Covid is Weird

[Number6]

I drove truck all over the country including trips into the highest infected areas.
For doing that and " risking" my life our government rewarded truck drivers nothing.

And what "reward" did you expect?

[ZoWie]

Again, you wouldn't care if it WERE Ebola, there is NOTHING that could happen, no matter HOW MANY MILLION DIED, that would cause you to say we shouldn't let business go on as usual.

And let's just remember that business was tanking without any shutdowns, because, and this will surprise you, people don't want to die just to keep the money engine running.

That's the idea I get from Joe's extended rants too. Mostly he's trying to say that the government taking an axe to the economy was a bad idea. I'm not going to go that far, because I don't think that's what they actually did, but I will agree that the first lockdowns were a nuclear solution to a threat that would have been less catastrophically neutralized by well placed rifle shots. The problem, though, was simple: we didn't have the ammo.

Why not? Two reasons, one is on everyone for not planning better. Where were the contingency plans? Where were the PPE? Now, on masks, there's an issue that no one here has addressed, myself included. They age. They can't sit in a FEMA storage warehouse forever. They lose their electrostatic charge in a year or so and don't meet N95 specs any more. So we have a planning issue here. Do we incur an indefinite expense to keep rotating the stock, or do we just wait until a threat comes and ramp up purchases? That will require some thought.

I don't know the answer to that one, though I would err on the side of keeping a reduced stock and rotating it. Enough to get us through the first couple of months while production ramped up. Most conservatives, though, would err on the side of forget about the masks, only old people die, and who needs them around anyway? They don't labor in the hot sun so what good are they? Who needs professors and thinkers and writers anyway? All that matters is that normal people put in long hours in brutal conditions for the pittance we think they deserve, while assholes like Musk rake in enough dough for 100,000 people by moving stock investments around.

Joe keeps saying young people don't die. I don't have information to argue that one effectively. What I've noticed is that young people do die, though in lesser numbers, and that long Covid does not correlate with age. We don't know why some people don't recover, but they don't, and that's a consideration going forward. Obviously, it's not the flu.

One of the evolutionary steps that covid has made is that younger people get worse cases now than most did at the start. They may not die from a case that would kill a 90 year old with comorbidities, so the statistics remain skewed, but it can still be catastrophic.

Perhaps it was a mistake keeping the schools closed as long as we did, but that was partly because we couldn't count on masking to work, even when we had enough masks to give them out at school entrances. It wasn't a supply issue at some point, but by then we had people blocking roads and demonstrating in the street that no one was going to tell them what to do, by God.

We can argue this until doomsday, and obviously minds are made up, so the same shit will go on until covid ultimately goes the way of Spanish flu and Bubonic plague, however many years or decades this will take. Next time the same thing will happen all over again. It's too bad that a few people have to be assholes about taking prudent precautions in a globalized environment.

[JoeMemphis]

Again, you wouldn't care if it WERE Ebola, there is NOTHING that could happen, no matter HOW MANY MILLION DIED, that would cause you to say we shouldn't let business go on as usual.

And let's just remember that business was tanking without any shutdowns, because, and this will surprise you, people don't want to die just to keep the money engine running.

For one thing you have no idea what I would do if it were Ebola. But that’s irrelevant anyway and nothing but pure speculation on your part.

Business was tanking because the govt was scaring the shit out of people. If you provided good information regarding who was at risk, you have no idea what would have happened. People should have been allowed to decide for themselves.

[JoeMemphis]

That's the idea I get from Joe's extended rants too. Mostly he's trying to say that the government taking an axe to the economy was a bad idea. I'm not going to go that far, because I don't think that's what they actually did, but I will agree that the first lockdowns were a nuclear solution to a threat that would have been less catastrophically neutralized by well placed rifle shots. The problem, though, was simple: we didn't have the ammo.

Why not? Two reasons, one is on everyone for not planning better. Where were the contingency plans? Where were the PPE? Now, on masks, there's an issue that no one here has addressed, myself included. They age. They can't sit in a FEMA storage warehouse forever. They lose their electrostatic charge in a year or so and don't meet N95 specs any more. So we have a planning issue here. Do we incur an indefinite expense to keep rotating the stock, or do we just wait until a threat comes and ramp up purchases? That will require some thought.

