From the article “A lot has changed, however, since vacationers in sunny spots left Quebec a week or two ago”. This is the type of thing that’s pissing me off because it’s just exacerbating an already really bad thing. Contrary to the quote, nothing has fucking changed over the last fucking few weeks except what spokespeople are saying.
This is like having a bunch of people standing on the lip of Mount Etna, as it Bible’s away, when the authorities state that jumping into the volcano is allowed, so off they jump; a few days later the authorities state that jumping into the volcano is no allowed.
I’m not criticizing the politicians; they have a bunch of things to balance, one of which is public health. We the public, however, should have the brains to see through that.
“When we are preparing the next report next week, we’ll have these conflicting reported statements that are no longer true, which is confusing to us, particularly when we have a deadline and are paid to work to a fixed schedule”
Many people are unable to differentiate between “I’m confused, because of the nature of my job”, and “other people are confused”. Even fewer people care to make the distinction.
I think a large part of the problem is we couldn’t do the perfect solution. If we had somehow established an absolute lockdown back in February and prevented all contact between people, the virus would have disappeared within a few weeks. Tough for the people who had it and died for a lack of medical treatment. And tough for the people who didn’t have a six week supply of food on hand. And we would have had to seal the borders to keep the disease out of the country.
This was never a realistic plan. We need to keep society functioning which means we need to have some contact between people. People need to be able to buy food and gas. People need medical treatment and other vital services. Which means people need to go to work. So we try to reduce the risks rather than eliminating them. We play percentages.
So you have a situation where you have a guy delivering pizzas every day for the last ten months. And his brother has been working in a gas station every day for the last ten months. But we tell them they can’t visit each other, even though it’s Christmas and they haven’t seen each other since March.
And these guys are thinking “Why is it an acceptable risk for us for us to go to work for ten months and see dozens of strangers each day on our jobs but it’s an unacceptable risk for us to see each other on one day of the year?”
Uh oh. Cue the New Zealand contingent. “If we could do it on an island* in the middle of nowhere, surely a massive country at the center of global commerce can.”
Yes, I know how to find their graph. I’m asking if we should take it into consideration before declaring they have managed the situation to completion. They wouldn’t be the first country, after all, to have a benign spring and a rough winter. Slovenia comes to mind, or much of Eastern Europe.
My point was that no country, even New Zealand, applied the perfect guaranteed plan. Different places tried different plans based on how much risk they were willing to assume.
Things are getting worse in Germany and could spiral out of control. As was pointed out, their current wave is the worst one yet. On the other hand our current wave is also the worst one we’ve had, and is far worse than Germany’s, and is getting worse each week.
The nature of exponential growth is, the worse things are, the faster they get even worse.
I guess the virus just doesn’t like the taste of German
I already posted a cite about this which you retorted to snarkily getting a mod involved, earlier in the thread. In case the mod note confused you, here’s the link again:
Making snarky personal remarks while noting that another poster was moderated for such remarks is missing the point entirely. In fact, I almost included your snarky previous remark in that same mod note I gave FigNorton. I evidently should have. I’m giving you the same instructions I gave him: Don’t respond to other posters in a snarky and personally insulting way. I’m instructing you to remain civil in this forum in the future.
