Why this place is so screwed up.

[testsubjectalpha]

It seems you are debating with yourself.

Haha, but see, that is rather a humble position of mine. I have many guesses... and a few certainties. It's best this way, no? When I say, a guess, I mean that I'm not trying to pass my speculative opinion as fact. I am aware that I can't be sure of the factual veracity of my hypotheses. But it is entertaining to think about it and express what one speculates might be more likely to be factual. After all, that's what we are here for, no? To debate politics...

In the future, if more information comes in and it is solid and irrefutable, two things might happen: the new information might disprove my guess, and I will have no problem saying "I guessed wrongly" or it might prove it, in which case I'd cross out that thought from the guess column, and allocate it to the certainty column.

[CenterField]

Bones, you mean because China let 3 million people fly out of Hubei Province all over the world after they knew they had a problem while the WHO said nothing to see here? Meanwhile China restricted travel out of Hubei Province to other destinations in China. Now China is laughing at the world, we hoarded the world's supply of PPE because we make it all. Reminds me of Cheech and Chong song.

Remind me again, why have 40 million Americans been laid off? Ping chee ouw. As a side note, 'continuing' unemployment claims are in the 20 million range. So the media is jacking the severity level up falsely and regurgitating a falsehood daily. All of them. By no means good either way you look at it as we all know businesses are still shut down (interesting Mayors and Govna's have not shut down protestor gatherings of more than 10 people...hmmm...).

The last phrase is a very interesting and valid point. I hadn't thought of it this way and you are absolutely right.

The first few phrases are very valid too.

I remember reading that 400,000 passengers got here from China in those few weeks... no wonder we got such a bad multi-centered outbreak.

By the way, people who blame Trump for the outbreak are being unfair. No other country in the world was able to stop this virus from getting in (I guess there is one exception, a small island nation, maybe Vanuatu if I recall correctly, entirely closed their borders and therefore had no cases). This virus is just too infectious (with a R0 of up to 5.7 which is not as bad as measle's but much worse than the flu's) and the fact that it can be transmitted by asymptomatic people makes it virtually impossible to contain.

So, while China and the WHO were minimizing the situation, would it really be feasible for Trump to close all borders and quarantine all the MILLIONS of people arriving to the US by plane? Do you know how many people arrive yearly here? 259 million. 21 million per month. So, how would we test at the border and quarantine everybody, in those four weeks when things were already spreading but nobody was aware???

Could Trump have acted a bit earlier? Yeah, I suppose so. But most likely, the outbreak would still have been about the same, just delayed by a few weeks.

So, no, to suppose that Trump is responsible for the outbreak is preposterous.

This said, I do think we could have responded better to it. In certain ways we did well. We flattened the curve and did not allow the healthcare system to be overwhelmed. Ventilators were sufficient after all - I'm not aware of a single case of an American who needed a ventilator but couldn't find one. Trump did send navy hospital ships to hot spots. They ended up vastly underused. He did use executive power to force reluctant GE to make more ventilators.

In other ways, though, we didn't do so well. PPE was irregularly distributed. The lockdown was chaotic and heterogeneous, and ended up not being very useful, and the way we engaged in stimulus wasn't very efficient (for example, we engaged in direct checks to the population and loans to small and large businesses, instead of simply massively supporting payroll like other countries did - such as France - and ended up with much smaller unemployment than ours). Testing was quite messy especially at first. The White House was jumping all over the place at one point, recommending lockdowns and suggesting draconian measures before reopening, and the next day tossing those plans and talking about liberating states (literally the next day), then a week later bringing back those same plans. Remember, Trump said Georgia was opening up too soon... then encouraged it. There was a lot of flip-flopping for example about wearing masks, and about promoting treatments that ended up presenting low efficacy and high risks.

What I resent most is not any responsibility for the outbreak itself. Claims that "Trump allowed the death of 105,000 Americans" are hyperbolic and so tainted by partisan politics that they become laughable. What I do resent is the chaotic leadership.

I think we could have had more steady guidance, clearer parameters, and we could have done what Spain did, for example. They had a very tightly organized lockdown, relatively short, and they isolated the mildly sick not even at home but actually in hotels that they adapted for that (so that they would not contaminate their own families), they protected payroll, enforced the lockdown homogeneously, then licked the virus and opened up again, and today Spain boasts several days of 1 or zero daily deaths.

South Korea did a lot of contact tracing and quarantine, and sequestered very strictly their elderly, ending up with a case-fatality ratio much smaller than other country's. And so on, there were other countries that did way better than we did. Monte$#@! [uh, what? Why does the software censor the name of a Balkan country, the one between Albania and Bosnia-Herzegovina???] now has zero cases and has declared that the virus was extinguished in their country.

Of course, our country is much bigger and more populous and it has a lot more border traffic, so it wouldn't be as easy for us to do as well as some smaller countries. We also have a cultural factor, here. Americans are by nature rebellious and not inclined to follow governmental advice.

The bottom line is that our bad luck in getting injected with this virus in multiple entry points before we could really do something about it, which is nobody's fault, got worsened by a quite chaotic response (despite some successes that I mentioned above) and by our cultural traits. This has resulted in us getting a double whammy: we are not only the worst hit country (4% of the world's population, 30% of the world's deaths) but we also destroyed our economy to a larger degree than most other countries did.

[CenterField]

It seems you are debating with yourself.

Maybe so.

