StrangeSox

His campaign and White House staff are also out there mocking Sen. Harris and Biden for wearing masks and taking precautions. e: this seems irresponsible to me

If you design a system that keeps failing over and over and over again, you don't get mad at the people using the system and insist they do better. You examine the system and find where you have procedural or technical or education or communication failures, because somewhere along the line, you messed up.

Personal responsibility as the primary mechanism very clearly does not work. A bad plan with people being "responsible," aka doing the things officials say is okay like going to bars and restaurants, is a bad plan that leads to 200,000+ dead. A good plan is one people can't ignore because these sorts of public places aren't open in the first place. We can again look all over the world to find examples of good and bad plans. The good plans don't rely on opening everything up but hoping people are responsible enough to not go do these things. That you're focused on penalties and punishment rather than proactive prevention really shows that you're still missing the key element, imo. You're focused on indivuals rather than institutions, venues, businesses. It all comes down to probabilities and risk assessments. Many people base their risk perception on what leaders and officials say and do. If officials are telling them things like indoor dining are safe, they'll be "responsible" and go do these things. That's why "personal responsibility" can never be step 1 in a public health crisis. People do need to be responsible and follow the rules, but thoes rules need to be responsible. Currently, they are very far from responsible. As a result, we have 40,000 more people every day catching this virus, 500-1000 of which will be killed by it, and 8k or so who will be hospitalized. Every. Single. Day. We've failed. We're still failing. Maybe you're 99% safe every time you go out, 3-4 times a week. Do that enough, though, and your risk of catching or spreading is going to climb to appreciable numbers. Now have everyone else in the community doing the same. Oops, now you've got yet another hotspot raging uncontrolled. The same story in community after community after community throughout the country. It's pretty clear evidence that we cannot rely on atomized risk assessment and instead must have strong top-down policy and coordination to handle this. By the way, those numbers in Gillespie County are actually not great. 10 deaths from a population of 25k would be pretty high up there on the deaths/1M if it were it's own country. Like Top-20-Worst-Countries bad. Cases would be Top 30. At the end of the day, we're all living in a country that's still suffering from an unchecked pandemic. Going to eat outdoors is much safer than going indoors, or to bars, or to family gatherings and other higher risk activities. But it's still a higher risk than simply staying home; you know, the personally responsible thing to do. It's a risk that you or someone else will get infected and the pandemic will continue to spread and we'll all keep suffering the consequences indefinitely. Holding people accountable after the fact doesn't bring 200,000 people and counting back to life. Personal responsibility is necessary but very clearly far from sufficient. The key to this is and always has been and will always be public policy.

Cuomo has also handled this whole thing very stupidly and continues apace

I'm not sure "Now that the President has been personally affected, he actually gives a shit and takes this seriously" is the winning message they think it is when there are already hundreds of thousands dead.

Trump campaign aide Erin Perrine on Monday suggested that President Donald Trump is a better leader than Democratic candidate Joe Biden because he has the “firsthand experience” of being infected with COVID-19. While speaking to Fox News host Sandra Smith, Perrine pointed to Trump’s joyride around Walter Reed Medical Center to wave at supporters as evidence of him continuing with a presidential schedule, which she said was “more rigorous” than Joe Biden’s daily activities. “Firsthand experience is always going to change how someone relates to something that’s been happening,” Perrine opined. “The president has coronavirus right now, he is battling it head on, as toughly, as only President Trump can. And of course that’s going to change the way that he speaks of it because it will be a firsthand experience.” “Those firsthand experiences are what are going to get President Trump four more years,” she added. “So of course he talks about it differently now that he has lived through it.”

I guess my only surprise at this point is that it took until October for this to happen. e: will always post relevant simpsons memes

Kinda tells you why they're pushing so hard for legal immunity for businesses. That way every company can be as reckless and incompetent as this White House has been in handling this but not be held accountable when they end up killing people. e: e2: really hammer that point home, idiots

Something to keep in mind regarding negative tests after an exposure is that incubation to the point of detectability usually occurs during the first week but can take as long as 14 days. A negative test on Day 3 or Day 7 doesn't mean you're in the clear. And of course it's zero protection against subsequent exposures. e: illustrative

that was an intensely boring game.

