Many conservatives and Republican fundamentally view liberals and Democrats as evil, corrupt, social justice warrioring, communists who want to take from the successful to give to lazy and incompetent criminals and destroy America. Conveniently, any evidence to the contrary will be viewed as “fake news” or “spin”, “groupthink” or some other justification for being disregarded. It isn’t rational so don’t try to rationalize it.
Many conservatives have an inherent, paranoid, almost pathological aversion to being told to do something they don’t want to do. They view this as an affront to their “rights”.
Many conservatives have an inherent aversion to having the government pay large numbers of people not to work.
To many conservatives living in more sparsely populated or suburban areas, the risk of COVID-19 is more abstract than the reality of being unemployed and financially ruined.
To wealthy Republican business owners, the risk of COVID-19 is more abstract and more easily mitigated than the reality of their profitability dropping. Particularly since they don’t actually have to go to the office if they don’t want to.
Admitting that Trump (or by extension, Fox News and the Republican Party) is wrong about these various medical and scientific points means opening the door to them being wrong about many other things that conservatives hold dear.
I believe a major factor in whether Republicans get elected in November will be how closely we are to “business as usual”.
I would also add that there are just a shit ton of people of both political parties who are sick of being stuck at home
…a lot of Trump flags, stupid signs, one guy flashing a white power hand signal, and zero attempts at social distancing
They aren’t protesting the lockdown, they’re protesting the virus. They are the reason why everything needs to be shut down. Some people are too stupid to take the pandemic seriously. They are achieving the opposite desired effect. Their actions prove we need to keep the shutdown in place.
Something similar happened at the state legislature here in Honolulu yesterday. About 100 people. Signs and shouts of the virus being fake news. I think three people were arrested. Should have been 100 people arrested. But no white power etc, not Republicans. Mostly the extreme hippie fringe one still finds in Hawaii.
But tensions are running high. Hawaii has seen only 619 cases and 16 deaths to date. People don’t stop to consider that maybe the reason the state has gotten off so slightly is because of the restrictions.
What are the consequences of reopening and dropping all restrictions? Worst case scenario about 1 in every 1000 Americans would die. Best case scenario about 1 in every 3,000 Americans would die.
What could we do to mitigate some of those losses? We could put more resources into identifying and protecting the vulnerable and most likely reduce those losses to possibly 1 in 10,000
Why is putting too much energy into slowing the spread of this virus a fools game? For many reasons. The quicker it passes the less damage it does. Easier to protect the vulnerable for 6 months as opposed to 3 years. The more time that goes by the more opportunity the virus has to sneak into places it shouldn’t be.
Are children and the general public at great risk from this disease? NO! They are under normal risks that nature puts on us all the time.
Will the shutdowns actually save lives are just delay a loss of life. This is a hard one, because loss of life indirectly associated with this virus could go on for years.
Social distancing and common sense especially for the elder should sufficiently slow the virus as to not overload hospitals, trying to stop this virus is a fools game.
Well HoneyBadgerDC, it is a fools game because there was/is really no good plan or preparation from the foolish leader that we have now.
Again, as pointed many times with evidence, more people do die when health systems get overwhelmed. And by overwhelmed it is not just talking about people dying directly from corona, but people that get subpar care when most people in hospitals and beds and equipment are geared to deal with the excess of corona cases that surge when restrictions are lifted. Unfortunately there are a lot of adults in their 20s who do live with their parents, and there is very little on the way of setting up quarantine facilities and economic aid to the ones that will be affected. Meaning that most will cause a surge in cases in many locations.
So, the real foolish errand is to pretend that everyone will follow the voluntary distancing, use of masks and to demand mass testing and contact tracing and the quarantines that would be needed.
That was Jonathan Portes - professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London and a former senior civil servant.
Because as Dr. Fauci told in a congressional hearing (before Trump forbade it now), that the coronavirus is 10 times deadlier than the seasonal flu. And again, healthy people that get infected do get back to their families and mingle with coworkers. Hence the point made:
The result of loosening the restrictions will be an acceleration in infections, then it is very likely that many firms would simply stop functioning, as workers became sick, or had to stay at home to look after family members.
