COVID-19 Megathread 5: The Trumps catch COVID-19

[Crumpets]

Total US casualties have now crossed the 40,000 mark, per NBC. At this point, it's not hard to imagine COVID-19 surpassing Vietnam in terms of American deaths within just another week or two.

[Crumpets]

I'm curious, given the history of adversarial governments using social media to organize protests in 2016, if there might be a third-party actor involved in these pro-COVID demonstrations that we're not seeing.

[Crumpets]

Don't know if this has already been shared, but:

https://twitter.com/shaunking/status/1254837685983817728

[Crumpets]

60k officially dead in the US now because of the virus in a few weeks.

And that’s only the numbers from hospitals and nursing homes.

Based on weekly death data from other countries (which are tracking all deaths in a country, also those at home), the real numbers could be 50% higher or twice as high.

Not sure why people are still quoting these grossly inaccurate numbers, like they mean anything. But okay.

I know right, CDC data says they are actually too low:

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1255502123644661768?s=21

Worth noting not all of the COVID-19 death toll is from the disease itself. In New York especially where hospitals and first responders have been stretched thin for weeks, overdoses, suicides, and other assorted deaths have also been abnormally high from the anecdotal evidence we have.

[Crumpets]

https://twitter.com/funder/status/1255960473989677061?s=20

[Crumpets]

Will Donald Trump have Australia's back if we enter a spat with China over the Corona-virus?

I'm going to say, "no".

https://twitter.com/emilyrauhala/status/1257455813720977408

Hey, OSINT is still INT.

[Crumpets]

In a kind of sick way, part of living in a decentralized democracy is going to be that, in a time like this, you're going to have some areas that just accept a higher level of casualties in exchange for the economic benefit than other areas. I think ironically some conservative communities are using a similar logic when it comes to COVID as liberals did with terrorism post-9/11 (i.e. yeah it's a problem and we should work to fix it, but I'm not going to live my life in constant fear of possibly being killed by a terrorist/COVID).

[Crumpets]

US blocks vote on UN's bid for global ceasefire over reference to WHO

The US has blocked a vote on a UN security council resolution calling for a global ceasefire during the Covid-19 pandemic, because the Trump administration objected to an indirect reference to the World Health Organization.

The security council has been wrangling for more than six weeks over the resolution, which was intended to demonstrate global support for the call for a ceasefire by the UN secretary general, António Guterres. The main source for the delay was the US refusal to endorse a resolution that urged support for the WHO’s operations during the coronavirus pandemic.

Unbelievable, the world is being mostly dictated by a madman ruining us all.

Not saying this was definitely the right call, but the proposed ceasefire had a lot of problematic loopholes (i.e. doesn't apply to undefined "counter-terrorism" operations) that made it kind of toothless and mostly symbolic.

[Crumpets]

Lmao reopening is exactly what this country should be doing. The states that reopened are no worse off than the states stuck in lockdown and the lockdown is ruining the economy everywhere. But muh 80 year olds I guess

Most states have barely done large scale openings and a couple states like Texas have seen recent spikes I believe.

It’s also not just 80 year old grandma’s dying that we need to be concerned about. There’s evidence this causes lung damage even in cases that have no symptoms.

Not to mention the fact that our medical workers have been working overtime in pretty fraught conditions for over two months now. And I don't know about you, but if I go to the doctor for whatever reason, I would like them to have had 8 hours of sleep the previous night and have access to all the equipment they need.

Even if we accept a certain level of new cases every day, it absolutely has to be a manageable level for our health infrastructure or actual COVID deaths will be the least of our concerns. Some areas have probably hit that threshold for reopening, but a heck of a lot have not.

[Crumpets]

Local FB conservative are out in force, 100k people have not died, it's 1k at most and it's a hoax. Sad.

"""""Local"""""

[Crumpets]

Great new map on Wikipedia:

[Crumpets]

Just did the weekly shopping (which is pretty much the only thing that gets me out of my neighborhood these days) and noticed the percentage of mask-wearing shoppers is way down from previous weeks, perhaps 20-25% of them were masked.

In contrast, in Seattle I'd estimate we're still at around 60-70% mask wearing when in a public business.

[Crumpets]

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1276184906159271937

It speaks volumes about how Trump views his base voters that, whenever things are going badly for him, he goes back to the racism to rally his floor of like 40%.

Hatred of China is not racist.

Hatred of the Chinese goverment and the political system that allowed this to happen is certainly not racist. Unfortunately for Trump, he's regularly praised the Chinese government's actions on the virus since the start of the year, so Trump kind of dug himself into a hole here on how we're supposed to interpret it.

[Crumpets]

NYT: 68% Have Antibodies in This Clinic. Can Neighborhood Beat a Next Wave?

At a clinic in Corona, a working-class neighborhood in Queens, more than 68 percent of people tested positive for antibodies to the new coronavirus. At another clinic in Jackson Heights, Queens, that number was 56 percent. But at a clinic in Cobble Hill, a mostly white and wealthy neighborhood in Brooklyn, only 13 percent of people tested positive for antibodies.

As it has swept through New York, the coronavirus has exposed stark inequalities in nearly every aspect of city life, from who has been most affected to how the health care system cared for those patients. Many lower-income neighborhoods, where Black and Latino residents make up a large part of the population, were hard hit, while many wealthy neighborhoods suffered much less.

But now, as the city braces for a possible second wave of the virus, some of those vulnerabilities may flip, with the affluent neighborhoods becoming most at risk of a surge. According to antibody test results from CityMD that were shared with The New York Times, some neighborhoods were so exposed to the virus during the peak of the epidemic in March and April that they might have some protection during a second wave.

“Some communities might have herd immunity,” said Dr. Daniel Frogel, a senior vice president for operations at CityMD, which plays a key role in the city’s testing program.

[Crumpets]

This may have been posted already, but NYT put out a very detailed map of mask wearing in the US:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/17/upshot/coronavirus-face-mask-map.html