Balta1701

His Dr.'s could be lying to him/giving him a very dilute dose also.

Frankly yes, several of those countries have done terrible jobs. England was awful, they had the wonderful "let's get to Herd immunity by letting it infect everyone" idea until their universities told them that's going to kill a million citizens. Sweden has had no official lockdowns, so saying they're idiots is describing exactly what we're doing right now. Spain and France got hit hard early, but they've also dropped their case loads down hugely since their peaks, which we have not done. There's no reason why the US had to have 100,000 dead people. We could have kept it to a few thousand with appropriate preparation and leadership, maybe even less.

OMFG yes they have been this is the definition of a horrible response.

Other countries have figured this out and had done so by March. You come into South Korea or Hong Kong, they test you on site, you moved to a stable location where they hold you for a few hours while they wait for test results, you get a GPS monitor and instructions to quarantine yourself for 14 days. You violate that, you get arrested and fined and that's what the GPS tracker is for. And the fact that we haven't dealt with it really at all...is going to produce WAY more economic disruption here, because we couldn't get the number of cases down. We're just going to "live with it" to quote my state's governor today, and in that situation, as many people will stay at home as humanly possible, saving as much money as they can.

There's about 15 more that month.

Because they shut the entire region down using their army and police force for 2 months starting in January and made it a point to disinfect everything they could in order to get it under control

1. We should have accepted testing help from overseas but Trump continues to assert for no reason that those tests are bad. 2. We needed to ramp up testing capacity in other ways and did not. As a consequence, we did not see the first cases imported from Italy. 3. Shutting down international travel was necessary, but it needed to have important restrictions. People had to arrive back safely, be held in a safe location, and then be quarantined. Neither of those happened, and that absolutely worsened the situation in New York and elsewhere. Other countries can handle this but ours can't. 4. The Federal government needed to be out in front calling for people to stay home, not vice-versa. They needed to manage the shutdown so that it was sufficient enough to reduce the number of cases, not level it off. That lack of planning is why we still have a plateau in cases when so many other well run countries have gone down.

No, but I definitely believe they don't have a thousand people dying per day right now. They got it under control within 2 months, from January to March cases dropped to very few. From March to May, we leveled out and declared we can't do any better. And we also know, beyond any doubt, that deaths in this country have skyrocketed way higher than the official count as well.

And that was an abject nightmare that produced crowds of coughing people in tightly confined spaces at airports over a weekend and probably was a major super-spreading event in early March, because it was handled incredibly poorly by the federal government. It had to be done...but frankly we'd have been better off not doing it than doing it and producing the massive crowds at customs that we created. If we weren't planning for how to isolate everyone who came in, and we made tens of thousands of people rush back in, and created the conditions for them to spread it, yeah that was a nightmare.

The US has 3% of the World's population and almost 30% of it's confirmed deaths. Even China, which you complain about, got this mostly under control within 2 months, while we're throwing in the towel because we're unable to get it under control. So somehow, large other sections of the world figured out how to control it or even eliminate it, but not us. If we had 3% of the world's confirmed deaths, comparable to our population, we would have 7000 dead.

Europe? I dunno, but I am in this thread on record on March 3 saying "OMG we completely f***ed up we need to close down the west coast right now and this is going to be a nightmare everyone panic". I coudln't know about the NY outbreak...because the US refused, for whatever reason, to accept testing assistance from the WHO.

But you realize that Congress plays a role in funding also, right? Each year, the President's OMB makes each agency create a budget, and the agency has to abide by that budget until Congress passes something. if the President's budget shows a cut, then things have to be shut down or slowed, sometimes for months, and only then might Congress step in. Several of the programs that dealt with epidemic preparation were eliminated based on these OMB orders over the past few years. The President's budget request this year for the CDC was $6.5 billion, showing a more than 10% cut. That was submitted to Congress on February 10. So, propose budget cuts every year, Congress doesn't step in for months, so the CDC is shedding preparedness ability the whole time.

There is clear DNA evidence that even if there was any early introductions into the US, they did not become an epidemic. The strains circulating in the US today are dominated by the strain that erupted in Italy in February. They were imported into New York in February, undetected, and spread everywhere from there. ONly a handful of people in Washington and California ever got sick from direct strains imported from China. There is no cure. The Chinese did exactly what our government did when faced with the epidemic, they dithered for a few days and that allowed major spread. They had lots of people traveling for a holiday and didn't want to provoke a panic/hurt the economy out of it. They waited about a week from the point where they had clearly identified the new strain on about January 9 to the point where they had everything to the WHO on January 21 and that was plenty to allow a huge amount of spread. They literally did the exact same thing our government did. So, why is one interesting and not the other to you?

And then for that entire next month we refused to take test kits from overseas, the CDC insisted on developing their own and they were faulty, and as a consequence we imported cases from Italy in Mid-Feb, they got to New York totally undetected because we went 3 weeks with almost no tests, the FDA was ordering private labs not to do any testing, there were several super-spreading events, and by March 1 there were probably several thousand active cases floating around New York City with 1 positive test. Washington and California responded to realizing they had major outbreaks with full shutdowns that week, but New York City and many other states dithered, allowing it to spread around the country even more over the next several weeks. The US didn't take advantage of that month to begin acquiring supplies, we were even shipping them overseas in February. We didn't come up with response plans, we didn't begin preparing people for any sort of actions they might have to take. We weren't working on 14 day quarantines for people coming from infected areas, we weren't even assuming community spread was possible. The people at the CDC, incuding Trump's appointee at the top, were a complete disaster.