I don't know the answer to that one, though I would err on the side of keeping a reduced stock and rotating it. Enough to get us through the first couple of months while production ramped up. Most conservatives, though, would err on the side of forget about the masks, only old people die, and who needs them around anyway? They don't labor in the hot sun so what good are they? Who needs professors and thinkers and writers anyway? All that matters is that normal people put in long hours in brutal conditions for the pittance we think they deserve, while assholes like Musk rake in enough dough for 100,000 people by moving stock investments around.

Joe keeps saying young people don't die. I don't have information to argue that one effectively. What I've noticed is that young people do die, though in lesser numbers, and that long Covid does not correlate with age. We don't know why some people don't recover, but they don't, and that's a consideration going forward. Obviously, it's not the flu.

One of the evolutionary steps that covid has made is that younger people get worse cases now than most did at the start. They may not die from a case that would kill a 90 year old with comorbidities, so the statistics remain skewed, but it can still be catastrophic.

Perhaps it was a mistake keeping the schools closed as long as we did, but that was partly because we couldn't count on masking to work, even when we had enough masks to give them out at school entrances. It wasn't a supply issue at some point, but by then we had people blocking roads and demonstrating in the street that no one was going to tell them what to do, by God.

We can argue this until doomsday, and obviously minds are made up, so the same shit will go on until covid ultimately goes the way of Spanish flu and Bubonic plague, however many years or decades this will take. Next time the same thing will happen all over again. It's too bad that a few people have to be assholes about taking prudent precautions in a globalized environment.

I never said let the old die. More bullshit talking points. I would have allocated the scare resources to the high risk folks. Kids didn’t need N95. Healthy people under 50 didn’t need masks. Older folks with comorbidities would have benefited from such precautions.

I never said young people don’t die. They just weren’t at high risk to die from Covid. Look at the CDC stats. We don’t lock down for the Flu.

[gounion]

I never said let the old die. More bullshit talking points. I would have allocated the scare resources to the high risk folks. Kids didn’t need N95. Healthy people under 50 didn’t need masks. Older folks with comorbidities would have benefited from such precautions.

I never said young people don’t die. They just weren’t at high risk to die from Covid. Look at the CDC stats. We don’t lock down for the Flu.

You ALWAYS operate from ignorance, don't you? Open a history book sometime. Look at the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed more people than World War One did, between 29 and 39 million. And yes we had lockdowns:

Social distancing measures were introduced, for example closing schools, theatres, and places of worship, limiting public transportation, and banning mass gatherings.

*snip*

A later study found that measures such as banning mass gatherings and requiring the wearing of face masks could cut the death rate up to 50 percent, but this was dependent on their being imposed early in the outbreak and not being lifted prematurely.[

But of course in 1918 you would have been against masking and lockdowns. You don't care at all about lives, only money.

And you have no medical knowledge at all. You're a fucking accountant. Yet you think you know more than Anthony Fauci.

[JoeMemphis]

You ALWAYS operate from ignorance, don't you? Open a history book sometime. Look at the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed more people than World War One did, between 29 and 39 million. And yes we had lockdowns:



But of course in 1918 you would have been against masking and lockdowns. You don't care at all about lives, only money.

And you have no medical knowledge at all. You're a fucking accountant. Yet you think you know more than Anthony Fauci.

Medicine has changed a great deal in 100 years. It’s 2020’s. Try to keep up with current events.

Further all your restrictive measures, all your mandates, didn’t work. The only thing that bent the curve was vaccines. Modern medicine. If it were up to you we would still be delivering mail on horseback. Speaking of ignorant. You develop strategy that needs to work today. Not 100 years ago.

[gounion]

Medicine has changed a great deal in 100 years. It’s 2020’s. Try to keep up with current events.

Further all your restrictive measures, all your mandates, didn’t work. The only thing that bent the curve was vaccines. Modern medicine. If it were up to you we would still be delivering mail on horseback. Speaking of ignorant. You develop strategy that needs to work today. Not 100 years ago.

