One other point this made me think of: one of the reasons the people quoted in the article are in disbelief is that, I think they generally trust their government to an extent that many Americans do not. I mean, who in their right mind would trust the current government with “a real lockdown”? As shown in my IMHO thread, not many.
And yes, I realize that this is Italy we’re talking about here, which just emphasizes the point. In a sense, the current administration (and perhaps Republican presidents in particular) are showing what conservative voters think is going on in government on every level in every way without exception.
It seems like a sad inability to think critically, to be honest. I mean, if one of these ‘masks are freedom’, type’s kid, goes into surgery do they care if the team wear masks? Why? Their health isn’t at risk, surely they can’t be mandated to do so just to protect someone else’s health?
What about the restaurant? The employees are mandated to wash their hands, to cook meat to this temp, to wash dishes in water this hot, etc. I mean, sure, some people might get sick, but hardly anyone dies of food poisoning. Surely those workers shouldn’t be ‘told what to do’ just to protect the health of strangers, right?
And everyone’s been okay for decades with, ‘No shirt, no shoes, no service!’, but suddenly ‘Not entry without a mask’, is somehow totally different and a constitution issue.
These things illustrate a total lack of critical thinking to me.
4% of the world’s population, 25% of the world’s coronavirus cases. Sheesh, no, things are not going well at all in the US.
While it is impossible to have stopped the virus from entering the country, it did not have to be this bad. The bumbling, fumbling government’s inept initial response sealed our fate. We had one chance (like every other nation) to get things right at the beginning of this by implementing a nationwide lockdown and requiring people to wear a mask in public, strategies proven to work. Flatten the curve and we can start to take steps toward opening things up again, and this wont last too long or be too painful.
But nooo. We had to have every state acting as their own country making their own decisions, people at the highest level discouraging a unified response, politicians contradicting health officials, people getting restless and starting to make unsafe decisions. I mean, while the rest of the world put up a fight to keep the virus under control, we essentially rolled out the welcome mat. Fuckin-A.
In a lot of cases, the opposition is not just contradiction; it’s physically, violently aggressive defiance. The US has had an unhealthy tolerance of misinformation bubbles and it’s beginning to have an unhealthy impact on society, public health, and politics.
The sad thing is neither of those was even strictly required. There are countries that did vastly better than us without an initial mask mandate. And other countries that did not lockdown that also did vastly better than us.
Moreso than specific measures, it seems that the biggest difference is having a coordinated response at the national level and one that takes medical/scientific expertise into account. This seems like a no-brainer but we failed at literally the simplest thing we could have done. And continue to fail at it now.
The first confirmed case in the US was Jan 20. The first confirmed case in South Korea was also Jan 20. While South Korea already had an epidemic response playbook and followed it to the point that they had things mostly under control by March, it was only really March when our federal government started its tepid response. We literally wasted 2 months that another country used to almost fully contain the disease.
Once you have a government that can coordinate a national response, which of a variety of specific measures (mask mandates, lockdowns, etc) can and does make a difference but seemingly much less of a difference than having functional adults running things. Several of the countries dinged for poor early responses are still doing vastly better than we are. We were talking about how badly Italy and Spain were doing several months ago, but no sane adult would feel safer about walking around in public in the US than in Italy today.
I think that America is approaching a point of serious decline, and it’s a decline from which we may not recover for a very long time, if ever. The pandemic shows that polarization is real and very toxic. It shows that people are just fine with being divided, and that they live in a zero-sum world in which someone else’s perceived “correctness” is their loss. For as long as I’ve kinda seen this moment coming, I admit that it’s still nevertheless shocking to me that we’re in this moment. But here we are.
Agree. So what do we do now? Evidently, there is a playbook for when an outbreak of a disease or even a pandemic starts. But now the train has well left the station - I don’t know that there is a playbook for when a country stands alone with a disease running rampant and hopscotching around, finding weakness in a fractured society with inconsistent response plans, and not taking advice from other countries that seem to know how to handle it. While the rest of the world starts moving toward a new normal, we will still be in the heat of battle, I am afraid. No one will want any disease-carrying Americans traveling to their fair shores.