Where did you get these numbers? They don’t match anything I’ve seen. We’ve seen overloaded hospital systems with a death rate close to 4% and then on the low side we have South Korea at 0.5%. Even if you assume that only 70% of the population catches the disease that means your best case is ~3 in every 1,000 and your worst case would be 3 in every 100.
Testing has produced no meaningful numbers as of yet. We don’t know how many of the tests were conducted on the general public as opposed to those already in hospitals.
We have no idea how many people are infected or have been infected. At this particular point in time the only meaningful number is death per millions and even that is being skewed because we don’t know how much the shutdowns have affected that number. It appears that most western nations start slowing down when the virus has killed about 500 in 1,000,000 of the population. New York is currently approaching 1300 per million and we don’t know how much of the community has been infected. I would put massive resources into antibody testing of the general public in New York and that would give us the best idea of what we are actually dealing with.
That’s not true at all South Korea has been doing wide spread testing of its population. To date they have tested 650K which is over 1% of their population and at least gives a relative idea on infection rates to correlate to deaths. Of that 650k there have bee 10,800 positive results with 252 deaths or about a 2% death rate it has increased in the last month and was only 0.5% the last time I checked it.
So you don’t believe in polling or statistics? If I polled 1,500 random people would I be able to extrapolate that to the greater population within a margin of error?
South Korea is testing ~9,000 people per day most of that is contact testing. Here is their report from 5/4 in this case they tested 8,176 people with 8 positives. Sure its not a perfectly random sample since they are primarily focused on any one who could have contracted it from another sick person but it does allow them to catch their asymptomatic carriers. I see no reason to think they aren’t testing a high percentage of all infected people in their country. Which would allow them to see the death rate with a pretty high accuracy.
At most you should be quibbling that their society with different demographics and health would have a different death rate than the US but I can’t come up with a reason the US would be wildly better.
1500 in a population as big as the US? No, it would be noise, not data.
If you polled 150,000, from across the country with different demographics maybe. But the point was, they were testing people , precisely because they thought they had contact with a positive test. That isn’t random.
Another reason to not believe the data inherently available in the right now. The CDC has roughly halved the deaths caused by Covid19 in the US since their initial number.
Representative? Sure with a margin of error (of 50%)
As mentioned in another thread, the bigger the uncertainty is, it actually gives the ones in favor of harder lockdowns more reasons to maintain the lockdowns.
The only two things about this virus that seem to have workable facts at this point that I can see are the death per million ratios and knowing who the primary targets of this virus are. If the death per million was matched up to some extensive antibody testing it might give us a fairly accurate idea of what the potential danger for this disease really is. Looking at western europe and some of the states on the east coast it looks like it might range from about 500 to 1500 but we still don’t know how many have been infected. Antibody tests would give us that pretty quickly.
The general public very likely has some issue that makes them at risk- half of all adults have high blood pressure. 10% have diabetes, asthma, and copd about 10%, etc. of course there is overlap, but nearly HALF of adults in America are high risk. It wont need to be 3 years, we will have a vaccine by late fall or 2020.
Common sense? No such thing.Look at the pictures of MAGA hat wearers with Ak47s, confederate flags and stuff out demonstrating.
The point is to flatten the curve and not overload hospitals. That has worked. What we are doing is working. It’s foolish not to continue a working policy.
This is my big point of contention. The high risk people you mentioned are not at high risk, they are at an elevated risk. The vast majority of those getting into trouble with this virus are in very bad shape to start with. I know a 65 year old woman with severe copd on O2 24-7 who is living in a rest home and has contracted the disease. She is currently recovering and could still go downhill but so far she seems to have gotten past it without going on a ventilator. 8 others in her facility have passed away and they were all bed ridden. We need more accurate information about risk factors so we can decide for ourselves.