No, you make the same argument today they did then. Don't do anything.

And you only like the vaccines is that you made a bundle selling them to the government, didn't you?

You're the one that said we've never had lockdowns. As always, you were ignorant of history.

[ZoWie]

There were lockdowns in 1918, and there was no Nooz scaring people because the war was still on, and media were tightly controlled by wartime measures regarding information flow. In fact, many historians have concluded that wartime censorship made the problem worse by keeping the facts out of public circulation, letting speculation and conspiracy theories run wild.

----

Uhhh, the way I remember the covid outbreak is that, actually, there was a huge media buzz, the opposite of 1918, and probably going too far. The media environment has changed. People see so many doom stories year after year that they tend to tune them out.

Even so, a lot of people decided on their own to stay out of crowded places. The economic decline was well underway before the government did anything beyond counting cases and putting out scary numbers. You probably had to live in a big city to notice. There was full awareness of a threat regardless of what the government said, and there was the usual denial from the very start by those who deny everything they don't see themselves.

Some anecdotal stuff from LA:

1. The Nooz went crazy reporting every single covid case, giving the idea that a global pandemic had already spread worldwide and everyone was in mortal danger. They turned to be right, for once, but after Ebola and HIV and whatever and whatever else, a good number of people simply took covid as one more scary nooz story and went about their business until shit hit rotating air mover. I conclude from that that the nooz has conditioned people to tune out by burning them out on scare headlines.

2. Despite #1, after a couple of weeks had elapsed and it became obvious that things really were going downhill fast, there was a mass panic in Koreatown. That's also when the crimes against Asians started, as if they were responsible. No, lax enforcement and/or sloppy lab work in China was responsible, but that doesn't matter because it would have happened soon enough what with everyone running around the world on airplanes and cruise ships. We need to learn how to cope in a globalized environment that really has only existed for about 50 years.

3. On Friday, after the shit really started hitting the fan around here, I lost an argument over eating out vs being safe and staying home. We were still a couple of weeks away from a full lockdown. We ate out. We were the only people in the restaurant. The streets were already emptier than usual. Traffic was not the usual Friday LA gridlock. Obviously, a lot of businesses were already in trouble. What I concluded from the sudden quiet was that, regardless of whether we locked down or not, the economy was going to be nuked. The world had changed.

3a. In a perfect world, we would have had contingency plans to get commerce back on its feet, but being the USA, we had other priorities. Far as I know, commerce still hasn't recovered. I know you can't give away tickets to live theater in LA, because the venues don't dare catch flak by requiring masks, and because there are still people who don't want to sit 3 feet from strangers indoors for 3 hours. Nothing draws. The last PR project around here generated a lot of Nooz chatter and buzz, and there were MAJOR star names involved, and still nobody came. The idea I get from what people said in phone calls is that there would actually have been a slightly better turnout had masks been mandatory.

3b. One bar I pass quite often just closed. The sign on the door has several paragraphs that indicate that the owner blames covid. This was actually a fairly popular place, and also one with a lot of space and fresh air unlike most bars. But covid got the blame. Not liberals. Not masks (which they didn't require). It's still out there, folks.

Conclusion: We should be dealing with the situation, but all I see is denial.

[JoeMemphis]

No, you make the same argument today they did then. Don't do anything.

And you only like the vaccines is that you made a bundle selling them to the government, didn't you?

You're the one that said we've never had lockdowns. As always, you were ignorant of history.

Nope. Not what I said. I advocate concentrating scarce resources on those who are at risk. Not the entire universe. Bottomline, we tried lockdowns and mandates and they didn’t work. Bottomline, next pandemic, we won’t be following the same playbook. Unless people like you are ignorant of recent history.

[JoeMemphis]

There were lockdowns in 1918, and there was no Nooz scaring people because the war was still on, and media were tightly controlled by wartime measures regarding information flow. In fact, many historians have concluded that wartime censorship made the problem worse by keeping the facts out of public circulation, letting speculation and conspiracy theories run wild.

----

Uhhh, the way I remember the covid outbreak is that, actually, there was a huge media buzz, the opposite of 1918, and probably going too far. The media environment has changed. People see so many doom stories year after year that they tend to tune them out.

