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Non-Political Coronavirus Thread

DeaconBrews said:
One problem: masks weren't readily available then and they were trying to get what was available to hospitals.
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One thing that American's have the ability to do is DIY the shit out of this stuff. We've seen that in the last few weeks.

As people have said, people of Asian countries habitually wear masks.
 
I mean this thing basically hit us where we are really bad as a nation:

1. Listening to anybody in an authority role.
2. Trusting science over conspiracy theorists.
3. Being told not to do something.
 
Deacsfan27 said:
The "stay inside for a while" was meant to give us time to improve testing/tracing. That message wasn't delivered effectively despite holding a press conference nearly every single day for a month because of the conflicting things coming from Fauci/Birx and Trump/Pence. All they had to say was "this is going to give us a time to ramp up testing and tracing so we can get back to life in 3-4 months". That wouldn't have kept everybody inside, but it would have been a helluva lot better messaging than what we got.
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I have no idea how quickly we could've scaled up every aspect of testing. I guess the most effective way would've been to ramp up the DPA for swabs, reagents, testing machines, etc and open up everything as quickly as possible to private labs and mobilize the national guard to early hotspots. Plus, aggressive contract tracing done with federal funding.
 
Contact tracing is where we should’ve quickly shifted our efforts after we utterly failed at virus testing. We’re still trying to figure out how to get our transistor radio working when we need to be manufacturing an HD TV
 
DeaconBrews said:
I have no idea how quickly we could've scaled up every aspect of testing. I guess the most effective way would've been to ramp up the DPA for swabs, reagents, testing machines, etc and open up everything as quickly as possible to private labs and mobilize the national guard to early hotspots. Plus, aggressive contract tracing done with federal funding.
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I ask this with all sincerity - what did other nations do? Obviously we have a ton of people in the USA and that makes it a lot harder.

This is also a pretty big indictment on our healthcare system as a whole, which is a big deal in several different realms right now.
 
Wakeforest22890 said:
Contact tracing is where we should’ve quickly shifted our efforts after we utterly failed at virus testing. We’re still trying to figure out how to get our transistor radio working when we need to be manufacturing an HD TV
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You can't contact trace if you can't test.
 
Deacsfan27 said:
I ask this with all sincerity - what did other nations do? Obviously we have a ton of people in the USA and that makes it a lot harder.

This is also a pretty big indictment on our healthcare system as a whole, which is a big deal in several different realms right now.
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South Korea identified the virus as a problem in mid-January and health officials from the government worked with pharmaceutical companies to shift their focus to manufacturing test kits and chemical reagent material for the kits on the basis that being able to test for the disease was central to containing it. When they confirmed someone had the virus through testing, the government mandatorily quarantined not only those individuals, but also anyone who they came in contact with whether or not they showed symptoms.

This allowed them to actually avoid a major shutdown of industries.

The irony in a pandemic situation from a governing perspective is that if your country has authoritarian tendencies to begin with from the government you are generally better equipped to address the pandemic.
 
Wakeforest22890 said:
South Korea identified the virus as a problem in mid-January and health officials from the government worked with pharmaceutical companies to shift their focus to manufacturing test kits and chemical reagent material for the kits on the basis that being able to test for the disease was central to containing it. When they confirmed someone had the virus through testing, the government mandatorily quarantined not only those individuals, but also anyone who they came in contact with whether or not they showed symptoms.

This allowed them to actually avoid a major shutdown of industries.

The irony in a pandemic situation from a governing perspective is that if your country has authoritarian tendencies to begin with from the government you are generally better equipped to address the pandemic.
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South Korea is a great data point, but the things that worked there can't really be scaled to America. My brother lived there for three years (and I lived in Asia for a year). South Korea and America are basically as opposite as you can get.
 
Grabs Turds Bare said:
You can't contact trace if you can't test.
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Obviously. My point is we dragged our feet on the testing front at the governing level and have spent our time focused on this instead of simultaneously working on the contact tracing infrastructure. A Johns Hopkins epidemiologist estimated a couple weeks ago that America would need about 100,000 contact tracers to help curb and contain the virus even without states reopening and we only had 25,000-30,000.
 