Now for some good news! https://www.jnj.com/johnson-johnson-initiates-pivotal-global-phase-3-clinical-trial-of-janssens-covid-19-vaccine-candidate Johnson & Johnson recently published some of their Phase 1/2 vaccine trial results, and so far so good. There were no serious health and safety concerns that arose from the ~1000 person trial, just the typical mild fever and soreness at the injection site we get with flu shots etc. The big upside for this vaccine candidate is that it's a single-dose vaccine. All of the other leading candidates will require at least one booster shot. That's more logistical headaches and a bottleneck on how many people we can vaccinate and how quickly--if we can pump out 100M doses by next summer of Moderna but each person requires two shots, that's only 50M vaccinated. J&J is starting a 60k person Phase 3 trial in multiple countries now.

We know he's been given a course of strong steroidal treatments that have a known side effect of serious cognitive impairment, we know his oxygen levels dropped to 80's at least twice which is where things get pretty foggy mentally, and we know that he's limited in who he can directly see and where he can go because he has a deadly contagious disease. We know he was heading pretty quickly in the wrong direction as of Friday, and we know that this disease can get really, really bad in a matter of hours. That's all information slowly pried out of his doctors rather than random tweets. It seems to me that it would have been prudent and responsible to temporarily transfer powers and authority to Vice President Pence until he turned the corner, which he has maybe done at this point. Luckily nothing happened, but it would have been absolute chaos if something catastrophic had happened while he was in the condition his doctors reported him to be in on Friday and at least some of Saturday. e:

Maybe a lot of this is talking past each other. Some of the irresponsible people are the political leaders who are doing things like opening up bars and restaurants for indoor dining and encouraging other high-risk activities such as that. Without responsible rules in place, which unfortunately include closing a whole lot of places down until things are at a controllable level, personal responsibility doesn't really start factoring in. Because you can be "responsibly" just doing the things all sorts of leaders and officials are telling you are good and safe, like going to bars, opening up schools, etc., and be contributing to the spread. So ultimately, I am looking to the public policy leaders to be officially/publicly responsible here. Because without strong state and national leadership and the willingness to make the tough calls and put in the strict rules, we don't have a chance. Step 1 is putting the responsible rules in place so we stop killing people. Step 2 is the personal, individual responsibility in following those rules we need. We did an okay job at Step 1 in a lot of places, though not all, early on. Since May in many areas and June in most others, we've seriously failed and we're heading down the wrong road at a steady pace. Without that Step 1, Step 2 doesn't really matter.

It's not jumping to conclusions, it's known side effects of Dexamethasone plus just all the stuff he's going through with a deadly disease and lowered oxygen saturation levels. This disease can progress very quickly and he had to be hospitalized. Pure irresponsibility.

He took a joy ride around the building to see his supporters, subjecting secret service members to the virus.

It wasn't a short stay, he is still at the hospital.

"My" plan, the plan that the successful countries follow, doesn't fall if people are responsible. You're just making things up at this point. One plan relies entirely on everyone agreeing what is responsible regardless of what is open and allowed, and then following those actions. That's the plan that has failed miserably.

How about instead of insisting on the failed strategy of "personal responsibility" over and over you take a look at places that controlled this? Allowing things to be opened and telling everyone that these activities are okay to engage in are what enables the irresponsibility, not shutting things down. How many more deaths, Tex?

Cases and hospitalizations are rising

People should be responsible. We have conclusive evidence in what our current set of policies allows and encourages as well as the outcome. It's a widespread failure.

If if if But they aren't. Every official signal is that it's safe to go to bars, schools, theaters, restaurants and other public spaces. So people go. And the disease spreads. We've tried your method of relying on personal responsibility. It has very conclusively failed. If many diverse people keep failing at the same thing, it's a good indication there's a problem with the underlying process. And we have examples from around the world of what successful and failed management look like. How many more deaths, Tex?

A few orders of magnitude lower than we are currently. How many more illnesses and deaths until you think it's smart to shut down again?