Even so, a lot of people decided on their own to stay out of crowded places. The economic decline was well underway before the government did anything beyond counting cases and putting out scary numbers. You probably had to live in a big city to notice. There was full awareness of a threat regardless of what the government said, and there was the usual denial from the very start by those who deny everything they don't see themselves.

Some anecdotal stuff from LA:

1. The Nooz went crazy reporting every single covid case, giving the idea that a global pandemic had already spread worldwide and everyone was in mortal danger. They turned to be right, for once, but after Ebola and HIV and whatever and whatever else, a good number of people simply took covid as one more scary nooz story and went about their business until shit hit rotating air mover. I conclude from that that the nooz has conditioned people to tune out by burning them out on scare headlines.

2. Despite #1, after a couple of weeks had elapsed and it became obvious that things really were going downhill fast, there was a mass panic in Koreatown. That's also when the crimes against Asians started, as if they were responsible. No, lax enforcement and/or sloppy lab work in China was responsible, but that doesn't matter because it would have happened soon enough what with everyone running around the world on airplanes and cruise ships. We need to learn how to cope in a globalized environment that really has only existed for about 50 years.

3. On Friday, after the shit really started hitting the fan around here, I lost an argument over eating out vs being safe and staying home. We were still a couple of weeks away from a full lockdown. We ate out. We were the only people in the restaurant. The streets were already emptier than usual. Traffic was not the usual Friday LA gridlock. Obviously, a lot of businesses were already in trouble. What I concluded from the sudden quiet was that, regardless of whether we locked down or not, the economy was going to be nuked. The world had changed.

3a. In a perfect world, we would have had contingency plans to get commerce back on its feet, but being the USA, we had other priorities. Far as I know, commerce still hasn't recovered. I know you can't give away tickets to live theater in LA, because the venues don't dare catch flak by requiring masks, and because there are still people who don't want to sit 3 feet from strangers indoors for 3 hours. Nothing draws. The last PR project around here generated a lot of Nooz chatter and buzz, and there were MAJOR star names involved, and still nobody came. The idea I get from what people said in phone calls is that there would actually have been a slightly better turnout had masks been mandatory.

3b. One bar I pass quite often just closed. The sign on the door has several paragraphs that indicate that the owner blames covid. This was actually a fairly popular place, and also one with a lot of space and fresh air unlike most bars. But covid got the blame. Not liberals. Not masks (which they didn't require). It's still out there, folks.

Conclusion: We should be dealing with the situation, but all I see is denial.

Don’t know about LA. I spend most of my time in FL and TN. We are wide open. Things are good. Perhaps we have just learned to live with Covid just like we learn to live with the Flu, the common cold, pneumonia etc. The earth keeps turning and life goes on. You can live in fear of this germ or that or you can just live and learn to deal with the fact that life carries with it a certain amount of risk that you can never eliminate. That’s part of it.

[ZoWie]

There are many lessons from this debacle, but I suspect they will be ignored. Nothing will change, and the same disaster will happen again.

Hell, we can't even get people interested in the goddamn climate, when it's obvious that it's gone berserk. Now I find out that some oil company had hard data in the 1970s and suppressed it.

Obviously war is still a problem that affects all of us, but everyone just talks and nothing ever changes and the existing situation guarantees that war will continue to disrupt the planet worse than disease, and that's pretty bad, whether or not you want to admit it.

Until we get a clue regarding good government, equality under the law, and intelligent preparation for threats, nothing will change and the world will be a mess. We'll have these same arguments over and over again.

[ProfX]

I hope the next president doesn't eliminate the federal Pandemic Response team, doesn't deny the severity of the problem, and doesn't ignore his own medical staff and advisors, as far as "lessons to be learned" goes.

[JoeMemphis]

I hope the next president doesn't eliminate the federal Pandemic Response team, doesn't deny the severity of the problem, and doesn't ignore his own medical staff and advisors, as far as "lessons to be learned" goes.

It would be nice if they didn’t undermine the very govt agencies before the election they want us to trust after the election.

