the elderly and people with weakened immune systems. Even if the same number of people ultimately get infected with SARS-CoV-2, it’s best to space those infections over time to avoid overwhelming our doctors and hospitals. Quicker is not always better, as we have seen in previous epidemics with high mortality rates, such as the 1918 flu pandemic.