Trump did keep a campaign promise of “America First” - we top the list of countries with the worst pandemic response. Murica! Fuck-yeah!
Good governance is about making the right choices, at the right TIME. Best shot at containment is to act early and clearly, but that boat has already sailed.
Some things are all but impossible to reverse, like money in politics, or profit in healthcare. There comes a time when it’s just too late now. Like trying to turn a train off a track.
America could maybe correct it’s path, and gain control, but NOT by doing what other countries undertook many months ago, I think. They’d be starting from a very different place. And any path forward that hopes for success would require a unity that seems lacking at the moment. This alone dooms most reasonable approaches, I should think.
That sheep is well and truly fucked and can’t be unfucked. It’s not too late to do something, but it’s definitely too late to avoid thousands of additional deaths and months of ongoing outbreaks.
So, we can stop actively fucking the sheep and try to go into damage control and triage.
It’s looking bad. We need to institute not just advisories but actual restrictions on a range of everyday activities and start encouraging widespread mask usage (something the White House has only made half-hearted attempts at). Unfortunately, because many of the things we’d need for a proper response have been politicized, enforcement, especially at the local and state levels, will be difficult. But difficult isn’t impossible. I get the feeling that a lot of GOP governors, even under a potential Biden presidency, might publicly grouse or complain but would ultimately get on board and be privately relieved. They’re mostly not idiots.
That leaves some potential holdouts who actually may be idiots (like DeSantis or Kemp), and I’m not sure exactly what to do there. They could probably be brought around, but I’m not sure how, which is why I’m an armchair analyst and not in government. Possibly it is the realization that every other state is actually doing better that brings them around.
Yup. Ever since Reagan’s “we’re from the government and we’re here to help” bullshit, the Republicans have gone down a path that government is never the answer and is only a problem, and they prove it more and more with each successive Republican administration.
They’re terrified that the government might do something well and convince people that it can be helpful, too, which is why they’ve spent years undermining the ACA.
Anyway, states do seem to have caught on a bit and individuals have also wised up somewhat, and the number of new cases seems to be falling, unless that’s just because the CDC is no longer involved in the counting and HHS is just lying. Certainly possible.
I would add some quotes from the article but it is just too depressingly on-target. It’s like everything wrong with the US: inequity, elder neglect, dysfunctional health care system, policies and politics, etc., etc., etc., has been rawly exposed by this pandemic. The question is will anyone be able to recognize it and implement meaningful changes that will better prepare us for the next pandemic.
The US has demonstrated very effectively how it could be completely defeated and reduced as a world power without a single shot being fired.
I would expect that its enemies have made note of it - Trump has significantly weakened the US - the only reponse that the US can make is to make much better preparations for the next pandemic, with far greater pandemic emergency legislation and enforcement. It will have to destroy the power of the ignorant right, if it fails that the US will always be vulnerable to repeated waves of pandemics and not all will be accidental.
I think Russia and China suspected there were social and political fault lines within the United States. It’s a good bet that Russian intelligence via the FSB had been monitoring American social media long enough to realize the potential damage that they could inflict. Moreover, the Russians have a lot of experience at using information warfare to their advantage.
Oh there are other very realistic outcomes, like the US dollar no longer being regarded as a reserve currency and the US sliding into massive economic and political turmoil that could lead to calls for secession. Not that states would actually succeed in seceding (try saying that a few times under the influence, lol), but that level of discontent might play itself out on social and conventional media. Hostile countries would definitely not waste a moment in amplifying these tensions.
But what would our allies do? Keep in mind that the EU countries and other allies will probably have their own economic crises. Normally the answer is coordination between the world’s largest and most stable democracies and economies, but what if that stability no longer exists? I think those are very real questions that not just Americans but people in allied countries have to ask themselves and find answers for. The world order going forward is thinking about how to survive as a strong, independent, sovereign country without the help of the United States.