[gounion]

It would be nice if they didn’t undermine the very govt agencies before the election they want us to trust after the election.

Um, the GOP and conservatives have been undermining government agencies for decades. Don’t pretend that’s pretty much Job One for you guys.

[Drak]

I hope the next president doesn't eliminate the federal Pandemic Response team, doesn't deny the severity of the problem, and doesn't ignore his own medical staff and advisors, as far as "lessons to be learned" goes.

Yep. Also shut down PREDICT, threw the handling a pandemic blue print left by the Obama admin in the garbage and removed the pandemic expert from China months before Covid hit.

[Number6]

That's the idea I get from Joe's extended rants too. Mostly he's trying to say that the government taking an axe to the economy was a bad idea. I'm not going to go that far, because I don't think that's what they actually did, but I will agree that the first lockdowns were a nuclear solution to a threat that would have been less catastrophically neutralized by well placed rifle shots. The problem, though, was simple: we didn't have the ammo.

Exactly, we didn't have the ammo because we didn't know enough about the enemy.

Why not? Two reasons, one is on everyone for not planning better. Where were the contingency plans? Where were the PPE? Now, on masks, there's an issue that no one here has addressed, myself included. They age. They can't sit in a FEMA storage warehouse forever. They lose their electrostatic charge in a year or so and don't meet N95 specs any more. So we have a planning issue here. Do we incur an indefinite expense to keep rotating the stock, or do we just wait until a threat comes and ramp up purchases? That will require some thought.

I don't know the answer to that one, though I would err on the side of keeping a reduced stock and rotating it. Enough to get us through the first couple of months while production ramped up. Most conservatives, though, would err on the side of forget about the masks, only old people die, and who needs them around anyway? They don't labor in the hot sun so what good are they? Who needs professors and thinkers and writers anyway? All that matters is that normal people put in long hours in brutal conditions for the pittance we think they deserve, while assholes like Musk rake in enough dough for 100,000 people by moving stock investments around.

Your comment about rotating stock reminded me of something from back in 2001. I attended a Medical Logistics symposium and a Lieutenant was giving a talk about going stockless (no inventory). I spoke with him afterward, privately, and asked him if his base had a 20-person mass causality where and how long would it take for him to get IVs and IV sets to the ER and wards to handle the casualties? He said he'd get them from their local Prime Vendor and it would take about an hour or two. He realized almost immediately his problem; the supplies were needed now, not in an hour or two. I explained to him I was reducing our medical/pharmaceutical inventory to almost zero but I was continuing to have an operating inventory of IVs, IV sets, and some other items just in case they're needed. When we receive new items we'd rotate the on-hand stock to be used first and then the new stock so nothing we had was expired or "old" stock. Your example of rotating masks is spot on and that is what has to be done.

Joe keeps saying young people don't die. I don't have information to argue that one effectively. What I've noticed is that young people do die, though in lesser numbers, and that long Covid does not correlate with age. We don't know why some people don't recover, but they don't, and that's a consideration going forward. Obviously, it's not the flu.

While majority of the deaths from COVID-19 were in the ages 50 and older there were a significant number of younger people who died. In the 0 -17 age group there were 1,14 deaths; in the age 19 - 29 group there were 6,749 deaths; age group 30 - 39 there were 19,255 deaths; age group 40 - 49 there were 45,092 deaths; and the number of deaths for those 50 and older was 1,014,688. https://www.statista.com/statistics/119 ... by-age-us/ So if you just use the ages 18 - 39 to define "young" the percentage is 0.25.
However, if there were a disease, today, or something else that killed 26,000 (ages 18 - 39) people in a short time people would be up-in-arms demanding the government do something.

One of the evolutionary steps that covid has made is that younger people get worse cases now than most did at the start. They may not die from a case that would kill a 90 year old with comorbidities, so the statistics remain skewed, but it can still be catastrophic.

Perhaps it was a mistake keeping the schools closed as long as we did, but that was partly because we couldn't count on masking to work, even when we had enough masks to give them out at school entrances. It wasn't a supply issue at some point, but by then we had people blocking roads and demonstrating in the street that no one was going to tell them what to do, by God.