Grabs Turds Bare said:
Seriously. I'm not even kidding. This would have worked.
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Yeah it definitely would have. But instead he spent weeks saying the virus wasn't a big deal, has maintained it will go away on its own, and has persistently ignored information from his own task force. This is why he's been horrible on this issue and his ratings continue to drop. It's also simply a reality of the pandemic that America had to deal with: an ineffectual leader who had no idea what he was doing. To say that it would've been easy for him to do so and so or it would have been easy for America to handle this in different circumstances ignores how bad Donald truly is and that he's an existing condition.
 
Deacsfan27 said:
I ask this with all sincerity - what did other nations do? Obviously we have a ton of people in the USA and that makes it a lot harder.

This is also a pretty big indictment on our healthcare system as a whole, which is a big deal in several different realms right now.
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I think the countries that are commonly cited (South Korea, New Zealand) have a few advantages:

1. Smaller populations
2. Less Land to spread out and thus more centralized populations
3. Adherence to mask-wearing
4. Less Air Travel and less points-of-entry (this screwed us on both coasts)
 
Apparently they did make MAGA masks available in May but Trump hasn’t worn them.
 
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Wakeforest22890 said:
South Korea identified the virus as a problem in mid-January and health officials from the government worked with pharmaceutical companies to shift their focus to manufacturing test kits and chemical reagent material for the kits on the basis that being able to test for the disease was central to containing it. When they confirmed someone had the virus through testing, the government mandatorily quarantined not only those individuals, but also anyone who they came in contact with whether or not they showed symptoms.

This allowed them to actually avoid a major shutdown of industries.

The irony in a pandemic situation from a governing perspective is that if your country has authoritarian tendencies to begin with from the government you are generally better equipped to address the pandemic.
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Do you think that the House would've voted for the necessary measures (big if, since Trump thinks it's the flu) in Mid-January when Pelosi handed off the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate on Jan 16th?
 
DeaconBrews said:
I think the countries that are commonly cited (South Korea, New Zealand) have a few advantages:

1. Smaller populations
2. Less Land to spread out and thus more centralized populations
3. Adherence to mask-wearing
4. Less Air Travel and less points-of-entry (this screwed us on both coasts)
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May have been discussed here before, but 2 here is critical for America. Areas that have reopened too early now are those where the virus didn't hit right away so weeks of capital were wasted on the shutdown where the problem just seemed to be elsewhere and not a localized issue. The virus was always going to go from dense population areas to other cities, to suburbs, to rural areas. By the time the virus started to spread (and continues to spread at this point) through these various areas, plenty of states were tired of being shutdown or being told what to do so they just reopened even though the virus hadn't meaningfully hit their area yet.

The end result you got was states like Arizona, NC, and SC - which didn't necessarily have major outbreaks from the get go (due no doubt in part to the lockdown restrictions which prevented spread early on) - opened right when the virus was making its way through suburban and rural areas. This meant that they never left wave one before reopening. If states had even been as compliant as to follow the initial CDC baseline of "14 days of declining test results and hospitalizations before starting to reopen anything - including phase one" we'd be basically guaranteed that every state at least curbed wave one before reopening.
 
DeaconBrews said:
Do you think that the House would've voted for the necessary measures (big if, since Trump thinks it's the flu) in Mid-January when Pelosi handed off the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate on Jan 16th?
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I really have no idea. I think best case neither party was going to move on this until late January to early February. But we do know that members of Congress were briefed on the corona dangers in mid-to-late January and that it was a very real threat that the virus would be a pandemic in our country.

As screwed up as it sounds, I think it's possible Democrats would have acted on this from a political perspective knowing that Donald and the GOP would view the virus as a hoax or overblown (as they are wont to do whenever science comes up against anecdotes/personal experience - aka the 2&2 enigma)
 
Serious question as I haven’t been in a restaurant since Februaryish. Do people wear masks while they are eating and remove for each bite/sip? Seems like the mask wouldn’t be helpful at all. No chance I eat inside for some time.
 
bmoneydeac said:
Serious question as I haven’t been in a restaurant since Februaryish. Do people wear masks while they are eating and remove for each bite/sip? Seems like the mask wouldn’t be helpful at all. No chance I eat inside for some time.
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Doubtful that anyone wears a mask at all
 
there definitely seems to be anti-mask judging around here. like I've gotten comments when I've gone to stores about buying into the hoax, living my life in fear, etc. I agree if Trump actually supported wearing a mask and did it himself the people who are against mask wearing (non-politically Trump supporters) we wouldn't be in quite this predicament.
 
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