We've never, ever seen biological science mobilizing like it is right now. The US government is in the way of course, and there's going to be issues like "do we have enough glass to hold the vaccines as they're distributed" that the government should be dealing with but it isn't, but with this many candidates it seems likely that we'll get there eventually. I just read a promising paper saying that the immune system T-Cell response to this virus is strong enough that long-term immunity may be possible: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/t-cells-found-covid-19-patients-bode-well-long-term-immunity With the work being done on this thing, and the ways people are trying to shortcut development, I'm genuinely hopeful that there can be one available before the 12 month mark is hit, but if I were a policymaker I'd be asking how we can deal with this for 18 months.

If it takes 10 years to develop a vaccine, then first of all I'll be totally amazed that I haven't gotten it by that point as easily as it spreads and given my line of work involves large groups of people. There's lots of ways that can go, but in the hypothetical that we just let 2000 people get it per day in Texas for the next 10 years, that leaves a large portion of the state with no immunity and continual, ongoing transmission all around. In that case, yeah that would be the last time I dine in at a restaurant until it's over, and I'll have to get used to shopping for all my clothes online. That's the world of a high-risk, immune compromised person until this is over. We've seen from some countries (New Zealand) that it is possible to create a setting that would make me feel safe enough to go out, but as long as there are 1000+ cases per day in this state, nope. There's lots of other ways it could go; you could get transmission down to ~0, you could have it burn through 75% of the state, kill a half million people, and then have it mostly go away because of herd immunity, but strike that balance and yeah, I'll be nervous every time I shop until this is over. Maybe, if I could afford it, in a few years I'd rent an RV and tour some national parks? And yeah, you see videos of restaurants and bars here and 1-2 people out of 50 in masks. 25% wearing them in the grocery store. Big groups of kids playing outdoors or recording Tiktok videos. This state has declared it to be over and commanded the virus to listen, and we're hitting new highs in cases per day quite regularly now. Outdoors maybe we have a shot, it does seem fair to say that transmission chances outdoors are low when there's sunlight and wind to disperse things, but anything indoors?

I don't disagree. But like it or not, I'm not going to a restaurant unless either there is virtually zero transmission in my area or until there's a vaccine. I'm not going to a baseball game without a vaccine. I'm not going on a vacation without a vaccine. I'm not going into Kohl's and trying on clothes in a dressing room without a vaccine or virtually zero transmission, I'm not waiting in a Black Friday line without a vaccine. You can declare the doors are open all you want, and even if I keep my job and my health insurance through this, I'm hunkering down for the next year+. This is the logical, rational choice for a very large number of people, particularly since we know that it can do serious damage to a large number of healthy people without killing them. So airlines, restaurants, hotels - there is nothing these things can do right now. You can't just declare "Things are back to normal" even if you have a low level of transmission in an area, because it would be dumb to behave as though it is. And 50, 75% of people in an area are going to understand - while the other 25% are letting themselves get sick, it's really dumb to go out right now. Can a hotel survive if 75% of its demand vanishes? Can a restaurant? No, obviously not. Which means...if we want these things back in a year, the only plausible answer is continued government support.

I would be scared of that situation. The stuff we seem to know right now is that being indoors with people for a long time, particularly when speaking or singing, puts out a large viral load and that those conditions enable it to spread well beyond a social distancing radius. Plus, if you are doing things like "touching surfaces indoors" that other people have touched, that can also be a way to get concentrated transmission. And, we still don't have a good understanding yet of bathrooms. Anyway, if you're indoors with a group of 70 people, and they're singing, even if they're wearing masks, there's a good chance that any infected people who showed up would pass it on, and if someone was carrying it and wasn't wearing a mask while singing, the whole room might come down with it.

Not exactly. Tommy John was worth 61 WAR in that count, but only 23 of those were accrued for the White Sox.

I'd guess maybe 10-20% of the league, with some notable veterans included.

Seriously, come hang out in Texas. You know what? I know where the video is. This is before the opening of bars and gyms this coming Monday. We've nearly doubled cases over the last 2 weeks, and that's almost certainly reflecting what was happening in late April. This video is May 13. Does this count as "Super safe"? More stuff opens this week. We have already baked in the next 500+ cases per day. How high does it go? I'm not going to project...but...well... My friend likes them sharing the Hookah, my favorite is that the only person with a mask walks by with the mask pulled down. What the lesson from NY has been is that once you have enough cases to become scared....the next doubling is already baked in. That's why this is so tricky. Mayor Di Blasio in NY recognized he had a huge problem on like March 23-24 when his entire public health staff threatened to resign if he didn't issue a lockdown order. 10 days later they had doubled in cases, and then it just didn't go down for 3 weeks.

I don't see any upward trend do you? full disclosure: Whiskey is involved in my current seeing.

I’ve been giving myself a razor cut for the last 20 years. I never thought it would save my life. Seriously, I can’t imagine a barber/hairdresser being safe. It would have to be treated like a hospital. N95 masks and face shields, full sanitation after every customer, no one in waiting rooms at all, only 2 people in the whole room, as little talking as possible, tests every 3 days? You’d have no way of knowing if your hairdresser was infected 2 days beforehand, they’d show no symptoms but they’d infect everyone who care in without that amount of gear, and unless they were trained like a doctor for cleanliness what are the odds they wouldn’t pick it up if they had a contagious patient? Do they have a full cleaning crew to come in after each patient? Yeah, I can’t figure out any way to make that work with the most recent results.

Then to get the players to give a deal where they go to a share rather than the current agreement, the owners should be offering the players a larger share than any other league. That way, if it sets a precedent for creating a capped league, it’s a precedent the owners hate and want to negotiate away. Both sides are making a sacrifice to create that as a compromise. 65% or revenue to the players? Owners would hate that precedent as much as the players don’t want a cap. plus, expenses should be weirdly low since they wouldn’t be spending money managing crowds or marketing ticket sales, so an unusually high fraction of revenue seems reasonable.