I supported closing the schools and I still maintain that was the right thing to do. A child coming from a home with someone who has COVID-19 exposes their fellow students, teachers, and staff members which carries it to their homes. While the children may not catch it or be asymptomatic they could inadvertently cause their teachers to catch it and/or die from it. A dead teach teaches no one anything.

We can argue this until doomsday, and obviously minds are made up, so the same shit will go on until covid ultimately goes the way of Spanish flu and Bubonic plague, however many years or decades this will take. Next time the same thing will happen all over again. It's too bad that a few people have to be assholes about taking prudent precautions in a globalized environment.

There will always be people, like Joe, who don't like anyone telling them what they can and can't do. They're like the people who in the face of a natural disaster like a hurricane, flood, or wildfire will refuse to evacuate when advised or told to do so because "No one tell me what to do" attitude and then they're the first ones to complain about no one coming out to rescue them in the middle of the disaster when it's unsafe to the rescuers. It demonstrates the stupidity of the selfish.

[ZoWie]

Joe doesn't get it that crowded urban areas require different solutions than suburbs. A solution that's fine in the Hamptons won't work in Manhattan, and vice versa.

My point was that big city commerce was collapsing before there were any lockdowns at all. People were already hunkered down at home. In these cases, the government did the only thing that had a chance of working under the conditions that prevailed, with no PPE to speak of and a population already in a panic, and made it official.

There would have been a considerable effect on the economy had there been no lockdowns. At some point, when you want to ruin your day, you can read the official UN guidance on pandemics. They have always said that commerce will slow or stop and things like power and Internet can be expected to fail for lack of personnel to maintain them. Actually, compared to the scenario the UN lays out, we got off rather easy.

It has nothing much to do with government policy. It has everything to do with an inevitable disruption of normal functioning which is inherent to the pandemic situation and has very little to do with what the government ultimately decides to do. At least here, there were always criteria in place for when things would re-open. There was a map with colors that corresponded to public health data, and when the data improved in an area, the colors changed. There was never an open ended lockdown of the sort Joe keeps talking about. The problem was really more that no one really expected it to last over a month and a half, but it did. Even so, much of LA was already functioning again as well as could be expected by that time. One can quibble about the schools, but most of the problem there was that remote learning had never really been implemented properly, and no one was surprised when it didn't work. We could have done a lot better there, but problems such as class and race get in the way, as usual.

Another issue is that the lockdown was hardly the sole cause of all the economic problems we've seen. What we have right now with the economy is a perfect storm, a very overdue one at that, and it still works with one key driver missing. Maybe take out two or three and it wouldn't have happened, but covid alone wasn't enough to do it. It simply accelerated a decline that most economists had expected for years. The supply chain was already malfunctioning, Putin was already going over the edge, the former guy in the White House was already incompetent, Congress was already useless, the Fed was already behind the curve, and price gouging was already rampant. Basically, the globalized economy was cruising for a bruising regardless of covid.

[JoeMemphis]

Joe doesn't get it that crowded urban areas require different solutions than suburbs. A solution that's fine in the Hamptons won't work in Manhattan, and vice versa.

My point was that big city commerce was collapsing before there were any lockdowns at all. People were already hunkered down at home. In these cases, the government did the only thing that had a chance of working under the conditions that prevailed, with no PPE to speak of and a population already in a panic, and made it official.

There would have been a considerable effect on the economy had there been no lockdowns. At some point, when you want to ruin your day, you can read the official UN guidance on pandemics. They have always said that commerce will slow or stop and things like power and Internet can be expected to fail for lack of personnel to maintain them. Actually, compared to the scenario the UN lays out, we got off rather easy.

It has nothing much to do with government policy. It has everything to do with an inevitable disruption of normal functioning which is inherent to the pandemic situation and has very little to do with what the government ultimately decides to do. At least here, there were always criteria in place for when things would re-open. There was a map with colors that corresponded to public health data, and when the data improved in an area, the colors changed. There was never an open ended lockdown of the sort Joe keeps talking about. The problem was really more that no one really expected it to last over a month and a half, but it did. Even so, much of LA was already functioning again as well as could be expected by that time. One can quibble about the schools, but most of the problem there was that remote learning had never really been implemented properly, and no one was surprised when it didn't work. We could have done a lot better there, but problems such as class and race get in the way, as usual.