[testsubjectalpha]

who destroyed our economy over a little nothing out of Wuhan? Gretchen, Andrew, Wolf, Newsom...
hmmm. China?

The last phrase is a very interesting and valid point. I hadn't thought of it this way and you are absolutely right.

The first few phrases are very valid too.

I remember reading that 400,000 passengers got here from China in those few weeks... no wonder we got such a bad multi-centered outbreak.

By the way, people who blame Trump for the outbreak are being unfair. No other country in the world was able to stop this virus from getting in (I guess there is one exception, a small island nation, maybe Vanuatu if I recall correctly, entirely closed their borders and therefore had no cases). This virus is just too infectious (with a R0 of up to 5.7 which is not as bad as measle's but much worse than the flu's) and the fact that it can be transmitted by asymptomatic people makes it virtually impossible to contain.

So, while China and the WHO were minimizing the situation, would it really be feasible for Trump to close all borders and quarantine all the MILLIONS of people arriving to the US by plane? Do you know how many people arrive yearly here? 259 million. 21 million per month. So, how would we test at the border and quarantine everybody, in those four weeks when things were already spreading but nobody was aware???

Could Trump have acted a bit earlier? Yeah, I suppose so. But most likely, the outbreak would still have been about the same, just delayed by a few weeks.

So, no, to suppose that Trump is responsible for the outbreak is preposterous.

This said, I do think we could have responded better to it. In certain ways we did well. We flattened the curve and did not allow the healthcare system to be overwhelmed. Ventilators were sufficient after all - I'm not aware of a single case of an American who needed a ventilator but couldn't find one. Trump did send navy hospital ships to hot spots. They ended up vastly underused. He did use executive power to force reluctant GE to make more ventilators.

In other ways, though, we didn't do so well. PPE was irregularly distributed. The lockdown was chaotic and heterogeneous, and ended up not being very useful, and the way we engaged in stimulus wasn't very efficient (for example, we engaged in direct checks to the population and loans to small and large businesses, instead of simply massively supporting payroll like other countries did - such as France - and ended up with much smaller unemployment than ours). Testing was quite messy especially at first. The White House was jumping all over the place at one point, recommending lockdowns and suggesting draconian measures before reopening, and the next day tossing those plans and talking about liberating states (literally the next day), then a week later bringing back those same plans. Remember, Trump said Georgia was opening up too soon... then encouraged it. There was a lot of flip-flopping for example about wearing masks, and about promoting treatments that ended up presenting low efficacy and high risks.

What I resent most is not any responsibility for the outbreak itself. Claims that "Trump allowed the death of 105,000 Americans" are hyperbolic and so tainted by partisan politics that they become laughable. What I do resent is the chaotic leadership.

I think we could have had more steady guidance, clearer parameters, and we could have done what Spain did, for example. They had a very tightly organized lockdown, relatively short, and they isolated the mildly sick not even at home but actually in hotels that they adapted for that (so that they would not contaminate their own families), they protected payroll, enforced the lockdown homogeneously, then licked the virus and opened up again, and today Spain boasts several days of 1 or zero daily deaths.

South Korea did a lot of contact tracing and quarantine, and sequestered very strictly their elderly, ending up with a case-fatality ratio much smaller than other country's. And so on, there were other countries that did way better than we did. Monte$#@! [uh, what? Why does the software censor the name of a Balkan country, the one between Albania and Bosnia-Herzegovina???] now has zero cases and has declared that the virus was extinguished in their country.

Of course, our country is much bigger and more populous and it has a lot more border traffic, so it wouldn't be as easy for us to do as well as some smaller countries. We also have a cultural factor, here. Americans are by nature rebellious and not inclined to follow governmental advice.

The bottom line is that our bad luck in getting injected with this virus in multiple entry points before we could really do something about it, which is nobody's fault, got worsened by a quite chaotic response (despite some successes that I mentioned above) and by our cultural traits. This has resulted in us getting a double whammy: we are not only the worst hit country (4% of the world's population, 30% of the world's deaths) but we also destroyed our economy to a larger degree than most other countries did.

[CenterField]

who destroyed our economy over a little nothing out of Wuhan? Gretchen, Andrew, Wolf, Newsom...
hmmm. China?

Yes, I do blame China. I do blame certain Democratic governors too, like I said in another post (and some Republican governors). But I don't give a pass to the Federal Government either. I think that nobody (among American politicians) is responsible for the virus being here, but we responded to it in a chaotic and damaging way, both at the Federal and State levels.

Just by looking at the stats: 4% of the world's population, 30% of the world's COVID-19 deaths, we can see that we didn't respond so well to this crisis. And we are the United States of America. We are the wealthiest and most advanced country in the entire planet. We are supposed to do better than that. I'm frankly disappointed in our leaders, from both parties.

[nathanbforrest45]

The destruction we are currently seeing is not very different from Kristallnacht. It was to create animosity against the Jews. The destruction we are seeing now is to create animosity against white society and capitalism.

BTW, if you were to actually give a reason why you think I am off the charts it would give you more credibility. As it is, you have none.

I am not the only one making this comparison
https://i.imgur.com/ryZgiEZ.gif

[Chris]

I am not the only one making this comparison
https://i.imgur.com/ryZgiEZ.gif

Put that image URL in [img]https://i.imgur.com/ryZgiEZ.gif[/img] tags.

[nathanbforrest45]

Thanks