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

[emailking]

Another day with about the same number of deaths as a week ago.

Hey Dr. Fauci, are you going to factor these riots into your models? He’s gotten everything wrong so far, so I have no doubt he will be wrong going forward.

Pretty sure he's gotten nothing wrong so far. On the other hand, your posts have like a 20% signal to noise ratio.

[emailking]

200 more deaths than last Monday. Hopefully it's just because of Memorial Day.

[emailking]

Think that's the first day since early in part 1 where we haven't pushed a new page in this thread.

[emailking]

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1267999135455682560

[emailking]

The hypocrisy is truly astounding. It is hard for me to see how these experts can justify maintaining social distancing and capacity restrictions when shilling for large-scale protests such as these. If we do not see a surge in new cases due to these protests, then how will these restrictions be maintained, going forward?

Wait, when did a medical expert that has promoted social distancing say that these protests were a good idea?

[emailking]

The public health response is what happens when PhD holders in this country are totally captured by and face sanction for failing to adhere to ideological wokeness.

These are the same PhD holders who used the same "ideological wokeness" to cajole us into lockdowns, school closures and universal mask mandates, mind you. 

I just hope this whole, drawn-out episode truly demonstrates how useless the medical/scientific/academic elite truly are (I say this as someone who spent 3 years in graduate school + my parents are both PhDs).  Governors and public officials who mindlessly jumped onto their bandwagon shouldn't have have a shred of credibility left. 

Einstein was both scientific and academic elite. Please feel free to ditch your phone, your car, not use the internet, and only watch local TV over the air. Very questionable any satellite technology could work without GR.

[emailking]

I haven't seen any evidence for this premise. There's a letter signed by dozens of public health and disease experts in support of the protests. Were any of them on TV saying we needed to lock down? Were any of them advising the CDC or local governments? Who exactly is a hypocrite here?

[emailking]

https://twitter.com/thegarance/status/1268666934364700674

[emailking]

Even 16% is well below what economists were predicting. This situation is too unprecedented. I'm all for making careful, evidence based predictions. But the accuracy may be like throwing darts at this point. Maybe it will be 8% or maybe it will be higher than it is now. Who knows. My guess would be something like 10.

[emailking]

Whoa big jump in cases. Hope it's a 1 day anomaly. Last Friday was high too.

[emailking]

Maybe it's confirmation bias or something, but it seems like on the downslope there's always been an excuse why a bad day is not as bad as it looks.

All this means is that it was even worse than we knew before.

[emailking]

I hope we can all agree that doing 500,000 tests and finding 25,000 cases is better than the days when we were doing only 80,000 tests and finding 35,000 cases.

If it were random testing, yes.

[emailking]

I was a supporter of the restrictions, but the political motivations and double standards of these "experts" has resulted in me cutting my support. I don't want to hear any more "6 ft apart" or "wear a mask". I will be doing neither. F*** you and your agenda.

If someone's apathetic like you, ok fine get all in their face. But if they've got a mask and/or are trying to keep their distance, please be respectful of that.

[emailking]

And sure, risking your life for a cause you believe in is wonderful, but this is going to kill hundreds-thousands of people who simply weren’t involved, who didn’t get that choice.

Maybe but I'm not sure we we can be confident it will be that high.

[emailking]

I have to apologize for ever doubting the sincerity of forumlurker.  I was, and still am, disgusted at the sacrifice of civil liberties over a moderately severe virus.  However, at least he stands by his convictions. It is truly amazing to see all of the liberals here and elsewhere that were crying out in outrage when conservatives picketed outside the Michigan state capitol now disappear.  They were committing mass murder back then for going outside!  The silence during the last week and a half of the riots/protests is truly deafening.  I now know I was right to doubt the intentions of so many “stay inside” people.  Don’t ever act like you care about the public health at this point.  We will never trust you again.

This is like saying that liberals should send their tax cuts back to the Treasury. Ya'll won on the lockdowns. They're over. It's not just you that get to go out now.

[emailking]

As long as you agree that you’re a hypocrite, I support you going out to your heart’s extent.

I don't think I am. I said I thought the lockdowns were unconstitutional and that I was worried the protests could lead to outbreaks before anyone else in the thread did. I also think people should have stayed home during the lockdowns. I'm more conflicted on the protests. But the half the posters in this thread are arguing this should all be over and done with now so you can't have it both ways.

[emailking]

Liking the low death number (in the sense that it's much less than recent numbers).

Still 20K cases though.

[emailking]

Because we're being mindful of the possibility of a 2nd wave that dwarfs this one, as happened in 1918, and are trying to prevent that. We don't fully understand why that happened then or if it's even a possibility now, but that's why a lot of us are weary about just going back to normal before we know more. Yes we understand pandemics eventually end and things are better in the US than they were a couple months ago. That doesn't mean they aren't bad.

[emailking]

At my grocery stores, there are people standing at the entrance as you go in making sure you have a mask. I assume Walmart is the same everywhere.

[emailking]

Death counts seem to be down this week, that's good at least

[emailking]

Ok Nate's splitting hairs. Cases aren't very likely to go to 0 at any point this year, so you could always claim any increase is part of the first wave. If we get another hump, and he doesn't want to call it a spike, what do you call that? Just a hump? These are all informal terms, I don't see what it matters really.

[emailking]

I think temperature might matter and UV light certainly does, but if you don't social distance inside climate controlled indoor environments it doesn't matter how hot it is outside.

[emailking]

I think case #'s matter. Like Penn said it was a huge deal for her, even though she wasn't hospitalized.

[emailking]

I don't understand why you are appealing to science when you appear not to understand very much of it.

I know more about science than the guy who came up with that model that said America would have 2.2 million deaths by now.

I do my homework on this.

Didn't that figure assume no social distancing or lockdowns?

[emailking]

That figure was so unrealistic that I have no reason to trust anything put out by the media ever again.

To be honest, this seems like deflection. I didn't say anything about the media. If it's a consensus among epidemiologists that 2.2 million US deaths with no social distancing was too unrealistic to take seriously than OK, but I haven't seen that.