Another issue is that the lockdown was hardly the sole cause of all the economic problems we've seen. What we have right now with the economy is a perfect storm, a very overdue one at that, and it still works with one key driver missing. Maybe take out two or three and it wouldn't have happened, but covid alone wasn't enough to do it. It simply accelerated a decline that most economists had expected for years. The supply chain was already malfunctioning, Putin was already going over the edge, the former guy in the White House was already incompetent, Congress was already useless, the Fed was already behind the curve, and price gouging was already rampant. Basically, the globalized economy was cruising for a bruising regardless of covid.

Never was an open ended lockdown? Really? Two weeks. To slow the spread? Remember that horseshit? Two weeks, two month, two years? What’s the difference. Hell if it hadn’t been for governors defying the federal guidance, we would still be closed. I don’t know what your definition of open ended might be but when you are told two weeks and then that keeps getting pushed further and further out, that’s my definition of open ended. Hell, they just asked to extend the pandemic emergency until the middle of the summer. This is after the President said on national TV that the pandemic is over. No wonder no one trusts theses institutions. The story changes weeks to week, month to month. I have an idea, leave people alone to make up their own minds.

I would agree with you we had no plan. That is evident. I agree with you we were unprepared. That was also evident. Where we disagree is that I don’t think we ever had a plan but we’re flying by the seat of our pants acting like we knew what we were doing. The folks who really knew were the folks in the ER. They knew who was doing most of the dying. Instead of focusing our scare resources where they were needed most, we focused on trying to control the entire country. That was our strategy. And it did not work.

When the vaccines were approved for emergency use, we had limited doses. Where did we focus our distribution efforts? On the entire population? On the young? No. We focused on those groups of people most at risk. A sensible, logical strategy. It worked. Demonstrably worked. How many lives could we have saved if we had taken that approach from the beginning? Instead of leading in a crisis, we hid. And bitched at anyone who dared question the government line. Now the evidence is coming to the surface that the government wasn’t right much of the time. Go figure.

[gounion]

Never was an open ended lockdown? Really? Two weeks. To slow the spread? Remember that horseshit? Two weeks, two month, two years? What’s the difference. Hell if it hadn’t been for governors defying the federal guidance, we would still be closed. I don’t know what your definition of open ended might be but when you are told two weeks and then that keeps getting pushed further and further out, that’s my definition of open ended. Hell, they just asked to extend the pandemic emergency until the middle of the summer. This is after the President said on national TV that the pandemic is over. No wonder no one trusts theses institutions. The story changes weeks to week, month to month. I have an idea, leave people alone to make up their own minds.

I would agree with you we had no plan. That is evident. I agree with you we were unprepared. That was also evident. Where we disagree is that I don’t think we ever had a plan but we’re flying by the seat of our pants acting like we knew what we were doing. The folks who really knew were the folks in the ER. They knew who was doing most of the dying. Instead of focusing our scare resources where they were needed most, we focused on trying to control the entire country. That was our strategy. And it did not work.

When the vaccines were approved for emergency use, we had limited doses. Where did we focus our distribution efforts? On the entire population? On the young? No. We focused on those groups of people most at risk. A sensible, logical strategy. It worked. Demonstrably worked. How many lives could we have saved if we had taken that approach from the beginning? Instead of leading in a crisis, we hid. And bitched at anyone who dared question the government line. Now the evidence is coming to the surface that the government wasn’t right much of the time. Go figure.

Your strategy is to let everyone catch it and if millions die, they die. But don't do anything to stop the flow of money.

[JoeMemphis]

Your strategy is to let everyone catch it and if millions die, they die. But don't do anything to stop the flow of money.

No. You mischaracterized it again. Typical for you.

[gounion]

No. You mischaracterized it again. Typical for you.

Not a damned bit. You ONLY care about money. Oh, and not having to wear a mask, since you don’t believe in the germ theory.

You don’t want to do ANYTHING that would stop the profits. We all know that.

[ZoWie]

WHAT government line? You mean drumpf encouraging people to threaten Fauci's life and defy local health policies? Do you remember when he told people, in all seriousness, that it worked to drink (or inject) bleach? Do you remember when a few scared people actually did, and increased the burden on the health care system, and on occasion the mortuaries? Sorry, your guy fracked up. I can't put it any more simply, minus all the political theory and public health debate. He told people to goddamn drink goddamn bleach, and that it was the flu and don't worry about it.

Then he got it and changed his tune, but none of his true believers were listening, because true believers don't listen. True believers drink Kool-Aid and hunt witches. That was indeed their reaction to covid, and it's documented and it's the facts and facts are inconvenient when arguing politics, but that's the way it is.

At some point, partisanship becomes irrelevant to the facts. I've certainly given my rather low opinion of what happens when Democrats make stupid mistakes that make them look just as bad as the Republicans. The thing with Biden's documents is unforgivable. How can anyone be that stupid? It's like Hillary's e-mails. It's trivial by comparison to what we let the Republicans get away with, but that is irrelevant. JUST DON'T FRICKEN DO IT. Damn, don't people get it about PR? Do you have to grow up in the public eye to understand the situation about glass houses and the hard projection of silicon dioxide?

The Republican response to covid remains The Big One, however. On the magnitude scale, it's a 10 compared to the typical Democratic 0.9. On covid, the Republicans did the the big political no-no in a free country. You don't spout the first nonsense that comes into your head when you're suddenly faced with a new crisis. You ask the grownups in the room what they know about it.

Fauci was the grownup in the room. He'd been doing it for decades, while the political fads du jour came and went, and he had the smarts to get us through it. You will remember what your side did there. Fauci had to fricken resign because he got sick of the death threats. He was the smart guy in the room, and your people threatened to kill him. How is that different from the witch hunts in the plague years?

Sorry, there may have been a fact shortage on both sides, but only one side actually put people's lives in danger and it wasn't mine. End of discussion. No more arguing with the ignorant.

[JoeMemphis]

WHAT government line? You mean drumpf encouraging people to threaten Fauci's life and defy local health policies? Do you remember when he told people, in all seriousness, that it worked to drink (or inject) bleach? Do you remember when a few scared people actually did, and increased the burden on the health care system, and on occasion the mortuaries? Sorry, your guy fracked up. I can't put it any more simply, minus all the political theory and public health debate. He told people to goddamn drink goddamn bleach, and that it was the flu and don't worry about it.

Then he got it and changed his tune, but none of his true believers were listening, because true believers don't listen. True believers drink Kool-Aid and hunt witches. That was indeed their reaction to covid, and it's documented and it's the facts and facts are inconvenient when arguing politics, but that's the way it is.

The Republicans did the the big political no-no in a free country. You don't spout the first nonsense that comes into your head when you're suddenly faced with a new crisis. You ask the grownups in the room what they know about it.

Fauci was the grownup in the room. He'd been doing it for decades, while the political fads du jour came and went, and he had the smarts to get us through it. You will remember what your side did there. Fauci had to fricken resign because he got sick of the death threats. He was the smart guy in the room, and your people threatened to kill him. How is that different from the witch hunts in the plague years?

Sorry, there may have been a fact shortage on both sides, but only one side actually put people's lives in danger and it wasn't mine. End of discussion. No more arguing with the ignorant.

Not my guy. Never was my guy.

What’s ignorant is pursuing a strategy that never stood a chance of working. What’s ignorant is thinking you can control 320 million people when you can’t even control some of your party leaders. You didn’t argue with the ignorant. You just blindly followed them without question. What does that make you?

[gounion]

Not my guy. Never was my guy.

What’s ignorant is pursuing a strategy that never stood a chance of working. What’s ignorant is thinking you can control 320 million people when you can’t even control some of your party leaders. You didn’t argue with the ignorant. You just blindly followed them without question. What does that make you?

Yet you follow what he says, and just blame the left for what he does.

[JoeMemphis]

Yet you follow what he says, and just blame the left for what he does.

More nonsense.